Iamerge trudged up the hill toward the monastery.  He felt defeated.  He felt confused.  Where once there had been a feeling of elation that came with cheating death, now he was filled with the hollowness of loss.  Iamerge was starting over, well and true, and on top of it he’d  made an enemy, it seemed. 

At best, Mongfind Ui Birlinn was a non-friend, the sort that always seemed to find their way into being an implacable foe, and no end of trouble.  That was at the best, because now he had no power, no wealth, no resources at all to deal with such an antagonist. 

What if his nest egg, carefully concealed, was actually lost to him like the boat that had splintered on the rocks?  Iamerge shuddered to think of it.  The sun was high in the sky by now, but its heat felt oppressive, not comforting in his current mood, a bane.  How different the world had looked walking down the hill in the morning  light.  Now he could not grasp hope.

As he neared the cluster of small stone buildings that was the Biblious Monastry he heard the brothers chanting their offices, praises to the God of their scriptures, the same as that of the Jews he had known.  He had to admit that their chanting of the words of scripture was pleasantly musical. 

He paused under a tree that wasn’t far from the low stone walls that marked out the monk’s fields.  The shade was a relief, the sing song chanting a pleasant distraction from the defeat of his hopes.  Iamerge sat, resting against rough bark of the shady tree, his disappointment turned to weariness, and he fell asleep.

Smoke was pleasantly surprised by the fare.  The monk’s table was bountiful it seemed the brotherhood was much more generous with its guests than it was with its brethren.  Gospels ate too, but Smoke noted his restraint despite having learned that he had been fasting while they were on the rock.  These men thought nothing of self-sacrifice, indeed that seemed to be the point of it all.

There were some 100  or so brothers, guest brothers, and novices here at the monastery.  The weather was most likely milder, but they lived in the same beehive huts, two or three together, and spent their lives in prayer and industrious work that supplied their physical needs with enough left for guests and to procure other needful things, at least in their minds, not luxuries, or niceties, but books and scrolls and writing implements, inks, and dyes.

Smoke listened as Gospels explained how his order had its foundations over the great mountains to the East even though he himself had never seen those mountains or even met a person who had.  These monks knew things far beyond their experience.  A man, even a learned one, likely knew far less, because these monks had access to written records, books, documents they had a memory to be envied.

Smoke had wondered about the Gaels who supposedly lived on the other side of the great Eastern mountain range.  He had lived in the south, had traded with Nubia, travelled through the lands of the Great Khan, dealt with factors of the blood thirsty Corn Kings, hired guides from the tribes, and from these he had heard whispers of the Gael, of the Celts on their islands, even of stranger, more exotic places, but only whispers.  Smoke wanted to know about these places.