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Authors: Joni Sensel

BOOK: The Humming of Numbers
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“I wish I was home.” Sighing, she drew back from the slot in the wall.
With a pang of sympathy, Aidan said softly, “Sounds to me as though you live here now, at least for a while. 'Tis not so bad. There's usually plenty of food, and we're safe from clan raids and—”
Just then a bell clanged.
“Time for Vespers,” he said, brushing dirt from his fingers. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” she pleaded. “I can't see the sky, so I won't see the moon or the stars. When the sun's gone, it will be black in here. And I'm afraid of things in the dark. Don't you have any candles to burn?”
The novices' dormitory had a lamp that burned most of the night, but Aidan knew she would have no such luxury. “Go to sleep now, and you won't notice,” he suggested.
She didn't answer. He could feel her fear seep out through the slit in the wall. Fear always droned of the
number one, and hers was tinny and bleak. The novice rubbed his palms against the coarse cloth of his robe. He needed to leave or he'd be late, but his heart vibrated in sympathy for her.
He reached and broke the stem of a rose. Passing the flower to her fingers, he said, “Here. The rose is a symbol of God's grace. He will protect you in the—”
“He's never protected me before,” she scoffed.
Shocked by her impious remark, Aidan floundered for a reply.
“But thank you anyway,” she added. “You're kind. I'll … I'll smell it and let it remind me of the sun.”
Aidan hurried to Vespers. It was a good thing he knew most of the hymns and prayers by heart, because his mind was not on them. He spent more of the worship musing about Lana than contemplating anything holy.
R
ory caught Aidan's eye as Vespers ended and the monks were dismissed.
Novices were firmly discouraged from forming bonds with anyone except their confessor. Rory wasn't too much younger than Aidan, however, and he'd lived at the abbey as a servant before becoming a novice, so he overflowed with useful information. Aidan couldn't help being drawn to him. The pale boy had a quick wit and a secretive smile, although he buzzed so harshly of the number one that it set Aidan's teeth on edge. The fearsome noise didn't seem to match Rory's easy ways, so Aidan often wondered if his fellow novice was ill. Reluctant to explain his concern, he didn't dare ask. Rory's impish humor made up for the discomfort of being around him. The pair often swapped opinions about their chores, their meals, and certain of their brethren. Once in a while, they whispered together
about a problem or confusion before drumming up the courage to discuss it with a more senior adviser.
Now, as the novices flowed out from their rear corner of the chapel, Rory lagged. He pretended to be transfixed by the carving of Saint Nevin on the lintel over the doorway. Aidan caught up with him. They both ducked out and jockeyed to walk side by side.
Because speech was strictly forbidden during meals, months ago they'd worked out a few subtle hand signs by which they could say hello, find out how the other was doing, and plan to meet for any hurried conversation that might not earn their masters' approval. They used these signals over short distances and in crowds as well as during meals, and now Aidan scratched his right ear, asking, “What is it?” as Rory trod alongside.
“You're looking reverent this evening, Brother Aidan,” Rory murmured. This comment was also a code that meant the younger boy could see something weighing on Aidan's mind.
“Only troubled by the needs of the body,” Aidan responded, without looking at him. Novices were taught to use those words when they needed to visit the privy.
Understanding, Rory trudged with Aidan and a few others toward the latrine. Both stepped back respectfully to let senior monks pass and then stood in single file as if
awaiting a turn. Once the small double privy was empty, they could remain just outside it and talk. Going in would have meant that anyone approaching might have heard them, but once the first rush following prayers or a meal was over, the sight of not one but two people already in line was enough to turn others away, at least briefly.
“There's a girl here,” Aidan murmured, without turning. “She's—”
Behind him, Rory choked. “In the privy?”
“No! In the abbey. Lord Donagh brought her, and it sounds as if she'll be staying.”
When Rory didn't answer immediately, Aidan twisted his head to see why. At last the younger boy teased, “Careful, brother. Chastity in flesh and in thought.”
Aidan groaned. “I'm sorry we ever talked about that.”
Perhaps because he was younger or simply more self-controlled, Rory seemed amused by Aidan's struggle with the temptations of women. Those temptations so far had been only imagined, but that did not lessen their pull. Aidan had expected the lusty thoughts and dreams to fade once he'd committed himself solely to the company of other fellows, not counting the abbot's fat wife or Father Niall's crabby one. The reverse, if anything, seemed to be true. The more time passed, the more female shapes rose unbidden in his mind. He'd confessed it more than once and tried to follow Brother Eamon's advice. There were times, however,
when the contemplation of God somehow turned into the contemplation of girls he had known. Aidan would hardly notice the shift until something, sometimes his own treacherous body, abruptly alerted him that he'd strayed.
