Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  A wave of guilt tided over Niccoluccio. He’d spent the past few days trying to read and meditate. He swallowed. As if anticipating Niccoluccio’s thoughts, Rinieri said, “The other brothers are probably right not to come near the infirmary. I doubt it will save them, come the end, but it might get them a few days’ reprieve for penance.”

  Niccoluccio swallowed. Rinieri could hardly have been more obvious if he’d come straight out and asked. Niccoluccio said, “I wasn’t aware you had no help.”

  Rinieri looked at him pointedly. “As I said, I believe the others made good decisions.”

  “You should not expect so little from us.” Niccoluccio had to force his next few words out. “I would be glad to help you.”

  Rinieri smiled, and turned his attention to his bread. The rest of their meal passed in silence. Niccoluccio couldn’t hear anything over the crunch of the bread’s grit in his mouth. His heart beat as though he’d just offered to follow Rinieri over a cliff.

  Rinieri said nothing on the walk to the infirmary afterward. The moment they stepped inside, Niccoluccio was stopped by a stench like nothing he’d encountered before. He couldn’t put words to it. It was overpowering: it reminded him both of a latrine and a garbage pit, but there was a third element to it, too, something musky and citrusy, heavy as compacted soil. It couldn’t be death. None of the brethren who’d died would have been left here long enough to decay. Niccoluccio remained in the shadow of the doorway until Rinieri, eyes gleaming with sympathy, waved him in.

  The moment Niccoluccio’s eyes adjusted enough to see the double row of cots, he understood. The smell wasn’t death, certainly. But the brothers resting on them were dying, and they were not doing so prettily. Their habits were stained and crusted yellow-brown with bile. Some of the brothers hadn’t been able to move to use their buckets, let alone the small lavatory in the back.

  The infirmary hadn’t been designed for so many men. All three of the original beds in the front room were taken. The rest of the cots had been dragged in from the dormitory.

  He hadn’t registered the sounds until the moment after he entered. One of the brothers was muttering prayers in a voice as weak as an old man’s. Another man, whom Niccoluccio belatedly recognized as deaf Brother Francesco, was scrabbling for the bucket beside his bed. A novice had a book splayed over his chest as though he’d been reading it to the others, though he lay unmoving now.

  Niccoluccio stopped breathing when he saw Gerbodo. Gerbodo seemed a different man. Sweat layered his forehead, reflecting the daylight coming in through the door. The muscles under his cheeks had slackened. His covers only came up to his chest. Either he had broken decorum by undressing, or Brother Rinieri had undressed him. He was asleep, his left arm above his head, no doubt to give relief to the bean-sized boil in his armpit.

  Prior Lomellini lay on the bed farthest from the door, eyes closed and mouth hanging open. His chest rose shallowly. A heavy black lump bulged from under his neck. Niccoluccio swallowed. Brother Rinieri threaded between the beds. He touched his hand lightly to Lomellini’s forehead. He sniffed Lomellini’s breath, and then the bottom of his sheets. He waved Niccoluccio to Lomellini’s bed.

  Rinieri said, “We need to move him to the back.” That was where brothers were taken to die. The moment of death was supposed to be private, between the sufferer and God.

  Niccoluccio said, “I thought you said Prior Lomellini had just taken ill last night.”

  Rinieri looked at him, and didn’t disagree. He just grabbed one end of the cot. Niccoluccio strained to lift the other.

  Lomellini’s eyes hung open. He said nothing as Rinieri and Niccoluccio lifted him, only looked at Rinieri with eyes stained red by the strain of vomiting. It was as if Niccoluccio didn’t exist. Niccoluccio at once felt ashamed for the ill thoughts he’d directed at Lomellini. Lomellini had been more political than other priors, certainly. But there was no slyness in his eyes now.

  The back room of the infirmary should have been empty, to allow the dying their privacy. There were already two men lying there. Both had shallow bowls of water balancing on their chests. The bowls were the last measure of breath. The water in one rippled gently. The other was completely still.

  Niccoluccio didn’t even know the name of the man who’d died. He was a novice, about as old as Rinieri, with an oily forehead and half-parted eyelids.

