MARIABRONN — Sharms Debris

Opens on the monastery courtyard — slate-grey stone, geometric arches, every line true, and at the dead centre of it a chestnut tree clawing green and brown across the order of the stone. Goldmund, nineteen, finds a bead of sap on his fingers and looks at them the way a man looks at blood.

ACT ONE - THE CAGE

EXT. MARIABRONN MONASTERY - COURTYARD - DAY

Slate-grey stone. Geometric arches, parallel pathways, vertical pillars. Every line true.

At the dead centre of it, a massive CHESTNUT TREE. Gnarled, asymmetric, clawing green and brown across the order of the stone.

GOLDMUND, nineteen, stands at the base of the trunk in a rough novice robe. Golden. Unlined. Beautiful in a way that has not yet cost him anything.

He looks up into the bark.

His hand finds a bead of sap oozing from a crack in the wood. Sticky. Amber.

A stone bell tolls.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

He draws his hand back. His fingers are stained.

He looks at them the way a man looks at blood.

INT. NOVITIATE WASHROOM - MORNING

Long stone troughs. Freezing well water. Thirty NOVICES in two rows, aligned to the inch. High arrow-slits admit grey light.

Nobody speaks. Hands break the surface -- slosh, splash. Linen scrapes on skin.

NARZISS, twenty, at the centre basin. He washes with clinical efficiency, spine straight as a blade. The cold does not reach his face.

Opposite him, Goldmund lowers his hands into the water and leaves them there. He watches his own reflection in the trough.

A droplet falls from his chin.

SPLASH.

The reflection breaks apart.

Narziss looks up. Across the water, their eyes hold.

He does not correct the boy.

INT. SCRIPTORIUM - CONTINUOUS

A vast, high-vaulted hall. MONKS in parallel rows at slanted desks. Quills scratch on vellum -- dry, papery, relentless.

Gothic windows cut clean stripes of white light across the floor. Goldmund walks the centre aisle through them. Light. Dark. Light. Dark.

He sits. Before him, a sheet of flawless Greek. He dips his quill.

ABBOT DANIEL, sixties, arrives at his shoulder without sound.

ABBOT DANIEL

Your hand is as steady as your intellect. It is flawless.

GOLDMUND

Thank you, Father.

ABBOT DANIEL

Your father wrote to me again.

Goldmund's quill stops.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

He asks whether you have taken your vows yet. He asks it every spring. He is a man in a great hurry to be rid of something.

GOLDMUND

He wants me to serve God.

ABBOT DANIEL

He wants the ledger closed.

Daniel looks down the rows of bowed heads. Every monk at the same angle. Breathing in time.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

It is not the worst reason a boy ever came here. The world outside these walls is a slaughterhouse, Goldmund. In here at least the blood stays in the ink.

GOLDMUND

There is blood in the letters, Father. Even here.

Daniel considers him. Something flickers -- interest, or its shadow.

ABBOT DANIEL

Yes. But here it does not stain your hands.

He moves away down the aisle.

Goldmund's hand begins to tremble. A heavy droplet of black ink gathers at the tip of the quill.

He tries to steady his wrist. The wrist jerks.

The ink falls. It splatters across the pristine Greek -- a dark, ragged wound on a perfect page.

The scratching of eighty quills rises around him until it sounds like insects in a wall.

He stands. The stool screeches back across the stone.

Every monk in the hall freezes.

Goldmund does not look at them. He walks out.

INT. CHAPTER HOUSE - MORNING

Stone benches in a ring. The whole community seated in order of seniority. ABBOT DANIEL at the centre, hands folded.

A NOVICE, sixteen, kneels on the flags in the middle of the ring.

NOVICE

I broke a jug in the kitchen. I did not say so. I let Brother Anselm believe it was the cat.

Nobody moves.

ABBOT DANIEL

Is that all.

NOVICE

And I thought about it for two days before I came in here.

ABBOT DANIEL

That is the fault. Not the jug.

He does not raise his voice at any point.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

Last place in the refectory until Sunday. You will eat after the cats.

The novice bows and returns to the bench. Not one face in the room reacts.

Goldmund sits in the second row, watching the machine work.

Beside him, Narziss is entirely at ease. He belongs to this the way a rib belongs to a chest.

Across the ring, FATHER LORENZ, sixties, is watching Narziss with a flat, patient dislike.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

Anyone else.

Silence. It goes on a long time.

INT. CLOISTER CORRIDOR - DAY

Narziss and Goldmund walk the vaulted corridor side by side, steps clicking in unison.

NARZISS

You spoiled a page this morning.

GOLDMUND

My hand slipped.

NARZISS

No.

They walk. Goldmund waits. Narziss offers nothing.

GOLDMUND

Then say what it was.

NARZISS

I don't know yet.

GOLDMUND

You always know.

NARZISS

I know what you are not. That is a different kind of knowledge and it comes much earlier.

He stops beneath an archway.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

You are not a scholar. You have never once asked me a question you wanted the answer to. You ask me questions so that I will keep talking.

Goldmund flushes.

GOLDMUND

That isn't true.

NARZISS

Ask me one now.

Goldmund opens his mouth. Nothing comes.

Narziss walks on.

INT. SCHOOLROOM - DAY

A bare cell. Two stools. A window too high to see out of, which does not stop Goldmund trying.

Narziss reads a line of Greek aloud.

GOLDMUND

(repeating it, badly)

NARZISS

Again.

Goldmund repeats it. Better.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Again.

Goldmund's eyes have gone to the window. A sound out there -- wind in the chestnut, and something else, a cart on the road.

Narziss watches him not be in the room.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Again.

And Goldmund says the whole line back, perfectly, without looking away from the window. The accents, the quantities, all of it.

Narziss sets down the book.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Now say what it means.

GOLDMUND

I don't know.

NARZISS

You just said it flawlessly.

GOLDMUND

I said the sound of it.

He looks back into the room and finds Narziss staring at him.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

What?

Narziss picks the book back up.

NARZISS

Nothing. Again.

INT. ABBOT'S PARLOUR - DAY

A stiff, cold room used for visitors and nothing else.

GOLDMUND'S FATHER, fifties, stands in good travelling clothes with his gloves in his hand. He has not sat down and he is not going to.

Goldmund comes in.

FATHER

You've grown.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

FATHER

The Abbot says you write a good hand.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

FATHER

Good.

He looks at the window. Then at the floor. He has been in the room ninety seconds and he has not looked at his son's face.

FATHER (CONT'D)

When will you take the vows.

GOLDMUND

In the spring, perhaps.

FATHER

The spring.

He turns the gloves over in his hands.

Goldmund takes a breath.

GOLDMUND

What was her name?

