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Dec. 24th, 2006 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupI can't believe that this is my third Christmas on Livejournal. Wow.
This is a continuation of my holiday tradition. This year's text comes from Doomsday Book.
It had stopped snowing, and the stars had come out. The village lay silent under its covering of white. Frozen in time, Kivrin thought. The dilapidated buildings looked different, the staggering fences and filthy daubed huts softened and graced by the snow. The lanterns caught the crystalline faces of the snowflakes and made them sparkle, but it was the stars that took Kivrin’s breath away, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, and all of them sparkling like jewels in the icy air. “It shines,” Agnes said, and Kivrin didn’t know whether she was talking about the snow or the sky.
The bell tolled evenly, calmly, its sound different again out in the frosty air-not louder, but fuller and somehow clearer. Kivrin could hear all the other bells now and recognize them, Esthcote and Witenie and Chertelintone, even though they sounded different, too. She listened for the Swindone bell, which had rung all this time, but she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear the Oxford bells either. She wondered if she had only imagined them.
She thought suddenly of Oxford on Christmas Eve, the shops lit for last-minute shoppine and the windows of Brasenose shining yellow onto the quad. And the Christmas tree at Balliol lit with multicolored strings of laser lights.
“I would that you had come for Yule,” Lady Imeyne said to Lady Yvolde. “Then we had a proper priest to say the masses. This place’s priest can but barely say the Paternoster.”
This place’s priest just spent hours kneeling in an ice-cold church, Kivrin thought, hours kneeling in hose that have holes in the knees, and now this place’s priest is ringing a heavy bell that has had to be tolled for an hour and will shortly go through an elaborate ceremony that he has had to memorize because he cannot read.
“It will be a poor sermon and a poor mass, I fear.” Lady Imeyne said.
“Alas, there are many who do not love God in these days,” Lady Yvolde said, “but we must pray to God that He will set the world right and bring men again to virtue.”
They were almost to the churchyard. Kivrin could make out faces now, lit by the smoky torches and by little oil cressets some of the women were carrying. Their faces, reddened and lit from below, looked faintly sinister. Mr. Dunworthy would think they were an angry mob, Kivrin thought, gathered to burn some poor martyr at the stake. It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
The steward’s wife grabbed for her husband’s sleeve, and he shook her off, but as soon as Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet came through the lychgate, he and Maisry’s father fell back promptly to make a clear path into the church. So did all the others, falling silent as the entourage passed through the churchyard and in the heavy doors, and then beginning to talk again, but more quietly, as they came into the church behind them.
Kivrin took the girls to stand beside Eliwys. Lady Imeyne knelt, but Lady Yvolde made only an obeisance. As soon as Imeyne rose, as servant hurried forward with a dark-velvet-covered prie-dieu and laid it on the floor next to Rosemund for Lady Yvolde to kneel on. Another servant had laid one in front of Sir Bloet on the men’s side and was helping him get down on his knees on it. He puffed and clung to the servant’s arm as he lowered his bulk, and his face got very red.
Kivrin looked at Lady Yvolde’s prie-dieu longingly, thinking of the plastic kneeling pads that hung on the backs of the chairs in St. Mary’s. She had never realized until now what a blessing they were, what a blessing the hard wooden chairs were either until they stood again and she thought about how they would have to remain standing through the whole service.
The floor was cold, the church was cold, in spite of all the lights. They were mostly cressets, set along the walls and in front of the holly-banked stature of St. Catherine, though there was a tall, thin, yellowish candle set in the greenery of each of the windows, but the effect was probably not what Father Roche had intended. The bright flames only made the colored glass darker, almost black.
More of the yellowish candles were in the silver candelabra on either side of the altar, and holly was heaped in front of them and along the top of the rood screen, and Father Roche had set Lady Imeyne’s beeswax candles in among the sharp, shiny leaves. He’d done a job of decorating the church that should please even Lady Imeyne, Kivrin thought, and glanced at her.
She was holding her reliquary between her folded hands, but her eyes were open, and she was staring at the top of the rood screen. Her mouth was tight with disapproval, and Kivrin supposed she hadn’t wanted the candles there, but it was the perfect place for them. They illuminated the Last Judgement and lit nearly the whole nave.
