by Carol Berg
Gram was standing now, his sober tunic hanging loose on his thin body. “Abbot Luviar, it seems to me that the god has brought us at least a slim hope of answers,” he said. Bathed in the smoky light from the tall windows at his back, less stooped, he took on a certain dignity. “Brother Victor is correct. Before we can approach the Danae, we must understand these grievances that have caused them to retreat from human contact. And we must learn how to use the maps to travel in Aeginea beyond the sentinels, for that is where we’ll find Stian and Kol if they yet live. Gildas has found no way to move past the Well, yet we know that Eodward visited the Well and walked as far as the ‘valley beyond it to the east,’ implying that he traveled from the west as from the abbey. So we are clearly missing something. As Brother Valen is the only person who has taken us even so far as this, I believe he holds the key both to these answers and to our interaction with the Danae.”
“Pssh!” Stearc regarded me with a look appropriate to rotting meat. “How do you propose for him to discover these answers that even you have failed to unlock? The man cannot even read his own book of maps. I say the danger a recondeur poses far outweighs any service he can offer.”
I stopped listening. Were they ever going to ask my opinion? Such an odd group of people. The enigmatic abbot. Brother Victor, whose unflappable, relentless reason was more unnerving than Stearc’s contempt. The Evanori warlord, himself a cipher—a scholar and warrior, a man who treated his secretary with a remarkably even hand while bullying his own daughter. Stearc seemed genuinely caught up in this mad venture. Worried. They were all worried, even Thalassa. It was easy to imagine my sister had come here solely to bait me, but she was a member of this group. Intelligence, wisdom, and a vision that is broader than one abbey or one kingdom or one faith, so Elene had said, referring, among others, to a member of my family. Truly a wonder of wonders.
“…see your reasoning. You think to have him question his grandfather.” Brother Victor’s quiet conclusion stung me awake like a stealthy wasp, as if Brother Infirmarian’s lancet pricked a mortified wound.
“No!” I yelled, on my feet before his last word had faded. Pain and hatred and crippling memory exploded from that incision like pus and septic blood. “You cannot force me to do that! I have naught to say to any of them. The old man is mad. You heard her say it. I won’t.”
“Brother Valen…” Several of them said it. They were all standing now.
“I cannot,” I said, fighting to hold back the onslaught of the past. “You don’t understand. Tell them, Thalassa. Tell them what happened every time Capatronn left to go adventuring.” The only person my father loathed more than me was Janus de Cartamandua, but pureblood discipline forbade him touching his own father.
I was already halfway to the door…shaking…furious…when I realized I had nowhere to go. Turning my back on them, I retreated toward the window, where I clutched the iron frame and stared into the yard. I tried to recapture my wonder at what I had seen at Caedmon’s Bridge—a living magic in the universe. Such a sight should leave all other events trivial. But all I could see, all I could feel, all I could hear were my grandfather’s conspiratorial whispers and his robust chortling as he rode away on his great horse, leaving me alone to face my father’s strap. Even my hatred for the man who beat me until my bowels released and confined me hungry and bleeding in my spell-darkened room could not match my hatred for the man who kept promising to set me free of it and never did. I had sworn I would never look at my grandfather again. Never speak to him. Never listen to him. He should be dead.
“Destroy my mind with Sinduri magic if you wish,” I said through gritted teeth. “Send me back to pureblood slavery if you wish, or throw me in the river with a stone hung round my throat. But do not ask me to sit in a room and have a civilized conversation with my grandfather.”
I did not hear their hasty deliberations as I pressed my forehead against the cold glass, raging and swearing—at myself more than anyone else. What use to be so angry over past misery? I had set myself free of that house, and if I had found only fleeting enjoyments and unsavory habits to soothe my restless nature, well then that was unfortunate. But at least I had made my own choices, whether to tan hides or steal a dagger or soldier for a king, whether to bed a woman or winter in an abbey or expend my magic on the doulon. At least I had lived.
