Chapter 2 #4
I looked at the box. The box seemed to look at me. “No, seriously,” I said. “How much?”
“Two.”
I hardly dared get close to it. At some point, some lunatic had painted it with lime whitewash, which had turned a sort of orange-grey under the influence of our common enemy, Time. Ignore the whitewash and consider the proportions. I’d seen them before, and I never forget a ratio.
“Two deniers for an old box.”
“There’s stuff in it.”
“Probably just old papers,” I said.
“I thought you liked old papers.”
I steeled myself, took a long stride forward and lifted the lid just enough to see inside. Old papers. “I might be able to shift it in Choris as a spice-box,” I said. “Half a denier.”
He shrugged. “I’m sick of the sight of the bloody thing,” he said. “Three farthings.”
Just a box, painted white, measuring maybe seven inches by five by four.
The one I’d seen just like it sat on the desk of the late duke, my previous employer.
It was Echmen burr rosewood – the trees are extinct now; five hundred years ago the reigning Echmen emperor had the last few of them cleared and burned, so that his suite of rosewood furniture would for ever be unique – and it was made in Mezentia by a craftsman whose name has been lost, but who was without doubt the finest cabinetmaker there’s ever been.
The duke wasn’t really fussed about the box.
What he cared about was what was inside it.
The unknown craftsman made boxes like the duke’s to house very special books.
I walked out of the shop and fifty yards down the street, then ducked in under an arch and lifted the lid, a bit wider this time.
Inside I saw four rolls of cream-white parchment, about as long as my index finger.
Rolls, mark you, not bound books, codices.
I had to lean against the wall to steady myself, and anybody passing would quite reasonably have assumed that I was drunk.
Which, in a sense, was true. Exhilaration and intoxication.
The Mezentine cabinetmaker who made the boxes worked for just one customer. We know him as the general secretary, which is short for general secretary pro tem of the Loyal Opposition.
What I needed to do was think, but that wasn’t easy with my brain churning like Svangerd’s stomach in a gale.
Talking of Svangerd, there was a chance, slim but real, that she might recognise the box for what it was, in which case nothing would keep her from smashing it to bits, burning the fragments and dumping the ashes in running water.
That complicated things. Also, I was going to Choris, and in Choris, at an ecumenical council, there was a good chance I’d be able to find someone who’d be able to read what was written on the four scrolls.
But once he’d done that he’d be in on the secret …
Suppose you lived in a big city and someone gave you a rat in a jar and told you, this is a plague rat.
Also inside the jar is a gold ten-bezant piece, and you and your family are starving.
So long as the rat stays in the jar, nobody’s going to get sick, but you and your wife and your six kids are going to starve to death, sure as apples; and who knows, you or one of your kids might be the one in fifty people who are immune to the plague. A bit like that.
Needless to say, I don’t believe in the general secretary or the Loyal Opposition.
If I believed in them, I’d have to believe in a lot of other stuff, such as the Invincible Sun, Good and Evil, life after death and all manner of other superstitious nonsense.
What was inside the box, therefore, couldn’t possibly be real – But a great many people, ninety-nine per cent of all living humans, would beg to differ with me on that point, and half of them would want to know what the writing on the rolls said, and the other half would cheer Svangerd on and hold her coat for her while she got rid of them for ever and ever.
The true gospels; being an accurate and authentic account of the Invincible Sun’s ministry on earth as incarnate Man.
As opposed to the Gospels, which purport to be an accurate and authentic account but probably aren’t; what they are is, of course, scripture, and the bedrock and foundation of the faith and Holy Mother Church.
Here’s the thing. The Gospels contradict each other.
There are large chunks in the First Gospel that are plainly interpolations, added at a later date by someone who wanted to steer the infant Church in a direction it ultimately didn’t take.
There are also a lot of improbable stories, wacky miracles, angels and demons, the sort of things even bishops can’t quite bring themselves to believe in, but they don’t actually say so out loud.
The official line is that the Gospels are the Word of the Invincible Sun filtered through the minds and perceptions of the fallible humans who heard the Word and wrote it down, hence all the garbage.
As to provenance, the Gospels seem to have been written somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred years after the events they describe, so presumably by second-generation believers recording an oral tradition that was starting to get a bit frayed at the edges.
But for all their faults they’re scripture, the most precious scripture of all, and there are half a dozen prayers you’re supposed to say to cleanse your spirit before you so much as open the book.
And then there are the true gospels. They’re written in Volusian, an extremely rare and obscure dead language hardly anybody can read these days, which happens to be the language that everybody was speaking and writing in the place and time when the Ministry took place; they’ve never been translated, for obvious reasons.
Very little is known about them, but one thing we do know is that they were written much earlier, say about fifteen to twenty years after the Ministry, and about eighty per cent of the content is identical; the same incidents described, the same speeches and parables and sermons.
But an awful lot of things (the improbable stories, wacky miracles, angels and demons) are left out, and in their place there’s other stuff: other incidents, other speeches, parables and sermons, that make perfect sense in context, but which leave you with a rather different message than the one you get from proper orthodox scripture.
