Flesh and Spirit Page 12

  I held the spell ready, touched my fingers to the keyhole, and released a dollop of magic. Nothing happened. The brass wasn’t even warm to the touch.

  I tried again, adjusting my expectation of the inner workings of the lock to something simpler. Feeling the press of time, I applied a much healthier dollop of magic. With a loud snap, blue sparks and bits of brass and bronze shot from the keyhole. The grate hung loose, a severely bent latch dangling from the brass frame.

  “Holy Mother!” I waggled my stinging hand. Mumbling curses at my ineptitude, I twisted the latch back into shape the best I could, pulled off the most noticeably broken pieces, and brushed the metal chaff under the edge of the cabinet with my boot. Gingerly, I pulled open the overheated grate and extracted the book. It was not mine.

  I stuffed the book back in the stack and slammed the grate, using a bronze shard to wedge it shut. Once the outer door was latched, I proceeded to the next book press. And the next…

  So many books. Useless things. Searching those damnable cupboards felt as if I walked down a street of noble houses, where lamplight and singing spilled out the windows, knowing I’d not be allowed through any door. Not that I yearned to read about the world in place of living in it. It just would have been nice to know I could get in if I chose.

  With nothing to show for my search so far but a broken lock and a stinging hand, I came to the last cupboard.

  “We would be happy to provide you books, Valen, did you but ask.” Pale light flared and died behind me.

  I dropped my walking stick with a clatter and spun about, backing into a table that immediately began sliding out from under me. “Father Abbot!”

  Abbot Luviar glided across the room and rescued the rushlight before I dropped it. “I’m sorry to startle you.”

  How the devil had he gotten to the far corner of the library without me seeing him? He’d certainly not been lurking there the whole time. I straightened my gown and backed away from him until blocked by the yawning door of the book press. “I was just…restless. I’ve slept so much.”

  “Understandable.” Smiling, he set the rushlight on the nearest table and retrieved my dropped stick. He carried no lamp of his own. “This is a fortuitous encounter. I’ve been intending to thank you for your service on Black Night and since. Your warning saved lives. Your tales lift hearts. Even the digging—”

  “I didn’t help. Don’t thank me.” The last thing in the world I desired was any share of what this man had wrought on Black Night. “Perryn of Ardra should have stood with his men. Died with them.”

  “Indeed, he should have,” said the abbot, using my rushlight to ignite a wall lamp, flooding one study table with pale illumination. “Events demanded otherwise.”

  “Is he still here?” Anger worked as well as strong mead to embolden my tongue.

  Revealing naught but weariness, Luviar propped his backside and his hands on the table. “The prince is safe. I’ll not say where.”

  “I’d have thought holy monks would stay removed from sordid politics,” I said.

  “Fleshly needs oft intertwine with the spiritual. How can a woman think of heaven while her children starve, or a man contemplate Iero’s great love as his vines wither?” His furrowed gaze fixed somewhere in the emptiness between us. “We cannot always see the full span of history as it unfolds. Sometimes I fear that to attempt it is to infringe the role of the One who sees all, past and future. Yet, if the Creator grants us sight—”

  His hypocrisy forced a choking sound from my throat. He jumped up and offered me his hand. “Here, Valen, are you ill?”

  “Must have jarred my wound when I stumbled,” I murmured, waving him off. “I’ll be all right.”

  He passed me the rushlight. “You should get back to bed. Rest. Heal. Despite its current troubles, the world is a wondrous place, the earth itself God’s holy book. Each man must discover his place in the great story. May you find your place…your peace…at Gillarine.”

  I bowed and hobbled toward the door. Behind me, Luviar unlocked one of the brass grates, pulled out a book, and sat down to read. His composure only pricked my fury.

  Boreas had been right. Monks were naught but self-righteous thieves. No Cartamandua gryphon marked any binding in that library.

  My days of sanctuary expired. As the only way a man of sixteen years or better could stay at the abbey beyond a fortnight was to take vows, that was what I resolved to do—at least until I could put my hands on my book. The monks insisted that my face revealed Iero’s joy coursing through my veins. But truly, my good cheer stemmed from imagining the faces of anyone who had ever known me upon hearing of my intent.

