Chapter 85: The Cartulary of Thawed Tongues

The papal bull was a small thing for all its weight. Aldric held it between two fingers as though it were a viper that had forgotten to strike, and in the thin light of the Paderborn chapter house, the lead seal caught the last of the afternoon and threw it back at him in dull, stubborn gleam.

“Read it,” Gerold said from the doorway, where he stood with his back against the jamb and his hand near his knife, as though a scroll might grow teeth.

“I am reading it.”

“You are looking at it.”

“That is how reading begins.” Aldric turned the parchment over. The reverse was blank, save for a single line in a hand he did not know. He read it twice. Then he read it a third time, and set the scroll down on the table as if it had grown warm.

“Well?” Gerold asked.

“The Holy Father wishes to know what I want.”

“That is a strange thing for a pope to ask.”

“It is a stranger thing for him to know I exist.”

Gerold pushed away from the door and came to stand across the table. The scar that split his jaw caught the light, pale as a river stone. “What does he offer?”

“Nothing. He asks.” Aldric tapped the second line with a fingernail. “He writes that the king of the Franks seeks a crown, and that crowns are heavy things, and that the shoulders which bear them must be chosen with care. He writes that he has heard of a lord from the Vosges who arranges the world to suit others, and that such a man might arrange a coronation to suit the Church.” He paused. “He writes that he would be grateful to know what that lord desires in return.”

Gerold was silent a moment. “That is a trap.”

“Everything is a trap. The question is only which teeth are in it.” Aldric sat down on the bench and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. The chapter house smelled of cold stone and old wax, of the winter that would not quite let go. Outside, the thaw had turned the yard to a soup of mud and horse dung, and the whole of Paderborn stank of it. He had spent the winter here counting the ways he could lose, and now the spring had come and the ways had multiplied like flies.

“You could refuse him,” Gerold said.

“Refuse the Bishop of Rome.”

“You have refused an emperor.”

“I have never once refused the Emperor. That is the great tragedy of my life. I have merely been too slow and too tired to obey him properly, and he has mistaken it for cleverness.” Aldric reached for the scroll again, then did not touch it. “If I write to Rome, I write against the Emperor.”

“If you do not write, you write against the Pope.”

“Yes. That is the arithmetic of it.” He looked up at the Saxon. “You have a talent for stating what I already know.”

“It is my only talent. You should use me for it more often.”

Aldric almost smiled. It was a weak thing, quickly gone. He thought of Hildegard at Saint Bernard, burning a letter in the brazier, whispering that some knots must be burned and not cut. He thought of the Emperor on the road, demanding his full mind and his full service, and of the writ of immunity that still did not exist. He thought of Rotrude, who had warned him he underestimated her father, and who had been right, as she was always right, and who was even now somewhere in this palace watching him the way a cat watches a bird that has not yet decided whether to fly.

“I want to go home,” he said. It came out quietly, without drama, and that made it worse.

“You have wanted that since the day I met you,” Gerold said. “You have not once achieved it.”

“I have achieved it in my mind a thousand times. I have sat on my terrace and drunk my own wine and watched the sun go down over my own vines. It is a very good life, Gerold. You would like it.”

“I would be bored.”

“That is the point.”

The door opened. A young monk entered with a candle, bowed, and set it on the table. He glanced at the papal scroll, crossed himself without seeming to know he had done it, and retreated. The flame steadied, and the room grew smaller around it.

“He does not want an answer,” Aldric said slowly. “That is what I have been missing. He does not want an answer. He wants to see what I do with the question.”

“Which is?”

“Which is the same thing the Emperor wants. They are both writing the same story from opposite ends.” He stood and picked up the scroll, rolled it, and slid it into the sleeve of his tunic. “I have been thinking of this wrong. I have been thinking I must choose between Rome and Aachen.”

“Must you not?”

“No. I must choose between being the author and being the ink.” He looked toward the shuttered window, toward the south, where beyond the mud and the thaw and the long road lay the gates of Saint Peter, and beyond them a fisherman’s ring, and beyond that a question that had been asked of better men than him. “The Pope wants to know what I desire. Very well. I will tell him. I will tell him that I desire one thing above all others, and that if he grants it, he will have a friend in the north for as long as he wears the ring.”

“And what is that one thing?”

Aldric smiled. It was still a weak thing, but there was an edge to it now, thin and bright as a knife in candlelight. “A writ. A small writ, signed and sealed, granting a certain lord of the Vosges leave to retire from all royal and papal service, in perpetuity, on the grounds of age, infirmity, and an incurable disinclination for glory.” He paused. “If the Pope signs it, the Emperor cannot touch me. And if the Emperor cannot touch me—”

“Then you go home.”

“Then I go home.”

Gerold frowned. “The Emperor will be furious.”

“The Emperor is always furious. It is his natural condition.” Aldric picked up the candle and moved toward the door. “But he is also patient, and he is also a man who understands that a tool which cannot be replaced must sometimes be indulged. If the Pope grants me my writ, the Emperor will have to choose. He can rage, or he can bargain.”

“And which will he choose?”

Aldric stopped at the threshold. The candle threw his shadow long and thin across the flagstones. “That,” he said, “is what I intend to find out. And I intend to find it out before the road runs out of spring.”

He stepped through the door into the courtyard, where the thaw had turned the world to mud and the smell of wet earth rose up like a promise or a warning. Somewhere beyond the walls, the Emperor’s banners snapped in the wind. Somewhere beyond the mountains, the Pope waited. And somewhere in the dark behind him, Hildegard’s burned letter still gave off its invisible heat, and Rotrude’s eyes were on him, and the story he had meant to write was writing itself faster than he could read.

He had a scroll, a question, and a pen.

For the first time since the frost had come, he was not sure he wanted to let it drop.