Flesh and Spirit tld-1

by Carol Berg

  “Yes, yes, I am,” I said, gathering my wits. “But I wasn’t sure what to do with the book…or whether the abbot would actually want such a valuable one when the price of it could do so much in the way of almsgiving.”

  Gram nodded and held out his palm again. “Abbot Luviar is very wise. He’ll guide you rightly. Heal well, friend, and thank you.”

  Once he’d gone, I longed for some other visitor to break the evening’s quiet. Not right that such a gentlemanly fellow should lance old boils and leave me to suffer the stink.

  No one came.

  Rain entirely inappropriate to Ardra’s driest season drummed on the roof all night, slowing only when the blackness beyond the horned window yielded to gray. I slept fitfully, seeing far too much of both night and dawn. Daylight brought Brother Gildas.

  Brother Robierre waved a wooden mallet he used for crushing seeds and pods, as he talked over my head with the dark-browed Gildas. “Ignore his complaining. Any man who can talk and eat as he does is fit enough to take wherever you will for an hour. Keep him moving, and send for me only if he collapses altogether.”

  “Am I to have no say in this?” I said, spitting out the detritus of hulls and stems that showered from his implement. “My leg—”

  “You have applied to take vows, including strict obedience bound by punishments both in this life and the next. If you insist on ‘having your say,’ perhaps you’d best reconsider your future.” Brother Gildas held up a white wool shirt he’d pulled from a black and white bundle in my lap.

  “He’s not broken his fast as yet this morning,” said the infirmarian. He retreated to his worktable, where he dumped a bag of dried seedpods into a large wooden bowl and attacked them with his mallet as if they were a nest of Iero’s detractors. “Never saw a man relish our victuals as he does. Point him toward the kitchen, and he’ll keep apace.”

  Shivering in the cold damp, I thrust my head and bare arms into the thick shirt. “There’s more folk eating bark soup than mutton broth of late, Brothers,” I mumbled. “Must I go barefoot?”

  “Wear your own boots today. You’ll receive your cowl and sandals on the day you take your novice vows, which we do sincerely hope will be your choice.” Brother Gildas smiled as if to soften the sting of his earlier rebuke, while I fumbled with clean white woolen trews and black knee-length hose. When my tight shoulder bandage hampered me, he knelt by the bed like a trained manservant, smoothly tugging the stiff, heavy boots onto my big feet, tucking in the hose, and tightening the laces up my legs.

  “Up now,” he said, rising and offering me his hand. “Don your gown. Then we’ll go walking to stretch your limbs, I’ll ask you a few questions for Father Abbot, and we’ll find sustenance before you wither.”

  Ah, the questioning. No one had come to the infirmary on the previous day to test my knowledge of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Jullian, who had taken it upon himself to visit me at least three times a day, had reported that Brother Sebastian had not yet returned from Pontia, and Brother Gildas had been closeted with the abbot and “visiting abbey benefactors” all day “except when they went to see the progress on the lighthouse.” The presence of a lighthouse here, at least six hundred quellae from Navronne’s northern seacoast, struck me as an oddity, even allowing for my usual morning dullness.

  The prospect of interrogation damped my already soggy spirits. Awkwardly I wrestled the common black wool gown over my head, not at all sure I could bring myself to take vows here—even for a season. Rules and restrictions and righteous preaching curdled my stomach like vinegar in milk. If I could find a buyer for the book of maps, then perhaps I could find a less restrictive haven, perhaps a lornly widow who needed pleasuring.

  The heavy garment enveloped me from neck to ankles, an unlikely happenstance as I had never failed to be the tallest man in any gathering since I had reached my full height at nineteen. But even more extraordinary was the sense of safety that enfolded me with the thick black wool, the same as that worn by every other monk throughout Navronne. Sweet, blessed anonymity.

  Most ordinaries viewed pureblood life as god blessed and couldn’t imagine why any of us would choose to forgo it. They didn’t understand about contracts and protocols, submission rules and breeding laws, all the things that had made me feel as if someone had bound me head to toe with silken cord and locked me blind and deaf in a coffin.