  “Good morrow, Valen! Iero’s grace is full upon you this glorious morn!” Only two days after his return from Pontia, I had already learned that Brother Sebastian was excessively cheerful in the early morning. My mentor, a ruddy-cheeked monk with a round head, a neat fringe of gray hair bordering his tonsure, and an ever-immaculate habit, as might be expected of the son of a ship captain, had just come from chapter to disturb my morning nap.

  “Brother.” Bleary-eyed, I hauled myself to sitting, keeping the blankets up to my neck as the morning was damp and cold. Five more beds had been claimed by coughing, wheezing monks who had taken chills on Black Night. Jullian crouched by the brazier, stirring a cauldron of boiling herbs.

  “What is great, you may ask?” Sebastian’s face beamed as he snatched the black gown from the hook on the wall beside my bed. “Brother Robierre and I have decided that you may set sail from your sickbed today.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Sorry to lose your good company, Valen. But you’ll be healthier out of here.” Brother Robierre pressed a rag across a spindly old monk’s mouth as the poor fellow coughed up enough sputum to float a barque. Perhaps he was right.

  Truth be said, I was a bit anxious at leaving my simple infirmary life behind for the mysteries of the monks’ dorter. As a child in a house devoted to the elder gods, I’d heard outlandish tales of Karish monks who ate children in their secret precincts, of barbed tails grown beneath their gowns, all manly hair plucked out, or even privy parts removed entire. Being older than age ten, and having met a good variety of folk along the years, and having even practiced Karish ways when times made it expedient, I knew such talk as nonsense. Yet missing princes, murdered monks, and their unquiet spirits had left me a bit more wary of Iero and his holy precincts.

  As Brother Sebastian exchanged blessings and gossip with the patients, I donned my gown. My little bundle of provisions, medicines, and knife—now well sharpened—went into my rucksack along with my secular clothes. The empty green bag remained safely tucked away at the bottom.

  “Until you take your novice vows, they’ll send you here to sup, so we’ll not lose you entirely,” said the infirmarian, grinning as he dispensed one of his potions to another man. “And you must come down here every evening to let me examine your wounds…”

  “…and to finish your tale of that tin smuggler in Savil,” called Brother Marcus from the bed closest to the door. “You can’t leave us not knowing if the fellow got out of the cave.”

  I laughed. “I’ve a better one, about the time I fell in with a caravan of—”

  “Be off with you, Valen, or I’ll chase you out,” said Robierre, beckoning Jullian to replenish an earthenware bowl with his steaming decoction. “We’ve our work to do.”

  “You’ve done well by me, Brother Infirmarian,” I said, taking a jig step and twirling foolishly into a sweeping bow. “You are Iero’s own artist with your lancets and caudles. I do thank you.”

  Robierre bobbed his head, flushed a little, and went on with his work. Jullian watched intently, a ladleful of his pungent liquid sloshing noisily into the fire. I winked at the boy, grabbed the rucksack and my alder stick, and joined Brother Sebastian at the door.

  “I shall strive to do as well by you as Robierre has done,” he said.

  “You can stick your nose in his business,
Sebastian,” Brother Marcus called after us, “and leave off telling the rest of us when our gowns are untidy or our beds ill made.” The red-haired scribe had taken a spear wound next his spine on Black Night and was dreadfully uncomfortable. He lay on his belly all day and all night, sketching odd little drawings on scraps of vellum laid on the floor under his nose. Robierre wasn’t sure the man would ever leave his bed.

  Brother Sebastian chuckled, held open the door, and waved me out. “Tell me if we set too fast a pace, Valen. Your leg seems to be progressing well.”

  We strolled past the herb beds and around the bake-house. “I was thinking that I should go walking in the countryside to strengthen it and cleanse my lungs from the sickly humors of the infirmary…”…and scout the possibilities for replenishing my supply of nivat.

  Brother Sebastian halted abruptly. “That would not be at all appropriate. Though yet unvowed, you must draw a sharp separation from the outer world. Once your leg receives Brother Robierre’s clearance, you will be assigned outdoor duties more than sufficient to cleanse your lungs.”

