THE PALIMPSEST OF MEMORY

THE PALIMPSEST OF MEMORY, by Deborah Davitt

Brother Thomas bent over his desk in the scriptorium. The quill in his big fingers looked frail and delicate, in marked contrast to the worn and calloused palms. He still couldn’t read—the monks had yet to teach him, in the year since he’d come to the monastery—but the abbot had put him to work in the scriptorium over the heavy objections of the librarian and head of the scribes. Or so he’d heard.

Still, as the quill spluttered over the scraped parchment, he wasn’t sure the abbot had made a good decision. Especially as black ink sprayed everywhere as he attempted a delicate serif.

“You must use a lighter hand, Brother Thomas,” scolded Brother Hiram, leaning over his shoulder. “Use some sand to soak up the ink, and then you can scrape away your mistake. Again.”

Clearly, Hiram thought that Thomas would be better employed in the gardens. Mostly, Thomas agreed with that. He’d be out in the fresh air, turning over soil with a spade. It wouldn’t be so different from handling a halberd or a spear—

—and for a moment, he remembered the halberd in his hand, its haft red-slick with blood. The feel as it grated along bones as it plunged through a horse’s chest as he ducked under the cavalry lance and drove it home. The screams of the dying mare, who hadn’t asked to be there. The spray of her blood across the white lily of Valois on his chest—

—and then he carefully redirected his thoughts. He was a man of peace now. That was that.

Hiram tutted over the scraping of the parchment. “This is a palimpsest,” he reminded Thomas for at least the fifth time. “No matter how you scrape, some of the original text shows through. You’ll have to be able to copy an entire text without error before I trust you with clean vellum. Or, gods forbid, the colored inks.”

Thomas occasionally wondered if Hiram enjoyed putting him down simply because he was a former soldier. If the bandy-legged, twitchy monk had once been bullied by larger, stronger children, and now found an outlet for all that childhood rage in him.

These were idle thoughts, however. He didn’t feel particular outrage at the continual verbal harassment; he knew he wasn’t doing well in the scriptorium, and was in no hurry to ascend to the heady heights of colored inks. The red in particular looked like blood, thick and glutinous, and the other scribes constantly had to thin it with fresh water, stirring vigorously before carefully applying it to a page. “It might be easier for me to make fewer mistakes,” he suggested in his low, deep voice, “if I could read what I’m copying.”

“Oh heavens, no.” Hiram shook his head dismissively. “Your illiteracy actually makes you a safer choice. We have here tomes that house prayers and spells could move the world if they were unleashed. Better for you—better for everyone—if the scribe that copies them isn’t a conduit for such power.”

Thomas sighed. He was fairly sure, from what Sister Justinia had said yesterday, that he was copying a prayer to cure an ague. Hardly world-shattering stuff. But he’d cheerfully kill to be able to read it—

—once again, he carefully redirected his thoughts. No. Not kill. It was just an expression, but it was the wrong thing to think here. Those were a soldier’s thoughts, not a monk’s.

During compline that evening, as he struggled to keep his eyes open throughout the long prayers, all spoken in a language he didn’t understand, but mouthed along with the others, raw rote memorization of the syllables, an alarm bell began to ring in the village in the valley below the mountain monastery.

The monks refused to hurry. The abbot finished the prayers, while Thomas chafed internally, most of him feeling that he should be heading for an armory to dress out in his kit and belt on a sword. “We should be prepared to handle wounded and refugees from the village,” the abbot said placidly to his brother monks. “It’s probably raiders.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting ready to defend the abbey?” Thomas asked Hiram, as the closest monk by his side.

Hiram laughed. “Oh, no raiders ever come here. They know our defenses are too powerful for them. We have prayers that will limn them in white light, and destroy them unto their very souls—”

Thomas froze as the first screams echoed through the hallways. Hiram bolted for the scriptorium, while Thomas ran towards the screaming. Raiders? No. Their armor was too clean, too well-maintained. They all wore matching surcoats, with the lily of Valois on them, the same lily he’d worn as a man-at-arms for twenty years—and they surrounded a chanting mage, who put up some kind of glimmering, soap-bubble thin shield, just as Hiram emerged from the scriptorium with a book in hand, chanting himself now.

That soap-bubble shield deflected the bolt of heavenly light that came down upon the invaders, leaving violet afterimages in Thomas’ eyes.

When the glare cleared, he could see that only one of the invaders had fallen, leaving a sword on the ground. Thomas picked it up. He, too, was a palimpsest. What he’d once been, still showed through. And now it was time to use it.

He moved through the soap-bubble shield, feeling it press against his skin. He could hear the harried note in the mage’s voice as the man read from his book, and Hiram read more loudly from his, their voices both frantic now, spell and counter-spell, a kind of grappling that Thomas could not comprehend.

But he and the men-at-arms around the mage understood a different kind of combat, and their blades clashed and wove. The others were younger. Stronger. Faster.

But Thomas had age and guile and experience, and that’s what prevailed. He noticed, almost off-handedly, that his sword strokes formed ascenders and descenders in the air. That their blood looked almost as black as ink in the strange light inside the soap-bubble. And then, as the voices reached a crescendo of spell-casting, and fire limned both the mage and Hiram, he crashed into the mage and brought his sword down across the man’s neck, taking his head with a serif slash that splattered blood across the floor and walls like ink across the page.

“What have you done?” Brother Hiram demanded, his voice shaking as he shuffled closer, closing his book upon one finger, as if holding his place in it.

“Saved your life, I think,” Thomas replied evenly.

“I was handling the situation! There was no need to profane these walls with blood!” Hiram’s voice nearly strangled on itself.

Thomas looked at the man. Then he sighed and wiped off his sword with a piece of a fallen soldier’s surcoat. He’d talk to the abbot about leaving the monastery tonight, Thomas decided tiredly.

But the abbot would hear nothing of his leaving. “No,” the abbot told him as they walked in the herb garden together. “What you were shows through, yes. And sometimes, that is a good and needful thing. But you can be more than what you were.”

“Then why won’t you teach me to read?” Thomas asked mildly.

The abbot paused mid-stride, and then replied smoothly, “Humility, of course. You must always strive to know your place in the order of things—”

So a soldier should stay a soldier, eh?

“So it’s not, as Brother Hiram said, because I might learn to use the spells I’m copying, and present a danger to myself or others?” Thomas couldn’t quite leach all the irony from his voice. He’d thought that the abbot understood him and his need for peace after a lifetime of war, but now, he wasn’t sure of that, either.

The abbot stopped and put a hand on his shoulder, reaching up to do so. “Of course not, my boy!” He paused. “Perhaps we could revisit the thought of you learning to read, however. Perhaps in a year’s time?”

Thomas regarded the abbot. While the abbot was supposed to be the father of the community, there was something slightly offensive about being called a boy by a man of his own age. “No,” he finally said, “I think it’s time we all admitted that I won’t suit here. I have taken no final vows. I will take my leave after Lauds tomorrow morning.”

He left on the same horse that had borne him here a year ago, a looted sword at his side. Feeling older, but no wiser, Thomas wondered if he should return to Valois. No, he decided as the horse descended along the mountain pass. No, the first thing I’m going to do is find someone to teach me to read.

Because while what he had been would always show through, he could become something more.

Just . . . not here.

 

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Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, From Voyages Unreturning, Xenoforming, and To Love Unquietly, please see www.deborahldavitt.com.