And then, as quickly as the night had fallen, all was consumed by light, as if the unsullied sun of summers past shot its beams straight into my eye sockets. As an avenging angel come down from heaven, the light swept away terror and in its place left a bright and sharp-edged tenderness that wrenched my heart. I cried out and stumbled backward.
A sharp crack on my skull brought the world—the green garth, the shrine, the cloister walk, the dull morning light—into focus again. I gulped air into my starved lungs. A cherubic rump protruded from the low arch where I had whacked my head. I spat on my middle finger, slapped the little aingerou, and prayed its friendly spirit to protect me from collapsing or exploding. No battle wound or shock had ever afflicted me so precipitously.
Brother Gildas’s gaze flicked from my face, to the serene enclosure, to my hand that now gripped the carved sprite as if seeking only its structural support. I half expected his lip to curl and his mellow voice to denounce me immediately as a heathen blasphemer. But he merely gripped my waist securely and assisted me back into the alley, looking a bit puzzled.
“Perhaps we’ve overdone,” he said when we were outside the cloister bounds again. “And you with an unbroken fast. Can I help?”
The world was so bright. So sharp. I pressed my head to the cool stone of the refectory wall and drew a ragged breath. “A drink of something…ale…or wine…please.”
Anything to dull the glare that yet vibrated behind my eyes like a fresh knife wound, to soothe the ache that throbbed in my chest as if I had lost my last friend or heard the last song ever to be sung.
Gildas pried me from the wall and assisted me down the alley, through a wooden gate and a muddy herb garden, and into the steams and smokes of the abbey’s kitchen. Two lay brothers, half obscured behind hanging baskets and vermin safes, stood at two long tables, trimming or chopping vegetables—turnips, garlic, carrots, and leeks—while a wizened, stoop-shouldered monk worked alongside them, grinding herbs with mortar and pestle. A slight figure in a layman’s hooded cloak of brick red deposited a flat, covered basket on one of the tables and retreated toward a far door.
“Thank you, Squire Corin,” called a ruddy-faced, leather-pated monk who stirred an iron vat hung over the great central hearth. “We’ll hope poor Gram finds more appetite at supper. Brother Cellarer will send better wine for your master.”
“Jerome!” my companion called across the stone-floored vastness.
“What can I do for you, Brother Gildas?” said the ruddy-faced monk as he emptied a wooden bowl of chopped cabbage into his pot. With the efficiency of long practice, he set the cavernous bowl aside, snatched a long-handled spoon from a rack on the soot-blackened wall, and poked at the cabbage that sizzled and spattered in his pot.
“Have you a bit of something mild and sustaining for our newest aspirant?” said Gildas, steadying me as I sank onto a pine bench beside the door. “I fear I’ve overtaxed him on his first excursion from the infirmary.”
Brother Jerome spun around, his wooden spoon raised as if it were a hierarch’s crozier, ready to assert his holy authority in this domain. “The supplicant who brought the Cartamandua maps?”
The whole world seemed to stop and stare just then, even the departing layman, who paused in the half-open doorway across the room and lifted his red hood slightly as if to see me better.
“Aye, the same. Still recovering from his injuries and unfed this day. My misjudgment.” Gildas returned his sober scrutiny to me. “And I beg forgiveness for that,” he said quietly. “Unworthy of me to assume…uh…that your strength was greater than you showed.”
I waved off his concern. My leg and back had contributed naught to my weakness that I could judge. Yet if I told Gildas what I had experienced, surely nothing good would come of it. The monks would call it a sign of Iero’s displeasure, pile on penances or rituals to reform me, and likely send me away. If some god or spirit or magical being did live within that garth, it must—
The likely truth stung my skull like a pebble from a sling. The shrine…the font…the murdered Brother Horach! Some people said that spirits loosed in savage torment would linger in the place of death, become revenants. Had I somehow invoked his wrath…or his benevolence? The contrary nature of the encounter left it open to myriad interpretations.
The world moved on again. The monks were back to chopping and grinding. The beardless servant vanished through the door. Forgoing fruitless speculation, I breathed deep, pleased to smell the garlic and to feel the steam that hissed from the wilted cabbage as Brother Jerome tossed aside his spoon and emptied a crock of liquid into his pot.
Brother Gildas filled a wooden cup from a nearby barrel. I drained it before his hand had moved away. Lovely ale, new made, not old. “Iero’s grace,” I said, and he brought me another.
“I’ve a barley loaf and syfling cheese will suit a fragile constitution,” said Brother Jerome, once he had tamed his soup. Thick gray hair fringed his leathery tonsure. He rummaged briskly in the flat basket and extracted a wrapped bundle and a small crock. “Sent back from the guesthouse untouched. Father Prior says Lord Stearc’s secretary Gram is a sickly sort and I thought to bolster him, but all the fellow took this morning was Robierre’s strengthening tea.”
Ah, Gram—the mournful fellow who’d consulted me about the maps. He’d had an unhealthy cast to his skin. A lord’s secretary.
The loaf was chewy where it should be and tender everywhere else, and the soft cheese tasted of almonds. Unflinching, I ate every morsel of both and buried my disturbance in the homely comforts of a well-run kitchen. Jerome and his minions, as with all who worked in kitchens and brew-houses, wielded power I understood.
Brother Gildas and I bade the kitchen staff farewell and trudged slowly past the lay brother’s reach in a light rain. I felt almost myself again. Likely Brother Gildas’s estimate of my collapse had been right, naught but hunger and healing. I’d had little experience of common sickness.
“Gillarine seems a vastly holy place,” I said. Healthy grain, plump vegetables, untainted sheep, spirits in its garth…I doubted any house in Navronne could boast such bounty.
“Many in our brotherhood have found it so. I have discovered my own destiny here—against every expectation of my life.”
His words left an offer hanging in the air, something more generous than tavern friendships. More honest. I was gratified, and a bit astonished, at such trust. But if I probed deeper, he would rightly expect to do the same. And that could not happen. Of all the protections I had built over the years, the surest was to keep my secrets close.
Fumbling about for a new topic, I hobbled across a cart track that led from the lay brothers’ reach southward along the Kay. The view of the wide, shallow river and the mist-shrouded valley, bound by forested ridges and the high mountains far to the south, recalled Jullian’s odd tidbit. “Tell me, Brother, why would anyone be building a lighthouse so far from the sea?”
Even the broad River Yaronal that separated the kingdom from the brutish herdsmen to the east could be no nearer than two hundred fifty quellae, and likely unnavigable at that nearest point. Indeed, I wasn’t certain people built lighthouses on rivers, much less in green vales like these.
My inquiry, posed in all innocence, halted Brother Gildas in midstride. “Who spoke to you of a lighthouse?”
One never reveals one’s sources when queried with such severity. “Mmm…I don’t recall. So many people come in and out of the infirmary.”
After a moment, he smiled and nudged me onward. “Well, of course, you haven’t yet seen the church windows on a day when the sun shines, else you’d grasp the reference. Come now, tell me more of Palinur.”