They made the whole church seem different, homier, more familiar, like St. Mary’s on Christmas Eve. Dunworthy had taken her to the ecumenical service last Christmas. She had planned to go to the midnight mass at the Holy Re-Formed to hear it said in Latin, but there hadn’t been a midnight mass. The priest had been asked to read the gospel for the ecumenical service, so he had moved the mass to four in the afternoon.
Agnes must have been trying to pull the bell off over her wrist. The already-fraying ribbon had tightened into a solid little knot. Kivrin picked at its edges with her fingernails, keeping an eye on the people behind her. The service would start with a procession, Father Roche and his acolytes, if he had any, would come down the aisle bearing the holy water and chanting the Asperges.
...
Father Roche was standing there. He was dressed in an embroidered white stold and a yellowed white alb with a hem more frayed then Agnes’s ribbon, and was holding a book. He had obviously been waiting for her, had obviously stood there watching her the whole time she tended to Agnes, but there was no reproof in his face or even impatience. His face held some other expression entirely, and she was reminded suddenly of Mr. Dunworthy, standing and watching her through the thin-glass partition.
Lady Imeyne cleared her throat, a sound that was almost a growl, and he seemed to come to himself. He handed the book to Cob, who was wearing a grimy cassock and a pair of too-large leather shoes, and knelt in front of the altar. Then he took the book back and began saying the lections.
Kivrin said them to herself along with him, thinking the Latin and hearing the echo of the interpreter’s translation.
“‘Whom saw ye, O Shepherds?’” Father Roche recited in Latin, beginning the responsory. “‘Speak: tell us who hath appeared on the earth.’”
He stopped, frowning at Kivrin
He’d forgotten it, she thought. She glanced anxiously at Imeyne, hoping she wouldn’t realize there was more to come, but Imeyne had raised her head and was scowling at him, her jaw in the silk wimple clenched.
Roche was still frowning at Kivrin. “‘Speak, what saw ye?’” he said, and Kivrin gave a sigh of relief. “‘Tell us who hath appeared.’”
That wasn’t right. She mouthed the next line, willing him to understand it. “‘We saw the newborn Child.’”
He gave no indication that he had seen what she said, though he was looking straight at her. “I saw ...” he said, and stopped again.
“‘We saw the newborn Child,’” Kivrin whispered, and could feel Lady Imeyne turning to look at her.
“‘And angels singing praise unto the Lord.’” Roche said, and that wasn’t right either, but Lady Imeyne turned back to the front to fasten her disapproving gaze on Roche.
“‘Speak, what saw ye?” Kivrin mouthed, and he seemed suddenly to come to himself.
“‘Speak, what say ye?” he said clearly. “‘And tell us of the birth of Christ. We saw the newborn Child and angels singing praise unto the Lord.’”
He began the Confiteor Deo, and Kivrin whispered it along with him, but he got through it without any mistakes, and Kivrin began to relax a little, though she watched him closely as he moved to the altar for the Oramus Te.
He was wearing a black cassock under the alb, and both of them looked like they had once been richly made. They were much too short for Roche. She could see a good ten centimeters of his worn brown hose below the cassock’s hem when he bent over the altar. The alb and cassock had probably belonged to the priest before him, or were castoffs of Imeyne’s chaplain.
The priest at Holy-Reformed had worn a polyester alb over a brown jumper and jeans. He had assured Kivrin that the mass was completely authentic, in spite of its being in midafternoon. The antiphon dated from the eighth century, he had told her, and the gruesomely detailed stations of the cross were exact copies of Turn’s. But the church had been a converted stationer’s shop, they had used a folding table for an altar, and the Carfax carillon outside had been busily destroying “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”
“Kyrie eleison,” Cob said, his hands folded in prayer.
“Kyrie eleison,” Father Roche said.
“Christe eleison, Cob said.
“Christe eleison, Agnes said brightly.
Kivrin hushed her, her finger to her lips. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.
They had used the Kyrie at the ecumenical service, probably because of some deal Holy Re-Formed’s priest had struck with the vicar in return for moving the time of the mass, and the minister of the Church of the Millennium had refused to recite it and had looked coldly disapproving throughout. Like Lady Imeyne.
