When I had been Collected, we had used our side as a haymow. A few years ago, in late summer, Fraa Lio and Fraa Jesry had been sent out with hoes to walk it looking for plants of the Eleven. And indeed they had happened upon a patch of something that looked like blithe. So they had chopped it out, piled it in the middle of the meadow, and set fire to it.
By day’s end, the entire meadow on our side of the wall had become an expanse of smoking carbonized stubble, and noises coming over the top of the wall suggested that sparks had blown onto the Hundreders’ side. On our side, along the border between the meadow and the tangles where we grew most of our food, the fraas and suurs had formed a battle line that ran all the way down to the river. We passed full buckets up the line and empty ones down it and threw the water onto those tangles that seemed most likely to burst into flames. If you’ve ever seen a well-tended tangle in the late summer, you’ll know why; the amount of biomass is huge, and by that time of the year it’s dry enough to burn.
At the inquisition, the deputy Warden Regulant who had been on duty at the time had testified that the initial fire had produced so much smoke that he’d been unable to get a clear picture of what Lio and Jesry had done. So the whole thing had been Chronicled as an accident, and the boys had got off with penance. But I know, because Jesry told me later, that when the fire in the blithe had first spread to the surrounding grass, Lio, instead of stamping it out, had proposed that they fight fire with fire, and control it using fire vlor. Their attempt to set counterfires had only made matters worse. Jesry had dragged Lio to safety as he was attempting to set a counter-counterfire to contain a system of counterfires that was supposed to be containing the original fire but that had gotten out of hand. Having his hands full with Lio, he’d had to abandon his sphere, which to this day was stiff in one place and could never quite become transparent. Anyway, the fire had provided an excuse for us finally to do something we’d been talking about forever, namely to plant it in clover and other flowering plants, and keep bees. When there was an economy extramuros, we could sell the honey to burgers in the market stall before the Day Gate, and use the money to buy things that were difficult to make inside the concent. When conditions outside were post-apocalyptic, we could eat it.
As I jogged toward the Mynster, the stone wall was to my right. The tangles—now just as full and ripe as they’d been before the fire—were mostly behind me and to my left. In front of me and somewhat uphill were the Seven Stairs, crowded with avout. Compared to the other fraas all swathed in their bolts, half-naked Lio, moving twice as fast, was like an ant of the wrong color.
The chancel, the heart of the Mynster, had an octagonal floor-plan (as theors were more apt to put it, it had the symmetry group of the eighth roots of unity). Its eight walls were dense traceries, some of stone, others of carved wood. We called them screens, a word confusing to extramuros people for whom a screen was something on which you’d watch a speely or play a game. For us, a screen was a wall with lots of holes in it, a barrier through which you could see, hear, and smell.
Four great naves were flung out, north-east-south-west, from the base of the Mynster. If you have ever attended a wedding or a funeral in one of the Deolaters’ arks, a nave would remind you of the big part where the guests sit, stand, kneel, flog themselves, roll on the floor, or whatever it is that they do. The chancel, then, would correspond to the place where the priest stands at the altar. When you see the Mynster from a distance, it’s the four naves that make it so broad at its base.
Guests from extramuros, like Artisan Flec, were allowed to come in the Day Gate and view auts from the north nave when they were not especially contagious and, by and large, behaving themselves. This had been more or less the case for the last century and a half. If you visited our concent by coming in through the Day Gate, you’d be channeled into the portal in the north facade and walk up the center aisle of the north nave toward the screen at the end. You might be forgiven for thinking that the whole Mynster consisted of only that nave, and the octagonal space on the other side of the screen. But someone in the east, west, or south nave would make the same mistake. The screens were made dark on the nave side and light on the chancel side, so that it was easy to see into the chancel but impossible to see beyond it, creating the illusion that each nave stood alone, and owned the chancel.
