Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“You know what a rage Ironhead can get into.”

“Truly, I do, and have the mark here on my cheek to prove it. Yet how then did Sylvestrius escape the lash? Nay, nay, you need not say. I know who must have intervened.”

“Truly, Brother, he is the sole gentling influence now that the Holy Mother, may God grant her healing, lies ill. He is the one person who stands between Ironhead’s coarseness and barbarity and the lives of so many innocents.”

As if this thought struck them hard with a vision of God’s mercy, they bent their heads in sincere prayer as the old presbyter in front began the Gloria.

Quedlinhame, the stand held the library’s catalog: different scribes at many different periods had added to the list. As she leafed through the catalog, she saw where a square Dariyan script, all capitals, changed abruptly to the rounded Scripta Actuaria favored by the early church mothers and gradually picking up the minuscule letters that marked the ascendancy of Salian clerics under the influence of Taillefer’s court schola. These days, the simpler Scripta Gallica held sway, imperial yet elegant.

What riches the catalog laid bare before her eyes! Not only Ptolomaia’s Tetrabiblos but also her magisterial Mathematici’s Compilation, Virgilia’s Heleniad and also her Dialogues, various geographies of heaven and Earth by diverse ancient scholars, the Memoria of Alisa of Jarrow with its detailed instruction in the art of memory, and more volumes on natural history and astronomy than she had ever seen before in one place. She skipped over the massive inventories of the writings of the church mothers but closely examined those pages marked black for caution. The numerous condemnations and tracts against various heresies held no attraction but, as she had hoped, there were forbidden texts on sorcery, like Chaldeos’ The Acts of the Magicians and The Secret Book of Alexandros, Son of Thunder.

How amazing and odd that a library of this scope should exist in the sphere of Somorhas. But hadn’t the voice said that beyond the gateway she would find her heart’s desire?

A small voice niggled at her from deep inside, annoying as a thorn. The merest prick of pain throbbed lightly behind her right eye. Hadn’t she read somewhere that in Somorhas lay only dreams and delusions?

“It cannot be so,” her voice whispered, almost as if she were two people, one watching, one speaking. “In the city of memory a great library stands in the third sphere, where the Cup of Boundless Waters holds sway, the ocean of knowledge available to mortal kind.”

That was true, wasn’t it? Best to make use of the time while she had it. She found the notation listing the location of St. Peter of Aron’s The Eternal Geometry in one of the library chambers and, seeing that others waited patiently behind her to use the catalog, hurried away. At every moment, with every footfall, she expected one of the robed clerics to challenge her. What are you doing here? Who are you? Where have you come from?

No one ever did. It wasn’t that they didn’t see her. Gazes marked her before moving away as easily as if she were someone expected. No one unusual. Not a stranger at all.

The corridor she had thought would lead her to the room of astronomies led her instead, unexpectedly, to a chapel elaborately decorated with gilded lamps hanging from a beamed ceiling and frescoes depicting the life of St. Lucia, guardian of the light of God’s wisdom. Her knees bent as if of their own volition, and in this way she knelt behind a pair of clerics robed in white and cloaked with the scarlet, floor-length capes that in the world below distinguished presbyters in the service of the skopos.

Strange how her thoughts scattered every which way. Because she could not calm her mind enough to lift her thoughts to God, she listened. The two clerics kneeling right in front of her evidently did not have calm minds either, because they were gossiping in low voices while, at the front of the chapel, an elderly man led a chorus of sweet-voiced monks in the service of Sext.

“Didn’t you hear? He saved poor Brother Sylvestrius a lashing.” “Nay, how can Brother Sylvestrius possibly have given offense? He scarcely speaks a word as it is, and sometimes it seems impossible to me that he even knows the rest of us exist because he’s so busy with his books.”

“It was nothing he said, but what he wrote in the annals.”

“Nothing deliberately disparaging, surely? That’s more Biscop Liutprand’s style.”

“Of course not. Sylvestrius wrote a dispassionate account of the crowning, rather than a flattering one.”

“And Ironhead couldn’t abide it. He’d rather hear one of those noxious poets singing his praises as though he were the next Taillefer rather than what he really is.”

“You know what a rage Ironhead can get into.”

“Truly, I do, and have the mark here on my cheek to prove it. Yet how then did Sylvestrius escape the lash? Nay, nay, you need not say. I know who must have intervened.”

“Truly, Brother, he is the sole gentling influence now that the Holy Mother, may God grant her healing, lies ill. He is the one person who stands between Ironhead’s coarseness and barbarity and the lives of so many innocents.”

As if this thought struck them hard with a vision of God’s mercy, they bent their heads in sincere prayer as the old presbyter in front began the Gloria.

Odd to feel that her body was not her own. She rose, quite unexpectedly, and edged backward, but there must have been another door into the chapel that she hadn’t seen before because, instead of backing into the corridor she’d just come down, she found herself in a gloomy, dank passage illuminated by a single flickering torch.

The light was bad, but with her salamander eyes she saw a trio of guards standing at a heavy wood door exactly like a dozen other such doors set into the corridor behind her. The stone walls seeped moisture. The floor stank of earth and cold. No fine lofty ceilings here. No skilled artisans had toiled to make this place a pleasure to look at or walk through.

“Ach, here’s the key,” said one of the guards. “Poor lads. I hate to think of their heads being stuck up on the wall just for stealing a bit of bread because they was too poor to buy none at market.”

“A bit of bread is one thing,” objected the second guard, “but stealing the king’s bread is quite another.”

“Tchah! King’s bread, indeed.” The third guard laughed coarsely. “That basket was headed for the king’s whorehouse, if you please.”

“Still, what belongs to the king is meant for the king, not for beggars like these two.”

They got the key turned in the lock and with some effort shoved the door open. “Come on out, lads,” said the third guard.

Not more than fourteen, the two boys had the weary, pinched look of children raised in constant hunger, starved rats. One was weeping. His companion was trying to be brave.