Chapter Text
Of the many tedious and unpleasant things he had been made to endure at the Central Abbey, Badeni especially despised work in the scriptorium. The room managed to be stuffy in both summer and winter, and the enforced silence among two dozen brothers bent over their manuscripts made him feel as if he were a fly trapped under a glass, able only to hurl itself at the unseen barrier between it and freedom. He preferred to get up and mumble while he worked, or pace around pulling at his hair, his ear; none of which was acceptable under the Rule. Only silence, only stillness. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so irritating if he was only expected to produce as much as the rest of the monks; yet alone among them his lettering was perfect, so he was often solicited to copy the rarest acquisitions, using fine vellum instead of parchment and working alongside an illuminator.
It did not escape him that he was most often assigned there because the task made it more difficult for his thoughts to wander. In that place his driving curiosity was an asset insofar as it could be pointed at subjects the Abbot preferred, nowhere else.
He had no reason to expect his feelings on the matter would ever change. It was always the same work, no matter whose words he was tasked to copy, the same useless effort. He didn’t see why he should be forced to repeat the musings of other men, most of whom had toiled with far less information and capacity than he, when the work could be done almost as well by a brother with rocks between the ears. He has musings of his own to shape into theory.
He hated copyist work with all his heart, he always would – so it came as a profound surprise to find himself eager to copy the words of a barely lettered peasant.
Chewing the inside of his cheek, he strained to hear the sound of footsteps coming up the path, a long stride at a brisk pace. Was he eager today? Badeni glanced in the direction of the window, and his suspicions were confirmed; this was the same time of day that Oczy returned from lessons with Jolenta and mercy missions in the town. The sound of footsteps increased, slowing slightly as he reached the front door. Three taps of a knuckle, then, “Badeni?”
They’d only spoken a few hours ago, yet Badeni felt as if he were hearing Oczy’s voice for the first time. “Yes?”
The sound of the door – creaking wood, a groaning hinge – before Badeni heard his footsteps across the floor, approaching with considerably more caution than he’d approached the barn. “Just putting my things away.”
Badeni knew that things included the book. But he could betray no interest now; not until much later, until he was alone. He had enough vague self-awareness to be appalled at his behavior, yet he could not seem to restrain himself. He paid more attention to the sound of Oczy moving through the murk blindness made of his surroundings than was strictly appropriate. It was probably best he no longer had the capacity for sidelong glances at anything farther than an armspan away, though he could no longer muster any gratitude to God for this mercy.
Belatedly he registered Oczy rummaging around the sack of food he had provided that afternoon, passing one heel of bread into his hands.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner.”
“That food is supposed to be yours.”
“Well… you should eat too. You haven’t yet today, right?”
“Ugh.” He noted with irritation that Oczy had once again managed to feed himself last; from this vantage point, the sack looked suspiciously empty. Ridiculous peasant, he thought, grinding his teeth from side to side.
“Why ‘ugh’? Isn’t it harder to work when you’re hungry?”
It was, but Badeni didn’t want to admit he was right. “You’re distracting me,” he said, turning away with a dismissive gesture. He couldn’t risk looking at Oczy’s face when it was this close.
Without another word, Oczy emphatically placed a second roll on the desk, just beside the fresh page, his fingers seeming to linger there for half a moment before he turned away and strode back to the door.
“Now you’re being absurd,” Badeni called to his retreating back.
“Sorry about that,” Oczy replied, only a little rueful. But Badeni could hear the smile in his voice, followed not long after by the creak of the door, the whisper of it settling back into its frame, then footsteps rustling in the grass, leading away from the barn.
Badeni turned back to the papers strewn across his desk, half-reading the one closest to his hands, the words slipping out of his mind as soon as they entered. So began his least favorite time of day; the interminable wait for nightfall, straining for the sound he sought most in the entire world, evidence that it was safe, and he could sate his curiosity unmolested.
He had only himself to blame for this predicament. If he’d never flipped open the cover of Oczy’s book, driven by incredulous curiosity, if he’d never skimmed that first page, and then read it again and again, increasingly unbalanced by the spread of sincere words in an awkward hand, he would never have known what was churning away in that inexplicable man’s head. He’d never have known just how much their meeting had meant.
Now, he was reduced to this pathetic state of distraction; instead of working, he was peering fruitlessly through the slats in the barn, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of Oczy’s shape perched on his stone, bent over the book in his lap.
