6 A Time of Learning

The monks had special magic they didn't call magic – Gilbert didn't understand why magic was a word they used only for bad things, and good things were either miracles or arts and sciences, but maybe he was just wrong about that the way he was wrong about so much else. They could make special marks that made words, and any monk who understood the marks could find the words even years later when the one who made the marks had been in the dead people place for so long he was almost forgotten.

They even had a whole building just for the trapped words, a building they called a library. Another building beside that was called a scriptorium and it had big windows and wide desks and monks who understood reading and writing would spend all their time there making new books or copying old, faded ones into new ones.

When Gilbert wasn't with Gisilbert-vati or in the infirmary where all the sick and hurt monks went so they could be looked after, he would slip quietly into the library or the scriptorium and watch the monks working and try to work out how the marks they made turned into writing, or he would look at the books and try to puzzle how the marks made something peoples could understand.

Writing had special shapes: it seemed to be a mix of loops and lines and squiggles arranged just so. Some patterns got used a lot, other ones were hardly used at all. The one that meant God, that had a big open loop with a dangly squiggle, then a small loop and two fancy lines with bars. All those shapes got used in other words, so they had to mean something on their own.

It made his head hurt, trying to work out what each shape meant and why sometimes a shape would be big and sometimes little, and sometimes the same shapes would make different words.

The way the monk who was called Brother Archivist would berate any monk who did anything wrong in the scriptorium especially if they damaged the precious stuff that went into the books – they called it parchment – told Gilbert that writing material was expensive and hard to get. Parchment came from animal skins, but took a lot of preparing – the room where the dehairing vats were kept smelled really bad, and monks who got splashed by the liquid in the vats usually needed the infirmary.

The stuff they wrote with – ink – needed ash and other things Gilbert didn't recognize to make a dark liquid that would leave marks on parchment, and the monks in the scriptorium spent as much time cutting feathers for their pens or quills as they did using them. If the small, sharp knives they used slipped, that could ruin a monk's ability to control the pen well enough to write.

He wasn't surprised to learn that the young monks – novices – didn't get to use the precious parchment. They learned with blocks of wood coated with wax, and scraped them so they could use the blocks again and again. If it got too messy, they could heat it up and smooth everything over again, or do that and add more wax.

Even that was precious: the wax had to be more pure than they used in candles so the marks the novices made with their styluses – Gilbert wasn't sure why a pen for a wax block had a different name than one for parchment, but the monks did like to give everything a special name that belonged to just that one thing – showed up. Older novices learned how to cut their own pens and practiced on bits of old, worn-out parchment that had been scraped off so many times it hardly held ink anymore. They didn't get to touch the good parchment until they could make the writing shapes well enough to satisfy Brother Archivist, and then they were set to work copying old, faded books so the words in them wouldn't be lost.

When he could, he sat on the floor, and used his finger to draw the shapes in the dust, trying to find the secret to making words so he could learn from the knowing trapped in all those books in the library. There could be something there that would tell him why his people thought he was a demon. Or how to convince them he wasn't.

He listened to the rise and fall of voices as he tried to get the shapes just right and not all wiggly, but he still nearly jumped right out of his skin when someone said behind him, "So you are our phantom scholar!"

Gilbert leaped to his feet and spun around, raising his hands. He didn't want to hurt the monks, they were good people.

The round-faced monk who looked down at him didn't seem angry. He had a bit of a smile and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled in a way that made him look somehow… nice.

"You would be Gisilbert Ax-Smith's boy, yes? Gilbert?" the monk asked.

Gilbert nodded. "Yes, Brother." All the monks were "Brother" because they were a made-family, like him and Gisilbert-vati.

"I am Brother Ludovicus, Brother Archivist's assistant," the monk said. He sounded happy. "We have been wondering who was studying writing in the dust when all the students are in their places."

Gilbert's heart started to slow down. The monk – Brother Ludovicus – wasn't mad at him. The monks all knew about him now, even if all they knew was that he was a Land-Soul who didn't know who his people were – which wasn't quite right but it was close enough – and he was Gisilbert-vati's son and that Gisilbert-vati had rescued Brothers so he was a friend of the monks.

He wasn't really learning though. He was just trying to copy the patterns and hoping he could figure it out.

He didn't mean to say that, but Brother Ludovicus laughed. "Little Brother, you do better than some novices who have been studying this past year and more – but that is because you want to learn, yes?"

Gilbert could feel the hot flush that was embarrassment on his face. He had to swallow before he could say, "Yes, Brother Ludovicus. I want to learn how to read and write and I can't do it on my own."

"Ah, so you are also the library ghost?"

Gilbert stared at him. "Not ghost!" He backed away, or tried to. The thick stone wall stopped him before he could go more than two steps.

Brother Ludovicus raised both hands, as though he was soothing a nervous animal. "Be calm, little Brother. I did not mean you are a real ghost."

Then why had he said it? It didn't make any sense to Gilbert.

The monks must have talked to each other about how Gilbert didn't know words very well and got confused about them because Brother Ludovicus squatted down to bring his face closer to Gilbert's height. "Some of my Brothers thought that there was someone in the library when they should have been there alone. Some of them believed a ghost had come to haunt us."

So there were monks who had mistaken Gilbert for a ghost and it was some kind of game with words to call him that? There were times when he didn't think he'd ever learn how to be a real people.

"Would you like me to ask your father if you can join lessons while you are here?" Brother Ludovicus asked, and Gilbert stopped worrying about strange games with words.

"Yes, please, Brother." He didn't think it was proper to hug the monk, but he wanted to. He didn't have any other way to show him just how happy he was to have a chance to learn.