His father goes completely still.

FATHER

Whose.

GOLDMUND

My mother's.

FATHER

You've no business with that.

GOLDMUND

I can't remember her face.

A long silence.

FATHER

Good.

He puts his gloves on.

FATHER (CONT'D)

I'll write to the Abbot in the spring.

He goes past his son to the door, close enough to touch him, and does not.

Goldmund stands alone in the cold room.

EXT. MONASTERY COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

Goldmund comes out into the geometry of the courtyard.

He crosses it, all the way to the middle, to the chestnut tree.

He puts both hands flat on the bark and stands there with his forehead against it, in full view of every window in the building.

INT. MUNIMENT ROOM - NIGHT

A low vaulted room full of chests. Narziss alone with a lamp and an enormous ledger open on a slab.

He turns pages. He knows exactly what he is looking for and roughly where it will be.

He finds it.

He reads. He reads it twice.

Then he sits down on the edge of the slab and looks at nothing for a long time.

He closes the ledger, puts the lamp out, and goes.

INT. ABBOT DANIEL'S STUDY - NIGHT

A small fire. Daniel in a chair. Narziss standing.

ABBOT DANIEL

You want to take the boy's grammar away from him.

NARZISS

I want to tell him what he is.

ABBOT DANIEL

Those are the same sentence.

He lets the fire crack for a while.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

Father Lorenz has asked me twice whether it is proper for a novice of twenty to be teaching. He does not mean the teaching.

NARZISS

No.

ABBOT DANIEL

Then be careful what you make it look like.

Narziss says nothing.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

If you wake him, he will go. You understand that. He will not thank you and he will not write and you will be in this house for fifty years.

NARZISS

Yes.

ABBOT DANIEL

Then don't.

Narziss looks into the fire.

NARZISS

He is the only thing in this building that is alive. I would rather lose that than keep it in a jar.

Daniel regards him for a long moment.

ABBOT DANIEL

That is either the best sentence I have heard in this room, or the worst.

He waves a hand.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

Go to bed, Narziss.

EXT. MONASTERY WALL - NIGHT

Two novices, KONRAD and ADOLF, both eighteen, crouch at the base of the wall where an ash tree has half-toppled against the stone.

Konrad hisses up into the dark. Goldmund's face appears over the parapet.

KONRAD

(whispering)

Are you coming, or are you praying?

Goldmund looks back once, into the black courtyard, at the chestnut tree.

He swings his leg over.

EXT. FOREST PATH - NIGHT

The three of them running, stumbling, laughing with their hands over their mouths. Wet leaves. Cold air burning in the lungs.

They pass a wayside shrine -- a stone niche, a crude weathered MADONNA, her face worn nearly smooth by a hundred years of rain.

Konrad and Adolf run past her.

Goldmund stops.

He stands in front of the little carving. He reaches up and puts two fingers on the ruined face.

KONRAD (O.S.)

Goldmund!

He takes his hand away and runs.

EXT. VILLAGE - BEHIND THE TAVERN - NIGHT

Music and shouting from inside. A bonfire throws light up a stone wall.

Konrad and Adolf are already talking to two village girls. Goldmund hangs back at the edge of the firelight, hands inside his sleeves, monastic, ridiculous.

A young woman crosses the yard with an armful of kindling. LISE, early twenties, brown-armed, unhurried. She sees him.

She looks at him for a while. He does not know what to do with his face.

She sets down the kindling and comes over.

LISE

You're from up there.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

LISE

Do they let you out?

GOLDMUND

No.

That decides something for her. She takes his wrist -- not gently -- and leads him out of the light.

EXT. FIELD BEYOND THE VILLAGE - NIGHT

Long grass. The bonfire is a small orange thing far behind them.

Lise stops. She turns and looks at him and waits.

Goldmund does not move. He is shaking.

She takes his hand and puts it flat against the side of her neck, and holds it there, so that he can feel the pulse going in it.

His whole body changes.

She kisses him.

They go down into the grass.

EXT. FIELD - LATER

Goldmund lies on his back looking up. Lise is already sitting up, pulling her shift straight, businesslike.

She looks down at him and laughs -- not unkindly.

LISE

You're crying.

GOLDMUND

I'm not.

She wipes his cheek with her thumb and shows him the wet on it.

LISE

Come back Thursday.

She stands and walks away through the grass.

Goldmund does not move for a long time. Above him the sky is going grey at one edge.

INT. NOVITIATE DORMITORY - DAWN

Thirty narrow cots. Goldmund lies in his, fully dressed, boots still on, staring at the ceiling.

The dawn bell begins.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

He does not get up.

INT. CHAPTER HOUSE - MORNING

The ring of benches. KONRAD and ADOLF kneel together on the flags. Both of them grey in the face.

KONRAD

We went over the east wall. On the feast of Saint Martin. We went down to the village and we were there until it was light.

ABBOT DANIEL

How many times.

KONRAD

Once, Father.

ABBOT DANIEL

How many times.

A pause.

KONRAD

Four.

Daniel nods slowly.

ABBOT DANIEL

Bread and water until Advent. And you will lie down across the refectory door at every meal for a week, so that your brothers have to step over you to eat.

The two of them bow their heads.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

Was there a third?

Silence.

Konrad's eyes flick -- one twitch, up into the second row of benches -- and back down to the flagstones.

KONRAD

No, Father.

In the second row, Goldmund sits absolutely still.

He does not stand up.

He does not stand up, and the moment goes past, and it is gone.

Across the ring, Narziss is looking directly at him.

INT. REFECTORY DOORWAY - DAY

Konrad lies face down across the threshold, arms out.

The community files in to eat, stepping over him one by one without a glance.

Goldmund reaches the door. He stops.

He steps over Konrad and goes in.

INT. MONASTERY LIBRARY - NIGHT

Towering shelves vanish upward into shadow. One oil lamp on an oak table holds a circle of gold in all that cold space.

Narziss at the table, writing. Goldmund at the edge of the light.

NARZISS

(not looking up)

You have missed three lessons.

GOLDMUND

I've been unwell.

NARZISS

You've been over the wall.

Silence.

GOLDMUND

The others whisper about us. They say you're too fond of me.

NARZISS

The others will be copying psalters until they die. Their opinion is not a weather I steer by.

He sets down the pen.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Was she kind to you?

Goldmund goes white.

GOLDMUND

Don't.

NARZISS

I'm not mocking you. I'm asking. I have no way of knowing what that is. I never will.

Goldmund comes into the light and sits down heavily across from him.

GOLDMUND

I don't know what's happening to me.

NARZISS

Something ordinary. It happens to everyone outside this building and to nobody inside it.

