Langue[dot]doc 1305

by Gillian Polack

  Guilhem had his eye on the fortifications. They were good, and practical, he thought, but not handled well. Sporadic checks of the pilgrim paths did not equal a proper watch.

  Since the castle was out of bounds (by order of the abbot, who really didn’t like Guilhem’s cousin), Guilhem asked around to find out who had the keys to the towers. He knew that they were managed separately to the castle, for they had been used twice as prisons since he had arrived. Once Fiz had cooled his heels overnight and the other time a pair of drunks had been restrained.

  A villager had the keys, he discovered, but no-one would say who. The abbot was the one who made these decisions and the abbot, as Guilhem had already discovered, refused to talk. This was very clear: Guilhem should stay out of the abbey’s business. Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert was not for the nobility or for the king, it was for the Church.

  “We are of Saint Guilhem, not of Charlemagne. We do not need the scions of Charlemagne to protect us. Look around - we have protected ourselves for five hundred years. Find other uses for your time. Praying for your immortal soul, perhaps. I’m certain your soul is in need of prayer.”

  * * *

  It was a bad day.

  In a small place, deaths hurt everyone. In Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, deaths hurt for a long time. Old Guilhem (the oldest Guilhem of the many by that name) had been expected to die for years.

  No-one knew who would take his place as the town memory. How was that dispute settled? Where is that boundary marker? How much do we give the abbey, the church, the person in Aniane who owns this triangle of land? There was a power vacuum and it would be hard to manage. Everyone would jostle to change the public memory and grab a few more small rights and privileges. And everyone would be on the watch for such jostling and such greed. Written records would be very important for a while.

  The other loss was unexpected. It was Fiz’s friend, the diver. He was showing off his skills in the steep slopes overlooking the Hérault. He wanted to find out how long he could hold his breath and how far downstream he could go. He was certain he could go farther than anyone had ever been before.

  The Hérault and its main tributaries were not safe waters. He hadn’t watched out sufficiently and he was caught up in the stream. As other times (although this time unintentionally) he was drawn underground by the current. He washed out at quite another village, miles away. Drowned.

  Young boys should never die, however full of vainglory and boast, thought Guilhem. He thought on his Book of Hours and was not able to recall if the day was red or black. He decided against opening it to check. Some days were black no matter how they were drawn.

  Chapter Seven

  Memories

  25 April, 1305 (St Mark’s Day)

  They did not commemorate ANZAC Day in the Hellhole. Mac felt that this was vaguely wrong. He found some beers and created his own two-up game from a carved bit of wood and his lucky twenty cent piece and a carved wooden copy of it.

  “Why do you have a lucky twenty cent piece?” asked Artemisia, when he invited her to join. “And why is it here, in the wild past?”

  “Wouldn’t want an unlucky one,” was Mac’s reply. “Fight Club rules. Don’t talk about the game. See you up top in fifteen minutes.”

  It was her and Murray and Mac. Murray wore a cap with a green and blue and black and white pin. He always wore that badge, somewhere on his clothes, but it moved according to his mood. They drank beer and played a token game, but it was too dark and the sky was too clear and soon they found themselves on their backs.

  “What are we looking at here, Murray?” Cormac demanded.

  “Cepheus just peeking out over the horizon,” Geoff said, promptly. “Then there are the bears and the dogs and the usual suspects. D’you want to learn?”

  Mac was offended: “I was making polite conversation!”

  When they returned down their little ladder, Artemisia finally caved in. She asked Mac for help with the communal calendar. “It’s important,” she explained. “We’re living in 1305. We need to have a sense of it, even if we’re here, underground. Otherwise we’re joining the zombies.”

  Mac didn’t understand her explanation, but he was delighted to make mischief. He also understood Artemisia’s frustration. He was a re-enactor and was feeling somewhat repressed in matters Medieval. He had expected excursions, not untold hours fixing water hammers, finding supplies, and explaining yet again to Sylvia and Pauline why heating was not an option. They drew all the red-letter days in red letters.

