Beneath Ceaseless Skies #229

by Rose Lemberg

  * * *

  The contraption is iron and leather, brown and brass. Obb barely gets a look before they hold him down shouting and force it over his head—it’s a mask, a grotesque, with ass’s ears, a long swinish snout, and brass-ringed eyeholes like big goggles. The abbot personally holds Obb by the shoulders as another monk fastens the straps and collars round his throat. Obb panics as the mask closes over him; it smells like mold and bad straw inside; but when he kicks or twists, the leather straps constrict his neck; he gasps, he fights, sucks air through his teeth, and lets out the scream he’s been nursing for months.

  The abbot says. “If you will act like a dumb brute, let others see you for a dumb brute.”

  The abbot’s words buzz strangely in the hollows of the mask. It’s his litanies, that’s what they’re punishing him for, Obb realizes: arithmetical errors. He cannot reply, because his mouth is stopped with an iron spike protruding behind the snout.

  The shame mask has its own wicked momentum, so that in the corridors, when the other novices throw chalk at him and he turns around, its weight lurches and nearly topples him over. Obb groans round the bit and his thirst bites because he knows he can’t drink anything for hours more. The stench of previous wearers’ old sweat drives him crazy; it’s worse than the itching on his legs, which he can’t reach now. He avoids, but catches anyway, his shadow in the windows—the day outside is rained into grays—and he’s like a beast balancing on two legs, like they’ve taken a mule from the mill shaft and taught him to stand and carry books. The boys’ teasing (encouraged by the brothers) is not so cruel, they pelt him with fatty chicken scraps but not rocks; still, Obb’s pride is so raw that he staggers down the hours in a red rage.

  The novices grab him and spin him in circles until he wants to vomit over the bit, until another boy steps in and cuffs somebody on the ear; still, Obb careens off in the wrong direction; he loses himself in stairs and halls he can neither recognize nor reject through the brass goggles. He starts to shake, because being late to class will mean another day in the mask. He sees a door he feels he knows, but when he enters, the equations on the board are unfamiliar and severe. And the students are sister novices, their expressions made opaque with strange knowledge. Agatha is there, muzzled but burning with intelligence. Obb reels back—he sees himself in their faces, monstrous and unimpressive.

  In the shame mask he is unfit for divine offices and spends the time sweeping and scrubbing the church floor. His neck strains to hold his head upright when he bends forward; on his hands and knees, he settles the iron snout on the stone tiles and tracks his scrub brush out of the corner of one eye. He feels the floor’s every flinty chip in his kneecaps. He scrapes the iron candelabras clean of their caked suety wax and hauls pails of water to the kitchen. Between pails and brooms his writing hand is in agony by afternoon. WroDski says if his litanies don’t improve, this will be the rest of his life—not the mask but the labor. “Monks with no head for doctrine are cellarers and choristers. At worst, they work the latrines and stables.”

  Unlike the other brothers, WroDski speaks to Obb no differently because of the grotesque locked over his head; or maybe WroDski goes around seeing ass’s ears on everyone. “You’re not stupid, Obb, but you are a fool.”

  Obb hides in the crypts during the free hour, under heavy, low rib vaults.

  An older boy, another novice, discovers him there among the stone saints. Obb flinches when this novice takes his wrist, but the boy sits on a bier opposite Obb and kneads the muscles in Obb’s hands. Obb’s eyes water, it feels so good and kind. This brother novice is sixteen, with thick brows and large, solemn eyes; his name is Bolyai. Bolyai tells Obb he once spent forty-eight hours in the shame mask his first year, even slept in it. The boy’s touch—the ease with which he presses his thumbs into Obb’s aching palm—flusters Obb. Blood flushes through his fingers and up his wrists; he inhales the chalky crypt air sharply. Bolyai is all ease: his cowl back, he tosses his hair from his eyes and lamplight catches in his smile. “I hated it here at first. Believe me. Now I can’t imagine life outside.” Obb squirms, but Bolyai holds on to his wrist and the flesh gives under the boy’s powerful fingers.