He closes the book. Soft, heavy.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I can define a flower for you. Its genus, its properties, its place in the hierarchy. I will never once see one.

He says it flatly. It is not a confession, it is an inventory.

GOLDMUND

Then teach me to see one.

NARZISS

I can't. That's the entire difficulty.

Goldmund puts his head in his hands.

GOLDMUND

I want to stay.

NARZISS

You will. You'll be back over the wall on Thursday and back in your cot by Lauds and in eleven years you'll be sub-prior and your hands will shake every spring and you'll never know why.

A beat.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Or you'll go, and be back before the first snow. You've never been hungry, Goldmund. Not one day.

Goldmund lifts his head and looks at him.

Narziss picks the pen back up. That is the end of it.

INT. MONASTERY INFIRMARY - NIGHT

Goldmund in a wooden cot, drenched, eyes enormous and glassy.

Somewhere far off the monks are chanting, but the sound arrives warped and metallic, like insects in a jar.

Narziss sits on a hard stool, dabbing his forehead with a wet cloth.

GOLDMUND

Amo, amas, amat. The letters are crawling on my skin. They're biting my throat.

NARZISS

The grammar is gone. You're safe.

Goldmund's hand claws at his own throat. His nails leave thin red lines.

GOLDMUND

There's a stone on my chest. My father put it there. He told me to forget her.

Narziss catches both wrists and pins them to the mattress.

NARZISS

Forget who?

GOLDMUND

(screaming)

I can't! There's a black hole where her face was!

Narziss does not let go. He leans down.

NARZISS

Then start with something smaller. What did she smell of?

Goldmund's back arches off the cot.

FLASH -- Golden hair blowing wild against an overexposed sky.

FLASH -- A sun-warmed shoulder. A silver chain lying against skin.

FLASH -- Female laughter, ecstatic, gone.

He collapses into the pillows. Tears run back into his hair.

GOLDMUND

(barely there)

Wet moss. And elderwood.

A breath.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

She didn't wear a veil. She danced. She laughed at the church bells.

Narziss releases his wrists. Very slowly, he puts his hand on the boy's matted hair and leaves it there.

He does not say anything at all.

Goldmund's eyes close.

Narziss sits on in the candlelight. He does not move for a long time.

INT. MONASTERY CHAPEL - DAY

Goldmund on a low bench in a side chapel. Recovered. Clear-eyed. Something in him has been let off a chain.

Narziss stands at a distance, against a pillar.

GOLDMUND

(without turning)

I can't pray to your God any more.

NARZISS

Mine is a concept. Nobody was ever meant to pray to a concept.

GOLDMUND

When I look at the altar I don't see the spirit. I see the wood. I see the paint on the hands of the saints.

He turns.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

I want to know who carved them.

Narziss says nothing.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Say something.

NARZISS

What would you like me to say.

GOLDMUND

Tell me to stay.

A long silence. Narziss's face does not move at all. It costs him everything.

NARZISS

The sun is high. The chestnut is shedding its husks.

He turns and walks out of the chapel.

INT. MONASTERY FOYER - NIGHT

Goldmund at the massive iron-bound doors. His hand shakes on the latch.

NARZISS (O.S.)

If you open that, the stone won't remember you.

Goldmund stops. Turns. Narziss is in the shadow of the archway behind him, dead centre.

GOLDMUND

I can't breathe here. The grammar's dead. I'm going to find what's breathing.

NARZISS

Before the snow.

GOLDMUND

What?

NARZISS

You'll be back before the snow.

Goldmund looks at him a moment longer. Then he throws his weight against the door.

It grinds open. Night pours in -- wind, the chestnut thrashing, crickets, wet mud.

He goes out.

Narziss stands in the empty foyer with the door swinging.

He does not close it.

ACT TWO - THE ROAD

EXT. FOREST ROAD - DAY

Rain. Goldmund walking, the novice robe already filthy at the hem, no shoes worth the name.

EXT. DITCH - NIGHT

Sleeping in a ditch under a hedge, curled hard around himself, teeth going.

EXT. FARMYARD - DAY

Begging at a door. It shuts.

EXT. TURNIP FIELD - DUSK

On his knees in the mud, digging up a frost-blackened turnip with his fingers, eating it dirt and all.

Snow starts to fall.

He stops chewing. He looks up into it.

He laughs -- once, wrecked, out loud -- and keeps eating.

EXT. MANOR GATE - DAY

Snow on a stone gatehouse. Goldmund at the bars, barefoot, the novice robe grey to the knee with road.

A SERVANT looks at him with no interest whatsoever.

SERVANT

Nothing here.

GOLDMUND

I can write.

SERVANT

Everyone can write.

GOLDMUND

Latin.

The servant stops. He looks at the hands on the bars -- cracked, filthy, and the fingernails all the wrong shape for a beggar.

INT. MANOR - GREAT HALL - DAY

A fire the size of a door. THE KNIGHT, fifties, in a chair, holding a sheet of vellum Goldmund has just written on.

He cannot read it. He holds it as though he can.

THE KNIGHT

What does it say.

GOLDMUND

"The knight received the pilgrim at the ninth hour, and gave him meat."

The Knight looks up over the page.

THE KNIGHT

Did I.

GOLDMUND

Not yet.

A pause. Then the Knight barks out one enormous laugh.

THE KNIGHT

I went to Rome. Forty-one days on the road each way, and there is not one soul under this roof who has ever wanted to hear a word of it. My own daughters yawn in my face.

He taps the vellum.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

You'll write it. All of it. In the Latin, so it lasts.

GOLDMUND

Yes, my Lord.

THE KNIGHT

Feed him. And burn that robe.

INT. SCULLERY - DAY

Steam. A wooden tub. Goldmund stands in it while VICTOR, thirties, pours water over his shoulders without ceremony or gentleness.

Folded on a stool: wool hose, a linen shirt, and a velvet doublet the colour of dried blood.

Victor looks at the doublet a moment too long.

VICTOR

That was his son's.

GOLDMUND

He has a son?

VICTOR

Had.

He pours another jug over him.

VICTOR (CONT'D)

Eleven years I've been in this house. You've been in it an hour.

GOLDMUND

I'm sorry.

Victor stops pouring.

VICTOR

What for?

Goldmund doesn't have an answer for that.

Victor almost smiles. It doesn't quite get there, but it starts.

VICTOR (CONT'D)

You're not what I thought.

INT. MANOR STUDY - DAY

Hard winter light through one leaded window.

Goldmund at the oak desk, quill going. The Knight paces behind him. In the window seat, LYDIA, twenties, with an embroidery hoop.

THE KNIGHT

-- and on the fourth day out of Bologna we were set upon by nine men.

