Excerpt of Sparrow, a written work by the 2020 Schumann Brothers Grant for Written Expression Winner, Kristen Hickey
Colm was waiting at the base of the tower when Sparrow finally made up her mind to start the night’s illumination. She had half a mind to turn around as soon as she saw him push off the wall, but he was already moving towards her and Sparrow had never learned to flee as well as Aoife.
“It’s late.” Colm’s voice cut through the soft rhythm of the rain falling into the cloister’s garden.
“I’ve all night,” Sparrow said, slowing as she passed him. His heavy feet followed hers up the stairs.
“I want to see what you have been working on.”
Sparrow just brushed her fingertips against the cool stone of the wall, and thought her usual prayer for Chen Jizi.
Sparrow held the door open for Colm, though she longed to close it, lock it before he could enter the scriptorium. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been in the tower with her. Colm, she thought, must have stopped by in the years since Chen Jizi’s death—maybe once, early on. But she’d been alone in the sky since then, no scribe or illustrator to join her. It set her on edge to have him there, just—looking.
As Sparrow circled the room, lighting her candles, she glanced about, too; she hardly had reason to look around anymore. The hours she spent here had piled atop each other, then the days, the months, the years. There was nobody there to move her stool, nobody there to blend paints into unsettlingly new shades. Nothing changed when Sparrow was absent, and so she had stopped thinking about it, as if it had become an extension of her very body.
She imagined that to Colm, it looked a terrible mess. The semicircular wooden table that fitted perfectly into the rounded wall of the tower had been built before even Chen Jizi took his vows, back when Solaskell’s scriptorium would have always held four scribes and four illuminators. Many had etched their initials into their stations, leaving clouds of letters and tiny fish, bees, sheep scored across the wooden surface. Sparrow, for her part, had filled the empty space of her predecessors with the waxy last nubs of candles, scattered pens of quill and reed, the pots of black ink and those of powdery color that she’d arranged first by hue, then by scarcity. On the round of the table farthest from the door, the monastery’s 200-year-old book of recipes sat amidst the remnants of her most recent experiments. And then, along the empty wall, the racks that stretched the sheepskins from the winter that had filled the room, for a time, with the smell of something almost breathing. Now, it was hidden under all the weighty scents of drying plants that Sparrow had cut from the garden the week prior.
When Sparrow finally turned again to look at Colm, he was peering into pots of pigment, wearing a deep frown that Sparrow couldn’t imagine was caused by the colors she had mixed. He stayed there, bent over the little crowd of pots, for far too long. Most of the powders were hardly visible in this light, and even less notable before they were wetted and bound. Sparrow knew he was looking for something wrong without even knowing what he was looking at. She sighed.
“Long before you joined us, this scriptorium was lit by the sun and always full of movement,” Colm said, finally, his nose still in one of her pots. Every ounce of Sparrow hoped that he would not breathe heavily enough to scatter her powders into the air. “You were mentored well, to be able to carry on alone.”
Colm finally returned the lid to the last pot and straightened up. It was only then, when her paints were safe, that Sparrow’s distracted mind considered Colm’s words, which had almost—nearly—contained a compliment for her.
“Truly, this space is a testament to the lasting guidance of Brother Jizi, and the hands of Beo beyond.”
“And the work that I have done,” Sparrow said, unable to help herself.
Colm waved his hand as if to sweep Sparrow’s claim away. “I see the light of Beo in every stone of this room. You occupy it.”
Sparrow clenched her jaw. For all that she wanted to say, she knew that Colm would only choose to see Sparrow spitting on the god whose house had raised her.
“Where is the manuscript you are illuminating now?”
Sparrow wanted nothing less than his indelicate fingers on her work. She stepped quickly between Colm and the stack of vellum that she had accumulated, laying her hand on the corner of the page as if offering to flip through the unbound pages at his command. Colm leaned over her arm.
“The frontispiece?”
Sparrow shook her head. “I do that last.”
Colm grunted.
“Chen Jizi—”
“Brother.”
“—liked to make them composites of the rest of the manuscript. If you knew what you looked for, you might see the entire book within the first page.”
“What is this, then?”
Sparrow looked at the page again. “The first pilgrims,” she said, hovering a finger over the rock upon which they crowded. The scriptures said their island sat not far from Solaskell’s coast, but none of the monastery’s boating expeditions had found land suitable for the start of a religion.
Colm grunted. “How many pages have you to finish?” he asked.
Sparrow shuffled through to the end, counting quickly. “Three spreads, it should be.”
Colm nodded absently, his gaze still on the first page of Sparrow’s manuscript, where dragons and serpents twisted about each other in the green of the sea.
“You ought to work on these dragons,” he finally said. “This is not our way of painting them.”
Sparrow frowned. “These are the same as the others I’ve done,” she said.
“Too stout. And are these ears or wings?” he harrumphed. “Accuracy is important in these matters.”
Sparrow snorted. “Accuracy for dragons?”
“Accuracy to the tradition. I could scarcely care if the founders of Solaskell thought sheep walked on eight legs, or that a hive of bees could lift a man in flight. As they looked at the world, so must we.”
“Been accurate to my own tradition, at least,” Sparrow muttered. Even this, perhaps, was untrue, for as Sparrow had grown at the monastery, so had her artistry. She should hate to look back at her earlier manuscripts.
Colm squinted at her. “Perhaps it is time you return to the libraries and your source material.”
Sparrow sighed.
“Must I remind you that these duties are not your own? Someday long after we join Beo, these buildings will crumble and all that will be left–”
“Is our legacy, and the books that share it,” Sparrow finished. It was as if Colm had long ago decided to devote only one good thought to anything, doomed to repeat the same vagueries
forever. This, in particular, was a weekly utterance.
Colm nodded sharply. “And you should know of the abbess’ plans to gift a manuscript to
the king. It must have been two generations ago that we presented to a ruler.”
“Why now?” The land around Solaskell always seemed on the verge of shifting hands, and the monastery and its nominal ruler had long ago come to the sort of agreement that let each keep to its own. Sparrow thought the current king must have been only a few years in power, the quiet recipient of a kingship his father had done terrible things to take, terrible things to keep.
“The abbess worries that we have made too much an island of our monastery,” Colm said. Sparrow didn’t miss the flash of a scowl that followed. She, wisely, said nothing, and in the silence that stretched between them, Colm seemed to remember himself.
“Fix the dragons,” he said, tapping the stack of vellum. “Return to the oldest texts tomorrow and take your cues from the masters.” Sparrow nodded, knowing even as she did so that the only way she would return to those pages was if Colm himself forced her hand. He would forget as soon as he found something else to scold her for, she hoped.
Colm pushed the door open, then paused. “The next depiction of Beo…paint them in my image,” he said. He was gone, halfway down the stairs before Sparrow could give voice to her
confusion.
Sparrow re-stacked the pages of her manuscript, pushed her pigment pots back into their messy array, and tried to imagine that her scriptorium did not now hold within it the air exhaled from Colm’s chest. Something that had been balanced carefully in the room was now askew, Sparrow felt.
With the unpleasant feeling that Colm lingered still behind her, Sparrow pulled her hair back and dipped her quill in ink.
