matter?”
“I cannot, Father,” Felix said in his thick-tongued Breton accent.
“Then we must have a meeting of the council.”
The Council of the Order of the Names had not been convened for many years. Felix struggled to remember the last time-it was nearly twenty years earlier, he believed, when decisions had to be made concerning the last great Library expansion. He was a young man then, a scholar and bookbinder who had sought out Vectis because of its famous Scriptorium. Because of his intelligence, skills, and probity, Baldwin, who was prior in those days, inducted him into the Order.
Baldwin led the None Office inside the cathedral, the mellow song of his congregation filling the Sanctuary. He followed the prescribed order of service by rote and allowed his mind to drift to the crypts during the droning chants. None began with the Deus in Adjutorium, followed by the None hymn, Psalms 125, 126, and 127, a versicle, the Kyrie, the Pater, the Oratorio, and the concluding seventeenth prayer of St. Benedict. When it was done, he exited the Sanctuary first and listened for the select footsteps of members of the Order following him to the adjoining Chapter House, a polygonal building with a sharply peaked roof.
At the table sat Felix; Brother Bartholomew, the grizzled old monk who led the Scriptorium; Brother Gabriel, the sharp-tongued astronomer; Brother Edward, the surgeon, who presided over the infirmary; Brother Thomas, the fat drowsy keeper of the Cellarium and the Buttery; and Sister Sabeline, Mother Superior of all the sisters, a proud middle-aged woman of aristocratic blood.
“Who can tell me the current state of affairs within the Library?” Baldwin demanded, referring to the monks who labored there.
They had all visited recently, driven by uneasy curiosity, but no one had more intimate knowledge than Bartholomew, who spent much of his life underground and even assumed the physical characteristics of a vole. He had a pointy face, an aversion to light, and made small quick movements with his scrawny arms to emphasize his speech. “Something is troubling them,” he began. “I have watched them for many years.” He sighed. “Many years, indeed, and this is the closest I have ever seen to emotion.”
Gabriel chimed in. “I agree with our brother. These are not typical displays of emotions that any one of us might experience-joy, anger, tiredness, hunger-but an unsettling sense of something being out of order.”
“What specifically are they doing that is different from their usual practices?” Baldwin asked thoughtfully.
Felix leaned forward. “I would say their sense of purpose seems somehow diminished.”
“Yes!” Bartholomew agreed.
“Over the years, we have always marveled at their infallible industry,” Felix continued. “Their toil is unimaginable. They work until they collapse and when they awake after brief respite, they are rejuvenated and begin anew. Their pauses for food, drink, and nature are fleeting. But now…”
“Now they are getting lazy, like me!” Brother Thomas guffawed.
“Hardly lazy,” the surgeon interjected. Brother Edward had a long thin beard, which he stroked obsessively. “I would say they have grown somewhat apathetic. The pace of their work is slower, more measured, their hands move sluggishly, their sleep periods are longer. They linger at their food.”
“It is an apathy,” Bartholomew agreed. “They are as they have always been, but you are correct, there is a certain apathy.”
“Is there anything else?” Baldwin asked.
Sister Sabeline fingered the edge of her veil. “Last week one of them did not rise to the occasion.”
“Astonishing!” Thomas exclaimed.
“Has this occurred again?” Gabriel asked.
She shook her head. “There has not been an opportune time. However, tomorrow I am bringing a pretty girl called Elizabeth. I will inform you of the outcome.”
“Do so,” the abbot said. “And keep me informed about this-apathy.”
Bartholomew carefully made his way down the steep spiraling stairs leading from the small chapel-sized building to the crypts. There were torches set at intervals along the stairwell that were bright enough for most, but his eyes were failing after a lifetime of reading manuscripts by candles. He felt for the edge of each stair with his right sandal before dropping his left foot onto the next.
The winding of the stairs was so tight, and he turned so many times on himself, that he was dizzy by the time he reached the bottom. Every time he descended these stairs and entered the crypts, he marveled at the engineering and building skills of his predecessors who had burrowed so deeply into the earth in the eleventh century.
He unlocked the enormous door with the heavy black iron key he kept on his belt. Since he was small and light he had to lean into it with all his strength. It swung on its hinges and he entered the Hall of the Writers.
Though he had entered the hall thousands of times since he was first initiated into the Order of the Names as a young abbey scholar with a quizzical nature, he never ceased to pause in amazement and wonder at the sight of it.
Now, Bartholomew looked out on a crop of pale-skinned, ginger-haired men and boys, each one grasping a quill, dipping and writing, dipping and writing, producing a din of scratching as if hundreds of rats were trying to claw into barrels of grain. Some were old men, some young boys, but despite their ages, they all looked uncannily similar to one another. Every face was as blank as the next, green eyes boring into sheets of white parchment.
The writers faced the front of the cavern, seated shoulder by shoulder at their long tables. The chamber had a domed ceiling that was plastered and whitewashed. The dome was specially designed by the eleventh century architect, Brother Bertram, to reflect the candles and increase their luminosity, and every few decades the plaster was whitewashed anew to counter the soot.
There were up to ten writers at each of fifteen tables stretching to the rear of the chamber. Most of the tables were fully occupied, but there were scattered gaps. The reason for the gaps was apparent because the edge of the chamber was lined with cotlike beds, some of which were occupied by sleepers.
Bartholomew walked among the rows, stopping to peer over a shoulder here, a shoulder there. All seemed in order. The main door leading from the stairwell opened. Young brothers were bringing in pots of food.
At the rear of the chamber, Bartholomew opened another heavy door. He lit a torch from a candle that was always kept by the door and entered the first of two interconnected pitch-dark rooms, each one dwarfing the Hall of the Writers.
The library was a magnificent construction, cool dry vaults so vast they seemed, in torchlight, to have no physical boundaries. He passed through the narrow center corridor of the first vault and inhaled the rich earthy smell of the cowhide covers. He liked to periodically check that no burrowing rodents or nesting insects had penetrated the stone-lined fortress, and would have made his usual thorough inspection of the entire library had he not heard a commotion behind him.
One of the young brothers, a monk named Alfonso, was calling for his companions.
Bartholomew ran back to the hall and saw him kneeling behind the fourth table from the front with two of his fellow monks. A pot of stew was spilled on the floor and Bartholomew almost slipped on it.
“What is wrong?” the old man called to Alfonso.
None of the writers were affected by the disturbance. They remained occupied as if nothing had happened. But at Alfonso’s knees there was a puddle of blood and a stream of crimson flowing from the eye of one of the ginger-heads, a quill thrust through his left eye deep into his brain matter.
“Jesus Christ Our Savior!” Bartholomew exclaimed at the sight. “Who did this!”
“No one!” Alfonso cried. The young Spaniard was shaking like a cold wet dog. “I saw him do it to himself. I was serving stew. He did it to himself!”
The Order of the Names convened again that day. No one had ever seen or heard of such an event and there was no oral history. Certainly, writers were born and writers died from old age. In this way they were like all mortal men, save for the fact that they never recorded their own births or deaths. But this death was entirely different. The fellow was young and had no sign of disease. Brother Edward, the surgeon, had confirmed this. Bartholomew had examined the last entry on the man’s last page and there was nothing at all remarkable about it. It was simply one more name that happened to be in Chinese characters, by Bartholomew’s reckoning.
It was clear this was suicide, an inexplicable abomination for any man. They discussed long into the night what actions they should take but there were no ready answers. Gabriel wondered if the body should be taken
