In the Ruins

Page 113

“Where is my father’s book?” she demanded.
“It is safe.”
I can immolate him. Her heart beat like a fury battering against its cage. Reach deep into him and burn him until he was nothing but cinders, like those poor soldiers she had killed, all of whom had screamed and screamed as the agony ate them from the inside out.
“Better a clean death,” she said, hearing how her voice shook and knowing he would interpret it as fear of him, when it was herself she feared. She would not be a monster, not even toward the one who had earned her hatred.
“You are right to be angry with me,” he said in his beautiful voice, “because I wronged you.”
“You abused me! Do not think to turn my heart now or ask me to forgive you.”
“You are all that matters,” he said, and she knew, horribly, that he was telling the truth as he understood it. Some things are true whether you want them to be or not. “I thought otherwise before, but I have seen things I cannot forget, terrible things. I regret what I have done in the past. I pray you, Liath, forgive me.”
“I am not a saint.”
“No, you are fire!” He moved, but only to lean against a table as though he would otherwise have fallen to his knees. “Can you not see it yourself, in this dark room? You are ablaze.”
So easily he unsettled her. This was not the battle she had anticipated.
“I want Da’s book,” she said, grimly sticking to the weapons at hand.
“‘God becomes what you are out of mercy.”’
“What are you saying?” He was only trying to knock her off-balance, as if he had not already.
He straightened. “Do you know what is in Bernard’s book?”
Don’t get angry. Don’t flare up. Don’t set the library on fire! She took a deep breath before she answered. She thrust aside the easy retort and kept her voice even.
“I know what is in Bernard’s book. The florilegia he compiled over many years—all the quotes and excerpts he copied out relating to the art of the mathematici. There is also a copy of al Haithan’s On the Configuration of the World, which Da obtained in Andalla.”
“And one other text.”
“In a language I don’t recognize, glossed in places in Arethousan, which I also cannot read.”
“I can read Arethousan. ‘God was born in the flesh so that you will also be born in the spirit.”’
She had expected many things, guessing that she and Hugh would one day meet and that on that day she would have to remember her strength. But this so shook her that at first she could not speak.
He waited, always patient.
“That’s a heresy! The church condemned the belief in the Redemption.”
“At the Great Council of Addai. Yet what if the Redemption is the truth? What if the holy mothers were lying?”
“Why would they?”
“Who can know what was in their hearts? What if the blessed Daisan allowed himself to be martyred in expiation for the sins of humankind? What if the account bound into Bernard’s book is true, the very words of St. Thecla the Witnesser herself? I have studied. The text your father hid in his book is an account of the redemption of the blessed Daisan, son of God. It is the witness of St. Thecla herself, and glossed by an unknown hand in Arethousan—because the original text is written in the tongue of Saïs, as was spoken in ancient days. As was spoken by the blessed Daisan. It was his mother’s tongue.”
“It can’t be.”
“Perhaps not. Where did Bernard find this book and why did he bind it with the others?”
“I don’t know. He never spoke of it. He must have found it in the east. It could be a forgery. Arethousa is rotten with heresy.”
“So the Dariyan church says. But it could also be the truth. Here.” He stepped back from the table. “Judge for yourself.”
It was impossible to stop herself from picking up the candle and approaching him, to see that in truth and indeed a book lay on the table. Was it Da’s old, familiar, beloved book? That book was the last thing she had that linked her to Da except his love and his teaching, except his blood and his crime against the creature that had become her mother, whom he had killed all unwittingly and out of love.
Da’s book.
She halted before she got into sword range. “What do you mean to do?”
“It’s yours. I’m giving it back to you.”
She tried to speak, but only a hoarse “ah” “ah” got out of her throat. She struggled against tears, against anger, against grief, against such a cascade of emotions that he moved before she understood he meant to and glided away through one of the archways and vanished into the shadows, just like that.