Orolo met me at the top of the stairs, notes under his arm. Before we began our descent, he took one last look at the stars and planets beginning to come out, like a butler counting the spoons. We went down in silence, lighting our way with our spheres.
Fraa Gredick, the Master of the Keys, was waiting by the portcullis just as Fraa Orolo had predicted. Another, slighter person stood next to him. As we came down the buttress, we saw that it was Gredick’s superior: Suur Trestanas. “Ugh, looks like we’re going to get penance,” I muttered. “This just demonstrates your point.”
“Which point do you mean?”
“The ugliness coming in from all directions.”
“I don’t think this is that,” Fraa Orolo said. “This is something exceptional.”
We stepped down into the stone cupola and crossed the threshold. Gredick slammed the grid down behind us with too much force. I looked at his face, thinking he was angry we’d made him wait. But that wasn’t it. He was unsettled. He only wanted to get out of there. We all watched him fumble with his key ring. As he was locking the portcullis down, I looked north to the Unarians’ cupola and then east to the Centenarians’. Both of their gridirons were also closed. The whole thing seemed to have been shut down. Perhaps a security precaution for Apert?
I expected Gredick to leave so that Suur Trestanas could give me and Orolo a scolding. But Gredick looked me in the eye and said, “Come with me, Fid Erasmas.”
“Where to?” I asked. It was unusual for the Master of the Keys to make such a request; it wasn’t his job.
“Anywhere,” he said, and then nodded toward the head of the stairs that would lead us down.
I looked at Orolo, who shrugged and made the same nod. Then I looked at Suur Trestanas, who only stared back at me, putting on a show of patience. She was early in her fourth decade of life, and not unattractive. She was brisk and organized and confident—the kind of woman who in the Sæcular world might have gone into commerce, and scampered up the hierarchy of a firm. During her first months as Warden Regulant, she had handed out a lot of penance for small infractions that her predecessor would have ignored. Older avout had assured me that this was typical behavior for a new Warden Regulant. I was so certain that she was going to give me and Orolo penance for being late that I hesitated to leave before she had done so. But it was clear that she had come here for another purpose. So I took my leave of Trestanas and Orolo, and began descending the stairs, followed by Fraa Gredick.
When Trestanas judged that Gredick and I were far enough away, she began telling Orolo something in a low voice. She talked for a minute or so, as if delivering a little speech that she had prepared.
When Orolo answered—which he did only after a long pause—it was in a voice that was wound up tight. He was making some kind of argument. And it was not the cool voice that he used when he was in dialog. Something had upset him. From this I knew that Suur Trestanas had not given him penance, because that was something one had to accept meekly, lest it be doubled and doubled again. They were talking about something more important than that. And Suur Trestanas had obviously told Gredick to get me out of that place so that she and Orolo could have privacy.
This was not a very satisfying end to the conversation that Orolo and I had shared on the starhenge! But it was further proof of the point he had made, and a challenge for me to put the idea into practice.
You must have this and hold to it or you’ll die. By the time I awoke the next morning I could not recall whether this was something Orolo had said in so many words, or a resolution that had formed in my own mind. Anyway I woke up exhilarated and determined.
In the Refectory I saw Fraa Orolo, sitting alone, several tables away. He gave me a tight smile and looked away in the next instant. He did not wish to fill me in on his argument with Suur Trestanas. He ate quickly, then got up and headed in the direction of the Decade Gate for another day on the town.
More important than the argument with Trestanas was my conversation with Orolo just before. I knew I could not talk about this in the Refectory. It would not survive Diax’s Rake; it would not be considered sound by the avout. Those of a more Procian bent would say I’d become a kind of Deolater. I’d be unable to defend myself without invoking all kinds of ideas that would sound ridiculously fuzzy-minded to them. At the same time, though, I knew that this was how the Saunts had done it. They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.
I wasn’t the only one with a lot on his mind. Arsibalt sat alone, ate practically nothing, and then skulked out. Later Tulia picked up her bowl and came over and sat by me, which made me happy until I understood that she only wanted to talk about him. Arsibalt had been doing a lot of brooding, and he had been doing it in conspicuous places, as much as demanding that we ask him what was wrong. I’d refused to do so because I found it such an annoying tactic. But Suur Tulia had been checking on him from time to time. She let me know I ought to go and see him. I did so only because the request had come from her.
After the Reconstitution, the first fraas and suurs of the Order of Saunt Edhar had come to this place where the river scoured around a ramp of stone and attacked it with explosives and water-jet cutters, cleaning away the scree and rotten rock—which they moved to the perimeter and piled up to fashion the concent’s walls—until they hit the sound stone at the heart of the mountain. This they cleaved off in slabs and prisms that tumbled to the valley floor, sometimes rolling almost to the walls before they came to rest. The ramp became a knob, the knob was sharpened to a crag. The first Thousanders whittled a narrow meandering stair up its face and went up there one day and never came back again, but pitched a camp on its top and set to work building their own walls and towers. The valley below remained a rubble-field for centuries. The avout swarmed over the strewn stones wherever they had come to rest and carved out of them the pieces of the Mynster. Almost all of them were now gone, and the land was flat, fertile, and stoneless. But a few of the great boulders were still dotted around the meadow, partly for decoration and partly as raw materials for our stonecutters, who were still fiddling with the Mynster’s gargoyles, finials, and such.
I found Arsibalt perched on the top of a boulder, surrounded by empty beverage containers that had been strewn around the place by slines. All around him, visitors were sleeping it off in the tall grass. Across the meadow, Lio was cavorting around a statue of Saunt Froga, flinging the end of his bolt out and letting it waft over the statue’s head, then snapping it back like a whip. I wouldn’t have looked twice if this hadn’t been Apert. But there were visitors on the meadow, watching, pointing, laughing, and speelycaptoring. Another useful function of Apert: to be reminded of how weird we were, and how fortunate to live in a place where we could get away with it.
Exhibit A: Fraa Arsibalt. Speaking whole paragraphs, complete with topic sentences, in perfect Middle Orth, with footnotes in Old and Proto-Orth, he explained that he felt aggrieved by his father’s refusal to talk to him, because he was not so much abjuring his father’s faith as trying to build a bridge between it and the mathic world.
This struck me as an ambitious project for a nineteen-year-old to undertake, seven thousand years after the two daughters of Cnoüs had stopped speaking to each other. Still, I heard him out. Partly so that I could later impress Tulia with what a good guy I was. Partly because I didn’t want to be a Lorite. But also partly because what Arsibalt was saying was nearly as crazy as my discussion with Orolo the evening before. And so perhaps, after I had heard Arsibalt out, he would let me confide some of my thoughts. But as the conversation (if listening to Arsibalt talk could be called that) went on, this hope curdled. It had not crossed his mind that I too might have some things I wanted to discuss—perhaps not as clever or as momentous as what was on his mind, but important to me. I bided my time. And just when I saw an opening, he changed the subject altogether and ambushed me with a rhapsody about “the exquisite Cord.” And so instead of talking about what I wanted to talk about, I was forced to come to grips with the idea of Cord as being exquisite. He wondered whether she might be open to an Atlanian liaison. I thought not, but who was I to judge? And a boyfriend who was (a) sterile and (b) only allowed out once every ten years seemed like a safe boyfriend to have, so I shrugged and allowed that anything was possible.