  For a long time, the crypt is quieter than any place Obb can remember, and the mask muffles even this absence, so that his imagination shapes the quiet into soundless footfalls, like it shapes strangers out of shadows and half-seen statues at the rims of his goggles. His silence does not seem to trouble Bolyai, who now advises him to sit taller at offices, never to hunch, because good posture helps his wrist-muscles over the long term. Obb finds he’s already exasperated with his new friend.

  “Come by my bunk tonight.” Bolyai stands and brushes the dust from his wrappings. He gives Obb’s iron ears a playful stroke. “I’ll do your other wrist, if you like it.”

  Obb bites hard on the spike. The invitation paralyzes him, like some giant muscle running the length of his body has fallen asleep and will erupt in pins and needles if he moves.

  * * *

  Sister Casorata unfastens the throat straps and draws them tenderly away from Obb’s flesh, which the weight has chafed raw. The dormitory is empty, ruddy with evening colors; all the others are at dinner. The sister cups Obb’s chin and eases his jaw open. The bit, as it comes out, shines thickly with spit and mucus, like some just-calfed animal. At last the mask comes off, and all the hot salt and stick on his face cools in the free air. Sister Casorata wipes down his face with a damp cloth and rubs salve into his neck. She offers a mirror but he shakes his suddenly light head; what if he looks and his face is the same.

  She sneaks a bread roll from the folds of her sleeves. “What does that man know of pity,” she keeps muttering. She squints at Obb. “The abbot, I’m sure you’ve realized, has no talent for doctrine. It humiliates him, so he humiliates others. Don’t let this experience teach you anything but some more discipline with your litanies.”

  “I’m going to escape,” Obb says. His voice is dry and weak. “I don’t know how yet, but—” He takes a small bite of the roll, working his unfamiliar teeth.

  She sighs. “If you only worked as hard to accept your lot here, Obb...” She sits and runs the cloth gently across his forehead. Her face is drawn, tired. “All of us were oblated, once. No one came to this life by choice, but most of us are content.”

  “Happy?”

  “Content.” She takes his hands. He lets them hang limp in hers.

  Everyone wants Obb to be content here; so there is resistance, he decides, even a sort of nobility, in being miserable.

  * * *

  The sun dazzles the courtyard stonework, and the entry archway is so dark that the horses seem to form out of shadow as they emerge, drawing the mail carriage. Obb presses back into the wall as the horses pass; their enormous, sleepy black eyes dismiss him, and one lets fall a slop of shit. Brother WroDski sets a hand on Obb’s shoulder and they step forward together, Obb holding a letter up to the mail driver. It’s the height of summer, and the man’s face has the moistness and consistency of cake.

  It is his second letter, this one to the royal governor. Obb suspects his letter to the bishop was confiscated, so he hands it personally to the mail. The driver expects a fee; WroDski fishes a copper out of his habit, but Obb grabs the coin and makes a fist around it, then counts to three. “I paid you,” he says, passing the copper up to the mailman. “Remember—I paid you, not him.”

  Both men have the grace to accept Obb’s fiction without any visible pity.

  Obb hates pity—compassion, as he sees it, is a blurring, demeaning virtue. The way his parents looked at him (sorrow-eyed, tucked lips) when he laughed too loudly or talked excitedly. Compassion clouds the truth, it introduces error. When he feels it, he’s tongue-tied and hobbled. When others feel it for him, pathetic. In this way, the abbey’s austerity is a relief. The stiff straw pillows and pallets, the cold stone floor as he processes in the dark, the winds howling over the roof, the mosquitoes in the night; the hours w
eeding the gardens, fingernails black with soil; the longer hours in the scriptorium, head numb with equations, lectures, and offices; his solitary icy rinses at dawn—he feels cleaner for it, more honest.

  In theology classes Obb sits behind Bolyai, absorbed in the smooth currents of his hair, ignoring the proofs on the board but studying the shadows of tiny curls that run down either side of Bolyai’s neck. Bolyai’s hair, so black and straight, always looks wet, and parts perfectly over his left brow, although there are no combs or mirrors in the dormitory. Obb dogs him through the cloisters as the older boy, always a little pompous, points out scrolled corbels and ogee arches carved into the stonework over doors: look, on each side of the arch, how the lower concave arc, curving one way, quietly becomes the upper convex arc, curving in the opposite way. It is an effect Obb has seen in his dreams of lines.

