Chapter 2 #6
We’d arrived at Bockstad, formerly the imperial university town of Clea Andron.
Once upon a time, the whole space between the foregate and the cathedral green was the Master’s park, the biggest and most important formal gardens north of Boc Bohec.
Now it was a rutted cart track leading to two dozen thatched roofs and a rather smelly tannery.
All that’s left of the foregate is one frost-gnawed fluted column, about thirty feet tall and leaning at an angle of roughly five degrees.
I could picture it as it used to be because there’s a detailed description of it in Rutimer’s Principal Buildings, one of the first books I copied when I was a novice in the scriptorium.
Presumably it’s all still there somewhere, ten feet down under the brambles, grass and dirt; the tessellated pavements, the footprint of the buildings, the bones of twenty generations of monks who died believing the university would be there for ever.
When I think about it, the sheer scale of what we’ve lost makes me feel sick and terrified.
And it’s really lost and gone for ever, and it’ll never come back, and there is no resurrection and life everlasting, only thistles and withies and new generations of men and women no better or more valuable than animals.
“We’re not here to enjoy ourselves,” Svangerd growled back. “And high mass in the basilica here is probably heretical and idolatrous. I can say mass back home, and I know it’s orthodox there. Stop trying to bribe me, I’m not a kid.”
“Suit yourself. If you want to miss out on an enriching spiritual experience, that’s up to you.”
She gave me her special glare, the one she reserves for when I’ve convinced her to do something.
The basilica of the Holy Child is three-quarters how it used to be, which is somehow worse.
About two hundred years ago they had a fire in the transept and part of the roof fell in.
Now, when you reach the top of the hill and look down on it, you see the green copper dome, the steel-blue slates, and a kind of saddle of greyish thatch separating them.
Thatch, for crying out loud. But the original slates came eight hundred miles from Auxentia, and ships don’t go that way any more, and nobody knows if the quarries are still there.
“Stop moaning, for pity’s sake,” she told me. “It keeps the rain out. And it’s wrong to have all that pretty decoration in a church. You should be listening to the words, not gawping at the decor.”
Not a topic on which we’ll ever agree, so I shut my face and tried not to gawp obviously.
Difficult, when you’re standing in the nave of a middle period Perfectionist basilica directly underneath the Harrowing of Hell as interpreted by the school of Adanarich the Younger, with the light streaming in through classical late-Roseate stained glass.
It was the sort of beauty that could almost kid me into believing, if I didn’t know better.
The choir wasn’t helping, either. At the Holy Child they sing a special mass all of their own, which some people speculate contains elements of the Procopian rite; if so, it’s a thousand years old, maybe the oldest music that still survives anywhere.
It’s not written down, because nobody knows how to do that any more.
It survives because brother cantor hums the tune to the novices, and yells at them till they get it just right; and fifty years later, one of those novices is the new cantor and gets to do the yelling.
Sorry if I’m banging on about something that doesn’t interest you, but I personally find it amazing; tiny scraps of the music that sprang into the head of Procopius forty generations ago, preserved in the most unlikely and inefficient way possible, but nevertheless preserved…
For now, anyway. All it would take would be for someone like Svangerd to decide that music is idolatry and they don’t hold with it, and that’ll be gone, too.
I guess the word I’m groping for is Progress.
It never ceases to stun me that there are still people who believe that Progress is an actual thing, rather than a sick joke.
My view is that we all progress until we’re too feeble to stand up any more, and then we die.
“Well?” I said, as we filed out after the blessing.
She glared at me some more. “Yes, all right,” she said. “It was beautiful.”
“Glad you came?”
“Piss off. And I still think it’s – well, a bit iffy, at the very least. Yes, I felt there like I was actually touching something I can never usually quite reach, which was pretty amazing.
But you just wanted to see the cute paintings and listen to the nice music.
That’s what’s wrong. It’s like Mother Anthemia used to say.
You’re never closer to the devil than when you’re in church. ”
At precisely that moment someone shoved past me, and I looked at him, and recognised him, and he grinned back at me and hurried away. Sigurthus. Oh, come on, I thought.
I didn’t tell her I’d seen Sigurthus.
I’ve kept information of that kind back from her on a number of occasions, and it’s nearly always ended in tears. What can I say? I’m an idiot.
“You really are something else,” she said to me, as we set off early the next morning.
“One minute it’s, there’s no hurry, let’s take our time and see the sights.
The next, it’s early starts and if we get a move on, we can be in Burnfels by nightfall.
Actually, the bit I really don’t get is why I ever listen to you at all.
I ought to just ignore you, like a crying kid. ”
I muttered something about getting the jump on the weather, which was about to change. Since the sky overhead was unbroken blue, I didn’t put much effort into it. Better to save my sincerity for later, when I might need it.
“Why are you so miserable?” she asked me, as the cart we were hitching a ride on lumbered down the broad track along the bottom of the Stacheldorn valley.
“It’s a warm, sunny day and we’re riding, not walking, we’re ahead of schedule and nobody’s trying to kill us.
You should be happy, for crying out loud. ”
“I’m happy,” I snapped back.
“No, you’re not. When you’re happy, you burble. You don’t just sit there with a face like bad constipation.” She frowned. “There’s something you haven’t told me.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there isn’t. If you must know, I’m going through some details of our cover story.”
“What, again?” She rolled her eyes. “You know your trouble? You overcomplicate everything. Too much detail.”
“There’s no such thing as too much detail,” I said. “It’s the whole art of deception. A lie can’t just be a coat of limewash, it’s got to be right down to your bones. Otherwise you’ll never convince anybody.”
“I worry about you sometimes,” she said. “Anyway, try not to pull those horrible faces, you’re depressing me.”
Fair enough. I tried to think of something cheerful – no, that wouldn’t do, it’d have to be something wondrous and joyful. So I imagined Sigurthus nailed to a door by his ears, and Svangerd smashing his ribs with a mattock handle.