  Under the oversight of the Pureblood Registry, pureblood families contracted out their magical services for a great deal of money. As Navronne’s nobles, magistrates, and clergy profited handsomely from the magic of our undiluted Aurellian blood, these parties had devised an inviolable compact a century ago, requiring every knight, magistrate, reeve, and sheriff to enforce the Registry’s rules. Not even a Karish abbot would dare disobey the fugitive laws. Harboring a common fugitive—a thief or a deserter—past his fourteen days of sanctuary would cost Abbot Luviar disgrace and ten years’ income—everything his abbey collected or produced—meaning ten years’ groveling to the local magistrates to return enough to allow the brothers to eat. But if the abbot was judged to have knowingly hidden a pureblood renegade—a recondeur—those magistrates would burn his abbey and his fields, and then they would hang him.

  So they just couldn’t know. A recondeur with any sense learned quickly to keep his head down, his lies consistent, his past private, and his appearance unremarkable. I smoothed my warm, unremarkable wool layers and felt a grin split my face.

  After fumbling briefly in the folds of his own gown, Brother Gildas pressed an alder walking stick into my hand. “A gift from Brother Horatio, our carpenter. Welcome to our brotherhood.”

  He slipped his shoulder under my right arm, and we stepped through the infirmary door into a chill, watery daylight. The infirmary sat off by itself, separated from the abbey proper by a patch of wet grass and a soggy herb garden. Far across the sea of gray slate roofs and the warm yellow stone of sturdy walls, the vaults of the abbey church soared heavenward.

  “We’ll visit the cloister garth first,” said Gildas, pointing toward the grander structures beyond the infirmary garden. “The abbey’s heart.”

  A flagstone path led us across a rock-lined channel that funneled water under the infirmary and past a squat wooden structure with two massive stone chimneys. Its jumbled wood stacks and the heaven-blessed scent of hot bread proclaimed it a bakehouse.

  The place seemed inordinately quiet. Water dripped from roofs and gutters. A fat, cold splatter on my head made me even more grateful for my wool layers. In his unending quest for cleanliness, Brother Anselm had bade me shave my face and trim my tangled hair the previous day.

  Once we passed the bakehouse, the infirmary no longer blocked our view to the south. I shook loose of Gildas’s arm for a moment and stopped to savor the spectacle. Mists and smokes and occasional pools of pale sunlight drifted over the green, steep-sided valley and the river, a flat band of silver that looped around the abbey precincts. Beyond the sheen of the river, a field of barley rippled gently in the soft rain, as healthy a crop as I’d seen in five years. My throat tightened at the beauty of it, and my eyes filled with more than raindrops, which left me feeling a proper weakling fool. Since I’d left the nursery, I’d never wept but when I was drunk.

  “I’m assuming you’ve seen grain fields, tanneries, mills, and sheep, all those things we’d find in the outer courts and south of the river—the River Kay, this is. If Father Abbot judges your calling that of a lay brother—suitable for manual labor, rather than the more challenging studies of a choir monk—you’ll live out your days in those surrounds.”

  Ranks and privileges—even in a brotherhood. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gildas offered me his shoulder again, but I shook my head and hobbled along beside him.

  As we rounded the corner of the garden, the monk walked faster as if to keep up with his thoughts. “The true peace of the monastic life is found in prayer and contemplation, study and scholarship. We don’t allow speech in the cloisters, library, or s
criptorium, but sign to each other for necessary communication.”

  “Peace will be welcome,” I said, working to keep up with his brisk pace. “There’s little enough to be had in this world, and talking never seems to improve matters. Though truly, telling stories of an evening or singing chorus to a bard are fine pleasures…holy gifts…as well. I’ll wager you brothers come from everywhere and have much to share in that way—after all your studying and contemplating, of course.” Surely they talked of something besides gods and holy writs. Surely they talked. All this broody silence seemed unnatural.

  “Within the framework of our discipline, certainly we converse—some of us more, some less. Brother Infirmarian says you’ve traveled all over Navronne and are overflowing with curious tales. I’d like to hear of your experiences.”

