The Seer and the Scribe Read Online Free PDF Page B

.” Sophie showed him the half-eaten slice of bread. “It still tastes the same, and besides, I’m getting full anyways. Let’s head back.” She waited until they were outside to take his hand again.
    Volmar took a deep breath, still simmering with anger. Were all girls this confusing? With Thomas, Sophie had stood her own ground and did not hesitate to put him in his place, and yet with the older stranger, she had kept her silence, choosing instead to ignore his insult.Maybe, he thought, she was right in turning the other cheek, realizing the stranger was a lost cause.
    He led her back across the courtyard and upstairs to the guest quarters on the east side of the Infirmary, where the women and children slept. Only then did he let go of her slender hand, a small part of him fearing for her future.
    Volmar clasped his hands loosely behind his back and forced himself to look into her eyes. Sophie stood before him, rigid and pale. He recognized instantly that she already knew of the enormity of the burden resting on her small shoulders. Her eyes were those of an old woman in a young girl’s face.

CHAPTER 5: RESTLESS SPIRIT
    Clearing Outside of Disibodenberg Monastery
    Harvest Festival, Late Afternoon
    Exhausted, Volmar felt the branch sigh beneath him as he settled his back firmly against the crook of the old yew’s trunk. Over the jovial sounds of the minstrels playing at the harvest festival, he heard the distant rumblings of an approaching storm. It made the air around him taut with expectation. Vespers would be soon, but for the moment he was grateful to be in his own world, away from the reach of the studied rituals, insistent conformity, and peculiar community of the cloistered life.
    From his perch, Volmar fixed his gaze on the cobbled road, thinking back to Sophie’s story and her journey from Mainz. This road led to a world he only knew from the books he read and the colorful tales of strangers. Was he a mere “scribbler,” as the arrogant soldier had indicated, destined to live his life on the outskirts of the real world? How could he effect real change, if he did not know how most people suffered and lived? Although he had completed his probationary period last year, and had made his profession of faith and taken the cowl 21 in spring, for some reason, he still struggled with his faith and his calling to be a scribe. If only God would give him a sign, a message that he was following his true destiny.
    Inside his head, the voices of his tutors echoed, rebuking his faithless questioning and his worldly need to intellectualize and seek proof of the spiritual realm. “How can you, a mere child, question the Word of Christ? Such faithless doubting would have me worried over my own salvation; my unclean, broken soul. Faith pleases God. God always responds to faith.”
    Volmar fumbled for a rag from his leather pouch and started rubbing furiously at his blackened fingertips. These ink stains would always reveal his livelihood as a scribe, as the crude soldier had deduced. Even if he ran away and left the familiar fortress of the monastery of Disibodenberg to explore the unknown world beyond, these stains would always mark him like Cain. Every stranger he would encounter would know he was a faithless, condemned man who had failed the church, and ultimately, God.
    â€œSurely, Lord,” Volmar closed his eyes and prayed, a little faintly, “by acknowledging my own weakness, I will find the faith I so ardently seek.” For how could he catch a glimpse of the one true God if he was blind to his own misgivings and sins? A boom of distant thunder answered, followed by a stark flash of lightning. The storm was fast approaching, a storm that would surely call off the evening’s events at the harvest festival.
    The sky darkened. Volmar imagined in its looming, shifting shadows the candle-lit Scriptorium 22 . The clouds transformed into the humps of the backs of his fellow