Chapter 29: The Scribe

After delivering the sedative that would allow Oana to separate her soul from her body, Danka returned to the safe-house, changed into a workers’ outfit, and left Novo Sokukt Tok. She returned to the farmhouse, packed her bucket, and went to sleep. She’d have to wait for Ernockt to return from work before departing. He had promised to help her leave the area, but he had to stay at his desk in the city councilmen’s building until sunset. When Ernockt returned, he handed the stolen trial transcripts to Danka. She could look them over if she wanted, but after reading them she was to throw the papers into the stove. The transcripts were full of mistakes. When Danka pointed that out, her host responded:

“The scribe for the city guards is a total idiot. If you told him that you saw a flock of geese walking along a path, he’d put down it was ducks or chickens. So, after you’re done reading, you can burn this and it won’t trouble your conscience. I just figured you’d want to see it first.”

After a few minutes, Danka opened the door of the stove and pushed in the report. She turned to her host.

“Now what? You said you’d help me leave.”

“Yes, that’s what I said. But I can’t go with you. I have to go back to work tomorrow and we shouldn’t be seen together. I’ve brought a donkey so you don’t have to walk. I’ll give you some letters so you can pursue your Path in Life in Rika Chorna. We need another scribe to follow events there anyway, and we’re going to see if we can find a position for you with the Vice-Duke or the city council.”

“So you expect me to work as a scribe and collect information for you?”

“Yes.”

“That, really, wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“Maybe it wasn’t. But we did help you with your revenge against Oana, didn’t we? I risked my own position in this town so you could fulfill your final orders from Defender Dalibora. I hosted you for over a month and spent my own money buying everything you needed. I do expect you to repay me. I don’t want any silver, and I wouldn’t accept it, even if you offered. What I need from you, and expect from you, is your assistance.”

“And you expect me to ride to Rika Chorna, by myself, with letters addressed to strangers, and assume nothing will happen to me along the way.”

“Nothing will happen to you, because you’ll be wearing your nun outfit. A nun outfit is the same in the Vice-Duchy as a collar would be in the western valley. People here don’t bother nuns.”

“A True Believers’ nun? You expect me to travel disguised as a True Believers’ nun?”

“And what’s so surprising about that? You’ve walked all over the western valley wearing nothing but your collar. In the eastern valley, the only way a woman can safely move about alone is to be dressed as a nun. Same goal, different outfit.”

Danka reluctantly put on the nun’s dress. It was unbelievably hot and cumbersome. However, outside it would protect her against the cold more than almost anything else she could wear. Ernockt handed her a prayer book and protocol manual so she could learn to act like a real nun. Among other restrictions, whenever a nun was moving around and not carrying anything, she had to keep her hands together in prayer. Also, she was not allowed to look at the face of any man. She cringed at the ridiculous protocol, but realized the rules would help keep her real identity a secret, assuming she could remember to follow them.

Danka was not looking forward to the trip, because she had never traveled in November. She had spent plenty of time outside in various places over the winter, but never actually journeyed to a new destination. However, her traveling conditions certainly could be worse. She’d have a donkey to ride on and carry her belongings, and the heavy nun habit, consisting of an under-dress, public dress, and winter cape would protect her against the cold.

Danka left the following morning as soon as there was a hint of light in the pre-dawn sky. The temperature had gone below freezing the night before, making the ground solid and covering the landscape with a layer of frost. She traveled along the main road, which, combined with the fact she was riding, sped up her trip considerably. She had to remember not to look back at any men who were looking at her. Occasionally a pair or group of thuggish-looking men approached her, but as soon as they saw she was wearing a nun’s dress, they moved on. The rules for overnight stays were similar for a nun in the Vice-Duchy as they were for a penitent in the western valley. The nun approached a church of her choosing, knelt until a Clergy member approached her, and was given a meal and a place to sleep. The only disadvantage of the arrangement was having to sing and pray with any other women who happened to be in the church at that time. Danka was hard-pressed to learn enough True Believers’ hymns to avoid raising suspicions.

