Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“…and to finish your tale of that tin smuggler in Savil,” called Brother Marcus from the bed closest to the door. “You can’t leave us not knowing if the fellow got out of the cave.”

I laughed. “I’ve a better one, about the time I fell in with a caravan of—”

“Be off with you, Valen, or I’ll chase you out,” said Robierre, beckoning Jullian to replenish an earthenware bowl with his steaming decoction. “We’ve our work to do.”

“You’ve done well by me, Brother Infirmarian,” I said, taking a jig step and twirling foolishly into a sweeping bow. “You are Iero’s own artist with your lancets and caudles. I do thank you.”

Robierre bobbed his head, flushed a little, and went on with his work. Jullian watched intently, a ladleful of his pungent liquid sloshing noisily into the fire. I winked at the boy, grabbed the rucksack and my alder stick, and joined Brother Sebastian at the door.

“I shall strive to do as well by you as Robierre has done,” he said.

“You can stick your nose in his business, Sebastian,” Brother Marcus called after us, “and leave off telling the rest of us when our gowns are untidy or our beds ill made.” The red-haired scribe had taken a spear wound next his spine on Black Night and was dreadfully uncomfortable. He lay on his belly all day and all night, sketching odd little drawings on scraps of vellum laid on the floor under his nose. Robierre wasn’t sure the man would ever leave his bed.

Brother Sebastian chuckled, held open the door, and waved me out. “Tell me if we set too fast a pace, Valen. Your leg seems to be progressing well.”

We strolled past the herb beds and around the bake-house. “I was thinking that I should go walking in the countryside to strengthen it and cleanse my lungs from the sickly humors of the infirmary…”…and scout the possibilities for replenishing my supply of nivat.

Brother Sebastian halted abruptly. “That would not be at all appropriate. Though yet unvowed, you must draw a sharp separation from the outer world. Once your leg receives Brother Robierre’s clearance, you will be assigned outdoor duties more than sufficient to cleanse your lungs.”

“But—”

His raised finger ended discussion. We had reached the stair to the monks’ dorter, and he was soon busy showing me the rope bed and straw-filled palliasse at the south end of the long, high-ceilinged room where I would sleep.

The empty green pouch in the bottom of my rucksack soon became more worrisome than midnight massacres, eyeless corpses, or monks who explained naught of lighthouses or vanishing royalty no matter what wheedling I did. I had taught myself not to think of nivat or the doulon overmuch. The need could come to affect all a man’s dealings, his friends, his choices, until life took shape from it every day and not just the one day in twenty-eight…or twenty-one…that it devoured him. I swore I’d rather go mad from the lack than let it rule me. But always the hour arrived when my bravado withered.

I had already confirmed that Brother Robierre kept no nivat seeds in the infirmary. An exploration of the bakehouse, while its denizens were at Vespers, had revealed that Brother Baker kept his brick ovens clean, his floor swept, his barrels of flour and salt sealed tight, and his wooden boxes of herbs and seeds labeled neatly, though with no sketch or hint of their contents for any who had difficulty with letters. None of the boxes contained nivat. I would have to go farther afield to replenish my supply.

My hopes of moving in and out of the abbey freely were quickly squelched. Every hour of my day was scheduled: services in the church, meals in the infirmary, washing, and walking. I suffered endless lessons, everything from how to fold my gown and place it in the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, to the signing speech the monks used in the cloisters, to a history of the brotherhood so detailed I could near recite what Saint Ophir had for breakfast every morning of his four-and-eighty years. Even my times of “study and reflection” in the church or the gardens were scrutinized. If I dozed off, one or the other of the brethren would immediately walk by and rap my skull with a bony knuckle.

And so I decided to slip out at night. The monks were abed with the birds, and as the dorter had been built for a hundred and twenty, a wide gap of empty cubicles separated my quarters from those of the thirty-one men who slept at the end nearest the church. And in the main, I was well shielded from their view. Besides the common shoulder-high screen of carved wood that separated one monk’s bed, chest, stool, and window alcove from the next man’s, a folding screen of woven lath had been set across the central aisle to separate the novices’ cubicles from those reserved for the monks. And I was the only novice.

But not only did Brother Sebastian poke his head around my screen twice each night, as the Rule advised, but the very structure of the dorter thwarted me. My cubicle lay between the monks’ cubicles and the reredorter. Throughout the night, sleepy monks in need of natural relief made a constant procession down the central aisle, around the lath screen, and past my open cubicle toward the cold wooden seats of the rere.

Worse yet, I was expected to parade down to the church with the monks to pray the nighttime Hours. These interruptions came at such frequent and unholy times—Vespers before supper, Compline at bedtime, Matins at midnight, Lauds at third hour, Prime at sixth—I could not see how I would ever be able to absent myself long enough to acquire what I needed. The anxiety I tried to keep from ruling my life crept inevitably into every hour.

“It’s come!” Brother Sebastian hurried down the path from the cloisters waving a rolled parchment. “I worried we might have to lie twixt wind and water for another month.”

I slammed the wretched book shut. Excessive meditation was surely ruinous to good health and spirits. While my mentor had attended the chapter meeting that morning, I’d sat on this stone bench in the hedge garden, pretending to study. The characters on the page had tightened into seed shapes. Every scent—of yew, of grass, of smoke from the kitchen—taunted me because it was not the earthy fragrance of nivat.

“It’s the letter from Palinur. The last impediment to your investiture is removed.” Having been informed that I was schooled enough to comprehend Aurellian, Brother Sebastian had blithely deemed no further reading test necessary, and his oral quiz of my mathematical skills had been less taxing than a visit to any Morian trade fair. He had lacked only the proof of my birth.

Sebastian unrolled the parchment under my nose. I furrowed my brow and inspected the page as if I could comprehend it. His chattering implied the cathedral labor rolls had indeed confirmed my status as a freeborn and legitimate son of nobodies.

Neither bastards nor villeins were allowed to labor on holy works. When I’d wandered back to Palinur a few years before in search of work, I had assembled several tavern acquaintances into a poor but devout family, believable enough to testify and get me hired on at the cathedral. I had cheerfully imagined my mother’s face if she ever learned she had been mimed by a whore who had serviced Palinur’s garrison so often, she could identify the soldiers’ pricks blindfolded.

Brother Sebastian’s face shone brighter than the hazy sun. “The abbot has given his consent. And, most excellently, it happens that the Hierarch of Ardra himself has arrived for a visitation and will preside at your vesting! Come along with me, lad.”

Before I knew it, we had collected my secular clothes from the dorter and a provision bag from the kitchen, and he was bustling me through the doorway of the very guesthouse where I had been certain that the Duc of Ardra was hiding from his royal brother.