‘Recovering Helen is only part of the task.’
‘For you, perhaps. Not for me.’
He grimaced. ‘We have to try to find out what’s going on. One traveller lost, maybe two, I could write it off as it just being a dangerous time. But travellers know how to protect themselves, how to avoid danger. No, there’s something else going on.’ He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. I wondered how long it had been since he’d slept.
‘You make it sound like magic’s stalking the land. Merlin, maybe. Morgan le Fay.’ I forced a smile, trying to speak lightly.
‘Don’t be foolish, Kenneth.’
The dryness of his voice sobered me. ‘Could it be that there’s an outpost of the Empire we don’t know about?’
‘I’ll tell you something we learned during your absence, Kenneth,’ said Benny. ‘The Empire sent a couple of its expeditions into the Dark Age. They never came back, either. The Imperial administrators buried the information in their archives – bad news was always unwelcome, and the messengers too often got shot. But we found it in the end.’
‘So they started avoiding those centuries too?’
He gave a nod of agreement.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I said.
‘Make several trips – bracketing shots, if you like. See if you can find out what’s happening without being thrown directly into the quicksand yourself – diagnose the disease without getting close enough to catch it, so to speak. If the exploratory visits go well, I’ll think again about sending you into Charlemagne’s time.’ He carried on without giving me a chance to interrupt. ‘First off, I want to send you back to the middle of the eleventh. We know enough about what was going on then to be fairly sure you’ll be all right. About 1040, I think. I want to keep you clear of the Great Schism of 1054.’
‘Where?’
‘France. There was a famine in the thirties and all hell was going to break loose in the fifties, but as far as we know the 1040s were relatively tranquil.’
‘When can I get started?’
*
It was one of those days in autumn when the air smells of winter but the sun still believes there’s some of summer left. I was standing in the middle of a tract of grassland being watched by a couple of very inquisitive cows; behind them, a score or so of others had already lost interest in me and returned their noses to the grass. I felt weak at the knees from the after-effects of decontam but for once I didn’t think I was going to puke. I slowly sat down and wondered just exactly where I might be. It seemed I was in luck, that no human eyes had witnessed my arrival.
I looked up at the sky. The day was working on towards evening. There were some thin clouds trying to form themselves into a mackerel pattern, and the hint of a scimitar moon. I should find some shelter, preferably warm shelter, as soon as I could, because the night would doubtless be chilly. Ideally I should find myself a monastery or a convent – I was dressed appropriately as a monk. In this period, in France, there should be no shortage of monasteries.
The cattle started lowing, moving restlessly as they turned towards a distant figure – some serf come to fetch them home for the night.
I got to my feet again as he approached.
He stopped at the sight of me, then came on more cautiously. By his standards, I was quite a big man.
‘Father?’ he said.
‘Blessings, my child.’ My mouth seemed clumsy as it coped with the Old French words. The language pack solved the problem of vocabulary but it could do nothing about the fact that my brain was saying one thing and my voice was uttering another. It felt as if my tongue and teeth were all flying off in random directions. It would be easier once I was among monks. I speak Latin fluently, and would have no need of the language pack.
He bowed his head and I made a vague gesture of benediction.
‘Where are you bound, Father?’
‘I’m in the service of the Lord.’
I could see him straining to understand my words. The other thing the language pack can’t solve is accurate pronunciation. Wherever in time we go, we always sound as if we’re saddled with an atrociously thick accent. One of the advantages of eras before the Industrial Revolution, when someone could live their whole life without going twenty miles from home, is that people were accustomed to strangers having unidentifiable accents.
What I’d just told him was that I was in essence just bumming around the countryside, relying on people’s hospitality in exchange for blessings – not to mention, in these days before medicine, the healing powers I could exercise through my very presence as an emissary of Our Saviour.
‘My home is but humble,’ he began, lowering his head again, ‘but if—’
I had no doubt his home would be humble, infested with rats, lice and screaming children, and with the wind howling through the gaps in the roof and walls.
‘Is there a house of God nearby?’ I interrupted. ‘A monastery? A chapel?’
He looked relieved. The poor man had probably resigned himself to giving me his supper.
‘An hour’s walk,’ he said, pointing roughly in the direction the sun was heading. ‘Maybe a little more. There’s a nest of nuns there.’
For a moment I wondered if I could believe him, if he might not just be trying to get rid of me, but my doubt vanished almost before it had arrived. A serf’s life was cheap. Trying to trick even so lowly a figure as a wandering monk could bring dreadful retaliation.
Moments later, having left him with an extra ration of blessings, I was trudging steadily across the pasture towards the place where the sunset would be.
Rabbits watched me as I passed them by. Their only sign of fear was the stillness with which they held themselves.
*
I found the nunnery easily enough. It was a small one, with fewer than a dozen nuns; the building looked more like a made-over barn than a house of God. The prim Mother Superior, Marie-Amélie, who was somewhat younger than most of her coterie, didn’t seem any too pleased to see me, but of course she had no choice but to bid me welcome.
