by Carol Berg
“Brother Chancellor gives out the work, Excellency,” whispered the sandy-haired monk, “and tasks us with the pages most suited to our skills. Not to set myself high, but both he and Father Abbot say I’ve a special touch for numbers, so perhaps—”
“I must have a word with the chancellor then, as well as with Abbot Luviar.” The hierarch glared across the room at Brother Victor, who leaned over a desk, heads together with a copyist.
The hierarch spoke to each of the copyists, his steepled upper lip rising high and stiff as he named more works frivolous or inappropriate. He condemned anything of mundane use: a scroll on glassmaking, a book on the building of Aurellian roads, an almanac that traced weather patterns in Morian over three centuries.
I was no judge of books and their uses. That a man could learn to make glass from another glassmaker, as I had learned to tan hides, brew ale, and cut stone from those who knew the work, made more sense to me than learning such things from blots on parchment. But then again, I could not see how a book reader would come nearer heaven by reading someone’s speculations on Iero’s parentage than by reading of the might of storms and sunlight over the river country.
The hierarch moved to a table where a grizzled monk traced his finger over a page in an open book while reading a set of unbound pages. The monk’s glance moved from one to the other and back again.
“So, Brother Novice,” said the hierarch as he peered over the shoulder of the monk and browsed through stacks that seemed to be awaiting similar examination. “Abbot Luviar has recounted how a journey of penitence brought you to this great conversion. A remarkable story.”
I cleared my throat. “A wonder, truly, Excellency. I feel uplifted. Reborn, as to say.”
He turned the pages of a small book, the colors of the inked patterns brighter than his ruby ring. “And you truly came upon Gillarine by chance?”
“Indeed, I wandered for days, bleeding and wounded, entirely confused as to my course. Having lived so short a time in the little village of”—I twisted my brain to come up with a name—“Thorn, and diseased with sin and violent behavior as I was, I was unfamiliar with any holy places in the countryside around. Even now, I could not tell you the location of that village or the true course of my wanderings, Excellen—”
Saints and angels! I almost swallowed my tongue. I had not noticed the man who stood stiffly in the shadow of a pillar, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes dead with boredom. The scarlet surcoat he wore over his gray gown bore the hierarch’s gold-broidered blazon of mitral hat and solicale. Of modest stature, with close-trimmed black hair, long nose, and an air of unremitting superiority, he scarcely needed the violet mask that covered half his face to proclaim him pureblood. Protocol forbade an ordinary to so much as notice him without his master’s leave.
I dropped my gaze and attempted to shrink inside my cowl. “Truly, Saint…uh”—the name escaped me—“that is, the guardian of wanderers must have examined…watched…over me every moment of that…of that—”
“Yes, yes.” Eligius’s frizzled brown hair bobbed alongside the red cap that had replaced his mitral hat. “You carried a book of maps, did you not? Even that could not aid you?”
I dared not let the name Cartamandua arise in association with me in front of the pureblood. Why had I not thought to take a false name as long as I carried the book? It was not so long a stretch from Valen to Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine to exposure.
“Alas, no, Excellency.” Think, fool. I spoke slowly, so as not to stammer as I crafted my tale. “Though I valued the book because of its connection to my lord Mardane Lavorile who gave it me, I read no holy places in its maps, which were mostly common drawings of rivercourses and the old Aurellian roads that interlace Morian. Little of Ardra. Little of practical use even when I was scouting for the mardane.”
“A frivolous work, then. And what has become of the book? Perhaps it is here being copied?”
“Why, I never thought of it as worthy of copying.” I scratched my head, turned about, and gawked as if to review the contents of all the copyist desks. “And none of the brothers took great note of it, save that a poor wanderer had a book at all. It’s certainly not one of these. I gave it up, Excellency, along with my secular garb and sinful ways. I’ve not even seen the thing since I determined to answer Iero’s call by taking vows. I can’t see how a map would guide a man’s soul to heaven.”