Goldmund writes.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

Eleven men.

The quill stops. Goldmund goes back and scratches something out.

In the window seat, without lifting her head from the hoop, Lydia smiles.

The Knight has gone to the window. Something real arrives in him and his voice changes for it.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

There was a church at the top of a stair. Hundreds of steps. And the whole city underneath it, all of it, gold in the evening.

A beat.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

I stood up there and I thought -- nobody I know will ever see this.

Silence. Goldmund waits with the quill up.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

Don't write that. Write the nine men.

He goes out.

INT. MANOR STUDY - CONTINUOUS

Just the two of them now.

Nobody speaks. The scratch of his quill. The click and slide of her needle.

His hand pauses.

He watches her fingers on the silver needle. He watches her chest rise and fall under heavy green velvet.

Lydia stops sewing. She raises her eyes and catches him.

Neither of them looks away.

The needle stays where it is.

EXT. MANOR COURTYARD - DUSK

Goldmund crossing with an armful of vellum. Victor at the woodpile, splitting.

VICTOR

Clerk.

Goldmund stops.

VICTOR (CONT'D)

Can you do it in German? The writing.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

Victor sets down the axe. He takes something out of his tunic and holds it out on his palm.

A single silver coin, worn nearly smooth.

VICTOR

There's a woman in Kirchheim. Anna. She had a boy off me. I want her to know I'm not dead.

GOLDMUND

You don't have to pay me.

VICTOR

Nothing in this house is given to me.

He puts the coin into Goldmund's hand and closes the fingers over it himself.

VICTOR (CONT'D)

Tonight?

GOLDMUND

Tomorrow. He has me until Compline.

Victor picks up the axe.

VICTOR

Tomorrow.

INT. THE MANOR - DINING HALL - NIGHT

A long oak table lit by one iron candelabra. Deep amber, deeper shadow.

The Knight tears meat off a pheasant bone with his teeth. Lydia and her sister JULIA, eighteen, at his left. Goldmund at his right, in the doublet.

Back against the wall, in the dark, Victor with a flagon.

THE KNIGHT

(chewing)

It suits him. Doesn't it suit him.

Nobody answers. Victor looks at the wall.

Under the table, Julia's bare foot slides out of its slipper, climbs Goldmund's hose and presses against his knee.

His breath catches. His face doesn't move.

Across the table Julia drinks, eyes on him over the rim.

Beside her, Lydia's knuckles whiten on her napkin.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

You look pale, clerk. Does the taste of meat frighten a monk?

GOLDMUND

No, my Lord. I am only contemplating the warmth of your house.

THE KNIGHT

Victor. Pour the guest his wine. Don't stand there like a starved dog.

Victor comes forward and pours. His hand wobbles. Dark red spreads across the velvet sleeve.

VICTOR

(low)

My apologies. Master.

The Knight's fist comes down.

THE KNIGHT

Clumsy peasant. Get out. Sleep with the horses.

Victor backs into the dark. His eyes stay on the sleeve.

EXT. FROZEN POND - DAY

White sky. Julia is already out in the middle of the ice, sliding, arms out.

Lydia and Goldmund stand at the bank.

LYDIA

Julia. It creaks out there.

JULIA

(not turning)

Make me come back.

She looks over her shoulder at Goldmund.

JULIA (CONT'D)

You. Come and get me.

Goldmund glances at Lydia, then steps out onto the ice.

It groans under him. He goes carefully. Julia waits until he is close and then seizes both his hands and spins him, hard, and his feet go and he stays up only because she is holding him.

She is laughing. Her face is an inch from his.

JULIA (CONT'D)

There.

She lets go and skates away toward the bank, leaving him alone in the middle.

The ice makes a long sound underneath him.

He comes in slowly. Lydia holds out her hand at the edge and he takes it.

She does not let go of it for a beat longer than she needs to.

Behind them, from the gate, Victor watches all three of them go up to the house.

INT. GREAT HALL - NIGHT

The Knight and a STEWARD over a document. Lydia stands in front of the table with her hands folded.

THE KNIGHT

Von Sickingen will take her at Candlemas. He is forty-six and he has water on two sides.

LYDIA

Yes, Father.

THE KNIGHT

You might look at me when you say it.

She looks at him.

LYDIA

Yes, Father.

In the doorway, unnoticed, Goldmund with the ink.

INT. THE MANOR - LYDIA'S BEDCHAMBER - NIGHT

One candle. Everything outside its reach is black.

The door opens. Lydia comes in barefoot in her shift and closes it behind her.

Goldmund sits up on the mattress.

She crosses and sits on the very edge of the bed, upright, hands in her lap. A yard of linen between them.

LYDIA

You may not touch me.

GOLDMUND

Then why did you come.

LYDIA

Because I would rather sit here and not be touched than lie in my own room and not be touched.

She looks straight ahead at the wall.

LYDIA (CONT'D)

Candlemas is in five weeks.

A long silence.

GOLDMUND

May I look at you?

Lydia thinks about it for a long moment.

Then she turns her face toward him and lets him.

He looks at her. Just that. It goes on much longer than is comfortable.

Her breathing gets uneven.

LYDIA

Stop.

He stops.

She goes to the door and stands with her hand on it, her back to him.

LYDIA (CONT'D)

Tomorrow night.

INT. UPPER CORRIDOR - DAWN

Victor comes along the corridor with a lamp and a bucket.

He stops.

Ahead of him, a bare foot and the hem of a shift disappearing through a door that is not her own.

He stands there for a while.

Then he goes on with the bucket.

EXT. STABLE YARD - DAY

Victor forking muck. Goldmund crossing.

VICTOR

Did you write it.

Goldmund stops. A beat too long.

GOLDMUND

Not yet.

VICTOR

It's been nine days.

GOLDMUND

He has me every hour there is. I'll do it.

Victor straightens up and looks at the doublet.

VICTOR

You've got the coin, though.

Goldmund goes for his purse.

GOLDMUND

Here. Take it back --

VICTOR

No.

He says it flatly.

VICTOR (CONT'D)

Write it.

He goes back to the muck.

Neither of them will get another chance.

INT. LYDIA'S BEDCHAMBER - NIGHT

The same. Lydia on the edge of the bed. Closer this time.

Goldmund's hand lies open on the linen between them, palm up.

After a while, without looking, she puts two fingers into it.

That is all. It is enormous.

INT. LYDIA'S BEDCHAMBER - NIGHT (LATER)

Lydia lying down now, on top of the blanket, still in her shift, her back against his chest. His arm is around her and neither of them moves.

Her eyes are open in the dark.

LYDIA

If I let you, I would have to marry you. And he would kill you before the wedding.

GOLDMUND

I know.