  Time seemed to flow smoothly around the next hours, a stream over pebbles. Niccoluccio was hardly conscious of their happening. He and Rinieri hauled the dead novice out of the infirmary and set him by Sacro Cuore’s small cemetery. Rinieri fetched the shovels, and Niccoluccio joined him in the painful labor of digging deep in the cold ground. By the time they returned, the man beside Lomellini had also died.

  When they came back from the second burial, Lomellini was still awake and staring at the ceiling. His eyes were sallow, his skin pale and veiny. He looked twenty years older than he had yesterday. Niccoluccio could not help but be impressed that Lomellini made no sound of distress, though the boil on his neck must have been agonizing. Rinieri called in the sacrist to administer the Last Rites, and to announce the deaths to the other brothers.

  After he and Rinieri tended to the other inmates – Niccoluccio numbly following Rinieri’s instructions – Niccoluccio returned to Lomellini with a book of scripture. Lomellini’s eyes remained open, and he breathed shallowly. Niccoluccio pretended not to notice the stains on his covers. He sat on the edge of the nearest cot.

  For much of the rest of the night, he read to Lomellini. He kept going after the prior shut his eyes, and stopped only when his breathing became so thin that there was no mistaking the moment.

  Niccoluccio retired to the refectory, intending to get a quick meal. He fell asleep at his bench. In the morning, Lomellini was dead. Another brother had taken his cot.

  Niccoluccio dug most of the graves. The hard soil yielded half an inch at a time, and his bleeding hands stung with every thrust, but he forced himself through it. He had nothing else to give. There were no longer enough of them left to provide decent funeral services.

  Whole groups of companions perished. After Brother Francesco died, Niccoluccio went about the dormitory to ask about him. The only one of the brothers who knew him well enough to provide an oratory had died shortly after Niccoluccio discovered him.

  Every morning, Niccoluccio and Rinieri carried brothers out of the dormitory. It seemed a miracle that there was anybody left. But the infirmary always had space to accommodate them. The inmates died as quickly as they were brought in.

  He and Rinieri worked silently, sincerely. Niccoluccio’s hands chapped and bled, turned black by the soap he and Rinieri used on the inmates’ sheets. They washed and changed everything as often as they could, but it was never enough. Niccoluccio never got used to the smell of sweat and vomit that suffused them. Still, he preferred anything to working with the sick themselves. His suffering was only a distant shadow of theirs. Only Rinieri had the expertise to handle them.

  Rinieri had held himself apart from the other office-holders. Niccoluccio only wished he knew anything else about the man. He was already dreading the day that Rinieri, too, would die. Or that Rinieri would hunt in vain to find anyone who could give Niccoluccio’s funeral oration.

  Or, worse, that he wouldn’t try.

  The monastery would become a cemetery of mute spirits, straining through the snowfall to hear anybody speak of them. In his working trances, he heard the endless peal of church bells across Italy, across the whole known world – a funereal chorus resounding long after anyone was left to hear them.

  No. He couldn’t let himself think like that. Sacro Cuore would go on. It was his life. Living or dead, he would always be here. The place was too much a part of him.

  Gerbodo lingered longer than Lomellini, but he, too, died. Over the next two days, he was followed by the precentor and almoner, and shortly afterward by the novice-master. All of the monastery’s senior office-holders, barring Brother Rinie
ri, were dead.

  Whoever had had the duty of refilling the refectory’s wash basin had died. Niccoluccio replaced it himself. Every morning, the basin was covered with a thin sheet of ice. The water stung his hands. Shoveling had turned his knuckles into maps of knobby callus and dry, bleeding skin.

  After getting his stale bread at nights, he didn’t have the courage or strength to return to the dormitory to listen for coughs and wheezing. He retired to the calefactory, the warming house. It was the only building in the monastery to be allowed a chimney and open fire, a comfort for the elder brothers. The prior before Lomellini, Prior Gianello, had spent most of his dying days there. Men of Niccoluccio’s age were typically not permitted inside. But he couldn’t keep himself from it. Every night, he went through the motions of rekindling the fire while he purged his mind of the day’s losses. The heat soaked into his bones.