I dared not glance at the pureblood. Was he listening? Did his bent enable him to detect lies?
The hierarch pursed his odd lips for a moment and then relaxed them into a smile. “Very true. Stay faithful to true teaching, Brother Novice, and your course will be straight.”
Sensing dismissal, I bowed, as I had seen the others do, and backed away carefully until my back touched the wall between two stacks of shelves. The pillar blocked my view of the pureblood and his of me. I heaved a sigh, allowing the storm of anxiety to ease.
A lay brother poked the fire and carried a lit taper to the lamps that hung from iron brackets fixed to the pillars. Outside the windows, the haze had thickened into bulging clouds, dimming the sunlight and sapping the room’s warmth.
The hierarch summoned Brother Victor with a wave of his jeweled finger. “Chancellor, a word with you before I take leave.”
The little monk hurried to the hierarch, his hands tucked under his black scapular, his oddly skewed features sober and attentive.
“All of you, pay heed and bear witness to my judgment of this abbey’s great work of writing!” said Eligius. “A member of your fraternity has fallen into grave error…” He rebuked Brother Victor at great length, accusing him of supporting the deviant philosophy of those who preached coming doom by his choices of materials to copy. “…and so you are to immediately remove all frivolous and mundane materials from this room. Your abbot may keep or dispose of the exemplars as he sees fit. But this—”
He whipped the page of numbers right out from under the young monk’s pen and threw it on the floor. A long smear of ink marred the meticulously written page.
“—and this—”
The pages on glassmaking, the Moriangi almanac, meticulous colored drawings of a millworks, and several other part-written pages joined the first one on the floor.
“—and every page copied from a profane work is to be burned in view of all residents of Gillarine as a sign of error and rededication.”
Brother Victor’s horror-stricken gaze leaped from the crumpled pages to the red-faced hierarch and back again. The other monks looked stunned.
Parchment to be burned? Even I knew how appallingly wasteful that was. Though my family’s house was a wealthy one, my tutors had scraped and overwritten precious vellum time and time again. And who could measure the time and care these monks had spent on these pages?
“You, Chancellor, are to receive twenty lashes before sunset today and be confined for five days with water as your only sustenance. Set this room in order and your copyists to their tasks, and then accompany Eqastré Scrutari-Consil, who will carry out my judgment. He will also question each of you”—his jeweled finger denoted every one of the shocked brothers—“to ensure that you understand your duties to Iero and the ordo mundi.”
Scrutari-Consil stepped away from the wall and bowed to Eligius, touching his fingers to his forehead. With a limp gesture of blessing, the hierarch swept out of the briskly opened door and into the rainy afternoon.
Chapter 12
“This is outrageous, Broth—”
Brother Victor silenced the sandy-haired monk with a gesture. Other monks left their desks to lay hands on his sleeves or his back, to shake their heads in silent denial, or to offer, with eloquent gestures, comfort or anger or comradeship. The chancellor briskly sent them back to work.
Hands clasped at his back, the pureblood watched impassively as Brother Victor darted about his duties. The man in red and gray needed no word or additional gesture to assert his authority over the room.
H
aving naught to do, I pressed my back to the wall, attempting to shrivel out of sight. I would have slipped out of the door, but Scrutari-Consil had positioned himself within view of it.
Scrutari-Consil—not a family related to mine, thanks be to all gods. The Scrutaris were known as perceptives. They were often contracted as investigators and inspectors, expected to root out lies and deceptions or to oversee town administrators. His colineal name Consil was unfamiliar; I could not recall the lineal bent of every pureblood family. The name’s Aurellian root suggested adjudication, thus a bent that might lend itself to mediation, untangling puzzles, or rendering judgments. Better for my lies and deceptions if he favored the Consil line, though I truly would prefer the man burst into spontaneous flames like a phoenix and not regenerate until I was fifty quellae from Gillarine.