Father Roche seemed all right now. He said the Gloria and the gradual without faltering and began the gospel. “Inituim sancti Envangelii secundum Luke,” he said, and began to read haltingly in Latin. “‘Now it came to pass in those days that a decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that a census of the whole world be taken.’”
The vicar had read the same verses at St. Mary’s. He had read it from the People’s Common Bible, which had been insisted on by the Church of the Millennium, and it had begun, “Around then the politicos dumped a tax hike on the ratepayers,” but it was the same gospel Father Roche was laboriously reciting.
“‘And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men of goodwill.’” Father Roche kissed the gospel. “Per evangelica dicta deleantur mostro delicta.”
The sermon should come next, if there was one. In most village churches the priest only preached at the major masses, and even then it was usually no more than a catechism lesson, the listing of the seven deadly sins of the seven Acts of Mercy. The high mass Christmas morning was probably when the sermon would be.
The sermon at St. Mary’s had been on rubbish disposal, and the dean of Christ Church had begun it by saying, “Christianity began in a stable. Will it end in a sewer?”
But it hadn’t mattered. It had been midnight, and St. Mary’s had had a stone floor and a real altar, and when she’d closed her eyes, she’d been able to shut out the carpeted nave and the umbrellas and the laser candles. She had pushed the plastic kneeling pad out of her way and knelt on the stone floor and imagined what it would be like in the Middle Ages.
Mr. Dunworthy had told her it wouldn’t be like anything she had imagined, and he was right, of course. But not about this mass. She had imagined it just like this, the stone floor and the murmured Kyrie, the smells of incense and tallow and cold.
Agnus dei. Lamb of God. Kivrin smiled down at Agnes. She was sound asleep, her body a dead weight against Kivrin’s side and her mouth slackly open, but her fist was still clenched tightly over the little bell. My lamb, Kivrin thought.
Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat’s face and worn-out hose.
She could never in a hundred year, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I’m glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.
-Connie Willis
A Very Happy Holidays to all of you, my dear friends! May the season be bright and warm and the New Year better than the last.
This is a continuation of my holiday tradition. This year's text comes from Doomsday Book.
It had stopped snowing, and the stars had come out. The village lay silent under its covering of white. Frozen in time, Kivrin thought. The dilapidated buildings looked different, the staggering fences and filthy daubed huts softened and graced by the snow. The lanterns caught the crystalline faces of the snowflakes and made them sparkle, but it was the stars that took Kivrin’s breath away, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, and all of them sparkling like jewels in the icy air. “It shines,” Agnes said, and Kivrin didn’t know whether she was talking about the snow or the sky.
The bell tolled evenly, calmly, its sound different again out in the frosty air-not louder, but fuller and somehow clearer. Kivrin could hear all the other bells now and recognize them, Esthcote and Witenie and Chertelintone, even though they sounded different, too. She listened for the Swindone bell, which had rung all this time, but she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear the Oxford bells either. She wondered if she had only imagined them.
She thought suddenly of Oxford on Christmas Eve, the shops lit for last-minute shoppine and the windows of Brasenose shining yellow onto the quad. And the Christmas tree at Balliol lit with multicolored strings of laser lights.
“I would that you had come for Yule,” Lady Imeyne said to Lady Yvolde. “Then we had a proper priest to say the masses. This place’s priest can but barely say the Paternoster.”
This place’s priest just spent hours kneeling in an ice-cold church, Kivrin thought, hours kneeling in hose that have holes in the knees, and now this place’s priest is ringing a heavy bell that has had to be tolled for an hour and will shortly go through an elaborate ceremony that he has had to memorize because he cannot read.
“It will be a poor sermon and a poor mass, I fear.” Lady Imeyne said.
“Alas, there are many who do not love God in these days,” Lady Yvolde said, “but we must pray to God that He will set the world right and bring men again to virtue.”
