by Rose Lemberg
Everyone gathers into the church for a High Mass to honor the Inquisitor and his retinue. The abbot unstores showy gold censers and monstrances from the treasury and lines the brother and sister novices along the nave to sing grave hymns. The sound, under the vaults, is sharp and clear as glass, unbearably beautiful.
The Inquisitor is a slight man with thinning red hair and oval glasses, but the way he bows his head uncuriously as he processes down the central aisle, never once looking at the people around him, makes Obb nervous. Behind the Inquisitor is his dervish, a sort of doctrinal advisor, a tall woman veiled in fine red mosquito netting that covers her entire body and drags on the floor. All the bells of St. Riemann’s seven towers are clamoring, bells big as houses, rattling church windows, their peals rolling like boulders down into the valley. Obb finds Agatha and waits to catch her eye, but she is staring at the veiled woman with a gray look of shock.
* * *
Obb is washing in the creek when shapes push through the bracken, on to the muddy bank. A weak light crests the mountains, but the dome of the sky is still black and starry; in this uncertain light, the figures recognize Obb, and he knows Bolyai’s and Agatha’s voices at once. He climbs out of the creek and they step into the clearing. They’re in peasant clothes and carry haversacks and water skins. Agatha has hidden her hair in a shepherd-boy’s cap—it’s a shocking effect; Obb feels if he hadn’t seen her before, he’d never know her for a sister.
“I can’t stay,” she says, embracing Obb. “He’ll take me and turn me into one of them, that woman... Their training, it—it breaks their minds...” She steps back, shaking. Bolyai holds her to him. How can they hope to escape through the forest? It’s impossible and Obb gets angry, thinking of its impossibility, but then Bolyai comes to him and hugs him and Obb’s thoughts get confused.
“You’re a good person,” Bolyai says, holding his face close to Obb’s. “Please, don’t tell anyone.” Obb feels he knows what Bolyai’s eyes are doing despite the morning dark.
“I won’t.”
Bolyai hesitates, then kisses Obb on the lips. It’s quick, but they both open their mouths. And Bolyai darts off. Obb’s head swims; he stands stiff, naked, dazed, and as Bolyai and Agatha disappear down the bank he hears the boy defending himself: “What? Everyone’s first is special.”
* * *
Obb lies on his back in the grass, drying, watching stars hide under spreading daylight. His body is all confusion: he’s crying, smiling broadly, he has a painful erection. His friends are gone and yet it’s invigorating, tremendous, to feel heartache over anything but his life before his oblation. Thin tears slide into his ears, into the cracked corners of his mouth. The cottonwoods overhead rasp in the breeze and shed airy white clots of filaments that catch the dawn colors and swim out from every gesture of capture; they are so miraculously light that his hand’s movement itself is heavy enough to fan them away. He cranes his head and squints as they thin into nothing.
* * *
Obb is true to his word; he is a little thrilled to be so true. The Inquisitor has asked to see Agatha; the day is dangerous. Obb protects her secret, but he can’t lie, only refuse. He’s stubborn about honor, but more basically he’s missing whatever gland lets others switch facts with lifelike inventions on the spot; when Brother Ramanujan asks if he knows anything about Agatha, Obb swallows his words and stares petrified, wide-eyed, and thrilled. And when Brother Ramanujan brings over the abbot and the stupid cruel man harangues him, promises him a year in the shame mask, Obb turns dark red and quakes uncontrollably, as though the words he holds inside would crack the mountains apart.
“Please, we’re worried for them,” Sister Casorata says; she bends and meets his eyes, her pupils dancing. “They grew up in a city, like you—they know nothing about being on their own, out there.” Obb does not begrudge her, but he says nothing.
Brother WroDski is at the door, looking startled. He and Casorata exchange an obscure glance. “She’s called for him, in the cloister garden.”
He nods stiffly to Obb. “Well, this should be interesting for you. Come.”
* * *
The Inquisitor’s dervish waits on a crooked wooden bench under the quince tree. The quince’s hundred-jointed boughs throw patchworks of brilliance and shadow over her red veils, which spread from her crown, over her obscured face, and pool in harsh colors at her feet. She shifts deliberately so the bench rocks on and off its uneven legs, knocking the flagstones, pock-POCK, pock-POCK. Obb starts to wobble as he advances.
Do her eyes move, examining him, under the red clouds of fabric?
“Brother WroDski tells me you have a gift for analysis,” she says. Her voice comes thick and husky through the mesh, and slow, swollen, awkward, like a voice in a dream.
Obb collects into himself, like a tortoise. His hands pull into his sleeves. “I won’t tell you where they’ve gone,” he says, “no matter what you or your master do to me.”
He tries to sharpen the words as they slide through his teeth, to cut through the sultry air, but the sun on his back makes him drowsy. His skin prickles with the first stirrings of sweat. The dervish does not invite him to sit. She draws her head back, and her netting rustles softly.
“How old are you, little brother? Fourteen?”
Obb nods. He holds every muscle so that he doesn’t shake.