When Brother Gildas broke away from Abbot Luviar, took my arm, and led me from the guesthouse and into the garden, I did not speak to him. I would waste no words on them ever again. I would lift not one finger to conspire in their madness.
The evening was still, a pale silver sheen of flagging sunlight behind wads of gray wool clouds. For once, the only storm raged inside me. Back in the guesthouse Thalassa was surely recounting the wicked tales I had so cleverly diverted earlier. Even worse, she could be telling them the whole sordid story of my childhood. Gods, how I hated the thought of that. But I would not waste any more time trying to explain.
Gildas held silent as we strode between the hedges, past the scummy pond, past the statue of Karus and uncountable images of saints put there as reminders of how we ought to live. I soon realized the monk was not leading me anywhere in particular. Thalassa’s two guards followed at a discreet distance, ready to pounce should I breathe wrong.
Rabbits sat paralyzed in the center of the path as we approached, darting out of our way just before we stepped on them. Two magpies screeched at us and then at each other and at the squirrels chasing through the hedges. Thunder rumbled from beyond the mountains.
I stared numbly at the path, my steps gradually losing their initial frantic pace. Eventually the bells for Vespers rang, and as the last tones drifted into silence and birdsong, my most acute fury seeped away. Still, Gildas waited.
“Don’t you need to be back at the guesthouse deciding what to do with me?” I said at last. “I’m not going to run off—not with those two brawny goslings prancing after me as if I were their dame. They’d have no second thoughts about violating the cloisters to chase me down, if that’s what concerns you.”
“I belong with the cabalists little more than you,” said Gildas. “I’ve been involved with them only three years. I help where I can, but my primary role is different from that of the others. They’ve not even told me how to open the lighthouse as yet. Only Victor, Luviar, and Stearc know that.”
“They’re all mad. Gods…Books and plows and Danae. Monks and princes, warlords and my sister the high priestess. An abbot who plays them all like strings on a vielle.”
“The ever-sensible Gram has not told you the connection between all these things?”
“It makes no difference. I’ll not dance to their music no matter what.” I shook my head. “And they’re not likely to tell me any more now, are they? Just more of my mind for my sister to obliterate lest I spew my guts to the hierarch and betray you all.”
We strolled through the hedge maze, a flock of sparrows twittering as they pecked at the worms the week’s rains had washed onto the path. Plainsong wafted faintly from the church, the pure melody twining itself around my anger, soothing my aching head.
“You must confess you are an enigma. What are they to think of you—a pureblood who throws away his position…his magic…to chop vegetables in a monastery? A man who could vie for power with princes, yet who has not bothered to learn to read?”
“Tell me of your vocation, Gildas,” I snapped. “Was it your mother’s prayers brought you here? My mother used predictions of my tormented demise to amuse her friends.”
“You don’t want to hear of my mother. She forbade us to eat berries on the last day of the week, for all know that the seeds would sprout vines in our bellies to grow out our ears if swallowed on Samele’s day. My mother believed that if she left a trail of blood between her door and the town well, a gatzé would come and grant her three wishes. Every child in Pontia would follow her to the well each day, taunting, asking what was her wish. She died with her veins flat from bleeding them. She—Well,
you are not the only man with difficult family.” He barked a laugh.
I stopped in midstride. Harsh, lonely…of a sudden Gildas reminded me of a Pyrrhan exile I’d once met. Pyrrhans believed the world beyond their land’s borders existed only in their imaginations, and thus every day spent outside Pyrrha felt askew—outside of time, in the wrong place. A blessed grace that Gildas had found a place he valued so deeply as Gillarine. “Ah, fires of heaven, Gildas…I’m sorry.”
Flushed from chin to the crown of his shaven head, he averted his face and nudged me forward again. “You’d no way to know, unless thought reading is a Cartamandua bent.”
“I’ve always imagined you at the very least some noble’s younger son, done out of inheritance by an elder brother or sister and sent off here unwilling. Perhaps even our rumored Pretender.”
His smile tightened. “Not in the remotest instance. My family had nothing. Certainly nothing I wanted. They were not…scholarly…and my mind hungered for more stimulation than stitching leather to fit other men’s feet. Pride of intellect led me astray for many years—until I began to look beyond the material world for answers. Humility is a difficult lesson.”
