Chapter 1 #5
She was so pleased with herself for figuring that out that she let me have three seconds or so in which to marshal my thoughts and arguments. “To be honest with you,” I said, “I don’t fancy killing anyone. Is that so bad?”
“Chicken,” she said. “And selfish.”
“Not really,” I said. “I’d say it was more having at least a tiny degree of respect for the sanctity of human—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Your precious conscience kicks up about guzzling a woman, or a nun, or a princess, but you haven’t got the guts to tell him to stuff his job, because you like your nice soft number in the scriptorium.
So you figure, if I make her do it, that means the blood’s on her hands.
Chicken, selfish and it doesn’t even work.
You’d still be as guilty as me. You’re pathetic, you know that? Only a complete moron lies to himself.”
There are times when I don’t like the truth very much.
“Fine,” I said. “Guilty as charged. But so what? You don’t mind killing women, or nuns, or princesses.
In fact, you positively enjoy it. No, don’t do all that emoting, it’s true.
You love killing aristocrats. It’ll be your birthday and All Saints all rolled into one. ”
“We’ll do it my way,” she said. “Agreed?”
“Absolutely not. It’s crude. It’s too risky. We’ll get caught. We’ll start a war.”
“Glad we’ve got that sorted out,” she said. “I’ll go and make the arrangements.”
*
Money: a bit of a sore subject, between you and me.
When I was a kid, before I left the world, I had an uncle.
Through no fault of his own he got into debt; he owed his landlord forty deniers rent and six deniers for seed corn, and then it rained all spring and he got washed out and nothing grew.
My uncle tried borrowing the money but all his family and friends were in the same boat, and he came up thirty deniers short.
So the landlord took him to the hiring fair at Jokulsness and sold him.
He fetched forty-two deniers, and the landlord scrupulously paid over the balance to my father as his next-of-kin. Hard but fair, our landlord.
Thirty years later, I breeze into the abbot’s exchequer with a bit of parchment in my hand, a bored clerk glances at it, waddles over to one of the big iron-bound oak chests, jangles a few keys and hands me a linen purse containing a hundred deniers.
I sign a receipt and that’s that. Nobody will ask me what I spend it on, and if I try and give some of it back after the mission’s over, the clerk will give me a horrible scowl and curse me under his breath, because paying expenses out is dead easy but paying them back in again once they’ve been issued is an administrative nightmare.
It can only be resolved by cutting a page out of the ledger, copying everything out again in slightly smaller lettering (to fit in a new entry) and pasting the new page in, with affidavits annexed to authorise the removal and substitution of a page …
So if I have anything left over at the end of a job, which I usually do, I have to run the gauntlet of the beggars on the priory steps, handing out ludicrous amounts of silver without getting my arms ripped out of their sockets in the process.
I don’t know what she does with her leftover expenses, but I have a shrewd suspicion she’s endowing an order of poor friars back in her hometown, wherever that is.
Anyway, money makes absolutely no sense, like everything else in this business.
I got my money from the exchequer, a new travelling gown and boots from the wardrobe, various specialist tools from the scriptorium, the Stack and the dispensary, and a set of impeccable credentials from the abbot’s chaplain, authorising me as a delegate to the council.
While I was in the chaplaincy office, I scarfed up half a dozen quarter-sheets of his parchment and leaned on his seal with a lump of soft wax in the palm of my hand while his attention was on other things.
I do my own wax casting. It’s a bit of a rigmarole.
You use the wax impression you’ve furtively obtained to make a plaster matrix, which you use to make a wax matrix, which you encase in clay.
You melt the wax out of the clay, which leaves you with a mould into which you pour molten bronze.
That gives you a more-or-less perfect copy of the original, and the rest of the day’s your own.
I collect seals; it’s a hobby of mine, like some people collect old books or icons by the great masters or weapons of historic significance.
I’ve got half a dozen chaplaincy seals – they keep changing the pattern, which is a nuisance; depending on the purported age of the document you’re faking, you have to know which pattern was current when.
