by Paul Kearney
Elsewhere in Charibon, the thousands of other clerics were also awake and paying homage to their God. At this time in the morning Charibon was a city of voices, it was said, and fishermen in their boats out on the Sea of Tor would hear the ghostly plainchant drifting out from shore, a massed prayer which was rumoured to still the waves and bring the fish to the surface to listen.
Matins ended, and there was a clamour of scraping benches and shuffling feet as the singers rose to their feet row by row. The High Pontiff left the cathedral first in the company of the Inceptine Vicar-General, Betanza. Then the senior churchmen filed out, and then the Inceptines. Last in the orderly throng to leave would be the novices, their stomachs rumbling, their noses red with early morning chill. The crowds would splinter as the clerics made their way to the various refectories of the orders for bread and buttermilk, the unchanging breakfast of Charibon’s inhabitants.
H IMERIUS and Betanza had not far to go to the Pontifical apartments, but they took a turn around the cloisters first, their hands tucked in their habits, their hoods pulled up over their heads. The cloisters were deserted at this time of the morning as everyone trooped into the refectories for breakfast.
It was dark, the winter morning some time away as yet. The moon had set, though, and the predawn stars were bright as pins in a sky of unsullied aquamarine. The breath of the two senior clerics was a white mist about their hoods as they walked the serene, arched circuit of the cloisters. There was snow in the air; it was thick in the mountains but Charibon had as yet received only a tithe of its usual share. The heavy falls would come within days, and the shores of the Sea of Tor would grow beards of ice upon which the novices would skate and skylark in the little free time they had. It was a ritual, a routine as old as the monastery-city itself, and absurdly comforting to both the men who now walked in slow silence about the empty cloisters.
Betanza, the bluff ex-duke from Astarac, threw back his hood and paused to stare out across the starlit gardens within the cloisters. Trees there, ungainly oaks purportedly planted before the empire fell. In the spring the brown grass would explode with snowdrops, then daffodils and primroses as the year turned. They were dormant now, sleeping out the winter under the frozen earth.
“The purges have begun across the continent,” he said quietly. “In Almark and Perigraine and Finnmark. In the duchies and the principalities they are herding them by the thousand.”
“A new beginning,” the High Pontiff said, his nose protruding like a raptor’s beak from his hood. “The faith has been in need of this. A rejuvenation. Sometimes it takes an upheaval, a crisis, to breathe new life into our beliefs. We are never so sure of them as we are when they are threatened.”
Betanza smiled sourly. “We have our crisis. Religious schism on a vast scale, and a war with the unbelievers of the east which threatens the very existence of the Ramusian kingdoms.”
“Torunna is no longer Ramusian,” Himerius corrected him quickly. “Nor is Astarac. They have heretics on their thrones. Hebrion, thank God, is coming under the sway of the true Church once more. The bull will have reached Abrusio by now—unlike its heretical king. Abeleyn is finished. Hebrion is ours.”
“And Fimbria?” Betanza asked.
“What of it?”
“More rumours. It is said that a Fimbrian army is on the march eastwards to the relief of Ormann Dyke.”
Himerius waved a hand. “Talk is a farthing a yard. Have we any more word of the Almarkan king’s condition?”
Haukir, the aged and irascible monarch of Almark, was laid low by a fever. The winter journey homewards from the Conclave of Kings had started it. He was bedridden, without issue, and more foul-tempered than ever.
“The commander of the Almarkan garrisons here received word yesterday. He is dying. By now he may even be dead.”
“We have people on hand?”
“Prelate Marat is at his bedside; the two are said to be natural brothers on the father’s side.”
“Whatever. Marat must be present at the end, and the will with him.”
“You truly believe that Haukir may leave his kingdom to the Church?”
“He has no one else save a clutch of sister-sons who amount to nothing. And he has always been a staunch ally of the Inceptine Order. He would have entered it himself had he not been born Royal; he said as much to Marat before the conclave.”
