Limner

The elderly monk dipped his brush into the scarlet ink and began to fill in the demon’s outline.  He was careful in his strokes, barely touching the dark borders of the figure, with its horns and hooves and lashing tail.  He left the eyes, for now, and cleaned his brush carefully.

He knew the shape and colour of the eyes of demons.  For years, they had haunted his dreams—not nightly, nor even weekly, but with a repetition far too frequent for comfort.  Each time one of the nightmares terrorized him, he prayed for relief, prostrate in front of the altar.  The Lord did not lift the torment; and, in time, he had come to the conclusion that it was either some forgotten sin, for which his dreams were a foretaste of Purgatory, or else a dread gift to inspire the illumination of the manuscripts he copied and decorated in the scriptorium.

Carefully, he removed his spectacles and placed them in their case.  His eyes were not as sharp as they once had been; and the aid to vision was a boon, permitting him still to use his talents.  The ink and paints were carefully capped, the brushes set aside.  Through the window, the light slanted in gold as the sun dipped low:  it was nearly time for Vespers.

One of those dreams came to haunt him that night.  Only the bell for midnight prayers finally called him to wakefulness; and, as he made his way with his brethren to the church, he still trembled, caught in the memory.  Even that familiar, holy safety at first seemed strange.  Then the glory of the psalms rose around him; and, in the unison of their voices, he finally recovered himself.  Next morning he dutifully confessed his weakness.  “Tell me of this dream,” he was asked, not for the first time.

Each nightmare was different in detail; yet all were, essentially, the same.  This time, he had been in the courtyard of the castle on a sunny summer’s day, put to wrestling with one of the other pages.  Then the sky darkened, as if with storm, though there was no rain.  Suddenly, he was pinned by large hard hands, not to the grass but to stone flags, and looked up to rafters.  Struggling, he realized that he was prisoned in a dungeon; and hard though he strove he could shift not an inch.  As he fought in vain, he knew he wrestled the Devil himself and—if the fair Lucifer won the match—would be lost forever in eternal darkness.

“And then the bell rang through my dream and woke me; and I went to vigil,” he finished.  He was given penance, and lay for an hour in prayer before the altar before helping Brother Eudes pull weeds in the cloister garden.  Despite the rule, the two monks spoke now and then—mostly pertinent comments concerning the plants, of course, but he also confided the details of the dream.

Brother Eudes considered this thoughtfully.  Then he said, “As you describe it, you were surely in knightly training at the start of the dream.  Was that true also in your youth?  Before you came to the abbey, I mean.”

The older monk cast him a glance.  “What else?” he said.  “I was not an oblate, if that is what you ask.”

“I wondered,” Brother Eudes began—and then hesitated.  “I do not wish to be rude,” he said apologetically, “but I wondered if the devil you wrestle in the dream is the life you might have had, if your family had not sent you to us.”

“Perhaps,” said the old monk.  He sounded troubled and bent back to his task.  By the time he spoke again, he had nearly filled the basket with weedings.  “It is true that, as a boy, it never occurred to me that I would not complete my training and, in due course, receive the accolade.  I would not inherit my father’s estate, of course.  I had two half-brothers who were grown men when I was born, and sisters as well.  But I saw a life ahead of me as a knight.”

“To send you into the church was understandable,” said Brother Eudes kindly.  Many monks were surplus sons.

“No, I chose this life,” said the monk; and his voice was clear and free of doubt.  “I was of an age to be made squire; but I confided my calling to Father Anselm—our priest, you understand—and he told my brother, my father having died by then.  Well, as you say, it was seen as quite appropriate.  I was homesick at first, I’m sure; but this was what I wanted.”

“And yet you wrestle with your past,” said Brother Eudes.  “You do not mention your mother—or had she died, too?  Well,” he added quickly, “by now, I’m sure she must be with Our Lord.”

“Yes, she fell ill,” said the monk.  “A dwindling, over months.  She was at peace in the end, I know; but I recall her concern about my future.  She named my guardian.”  He frowned suddenly, and faltered in his speech.  “She … yes … I went to live with….”  He trailed off.

Brother Eudes thought he looked puzzled, and said tactfully, “It has been many years, of course.”

The old monk frowned a little.  “My m-mother,” he said, stammering a little, “was my father’s second wife.”

“Yes,” said Brother Eudes, for older half-brothers certainly suggested as much.

“She had no family left; or, rather, my grandmother died when I was very small.  I never met her.  There was a brother too—my uncle—but I never met him, either.  He was older by quite a bit; but Maman mentioned him fondly.  He took the cross and died in the Holy Land before I was born.”

“A good end, fighting for Christ and Jerusalem,” murmured Brother Eudes encouragingly.

“Oh, yes.  My mother always spoke well of mon Oncle Nicolas; and, as a boy, I wanted to grow up to be a knight like him.  So I trained hard, running and jumping, and learning the sword and lance, if only a child’s weapons.  I was a good rider, over the roughest country.  The sergeant-at-arms spoke well of me….”  He trailed off again.

