“I don’t have to admit it,” Dom Paulo told him curtly.
When Gault was gone, the abbot, after a brief debate with himself, decided to handle the problem of the Poet-sirrah! before the problem of perdition-versus-progress. The simplest solution to the problem of the Poet was for the Poet to get out of the royal suite, and preferably out of the abbey, out of the vicinity of the abbey, out of sight, hearing, and mind. But no one could expect a “simplest solution” to get rid of the Poet-sirrah!
The abbot left the wall and crossed the courtyard toward the guesthouse. He moved by feel, for the buildings were monoliths of shadow under the stars, and only a few windows glowed with candlelight. The windows of the royal suite were dark; but the Poet kept odd hours and might well be in.
Inside the building, he groped for the right door, found it, and knocked. There was no immediate answer, but only a faint bleating sound which might or might not have issued from within the suite. He knocked again, then tried the door. It opened.
Faint red light from a charcoal burner softened the darkness; the room reeked of stale food.
“Poet?”
Again the faint bleating, but closer now. He went to the burner, raked up an incandescent coal, and lit a splinter of kindling. He glanced around and shuddered at the litter of the room. It was empty. He transferred the flame to an oil lamp and went to explore the rest of the suite. It would have to be thoroughly scrubbed and fumigated (also, perhaps, exorcised) before Thon Taddeo moved in. He hoped to make the Poet-sirrah! do the scrubbing, but knew the chance was remote.
In the second room, Dom Paulo suddenly felt as if someone were watching him. He paused and looked slowly around.
A single eyeball peered at him from a vase of water on the shelf. The abbot nodded at it familiarly and went on.
In the third room, he met the goat. It was their first meeting.
The goat was standing atop a tall cabinet, munching turnip greens. It looked like a small breed of mountain goat, but it had a bald head that appeared bright blue by lamplight. Undoubtedly a freak by birth.
“Poet?” he inquired, softly, looking straight at the goat and touching his pectoral cross.
“In here,” came a sleepy voice from the fourth room.
Dom Paulo sighed with relief. The goat went on munching greens. Now that had been a hideous thought, indeed.
The Poet lay sprawled across the bed with a bottle of wine within easy reach; he blinked irritably at the light with his one good eye. “I was asleep,” he complained, adjusting his black eyepatch and reaching for the bottle.
“Then wake up. You’re moving out of here immediately. Tonight. Dump your possessions in the hall to let the suite air out. Sleep in the stable boy’s cell downstairs if you must. Then come back in the morning and scrub this place out.”
The Poet looked like a bruised lily for a moment, then made a grab for something under the blankets. He brought out a fist and stared at it thoughtfully. “Who used these quarters last?” he asked.
“Monsignor Longi. Why?”
“I wondered who brought the bedbugs.” The Poet opened his fist, pinched something out of his palm, cracked it between his nails, and flipped it away. “Thon Taddeo can have them. I don’t want them. I’ve been eaten up alive ever since I moved in. I was planning on leaving, but now that you’ve offered me my old cell back, I’ll be happy—”
“I didn’t mean—”
“ — to accept your kind hospitality a little longer. Only until my book is finished, of course.”
“What book? But never mind. Just get your things out of here.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Good. I don’t think I could stand these bugs another night.” The Poet rolled out of bed, but paused for a drink.
“Give me the wine,” the abbot ordered.
“Sure. Have some. It’s a pleasant vintage.”
“Thank you, since you stole it from our cellars. It happens to be sacramental wine. Did that occur to you?”
“It hasn’t been consecrated.”
“I’m surprised you thought of that.” Dom Paulo took the bottle.
“I didn’t steal it anyway. I—”
“Never mind the wine. Where did you steal the goat?”
“I didn’t steal it ,” the Poet complained.
“It just — materialized?”
“It was a gift, Reverendissime.”
“From whom?”
“A dear friend, Domnissime.”
“Whose dear friend?”
“Mine, Sire.”
“Now there’s a paradox. Where, now, did you—”
“Benjamin, Sire.”
A flicker of surprise crossed Dom Paulo’s face. “You stole it from old Benjamin?”
The Poet winced at the word. “Please, not stole.”
“Then what?”
“Benjamin insisted that I take it as a gift after I had composed a sonnet in his honor.”
“The truth!”
The Poet-sirrah! swallowed sheepishly. “I won it from him at mumbly-peg.”
“I see.”
“It’s true! The old wretch nearly cleaned me out, and then refused to allow me credit. I had to stake my glass eye against the goat. But I won everything back.”
“Get the goat out of the abbey.”
“But it’s a marvelous species of goat. The milk is of an unearthly odor and contains essences. In fact it’s responsible for the Old Jew’s longevity.”
“How much of it?”
“All fifty-four hundred and eight years of it.”
“I thought he was only thirty-two hundred and—” Dom Paulo broke off disdainfully. “What were you doing up on Last Resort?”
“Playing mumbly-peg with old Benjamin.”
“I mean—” The abbot steeled himself. “Never mind. Just get yourself moved out. And tomorrow get the goat back to Benjamin.”
“But I won it fairly.”
“We’ll not discuss it. Take the goat to the stable, then. I’ll have it returned to him myself.”
“Why?”
“We have no use for a goat. Neither have you.”
“Ho, ho,” the Poet said archly.
“What did that mean, pray?”
“Thon Taddeo is coming. There’ll be need of a goat before it’s finished. You can be sure of that.” He chuckled smugly to himself.
The abbot turned away in irritation. “Just get out,” he added superfluously, and then went to wrestle with contention in the basement, where the Memorabilia now reposed.
14
The vaulted basement had been dug during the centuries of nomadic infiltration from the north, when the Bayring Horde had overrun most of the Plains and desert, looting and vandalizing all villages that lay in their path. The Memorabilia, the abbey’s small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soi-disant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey’s books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knights-friars would have burned many of them as “heretical” according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope.
Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible — that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.