Eligius had addressed Scrutari with the pureblood honorific eqastré, an affectation that signified nothing. As a form of address between purebloods, eqastré indicated parity in rank. Between pureblood and anyone else in the world, such address had no meaning, for protocol dictated that purebloods were so far exalted by the gods that ordinaries could in no wise be compared with them. The only relationship permitted between an ordinary and a pureblood was that spelled out in a Registry contract. Sweat dribbled past my ears.
Brother Victor’s silent hands were busily directing his copyists. Though I had little experience with the monks’ signing speech, his instructions were easy to interpret. Those whose work had been halted were to gather their completed pages from the neat stacks on the holding tables and pile them on a long table littered with broken pens, empty ink horns, and less orderly piles of written sheets. They were to collect their exemplars, the original documents being copied, in different piles on the same table.
As each monk turned in his pages, the chancellor passed him a new book or scroll he drew from the cluttered bookshelves. Before the last had been distributed, monks had already spread new vellum on their desks and begun to measure and rule their pages with thin sticks of the same plummet stonemasons used to mark their plans. The pureblood strolled down the rows, examining the titles of the new works.
At first Brother Victor seemed inordinately calm. But as he began sorting the damaged pages and proscribed books, his hands began to shake, knocking over the heaps of pages, books, and scrolls more than once, leaving the table a heaped confusion. When he noticed me watching, a tinge of scarlet touched his pale cheeks. Abruptly, he summoned me to join him. He scooped up the piles of discard pages and dumped them into a large basket underneath the table.
When I reached the chancellor’s side, his small, neat hand—steady now—pointed first to the remaining heap of books and papers and then upward. For a moment I had the notion that he was saying something about heaven. But then I realized he merely wanted me to carry the things upstairs to the library. Grateful for the excuse to leave and for the rule of silence that prevented his use of my name, I pressed my palms together in acquiescence.
The rain, now a downpour, had the gutterspouts flowing. Water had pooled in the alley and at the base of the ascending stair outside the door. Moisture spattered across the threshold as I awkwardly tried to draw my cowl over my ungainly armload of books, scrolls, and loose pages. Feeling the pureblood’s eyes on my back did not steady my hands. Crinkling his red-rimmed eyes in disapproval, the stoop-shouldered monk set down his ink basket, yanked the heavy wool across the jumble, and stuffed a wad of the cloth into my already over-occupied hand to hold it there.
The open air cooled my incipient fever. The pureblood could not possibly have recognized me.
The stair was not half wide enough to carry such a load. I must either risk tumbling over the open side of the steps or scrape arms and elbows on the wall, thus smearing moss onto my new cowl. At the top of the stair I pawed at the brass latch of the library door, at the same time drawing up my knee to catch some book that was sliding out of my arms. If I took another step, some precious writing was going to drop into the chilly puddle that was seeping into my new sandals around my bare toes. By the time Jullian pulled open the library door, I was crouched in an immovable knot.
The boy gaped as if I were a lunatic. I waggled my brows and my chin toward my laden arms, hoping he or one of the monks in the room would catch my meaning before the growing heat in my thigh burst into flame.
At last understanding dawned. Jullian reached under my dripping cowl and supported the collapsing bundle as I waddled through the doorway. As the monks resumed their studies, the boy rescued the most precariously poised texts. I dumped the rest of the stack on the table beside them.
The boy and I blotted stray droplets from sheets and folios with a kerchief, stacked the books, set aside the scrolls in their cloth or leather cases, and straightened the loose pages. We had reduced the clutter by half, when one brightly colored page caught my notice. As Jullian laid another page on the pile of loose sheets, I gripped his slender wrist and pulled it away, staring at the one atop the stack. The crisply white vellum depicted a detailed diagram of mill cogs, inked in bright red and blue. A square outlined in the text gaped empty, awaiting a second drawing. I shifted several more of the loose pages and found the half-completed list of carefully drawn numbers, a streak of black ink left where the page had been whipped out from under the hand of the copyist.
