The Humming of Numbers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Copyright Page

  For Tom, who helped me to hear it again

  I

  Lana Nicarbith hummed of the number eleven. The sound caught Aidan’s attention as he swept the path near the abbey’s front gate. He stared, open-mouthed, while Lord Donagh dragged the girl through the entry, past Aidan’s poised broom, and inside. Plenty of people filled Aidan’s ears with the chiming of four or seven or nine, and many of his brothers in the order purred softly of six. Never in his seventeen years, though, had Aidan O’Kirin met anyone endowed with the energy of a number higher than ten. He’d seen Lana before, but only from a distance—too far to hear the eleven that wafted from her now like fragrance from a flower.

  Aidan followed. He noted the hand clamped on her arm and wondered why the ruler of eight clans had hauled his bastard daughter to the monks. His own footsteps quickened, along with his pulse. He risked a chiding if the abbot saw him being nosy, but the birch broom in his work-calloused hands gave him a meager excuse. He trailed a few paces behind Donagh and the slender ginger-haired girl. They angled through the yard toward the abbot’s quarters, which sat near the gate on the sunny side of the stone chapel.

  Clearly not happy to be there, the eleven girl stamped her bare feet and struggled and screeched.

  “Stop squawking,” Donagh ordered, yanking her forward. Fury and embarrassment glowed from his face. “This is a holy place.”

  “Not to me,” she retorted, her head whipping around. Her eyes struck Aidan. Impaled by their blue fire, he did not drop his regard as would have been proper. She went stiff. Her protests fell silent. The humming eleven, if anything, grew louder.

  Aidan had realized long ago that he alone heard the numbers humming from people and things. To him, the mathematical tones were as natural as colors or smells, just one more detail to notice and rather more pleasant than a whiff of dung or sour breath. His attempts to discuss it as a small boy, however, had failed. Nobody understood when he tried to explain. He’d been humored, at best, and more often had met with bewildered irritation. While still young, he’d grasped the truth: Others heard birdsong, windsong, human speech. But nobody else heard the more subtle buzzing that he did. The music of numbers otherwise fell on deaf ears.

  So the girl staring back at him now, the one whose skin whispered eleven, could not have been startled for the same reason he had been. She should have been embarrassed, caught acting so wildly, yet her face spoke plainly of some disappointment. It seemed to be aimed straight at Aidan. Wondering why, he raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry. She scowled. After a long, frowning look, with her neck craned to keep him in view, she stopped resisting completely and turned to follow sullenly behind her captor. The flash of silent communion between her and Aidan had somehow proved more persuasive than the lord’s command or rough handling.

  They approached the abbot’s thatched house. Donagh rapped on the door, which opened to admit them. Nobody bothered to close it behind them. Aidan halted to perform some halfhearted sweeping in case the abbot reemerged with the visitors in tow. Fixing his brown eyes on the already-smooth ground, he let a swath of his dark hair partly hide his narrow face.

  When the doorway remained empty, the young monk-in-training slipped nearer. His feet, still bare in the autumn sunshine, padded soundlessly on the earth. They faltered near a stone bench tucked under the abbot’s thatched eaves. Aidan didn’t dare venture closer. He was supposed to be sweeping the path near the gate and meditating on cleanliness and purity before the noon prayers. It would be impossible to even pretend obedience if he went any farther. Poking his broom at a dead leaf under the bench, he tried to quiet his breath, the better to eavesdrop.

  “She was alongside the pilgrims’ route,” Lord Donagh was saying. “Selling these. Or trying to.” Aidan’s ears caught the clatter of wood tumbling across the table.

  “Pilgrims are beset by evil at every turn,” sighed Abbot Bartley. The abbey was an attraction along the popular Saint Nevin’s Way, and brigands and thieves knew it well. Many a pilgrim arrived empty-handed or beaten, giving the monks ample chance to practice hospitality and compassion.

