The Burning Stone

“Are you repudiating the wisdom of the church mothers? Do you claim to have been granted wisdom that they were denied?”



“I have seen a vision of the cosmos! In it I saw many miraculous things, but I saw no Chamber of Light but rather a great creature so vast that it had neither beginning nor end. And I thought then that we are too small to encompass God. We cannot name God, or gods of any kind. Such a cosmos is ineffable, unknowable. But we are not helpless in the face of glory. Perhaps we can come to understand how a dragon can descend and ascend so that we can hope to do so in time. We can learn why the stars turn in a wheel as they do, or why—”



“You are raving,” said the guestmaster coldly. “I see that our good Father Lentfridus foretold rightly this morning at Prime when he said that these portents signaled disorder and disaster. He will deal with you, because I cannot. Come, Wigo, you have been polluted.”



He left the room without another word, and the poor young assistant, all goggly eyes and frightened “o” of a mouth, hurried after him.



Well. Some things didn’t change after all. As among the Quman, it was his wretched and ready tongue that got him into trouble. But he could not regret his passionate words. They only confirmed the aim that had been taking shape in his mind since the first moment he saw the dragon.



He had lost his manhood and his honor, been humiliated and shamed. He had lost his simple faith in the Unities and because of that he had no desire to return to the home where he had first pledged fealty to that faith.



But he had gained something else: a new vision of the cosmos, not as a place where God in Unity reign in splendor from a fixed, static throne or where his grandmother’s gods gather in the sacrifices and mete out gifts and punishments accordingly, but a cosmos where all these things are true and yet none of them are, a place altogether more magnificent, more numinous, and more mysterious than he had ever imagined.



And he wasn’t the only person trying to come to grips with new things. At least one other person in this world was scribbling on parchment, and he recognized in those markings questions rather than answers. Although Kansi-a-lari had abandoned him, either because she thought he was dead or because she had no further use for him, he knew he had to go after her not for her sake, but because of her son. Her son would know who had written on the scrap of parchment.



He had a good idea that he ought not to wait for the guestmaster to return with the abbot, who would no doubt descend with all the wrath of an offended lord and the heavy weapons of orthodoxy at his right hand. His grandmother had always enjoined him to be practical. So he gathered his sparse belongings and departed by way of the stables. With the goats as his stubborn and rather truculent companions and a hearty meal in his stomach, he struck north along the old stone road, following the prince.