When it was clear nothing more would be said, Brother Eudes offered, “You serve Christ and the Church here too.”

“Without doubt.”

“And yet you dream.”

After Sext and the midday meal, the old monk returned to the scriptorium.  The red ink he had brushed delicately across the body of the demon was well-dried to the touch; and, now sure that there would be no bleeding of colour, he began to grind the pigments he would need for the fine detail.  It was tedious but necessary work with mortar and pestle; and, as he pressed the fragments into ever finer powder, his thoughts drifted.

He remembered well the months leading up to his mother’s death.  A small dower property had been settled on her in her widowhood; and, by her husband’s will, this would be inherited by their son, assuring his future.  Nevertheless, when she had realized that her illness would be the death of her, she had been deeply troubled, knowing him to be far too young to manage the property.  There was therefore the question of a guardian.  It had been a strange time after her death; but his Oncle Nicolas had taken him under his wing, at least for a—

His hand jerked.

A sprinkling of dark granules had scattered on the work table.  Delicately, the monk reached for a brush, and swept them off the wood back into the mortar.  Careless, careless, he chided himself.  Were he to jerk his hand like that while holding brush or pen, he might ruin all the work he had done so far, and would need to scrape off all the paint and start again.

His memory was truly failing.  How could he have lived for any time with Oncle Nicolas?!  His mother’s older brother had never returned to Brabant.  He had died in the fight to free Jerusalem from the pagan.  As a boy, the monk might once have had promise in the martial arts and thought to follow his uncle on Crusade; but his mother’s death had utterly changed the course of his life, revealing to him the true work to which God called him.

After wiping the area clean, he resumed the task of grinding his pigments; then, perforce, his attention must be on mixing the powder with the right amount of binder.  The past dimmed to shadow; daylight fell on the parchment before him.  There must be no mistakes in his illumination of the manuscript.  He peered close at the prancing red figure, intent on the adding the finest of brush and line work.  Later, after he had set the sheet of parchment aside to dry, he turned to a sheet on which Brother Jehan had copied text from the Gospel of Mark.  Space had been left for a fancy initial; and the monk began to sketch its outline with the silverpoint, pausing only when the light began to dim.

It was not yet time for Vespers.  A cloud must have passed over the sun; and the monk left his work to check whether the weather was turning to rain.  The work of a scribe requires clear sight of the page; and he might need to request a ration of candles.

Ah, he thought as he peered out into the cloister, such change from his training as a boy.  A fighting man must, after all, be fit for the march, however miserable the conditions.  He had raced and ridden in nigh on the worst of weather.  His father would have it no other way; and the men-at-arms and squires trained, too.  Though, as he recalled those last days before his novitiate, Oncle Nicolas had never been one to ride out on the hunt with—

He shook his head.  His memory again!  (Alas, he was not as young as he used to be:  it must be that.)  Of course, he must be thinking of his oldest half-brother.  Who else?  Geoffroi had been a man grown when the monk was born:  he was the natural choice to take charge of an orphaned nephew.  Indeed, when the monk thought about it, he had a clear memory of Geoffroi being greeted ceremoniously by the abbot on their arrival here.  They had spent a couple of days in the best guest chamber before he returned to his demesne with his retinue, leaving his young brother in the care of the novice master.  It was a fine room, with window glass and carved cornice.  As a boy, he had served guests at table there once or twice if they chose not to join the monks in the refectory.  Indeed, there were guests at the abbey now.  Not just the usual pilgrims, but two richly dressed noblemen and a lady with a fur-lined cloak.  The monk had, of course, seen them only at a distance:  his skills lay in scribing and illuminating.  He had never been the abbey’s hosteller.

That night, the monk dreamed again.  He woke long before the bell, and lay awake murmuring prayers silently in his bed.  What brought on these nightmares?  Years might pass without any interruption to his nights (save, of course, for rising for the usual mid-night offices); yet, as had happened once or twice before, his sleep was disturbed for days.  It had been the same dream—it was always the same dream, in essence, if not in detail.  This time he had been riding after a fox, until it turned to face his horse, transformed in mid-leap into a great wolf, and bore him down, teeth at his throat.  “Sancte Míchael Archángele, defénde nos in próelio,” he repeated to himself.  In his mind’s eye, the great glowing eyes still stared into his own.

His latest work on the painted demon was dry when he returned to the scriptorium, ready to add the final detail.  With precise tiny touches, he dabbed glue.  Taking a deep breath, he breathed heavily on the parchment; and, with the tip of his brush, laid flakes of pure gold leaf on the now-tacky surface.  After letting it set, he delicately brushed off the loose bits, and lifted them back into their pot.  When it was dry and fixed, he would burnish the gilding lightly with the agate.

Other monks might limn their devils and imps with eyes like scarlet coals.  But he knew better.  The eyes of a demon are gold.