Spires of Spirit by Gael Baudino

talent, David my son, it will be a fitting masterpiece to crown my church. People will come from miles around to see it.”
    David shifted uneasily. Outside of town, the forest was full of autumn color—red and russet, yellow and gold—its final celebration before the death of the year. He had received the summons from Alban an hour before, and he had scuffed through piles of those glowing, fallen leaves as he had taken the road into the village. He had known even then why he had been called, had known, too, that he could not avoid this meeting . . . or the demand that would be made of him.
    Still, he sought to evade the inevitable. “I hope you realize,” he said, “that I have other commissions to attend to. Members of the baronial houses desire panels and statues for the churches and cathedrals they're building in the cities to the north.” He kept his voice polite.
    “Pah!” said Alban. “Rivalries. Blood feuds, too, I imagine: stabbing each other in the back amid the reek of taverns. Fine people to set up carvings before God!” He laid a fatherly hand on David's shoulder and did not notice that the carver winced. “This village is your home, David. Your birthplace. You grew up here, went to school, received sacraments. If I'm not mistaken, you thought about a vocation for a while, eh?” He patted David's shoulder . . . and did not notice that the carver winced again.
    David did not reply for some time. The bare cross, he thought, was sufficient for the church: a stark counterbalance to a lavish interior in which stained glass windows soared up on all sides, stone carvings peered out from corners of the elaborate vaulting, and an inlaid floor gleamed in the light of candles in gold (gold!) holders. Alban had wanted a fine church, and he had built one; but though David could see that it was attractive enough in its own way, all its opulence and ornament, in his opinion, found a resolution only in the simplicity of the cross—a vertical and a horizontal beam, the wood smoothed and planed and polished, no more—as if that simplicity were a reminder not only of the poverty of the One who had suffered there but also of the point of that suffering: that the cross should eventually be bare, the tomb empty.
    He found himself thinking of the autumn leaves through which he had walked on the way to the meeting. The harvest: yellow fields, dying leaves. Soon, the grain would be gathered in, and the fields would be left stripped and forsaken . . . like the cross. Autumn was a hard season for David. There was too much death in autumn, too much of a sense of futility as the life of summer guttered into cold and dark. Only the distant spring made the bleakness at all bearable.
    If only Alban had asked for some other carving! Doors, maybe, or maybe a screen. David could see either project easily: trees, forests, animals peering through carved trunks and bunches of flowers, intricate filigrees. There could be life there, and love, and the touch of a Hand that had brought healing and comfort.
    “David?”
    Death.
    “David?”
    Death. Death. Death.
    He dropped his eyes, unable to think of anything to say.
    “I want that crucifix.”
    “Are you ordering me, master?” said the carver. “I'm a free craftsman.” A thought came into his head. “How much are you willing to pay for such a carving?”
    Alban looked shocked. “Pay! Your whole life you have benefited from the Church, and now you talk of payment? Look at this fine church, David! All the love that I could muster I lavished upon it. The men who worked here were compensated for their labor, true, but they were from the north, from Hypprux and Maris and Belroi, and they did not care about a church in Saint Brigid. You, though, David . . . you grew up here. Surely you would be willing to donate a carving to—”
    David's patience finally broke. This priest had come to the village hardly five years ago, a complete stranger sent down from the north. By what right did he