by Carol Berg
“I don’t know that I could tell you aught you cannot read from the book itself,” I said as he settled himself on the stool.
He was something near my own age, and not a bad-looking fellow, save for an unhealthy gray hue to his complexion. His close-trimmed black hair, beardless chin, and conservative attire—ash-gray cape over an unadorned knee-length tunic of dark gray—accentuated the hollows in his cheeks. His eyes sat deep, dark, I thought, though that could just be shadows from his hat.
“If nothing comes of my questions, so be it.” A grave, modest smile softened his severe appearance. “At the least I can report to my master that I did as he asked, which is often quite enough to satisfy him once the…mmm…storm of displeasure…is past. Just tell me if I press too much or if you tire.”
I had to be careful. To refuse this fellow might offend the abbot. And I’d not wish the abbot—or this man, whoever he was—to conclude I’d stolen the book after all. Likely I knew enough to satisfy a besieged secretary. “Ask what you will. I’ll do my best.”
“I’m ever grateful.” He scooted his stool closer to the bed, so we could view the book together. He leafed through several pages. “Of course I’ve seen common maps—a few scratched lines and place names and perhaps a landmark or two. But I’ve no experience of such fine maps—a sorcerer’s maps—and so great a variety of them. The written explanations in the book itself are confusing. I thought perhaps that the lord who’d given it to you might have explained what kinds of maps these are and how their magic works.”
Gram offered me the book, and I turned a few pages, opening to a leaf displaying four small maps of different kinds. I stared at the page—its lines and symbols evoking far too much of memory. On his random appearances at our house, my grandfather had forced me to sit with him and look at his book, whispering in my ear of its importance, of its perfection, of its cleverness and magic, and how I must learn to use it. His breath had smelled of cloves, onions, and black ale, his body of unwashed skin and horses despite his fine clothes. Disgust rippled through me alongside the recollection. Those sessions had lasted only as long as it took me to spit on his shirt and wriggle out of his grasp. But his lessons had always begun with this page.
“My—Mardane Lavorile told me that every variety of map is represented in this book,” I began. “Most, like this one, are fichés.” I pointed to the rigorous little rendering of roads, mountains, and rivers—very like the great maps stretched and mounted on the walls of my father’s library. “It is accurate in heading, scale, and proportion, so that a lesser distance on the map implies a lesser distance in truth. And the details are as precise as the cartographer can make them…”
The secretary listened intently, as I explained about keys and compass roses, and interpreted some of the symbols—for mountains, water features, towns and cities, shrines and temples, and the like. He asked me to clarify a few points, but otherwise did not interrupt.
“This map, on the other hand”—I indicated a fanciful colored drawing of a town with buildings and bridges and roads all mismatched in size—“is of the type known as a grousherre. The streets and structures are drawn with proper connections and relative positions, so that you can know which road leads to which, or which house stands beside which bridge. But the size and proportion of each object is determined by its importance not accurate measure.”
“That seems a strange way to make a map.” Gram pored over the drawing for a moment, his face drawn up in a puzzle. “Makes me think the maker was an odd sort of fellow.”
I grinned. “Exactly my own thought. I’ve never seen the purpose of them, save for making a page where the cartographer could show off and splash around all his colors of ink.”
“So what about these other two? This one looks to be a coastline, but I don’t understand the markings.” The little map detailed the fanlike outlets of one of Morian’s great rivers and the creneled inlets and channels on either side of it. Tiny numbers littered the expanse of land and sea.
“That’s a portolan,” I said. “A navigation map. The marks are winds and tides and notations for sailors’ instruments. I’ve no skill with ships to be able to tell you more than that. And this last is an example of a mappa mundi—a rendering of the wider world as if viewed from Iero’s heaven. You can always tell them by their oval shape.” My grandfather had included three mappa mundi that spanned two pages each. “The one in the very back of the book shows the trade routes to Aurellia and to Pyrrha, the land of volcanoes.”
