The workmen raise another lift of scaffolding past the windows of the library; they chatter happily amongst themselves and I catch snippets of light-hearted banter: a running play-fight of exchanged insults and mock threats. Yesterday I could see their faces and hear them clearly but today I see only their boots and ankles and miss much of what they say amongst the general noise of their work. I am sorry to have lost their company even though they could not have realised that I was sharing it.
What I do is often a work of intellectual scaffolding. I take apparently all too lightweight a framework and erect upon it a platform, no more often than a confidence trick of conclusions and imagined certainties. Such is the work of a scholar, a monk and a historian in these days. Carrying pales of mortar along a scaffold gantry seven floors above the central courtyard would be a great deal safer I hazard to guess than my career, certainly intellectually and morally; at times even physically.
Yes, writing history can be a dangerous business. I cast my eyes about but see at the other desks only the faces of allies. I would not call them friends, but they at least know and accept the true work of this place.
I shuffle my papers and leave on top of the pile not the approved story-telling of the Ministry of Conformity, but my own notes, an attempt to chronicle the last days of the War of Religion.
Even to call the rebellion the War of Religion is a crime against the God-Emperor, after all how could religion provoke a war? In fact the word religion is hardly used today; when a way of life becomes so dominant, when the alternatives can hardly be imagined, let alone discussed, why does it need a name?
It takes me a few moments to get over my own anxiety and to truly concentrate on the work at hand. I put myself in danger but also the sources I use should they by chance be identified by their scrawled and secret contributions.
Towards the very end of the war, long after the outcome had ceased to be in doubt, some of the die-hard rebels took to isolated strongholds to continue the fight. Their alternatives were grim. In one of the remote villages of the mountains of what is now Western Province one remnant force, probably not even half a company of the rebel army, had taken refuge.They may have been part of McClintock's Column, 3rd Army, but by then such niceties of the order of battle had become meaningless.
They had nowhere else to go and had probably decided that even dispersal had become impossible. Two full companies of the Cardinal-General's Assault Guards, supported, depending on which sources you believe, by either one or two heavy hover tanks, had them penned in. The outer defences had fallen in a few bloody skirmishes and only the village, deep in the canyon, remained.
The long last night of the seige would have come to an end with the call to prayer. In the village the rebels too would have heard it, the stern demand to give worship to His Celestial Highness; they would have realised that with the end of prayers the attack would be launched.
From two company camps and from the hatches of fighting vehicles more than two hundred men would have heeded the summons to collective worship. The men were a mixed bunch, some veterans of the war's hardest and bloodiest battles, others no more than boys. Those very boys walk the streets now wearing still their ribbons and their commissions, three decades long enough for them to forget that they came only late to the suppression of the rebellion.
Within minutes of the last chorus and the loudest amens the AGs were back in their squads and in their vehicles; weapons were checked and armour fastened. The bravado and the jokes were those of an army victorious; the enemy would be taught today what it meant to meet the AGs.
From the most advanced position, as was normal after the Holy Court issued Decree 740e, a junior officer went forward, quite out in the open and carrying only a megaphone. Although there had been notable exceptions, the rebels rarely seem to have fired more than a warning shot or two at envoys of this type, and by the final actions of the war their ammunition was so scarce that the AGs feared not even this gesture.
'In accordance with Holy Decree 740e, His Most Merciful and Holy Majesty the Immortal God-Emperor instructs and commands all rebels, heretics and self-styled rationalists to surrender immediately. His Holy Majesty generously offers re-education and rehabilitation to all those who, even at this late stage, come willingly back into the warm embrace of the Holy Court. Holy Decree 740e commands the forces of the Holy Court to grant one quarter of an hour for surrender after the decree is read. That period begins now.'
Before the youthful officer had made his way back to the line the answer had come that day. A rough pole stood atop one of the flat roofs of the village; a lone figure appeared next to it and slowly, jerkily, as if the cord ran over a reluctant pulley, he hauled a plain black flag into the morning air. The warm breeze caught the symbol of defiance and despair and it snapped taut, animated and clear to see against the vermillion and coral of the sky.
Just less than a quarter of an hour later the main gun of a hover tank reduced the flag, flag-pole and the house from which it flew to little more than dust.
The Rationalists were known for their use of deep bunkers and networks of tunnels; sometimes they would create subterranean fortifications in a matter of hours and lie, their forces intact, beneath settlements obliterated on the surface. The armies of the Holy Court did have small amounts of Off-world (another heresy now) ordinance capable of destroying such bunkers, but His Majesty the God-Emperor had personally intervened after the first few towns had become collections of craters, saying apparently 'better to spill the last drop of my brave soldiers' blood than destroy every building in every town. We will chase the rebels out and the peace will be all the more easily won.' The shattered townscapes and the huge bodycounts that followed gave the lie to the God-Emperor's wisdom, but the bunker busters remained at their depots in the latter stages of the war, and to this day as far as I know.
'Spare no-one' the Colonel intoned over the comm-net. 'Our orders are clear, save only for infants too young to understand the folly of their elders, all must die. We are the fighting Assault Guards! we are invincible! Let your faith be your armour and let your conviction carry you to victory!'
It is difficult to speculate about the rebels in the village on that morning. We do know that Rationalist forces late on in the war had begun to elect their officers and that they remained, as they had been from the start, mixed units. The God-Emperor's men were often warned to beware the women soldiers of the rebels; their wiles and their use of seduction. The wartime propaganda placed a great deal of emphasis on the difference between the "rebel whores" and the "women of the Empire".
