“Is something wrong, Father Germanus?” I asked, daring to interrupt his thoughts. He blinked, then seemed to shake himself although he made no visible move.
“No.” I could tell from his voice that that was true. “No, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. It’s simply that—” He broke off and frowned slightly. “It seems like an unconscionable time since last we spoke. When was it?”
“Eight weeks ago, Father. The day before you left to go to Britain.”
“Aye, right, eight weeks ago … Dear Lord, the time is flying nowadays. Eight weeks, gone in a blink, and it seems but yesterday since I was talking to Ludovic about our plans for traveling, and that in itself must have been nigh on half a year ago.” He paused, and then asked, “Did you really believe it necessary for your friend Lorco to win this afternoon?”
I gaped at him, caught off balance yet again by the sudden emergence of this question when I had not expected it, but this time, having been through the exercise of discussing the matter with Tiberias Cato, I responded more quickly and more easily.
“Yes, Father. I did.”
“Hmm. Why? Do you object to my asking?”
“No, Father, of course not, but Tiberias Cato and you both noticed what happened. Do you think anyone else saw?”
Father Germanus shook his head tersely. “No, I doubt it. Cato and I noticed it because we both know you as well as we do, and we saw … shall we say, a certain lack of fire and energy in your attack? Duke Lorco took great pleasure in his son’s prowess. You intended that to be the case, did you not?” I nodded. “I thought so. Why?”
I shrugged. “Lorco is my friend, sir, and his father’s esteem is important to him. I saw that today, and I first noticed it yesterday, when word came of his father’s visit. It was good that he should win and make his father proud.”
The bishop smiled a tiny smile and raised his right hand to bless me. “Peace be upon you, then. I shall beseech God in my prayers to furnish you with friends worthy of such loyalty and trust.”
I smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Father.”
“Do not thank me, boy. Friendship is God’s gift for fortunate men to share. It is a wonderful phenomenon and it exists according to its own rules and regulations. Its criteria are unique unto itself and it is restrained by none of the usual demands that people place upon other people’s behavior.”
Once launched upon a favorite topic—and I knew by this time that the bishop loved to talk about the criteria governing friendship—Germanus could be virtually unstoppable. I sat back and listened for a long time as he held forth on all that he believed about friendship, and much of what he told me that afternoon is still as alive in me today, and as fresh and credible, as it was when I first heard it that day.
He talked about the nature of friendship and about its durability; about how it could, and often did, spring out of nowhere, fully formed to take both members of the relationship by surprise, and then he went on to describe how, at other times and in other circumstances, it might grow slowly and almost unnoticeably, unsuspected by either participant. He pointed out to me, too, that friendship is untrammeled and unconstrained in its acceptance in a friend of appearances and personality quirks that would be unacceptable in anyone else; and from there he progressed to a discussion—albeit one-sided—of the nature of friendship and its relationship to love.
I listened, fascinated, to everything he had to say, hanging on his every word and feeling no urge to speak or to intrude upon what he was unfolding to me.
Love, he maintained, is an essential part of friendship, although it might be seldom mentioned by the friends themselves, but friendship may not necessarily be a part of love. Physical love—sexual love—and the state of being in love he explained as being conditions that completely enfold two individual people, fusing them emotionally and inexorably into a single unit of awareness and rendering them generally oblivious to everything else that is taking place in the world about them. They are a pair, but in the fiery singularity of their love for each other they exist as a single entity that shuts out the rest of the world.
Friendship, on the other hand, while also confined to two people, involved each of the two less exclusively and far less selfishly. Lovers demanded closeness—propinquity was the word he used—but friends could remain friends at opposite ends of the world and their friendship was undeterred by years of separation. Each friend in a pair might have many other friends, and those friends might like or dislike any of their friend’s other friends, but the initial pair’s friendship was a thing unique to the two of them, and though they might choose to extend the privilege of their friendship to others, their own friendship remained strictly and at all times a private matter between the two of them. I blinked, I recall, when he said that, but I managed to follow it without difficulty.
True friendship, he asserted in summing up, was a unique and divinely privileged phenomenon, and in consequence it was a condition that occurred only rarely in the life of any single person. If a man could name five close, lifetime friends before he died, Germanus said, then that man’s life had truly been blessed.
I clearly remember that as I listened to him say that I felt uncomfortable, skeptical, and even slightly embarrassed by what I perceived as his naivety, for I was fifteen years old and had a wealth of friends—scores of them, I thought. I was prepared to accept everything else that Germanus had had to say on the subject of friends and friendship, and in fact I had been delighted to hear him endorse some of the ideas that had occurred to me in thinking about my friends, but I really did believe that he was being ingenuous in insisting upon this scarcity of true friendship. Alas, two decades were to pass before I came to appreciate what he had meant.
“Now, I have a task for you, should you be willing to accept it.”
I straightened with a jerk, aware that I had been woolgathering.
“Anything, Father,” I said. “Anything, and gladly.”
“Hmm. Enthusiasm, without knowing what is involved? Thank you.” Smiling at his own observation, he crossed to the armchair on the other side of the fire and sat down, tugging at the voluminous folds of his outer garment and shifting in his seat until he had adjusted everything and could sit in comfort. “I want you to go home,” he said, and then, before I could react, he held up his palm to forestall me. “I have just returned from Britain, as you know, and much has happened while I was over there—happened here, I mean, in Gaul, not merely in Britain.”
I nodded, silently, and waited.
“I was supposed to spend last night in Lutetia, for no other reason originally than the fact that it lies on the direct route here from the coast. But it is also a central point for irregular gatherings of bishops, and one of those was convened while I was in Britain, in response to several urgent matters that arose unexpectedly and could not safely be postponed. It was known that I would be returning shortly from Britain, but couriers were dispatched to find me sooner and to summon me to the gathering in Lutetia as quickly as I could travel. They missed me on their first pass because I had made a detour for reasons of my own, and by the time they found me I was preparing to leave for home, so they only gained a single day on my planned schedule. Thus I arrived in Lutetia one day earlier than I had intended, and spent not one but two nights there, conferring there with my pastoral brethren.”