Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  Frai Lorenzi had the wherewithal to first instruct one of the junior monks to see to their guest, and Tess, to her dismay, was led back to her cell and bid good night.

  * * *

  The matins bell woke her—indeed, there was no sleeping through it—and she got up only to find her door locked. She banged and shouted to no avail, and so she went back to bed in hopes that maybe this was a dream and things would be different when she woke up.

  Breakfast woke her the second time, a tray under her door. Tess was forced to admit that she was locked in and had no notion why.

  The abbot visited her at noon, his priors looming behind him, and explained that Santi Prudia’s Sign was a holy mystery, and therefore Tess could not be allowed to leave. She could, however, join the order, and once she’d earned enough seniority—

  She closed the door in his face—maybe not her wisest move, as it was locked again immediately. Tess threw herself onto her cot and stayed there all day. The window, though paneless, was too narrow to squeeze out of.

  She was startled awake by Frai Lorenzi sitting on the foot of her cot. He carried a roll of parchments under one arm and was wearing spectacles. The light through the window had turned orange; it was nearly sunset. Tess sat stiffly, side aching, and tried to shake off her grogginess.

  “Forgive me for waking you, Brother Jacomo,” said Frai Lorenzi. “But I need your help, and I believe you need mine.”

  “I can’t join your order,” said Tess, ready to explain why, if it would get her out of there.

  The creases in his forehead deepened. “Well, you could, if you wished, but I disagree with our abbot that witnessing Santi Prudia’s Sign means the choice is made for you.” Frai Lorenzi lowered his voice, as if Pater Livian might overhear. “Our mandate is to conserve and interpret knowledge, not conceal it. Why shouldn’t the world learn of the wonder beneath our feet? Are we alone worthy of glimpsing Heaven’s majesty? I can’t accept that.

  “If you don’t feel called, though, you mustn’t be forced to stay. You and I both know you’re no seminarian.” He smiled a little at her discomfiture. “No more pretending, Jacomo. My cousin Bastien was never prior. He’s the head archivist. Runs in the family.”

  Frai Lorenzi pulled a complicated key out of his pouch and laid it on the cot between them. “This opens every lock in this monastery. The front gate, obviously, will be guarded, but there’s the orchard gate, where we load cider barrels, or a sally port at the end of the chapel, in case of fire. There are several others; you’ll find your way.” He transferred the roll of parchment to his hands, tightening it nervously. “Leave the key in the shrine. I’ll find it.”

  “Thank you,” said Tess dubiously. “But why help me?”

  “Because there’s someone else I can’t seem to help,” said Frai Lorenzi sadly. Glare on his spectacles obscured his eyes as he unrolled the parchments upon the thin coverlet. They were pages excised from books, all in the same hand (left-handed, Tess noted). At first she thought he wanted her to read them, but the pages were from different texts and he flipped them too quickly.

  The margins were alive with innumerable eccentric drawings. “Look at this one,” he said, pointing to a dog wearing a bishop’s miter. Tess glanced at the old archivist’s face, trying to understand if he meant her to be appalled or appreciative. His expression remained neutral, but his eyes gleamed when he showed her Frai Moldi’s drawing of a battle between armies of crabs and frogs. Tess decided he admired these drawings, even if he was too proper to say so.

  There was a nun laying eggs, a fish-headed baronet, a recognizable Pater Livian picking fruit from what could only be described as a bollocks tree. They were terrible and hilarious, and they made something ache in Tess’s heart.

  The old librarian pinched his dry lips together. “At first I made him redo everything. When that didn’t deter him, I showed his scribbles to the abbot, who locked him in the cellar hole. Moldi never seemed to care, but eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped tattling, stopped pulling pages. There are penis-demons, arse-bagpipes, every outrageous thing he could devise, scattered throughout the library for the edification of future scholars, Heaven help them.”

  “So…you want him to stop?” asked Tess, trying to understand.

