The Vow of Silence

The scriptorium of the Monastery of the Crags hung over a cliff that dropped three hundred varas sheer to the gorges of the Arlanza, and in winter the wind came in through the arrow slits and set the lamp flames trembling as if someone were blowing up from the abyss. Twelve monks copied psalters from matins to vespers without saying a word. One of them could not say it.

Rodrigo de Molina dipped his pen and closed the last stroke of a capital letter. He wore the brown habit of the lay penitents and, tied around his neck, a black leather ribbon: the mark the Royal Chancery put on convicts whose tongues it had burned for contempt. Two years earlier he had been the kingdom's chief cartographer. His crime was refusing to erase from the crown's map three hundred leagues of common pasture, yew woods and mills that belonged by charter to the farmers of Valdelobos; Chancellor Don Beltrán de Vivar wanted them painted as wasteland so he could hand them to the bankers of Flanders. Rodrigo preferred the cautery to the signature.

The monks believed his silence was a vow of penance. Only the prior knew the truth, and he charged for it: every year a purse of ducats arrived from Burgos to keep him locked behind the cloister, copying saints' lives with the same hand that had measured the kingdom.

Rodrigo had made himself a slate from a roof tile and wore it hanging from his belt, with a stub of chalk. He used it little. In two years he had learned that most of what people say doesn't need saying.

That morning the prior had stopped behind his desk, as he sometimes did, to look at the psalter over his shoulder. He was a broad man with a face of stone and fingers loaded with rings that hadn't come from any vow of poverty. He had run his forefinger down the margin of the page, where Rodrigo, between two verses, had drawn without thinking a river with all its tributaries, the size of a fingernail. The Ebro, with the Segre and the Cinca and even the stream that came down from Moncayo.

The prior took the scraper from his sleeve and erased it, slowly, until the parchment was white. He said nothing. There was no need: they both knew that next time it wouldn't be a scraper.

At the hour of terce the archive door opened and the prior's niece came in with a basket of linen paper, sticks of sealing wax and horns of freshly beaten ink. Her name was Leonor de Ayala; she was nineteen and had a way of looking at codices as if they might escape her. Her father had been a pilot on the Cantabrian run until the sea kept him; she had ended up at the monastery with a trunk of sea charts and permission to catalogue the Greek and Arabic manuscripts no friar could read.

She stopped at Rodrigo's desk to leave him a new inkwell. Her fingers brushed the wood. With a quick gesture, hidden under the wide sleeve of her habit, she dropped into the lap of his robe a vellum cylinder tied with green cord.

Rodrigo raised his eyes. She didn't lower hers. Without moving her lips, she made with her left hand a sign he had seen the pilots of Laredo make: open channel between reefs.

He waited until the brother warden began his round along the north wing. He untied the cord under the table and unrolled the vellum on his knees.

It was an old portolan, calfskin toasted by the centuries, drawn in sepia with notes in old Boreal. It described the range of the Silent Lands and, crossing it from south to north, a fine line that no court atlas showed: a pass over the glacier of the Three Sisters that joined the southern valleys to Oakhaven without touching a single one of the viceroy's customs posts. In the corner, half worn away, the seal of a queen with seven eyes.

At the foot of the map, in fresh ink and a small, elegant hand, Leonor had written three lines.

I know who you were at court, Rodrigo de Molina. Tomorrow an escort of the tercios arrives with a signed order to take you to Burgos and hang you without trial. Tonight, at compline, the orchard postern will be open. Bring your compasses if you want to see a free sky.

Rodrigo rolled up the vellum slowly. Across the room, by the brazier, the prior was watching him.

The prior didn't move. He warmed his hands at the brazier without taking his eyes off him, and when the warden passed by he said something to him in a low voice. Rodrigo didn't hear it. It was enough to see the warden turn to look at him and then lock the archive, as he did every evening, but with two turns of the key instead of one.