Watermark

by Vanitha Sankaran

  Biatris crashed through the brush in front of them, sweating and struggling to recover her breath. Her gaze roved from Onors to the father, then rested on the young girl and the babe. She rushed to them with a cry.

  Forgotten for a moment, Onors pulled back along the riverbank.

  “The babe lives. She may yet be saved,” Biatris said, taking the injured child in her arms. She lurched toward the path that led uphill back to the house. “If we move fast.”

  The man swallowed and clenched his fists. He stared hard at Onors, then followed the old woman. Onors watched until the pale-white babe disappeared from her view. Had she saved it? Would it live?

  Only God knew.

  It is too difficult to detect heretics when they do not openly admit their error but hide it, or when there is not certain and sufficient evidence against them.

  —Bernardo Gui,

  Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis

  Part I

  Spring 1320

  Chapter Three

  A clap of thunder startled Auda awake. Bolting upright on her pallet of hay, she pushed aside the oilcloth flap covering the square outlook by her bed. Storm clouds darkened the predawn sky. She huddled in her blanket and breathed against the furious thump of her heart. Closing her eyes, she tried to drowse to the rumble of her father’s snores from the loft above, but it was no use. She couldn’t fall back asleep.

  By habit, she reached across the pallet for her sister, Poncia, to ask her to sing a tune, a love song or a hymn from church. Sometimes, after a nightmare, her sister would hold Auda’s hand and hum an old lullaby of their mother’s. But Poncia, only six months ago, had married and moved away.

  Auda slid out of her pallet and pulled a woolen dress on over her shift, her bare toes scrunching against the cold winter ground. Thin ice shards had formed in the basin of rainwater that stood outside the larder where she slept. She picked them out and washed her face, then stole into the hearth room. Dried rushes and alder leaves crunched under her feet, their sweet woody fragrance rising up.

  The fire had dwindled low under the cook pot. Auda fanned the embers, then opened the shutters over the outlook and rolled up the oilcloth flap to let in some air. The rain had started again. Little wonder: it had rained every day for the past four months in Narbonne. Each morning, the downpour arrived with the salty breeze of the marin off the Mediterranean. Normally, the dry gusts of the evening cers would chase the rain away, but not these days. These days the rain was constant.

  “The inquisitors are circling Narbonne like hawks,” her father had told her with a dark look, “while the priests claim the rain is all the work of the devil.” He snorted. “Pure nonsense.”

  But the Church had added extra masses at Matins and Prime just to accommodate all the newfound piety.

  Auda fed the fire sticks of wood. Orange shadows flickered over the sparsely furnished room. In one corner, a table and two benches stood alongside a shelf that held a pair of empty wine flagons and a green wax tablet with a wooden stylus. Two sackcloth cloaks hung on hooks nailed into the door.

  Fanning away the acrid smoke that rose from the burning pine kindling, Auda tiptoed down the corridor that led to her father’s studio. A familiar sense of anticipation prickled her spine.

  This was where she and her father made paper, reams of blank sheets to be filled with words from all manner of people—rich lords, learned priests.

  Even her.

  The workshop was centered around a large vat holding the linen mixture that made up the paper pulp. Fashioned from an old wine barrel, the vat sat on a plinth over a low fire and next to a drainage gulley cut into the rough brick floor. Auda crossed the channel by way of a wooden duckboard and lit a torch. The flame’s reflection danced on the vat’s black liquid surface. Today her father would beat the macerated linen into a pulp; when he was done, the actual papermaking would begin.

  Auda dropped the torch in a sconce over a row of smaller barrels, where the degrading cloth that would go into the next batch of pulp was kept. The wet linen rags, balled up inside, were already moldy and fermenting. She breathed in, picking out nuances in the ripe odor, the sweetness and the acidic undertone that lingered in her nostrils. Another week and they’d be ready.

  She sat down at the corner desk. Its surface was cluttered with a miscellaneous ruck: quills, blades, brushes, old bits of paper, older pieces of parchment, pots of ink and sand, and an empty flagon of wine. In the middle sat a large book that her father, Martin, had rented from the stationer.