Betanza was silent, thoughtful. Were the Church to inherit the resources of Almark, one of the most powerful kingdoms in the west, it would be unassailable. The anti-Pontiff, or imposter rather, Macrobius, and those monarchs who had recognized him, would face a Church which had become overnight a great secular state.
“Quite an empire we are building up for ourselves,” Betanza said mildly.
“The empire of Ramusio on earth. We are witnessing the symmetry of history, Betanza. The Fimbrian empire was secular, and was brought down by religious wars which established the True Faith across the continent. Now is the time of the second empire, a religious hegemony which will rear up the Kingdom of God on earth. That is my mission. It is why I became Pontiff.”
Himerius’ eyes were shining in the depths of his hood. Betanza remembered the wheeling and dealing which had secured Himerius the Pontiffship, the bargaining. Perhaps he was näıve. Though head of the Inceptine Order, he had been a lay nobleman until quite late in life. It gave him a different outlook on things which at times made him oddly uncomfortable.
“Dawn comes,” he said, watching the glow of the approaching sun in the east. He felt an obscure urge to throw himself face down on the ground and pray; a dread and apprehension the like of which he had never experienced before rose in him like a breeding darkness.
“Do you recall The Book of Honorius, Holy Father? How does it go?
“ ‘And the Beast shall come upon the earth in the days of the second empire of the world. And he shall rise up out of the west, the light in his eyes terrible to behold. With him shall come the Age of the Wolf, when brother will slay brother. And all men shall fall down and worship him.’ ”
“Honorius was a crazed hermit, a Friar Mendicant. His ravings verge on the heretical.”
“And yet he knew Ramusio, and was one of his closest followers.”
“The Blessed Saint had many followers, Betanza, among them a proportion of lunatics and mystics. Keep your mind on the present. We go to meet the Arch-Presbyter of the Knights Militant this morning to talk to him about recruiting. The Church needs a strong right arm, not a perusal of ancient apocalyptic hallucinations.”
“Yes, Holy Father,” Betanza said.
The two resumed their walk around the quiet cloisters of Charibon while the silent dawn broke open the sky above them.
A LBREC had missed Matins, and he did not go down to breakfast. His stomach was as closed as a stone and he was kneeling in prayer on the hard stone floor of his frigid little cell. The dawn light was slanting in through the narrow window making the lit candle he had been reading by seem dim and yellow. On the table before him the pages of the old document had been laid out in orderly piles.
He rose at last, his pointed face deeply troubled, and sat before the table where he had spent most of the night. One hand snuffed out the candle as the rising sunlight stole into the room, and the smoke from the extinguished wick writhed back and forth in front of his eyes in grey wires and strings. The eyes were rimmed in scarlet.
He turned over the leaves of the document yet again, and his movement was as gingerly as if he expected them to explode into flame at any second.
“The winter of a man’s life,” said the Saint, “is the time when all those around him take the measure of all he has done and sought to do. And all that he has failed to accomplish. My brothers, I have set in this soil a garden, a thing which is pleasing in the sight of God. It is yours to tend now. Nothing can uproot it, for it grows in men’s hearts also: that one place where a tyrant’s fist can never reach. The Empire is failing and a New Order begins, one based on the truth
of things, and the compassion of God’s own plans.
“But for myself, my work here is done. Others will do the teaching and the preaching now. I am only a man, and an old one at that.”
“What will you do?” we asked him.
The Saint lifted his head in the morning light which was breaking over this hillside in the province of Ostiber; for we had talked and prayed the night away.
“I go to plant the garden elsewhere.”
“But the faith is spread across all Normannia,” we said. “Even the Emperor has begun to see that it can no longer be suppressed. Where else is there to go?” And we begged him to remain with us and live in peace and honour among his followers, who would revere him all the remaining days of his life.
“That is the way of pride,” he said, shaking his head. And then he laughed. “Would you set me up as a wrinkled idol to be venerated as the tribes of old worshipped their gods? No, friends. I must go. I have seen the road stretching ahead of me. It goes on a long way from here yet.”
