The Reckoning of Saint Donatian

The clerk had been told to leave the name unwritten until morning. That was the part he remembered afterward: the instruction had seemed ordinary.

There were always names waiting for permission. Men whose debts required a gentler word, families whose standing depended upon a different grandfather, gifts that became obligations when the recipient learned who had sent them. His work was to make such matters legible. He had not been employed to ask whether they were true.

Now a man stood at his table with mud drying on the hem of his cloak.

“Have you copied it?”

“Not yet.”

The man looked toward the door before answering. From the church came the faint sound of movement, benches shifting, someone clearing his throat. The clerk set his pen beside the unfinished entry.

“Then leave it.”

It was not the instruction that frightened him. It was the relief with which the man spoke it.

Outside, the Burg was waking. A woman carried bread beneath a cloth. Two boys disputed ownership of a dropped coin. In a few moments the bells would gather all those separate mornings into one familiar sound.

The clerk looked at the blank space where the name should have been.

He could still fill it. He could still finish an ordinary task before anyone decided that ordinary tasks had become dangerous.