  The girl in the abbot’s dim chamber apparently had no interest in compassion. “If they’re foolish enough to believe that their sins can be wiped away just by—”

  Her voice was interrupted by what sounded like a slap. Aidan had never met Donagh directly, but he’d grown up in the shadow of the lord’s fist. It fell unevenly across Donagh’s domain. Wealthy enough to sneer at the fines imposed for his own misdeeds, the lord invoked the law when it pleased him and scoffed when it did not. Aidan had long ago pegged the man as an eight, although less kind than most and even more unpredictable.

  “Shut your mouth, or I’ll see that shame shuts it for you,” Lord Donagh growled to the girl. “Since you can’t pay the restitution accorded your crime, I’m tempted to chain you in the stocks and let pilgrims loose their spittle on you. Your mother’s pleading is the only reason you’re not there already.”

  Aidan’s slender artisan’s fingers tightened on his broom handle. He’d seen dishonored men in the stocks, with their ankles locked in place, unable to dodge any foul thing pitched their way. And spittle was hardly the worst thing that flew. The thought of the girl’s pretty face splattered with rotten fruit or manure made him cringe.

  The threat frightened her as well, evidently.

  “Forgive me, Rí,” she murmured, using the traditional title that acknowledged his rank. She knew better than to call him Father, Aidan noted, even though that’s who he was. Unlike some noblemen, who boasted the count of their illegitimate children, Donagh preferred to ignore them. Aidan reflected how difficult it must have been for her to grow up amid so much pretense and gossip.

  “But why have you brought her to me, lordship, if I may ask?” The abbot sounded dismayed. Some cousin of the lord, the two-ish fellow did not much like surprises.

  His ears straining, Aidan risked moving closer.

  “Put her to work in the kitchen or fields” came the reply. “She needs a dose of humility. Perhaps hard work and the Holy Spirit may cleanse her of sinful ways.”

  “But, Lord Donagh, surely a convent would be—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s not worth the cost of entry at Saint Brigid’s, not to mention the trip. Besides, we’ve had word of Norsemen on the move.”

  “Nearby, my lord?” Bartley squeaked. A Viking raid might bring fleeing farmers into the monastery’s already bustling enclosure. The defensive ramparts could help repel raiders while the holy bones of the saint offered even more potent protection.

  “Not that I’ve heard. But travel is out of the question. You have a wife here yourself, do you not? As does Father Niall.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “She can be confined here, then. She’s not handsome enough to threaten any chastity vows.”

  The abbey rules forbade argument, and besides, Aidan could hardly speak up from outside, but contrary thoughts crossed his mind. The lord must have meant mostly to brush off objections.

  “If she causes you trouble,” Donagh continued, “more extreme measures will b
e necessary.”

  “No, please,” came the girl’s voice, even softer than before. “Please don’t chain me or send me to nuns far away.”

  “But, your lordship—”

  “As a favor to me, Bartley. I will express my gratitude to you and Saint Nevin on Sunday. With silver.”

  “As you wish, then,” the abbot sighed. Donagh’s vassals griped about his rents and his temper, but few who tilled his lands or depended on his favor would dare speak against him. The abbot proved no exception. “We will try.”

  Aidan busied himself with his broom as Lord Donagh took his farewell. The lord emerged abruptly over the threshold with a scowl. Accustomed to the presence of both servants and monks, he did not give the thin, sharpfaced novice so much as a glance.

  The stamping footsteps retreated toward the gate.

  “Peddling false relics is a serious sin,” Abbot Bartley said after a moment of silence.

  “How do you know they’re false?” the girl asked. Spirit had returned to her voice.

  “Even we don’t have fragments of the True Cross,” he scoffed.

  “Exactly,” she said. “So you don’t know what it looks like, do you? Touch it. ’Tis not oak or elm or alder, certainly. So this could be the wood of the Cross, couldn’t it?”

  Aidan grinned despite the sober accusation against the girl.

  “Broken rake handle, more likely,” the abbot said. “How would a lowly girl like you possess a relic like that?”

  “A tree sprite told me where to dig near the base of its tree,” she replied.

