Spires of Spirit (6 page)

A bend in the trail brought him around to face the clearing again, and only then did he look, climbing up on top of a boulder in order to see. The Leather-woman still stood by the fire, the beryl shining in her hand, and as she suddenly lifted it over her head, Andrew could not help but wonder whether, in the next moment, his head would suddenly split. But when the Leather-woman brought her hand down again, it was not to hurl a curse, but rather to fling the stone onto the hard ground.

It shattered on the rocks.

A blast of incandescence, as though a star had come to dwell in the stone circle. Mounting blindingly, mounting hugely, it expanded, widened, reached out as though it would encompass the world. Leather-woman, stones, fire—all and everything vanished within the searing light.

Andrew had but a moment to stare before it reached him, lifting him up and throwing him back off the rock. For a moment, he hung suspended, arms outstretched, feet dangling uselessly, and then, the blast passing by, he fell heavily onto the ground. He had a brief glimpse of lattices of shimmering lines weaving themselves into new patterns, and then blackness overwhelmed him.

***

When he awoke, it was morning, the winter sun just rising over the plains to the southeast. He was cold and stiff, and he was infinitely grateful for his thick cloak. More than likely it had saved his life that night.

Still groggy, he pulled himself back up to the top of the boulder and looked around. There was the clearing, and there was the circle of stones . . . but there was no trace of the Leather-woman; and when he made his way back up the trail, he found nothing more than what he had seen from a distance. Even the ashes of the fire were gone.

The world suddenly looked very bleak, and he felt empty and sad. But he turned away, turned toward the village, for he knew that Elizabeth and the children would be frantic about his absence.

Slowly, he descended through the boulders and into the bracken and the heather, and when he came to the Leather-woman's hut, he found that its fire had died. The dwelling now looked untenanted, even more forlorn than before. The wind stirred the dead heather, and snow was blowing in through the open door.

Andrew stood for several minutes, grieving over his failure, for the hut was almost accusatory in its desolation. She was gone. There would be no more chances.

But then he heard weeping. A soft, quiet voice.

He wiped his eyes and followed the sound, and in a clump of heather he found huddled a young girl, not more than seven summers old. She was dressed in rags that looked woefully inadequate to the cold, and Andrew tore off his cloak and cast it about her shoulders while she looked at him, wide-eyed.

“Don't be afraid,” he said.

She had great self-control for one so young, and she blinked back some of her tears and managed to whisper, “Thank you, sir.”

“Who are you?” said Andrew. “Where are you from?”

“I . . .” Her hair was long and dark, and as she stared at him out of eyes as blue as mountain lakes, her lip trembled. “I don't know. I don't—” She suddenly winced and looked down at her legs.

Andrew was puzzled, and when he pulled the cloak aside, he had to stifle a cry. Her right leg was perfectly straight, sound, and healthy, but it was imprisoned in a harsh, iron brace that bent it unnaturally.

“I couldn't get it off by myself,” she said.

Andrew stared for a moment, then pulled out his knife and cut away the old leather fastenings. He eased the brace from her leg and rubbed warmth and blood back into the flesh. “Who . . . who did this to you?”

He looked into her face as he spoke, and then he knew, for she was staring at the iron brace with a dim flicker of pain and recognition, and her eyes were growing troubled. But Andrew stood, picked up the brace, and threw it as far away as he could; and then her pain and recognition faded . . . and her memory, he supposed, faded too. Her eyes cleared and shone. They were lake blue, tranquil.

Andrew knelt before her. “What's your name, maiden?”

“I don't know. I don't remember. I don't think I have one.”

“Nor home, neither?” But he knew the answer already . . .

“No, sir.”

. . . just as he knew his own reply, for: “You have one now,” he said. “You'll come and live with me and my wife, Elizabeth, and our children. My name is Andrew.”

“You're a . . . a carpenter,” she said suddenly, then looked uncertainly at him, smiled, and shook her head as the last trace of remembrance fled.