She spent a week traveling towards Novo Sumy Ris. When the town came into sight, she was tempted to go in and return to the church, but decided against taking that risk. She took a road bypassing the town and headed east towards her destination, the city of Rika Chorna.

Danka arrived just in time. As she entered Rika Chorna, snow began falling. It was the beginning of the winter’s first real snowstorm, and it would be particularly severe, dropping knee-deep snow onto the central part of the Vice Duchy. She knew from experience that towns closer to the foothills, such as Novo Sumy Ris and Novo Sokukt Tok, along with the hilly roads that connected them, would receive even deeper snow. So, that was it for the year as far as traveling or trading were concerned. The roads were blocked and only the most determined or fool-hardy would venture out from wherever they happened to be when the first snow came down.

Rika Chorna, given its name for the same reason the province carried that name, was the second-largest city in the Duchy with more than 40,000 people living there. It also was the seat of the region’s ruler, Vice-Duke Petroickt. Like Novo Sumy Ris, the regional capitol boasted a large church that was an exact replica of the cathedral in the original Sumy Ris. Danka recognized replicas of other old buildings from the former capitol, plus copies of less fortunate ancient buildings that had since been torn down by the Ottomans over the past two centuries. She shook her head, still wondering why, after 250 years, people were so obsessed with the old southern capitol. The Grand Duke had nearly suffered a disastrous defeat because of his desire for Sumy Ris. For the exact same reason, the Defenders did suffer a disastrous defeat. Out of three cities in the Vice-Duchy she had visited so far, Danka had seen replicas of the Sumy Ris cathedral in two of them. The replicas of the structures in the lost southern capitol surrounded the church, but the rest of the city had standard European architecture and reminded Danka of her hometown Rika Heckt-nemat. There was no city wall around Rika Chorna, nor around any other town in the Vice-Duchy.

Next to the church was the governor’s palace, which was by far the most significant building in the city. It was larger and more ostentatious than the Grand Duke’s castle. Unlike the castle, which was built first as a defensive structure, the palace did not have high walls and clearly was not meant to serve any military purpose. It was built solely as a seat of government and a luxury residence. Gardens surrounded it and there was a large courtyard containing a stone bathing area for summer swimming.

Danka examined her letters and found a name and house description for her contact. She led the donkey to a two-story residence that was behind the governor’s palace. A woman in a merchants’ guild dress answered the door and asked the “nun” where she had come from.

“From a farmhouse, right outside Novo Sokukt Tok”

“Very well, sister. You may enter.”

The residence was a safe-house belonging to Ernockt’s intelligence-gathering network. It had a basement with a secret passageway leading to another safe-house on the same block, so it was easy for anyone entering one residence to exit the other and evade surveillance. Inside the house there were two other “nuns” and a couple of older men dressed in traders’ outfits. Outside the residence, the “nuns” couldn’t talk to the men, but inside the protocol was more typical of the western valley. The men were in charge, but the women could speak freely to them and offer their opinions and advice. One of the men went out through the other house to deal with the donkey. He brought in Danka’s bucket and then took the animal to a stable outside town. Meanwhile, one of the women, who introduced herself as Sister Zanktia, told Danka to bathe and issued her a clean nun’s outfit. Danka drew a frustrated breath when she saw the dress. Apparently she would remain a “nun”. So, the disguise was not just for traveling.

While eating dinner, the two “merchants” and the two “nuns” questioned Danka about her general knowledge of the world and the Duchy. They were impressed by what she knew and all the places she had visited. They asked her to provide writing samples and practice taking dictation, then show them what she knew about mathematics and using the abacus. They told her to sing and pray to see what her voice sounded like. Like everyone else, her hosts were bewildered by the contrast between Danka’s lower-class accent and her expansive knowledge of academic and intellectual subjects. In spite of a decade of wandering and everything that had happened to her, Danka was never able to change her intonation and the way she pronounced her words. One of the men commented:

“It’s fortunate nuns don’t talk much. Listening to your voice is not at all pleasant.”