  Niccoluccio draped himself in front of the fire and wondered if he would wake. But each morning he woke healthy save for the ills his work inflicted on him. His shoulders felt like hot irons, and his hands stung like they’d been boiled, but he never woke with a fever nor black lumps.

  The remaining monks kept themselves in their cells, too afraid of each other to emerge for any reason other than necessity. Niccoluccio tried to recount the names of those he knew were still alive, besides Rinieri. Brothers Rainuccio and Arrigheto had left on their mission to the bishop. There had been no word. Beyond that, there were names Niccoluccio had only heard in passing, names he couldn’t attach feeling to. By the time Niccoluccio became familiar with them, it was too late. They’d been brought into the infirmary.

  He’d long ago lost track of the number of men Sacro Cuore had lost. He’d buried two dozen with his own hands. That made thirty-five total? Forty? Out of fifty-nine. Sacro Cuore was hollowed out, a shell of stone and wood.

  At last, though, the flow of the diseased and deceased began to diminish.

  Rinieri began taking walks around the freezing cloister in the morning. Niccoluccio joined him. Niccoluccio had occasionally had trouble with ice lining the cloister walk, but never as much as this year. The brother whose duty it was to clear the walk had also died. He and Rinieri took each step slowly, haltingly.

  Rinieri remarked, “We must have angered the Almighty mightily to have this happen during winter. At least in summer we might die with a trifle more comfort.”

  Rinieri’s fatalism had never let up. Niccoluccio said, “I’ve always felt there was no more holy a season than winter. The snow stifles sound. It helps keep everything in the cloister silent.”

  “Silent evermore,” Rinieri mused. “If the birds and beasts continue on, they’ll enjoy that.”

  “Christendom has survived worse,” Niccoluccio said.

  Rinieri said, “Christendom cannot survive an angry God. It has never stopped paining me that you will not accept that.”

  “I cannot believe our time on Earth is finished.”

  “Prior Lomellini had a difficult time accepting his end, before he died. As did many of the others.”

  Rinieri hobbled over the next patch of snow-covered ice, slower than usual. Niccoluccio had to take mincing steps to keep from overtaking him. “I didn’t just come to this monastery for the sake of my own salvation. I came to be a part of the Body of Christ, of the Church He built. It has long outlasted all its founders save Him. The work we do here is meant to last centuries.”

  “The house Christ built on Earth is long-lasting, but no more eternal than Earth itself. There’s no need to have a house without occupants.”

  “Long after we’ve gone, I have to believe that there will still be men walking this cloister, and that the work we’ve done here will continue to help guide them to their salvation.”

  “You ‘have’ to believe. You see, even when you pretend it’s not about your desires, it is.”

  Niccoluccio shifted. No doubt Rinieri derived a great deal of satisfaction from his hesitation. “Even now, the pace of the pestilence is slowing. For the past two days, now, we’ve had fewer and fewer sick and dying.”

  Rinieri gave him a look of the sincerest pity. For the first time, Niccoluccio noticed how red his eyes were. His cheeks were flushed.

  “My poor man,” Rinieri said. “Have you counted the heads that have come through our doors?”

  Niccoluccio shook his head. “I started working with you too late to start counting.”

  “Our work isn’t slowing because the pestilence is leaving us.” Rinieri slid his hood partway back. He brought his fingers to the side of his neck, to the black lump the size of a bean.

  Niccoluccio gaped. Rinieri smiled, thinly. “It’s slowing because, very soon, there will be no one left to die.”

  5

  The empty bridge spanned the dark, seemingly rootless. Meloku kicked a rock along it. There were a few things to admire about Venice, she supposed. Any Mediterranean coastal city that had avoided the plague thus far was worth a second glance. Its people had their wits about them. Still, she couldn’t keep the resentment from leaking out of her thoughts and into her demiorganics.

  “Now, now,” Companion soothed. “Venice is an important urban power in its own right. There’s plenty to be gained here.”

  Meloku had slept through the flight to Venice. The shuttle had deposited her on an empty pier at midnight. She’d missed getting an aerial overview. Companion had dutifully recorded the view, as well as given her a satellite map of the city. Meloku had shunted it into deep memory.

