The Scribe

A Story Left Untold

May 20, 2024

Even in a saga five books long, there isn’t room for every character’s story. With the shifts of plot that invariably happen from one draft to the next, a seemingly unimportant character suddenly claims a more prominent role, while another who’d had a major part to play in an early version is reduced to a few sentences in the manuscript that goes to print. Still, the stories of these diminished characters mattered to them and today’s post belongs to Gerold, a former scribe whose ability to do accounting is the only reason Stefan, sheriff of the shire of Codswallow, keeps him in his guard.

Seeing him hunched over his work table—stacks of ledgers to the right of him and piles of scrolls to the left—no one, not even with the stretch of a vivid imagination, would suppose that the bowed figure with pinched features and a nervous tick was a man with a dramatic history, much less one with the passion to sacrifice everything he had for love. But Gerold had not always been a tense and finicky middle-aged man. He’d once been a tense and finicky young man, one whose obsession with detail, along with an exceptionally gifted hand at inscription, had earned him a secure position as a copyist in the Abbey of Saint Hrodulf.

Gerold had not always been a tense and finicky middle-aged man. He’d once been a tense and finicky young man . . .

‘Gerold’ was not Gerold’s birth name. He vaguely remembered he’d once been called Ealfred, but didn’t know anything else about his early life, never having been been told that his mother had been the daughter of a nobleman whose estate included one of the finest manors in Saxon England or that his father was the oldest son of an equally noble house in a neighboring kingdom.

If the beautiful Lady Ealfreda and the dashing Lord Wulfstan had met under different circumstances, theirs might well have been a match of love as well as an advantageous political alliance. As it was, their two families were on opposite sides of a war and Wulfstan led the attack that burned Ealfreda's home to the ground—killing her parents and her four brothers before raping her and leaving her for dead.

Ealfreda’s uncle, Lord Ealswerth, got word of the attack, called his guards, and raced there with reinforcements. Arriving too late to save the rest of the family, Ealswerth found his niece wandering, dazed and naked, through the smoldering ruins. He wrapped his cloak around her and took her back to his own manor where, together with his wife and servants, he spent the next nine months watching over her to keep her from killing herself. After Gerold was born, however, they relaxed their guard, and she was able to slip out of the manor, holding her infant son with one arm and the heaviest rock she could carry with the other.

With both hands full, she hadn’t been able to latch the door behind her.

A servant saw it was open and sounded the alarm.

They began the search at once, racing to the lake and praying that they were not too late.

If God was going to work a miracle, Lord Ealswerth had wondered at the time, why not save the mother as well?

It was a full moon and the light overhead shone through the glassy surface to where she lay with her night dress wafting around her, still clutching both the rock and Gerold.

They’d splashed in, pulled the two bodies out of the chilly water, and were carrying them back for burial when Gerold gave a little cough and began to cry.

If God was going to work a miracle, Lord Ealswerth had wondered at the time, why not save the mother as well? He kept his question to himself, however, handing Gerold to a wet nurse in whose care he survived three waves of fever that took all of his foster mother's own children. It was when the nurse herself died unexpectedly that Ealswerth became convinced the boy was a Jonah and put him into a distant monastery telling no one about his past except for the abbot, and then revealing it in a confessional to assure the abbot’s silence.

Over the next twelve years, the pattern of Gerold's life seemed to repeat itself. If there was an outbreak of a virulent illness or a falling branch in the abbey’s orchard—it would miss him (in the case of the tree branch only by a hair's breadth) striking down whoever had been closest to him. Bound by the seal of confession, the abbot murmured prayers for divine mercy and took it as proof of the power of those prayers that not everyone who sat next to Gerold at meals or stood next to him in chapel died.

Although Gerold never learned the story of his tragic beginning, each brush with death added to a growing mix of anxiety and guilt, inner turmoil that he sought to assuage through rigid obedience to the abbey’s rules and single-minded devotion to his work.

Although Gerold never learned the story of his tragic beginnings, each brush with death added to a growing mix of anxiety and guilt, inner turmoil that he sought to assuage through rigid obedience to the abbey’s rules and single-minded devotion to his work.

The Abbey of Saint Hrodulf was justly renowned for its illuminated copies of the Bible, wonderful volumes copied from copies of the original copy carried from Rome by Saint Hrodulf himself, the monastery’s founder and first abbot.

