He lay on his back in the little graveyard behind the refectory, near Timothy's reluctant garden. It was a little after three in the morning and as dark and quiet as the city would ever get. Most of the lights in the high-rises towering above him were off, and the garbage trucks had not yet started their hydraulic howls and rude hammering of metal against metal. This is how peacefulness would be measured in this city, at least for those who did not live high above the din.
He had come to feel that life in this monastery with its futile walls and surrounding buildings was like being at the bottom of a high-sided box, one like those offering kittens on the street. The only view, the only space, was either upward or inward. Tonight, both were infinite yet confining.
He remembered what Robert Peaches had said in the little park about a building's occupying not only its own physical space but also a cylinder that continues both below and above its material structure. He imagined the city block the monastery occupied and, using the skyscrapers around him as a sighting instrument, tried to project it into the heavens. But though the night was clear, he was unable to discern among the stars where this little cylinder might go, or where it might arrive.
He was no more successful in terms of his inner space. For the first time in his life as a monk, uncertainty had come to cloud his peace and keep him awake. The rhythm of monastic life, the mantra of ritual prayer, the balm of the chant no longer calmed his soul.
It occurred to him that some atonement might help him regain his focus. Flagellation had long ago been abandoned, but perhaps some other form of self-mortification would do. It was chilly, and a sharp rock or stick pressed painfully against his shoulder blade. He told himself to lie motionless and not to move at all, even when it became unbearable. He would remain there, unmoving, until it was time to help Brother John with breakfast.
He should not have been surprised that it was Jess who had driven a needle to the very center of his conscience. No, not his conscience. His consciousness, his being. She was, after all, direct and incisive and unpredictable.
Deep down, Alphaios had been half-expecting the question to be raised by Prior Bartholomew upon discovery of some exploit, or stumbled upon during some blunt gambit by Brother Simon or Levi. But in one probing moment, it was Jess who had brought it all to the surface.
He did not concede to the growing discomfort of the rock, at least not on purpose. His thoughts began to drift through the city and its people, and he simply forgot his intention. It was not long before he raised himself up, absently rubbed his shoulder and returned to his cell.
Later, after lunch, he walked directly to the library. The day was clear and bright—just as the night had been—and he would be able to start work on the intricate little painting that waited for the right combination of light and energy. Not only that, Inaki would be returning from his research trip to northern Spain, a full week later than planned.
He was eager to learn what Inaki had found. Whatever it was, it must have been important to keep him there an extra week. Meanwhile, he would focus his attention on the task at hand.
The bifolium in front of him had somehow escaped water damage. Neither, remarkably, had the passage of some six hundred years dimmed its beauty. One of its pages was an early fifteenth-century masterpiece equal to any period painting he'd ever seen in Florence or Rome. He attributed it to Obadiah: it had a very serious mien and was traditional in both interpretation and artistry. Though he was more predictable and doctrinal than Jeremiah, Alphaios still counted Obadiah among the best illuminators of his time.
On the outward, right-side margin was a narrow, vertical painting of three virgin martyrs in full figure. They overlapped downward from right to left and back to right, and were entwined together in gold leaf filigree in the form of ivy. The figures were unconstrained by a formal frame. It was exquisite in detail and color, with very fine brush and pen work.
XM had done beautiful work copying the text. Alphaios had already illuminated the grandly flourished initial capital letters on the page—unmistakably Zephaniah's work—and had penned in the small purple budded crosses that were interspersed among the text. He had laid the gesso for the gold leaf. Now his task was to copy the exquisite painting with absolute faithfulness. The first step would be laying and burnishing the breath-thin gold leaf into the threads of ivy. This had to be done before the painting, because gold leaf would not adhere to a painted surface.
At the top right was St. Catherine of Alexandria. She was in a gown of wine red with gold thread embroidered across the bodice. Here the gold would be crushed and bound together with gum arabic. Instead of the sheen of gold leaf, this gold would sparkle in the light. Over St. Catherine's shoulders was a long, luxurious cloak in a rich bronze with golden highlights. In her right hand she carried a book. Parts of a broken wheel rested at her feet.
Legend had it—for with every saint, it was often legend rather than historical fact which underlay their veneration—that as an unusually learned young woman she confronted the Roman emperor in his court for worshipping pagan gods and persecuting Christians. She was imprisoned for her audacity, and the emperor's scholars were employed to use reason to get her to recant her faith. Instead, she persuaded many of them to become Christians, including the emperor's own wife and his most-trusted general. All of her converts were martyred by the emperor, and Catherine was condemned to a torturous death on the wheel. At her first touch, however, the wheel collapsed. The emperor ordered her beheaded. Angels were said to have carried her body to Mount Sinai, where a church and monastery were later built in her honor. Among many other groups, Catherine became the patron saint of wheelwrights, mechanics, philosophers and the dying.