Holy Mother Church has known about the true gospels for a very long time, ever since she was a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics meeting in rooms over stables and hiding in drains from the police.
She takes the view that the true gospels are heresy: forgeries concocted by the Evil One to lead the faithful astray.
Look, she says, at the subtlety of the deception – eighty per cent true, twenty per cent poison; unless you happened to know (because you’d been told) that these abominable texts were evil lies, you could very easily believe them and be seduced into blasphemous error, because they’re so horribly plausible.
Furthermore, Holy Mother Church added at a later date, they don’t actually exist. What people call the true gospels are actually forgeries, concocted centuries later by enemies of the faith who also went back and altered the manuscripts of the Early Fathers, inserting references to the true gospels to give them a spurious provenance.
Fortunately (says Holy Mother Church) the original manuscripts of the true gospels were long ago hunted out and destroyed, so if anyone shows you a set of four old books and tells you that’s them, they’re lying or deluded.
Furthermore, anybody claiming to own or have read them is undoubtedly an agent of the Loyal Opposition, and it’s your duty to hand them over to the nearest canons juridical for immediate execution.
In particular, be on your guard for small rosewood Mezentine boxes, exquisitely made, containing four small rolls of cream-white parchment written in Volusian.
Served me right for fooling about in shops when I ought to have been finding us a boat to Choris. I pulled myself together with a snap and made a decision.
Nobody knew what I’d got. The man in the shop knew I now had a box, but nobody knew what that box was, or it wouldn’t have been in the shop.
For now, unless I told someone or I took the box somewhere it could be recognised by an expert, the rat was still in the jar and no danger to anybody.
There are a great many disused wells in Mavais.
I could lift the lid and drop it down, and chances were that nobody would ever find it.
Or I could put it on the fire, or wait till we were on the boat to Choris and drop it over the side.
If I did that, it wouldn’t be a problem any more, not to me, not to anyone.
On the other hand, it was – well, what it was. Indescribably important, a slice of human knowledge and experience that couldn’t be allowed to perish, not if I planned on ever sleeping again. I had a duty –
I have lots of duties. That’s fine so long as they don’t conflict, but all too often they do, and that’s why my life is not, on balance, a happy one.
Naturally I couldn’t just keep the bloody thing, as my very own, as a possession.
In theory at least, my vow means that I have no possessions, merely the use of certain artefacts owned by the order.
That meant that my choice was properly between killing the box and giving it to someone. The right someone.
The abbot. Oh boy, yes. Abbot Simocatta would love to have it.
Having got it, he’d be embarrassingly grateful to me for the rest of his life and quite possibly make me his successor.
Was he the right person to have the box?
Decidedly not. It would sit on his desk in pride of place, and the four rolls of parchment would stay inside it, unread, since none of us at the abbey could read them, and he wouldn’t dare tell anyone else what he’d got for fear they’d turn up under his castle walls with an army and try and take it away from him.
And then he’d die and I’d take his place, and the problem would come back to me, like a homing pigeon.
But I was going to Choris, to an ecumenical council.
And I wouldn’t have to come right out with it and say, I have this box with me, in this very building.
I could say I knew where it was, or I had an idea where it might be, and gauge the reaction.
If it turned out that the man I was talking to belonged to the burn-the-abomination school, then I’d go away and look for it and not find it, and that would be that.
If, however, he promised me faithfully that it would be kept safe and transcribed and studied by serious scholars – assuming, of course, that he was telling the truth.
Not always a safe assumption, I’ve found, when dealing with people.
Or I could look for a safe place, right here in Mavais, and leave it there, so at least I wouldn’t have the wretched thing on me, a responsibility and a threat to my life.
Echmen rosewood is amazing stuff. It doesn’t warp or crack like other woods do, and things kept in it stay good for ever, and the nameless Mezentine craftsman could make a box that was genuinely airtight – somewhere like the gap between the top of the wall and the rafters in an old shed somewhere, the sort of place nobody would ever think to look, just long enough for me to go away, get my head together, then come back and fetch it.
We’d be passing through Mavais on our way home from Choris after the council.
But there was a good chance we wouldn’t be coming back, bearing in mind what we were going to Choris to do … It shows what an effect the box was having on me that it had driven all that out of my mind, until I suddenly remembered it.
You need to tell Svangerd, nagged a little voice in the back of my head.
Bullshit, I told it. She only needed to know if the rat managed to find its way out of the jar.
In the meantime, I was doing her a favour by not telling her, since she tends to fret when she thinks that instruments of pure evil are loose in the vicinity.
In fact, the only responsible thing I could possibly do, at least until I’d reached an informed decision, was not tell anyone.
In my shoes, Svangerd would’ve taken responsibility one step further, gone back to the shop and killed the owner; bearing in mind what was at stake, for once she wouldn’t be overreacting.
But I guess I’m basically childish and frivolous by nature, because as far as I was concerned, that would be one step too far.
If only I had a friend in Mavais I knew I could trust –but I didn’t. Which meant the box was coming with us to Choris. Nuts.