  “But—”

  His raised finger ended discussion. We had reached the stair to the monks’ dorter, and he was soon busy showing me the rope bed and straw-filled palliasse at the south end of the long, high-ceilinged room where I would sleep.

  The empty green pouch in the bottom of my rucksack soon became more worrisome than midnight massacres, eyeless corpses, or monks who explained naught of lighthouses or vanishing royalty no matter what wheedling I did. I had taught myself not to think of nivat or the doulon overmuch. The need could come to affect all a man’s dealings, his friends, his choices, until life took shape from it every day and not just the one day in twenty-eight…or twenty-one…that it devoured him. I swore I’d rather go mad from the lack than let it rule me. But always the hour arrived when my bravado withered.

  I had already confirmed that Brother Robierre kept no nivat seeds in the infirmary. An exploration of the bakehouse, while its denizens were at Vespers, had revealed that Brother Baker kept his brick ovens clean, his floor swept, his barrels of flour and salt sealed tight, and his wooden boxes of herbs and seeds labeled neatly, though with no sketch or hint of their contents for any who had difficulty with letters. None of the boxes contained nivat. I would have to go farther afield to replenish my supply.

  My hopes of moving in and out of the abbey freely were quickly squelched. Every hour of my day was scheduled: services in the church, meals in the infirmary, washing, and walking. I suffered endless lessons, everything from how to fold my gown and place it in the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, to the signing speech the monks used in the cloisters, to a history of the brotherhood so detailed I could near recite what Saint Ophir had for breakfast every morning of his four-and-eighty years. Even my times of “study and reflection” in the church or the gardens were scrutinized. If I dozed off, one or the other of the brethren would immediately walk by and rap my skull with a bony knuckle.

  And so I decided to slip out at night. The monks were abed with the birds, and as the dorter had been built for a hundred and twenty, a wide gap of empty cubicles separated my quarters from those of the thirty-one men who slept at the end nearest the church. And in the main, I was well shielded from their view. Besides the common shoulder-high screen of carved wood that separated one monk’s bed, chest, stool, and window alcove from the next man’s, a folding screen of woven lath had been set across the central aisle to separate the novices’ cubicles from those reserved for the monks. And I was the only novice.

  But not only did Brother Sebastian poke his head around my screen twice each night, as the Rule advised, but the very structure of the dorter thwarted me. My cubicle lay between the monks’ cubicles and the reredorter. Throughout the night, sleepy monks in need of natural relief made a constant procession down the central aisle, around the lath screen, and past my open cubicle toward the cold wooden seats of the rere.

  Worse yet, I was expected to parade down to the church with the monks to pray the nighttime Hours. These interruptions came at such frequent and unholy times—Vespers before supper, Compline at bedtime, Matins at midnight, Lauds at third hour, Prime at sixth—I could not see how I would ever be able to absent myself long enough to acquire what I needed. The anxiety I tried to keep from ruling my life crept inevitably into every hour.

  “It’s come!” Brother Sebastian hurried down the path from the cloisters waving a rolled parchment. “I worried we might have to lie twixt wind and water for another month.”

  I slammed the wretched book shut. Excessive meditation was surely ruinous to good health and spirits. While my mentor had attended the chapter meeting that morning, I’d sat on this stone bench in the hedge garden, pretending to study. The characters on the page had tightened into seed shapes. Every scent—of yew, of grass, of smoke from the kitchen—taunted me because it was not the earthy fragrance of nivat.

  “It’s the letter from Palinur. The last impediment to your investiture is removed.” Having been informed that I was schooled enough to comprehend Aurellian, Brother Sebastian had blithely deemed no further reading test necessary, and his oral quiz of my mathematical skills had been less taxing than a visit to any Morian trade fair. He had lacked only the proof of my birth.

  Sebastian unrolled the parchment under my nose. I furrowed my brow and inspected the page as if I could comprehend it. His chattering implied the cathedral labor rolls had indeed confirmed my status as a freeborn and legitimate son of nobodies.