  When daylight came, Sylvia looked at the defaced calendar. She marched into Luke’s office. A moment later Konig was called in. Artemisia was asked to explain. She pulled up a picture of a page from a Book of Hours and told them that red letter days were the good ones.

  That was it. No punishment. No big drama. From then on, everything was red or black to the team, on screen or in real life. It became part of who they were, along with logging finds and testing samples and overwhelming Ben’s and Sylvia’s databases with information.

  Chapter Eight

  Shifting Views

  Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert was in the process of reshaping itself after the deaths. Boundaries between people were being redrawn, memories were being consolidated, relationships were being reaffirmed. The only thing that didn’t change was Fiz. He and his friend defiantly acted as if they were still three, still rulers of the earth on which they walked. They wanted no help. If they cried alone, they didn’t tell anyone. They played pranks and they raided gardens and they earned odd bits of money through occasional jobs of work. They were not going to accept that the world had changed.

  Having had its focus shifted by the loss of the one who knew all the ways and all the traditions, the rest of the town felt differently. It was as if the main street bent now at a different angle and all the vistas were new. Many town dwellers started to wonder about the people who lived under the hill. They’d noticed the hill dwellers (Artemisia would have pointed to this as evidence that not all ancestors were zombies), but now their presence was remarked upon and discussed.

  “These people,” said Berta, adamantly, “these people,” she reiterated, for what she had to say was important. “These people are not going to go away.”

  “I thought they’d go away,” confessed Sibilla. “Why do they live under the hill, anyway? What do they eat?” And so discussion began. Initially, it led away from the hill folk and to someone closer: Guilhem.

  “He is a problem,” Berta stated, still adamant in her opinions.

  “He’s a young man who needs to do a bit of work,” Guilhem-the-smith shrugged.

  “Can’t terrace, can’t grow olives, no craft skills, doesn’t work with or for the abbey,” Sibilla, as always, sided with Berta.

  “What can he do, then?” asked the big smith.

  “Maybe our new knight can help us? Maybe we have a good job for him and he doesn’t know it.”

  “How? What job?”

  “We need someone expendable to talk to the hillfolk.”

  “Why expendable?” Guilhem-the-smith worried when anyone thought that any individual could be sacrificed in this way. Jesus had done that, but ordinary men should not.

  “We don’t even know what they are. Human, fairy, demon, something else entirely.”

  “True. And if any of us talk with them and our souls are lost then the whole town has another hole.”

  “Like the one we have from that idiot diver. He was a pest, and stupid, but death and his soul in Purgatory”

  “It was too harsh. It always is.”

  “How do we do it?” Berta entered the conversation again, enthusiastically, with Sibilla standing next to her, very close, very intense. “How do we make sure that the knight is the one who talks to them?”

  “Watch,” said Guilhem-the-smith. “He’s lonely and needs to find his place. If we continue to exclude him from our daily lives, but if we talk to him and make him care a bit, then he will do it himself.”

  “We
should discuss it with him then,” said Sibilla.

  “No. Let him think it’s his own idea.”

  * * *

  Sylvia was flirting with Konig. Again. The Prince Valiant look, Artemisia supposed, lured Sylvia into constant temptation. This time, Konig’s face was intent. Artemisia knew that look. It was exactly the same as her sister’s. Konig was up to mischief.

  Her experience with Lucia made it all too easy to spot those changes in expression. He might lie and look as if he were telling the truth, or he might be truthful and sound as if he were devising a fanciful fiction. She always caught him out: he’d stopped trying it on her.

  Sylvia was less expert.

  Mac was also alert to Konig’s mischief. It was Mac, in fact, who had first alerted her. He hated Dr Benjamin Konig, even as he wished he could be like him. Artemisia determined that, if their caverns were full of ancient gods, Konig would be Coyote.

