The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (2 page)

Domfarcai fidbaidæ fál fomchain lóid luin lúad nad cél.

Huas mo lebrán indlínech fomchain trírech innanén . . .

Fommchain cói menn medair mass himbrot lass de dindgnaib doss

debrath nomchoimmdiu cóima cáinscríbaimm foróda ross.

A hedge of trees surrounds me:

a blackbird’s lay sings to me

praise which I will not hide . . .

Above my manuscript—the lined one—

the trilling of the birds sings to me.

In a gray mantle the cuckoo sings

a beautiful chant to me from the tops of bushes:

may the Lord protect me from Doom!

I write well under the greenwood.

—Verse written in the margin by an Irish scribe who copied Priscian’s
Institutiones Grammaticae
(a Latin grammar) in the mid-ninth century

Anno Domini 877

An Feadán Mór, Éile Uí Chearbhaill, Éiru

The oak wood was still. All sound seemed soaked up by the thick carpet of moss underfoot. Eóghan stood gazing up into the branches of a giant oak. He stretched as tall as he could, but the gallnuts hung just out of arm’s reach, dangling from a branch above his head. He knew from experience that this particular nut contained the worm of a wasp—and the handiest substance for making good dark ink. Eóghan threw his arms around a stout low-hanging branch and swung his legs up over it. He was an agile climber, having spent many hours in the oak grove near the monastery where he had lived as a child. Soon he was buried in thick sprays of foliage, straddling the branch and inching out toward his quarry, the galls that hung like brown fruit from clusters of leaves. From this perch, he could see his master walking in the morning sun along the edge of the bog where they had spent the night.

Eóghan felt the tension building inside him, then a sudden rush of air as a bewildering noise erupted from his throat. “Cuh-cuh-CUH!”

The master was well used to such outbursts. He turned and raised a hand to his eyes, peering up into the tree. “Ah, you’re awake. God be with you, Eóghan,” he said.

“Cuh-cuh-CUH!” Eóghan shouted again, in reply. Out here in the wood, his voice blended with the sounds of birds and animals, absorbed by the forest floor. Back in the world of men, his yelps and cries had rung out against stone, echoing and reverberating, out of place and rude. Here he was a part of nature, another element in the seamless world of wonders rather than an aberration.

Eóghan could not help what was happening. He had ever been like this.
Devil-touched
, his own father had called him, and had beaten him sorely nearly every day of his life, in a vain attempt to chase away the demons. When she could bear the beatings no longer, his mother had carried him to the monastery—he was still a child—and persuaded the monks to take him in, to train him up in their ways. The brothers had
not been unkind, but in truth they held out little hope for him. They’d thought him simple and put him to work plucking birds for the cook, or gathering nuts and mushrooms in the wood, where his shouting and random gestures could disturb no one but the other wild creatures.

Eóghan inched forward, keeping his oak gall quarry in sight, remembering those early days at the monastery, considering how they had brought him to this place. He had often been set under the kitchen window, where the cook could keep a close eye on him. As he worked, he used to watch the monks strolling from the church to the Scriptorium.

The Scriptorium began to intrigue him. Whenever he was sent to fetch water, he would upend his bucket and stand upon it to peer through the windows, spying on the monks at their writing desks, each with a sheet of calfskin in front him, covered in black marks and designs such as Eóghan had never seen before. At a table in one corner, one brother often worked stitching together calfskin pages, marking them with barely visible lines, or tooling the leather covers that would eventually bind them. Around the walls of the Scriptorium hung leather satchels filled with books, for that was what they were called, these monks’ writings. For months, he had lurked outside whenever he could, watching their painstaking work, fascinated by the brother who made the inks, his crocks full of insects and dried berries, his beakers of wine and blocks of crystal gum. Eóghan had longed to be inside, not just to be near the fire but also so that he could see how everything was done. He had to take great care not to be noticed at his hiding place outside the window. When the shouting fits came upon him, he would stifle the sound with his fist, punching the words and noises back down his throat.

Eventually he had begun to steal into the Scriptorium at night, to gaze upon the work on each writing desk, the pots of ink in every hue. He studied the marks the monks had made, recognizing the same shapes repeated over and over, each page recognizable for its subtly different hand. He traced the shapes of elaborate capitals, studying how the scribes had devised their miraculous designs. To him, every codex hanging from the pegs upon the walls was a living thing, a great soul-cry come to life in a myriad of shapes and colors, in the wild eyes, the bared teeth, and talons of the long-necked peacock, the calf, the dog, the eagle. In his dreams, the animals from the manuscripts moved and spoke, fought fierce battles. It seemed that a kind of secret life was hidden everywhere and in everything, and books were no different.

As he worked in the kitchen, he began to mark out the shapes he’d seen in pig’s blood, or the juice of a beetroot, tracing over and over, seduced by their sinuous outlines, taking care to destroy any recognizable character whenever the cook passed by.

On one of his nighttime forays into the Scriptorium, he found a wooden cask full of oak galls, more crushed in a mortar on the ink maker’s table. He had seen these growing in the grove whenever he was gathering mushrooms or acorns for the cook. So he had begun collecting galls each time he went to the oak wood and secretly adding them to the ink maker’s store. Then one night, as he was leaving his gift of gallnuts, the door of the Scriptorium had burst open.

“There he is!” shouted Brother Alphonsus, the ink maker. “I knew someone had been here. Catch him!”

Eóghan smiled, remembering how he had led the monks on a wild chase that night, leaping over writing desks, spilling ink everywhere. He was younger and more agile than any of them, and by the time they finally caught him, the whole monastery was awake. Faces crowded into the doorway, and the Scriptorium was filled with flickering candlelight.

