Ruaidhrí Ó Cuinn (ROO-ree oh KWIN) was the forty-first man to hold Kells since Colum Cille's people came off the island of Iona with the shrine upon their shoulders. On the afternoon the packet came he went down through the lower cloister faster than a man of his office ought, folds of wool and silk billowing behind him.
His thoughts went down ahead of him, three turns of the stair in front of his knees, arriving at the gate before his body had cleared the second landing.
Fire at Sulmona, the library gone, the whole Abruzzese holding turned to grey feathers on a hot wind. Or plague, which was worse, because plague travelled and fire did not. Or the Turk. Or the King. Or, briefly and shamefully, a plea for money.
He counted as he descended, the way other men prayed. Nine and thirty volumes bound out of the scriptorium this year past. Four psalters to Armagh. A breviary to a Norman house in Meath that had paid in cattle and would pay in beasts again. Orders standing for sixty more, and the orders were the least of it, because the orders were only what the world had thought to ask for. The vellum came in through a dedicated portal. The gum and the lapis came in through another. Twenty-two hands worked the desks above him, and every one of them had been taught by a hand he had chosen. Every letter they laid down was a letter the world could not get elsewhere at that quality, in that quantity, for that price. Elsewhere was the whole of it. There was no elsewhere. Kells did not sell books. Kells decided which books existed.
The smugglers' gate was a low postern in the water wall, put there by an abbot two centuries dead for reasons nobody wrote down and everybody used. Wine came through it. Pigment came through it. Once, a boy. The toll men on the road had never troubled the cathedral and the cathedral had never troubled them with the truth of what it moved. The arrangement had held long enough to acquire the quiet respectability of a custom.
The messenger stood in the wet with his back to the sea, which told Ó Cuinn what kind of crossing it had been.
A lay servant, not a priest. No cloak for the crossing. That was the sender all over. Bartolomeo Quatrario, by the grace of God Bishop of Sulmona and Valva, was a man whose piety was eclipsed only by his frugality, and who had once, in Ó Cuinn's own hearing, returned a gift of candles on the grounds that the evening was not yet dark. The two men had corresponded for nineteen years. In nineteen years Quatrario had sent four letters, and three of those had been to decline something.
"From the hand of my lord of Sulmona," the messenger said.
It was a waxed paper packet, flat, no heavier than a dried fig. The direction on the outer fold read, in that cramped southern hand, To Ruaidhrí Ó Cuinn, Bishop of Kells, and nothing further. No honorific. No prayer for his health. Honorifics cost ink.
The seal belonged to the sender, right enough. The keys and the little crooked star. But the wax was thin, laid on cold, stamped off centre, and along one edge it carried the ghost of an earlier impression. The man had melted down a seal he had already used.
Even now. Even sending this, whatever this was, he had begrudged the wax.
He had come out by way of L'Aquila, the servant said, when asked about the road. Ó Cuinn noted it only because it was the long way round, and thought no more about it.
"He says to tell you," the messenger said, and then stopped, and looked at the sky as though he had been asked to carry something heavier than the packet, "he says to tell you it is the destruction of our power."
Ó Cuinn waited for the rest.
There was no rest. The man turned to the weather and the road and went, quickly, in the manner of someone leaving a room where a lamp has just been knocked over. Ó Cuinn stood at the smugglers' gate with the packet in both hands. The rain came in off the water in long slow lines.
The basket came down for him on the north face, which was the only mercy of the afternoon. It came down shuddering, rope groaning through the wheel above, wicker turning on its own axis, the whole coast swinging past twice before it touched. Brother Cormac was in it, holding the rim, apologising for the weather as though he had arranged it.
They went up together.
"There's talk in the kitchen, Father."
"There is always talk in the kitchen."
"A ship put in at Drogheda with no man fit to stand. A woman in the low town has a lamb with two faces. Brother Aidan says the geese came early this year and came in wrong, out of the west instead of the north."
"Brother Aidan could not find west with both hands on a clear night."
"He can when it suits him."
Ó Cuinn almost smiled. The basket rose past the level of the roofs and the land opened out below them, the low town first, then the river running brown, the weather already in it, then the fields, then the bogland going the colour of a bruise, and beyond all of it the slate-grey sea with the weather standing on it like a wall coming slowly nearer.
"Look at it," Ó Cuinn said. "Tell me what you see."
"Home, Father."
