At the end of September, Èble blesses the plows. There’s no time to lose; the rains are coming. Ten gigantic plows, ten war machines with handles as long as a lance and as broad as a thigh, and six oxen fettered, two by two, to the shaft. Èble is croziered and mitered in the early dawn. He can see them from above on the new land, like ten catapults erect and pointing at Saint-Michel. He walks down; he makes the sign of salvation over these diabolical machines and the horned herd. All at once the men shout, the oxen move off, and the machines follow; the earth opens; red and black are mixed: one monk by the shaft, four fishermen taking turns and propped along the handles. At the due hour the monks climb back up the little island and go to sing; the natives guide the oxen and maintain the furrow on their own. The chants fall like dew from above onto the sweat and the shouting, the panicked muzzles of the oxen, the earth that is shifted and laid bare. The fishermen eventually know the chants, take them up down below. The children run and dance along the plowshares, day after day.
One morning before Lauds, as the autumn drizzle is setting in and the plowing is coming to an end, an equipage arrives on two barges, with men-at-arms and an imposing figure who seems to be wearing a squirrel-fur hood, but it’s hard to be sure: day has scarcely broken. The lookout brother goes to fetch the abbot, and leaning against the outer wall beneath their black hoods the two men scrutinize and speculate, say that it must be this person, or rather that. The barges dock, the imposing figure stands up in an agile movement, and the moment he sets foot on the first step the abbot recognizes him: it’s Benoît, who was like a son to Èble in the days of incense and the purple ring, and whom he named coadjutor at Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers. Today he’s the one who wears the purple ring on his finger. He has come in person. He’s taller than Èble. Beneath the squirrel fur he looks a little like Hugues, but his skin is not as dark, his cheeks not as hollow. On the terrace in the drizzle he kisses the abbot’s hands, they embrace, and he says, “Your brother Guillaume is dead, and before he passed away he asked us to convey his farewells to you.” No, he did not die by iron; he too was tired, he’d thrown in his hand, he drew his last breath at the monastery of Saint-Cyprien, surrounded by orisons. They embrace once more, black hood alongside gray hood they walk to and fro, Benoît talks about the departed warrior, about the other men of fire: Foulque who now controls Anjou, little Hugues Capet who controls France and whose teeth are long. Èble isn’t really listening to these tales of secular matters which no longer concern him; his thoughts are wandering. He looks at little Benoît who served mass for him and who wears the purple ring; he thinks about Hugues, who is the same age as Benoît, about the sons he never had, and about the iron Guillaume used to brandish at every turn: when he was drunk, when he was joshing, when he was choked with anger. He weeps for Guillaume from the bottom of his heart, but there is something in his tears that gladdens him like wine. The sun is fully up now. The fishermen are walking down to the reclaimed plots with the oxen. Together they look at the war machines that require twenty arms to lift the shaft and yoke the oxen. Benoît remarks that the oxen in the third team are exhausted, and the lead ox is jerking its head the way they do when they’re about to turn nasty. The bishop retires to sleep, the abbot in the chapter house distributes the tasks for the day. For the shaft of the third team he picks Hugues.
The drizzle persists all morning. The animals have gaiters of mud right up their legs, as heavy as they. Around noon, an ox on the right-hand side of the third team collapses, and on the left-hand side the lead ox, exasperated by this resistance, bellows and charges. Hugues, who jumped to the wrong side, the left, takes the charge full in the chest; he falls, five standing oxen and one slumped ox trample across his body, and finally thirteen inches of iron slice his body in two.
It’s the first death since the monastery has been restored. A hole has been dug in the old cemetery, which dates from the time of Philibert — a few bones from the time of Philibert have briefly seen the light of day again. Hugues arrives in the white shroud; the monks have piously washed and anointed what remained and disentangled the bones from the mud. They have placed a plank of wood inside the shroud so that the two pieces look like one. The sun has returned. He is laid in the earth; his beautiful throbbing voice will never again be heard. The shrill bells all ring out, the beautiful confident voices all sing, and, deep inside, each voice hears the voice that throbbed and is dead. Bishop Benoît without miter or cowl sings among them as if he were one of them. Then the seagulls can be heard: Èble slowly steps forward without miter or hood, pronounces the prayer of absolution for the dead. The vast red twilight shines through the white towhead; he looks like a saint.
The fishermen on the barges leave to set up the nets for the night catch.
Next to the bishop at the guest table, the abbot’s place is empty. He is not seen either at Compline.
He has been walking in the old cemetery where Hugues’s fresh cross is all there is. Once the barges have left, he is inside the hut. A body, or the earth in its entirety, bares itself up to the waist in the dark. In the dark a plow slices a man in two, a manat-arms expires in a slow death agony, a brother kills his fellow brothers. The world is gathered in a wound of wet fire, and this world can be joined and then disjoined at will. Shifted thus the world cries out and exults. The abbot cries out and exults. He returns to the cemetery, where the moon has risen. He prays for Hugues before the tiny new cross, he laughs and weeps, and once again he hurries to the hut. He leaves only when he hears the voices of the fishermen. As he leaves, he passes the husband on the doorstep. For a moment they look at each other in the moonlight, then each goes where he must.