1003 After the Thousandth Year
The moods of the Mediterranean were the moods of things opposite: sun/soil, night/day, truth/lie, birth/death, the mingling of opposites forever in contention. The universe was of axioms and dominions from which anything could be construed.
But sea peoples and northmen knew of mist and lost sun, the blendings of the sea at once giving and taking. They knew the heat that brings haze and the cold that brings rain, that the houses of neighbor become but distance-thin daubs, that the blue and grey land is made of illusions, that the vessel rounding the point in the brushed sun’s glaze is indistinguishable between a husband’s return and a pirate sliding landward to plunder. A knowledge of the sea says nothing is what it seems to be.
Water was sound’s perfume — eddies, slow places, flow without rhythm, the susu susuru sibilance of water over smooth stones The spring began everything the sea would one day be. Flowing its own way, thief of good soil, its nestling was so soft that it alone could melt mountains. Wherever water was, they knew, the bones of the earth could be broken by its being.
The family came to the place where a local lord had granted them the use of a spring. They would live there for the rest of their lives, so they brought oxen, wagons, axes, knives, chickens, children, dogs. They made shacks for themselves, saving the hearts of the trees for the timbers of the church, keeping for themselves only the limbs, twigs, leaves. The children kept the fires going, the women foraged and cooked, and the men cut the stone and carved it. When it was winter they threw the stones into the fires then cut them when they were warm.
Hence they used the spring’s trickle well. First they flumed the flow to pool it behind a downstream dam. That drained the higher ground where they wanted to build. They netted the pond for fish until the first of the pigs grew fat. Then they used the water to break into remnants stones too big for oxen but not for fire. They dug a pit beneath a boulder as deep as they could spade. They built a fire in the pit, first limbs and then logs, fueling the heat until the bottom of the boulder was dull red and the top hissed steam when water was flicked on. Then the coals were buried, the soil tamped hard, and they brought bucket after bucket of water from the spring and poured it over the stone’s top until with no warning there would come a deep snap and a cloud of ashes and steam would hiss high. Then they cheered as the oxen took away the pieces for the foundation of their church.
For the millennium year of 1000 had come and gone and the world hadn’t ended. Every sign in the books and the stars had said the end was nigh. But perhaps they hadn’t been prepared. Perhaps they had learned only to avoid sin, not how to love God. So the water of life gave them the will to go on. Eyes that had closed last night to dread now opened to hope. From the tellers of the time there came these words:
So on the threshold of the aforesaid Thousandth Year, some two or three years after it, it befell them all, especially in Italy and Gaul, that the fabric of the world should be rebuilt. Every nation rivaled the other which should
worship in the seemliest house. It was as though the world had shaken off her old robes and was clothing herself everywhere in garments of white churches.
The priest told them the shape he wanted built, a shape he had learned from a forgotten conqueror they called Roman. They knew the direction they wanted the building to face: east, toward Jerusalem, so that every step toward the altar was a step closer to God.
But the rest had to be learned: how to harden crude iron into chisels by heating it to red-yellow then pounding it then quenching it sizzling in buckets of water. Doing this over and over again until the metal rang when it struck the stone. How to break slate loose from its layers by driving wooden stakes into slabs and then flooding them with water until the wood swelled and the slab split free. How to design the cuts of the pieces using fingers and water on an chalk-dusted table. How to hold lines up with circles so that the roof became like a barrel turned inside out, not clenched but thrust. How to arc stone across space by cutting it into shapes that would pinch themselves together so tightly that once the trestle was removed, even if the rest of the structure would someday fall, the part that would remain was also the most delicate.
They began with oaks, and of those, only trees thicker around than the village’s oldest ox, whose heartwood was so dense it could bear almost any load. They cut off the outer wood while the tree was still standing, then left it to weather a year. They used the soft layers for shingles and the bark and acorns to tan leather.
Then they cut the trees down and squared the limbs and trunks with adzes. Oxen dragged the pieces to a stream that had been dammed into a pond. The beams soaked there ten years, weighted beneath heavy stones, allowing the water to take its own time to carry away the sap. Then the beams were dragged out and levered onto trestles in sheds so air could reach them on all sides. There they dried another ten years.
The men who raised the beams took the same care. No beam was left unexposed to the air, so that be the day dry or wet, there was a bare place where dampness could escape. Nails of bent iron would molder away their strength but dovetails would not, so every roof timber reflected the geometry through which the carpenter preserved the way of his world.
Because the family had cleared the land around their church, the local lord allowed them to farm it under his protection in fief, in satisfaction of the words of the canons of the time, that no land or man should be without a
lord. When the family was later confirmed in the church by the lord’s bishop, the lord attended the observance but would not yield to them permission to adopt his name.
They therefore took unto themselves the name of the fief itself, to last as long as the family should live.
Thus the Lefiefs began.