Below her and to her left, in a simple lilac garment that became purple in its folds and shadows, stood Margaret of Antioch. In one hand she held a silver chain with which she tethered a scaled, ungainly green beast at her feet. Part of a boiling cauldron stood off to one side.
St. Margaret's story was brutal. She was said to have been born to a pagan priest. As an infant, when her mother died, she was put under the care of a distant shepherdess. Under that woman's influence, she became a Christian. When she was a young woman, a Roman official attempted to force his attentions on her, but she refused. Angry, irritated, or just because he could, he denounced her in public and she was put on trial. Faced with a painful death unless she renounced her faith, she chose the former. Death by fire was attempted, but in the face of her prayers, the flames did not burn her. Boiling water failed to cook her alive. Finally, she was beheaded. After her death, many apocryphal acts were attributed to her, among them being swallowed by Satan in the form of a dragon. She escaped, legend said, when the points of her cross irritated the dragon's throat. St. Margaret became the patron saint of pregnant women and childbirth.
The last figure, further down and to the right, was St. Barbara, golden-haired and wearing a finely woven gown of pure white. A sky-blue cloak draped around her back and over both arms. In her right hand she held a gold chalice from which a holy light emanated. In her left was a palm frond, a sign of martyrdom. Behind her was part of a stone structure showing light from three small windows.
Her story was even worse. As a young woman, said the hagiographers, she was secluded in a tower by a domineering father, a pagan, to protect her from the outside world. Through her own prayer and study, and perhaps through surreptitious teaching by a local priest, Barbara secretly converted to Christianity and was baptized. When her father had a bathhouse constructed for her, she had an extra, third window put in to symbolize the Trinity. Upon learning she'd become a Christian, her father denounced her before the civil authorities, offered her up for torture and beheading, and subsequently took up the axe himself to complete the task. His fate? To be killed by lightning on his way home from her execution.
Perhaps because of the lightning and the thunder that must have accompanied her departure, Barbara became the patron saint of artillerymen and miners. She also came to be sought out by the faithful for assurance that they would receive the gift of last rites before dying—a last opportunity for penance and the Eucharist.
Each woman had a delicate gold halo above her head.
Alphaios noted that these were the only three women in the group of saints called the fourteen holy helpers. The helpers were considered by many to be the most accommodating intercessors for the prayerful. It wasn't unusual that only the women were depicted, for individual variations were a hallmark of such books of hours.
Much of Alphaios's religious education had included recitations of the saints, and the daily formal prayers of his order still called upon many of them for their help in gaining heaven's final favor. As far as he could tell, his brothers in the monastery still believed in their literal power. Suffrages to the saints and entreaties for their assistance continued to be a fervent part of their daily prayers.
He couldn't quite remember when he'd begun to doubt, but it had been long ago, and now Alphaios viewed saints mostly as good people—although there could be some who were not—who had lived their faith or died their faith. Yet even in this context, goodness had different meanings. It could mean zeal more than charity, even the relentlessly rooting out of heretics and others who gave any challenge at all to Church doctrine.
The legends that had grown up around saints, he had come to believe, were used by priests and popes primarily to reach the faithless and to keep the faithful. Lay people themselves had pressed for the sainthood of many beloved figures, perhaps as a way of buttressing their own beliefs, making a personal connection to their faith, or bending the Church to their will.
For Alphaios, sanctity was not to be found in bombast but in whispers; not in heroic deeds but in humble service; not in self-mortification or other hardships for imagined sins, small sins, or sins never committed. If saintliness were to be achieved inside a cloistered order, it would not be because of prayer in seclusion, but because of service to the others who lived behind those closed doors.
These thoughts did not prevent him from applying his craft, and before he knew it, he'd reached his two-hour limit. He was inspecting the bifolium and his worktable for stray slips of gold leaf when Inaki came through the door of the scriptorium. He clapped Alphaios on the back.
"I stopped by an hour ago, but you were so deep into your work I decided to come back."
"You kept me waiting for news of your trip?"
"News? What makes you think there's news?"
Alphaios took his friend's hand and shook it warmly. "I can see it in your face. Welcome back. Besides, you didn't stay an extra week just to sun yourself in San Sebastian."
"I was tempted." Inaki looked at the worktable. "Ah, you've started the ladies. I hoped you would."
"Let me put them away. Then tell me about your trip."
When the sheet of parchment had been stowed and Alphaios's tools were in their places, they went to the scribes' work area. Each found a high stool and sat down. They were surrounded by angled worktables and cabinets. Not a single pencil or piece of vellum was out of place.
"The professor was right," Inaki said. "The journal didn't have any more references to anything like a royal family kneeling before a pope—wink or no wink. Just the one page he sent us."
