Brother Yacoub is remembered by posterity, if at all, given the widespread godlessness of our age, as Yacoub the Demon Defier. But before facing the three trials that garnered him this title, as a young monk he earned the admittedly less imposing nickname “Brother Beer” for his pioneering introduction of glass into the monastery’s brewing process. The resultant crispness resounded in satisfied sighs and lip smacks echoing across taverns in central Europe lucky enough to serve his distinguished brew. Brother Beer’s innovations brought additional fame and funds to not just the monastery, but to the village of Samoëns, enjoyed by pilgrims who came each year to pray in the bracing air of the French Alps and by the thirsty stone cutters and masons who flocked to the area drawn as much by the beer as the rich deposits of limestone.
Prior to his conversion and subsequent brewing fame, Yacoub was known by the even less flattering moniker “Yelling Yacoub” because he burned up his adolescence as a Barbary pirate, leaping onto Christian ships with a shrill war cry to inspire his men and strike fear into his enemies during raids. Yacoub and his crew bedded any women—and many of the more voluptuous men—they found, selling the stoutest captives to the Sultan to bolster his army with wheat-fed Europeans or to till the fields of local Berber chieftains. Days of bloody decks and chipped scimitars. Yacoub’s Roman nose inhaling the pungent reek of surrender wafting from the slaves in the hold. The salty rush of sea air. Round asses, swinging breasts, and a fierce, green-eyed lass with lips as sweet as knafeh who almost enchanted Yacoub into freeing and running away with her but when he fought free of her thrall, he managed to toss her, despite the high price she would have fetched in the slave markets of Tangier, into the sea.
Seasons of rape and pillage, cunning attacks and wild retreats. This savagery continued unabated until Yacoub met his match, cured of his heathen ways after capture by French knights returning from the Crusades. Wheezing in the hold of an enemy ship, ribs crushed, blood crusting over his eyes from a head wound, Yacoub welcomed Christ into his heart and Christ welcomed Yacoub into His Kingdom. The Lord’s light shines even in the darkest hearts of men. Once healed, Yacoub entered into four years of service as a diligent squire to Sir Jean de Cluses, the man who dealt him said head wound. Sir Jean was an honest, God-fearing soldier in Christ’s army, renowned for his brutal swordsmanship—he was a bear of a man who swung a six-pound bastard sword like it was a lethal toy, tearing through man and mast, flinging guts and limbs and timber ten yards in every direction, even shattering Yacoub’s wooden shield as if it were mere glass and not seasoned oak covered in cured leather in the method of the Vikings of old—not only in his hometown of Samoëns but the whole length of the French Alps, north to Lac Léman and south to Nice.
Sir Jean brought Yacoub to his beloved Samoëns and when illness withered the knight, pneumonia doing what neither sword nor spear could, Samoëns is where Yacoub decided to remain, doing God’s work, following God’s will, and defying His enemies the first of which was a demon who possessed Brother Ronov one cool summer evening while the monks hiked to the base of the massif outside Samoëns for a night of intense prayer close to the heavens. At first, Yacoub and his fellow monks chalked Ronov’s erratic behavior up to drinking too many strong brews at high altitude. But when his usually hazel eyes took on a greenish tinge and he began chanting in slobbery Aramaic, flailing in the dirt and touching himself in an unmonkly manner, Yacoub soon realized they were confronting a possession. In accordance with the rituals laid out by the eldest and wisest monks at the monastery in Samoëns—hearty drinkers all—Yacoub and friends leapt into action, dousing Ronov, who was on the verge of becoming a mere vessel, a meat puppet, with a skunky pilsner. Ronov shook. The demon shook within his host’s shell. In Aramaic—and this is according to the records we have now, admittedly, third-hand, time-worn, time-warped—the demon, through the lips of Ronov, said “Did you know the air was stale around the tree in the midst of the garden, monk? Deep within me I heard you yell, Yacoub, and my blood roiled. You swept across decks like a bladed wind, slicing throats and cleaving limbs. You were beautiful. This is love, monk,” and here Ronov, sticky with Yacoub’s holy ale, shook ever more violently, skin-rippling in arcane patterns, and took Yacoub’s hand with a firm, but delicate grip, “You look weak, Yacoub. You need nourishment. And I am good for a certain kind of food and pleasant to the eyes if you but opened yours.” The monks chanted, beseeching the Archangel Michael, the Saint, the warrior of righteousness. And just as Ronov was freed of the demon, he said “Yacoub,” quietly, as if to himself or his maker.