All at once, the crowd at the doorway parted, and a single figure approached. He was short in stature and quite rotund, with a kindly face and a ringing voice. “Unhand the boy,” he commanded curtly, and the monks complied, releasing Eóghan’s flailing limbs and backing away. The newcomer was a visiting scholar and evidently a man of some importance, to judge from the way the monks bowed to him.

“What are you doing here, boy?” the scholar asked. “What business do you have here in the Scriptorium—in the middle of the night?” His voice, though strong, was also gentle.

Eóghan felt himself color, even now, years later, remembering his response. “Arse-lick,” he’d replied. His hands felt blindly for the galls in his bulging pockets, mortified at his own words but unable to stop them. “Cuh-cuh-cocksucker. Arse-lick.” He’d heard the sharp intake of breath, watched the faces around him drain of blood waiting for the visitor’s response.

“Why don’t you show me what’s in your pockets?” the scholar had calmly replied.

Eóghan had rubbed his hands together and touched his forehead three times, then reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of galls. A new light of understanding shone from the scholar’s eyes.

“He’s mad,” came the abbot’s voice, trying to soften things. “This boy works in the kitchen, Excellency. He’s simple in the head, doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“On the contrary, I think he knows exactly,” said the scholar. “You may leave us.”

“But Excellency, if this boy was stealing from the Scriptorium, he must be punished.”

“You would flog the lad for replenishing your stores? That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it, boy?”

“Cac-cac-cac,” Eóghan had replied, flushing and nodding furiously. “Cac-cac-eater!”

And so it had begun that night twenty-seven years ago, his apprenticeship as a scribe. His protector, the visiting scholar, had eventually left them, but not without exacting a promise from the abbot that he would be brought up in the way of the scribes. At first the monks resented him, a mere boy plucked from the mud at the scullery door, but none would deny his growing skill. At the beginning they allowed him only to gather the gallnuts for their ink. When he’d proved himself adept at that task, they had shown him how to crush the galls with mortar and pestle, then soak them in wine to extract the essence. They’d taught him how to boil that essence down and mix it with gum arabic and vitriol to make a strong black ink. How to mix copper ash for purple, white flake for red, hawthorn berries or eel gall for yellow. In seven years, they had taught him nearly everything contained in their Book of Secrets, and he had learned it well. He had shown himself so diligent in the study of inks and ink making that the monks began to teach him how to cure and stretch the calfskin for vellum, how to measure and mark pages for a gathering. Still not satisfied, he begged to be allowed to take up the pen. To write.

And that was when he had truly surprised them all. For the act of writing stilled his tongue, his hands. He never once shouted or touched his head while copying. At the lettering, no hand was steadier. What magic was there in word making that kept him steady? God was with him then, the monks said. It was sacred, that moment—mind and hand together distilling thoughts into words. How could any human creature know greater joy? It was only when he laid down the quill that the fits came upon him again.

When they taught him to read, how he had pored over the precious
gatherings, breaking the rules and burning a lamp into the wee hours to soak up all he could, his soul burning like his illicit flame, with a desire to know. Eóghan had begun to understand that he had suffered all these years from a surfeit of words, too many for his heart and mind to contain, so they kept spilling out of him.
In principio erat verbum
, the Scripture said—In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Verbum, verba, verbi, verborum, verbo, verbis, verbatim, verbalis, verbosus.

Then his master the scholar had returned and taken him abroad to the Frankish court, where they worked for nearly twenty years, translating and creating new thoughts from old, the master reciting great strings of words, Eóghan diligently writing them down. At the start of all that, he had previously made only faithful copies; this work in which the master was engaged was something new, connecting his own fleeting thoughts to concrete words, and not only that, but also creating in their arrangement an object of profound beauty, like a spider spinning a web.

Three months ago he and his master had set out upon this pilgrimage, from Laon back to Éiru, the place of their birth. Eóghan did not know the master’s reason for this journey. When he asked, his master replied only, “Even wild creatures return to the places whence they’ve come.” Two nights ago, they had lodged at the monastery not far from here, where he and the master had met, where he had learned the secrets of the scribes.

Eóghan looked down from his perch in the tree at the master, still sunning himself by the edge of a bog pool. The oak leaves around him stirred in the breeze, and morning sunlight played on the water, making a golden checkerboard that seemed to move and meld together, and Eóghan was filled with such an unaccustomed feeling of well-being, his mind combining the contours of the oak leaf with the glinting ripples—all part of the enfolding mysteries of
vitae aeternum
—and he knew exactly what sorts of embellishments he would try out on the pages his master would dictate today. They would argue, and Eóghan would ask questions. He had become a part of the master’s work. He was even allowed to add a gloss from time to time, adding the warmth of his breath to amplify the master’s thoughts and words. It was a joyful thing, seeing their two hands on the page side by side.

All at once, Eóghan’s thoughts were disturbed by a distant, faint sound of horses approaching. A jagged panic shot through him. From
childhood, his first impulse at the prospect of meeting unfriendly stares had always been to hide. And so he climbed higher in the tree, hoping to conceal himself amid its leathery green leaves. As he slipped from sight, a pair of horsemen came charging through the wood, pausing directly below the tree where he was concealed. The forest floor muffled any hoofbeats; all Eóghan could hear was the squeaking of leather saddles, the rasp of labored breathing.

“There he is,” the first horseman said to his mate, pointing through the trees at the master. “I confess it’s beyond me why anyone should be frightened of such a weak old man.” The second rider only grunted. They were so close below Eóghan that he could smell the rank odor of their bodies. There was an edge in the speaker’s voice that said these two were fighting men. They seemed to know his master—what were they after?

Eóghan felt a sudden whirlwind of words in his throat, trying to force their way out, and his first instinct, as always, was to keep them from escaping. He stuffed his fist into his mouth and bit down hard, pain erasing for a brief moment the overpowering need to speak.