LYDIA

So we will do this instead. For as long as the winter is.

The door opens.

JULIA stands there with a candle, in her nightdress, taking in the whole tableau -- the shift, the blanket, the arm, the nothing that is happening.

She smiles.

JULIA

Oh, Lydia.

Lydia is off the bed instantly.

LYDIA

Get out.

JULIA

(coming in, closing the door)

No. I don't think so.

She sets the candle down and looks at Goldmund with frank appraisal.

JULIA (CONT'D)

She hasn't let you, has she. Five weeks and she hasn't let you.

LYDIA

Julia --

JULIA

I would let you.

She says it to Goldmund, watching Lydia.

JULIA (CONT'D)

And if you tell him, sister, I'll tell him what I saw. So now it's mine as well.

Julia sits down on the bed between them, deliberately, and takes hold of the blanket.

Lydia stands in the middle of the floor, shaking.

Goldmund looks from one to the other. He is in a trap and he can see every wall of it.

INT. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE KNIGHT'S CHAMBER - CONTINUOUS

Victor stands in front of a heavy door with a lamp in his hand.

He stands there a long time.

He is not enjoying this. That is the thing to see.

He knocks.

INT. LYDIA'S BEDCHAMBER - CONTINUOUS

The door comes off its latch.

The Knight fills the frame, sword drawn, face gone purple. Behind him in the corridor Victor holds the lamp.

THE KNIGHT

Out of the bed.

The sisters scream. He drags Goldmund onto the stone by his hair and lays the flat of the blade against his neck.

THE KNIGHT (CONT'D)

Both of them. Both of my daughters.

GOLDMUND

My Lord, nothing has --

THE KNIGHT

Strip him. Throw him past the gate. If he is on my land at sunrise, hang him.

Goldmund's eyes find Lydia across the room.

She does not look away. She is memorising him.

EXT. MANOR COURTYARD - NIGHT

Snow coming down through torchlight.

Two men hold Goldmund's arms while a third cuts the doublet off him. It comes away in strips. Then the shirt. Then the boots.

They walk him to the gate in his linen and throw him through it.

He gets up out of the snow.

He looks back.

High in the wall, one lit window. Lydia stands in it and does not move.

Behind the men at the gate, in the dark, Victor. He is holding the lamp and he is looking at the ground.

The gate closes.

EXT. FROZEN RIVERBANK - NIGHT

Black water moving under thick ice.

Goldmund huddled on pine needles in a feverish half-sleep. Across a dead fire, Victor sits with a skinning knife, ribs showing through his tunic.

Victor crawls forward without a sound. His fingers work at Goldmund's belt.

Goldmund snaps awake and catches his wrist.

GOLDMUND

Victor.

VICTOR

Give me my coin.

GOLDMUND

What?

VICTOR

My coin. Anna's coin.

Goldmund goes for the purse with his free hand.

GOLDMUND

It's here. It's right here, take it --

But Victor is already past it. The coin stopped being the thing days ago.

Victor throws his whole starved weight onto him. The knife goes into the needles, forgotten. Both hands close on Goldmund's throat.

No sound but the wet scrape of a windpipe going flat.

Goldmund's vision tunnels. His clawing hand finds a river stone.

He swings it up.

CRACK.

Blood. He swings again, and again, in pure animal terror.

CRACK. CRACK.

Victor rolls sideways into the mud. His chest rattles once. Stops.

Goldmund crawls to him and puts a hand on his chest. Nothing.

His mouth opens wide. No sound comes out of it at all.

EXT. RIVERBANK - DAWN

Goldmund sitting exactly where he was. The body exactly where it is. Snow has settled on both of them equally.

He opens his right hand.

The coin is in it. Worn nearly smooth.

He looks at it for a long time.

Then he leans over and puts it into Victor's palm, and closes the dead fingers on it the way Victor closed his.

He gets up. He looks at his hands.

He walks away downriver.

INT. CONVENT PARLOUR - DAY

A bare room divided by an iron grille.

On the far side of it, in the white and black of a novice, sits LYDIA.

Her hair is gone. Her hands are folded exactly as they were folded in front of her father's table.

On this side of the grille, an older woman -- an AUNT, in travelling clothes -- is talking, and has been talking for some time.

AUNT

-- and he will not have your name said in the house. Not at table, not by the servants. Julia is to marry the von Sickingen man in the spring instead, which she does not deserve and will not enjoy.

Lydia says nothing.

AUNT (CONT'D)

Have you nothing at all to say?

Lydia looks at her through the grille.

LYDIA

Was it snowing? That night. After.

AUNT

What?

LYDIA

When they put him out. Was it still snowing.

The aunt stares at her.

AUNT

I have no idea.

Lydia nods slowly, as though a small practical matter has been settled, and looks at her hands again.

INT. MARIABRONN - ABBOT'S CELL - DAY

A bare room. ABBOT DANIEL lies in a narrow bed, grey, folded down to almost nothing.

Narziss sits beside him with a book he is not reading.

ABBOT DANIEL

They'll elect you.

NARZISS

They shouldn't.

ABBOT DANIEL

No. But they will.

His hand moves an inch on the blanket toward Narziss's. Narziss does not take it.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

The golden one. Did he ever write?

NARZISS

No.

ABBOT DANIEL

Mm.

He closes his eyes.

ABBOT DANIEL (CONT'D)

You let him go. That was the one warm thing you ever did.

Narziss sits very still.

INT. CHAPTER HOUSE - DAY

The ring of benches. Every seat full. The Abbot's chair is empty.

The community votes the old way: each man in turn walks to the front and lays a folded paper in a bowl.

FATHER LORENZ walks up and lays his in and walks back, and his face says everything about how he has voted.

Narziss sits in his place and does not watch any of it.

They count. It does not take long.

The PRIOR crosses to Narziss and holds out the ring.

Narziss looks at it in the man's palm for slightly too long.

Then he puts out his hand.

INT. ABBOT'S CELL - NIGHT

The room Daniel died in. Stripped. New linen on the bed.

Narziss stands in the middle of it in the new ring, holding a candle, looking at the walls of the rest of his life.

He does not put the candle down.

EXT. WAYSIDE CHURCH - DAY

A small stone church at a crossroads. Goldmund, filthy, half-starved, pushes the door.

INT. WAYSIDE CHURCH - CONTINUOUS

Cold. Empty. Dust in one shaft of light.

He is halfway up the nave, looking for somewhere to sleep, when he stops.

In a side niche stands a wooden MADONNA.

She is not a symbol. She is a woman. Her weight is on one hip. Her mouth is slightly open. She is looking at something below and to the left of her that is not there.

Goldmund stands in front of her.