  He rented books as often as he could from Tomas, even when the men had no work to discuss. A shopkeeper with strong ties to the Church and the Parchmenter’s Guild, Tomas was loath to speak in public about Martin’s paper, but for a few discreet coins would approach the papermaker with some side work.

  “Cheap men need cheap copies,” Tomas would say, sniffing as he handed her father a thick wrapped package containing a book made of parchment.

  It was almost always a text for a university, though occasionally a colorful romance or collection of verse made an appearance. Martin would make sheets of paper in an identical size and number to the parchmented work and copy the text in his careful hand. A binder would sew the work up into gatherings of eight pages, then stitch the gatherings together and bind them with cloth-board covers. The resulting book would be far less grand than a parchmented work with colorful illuminations and a tooled leather cover, and would fetch small coin for all the effort. Still, Martin jumped at every chance to copy a parchmented book on paper.

  “Someday people will flock to us directly, eh, Auda?” he said often. “They will seek us out to have their words captured in a dozen books spread all over Christendom.”

  Auda quelled a shiver of excitement and tried not to dream, as she often did, that the first original book Martin made would be written by her. Surely that was his dream, too—why else would he go through such effort to bring books home to share with her? She could picture it, a leather-bound volume containing pages and pages of her writing, maybe even decorated with bright illuminations. If Poncia knew of her ambitions, she would scoff at them both, asking what kind of woman wanted to write books? Few could even read.

  Poncia might well be right. But what if she wasn’t?

  “The Lord saved you for a reason, my special child,” Auda had heard her father mumble once. “If only I knew why.”

  She caressed the dark book on the desk, her fingers trailing over the fat black script on the book’s cloth-board cover. Liber compositae medicinae. She’d told her father she wanted to make a booklet of simples and herbal cures for her sister, on the occasion of Poncia’s saint’s day. Her sister was ever at a loss to remember which herbs fought melancholy, which soothed distemper, and which chilled a fever. The week after Auda had shared her plan with her father, he had brought her this book on physicking. The volume was due to go back to the stationer’s today.

  She flipped it open. The first page, as usual, bore the book’s curse.

  He who thieves this Book

  May he die the death of pain,

  May he be frizzled in a pan.

  Says the servant of the Lord:

  Steal not this Book, stranger or friend

  Or fearing the Gallows will be your end.

  And when you die the Lord will say

  Where is my Book that you stole away?

  The curse should have scared her but Auda only felt a kinship with the writer who’d authored the warning not to mistreat his book.

  Reaching into a desk drawer, she pulled out the paper booklet she was making for Poncia. She’d already sketched in the symbols for wind, earth, fire, and water over a drawing on the human body, copied from a Greek codex she’d read months before. On the front page she had drawn a pelican, which had been a favorite of their mother’s. On the back page she’d written herbal wisdom on getting a babe secured in the womb.

  She flipped to the blank middle now and chose a last few simples to copy. Hummi
ng while she worked, she wrote each recipe like a verse to be sung, crafting it into a rhyme that her sister could remember.

  For soothing sleep, slumber sublime

  Lemon and lavender’s the cure.

  If frights and fears in dreams disturb,

  Add chamomile, to be sure.

  She read the words over, pleased. It was only in moments like this when she thought she heard her own voice.

  A loud snore interrupted her tune and she glanced up at the loft. Her father had returned home late last night from the tavern, drunker than a sheep’s head soused in ale. His snores rumbled, deep and regular. Dawn would soon break. If he didn’t wake soon, he would miss the morning market. Three times a week, on market days, Tomas allowed Martin to set up in a corner of his stall to serve as a scribe, a reader and writer of letters for those who could not do for themselves. The work earned Martin a few pennies, and Tomas even more for supplying the parchment and ink.