  “No denying I’ve had restless feet…” My mind sorted through my spotted history like a washwoman picking through soiled and ragged linen. Sadly, I found little fit for display. Gildas wouldn’t be looking for adventures and oddments like those Jullian teased out of me on his daily visits. “I followed King Eodward all the way to the Caurean shores. After he died, I hired out on the docks in Trimori for a while, but the Caurean storms frosted my bones worse than Ardran winter. I think the Adversary’s domain is surely ice, Brother Gildas. Not fire at all. Is that false doctrine? The holy writs say the wicked will burn, and I’ve found that cold burns worse than fire.”

  “I’ve not heard that point argued,” he said. Though he knit his solid brow, his face was not so sober. “Perhaps Brother Sebastian will pursue the question in your studies. Go on. Tell me more.”

  “Well, I moved on to Savil and apprenticed to a tanner—honest work, but the stink is poison to a tender stomach such as mine…”

  At the far end of the walk a plain rectangular building stretched off to our left. On the littered muddy ground behind it, three lay brothers, their gray scapulars tucked up in their belts, wrestled the trunk of a sturdy oak from a donkey dray. Another of the brethren was shifting a pile of new-split logs to the wood stores stacked neatly in the building’s undercroft.

  “The lay brothers’ reach,” Brother Gildas said, nodding to the busy fellows when I paused in my babbling. “Their sleeping quarters and refectory, and the food, oil, wool, and wood stores for the abbey. So did you stay in Morian?”

  I moved on carefully. “Nay. After the winter in Avenus, cutting stone in the quarries, I heard the call to labor on the hierarch’s new cathedral in Palinur. A fine thing to build for Iero’s own house…”

  …and excellent pay on a sacred project, intended to proclaim Iero and his Karish church as triumphant over the elder gods and their Sinduri council. I had worked in Palinur only one season, though. The labor had been grueling, the hours long, and the punishments for any lapse in workmanship severe. And indeed, the proximity to my family and the attendant risks of being identified had made the royal city unpalatable. Once I’d padded my purse enough to last a season more, I was off to try something new.

  It was not fear of discovery made me move so often. Recondeurs were rare, and every one of them was recaptured within half a year, hauled up for public flogging or humiliation, and then vanished from sight and speech, save for horrified whisperings among pureblood families about “close confinement” and “unrestricted contracts.” Every sorry soul of them failed in rebellion because the fool could not forgo using the bent to soften the hardships of ordinary life: hunger, cold, hard work, uncertainty. The Registry would never search the places I lived, because they’d never imagine a pureblood forsaking his comforts for a life where he’d not know when he’d eat next. I had refused to learn much of spellworking as a child—as I had refused to learn much of anything they tried to pound into my head—so I’d little to give up.

  As it was, I’d just never found any occupation worth the bother of staying in one place. Restless feet, just as I’d told Gildas. Incurably restless feet, in fact. A disease.

  The path turned sharply back toward the river. We left it behind and angled right into a brick alley.

  “Gillarine seems well constructed,” I said, seizing an excuse to divert the conversation from myself. “What building is this to have windows so many and so fine?”

  “The monks’ refectory,” said Brother Gildas. “You’ll be happy to hear that novices get meat three times a week and half again the portions of the rest of us. We use all our wiles to lure the worldly into harmony with the god.”

  As I picked my way across the uneven bricks of the pooled and puddled alley, I caught a merry glint beneath his sober brow. Cheerful humors can redeem even excessive piety. I liked him.

  “Gillarine must truly lie on holy ground to produce such bounty,” I said. “The patroness of travelers led me here, no doubt of it.”

  “We’ve exceptional soil and water here. The font in Saint Gillare’s shrine is said to be rooted in a holy spring.” All the monks and friars I’d ever met seemed to wear a secret pleasure beneath their holiness, like gamers who carry skewed dice up their sleeves. Gildas was no different.

  The brick passage squeezed past a coal store and kitchen building and then widened as we approached a colonnaded walkway that extended right and left and all the way around the broad green garth beyond it. The walkway’s tiles had been laid in intricate coiled patterns like those on Aurellian urns and doorposts, with the trilliot, the three-petaled lily of Navronne, tucked into its loops here and there, alongside the golden sunbursts reminding us of the One God’s glory.

