“Brother.” Bleary-eyed, I hauled myself to sitting, keeping the blankets up to my neck as the morning was damp and cold. Five more beds had been claimed by coughing, wheezing monks who had taken chills on Black Night. Jullian crouched by the brazier, stirring a cauldron of boiling herbs.
“What is great, you may ask?” Sebastian’s face beamed as he snatched the black gown from the hook on the wall beside my bed. “Brother Robierre and I have decided that you may set sail from your sickbed today.”
“But I thought—”
“Sorry to lose your good company, Valen. But you’ll be healthier out of here.” Brother Robierre pressed a rag across a spindly old monk’s mouth as the poor fellow coughed up enough sputum to float a barque. Perhaps he was right.
Truth be said, I was a bit anxious at leaving my simple infirmary life behind for the mysteries of the monks’ dorter. As a child in a house devoted to the elder gods, I’d heard outlandish tales of Karish monks who ate children in their secret precincts, of barbed tails grown beneath their gowns, all manly hair plucked out, or even privy parts removed entire. Being older than age ten, and having met a good variety of folk along the years, and having even practiced Karish ways when times made it expedient, I knew such talk as nonsense. Yet missing princes, murdered monks, and their unquiet spirits had left me a bit more wary of Iero and his holy precincts.
As Brother Sebastian exchanged blessings and gossip with the patients, I donned my gown. My little bundle of provisions, medicines, and knife—now well sharpened—went into my rucksack along with my secular clothes. The empty green bag remained safely tucked away at the bottom.
“Until you take your novice vows, they’ll send you here to sup, so we’ll not lose you entirely,” said the infirmarian, grinning as he dispensed one of his potions to another man. “And you must come down here every evening to let me examine your wounds…”
“…and to finish your tale of that tin smuggler in Savil,” called Brother Marcus from the bed closest to the door. “You can’t leave us not knowing if the fellow got out of the cave.”
I laughed. “I’ve a better one, about the time I fell in with a caravan of—”
“Be off with you, Valen, or I’ll chase you out,” said Robierre, beckoning Jullian to replenish an earthenware bowl with his steaming decoction. “We’ve our work to do.”
“You’ve done well by me, Brother Infirmarian,” I said, taking a jig step and twirling foolishly into a sweeping bow. “You are Iero’s own artist with your lancets and caudles. I do thank you.”
Robierre bobbed his head, flushed a little, and went on with his work. Jullian watched intently, a ladleful of his pungent liquid sloshing noisily into the fire. I winked at the boy, grabbed the rucksack and my alder stick, and joined Brother Sebastian at the door.
“I shall strive to do as well by you as Robierre has done,” he said.
“You can stick your nose in his business, Sebastian,” Brother Marcus called after us, “and leave off telling the rest of us when our gowns are untidy or our beds ill made.” The red-haired scribe had taken a spear wound next his spine on Black Night and was dreadfully uncomfortable. He lay on his belly all day and all night, sketching odd little drawings on scraps of vellum laid on the floor under his nose. Robierre wasn’t sure the man would ever leave his bed.
Brother Sebastian chuckled, held open the door, and waved me out. “Tell me if we set too fast a pace, Valen. Your leg seems to be progressing well.”
We strolled past the herb beds and around the bake-house. “I was thinking that I should go walking in the countryside to strengthen it and cleanse my lungs from the sickly humors of the infirmary…”…and scout the possibilities for replenishing my supply of nivat.
Brother Sebastian halted abruptly. “That would not be at all appropriate. Though yet unvowed, you must draw a sharp separation from the outer world. Once your leg receives Brother Robierre’s clearance, you will be assigned outdoor duties more than sufficient to cleanse your lungs.”
“But—”
His raised finger ended discussion. We had reached the stair to the monks’ dorter, and he was soon busy showing me the rope bed and straw-filled palliasse at the south end of the long, high-ceilinged room where I would sleep.
The empty green pouch in the bottom of my rucksack soon became more worrisome than midnight massacres, eyeless corpses, or monks who explained naught of lighthouses or vanishing royalty no matter what wheedling I did. I had taught myself not to think of nivat or the doulon overmuch. The need could come to affect all a man’s dealings, his friends, his choices, until life took shape from it every day and not just the one day in twenty-eight…or twenty-one…that it devoured him. I swore I’d rather go mad from the lack than let it rule me. But always the hour arrived when my bravado withered.
I had already confirmed that Brother Robierre kept no nivat seeds in the infirmary. An exploration of the bakehouse, while its denizens were at Vespers, had revealed that Brother Baker kept his brick ovens clean, his floor swept, his barrels of flour and salt sealed tight, and his wooden boxes of herbs and seeds labeled neatly, though with no sketch or hint of their contents for any who had difficulty with letters. None of the boxes contained nivat. I would have to go farther afield to replenish my supply.
My hopes of moving in and out of the abbey freely were quickly squelched. Every hour of my day was scheduled: services in the church, meals in the infirmary, washing, and walking. I suffered endless lessons, everything from how to fold my gown and place it in the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, to the signing speech the monks used in the cloisters, to a history of the brotherhood so detailed I could near recite what Saint Ophir had for breakfast every morning of his four-and-eighty years. Even my times of “study and reflection” in the church or the gardens were scrutinized. If I dozed off, one or the other of the brethren would immediately walk by and rap my skull with a bony knuckle.
And so I decided to slip out at night. The monks were abed with the birds, and as the dorter had been built for a hundred and twenty, a wide gap of empty cubicles separated my quarters from those of the thirty-one men who slept at the end nearest the church. And in the main, I was well shielded from their view. Besides the common shoulder-high screen of carved wood that separated one monk’s bed, chest, stool, and window alcove from the next man’s, a folding screen of woven lath had been set across the central aisle to separate the novices’ cubicles from those reserved for the monks. And I was the only novice.
But not only did Brother Sebastian poke his head around my screen twice each night, as the Rule advised, but the very structure of the dorter thwarted me. My cubicle lay between the monks’ cubicles and the reredorter. Throughout the night, sleepy monks in need of natural relief made a constant procession down the central aisle, around the lath screen, and past my open cubicle toward the cold wooden seats of the rere.
Worse yet, I was expected to parade down to the church with the monks to pray the nighttime Hours. These interruptions came at such frequent and unholy times—Vespers before supper, Compline at bedtime, Matins at midnight, Lauds at third hour, Prime at sixth—I could not see how I would ever be able to absent myself long enough to acquire what I needed. The anxiety I tried to keep from ruling my life crept inevitably into every hour.
“It’s come!” Brother Sebastian hurried down the path from the cloisters waving a rolled parchment. “I worried we might have to lie twixt wind and water for another month.”
I slammed the wretched book shut. Excessive meditation was surely ruinous to good health and spirits. While my mentor had attended the chapter meeting that morning, I’d sat on this stone bench in the hedge garden, pretending to study. The characters on the page had tightened into seed shapes. Every scent—of yew, of grass, of smoke from the kitchen—taunted me because it was not the earthy fragrance of nivat.