It was hopeless. She found four shards of rock, which she tied up in her sleeve. One was sharp enough to use as a weapon, if it came to that, and the others could mark her starting point if she ever got back there in such time that her mark was still moist. She found no trace of water and no hint of any kind of opening that might lead her out.
After one thousand three hundred and sixty-nine hand falls, she found a smear of liquid smelling of urine: her own mark. She had come full circle. If there was a tunnel leading out of this cavern it was either high up in the wall or somewhere out on the cavern floor, drowned in darkness and easy to miss no matter if she crossed and crisscrossed the floor a hundred times as she weakened, thirsted, and failed.
She was trapped.
There it was again: two scrapes, a silence, and two scrapes. But she listened for a long time after, and heard nothing more.
4
ROSVITA sat in the hall of the convent of St. Valeria with The Book of Secrets open on a table before her. She had stolen this book years ago, and lost it again soon after, so she had never had leisure to examine it page by page. A monstrous document, absolutely fascinating. The book contained three books. One was written on paper, in the infidel manner, and with the curling script used by the Jinna. It was impossible to decipher. The middle book was written on ancient, yellowed papyrus, the alien letters glossed here and there in Arethousan. “Hide this” read the first words of the gloss, and so Bernard had hidden it. Most of the text was not translated, but what was written in Arethousan allowed her to guess that this scroll preached the most dangerous heresy known to the church, that of the Redemption.
She hadn’t the strength to consider it now. She turned to the first portion of the book.
The man called Bernard, Liath’s father, had compiled a priceless florilegia. For years he had written down every reference he had found to the arts of the mathematici. She was familiar with the methods of timekeeping according to the rising of stars and constellations, but much of what was recorded here she found difficult and technical: quadrant, angle, equant point, trine, and opposition. There was a catalog of several hundred stars, including the latitude, longitude, and apparent brightness of each one, written in such a tiny hand that it was almost impossible to read. But other selections she could skim as she paused on each page to marvel at its secrets, many of them contradictory.
The whole universe is composed of nine spheres. The celestial sphere is outermost, embracing all the rest … In it are fixed the eternally revolving movements of the stars. Beneath it are the seven underlying spheres, which revolve in an opposite direction.
Below the moon all is mortal and transitory. Above the moon, all is eternal. In the center is the Earth, never moving.
Her hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun are stationary, and that the Earth is borne in a circular orbit about the Sun.
It is easily demonstrated to anyone that the immutable aether is distributed over and penetrates all the wholly changeable substance around the Earth.