Garrido, Antonio - The Scribe

Theresa listened, absorbed. He spoke of things she didn’t understand, but his words seemed sincere.

Alcuin approached the desk that her father used and pressed both of his palms to its surface. When he lifted them, his handprints were visible in the dust.

“Your father worked here, in this very spot. Here he spent his final weeks preparing a document of inestimable value to Christendom. Now answer me: Are you prepared to swear an oath?”

Theresa was frightened, but she agreed. She repeated after Alcuin that she would never, under pain of eternal damnation, reveal what she would soon learn about the document. She swore it on a Vulgate that she then kissed reverently. She promised that Hoos would never learn anything about it.

Alcuin took the Bible and placed it near his handprints. Then he eyed the prints in the dust left by Gorgias’s styluses and asked Theresa to look at them closely.

“According to Wilfred, your father disappeared a couple of months or so ago, and Genseric was found dead two weeks ago. Now, look at these marks. What do you see?”

Theresa examined them carefully. There were Alcuin’s handprints on the table, a row of styluses, and two small elongated marks.

“I don’t know… prints in the dust.”

“Yes, but look closely: The handprints I have just made are fresh, and yet the other two,” he said, pointing at the elongated marks, “whose shape undoubtedly corresponds to two styluses—they are already covered with a thin layer of dust. And even then…”

“Yes?”

“They are not identical. Not only in their shape, which is obvious, but also in the quantity of dust they have accumulated. The one on the left, which is a little bigger, has more than the one on the right.”

He walked over to the drawer where Wilfred kept the stylus they had found driven into Genseric’s stomach. He picked it up and positioned it perfectly over the smaller print. “As you can see, this print was made from this stylus, but the veil of dust over it is finer than the dust covering the print left from the bigger stylus. This tells us that the stylus I am holding—the one that ended Genseric’s life—was taken from the desk later than the bigger one, which lay in this other mark.”

He then went over to a nearby table where there were several books and picked one up. “The marks from these books, on the other hand, display a similar amount of dust to the mark left by the bigger stylus. Wilfred assured me that on the day your father disappeared, so did the codices and styluses. However, the thinner layer of dust that has settled over the print of the smaller stylus, again, the one found stuck in Genseric, suggests that it was actually taken from the scriptorium quite a few days later.”

“And that means…?”

“Think about it. Books aren’t the only things missing from the scriptorium. Also gone are inkwells, pounce, pens… everything that your father would need to prepare a document. And curiously, all the prints left behind from this equipment display a similar amount of dust as the large stylus, which allows us to deduce that the equipment and the large stylus were taken at the same time. So, it doesn’t make sense that the other stylus would disappear later, especially considering that, after your father’s disappearance, Wilfred closed the scriptorium. So, someone other than Gorgias took that stylus that was found in Genseric.”

“But why?”

“To frame your father, of course. And not only that. I am certain that Genseric did not die from the stabbing. Rather, the suspected murderer drove the stylus into him after he was killed.”

“But, how can you be so sure?” Theresa asked in surprise.

“Well, with the far-fetched excuse that I wanted to bless the coadjutor’s body with some relics, I was allowed to exhume his coffin, and was able to examine his habit. I must confess that if Genseric had not been of weak bladder, they would have buried him in other clothes, and his habit would be lost by now, so I was fortunate that he was. During my examination I found the entry wound, with the corresponding hole in his clothes at stomach level. An injury like that would have made him bleed to death. But interestingly there was nothing more than a small ring of blood on the habit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, a living heart pumps the blood through the wound, causing death by exsanguination, which never happens when a body is already dead.”

Theresa was still trying to grasp the meaning of his words. “So what you are saying is that Genseric died some other way, and then someone tried to feign a murder?”

“He didn’t die another way—he was killed another way!” he exclaimed.

He told her how he had examined the remains of vomit found on Genseric’s front, and without being able to establish the nature of the poison, he was still absolutely certain that some kind of bane had finished him off.

Theresa breathed a sigh of relief. She considered telling Alcuin what she had found on her excursion with Zeno, but without knowing why, she decided to wait a while.

Meanwhile, the monk, who was gathering together codices and tidying the scriptorium, continued to ponder his theories. “Wherefore, whoever gained entry to the scriptorium was in all likelihood the same person who murdered Genseric,” he concluded.

“You mean Wilfred?”

“Poor Wilfred is a cripple. What’s more, he’s not the only person who had keys. Genseric also had some.”

“So what does that mean?”

“This is what I intend to find out.”

He explained that, before disappearing, Gorgias had been working on a document of vital importance to the interests of Charlemagne and the Papacy. A fourth century testament in which the Emperor Constantine yielded the Roman Church to the Papal States, acknowledging the Pope’s entitlement to govern the Christian world.

“Gorgias did not finish the document. In fact he was working on a replica of the original. I have the original with me, but it is in a deteriorated state. The fact is we need to complete it, and to do so, we need your father.”

“What do you mean?” Theresa interrupted.

“He is the only person who can finish it. Hence, I would like to propose a deal: You stay here in the scriptorium, working on this draft—and in the meantime, I will search for Gorgias.”

“And what will I have to do with it?”

“Go over the draft. We might be able to use it, if necessary. The truth is nobody else should know about this matter. And under these circumstances, finding a scribe I can trust—and with a good enough command of Greek to transcribe correctly in it—would be difficult, to say the least.”

Alcuin then explained in more detail what the work would consist of, and reiterated the importance of keeping it secret.

“Not even Wilfred can know?”

“Not Wilfred, nor anyone else. You will work alone in this scriptorium, and if anyone asks, you say you’re transcribing a Psalter. You will continue to sleep in the fortress, come here in the morning, and not stop until nightfall. While you make headway, I will look for your father. He cannot have gone far.”

Theresa agreed. Finally she decided she must tell him about Zeno. Hesitantly, she told him of her discovery of the amputated arm and the crypt in the wall.

“Amputated, you say? Good God, Theresa! Why did you not tell me immediately?” he cried, despairing.

Theresa tried to apologize, but it seemed as if the Devil himself had suddenly taken hold of Alcuin as he swore and cursed, scattering the parchments across the floor, before slumping into the chair like a defeated, old rag doll.

Stunned by his outburst, Theresa didn’t know what to say.

After recovering his normal composure, the monk stood up with an absent look in his eyes. “We have a problem, then. A big problem,” he said, his voice unnervingly tranquil.