“What is it, Josephus?” Paulinus cried. “Why will you not say what is the matter?”
“Look!” Josephus answered. “Tell me what you see.”
Octavus continued to work his stick in the snow. The two men towered over him and studied his etchings.
“It cannot be!” Paulinus hissed.
“But surely it is,” Josephus countered.
There were letters in the snow, unmistakable letters.
S-I-G-B-E-R-T O-F T-I-S
“Sigbert of Tis?”
“He is not done,” Josephus said excitedly. “Look: Sigbert of Tisbury.”
“How can this boy write?” Paulinus asked. The monk was as white as the snow and too scared to shiver.
“I do not know,” Josephus said. “No one in his village can read or write. The sisters have certainly not been teaching him. In truth, he is considered feeble-minded.”
The boy kept working his stick.
18 12 782 Natus
Paulinus crossed himself. “My God! He writes numbers too! The eighteenth day of the twelfth month, 782. That is today!”
“Natus,” Joseph whispered. “Birth.”
Paulinus stamped his feet through the snow writings, eradicating the numbers and letters. “Bring him!”
They waited for the monks to leave the Scriptorium for mass before seating the boy atop one of the copying tables. Paulinus put a sheet of vellum in front of him and handed him a quill.
Octavus immediately began to move the quill over the parchment and did not seem at all bothered that there was nothing to see.
“No!” Paulinus exclaimed. “Wait! Watch me.” He dipped the quill into a ceramic pot of ink and gave it back to him. The boy continued to scratch but this time his efforts were visible. He seemed to take notice of the tight black letters he was forming, and a guttural noise emanated from deep in his throat. It was the first sound he had ever made.
Cedric of York 18 12 782 Mors
“Again, the date. Today,” Paulinus muttered. “But this time he writes ‘Mors.’ Death.”
“This is surely sorcery,” Josephus lamented, stepping backward until his rump bumped against another copying table.
The ink ran dry and Paulinus took the boy’s hand and made him dip the quill himself. Expressionless, Octavus started writing again but this time it began as gibberish.
18 12 782 Natus
The men shook their heads in confusion. Paulinus said, “These are not normal letters but once again here is the date.”
Josephus suddenly caught himself and realized they were to be late for mass, an inexcusable sin. “Hide the parchments and the ink and leave the boy in the corner. Come, Paulinus, let us make haste to the Sanctuary. We will pray to God to help us understand what we have seen and beg for him to cleanse us of evil.”
That night, Josephus and Paulinus met in the chilly brewery and lit a fat candle for light. Josephus felt the need for an ale to calm his nerves and settle his stomach, and Paulinus was willing to humor his old friend. They drew a pair of stools close to one another, their knees almost knocking.
Josephus considered himself a simple man who understood only the love of God and the Rules of St. Benedict of Nursia that all ministers of God were obliged to follow. However, he knew Paulinus to be a sharp thinker and a learned scholar who had read many texts concerning the heavens and the earth. If anyone could explain what they had seen earlier, it was Paulinus.
Yet Paulinus was unwilling to offer an explanation. Instead he suggested a mission, and the two men schemed about how best to accomplish it. They agreed to keep their knowledge of the boy secret, for what good could possibly come in upsetting the community before Paulinus could divine the truth?
When Josephus had drained the last of his ale, Paulinus reached for the candle. Just before he blew it out he told Josephus something that had been on his mind.
“You know,” he said, “there is nothing to say that in the case of twins, the seventh son to be born of a woman is, by necessity, the seventh son that God had conceived.”
Ubertus rode through the countryside of Wessex on the mission that Prior Josephus had pressed on him. He felt an unlikely servant for the task but was beholden to Josephus and could not refuse him.
The heavy, sweating animal between his legs warmed his body against the crisp chill of the mid-December day. He was not a good rider. Stonecutters were used to slow speeds in an ox-drawn cart. He gripped the reins tightly, pressed his knees against the belly of the beast and held on as best he could. The horse was a healthy animal that the monastery kept stabled on the mainland, just for this kind of purpose. A ferryman had rowed Ubertus from the shingled beach of Vectis to the Wessex shore. Josephus had instructed him to make haste and return within two days, which meant the horse must be made to canter.
As the day wore on the sky turned slate gray, a hue akin to the rocky face of the coastal undercliffs. He rode at pace through a frosty countryside of fallow fields, low stone walls, and tiny villages, much like his own. Occasionally he passed dull-looking peasants, trudging on foot or riding lethargic mules. He was mindful of thieves but in truth his only possessions of value were the horse itself and the few small coins that Josephus had given him for the journey.
He arrived in Tisbury just before sundown. It was a prosperous town with several large timber houses and a multitude of neat cottages lining a broad street. On a central green, sheep huddled in the gloom. He rode past a small wooden church, a solitary structure on the edge of the green, which stood cold and dark. Beside it was a small burial ground with signs of a fresh grave. He quickly crossed himself. The air was filled with smoky hearth fires, and Ubertus was distracted from the burial mound by the delicious odors of charred meat and burning fat everywhere.
Today had been market day, and there were still carts and produce stalls in the square not yet removed because their owners remained in the tavern drinking and throwing dice. Ubertus dismounted at the tavern door. A boy took notice and offered to hold his reins. For one of his coins, the boy led the horse away for a bucket of oats and a trough of water.
Ubertus entered the warm crowded tavern and his senses were assaulted by a din of drunken voices and the smells of stale ale, sweating bodies, and piss. He stood before the blazing peat fire, revived his cramped hands and called out in his thick Italian accent for a jug of wine. Since it was a market town, the men of Tisbury were well- used to strangers, and they received him with cheerful curiosity. A group of men called him to their table and he fell into an animated conversation about where he hailed from and why he had come to town.
It took Ubertus under an hour to pour three jugs of wine down his throat and obtain the knowledge he had been sent to discover.
Sister Magdalena usually walked through the abbey grounds at a deliberate pace, not too slowly, as that would be wasteful of time, but not too speedily, as that would create the impression that something on this earth was more important than the contemplation of God.
Today she ran, clutching something in her hand.
A few days of warmer air had thinned the snow to a patchy shell, and the paths were well-trampled and no longer slippery.
In the Scriptorium, Josephus and Paulinus sat alone in silence. They had dismissed the copyists so they could meet privately with Ubertus, who had returned from his mission, cold and exhausted.
Ubertus was no longer there, having been sent back to his village with a grim thanks and a benediction.
His report was simple and sobering.
On the eighteenth day of December, three days earlier, a child was born in the town of Tisbury to Wuffa the tanner and his wife Eanfled.
The child’s name was Sigbert.
While neither would openly admit it, they were not shocked by the news. They half expected to hear as much since it was scarcely possible that the fantastic circumstances of a mute boy born to a dead mother who could,