  Aidan’s eyebrows shot up. He’d heard a few people claim to commune with the Otherworld, but her whirring eleven gave her words weight. They also troubled his heart.

  Numbers had hummed to Aidan his entire life. By his twelfth year, however, when his father had first suggested the monastery, Aidan had stopped mentioning them to others. After a few winters of study, the thoughtful young loner had decided his awareness of numbers must be the whisper of God, a gift delivered to him and not anyone else. He had embraced the idea of joining the monks, and not only because his three older brothers would claim all of his father’s cattle and pigs. Saints often heard voices, after all. Hearing the humming of numbers was not so different. Or so Aidan hoped.

  Not long after formally becoming a novice last fall, he had cautiously brought up the subject with his mentor. Brother Eamon’s reaction had dispelled Aidan’s sense of privilege, planting a fear in its place: A whisper that nobody else heard might come not from God but from demons.

  That same dread rose again now at the new arrival’s claim.

  “Enough lies, young charlatan,” Bartley told the girl in his chamber. The abbot obviously held no belief in tree sprites and no fear of demons. “You would have done better to confess your sin. But I trust that a day of fasting will strengthen your soul.”

  “He said kitchen work,” she protested, as more footsteps sounded. Feet scuffled as if their owner were dragged.

  “There will be grain enough to grind on the morrow. Until then, my lamb, you can reflect.”

  “Wait! My wood-”

  “You won’t need it.”

  They were about to emerge. Aidan realized that he should have moved away sooner. Now he would almost surely be spotted and censured.

  II

  Frozen in indecision, Aidan resisted the urge to flee. He could duck ’round the nearest corner, but that would not be far enough to keep him out of sight for more than a few seconds, and the pounding of running feet in a monastery would betray him even more quickly than a glimpse of his form. The wisest course was to drop to his knees and beg forgiveness even as the abbot emerged and spied him there.

  Instead Aidan dove under the wide stone bench. His shoulders and spine cracked painfully against the stone. Folding tight, he drew up his lanky legs, dragged the broom in behind him, and was obscured by the bench’s shadow as well as its thick stone feet. The tight space reminded him sharply that such antics were better left to boys half his age. Too late; the abbot’s leather slippers stepped over the sill. Aidan held his breath.

  Two pairs of feet hurried by without hesitation. As they vanished around a corner, gratitude washed over Aidan. Then the gravity of what he’d just done squeezed his chest. He wasn’t afraid of punishment so much as a blot on his reputation. Aidan wanted badly to serve in the scriptorium, and he’d only recently been allowed to scrape calfskin to help make the vellum pages. It was hard work, and his hands were always sore, but even that taste of the scribes’ duties thrilled him. The inks he’d glimpsed didn’t just hum but actually shouted at him, numbers in pure liquid form. He couldn’t wait to feel a goose quill balanced in his own fingers, to draw it across a page leaving a graceful mark. No other worship could compare to the honor of copying beauty and wisdom in red and green ink, lapis lazuli, and fine dabs of gold.

  A novice who shirked his duties to hide under benches, however, would never touch quills or inks, let alone the great books. He lay in the dirt and shadows, his heart pumping, until well after the footsteps had faded. He felt trapped by the notion that someone would see him crawling out from under the bench.

  The realization that his brethren would soon pass by on their way to midday prayers finally drove him out. Seeing no one in the yard, he took a deep breath, slid sideways, and scrambled to his feet.

  “Napping, Brother Aidan?”

  Aidan whirled. A hawk-faced old monk stood in the abbot’s doorway, a thin smile on his lips.

  The smooth voice continued. “Or just hearing the spiders’ confessions before you sweep them away?”

  Sickened, Aidan fumbled for words. It had never occurred to him that anyone else might have been with the abbot when Lord Donagh had entered. He should have heeded his instinct to wait. Having been both a fool and a weakling, now he’d reap the results: Brother Nathan ran the scriptorium.

