Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“You’re a proper villain, Brother,” I said, wincing as I rolled over and let them prop my leg up again. “I’m not thanking you as yet. This activity has surely stirred up the poisons in my blood. And this drink fit only for dogs and horses, tainted by ill-let blood, will compound them. I could die from it.”

“You’ll not die today, Valen.” Chuckling, Brother Badger tucked me in more gently than my mother had ever done. This was indeed a fine and friendly place.

“I need to be gone now,” said Jullian, scrambling to his feet not long after the bells for the Hour of Compline—night prayers—fell silent. “I’ve duties.”

The door banged behind him. He had been regaling me with descriptions of the various monks, while the infirmarian and his assistant hied off to pray again. Though guileless as a newborn calf, the boy had a wit about him. I felt as if I knew the denizens of Gillarine already.

Left alone, I wormed my way down into the bedclothes, more tired than I ought to be from another day of sleeping and eating and taking Robierre’s enforced exercise. Before I could settle, a draft from the door set the rushlights wickering. Another visitor. Boots, this time, curiously enough. Quiet, measured steps.

“Yes, I’m awake,” I said over my shoulder, wishing I could lie facing the doorway at least. “And pleased for visitors.” The infirmary was beginning to feel more like a public marketplace than a house of healing.

“Good. I’ve no wish to overtax you.”

The quiet boots and low, pleasant voice belonged to a gaunt man soberly dressed in secular garb and a round-brimmed felt hat. As he came round the bed, he grabbed one of Robierre’s stools. Under his other arm, he carried my book of maps.

My welcome froze on my lips, and I set myself ready to muster a host of ailments if the conversation grew dangerous. Jullian’s talk of magistrates and pureblood investigators still had me twitching.

“My name is Gram Scriptor,” he said, inclining his back and extending his open palm in greeting as southerners do. “My employer is visiting Gillarine and got wind of this magnificent volume. He’s an educated man of wide-ranging interests and bids me learn what I can of it while we bide here that I might record the information in his journals. Abbot Luviar graciously permitted us to view the book and suggested I consult you with my questions, if you felt up to it.” Scriptor…a secretary, then, of unnotable family.

“I don’t know that I could tell you aught you cannot read from the book itself,” I said as he settled himself on the stool.

He was something near my own age, and not a bad-looking fellow, save for an unhealthy gray hue to his complexion. His close-trimmed black hair, beardless chin, and conservative attire—ash-gray cape over an unadorned knee-length tunic of dark gray—accentuated the hollows in his cheeks. His eyes sat deep, dark, I thought, though that could just be shadows from his hat.

“If nothing comes of my questions, so be it.” A grave, modest smile softened his severe appearance. “At the least I can report to my master that I did as he asked, which is often quite enough to satisfy him once the…mmm…storm of displeasure…is past. Just tell me if I press too much or if you tire.”

I had to be careful. To refuse this fellow might offend the abbot. And I’d not wish the abbot—or this man, whoever he was—to conclude I’d stolen the book after all. Likely I knew enough to satisfy a besieged secretary. “Ask what you will. I’ll do my best.”

“I’m ever grateful.” He scooted his stool closer to the bed, so we could view the book together. He leafed through several pages. “Of course I’ve seen common maps—a few scratched lines and place names and perhaps a landmark or two. But I’ve no experience of such fine maps—a sorcerer’s maps—and so great a variety of them. The written explanations in the book itself are confusing. I thought perhaps that the lord who’d given it to you might have explained what kinds of maps these are and how their magic works.”

Gram offered me the book, and I turned a few pages, opening to a leaf displaying four small maps of different kinds. I stared at the page—its lines and symbols evoking far too much of memory. On his random appearances at our house, my grandfather had forced me to sit with him and look at his book, whispering in my ear of its importance, of its perfection, of its cleverness and magic, and how I must learn to use it. His breath had smelled of cloves, onions, and black ale, his body of unwashed skin and horses despite his fine clothes. Disgust rippled through me alongside the recollection. Those sessions had lasted only as long as it took me to spit on his shirt and wriggle out of his grasp. But his lessons had always begun with this page.

“My—Mardane Lavorile told me that every variety of map is represented in this book,” I began. “Most, like this one, are fichés.” I pointed to the rigorous little rendering of roads, mountains, and rivers—very like the great maps stretched and mounted on the walls of my father’s library. “It is accurate in heading, scale, and proportion, so that a lesser distance on the map implies a lesser distance in truth. And the details are as precise as the cartographer can make them…”

The secretary listened intently, as I explained about keys and compass roses, and interpreted some of the symbols—for mountains, water features, towns and cities, shrines and temples, and the like. He asked me to clarify a few points, but otherwise did not interrupt.

“This map, on the other hand”—I indicated a fanciful colored drawing of a town with buildings and bridges and roads all mismatched in size—“is of the type known as a grousherre. The streets and structures are drawn with proper connections and relative positions, so that you can know which road leads to which, or which house stands beside which bridge. But the size and proportion of each object is determined by its importance not accurate measure.”

“That seems a strange way to make a map.” Gram pored over the drawing for a moment, his face drawn up in a puzzle. “Makes me think the maker was an odd sort of fellow.”

I grinned. “Exactly my own thought. I’ve never seen the purpose of them, save for making a page where the cartographer could show off and splash around all his colors of ink.”

“So what about these other two? This one looks to be a coastline, but I don’t understand the markings.” The little map detailed the fanlike outlets of one of Morian’s great rivers and the creneled inlets and channels on either side of it. Tiny numbers littered the expanse of land and sea.

“That’s a portolan,” I said. “A navigation map. The marks are winds and tides and notations for sailors’ instruments. I’ve no skill with ships to be able to tell you more than that. And this last is an example of a mappa mundi—a rendering of the wider world as if viewed from Iero’s heaven. You can always tell them by their oval shape.” My grandfather had included three mappa mundi that spanned two pages each. “The one in the very back of the book shows the trade routes to Aurellia and to Pyrrha, the land of volcanoes.”

“Now, what of the magic? I’ve heard tales of Janus de Cartamandua’s maps…”

“Well…” I bit my lower lip, a reminder I often used to watch my mouth. This visitor had set me too much at ease. “I know little of that. I used only a few of the maps, as the mardane needed.”

Supposedly, unlike those created by my father or my brother, Max, or any other cartographer in Navronne, my grandfather’s maps showed the earth’s most secret and holy places—magical pools, sacred groves, the earthly dwellings of spirits and angels, places that no traveler would ever “happen” upon. Places that could be found only by using these maps. So I had been told.