They must have waited knowing that they would all die that day. Even if by some miracle the first assault had been driven back, such a victory would be short-lived indeed. Still they were clearly determined to fight and those of the villagers who remained seem to have been willing to fight and to die with them. Afterwards bodies of old men and women were found, hands still clinging to rifles, and shattered corpses of children were uncovered holding pistols or carrying grenades and ammunition. The defenders had no chance.
I look up from my desk to see that Brother Armand has entered the library. As nonchalantly as I can I shuffle my papers once again and an innocuous celebration of the God-Emperor's architectural talents comes into clear view.
'Brother' Armand greets me with his supercilious smile. Why me today I don't know.
'Brother Armand' I reply, 'I trust that you are well today.'
His eyebrows rise as if he suspects that I am being insolent, but the smile does not alter. 'I am well. I trust that the work outside does nothing to blunt the excellence of your work this day.'
'No indeed Brother. I thank you for your concern but it is easier now that they have moved on to the floor above.'
'Good. I will leave you then to your work. I am sure that you are aware that the Abbot wants all projects finished in time for the visit of the Cardinal-General.'
'Indeed' I say with a grin and a nod, 'I am aware.'
Armand strides away through the long library and I try, not altogether successfully, to stop staring at his back as he leaves. Hateful man. I look at my left hand; it is not shaking. My heart is hardly fluttering in my chest. I straighten and move papers around again in front of me. Only doing this makes me realise that my neck, my back and my chest are covered with a cheen of cold sweat that sticks uncomfortably as I move against my clothes. I have not lost my fear and that is no bad thing.
Some stories survive from the heat and confusion of assaults like the one that took place that day. For reasons that will become obvious I like most of all the accounts of meetings between Imperial soldiers and the women fighters of the rebel armies.
I imagine some raw recruit in the Assault Guards, some farm boy from the Northern Provinces where they do not even teach the girls to read and where women rarely leave the house, coming face-to-face with a battle-hardened Rationalist woman in the ruins of a stone-built house.
He stands there in battledress dusty for the first time, an Imperial issue, Off-world constructed, advanced combat rifle levelled nervously at the woman. His soft cheeks are flushed and there is no sign of a beard on his chin.
She wears combats torn and tattered from years in the field, the dark rebel green with insignia barely visible, threadbare but still clinging to shoulder and breast. Her pistol, empty, hangs at her side. I imagine that she has raven black hair and dark brown eyes; I imagine that she is beautiful; even the lines at the corners of her eyes add to her beauty. She is lean. She smiles at the boy soldier and scares him out of his wits. He takes a step backwards, he does not shoot.
'You don't want to kill me soldier' she says and steps towards him, 'I can see that you don't. Why don't you let me go? No-one will ever know.'
She is closer to him now and still he doesn't shoot. He is thinking that she looks like one of his aunts, or that he just can't kill a woman, but that he must. He hesitates and hears someone coming from the rubble-filled room at his back. His eyes are away from the woman rebel's face for a split second, and she moves faster than he can draw another breath or re-aim his rifle; she side-steps and brings her other hand, not the one with the pistol, around from her back. The boys cries out as the long blade of the bayonet, Imperial issue, enters his side. He fires off an ill-directed burst that shatters nothing but stone and then falls to the floor, breathing his last and tasting blood as it runs copiously from his mouth.
The next Imperial through the door fires without a second thought and the rebel woman staggers back under the fusilade. She is dead in moments, a crumpled and anonymous casualty who will have no more memorial than the disturbed earth pushed back over a crammed pit.
Fantasy more than history I know. I can piece together many such encounters from the tales I have discovered, it is just that in my imagination the fight assumes too much significance to help the functioning of a disciplined historical mind.
This has been my problem since I first had a chat with Brother Simon. I was already writing what you might call "free history" before that, I had been tutored by Brother Lawrence and was well aware that the houses of our order were the refuge for many who had Rationalist leanings. How I miss Lawrence.
But it was Simon who ruffled my black hair and whispered to me in the kitchen when I was a boy. 'You know how you come to be here lad?' he asked conspiratorially.'Do you know?'
'No Brother' I had said shyly and tried to pull away from his tight embrace. His breath was sour.
'You, my boy are special. And you are lucky. I know that you are clever too; you won't be working down here with me too often I can tell you.' He smiled and shook me in his encircling left arm, pushing his right hand through my hair again. 'You get yourself up to the library after and have a read of Decree 740e; work out when you were born and then have a little think about how you come to have been here all of your short life.'
Decree 740e had contained general orders about captured infants and when Simon had given me that kindly talk of his I was all of sixteen. The rebellion had been finally extinguished fifteen years before.
And so the secret histories are written here at my desk, and at the desks of others who risk their lives to create some record of events otherwise destined to be lost in manufactured myth and propaganda. The intellectual and moral dangers I have spoken of are clear: those of us who scribble in this rebellion of pen and ink can all too readily in our turn throw some colourful myth up on the scaffolding of our imaginations.
The work I do is vital, but I see again today, nearly twenty years after Simon told me to look for my origins on some long still battlefield, that I must guard still against the dreams that so easily shape the accounts of what I would like to call history.