“Now, what of the magic? I’ve heard tales of Janus de Cartamandua’s maps…”
“Well…” I bit my lower lip, a reminder I often used to watch my mouth. This visitor had set me too much at ease. “I know little of that. I used only a few of the maps, as the mardane needed.”
Supposedly, unlike those created by my father or my brother, Max, or any other cartographer in Navronne, my grandfather’s maps showed the earth’s most secret and holy places—magical pools, sacred groves, the earthly dwellings of spirits and angels, places that no traveler would ever “happen” upon. Places that could be found only by using these maps. So I had been told.
“But the abbot says you used the guide spells that unlock their power. I’m sorry to press. My master is”—he cleared his throat and ducked his head, his gray skin taking on a rosy cast—“excitable. So I beg your indulgence. Whatever you can tell me would be valuable. I’m afraid he’s going to ask me to copy one of these before we leave the abbey.”
Though I didn’t begrudge him the knowledge, I sincerely wished the fellow would stop asking questions. Yet he was gently spoken and seemed a mournful sort. And I knew well of excitable masters who asked the impossible.
“You see this oval banner on the larger map,” I said. “It’s called a cartouche. Look carefully and you’ll find the words of the guide spell scribed there, or if the map is too small to have a cartouche, you’ll find it buried in the border decorations. But copying won’t give you any use of it. The mardane told me that the cartographer’s magic is in the rendering, not just the words and symbols.”
“Ah.” He sat up straight and sighed. “Well, that’s good news for me, if my lord will believe it. So how would you invoke the spell?”
“Speak the words of the spell while tracing your finger along your desired route. With the aid of the spell and a bit of common wisdom, your mind and senses will tell you when you stray from the path. It’s useful enough.” So I had been told. Endlessly.
“And that’s all?”
I sagged back onto my pillows. “If a fellow like me can do it, I’ve no doubt anyone can.”
Gram smiled again as he closed the book and stood to go. “I think you speak yourself an injury, sir. Your explanations were very clear, and you’ve surely a good head for maps and scouting. Someday perhaps I can return this favor.”
I appreciated his effort to be kind. Old resentments about family and books and written words could not but taint my answers. He had no way to know that maps were of no use to me. “Your employer…he would like to own such a book as this?”
“In truth, not. He gives all his books to Gillarine.” Gram cocked his head to one side, curiosity blossomed like a daylily at dawn. “But I thought you were taking vows. Don’t initiates give—?”
“Yes, yes, I am,” I said, gathering my wits. “But I wasn’t sure what to do with the book…or whether the abbot would actually want such a valuable one when the price of it could do so much in the way of almsgiving.”
Gram nodded and held out his palm again. “Abbot Luviar is very wise. He’ll guide you rightly. Heal well, friend, and thank you.”
Once he’d gone, I longed for some other visitor to break the evening’s quiet. Not right that such a gentlemanly fellow should lance old boils and leave me to suffer the stink.
No one came.
Rain entirely inappropriate to Ardra’s driest season drummed on the roof all night, slowing only when the blackness beyond the horned window yielded to gray. I
slept fitfully, seeing far too much of both night and dawn. Daylight brought Brother Gildas.
Brother Robierre waved a wooden mallet he used for crushing seeds and pods, as he talked over my head with the dark-browed Gildas. “Ignore his complaining. Any man who can talk and eat as he does is fit enough to take wherever you will for an hour. Keep him moving, and send for me only if he collapses altogether.”
“Am I to have no say in this?” I said, spitting out the detritus of hulls and stems that showered from his implement. “My leg—”
“You have applied to take vows, including strict obedience bound by punishments both in this life and the next. If you insist on ‘having your say,’ perhaps you’d best reconsider your future.” Brother Gildas held up a white wool shirt he’d pulled from a black and white bundle in my lap.
“He’s not broken his fast as yet this morning,” said the infirmarian. He retreated to his worktable, where he dumped a bag of dried seedpods into a large wooden bowl and attacked them with his mallet as if they were a nest of Iero’s detractors. “Never saw a man relish our victuals as he does. Point him toward the kitchen, and he’ll keep apace.”