Danka came very close to tearing off her nun outfit and storming out. Dressing up as a True Believers’ nun was absolutely the last disguise she wanted to wear, and now, on top of everything else, that idiot had the nerve to insult her speech. However, she had long since learned to never let her temper get the best of her. It was heavily snowing outside, her hosts had taken back their donkey, she was in a strange city with no money, and she did need to return the favor Ernockt had done for her. So, she had to hold her tongue, at least for the moment.

Danka’s hosts gave her the chance to sleep and did not force her to go back out in the snowstorm. She slept alone in a bed with heavy curtains surrounding it and didn’t wake up until it was already light outside. The room was bitterly cold, so she was torn between wanting to stay under the blankets and being forced to get up and use the chamber pot, thus alerting the others she was awake. She was able to resist her bladder for a few minutes, giving herself time to think about her situation and how best to deal with it. She began to wonder if Ernockt really was the one who wanted her to go to Rika Chorna. Was it possible he sent her because he was acting under orders from the Prophets in the Great Temple? As for his group of conspirators, she didn’t know anything apart from what he had told her. They could be very powerful or not powerful at all. For the moment it would be better to assume the former and that she had no hope of leaving Rika Chorna without their permission.

As soon as Danka finished a late breakfast, Zanktia took her to the main church to show her around and introduce her as a new nun to the Clergy. She had to endure constant whispered reminders of how she should behave as a nun and the complicated prayer protocol she needed to use inside a True Believers’ place of worship. She would have to spend the rest of the month learning hymns and Latin phrases, when to cross herself (which seemed to be continuously), and the rituals surrounding faction’s weird obsession with the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The True Believers seemed to really be worked up about that execution.

The True Believers in the Vice-Duchy were even more removed from Danubian traditions than their counterparts in the western valley. One example was the difference between the universal acceptance of collars for Public Penance by both the Old Believers and the True Believers in the west, and the rejection of collared penance in the east. Another example was celibacy. In the western valley the True Believers “encouraged” their clergy members to be celibate, but the rule could not really be enforced. In the east, the priests had to be celibate. Another example was the priests’ focus on the deities themselves. In the west doctrine focused on the Lord-Creator and his enemy Beelzebub the Destroyer. In the east there was much more emphasis on praying to the Virgin Mother and the executed son.

Celibate nuns did not exist at all in the west. In the east there was the convent in Novo Sokukt Tok and multiple schools located in various cities. During her stay in Novo Sokukt Tok, Danka had learned that for any girl whose parents were not willing to pay for a private tutor, the only way to become literate was to seek education through the True Believers. The True Believer nuns ran several schools for girls in the Vice-Duchy, but they “strongly encouraged” any girl entering their schools to become a nun. That “encouragement” became a formal requirement if the girl wanted to learn anything more apart from basic literacy. In the western valley, most guilds included teaching their members’ daughters how to read and write as part of their services. The Old Believers ran schools for non-guild children and taught boys and girls alike, although the classes were separated by sex. So, in the western valley most women had some knowledge of reading and writing, while in the Vice-Duchy most women were completely illiterate.

Having to learn the protocol for a nun made Danka think about her upbringing in Rika Heckt-nemat. The parish in her hometown was controlled by the True Believers, or at least it was in 1750, the year she left. Thus, she already was vaguely familiar the main points of the True Believers’ doctrine. Her family didn’t pay much attention to the Lord-Creator or the executed son, but they frequently prayed to the Virgin Mother for favors such as making their chickens lay eggs or making their vegetable garden grow. The town’s finer residents dismissed the Siluckts and their neighbors as worthless illiterates, so they didn’t bother taking the time to make the laborers understand the more complicated doctrine coming out of the Christian Bible.

