Flesh and Spirit Read online

  I stuffed my hands in my lap and recalled other houses where the protocols were even less comprehensible than these. As a child, I had made an art of hiding under noblemen’s tables, tormenting the dogs, tugging on the hanging edges of the table coverings, tweaking startled ladies’ toes and wiping my greasy hands on their skirts, and drinking far too much wine from ewers I’d dragged along with me. I smothered a laugh, imagining the poor amusement I’d find under these tables.

  It was a prayer we awaited, of course, intoned at length by Prior Nemesio. Once the perficiimus ended it, the abbot rang a small bell, and Brother Cadeus, the porter, began to read from a book sitting on the lectern. As the monks picked up their spoons and reached for bread, he announced the day’s text as the writing of Juridius the Elder, a practor of Agrimo.

  Gerard stuffed his mouth and frankly examined my new cowl. Then he stretched his neck and peered around behind me. As I bent over my bowl for my next bite, I tilted my head his way, exposing the bare patch Brother Sebastian’s shaving knife had left, which felt roughly the size of a knight’s shield. The boy’s ready grin appeared around his mouthful of bread. I grinned back at him around my spoon and glanced at Jullian. The Ardran boy’s attention held firmly to his bowl, his face pale and solemn. I didn’t understand. He had no reason to be angry with me. Had Brother Gildas “reprimanded” him again?

  I was no more than halfway through my soup when the hierarch replaced Brother Cadeus at the lectern. “Dearest Brothers, it is our delight to join you for this great occasion,” said Hierarch Eligius, spreading his arms so that his wide sleeves and mantle swept in great curved folds like angels’ wings. “A soul claimed for Iero’s service. A voice added to the chorus that carries our petitions night and day to the halls of heaven. But as your shepherd, I must use this example for instruction as well as celebration, to chastise as well as to commend…”

  The hierarch preached of the ordo mundi—clearly installing himself at the top of the fixed order of the earthly plane and relegating heathenish Harrowers to the bottom. The monks sat motionless, attentive. Gerard’s mouth hung open slightly as if poised on the verge of speech. Jullian, though…Jullian’s eyes remained fixed on his bowl.

  “Rather than pronouncing faith in Iero and his anointed clergy, and fighting to enthrone our rightful king from a proven son of Eodward’s body, some servants of despair preach another kind of chaos—that villeins and practors, scholars and servants must join in some whimsical preparation for an age of doom and darkness. They propound a sovereign of rumor, as if Iero might sanction a righteous claimant to Eodward’s crown conjured from peasants’ dreams and tavern gossip. Such deviance invites Iero’s wrath and must be purged from our midst!”

  Blessed saints and angels…deviance! A word to make a man look to his purse and his neck. So hopes of a Pretender and this talk of end times were named anathema…and poor pale Jullian looked guilty as a married man caught with his hand under a harlot’s skirt. What had the boy got himself into? No more dangerous enemy exists than a holy man, especially when his writs and precepts get tangled with royal politics.

  The abbot rang his bell. After more prayers, Prior Nemesio led us from the refectory. My soup remained unfinished, a casualty in a holy war.

  Once down the stair, our orderly processional dissolved into quiet chaos. Many of the monks squeezed my arm or pressed my hand in companionable congratulations; others laid one open palm in the other and gestured as in offering—the monks’ signing speech for a gift of Iero’s blessing. As I accepted their good wishes, Brother Sebastian stood at my shoulder as proudly as if I were his own creation. For certain, the brothers were a friendly lot.

  Once most of the brothers had dispersed to their afternoon’s activities, a hooded monk tugged at my arm and drew me around and behind an unlit hearth. “The hierarch will ask you about the book,” he said, his words penetrating my skull as much by virtue of their ferocity as by my hearing them. “You will not reveal its exact title or its history. You will not offer it to him. If you value the boy’s safety, see that it remains here.” Before I could respond, he hurried away.

  I knew it was Gildas. I recognized the thatch of brown hair on the back of his hand. And who but Gildas would encourage me to lie to the authority I had just vowed to obey? He had recognized my lack of finer scruples early on. Yet it wasn’t so much his particular demand that left me bristling—I’d no wish for Hierarch Eligius to get his hands on my book. But his reference to Jullian sounded very like a threat.