  Frai Lorenzi startled. “No, no. He stopped once he realized he wouldn’t be punished anymore. All this fierce, outrageous talent, and he doesn’t care a fig. He wanted punishment, and he’s found other ways to earn it.” The librarian smoothed the pages against his knee. “He hardly speaks to me anymore. I hoped, when you smiled at him, that maybe you saw through him. That you might befriend him. You’re leaving, though.”

  “Indeed,” said Tess, studying his face.

  “Good,” said Frai Lorenzi curtly, rerolling the parchments. “Let me just reiterate: that key opens any lock here. All of them. You should have no trouble.”

  He wasn’t very subtle. Tess took up the key and mimed unlocking the air. “All of them. Even the cellar hole.”

  Frai Lorenzi rose and paused with one hand on the door, his face full of grief and hope. “Thank you,” he said softly. “He’s the son I never had. I don’t know what else to do.”

  He left. Tess put on her boots, gathered her things, and sneaked down the dormitory hallway, through the vaulted kitchens, and into the cellar. She found no “hole,” only casks and crates and a dark stairway to the subcellars. She went deeper, through more storage rooms, and was ready to give up when she spied it behind a hogshead of ale, a depression in the floor covered by an iron grille. As her pool of lamplight neared, dirty fingers poked up through the bars like tentative shoots in springtime.

  “Frai Lorenzi?” said a heartbroken voice.

  “He sent me to release you,” Tess said, kneeling by the hole and fitting her key to the padlock. Hinges shrieked as she swung back the grille. Moldi’s eyes reflected lamplight like a frightened animal’s. His chin was gritty with day-old beard.

  “Give me your hand,” said Tess, reaching toward him.

  “Give it? I don’t have a spare, like some people,” said Moldi, making no move to get up. In fact, he flattened himself so Tess couldn’t reach him.

  “I’m not coming out,” he said. “You needn’t bother.”

  Tess lowered herself onto her stomach, arms folded at the edge of the hole, fascinated. His petulance wasn’t aimed at her, and there was probably nothing she could do to fix it, and still this drew her like a moth to flame. “Are you angry that Lorenzi didn’t come for you?” she said, trying to guess. “He thought you wouldn’t speak to him.”

  “I probably wouldn’t have, at that,” said Moldi grudgingly. “I’m an incorrigible ingrate.”

  “Bitter as gall,” said Tess. She recognized it, even if she couldn’t see the root cause. “Is it because you lost your arm?”

  “Lost it?” he cried. “Never. Does Goreddi have the expression ‘I’d give my right arm’? I gave mine to get out of subduing the Archipelagos. Threw myself under a horse.”

  Tess grimaced, imagining the desperation it would take to do such a thing.

  Or the courage.

  “It was a foolish trade; I’d assumed I could go home,” said Frai Moldi, growing quieter. “I hadn’t appreciated that I was merely a coin in my baronet father’s keeping. Betting me on warfare brought a poor return, but I had to be spent somewhere. I had no say in the matter. He reinvested me here and sent my younger brother to be a soldier in my place.”

  “You’re worried your brother will be hurt,” suggested Tess, still groping for the answer.

  “I hope he’ll be hurt,” said Moldi, deep in his hole. “He likes killing things, and he’s good at it. Mark my words: if the Archipelagos catch fire, it will be Robinôt who did it, and his pathetic brother Moldi who’s ultimately responsible. We should have been a feeble soldier and a terrible priest; that was our de
stiny as the second and third sons of a baronet, and no harm done except to my soul.” His voice broke. “Now the world is afflicted with an incapable monk and an arguably excellent axe-lieutenant, which is much, much worse.”

  “You’re not merely a monk,” said Tess, trying to sound encouraging. “You’re a historian. If there is trouble in the Archipelagos, as you say, maybe someday your insights into your brother will let you write the definitive—”

  Moldi’s shoe hit Tess stingingly in the ear, and then it ricocheted back down the hole and got him in the face. “Damn it,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “No, I’m not a historian. I’m trapped, as surely as I was before, but without any spare limbs to gnaw off.