  She looked up. The shuttle was a blur of shadow. It faded into little more than the suggestion of a breezy cloud, visible only in the infrared.

  “A local power,” Meloku subvocalized. “It can’t control the Italian peninsula. It’s got no power over Europe’s imagination.” Not like the papacy.

  “Europe is not centralized, nor will it ever likely be. Even the papacy has enemies everywhere.”

  Meloku kept her thoughts stifled as she reached the other side of the canal. Cold air brushed her neck and ears. She hated it when Companion lectured her. It meant Companion was disappointed in her. She’d learned by now that it always had a good reason to be.

  Companion continued, “In any case, you underestimate Venice’s influence. Its trading network extends far beyond the Mediterranean. Its armies and mercenaries have toppled nations. Given the right guidance, it could grow into an empire.”

  “But it’s never going to receive the right guidance, is it?”

  She knew she was being petulant, but she couldn’t help herself. Emotional control was one thing she’d never quite mastered over her decades. Not, at least, in the confines of her own head. More and more, she relied on Companion to keep herself in check.

  Her rock clattered ahead. There were no lanterns or torches. She navigated by retinal infrared. Bodies glowed ahead. She stayed carefully clear of them, as well as the watchmen on patrol across the next canal.

  She fancied herself a ghost slipping through Venice, intangible. She never needed to employ any of her stealth capabilities. That, at least, made her feel a little more competent.

  Slowly, against her will, Meloku’s mood buoyed. She’d always found cities exciting. No matter how many planes she’d visited, some part of her subconscious always thought of “proper” worlds as endless flatness, water from horizon to horizon. The island-ships and pleasure cruisers of home never stayed put. There’d been no sense of place. The tourists always wanted the same experience. Every ship had the same foods, everyone spoke with the same accent.

  Like all of the cities on this gloomy little world, Venice was a sprawling mess. Her first impression was of tangled knot of wood and stone, suspended like jetsam over the water. She entered what was obviously a wealthier neighborhood, with swept walkways and kinder smells. There were more canal boats tied to each dock. She passed an open yard that, judging from its refuse piles, housed a fruit market in the day. The wind from the port was suffused with the odors of day-old salt fish. The next building ov
er was obviously a warehouse, protected from fire by canals. The hot outlines of night guards stood at each corner.

  She turned to follow the waterway. Companion told her it was the widest in the city. The houses looming over it had been designed to impress the neighbors as much as those passing. Their facades were ornately carved. Heraldic banners hung over the doors of those manors whose inhabitants had been wealthy and bold enough to be knighted. The streetside loggias were hung with silk. A pulse scan revealed prodigious amounts of gold and silver in seemingly every room of every house. Even some of the servants’ quarters had polished mirrors and silk sheets.

  She asked, “We’re still going forward, aren’t we?” A not-so-deeply buried part of Meloku remained afraid that her reassignment had messed up everything.

  “We can hardly do anything else,” Companion assured her.

  Companion was one of the few non-neutered AIs the amalgamates allowed to exist in the Unity. No one was meant to know that the amalgamates still dabbled in true AI. And this one was hers. A gift for her service. A superior and a friend, keeping her honest.

  It lectured her on the city as she searched for a place to begin operations. She was the first of her team to visit Venice, but Companion had months of satellite coverage to draw from. Venice was an extraordinarily wealthy city, richer than any city Meloku had visited thus far. It appeared that Venetian trading posts thrived in every port, sending gold and silver back home. Trade poured through every pier. Even plague quarantine couldn’t stop the smugglers arriving every day.

  As with seemingly every city on the Italian peninsula, Venice was at war. Mercenaries clashed on land and sea, but Venice remained untouched. A bankers’ war. It reminded Meloku of the aftermath of wars she’d seen on other planes – wars fought on the Unity’s behalf, and that few in the Unity knew about.

  Though she shied away from people, she was dressed as a local, in a rough reddish-brown kirtle and chemise treated to look as though it had suffered through a long, horseless countryside trek. Her oval-shaped field kit appeared wooden. Even the other members of her team had no idea about the technology inside. They would have been appalled by the weapons.