Codex Aurea

Vpon the failing of the light, when the bell has rung for Vespers and the last of it still trembles in the air, there walks in the beech-wood above the abbey a hart of sixteen tines, and every tine is tipped with fire.¶It does not come out of the wood, for it was never in the wood. It is simply there, the way dusk is there: no man has seen it arrive, and no man has seen it go. It exists in the seam between day and night, which the learned say has no width at all, and the hart says otherwise.

Brother Anselm, who was a gamekeeper of the Earl of Greyfen before he took the cowl, watched for it through forty dusks of one autumn. He learned to measure the moment by a held breath: draw breath when the sun's last edge goes under, and before that breath is loosed, the hart has come and stood and turned its head. He swears that the hounds would not run at it.¶Of its face he will say only this: that you cannot look at it directly, for to look at it directly is to find that it is already night, and the hart is folded up in the dark like a letter in a sleeve.

Marke well the gutter of this very book, for a cat lives in it. She was an honest mouser of the scriptorium until the feast of Saint Luke in the year 1214, when she slipped between folio 43 and folio 44 in pursuit of a mouse that Brother Odo had drawn too well, and she did not come out, and she has not come out since.

She now travels between the pages of every book bound within these walls, as a woman may walk between hedgerows. The evidence is threefold: that certain books are warm when no hand has held them; that hairs of no colour at all are combed from the gutters at Eastertide; and that letters are found licked thin, and some few are gone entirely.¶You will not find her on any page. Do not look for her on the page. She lives between them, where the book is thickest and no reader has ever been.

Certain it is that on the high feasts, at the raising of the host, there enters at the east window a singing of birds, and no birds. It is not one voice but a hundred, braided; it comes from the air above the rood-screen, from a place a man could cover with his two hands, if his hands were where his eyes tell him nothing is.¶The sacrist caused nets to be hung in the rafters, fine nets, fowler's nets. They caught dust and one bat, who was questioned and released. The song went on above them, and those who heard it say it went on as if amused.

Hild, Abbess of the Marsh Houses, being skilled in the eight modes, wrote the melody down as it fell, note under note, on a leaf of this very quire. That leaf is warm to the touch. It has been warm for seven years. In winter the novices take turns holding it, which the Abbess permits, provided they read while they warm.

In the grey seas beyond the Humber mouth there swims a whale that carries its own light before it, on a stalk of flesh, as a chamberlain carries a lamp down a corridor he knows and you do not. Shipmen call it the Lantern, and they do not call it anything else, in case it hears the rest.¶Its custom is this: to honest ships it goes ahead, and the light leads them through fog to harbour. But a ship that carries a liar it follows, patient as rent-day, until the falsehood is spoken aloud and spent — and then the light goes out, and the whale with it, and the fog remains.

Wulfric, shipman of the Humber, followed the light through fog for a night and a day, having first put ashore a passenger he declined to name. He was set gently on his home shore at Ravenser, and the light went out as a candle is pinched, with two fingers — and whose fingers, God knows.