As Danka looked at all the Virgin Mother statues displayed around the church in Rika Chorna, her thoughts drifted to Lilith. In her mind the two deities, the Virgin Mother and Lilith, were both foreign goddesses. The goddess who actually had character and did things and fought back when the Lord-Creator mistreated her was a subject of her admiration. The goddess who did nothing apart from having a kid, without even bothering to have sex like a normal human being, was a subject of her derision. As for the Son of Man and execution that was the focus of the entire True Believers’ religion, Danka thought: so what? People are executed all the time. Why was being crucified in Jerusalem any worse than hanging on an impalement hook in the Kingdom of the Moon? Why was one man’s execution more important than another’s? Of course, she knew the answers to most of those questions, having read the Christian Bible. But those answers made no sense to someone who was not, and never would be, a Christian. She considered herself a Follower of the Ancients, and if she was the last Follower in the entire Realm of the Living, then so be it. Zanktia told her they understood her distaste for the True Believer’s doctrines and practices. Her hosts reminded her that their mission was to undermine the True Believers by collecting information and providing it to the Grand Duke and the Prophets in Danubikt Moskt.

Danka responded that she’d do whatever she could to undermine the True Believers, because her hatred of their doctrine and beliefs was visceral.

Danka moved out of the safe-house at the beginning of December. Her handlers felt she was ready to begin the next phase of training for her clandestine life by living among the city’s real nuns. Zanktia took her to a house adjacent to the church to live with 17 other women, all nuns who had gone through the True Believers’ school system and ordained at the convent in Novo Sokukt Tok. Danka stood out among her companions because she was an outsider and much more attractive than any of the others. She was 23, but she looked considerably younger because she had been administering herself doses of Babackt Yaga’s mushroom tea over the past seven years. The others looked her over with suspicion and jealousy. On the first night at her new home, Danka had to endure a sermon by the leading nun talking about the danger of physical beauty and how it led to carnal sin.

The nuns in Rika Chorna divided themselves into two groups: scribes and instructors. The younger women spent their days transcribing endless hymn sheets and copying or preparing church correspondence such as letters and directives. The clergy from the main church kept meticulous records of all happenings, which the Bishop wanted transcribed in clear, attractive handwriting on fine parchment. Danka frequently transformed a hastily-written note into a finely-written letter with improved vocabulary, converting it into a document that could be sent off and make the author look good to his reader. Meanwhile, the older and more trusted members of the group spent their days in a less grueling manner, giving literacy classes to local girls in a house adjacent to the one where they lived.

Danka took notes on anything she felt was important and compiled them into a sheet of parchment written with the smallest handwriting possible to conserve space and paper. She kept the reports hidden in a special pocket inside the lining of her dress. She read and memorized as much as she could of her companions’ writings, making notes and passing them to her contact. She spent her sparse spare time reading every book in the house, although unfortunately most of the material was about theology and True Believers’ doctrine. She received plenty of insight about the workings of the diocese and its relationship with the Roman Church, but not much else. Every few days Zanktia passed by with a delivery of washed linens and Danka slipped her the notes she had collected over the past few days. Usually there was a small paper handed to her in return, containing comments on what information was useful and what information was not, along with requests for additional notes on specific topics or persons.

Danka’s handlers seemed especially interested in learning about movements within the clergy, knowing who was traveling to different locations and why. During the winter there was not much movement, but Zanktia wanted Danka to practice providing information on any traveling to prepare her to make comprehensive reports when the True Believers moved about in the summer. Danka sighed. Next summer. She couldn’t imagine spending an entire summer in her horrible outfit sitting at a desk in a room full of insufferable, hostile, ugly, companions. She’d have to figure out how to extricate herself.

Danka spent four months transcribing documents. Throughout the entire winter she never left the residence, except to go to the church for daily prayers and hymn practice. Danka’s fellow scribes did not talk much to each other and talked even less to her. They sang and prayed as a group, but spent their meals and their duties in silence. She slept in a room with five other women, but never conversed with them.

