“I want to go back to the world, Domne,” he announced firmly.
Dead silence was his answer. The abbot’s eyes became glittering slits. Blacktooth blinked and looked aside. A buzzing insect flew through the open window, circled the room twice, and alighted on Jarad’s neck; it crawled there briefly, took wing again, and flew buzzing out by the same window.
Through the closed door of the adjoining room, the faint voice of a novice or postulant reciting his assigned Memorabilium penetrated the silence without really diminishing it:
“—and the curl of the magnetic field intensity vector equals the time-rate-of-change of the electric flux density vector, added to four pi times the current density vector. But the third law states the divergence of the electric flux density vector to be—” The voice was soft, almost feminine, and fast as a monk reciting rosary, his mind pondering one of the Mysteries. The voice was familiar, but Blacktooth could not quite place its owner.
Dom Jarad sighed at last and spoke. “No, Brother Blacktooth, you won’t disown your vows. You’re thirty years old, but outside these walls, what are you still? A fourteen-year-old runaway with nowhere to go. Pfft! The good simpletons of the world would pluck you like a chicken. Your parents are dead, yes? And the land they tilled was not their own, yes?”
“How can I be released, Father Abbot?”
“Stubborn, stubborn. What have you got against Boedullus?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s contemptuous of the very Nomads—” Blacktooth stopped; he was in another trap. He had nothing against Boedullus. He liked Boedullus. For a dark-age saint, Boedullus was rational, inquisitive, inventive—and intolerant. It was the intolerance of the civilized for the barbarian, of the plantation owner for the migrant driver of herds, of Cain, indeed, for Abel. It was the same intolerance as Jarad’s. But Boedullus’s mild contempt for the Nomads was beside the point. Blacktooth hated the whole project. But there across the desk from him sat the project’s originator, giving him pained looks. Dom Jarad was as always Blacktooth’s monastic superior, but now he was more than that. Besides the abbot’s ring, now, he wore the red skullcap. As the Most Eminent Lord Jarad Cardinal Kendemin, a prince of the Church, he might as well be titled “Winner of All Arguments.”
“Is there some way I can get out, m’Lord,” he asked again.
Jarad winced. “No! Take three weeks off to clear your head, if you want to. But don’t ask that again. Don’t try to blackmail me with hints like that.”
“No hints, no blackmail.”
“Oh, no? If I don’t reassign you, you’ll go over the wall, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Good! Then listen, my son. By your vow of obedience, you sacrifice your personal will. You promised to obey, and not just when you feel like obeying. Your work is a cross to you, is it? Then thank God and carry it. Offer it up, offer it up!”
Blacktooth sagged, looked at the floor, and slowly shook his head. Dom Jarad sensed victory and went on.
“Now, I don’t want to hear anything about this again, not before you’ve finished all seven volumes.” He stood up. Blacktooth stood up. The abbot shooed the copyist out of his office then, laughing as if it had been all in fun.
Brother Blacktooth passed Brother Singing Cow in the corridor on his way to Vespers. The rule of silence was in force, and neither spoke. Singing Cow grinned. Blacktooth scowled. Both of his fellow runaways from the wheat plantations knew why he had gone to see Dom Jarad, and both lacked sympathy. Both thought his job a cushy one. Singing Cow worked in the new printing shop. Wren worked in the kitchen as Brother Second Cook.
He saw Wren that night in the refectory. The second cook stood on the serving line, apportioning mush to the platters with a large wooden spoon. Each man in passing murmured, “Deo gratias,” and Wren nodded back as if to say, “You’re welcome.”
As Blacktooth approached, Wren already held a huge gob of mush on the spoon. Blacktooth held his platter to his chest and signaled too much with his fingers, but Wren turned to speak “necessary” instructions to a busboy. When Blacktooth relaxed his platter, Wren piled it on.
“Half back!” Blacktooth whispered, breaking silence. “Headache!” Wren raised his forefinger to his lips, shook his head, pointed to a sign—sanitary rules—behind the serving line, then pointed toward the sign at the exit, where a garbage monitor checked for waste.
Blacktooth laid the platter on the serving kettle. With his right hand he scooped up the heap of mush, with his left hand he seized the front of Wren’s robe. He pushed the mush in Wren’s face and massaged it until Wren bit his thumb.
The prior brought word directly to Blacktooth’s celclass="underline" Dom Jarad had relieved him of his job in the scriptorium for three weeks, in order that he might pray the stone-floor-scrubbing prayer for the cooks in the kitchen and dining area. And so for twenty-one days Blacktooth endured Wren’s smiling forgiveness while knee-skating on soapy stones. More than a year passed before he again raised the standing question of his work, his vocation, and his vows.
During this year, Blacktooth felt that the rest of the community had begun to watch him rather closely, and he sensed a change. Whether the change was really in the attitudes of others, or entirely within himself, its effect was loneliness. Occasionally he felt estranged. In choir, he choked on the words “One bread and one body, though many, are we.” His unity with the congregation seemed no longer taken for granted. He had spoken the words “I want out,” perhaps before he really meant them; but not only had he uttered such a thing to the abbot, he had allowed his friends to learn of the incident. Among the professed, among those who by solemn vows had committed themselves irrevocably to God and the Way of the Order, a monk with regrets was an anomaly, a source of uneasiness, a portent, a thing in need of pity. Some avoided him. Some looked at him strangely. Others were all too kind.
He found new friends among the younger members of the community, novices and postulants not yet fully committed to the Way. One of these was Torrildo, a youth of elfish charm whose first year at the abbey had already been marked many times by trouble. When Blacktooth was sent to the cooks for three weeks of floor-scrubbing penance, he found Torrildo already scrubbing there as punishment for some unannounced infraction, and he soon learned that Torrildo’s had been the muffled voice reciting a Memorabilium in the room adjacent to Dom Jarad’s during the professed monk’s unhappy interview. They differed widely in their interests, origin, character, and age, but their common penance pushed them together long enough for a bond to form.