Flesh and Spirit tld-1

by Carol Berg

  “Didn’t think so.” Pain snagged his rasping voice. His forehead felt hot beneath my hand. “Ye ought to leave. Don’t let the orange-heads pray over ye. Their prayin’ emptied me out, till I can’t think of naught but the dark—” Despair edged his words with panic.

  “Hush now. You’ll not be alone. I swear it. Will you trust me?”

  “Ye’ve never broke yer word.”

  “Listen…you’ll not believe my plan for winter…”

  I told him every detail of my rescue and the abbey. Of Jullian and Sebastian, of Brother Badger and Brother Gildas, of bells and books and prayers and mysteries. Of rich smells and jewel-colored windows and rippling barley. As I talked, I drew out the little green bag and used the mirror to crush the nivat on a rock. Trying not to inhale the scent, lest it trigger my own craving, I pricked my finger and worked my perverse magic.

  “Here, now, I’ve something will ease you a bit. Give it a try.” I scooped up the bubbling black paste and poked it in his mouth.

  Pain devoured him. Scoured and shook him as would a dragon lion of Syanar. I waited. When, at last, his ravaged body convulsed in ecstasy, I stabbed the sharp little knife—sure and fast and deep—into the hollow at the back of his neck. Forgive.

  PART TWO

  A Gathering of Wolves

  Chapter 11

  The hierarch’s flat feet measured almost the same in their length and width. They pained him when he had to stand on cold hard granite slabs for long periods of time. I knew this because he crunched up his toes and splayed them out again, rocked from toe to heel, and rolled them to the side. He did not wear sandals, for, of course, he was not a vowed brother of any monastic order, but the highest-ranking clergyman in Navronne, a common practor who had achieved a rank on par with a duc. His embroidered slippers were soft purple velvet held on by white silk ribbons that crossed over his thick, stockinged ankles. Every little while he set one foot upon the other to rest it, leaving dusty smudges on the top of his fine shoes.

  Feet and their various coverings and the grimy hems of gowns, robes, and other vestments were all I could see of my investiture rites. As I had for the past three hours, I lay prostrate before the high altar of Gillarine Abbey church, the unending prayers and admonitions rolling over me like the billowing incense smokes. My shoulder ached, my leg had stiffened, and my long straight pureblood nose had been rubbed raw by the same cold hard granite slabs that so tormented the hierarch’s feet.

  Someone sprinkled water on my head and back. Drips rolled down the shaven patch at the crown of my head. Tonsured…great Kemen, Lord of Sky and Storm, what woman will ever lie with me now? Drips spattered on my black gown, absorbed by the layers of wool. Drips rolled down my bare feet, tickling. I tried not to twitch. My trembling was due more to the marrow-deep chill creeping through me from the floor than awe of my current intimacy with the divine.

  I was not wholly irreverent. I honored all gods who professed an interest in human folk, and I respected custom and rituals that evoked the great mysteries of the world: death and birth, forests, ocean, and storms, music, copulation, and fermentation. But I saw no virtue in mere endurance and had never understood why a god would wish to be so long preoccupied with any one event.

  Best keep my mind somewhere close to business. News brought by the hierarch’s traveling party had only confirmed my decision to stay here—plague had broken out in the Moriangi port of Haverin.

  Pestilence, famine, war…how many times in the past few days had I heard mention of the end times? The long night, Jullian had said, as if it were a lovers’ assignation for which he had been awaiting only notice of the time. Before long these doomsayers were going to have me hanging bells on my ears and painting my forehead with dung.

  I dared not close my eyes. Brother Sebastian had rousted me as the bells rang for Prime, scolding me roundly for sleeping, for sleeping in the bed, for sleeping too long, and for sleeping naked. “A monk must always lie down girded in no less than trews, shirt, and hose so he will not be late to pray the night Hours, so spake Saint Ophir in his Rule.” While I reluctantly rolled into the frigid air and drew on the clean underthings he had brought me, my mentor had tightened his lips at some additional transgression. “Are you yet a sapling like these boys who cannot yet control their fleshly dreams? Surely you did not profane your vigil night apurpose!”

  It was the bed linens bothering him. I had shaken my head vigorously and shifted the treacherous appendage inside my trews, attempting to look properly humiliated while trying to remember just what had happened on my return from Elanus. Numb, exhausted, I had hidden my green pouch and the packet of knife and medicines in the garden maze outside the church and prayed that the bells I’d heard as I slogged over the last slope and down the road to the gatehouse were Matins and not Lauds.