  Knowing it was too late, Aidan dropped to one knee. His face burned. “Forgive me, Brother Nathan. I saw them arrive, and I gave in to my curiosity.”

  “Curiosity is not a sin that I am aware of,” said Nathan. “Deception, however …” He paused. The air was filled only with the purr of Brother Nathan’s elegant but uncompromising nine.

  Realizing he’d heard that number faintly from under the bench but had simply ignored it, Aidan forced himself to ask, “How should I atone for my failure?” He expected an order to confess to the abbot as well as to Brother Eamon. No doubt he’d be assigned some unpleasant task to help cleanse his soul.

  When he got no response, Aidan gulped against the lump in his throat. He felt his dreams shriveling. “Please guide me,” he pleaded, keeping his gaze on the older monk’s feet. Certain Brother Nathan was aware of his hopes, he added, “I want to be worthy of your work. How can I become more deserving?”

  “Sweep,” said Brother Nathan. “That is what brooms are best suited for. Or sit on the bench, which is better suited for that than lying beneath.” He stepped around Aidan to leave.

  Aidan leaned on his broom, shuddering in relief. Brother Nathan was letting him off with great kindness and humor.

  The departing monk added a few words over his shoulder. “When I think you are suited to copying Holy Scripture,” he said, “I will let you know.”

  To Aidan it sounded as though he could sooner expect the return of the Messiah. That, if it took place in the year 1000 as most everyone guessed, was still some fourscore years away. Certainly Aidan would not live to see it. The young monk slowly rose back to both feet, wishing he’d been anywhere else when the abbey’s troublesome new guest had arrived.

  Trouble had avoided him neatly until then, with just one exception. Having performed well as a student, mastering Latin and memorizing all 150 Psalms, Aidan had eagerly donned the robe of a novice when it had been offered at last. The monks’ scratchy gray wool muttered of twenty-one against his skin. He had stopped hearing it soon enough. Like the scents in a field of flowers, numbers murmured in his ears so continually
that they faded unless he tried to hear them—or was startled, as he had been by Lana.

  Once cloaked in a monk’s robe, however, Aidan had felt obligated to mention the humming of numbers to Brother Eamon. In trying to explain, he had made the mistake of saying that many of his fellow monks brought the number six to his mind. A horrified look had crossed Brother Éamon’s face. The senior monk fretted that Aidan might be bewitched by the Number of the Beast recorded in Saint John’s Revelation. He’d assigned Aidan three full days of solitary prayer to inspect his heart. The novice obeyed without protest. To himself, though, Aidan scoffed. Whether the Beast’s number was 666 or 616 remained a matter of far-off church debate, according to the abbot, but how anyone could fear any combination of sixes, Aidan didn’t know. Sixes were soft-spoken, slow-moving, and kind. Only long contemplation had helped him understand that such deception might be the Beast’s secret.

  The Beast crossed Aidan’s mind now as he recalled the piercing look the girl had given him in the yard. Both her squeals and her wild struggle against the lord’s grip could have been caused by a demon. Aidan had a hard time believing that demons could enter through a person’s nostrils or ears. If she did have a monster inside her, however, growling through her eleven, perhaps Brother Eamon was right. Perhaps the numbers he heard came from somewhere much darker than heaven.

  More troubling yet, any demon inside her may have peeked out through her blue eyes and spied him there listening. Certainly something in her had taken notice when their gazes had locked.

  Aidan shoved that fear from his heart, loath to believe that the humming of numbers, as natural to him as the sunshine and considerably more dependable, could be powered by evil. No dark force could make everyone hum.

  He could not sweep thoughts of the eleven girl so easily from his mind. Curiosity swelled in him, and after the noon prayers he found an excuse to pass through the guesthouse. Since novices were often expected to tend to guests’ needs, they were permitted to come and go freely from that building. The new arrival was not there, not even in the portion reserved for the poorest pilgrims. Aidan began to think the abbot may have taken her outside the compound after all. Perhaps she’d been lodged with servants in one of the cottages huddled near the abbey’s gates.