Shivering in the cold damp, I thrust my head and bare arms into the thick shirt. “There’s more folk eating bark soup than mutton broth of late, Brothers,” I mumbled. “Must I go barefoot?”
“Wear your own boots today. You’ll receive your cowl and sandals on the day you take your novice vows, which we do sincerely hope will be your choice.” Brother Gildas smiled as if to soften the sting of his earlier rebuke, while I fumbled with clean white woolen trews and black knee-length hose. When my tight shoulder bandage hampered me, he knelt by the bed like a trained manservant, smoothly tugging the stiff, heavy boots onto my big feet, tucking in the hose, and tightening the laces up my legs.
“Up now,” he said, rising and offering me his hand. “Don your gown. Then we’ll go walking to stretch your limbs, I’ll ask you a few questions for Father Abbot, and we’ll find sustenance before you wither.”
Ah, the questioning. No one had come to the infirmary on the previous day to test my knowledge of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Jullian, who had taken it upon himself to visit me at least three times a day, had reported that Brother Sebastian had not yet returned from Pontia, and Brother Gildas had been closeted with the abbot and “visiting abbey benefactors” all day “except when they went to see the progress on the lighthouse.” The presence of a lighthouse here, at least six hundred quellae from Navronne’s northern seacoast, struck me as an oddity, even allowing for my usual morning dullness.
The prospect of interrogation damped my already soggy spirits. Awkwardly I wrestled the common black wool gown over my head, not at all sure I could bring myself to take vows here—even for a season. Rules and restrictions and righteous preaching curdled my stomach like vinegar in milk. If I could find a buyer for the book of maps, then perhaps I could find a less restrictive haven, perhaps a lornly widow who needed pleasuring.
The heavy garment enveloped me from neck to ankles, an unlikely happenstance as I had never failed to be the tallest man in any gathering since I had reached my full height at nineteen. But even more extraordinary was the sense of safety that enfolded me with the thick black wool, the same as that worn by every other monk throughout Navronne. Sweet, blessed anonymity.
Most ordinaries viewed pureblood life as god blessed and couldn’t imagine why any of us would choose to forgo it. They didn’t understand about contracts and protocols, submission rules and breeding laws, all the things that had made me feel as if someone had bound me head to toe with silken cord and locked me blind and deaf in a coffin.
Under the oversight of the Pureblood Registry, pureblood families contracted out their magical services for a great deal of money. As Navronne’s nobles, magistrates, and clergy profited handsomely from the magic of our undiluted Aurellian blood, these parties had devised an inviolable compact a century ago, requiring every knight, magistrate, reeve, and sheriff to enforce the Registry’s rules. Not even a Karish abbot would dare disobey the fugitive laws. Harboring a common fugitive—a thief or a deserter—past his fourteen days of sanctuary would cost Abbot Luviar disgrace and ten years’ income—everything his abbey collected or produced—meaning ten years’ groveling to the local magistrates to return enough to allow the brothers to eat. But if the abbot was judged to have knowingly hidden a pureblood renegade—a recondeur—those magistrates would burn his abbey and his fields, and then they would hang him.
So they just couldn’t know. A recondeur with any sense learned quickly to keep his head down, his lies consistent, his past private, and his appearance unremarkable. I smoothed my warm, unremarkable wool layers and felt a grin split my face.
After fumbling briefly in the folds of his own gown, Brother Gildas pressed an alder walking stick into my hand. “A gift from Brother Horatio, our carpenter. Welcome to our brotherhood.”
He slipped his shoulder under my right arm, and we stepped through the infirmary door into a chill, watery daylight. The infirmary sat off by itself, separated from the abbey proper by a patch of wet grass and a soggy herb garden. Far across the sea of gray slate roofs and the warm yellow stone of sturdy walls, the vaults of the abbey church soared heavenward.
