Thomas paled. "Brother, please," he said quickly and desperately, "don't hand me over to the police. Give me penances, I'll scrub the sacristy floors for a year, but don't—you can't—let them cut off my hand. Look, the fishing rod broke, I can't do it any more. If you—"
"I'm sorry, Thomas," the abbot said. "There's nothing you or I can do about it now. Our duties are clear. This… this calamity may, I hope, turn out in the end to have been your key to salvation." The abbot looked down at the shivering monk with something like sympathy. "Try to see it in that light. Try—"
Thomas hit him, hard, in the stomach, and the old abbot dropped to the dewy grass like a broken piece of lumber. Thomas opened his hand and let fall a fist-sized piece of the fishing pole.
"Hey!" came a voice across the dark lawn. Running footsteps could be heard from the direction of the chapel, so Thomas turned and hobbled in the opposite direction, toward the vegetable garden and the south wall.
"Stop!" called one of his pursuers. "Stop in the name of God!"
Thomas instinctively slid to a halt. A moment later he was running again, impatiently cursing himself.
He was in among the vegetables now, in total darkness, tripping over tomato vines and putting his feet through watermelons. Chilly mud splashed his legs and clogged his sandals.
A half dozen outraged monks followed him cautiously; they assumed he was a bandit, probably armed, and possibly accompanied by vicious henchmen, so they hung back and contented themselves with shouting admonitory bits of Scripture at him.
Thomas lurched through the last of a row of bean trellises and collided with the rough bricks that formed the wall. He tried to climb it, but gave up when the bricks cracked apart under his fingers. The monks, beginning to doubt his stature as a menace, were throwing rocks at him now with rapidly improving accuracy.
Thomas yelled as a well-flung cobble caught him in the ribs. He couldn't linger there, he realized. Dropping to his hands and knees he scuttled along the base of the wall, searching for one of the drainage pipes that passed through it at irregular intervals. He cut his ringer deeply on a stray bit of broken pottery and blundered through several complicated spider webs, but finally found one of the pipes. Urged to haste by the increasing velocity of rocks tearing into the vegetation all around him, he scrambled headfirst into the narrow, slippery, downward-slanting shaft.
The monks soon found his escape route and were fiercely thrusting a couple of tree branches into the pipe mouth when Brother Olaus limped up and told them to be quiet. "He's gone… you idiots," he gasped. "Back to your cells, now, move. I'll… inform the police in the morning."
Still not certain what had happened, the monks shrugged, put down the branches and trudged back to the main building. Soon the last of the monastery's lights was extinguished, and except for occasional faint sounds like voices and laughter in the sky, the silence was complete.
The air was sharp with pre-dawn chill, and Thomas's nose and throat ached every time he took a breath. His first impulse was to thrash his way through the grapevines to the front gate of the monastery and pound on it until someone let him back in; they would turn him over to the police in the morning, but at least until then he'd be able to sleep and be warm in the piled straw on the floor of the detention cell.
No no, he told himself, trying to muster some confidence, this is adventure. The whole world is laid out and waiting for you if you can just get clear of these damned vines and wait till the sun comes up. After a few moments of indecision he took his own word for it and plodded through the darkness, whimpering softly as the cold penetrated every seam in his robe.
He tried to move steadily south, toward Los Angeles, but thickets and creeks and ravines twisted his course so often that after a while he had no idea which direction he was facing. I may wind up in the Hollywood Reservoir, he thought, or even back at the monastery. I've got to get my bearings.
After frequent collisions with pine branches and trunks, he decided to climb one of the offending trees to look for the lights of Los Angeles to guide him. He peered up at the branches silhouetted against the dim purple sky, trying to judge which tree was bare enough to serve as a ladder and crow's nest. At last he chose a tall one whose limbs appeared solid and evenly spaced.
He climbed quickly, glad to be free of the dew-soaked, clinging underbrush, and soon straddled a comfortable branch 15 meters above the ground. He gazed around intently, trying to focus his tired eyes on the dim, blurry landscape. He could see no lights, but half a mile away a gray streak curved through the forest—the Hollywood Freeway. With the first surge of real confidence he'd felt that night, he decided to follow it south and be in the city by sunrise.
He hopped and swung his way back down the tree, cheerfully imagining the breakfast he would buy with the money he'd taken from the bird man. Bacon for sure, he thought. Scrambled eggs… no, an omelette, by God. And beer. And—
"Take it slow now, son, and keep your hands where we can see 'em," came an odd, quacking voice below Thomas. Startled, he missed the next branch and half-leaped, half-fell to the bed of matted pine needles three meters beneath him.
He scrambled painfully to his feet and then froze when he saw he was surrounded by short, stocky figures. Children? he wondered dizzily.
A match flared briefly in a gnarled hand, and Thomas realized they were dwarves—a bearded, ragged crew, with mean-looking knives thrust into the belts of their leather tunics.
"A monk!" observed the one with the match. "Up in a tree, chatting with God in the middle of the night!" The other dwarves laughed uproariously in falsetto voices and slapped their knees. "Well now," the leader went on, "what we want to know—right, boys?—is if you've got some tobacco. Quick, now, no lies!"
Thomas blinked and gulped. "Tobacco?" he answered automatically. "No. I don't smoke. Sorry."
The dwarves growled and muttered, and a few unsheathed their knives. Thomas glanced around for an escape route, and saw none. "Look," he said desperately, "I'll get some and bring it back. There's some at the monastery—good stuff, cavendish. I'll be back before the sun clears the hills."
Scratching their beards, the dwarves frowned and exchanged shrewd glances. "Ah," piped up the leader again, poking Thomas in the ribs, "but how do we know you'll come back? Eh?" The other dwarves nodded, pleased that their leader had so succinctly expressed the problem.
"Here," Thomas said, trying to sound sure of himself. "Hold my rosary until I return." He untied the long rosary—133 polished wooden beads knotted along a light rope—that encircled his waist, and handed it to the leader. "It's collateral," he explained.
"I thought you said it was a rosary," said the leader.
"It is, dammit," said Thomas with some exasperation. "Collateral means I let you hold it so you know I'll come back."
"Ah!" said the dwarf, nodding wisely. He considered the idea for a moment. "Well, it sounds okay to me. Whoever heard of a monk without his rosary? We've got him over a barrel, eh boys?" His fellows nodded and grinned delightedly. "We'll wait here. You sure you can find your way back?"
"Yeah, I come here all the time," said Thomas, edging away. The sky had lightened during the discussion, and he could see well enough to sprint quickly away as the dwarves huddled around their leader, examining the rosary with great interest.
I've lost my badge of office, Thomas thought. I'm no longer a monk—just a battered young man in a ripped brown robe. The thought frightened him a little, and brought home to him, as nothing else had, the realization that he really had stepped out from under the stern but protective wing of the church. The sun was nearly up, though, and the empty blue vault of the sky promised a warm day. The birds were setting up a racket in the trees as Thomas trotted along a path below them, craning his neck for a glimpse of the freeway.