He picked her up and carried her home. The villagers marveled at the pretty young waif from the bracken, and they marveled more at how she had been abandoned by all, to be rescued only by chance. But Elizabeth met him at their door, and she kissed the child and bade her be welcome, and she gave her warm clothes and a hot breakfast. She met Andrew's eyes, and he knew that she had guessed.

They named her Charity.

The west doors of the church were open, and the reddening light of sunset spilled in, setting the length of the nave aglow and illuminating the bare wooden cross above the altar. David's hands were in his tunic pockets, and he kept them there while he examined the cross, lips pressed together, uncomfortably aware of the priest who stood beside him.

“I want it finished by next Easter,” said Jaques Alban, lacing and unlacing his fingers inside the sleeves of his soutane. “With your talent, David my son, it will be a fitting masterpiece to crown my church. People will come from miles around to see it.”

David shifted uneasily. Outside of town, the forest was full of autumn color—red and russet, yellow and gold—its final celebration before the death of the year. He had received the summons from Alban an hour before, and he had scuffed through piles of those glowing, fallen leaves as he had taken the road into the village. He had known even then why he had been called, had known, too, that he could not avoid this meeting . . . or the demand that would be made of him.

Still, he sought to evade the inevitable. “I hope you realize,” he said, “that I have other commissions to attend to. Members of the baronial houses desire panels and statues for the churches and cathedrals they're building in the cities to the north.” He kept his voice polite.

“Pah!” said Alban. “Rivalries. Blood feuds, too, I imagine: stabbing each other in the back amid the reek of taverns. Fine people to set up carvings before God!” He laid a fatherly hand on David's shoulder and did not notice that the carver winced. “This village is your home, David. Your birthplace. You grew up here, went to school, received sacraments. If I'm not mistaken, you thought about a vocation for a while, eh?” He patted David's shoulder . . . and did not notice that the carver winced again.

David did not reply for some time. The bare cross, he thought, was sufficient for the church: a stark counterbalance to a lavish interior in which stained glass windows soared up on all sides, stone carvings peered out from corners of the elaborate vaulting, and an inlaid floor gleamed in the light of candles in gold (gold!) holders. Alban had wanted a fine church, and he had built one; but though David could see that it was attractive enough in its own way, all its opulence and ornament, in his opinion, found a resolution only in the simplicity of the cross—a vertical and a horizontal beam, the wood smoothed and planed and polished, no more—as if that simplicity were a reminder not only of the poverty of the One who had suffered there but also of the point of that suffering: that the cross should eventually be bare, the tomb empty.

He found himself thinking of the autumn leaves through which he had walked on the way to the meeting. The harvest: yellow fields, dying leaves. Soon, the grain would be gathered in, and the fields would be left stripped and forsaken . . . like the cross. Autumn was a hard season for David. There was too much death in autumn, too much of a sense of futility as the life of summer guttered into cold and dark. Only the distant spring made the bleakness at all bearable.

If only Alban had asked for some other carving! Doors, maybe, or maybe a screen. David could see either project easily: trees, forests, animals peering through carved trunks and bunches of flowers, intricate filigrees. There could be life there, and love, and the touch of a Hand that had brought healing and comfort.

“David?”

Death.

“David?”

Death. Death. Death.

He dropped his eyes, unable to think of anything to say.

“I want that crucifix.”

“Are you ordering me, master?” said the carver. “I'm a free craftsman.” A thought came into his head. “How much are you willing to pay for such a carving?”

Alban looked shocked. “Pay! Your whole life you have benefited from the Church, and now you talk of payment? Look at this fine church, David! All the love that I could muster I lavished upon it. The men who worked here were compensated for their labor, true, but they were from the north, from Hypprux and Maris and Belroi, and they did not care about a church in Saint Brigid. You, though, David . . . you grew up here. Surely you would be willing to donate a carving to—”

David's patience finally broke. This priest had come to the village hardly five years ago, a complete stranger sent down from the north. By what right did he go on about birthplaces? “To God?” he said. “Or to Jaques Alban? Tell me, master: would you have to give up a fat capon on Saturday nights in order to provide me with a decent wage?”

“I am simply reminding you about obligations.” Now they were facing one another over ten feet of stone flooring: priest with fists at sides, carver with fists in tunic pockets.

