Chapter 9 #4
“The way he told it, it was self-defence. And burning a man in his house does sound rather like my dad’s style, I have to admit. And Kotkel’s.”
“You’re amazing,” she said. I’d always wanted to hear her say that. To quote her, it’s all about context. “Well, it just goes to show. You can take the boy out of the Mesoge, but you can’t take the Mesoge—”
“Yes, all right. I only told you because I thought you’d be pleased.”
She was thinking. “You need to find out who paid him to come here.”
“I tried. He doesn’t know.”
“If we knew that—”
“But we don’t. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Some philanthropist. I couldn’t care less, so long as he solves the problem and we can all go home. I’m not really interested in the whys and wherefores any more. I just want it to be over.”
“Wishful thinking. Try not to be too disappointed.”
The hell with it, I thought. I’d done my duty and told her. If she was determined not to believe, that was her lookout.
Blessed are those. I did say that, didn’t I?
I went to the session where I’d been instructed to stand up and make trouble. I went early so I could get a seat near the front. I felt like it was market day, and I was waiting to find out if I was the pig or the butcher.
The session was important because the authenticity commission was due to give an interim report before the scheduled debate got under way.
Just as well I arrived early, though it was noticeable that it was the seats at the back, close to the doors, that people wanted to sit in.
Plenty of room at the front until the last moment.
In fact, the seat next to me was empty until the doors closed, at which point the man with the chins bustled in and plonked himself down next to me, so hard that the bench flexed under him.
“All set?” he whispered to me.
I smiled instead of speaking.
“Break a leg.”
Yours for choice, I didn’t say. On the rostrum, Vitimer stood up and cleared his throat, looking like a brand-new target face in the archery butts: not a mark on him, but that was liable to change.
The commission, he said, had now had an opportunity to examine the disputed documents.
Without further ado, therefore, he called on Sister Ulularia to present her findings.
I watched her stand up. I could see she was terrified.
She’d examined the documents, she said, with particular regard to the age and nature of the parchment on which they were written.
She gave us a brief precis of her qualifications – her years in various scriptoria, the work she’d done, the monographs she’s written; she took a long time over that, as if she wasn’t keen to get on with the next part of her speech.
The parchment, she said, was definitely old, quite possibly old enough to be what it purportedly was. The fact that it had been ground down and erased, more than once, was not in itself a barrier to authenticity, since reusing parchment was common practice at that time in that place. However –
(It was the way she said it, and the scared look in her eyes, like some hunted animal.)
However, she went on, there was the question of the burnishing.
After a piece of parchment is scraped and sanded for reuse, it has to be burnished, to close up the pores and fibres and present a smooth surface to write on.
If this step is neglected, the ink tends to seep into the fibres.
The manuscripts she’d been given to examine had indeed been burnished, to the standard she’d come to expect in documents of that age.
But she had reason to believe that the burnisher used was made of bone, or possibly walrus ivory.
For an imperial-era document of that age, she would expect to have seen the marks of a glass burnisher – a shinier, closer-packed surface, more even, as you might expect from a harder, more uniform instrument.
The secret of making glass burnishers was, of course, lost when the empire fell, and no example was known to have survived; modern burnishers were all made of bone, wood or steel.
There were, she quickly went on, instances of bone burnishers being used under the empire, but only in the frontier provinces and in satellite kingdoms not under direct imperial control; given the purported provenance of these documents, it was unlikely that they would have been copied in any such place.
By contrast, the use of a bone instrument would be entirely consistent with a modern scribe recycling an ancient document – in other words, a forgery.
While not conclusive, this evidence would seem to cast a certain degree of doubt –
Something hit me in the ribs. It was the many-chinned man’s elbow. He was staring at me. “You arsehole,” he whispered in my ear. “It was a bloody fake all along, and you knew—”
He stopped. Everybody was staring at him. That’s what you get when you whisper in a room with excellent acoustics, when everybody else is keeping dead quiet.
A certain degree of doubt, continued Sister Ulularia, on the authenticity of the documents. For further corroboration, she would now call on her colleague, Father Zosimus.
She sat down. Zosimus stood up. The ink, he said, was wrong.
Very, very nearly right, but all wrong. It had been made to an authentic imperial recipe fortuitously preserved in Theophilus’ On Sundry Arts, but the verdigris in the mix had been derived from Permian copper (which tarnishes to a slightly redder brown), and Permian copper only began to be imported into the empire after the loss of Sirupat to the Sashan empire, two hundred years later than the purported date of the documents.
There was of course the remote chance that the scribe had somehow got hold of Permian copper two centuries before it was commonly available in the South, but Saloninus’ razor would tend to indicate that the ink was a modern formulation, closely following the ancient recipe – precisely the behaviour, in fact, that one would expect from an expert forger.
“You shit,” murmured the many-chinned man. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I ignored him. I was concentrating on Brother Hunferth, who was saying that the handwriting was perfect for that place and time; in fact, it was too perfect.
The documents were written in demotic cursive script, and the handwriting was distinctive enough to be identifiable.
It was the writing of a scribe, known from over a dozen surviving manuscripts and referred to in scholarly circles as the Stachelburg Master – and that was interesting, because the Stachelburg Master worked exclusively in one northern monastery, where he copied works of unimpeachable orthodoxy over a period of forty years.
It was conceivable that at some point he left the north, came south and embraced heresy.
Conceivable, but rather unlikely. More likely was the explanation that a very clever forger, searching for a model, had lighted on a Stachelburg manuscript and copied the handwriting style impeccably, without realising that in doing so he was giving himself away –
You could’ve heard a pin, or a jaw, drop.
Mine was on my chest, and none of the muscles that were supposed to control it seemed to be working.
Then Jormunrec got up and said that the texts were written in flawless, pitch-perfect Antecyrenaean, a language so dead that (as far as he was aware) only he and about a dozen other scholars now living could read it; he could name the other twelve; he named them.
He knew them all and none of them, he ventured to suggest, were the sort of man or woman who’d assist in perpetrating such a heinous forgery, not to mention the blasphemy or the heresy.
It was conceivable (he said, with a sideways glance at Hunferth) that there was someone else who knew the language well enough to write it like a native, but where and how such a person could have learned it, he couldn’t begin to imagine.
Whereupon Brother Terving jumped up, without waiting to be called by the chair, and said that the metrical forms used in the versification of ancient Antecyrenaean poetry were so complex and so little understood that he couldn’t think of anyone who’d be capable of faking them convincingly, and that as far as he was concerned, he neither knew nor cared about the parchment or the ink, but the words themselves were unmistakeably genuine.
The man with the chins had gone white as a sheet and was clutching his left arm as though in pain.
I think I was the only person in the room who noticed, or who’d have given a damn if they had.
For a very long time nobody moved or spoke.
Then a very old woman in the white habit of the Poor Sisters got up.
“So what you’re saying is,” she said, “we’re right back where we started. ”
Zosimus stood up and nodded. “The conclusion of this commission,” he said, “is that the manuscripts are a modern copy, probably intended to deceive, of ancient texts written at the time of or shortly after the Passion of Our Lord, in the region where the events described took place.”
Someone yelled, “Then the true gospels are true.”
“Not necessarily,” someone else called out. “Just because they’re old doesn’t mean they’re not a pack of lies. Just a pack of very old lies, that’s all.”
At which point everybody started yelling at once, and I decided to leave while I still could.