People in my line of work have come to grief over details like that, but not me.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” Brother Artifex wanted to know, when he caught me in his workshop using his furnace and crucible.
“Classified,” I said.
“Piss off. How many times do I have to tell you, don’t screw around with my stuff without asking. When you ask, I say yes. When you don’t ask—”
“Sorry.” I gave him my charming smile. It’s not very good and I really need to get another one. “I needed some bits and pieces for a job.”
He scowled at me. “When people want bits and pieces they come to me,” he said. “They tell me what they want and I make them. They don’t just wade in and overheat my crucibles.”
“Can you overheat a crucible? I thought—”
“You were wrong. Give it here.”
Oh dear. My fault. I’d figured that I’d be safe, because the third Monday in Advent is when Brother Artifex goes to the woods to collect his winter supply of charcoal.
What I hadn’t taken into account was the heavy rain three days earlier, which by now would have drained down off the hills and swollen the river to flood, making the ford at Spitz impassable.
That’s the trouble with high precision and dead reckoning.
You need to allow for all the variables, not just the ones you happen to remember.
It was his workshop, so he took over. The casting went off just fine, and he broke open the mould. “What’s that?”
“Classified.”
“It’s a seal.” He picked it up in the tongs and peered at it. “Are you supposed to have this?”
“Of course,” I said. “Ask Father Prior if you don’t believe me.”
He gave me that look of his, which always reminds me of a screw thread. “Nothing to do with me,” he said. I think it was slowly dawning on him that by not asking him to make me a hooky seal, I’d actually done him a favour, in a left-handed sort of a way. “Anything else you want, while you’re here?”
Yes, I didn’t tell him: some keys, to be cast from the wax impressions in the little box in the sleeve of my gown, and a thin, sharp blade, capable of being concealed in the spine of a pocket-size missal or psalter. “So,” I said, “you weren’t able to go and fetch the charcoal.”
“No.”
“Nuisance, that.”
“Guess I’ll just have to go tomorrow,” he said warily, “when the river’s had a chance to settle down.”
I nodded. “Mind how you go,” I said.
I looked in the index – six calf-bound volumes the size of paving-slabs – and saw that the abbot’s copy of Hvittinga’s Old High Permian grammar and lexicon was in the New Building, second floor, room six, east wall, sixth shelf, location 47. Only it wasn’t.
That was a nuisance. There are eight known copies of Hvittinga, spread across the known world with annoyingly large gaps between them.
The closest one was, in fact, in Choris Anthropou, which was where I was headed.
Of course, it was possible that someone had wanted to look something up and had neglected to fill out a docket and file it with the librarian. People can be so careless.
So I tried asking around, but nobody I knew had heard of any of the other names on the list, the one with my name at the top of it. I didn’t ask Egil, of course.
Life, I’ve always firmly believed, was supposed to be simple.
The purpose of a living thing is to reproduce.
Ancillary to that purpose, it needs to stay alive long enough to find a mate and do the job, which means it has to find and eat food.
If it’s a mammal, it also needs to survive until its offspring is old enough to look after itself.
That’s basically it. Anything else is just over-complication and self-indulgence.
Holy Mother Church, of course, begs to differ.
Holy Mother Church holds that the purpose of human life is to glorify the name of the Invincible Sun, and nothing else.
Ancillary to that purpose is staying alive and procreating further generations of worshippers – but strictly ancillary.
Back in the old empire, of course, there were philosophers who had all sorts of crazy notions – liberty, the pursuit of happiness – which they set out in detail in books which are now mostly lost. A few tantalising quotations remain, preserved in books on grammar, rhetoric and bee-keeping, but mostly they’re gone for ever and, guess what, life goes on.
When I was a kid, everything really was pretty simple, on a farm in the Mesoge, the armpit of the known world.
The Mesoge was the anvil on which my worldview was forged, and I see no reason to revise my opinions.
Life was supposed to be simple, and human beings were designed to live the simple life. Coping with the complicated shit is an unnatural skill. I have many unnatural skills, of which I’m not proud, but not nearly enough.