  People had to get along as they could in this world. Gods knew I’d done my share of wickedness along the way. But when the account for a man’s deeds fell due, the one to pay should be the man who made the choice to do them. Never friends…and never, ever, children.

  “His Excellency wishes to congratulate you,” Brother Sebastian said, as he bustled me down the cloister walk toward the scriptorium, where the hierarch was inspecting the monks’ work. I was yet grumbling under my breath at Gildas’s high-handed manner when we stepped into the cavernous, many-windowed room tucked into the understory of the library.

  The place was deliciously warm, though it reeked of sour vitriol and acrid tannin—ink. Amid orderly rows of thick, unadorned columns that sprouted at their crowns into great sprays of vaulting ribs, orderly rows of copyists hunched over sloping desks, writing or painting their pages. A severely stooped monk, wisps of white hair feathering his tonsure, moved from desk to desk with a basket of small flasks, replenishing the ink horns fixed to each desk by metal hoops. Other monks sat at long tables shaving quills or stitching folded pages together. Save for the soft scratch of pens, the whisk of knives, and the rustle of pages, the place was very quiet. Holy silence was kept here as in the cloisters.

  “Ah, our new novice.” Hierarch Eligius’s unmuffled voice resonated like a barrage of stone against a siege wall, causing heads to pop up all over. He closed the small fat book that lay on a copyist’s desk, picked it up, and peered at the title. “A Treatise on the Nature of Evil written by Jonne of Lidowe. A truly noble work. Have you read it?” He wagged it in the air.

  Uncertain whether I was expected to voice my answers or not, I shook my head.

  “Do so when this copy is complete.” He dropped the little volume on the desk. “Brother Fidelio, you’ll see to it?”

  The copyist nodded and dipped his pen again.

  Brother Sebastian gave me a gentle shove, and I joined the hierarch just as he moved on to the next desk, his elaborate cloak jarring Brother Fidelio’s elbow. The monk sighed silently, set down his pen, and scraped at his work with a pumice stone.

  Eligius squinted at the second copyist’s work. “You’ve a beautiful hand, Brother. Every character well formed and clear. The history of the Karish in Navronne is an inspiring text. But I would like to see more color and variety in the capitals. You must not starve the glory of presentation in some rush to completion.”

  The chinless Brother Victor, my diminutive companion of Black Night, seemed to be in charge of the scriptorium activities. He flitted from one desk to another, answering unspoken questions from the copyists, fetching books from the shelves on the end wall, or using naught but his deft fingers to describe corrections to a binder’s stitching.

  At the next desk, a scrawny, sandy-haired younger monk held his tongue between his lips as his blackened fingers drew tiny characters in long straight lists. The blank parts of the page were marked into columns with lines of light gray.

  “A fine presentation, Brother, but this—” The frowning hierarch tapped a white-gloved finger on a tattered scroll held open by lead weights. “The Tally of Grape Harvests in Central Ardra in the Years of Aurellian Rule? Surely more uplifting pages wait to be copied—sacred texts, sermons, or noble histories that will turn men’s thoughts to Iero or his saints. Who chose this as an exemplar? Come, come, speak up.”

  “Brother Chancellor gives out the work, Excellency,” whispered the sandy-haired monk, “and tasks us with the pages most sui
ted to our skills. Not to set myself high, but both he and Father Abbot say I’ve a special touch for numbers, so perhaps—”

  “I must have a word with the chancellor then, as well as with Abbot Luviar.” The hierarch glared across the room at Brother Victor, who leaned over a desk, heads together with a copyist.

  The hierarch spoke to each of the copyists, his steepled upper lip rising high and stiff as he named more works frivolous or inappropriate. He condemned anything of mundane use: a scroll on glassmaking, a book on the building of Aurellian roads, an almanac that traced weather patterns in Morian over three centuries.