What had Brother Victor sent out to be burned? Certainly not the pages the hierarch had selected. With so many sheets piled on the table, perhaps the chancellor had picked up the wrong ones…or perhaps he had assumed that I, a befuddled novice of less than a day who had never worked in his scriptorium—and thus was not subject to questioning at the hierarch’s order—wouldn’t notice he had switched them.
My suspicions were quickly confirmed. We had just spread out the last few pages, careful of the still damp ink, when Brother Gildas hurried through the library door. He shooed a puzzled Jullian back to his books, wax tablet, and stylus—implements of torture familiar from my own boyhood—then gestured for me to bring the stacked pages. Producing a key from under his scapular, Gildas unlocked the inner grillwork door of the last book press on the south wall and stowed the suspect pages, slipping them between the books along with scraps of vellum he took from a basket to protect the drying ink. One would have to rifle the entire collection to discover the forbidden copies.
As Gildas locked the grate, shut the cupboard’s outer door, and shot its bronze bolt back into its catch, I noted the brass solicale affixed on the door—the abbot’s sign. So the contraband now lay hidden in the abbot’s own book press. Astonishing.
His back to the other three monks, Gildas held a finger to his mouth, laid his clenched fist on his breast, and flicked his eyes toward Jullian. His message was quite clear: silence, obedience, the boy’s safety. He waited, his dark brow raised in query.
I pressed my palms together and inclined my head. As in the matter of my book, my interests coincided with his demands. I was the least likely man in the abbey to carry tales to the hierarch or his lapdog. Yet only the time and company restrained my anger and resentment.
Vowing to lie in wait for the damnable monk after supper and force an explanation from him, I started out the door to find Brother Sebastian, while Gildas smiled cheerfully, drew up a stool next to Jullian, and began to inspect the boy’s work. And then the bells took up clanging. Not a call to the Hours—Nones had rung while I was with the hierarch in the scriptorium, and Vespers would not ring for at least an hour more. These bells stuttered in an unbalanced cadence that summoned the community to lay down whatever duties occupied the moment and gather at the refectory stair.
Everyone rose quickly, gathering their books and tablets and locking them away. But as Gildas and the other monks hurried out the door, I hung back. The bells would ring twice more, allowing time for scattered brethren to stopper their ink, damp cook fires, or round up sheep and goats, and I determined to take advantage of the opportunity. A matter more worrisome than frivolous copying or hidden pages
preyed on my mind.
Jullian, scratching one bare, mud-spattered leg with his sandal, held the heavy door open, waiting for me. He blinked in surprise when I dragged him back into the room and pushed the door shut.
“A moment, if you would,” I whispered. No finger twiddling would suffice for this. “I need to speak with you, and as you’ve been avoiding me so purposefully, and my life seems like to get more complicated now I’m vowed, I think this will have to do.”
Pressing his back to the doorpost, the boy glanced up at me with the sidewise aspect of a thief caught. This would take some care.
I perched my backside on one of the library tables. “Tell me how you came to live in an abbey so young. Your family, I suppose. Dead, are they?” I’d wager my life on the answer to that one.
It certainly was not the question he expected. He stared for a moment, as if to read my intent. Then he shrugged. “Aye. Mam died birthing when I was six. My da was clerk to a wool factor in Pontia, or, well, he wasn’t actually my da, as mine was dead. He said he’d no will left to raise a boy that wasn’t his. So he gave me the choice to go on to Cradens Abbey school that’s in Pontia or to apprentice to a dyer, as that fee was the best he could afford to pay. I liked schooling, so it was no hard choice. I heard he left the factor not long after that and went off to the fighting. He’s likely dead now, too.”
He spoke with assurance, not loud, but not whispering either, bold in his secrets and brave in his lonely confession. I knew that not every family was as easy to leave behind as mine. And the story was plausible enough.