"You see a truce." He shifted the packet inside his sleeve, out of the wet. "Every one of those roofs is nine months from starving. That river drowns a child most years. Forty winters ago there were men on that water who would have taken the whole of it for the pleasure of the noise, and men like them are alive yet, and only waiting to be told it can be done again. Nothing down there is settled. Nothing down there is even quiet. It is held."
"By God, Father."
"By God," Ó Cuinn agreed. "And by the calendar we send them, so they know when to plant and when to fast. And by the book on the altar at Armagh, which is our book, and says the same words as the book at Kilkenny, which is also our book, because we wrote them both and we did not let the words wander. That is what stops it. Not the walls. One agreed thing, held in one place, by people who can be trusted with it. There is one road for those words and it runs through this gate." He watched the wall of weather come on. "And if it were not held. If every parish had its own words and every man his own calendar. You would not need an enemy. You would only need a season."
Cormac said nothing to that, which Ó Cuinn took for agreement, and was not.
At the top Ó Cuinn stepped out stiffly and went in to his study and his fire and the small green bottle of usquebaugh that Armagh sent every Michaelmas and never mentioned. The young friar stayed by the wheel with his hand on the wet rope, looking at what was left of the horizon.
"And what a world if it was," he whispered.
The fire was well up by his second cup. The rain had found the shutter and was working at it patiently. The packet lay at his elbow where he had set it down an hour ago. He had looked at it perhaps forty times and not touched it, and had begun to be annoyed with himself. He did his best work annoyed.
The lightning came first and lit the room white, every stone of it, the ink pots, his own hands.
He picked the packet up.
The thunder arrived as he broke the seal. His nerves screaming.
Inside the waxed paper, sitting in his palm, was a book.
A small one. Smaller than his hand. The kind of thing a man might carry in a coat.
He turned it over twice.
It smelled of oil. Not oak gall and gum. Something nearer a lamp.
It was a poor thing. The spine cracked open at the first pressure with a sound like a knuckle, and he saw why at once: cheap horse glue, going brittle already, holding gatherings of eight that had not been sewn so much as persuaded together. The boards were paper over paper. The edges had been cut by somebody in a hurry with a blade that wanted stoning.
And the text. Ó Cuinn held it to the fire and read half a page and felt the tightness go out of his chest.
The letters were all the same. Not similar, the way a good hand is consistent. The same. The identical wound in the identical place on every second e, over and over down the page, dead and even and mechanical, no thinning where the wrist tired, no weight where the man leaned in, no place at all where a living thing had passed through. There was no one in it. He had read the work of ninety scribes and could name a dozen of them blind, from a line. Here there was nobody to name. It was a page with no author and no maker, and it did not even have the decency to be beautiful about it.
He read a little further. The Latin was sound and the sense was ordinary and the ink was too light in the second column, where somebody had not troubled to make it right.
At the back, where a scribe would have asked the reader to pray for him, there was a line naming the town and the man. Aquila. Some German. Ó Cuinn had never heard of him, which he took to be the correct state of affairs.
Why this, he thought.
Kells had stood through the burning and the sack, through the Northmen coming up the river with the tide four times in one generation, and it had put its books in the ground and dug them up again and gone on. Stone, and time, and men who could be trusted with the words. Against this. A cracked spine and horse glue and forty-one identical wounded letters.
One thing surfaced while he was turning it over, and did not stay. Bartolomeo Quatrario had bought this. The man who returned a gift of candles because the evening was not yet dark had spent money on a book and sent it the length of Christendom to be given away. Ó Cuinn filed it under the general strangeness of Italians and let it go.
He had asked every question a maker asks. Whether it was well made. Whether there was anyone in it. Whether he would have let it out of his own scriptorium. He did not ask the question a man who holds the only gate should ask, which is where the road has gone.
He knew ruin. He had spent the afternoon's descent arranging it, fire and plague and the Turk, and had felt each one properly, the way a man feels a thing he is confident of surviving. Every ruin he could picture came from outside, and arrived somewhere else first. The low town before the hill. The river before the roof. Sulmona before Kells. He had never once managed to imagine a ruin that began in his own hand, and he could not manage it now.
He set the book on the table beside the bottle, where the firelight could reach it, and he laughed, once, in the way a man laughs at a friend who has been frightened by his own coat on the back of a door. Poor Bartolomeo. Nineteen years, and four letters, and this.
Outside the rain arrived all at once, the way it does when it has been coming a long while.
Plan B works with founders, chairs, and boards on the question Ó Cuinn never asked. Not whether the work is good. Whether the position still holds.
planb.works · b@planb.works