"What about other writings by the same author?"
Inaki shook his head. "None in Uncastillo. Not in the monastery, not in the town's archives. Nothing."
Alphaios was disappointed. He knew in his heart the lost painting with the wink was the work of Jeremiah. But he was as eager as Inaki to find a better description of it than the professor had found. And any further clue to the painting might also provide information regarding the book's birthplace.
"But..." Inaki drummed his fingers on the worktable next to him, then grinned broadly. "I did find some sixteenth-century codices that hadn't been known before. Think of it—previously unknown manuscripts! And they center on Basque life and history. That's what kept me there. They were stuffed into a broken-down cupboard in an old stone barn. It'd been shoved back against a wall behind some old lumber and farm tools. I found an early Bible in Euskara. I don't have a date on it yet, but the first known translation was in 1571. This one was printed on a mechanical press and could date as early as only fifty years later. Not even the monastery had a record of them!"
Alphaios was happy for his friend. For an archivist, unearthing such ancient documents about his own ancestral lands would be the find of a lifetime. But they had no bearing on the book of hours.
"Let me show you," Inaki said. "I brought a couple of documents back. I nearly had to turn over the deed to the library to get them, but I persuaded them to check my credentials. So here we are. Let's go upstairs." He stood up and headed for the door, waving Alphaios along.
Inaki was so enthusiastic that Alphaios held back further questions of his own—he would have ample time later. Not reluctantly, but not sharing his friend's exuberance either, he followed the archivist out of the scriptorium and up the stairs.
Spread out on Inaki's desk was a dark piece of felt. The archivist lifted it, and before him lay an illumination on old parchment. He approached it, and when he got close, his heart began to race. "Jeremiah," he whispered.
There was no reaction from Inaki. The building was silent.
The page was small, from a book probably meant for an important man's library, perhaps a bishop or a noble. It was well scribed, but it was the miniature painting that stood out.
"Jeremiah," Alphaios said again, aloud this time.
"Are you certain?"
Alphaios nodded and pointed to the small painting. It was of a bishop dining with a small group at a table. "Look at the position of this hand. It's typical of him: a more natural position, more physiologically correct than most illuminators of his time. And the bishop's forehead, here? The blemish. Maybe a birthmark or a boil? Jeremiah frequently shows some physical flaw in such figures. He used it as a covert way to underscore their mortality and bring them down a peg or two. I can show you examples."
He stood for long moments more. "Remarkable. Where did you find it?"
"There in Uncastillo, at the monastery. It was in a book that had lost its binding. The miniature looked familiar to me. I couldn't say for sure, or even why. I found the traveler's journal, but there weren't any other references to the wink in it. No clues at all about where he might have seen the book. I looked through the other manuscripts they had, books that traced back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had twenty-seven of them. Remarkable, really, but disappointing for us. I passed by this illumination while I was looking for written references, but then something about it nagged at me. I couldn't have told you why, but the more I looked at it the more I thought you should see it."
"Is there any other work like it in the book? Or the others?" He meant Zechariah, Zephaniah, and Obadiah. "Did you get the opportunity to study it?"
"Tomorrow, Alphaios, tomorrow. I must go home to my wife." He smiled broadly. "She has missed me too, you know."
Alphaios felt his face warming. "Of course, Inaki. Go home. We'll talk more tomorrow."
Half an hour later, he was at the little café, speaking with Nico. He sat near the fence, for his favorite table was occupied. The day had been good—sunshine, Jeremiah's art, the collegial pursuit of knowledge—and now an espresso invited his appreciation.
He was watching a nearby sketch artist at work when the tall Nigerian woman appeared on the other side of the street. She was smooth in her gait, and today wore a striking long dress and matching cap in a modern pattern of dusty light blue and tan that contrasted handsomely with her ebony skin. She was alone.
He had seen glimpses of her a number of times since the awful day of the accident. He hadn't spoken to her, though, and realized he still harbored deep pain for her and guilt at his deception.
As he watched, the woman's head turned his way, and for a brief moment their eyes met. She changed direction and walked directly toward him.
Alphaios stood up as she approached. For the second time that day, he was aware of his heart pounding in his chest. He observed again that she was considerably taller than him. There was deep sadness in her dark, direct eyes. He didn't know how to greet her, what to say.
She reached across the low patio fence and laid her open palm over his heart. "Father," she said fiercely, "I will marry again. I will have children."
He nodded dumbly. He could not think of anything to say, and before he could gather himself, she was gone. It was too late to tell her he was only a monk, but it no longer mattered. Strangely, Robert Peaches's buildings and their cylinders of space came to mind. He had a sense that his own personal one had just grown wider.
~*~*~