No one had ever shared such a clean and honest piece of himself with me, especially on so private a matter. In my first days at the abbey he had offered me his friendship, and caution had made me refuse him. Too late now. I regretted that as much as any consequence of this wretched day. “At least you’ve a mind for lessons. Some skulls are too thick.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Come now, we have no time to recount our mournful pasts. You need to decide what to do next. Right now they’re debating whether to send you to Palinur as a novice of Saint Ophir, as Abbot Luviar wishes, or as a recaptured recondeur in the high priestess’s custody.” He cocked his head in inquiry. “Truly you have a right to know why the abbot wants to keep you on his leash. Shall I tell you?”
“Do as you like.”
“Gram could recite it better, I suppose, with his tallyman’s mind. But here’s what I know…Twenty years ago, Brother Victor and Brother Luviar, scholars and visionaries of extraordinary perceptions, came to believe that certain changes they saw in the world were serious enough that they needed to prepare. Their studies and calculations intimated that some twenty-five or thirty years might pass from the depth of crisis until men and women were ready to hear again of books and plows. They recruited a few people to help them build the lighthouse to survive the worst. Being of middle years themselves, they decided they needed a younger man to stand with the lighthouse, a Scholar who knew both the content of the books and how to use the tools they had chosen to preserve. Even in so short a span, much knowledge could be lost. If those who know how to warp a loom are dead, who will prevent others from burning the loom to stay warm?”
I said nothing. I preferred to forget these people and their plotting. They needed no vagabond jackleg to help them.
My lack of response did not deter Gildas. “And what if we were to lose all those who can read? City dwellers are most susceptible to plague. To ravagers. If the cities die, if learning dies, we are sent back to the land, to nights in the wild forest with spirits we can no longer tame with words, to awe of these Gehoum—the Powers who make the sky grow light or dark, whose righteous wrath is fire and storm…” His words trailed off.
An icy breath traced my spine, very like the night Sila Diaglou plunged her stake into a bleeding Boreas. I shuddered. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were the diviner in this cabal,” I said.
He laughed away the mystical fog that had settled over him like the haze cloaking the river in the night. “I’ve no magic. I only read the sayings of diviners and heed them.” He waved for me to keep walking as he talked. “Luviar and Brother Victor chose one of their finest and most versatile students at Gillarine’s school to be their Scholar, a young warlord of Evanore.”
“Not Stearc!” I said, not believing it even as I said it.
Gildas nodded, tucked his hands up his sleeves, and rounded a corner between the straggling yews. “Stearc applied himself to read every volume as they stored it away and to learn the working of every tool. But when blight hit the vineyards, and King Eodward had still not named a successor, Luviar and Victor began to believe that the dark time could last longer and lie deeper than they’d thought. The lack of a strong and righteous king makes the coming decline far more severe, you see. Stearc agreed that they needed to prepare someone younger to become the Scholar.”
I halted again and stared at his hairless skull and well-hewn face, at the clear, unmarked skin, at the brown eyes never lacking in irony, tucked under the line of his dark brow. “You.”
No wonder he forever smelled of sheep or smithing or yeast and barley. No wonder he was forever reading. He was the one chosen to survive and remember and, when the time was right, teach. The keeper of the lighthouse. The memory of a bed crammed up against stacked barrels aroused a dreadful understanding.
“Great holy Iero, they’re going to shut you in there, aren’t they? Seal you in the lighthouse. So you’ll survive the worst. Alone…for years…alone…”
“That was the original intent. Don’t look so horrified! I thrive on solitude and silence. It is the only peace we’re given in this world. And consider, I would have infinite occupation and no interruptions. However, a few months ago, we received new information that threw our whole plan into doubt.”
He moved on. I followed, unable to ignore the story. A rabbit sat chewing in the middle of an intersecting path, scampering away only when we were close enough to step on it.