At least I could offer them a second male voice at vespers, for there was another monk staying there overnight. He was plump, chubby-faced, jolly and bald – the very image of Friar Tuck in the old picture books, in fact – and his name was Léon. After Matins the following morning, as we all breakfasted together on a thin, lukewarm porridge, I realised from various clues, including the smell of him, that he’d spent the night with Marie-Amélie. So much for her primness.
I wondered what I smelled like to him. Questionably clean, I suspected.
He was as genial as he looked. When I learned he was en route to the Abbey of Saint Martial at Limoges and asked if I might accompany him along the way, he was more than happy.
‘We can travel in style, two fine fellows like us!’ he cried, nudging me in the belly with a surprisingly sharp elbow.
He told me he’d arranged for a local man to take him by cart – ‘Such a trudge otherwise, dear boy, and I’m sure the Lord wouldn’t wish his humble servants to blister their feet!’ When the carter turned up not long after, I discovered it was none other than the peasant I’d met among the cows the afternoon before. Perhaps his services were payment for an indulgence Léon had granted the man’s liege lord.
The cart was ox-drawn and progress was excruciatingly slow. Much of the time, impatient, I walked alongside while Léon rode with his legs dangling over the tailboard, kicking the air.
He talked all the while, barely pausing for breath, and I listened eagerly. This was what I was here for, after all – to learn more about life in the eleventh, at least in this one small part of the world. I knew I could take nothing Léon said for granted – the idea of there being just a single version of the truth wouldn’t become current for centuries yet – but I could hope for some valuable kernels of information.
St Martial’s Abbey, when we reached it at the end of the day, was a grand edifice – grander, in its way, than New Vatican, alth
ough not as sprawling. Nearby was the busy little city of Limoges. I gleaned from some of Léon’s snide asides – he was no intellectual – that the abbey’s community was active in fostering culture, including the copying of texts. I couldn’t have hoped for a better place to land.
Our carter, who’d spoken barely a word to us all day, made it plain that he wasn’t going to risk the road home at night. No one at the abbey batted an eyelid at having to put up three unexpected visitors, and soon enough I found myself in a small cell. Through the solitary narrow window, high above my head, I could hear the wind beginning to pick up. The bunk was a shelf of plain wood with a couple of thin, suspicious-looking wool blankets. The walls, unadorned except for a single crucifix, were faced with grey cement. I sensed I was going to be cold tonight.
But the abbey served a fine supper of roasted meats and root vegetables, washed down with plenty of wine and cider, so I slept soundly.
*
‘You tell me you are a man of scholarship,’ said Abbot Odolric. He was tall by eleventh-century standards – almost as tall as I was – and his grey eyes almost matched the silver of his hair, which he wore long, tied in a knot behind his head. He had no sense of humour whatsoever, and I’d liked him on sight.
‘I am well regarded in my own land.’
‘Scotland?’
‘Yes.’ I had no trouble reading the Latin of the documents in the monastery’s library. Writing it was going to be more difficult, although not insuperably so: the job of a copyist is, after all, to copy. I expected I’d be slow to start with. Being Scottish, where letters might be formed a bit differently, was as good an excuse for this as I needed. It was all of a piece with my execrable accent. Even Odolric, who I’d already learned was the most polite of men, winced sometimes at my speech.
‘And you would like to stay with us and help us in our task?’
‘Yes.’
He looked me up and down. ‘You seem honest enough, for a Scotsman, and we could certainly use the assistance. What about your friend?’
‘Léon? He’s just a companion of the road.’
Léon had drunk enough for ten last night. When I’d got up from my hard bunk this morning I’d been able to hear him snoring clear through the thick stone wall between our cells. He’d skipped Matins. I hadn’t seen him at all so far today.
Odolric gave a frosty smile. ‘I imagine he’ll soon be on his way.’
I shrugged. ‘He’s his own master.’
Odolric had already shown me the library/scriptorium. It was huge – far bigger than you’d expect for even an establishment the size of St Martial’s Abbey. The room stank of unwashed males. I hadn’t counted, but there must have been at least thirty monks bent over their writing tables, busily working away. Half a dozen young novices were in attendance, running errands for the scribes. When I’d murmured something about being surprised to see so much industry, Odolric looked slightly puzzled. ‘History waits for none of us,’ he said cryptically before leading me away so we could converse in private.
It was soon settled that I was welcome at the abbey for as long as I cared to stay. After lunch I was shown to one of the few vacant writing tables – it was like a large lectern – and supplied with ink and a pair of quill pens: two pens, so that I could carry on working with one while a novice was trimming the other. The novice assigned to me, Mauritz, a brawny lad who looked to me as if he’d be better off as a blacksmith, gave me a single large sheet of coarse, rough-edged paper. On another sloping board beside me he reverently placed a wooden-bound book held open at its first page by a clip.
‘Thank you,’ I said, settling myself on my high stool.
Mauritz looked startled to be thanked, then turned to answer the call of one of the other monks.
And so my new career as a scribe started, as simply as that. Odolric must have relied very much on his own judgement of character – or perhaps he’d prayed for guidance – because paper was expensive stuff. If I made a mess of a sheet it’d be a small tragedy.