“I am simply reminding
you
about food, tithes, and rents.”

Alban remained standing for a moment, then wandered over to a prie-dieu and knelt, propping his head on his folded hands. “You have a sister in the convent, do you not?”

Sunbeams poured in through the western door. The day was dying in sunset, its death as vibrant as that of the forest.

David watched the priest warily. “Yes. What of it?”

“The convent of Saint Barnabas. Near Hypprux, I believe. Cloistered.”

“Yes.”

“There have been witch burnings in that region, have there not?” The priest's voice was bland, matter-of-fact. “Elves and other demons consorting with humans and such. There have been outbreaks of . . . possession . . . in a number of the cloistered orders.”

David's mouth worked for a minute or two. His hands were still clenched, but he could feel the blood go from his face.

The priest did not look at him. “You are overproud, David. Perhaps your not-insignificant talent is the cause. It would perhaps be good for you to undertake some work in the service of the Church. A crucifix, for example.”

David felt ill, dizzy. His sister . . . possession . . . the Inquisition . . .

“Consider.”

He found his voice. “Yes indeed, master. I will.” His words were hoarse, almost inaudible, and he felt as though he must immediately collapse in fear or explode in anger. But he did neither: instead, he made his way down the nave as if blind, groping through the glory of the sunset. Behind him, Alban regarded the bare wooden cross appraisingly, as if visualizing the wonder that would replace it.

***

David carved wood, and he carved alone. His house lay well outside the village, within the growth of trunks and leaves at the edge of Malvern, the great forest that grew to the northeast. He had built it himself, raising the walls years before when he had left the Carvers' Guild in Maris and returned to the place of his birth. At the time, life in even a small village like Saint Brigid had not appealed to him, for it had reminded him too much of the city, and therefore he had made his house in the forest, and in its facade he had duplicated weathered bark, incursions of lichen, and boughs of randomly scattered leaves with a skill so great that it was impossible to say where the wood of the forest left off and that of the house began.

There, hidden and alone, he worked. In solitude he wrought the carvings that had made him famous throughout the land, carvings that seemed to live, breathe, and grow as his skilled fingers freed from the wood the designs and the figures that sprang from his imagination. His leaves curled and fluttered in wooden breezes, his animals romped in ligneous fields, his kings, queens, barons, and bishops looked out of their vegetable matrix with eyes that mirrored faith and inner strength.

But he had never carved a crypt, or a tomb, or a crucifix. He had, in fact, gone to great lengths to avoid any work that smacked at all of death or mortality. His flowers were always in bloom, the faces of his men and women healthy, alive. And though this pointed omission was occasionally noticed and commented upon, he was forgiven. Because of his talent. Perhaps because of his solitude.

But this evening, solitude was no refuge for him, and when he reached his house, he slammed the door behind him and sat down heavily on a low stool by the unshuttered window of his workshop, his face in his hands as though he would hide both from the priest and from the bright dying outside.

A crucifix. To be sure, it was a common enough thing to carve, and he supposed that the Church needed its crucifixes . . . but he hated them. And if Alban had his way, the face on the suffering Figure would be as contorted as the body, racked with pain and sorrow, something the children would be frightened of, something to trouble the dreams of the townsfolk.

“A fine thing to hang in the house of God,” he muttered bitterly. “The image of a dead body for a fat priest in exchange for peace of mind and my sister's life.”

Alban was capable of anything. Anything. David had not liked him from the beginning, when the priest had arrive in Saint Brigid on a fine horse with a harness set with gems. Ignoring the villagers, he had ridden directly to the small chapel that had been built two centuries before, and, after examining it, had been overheard to mutter with some distaste: “This will not do.”

And that
will not do
had clung to the village like a leech for seven years, with the priest exhorting the villagers to give more and more in labor and money for the building of what he considered to be a fitting church. During that time, too, Alban had deserted his cure for trips to the coastal cities to plead for funds, sold (some suspected) fake relics to the nobility, used what influence he had among the churchmen and the barons to fatten the building fund, and, upon occasion, done . . . even more.