“There is nowhere to go,” we protested, for we were afraid of losing his leadership in the great trials which still awaited us. But also we loved this old man. Ramusio had become father to us and the world without him would seem a drear and empty place.
“There is a far country which the truth has not yet reached,” he told us. And then he pointed eastwards, to where the Ostian river foamed sunlit and brilliant between its banks, and farther away the black heights of the Jafrar which mark the beginning of the wilderness beyond. “Out there it is night still, but I may yet use the years remaining to me to usher in the morning in the land beyond yon mountains.”
A teardrop dripped off Albrec’s nose to land on the precious page below, and he blotted it at once, angry with himself.
He could see the sunshine of that long-ago morning, when the Blessed Saint had stood in the twilight of his life on a hillside in Ostiber—or Ostrabar as it was now—and had talked with the closest of his followers, themselves grown old in their travels with him. St. Bonneval was there, who was to become the first Pontiff of the holy Church, and St. Ubaldius of Neyr, who would be the first Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order. The men who watched that sunrise break over the eastern mountains would become the founding fathers of the Ramusian faith, canonized and revered by later generations, prayed to by the common people, immortalized in a thousand statues and tapestries across the world.
But that morning, in the early light of a day gone by these five centuries and more, they were merely a group of men afraid and grieved by the thought of losing he who had been their mentor, their leader, the mainstay of their lives.
And who was the mysterious narrator? Who was the writer of this precious document? Had he really been there, one of the chosen few who had accompanied the Blessed Saint through the provinces of the empire, spreading the faith?
Albrec turned through the crumbling pages, mourning the lost leaves, the illegible paragraphs.
That morning in Ostrabar was a day sacred to the Church and all Ramusians. It was the last day of the Saint’s life on earth. He had been assumed into heaven from the hillside, his followers watching as God took to his bosom this the most faithful of his servants. Until Ostiber had fallen to the Merduks and become Ostrabar, the hilltop had been a holy place of pilgrimage for the Ramusians of the continent, and a church had been built there within a few years of the miraculous event.
At least, that was what Albrec and every other member of the Ramusian faith had been taught. But the document told an entirely different story.
He took no companion and would accept no company, and he forbade those he was to leave behind ever to follow him. On a mule he left us, his face towards the east, from whence the morning comes. And the last we saw of him, he was in the lower passes of the mountains, the mule bearing him ever higher. So he was lost to the west for ever.
It was this and the succeeding pages which had kept Albrec up all night, reading and praying until his eyes smarted and his knees were cold and sore from the flags of the floor. Nothing here of an assumption into heaven, a glorious vision of the Saint entering God’s kingdom. Ramusio had last been seen as a tiny figure on a mule headed into the heights of the most terrible mountains in the world. The implications of that made Albrec tremble.
But the story did not end there. There was more.
Among the folk who went to and fro across the borders of the empire at that time, there was a merchant named Ochali, a Merduk who every year braved the passes of the Jafrar with his camel trains, bringing silks and furs and steppe ivory to trade from the lands of Kurasan and Kambaksk beyond the mountains. He was a worshipper of the Horned One, like all those who lived beyond the Ostian river. Kerunnos was the forbidden name he and his people gave to their God, and when he reached the provinces of the empire every summer he would give sacrifice at the roadside shrines of the tribes for a safe passage of the Jafrar. But one summer, some eight years after Ramusio had journeyed east, he neglected to make his usual sacrifices to the Horned One.
Men who knew him asked why, and he told them that he had found a new faith, a true faith which owed nothing to sacrifices or idols. An old man, he said, had been preaching in the camps of the steppe peoples for several years now, and his words had gained him many followers. A new religion was birthing in the far lands of the Merduks, and even the horse chieftains had taken it to heart.