  Neither bastards nor villeins were allowed to labor on holy works. When I’d wandered back to Palinur a few years before in search of work, I had assembled several tavern acquaintances into a poor but devout family, believable enough to testify and get me hired on at the cathedral. I had cheerfully imagined my mother’s face if she ever learned she had been mimed by a whore who had serviced Palinur’s garrison so often, she could identify the soldiers’ pricks blindfolded.

  Brother Sebastian’s face shone brighter than the hazy sun. “The abbot has given his consent. And, most excellently, it happens that the Hierarch of Ardra himself has arrived for a visitation and will preside at your vesting! Come along with me, lad.”

  Before I knew it, we had collected my secular clothes from the dorter and a provision bag from the kitchen, and he was bustling me through the doorway of the very guesthouse where I had been certain that the Duc of Ardra was hiding from his royal brother.

  “Tomorrow dawn I’ll come for you, my son. Open your heart for Iero’s guidance.” Brother Sebastian pushed a canvas bag into my hands, and for a moment the animation of his round face yielded to a quieter sentiment. “You’ve a cheerful heart, Valen…yes, yes…Robierre has seen it as well, as has everyone who’s met you. Our brotherhood will benefit greatly from the vigor you bring. But nothing sours a graceful spirit more than taking a path it is not meant to walk, so we would have you be certain of each step along the way.” He grinned and retreated down the steps, waving as he disappeared past the granary. Guilt nudged my shoulder, but I quickly dismissed it.

  The bag contained bread, cheese, and a traveling flask of ale, provisions for my journey should I decide to abandon the monastic life. An earthenware flask contained a liquid that had no smell. I wrinkled my nose. Water from the blood-tainted abbey spring was to be my only sustenance for my night of meditation. The bag did not contain my book. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted that they thought I was so stupid as to abandon my only possession of value, or gratified that they considered me worthy of their company.

  I explored the guesthouse, speculating as to where the abbot had installed his royal supplicant if not here. Though its chambers were not elaborately decorated, it was more luxurious than anywhere I’d slept in many years. Plum-colored rugs warmed the bare floors. Brightly woven tapestries blanketed the walls, depicting the events from the life of Karus, the divine mystic from the steppes of far Estigure whose unruly sect had grown into Iero’s Karish church.

  A
magnificent fresco in the dining room illustrated the familiar theme of the ordo mundi—the world’s proper order. In sweeping bands of blue, yellow, and crimson, the artist illumined the three spheres: the arc of heaven, where the holy saints lived with Iero and Karus; the base foundation of hell, domain of the Adversary and damned souls; and in between, the earthly sphere with its righteous layers of kings and hierarchs, purebloods and peasants, its somber labors and abject wickedness so vividly depicted and its true delights so blatantly ignored. Though Iero extended his hands toward the earthly sphere in invitation, only the winged grace of angels bridged the gaping emptiness between the spheres of heaven and earth. A sad oversight, I’d always thought. In this respect, the Sinduri Council offered a more pleasing view: that every arch, tree, window, grotto, and mud puddle had its pesky aingerou, a messenger to the elder gods. Thus common folk could hold a discussion with our ever-quarreling divine family by raising a glass in an inn or taking a piss in the wood.

  It was tempting to build a fire in the hearth, relax on the fine couch, and contemplate this profound and beautifully wrought statement of humankind’s place in the scheme of things. But I dared not miss this chance to get out, acquire what I needed, and get back again without prompting uncomfortable questions from my hosts. Unfortunately the guesthouse held no valuables small enough to carry with me.

  Though I had been instructed to leave my monk’s garb in the dorter for my vigil night, pragmatism had prompted a minor disobedience. Those who prowled the roads of Navronne, whether soldiers, highwaymen, or even the most devout followers of the elder gods, considered it unlucky to touch a wayfaring monk or practor. Interference with traveling clergymen had been a hanging offense since the days of King Caedmon’s Peace and the Writ of Balance. The Writ, a declaration of truce between the priests and priestesses of the Sinduri Council and the Karish hierarchs, had been proclaimed at Navronne’s birth by King Eodward’s great-great-great-grandfather—or his father, if you believed the legend that a beleaguered Caedmon, his beloved kingdom on the verge of annihilation by the Aurellian Empire, had sent his infant son Eodward to live with the angels for a hundred and forty-seven years.