Badeni fidgeted. Impatience frayed his concentration, rendered all efforts futile. He couldn’t even truly watch; he could only wait. His blindness forced him to ascertain the hour not by the position of the sun, but by the quality of the light. And it seemed to him, on this particular day the accursed sun was taking twice as long to plunge beneath the edge of the horizon.
In normal circumstances, the waiting would have forced him to be useful, to at least cobble together a semblance of progress on the most important work of his life. Concentration was one of his most valuable assets, focus that allowed him to sift through the noise of life for the signal within. His mind assailed a problem from many angles, probing for the weakness that would see it unraveled before him. He was not accustomed to this whatsoever. Now, he could only gauge the dimming brightness of the room, and strain to hear the sound of a turning page, or grass bending under the weight of a reclining figure.
The trouble was, he didn’t need the book in front of him for it to fill his mind, for he remembered the first page with perfect accuracy. He’d written it twice by now; once transcribing his edit onto a scrap of spare paper, for he dared not remove the book from the barn, and again on the pate of a beggar.
This is what I thought was true.
The Earth is the center of the universe. It is pinned to the underside of existence, always set apart. To be at the center is to be at the bottom, where all the worst things in Creation come to live. And in that fixed place, there are rules. If you get your hopes up, you’ll only be disappointed. If you begin with despair, you won’t be hurt as bad. Only a privileged few are fated to be content; the rest of us have to make do with sorrow and loss. Our only recourse is prayer. Our only hope of happiness is in Heaven.
But what if the Earth moves?
Not pinned, not fixed, but free? Then everything I thought I knew is wrong! Everything based on that truth has to be looked at again. Are hopes doomed to be disappointed? Could someone avoid pain if they braced for it their whole life, or would that just be another way of living in pain? Is happiness the claim of a special few, or do we all have one? On a moving earth, the search for what’s true begins again.
The book was, naturally, riddled with misspellings and awkwardly shaped letters. Yet Badeni was forced to confront the fact that he himself hadn’t been able to compose anything worthwhile after only a month’s acquaintance with words, that perhaps there was something exceptional about this peasant. He was willing to concede that much. But only because the evidence was staring him in the face. He flipped the page and craned closer:
I would never have figured this out by myself.
My mentor at work set out to meet a monk who could answer his questions about the stars, and I went along with him because I couldn’t decide for myself what was best. I’ve always had that trouble. But the journey was hard, and I was the only one who made it. The monk almost turned me away, but something changed his mind. I don’t know what it was, and I’m too nervous to ask. He was able to answer some of those questions, and he gave me a thousand more. He told me what he’d suspected, and now had cause to believe; Heaven and Earth are one. They exist in the same plane, the same place, governed by the same rules.
At first, I was afraid. For so long, the promise of Heaven was the only light in my life, rescue from the pain and ugliness of this world. Even if I could never make it there, its perfection was reassuring. If Heaven and Earth are the same, would that mean both are corrupt? But he corrected me right away. It could just as easily mean the Earth is as sacred and sublime as the perfection above. And when I finally lifted my eyes, I began to understand. It felt like truth. That solid certainty in the center of your chest. How could it be anything else? Look around and you’ll see what he meant.
That is what he told me, and everything I’ve seen since then makes me think he’s right. I hope he is, I hope so badly.
At this Badeni had to put the little book down. His head spun at the memory of their meeting, heart surging against his ribs; he had been so caught up in the moment of his long-awaited destiny and the thrill of perfected understanding that he hadn’t noticed the effect his convictions had on the strange man with sad eyes. It had driven him to write, when a month ago he could not sign his own name.
He had only written a few more pages then, but they were remarkably efficient; he proceeded to explain the core concepts of theory Badeni had laid out to him, and summarize the events that led up to the discovery of Venus’ final phase. Just as he had promised, he avoided any mention of their names. Badeni was ‘the monk’, Jolenta was ‘the scholar’ or sometimes ‘my teacher’, titles that were deliberately misleading, in his case at least, as he was no longer a monk. And while Jolenta was a scholar, she would not be recognized as such by most people, especially not by inquisitors. But it went even further; Oczy never revealed the existence of stone chest or how he came to find it, he offered no specifics about himself that might serve to identify them. Incriminating detail had been pared away by a more cautious and discerning hand than Badeni had credited to him, leaving only the most vital essence behind.
As he reread Oczy’s pages for the fourth time, a familiar, skin-crawling panic took hold. He was callously deposited back into the present, forced into awareness of his own racing heart and twisting stomach, palms suddenly slick with sweat. He knew better than most what the Church did to precious things it could not reconcile with itself; knew firsthand how inquiry was punished, even more so if it came from one expected never to question. He remembered, in a place deeper than bone, the stench of burning hair and flesh, and the keening of an animal in pain.
