“But why would he not want — ”
“Don’t ask too many questions. The abbot told me at the beginning that the library was not to be touched. He must have his own good reasons. It could be that he is involved in some matter he thought unrelated to Adelmo’s death, and now he realizes the scandal is spreading and could also touch him. And he doesn’t want the truth to be discovered, or at least he doesn’t want me to be the one who discovers it…”
“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I said, disheartened.
“Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?” William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Then he sent me to rest. As I lay on my pallet, I concluded that my father should not have sent me out into the world, which was more complicated than I had thought. I was learning too many things.
“Salva me ab ore leonis,” I prayed as I fell asleep.
AFTER VESPERS
I woke when it was almost tolling the hour for the evening meal. I felt dull and somnolent, for daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh: the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy,. sated and unsated at the same time. William was not to his cell; obviously he had risen much earlier. I found him, after a brief search, coming out of the Aedificium. He told me he had been in the scriptorium, leafing through the catalogue and observing the monks at work, while trying to approach Venantius’s desk and resume his inspection. But for one reason or another, each monk seemed bent on keeping him from searching among those papers. First Malachi had come over to him, to show him some precious illuminations. Then Benno had kept him busy on trifling pretexts. Still later, when he had bent over to resume his examination, Berengar had begun hovering around him, offering his collaboration.
Finally, seeing that my master appeared seriously determined to look into Venantius’s things, Malachi told him outright that, before rummaging among the dead man’s papers, he ought perhaps to obtain the abbot’s authorization; that he himself, even though he was the librarian, had refrained, out of respect and discipline, from looking; and that in any case, as William had requested, no one had approached that desk, and no one would approach it until the abbot gave instructions. William realized it was not worth engaging in a test of strength with Malachi, though all that stir and those fears about Venantius’s papers had of course increased his desire to become acquainted with them. But he was so determined to get back in there that night, though he still did not know how, that he decided not to create incidents. He was harboring, however, thoughts of retaliation, which, if they had not been inspired as they were by a thirst for truth, would have seemed very stubborn and perhaps reprehensible.
Before entering the refectory, we took another little walk in the cloister, to dispel the mists of sleep in the cold evening air. Some monks were still walking there in meditation. In the garden opening off the cloister we glimpsed old Alinardo of Grottaferrata, who, by now feeble of body, spent a great part of his day among the trees, when he was not in church praying; He seemed not to feel the cold, and he was sitting in the outer porch.
William spoke a few words of greeting to him, and the old man seemed happy that someone should spend time with him.
“A peaceful day,” William said.
“By the grace of God,” the old man answered.
“Peaceful in the heavens, but grim on earth. Did you know Venantius well?”
“Venantius who?” the old man said. Then a light flashed in his eyes. “Ah, the dead boy. The beast is roaming about the abbey…”
“What beast?”
“The great beast that comes from the sea … Seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads three names of blasphemy. The beast like unto a leopard, with the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion … I have seen him.”
“Where have you seen him? In the library?”
“Library? Why there? I have not gone to the scriptorium for years and I have never seen the library. No one goes to the library. I knew those who did go up to the library…”
“Who? Malachi? Berengar?”
“Oh, no …” the old man said, chuckling. “Before. The librarian who came before Malachi, many years ago …”
“Who was that?”
“I do not remember; he died when Malachi was still young. And the one who came before Malachi’s master, and was a young assistant librarian when I was young … But I never set foot in the library. Labyrinth …”
“The library is a labyrinth?”
“Hunc mundum tipice labyrinthus denotat ille,” the old man recited, absently. “Intranti largus, redeunti sed nimis artus. The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out. You must not transgress the pillars of Hercules…”
“So you don’t know how one enters the library when the Aedificium doors are closed?”
“Oh, yes.” The old man laughed. “Many know. You go by way of the ossarium. You can go through the ossarium, but you do not want to go through the ossarium. The dead monks keep watch.”
“Those dead monks who keep watch — they are not those who move at night through the library with a lamp?”
“With a lamp?” The old man seemed amazed. “I have never heard this story. The dead monks stay in the ossarium, the bones drop gradually from the cemetery and collect there, to guard the passage. Have you never seen the altar of the chapel that leads to the ossarium?”
“It is the third on the left, after the transept, is it not?”
The third? Perhaps. It is the one whose altar stone is carved with a thousand skeletons. The fourth skull on the right: press the eyes … and you are in the ossarium. But do not go there; I have never gone. The abbot does not wish it.”
“And the beast? Where did you see the beast?”
“The beast? Ah, the Antichrist … He is about to come, the millennium is past; we await him…”
“But the millennium was three hundred years ago, and he did not come then…”
“The Antichrist does not come after a thousand ears have passed. When the thousand years have passed, the reign of the just begins; then comes the Antichrist, to confound the just, and then there will be the final battle…”
“But the just will reign for a thousand years,” William said. “Or else they reigned from the death of Christ to the end of the first millennium, and so the Antichrist should have come then; or else the just have not yet reigned, and the Antichrist is still far off.”
“The millennium is not calculated from the death of Christ but from the donation of Constantine, three centuries later. Now it is a thousand years…”
“So the rein of the just is ending?”
“I do not know… I do not know any more. I am tired. The calculation is difficult. Beatus of Liebana made it; ask Jorge, he is young, he remembers well… But the time is ripe. Did you not hear the seven trumpets?”
“Why the seven trumpets?”
“Did you not hear how the other boy died, the illuminator? The first angel sounded the first trumpet, and hail and fire fell mingled with blood. And the second angel sounded the second trumpet, and the third part of the sea became blood… Did the second boy not die in the sea of blood? Watch out for the third trumpet! The third part of the creatures in the sea will die. God punishes us. The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy; they tell me that on the throne of Rome there is a perverse pope who uses hosts for practices of necromancy, and feeds them to his morays… And in our midst someone has violated the ban, has broken the seals of the labyrinth…”