He puts a hand out and does not touch her.

His face comes apart. He sits down hard on the flagstones and cries like a child, without covering it, without dignity, in an empty building.

INT. WAYSIDE CHURCH - LATER

An old SEXTON sweeps around him, unbothered.

GOLDMUND

Who made her?

SEXTON

Niklaus. In the city. Bishop paid a fortune, they say.

GOLDMUND

Which city?

The sexton looks at him -- the bare feet, the ruined robe.

SEXTON

Long way, that.

Goldmund is already standing up.

EXT. ROAD - DAY

Goldmund walking. Different now. He has somewhere to be.

ACT TWO - THE PLAGUE

EXT. ROAD - DAY

A second figure has attached itself to him. ROBERT, twenties, talkative, soft-handed, a runaway apprentice with opinions about everything.

ROBERT

-- and I said to him, a man who beats his apprentice is a man who has run out of arguments. And he had. He had run out completely.

GOLDMUND

Mm.

ROBERT

My uncle's a cooper in Freiburg. Three days from here if the weather holds. He'll take me. He said so at my mother's burying, which is the sort of thing people say, but he wrote it down.

He pats his chest, where a letter is.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

You don't say much.

GOLDMUND

No.

ROBERT

That's all right. I'll say it.

Ahead of them, at the roadside, a farm cart. The ox still in the traces. Nobody driving it.

They slow down.

The ox has been dead for days.

EXT. VILLAGE - DAY

Twenty houses. Doors open. Washing still on a line, stiff with frost.

No smoke from any chimney. No dogs.

ROBERT

(quietly)

Hello?

Nothing comes back.

INT. FARMHOUSE - CONTINUOUS

Goldmund pushes the door.

A family sits at their table. Father, mother, three children. They have been sitting there a long time.

There is food still on the board, gone black.

Robert makes a noise behind him and is gone, out, retching in the yard.

Goldmund stands in the doorway and looks.

He does not look away, and he does not look away, and he does not look away.

INT. FARMHOUSE - LATER

Robert comes back in, wiping his mouth, to find Goldmund sitting on the bench at the end of the table.

He has a scrap of charcoal. He is drawing the mother's face onto the whitewashed wall.

Robert stares.

ROBERT

What are you doing.

Goldmund does not stop.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

Goldmund.

GOLDMUND

Nobody else is going to.

He keeps working. Robert backs out into the yard.

EXT. VILLAGE STREET - CONTINUOUS

Robert wild-eyed, hands shaking.

ROBERT

We go around. We go around the whole valley, we go up over the ridge --

GOLDMUND

There's no around.

ROBERT

There's always around!

Goldmund keeps walking. After a moment, so does Robert.

EXT. MANOR HOUSE - DAY

A handsome house behind a wall. The gate stands open. A peacock walks across the gravel.

INT. MANOR - DINING ROOM - DAY

Dust in the light. A long table laid for twelve and never eaten from.

Robert goes down the room opening things. Silver. A cheese. Wine.

ROBERT

Nobody. There's nobody.

He holds a bottle up.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

This is a bishop's wine. This is a wine a bishop would think twice about.

INT. MANOR - DINING ROOM - LATER

The two of them at the head of the table, eating like animals. Robert has put on a dead man's fur-collared coat over his rags and is wearing a hat.

He stands on a chair with a goblet.

ROBERT

My lords! My ladies!

He is drunk and it is the happiest he has been in the picture.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

The world has ended and I am rich!

Goldmund laughs. Actually laughs, out loud, for the first time since the monastery.

Robert grins down at him.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

There. He's got a face.

INT. MANOR - UPPER LANDING - CONTINUOUS

Robert, still in the hat, opens a bedroom door.

He stops.

INT. MANOR - BEDCHAMBER - CONTINUOUS

A man and a woman lie in the bed under good linen.

They have been dead a fortnight. She is turned in toward him and his arm is under her neck, and neither of them has moved since.

Robert takes off the hat.

Goldmund comes to the door behind him and looks past his shoulder.

Then he sits down on the floor in the doorway, takes out the charcoal, and starts on the back of a broken shutter.

Robert watches him do it for about four seconds.

ROBERT

Christ. Christ, Goldmund.

He walks out.

INT. MARIABRONN - CHAPTER HOUSE - DAY

The ring of benches. Narziss in the Abbot's chair now, the ring on his hand.

A LAY BROTHER stands in the middle of the ring with his cap off.

LAY BROTHER

Ingelheim on Tuesday. Bad. And they've had it at Steinach.

A murmur goes round the benches. Narziss does not move.

NARZISS

How many at Steinach.

LAY BROTHER

They stopped counting, Father.

Narziss looks at the floor for a moment.

NARZISS

The gates are shut from tonight. Nobody in. That includes travellers, that includes the sick, that includes anyone at all.

FATHER LORENZ

Father -- the almonry --

NARZISS

The almonry is shut.

He stands.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I will answer for it.

EXT. MARIABRONN GATE - NIGHT

The great doors swing to. The bar goes across. Two lay brothers put their shoulders to it.

Behind them, in the dark of the courtyard, the chestnut tree moves.

EXT. BURIAL PIT - DAY

A trench thirty yards long outside a town wall. Quicklime in sacks. Four GRAVEDIGGERS with rags over their faces, working with the total lack of urgency of men who have been doing this for months.

A cart backs up and tips.

Goldmund and Robert stand at the edge of the road.

A GRAVEDIGGER, fifties, comes over and looks them up and down without much interest.

GRAVEDIGGER

Digging or dying?

ROBERT

Neither. Passing.

GRAVEDIGGER

Passing's finished. Everyone's passing.

He nods at the trench.

GRAVEDIGGER (CONT'D)

Fourpence a day and all the wine in the town, and I can't keep four men. They come out here, they look in, they go home and shut the door and wait.

He spits.

GRAVEDIGGER (CONT'D)

Waiting doesn't work either. But you can't tell them.

Goldmund is looking into the pit.

He has been looking into it the whole time.

GRAVEDIGGER (CONT'D)

(to Goldmund)

You. Fourpence.

GOLDMUND

No.

GRAVEDIGGER

Pity. You've got the face for it.

EXT. WOOD - DUSK

Smoke through the trees, and light -- too much light for a cooking fire.

They come out at the edge of a clearing.

A house is burning. Beside it, a pyre that has already collapsed into embers.

A young woman sits on the ground twelve feet from it with her back straight. REBEKKA, twenties. She does not react to their arrival.

Goldmund crosses the clearing slowly and crouches at a distance.

GOLDMUND

Who was it.

REBEKKA

My father.

GOLDMUND

The sickness?

REBEKKA

The village.

She says it without inflection.