Brother Eamon had kindly assured him that a firm will and the love of God would help him prevail. Rory, too, seemed bent on reminding him often and heartily, but Aidan wasn't so sure. At times only the complete lack of privacy stood between him and the kind of touching that his mentor called self-abuse. Since even the latrine had two seats, however, the temptation was quashed, if not by Aidan's will, then by others' watchful eyes.
“I just thought it was interesting,” Aidan grumbled, trying to pretend there was no truth in Rory's assumption. “Girls don't arrive here every day. Forgive me for noticing.”
“I forgive you, not that it will do you much good,” Rory said amiably. “'Tis not my forgiveness you need. But if I were God Almighty, I'd make the rules easier for you.”
“Shh! Careful, yourself,” Aidan said, glancing sharply toward the workshops behind them. Wool spinners and weavers were returning to conclude their day's labors but paying no attention to anyone near the latrine. “That's almost blasphemy to say you could do better than God.”
“I think it is blasphemy, or it would be if I meant it.” Rory's voice dropped. “But anyone can see that some of the rules come from men, not from God. How long would
people inhabit His earth to worship Him if we were all pure and chaste? He'd have to create new men from mud.”
Aidan chomped hard on a grin. “You think He'd rather put up with a few carnal sinners?”
“It was His idea, obviously. If we weren't meant to come together like animals, He could have made us more like plants.” Rory brushed his toes through the dust, musing. “God is probably relieved when monks and priests just take wives and don't try to pretend. Fewer virgin births for the angels to herald that way.”
“Ai. You'd better never talk like that around anyone else,” Aidan warned, again eyeing the yard behind them. “Even the other novices might turn you in.”
“Ah, that's why you'll take vows before I ever will, my brother. You're not more devoted. Just more cautious, I guess.” He stepped past Aidan toward one side of the latrine.
Aidan stopped him with a grip on his arm. Rory's glib tone had fallen flat. The older novice looked for a jest in his friend's pallid gray eyes. None lay there.
“Do you question your calling, Rory?”
Rory gazed back, clearly wondering not how to answer, but whether he should.
“You can trust me,” Aidan murmured. “I won't say anything.”
With one hand, Rory smoothed the coarse cloth over
his chest. “I didn't have much choice about coming here,” he said, speaking to the ground at their feet. “Less than you, even. My parents gave me and my younger brother to God so the rest wouldn't starve. But, Aidan—” He looked up. “Have you ever heard God's voice? Actually heard it speaking, I mean? Or an angel's?”
Aidan hesitated. The humming of numbers was not quite a voice, and although he hoped it came from God, he certainly didn't hear it as words.
“Not exactly,” he said. He held his breath, gathering nerve to say more. “But I—”
“I have,” Rory said, his face more unreadable than Aidan had ever seen it. “Once. I was told that I will face Christ's judgment in heaven before long and reminded to complete as much of His work as I can in the days I have left. That's why I always volunteer to hand out the alms to the hungry. But I doubt I will ever take the tonsure and have a bald place shaved on my head.”
Aidan wanted to tell Rory he must have been wrong about the voice or its message. He couldn't do it. Even if he had never heard anything mystic himself, he had his own suspicions about his friend's health. Rory's admission confirmed them.
While Aidan gnawed his lip and wondered what else he could say, Rory grinned.
“That doesn't mean I want to see you go astray. If I'm
wrong, I'll just be a lay brother working the fields or cutting stone for the new church. Only tonsured monks get to be scribes. So I figure my good works should include keeping a sharp eye on your soul. Forget about that girl.”
Rory pulled free and slipped inside the privy before Aidan could collect his wits to respond. His eyes scoured the packed earth of the yard while his mind retraced Rory's words. The idea that he was being watched and guided by a younger friend felt backward and shameful. Worse, he feared Rory was probably right.
R
ory's shocking admission briefly pushed Lana from Aidan's mind. Not long after the two novices signaled a farewell outside the privy, however, she tripped back into his thoughts. Chores left him no time to wander before darkness and the first nighttime prayers. Afterward, on his way back to the hut that served as the novices' dormitory, Aidan took a detour. He hung back from those traipsing toward their beds and slipped away to the rose garden. It was indeed a dark night, but as he crept from one building or stone cell to the next, he unconsciously let his ears guide him. Not only the hidden monks but the wooden timbers, the grass thatch, and the roses hummed a muted trail of numbers to follow.
The brothers remained silent throughout the night, except for the Nocturns worship at midnight and Matins a few hours later, so he wouldn't be able to speak to her this time. But the memory of her fear and her fingers straining
out of her cell, as though from an unfinished tomb, had haunted his prayer time. He wanted to check whether she had fallen asleep as advised.
She hadn't. As he made his way between the shadowy rosebushes, he heard her softly crooning an old song to herself. The notes drifted to him like the fabled music of faeries. Chills ran along his skin.
Perhaps he gasped or she heard his footsteps. The song stopped. Aidan had never before minded the strict silence that followed the last prayers of the day. Now words clogged in his throat. He wanted to ask her to continue her song. He'd heard plenty of monks singing in chapel, some with more talent than others, but he'd never heard a trilling like this. Her voice, harmonizing with the chimes of eleven, could have been that of an angel.