Creating those Bibles began with reproducing the words on each page letter for letter and line for line, an arduous and exacting labor that left most of the abbey’s scribes more than ready to rise from their stools and stretch their cramped hands at the end of the day. Gerold, however, would have been happy if the evening bells never rang. This was, in part, because focusing his mind completely on his work was his only respite from his otherwise constant worry and, in part, because writing came so easily to him.

Unlike the other scribes, Gerold hadn’t had to struggle to learn how to touch the tip of his quill to the surface of the ink, hold it there for the exact fraction of a moment needed to take up just the right sized drop, give the slight shake that returned the excess to the pot and begin. Beyond the mental relief his work gave him and the justifiable pride he took in his skill, Gerold was, from the first, enthralled with the sensation of writing, the smooth flow of the ink as his quill’s point skimmed the surface of the parchment leaving perfectly formed letters in its wake.

Gerold was, from the first, enthralled with the sensation of writing, the smooth flow of the ink as his quill’s point skimmed the surface of the parchment leaving perfectly formed letters in its wake.

His love of inscription was in stark contrast to his dread of illuminations.

While the words on each page had to be reproduced exactly, the abbot not only allowed but urged the scribes to embellish the initial letter of each chapter and the borders of each page with patterns and pictures of their own design—in keeping, of course, with the content of the text. In a community where every other aspect of their lives was governed by the rigid rules of their order, this artistic license was the closest thing to personal freedom any of the scribes would ever know and was, for most, a welcome relief from the tedious drudgery of copying text.

But not for Gerold. The brushes, paints and gilts needed for illuminations did not work for him the way quills and ink did—there were too many of them to decide between and having to make decisions broke the shield of meditative absorption that kept his gnawing sense of foreboding at bay. By dint of sweat and dogged deliberation, Gerold managed to copy the illustrations as exactly as humanly possible, only to disappoint himself, the abbot—and presumably God—with a lifeless facsimile of the original.

Still, even with his struggle with paints and brushes, Gerold was as close to being happy when he was at his desk in the scriptorium as he understood that word to mean.

While in other monasteries each scribe had a bible to copy, in the Abbey of Saint Hrodulf scribes sat two to a table with the bible they were copying propped open on a stand in front of them.

While in other monasteries each scribe had a bible to copy, in the Abbey of Saint Hrodulf scribes sat two to a table with the bible they were copying propped open on a stand in front of them. The writing table where Gerold worked for seven years had been on the left side of the room and he’d sat on the left side, next to the window. Over those seven years he’d had three table mates—Brother Hreodborth who’d been among those fatally stricken when a plague of fevered cough had run through the monastery five years earlier, the elderly Brother Aelfgar who’d quietly passed away in his sleep the previous winter and now Brother Glaedwine, a newly consecrated monk of about the same age as Gerold.

Since the rule of silence was kept as strictly in the scriptorium as anywhere in the abbey—and hand signals were allowed only to request more ink or gilt—Gerold had never actually spoken to Glaedwine since they’d become table mates or at any time in the past, but in recent weeks he’d begun to notice when Glaedwine’s hand reached for a pot of paint on Gerold’s side of the table and that he often cast covert glances at Gerold’s carefully lettered parchment.

Special friendships were at the top of the litany of things prohibited under the rules of Saint Hrodulf so Gerold disciplined himself not to look at Glaedwine directly. Still sitting elbow to elbow for nine hours a day he’d grown increasingly aware of small things about his table mate—his fringe of dark curling hair, his sparkling brown eyes, and how he seemed to smell of something sweet and spicy.

Special friendships were at the top of the litany of things prohibited under the rules of Saint Hrodulf so Gerold disciplined himself not to look at Glaedwine directly.

Gerold’s last day as a monk in the Abby of Saint Hrodulf began in an ordinary way. He rose for the dawn prayers, breakfasted with his fellow monks in the abbey’s dining hall then took his place in the line of thirty-six scribes treading single file along the wooden walkway to the scriptorium where he made his way up the aisle to the table he shared with Glaedwine. He pulled out his stool and sat down, checking to see that his parchment was laid out straight, his quills sharp and his inkpot full—all the while keenly aware that Glaedwine was getting settled next to him.

