Chapter 10 #2
The document I’d picked up was nothing to do with all that.
It was a requisition on the Treasury for two hundred deniers; as good as cash money in your hand, you could take it anywhere, the paymaster’s office or the Merchant Venturers, and they’d give you good silver for it, no questions asked.
Or you could find a quiet corner with good light, such as the top end of the ostlers’ yard behind the mounting block, and you could have at it with the edge of a sharp knife, a palmful of brick dust, a stag-horn burnisher, a bottle of ink you’d absent-mindedly picked up off some clerk’s desk and a goose-quill, fresh from the goose’s reluctant wing.
By the time I’d finished with it, Sister Ulularia and Father Zosimus would’ve signed off on it without a qualm. I’m that good.
The librarian barely glanced at it, after all that work. Now that’s praise indeed. “What’re you after?” he asked me.
“This is a bit of a long shot,” I said, “but if you haven’t got it, nobody has. Tractantius, Concerning Life.”
He frowned, then shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Never heard of it.”
“What about Scaphio of Iden?”
“You what?”
“Thrasamund’s Natural History? Lactantius’ Reflections?”
He thought for a moment. “I haven’t got either of those, sorry,” he said. “But I have an idea that there’s large chunks of Lactantius quoted in Ratpert of Schanz’s Institutions of Oratory. I’ve got that, if it’s any help.”
“Oh, go on then. Why not?”
I’d heard of Ratpert’s Institutions, though I’d never seen a copy.
It’s basically a collection of ready-made speeches for the lazy or incompetent public speaker: whole speeches, and bits you can incorporate, all drawn from the lesser-known works of the best authors, so you can steal them with very little risk of being found out.
It was written in the middle empire, and later editions took out the material that had been used too much and was starting to sound familiar to audiences, and replaced it with new stuff.
The Sisters’ edition was very late, a sixth- or seventh-generation copy, made by a semi-literate scribe with a penchant for drawing sea-serpents in the margins.
I found a desk in the corner, under a window, and sat down to read.
The librarian was clearly a very learned man, because sure enough, there were four lengthy extracts from Lactantius in the second appendix, labelled for sundry occasions, whatever that was supposed to mean.
One of them was a description of a sea-battle.
One was a virulent attack on someone or other’s fiscal policy.
One was a best man’s speech at a wedding. The fourth –
In this regard, Scribonian may be held to resemble the so-called ghost-masters of that remote and barbarous region known as the Mesoge, whose peculiar skill, so men say, is to summon from the grave the dead bodies of murderers, blasphemers and other outcasts, instilling in them new life and compelling them to do their bidding.
Just as these uncouth necromancers pluck the unwilling dead from their moorland tombs, Scribonian seeks to resurrect the long-dead heresies of Mercullus and Diapason, dragging them back from the very pit of hell to torment the credulous and the unwary.
But, whereas the unquiet revenants of that savage country may easily be disposed of by means of a diapygon’s dagger and the remorseless element of fire, Scribonian’s afterwalking lies and delusions, his false premises, his unsustainable conclusions, his specious arguments irredeemably tainted with anathema and condemned doctrine –
Whoever the hell Scribonian was. Not, I’m afraid, that I cared terribly much. I closed the book and went back to the desk.
“You wouldn’t happen to have such a thing,” I asked, “as a dictionary?”
“Four,” he said, with monumental smugness. “What’re you after?”
I looked in all four. None of them could tell me anything about the word diapygon. Ain’t that the way.
The librarian gave me an amused smile. “No dice?”
“Apparently not.”
“What’s the word you’re after?”
I told him. He laughed. “Well,” he said, “that wouldn’t be in a dictionary. It’s naughty.”
“It’s what?”
“Naughty. Rude. You know.” He grinned. “Well, depends on when. By the late empire it wasn’t something you said, but earlier I think it was all right. Funny how words change like that. For instance, piss is quite acceptable in Orosius, but—”
“What does it mean?”
He frowned. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not sure. It’s just something you call someone if you don’t like them very much.”
“Fine,” I said. “Can you think of anywhere I can find out what it originally meant, before that? It’s actually quite important.”