The room was cold and usually Danka was so tired that she fell asleep immediately. However, about once a week she had insomnia and would spend hours lying awake, thinking about Ilmatarkt. She didn’t have much time to think about him or truly grieve over his death during the past year, but lying alone in that cold bed, tormented by loneliness and sexual frustration, she realized how much she missed her late husband. She could have enjoyed a happy life with him, had the Destroyer not taken him away. He satisfied her sexually, treated her with respect, and challenged her intellect. Also, in his own manner, detached and intellectual as it was, he did love her. She could not share the pain of being a widow with anyone, so she had to grieve for him in silence, by staring into the darkness and allowing tears to run down her cheeks.

When the weather started to warm up towards the end of March, Danka wrote note to Zanktia informing her handlers that they would have to find her another assignment. There was no way she would tolerate staying with the nuns over the summer. She expected the answer to be no; that she’d have to stay in the house indefinitely. However, on the final day of March, an official from the Vice-Duke’s palace showed up with Sister Zanktia. He ordered the scribes from the residence to line up and for each to hold a sample of her writing in front of her. Danka’s handwriting was not the best from the group, but her face caught the official’s attention. He looked her over and asked her some questions about her background. She responded with a fictional biography given to her by her handlers, that she was daughter of a devout guildsman from Novo Sokukt Tok.

The official violated protocol by pulling off her hat to have a better look at her head and braided hair. The other nuns quietly gasped and flinched at the act of disrespect.

“It’s a pity you’d waste your beauty like this.”

Danka pretended to be extremely nervous, but inwardly she was concealing hope that her intolerable life was about to change. The fact that Zanktia was with the official raised her anticipation of a transfer or change of assignment. The official quietly spoke to the leader of the residence. She cast a suspicious look at her young subordinate, but nodded and put her hands together in prayer. The official motioned Danka to follow him.

Danka left the residence without going back inside or even saying goodbye to anyone. She kept no belongings in her room and the few items she did have with her, such a small supply of blue powder, the ingredients for making birth-control paste, her comb, and the thread for cleaning her teeth were safely stored in special pockets she had sewn into the lining of her dress. She had not seen her bucket since November: she could only hope it was still at the safe-house.

The official and the two “nuns” walked the short distance between the scribes’ residence and the entrance to the Vice-Duke’s palace. Parts of the palace exterior had been within Danka’s range of view throughout the entire winter, but she never had set foot inside. The day was grim, rainy, and overcast, but Danka could feel a hint, just a hint, of spring in the air.

Danka’s escorts led her through the outer door of the palace into the most luxurious room she had ever seen. The decor was Baroque and modeled after a palace in France. Expensive-looking vases imported from China sat on equally-fancy tables. The corridors were filled with paintings and statues, including multiple busts of the Vice-Duke.

Beyond the main entrance and reception area a large set of glass doors opened up into a finely-trimmed garden. The grounds were meticulously maintained, much more so than in the Grand Duke’s castle. Actually, the Grand Duke’s residence, as luxurious as it was to a person with Danka’s upbringing, was Spartan compared to the abode of the Vice-Duke. As she looked around at all the statues and imported decor, she wondered how much money the Vice-Duke was spending on his residence. After seeing the interior of the palace, it wasn’t hard to understand why taxes were such a problem for the Vice-Duchy’s farmers and guildsmen.

The main section of the palace boasted a large round ballroom covered by a dome painted with angels flying around in puffy clouds. The area under the dome was surrounded by marble pillars and stain-glass windows. Portraits of the Vice-Duke and his family members covered the walls and statues stood in front of each pillar. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Danka was no connoisseur concerning decor, but compared with the somewhat simpler furnishings of the Grand Duke, she felt the palace in Rika Chorna was decorated in poor taste.