That day, the first day of June, the window shutters were flung wide open. A warm breeze fragrant with the scent of roses wafted in as Gerold turned the page of the Bible from the just completed Book of Job to the Song of Solomon*.

As a rule, Gerold did not think about the significance of the scriptures he was copying. Once he took up his quill, touched it to the surface of the ink and began to work, the scripture’s words were reduced in his mind to the shape of each letter, the number of letters on each line and the number of lines on the page. But that morning Gerold was not only aware of the meaning of the psalm’s sensuous opening phrase, osculetur me osculo oris sui quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino, but of how the words seemed to speak feelings he’d never before experienced. Instead being distracted—losing his grip on his quill or control over his lettering—he felt empowered and the words of the psalm’s first three verses were the most clear and vibrant he’d ever formed.

Finishing the e in recti diligunt te at the precise end of the tenth line, he paused on the pretext of cleaning the point of his quill and slid his eyes towards Glaedwine’s page, taking in the whole of it, Ego flos campi et lilium convallium Sicut lilium inter spinas sic amica mea inter filias Sicut malum inter ligna silvarum sic dilectus meus inter filios sub umbra illius quam desideraveram sedi et fructus eius dulcis gutturi meo, in a single glance.

Although the words on Glaedwine’s parchment were directly copied from the Bible’s right-hand page, they seemed like an answer to his own.

Drawing a breath and steadying his hand, Gerold went on, forming each stroke and curve with controlled passion.

Nigra sum sed formonsa filiae Hierusalem sicut tabernacula Cedar sicut pelles Salomonis Nolite me considerare quod fusca sim quia decoloravit me sol filii matris meae pugnaverunt contra me posuerunt me custodem in vineis vineam meam non custodivi Indica mihi quem diligit anima mea ubi pascas ubi cubes in meridie ne vagari incipiam per greges sodalium tuorum.

Again he paused and peeked. Glaedwine’s hand was in the midst of writing Fulcite me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo.

Gerold’s heart gave an unprecedented flutter. Somehow certain that his mind and Glaedwine’s were mystically linked, he dipped his quill and wrote his own next lines.

Si ignoras te o pulchra inter mulieres egredere et abi post vestigia gregum et pasce hedos tuos iuxta tabernacula pastorum Equitatui meo in curribus Pharaonis adsimilavi te amica mea

Gerold’s heart gave an unprecedented flutter. Somehow certain that his mind and Glaedwine’s were mystically linked, he dipped his quill and wrote his own next lines.

As he waited for Glaedwine’s reply, Gerold heard a frog croak from somewhere outside the open window.

Glaedwine set down his quill and took up a brush and with few deft strokes painted an emerald-green frog that seemed to be smiling at Gerold from the lower left corner of the page.

The harmony of that moment was disrupted by the approach of Brother Enswerth, the grim monk in charge of work in the scriptorium whose vulture-like gaze threw the dread of pitiless penance into the hearts of the scribes.

Glaedwine dropped his brush and picked up his quill, holding it poised over his page as he stared intently at the open bible

Neither of them breathed until Brother Enswerth moved on.

Gerold felt Glaedwine’s tension and could sense that he was clenching his quill too tightly as he went back to work.

If their minds had truly been melded, Glaedwine would have heard Gerold’s silent warning that his letters were too wide and spread too far apart. As it was Gerold watched helplessly as Glaedwine came to the end of the line, with five words left to do and only space for three. If he ran those extra words over on the next line, the whole page would be set askew. But what seemed an impossible dilemma to Gerold was solved when, after a moment’s deliberation, Glaedwine simply dropped out two words and fit other three into place.

Gerold drew a breath along with Glaedwine, holding it while Glaedwine dipped his quill back into the ink and gave it a shake to get rid of the excess.

No! Not so hard! Gerold almost cried his warning aloud at the very moment Glaedwine’s too vigorous flick sent a fat drop of ink into the air. Time seemed to stand still as Gerold watched it fly up in an arc and come down to land in the center of Glaedwine’s parchment—a parchment that was consecrated to God and was worth the cost of a day’s meals for the whole of the monastery.

