Tribal sun with yin yang centre on chest

The abbot has finally let me take up the cloister floor, and I am writing this on my knees in the dust with the tiles stacked beside me like loaves. Under the flagstones, where no one has looked since the old chapter house was roofed over, there is a sun. Brother Anselm swears the masons who came up from the coast laid it, and he has a prayer book with a page of rays drawn around a hole that someone later filled with cement.

The rays are long and tapering, black as tar where the lime has kept them, and they run out toward the edges of the room like spokes from a cart wheel that has come off its axle. Around the centre sits a ring of white triangles, each pointing outward, each cut from a different stone. In the middle is a circle split in two. One half is dark, one half light, and the dark curls into the light with a small eye of its own. Anselm calls it the balance. I call it a joke the masons played on the abbot, because nobody here has agreed about anything since Lent.

I have started to think the triangles are the important part. Count them with me sometime. There are twenty-four, and every one has been worn flat by sixty years of sandals walking the same path to the refectory. I have been tapping at the cement with a cold chisel all afternoon, and the light through the arch has crept from one ray to the next. I think the sun is only waiting for someone to stop arguing long enough to let it rise.

Write to me when the rain stops. Tell me whether you still keep the lamp lit in the scullery window.

Yours in some confusion, Tomas