She gathers her veils and folds her hands in her lap. “I hope that wasn’t the last of your courage. I’d like to see more of that fire, if you have it.” She laughs—a ringing, affected laugh. “My ‘master’? Do I look like a dog to you, you pimple-faced shit?”
Obb’s face goes so hot his scalp crackles. “I don’t have pimples.”
“Why should you protect her? She seems a willful, nasty sort. You don’t go round eating tacks and pencils, do you?”
“She didn’t choose to be here.” He tries to be sullen, to sink his resentment in silence, but it keeps surging up out of him. If he isn’t careful he’ll blaspheme and be in front of the Inquisitor before he finishes his sentence.
The dervish rises, and her clouds of netting condense around her. “I heard you spent a day in a shame mask,” she says, and her voice drops lower. “Imagine spending years in one, little monk, except it’s your own face, your own body that’s wrong.” Her posture shifts, as she stands; Obb is bewildered to see, or to think he sees, a man under the reds; then the illusion is gone. “I am so very familiar with being trapped in a life I didn’t choose.”
Obb cocks his head, forgetting his anger. “Are you...?”
The red figure stands motionless in the sun. The cloister is quiet, the arcades empty and shaded, the only movement the bees in the lavender. Obb recalls that some doctrines and orders are restricted by sex, only nuns can study divination, only men can be priests. Are the dervishes all cross-sexed, then? But then, he thinks, why would Agatha be afraid of becoming one herself, unless—
Obb lowers himself on to the bench and lets out a breath. He is a fool.
Dervishes, the dervish says, study the mysticism of numbers: the patterns of primes, the ranks of infinities, the powers and dominions of God’s angels. It is exhausting and baffling work that demands rigorous thought but produces no practical uses. Only the most Disordered, men and women born into the wrong lives, become mystics. She spreads all her fingers, examining them through the fabric. “They tell me I have a nervous condition,” she says. She wiggles her fingers and the fabric glimmers with light. “It makes my nerve ends prick at random. So they say. Do you know what I say? I say, I’m being bitten by ticks and fleas and ants and mosquitoes all over my body, at every hour of every day. They don’t believe me, and I don’t believe them. But the netting helps me believe them a little. Do you ever feel, little monk, that the world is eating you alive, a little more every moment?”
Obb’s eyes swell with tears. It is exactly how he feels, but he’s afraid to admit anything to her. “I’m not telling where they’ve gone.”
“The runa
ways? They’ve gone into the nunswood, obviously. Stop underestimating me.” She waves this off. “You know, I’m heels over head for you—per caput que pedesque, and all.”
Obb goes very still. “What does—”
“Because you hate it here.” She draws from her habit a bunch of pages and unfolds them, one, two, three. He can’t see their script under the red fabric, but he is certain they are his letters. “Hate is an interesting thing. Well, Love gets the poems, but isn’t there something grand about someone who never stops hating this awful place? By which I mean life itself.”
“I was misoblated...”
“Nonsense. You’re Disordered, you just don’t know what that means.” She steps closer, bowing under the crooked quince branches and their yellow-green apples. “I’m right, aren’t I? No one’s told you what ‘Order’ and ‘Disorder’ really are? Clergy are such fucking prudes.”
Obb crosses his arms and ankles and pulls further into himself. His temples are pounding; he focuses on the function line from his dreams, a sea serpent undulating up, from dark, dinosaur depths... She sits by him and places a hand on his back. Her veils whisper over his cassock. “Go ahead and let it out. You must have an idea.”
He thinks of Bolyai, kissing him by the creek. And what the boys do to each other in the dormitory in the night. He has considered that possibility before—he knows most boys are doing those things with girls at their age—but rejected it because if that’s Disorder, then that belongs to WroDski, Casorata, everyone here. It means the abbot is that way too, which is a horrifying idea, not only because the abbot is ugly, but because it means he and the abbot are the same to the rest of the world. His spit sours on his tongue. The dervish hums. “Don’t feel you have to make it into a bigger shock, child.”
Her patience humiliates him. If he accepts what she is saying, he has been a fool all his life. Has everyone known but him? He feels sick, to think that something so tender and naked in him will be what everyone else knows about him, how they mark him, for the rest of his life. He spits and spits into the ground.
“That’s one I haven’t seen before.”
“Why? Why would they send us all here for that?”
“Fear. Low birth rates. They still think they can cull the trait—so they corral us in these dreary monasteries and put us to work ciphering out their civilization.”
“But it makes no sense! If that’s Disorder, what does it have to do with doctrine?”
“Makes sense?” she repeats to herself. “ ‘Makes’ sense.” In her arms, he feels her laugh. “Ecce ancilla Domini. Doctrine makes sense. The world wants sense, so we make it.”
“Some people here are bad at doctrine, even if they are Disordered.”
“It’s a funny thing, there doesn’t seem to be a reason at all why we are, and yet we are... Now, what do you think would happen to us if they thought we were no use at all?”
