The young men walked over the fields to supper at the Abbey farm, as usual, and Dame Cicely, as usual, stood in the door to greet them.
“How goes the work, lads?” she asked, and then caught Alan by the shoulder, crying, “No need to answer. I know by the face on thee. What hast been doing to make it shine so?”
“Only finished a piece o’ work, mother,” said Padraig with a grin. “It takes some men a long time to do that. If they would bide just this side of a masterpiece they’d save ’emselves trouble. But they will spend all their force on the last step.”
“Aye,” said Alan, “better leap clean over the Strid while you’re about it.”
And for once Padraig had no more to say.
Oddly enough Brother Basil also thought of the Strid that night—the deep and dangerous whirlpool in the grim North Country had haunted him ever since he saw it. He and Tomaso came back, after dark, to the crypt, and spread out the torn manuscripts by the light of two flambeaux in the wall. None of the pages were whole, and the script was in Latin, Arabic, Greek and Italian, and not all in the same handwriting. Both believed that in searching the heap for secrets of their arts they had stumbled on something dangerous.
“I believe I know where these came from,” Tomaso said, when they had patched together three or four pages. “They are part of the scripts of Archiater of Byzantium, who was taken for a wizard in Goslar ten years ago. I thought that all his books were burned. There was talk enough about it.”