He shrugged. “There’s Polemon’s Philology,” he said. “Back wall, two shelves down, seventy-six from the left.”
My heart flooded with lust. “You’ve got a copy of Polemon?”
“The only one east of Auxentia,” he said. “Be careful with it, for God’s sake. The binding’s not what it was.”
Dear God, I thought; Polemon of Sirupat, the greatest lexicographer the world’s ever seen, whose book was lost in the Great Fire – apparently not, because here was a copy, a great big thick thing, codex-bound between two massive elm boards, which at some stage would appear to have been used as a butcher’s block, to judge by the knife-cuts and the lingering traces of dried blood.
At any other time I’d have been transfixed with joy and wonder.
A bit like the hermit in the story, who was hoeing his beans when a stranger came along and asked the way to somewhere or other.
“Straight down the road,” the hermit answered, not looking up, “Just follow your nose, you can’t miss it”; and then, an hour or so later, the penny dropped and he realised that the man he’d been talking to was the Risen Lord, made manifest as a result of a lifetime of his solitary prayers.
But at that moment, all I wanted was to know what a certain word meant.
Polemon wrote in the early empire, about two hundred years before Ediulf of Cledda invented alphabetical order.
To find a word in Polemon, you start at the top of the first page and work your way down to the bottom.
If it’s not there, you start at the top of the next page, and so on.
The Philology isn’t a dictionary; it’s a concordance: it tells you the books each word is used in, quoting scraps of sentences by way of context, with a definition tacked on at the end if he feels it’s necessary.
I’d scanned about seventy pages when the light suddenly went out.
I looked up. Someone was standing between me and the window.
“That was pretty low, wasn’t it?” he said.
An old man, quite tall, thin, with a tiny line of white hair on his upper lip, clipped perfectly straight. “Excuse me?” I said.
“Leaving him to die like that. You knew perfectly well what was happening. You could have helped him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A man dying of a heart attack sitting right next to you,” he said. “There was a little glass bottle in his left sleeve. Foxglove essence. Two drops on his tongue might have saved him. But no, you just sat there. People like you make me sick.”
“Who are you?”
“As of a couple of hours ago, his replacement. A promotion, I might add, that I could very well have done without. He wasn’t just my superior officer, he was my friend. I don’t suppose it crossed your mind that he might have had friends, or a family.”
Oh for crying out loud. “Would you mind standing a bit to your left? You’re in my light.”
He reached down and closed the book, losing my place. He was tall but old and frail looking; I could’ve smashed him as easily as Kotkel could’ve smashed me. “There’s no time for that,” he said. “You’ve got to put right the mess you’ve made.”
I looked round for the librarian. No talking in the library; I could perfectly legitimately have him thrown out. The librarian wasn’t there. “Get lost,” I said. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want to play any more.”
“So it’s all a game to you,” he said. “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. Everything’s a game to you: science, learning, religion, even lying and stealing and killing. You don’t seem to appreciate, some things matter. Some things have consequences.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know what diapygon means, would you?”
“Typical,” he said. “I point out your abominable lack of common decency and you reply with vulgar abuse.” He put his hand on the cover of the book, to stop me opening it. “Now listen to me. The situation is clearly disastrous, but it can still be retrieved. You need to kill Vitimer.”
You think you’ve heard it all. “Say that again.”
“You should find it simple enough. Vitimer trusts you. If you ask him for a private audience, there shouldn’t be a problem. I imagine you can find a way to escape afterwards. You seem to be quite resourceful when it comes to saving your own skin.”
“Why,” I said, “would I want to do a thing like that?”
“Because if you don’t,” he said, “your father’s reanimated corpse will crush Sister Svangerd’s head like an eggshell.
We both know that you won’t let that happen.
You have until this time tomorrow. I suggest you don’t leave it too long.
If it’s to do any good at all, it has to be done quickly, the sooner the better. ”
I shook my head, to give myself time to recover. “I’m afraid you’re a bit behind the times,” I said. “I’m not scared of walkers any more. There’s a hero in town, from the Mesoge. The genuine article. This time tomorrow, there won’t be any walkers in Choris.”