REBEKKA (CONT'D)

They said we put it in the wells. Fourteen of us. They did it in the afternoon so they could see.

Robert has stopped at the treeline and will come no closer.

Goldmund takes off his cloak and holds it out.

She looks at it. She does not take it.

GOLDMUND

Come with us.

REBEKKA

Where.

GOLDMUND

West. There's a city.

REBEKKA

There is a city in every direction and this has happened in all of them.

She turns her head and looks at him properly for the first time -- and what is in her face is not grief. It is a complete and level contempt for anything he could possibly say.

REBEKKA (CONT'D)

You want to be kind to me. So that afterwards you can have been kind to me.

Goldmund has no answer.

REBEKKA (CONT'D)

Go away.

He stays crouched there a while longer.

Then he puts the cloak on the ground beside her, and stands, and goes.

EXT. WOOD - LATER

Walking in the dark. Robert glancing back.

ROBERT

She'll die there.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

ROBERT

So why didn't you --

GOLDMUND

Because she was right.

They walk.

ROBERT

Are you going to draw her too?

Goldmund does not answer that.

EXT. VILLAGE - DAY

A dozen VILLAGERS in the road. Men with flails and one with a sword he does not know how to hold.

Goldmund and Robert have their backs to a wall.

VILLAGER

Where have you come from.

ROBERT

Freiburg. My uncle's a cooper in --

VILLAGER

You came past the wells.

ROBERT

We came up the road, there's only the one road --

A woman at the back starts up, high and fast, that they are the ones, that they were seen at the trough, that her sister was well on Tuesday.

The crowd moves in. Somebody has hold of Goldmund's arm.

He does not struggle. He looks at their faces with a terrible, absorbed attention -- he is still doing it, even now, even here.

Then a MAN at the front of the crowd stops shouting.

He puts his hand up to the side of his own neck.

He feels something there.

He takes his hand away and looks at his fingers, and then looks up at the people standing next to him.

They see his face.

The crowd comes apart like water. In four seconds there is nobody within twenty feet of him.

He stands alone in the middle of the road with his hand at his throat.

Robert is already running. Goldmund walks.

EXT. ROAD - DAY

A procession coming the other way. Forty FLAGELLANTS, stripped to the waist, purple with cold and with their own work, swinging knotted cords over their shoulders in time.

Half of them are children.

They are singing something that used to be a hymn.

Robert and Goldmund step off the road. The line goes by for a long time.

One of the men breaks step, comes over, and presses a cord into Goldmund's hands. His eyes are enormous.

FLAGELLANT

Take it. It's the only medicine.

He rejoins the line.

Goldmund stands holding the cord. He looks at the knots.

Braided into every one of them -- small pieces of iron.

He lets it fall in the road.

EXT. CAMPFIRE - NIGHT

A poor fire in a wood. Robert on one side of it. Goldmund on the other with the broken shutter across his knees, working the charcoal.

Robert watches him for a long time.

ROBERT

Say something.

GOLDMUND

About what.

ROBERT

Any of it. The house. The woman by the fire. Any of it.

Goldmund keeps working.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

Nothing goes in. I've been watching. Everybody we meet is coming apart, and it goes into you and it never comes back out, it just --

He gestures at the shutter.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

-- turns into that.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

ROBERT

I thought you were brave.

He stands up.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

You're not brave. You're hungry.

Goldmund stops working.

He looks up at Robert across the fire and he does not deny it, and that is the worst thing that happens to Robert in the whole picture.

EXT. TOWN SQUARE - PLAGUE TOWN - DAY

A prosperous weaving town. High walls. The gates standing open.

Silence.

Every door marked with a crude red cross, still wet. In the middle of the square, a cart piled with rigid corpses under a dust of snow.

Goldmund walks in through the gate and keeps going up the middle of the street.

Robert stops at the gate and will not come through it.

ROBERT

Goldmund.

Goldmund keeps walking.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

Goldmund!

He does not turn around.

Robert stands in the gateway with his hand on the stone.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

(smaller)

Freiburg's three days.

Nothing.

ROBERT (CONT'D)

I'd have taken you.

The figure gets smaller up the street.

Robert waits a little longer than he needs to.

Then he turns and goes back the way they came, fast, and then running.

EXT. PLAGUE TOWN - STREET - CONTINUOUS

Far ahead, a figure slips behind a stone well. LENE, twenties, mud-smudged, barefoot in the snow.

She looks back at him once, and ducks into a bakery cellar.

He follows her down into the ground.

INT. THE CELLAR - NIGHT

A damp vault. Embers throw red light up the walls. Lene sits in the straw, watching him.

LENE

There's nobody left to steal from up there. That's how I know you didn't come to steal.

GOLDMUND

No.

LENE

You've killed someone.

Goldmund goes still.

LENE (CONT'D)

Don't. It's in the hands. Everybody's is in something. Mine's in the teeth.

She stands and undoes her woollen shift. It falls. She is gaunt, and unashamed, and lit red.

LENE (CONT'D)

Everyone above us is crying to God and waiting for the black spots to bloom. They're letting the winter eat them.

She comes toward him.

LENE (CONT'D)

We're the only two things burning in this town. Break the ice inside me.

She takes him down into the straw. Her teeth find his shoulder and draw a hot line of blood.

He stops being careful.

INT. THE CELLAR - DAY

Weeks on. They have made the place almost a home -- a stolen blanket, a pot, a candle stub.

Lene sleeps. Goldmund sits with a scrap of charcoal from the fire, drawing her on the flat of a broken barrel stave.

He gets the mouth wrong. He scrubs it out with his thumb and goes again.

He gets it wrong again.

He puts his head back against the cold wall and looks at what he cannot do.

INT. THE CELLAR - DAY (LATER)

Lene flat on her back, slick with grey sweat. On her neck a swollen black BUBO inside a red web of veins.

Goldmund holds her burning hand. Her fingers come up and brush his cheek.

LENE

(parched)

The beast has eaten me. Run.

Her chest shudders. Stops.

Goldmund sits in the grey silence. He closes her eyes with his thumb.

He picks up the barrel stave with the failed drawing on it.

He looks at Lene's dead face. He looks at the drawing.

He takes it with him.

INT. MASTER NIKLAUS'S WORKSHOP - DAY

A vast attic. Sunlight through high windows, thick with lime dust. Half-finished saints stand about the room like people waiting to be spoken to.

MASTER NIKLAUS, sixties, hands twisted by forty years of work, at a bench. Goldmund in the doorway. Filthy. Barefoot.

NIKLAUS

I don't give alms.

GOLDMUND

There's a Madonna at the Steinach crossroads.

Niklaus does not look up.

NIKLAUS

There is.