  Auda laid down her quill, intending to wake her father. Yet as if on cue, he groused himself awake and a few moments later, lumbered into the workshop. The months of dampness had stiffened his joints and he walked with a slight limp. The rains had waterlogged the crops and thinned the stock of birds and beast sent to the butchers. Martin’s once ample paunch had receded into mere chubbiness, though his shoulders were still strongly muscled.

  Martin climbed the steps to the vat and loosed a stream of urine into the murky water to help the soaking linens degrade. He leaned in and plunged a hand into the pulpy water. Gray strands stuck to his fingers.

  Sitting back, Auda focused on her father as light from the torch caught him in profile. On the surface he looked like any other man, stout with swarthy skin, thick limbs, and cropped hair. But to her his brown eyes spoke of his true character, of risk and passion.

  She loved watching him work in the quiet moments of the morning. Somehow, when he held his long-handled paddle and churned the pulp, his awkward gait grew into grace, his reserved manner into an expression of devotion.

  Today, however, he didn’t pick up his tools. Instead, he rubbed his wet fingers against his smock and sought his daughter in the shadows.

  “Ah, ma filla,” he said, his thin lips curving into a wide smile, “one week more and this batch will be ready to sell. And just in time! This is going to be the batch that changes everything for us.”

  Auda lifted her head to meet his merry eyes. What did he mean?

  “We have order for paper, Auda. A real order! Not this piddling work of scribing dull letters or copying books for the cheapest bidder. No, this request is for blank sheets, not just a few but four whole reams. And here’s the best part.” Martin leaned in. “The order comes straight from the palace!”

  Chapter Four

  Auda blinked, trying to understand. Someone from the palace wanted his paper? Who could it be? Where had this person found Martin? Had he said what the paper would be used for? Her father had been trying for years—since before she was born—to get anyone of worth to notice his paper. She wanted to know every detail.

  Martin mistook her confusion for wonder. “I know, it’s an amazing fortune for us. But there’ll be time enough to discuss it later. Come, we’ll be late to meet Tomas.”

  He hurried her out of the room before she could ask any questions, reminding her to take the physicking book with them. While he packed a sack of the tools he needed for scribing—Tomas provided nothing but a corner of the stall and a small table and stool—Auda busied herself with the ritual of getting dressed to go outdoors. She tied her bone white hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, covering it with a square of tan cloth and a cap over that. Wrapping herself in a thick sackcloth cloak, she drew the hood around her face.

  Out of habit, she patted her nose, lips, and cold cheeks, feeling the tiny pockmarks where ash from the hearth and vat had singed her cheeks. Skinny and pale, with the straight body of a boy, she was certainly no beauty. But as long as she tucked her hair under layers of fabric and her white skin stayed hidden under her dress and cloak, she would look no different than any other girl swaddled against the cold rain.

  She wrapped the book in a sackcloth cover and waited for her father outside. The air smelled of drenched earth and loam. Auda raised her face to the drizzle, breathing in the cold wetness until her chest felt full to bursting.

  “Come along, Auda,” her father said, clapping a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s be off.”

  She followed him down the long dirt path that led to the main road. Her father set a brisk pace today, his step quickened with happiness. Well, why not? An order for four reams would keep them fed for months. And if the customer liked the paper, that could change everything for them. She smiled, feeling a lightness in her step also.

  “Such a fine day, Auda,” Martin said, looking back at her. “No matter what the priests say, with all the rains, the town looks like it’s born anew.”

  The rain had brought a certain lushness to town: the flowers and trees and the thriving vineyards that carpeted the fields outside of Narbonne. The grapes ended at the rocky hills of La Clape, which stood as a barrier between the precious fruit and the salty marshes that led out to sea beyond. To the west, the hazy silhouette of the Corbières blended into the gray sky. A long ribbon of storm clouds nestled in the valley of the mountains.

  Whatever else the rains heralded, for Auda they brought clarity of sight. Her pale eyes hurt in the open daylight, burned in the full sun. Even with her hand shaded over her lids, she could scarcely see in the brightness of a normal summer day. But in the dimness of first light, especially under a cloudy sky like this, she could almost discern detail beyond the usual shabby blurs.

