We sang the words of the divine book and, as we were bearing witness to the Word come to enlighten all peoples, it was as if the daystar in all its splendor were invading the temple. The light, still absent, seemed to me to shine in the words of the canticle, mystic, scented lily that opened among the arches of the vaults. “I thank Thee, O Lord, for this moment of ineffable joy,” I prayed silently, and said to my heart, “Foolish heart, what do you fear?”
Suddenly some noises were heard from the direction of the north door. I wondered why the servants, preparing for their work, disturbed the sacred functions in this way. At that moment three swineherds came in, terror on their faces; they went to the abbot and whispered something to him. The abbot first calmed them with a gesture, as if he did not want to interrupt the office; but other servants entered, and the shouts became louder. “A man! A dead man!” some were saying. And others: “A monk. You saw the sandals?”
Prayers stopped, and the abbot rushed out, motioning the cellarer to follow him. William went after them, but by now the other monks were also leaving heir stalls and hurrying outside.
The sky was now light, and the snow on the round made the compound even more luminous. Behind the choir, in front of the pens, where the day before had stood the great jar with the pigs’ blood, a strange object, almost cruciform, protruded above the edge of the vessel, as if two stakes had been driven into the ground, to be covered with rags for scaring off birds.
But they were human legs, the legs of a man thrust head down into the vessel of blood.
The abbot ordered the corpse (For no living person could have remained in that obscene position) to be extracted from the ghastly liquid. The hesitant swineherds approached the edge and, staining themselves with blood, drew out the poor, bloody thing. As had been explained to me, the blood, having been property stirred immediately after it was shed, and then left out in the cold, had not clotted, but the layer covering the corpse was now beginning to solidify; it soaked the habit, made the face unrecognizable. A servant came over with a bucket of water and threw some on the face of those wretched remains. Another bent down with a cloth to wipe the features. And before our eyes appeared the white face of Venantius of Salvemec, the Greek scholar with whom we had talked that afternoon by Adelmo’s codices.
The abbot came over. “Brother William, as you see, something is afoot in this abbey, something that demands all your wisdom. But I beseech you: act quickly!”
“Was he present in choir during the office?” William asked, pointing to the corpse.
“No,” the abbot said. “I saw his stall was empty.”
“No one else was absent?”
“It did not seem so. I noticed nothing.”
William hesitated before asking the next question, and he did so in a whisper, taking care that the others could not hear: “Berengar was in his stall?”
The abbot looked at him with uneasy amazement, as if to signify that he was struck to see my master harbor a suspicion that he himself had briefly harbored, for more comprehensible reasons. He said then rapidly, “He was there. He sits in the first row, almost at my right hand.”
“Naturally,” William said, “all this means nothing. I don’t believe anyone entering the choir passed behind the apse, and therefore the corpse could have been here for several hours, at least since the time when everyone had gone to bed.”
“To be sure, the first servants rise at dawn, and that is why they discovered him only now.”
William bent over the corpse, as if he were used to dealing with dead bodies. He dipped the cloth lying nearby into the water of the bucket and further cleanse Venantius’s face. Meanwhile, the other monks crowded around, frightened, forming a talkative circle on which the abbot imposed silence. Among the others, now making his way forward, came Severinus, who saw to matters of physical health in the abbey; and he bent down next to my master. To hear their dialogue, and to help William, who needed a new clean cloth soaked in the water, I joined them, overcoming my terror and my revulsion.
“Have you ever seen a drowned man?” William asked.
“Many times,” Severinus said. “And if I guess what you imply, they do not have this face: the features are swollen.”
“Then the man was already dead when someone threw the body into the jar.”
“Why would he have done that?”
“Why would he have killed him? We are dealing with the work of a twisted mind. But now we must see whether there are wounds or bruises on the body. I suggest it be carried to the balneary, stripped, washed, and examined. I will join you there at once.”
And while Severinus, receiving permission from the abbot, was having the body carried away by the swineherds, my master asked that the monks be told to return to the choir by the path they had taken before, and that the servants retire in the same way, so the ground would remain deserted. Thus we remained alone, beside the vessel, from which blood had spilled during the macabre operation of the body’s recovery. The snow all around was red, melting in several puddles where the water had been thrown; and there was a great dark stain where the corpse had been stretched out.
“A fine mess,” William said, nodding toward the complex pattern of footprints left all around by the monks and the servants. “Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men’s bodies leave very legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scrape and perhaps we will read nothing interesting on it. Between here and the church there has been a great bustle of monks, between here and the barn and the stables the servants have moved in droves. The only intact space is between the barns and the Aedificium. Let us see if we can find something of interest.”
“What do you expect to find?” I asked.
“If he didn’t throw himself into the vessel on his own, someone carried him there, already dead, I imagine. And a man carrying another man’s body leaves deep tracks in snow. So look and see if you find around here some prints that seem different to you from the prints of those noisy monks who have ruined our parchment for us.”
And we did. And I will say immediately that I was the one, God preserve me from all vanity, who discovered something between the jar and the Aedificium. They were human footprints, fairly deep, in a zone where no one had yet passed, and, as my master remarked at once, fainter than those left by the monks and the servants, a sign that more snow had fallen and thus they had been made some time before. But what seemed to us most noteworthy was that among those prints there was a more continuous trail, as of something dragged by the one leaving the prints. In short, a spoor that went from the jar to the door of the refectory, on the side of the Aedificium between the south tower and the east tower.
“Refectory, scriptorium, library,” William said. “Once again, the library. Venantius died in the Aedificium, and most probably in the library.”
“And why in the library exactly?”
“I am trying to put myself in the murderer’s place. If Venantius had died, been killed, in the refectory, in the kitchen, or in the scriptorium, why not leave him there? But if he died in the library, then he had to be carried elsewhere, both because in the library the body would never have been discovered (and perhaps the murderer was particularly interested in its being discovered) and because the murderer probably does not want attention to be concentrated on the library.”
“And why should the murderer be interested in the body’s being discovered?”
“I don’t know. I can suggest some hypotheses. How do we know that the murderer killed Venantius because he hated Venantius? He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to signify something else.”