Читать книгу Sacred Bones - Michael Spring - Страница 8

FIVE

I mastered my scribal skills with an ease my father would have hugged me for, and went to work in the scriniarium as one of hundreds of glorified young notaries overseeing the daily business of the Church. Having a way with words, I was assigned to the library, where I handled requests for books and kept records of those on loan.

“We search for Cicero’s De Oratore and the Commentaries of Donatus on Terence,” wrote an elderly monk from Lorsch. “Please also send us the Commentaries of Saint Jerome on Jeremiah, from the seventh book to the end. We’ll return it as soon as it’s copied. We can’t find anything beyond the sixth book north of the Alps.”

Four months passed before I could find a messenger going to Lorsch whom I could entrust these treasures to. Did he drown on the way? Was he waylaid by robbers or eaten by wild beasts? I’ll never know. Neither he nor the books he was charged to deliver were ever seen again.

On dark nights, when I’m fast sleep, I still sometimes pay a visit to the monk from Lorsch. I find him sitting on the floor of his cold dark cell, waiting for the scraps of ancient wisdom I tried to send him. I call out to him but he doesn’t answer. Animals without names howl outside his door. The only light is the lamp he reads by and the stars.

I envied the Pope’s messengers their freedom, their availability for whatever life threw their way. When I wasn’t working in the library, I wandered over to Saint Peter’s stables and helped the boys load the carts and harness the horses as they set off around the kingdom. I was still waving long after they rumbled out of sight.

A horse named Romulus, a strong Low Country horse with Oriental blood, would follow me around the stables, nuzzling me and licking honey from my fingers with his rough tongue. His power was astonishing. When his hooves began to split and soften, I pleaded with the count of the stable to give him wooden shoes. He wouldn’t hear of it. “You bookish types are all alike,” he growled. “If horses were meant to have shoes, God would have given them shoes.” Romulus whinnied and pawed the ground. He could hardly stand. A few weeks later the count had him slaughtered.