  Gildas laid a finger on his lips. I had not actually noticed the bustle of kitchen and bakehouse, the whacks and grunts of the wood choppers, or the complaints of distant sheep as we walked from the infirmary…not until we stepped into the cloisters of Gillarine and all such common sounds dropped away. The place was so quiet, I could almost hear my own blood flowing.

  We crossed the cloister walk and paused at the edge of a vast square of healthy green. The garth was bounded on four sides by the slender columns and graceful roof arches of the cloister walks, and dominated by the church’s vaulted roof and slender towers, directly across from us. To our left loomed the unadorned bulk of the lay brothers’ reach. On our right, a round-domed structure with lancet windows of colored glass and a number of other fine buildings with many windows crowded the cloister walk. And in the center of the garth stood a shrine, its interlocked arches of delicate stonework looking very like a large birdcage.

  Few monks were abroad. One sat reading on a narrow bench enclosed on three sides, one of forty or fifty such carrels tucked under the cloister by the church. Another hooded brother halted and bowed before passing into the shrine beneath a stone lintel supported by two lithe stone angels who had somewhere lost their wings. He quickly reappeared, a copper ewer in his hand.

  Gildas pointed toward the shrine and stepped onto the cobbled path that led across the grass. I dutifully followed…

  Darkness engulfed me. I staggered sideways, limbs quivering, joints turned to jelly. Weak…sick…gasping…starved for air and sound, as well as light. Gods of mercy, what have I done that I should be struck blind? Guilt and horror, the surety of death and vengeance wrung my neck like a hangman’s noose, while remnants of old sins chased each other through my conscience like brightly colored birds, only to be swallowed in the blackness.

  And then, as quickly as the night had fallen, all was consumed by light, as if the unsullied sun of summers past shot its beams straight into my eye sockets. As an avenging angel come down from heaven, the light swept away terror and in its place left a bright and sharp-edged tenderness that wrenched my heart. I cried out and stumbled backward.

  A sharp crack on my skull brought the world—the green garth, the shrine, the cloister walk, the dull morning light—into focus again. I gulped air into my starved lungs. A cherubic rump protruded from the low arch where I had whacked my head. I spat on my middle finger, slapped the little aingerou, and prayed its friendly spirit to protect me from collapsing or explodi
ng. No battle wound or shock had ever afflicted me so precipitously.

  Brother Gildas’s gaze flicked from my face, to the serene enclosure, to my hand that now gripped the carved sprite as if seeking only its structural support. I half expected his lip to curl and his mellow voice to denounce me immediately as a heathen blasphemer. But he merely gripped my waist securely and assisted me back into the alley, looking a bit puzzled.

  “Perhaps we’ve overdone,” he said when we were outside the cloister bounds again. “And you with an unbroken fast. Can I help?”

  The world was so bright. So sharp. I pressed my head to the cool stone of the refectory wall and drew a ragged breath. “A drink of something…ale…or wine…please.”

  Anything to dull the glare that yet vibrated behind my eyes like a fresh knife wound, to soothe the ache that throbbed in my chest as if I had lost my last friend or heard the last song ever to be sung.

  Gildas pried me from the wall and assisted me down the alley, through a wooden gate and a muddy herb garden, and into the steams and smokes of the abbey’s kitchen. Two lay brothers, half obscured behind hanging baskets and vermin safes, stood at two long tables, trimming or chopping vegetables—turnips, garlic, carrots, and leeks—while a wizened, stoop-shouldered monk worked alongside them, grinding herbs with mortar and pestle. A slight figure in a layman’s hooded cloak of brick red deposited a flat, covered basket on one of the tables and retreated toward a far door.

  “Thank you, Squire Corin,” called a ruddy-faced, leather-pated monk who stirred an iron vat hung over the great central hearth. “We’ll hope poor Gram finds more appetite at supper. Brother Cellarer will send better wine for your master.”

  “Jerome!” my companion called across the stone-floored vastness.

  “What can I do for you, Brother Gildas?” said the ruddy-faced monk as he emptied a wooden bowl of chopped cabbage into his pot. With the efficiency of long practice, he set the cavernous bowl aside, snatched a long-handled spoon from a rack on the soot-blackened wall, and poked at the cabbage that sizzled and spattered in his pot.