They were almost to the churchyard. Kivrin could make out faces now, lit by the smoky torches and by little oil cressets some of the women were carrying. Their faces, reddened and lit from below, looked faintly sinister. Mr. Dunworthy would think they were an angry mob, Kivrin thought, gathered to burn some poor martyr at the stake. It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
The steward’s wife grabbed for her husband’s sleeve, and he shook her off, but as soon as Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet came through the lychgate, he and Maisry’s father fell back promptly to make a clear path into the church. So did all the others, falling silent as the entourage passed through the churchyard and in the heavy doors, and then beginning to talk again, but more quietly, as they came into the church behind them.
Kivrin took the girls to stand beside Eliwys. Lady Imeyne knelt, but Lady Yvolde made only an obeisance. As soon as Imeyne rose, as servant hurried forward with a dark-velvet-covered prie-dieu and laid it on the floor next to Rosemund for Lady Yvolde to kneel on. Another servant had laid one in front of Sir Bloet on the men’s side and was helping him get down on his knees on it. He puffed and clung to the servant’s arm as he lowered his bulk, and his face got very red.
Kivrin looked at Lady Yvolde’s prie-dieu longingly, thinking of the plastic kneeling pads that hung on the backs of the chairs in St. Mary’s. She had never realized until now what a blessing they were, what a blessing the hard wooden chairs were either until they stood again and she thought about how they would have to remain standing through the whole service.
The floor was cold, the church was cold, in spite of all the lights. They were mostly cressets, set along the walls and in front of the holly-banked stature of St. Catherine, though there was a tall, thin, yellowish candle set in the greenery of each of the windows, but the effect was probably not what Father Roche had intended. The bright flames only made the colored glass darker, almost black.
More of the yellowish candles were in the silver candelabra on either side of the altar, and holly was heaped in front of them and along the top of the rood screen, and Father Roche had set Lady Imeyne’s beeswax candles in among the sharp, shiny leaves. He’d done a job of decorating the church that should please even Lady Imeyne, Kivrin thought, and glanced at her.
She was holding her reliquary between her folded hands, but her eyes were open, and she was staring at the top of the rood screen. Her mouth was tight with disapproval, and Kivrin supposed she hadn’t wanted the candles there, but it was the perfect place for them. They illuminated the Last Judgement and lit nearly the whole nave.
They made the whole church seem different, homier, more familiar, like St. Mary’s on Christmas Eve. Dunworthy had taken her to the ecumenical service last Christmas. She had planned to go to the midnight mass at the Holy Re-Formed to hear it said in Latin, but there hadn’t been a midnight mass. The priest had been asked to read the gospel for the ecumenical service, so he had moved the mass to four in the afternoon.
Agnes must have been trying to pull the bell off over her wrist. The already-fraying ribbon had tightened into a solid little knot. Kivrin picked at its edges with her fingernails, keeping an eye on the people behind her. The service would start with a procession, Father Roche and his acolytes, if he had any, would come down the aisle bearing the holy water and chanting the Asperges.
...
Father Roche was standing there. He was dressed in an embroidered white stold and a yellowed white alb with a hem more frayed then Agnes’s ribbon, and was holding a book. He had obviously been waiting for her, had obviously stood there watching her the whole time she tended to Agnes, but there was no reproof in his face or even impatience. His face held some other expression entirely, and she was reminded suddenly of Mr. Dunworthy, standing and watching her through the thin-glass partition.
Lady Imeyne cleared her throat, a sound that was almost a growl, and he seemed to come to himself. He handed the book to Cob, who was wearing a grimy cassock and a pair of too-large leather shoes, and knelt in front of the altar. Then he took the book back and began saying the lections.
Kivrin said them to herself along with him, thinking the Latin and hearing the echo of the interpreter’s translation.
“‘Whom saw ye, O Shepherds?’” Father Roche recited in Latin, beginning the responsory. “‘Speak: tell us who hath appeared on the earth.’”
He stopped, frowning at Kivrin
He’d forgotten it, she thought. She glanced anxiously at Imeyne, hoping she wouldn’t realize there was more to come, but Imeyne had raised her head and was scowling at him, her jaw in the silk wimple clenched.
Roche was still frowning at Kivrin. “‘Speak, what saw ye?’” he said, and Kivrin gave a sigh of relief. “‘Tell us who hath appeared.’”
That wasn’t right. She mouthed the next line, willing him to understand it. “‘We saw the newborn Child.’”
