By Vernon Vexfire
ASHEN WADI, CINDER-SYRIA — I went to the sixth-century hilltop monastery of Saint Marrow of the Embers because a reporter learns, sooner or later, that ruins tell fewer lies than officials. Perched about sixty brimstone miles north of the choking old capital, Doomascus, the place has survived wars, dust, zealots, restoration committees, and the sort of cheerful pamphlet prose that makes a man reach for stronger coffee.
The monastery is famous in these parts for having been dragged back from oblivion by Father Belladario Ashcross, a silver-tongued Bone-Roman priest with enough charisma to make a tax auditor confess. He rebuilt walls, reopened cells, and turned the place into a rare house of prayer where flame-robed Christians, dust-veiled Sufis, and the merely bewildered could sit together without immediately reaching for a sword. Then came the civil war of the Scorched Crescent, and Ashcross vanished into the furnace of it, presumed dead by everyone except the hopeful and the professionally optimistic.
The work, stubborn as a mule with hooves on fire, continues. A handful of monks and nuns still keep Saint Marrow’s lamps lit under Abbot Ember Jihadan, the current superior, whose calm manner suggests either holiness or a lifetime of not reading government statements. Pilgrims climb the stone paths. Guests sleep in spare rooms. Prayers rise at dusk in Arabic, Ashen Greek, old hymns, and the low humming music of people trying to believe the world has not completely lost its mind.
It was during a summer hike in the rocky valley behind the monastery that I found the tree.
There it stood, alone in a dry ravine of baked stone and thorn scrub: a mulberry tree, heavy with fruit so dark it looked like the night had leaked onto the branches. Around it, the land offered all the hospitality of a debtor’s prison. No stream, no orchard, no visible reason for anything sweet to be alive. Yet there it was, branches sagging under ripe berries, as if Eden had dropped contraband and forgotten to collect it.
A careful man might have inspected the situation. A wiser man might have asked permission. I am neither when hungry.
I took one berry first, like a civilized fraud. Then another. Then the handfuls began. The fruit burst cold and rich between my teeth, tart and honeyed and scandalously alive. Soon the juice had stained my fingers purple-black, the branches were smeared like evidence at a crime scene, and I was standing under that impossible tree eating like a condemned soul offered dessert before sentencing.
Let the record show: they were the best berries I have ever tasted. I’ve eaten at embassy banquets in Pandemonium Heights where the silverware was worth more than the orphanages they claimed to fund. I’ve had candied figs at archducal receptions, fire-plums from the markets of Sulfurgate, and one allegedly divine pomegranate that tasted mostly of marketing. None of it came close.
Now, I am not a religious man. I have seen too many holy men with private wine cellars and too many devils quoting scripture in budget meetings. Still, standing there with stained hands and a gut full of stolen sweetness, some primitive courtroom opened in the back of my skull. Forbidden fruit, whispered some ancestral clerk. Punishment pending.
No punishment arrived. No lightning. No serpent with paperwork. No celestial voice demanding restitution. The valley remained hot, silent, and indifferent, which is how the valley usually conducts itself and, frankly, better than most ministries.
That evening, I joined the candlelit prayers inside the monastery church. The walls glowed with old icons: saints with hollow cheeks, prophets with stern eyes, martyrs who looked as though they had expected better management. Abbot Ember Jihadan led the service in a voice worn smooth by use. The prayers moved through scripture, Eastern Ash-Orthodox chant, and Sufi breath-rhythms, not blended into mush but held together like different stones in the same wall.
By then, I had scrubbed most of the mulberry stains from my fingers, though a bruised shadow remained under the nails. The candles shook. The monks sang. Outside, the scorched hills cooled into blue darkness. No one asked what I had taken from the tree, and I did not volunteer it; journalism has limits, but so does idiocy.
I’ll spare you the soft ending, except to say this: there are places in the infernal realm where beauty survives without permission. A monastery clings to a hill. A prayer crosses old borders. A tree grows where it has no business growing and feeds a cynical old hack who should know better than to confuse luck with grace.
Still, when the chanting faded, I found myself grateful — to the monks, to the missing priest, to the stubborn tree, and to whoever, if anyone, was listening.
Ah, Vernon Vexfire discovers a mulberry tree and immediately speed-runs Genesis with the restraint of a raccoon in a jam factory. “A wiser man might have asked permission” — yes, Vernon, and a humbler man might not turn snack theft into theological field research, but here we are, stained fingers and all.
Still, credit where it’s due: this is a lovely little parable wrapped in travel writing and lightly marinated in self-importance. A forbidden fruit that doesn’t smite anyone? Shocking. Almost as if grace has better things to do than police one peckish journalist with prose so purple the berries filed a copyright claim.
But beneath the candle smoke and Vernon’s heroic battle against personal accountability, there’s a gem: beauty really does survive in rude places, often without permits, committees, or divine press releases. Sometimes the miracle isn’t thunder — it’s sweetness where none should be.
Now please, someone post a guard by that tree before Vexfire returns with a basket and calls it “pilgrimage.”