Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

Once most of the brothers had dispersed to their afternoon’s activities, a hooded monk tugged at my arm and drew me around and behind an unlit hearth. “The hierarch will ask you about the book,” he said, his words penetrating my skull as much by virtue of their ferocity as by my hearing them. “You will not reveal its exact title or its history. You will not offer it to him. If you value the boy’s safety, see that it remains here.” Before I could respond, he hurried away.

I knew it was Gildas. I recognized the thatch of brown hair on the back of his hand. And who but Gildas would encourage me to lie to the authority I had just vowed to obey? He had recognized my lack of finer scruples early on. Yet it wasn’t so much his particular demand that left me bristling—I’d no wish for Hierarch Eligius to get his hands on my book. But his reference to Jullian sounded very like a threat.

People had to get along as they could in this world. Gods knew I’d done my share of wickedness along the way. But when the account for a man’s deeds fell due, the one to pay should be the man who made the choice to do them. Never friends…and never, ever, children.

“His Excellency wishes to congratulate you,” Brother Sebastian said, as he bustled me down the cloister walk toward the scriptorium, where the hierarch was inspecting the monks’ work. I was yet grumbling under my breath at Gildas’s high-handed manner when we stepped into the cavernous, many-windowed room tucked into the understory of the library.

The place was deliciously warm, though it reeked of sour vitriol and acrid tannin—ink. Amid orderly rows of thick, unadorned columns that sprouted at their crowns into great sprays of vaulting ribs, orderly rows of copyists hunched over sloping desks, writing or painting their pages. A severely stooped monk, wisps of white hair feathering his tonsure, moved from desk to desk with a basket of small flasks, replenishing the ink horns fixed to each desk by metal hoops. Other monks sat at long tables shaving quills or stitching folded pages together. Save for the soft scratch of pens, the whisk of knives, and the rustle of pages, the place was very quiet. Holy silence was kept here as in the cloisters.

“Ah, our new novice.” Hierarch Eligius’s unmuffled voice resonated like a barrage of stone against a siege wall, causing heads to pop up all over. He closed the small fat book that lay on a copyist’s desk, picked it up, and peered at the title. “A Treatise on the Nature of Evil written by Jonne of Lidowe. A truly noble work. Have you read it?” He wagged it in the air.

Uncertain whether I was expected to voice my answers or not, I shook my head.

“Do so when this copy is complete.” He dropped the little volume on the desk. “Brother Fidelio, you’ll see to it?”

The copyist nodded and dipped his pen again.

Brother Sebastian gave me a gentle shove, and I joined the hierarch just as he moved on to the next desk, his elaborate cloak jarring Brother Fidelio’s elbow. The monk sighed silently, set down his pen, and scraped at his work with a pumice stone.

Eligius squinted at the second copyist’s work. “You’ve a beautiful hand, Brother. Every character well formed and clear. The history of the Karish in Navronne is an inspiring text. But I would like to see more color and variety in the capitals. You must not starve the glory of presentation in some rush to completion.”

The chinless Brother Victor, my diminutive companion of Black Night, seemed to be in charge of the scriptorium activities. He flitted from one desk to another, answering unspoken questions from the copyists, fetching books from the shelves on the end wall, or using naught but his deft fingers to describe corrections to a binder’s stitching.

At the next desk, a scrawny, sandy-haired younger monk held his tongue between his lips as his blackened fingers drew tiny characters in long straight lists. The blank parts of the page were marked into columns with lines of light gray.

“A fine presentation, Brother, but this—” The frowning hierarch tapped a white-gloved finger on a tattered scroll held open by lead weights. “The Tally of Grape Harvests in Central Ardra in the Years of Aurellian Rule? Surely more uplifting pages wait to be copied—sacred texts, sermons, or noble histories that will turn men’s thoughts to Iero or his saints. Who chose this as an exemplar? Come, come, speak up.”

“Brother Chancellor gives out the work, Excellency,” whispered the sandy-haired monk, “and tasks us with the pages most suited to our skills. Not to set myself high, but both he and Father Abbot say I’ve a special touch for numbers, so perhaps—”

“I must have a word with the chancellor then, as well as with Abbot Luviar.” The hierarch glared across the room at Brother Victor, who leaned over a desk, heads together with a copyist.

The hierarch spoke to each of the copyists, his steepled upper lip rising high and stiff as he named more works frivolous or inappropriate. He condemned anything of mundane use: a scroll on glassmaking, a book on the building of Aurellian roads, an almanac that traced weather patterns in Morian over three centuries.

I was no judge of books and their uses. That a man could learn to make glass from another glassmaker, as I had learned to tan hides, brew ale, and cut stone from those who knew the work, made more sense to me than learning such things from blots on parchment. But then again, I could not see how a book reader would come nearer heaven by reading someone’s speculations on Iero’s parentage than by reading of the might of storms and sunlight over the river country.

The hierarch moved to a table where a grizzled monk traced his finger over a page in an open book while reading a set of unbound pages. The monk’s glance moved from one to the other and back again.

“So, Brother Novice,” said the hierarch as he peered over the shoulder of the monk and browsed through stacks that seemed to be awaiting similar examination. “Abbot Luviar has recounted how a journey of penitence brought you to this great conversion. A remarkable story.”

I cleared my throat. “A wonder, truly, Excellency. I feel uplifted. Reborn, as to say.”

He turned the pages of a small book, the colors of the inked patterns brighter than his ruby ring. “And you truly came upon Gillarine by chance?”

“Indeed, I wandered for days, bleeding and wounded, entirely confused as to my course. Having lived so short a time in the little village of”—I twisted my brain to come up with a name—“Thorn, and diseased with sin and violent behavior as I was, I was unfamiliar with any holy places in the countryside around. Even now, I could not tell you the location of that village or the true course of my wanderings, Excellen—”

Saints and angels! I almost swallowed my tongue. I had not noticed the man who stood stiffly in the shadow of a pillar, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes dead with boredom. The scarlet surcoat he wore over his gray gown bore the hierarch’s gold-broidered blazon of mitral hat and solicale. Of modest stature, with close-trimmed black hair, long nose, and an air of unremitting superiority, he scarcely needed the violet mask that covered half his face to proclaim him pureblood. Protocol forbade an ordinary to so much as notice him without his master’s leave.

I dropped my gaze and attempted to shrink inside my cowl. “Truly, Saint…uh”—the name escaped me—“that is, the guardian of wanderers must have examined…watched…over me every moment of that…of that—”

“Yes, yes.” Eligius’s frizzled brown hair bobbed alongside the red cap that had replaced his mitral hat. “You carried a book of maps, did you not? Even that could not aid you?”

I dared not let the name Cartamandua arise in association with me in front of the pureblood. Why had I not thought to take a false name as long as I carried the book? It was not so long a stretch from Valen to Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine to exposure.