“Stearc brought your sister into the cabal. He knew and respected her from other dealings with the Sinduri. She worked a grand divination, a whole day of incantations, burning herbs, and magical water basins, a marvel such as those of us raised outside pureblood halls had never seen before. And what she augured confounded the cabal. Two hundred and ten years until the dawn. A very long night indeed. Too much solitude, even for me! Somewhere along the way, Stearc had come by the private journal of Eodward’s tutor—a Moriangi monk named Picus, sent by Caedmon to accompany and educate his son in his exile. And so, thoughts turned to the Danae.”
Lost in imagining the dreadful destiny they had planned for Gildas, I failed to grasp the connection. “I don’t understand.”
As joyful evensong floated from the church, Gildas laughed again, not so merrily this time. “It seems we are both condemned to a life we would not choose. Instead of granting me a few decades of peace, solitude, and study, they wish me to go live with beings who despise humans, disdain scholarship, and who fight among themselves over which tree belongs to whom. If it can be arranged, I am to live in Aeginea.”
“Live with the Danae? Seven years for one…thirty years. So you would be…what?”
“According to this fey reasoning, when the madness fades and men realize they need what I can teach, I shall be but nine years past my fiftieth birthday—no older than Abbot Luviar, a hale and vigorous man. And perhaps not even so advanced as that in terms of health and strength, for once back here Eodward remained a man in his prime until well into middle age.”
“Deunor’s fire!”
And as I contemplated this mad scheme, the most personal of Gillarine’s recent mysteries unraveled as well. No more wondering why the abbot had allowed an unsavory vagabond to join his holy brotherhood. He must have thought my grandfather’s book a gift from Iero himself. Had I not told him that I had successfully made use of the book, he would likely have kept only the book and sent me away. And I would still be free. After twelve years evading the prison of my birth, my lies had caught me up at last.
“Ah.” Gildas halted in midstride and pointed down the path. “It appears as if the decision has been made.”
Thalassa’s two liveried guards hurried toward us. I imagined shackles tightening about my wrists. My gorge rose.
“Strike me,” said Gildas, grasping my shoulders and spinning me about to confront h
im. Fiery excitement bloomed in his face.
“What?”
“Strike me and run. Through the cloisters to the bridge behind the infirmary. Wait at the dolmen in the grain fields south of the river. I’ll tell them a shortcut—misdirect them. As soon as I can, I’ll bring food and coin, whatever you need. But wait for me. Promise.” He grinned and let his grip slide down my arms, shaking me out of my astonishment. “The cabal will find a road that is not built on the backs of dead men.”
“Ah, Brother, you must not—”
“Strike! Go!”
A hopeless scheme. But life’s breath to one suffocating.
I drove my fist into his smiling face. His smooth skin broke and the fine bones shifted as I summoned the pent fury of the day to fuel the blow. My aim was not merely to play the necessary part, but to keep him blameless, for his gift was not only the strike, but the suspicion that must inevitably surround it. I knew well which injury could harm him more. Make one worse, and the other might be eased. They’d blame his misdirection on his muddled head.
“Iero’s grace, Brother,” I said, as he crumpled into the yew hedge. And then I ran.
Chapter 20
“I should just go,” I said, as I blotted stray water droplets from my neck.
A storm had blown in soon after I reached the ancient stones of the dolmen, and the broad lintel stone, though something like a roof, did little to shield a man from wind-driven rain. The worst of the storm had passed somewhere between the ringing of Compline and the day’s end bell, but by the time Gildas at last popped out of the fog, I was thoroughly soaked and incomparably edgy. I had waited more than four hours, telling myself every moment that I was a madman to do so.
“No! You must not stir from here,” said Gildas softly, crouched close enough I could make out his face. Voices carried in the fog. “Your sister insists that you’ll run fast and far. They’re scouring the countryside, the river, and the woodland tracks. They’ve alerted the watch in Elanus. They’ll never imagine you’ve remained so near the abbey and in a barley field to boot. Even the purebloods—You’re one of them, Valen. Surely you’ve spells to conceal your path, spells to confuse them.”