Chapter 3I was looking at my hands. They were not my hands. I stared at them as if looking through a distorting lens or the eyes of another man, not recognising that the hands in front of me were mine.
The hands were those of a young man but marked with years of hard toil. They protruded from rough sackcloth sleeves. They gripped a small wooden bowl and a scrap of stale bread in the other. Knowing that I was hungry, I scraped the bread around the bowl, mopping up what little remained of the thin broth that the bowl had once held. I ate the bread, knowing it would do little to sate me. I wondered briefly if this was a dream, before the needs of the moment took charge of my senses.
Looking up, I saw the abbot at the High Table. His eyes were blue and sharp, and kept close watch over his ch
