Shroud of Shadow

Shroud of Shadow by Gael Baudino Page B

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Authors: Gael Baudino
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and with knowledge.”
    They spent a few minutes with music, then. Natil drew melodies from her harp and politely requested that Omelda sing them. At first, she tried popular songs—bawdy and sentimental both—but when Omelda proved to know very few of them, she turned to chant. Omelda balked at the task, for chant in any form awakened too many echoes of her inner voices; but Natil, insistent, made her sing the same chant over and over again with the inflections and cadences and stresses of ordinary speech until the old, monotonous plodding was beginning to fade in Omelda's mind and she could think of the chant in question only as a plastic, organic, living thing with all the taut springiness of a freshly clipped lawn.
    “But what good is it?” Omelda finally asked. “I can learn this chant this way, but there are all the others . . .” She lifted her large hands, let them fall into her lap. One chant? There were thousands in the Church liturgy. An entire shelf of the abbey library was given over to chant books—the Antiphonary, the Graduale, the Hymnarius—and a dozen others. What was one chant among so many? And Omelda could not even see the use of the alterations upon which Natil had so insisted.
    Natil took up a soft cloth, wiped the strings of her harp, wrapped the instrument. “It is a start,” she said. “I do not know where it will lead you.”
    Omelda opened her mouth, but Natil looked at her with bright blue eyes an she shut it again.
    “I did not know where I would be led when I came into life,” said the harper. “I did not know where I would be led when I looked up from my harp and saw you standing at the window. I do not know what next week might bring, or even . . .” A flash of pain and loss in those blue eyes. “. . . or even tomorrow. But you asked me to teach you my music, and so I am trying to do that.”
    Chastened, feeling again a sense of transgression, Omelda rose silently and gathered the remainder of the food. Woman's work: cleaning up, plodding from one task to another. There was always something to do, whether in the Divine Office or in housekeeping.
    “I'm sorry, Natil,” she said suddenly.
    Natil looked up. “Sorry, beloved?”
    “For complaining. I'm always complaining.” Omelda almost smiled: her sisters would be in chapter right about now, confessing to one another, asking God's forgiveness for personal faults and failings. Turn and twist and run as she would, she could not escape the life to which she had been committed. “Forgive me.”
    Natil nodded as she rose. “I forgave you the moment you uttered the words, Omelda. Forgive yourself.”
    Omelda stared, speechless. In chapter, faults would be confessed and punishments and disciplines meted out by Dame Agnes. But Natil—oh, what a difference was this!
    Natil bowed. “It is a hard thing to forgive yourself deeply and sincerely, is it not? But it is an important thing to learn rightly.”
    Omelda found her voice. “Only God can truly forgive. God and the priests.”
    Natil straightened, fixed Omelda with her blue eyes for a moment, then bent and picked up her harp. “So say the priests, beloved.” But Omelda sensed that the harper—prophet or madwoman, she did not know—did not believe a word of what the priests said.

Chapter Five
    Darkness. Absolute darkness. The darkness of the grave. The darkness of the crypt. The darkness of death.
    Siegfried of Madgeburg, Inquisitor of Furze, stood silently in the deepest corridor of the House of God. A soul newly flown from its body, he imagined, saw and felt this profundity of darkness. With full knowledge that, about it, but now forever beyond its grasp, the world of mundane concerns went on just as the world of Furze and poverty and wool cooperative plots went on outside the walls of the House of God, the individual soul, like the prisoner in the room ahead, like Siegfried himself, waited alone and in darkness.
    And so Siegfried stood, silently meditating on the task

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