Gerold knew, as Glaedwine must, that this was no minor sin to be absolved by a day or two in kneeling in prayer but one so grievous Glaedwine might well be dismissed from the scriptorium or even from the abbey. For a wild moment, Gerold was on the verge of taking the spoiled page and giving Glaedwine his in exchange—but realized before he’s finished the thought that his page was the left one with psalm’s first chapter and Glaedwine’s was the right with the second chapter and Brother Enswerth would recognize the deception at a glance.

Gerold knew, as Glaedwine must, that this was no minor sin to be absolved by a day or two in kneeling in prayer but one so grievous Glaedwine might well be dismissed from the scriptorium or even from the abbey.

Maybe he could save Glaedwine by taking the blame himself, saying that he’d been the one to shake the drop off and spoil the parchment! Gerold was thinking hurriedly about how he used enough force for the drop from his quill to fly that far when Glaedwine dipped his quill back in the ink, giving it a deft, effortless shake and added quick lines to the blot, turning it into a fly with sparkling eyes and iridescent wings.

Gerold cheered inwardly as Glaedwine put down the quill, picked up a brush and started to paint. For the remainder of the morning, they labored in earnest harmony, Gerold finishing his inscriptions and Glaedwine painting a dazzling border of flowering vines, shimmering butterflies and shining beetles that seemed like they were actually crawling, with the result that what has been a blot of spilled ink seemed one more skilled decoration.

After the noon prayers (Gerold’s having been more intense and less rote than usual) and the midday meal, they returned to their work table. The two parchment lay side by side—Gerold’s perfectly inscribed but with only empty space around its edges and Glaedwine’s with its wonderfully illuminated border but its text barely started.

In what was to be the last hand gesture Gerold would make to Glaedwine, he pointed from himself to Glaedwine’s parchment and from his own parchment to Glaedwine. Both of them glanced to be sure that Brother Enswerth wasn’t watching and switched pages. By time the bells sounded for the mid-afternoon prayers they’d each finished their parts and switched the sheets back.

Returning from chapel, Gerold turned the page of the Bible and they carried out their secret interchange, Gerold doing the inscriptions and Glaedwine the illuminations, slipping the pages back and forth without being caught. More than ever Gerold wished the bells for vespers would never ring but it did, and as he was getting up and tucking his stool under the table close to Glaedwine’s, Gerold was assailed by the qualms and fears that had been lying in wait for him—transforming the happiness he’d felt sitting next to Glaedwine into an overwhelming dread that this closeness might spell doom for the first person he had ever loved.

Gerald dreamed that night of walking out of the scriptorium and toward the monastery’s chapel behind mourners chanting a Requiem Mass and carrying a casket on their shoulders.

Gerald dreamed that night of walking out of the scriptorium and toward the monastery’s chapel behind mourners chanting a Requiem Mass and carrying a casket on their shoulders. Once inside, they lowered the casket to the floor. It held Glaedwine, lying with his arms crossed—his right hand holding his brushes and his left holding a manuscript page they’d done together.

The church bells clanged, at first seeming a part of his dream and then waking him from it. He rose, shaking, and joined the line of monks going to the midnight prayers. Having already made up his mind, he stayed well away from Glaedwine during the service and, when it was over, he went to the Abbott to confess that he had lost of his calling.

The Abbott said nothing to dissuade him, in fact had looked relieved, as he pulled out a letter requesting a scribe to do a merchant’s accounts.

After leaving Saint Hrodulf, Gerold’s path had taken him on a series of twists and turns. He’d served as the merchant’s accountant for seven years before being falsely accused of embezzlement. Warned of his danger by a sympathetic fellow servant he escaped wearing borrowed clothing, only to be mistaken for a peasant and caught up in the mass recruitment of King Athelrod’s army.

Being handed a spear and sent into battle did nothing to reduce Gerold’s natural timidness or his persistent sense of doom and it came as a complete surprise to him that he was one of the survivors of the last battle that Stefan fought before being demoted and sent to serve as the sheriff of Codswallow.

*The verses quoted are from the Vulgate version of the Bible; their English translations can be found on Vulgate.org

Author’s Note: While the books in The Druid Chronicles are available at all major book sellers, I encourage readers to patronize their local book store or, if unavailable there, to consider purchase through Bookshop.org

Letters From Llwddawanden

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