But Obb is still working his way through the implications. “If there are Disordered people who aren’t good at doctrine, does that mean there might be Ordered people who can learn it?”
“You’re not listening very well. If the laity decides we’re unnecessary—if their architects and engineers and naval astronomers could do their good works without tithing us—without us, do you see?—what do you suppose they would do with boys like you, and girls like me?”
It is the second time she asks that her meaning sinks in. He remembers a detail from the sack of St. Riemann’s: that the town had raped the sisters before hanging them in the forest.
He tries to meet the shadow of her eyes behind her veils. He could scarcely imagine any world where the Church didn’t absolutely control theology, Trinity doctrine, infinitesimals, the analysis magna, divination—anything with disordered numbers, any calculation more complex than arithmetic. But if he was following the dervish’s argument, the bishops had only seen power and taken it, and told everybody else it was theirs alone.
“It’s just a lie, then?” he asks—not as criticism, but she catches his chin anyway.
“Nothing about faith is ever ‘just’ a lie,” she says. “There are no lies in religion. But there are concepts that grab the imagination and take root because they offer us solace—or utility. Is infinity a lie? A concept dreamed up in books thousands of years old from before the Floods. Is it a lie? It doesn’t occur in nature. Yet without this concept you’ll never know the red planet’s perihelion or the volume of Gabriel’s horn. Is it a lie?”
Obb nods. He is struggling to take everything in, but he perceives a new trust between them, so that he follows her words even when he doesn’t understand.
“What happens when a layperson tries to study doctrine?” he asks, suspecting that, for once, he knows the answer.
“Then it’s heresy, Obb. You see now, why the Inquisitor pursues his office with such ruthlessness? He protects our claim to doctrine against those outside the Church—or in it. If they still burned heretics at the stake, he’d do it, to protect us. He has hatred enough, to do it. But it’s time for him to take on a sharp-minded clerk and train him up in the protection of the faith, such as it is. And Brother WroDski tells me you have a natural gift for analysis.”
Obb relaxes into the dervish’s arms, meeting a strange comfort there. He feels safe in her cynicism. Maybe the Inquisitor’s fearsomeness feels just as safe. Obb knows Sister Casorata doesn’t want him to become a cruel man. And he knows his parents would be horrified—but what loyalty does he owe them, their values, anymore? Over the scalloped roof tiles, crows settle on a procession of limestone sisters along the scriptorium roof, black against the sky and holding books open to the western light.
* * *
Compline: the Inquisitor’s carriage will travel by night. Brother WroDski intones the tutor’s blessing over Obb, full of misgivings. He’s told Obb how little he likes Obb’s choice and urged him to consider analytic geometry. But he said this already resigned, his mind already at work on a more promising abstraction than mentorship. He means well, but Obb is no scholar.
The abbot bows to the Inquisitor and eyes Obb warily—wondering if Obb will remember him. Let him be afraid, let them all be afraid, in the villages and cities. Obb will remember.
Sister Casorata hands Obb his provisions for the journey. She begins a gesture as if she will push Obb’s bangs out of his eyes; as if he will feel her firm fingers raking his hair one last time. But she is all formality, just as on his first day. He says to her quietly, I told you I’d escape.
Neither the Inquisitor nor the dervish say anything to Obb as he climbs into the carriage. The wheels shudder into ruts as the carriage leaves the courtyard. It is a clear night and the moon stipples the cottonwoods’ waxy leaves with soft light, like a scatter of small bones. Obb imagines Bolyai and Agatha slipping through those trees, a pair of eternal fugitives always one night ahead of their pursuers. But he knows that in a few more days, if they haven’t been found, they’ll likely be dead. He lets the panic of this thought wash over him and off him.
But if they did make it out on their own, where would they go? Could they live together undetected, an ordinary couple in a city, unlucky in childbirth, like so many? And if he or she couldn’t help but pursue their studies on their own: if Agatha can’t sleep for the power chance holds over her imagination, and if she closes the shutters and lights the lamp in the small hours of Lauds—dropping handfuls of dress pins on to ruled paper, flashing shivers of gold—would she and her dark-eyed husband one day be brought as heretics before Obb on his inquisitorial throne, robed in magisterial black?
“Well, Oblate,” the Inquisitor speaks at last, “have you chosen your name?”
Copyright © 2017 Theodore McCombs
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Theodore McCombs is a writer in Denver and a current student of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica and Electric Literature, among others. He is a co-editor and regular c
ontributor at the speculative literary blog Fiction Unbound and he tweets as @mrbruff.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
COVER ART
“Monument,” by Jeff Brown
Jeff Brown is a professional freelance artist from Saskatoon, SK, Canada, living in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In the world of book cover design and illustration, he has worked with over ninety book authors on more than two-hundred fifty covers. In the world of games, he has worked for companies such as Fantasy Flight Games, Pelgrane Press, and Logic Artists as a concept artist & illustrator. He currently does freelance work and long term projects. To see more of his work, visit jeffbrowngraphics.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.