Chapter 10
That night, by the dancing light of a campfire, one of the goons fished the wool out of my mouth with a bit of twig. Then he held a jug to my mouth so I could wash the taste away.
“Just bread and water, I’m afraid,” Grimhild was saying. “Partly because we’ve found that when you’re recovering from possession, anything richer tends to come back out again with extreme prejudice. Also, it’s all we’ve got.”
That didn’t quite square with what I’d seen.
Simocatta’s people had loaded a large hamper on the cart, direct from the abbot’s kitchen.
It was still there, unopened. She must’ve seen me glance at it.
“You really wouldn’t want to eat anything out of that,” she said.
Ah, I thought. “It’d be meant for me, not you, but I don’t suppose the risk of collateral damage would bother that thing particularly much.
No, we’re sticking with the bread we brought with us, and water from the nearest stream.
Heartbreaking, if what I hear about Simocatta’s taste in food is anything to go by.
Is it true he spends ninety gulden a year just on truffles? ”
“Sixty,” I croaked. My throat felt like it was lined with thistles.
“I stand corrected. Sixty gulden. That man is a disgrace. Still.” She bit off a chunk of stale bread and chewed vigorously. “I wouldn’t want to be him, in a day or so.”
They were getting the wool out of Svangerd’s mouth. I think they were scared she’d bite them. “Really?” I said.
She tapped the side of her nose with her forefinger. “Let’s just say everything’s under control,” she said. “Even you two. For now.”
We chewed our bread and gulped down our water, which tasted of peat, and then the gags went back in. And so on and so forth, all the way to Kouden.
It wasn’t a place I ever expected to come back to, and the sight of it made me feel miserable.
A smith drilled us free of our chains with a bit and brace and we tried to stand up, which was of course hopelessly overoptimistic.
We were carried through the main gate, across a quadrangle into the stable yard, then through a small gate into another yard, mostly filled with junk; empty barrels, heaps of charcoal, stacks of logs.
Across that, another small gate, into a cloister.
Halfway down, a small, unobtrusive door. Welcome to the recovery ward.
Small cells, no windows, a glazed terracotta pot on the floor, a door made of iron bars so the guard could see what we were doing at all times.
The walls were yellow brick, which told me they were quite old; yellow brick came from the vast imperial brickworks at Olethria, and were shipped right across the empire, even though there were perfectly good brickyards in every province.
The floor was beaten clay-and-cow-dung mix, polished smooth as marble by centuries of bare feet.
The roof was rafters and boards, but much too high to reach.
Forget it, I told myself, and settled down to be utterly wretched.
At which point, the door opened and a guard came in.
He was carrying a small writing desk, and a book.
“She says you’re to make yourself useful,” he said.
The inside of my head flooded with light. “Thanks,” I said.
A book. Not just any book. Psammetichus’ Digest, that amazing, ridiculous magpie’s stash of history, gossip, comic songs, theological disputations, mathematical formulae and smutty stories compiled by Psammetichus of Luge in the reign of Lucian III.
There are nine surviving copies, three in my handwriting.
Strictly speaking the book is anathema, since it contains a quotation from the heretic Barcenna – actually, a recipe for sprats in batter with a cream and egg sauce, but that was enough for the Second General Synod to condemn the Digest to death by burning.
Inside the desk I found once-skived goatskin parchment, oak-gall ink in a lead bottle, nine pre-cut goosewing pens, a beech ruler and the small piece of soapstone without which laying out a page is next thing to impossible.
“How am I expected to do decent work in here?” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper. “It’s as dark as a bag.”
“She thought of that,” said the guard. “There’s a lamp on its way down from the stores.”
They put the lamp on the other side of the grill door.
Not just a lamp but a glorious Mezentine clear glass globe-shaped bowl, filled with water.
Put one in front of a lamp and it triples the amount of light.
It goes without saying that nobody knows how to make them any more, so this one had to be at least five hundred years old.
From time to time I would stop work and look up at it, a glowing ball of light, filling me with joy, fulfilment and purpose.
If you believe what they tell you, the Invincible Sun is exactly the same only more so, but I must confess I’ve never felt that way myself.
As far as I was concerned, the artificial Mezentine version was good enough for me.
Accordingly I bowed my head to it from time to time and worshipped it.
They say a man’s got to believe in something, after all.
I finished the copy of the Digest, slowly and reluctantly, not wanting it to end. At the bottom, I exercised a clerk’s privilege that I rarely indulge in, and signed my name; the one I was born with, not my name in religion.
About an hour later (though it was hard to judge time in my tiny paradise, by the light of my immobile man-made sun) the guards came and took away the desk and put out the lamp.
You’ve finished, they explained, and oil costs money.
But it’s all right. She’s got more books for you to copy, tomorrow or the next day.
Three endless days later, the desk returned, with a copy of Bryennius’ Introduction to Aelian Grammar.
It may not sound much, but it’s one of my favourite books ever, because Bryennius illustrates his lessons with quotations, mostly from archaic and classical poetry.
Embedded in his text are fragments written centuries before the first emperor was crowned, and very occasionally he quotes whole stanzas, even though all he’s doing is giving an example of the correct use of the pluperfect subjunctive, and if he hadn’t chosen to point out a rare but valid secondary use of the gerund, giving as an example an extended passage from the Lay of the Last Survivor, the human race would have entirely forgotten about the Great Mamertine War, fought between the Artonians and the Shascar two thousand years before the foundation of the city.
I finished Bryennius, but that was all right, because they’d been urging me to get a move on; they needed me to copy something else. I woke up to find the lamp lit and shining bright, and the desk beside me on the floor.
“Hello,” said a voice from out of the light. “How are you feeling?”
It took me a moment to place it: Mother Grimhild. “Fine,” I said.
She came forward out of glory and I was able to see her. She was holding a small three-legged stool. She put it down next to me and sat on it. “Don’t bother shutting the door,” she said to someone I couldn’t see. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“Have you brought the next book?” I asked.
“In a while,” she said. “Oh, and since you ask, Svangerd is doing very well.”
I hadn’t thought about her for days. “That’s good,” I said.
“It was touch and go at one point,” Grimhild said.
“She wouldn’t eat, so we had to force-feed her with a bone tube.
She cried non-stop for three days. Actually, that’s not unusual.
It takes some people that way. You think they’re fine and then they break down completely. But she’s starting to mend at last.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“When she was really bad she kept calling for you,” Grimhild went on.
“Your name and help me, over and over again.” She frowned.
“It puts me in an awkward position,” she went on.
“Strictly speaking I ought to split you two up. Probably I’d be doing you both a favour.
On the other hand, you do work well together. I’ll have to think about it.”
Behind her, the lamp shone. Thy will be done, I was tempted to say, but didn’t.
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” she went on. “I thought you might be interested to know. Tysapherna’s dead.”
Who? Oh, her. “I see,” I said.
She nodded. “She burned to death in a fire,” she went on, “the day after we left. Bad business. I’m afraid the monastery’s gone.”
Gone. What did that mean? Oh, I thought. “The library,” I said.
She pulled a sad face. “Pity about that,” she said.
“Simocatta sent his personal guard to try and save some of the books, but the roof fell in on them. The whole place went up like lamp oil. Apparently, just when the fire had taken hold, the wind changed. After that, there really wasn’t anything anybody could do. ”
There’s that line in Saloninus, when the devil comes to tempt the scholar. What are you doing here, the scholar says, you should be in hell. And the devil says: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
She looked straight at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it had to be done.”
“No,” I said. “No, it didn’t.”