The Grove Eats Missionaries

They dispatched me from Mediolanum to look into a miraculum, which is to say some poor soul bled out where the bishop thought holy ground ought to be.

The parchment still smelled of wax and goat hair when I cracked it. His Grace wrote: “A band of brethren gone missing beyond the black pines near the ruins of Vercingetorix. The rustics whisper of a spring that speaks and a grove that laughs. Bring back relics or bones.”

I was never good at either.

By the next dawn I reached the edge of empire, where the silva nigra began and the map surrendered. Even Sol grew timid there; the light turned coward. One could taste the decay upon the tongue. The aves chattered not hymns but gossip. Another missionary, they said. Let us see how long this one prays before he cries.

I found their camp by smell—boiled pork, damp wool, and fear. Four tents still stood, crucifixes nailed upright, each one blackened from within as if smoke had burned the air itself. The firepit was cold. Their codex itinerarium lay nearby, and the vellum pulsed beneath my hand—once, like the beat of a buried heart.

Die prima: We baptized the river. It bit Brother Paulus. He swore he heard his mother’s voice confessing through the foam.

Die secunda: The spring mocks us in the night. We have named it Beel-Hydra.

Die tertia: Paulus walked into the current to beg forgiveness. The water whispered the Symbolum Apostolicum backward until dawn.

By the fifth day the ink reddened and grammar perished.

The bishop’s clerks imagine daemonia wear horns, but the clever ones attire themselves as landscape. This one wore the hide of a river—blue, rippling, muttering the psalms half a note wrong. I set a candle by the bank; the flame shivered.

“Sanctus es,” it said in Latin older than the legions. “Sanctus et tardus.”

I told it I was merely a notarius of the bishopric. It told me I was flesh with a quill—much the same.

It rose, shaped like a man but made of current, mouth a whirlpool. The scent was iron and lilies. Beneath the flow something laughed—a woman perhaps, or a pipe bursting in Tartarus.

“You bear a cross,” it said. “Good. I require something to crucify.”

A silence heavy as incense pressed against my ears, and the scent of wet loam thickened until I thought I might drown in air. Then the grove moved. Trunks adjusted their posture like drunk veterans in a basilica. Roots entwined themselves into the sign of the cross. A sapling disgorged a vertebra.

I did as any sane investigator of the cloth might: I jested.“You hear confessions?”

The forest exhaled. “We take converts.”

That was the moment I knew—these were no fresh-born devils but elder gods with new warrants. The missionaries had been recruiters in the wrong province.

A hand of bark grasped my shoulder. In the tongue of Gaul it murmured, “You baptize water, you drown faith.” The river snickered behind me. “We liked the pagani better. They poured wine.”

I drew my iron cross. “In nomine Patris—”

“Cuius?” asked the river. “Yours or mine?”

Its laughter curdled into mist, the mist to fingers reaching for my eyes. I struck downward. The water screamed; the forest convulsed like a flayed stallion. I fell into mire that smelled of confessionals.

When I awoke, the grove was gone.

Only the diary remained, open to a new page:

Die sexta: The investigator arrived. The river amused. The forest fed.

Back in Mediolanum the bishop asked if I found relics.

“Only rumours,” said I.He smiled as saints frown. “Then set them to parchment. We shall make them doctrine.”

Weeks passed. The rain acquired a metallic savour. In the forum’s fountain the water frothed too fast; pigeons avoided it.

A whisper rose with the spray: Adhuc sanctus es, parve clerice? Adhuc siccus?

I dropped a coin; it returned black. I laughed.

“You again.”

“We never let you leave,” it said. “We only let you forget the drowning.”

I drink more now. The wine tastes of river, but it suffices. The bishop calls me unctus.

Truth: I have been leaking since that night.

Dreams bring trees that breathe, roots that sigh my name, a choir of worms chanting the Gloria. Sometimes, when I sneeze, water that is not mine spills forth.

They have promoted me—Inspector of Miracles.

I sign reports: bleeding statues, talking wells, crucifixes adrift.

At times I read a name I know: Paulus, Silvanus, or my own—written forward and backward in the margins. The ink is ever damp.

One would think, after so many drownings, the Church would cease baptizing rivers. One would think the rivers might stop laughing. Yet faith is stubborn, water patient, and I the clerk between heaven’s archives and hell’s plumbing.

I warn each novice to carry salt. They forget. They return thirsty. Each draught adds another hymn to the current.

On certain moons I hear singing from the gutter beneath my cell—a baptismal hymn with better rhythm. I hum along. The floorboards ripple.

One day the water will recall my name entire. When it does, I shall cease pretending to breathe.