When Ochali’s acquaintances in the province of Ostiber pressed him further he refused to elaborate, saying only that the Merduk peoples had found a prophet, a holy leader who was taking them out of the darkness and putting an end to the interminable clan wars which had always racked his people. Merduk no longer slew Merduk in the distant steppes beyond the Jafrar, and the men who abode there lived in harmony and brotherhood. The Prophet Ahrimuz had shown his people the one true path to salvation.
There was a thumping at Albrec’s door and he jumped like a startled hare. He had time to cover the ancient document with his catechism before the door opened and Brother Commodius walked in, his big bare feet slapping on the stone floor.
“Albrec! You were missed at Matins. Is everything all right?”
The Senior Librarian looked his normal ugly self; the face regarding Albrec with concern and curiosity was the same one the monk had worked with for nearly thirteen years. The same huge beak of a nose, out-thrust ears and unruly fringe of hair about the bald tonsure. But Albrec would never again see it as just another face, not after the night in the lowest levels of the library.
“I—I’m fine,” he stammered. “I didn’t feel well, Brother. I have a bit of a flux so I thought it better to stay away. I’m going to the privy every few minutes.” Lies, lies and sins. But that could not be helped. It was in a greater cause.
“You should see the Brother Infirmiar then, Albrec. It’s no good sitting here and reading your catechism, waiting for it to go away. Come, I’ll take you.”
“No, brother—it’s all right. You go and open the library, I’ve made you late enough as it is.”
“Nonsense!”
“No, truly, Brother Commodius, I can’t keep you from your duties. I’ll visit him myself. Perhaps I’ll see you after Compline. I’m sure an infusion of arrowroot will set me up.”
The Senior Librarian shrugged his immense, bony shoulders. “Very well, Albrec, have it your own way.” He turned to go, then hesitated on the threshold. “Brother Columbar tells me that you and he were down in the catacombs beneath the library.”
Albrec opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Seeking blotting for the scriptorium, it seems. And I dare say you were doing a little ferreting around on your own account, eh, Albrec?” Commodius’ eyes twinkled. “You want to be careful down there. A man might have an accident among all that accumulated rubbish. There’s a warren of tunnels and chambers that have not been disturbed since the days of the empire. They’re best left that way, eh?”
Albrec nodded, still speechless.
�
��I know you, Albrec. You would mine knowledge as though it were gold. But the possession of knowledge is not always good; some things are better left undiscovered . . . Did you find Gambio’s blotting paper?”
“Some, Brother. We found some.”
“Good. Then you will not need to go down there again, will you? Well, I must go. As you say, I am late. There will be a huddle of scholar-monks congregated round the door of St. Garaso thinking uncharitable thoughts about me. I hope your bowels clear up soon, Brother. There is work to be done.” And Commodius left, closing the door of Albrec’s cell behind him.
Albrec was shaking, and sweat had chilled his brow. So Columbar could not keep his mouth shut. Commodius must have questioned him; he had seen Albrec and Avila that night, perhaps.
Albrec had joined the Antillian Order for many reasons: hatred of the open sea which had been his fisherman father’s daily bread; a love of books; but also a desire for security, for peace. He had found it in Charibon, and had never regretted his thirteen years in the confines of the St. Garaso Library. But now he felt that the earth had shifted from under his feet. His safe world was no longer so tranquil. There was an old saying among the clerics of Charibon that it was but a short step from the pulpit to the pyre. For the first time Albrec appreciated the truth behind the dark humour of it.
He uncovered the document, glancing fearfully at the door as he did so, as though Commodius might leap out with his face a devil’s mask again.
He should destroy it. He should burn it, or lose it somewhere. Let someone else discover it a hundred years hence, perhaps. Why should it be he who must shoulder this burden?
It is my belief, the narrative went on, that the Blessed Saint did indeed succeed in crossing the Jafrar. He was a man in the seventh decade of his life, but he was still strong and vigorous, and the missionary flame burned hotly in him. He was like a captain of a ship who can never rest until he has found an uncharted shore, and then another, and another. There was a restlessness to him which I and others believed to be the spirit of God.