The exaggerated decor did not draw Danka’s attention nearly as much as how the palace women were dressed. To a Danubian, especially a lower-class woman like Danka, the palace clothes were truly shocking and scandalous. The wives of the Vice-Duke and his advisors boasted impossibly heavy and complicated silk dresses imported from France. Like all Danubian women, the palace residents wore their hair in braids, but those braids were covered by over-sized wigs. Seven years before, Danka had seen some fashionable European clothing when she traveled north of the Danubian border with the Followers, but to see such exaggerated get-ups in the Duchy itself was a shock. Danka later found out the elite women did not dare go out on the street in their foreign outfits, but the palace had unique protocol and any respectable woman had to wear French clothes while inside to distinguish herself from the “uncouth” commoners outside.

The group approached the area where the Vice-Duke had his conference rooms and living quarters. They entered a luxurious reception area that was smaller than the outer reception area, but still large and ostentatious. The area was comfortably warm, heated by the cave-charcoal stoves Danka had introduced to the Grand Duke a few years before. There were several guards in the room, along with a group of noblewomen and a couple of advisors holding rolled-up documents. Danka had never seen a picture of Vice-Duchy’s ruler and thus not sure what he looked like. However, in a palace full over over-dressed people he stood out, wearing an outlandish silk outfit covered with lace and jewels, topped with a cape made of imported white fur. His head was properly shaved, but Danka had no way of knowing that because the ruler wore an enormous white wig. On top of the wig he wore a crown so full of jewels that one could barely see the gold or silk underneath. With him were three effeminate-looking teenaged boys wearing equally effeminate clothing. One of the boys was carrying a falcon with its head covered by a tiny hood. Danka correctly assumed the teenagers were the Vice-Duke’s sons.

As she approached the Vice-Duke and the boys (if that’s what one chose to call them), she tried to make sense of the bizarre spectacle in front of her. It was very fortunate that she already had seen pictures of late eighteenth-century western European royalty, so she understood the Vice-Duke and the members of his entourage were attempting to model themselves after elite fashion in places like Paris. Obviously the eastern nobility viewed traditional Danubian culture as primitive and uncouth. Perhaps they had to live in that inferior culture, but that didn’t mean they had to sink to the simplistic and uncivilized behavior of their subjects. The entire set-up would have been more pathetic than offensive, had it not been for the crushing taxes the farmers and guildsmen had to pay to maintain it.

The official saluted the Vice Duke and his sons while the two “nuns” knelt and clasped their hands together in prayer. The boys were leering at Danka. As soon as the official explained that a new scribe had been brought from the local nuns’ house, the ruler told the two women to stand up. He examined younger nun.

“Her face is very pretty. Let me see the rest of her.”

The official turned to Zanktia: “Strip her. Remove that habit and whatever she’s wearing underneath.”

Danka’s companion froze, unsure that she had heard the command correctly. Her eyes went wide and she glanced around the room, noting there were a dozen other people present. When she opened her mouth to object, the official slapped her hard across the face. The blow was so hard and so unexpected she fell to the ground. The official kicked her to get up.

“What’s wrong with you, nun? Are you stupid or just rebellious? I told you to strip that girl! Now do it!”

Danka could tell Zanktia was as shocked as she was, that she had not expected to have to strip her. Reluctantly, with trembling hands, the other woman unfastened the hooks holding Danka’s collar in place and lifted her outer dress over her shoulders and head. She untied the stays of her inner dress and let it fall to the floor. Danka was terrified, but not in the way a normal nun would have been. She was not bothered being naked in front of others, but obviously in the Vice-Duchy being publicly stripped, especially for a nun, was meant to be a major humiliation. Had she been in the western valley she simply would have stood straight, with her eyes facing forward and her hands at her sides. However, in Rika Chorna she knew that she needed to behave like a real True Believers nun would act under the circumstances. She cowered and tried to cover herself, and even forced tears to come to her eyes. The official yelled at her and slapped her several times before she “managed” to stand straight and uncover herself. Keeping up the fa�ade of unbearable shame, she closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and pressed her legs together. She felt a hand fondling her breasts and heard the Vice-Duke’s voice.

“Very nice. Very nice indeed. Yes, she’ll do. She’s very young and her bosom is firm. You did well, Sister, to bring her to me.”