Chapter 7 #5
Grudgingly I allowed my heart to burst into song.
I wasn’t going to have to do this alone.
She’d be with me. She’d be with me because – not a logical conclusion to draw, merely an intuitive one – she liked me and didn’t want me to get killed; more to the point, she’d forgiven me, and that mattered a lot.
And with her along, who knows, we might even win.
The last thing I’d ever do would be underestimate her abilities with weapons.
It’s the last thing quite a few people ever did, as a matter of fact.
Not something to dwell on, but good to have at the back of my mind.
“Fine,” I said. “Now put it away, for pity’s sake, before someone sees it.”
“You,” she said, “are a disgrace to your cultural heritage, you know that? I thought you liked fine weapons in the Mesoge.”
I rolled my eyes. She was quite right. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a terrifying old man who lived in absolute squalor in a turf hut with only two-thirds of a roof.
He ate nettles in season, mice and sparrows when he could get them, and his three acres of land were mostly docks, brambles and withies, but he owned seven magnificent pattern-welded swords, in exquisite bone and parcel-gilt scabbards, and a halberd worth a hundred oxen.
People used to walk for days across the mountains to see his collection.
When I knew him he was so old and feeble he could barely lift them off their hooks, and when he died they were buried with him, which everybody thought was perfectly reasonable.
A year later, someone dug into his mound and stole the lot, which is also a fine old Mesoge tradition, and none of my family felt any need to do anything about it.
“Put it away,” I repeated. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Six hundred years old and still as sharp as a razor,” she said fondly.
“All it needs is a few touches with the water-stone and a quick brush-up with the steel and it’s good to go.
” She wrapped it up and laid it down on the ground beside her.
“You know, there might be something in this notion of yours. They don’t make ’em like that any more. ”
“If I were you,” I said severely, “I’d find a nice quiet corner of a side-chapel somewhere and have a good pray. Calm yourself down, before you get over-excited.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” she said quietly. “After all, it might be the last chance I get.”
That hurt. If Kotkel came and she was killed – I worry about her, a lot of the time.
She thinks she’s indestructible, and in all the years I’ve known her she’s only got herself badly cut up twice, which is astounding when you think about it.
The second time, I actually spent the night on my knees in front of an altar, praying to a god I knew didn’t exist, until someone came and told me she was out of danger.
We all do stupid things sometimes. Luckily, she never found out, or there’d have been hell to pay.
But Kotkel would be a different matter, and my theory about imperial metallurgy was just that, a theory.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, on an impulse I only half understood. “I can sit at the back and read a book while you do your mumbling.”
“Piss off.”
We decided on the Rose Chapel, which was likely to be deserted at that time of day.
She went and kneeled in front of the altar (a magnificent Aesthetic-era triptych, flanked by neo-Mannerist frescoes; she didn’t even glance at them) and I sat in the window-seat with my feet up and found my place in my pocket-sized copy of Nicephorus’ Commentaries.
The late sun was slanting in through the window, her soft chanting was distinctly soporific and Nicephorus isn’t calculated to keep a man awake at the best of times.
I was hovering on the edge of a doze when a man and a woman came bustling in.
“Sister Svangerd,” the woman sang out. “Is that you?”
Svangerd shot up and spun round. The woman lowered her hood: a thin face, iron-grey hair cropped short. “Sister,” Svangerd said. She sounded like she’d been caught in the branches of a tree, stealing apples.
The man stayed where he was. The woman looked at me, scowled, and went over to where Svangerd was standing.
She whispered in Svangerd’s ear for quite some time.
Then Svangerd said, “Of course,” or something like that.
The woman nodded and walked away, collecting the man on the threshold. I stood up and put my book away.
“What was all that about?”
She looked scared. “Mother Krimhild,” she said.
I knew all about Mother Krimhild. When Svangerd left the world and asked to join the order, nobody wanted to have her.
She was too far gone, they all said – irredeemably bad, and with violent antisocial tendencies.
But Mother Krimhild didn’t think so. She ran a small priory in Neidhol, where she wrote commentaries, composed beautiful music and painted illuminated missals so lovely they reduce me to tears.
