Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg Page A

world, inserting energetic and sometimes fantastical representations of stags, foxes, and racing hounds alongside the angels and vines that graced the prayers and psalms. I speculated as to whether he had suited the beasts’ postures to the mood or sense of the prayer, which struck me as a clever idea.
    Yawning, feeling lazy and dull-witted as always on the day after the doulon, I traced my fingertips over the letters as I had so often as a child. In those days, believing I might remedy my persistent failure to decipher the mystery of written words, I had allowed magic to roar from my body’s center into the confounding shapes on the page—scorching no few books in the endeavor. The fingers are the conduit of magic.
    I no longer wasted my resources on that particular exercise. I had come to terms with my incapacity and managed well enough all these years. But if these holy brothers discovered my lack, they would surely pitch me over their lovely wall. That was damnably annoying.
    I slammed the book shut and hunched deeper in the bed, warm and dry again after the previous day’s unsettling excursions. Jumbled thoughts of murdered monks and abbey benefactors who just happened to serve unsavory princes had plagued me all the boring day—or at least when I could avoid thinking of my empty nivat bag and the difficulty of refilling it. I had trained myself to set that worry aside for a few weeks between necessity, refusing to allow the disease or its unhealthy remedy to set the course of my life. The attack, a full week short of the usual and with so little warning, had profoundly unnerved me.
    Under the more direct beams of the rushlight, Brother Anselm worried over his colored chart that detailed astrological influences on the body’s humors, certain he would find some correlation with my relapse in the cloister garth. Sooner or later the earnest fellow would approach the bed with his piss jar or his magnifying lens or his well-polished lancet, asking politely to examine my eyeballs or the underside of my tongue or to take some sample of my regenerating bodily fluids.
    I was trying to decide whether to give in to sleep and thus keep good Anselm at bay, when a blast of cold air heralded Jullian’s appearance in the infirmary doorway. The boy was as pale as an Ardran milkmaid’s ass. “Brother Anselm, Brother Robierre summons you immediately with his medicine box and both litters. We’ve wounded soldiers at the gates!”
    â€œWho?” I said, sitting up straight as Brother Anselm jumped from his stool and dragged litter poles from beneath the vacant beds.
    â€œArdrans. Fifty of them at the least. Or a hundred…bloody…torn to pieces…”
    The boy’s peaked complexion and strangled declaration indicated that the evening’s events had already profoundly altered his understanding of the world. Exposure to ugly injuries such as mine was one thing, but four or five cadres’ worth of battle wounds would be far different. Angels preserve the boy from ever seeing the battlefield itself.
    It had required many a tankard to dull the images of my own introduction to the soldiers’ mysteries. I had never subscribed to myths of noble purpose or personal glory in battle, but I had believed that shoving a spear into a twitching body busily shitting itself could make a man of me. I’d blundered through innumerable bloody days since, as much avoiding other fools’ spears and axes as wielding my own.
    Brother Anselm wrapped the litter poles in their leather slings, dumped them into the boy’s outstretched arms, and threw a stack of linens atop the load. After tossing a few loose items from the shelves into a wooden chest, he slammed the lid, fastened the latch, and hefted it onto his shoulder. Before you could blink, only the chilly draft remained with me in the infirmary.
    The laws of sanctuary and the sanctity of abbey walls seemed suddenly flimsy.
    Two of