  Bolyai focuses him on the subtle but exquisite pop of pleasure at this point of conversion. “That is the voice of Our Mother, Queen of Good Counsel, exciting us to bend our intentions to the will of Our Almighty Father.” Obb grins stupidly; he doesn’t believe a word of it, but he feels safe in the way Bolyai smiles at him. Mocking but not unkind—laughing at Obb’s anxiety when Obb can’t himself laugh. Bolyai is the type of personality that enjoys arranging and dictating things, and Obb’s new life needs arrangement.

  Obb sleeps jackknifed on his side, his knees pulled to his chest. Some nights he wakes in the middle of first sleep and hears sharp, unnerving breaths coming from down the rows of boys. From where Bolyai’s bunk is, maybe. Obb knows what is happening but keeps that knowledge sunk under the surface of his thoughts. He lies absolutely still until the sounds stop, or he falls asleep and then dreams of dark shapes ribboning up from the bottom of a bay.

  In the scriptorium, he finds Bolyai and Agatha, heads bent together over their books, seated under a rose window of radiant stained glass. They are scattered with colors; her white habit like a flowerbed, his face wine red and forest green. They are deep in concentration; Obb approaches, fearing to breathe too loudly. Agatha is the first to look up—it’s the first time he’s seen her face uncovered and she’s pretty in an unsettling, porcelain way, like the figurine of an unnamed saint. When she smiles at him, shyly, tentatively, Obb sees the glass and nails she’s swallowed, tearing at her intestines; he smiles back. She invites Obb to read with them and when Bolyai makes a quick impatient face, gives him a coy look. But soon Bolyai is his cheerfully intrusive self again, slipping two fingers into Obb’s collar and tugging the cowl aside to see how Obb’s bruises are healing.

  Obb is too nervous to talk, but Agatha understands this and talks to him instead about her work: she is studying to be an Azarite, an order dedicated to random chance and divination. Only nuns can learn their doctrines, since women are thought better suited to chaos; but sometimes the Azarites teach certain methods to the monks for specific application. Bolyai is studying religious economics, which require a basic knowledge of divination formulae. “I’m going to be Cardinal of the Bourse one day,” Bolyai says, in that irresistible confidence that makes the air brighter, the rafters and shadows of the scriptorium less awful. Obb tells them his concerns about infinity and error, and they sympathize. He tells them about the true function line his litanies seem to cluster around, like bulrushes keeping tight to a stream, and they lean in to hear him, so close he can feel the heat of their foreheads.

  “She doesn’t need to wear the muzzle anymore?” Obb asks Bolyai, later, and he beams, “Not when she’s with me.” He spoke to Brother Ramanujan and promised to watch her. “She’s not a bad person,” Bolyai insists, “but she feels everything so strongly—and sometimes, it overwhelms her to the point she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” For a moment, Bolyai flickers and dims; then he takes Obb’s hand in his and squeezes, his fingers strong as ironwood.

  “I don’t want to be here either,” Obb says, trying to control his own emotion. The longer Bolyai holds his hand, the more panicked he feels. “What right do they have to pen us up here?”

  Bolyai looks at him guilelessly and says, “We’re Disordered,” and that’s that.

  Something is out of joint in Obb, in Bolyai, Agatha, WroDski, Casorata, all of them. Six months in, Obb has passed from suspicion to disbelief. What could be wrong with all of them?

  * * *

  In WroDski’s cell, Obb confesses his dream of a function that snakes along the angelic axis in peaks and troughs. He can’t say where this vision came from, except his calculations at divine offices—hundreds on hundreds of approximate values falling into place along the snake-line in his head. The cell is cluttered and warmer than WroDski himself. Stacks of sketches and books texture the room, astronomical instruments crowd the pallet, but there is no iconography; only the expected figurine of the Offered Son, a womanly youth nailed to a wattle fence. An excitement comes over WroDski as he listens; he pushes up his sleeves and clears the straw from the floor on his hands and knees. He takes a piece of chalk and draws a line—

  It’s the posture of the Offered Son: head bowed in pain, arms hooked over the fence’s top. And it’s the same function Obb sees in dreams. “Do you realize what a rare talent that is?” WroDski cries, almost laughing. Against the wall, Obb hugs his knees; he doesn’t like WroDski’s excitement, and he doesn’t like the idea that his mind has been doing something, changing, outside his conscious control. “To plot several hundred coordinates—in your head!—from numerical methods. Extraordinary. That’s extraordinary!” WroDski’s pronounced forehead, usually a dome of wrinkles, is smooth, his eyes light with relief, the corners of his mouth pulling away from an old, old sadness.

