What does the Leoma* seek
*Leoma: Old English word for radiance, light, gleam.
A story by Isla Cobb
Let me take you back to the scriptorium of Saint Bartholomew at Cranborne Priory in the year 1032. Cranborne stood then within the great wooded Chase, already ancient long before the priory bells first sounded. The old country still lay all around, much of it wild or half-tamed.
And here, in the winter of that year, we meet Frater Alwinus.
He was a careful man, trusted with documents because he had the sort of mind that disliked disorder instinctively. He believed, as many scribes did, that to name a thing correctly was to fix it safely in the world.
Which is why what he had found unsettled him so deeply.
The boundary charter on Frater Alwinus's desk had something attached to it, a separate sheet written in a hand that did not match any of those on the charter. It was in the vernacular, and was unsigned. It seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the demarcation of the land tenanted by Godwin the Elder.
No one else in the scriptorium seemed to have taken much note of it. Brother Osbert, who had logged the charter into the house register, had written only Boundary agreement, Pentric lands, with vernacular addendum.
Alwinus was not a man who habitually wrote in margins. He thought that commentary belonged in more formal commentaries, which had their own proper form and their own proper place in the library.
But something in the manuscript compelled him to write into the narrow blank space beside these difficult words. He wrote in the hope that those who came after him might understand the unease the text had stirred in him, an unease born partly from theology, but mostly from his knowledge of the Chase itself, and from conversations held over many years with local elders and peasants who knew the land and its older ways better than any cleric ever could. Indeed, he found that he knew more of the phenomenon described in the text than he was comfortable with.
He wrote in small and careful script, with the hand of a man writing important things down before the importance escaped him.
On þe Midsumor-morne, the fragment began, when þe world haldeth its breþe þer riseth in þe Est a Leoma not of sunne.
On the midsummer morning, there rises in the East a radiance not of the sun.
He wrote beside it: I have heard from the old ones that the light walks before the sun as a herald not sent by God. They name it not as creature nor as sign, but as a thing apart from Creation. It shines not for men, and therefore men ought not to look upon it.
He had heard this, he thought, from old Wulfric of Pentric, who said it in a way that was not fearful, exactly, but careful in the way that people who live near deep water are careful: not because they are afraid of the water, but because they have a clear-eyed understanding of what the water can do.
Alwinus had been nineteen then, newly at the abbey, making himself useful by taking inventories of the outlying farms. He had thought Wulfric's statement was picturesque peasant speech and had written it in his notes as a curiosity. Twenty years later, in the scriptorium, he found himself writing it in the margin of a fragment attached to a boundary charter. Perhaps Wulfric had been right about what kind of thing it was.
It standeth bifor þe day, and þe day knoweth it not.
He sat with this line for a long time before writing anything beside it. The theological difficulty was real, and he was a man who took theological difficulties seriously. How can a thing stand before the day which the Lord made? The day was created as the first ordering of light from dark. Fiat lux, and there was light, and it was good. Before that ordering lay only the unshaped world: darkness upon the deep, the waters without form, and the Spirit of God moving over them.
And yet the fragment said: the day knoweth it not. Not that the strange light failed to know the day, but that the day itself, the ordered world of God’s making, did not recognise the Leoma. The distinction troubled Alwinus deeply. It suggested something older moving unseen alongside Creation, outside the proper knowledge of the world.
He wrote: How can a thing stand before the Day which the Lord made? If the day knoweth it not, perhaps it belongeth to that unshaped time before the first ordering of light from darkness. The elders fear all mention of things that seem older than the dawn. I set these words here only that others may take warning.
It was not, he felt, a fully satisfying theological resolution. But it was an honest one, which he thought was valuable for future readers.
No mon shal looke on it longe, for it seeth þe lokere. It marketh hem þat marke it.
He recalled that Brother Eadferth had been a quiet man; reliable, with a fundamental absence of the kind of interior turbulence that makes men unpredictable. He had worked in the scriptorium for eight years without particular distinction, copying agricultural records and property surveys with a steady hand and the satisfaction of a man whose work matched his temperament exactly.
Alwinus had been with Eadferth on the lands near Pentric when Eadferth looked east before dawn on the solstice.
They were staying then at a timber grange where the priory kept sheep and barley fields. Alwinus had come to settle a dispute concerning boundary stones; Eadferth accompanied him as witness and assistant.
It was well-known that none of the locals here would enter the East field until after sunrise.
There stood in the field an ancient barrow, grass-grown and hollowed slightly at its crown. Alwinus and Eadferth assumed, as educated men often did, that the peasants’ reluctance sprang from the old burial mound and the usual superstitions that gathered around such places in the Chase.
Only later did Alwinus begin to suspect the villagers had feared something else entirely.
On the solstice morning they rose before dawn with the peasants. Alwinus had wondered at a strange luminance at the narrow window of the grange, but busied himself with his preparations for the day ahead. After a time he went to the window and had seen Eadferth standing motionless in the distance, way off in the East field beneath the first signs of the rising sun in the sky. At first he thought the brother was merely watching the sunrise. But there was something wrong in the stillness of him.
Alwinus hurried out through the grass, damp with dew. As he approached, Eadferth did not turn at the calling of his name. He stood entranced and speechless, his face angled toward the eastern horizon, his eyes drawn always back toward whatever lingered there.
He had been taken in from the East field and put to bed, and he had slept for three days, the sleep of someone engaged in something strenuous elsewhere. His eyes moved behind their lids. His lips moved without sound. He gripped the blanket at intervals with an urgency that made whoever was sitting with him that hour look away.