Her Nine Tears of Grace is still regarded as the definitive work on the Hermit Fathers, and she’s the only woman ever to have been invited to join the Standing Commission on Orthodoxy, though she sensibly refused.
I thought she’d died years ago, but apparently not.
“She’s here?”
Nod. “She’s ill. She’s had a stroke. And she wants to see me.”
“Go,” I said. “Here, give me that. I’ll take care of it.”
She thrust the cloth bundle at me. “Stay here,” she said.
“Sure. Good luck.”
It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but it got me a smile.
I sat down in front of the altar with the bundle on the floor at my feet, and tried to appreciate the glory of the triptych, but I couldn’t really see it.
The stroke, presumably, was brought on by horror at the prospect of schism.
Some people take things so very seriously.
If Svangerd saw Krimhild die, it’d probably be the end of her.
Love, you see. It makes a mess of everything.
I don’t know how long I sat there, but it was nearly dark when Svangerd came back. She sat down next to me and bowed her head.
“Well?”
“She’s really sick,” she said. “She could hardly speak.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She needs me to do something for her.”
“Good. Do it.”
She took a deep breath. “She’s written a speech, to be delivered to the council. She can’t do it herself, so she wants me to.”
“Good choice,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
She shook her head. “It means I won’t be able to come with you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
She looked up at me. “I’m scared,” she said. “She’s lying there all alone in the dark. What if the monster comes and gets her?”
Not a bad point. If I were Kotkel and I really wanted to depress everybody, I couldn’t ask for a more appropriate victim than Prioress Krimhild. “I’ll be there,” I said, before I realised I was speaking. “Can you arrange for me to be let in? I can’t just go wandering about the nuns’ apartments.”
“I’ll see to it,” she said. “Thanks.”
Isn’t that what every young man longs for, the chance to play knight errant?
Have no fear, my lady, et cetera. Instead I felt terrified and guilty, as though I’d just undertaken to play the harp in front of the archduke and his entire court (I can’t, of course, play the harp).
What if Kotkel turned up and I couldn’t stop him?
That would be really bad. But that thought didn’t seem to have crossed her mind.
“Have you seen the speech?”
“What? No, I haven’t. She’s dictating it now. With any luck I’ll have time to read it through before I have to say it out loud. Come on. I’ll take you to her.”
My room was on the way. I stopped off to dump the sword and pick up my billhook.
She hadn’t had an opportunity to put a really fine edge on it for me, but I couldn’t actually see that it would matter in the long run.
How different, I said to myself, my life would have been if I’d been an only child.
Better, quite possibly. Definitely longer.
As I made my way through the corridors and cloisters, I met big mobs of people streaming the other way, going to the debate.
They gave off a feeling of excited urgency, as though they were going to an execution, not quite sure whether it was to be someone else’s or their own.
All in all, I didn’t mind not joining them.
Confession time: I may not believe in God but I guess I do believe in Holy Mother Church, and the sight of her ripping herself to pieces wasn’t one I was eager to witness.
I thought about that as I crossed the inner quadrangle and climbed the long staircase to where I was going.
Holy Mother Church is built four square on a lie, rather like the Asecuivo Company in the late empire, which raised millions of bezants to fund the colonisation of a distant country they knew didn’t actually exist, because they’d made it up.
But they put on such a convincing show that a group of their rivals got together and resolved to find another route to the fabulous Isle of Asecuivo, with a view to poaching on the Company’s monopoly, and in the process discovered the genuine and fabulously wealthy Denaura Islands, where spice grows like weeds and the beaches are littered with orange amber.
Holy Mother Church may have invented its Asecuivo, but without her we’d never have had Denaura – the books which her libraries preserved when the empire crashed, a handful of seedcorn rescued from the long winter.
For all I know, the Denaura islands are still there, still shaded from the year-round sun by the leafy tops of nutmeg and mace and gum trees, bowed down with priceless fruit and dripping rich orange sap from every trunk; but of course we don’t go there any more.
One day, maybe, we’ll be able to afford to go back, by which time I sincerely trust we’ll have learned that there’s more to life than nutmeg.