  I was no judge of books and their uses. That a man could learn to make glass from another glassmaker, as I had learned to tan hides, brew ale, and cut stone from those who knew the work, made more sense to me than learning such things from blots on parchment. But then again, I could not see how a book reader would come nearer heaven by reading someone’s speculations on Iero’s parentage than by reading of the might of storms and sunlight over the river country.

  The hierarch moved to a table where a grizzled monk traced his finger over a page in an open book while reading a set of unbound pages. The monk’s glance moved from one to the other and back again.

  “So, Brother Novice,” said the hierarch as he peered over the shoulder of the monk and browsed through stacks that seemed to be awaiting similar examination. “Abbot Luviar has recounted how a journey of penitence brought you to this great conversion. A remarkable story.”

  I cleared my throat. “A wonder, truly, Excellency. I feel uplifted. Reborn, as to say.”

  He turned the pages of a small book, the colors of the inked patterns brighter than his ruby ring. “And you truly came upon Gillarine by chance?”

  “Indeed, I wandered for days, bleeding and wounded, entirely confused as to my course. Having lived so short a time in the little village of”—I twisted my brain to come up with a name—“Thorn, and diseased with sin and violent behavior as I was, I was unfamiliar with any holy places in the countryside around. Even now, I could not tell you the location of that village or the true course of my wanderings, Excellen—”

  Saints and angels! I almost swallowed my tongue. I had not noticed the man who stood stiffly in the shadow of a pillar, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes dead with boredom. The scarlet surcoat he wore over his gray gown bore the hierarch’s gold-broidered blazon of mitral hat and solicale. Of modest stature, with close-trimmed black hair, long nose, and an air of unremitting superiority, he scarcely needed the violet mask that covered half his face to proclaim him pureblood. Protocol forbade an ordinary to so much as notice him without his master’s leave.

  I dropped my gaze and attempted to shrink inside my cowl. “Truly, Saint…uh”—the name escaped me—“that is, the guardian of wanderers must have examined…watched…over me every moment of that…of that—”

  “Yes, yes.” Eligius’s frizzled brown hair bobbed alongside the red cap that had replaced his mitral hat. “You carried a book of maps, did you not? Even that could not aid you?”

  I dared not let the name Cartamandua arise in association with me in front of the pureblood. Why had I not thought to take a false name as long as I carried the book? It was not so long a stretch from Valen to Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine to exposure.

  “Alas, no, Excellency.” Think, fool. I spoke slowly, so as not to stammer as I crafted my tale. “Though I valued the book because of its connection to my lord Mardane Lavorile who gave it me, I read no holy places in its maps, which were mostly common drawings of rivercourses and the old Aurellian roads that interlace Morian. Little of Ardra. Little of practical use even when I was scouting for the mardane.”

  “A frivolous work, then. And what has become of the book? Perhaps it is here being copied?”

  “Why, I never thought of it as worthy of copying.” I scratched my head, turned about, and gawked as if to review the contents of all the copyist desks. “And none of the brothers took great note of it, save that a poor wanderer had a book at all. It’s certainly not one of these. I gave it up, Excellency, along with my secular garb and sinful ways. I’ve not even seen the thing since I determined to answer Iero’s call by taking vows. I can’t see how a map would guide a man’s soul to heaven.”

  I dared not glance at the pureblood. Was he listening? Did his bent enable him to detect lies?

  The hierarch pursed his odd lips for a moment and then relaxed them into a smile. “Very true. Stay faithful to true teaching, Brother Novice, and your course will be straight.”

  Sensing dismissal, I bowed, as I had seen the others do, and backed away carefully until my back touched the wall between two stacks of shelves. The pillar blocked my view of the pureblood and his of me. I heaved a sigh, allowing the storm of anxiety to ease.

  A lay brother poked the fire and carried a lit taper to the lamps that hung from iron brackets fixed to the pillars. Outside the windows, the haze had thickened into bulging clouds, dimming the sunlight and sapping the room’s warmth.

  The hierarch summoned Brother Victor with a wave of his jeweled finger. “Chancellor, a word with you before I take leave.”

  The little monk hurried to the hierarch, his hands tucked under his black scapular, his oddly skewed features sober and attentive.