The east nave was empty and little used. We’d ask the older fraas and suurs why; they’d give a wave of the hand and “explain” that it was the Mynster’s formal entrance. If so, it was so formal that no one knew what to do with it. At one time a pipe-organ had stood there, but this had been ripped out in the Second Sack, and later improvements of the Discipline had banned all other musical instruments. When my crop had been younger, Orolo had strung us along for several years telling us that there was talk of making it a sanctuary for ten-thousand-year fraas if the Concent of Saunt Edhar ever got round to building a math for such. “A proposal was submitted to the Millenarians 689 years ago,” he’d say, “and their response is expected in another 311.”
The south nave was reserved for the Centenarians, who could reach it by strolling across their half of the meadow. It was much too big for them. We Tenners, who had to cram ourselves into a much smaller space just next to it, had been annoyed by this fact for more than three thousand years.
The west nave had the best stained-glass windows and the finest stone-carving because it was used by the Unarians, who were by far the best-endowed of all the maths. But there were easily enough of them to fill the place up and so we didn’t resent their having so much space.
There remained four screen-walls of the chancel—northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest—that were the same size and shape as the four that lay in the cardinal directions but that were not connected to proper naves. On the dark sides of these screens lay the four corners of the Mynster, cluttered by structural works that were inconvenient for humans but necessary for the whole thing to remain standing. Our corner, on the southwest, was by far the most crowded of these, since there were about three hundred Tenners. Our space had therefore been expanded by a couple of side-towers that bulged out from the walls of the Mynster and accounted for its obvious asymmetry in that corner.
The northwest corner connected to the Primate’s compound, and was used only by him, his guests, the wardens, and other hierarchs, so there was no crowding there. The southeast corner was for the Thousanders; it connected directly to their fantastical hand-carved stone staircase, which zoomed, veered and rambled down the face of their crag.
The northeastern corner, directly across from us, was reserved for the Ita. Their portal communicated directly with their covered slum, which filled the area between that side of the Mynster and the natural stone cliff that, in that zone, formed the concent’s outer wall. A tunnel supposedly gave them access to the subterranean workings of the clock, which it was their duty to tend. But this, like most of our information concerning the Ita, was little better than folklore.
So there were eight ways into the Mynster if one only counted the formal portals. But Mathic architecture was nothing if not complicated and so there were also any number of smaller doors, rarely used and barely known about, except by inquisitive fids.
I shuffled through the clover as quickly as I could without stepping on any bees. Even so I made better time than those on the Seven Stairs, and soon reached the Meadow door, which was set into a masonry arch that had been grafted onto the native rock. A flight of stone steps took me up to the level of the Mynster’s main floor. I dodged through a series of odd, mean little store-rooms where vestments and ceremonial objects were kept when out of season. Then I came out into that architectural hodgepodge in the southwest corner that we Tenners used in place of a nave. Incoming fraas and suurs obstructed me. But there were lanes of open space wherever the view was obstructed by a pillar. Planted in one of those lanes, right up against the base of a pillar, was our wardrobe. Most of its contents had been dumped out onto the floor. Fraa Jesry and Fraa Arsibalt were standing nearby, already swathed in scarlet and looking irritated. Fraa Lio was swimming through silk trying to find his favorite robe. I dropped to one knee and found something in my size among the ones he had discarded. I threw it on, tied it, and made sure it wouldn’t get in the way of my feet, then fell in behind Jesry and Arsibalt. A moment later Lio came up and stood too close behind me. We came out from the shadow of that pillar and threaded our way through the crowd toward the screen, following Jesry, who wasn’t afraid to use his elbows. But it wasn’t that crowded. Only about half of the Tenners had shown up today; the rest were busy getting ready for Apert. Our fraas and suurs were seated before the southwest screen in tiered rows. Those in the front sat on the floor. The next row sat on their spheres, head-sized. Those behind them had made their spheres larger. In the back row, the spheres were taller than those who sat on them, stretched out like huge filmy balloons, and the only thing that kept them from rolling about and spilling people onto the stone was that they were all packed in together between the walls, like eggs in a box.