  “I get it from my great-great-great-great grandfather,” Konig said this and looked directly into Sylvia’s face. Very confrontational, Artemisia thought, except that Sylvia didn’t seem to find it so. His voice was gentle. “He was a notoriously rakish late Georgian poet.”

  “Oh,” said Sylvia, obviously enchanted.

  “On my mother’s side,” Konig continued, his hand cupping Sylvia’s chin, as if he himself were the Regency rake, “I’m the descendant of an overly verbal Victorian novelist who also wrote anonymous broadside ballads.” What was incredible was that Sylvia believed him. Stars shone in her eyes.

  Artemisia made those stars wink out with just two words. “Anonymous, huh?”

  “Sprung bad, Konig,” and Geoff stepped out from the corridor. He walked blithely through the still tableau, carrying his kit, his flag-pin attached firmly to his backpack.

  If he walks straight ahead at that pace, Artemisia thought, he will walk right off the cliff. He almost did. He strode out the main cave opening as if it were paved and turned to the left barely before the edge. Show-off, Artemisia thought, half-admiring. Everyone here has the biggest need to make a spectacle of themselves. Everyone except what’s his name. He was at the next desk to her and she knew him as well as she knew everyone and still his name escaped her. She could see in her mind the way his dark hair was growing as stubble and the size of his eyes. Everyone knew those watching eyes. He had a French name and a Melbourne accent. That didn’t help. Finally. Tony. She said it aloud.

  “What?” he said from behind her.

  “I was trying to remember your name…” Artemisia wondered if it were possible to feel more embarrassed.

  “Oh,” said Tony. “It doesn’t matter. Sylvia called me Bill yesterday.”

  “Bill?” Artemisia couldn’t see where Sylvia got that from.

  “Bill was the person I replaced.”

  “I didn’t realise you were a replacement too. We have something in common.”

  Tony’s voice was non-committal. “Yes,” he said. He sat down at his desk and lost himself in the embrace of his computer.

  * * *

  Outside was Geoff’s world. He loved walking by feel and discovering the changes in texture of the rocks underfoot. He loved the shifts in the air and the scent of herbs that reached even the caves. Geoff had moved to a friendlier place and time. It enfolded him in its warmth. He measured the temperature and the rain as much with his body as with his gauges.

  Back home he had a thousand and one tools to help him. Here he did his job without satellites and without weather stations and he carried bits of other peoples’ tasks with him, thanks to Theo’s policy of the fewest possible team members being out and about. The challenge filled his lungs bigger and made him want to sing.

  Geoff was so absorbed in the joy of noting precipitation and taking samples and in trying not to sing and in the scent of wild thyme and lavender that he entirely failed to notice that he was being trailed by a girl and a boy. They poked each other and they giggled in the way that only an eleven year old girl doing something slightly naughty in the company of her nine year old brother can do.

  “Fairy,” said the boy.

  “Not,” his sister was valiantly trying to keep quiet.

  “Fairy,” he said more confidently, “very big fairy. Dark and tall and fairy.”

  “If you don’t shut up, we’ll go home,” Bona warned.

  “Fairy,” the boy whispered obstinately to himself, where his sister couldn’t hear.

  They followed Geoff until Bona heard the bells. “Now,” was all she said. Her brother turned with her and they went home.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said, when they came close to the wall. “There won’t be any fairies with you gone.”

  “I don’t want to leave you,” she said, her arm around his shoulder. “You’re my favourite person on all the earth. I want to be in Montpellier. I want to learn how to smith. Maybe I’ll have my own business, one day. I want my own business. I want to make beautiful things. Anyway, it’s a long way away. Months and months and months. Maybe not until next Lady Day.”

  “I know,” but his voice was sad.

  “Bread,” she suggested.

  “Yes!” and it was as if wistfulness had never been.

  Chapter Nine

  Sylvia

  Sylvia still ignored the rules about checking with Artemisia’s schedule and about not being seen. Each time she ignored the rules, she took her daring a bit further. Partly, this was boredom. Partly it was because she defined her main task as astronomical observations and these depended on factors outside the caves. Partly it was the sense that the historian was a nonsense addition to the team and that what she said was not relevant.