When he woke, he ate half a loaf of bread without speaking and drank a full cup of water, and then sat for a while with his hands in his lap.
Then he had said: “A brightness waited to speak with me, but had no mouth. They had waited long”.
He would say nothing else about it. He was otherwise entirely himself again: steady, quiet, unremarkable. He worked in the scriptorium for another twelve years before he died of a winter fever. Whatever he had seen on the other side of those three wandering days had gone with him to the grave.
Alwinus wrote: This I believe. For Brother Eadferth looked eastward on the solstice and afterward fell into strange dreams. He said a brightness waited to speak with him but had no mouth. His soul wandered for three days before he woke. He would not speak of what he saw, save that they had waited long.
He considered whether to add more. He decided that more would be less.
Cease thy hande from þe scythe, bind þe gate, and turne not toward þe Est lest þe Leoma count þe steppes of thy soul.
Several summers before he discovered the manuscript, Alwinus had already heard the old cautions surrounding the East field at Pentric. No man, the tenants said, should begin the midsummer hay cutting there before sunrise. The older labourers would not speak of it.
Alwinus regarded most of it as ordinary peasant superstition. The Chase bred such stories easily.
Then, in the summer after Eadferth’s death, warm weather brought the meadow-grass ready earlier than expected. He attempted to find men willing to enter the East field at midsummer dawn with scythes, to cut the hay before the heat of the day.
He had asked six men. He had asked carefully and had thought he was quite persuasive. Not one would go.
The last man he had asked was Edmund. He had once wielded his scythe through thunder, storm and hail after all others had left the fields. Edmund had looked at Alwinus for a moment with an expression that suggested he was revising his estimate of the monk's intelligence downward.
He had said: Let the Leoma have its walking-place. A field may be reaped and grow again; a soul once taken may not.
Alwinus wrote it down in the margin exactly as Edmund had said it, because it was better than anything he could have composed himself.
…when þe Leoma walketh þe fieldes, þe lamb freezeth in stride, þe dewe hangeth unfallen, and al þe world holdeth as in un-made houre.
He wrote: I have seen the sheep stand as if carved. They slept not, they feared not, they were simply still as stone, as if time itself had ceased for several beats of the heart. Those moments felt long.
He had seen it twice: once in the East field at Pentric at first light, once, disturbingly, closer to the abbey's own fence line, a cluster of six ewes simply stopped in their various attitudes of grazing and walking, like a painting of sheep rather than sheep themselves. Both times the moment had been brief.
Both times the sun had not yet risen, yet from the corner of his eye he was aware of a strange light, cold and faintly blue, a light not of the sky.
Both times he had instinctively looked down, turned his gaze anywhere but east.
He remembered what happened to Brother Eadferth and what Edmund had said about the Leoma, fields and souls, and whatever instinct had kept his eyes turned away from the East, he was grateful for it.
Follow not þe Leoma, for it goeth not wher men may go. It seeketh þe old þings and þos þat were lost bifor their birthe.
Outside the scriptorium window, the winter afternoon was growing toward dark. The fire in the corner of the room needed tending, and Brother Osbert was making the small sounds of a man preparing to stop work for the day.
He wrote: Old things indeed. Things that walked when the first stones were raised. I pray we may never know what the Leoma seeks nor count ourselves among its reckonings.
He read it back. He thought it lacked scholarship and was barely even useful commentary. It was a monk at a desk in winter writing about something that did not fit inside the categories available to him, while something older than charters walked the East field at midsummer, seeking whatever it sought.
…and when þe Leoma turneth, who shall it reme
Reme. The word seemed half-known to him. It carried echoes of reckoning and ordering, of things measured, placed, or made right. Yet he could not be certain of any meaning.
When the Leoma turneth.
Until that moment he had imagined the Leoma as a thing that had fixed habits. It was dangerous, ancient, unknowable, but consistent. It walked shining in the East field at midsummer. It appeared before dawn. It sought old things. Perhaps it had also been closer to the Abbey; he recalled the six ewes frozen in motion by the fence that day, and the light nearby that he did not look towards.
Turning implied attention. A thing that turns has noticed something.
Alwinus looked down at his own annotations crowding the margins. All his careful little reasonings, his cautious theology, his tidy recording of peasant sayings and remembered incidents. It occurred to him that commentary itself might be a form of looking.
That to seek to define or describe a thing was to incline oneself toward it however slightly.
That perhaps whoever wrote this, generations before, had realised this too late. For the first time, Alwinus wondered uneasily whether he himself had already begun to do the same.
Alwinus took up the knife used for scraping errors from vellum. His hand hovered over the final line a long while. Then, because habit remained stronger than fear, he put down the knife and added one final note beside the line.
I judge this sentence perilous, not for what it saith, but for what it inviteth the mind to ask thereafter.
Outside, beyond the abbey walls, the winter wind moved eastward across the dark fields of Cranborne Chase, passing over the frozen ground where, in six months' time, the Leoma would once again arrive before the sun, bringing ‘those who wait.’
He capped the ink, aligned the charter and its attached fragment carefully on the desk and weighted its corners. Brother Osbert had already left for vespers, and the scriptorium was empty. He picked up his candle and firmly closed the door behind him.
The charter and its attached sheet sat upon the desk in the dark. In the margins, the small careful hand waited to be read by someone who might, in centuries yet to come, understand more of what troubled Alwinus than Alwinus himself ever could.