Chapter 8 #2
How did I go about faking the true gospels? Good question. I know everything there is to know about falsifying ancient documents, but I didn’t see how it was possible.
Among the delegates, I’d noticed a number of very illustrious men, and one exceptional woman.
Let’s start with her first: Sister Ulularia, from the Tears of Grace in Ormsfell.
She’d spoken briefly in a debate, and I remember looking at her and thinking, So that’s her, the woman I’ve been hearing about all my life.
Sister Ulularia is the greatest living expert on parchment.
She grew up in a tannery, so she knows every type of skin there is.
She left the world and was assigned to a scriptorium when she was twelve years old, so she’s been in the business over fifty years.
She can tell, just by looking, how old a piece of parchment is, what it was made from, where the skin originated – where on the animal, where in the world – how it was cured, skived and burnished; more to the point, when it was made, and if her professional instinct isn’t good enough, she’ll go through it point by point, like a doctor of logic, explaining how she arrived at her conclusion: colour, texture, smell, degree of translucency, grain direction, as governed by a thousand years of fashions in parchment manufacture.
She’d been appointed to the commission of enquiry, so by now she’d undoubtedly seen the true gospels and declared that the parchment they were written on was unimpeachably right, exactly what it should be.
Then there was Father Zosimus, who I already knew by sight: he’d testified in a trial before the canons juridical as an expert witness, pointing out certain fatal errors I’d made in faking a charter.
Zosimus is the ink man. He knows as much about ink as Ulularia does about parchment.
His oldest and dearest friend is Brother Hunferth – they were novices together at the Holy Mountain – and they often work together.
Hunferth’s field of expertise is lettering.
He was the last man ever to read Callinicus’ Epigraphy before it was lost in a fire, and they reckon he memorised it, word for word.
Someone like me can tell demotic uncials from cursive italics, but Hunferth can tell you exactly when and where a page was written; usually he can identify the scribe, although his name has long since been forgotten, simply by a distinctive hook at the end of a letter or a habit of resting his pen every time he looked up at the text he’s copying.
Zosimus and Hunferth have been inseparable for sixty-four years, so naturally they were both at the council, and were on the commission.
So was Canon Jormunrec of Vaffe, the foremost living authority on ancient languages, and Brother Terving, a man who under other circumstances I’d have fallen down and worshipped like a god, because of his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient imperial prosody.
They were all on the commission, they’d all have seen the contents of the little wooden box, and none of them would have had a moment’s hesitation in announcing that whether or not the true scriptures were scripture, they most definitely weren’t recent fakes, dashed off by a third-rate forger in a remote northern scriptorium with no access to rare or controlled materials –
Their word against mine; oh boy.
Then I pulled myself together just a bit, and thought it through.
Why was I being forced to do this dreadful thing?
To sabotage the brittle truce that Svangerd’s speech had brought about and plunge Holy Mother Church into schism.
That was the objective. So what would I need to do in order to achieve it?
Answer: it wouldn’t have to be perfect. In fact, perfect would be counterproductive.
If I got up on my hind legs and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the true gospels were fakes (but they weren’t; the truth was, as usual, irrelevant), that would have the effect of knocking the schism on the head for good and all.
Precisely what my loathsome new friend didn’t want.
No: what he was after was an irreconcilable difference of opinion between the experts on the commission, leading to an inconclusive verdict, probably a minority report by the dissenting faction; all of which would be like breaking into a prison and handing out spears to the lifers.
If the commission fell apart within days of its formation, that would be the last, best hope for avoiding schism gone up in flames and I’d have done my job, so Svangerd ought to be safe –
Now then, I thought, that’s more like it.
I only needed to be plausible in one department.
All the other experts would pronounce the texts to be genuine, but one expert would stand up and say no, this man could have done what he claims to have done, and therefore there’s reasonable doubt.
Cue disagreement, dissent, taking of sides, chaos and the violent death of Holy Mother Church, an institution (did I ever mention that?) of which I happen to approve wholeheartedly.
One department. In other words, I had to single out one of the experts and figure out a way of making him (or her) believe that a perfectly genuine document was hooky. That was still impossible, but it was a smaller, more concentrated, more tightly focused impossibility. Things were looking up.
“We should leave,” she said. “Go home. This place is starting to get to me.”
I’d seen that coming, rather like a soldier in a vastly outnumbered army watching the enemy advancing. “Agreed,” I said. “But I don’t suppose they’ll let me go. They’ll need me to give evidence to the commission. You can go, though. In fact, I think you should.”
“Balls,” she said. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. When I’m not watching you like a hawk, you do really stupid things. Like buying those books.”
“One of us needs to report back to the abbot for instructions. In case you’ve forgotten, we’re here as his representatives. We work for him. And right now, he needs to be told what’s going on. I can’t go, obviously, so it has to be you.”
“Keeping you from making more fuck-ups is more important.”
“No,” I said. “You can’t go making decisions like that off your own hook. Remember your vow of obedience. You used to take stuff like that seriously.”
I felt like I’d just kicked a puppy. “Fuck you,” she said. “All right, I’ll go back. But not until the commission’s made its report.”
“You can’t—”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “So I do as you say and I go back to Simocatta and I tell him, there’s a commission which is going to solve the question once and for all, but I decided to come back a day or so before it made its report. Do you think he’ll be impressed by that? I don’t.”
“Fine,” I said. “Stay.”
“And while I’m here,” she added, “I might as well kill the monster.”
Oh, for crying out loud. “You what?”
“Well,” she said, “you aren’t capable of it; that’s obvious.
You tried and you failed. Not your fault.
It just happens not to be your particular field of excellence.
But killing stuff is what I’m good at, and nobody else seems inclined to do it, so I guess it’ll have to be me.
It’s all right,” she went on, while I was still trying to regain the use of my voice, “you can tell me everything I need to know about these monsters, and then I can figure out a way of guzzling it, and that’ll be that. ”
“You lunatic,” I said, “haven’t you been listening? They can’t be killed.”
“So you say,” she said, “though what you’re actually saying is, nobody’s ever managed to kill one yet.
And since the only people who’ve ever tried are a bunch of hick farmers in that godforsaken place you come from, I don’t necessarily take that as conclusive proof.
But even if you’re right, they can be stopped, like you stopped—” She pulled up short, as if she’d just put her foot in a rabbit-hole.
“The first one. Well, he hasn’t been back, has he? ”
“Svangerd, they’re dangerous.”
“Oh, come on.”
“They are. They’re eight feet tall. Weapons won’t touch them.”
She sighed. “Most of the people I guzzle are taller than me,” she said. “You get used to that when you’re a girl. And you said that old steel made by the empire—”
“That’s just a theory.”
“Sounds convincing to me. Look, somebody’s got to try. We can’t simply let this thing roam around squashing people’s heads for ever and ever, that’s not right. You can’t let Evil win just because you’re scared it might hurt you.”
“Why not?” She’d got me well and truly rattled.
“Look, by your own argument, they can only damage the body, not the soul. So what’s really happening is, all these good people Kotkel’s killing are going to their eternal reward a bit ahead of schedule.
Fine. Probably if he didn’t kill them before their time, they’d live to commit a mortal sin, and then they’ll end up in the Very Bad Place.
And it’d all,” I added, “be your fault. Did you think of that?”
She gave me that look. “Don’t make jokes about it,” she said.
“I happen to believe that I’ve been sent here at this precise moment for a purpose.
I was here to make that speech when Krimhild was taken ill, and now I’m going to stay here and kill the monster.
I’m in the right place at the right time, I can feel it.
I can’t expect you to understand something like that, but it’s true. I know it is.”