“Because of this, you’ll stay with the Reaver?”
The old man drew himself erect. “I love my bees,” he said. “They need me.”
Conrad growled. “A pox on bees. We’ll die here, talking of your bees.”
“I talk too much of bees,” the old man said. “Follow me. Keep close upon my heels.”
He flitted like a ghost ahead of them. At times he jogged, at other times he ran, then again he’d go cautiously and slowly, feeling out his way.
They went down into a little valley, climbed a ridge, plunged down into another larger valley, left it to climb yet another ridge. Above them the stars wheeled slowly in the sky and the moon inclined to the west. The chill wind still blew out of the north, but there was no rain.
Duncan was tired. With no sleep, his body cried out against the pace old Cedric set. Occasionally he stumbled. Conrad said to him, “Get up on the horse,” but Duncan shook his head. “Daniel’s tired as well,” he said.
His mind detached itself from his feet. His feet kept on, moving him ahead, through the darkness, the pale moonlight, the great surge of forest, the loom of hills, the gash of valleys. His mind went otherwhere. It went back to the day this had all begun.
2
Duncan’s first warning that he had been selected for the mission came when he tramped down the winding, baronial staircase and went across the foyer, heading for the library, where Wells had said his father would be waiting for him with His Grace.
It was not unusual for his father to want to see him, Duncan told himself. He was accustomed to being summoned, but what business could have brought the archbishop to the castle? His Grace was an elderly man, portly from good eating and not enough to do. He seldom ventured from the abbey. It would take something of more than usual importance to bring him here on his elderly gray mule, which was slow, but soft of foot, making travel easier for a man who disliked activity.
Duncan came into the library with its floor-to-ceiling book-rolls, its stained-glass window, the stag’s head mounted above the flaming fireplace.
His father and the archbishop were sitting in chairs half facing the fire, and when he came into the room both of them rose to greet him, the archbishop puffing with the effort of raising himself from the chair.
“Duncan,” said his father, “we have a visitor you should remember.”
“Your Grace,” said Duncan, hurrying forward to receive the blessing. “It is good to see you once again. It has been months.”
He went down on a knee and once the blessing had been done, the archbishop reached down a symbolic hand to lift him to his feet.
“He should remember me,” the archbishop told Duncan’s father. “I had him in quite often to reason gently with him. It seems it was quite a job for the good fathers to pound some simple Latin and indifferent Greek and a number of other things into his reluctant skull.”
“But, Your Grace,” said Duncan, “it was all so dull. What does the parsing of a Latin verb…”
“Spoken like a gentleman,” said His Grace. “When they come to the abbey and face the Latin that is always their complaint. But you, despite some backsliding now and then, did better than most.”
“The lad’s all right,” growled Duncan’s father. “I, myself, have but little Latin. Your people at the abbey put too much weight on it.”
“That may be so,” the archbishop conceded, “but it’s the one thing we can do. We cannot teach the riding of a horse or the handling of a sword or the cozening of maidens.”
“Let’s forsake the banter and sit down,” said Duncan’s father. “We have matters to discuss.” He said to Duncan, “Pay close attention, son. This has to do with you.”
“Yes, sir,” said Duncan, sitting down.
The archbishop glanced at Duncan’s father. “Shall I tell him, Douglas?”
“Yes,” Duncan’s father said. “You know more of it than I do. And you can tell it better. You have the words for it.”
The archbishop leaned back in his chair, laced pudgy fingers across a pudgy paunch. “Two years or more ago,” he said to Duncan, “your father brought me a manuscript that he had found while sorting out the family papers.”
“It was a job,” said Duncan’s father, “that should have been done centuries ago. Papers and records all shuffled together, without rhyme or reason. Old letters, old records, old grants, old deeds, ancient instruments, all shoved into a variety of boxes. The job’s not entirely done as yet. I work on it occasionally. It’s difficult, at times, to make sense of what I find.”
“He brought me the manuscript,” said the archbishop, “because it was written in an unfamiliar language. A language he had never seen and that few others ever have.”
“It turned out to be Aramaic,” said Duncan’s father. “The tongue, I am told, in which Jesus spoke.”
Duncan looked from one to the other of them. What was going on? he asked himself. What was this all about? What did it have to do with him?
“You’re wondering,” said the archbishop, “what this may have to do with you.”
“Yes, I am,” said Duncan.
“We’ll get to it in time.”
“I’m afraid you will,” said Duncan.
“Our good fathers had a terrible time with the manuscript,” the archbishop said. “There are only two of them who have any acquaintance with the language. One of them can manage to spell it out, the other may have some real knowledge of it. But I suspect not as much as he might wish that I should think. The trouble is, of course, that we cannot decide if the manuscript is a true account. It could be a hoax.
“It purports to be a journal that gives an account of the ministry of Jesus. Not necessarily day to day. There are portions of it in which daily entries are made. Then a few days may elapse, but when the journal takes up again the entry of that date will cover all that has happened since the last entry had been made. It reads as if the diarist was someone who lived at the time and witnessed what he wrote–as if he might have been a man not necessarily in the company of Jesus, but who somehow tagged along. A sort of hanger-on, perhaps. There is not the barest hint of who he might have been. He does not tell us who he is and there are no clues to his identity.”
The archbishop ended speaking and stared owlishly at Duncan. “You realize, of course,” he said, “if the document is true, what this would mean?”
“Why, yes, of course,” Duncan answered. “It would give us a detailed, day-by-day account of the ministry of Our Lord.”
“It would do more than that, my son,” his father said. “It would give us the first eyewitness account of Him. It would provide the proof that there really was a man named Jesus.”
“But, I don’t–I can’t…”
“What your father says is true,” the archbishop said. “Aside from these few pages of manuscript we have, there is nothing that could be used to prove the historicity of Jesus. There do exist a few bits of writing that could be grasped at to prove there was such a man, but they are all suspect. Either outright hoaxes and forgeries or interpolations, perhaps performed by scriptorium monks who should have had better sense, who allowed devotion to run ahead of honesty. We of the faith do not need the proof; Holy Church does not doubt His existence for a moment, but our belief is based on faith, not on anything like proof. It is a thing we do not talk about. We are faced with so many infidels and pagans that it would be unwise to talk about it. We ourselves do not need such proof, if proof it is, that lies in the manuscript, but Mother Church could use it to convince those who do not share our faith.”
“It would end, as well,” Duncan’s father said, “some of the doubt and skepticism in the Church itself.”
“But it might be a hoax, you say.”
“It could be,” the archbishop said. “We’re inclined to think it’s not. But Father Jonathan, our man at the abbey, does not have the expertise to rule it out. What we need is a scholar who knows his Aramaic, who has spent years in the study of the language, the changes that have come about in it, and when they came about. It is a language that over the fifteen hundred years it was in use had many dialectical forms. A modern dialect of it is spoken still in some small corners of the eastern world, but the modern form differs greatly from that used in the time of Jesus, and even the form that Jesus used could have been considerably different than the dialect that was used a hundred miles away.”