第16章 The Long Vigil

The vigil of Saint Veylen fell on the last day of the snow, and the house kept it the way it had kept the feast in every year of its long decline: with candles, because the generator would not hold, and with the office sung by the four brothers who still had voices, and with the Doom lit from below by a ring of flames so that the figures seemed to lean out of the dark and down toward the living. It was the most beautiful the wall had ever been, and Aloisia stood at the back of the nave and understood, for the first time, why the house had feared it. Seen by candlelight, at a distance, with the faces averted and the judge's heavy face above them all, the Doom did not look like a picture of judgment. It looked like a room full of people who had been told to keep still and had been keeping still for three hundred years. They opened the seal after Compline. It took five of them: the abbot, Notker, Brother Meinrad and Brother Volkmar and Aloisia herself, with iron bars and a mallet and a wedge, working through the mortar around the flag in the floor of the old chapter house while Vlasta held the lamp. The mortar was hard as flint and came away in chips, and under the chips the iron bolt showed, rusted to the color of dried blood, and it would not turn in its socket, and in the end they cut the bolt itself with a hacksaw, working in turns, and the sound of the saw in that low room was the sound of something being let out at last. The flag came up on a groan of iron and settled onto its side, and where it had been there was a stair going down into black, and out of the black came a cold that was deeper than the cold of the room, and with the cold a smell that was not rot and not dust but something older, like the air of a place that has been shut since the beginning. Aloisia went down first, because it was her condition and she would not send another to do it, and the abbot came after her with the lamp, and the stair went down twelve steps and opened into a passage that ran the length of the old chapter house and beyond it under the garden, a passage she had felt for weeks through the stone and had drawn on no plan. The passage was dry. That was the first thing that struck her, and she would think about it later more than she thought about the rest. After three hundred years under a mountain, with a stream not fifty meters off and the snow above them melting every spring, the passage was dry as a tomb that has been sealed with care, and the air in it was still, and the dust on the floor had not been disturbed since it settled. The bones were in the far chamber, at the end of the passage, laid along the walls in rows, and there were more than she could count in the lamplight, and Meinrad, who had been a farmer before he was a brother, knelt down and began to count them the way he would have counted sheep, softly, and gave up somewhere past thirty. They were small, many of them. There were women among them. There was a child's shoe, leather gone to the color of stone, and a wooden bowl, and a comb of carved bone, and a rosary of knotted cord with the knots pressed flat by hands that had worn them smooth. And on the stone of the passage wall, scratched with something harder than stone, was a crowd. Aloisia lifted the lamp and put her face close to the wall and felt her skin go cold. Someone had scratched figures into the stone, hundreds of them, small and crude and patient, standing close together along the whole length of the passage, row above row and row above row, and every one of them had its face turned away. It was the company of the Doom, done in scratches on the dark, and it had been done by people who had spent their last days in this passage with nothing to do but this. They had made a record. They had counted themselves. And near the center of the crowd, where the lamp was brightest and the scratches deepest, one figure had been drawn and left without a face: not a crude absence, but a careful blank, an oval of clean stone in the middle of the crowd, and the stone there was warm under her fingers, warm where everything around it was cold, and she drew her hand back as though she had touched a stove. Behind her, Brother Notker began to say names. He was not reading. There was nothing to read. He stood at the foot of the stair with his hands at his sides, and the names came out of him one after another in the still air of the passage, low and steady and unhesitating, forty of them and more, a recitation that he had never learned and that rolled out of him the way a river rolls, and when he came to the last of them he stopped and stood breathing and could not say where the names had come from or what he had been doing, and he looked at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else. The abbot put the lamp on the floor and knelt down in the dust and said a prayer, and the prayer had no words she recognized, and when he stood up his face was wet and old in a way she had not seen before. He said, Leave it open. We will not seal it again. In the morning we will read the names in the church, all of them, and we will write them in the book, and we will let whatever this is finish. They went up at dawn through the cold, and when she came into the church with the first grey light behind her, the wall had changed again, the way she had known it would, and the company of the hidden now filled the whole left quadrant from the gate to the corner, so dense that the individuals had begun to lose their outlines and become a crowd, a crowd of the turned and the counted, and at their head the tall one stood with the finished face she had seen in the dark two nights before, and she still could not name it, and she would know it, she thought, when she heard it spoken. ---