He gave no indication that he had seen what she said, though he was looking straight at her. “I saw ...” he said, and stopped again.
“‘We saw the newborn Child,’” Kivrin whispered, and could feel Lady Imeyne turning to look at her.
“‘And angels singing praise unto the Lord.’” Roche said, and that wasn’t right either, but Lady Imeyne turned back to the front to fasten her disapproving gaze on Roche.
“‘Speak, what saw ye?” Kivrin mouthed, and he seemed suddenly to come to himself.
“‘Speak, what say ye?” he said clearly. “‘And tell us of the birth of Christ. We saw the newborn Child and angels singing praise unto the Lord.’”
He began the Confiteor Deo, and Kivrin whispered it along with him, but he got through it without any mistakes, and Kivrin began to relax a little, though she watched him closely as he moved to the altar for the Oramus Te.
He was wearing a black cassock under the alb, and both of them looked like they had once been richly made. They were much too short for Roche. She could see a good ten centimeters of his worn brown hose below the cassock’s hem when he bent over the altar. The alb and cassock had probably belonged to the priest before him, or were castoffs of Imeyne’s chaplain.
The priest at Holy-Reformed had worn a polyester alb over a brown jumper and jeans. He had assured Kivrin that the mass was completely authentic, in spite of its being in midafternoon. The antiphon dated from the eighth century, he had told her, and the gruesomely detailed stations of the cross were exact copies of Turn’s. But the church had been a converted stationer’s shop, they had used a folding table for an altar, and the Carfax carillon outside had been busily destroying “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”
“Kyrie eleison,” Cob said, his hands folded in prayer.
“Kyrie eleison,” Father Roche said.
“Christe eleison, Cob said.
“Christe eleison, Agnes said brightly.
Kivrin hushed her, her finger to her lips. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.
They had used the Kyrie at the ecumenical service, probably because of some deal Holy Re-Formed’s priest had struck with the vicar in return for moving the time of the mass, and the minister of the Church of the Millennium had refused to recite it and had looked coldly disapproving throughout. Like Lady Imeyne.
Father Roche seemed all right now. He said the Gloria and the gradual without faltering and began the gospel. “Inituim sancti Envangelii secundum Luke,” he said, and began to read haltingly in Latin. “‘Now it came to pass in those days that a decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that a census of the whole world be taken.’”
The vicar had read the same verses at St. Mary’s. He had read it from the People’s Common Bible, which had been insisted on by the Church of the Millennium, and it had begun, “Around then the politicos dumped a tax hike on the ratepayers,” but it was the same gospel Father Roche was laboriously reciting.
“‘And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men of goodwill.’” Father Roche kissed the gospel. “Per evangelica dicta deleantur mostro delicta.”
The sermon should come next, if there was one. In most village churches the priest only preached at the major masses, and even then it was usually no more than a catechism lesson, the listing of the seven deadly sins of the seven Acts of Mercy. The high mass Christmas morning was probably when the sermon would be.
The sermon at St. Mary’s had been on rubbish disposal, and the dean of Christ Church had begun it by saying, “Christianity began in a stable. Will it end in a sewer?”
But it hadn’t mattered. It had been midnight, and St. Mary’s had had a stone floor and a real altar, and when she’d closed her eyes, she’d been able to shut out the carpeted nave and the umbrellas and the laser candles. She had pushed the plastic kneeling pad out of her way and knelt on the stone floor and imagined what it would be like in the Middle Ages.
Mr. Dunworthy had told her it wouldn’t be like anything she had imagined, and he was right, of course. But not about this mass. She had imagined it just like this, the stone floor and the murmured Kyrie, the smells of incense and tallow and cold.
Agnus dei. Lamb of God. Kivrin smiled down at Agnes. She was sound asleep, her body a dead weight against Kivrin’s side and her mouth slackly open, but her fist was still clenched tightly over the little bell. My lamb, Kivrin thought.
Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat’s face and worn-out hose.
She could never in a hundred year, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I’m glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.
-Connie Willis
A Very Happy Holidays to all of you, my dear friends! May the season be bright and warm and the New Year better than the last.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 04:30 pm (UTC)*hobbity hugs*