  The church bells rang for Matins and peasants dressed in dirty work clothes began emerging from the huts lining the road. Full on a breakfast of bread and watered beer, they headed toward the fields to plough the land for the spring sowing. Auda smiled at each of them as she passed, but received scant acknowledgment in return.

  She frowned. Normally, when she went out with her sister, people nodded with a greeting. Had the rains visited so much ill will on town that people had forgotten how to smile?

  Priests settled in pairs along the road, calling out sermons to the few people passing by.

  “The Second Flood is Coming: God will Save the Faithful,” one of them yelled. “Repent now and be forgiven of your sins! The Church will save your souls.”

  “The only thing the Church is going to do,” her father muttered in a low tone, “is to bring in the inquisitors. Idiots.”

  Auda closed her mouth against the thick nubbin of her tongue. The threat of inquisitors had been with her for her entire life. Her father had even built a hiding place in the kitchen to secret her away in case of danger, a small hole behind the wall, barely large enough to hold one person.

  Well, rain or no, this town was her home and she felt safe here. Anywhere else, she might have been killed because of her appearance, or at least walled away in a convent. Yet even among the conflagrations of heresy that had burned whole towns to ashes in the last century, Narbonne prospered. It wasn’t for lack of heresy. Forbidden churches spouting a myriad of philosophies had once lived side by side in town. People might gripe about their neighbors’ doings to themselves, but to the outside world and the Church they would say nothing. Narbonne guarded her own.

  The rain grew thicker, flooding the numerous puddles. They picked up their pace, turning onto the cobblestone Via Domitia, an old Roman merchant road, toward Auda’s namesake, the river Aude. The rising waters flowed alongside the houses and shops, beyond the docks where the butchers dumped their offal every morning, past the new cathedral construction, and eventually out to sea. The Aude bisected Narbonne into two districts, the rich city of the nobles and the poorer, workingman’s bourg, where her father’s cottage stood.

  Swollen with weeks of rain, the river was reckless and feckless with abandon. Its roar seemed like the melody of a hundred discordant voices. Had these
very voices clamored for the piece of her that now rested in frigid waters? Auda wondered, as she had so many times before, whether her father had named her after the river as a reminder or a caution. She knew only the bare facts of her birth and mutilation, and very little about her mother. Neither her father nor her sister liked to speak of that time.

  “Come along, Auda, no time to dally,” Martin interrupted, hurrying her away.

  Auda kept her eyes on her feet as they strode along the path to Parchmenter’s Lane, until at last they reached the stationer’s shop. Sitting in the middle of the line of shops, the tiny building housed sheer wizardry: here one could buy all the ingredients to make someone smile, laugh, fall in love, even hate.

  Martin ushered her inside. The shop was arranged in precise order, each wall lined with shelves crammed with items. The lower sills held the inexpensive and bulky articles: copper vessels and clay pots; thongs, cords, and cloth boards for binding; glue made of gum, fish, and sometimes even cheese; wax tablets in red and green; bottles of chalk, ash, powdered bore, and pumice; clothlets; scraps of leather; old lengths of twice-used palimpsest; and a rack of thin needles. Auda trailed her fingers over a pair of rolled hemp balls and onto a stack of wooden boards—oak and smoothed pine.

  The higher shelves (in plain sight of Monsieur Tomas) stored the more expensive, exotic merchandise. Here lay the burnishing tools for smoothing parchment; quills, reed pens, and metal tips; bone points; gall ink and inkhorns; dyes of every color (red ochre, terre verte, saffron, red brazil, vegetable green pigments, azurite and tumsole seeds, even cinnabar and lapis lazuli); ivory tablets; knives of fine steel; creamy rolls of parchment and thinner sheets of vellum; and boxes whose treasures she had not yet had the chance to discover.

  Tomas himself guarded her favorite shelf, a thick plank of iron-studded wood bearing chains that hung in heavy loops behind his desk. Anchored into these chains were the books the stationer ordered from faraway scriptoriums, usually at the behest of a nobleman.