Holy Smoke

Beneath his woolen cloak, Aethelstan, son of Aethelred, was burning with a high sanguine fervor, not daring to stop as the night air chilled his sweat. Clutching the precious bundle to his chest, Aethelstan spared a glance at the gathering storm clouds, dreading the potential for divine retribution before his purpose could be fulfilled. Stealing through the neat furrows of a walled garden, the breathless pilgrim pounded on the sanctuary door.

It was not long before footsteps approached, and a light bled through the stoic timber. The door’s rusty lamentations drowned out the whispering of the shifting thresh, and a lantern’s flame gleamed dully on the cross that marked the holy portal. “Sister!” Aethelstan urged, pushing the hood back from his earnest face. “I am come under cover of darkness to bestow a sacred relic upon this house of the Lord our God!”

The nun sighed. “Dude, it’s like, three in the morning.”

Distant thunder rumbled overhead, the coming storm thrumming through the heady air. The nun rolled her eyes at the pilgrim’s flabbergasted countenance and said, “Alright, you better come in. Christian charity never sleeps, I guess.”

Aethelstan shuffled over the threshold and the nun shoved the door closed. “Now, look, Mr…?”

“Uh…” It took a very brisk trot to keep up with the smooth stride of the nun, and the poor traveler was more than a little out of breath. “I am Aethelstan, son of—”

“Look, Stan,” the nun cut in. “Protocol says I gotta go get Father Matthew on account of you being a man, et cetera, et cetera, but if I go get Father Matthew right at this exact moment, I’m gonna find him in the company of Sister Dorothea, and that bitch gets under my wimple on a good day, so how ‘bout you just keep your hands to yourself and save me the headache, alright?” She lifted the lantern and, with the skill of much practice, lit a long-stemmed pipe. “Did you hear me, Stan? Is that alright?”

“Uh…” Aethelstan glanced around at the dark stones. “Is there, uh, someone else I can talk to…?”

“Not really aligned with the ‘cover of darkness’ concept, huh, Stan?”

The nun led him to a small office, with a long table, a writing desk by the window, and a wall of locked cabinets, intricately painted with saints, angels, and for some reason, jousting rabbits riding on snails. Setting down the lantern, the nun nodded to the bundle in Aethelstan’s arms. “Alright, what do we got? Finger? Girdle? Baby teeth?”

Prickling feelers of doubt were creeping over Aethelstan’s heart, but a bolt of lightning flared across the window. “Sister,” Aethelstan leaned closer, lowering his voice in a conspiratorial whisper. “I have here the Holy Grail.”

The nun sighed a stream of smoke. “Another one.”

A deep wound cleft through Aethelstan’s faith. “No, not ‘another one’!” he huffed, ripping the fabric wrapping away from the cup inside. He shoved the goblet in the nun’s unimpressed face, shaking it under her nose to gleam dully in the light of her pipe. “This is The Grail! The one our Lord Jesus Christ filled with his blood at the Last Supper, the very cup of the first communion among the apostles!”

Putting a hand on the cup, the nun lowered it to the tabletop. “Stan, buddy,” she exhaled. “Do you have any idea how many heads John the Baptist had? Do you know how many nails they hedgehogged into that cross? Would you believe our Lord Jesus Christ had no less than seven foreskins? We have enough holy splinters to build another Arc.”

The nun parked her pipe between her teeth and gestured to the wall of cabinets. “The relics business is a business. We get a little foot traffic for Mary Magdalene’s hair or St. Michael’s fingernails, and most people don’t question the legitimacy of all the little shriveled bits. But, people will want to know if something this famous is really, really, real, and the Vatican has never verified a grail. Doesn’t happen. The quest goes on.”

“This is real!” Aethelstan insisted. “You have to believe me!”

“His holiness in Rome has to believe you,” the nun said. “Over everybody else with a shiny cup. We can’t afford to advocate for every chalice that comes along, and every other abbey is incentivized to discredit us. If people think we’re exploiting a hoax, they’re going to wonder if any of our mummified tongues and julienned intestines can really make miracles.”

Lightning sliced across the sky, thunder close on its heels as Aethelstan clutched the cup to his chest. “You…heretic!” he marveled. “You won’t accept a real miracle in case it overshadows the fakes!”

The nun gestured with her pipe. “You know the word ‘grail’ could come from ‘graal’ or ‘gradale’ which often as not refers to a dish or mixing bowl, not a cup. If the Vatican can’t even agree on that, what makes you so confident in your little discovery?”

Aethelstan son of Aethelred said, “Faith.”

It started to rain.

The nun crossed her arms and leaned against a painted angel. “I don’t want to take your faith, Stan,” she said. “When I was a little kid, my whole family got measles. Two of my sisters died, and my mother brought me here because they had an ear off St. Jude. I got better. I was so grateful, I devoted my life to Christ, and now that bitch Dorothea keeps sticking me with the midnight vigil. So, you keep that cup where it can hold the most meaning for you. Before you get betrayed by an ear that saves you from measles, but not gruel-based IBS and aggravated habit rash.”

Aethelstan slowly placed the cup back on the table. “My father stole that cup,” he said. “After he killed all the monks protecting it. I wanted to return it to the church and right that wrong. But if what you say is true, and none of it’s real, then they all died for nothing.”

"And if what I said was not true," the nun said softly. "Your dad probably would have sold it years ago?"

Aethelstan stared through the suspect relic. Opening up one of the cabinets, the nun retrieved a decanter of wine, and poured some into the cup. “Monks die for their faith all the time,” she told him. “Probably their preferred way to go. And God understands what you were trying to do.”

The disappointed pilgrim hesitated, then had a sip from the cup. “Is any of it real?”

The nun held out her hands. “People really get better. They really have revelations. There really is renewed belief in God. Whether any given rib was popped off the right cadaver doesn’t cheapen that experience. Kind of what faith is all about.”

Turning the chalice in his hand, watching his own red reflection in the claret, Aethelstan mused, “Still a nice cup.”

Taking it from him, the nun had a lengthy swallow of wine. “Works,” she confirmed, handing it back. “I fed St. Jude’s ear to one of the pigs in the yard. Truly transcendent bacon.”

“I’m sorry,” Aethelstan said. “If that matters.”

The nun knocked the ash out of her pipe. “I forgive you. Whether it matters or not.”

There were hurried footsteps in the corridor, and the nun sucked her unimpressed teeth. “Piss it, that’ll be that bitch Dorothea sneaking back before morning mass.”

“I better go,” Aethelstan said. “I’ve had about all the Christian charity I can take.”

“Amen.”

Putting his hood up against the rain, Aethelstan rinsed the last of the sacramental wine from the dead monks’ cup. Now that he knew it wasn’t the goblet of the apostles, he started to wonder how much he could flog it for. Fully intending to tithe profits, of course, but you know what they say about good inten-

A lightning bolt lanced down from the sky, blinding and bursting every nerve in the pilgrim’s body before immediate thunder slapped him back together again.

Aethelstan knew he wasn’t dead, because his heart was trying to kill him. As the world crept back into focus, rain drumming over the ringing in his ears, a chill wind lifted wisps of smoke from the woolen cape. Dropping the uncanny cup from numbed fingers, Aethelstan, son of Aethelred, saw the only burn from the lightning strike was where the dread vessel had been clutched against his palm.

The rain spattered on a red, raw cross.