  Thus, when Artemisia asked her if she could explain how they were limiting their environmental impact, she ignored the historian and went about her business as if a fly had passed. Geoff answered Artemisia, and so did Ben, walking her through the careful processes that had been planned from Melbourne. “Where are the people in this?” she asked.

  “We avoid them,” said Ben, “so they don’t feature.” Like Lucia’s chemotherapy bod, Artemisia thought, where everything is about the science and humans don’t come into it. She was so very lonely for Lucia.

  * * *

  Guilhem had been in the habit of taking his Book of Hours with him when he was out and about. No-one knew that he had a small book in his bag, and he was reassured that one of his most valuable possessions was there, with him, no matter where he found himself.

  When he took the long route home because he didn’t want to be there, he forgot that the path beyond the End of the World was not as fine as the main pilgrim road. He arrived home to find that his book had slipped out of his pack, probably during a particularly complex navigation around rocks and a rather worrying drop. His bookbag was empty, its ties loose.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he told his people, and went to find it.

  He was close to where he thought he might have dropped it, when he saw a woman bending over. She had no veil, no wimple. And she held his book in her hand.

  “Mine!” he shouted, “That’s my book! Thief!” He crossed the distance quickly but she was gone. He searched until it was too dark, and cursed the crescent moon for not providing the light to search further. He had missed prayers and the evening meal, and he was torn up inside.

  The book was illuminated by a master. It was the one possession he could not, would not lose.

  * * *

  Sylvia strolled in through the big office opening, looking flushed but triumphant. Luke took one look at her, and another at what she carried. He confiscated the book and quietly took it to Artemisia.

  “What’s this worth?” he asked.

  Artemisia looked at it very closely and with mounting awe. “It’s exquisite,” she said. “Where did it come from?”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “About as much as a Rolls?” she guessed. “A classic car, anyhow. An unaffordable one.”

  “And whoever has lost it will want it back
?”

  “God, yeah,” Artemisia searched for oxygen. “You’d look for a diamond ring in the street if you lost it, and diamond rings are harder to find in a street than Books of Hours on a barren hillside.”

  “Sylvia was seen taking it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Language,” admonished Luke.

  “This is bad,” Artemisia said.

  “She’s put all of us in danger,” said Luke.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I need to think.” The great man thought. He ate in his study that evening. He thought some more. The next morning he had a long interview with Sylvia. She walked out looking pale but unrepentant. Then Luke called for Artemisia.

  Artemisia was designated to return the book and to persuade the owner to keep silent about the team. Luke turned on his charm and power to persuade her. Finally, Luke admitted that the team needed its historian. That she was not an optional extra. Artemisia didn’t find this reassuring. Sylvia, Artemisia decided, is a greedy, reckless toad.

  “She has drawn you a sketch.”

  “Me? A sketch?”

  “Of the owner. I want you to give it back. Make amends. Ensure our safety and security and privacy. I’ve explained already.”

  “Why did Sylvia do it?”

  “I’ll find out,” Luke promised. “And she won’t do anything this stupid again, because I’m going to rein her right in. She thinks she owns the expedition and she most certainly does not.” In other words, Artemisia reflected, Sylvia had given the boss cheek.

  The Book of Hours puzzled Artemisia. It was a real gem. New. Beautiful. Some sort of late Gothic bookhand.

  Artemisia turned for Brown’s book, so that she could check the hand out and give it a proper name, but Brown’s book was in the distant future. The Book of Hours was of the present. Fabulous illuminations. Expensive illuminations, too, with that glorious blue and that rich gold. A truly exquisite hand. A single hand, for the whole book.

  This is so early, Artemisia thought. We aren’t in the Book of Hours’ heyday and yet someone carries this. A museum piece from the moment of its creation, except that it wasn’t. They were living in the museum. Who on earth would own a volume like this here, at the end of the world?