Time Will Tell by Donald Greig

aquamarine and gold leaf, adorned with pictures
of strange animals and freakish men, but never, never had he seen such clear and honest efforts. He had no idea, he added, that the boys who sang in the choir were such talented scribes.
    When he got to my desk he stopped.
    â€˜And your name is…?’ he asked.
    â€˜Geoffroy Chiron, Maître Ockeghem,’ I replied.
    â€˜Chiron? Ah, the centaur,’ he said, ‘or should that be a foal?’
    None of us knew what he meant and, seeing our incomprehension, he explained. Chiron was a centaur, half-man and half-horse, the half-brother of Zeus, who surrendered his immortality when the pain of a wound proved too great.
    â€˜Well, well,’ he said, looking at my work. ‘This really is excellent. You like ligatures, I see?’
    â€˜Yes, Maître Ockeghem.’
    â€˜We will have to keep an eye on you. You have a steady hand. And that is entirely appropriate, for the name Chiron comes from the Greek meaning “good with the hands”. You also have a good musical understanding.’
    He turned to the rest of the class.
    â€˜And that, boys, is what we must all aim for. We must not merely be singers: we must be musicians. We were put here on earth to comprehend the world and not merely to be agents of God’s will, and we must understand music in the same way that we seek to understand God. And that is what young Monsieur Chiron has done here. He has not just written the notes: he has applied thought to the notes. Well done.’
    As I look back now I can see that Jehan’s praise was exaggerated in order to encourage me. He must have know that my use of ligatures was not conscious as he suggested, but merely an affectation like the loop of the letter ‘g’ or the flourish of a signature wherein the letters of the name itself become impossible to read. It was an outward display with no real comprehension, but at the time I was so proud I could have burst.
    What Jehan actually saw that day was a steady hand matched by a steadfast nature; I was accurate and I was neat, the two essential qualities of the scribe. It would be ten more years before he saw evidence of my hand again, when his usual copier had left the city to travel to Bourges and he needed help with the transcription of a new mass.
    It is to Jehan Ockeghem, then, that I owe my early career as a scribe, a skill which, though he was happy to encourage, he viewed as only a stepping-stone to greater things. I should not, he insisted gently on several occasions, become an artisan when I had a brain and wit better suited to high office. Thus it was as a scribe that I began my working life and, with him as my patron, I was introduced to men of high office in the city of Tours for whom I would perform simple tasks such as drafting documents and even personal correspondence.  
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    I have wandered from the path again:
Ostende mihi Domine viam tuam et deduc me in semita recta
    [Set me, O Lord, a law in thy way, and guide me in the right path]. 
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    This is about Jehan Ockeghem, as I must constantly remind myself. I am old now, the assured stroke of the quill that characterised my youth now subject to illness and an infirmity of age whereby my hand shakes and my fingers seize up, particularly in the cold, damp days of winter; sometimes it hurts to write at all and instead I am forced to turn my mind to contemplation. That is no bad thing for composition of any kind, as Jehan taught me. The process is one from thinking to writing, from designing in the mind to crafting on the page. Indeed that is my aim here: to set down the events as I witnessed them, to bring to my thoughts and to incidents the clarity of reflection, thence to refine them in the act of writing. And that, of course, is the same process as the one I developed through transcribing Jehan’s compositions.
    As I was saying, I developed my skills as a scribe over many years in the service of Jehan Ockeghem.