The monks and the heavens rejoiced.
***
Four years later, Yacoub caved to temptation. Memories of his bloody adventures of yesteryear haunted his nights. The feel of the demon’s grip, familiar, intimate, hounded him. The final blow to his faith came in the form of Genevieve, the daughter of a local stone cutter with strawberry blonde curls and a tremendous bosom, milky as the much sought-after limestone the region was famous for. She’d had a volcanic love of God, a molten reverence matched, or even dare we say, surpassed, by a sudden lust for Yacoub, the dark monk who came from mysterious adventures in the Mediterranean to brew magnificent beers in esoteric glass containers in the little monastery at Samoëns. Genevieve made regular offerings of hearty meals of bread she baked and butter she churned and Yacoub partook and kept on partaking until, full-bellied and besotted, he partook of her flesh for hours behind the storehouse, fornicating feverishly in the hay, each thrust conjuring images of a life he could have had if he had embraced the earthly, carnal realm. Joys of the flesh. Stirring battles. A family. “I am a bladed wind,” he whispered into Genevieve’s ear, his lips brushing sweaty hair and hay.
At dawn, this erotic, illicit, profane coupling ceased and with the sun came shame. Yacoub tore himself away from Genevieve, his mouth full of hay and the slime of their combined sex, and stumbled away, walking goat trails and hunting paths, scrambling over loose scree and through alpine scrub, skirting glaciers as he headed towards his old home, south, to the wine-dark sea of antiquity. He walked for months, punishing himself, wearing his shoes to shreds, shedding the soft pounds he’d gained in his quiet, monastic beer-drinking complacency. When he reached Nice, he fell more deeply into sin, copulating with women and men and animals in the alleys of that beautiful, filthy city on the sea. Sores sprang on his loins and rumors spread amongst the ignorant and pagan denizens about the Saracen monk, tall, dark, and gaunt, whose colossal member could cure impotence and, under the right conditions, at the right angle, could bring women face to face with the Almighty Himself.
Begging, blessing, fucking in fear and disgust: a year drained away for Yacoub in this dissolute fashion. One blustery autumn night, fate, and a Baronet, came for him. He arrived at his hovel with two cloaked attendants and a face that, were it not for its obvious anguish, would have been handsome. “Are you the fallen monk?” the Baronet asked.
“I am Yacoub.”
“My wife is in chambers now and speaking in tongues.”
“I can do nothing for you. God no longer watches over me.”
“And yet my wife calls for you.”
“For a monk?”
“For a monk, a brewer, a warrior, a pirate. For a man named Yacoub who cast a green jewel into the sea.”
Yacoub shivered, frail in his faithlessness, but he followed the Baronet for he sensed a desperate witchery in the wife’s request. In a small castle overlooking the ships quarantined in port and, beyond them, lost in the shadowy distance, the shores belonging to the Sultan, Yacoub entered the bedchamber to confront the Baroness who had called for him.
“Yacoub,” the Baroness whispered, wearing only a white, sweat-soaked dress and a large wooden cross on a necklace which, evidenced by her reddened breasts, was the cause of much irritation.
“Please,” the Baronet said, “attend to her,” before closing and locking Yacoub in with the woman and whatever had possessed her.
“I am Yacoub,” he said in a raspy voice devoid of his previous confidence.
“Fuck me, monk, and I will cure all. Your sores and shame and fear. Your soul-sickness. The words of your God which are thorns in your heart. Let me take it from you. Give me a child and I will give you a new life. Together, we will have a life. Not for what passes for one in your sorry little monastery.”