“We’ll visit the cloister garth first,” said Gildas, pointing toward the grander structures beyond the infirmary garden. “The abbey’s heart.”
A flagstone path led us across a rock-lined channel that funneled water under the infirmary and past a squat wooden structure with two massive stone chimneys. Its jumbled wood stacks and the heaven-blessed scent of hot bread proclaimed it a bakehouse.
The place seemed inordinately quiet. Water dripped from roofs and gutters. A fat, cold splatter on my head made me even more grateful for my wool layers. In his unending quest for cleanliness, Brother Anselm had bade me shave my face and trim my tangled hair the previous day.
Once we passed the bakehouse, the infirmary no longer blocked our view to the south. I shook loose of Gildas’s arm for a moment and stopped to savor the spectacle. Mists and smokes and occasional pools of pale sunlight drifted over the green, steep-sided valley and the river, a flat band of silver that looped around the abbey precincts. Beyond the sheen of the river, a field of barley rippled gently in the soft rain, as healthy a crop as I’d seen in five years. My throat tightened at the beauty of it, and my eyes filled with more than raindrops, which left me feeling a proper weakling fool. Since I’d left the nursery, I’d never wept but when I was drunk.
“I’m assuming you’ve seen grain fields, tanneries, mills, and sheep, all those things we’d find in the outer courts and south of the river—the River Kay, this is. If Father Abbot judges your calling that of a lay brother—suitable for manual labor, rather than the more challenging studies of a choir monk—you’ll live out your days in those surrounds.”
Ranks and privileges—even in a brotherhood. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gildas offered me his shoulder again, but I shook my head and hobbled along beside him.
As we rounded the corner of the garden, the monk walked faster as if to keep up with his thoughts. “The true peace of the monastic life is found in prayer and contemplation, study and scholarship. We don’t allow speech in the cloisters, library, or scriptorium, but sign to each other for necessary communication.”
“Peace will be welcome,” I said, working to keep up with his brisk pace. “There’s little enough to be had in this world, and talking never seems to improve matters. Though truly, telling stories of an evening or singing chorus to a bard are fine pleasures…holy gifts…as well. I’ll wager you brothers come from everywhere and have much to share in that way—after all your studying and contemplating, of course.” Surely they talked of something besides gods and holy writs. Surely they talked. All this broody silence seemed unnatural.
“Within the framework of our discipline, certainly we converse—some of us more, some less. Brother Infirmarian says you’ve traveled all over Navronne
and are overflowing with curious tales. I’d like to hear of your experiences.”
“No denying I’ve had restless feet…” My mind sorted through my spotted history like a washwoman picking through soiled and ragged linen. Sadly, I found little fit for display. Gildas wouldn’t be looking for adventures and oddments like those Jullian teased out of me on his daily visits. “I followed King Eodward all the way to the Caurean shores. After he died, I hired out on the docks in Trimori for a while, but the Caurean storms frosted my bones worse than Ardran winter. I think the Adversary’s domain is surely ice, Brother Gildas. Not fire at all. Is that false doctrine? The holy writs say the wicked will burn, and I’ve found that cold burns worse than fire.”
“I’ve not heard that point argued,” he said. Though he knit his solid brow, his face was not so sober. “Perhaps Brother Sebastian will pursue the question in your studies. Go on. Tell me more.”
“Well, I moved on to Savil and apprenticed to a tanner—honest work, but the stink is poison to a tender stomach such as mine…”
At the far end of the walk a plain rectangular building stretched off to our left. On the littered muddy ground behind it, three lay brothers, their gray scapulars tucked up in their belts, wrestled the trunk of a sturdy oak from a donkey dray. Another of the brethren was shifting a pile of new-split logs to the wood stores stacked neatly in the building’s undercroft.
“The lay brothers’ reach,” Brother Gildas said, nodding to the busy fellows when I paused in my babbling. “Their sleeping quarters and refectory, and the food, oil, wool, and wood stores for the abbey. So did you stay in Morian?”