Laura Gilman - Curse the Dark

Wren thought of a few particularly good comebacks, but settled for an unhappy grunt. She had fallen asleep and left the driving to him. That put him in the decision-making seat, and his instincts were pretty damn good about stuff like this. Even if she was still in dire need of that shower and a candy bar.

“Besides…” He looked down at the view, but his attention was clearly elsewhere. The breeze ruffled his hair slightly, and made her wish she were wearing a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in weeks.

“Besides?” she prompted him.

“It’s nothing. I just wanted to get started, is all.”

“You sure they’re going to want drop-in visitors?” she asked mildly. “I mean, monastery, monks, isolation, etcetera, right?”

“We’re hardly unexpected. And I don’t think it’s a cloistered monastery in the way you’re thinking—according to the sign we passed on the way up, they have a gift shop.”

“Oooookay….” For some reason, Wren had the sudden visual of pasta in the shape of the Crucifixion, with red sauce, and shook her head violently until the image was gone. She was already probably going to Hell, but why make it even worse? “But monks and prayers and bell-tolling, right?”

“Indeed. And we even wear robes occasionally.” They both spun around to see a middle-aged man in a pale grey robe that should have looked silly but didn’t, standing in the grass to the side of the parking area, smiling at them. “Forgive me. I heard the car coming up the hill and came down to see who it could be. I am Brother Teodosio. And you, obviously, are our visitors from the States.”

“Sergei Didier,” Sergei’s hand was engulfed in the other man’s. They were about the same height, but Teodosio had at least fifty pounds on him, and very little of it was muscle. His face was round, but not jolly, and Wren didn’t think many people challenged him twice.

“Wren Valere,” she said, and had her own hand swallowed in turn. His skin was warm, and a little moist, but nothing unpleasant. His eyes were surprisingly blue, under the black hair peppering into grey, and Wren noted that he didn’t have a tonsure like she’d always thought was required style for monks.

And he’s wearing jeans under that robe. And sneakers. Another fine myth shot to…okay, maybe not hell, for a monk.

“I hope that your drive down was a pleasant one. Welcome to the Sienese, and specifically to I Monaci delle Sante Parole—better known to some as the House of Legend.”

“House of…?” Sergei’s ears practically perked up, probably hoping it had something to do with artwork he could cart back home and make a nice chunk of change on the side.

“Legend.” Teodosio’s attention went back to Sergei, promptly dismissing—forgetting about—Wren. That was a side effect of her particular blend of skills, and part of what made her so effective. And why her mentor, Neezer, had nicknamed her Jenny-wren. Because nobody ever saw the small brown bird—but she saw them.

“Indeed,” the monk continued, “as with any building over a century or two old, there are stories attached to it. And the House is quite old, indeed. It is our heritage, our reason for being here. And, indeed, the reason for your being here as well, sadly.”

“As to that—my information said that you would be able to fill us in on the specifics?”

“You were not told?” The monk seemed taken aback by that, then shrugged as though asking why the works of man should be any less obscure than the works of God.

“To understand, you must first understand who we are, and what we do here. The story is—” and he made a gesture to indicate that they should walk with him along the path Wren now saw leading through the field and up the rise to the building she had noted earlier “—that in the early years of the thirteenth century, four monks came north, fleeing the aftermath of one or another of the endless squabbles between the city-states and the papacy.”

Sergei fell easily into step beside their guide, leaving Wren to take up position behind them on the path.

“Their abbey had been destroyed?” Sergei was in smooth mode, she noted. She kept her ears open and took mental notes, in case anything seemed relevant—or might become so, later on.

“They kept no records of where they came from—we don’t even know their names, as they simply referred to themselves as, how would it translate?” He shook his head as though searching for something inside. “As ‘the brothers of the gathering word’? Close enough. And that is the assumption, yes. Destroyed, or taken as spoils of victory by whichever princeling had control of that town on that particular month.”

Sergei was nodding, drawing the monk on to tell the rest of the story.

“With them, so the story goes, they had little money, no supplies, and two chests filled with manuscripts they had taken from their abbey when they fled. That, we assume, is why they took the name they did, referring to the gathering of the manuscripts into a library of sorts. They arrived here, and with the permission of the local Ghibelline nobility and the local bishop, built the House first, not for their own protection, but for the books they carried with them. And so it has been ever since; we are the caretakers of learning, of the wisdom established by those who have come before us.”

“Librarians, you mean.”

Rather than looking offended, Teodosio smiled and nodded. “Exactly.”

Somehow Wren doubted that it had been anywhere near as simple or neatly tied up as that. From what little she knew of history, the rivalries he mentioned had been pretty nasty, and making an alliance with the wrong person could be deadly. So what had those four monks offered the local bishop that he gave them—homeless, with no money or military strength—permission to build their own independent housing on what looked like some seriously prime property? Sergei’s notes said, for all they were Catholic monks in name, there wasn’t any direct control of the order from Rome. She was just a nice lapsed Protestant girl, but that seemed really odd to her. Wasn’t there a whole chain of command thing, orders of obedience, ad extreme nauseum?

She made a mental note to follow up on that particular question, when she had time. It might be nothing—or it could be everything. You never knew.

They came around a bend in the path, and were on a cliff overlooking a valley town that could have come out of a tourist’s guide.

“Wow,” Wren said, taking a step closer to the edge. Absolutely prime property, yeah. You could see for miles, the horizon a smudge of sun-yellowed fields intersected by the occasional ribbon of black road and dotted by random buildings that were probably either barns or farmhouses.

“Indeed. It reminds one of the glory around us, every morning, when I come out here.”

Not to mention being totally defensible, Wren thought, casting a look over her shoulder to where the low stone building was revealed to be a more elaborate structure than it had first appeared. Yeah, red stone fortresslike building put on the top of a hill, near a cliff, sure they’d just hand that view over to a couple of rabbitting monks, no questions asked, out of the goodness and charity in their hearts.

Wren didn’t much believe in the goodness of anyone’s heart. Not without references.

“You speak excellent English,” Sergei said finally.

Teodosio laughed. “I went to university in Boston,” he said. “M.I.T. I thought I was going to be a mathematician, but God had other plans for my curiosity.” Wren looked away from the view at that, but his face seemed as serenely unlined as before.

“Come, you’ll want to visit the room where the manuscript was taken from, and see what you may see, yes?”