Flesh and Spirit Read Online Free PDF

always be left open in an infirmary to allow ill humors to escape the room, which caused a frigid draft whenever the outside door was opened. And third, endearing as I found Brother Badger, as I called the good infirmarian, a sick man should be exempt from excess praying. Feigning sleep was my only reprieve.
    I tugged the blankets over my bare shoulder, luxuriated in the returning warmth from the hearth, and speculated about what delicacy the good brothers would bring from the abbey kitchens to fill my invalid’s stomach. I had always been a quick healer, but the brothers didn’t need to know that. Life was good.
    “Comfortable, are you?”
    My eyelids slammed open to reveal the abbot’s attendant sitting on the bedside stool. I’d heard not a step or a breath.
    “Brother Gildas! How did you—?” Recalling my position as aspiring novice and the tedious duties that were like to involve the moment I was well enough, I checked my tongue and allowed my breath to quaver bravely. “Well, Brother, I’m as comfortable as a man can be with fever shakes and septic blood and holes in his flesh where there should be none. Bless you for asking.”
    His dark brows lifted, and he pulled a wedge of cheese from under my pillow. “We’ll feed you even when you’re healed, Valen. And you needn’t fear I’ll tell the abbot that your devotions are perhaps more directed to his kitchen and his bed than his church at present. Every man here has his own reasons for piety.”
    “The bounty of the good god is a fit occasion for thanksgiving,” I said a bit defensively, tucking the rest of my cache more securely under my head. “And surely he expects us to conserve that bounty for harder days.”
    Perhaps it was their shaven heads that made this man and the abbot appear so intensely focused, their eyes dominant in their hairless skulls as if they might read a man’s very soul. Not that my soul was all that interesting—a man of seven-and-twenty summers who scrabbled from one job to another, doing as he needed to wrest a bit of enjoyment from a world that seemed worse off by the day. But at least this fellow was near enough my own age that he might remember something of a man’s needs.
    “I do hear Iero’s call to the prayerful life quite clearly. But, in truth, Brother Gildas, I am yet a sinful man who enjoys the pleasures of bed and board overmuch. No matter how devoutly my soul yearns to reform, my body forever backslides.”
    “And yet our abbot, whose eye is infinitely wise, judges you worthy of initiation. I’ve never known him so precipitate in judgment. He’d have you vowed before Saint Marcillus’s Day, scarcely a fortnight hence.” His head tilted as if to examine me from various angles, his deep-set eyes unwavering. “Well, neither you nor I may see the right of it, but the god scorns none with a good heart. We must have faith that he will illumine yours as he sees fit. Brother Sebastian has been charged with your guidance and instruction, but Father Prior has dispatched him to Pontia to investigate the rumor of two books brought in by traders. So I was asked to bring you these.”
    He laid a worn book and a roll of parchment on the bed in front of me. “Your psalter, left by good Brother Horach, who passed to his next life not long ago. And a summary of Saint Ophir’s Rule, which you must commit to memory ere you take your novice vows. Brother Sebastian will discuss them with you upon his return.”
    “A dead man’s book?” I said, drawing back from it as far as the heavy bolster allowed.
    “He was not diseased, if that’s your worry.”
    “No, no…”
    I had long abjured the soldiers’ maxim that wearing a dead man’s boots or cooking in his pot would see your own life forfeit within a year. Books, as it happened, raised other problems.
    “It’s just that…a holy saint’s book…for my eyes that have looked on so much of the Adversary’s wickedness to rest upon such precious pages seems sacrilege.