Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

Whenever I wasn’t in the central chapel for Mass, I spent my time in the scriptorium. Gertrud made it clear from the start that she didn’t appreciate my presence. Because of her position as armarius, however, it would have been improper for her to vent her frustrations directly. For this, she had her minion Sister Agletrudis.

Agletrudis was a chubby little planet that orbited around Gertrud, the scriptorium’s largest star; her every action was calculated to please her mistress by torturing me. Her only goal in life was to take over the scriptorium when Gertrud finally died. What was I, except an obstacle upon that path?

Well before I arrived, a financial consideration had infiltrated the scriptorium. It was common practice to produce books for wealthy citizens, often in exchange for land upon their deaths. Gertrud, despite all her self-professed holiness, never took offense at the economic terms of this arrangement but disliked the sale of books for a different reason altogether: it interfered with using the scriptorium to achieve her own ends. Early in her career, Gertrud had decided that she would produce one great work upon which her legend would forever rest: a definitive German-language version of the Bible. Though she never said it aloud, I’m certain she imagined it would come to be known as Die Gertrud Bibel.

This was the basic problem with my presence: I was a young girl-an incomplete adult-who would take precious time away from her real work. I remember Gertrud’s words when she put me under the tutelage of Agletrudis. “The prioress seems to believe this child will be able to offer something. Demonstrate for her some of the basics of the craft, preferably on the other side of the room, but she is not to touch anything. Those fat little fingers are undeserving of God’s instruments. And above all, keep her away from my Bible.”

So, in the beginning, I was only allowed to watch. You’d imagine this to be incredibly boring for a child but, as I’d spent much of my young life gathering information while sitting quietly in the corner, this was nothing new for me. I was hypnotized by the way the quills worked as an extension of the scribes’ fingers. I learned the recipe for ink and that adding vermilion or cinnabar would make it red. I watched the way the nuns used a blade to sharpen their nibs, whenever the lettering threatened to lose its definition. I knew instantly that I was in the right place.

Things that we take for granted today were extraordinary at the time. Take paper, for example. We didn’t make our own but received delivery from a local parchmenter. Then we had to ready the parchment for use. The nuns sorted it by quality and then arranged the sheets by hair and flesh sides, so the grains of the pages would match when the volume sat open on its spine, and sometimes Gertrud would instruct that the parchment should have some color added “just for a touch of drama.” A single book required the skins of several hundred animals. How could a girl not be fascinated by that?

I can criticize Gertrud for many things but not her devotion to the craft. If the work was a translation, discussions about the phrasing of a single sentence sometimes lasted for over an hour. Most nuns in that room, despite the grumblings about Gertrud’s dictatorial attitude, felt that she was completing a task God had specifically chosen her to do. The sisters never flagged, not even during the most intense periods of working on Die Gertrud Bibel.

There were a few scribes who wondered under what authority such a grand translation was being attempted and whether the undertaking were not sacrilegious, but these sisters knew better than to question the scriptorium’s armarius-or simply feared to do it. So they didn’t complain, but focused instead on the rare pages of the Bible that received Gertrud’s approval. While everyone had input into the process, she always had the final say.

Gertrud allowed only the most skillful scribes to work on the most perfect vellum. She hovered over the work, jerking her scrawny neck each time she feared that a word might be misspelled or that the ink might be smudged. When the final period was dotted on the page’s final sentence, you could see Gertrud’s shoulders let go and you could hear the air that had been trapped in her lungs exit in relief. Then she would loudly slurp in another mouthful.

These moments of relaxation never lasted long. Gertrud would take the leaf to the rubricator so that the chapter and verse numbers could be highlighted in red, and while this was being done, the illuminator would make dozens of trial sketches for the blank spaces on the page. When the final decisions were made, the image was laid into place.

The completed pages were magnificent. Gertrud would spend a good hour, checking and double-checking it, before she would file it away and start the next page. Leaf by leaf, the book was coming into existence, but there were always other jobs to be completed. Whenever we had a backlog of manuscript requests from the nobility, Gertrud would glance longingly in the direction of her first love. But she had her orders from the prioress just like everyone else.

Somehow word reached the prioress that I wasn’t being allowed to participate in any scriptorium duties. I imagine Sister Christina was probably behind this. With a great sigh of resignation and a lengthy explanation that she was against it, Gertrud explained that “under order of the prioress, I now have to allow your stupid little hands to start practicing.” She gave over some old parchment, ruined by copying errors, and told me to start my efforts.

I immersed myself in it. I worked on any discarded vellum I could find and, as my skills improved, I was grudgingly given better quills and greater leeway to practice my translations. I could already understand German, Latin, Greek and Aramaic, the Italian of Paolo’s prayer book, and some French. I was reading my way through every volume in the scriptorium and my development was a constant source of amazement to the sisters, although I never received a word of praise from Gertrud. Sister Agletrudis always took great pleasure in pointing out my every mistake and when I turned my back on my work, my inkwells would mysteriously tip over, my books would mysteriously go missing, or my quills would somehow mysteriously snap. Each time I pointed out these “coincidences” to Gertrud, she’d only smirk and vouch for Sister Agletrudis’ very fine character.

Eventually, however, Gertrud and her acolyte could no longer continue to deny my talent. I was becoming the most versatile of the translators, and I was also the fastest and most accurate. Agletrudis’ annoyance with me moved beyond simple dislike, into feelings of jealousy and threat, and there was a disturbed look in Gertrud’s eyes as she started to realize how valuable I could be to Die Gertrud Bibel. She was no longer a young woman, and if she wanted to ensure that the Bible was completed in her lifetime, she needed to hurry the process along. Eventually, she allowed me to start contributing.

There was also life outside the scriptorium. As I grew older, I discovered a way to climb over the monastery gates and finally gain access to the world outside. I wasn’t looking for trouble; I only wanted to see what was out there. Naturally my first stop was the small home that belonged to Father Sunder and Brother Heinrich. When I appeared, Father Sunder let his displeasure in my actions be known. He threatened to haul me back to the monastery and report me to the prioress, but somehow we ended up having a cup of juice instead. And then we had something to eat. And before he knew it, so much time had passed that it would have been awkward to try to explain why he had not brought me back immediately. So, after I promised not to come again, Brother Heinrich and Father Sunder allowed me to sneak back into the monastery. I returned the following night. Again I was severely chastised, but we ended up having more food and drinks. This pattern of my broken promises and their half-hearted scoldings continued for some weeks before we gave up the pretense altogether.