“It’s some kind of trance,” said the blur.
“He’s not the only one to have fainted in that corner of the cloister,” commented the second blur, whose voice was becoming recognizable.
Dominic tried to turn his head to hold a detail in his vacant eyes.
“You should have that place torn down and exorcized. There is nothing good in there now,” suggested the second blur, whose features were sliding and compressing into the shape of Friar Cuthbert.
“He awakes. Dominic! Dominic?” called the first blur, who had turned into Pittancer Johbert.
Cuthbert lifted the prone man’s head and looked more closely into his rolling eyes, then put a steadying arm around Dominic’s shoulders.
“Can you see me, boy? Can you hear me?”
Dominic’s throat and tongue made the appropriate shapes. He drew air up past them, but no words came out. The sound that escaped him made the others quell and nearly drop him. It was not unlike the call of a bittern: a low, flat modified honk, a boom. Dominic’s eyes were now wild but focused; he gulped air and forced himself to utter more sensible sounds. But the bittern spoke again, this time louder and more urgent.
“Don’t agitate yourself so! Try not to speak, you must have hurt your larynx in the fall,” said Johbert to the panting and confused young monk, who was now gripping his own throat in terrible anxiety, trying to massage or squeeze his voice to make more human sounds.
By nightfall, it was clear to all the brothers who examined Dominic that his human speech had vanished, or been stolen. The unfortunate novice became quite distraught when Friar Benedict asked him to explain the charcoal script written on the wall of the Cyst. It had been Benedict who first insisted on the charcoal being placed there months before, when the Quiet had begun to change. He wanted a true record of everything that took place within the cloistered wall.
Benedict was a grizzled old man whose life had been marred by a deformity of his mouth, which warped his speech and twisted his upper lip into a permanent snarl. He spent most of his time in the scriptorium, clarifying histories and cataloging the useful elements of the known world: compiling the consuetudinary for future generations of monks. His iron will had formed no rust over the years, and his irascible, dogmatic temperament was legendary. He would have interrogated Christ himself had Christ ever dared step inside the monastery that had always been Benedict’s home.
“Pay attention, child, and tell me exactly what you heard,” the old man demanded, his hand already on Dominic’s shoulders, as though ready to shake out the words, if necessary. “Your writing on the wall was clumsy. I can’t quite make out all the words. It would be unforgivable if we never understood your meaning after such a valiant and distressing attempt to chronicle the miracle.”
The word miracle produced different reactions among the brethren, but they were nothing compared to Dominic’s paroxysm of violent gesticulation and the series of resounding booms that followed.
Suddenly he was out of bed and shambling across the room in the general direction of the door. With care, the pittancer tried to restrain Dominic, but he was rudely pushed aside. By the time Dominic was across the cloister and approaching the offending wall, a quarter of the monks were behind him. Even in the dimming blue light, the novice could see the charcoal scrawl. He staggered toward it and slowed as the words came into view. Some of the monks tried to read the passage again. Dominic recognized the swirls of his own hand. His signature in the letters of a sentence that he had never seen before…in a language he understood as Latin but which he could not read or write. He wanted to scream that he had not written this message, but some treacherous doubt was hiding in the black space behind his lost voice.
“You see it? The second and fifth words are unclear,” pressed Friar Benedict, oblivious to the poor youth’s plight. “It makes no sense in its present form; it looks like it says something about a dog?”
“What dog?” demanded Abbot Clementine, who had appeared behind the posse of monks.
Dominic turned and boomed at the abbot until the Father Superior had to cover his ears with his hands. This allowed Friar Benedict to take charge, sending the boy back to his bed and dismissing everyone else so he could speak to the abbot alone.
“What ails the youth so?”
“A voice was heard again, here by the empty Cyst, and it shouted at the poor child.”
“Who witnessed this?”
“Only he who was so grievously afflicted by it.”
“A sore throat is hardly grievous.”
“It is not just a sore throat. His voice suddenly vanished, and it’s made the boy deeply disturbed.”
Abbot Clementine barely concealed his contempt and harshly said, “I think you are making too much of this.”
“Father Superior, I make of it what I am told and what I see with my own eyes, and what I have chronicled about events here since the Testiyont disappeared.”
“The Testiyont did not disappear; it simply got old and died, as we all will. How many times do I have to repeat myself to waylay these morbid fears and fishwives’ rumors?”
Benedict felt the sting, but he would not let himself show emotion or allow his rage to lead him into the arguments he was so famous for having. So he ignored the slight completely and continued.
“If we had been informed of the Oracle’s place of burial, then the anxiety about its soul’s being at peace could have been taken out of the equation, on the evidence of the phenomena attached to its Cyst.”
“Equation! Evidence! What are you talking about? Nothing is happening here, you old fool. It is you and the few others with too much time on their lazy hands who are causing so much doubt and spreading wicked rumors about the fate of the Testiyont. I have told you everything you need to know. And I will not have my authority questioned again!”
Abbot Clementine was a strong, powerful man, and during this speech, he had closed on the diminutive Friar Benedict, spitting the last words down on his wrinkled brow before shrugging violently, marching over to the faint words, and rubbing them out with such violence that the plaster beneath crumbled under his censorship.
That night they inclined Dominic with a potent tincture of valerian. The roof drifted away and he started to sink into a hollow of darkness. Just before the work of the warm hebetude was complete, there was an irony of birds. The far-distant warbling lark and the low-wading bittern sang together: one fluttering in the clouds, the other skulking cautiously among the reeds, their unique songs and the extremes of their gravity shared, like the shy invisibility that kept them hidden and alive. The somnambulant Dominic looked deep into the marshes, hoping to see more, but the condensed darkness refused him. Then a vague luminescence started to grow, looking as if it wanted to form into a face—a white man’s face, with eyes shut tight. Mercifully Dominic’s dream lifted its sight away, soaring upward to find the flutter in the high blue skies. But halfway up, it became entangled in the snow-covered paths of a distant mountain, and there, in the blinding whiteness, another shadow was forming that was not a man. Dominic’s sleep finally overcame his racing mind. He did not see that both sets of closed eyes were trying to see each other, or that soon they would.