  Obb asks Casorata to translate this scene to him, since there’s no use asking WroDski for explanations. It’s Obb’s monthly lice inspection, and every so often Sister Casorata’s long fingers come into view over the basin, rolling a white speck between them as if she’s salting a dish. “The line you saw is the graph of a function we’re all familiar with, fundamental to Trinity doctrine. Our priests use it a great deal in their engineering ministries.” Obb’s hands and ankles buzz with bug bites, but Casorata snaps her fingers right by his ear when he tries to scratch them. “The function is easy to calculate for certain values, but for others, we have to use an approximation based on an infinite litany; you’ll learn how next year. It really is remarkable, Obb. To chart the function line from the approximations you’ve been calculating. Magnificat intellecta mea Dominum.”

  “Why did Brother WroDski look so relieved, though?”

  “We’re all relieved. You won’t be consigned to drudge work, not with a gift for analysis like yours.” Obb’s heart sinks; everyone’s happy to see him fall into the rhythm they have forced him into, to excel at work that suffocates him. He really must belong here, after all. Maybe this is his home, now: forever. Sister Casorata’s muscular fingers dig through his hair and his head nods forward and back. “And it does happen, however rarely; of course there’s always a risk, however small—of some unfortunate Ordered child coming here by mistake, misoblated... We still worry it could have happened to one of ours...”

  Obb’s skin crawls. Misoblated. There really are those who don’t belong here; they have a word for it. He digs his fingernails into his palms to keep himself from shaking.

  * * *

  When he washes, he checks his face in the creek’s reflection, so close to the water he can smell the vegetable matter at its bottom, the muck under the shivering skin of his image. What is Disorder supposed to look like, anyway? Isn’t it something in the line of his cheek; a thinness, a weakness, in the bones under his eyes? How did his parents know to oblate him, how did anyone know, if Disorder isn’t something you can see?

  * * *

  After Prime, one morning: Brother WroDski waylays Obb; his face is paler than Obb has ever seen it. He holds a letter pressed between his thumb and forefinger so forcibly it contorts into a valley: Obb’s third letter, the first two having gone unanswered. The crown prosecutor�
��s office must have forwarded it to the abbey—Obb is shocked at their callousness.

  I have been kidnapped, forced into the cloister against my will and against God’s, I am the rare unfortunate Ordered child coming here—

  “‘Misoblated’! Where did you learn that term?” WroDski steers Obb by the shoulder into the chapter house, and the benches along the wall are like an empty audience: lives stolen for the abbey, what they might have been. WroDski pins him against the stones. “It’s a deeply offensive term. An insult to everyone here, everything we work for, and a lie.”

  “How do you know, Brother? How does anyone know.”

  WroDski’s hand pulls back into its sleeve. His voice quivers: “If we imagine one case in a thousand, even then— No. Unheard of, a confirmed case. The nature of Disorder is that we never do know our true selves, after all.”

  His gaze tears over Obb’s face, as if the confirmation is there, plain for anyone to see: Obb is exactly where he should be, where he will stay the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Some migrating dark birds—grackles?—are flocking the oak trees. There can’t be more than a hundred, but they sound like three thousand; they send up piercing, shrill calls like a metal axle grinding under a cart, and these cries echo through the valley in the white mists that trail like brides through the treetops. Obb notices. A few others notice and leave their game. They stand in a row looking out across the landscape. In the distance, a horn sounds.

  An Inquisitor arrives in the afternoon. Novices in the theology classroom spot the red carriage, with the papal compass emblazoned in gold, making its way up the road. They set down their proofs and crowd at the windows. Brother Russell doesn’t scold them but peers over their heads from where he stands, his hands gripping the lectern. Obb has once seen an Inquisitor’s carriage, in the city, but it had been hard to see in the late dusk blues that shaded the street, and his father, livid, refused to speak of it.