  “Frai Lorenzi says that if I study, the threads of truth will come together into a numinous, shining tapestry—or some cack. But you know what history looks like to me? My weeping mother and splenetic father; my sweet-natured elder brother, a Daanite, obliged to flog his serfs and produce an heir; my sisters married to wastrels just to join their lands with ours; and a little devil who’s traded his homilies for a poleaxe, thanks to my selfishness.

  “Here’s the truth, Brother Jacomo: history is a hole, and at the bottom is a smelly drain, a damp floor, and a debauched monk who can’t see his way out of darkness.”

  It took Tess a moment to find her voice; the word selfishness echoed inside her, bringing back memories and regrets. Old bitterness was never completely gone. “I’ve lived in that hole,” she said quietly. “I promise you, that’s not all there is. The world is different than you think.”

  Moldi made a rude noise through his lips.

  “However,” said Tess, pushing off the floor and brushing grime from her jerkin, “I can’t make you come out. Frai Lorenzi hopes you’ll leave; I just want you to have the choice.”

  His voice grew small: “Leave…the monastery? Where would I go?”

  “You could come with me,” said Tess, not sure if she meant it. Frai Moldi would make a dismal traveling companion, but maybe that was better than no companion. Pathka’s quest was finished; she’d barely admitted to herself what that meant. “I have some business to attend to in the cavern,” she said, “and then I’m off to Segosh.”

  “That cack-hole!” he cried, his scorn returned in force.

  “Is it worse than the one you’re in?” said Tess.

  The silence seemed to deepen as Frai Moldi considered. “Good point,” he said at last, sitting up. “Segosh is certainly worse. I’m surely meant to keep rolling downhill.”

  He staggered to his feet. Tess hesitated and then said, “Can you climb out?”

  “What do you think?” said Moldi, reaching for her help.

  He brushed cellar-hole detritus off his cassock and then led her by quiet passages to the gardens; they stopped at the well so Moldi could get a drink and dump a bucket over his head—most welcome, because he smelled terrible. The orchard door was closest, so they departed that way and locked it behind them. Tess waded through waving grass toward the shrine, Moldi at her heels. She left the key on the altar for Frai Lorenzi while Moldi studied the pagan inscription above the doorway down, shaking his head.

  “I’ve got to go down again before we leave,” said Tess.

  Moldi wrinkled his nose. “Down…with the giant serpent. On purpose.”

  She’d discounted his terror in the library. “If you’re frightened, you can wait here, but Frai Lorenzi will come fetch his key eventually, and I don’t know how long I’ll be below. I’ve walked a long way….” Across lifetimes, she felt. “I have to see the serpent, after all I’ve gone through to get here. And I have a friend down there whom I can’t leave without saying goodbye.”

  Moldi stared at his shoes while she spoke; when he raised his chin, there was an unaccustomed gleam in his eyes. “All right, then. Let’s see this monster. Why the devil not?”

  They descended. Halfway down, the biggest tremor yet made the stairs churn and rock like the ocean. They flung themselves flat and clung to the steps for dear life. Tess prayed to St. Prue (as seemed prudent) not to be buried alive in this stairwell.

  The shaking ceased, and Tess clambered to her feet, but Frai Moldi couldn’t seem to stand; he trembled as if the quake continued in his very bones. His fear hadn’t all been an act. Tess grasped his hand, pulled him to his feet, and kept hold of him the rest of the way down.

  So it was that Tess, hand in hand with a monk, entered the great chamber and saw.

  * * *

  The world was different than either of them had thought.

  * * *

  Tess always felt, later on, that words could not begin to touch that moment.

  Not that she didn’t try, but explaining was like trying to carry a river in a teacup. Or worse, that the experience was like a paper-thin, perfect sheet of ice upon a pond, and every word of explanation a heavy footfall, obliterating what it meant to elucidate. The serpent truly was thmepitlkikiu, the death of language.

  The only approach was through analogy, but Tess didn’t know many good ones.