I don’t know what the good abbot would have done had he known about the notepad I kept in a hidden pocket of my cowl, alongside my portal. I sent occasional written messages to Benny, reporting progress; the most important message, I guess, was that I was still alive – that I hadn’t succumbed to whatever had overtaken the other travellers.
I was grateful I wasn’t being asked to illuminate the text. I got the impression from Odolric and, later, from listening to my colleague scribes, that there was far too much copying to be done to allow for such niceties as illumination. Again, I found myself wondering where all this work had come from.
The book that I found myself transcribing was nothing of great note. It was just a rather dull and historically fanciful account of the adventures of Saint Peter between the time of the Resurrection and his own crucifixion, some thirty years later. He healed the sick, preached the word of Christ, healed the sick, made some prophecies about the imminent return of Christ, healed the sick . . . It seemed pretty obvious that two or three legends had been repeated in various different forms and then strung together to make a fake biography. I wonder if this particular text survived the Middle Ages. Perhaps it was far more valuable than I realised.
I could hardly believe the abbey at Limoges was unique in being overwhelmed by material to be transcribed. Such periods did occur in human history, I knew. Only a century or so before where I was now the entirety of Byzantine literature had been transcribed in just a few decades as the old majuscule script was replaced by the more flexible minuscule. There was also the huge translation and adaptation effort, still ongoing as I toiled in the abbey scriptorium, made by the Arab scholars to keep Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian scholarship alive. So massive transcription efforts weren’t unknown. It’s just that I’d never heard of this one, and I thought I should have. Perhaps it was exactly this wave of copying that had tugged back the drapes to let the light of the Middle Ages, wan though it was, shine in on Europe’s long darkness?
Of course, I could discuss none of this with the men who worked alongside me. I’d hoped I might be able to form a friendship with at least a few of them, but they weren’t gregarious in that sense. They did gossip at the dinner table, though, these men, and I was able to pick up bits and pieces of information.
The most important item – and it took me a while before I realised what I was hearing – was that not everyone there was engaged in transcription. A few, generally deferred to as if they formed an unofficial elite, were designated historians rather than scribes. Naturally, I did my best to be closer to them – not as easy a task as it might sound, because they were the top dogs and I was a recently arrived whelp. The only one who showed much interest in me was the most senior of them all, an old monk with a laugh as dry as dust and a way of looking at me, head to one side, that made me feel I should be saying something far cleverer than I actually was. His name was Karl-Georg and he came from Saxony. I wondered if his amicability stemmed from the fact that his accent was as gruelling as my own.
I wish now I’d been given the chance to know Karl-Georg better.
*
Winter was bone-achingly cold that year. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I wasn’t the only one. Even the people of Limoges cursed it as especially severe. Odolric issued instructions that the hearth in the dining hall be kept perpetually ablaze so the poor people of the town could come and keep themselves warm; despite his generosity, it seemed hardly a day dawned without a fresh report of some poor soul being found frozen to death in a ditch somewhere. Far too many of them were children.
Some of my brethren took to sleeping among the paupers, where there was warmth, rather than in their stone cells.
My scoundrelly friend Léon came by, seeking the hospitality of the abbey once more, on his way back from wherever he’d been. He seemed to be travelling in more haste this time, and I suspected he’d been caught bedding someone else’s wife. He stayed just the one night and left early the next day.
‘You should come with me, dear boy,’ he urged. ‘We’d be fine companions on the road together.’
I shook my head firmly. ‘I have a duty here.’
I did – just not the duty he thought it was.
I’d expected that chastity might be a problem of my monastic life, but in fact I was finding it no burden at all. It wasn’t that I’d lost my sexuality. Several times a day I’d be painstakingly copying a word and have to pause until the vision of Helen’s face that had sprung up between me and the page had faded; and it wasn’t always just the face I saw. No, I think it was more that something of the sanctity of the task we were undertaking penetrated the spirit of even this unbeliever. Far from all of the monks around me were ascetic – most of them ate and boozed merrily and probably were as fond of wenching as Léon – but a few of them were like Odolric and Karl-Georg, and those were the ones I found inspired my respect. From respect to emulation is a small step.
In January the crushing cold of the winter proved too much for Karl-Georg’s ancient heart. We found him one morning rigid in his bunk, as cold as the air in his cell. I wasn’t the only one who shed tears. We could have left the matter of his burial to the sexton’s men, but somehow that would have seemed degrading. I volunteered to be part of the team that dug his grave. It took us a full day. The soil was frozen so hard it was like trying to crack rocks. I have no idea how many spades we destroyed between us before it was done.
The next day, as I was entering the scriptorium, Odolric took me to one side.
‘We’ve lost an historian,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘And a good man, which is a greater loss.’
He murmured agreement, then added: ‘I’ve been watching your progress, Kenneth. At first I thought I’d made a dreadful mistake by so much as allowing you near a page of paper with a pen in your hand. But God reassured me I’d done the right thing, and of course He was right.’ Odolric made the sign of the Cross over his breast. ‘Your work’s as good as anybody’s now, better than most.’
I turned half away, embarrassed.
Tales from the Vatican Vaults Page 7