  But “fleshly thoughts” had dogged me all the way back through the bogs and woodlands: the taste and feel of Adrianne on my tongue and fingertips and the memory of the dusky-smooth limbs and silken hair of the catamite. Strange and perverse that such images could arouse me after I had murdered a comrade I’d sworn to defend…after I’d spent half the night scraping a hole in the soft black dirt of Graver’s Meadow and laying Boreas and his woman there, my last coppers on their eyes and some of Brother Badger’s herbs in their hands and mouths to pay their tally to the Ferryman. Somehow the simple rites in the darkening meadow had left me at peace, and then the feel of the living earth under my hands as I sought the road back to Gillarine had sent unseemly desires coursing through my flesh. Truly I was a lunatic.

  The brothers were singing now. Something different this morning. From each side of the choir, right and left behind me, came a different melody—two songs twined around each other, all the beauty and simplicity of plainsong, but counterposed to make something larger and more wonderful. I had heard them practicing this work, but I hadn’t known it was for this occasion. For me. Well, for Iero, of course…everything they did, everything they said, was to honor Iero and his saints and prophets. Nonetheless, of all the good comrades I’d encountered through the years, none had ever made a song for me. I felt like an ass, grinning into the floor.

  Music infused my bones and sinews, not only my ears and soul. As a child I’d been offered no training in any instrument beyond the minimum necessary for a “cultured man’s education”—that aborted on the day I smashed my music master’s three-hundred-year-old harp into a stone pillar. Alas, my voice did sound like a carpenter’s rasp, elsewise a bard’s life might have suited me most excellently. If only I’d been born to a family of pureblood musicians, perhaps I could have put up with all the rest.

  Hands touched my shoulders. “Rise up now, son of Iero and Saint Ophir, and with thy solemn avowal will thy new life begin.”

  Blessed gods be thanked! I tried not to appear a lumbering ox as I got to my feet.

  The hierarch occupied a purple-draped chair between me and the high altar, a regal figure, though his upper lip drew up in the middle like a church spire, and the lower one, full and fleshy, drooped below it like the seedsman’s iron scoop, leaving two large yellow teeth on permanent display. In droning solemnity, he intoned, “Swear thou, chosen of the One God…”

  I knelt before Eligius and a coolly serious Abbot Luviar and swore on my hope of grace and heaven to abide by the particulars of Saint Ophir’s Rule. I meant what I said, though, if anyone had listened very closely through the fits of coughing that overtook me at certain crucial moments, he might have noted that I altered a few important words, such as “for the duration of my novice vows” rather than “for the duration of my novice year.”

  Graver’s Meadow had reminded me why I was careful about oath swearing. As the condition of the brothers’ hospitality, I would do my best to obey their Rule, but I would not bind myself beyond reason. So as I knelt before the hierarch, I ensured my vows were entirely accurate. They would last only as long as they lasted.

  When the swearing was done, Sebastian and Gildas dropped
a voluminous garment over my head, shifting it around so that the shortest sewn seam reached halfway down my breast, leaving the black wool cape open the rest of the way down. They adjusted the cowl’s soft folds about my neck and shoulders and then lifted its hood over my newly trimmed hair. The abbot himself knelt before me to slip my sandals onto my feet. And then it was done.

  From the outside I must appear like these other monks, who rose from the choir stalls and followed the hierarch, abbot, and prior in orderly procession through the nave. But, as far as I could tell, my every failing and regret remained hidden under my cowl, alongside unseemly hatreds, new and old. Too bad. The morning’s prayers had promised that I might leave all such burdens behind.

  After we washed in the lavatorium—a capacious room in the understory of the monks’ dorter where water channeled from the river ran perpetually through a waist-high stone trough—Brother Sebastian led me up the south stair to the monks’ refectory for the first time. Most of the monks were already seated at the two long tables along the side walls. Facing the center of the room, backs to the walls, they arranged themselves in order of age, as it appeared, or length of time in the order, which was much the same. At the small head table the abbot and the prior sat on either side of the hierarch. Reminding me with a gesture to keep silent, Brother Sebastian hurried me past the great gap of empty places and delivered me to the table at the lower end of the rectangle. To my surprise Jullian and Gerard squeezed along the wall behind one row of monks and past the long gap of empty seats and took stools on either side of me.

  The large room was spare of decoration: no paintings, statues, or carvings, no color but the burnished walnut of the floor and the palest yellow on the walls and between the stone ribs of the high, barreled ceiling. Its truer grandeur was its extravagance of windows on all four walls. Though the chilly room had no hearth, its tall windows, composed of astonishingly clear glass panes, bathed every place, even mine, with light.

  Once all were seated, lay brothers carried in bowls of soup and baskets of bread. My stomach was near devouring itself after a long morning’s fast on top of my night’s adventure. The moment the steaming bowl was set in front of me, I snatched up my spoon and dipped, reaching for the bread basket with the alter hand. The knock of my spoon on the bowl resounded through the cavernous room like a tabor’s whack. I looked up. No one else had moved.

  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.”