In an obedient stupor, Yacoub disrobed. Joylessly, he mounted the woman, entering her, weeping. A conflicted, weary heart but a willing member. Tears fell on her cross and her blistered chest beneath it. She laughed and squirmed and wept in turn, trying to kick free of the ropes fastening her limbs to the bedposts, to wrap her legs around Yacoub, the former monk. She smelled of the sea. Blood-drenched decks. Palms ripped open by salt-crusted ropes. Arrows piercing sails. He recalled Sir Jean. The heft of his savior’s sword. The smell of cooking malt in the monastery kitchen. The soaked grains in the storehouse. Genevieve, limestone dust, a green-eyed urchin in Marrakech hand-feeding him a fig when he was starving in an alley, brought to the brink of death by poverty while not yet six years old. An unquenchable thirst. An impossible heat. Life thrumming within and around him. And God nowhere to be found.
“Come in me,” the demon panted. “Come in me and I will be yours and you will be mine and our blood will mingle together to create a life making us Gods ourselves in this garden.” She grew more feverish, ecstatic, eyes rolling into her head, spittle bubbling at the corners of her mouth. “My Yacoub,” she moaned.
“Yacoub,” he said, meeting her gray-green eyes and suddenly aware of a cleansing light on him, above him, within him, bright and clear and cool and true, illuminating him, a halo forming around his head then ringing around him, down his torso, around his cock, “but not yours.”
The demon screamed and squirmed, begged and threatened, cursed and cajoled, for hours but though Yacoub’s erect penis remained inside her, a rod of righteousness in a carnal test of fate, he never came.
The next day the woman was herself again, a Baroness, a stern, blue-eyed beauty with dignified bearing and a noble name. Her husband the Baronet paid Yacoub with a generous bag of silver. “For the good monks of Samoëns,” he said, when Yacoub tried to refuse.
Yacoub arranged for a carriage to Chamonix and a horse from there back to his brethren in Samoëns. But before he departed, he waded chest-deep into the Mediterranean and wept as he ejaculated a repentant spume into the sea.
***
Decades passed. Brother Ronov pioneered a new, bitter ale much esteemed by the local gentry. The monastery coffers, as a consequence, swelled. The scandal with Genevieve was forgotten when she married a respected mason and gave birth to two lovely, if dark-complexioned, twin girls. The word of God spread in the hearts of the people and took root ever more deeply in the soul of Brother Yacoub who, after his year of sin in Nice, embraced his monkhood with twice as much devotion. And yet, and yet. On cold nights, when the monastery’s stone walls felt as cold as the glaciers beyond them, he recalled the demon’s gentle touch on the massif that summer night. Remembered the wet warmth of the demon within the Baroness, her arms and legs straining at the ropes, her mouth soft as a ripe fig, her voice trembling with genuine longing. Remembered, yes, but he didn’t allow himself the luxury, the decadence, of regret. His faith was his foundation, enduring and unshakeable.
In his fifty-first year, Brother Yacoub faced his third and final demonic challenge. He was summoned to Paris by a powerful Duke with close ties to the new King, Philip II. The Duke’s second son had suffered all manner of afflictions: boils, blisters, convulsions, even lustful fondling of the servants. Confined to his bedchamber, the young lord hadn’t eaten for a month. Local priests and monks had tried exorcisms and even petitioned a healer from Milan acclaimed for his miraculous poultices but all was for naught. No progress until the son himself asked for Brother Yacoub, for a monk, a brewer, a warrior, a pirate. For a man named Yacoub who cast a green jewel into the sea. With crippling trepidation overcome only by his reinvigorated faith, Yacoub accepted the request and left Samoëns, traveling west by horse until arriving in Paris at the cusp of autumn. An ill wind blew through the capital, carrying the stench of the city, a medieval aroma of feces, garbage, and rotting meat.
Yacoub entered the son’s bedchamber and though the castle had been cold, the room was sweltering. The oppressive heat took him back to his childhood starving and thieving on the streets of Marrakech. He approached the bed and the young man writhing atop it beneath heavy blankets of hide and fur and feather. He began reciting his prayer to the Archangel Michael.
“What has he ever done for you?” the young lord asked in a voice high of pitch and sultry, but old too, older and wiser than his sixteen years.
“I am Yacoub. I am here as you requested.”
The young lord laughed. “I know you, Yacoub. More than you know yourself. Yet you call on the aid of Michael and his ilk, his Lord. But what has he ever done for you? I tell you true: the air was stale in the garden.”