  “All of you, pay heed and bear witness to my judgment of this abbey’s great work of writing!” said Eligius. “A member of your fraternity has fallen into grave error…” He rebuked Brother Victor at great length, accusing him of supporting the deviant philosophy of those who preached coming doom by his choices of materials to copy. “…and so you are to immediately remove all frivolous and mundane materials from this room. Your abbot may keep or dispose of the exemplars as he sees fit. But this—”

  He whipped the page of numbers right out from under the young monk’s pen and threw it on the floor. A long smear of ink marred the meticulously written page.

  “—and this—”

  The pages on glassmaking, the Moriangi almanac, meticulous colored drawings of a millworks, and several other part-written pages joined the first one on the floor.

  “—and every page copied from a profane work is to be burned in view of all residents of Gillarine as a sign of error and rededication.”

  Brother Victor’s horror-stricken gaze leaped from the crumpled pages to the red-faced hierarch and back again. The other monks looked stunned.

  Parchment to be burned? Even I knew how appallingly wasteful that was. Though my family’s house was a wealthy one, my tutors had scraped and overwritten precious vellum time and time again. And who could measure the time and care these monks had spent on these pages?

  “You, Chancellor, are to receive twenty lashes before sunset today and be confined for five days with water as your only sustenance. Set this room in order and your copyists to their tasks, and then accompany Eqastré Scrutari-Consil, who will carry out my judgment. He will also question each of you”—his jeweled finger denoted every one of the shocked brothers—“to ensure that you understand your duties to Iero and the ordo mundi.”

  Scrutari-Consil stepped away from the wall and bowed to Eligius, touching his fingers to his forehead. With a limp gesture of blessing, the hierarch swept out of the briskly opened door and into the rainy afternoon.

  Chapter 12

  “This is outrageous, Broth—”

  Brother Victor silenced the sandy-haired monk with a gesture. Other monks left their desks to lay hands on his sleeves or his back, to shake their heads in silent denial, or to offer, with eloquent gestures, comfort or anger or comradeship. The chancellor briskly sent them back to work.

  Hands clasped at his back, the pureblood watched impassively as Brother Victor darted about his duties. The man in red and gray needed no word or additional gesture to assert his authority over the room.

  Having naught to do, I pressed my back to the wall, attempting to shrivel out of sight. I would have slipped out of the door, but Scrutari-Consil had
positioned himself within view of it.

  Scrutari-Consil—not a family related to mine, thanks be to all gods. The Scrutaris were known as perceptives. They were often contracted as investigators and inspectors, expected to root out lies and deceptions or to oversee town administrators. His colineal name Consil was unfamiliar; I could not recall the lineal bent of every pureblood family. The name’s Aurellian root suggested adjudication, thus a bent that might lend itself to mediation, untangling puzzles, or rendering judgments. Better for my lies and deceptions if he favored the Consil line, though I truly would prefer the man burst into spontaneous flames like a phoenix and not regenerate until I was fifty quellae from Gillarine.

  Eligius had addressed Scrutari with the pureblood honorific eqastré, an affectation that signified nothing. As a form of address between purebloods, eqastré indicated parity in rank. Between pureblood and anyone else in the world, such address had no meaning, for protocol dictated that purebloods were so far exalted by the gods that ordinaries could in no wise be compared with them. The only relationship permitted between an ordinary and a pureblood was that spelled out in a Registry contract. Sweat dribbled past my ears.

  Brother Victor’s silent hands were busily directing his copyists. Though I had little experience with the monks’ signing speech, his instructions were easy to interpret. Those whose work had been halted were to gather their completed pages from the neat stacks on the holding tables and pile them on a long table littered with broken pens, empty ink horns, and less orderly piles of written sheets. They were to collect their exemplars, the original documents being copied, in different piles on the same table.

  As each monk turned in his pages, the chancellor passed him a new book or scroll he drew from the cluttered bookshelves. Before the last had been distributed, monks had already spread new vellum on their desks and begun to measure and rule their pages with thin sticks of the same plummet stonemasons used to mark their plans. The pureblood strolled down the rows, examining the titles of the new works.