  Far to the north, on the continent of Iboia, was a chasm, a gash in the face of the world so deep and wide that one could not see the bottom, or even the opposite rim on a hazy day. Its edge, where the rock was crumbly and weak, posed a real hazard of falling in and tumbling more than a mile downward, bumping and cursing. Yet people stood at the edge, gaping foolishly, because they didn’t believe it. The chasm was too big to understand.

  Tess, alas, didn’t have access to this metaphor.

  At the end of St. Jannoula’s War, when St. Pandowdy bestirred himself from the swamp and circled Lavondaville, shedding dirt and rocks and trees and shining with the light of Heaven itself, people fell on their knees, prostrated themselves, and wept for joy and terror. His presence was so sublime that a human mind could not comprehend it.

  Tess, in the tunnels when St. Pandowdy rose, couldn’t make this comparison, either.

  The closest she could get were the stars. Kenneth had once explained that while it looked like the sky arched above and the earth sat solidly below, up and down were mere conventions. “We’re clinging to a sphere, after all,” he’d said. “From some angles, up is toward the earth and down toward the sky, and everything—people, horses, cathedrals, dreams—is suspended over the ceaseless void, barely hanging on.”

  Tess had looked at the stars differently after that, lying with her back pressed desperately to the earth, and felt the thrill and terror that gravity might capriciously drop her into the sky and she would fall forever.

  Anathuthia recalled in Tess that terror and exhilaration. The whole chamber ached with vibrant life as her luminescent blood pulsed beneath milky, translucent scales. Her massive loops and coils arced impossibly, like stone arches made of noonday sky, burning a hole in night. Tess had to squint because the light was too much. Everything about Anathuthia was too much.

  And Tess was vanishingly small.

  Everything disappeared. Will. Dozerius. Mama.

  All your failures and hopes, your suffering and striving, the great coils seemed to say, are inconsequential, compared with this. They are nothing.

  You are nothing.

  It was a relief to be nothing; it felt deep and beautiful and true.

  Tess wept.

  Beside her, Moldi wept for reasons of his own. Maybe for the same reason. Tess didn’t let go of his hand. They could not feel time passing.

  All was nothing. It was exactly as it should be.

  * * *

  Moldi broke the reverie after what might have been hours. “Light requires the high relief of darkness,” he said, and although Tess’s thoughts had been going in other directions, she understood him. “Seeds sprout in darkness. Children are conceived, and the sun reborn. Death returns us to it. Darkness is not…it’s not wrong.”

  He was weeping again. Tess cou
ld think of nothing to do but hold him close, his head against her shoulder. He clung to her fiercely until his breathing calmed. “You are not wrong,” Tess whispered into his hair. Impulsively she kissed the top of his head.

  Experiencing nothingness had left her feeling unexpectedly full.

  Moldi sat up, wiping his wet face with the end of his sleeve. The blue light gave him a ghostly aspect. “I hope you won’t be too disappointed, Brother Jacomo, but…I need to go back. I—” His voice broke again, but he steadied himself. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve heard the call.”

  “Your vocation?” whispered Tess, happy for him.

  He shrugged self-deprecatingly and quirked the first smile Tess had seen on him, a small, ironic, unpracticed thing. “That’s a rather grand word for finally noticing what’s been right in front of you. But Santi Prudia’s Sign was painted in mile-high letters. ‘O ignoramus,’ it said, ‘your life is not a tragedy. It’s history, and it’s yours.’ ” He flashed Tess an apologetic look. “It made terrible yet reassuring sense in the moment. Words aren’t—”

  “I know,” said Tess. “I had a moment of my own.”

  “Would you tell me about it?” asked Frai Moldi shyly.

  Before Tess could answer, though, Anathuthia moved. She rubbed against the ceiling, and loose rock rolled down her shining body, boulders like grains of sand. A chunk the size of a farmhouse crashed and split with a sound like the world’s end. Across the dark ceiling a darker crack appeared, like black lightning, growing and forking as it spread.

  Tess and Moldi held on to each other and gaped, forgetting they had lives to fear for, until a shape came hurtling out of the shadows and shoved them toward the stairs.