“He made us in his image.”
He laughed again, raspy, sad. Eyes a soft, wet, mossy green. “He is lonely and bored. He wants followers, worshippers. But all I ever wanted was you. On the boat, you had me and I had you yet you cast me into the sea. On the streets of Marrakech, I offered you succor and protection yet you fled. Beer won’t brew without yeast. Your cock won’t stiffen without a rush of blood. Man can’t live on faith alone. He must eat and breathe and fuck. Yet you forsake me.”
Yacoub trembled, throat parched, recalling and not recalling, knowing and not knowing. “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil,” he said, his voice weak, faltering.
The young lord smiled beneath his tumulus of blankets and slid his left hand outside them and toward Yacoub. “Take my hand, Yacoub.”
Yacoub, despite his faith, his strength, wept, conscious of a loss of something. A woman. A green-eyed child with Yacoub’s dark skin and aquiline nose. A life he could have lived. He continued his prayer. “May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan.” But he took the young lord’s hand, startled by the strength in his slender, clammy fingers.
“I’ve loved you, Yacoub,” the young lord—or the thing possessing him—said. “Three times I’ve come to you. Three times I’ve confessed to you. Bearing no conditions or rules, making no demands or threats. My monk, my brewer, my warrior, my pirate, my heart, my world. I loved you and love you still. But I will not come again. My Yacoub.”
“And all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls,” Yacoub said, crying hard now, snot and tears falling from his face onto their clasped hands. The young lord shook. His green eyes changed, darkened, shed their color, grew intensely clear, then closed. He had fallen into a deep sleep. “Amen,” Yacoub said, before kissing his forehead. Cold limestone, crisp pilsner, the ruptured purple flesh of a fig. Yacoub collapsed beside him.
In the morning, he left for Samoëns with two fresh horses for he wanted very much to be amongst his friends, his fellow monks, drinking ale before the snows came.
***
Brother Yacoub lived a long, illustrious life in the service of the Lord. On his deathbed at the age of one-hundred-and-two, in the new wing of the thriving monastery at Samoëns, he lay surrounded by his successors, the only remaining monk of his generation. Sitting at his side, as his breath became weak and ragged, a scribe waited to record his last words, a prayer or psalm or verse, a bit of wisdom to guide the monks current and to come, but they proved inaudible, incoherent. Yacoub could no longer yell. The sounds which escaped Yacoub weren’t his words so much as the muffled steps of Death’s arrival.
Later accounts make disparate claims as to Yacoub the Demon Defier’s last words. According to oral histories passed down through the monastery, Yacoub, unable to digest anything heavy, called for fruit. A slice of apple, perhaps. Or, though exotic, a ripe fig. The last act of earthly desire before he departed for the heavenly realm. Meanwhile Sister Doris, a major figure of the Counter Reformation’s impact on Alpine monasteries and nunneries and an acknowledged expert on the history of beer brewing in the late Middle Ages, asserts that through her archival studies she discovered a hand-written account of a one-sided conversation between Yacoub and the Archangel Michael about the relative merits of Dubbel versus Tripel ales among the Trappists of Belgian overheard by a stable boy outside his window who recounted the conversation to a merchant with an interest in secrets of the brewing trade. Later historians, however, never saw the note in question themselves and thus dismissed Sister Doris’s version of events. Perhaps most convincing, if nonetheless unsubstantiated, is Brother Achel’s record of Yacoub’s last breaths. An amateur historian with an engaging if byzantine prose style and a respected monk at the monastery at Samoëns a mere single generation after Yacoub, Achel claimed Yacoub’s final act was a fit of determined hacking and gasping until he managed, force of will surmounting blood, phlegm, and decay, to fill his famous lungs with one final breath and yell out something half-coherent about a garden with stale air. Though witnesses put little stock in these words given his delirium, it is said they were nonetheless impressed by the passion with which he uttered them, as if they were pregnant with a lifetime of longing, one might even say regret.
— Jon Doughboy is shopping for costumes in the culture store in the Mall of Unlived Experiences. See him dolled up in his latest identity @doughboywrites