He had laid his hands flat over the cover to still their shaking. The ideas within the pages comprised only a small portion of its worth – he could have written a summary of his own, if he wished to. The true value came from the words Oczy chose, the struggle toward a skill for no other reason than earnest curiosity, the way each page was a little stronger than the last, a little more fluent. Its worth came from the drive to make accessible what Badeni had made so for him.
He flipped open the cover once again and stared at those inexplicably charming words, tracing a line with his finger. Slowly conviction overtook his panic, cast it into irrelevance; the book must be preserved. He had to protect it.
An undertaking in itself; mere papers pressed between leather was no longer an acceptable solution. Its complete destruction and eradication from this world was as easy as possession of a single object, with no translation or delay in place. Unacceptable.
The idea had come to him on the third sleepless night, amid pacing and mumbling and feverish speculation. There was indeed something more durable than paper, more invisible both to the authority that regarded them as deficient and the general populace who viewed them with jaundiced suspicion, with a natural cover shielding the precious words from view in a matter of days. He heard himself laugh. Of course, the answer was obvious. He was incomprehensibly stupid for not thinking of it at once.
It only took him a day to find the man he designated as his page One. He had seen the man begging from Oczy the most; he was easily distinguishable by his voice, which resembled plaster flaking off a wall, and a thatch of thick, dark hair. For the promise of food and care, the man accepted the task Badeni laid out for him; he was to manage the other pages, find more men than could be trusted to keep the existence of the words on their skin a secret.
They exchanged few words then. Even when the man tried to introduce himself properly, Badeni cut him off. “Stop. If I don’t know your name, I can’t betray it. You’re Page One.”
To One’s credit, he accepted this reasoning with a grunt of assent.
After a moment, Badeni was driven to add, “You should avoid sharing your names with each other as well.”
He had done this for seven pages; now he must wait for Oczy to finish the next. Not even a year in the detested scriptorium had ever slowed time to a stunted crawl like the interminable waiting for page eight had, and this wait had only lasted a fortnight. He had to stop himself from bothering Oczy to put his reading away and get back to writing, since he wasn’t even supposed to approve of this undertaking in the first place. He might still be safe in disapproval if he hadn’t indulged his constant need to solve what he perceived to be an incongruity in his understanding. He hadn’t known a peasant’s curiosity to entail much more than gossip.
Finally, finally, that one sound he had been waiting for; the slow, sleep-touched exhale of someone sunk deeply in a dream.
He burst from his seat, too frustrated for any further excess of caution. What was the point, anyway? Oczy always knocked before he came inside. His nerves thrilled as he snatched the book from its unassuming perch atop a crate, his heart pinning itself to the back of his throat. Too impatient to settle at the desk, he pulled his reading glass out from the pocket of his robe and flipped the book open to the most recent page. Relief and delight took him all at once, for it was one he had not yet read:
I’m trying to find a way to describe it and nothing works, there’s always a piece of it missing.
There’s something about seeing it with your own eyes. About knowing the truth, the way you would know water is wet or sunlight is warm.
The scholar and the monk are always talking about things I don’t understand, theories drawn up by people who lived thousands of years ago. And they’re hard to picture. But this was easy, even for someone like me. If the Sun is the center of everything, then from our perspective nothing will obstruct the view of Venus' illuminated face. So when I saw Venus full, I could know with perfect certainty. Where we are in the universe.
There’s just something about it. I wish I was better at explaining.
The monk once told me our Lord’s Creation is both perfect and comprehensible, and that sounded like it should be true. I hoped it was. But this was the moment when I really knew that for myself.
If Oczy were any better at explaining things, he might never recover; it was already hard enough to meet that penetrating gaze, despite his failing sight, soon it would be impossible. He didn’t just skim through each entry, after all; for every one word that Oczy wrote, Badeni wrote them twice.
In the morning he’d meet with One and whatever man they selected for this mad undertaking next. He’d attempt to hash out the dozen unfinished equations staring up accusingly at him, reproaching him for his juvenile distraction. Tomorrow, the work must continue.
But tonight he could allow himself to indulge. So he took a careful seat and spread a fresh sheet of paper over the table, smoothing it flat, savoring the feel of it under his hands. What he once found tedious had in the course of a few weeks become essential preparation. For now he could fix the spelling and grammar with fluent ease, and set down those earnest words in the clear hand of a copyist.