Struggling to keep his tongue still, he snapped another rose off its stem and passed it into the gap in the wall. Her hand was not there. Unsure if she'd notice his gift in the dark, he tapped his nails on the stone. This noise stretched the bounds of obedience, but he couldn't see how a little rapping of fingers differed so much from soft footfalls or the creak of a door.
She heard him. “Aidan?”
He couldn't reply, but he might not have answered anyway. He wanted to hear his name again in her silvery tones.
She didn't repeat herself. She did not sing again, either, though he waited so long he feared his absence from the dormitory might be noticed. He could feel her eleven-ness and her strangeness and her girlish defiance just on the other side of the thick stone wall. No rustling or even the sound of her breathing, however, escaped through the slot. He put his hand to it, but the stone was hard and rough and empty of both roses and fingers, other than his. So he pulled away and crept out of the garden, hoping she did not hear him leave.
The nighttime and predawn worship passed in a sleepy blur, as those hours often did. When Aidan awoke again in the morning, he forgot briefly that the abbey held anything different. Eagerness spiked through him as memory returned. He rose in haste and then slowed, telling himself he might as well forget again. He would likely never get closer to Lana or speak to her any more freely than he already had. Yesterday's risks had been disobedient and foolish. It occurred to him, belatedly, that her intriguing eleven-ness might even be the work of Satan, designed to tempt him from his duties, not to mention from the path that would lead him to the scriptorium someday.
His guilt took flight right after breakfast, when old Brother Nathan caught him on the way out of the Great Hall where they ate.
“See me after daily instructions,” the stern monk told him.
Aidan nodded, struggling to keep his face from cramping in worry. A delayed punishment might be coming, and perhaps not just for hiding under a bench. Someone may have spotted him whispering with Lana yesterday.
Standing among the gathered monks, Aidan thought instructions would never end. The abbot rambled on about the state of the crops, preparations for winter, and next week's assignments for scrubbing the latrine. Aidan tried not to fidget and shuffle his feet. Distracted, he almost didn't notice the mention of his own name. The awareness of others' eyes on him honed his attention.
“Brother Aidan has been with us almost a year now,” the abbot was saying. “His time as a novice is nearly done. Now his devotion and faith should be tested more severely. I want to make you all aware of a task set for him, that you might watch him and guide him if his feet seem even slightly to stray.”
Aidan gulped, completely unprepared for anything Abbot Bartley might say. He knew that a novice's final weeks were a time of close scrutiny. He'd be questioned hard before he took his lifelong vows. Only satisfactory answers would permit him to have the peak of his skull shaved in the tonsure that marked a full-fledged monk. But he hadn't realized any other sort of test might be involved.
The abbot cast a glance at Brother Eamon, who simply nodded approval.
“A guest arrived here yesterday, one who may stay for a time,” the abbot continued, frowning ever so slightly. Aidan closed his eyes to receive what was almost certainly coming: humiliation for lurking beneath a bench upon the visitor's arrival, then the assignment of penance disguised as a test.
As the abbot went on, not at all as Aidan expected, it took a minute for his ears to recover and listen.
“I remind you to remember your vows and treat this guest as though Christ Himself, in hooded robes, had come calling,” the abbot said.
Aidan barely contained a nervous snicker. He'd heard guests described the same way before, but he'd never known any to be locked in the penitent's cell. He wondered if Jesus would have minded.
“To save you from being startled,” Abbot Bartley continued, “I will make you aware that this guest is a particular young girl who will serve God and this abbey as a scullion in the kitchen.”
The monks were far too disciplined to murmur, but a few scowls and raised eyebrows revealed their surprise.
“Most of you need not concern yourselves, nor should you speak with her, of course. As is our custom, one novice will take special charge of the guest's guidance and
protection.” The abbot's blithe tone grew firmer. “That duty befalls Brother Aidan.”
Aware that his jaw had gaped but unable to close it, Aidan met the abbot's eyes. Abbot Bartley gazed back with serenity and a glint of mischief.
“Through this challenge, I think the strength of his calling and faith will be made clear.”
The abbot made a few final announcements while Aidan's head swam. He could feel Rory poking a finger into the small of his back, somewhere far away, but the warning wasn't needed. The truth of what had seemed for an instant like a reward settled over him. Lana was troublesome—that was why she was here, even if he wasn't supposed to know that. It would be easy enough to show her the few places she would be permitted to go. But who could guess what new trouble she might cause? All of it would fall on his shoulders, and it would take only a slight lapse in attention or judgment for him to be barred not only from the scriptorium but perhaps from the monastery itself. Aidan's entire life had just been placed in the hands of an irreverent girl who'd already committed a crime, who didn't mind what she said about God to a monk, and who hummed of the number eleven.

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