GOLDMUND

You made her.

NIKLAUS

Thirty-one years ago.

GOLDMUND

I walked four hundred miles.

Niklaus looks up now. He takes in the feet, the robe, the state of him.

NIKLAUS

Then you're a fool as well as a beggar. Get out.

Goldmund crosses the room and puts the barrel stave down on the bench in front of him.

Niklaus glances at it, to be rid of him.

Then he stops.

He picks it up. He carries it to the window and turns it in the light.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Who is she.

GOLDMUND

She's dead.

NIKLAUS

That isn't what I asked.

He sets it down. He does not give it back.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

You have the eye of a master and the hands of a butcher. Do you know how many men I have met with the eye?

GOLDMUND

No.

NIKLAUS

Four. Three of them drank.

He turns back to his bench.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Sweep the floor.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Goldmund sweeping. He works his way down the room and comes to the piece on Niklaus's own bench.

A Madonna. Nearly finished. The drapery is immaculate. The proportion is perfect.

She is dead.

Goldmund stands looking at her with the broom in his hands.

Behind him, at the door, Niklaus has stopped.

He watches Goldmund not say anything.

Then he comes in and puts a cloth over the piece and goes on with his day.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

A sandstone grinding wheel running with cold water.

Goldmund at the crank, holding the flat of a chisel to the stone. Sparks drop orange into the grey trough.

The sound rises and fills everything -- a thin metallic hiss, almost exactly the sound of quills on vellum.

His face comes up in the wet steel. Calm. Absent.

He turns the crank.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Niklaus takes a half-finished head off Goldmund's bench, looks at it for two seconds, and drops it in the offcut bin.

NIKLAUS

Again.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

Goldmund alone, working by candle, sleeves rolled, forearm corded.

LISBETH, twenties, appears in the doorway in a shawl with a covered dish. Neat. Careful. She stops at the edge of the sawdust as if it were water.

LISBETH

He says you're not to burn the good candles.

GOLDMUND

Tell him I'm burning the bad ones.

She sets the dish down on a stool and does not come further in.

LISBETH

Does it not get into your chest? The dust.

GOLDMUND

Yes.

LISBETH

Then why --

She stops herself. It is not her business. She goes.

Goldmund looks at the dish. Then he goes back to the wood.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Niklaus takes a second head. Looks. Drops it in the bin.

NIKLAUS

Again.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

Goldmund's hands: blistered. Then bleeding. Then wrapped. Then simply changed -- broader across the knuckle, black in the creases.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Niklaus picks up a third head.

He does not drop it.

He turns it over twice. Then he puts it back on the bench, exactly where it was, and walks away without a word.

Goldmund stands looking at it.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Two GUILD MEN in good wool are going along the row of saints with Niklaus, tapping, murmuring, unimpressed by everything.

Goldmund watches from the far end of the room.

When they have gone:

GOLDMUND

Why can't I sell my own work?

NIKLAUS

Because you're not a master.

GOLDMUND

Then make me one.

NIKLAUS

I can't. The Guild makes masters. The Guild makes them out of men with a house, a wife, and a father-in-law in the Guild.

He wipes his gouge.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

That is the whole of it. That is the entire art. Did you think it was the wood?

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

A small block of lime on Goldmund's bench. He has been at it for a long time.

A woman's head, roughed out. He is trying to find a face.

He works. He stops. He turns the block. He works again.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT (LATER)

Candles burned down to stubs.

The head is finished, and it is nobody. It is a competent, empty, well-made woman, and the emptiness is exactly the emptiness of the piece under the cloth on Niklaus's bench.

Goldmund sits down on the floor and looks up at it.

Then he gets up, takes the hatchet off the wall, and puts it through the face.

INT. WORKSHOP - MORNING

Niklaus stands over the split block and the scattering of pale chips.

He crouches, picks up a fragment, turns it over.

He is not angry. He is something worse -- he is relieved.

NIKLAUS

Good.

Goldmund, in the doorway, hasn't slept.

GOLDMUND

It was nothing.

NIKLAUS

Yes.

He drops the fragment.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

You are not ready for her. You will not be ready for years. And when you are, she'll take everything you've got and leave you on the floor.

He goes to his own bench and pulls the cloth off the dead Madonna.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

I was ready once. Thirty-one years ago. For about eleven months.

He looks at his own work.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Now I make furniture with faces on it. Go to bed.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY (TWO YEARS LATER)

Goldmund, twenty-three, before a towering block of pale lime.

NIKLAUS

The Guild wants Saint John the Apostle. Young. Filled with spirit. Untouched by the dirt of the world.

He looks at Goldmund.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Can you find a face like that in that head of yours?

Goldmund closes his eyes.

For a moment -- a dark library. One lamp. A man on the other side of a table, picking up a pen.

GOLDMUND

I've known it my whole life.

MONTAGE -- THE CARVING

-- Heavy mallet strikes. The timber roughs out.

-- The gouge finds long disciplined vertical folds. They fall exactly as a monastic habit falls.

-- Lisbeth in the doorway at dusk with a dish, watching him work, not announcing herself.

-- A finer gouge on the face. A high forehead. A sharp nose. Thin lips parted, about to speak Greek.

END MONTAGE

The finished Saint John stands in the morning light.

It is Narziss.

Niklaus comes down the room and stops in front of it.

He does not touch it for a long moment. When he does put his thumb along the wooden jaw his hand is not steady, and it is not only feeling that is doing that.

NIKLAUS

Who is he.

GOLDMUND

My brother. The one who stayed in the stone.

Niklaus nods slowly. He keeps looking at the statue.

NIKLAUS

I'll take it to the Guild myself.

He walks away down the room. Halfway, he stops, with his back to Goldmund.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

I could not have done that.

He goes out.

INT. MASTER NIKLAUS'S HOUSE - DINING ROOM - NIGHT

Tapestries. Polished panelling. Silver on the table.

Niklaus at the window. Lisbeth at the table with her eyes on her plate, turning the rings on her fingers.

NIKLAUS

The Guild has taken the Saint John. I'm offering you the workshop. The inheritance.

A beat.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

And my daughter. Which is how it is done, and you know it is how it is done, because I told you.

Lisbeth does not look up.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

You'll be a master before Easter. You'll never know the frost again.

Goldmund looks at Lisbeth. She raises her eyes and gives him a small, hopeful smile.

He looks down at his own hands.

Very faintly, under the room -- the hum of the monastery foyer.

GOLDMUND

I can't stay, Master.

The fist comes down.

NIKLAUS

You're a beggar. I took you off my own floor. I'm offering you my blood and my life's work.

GOLDMUND

You gave me a language. If I stay in this room I'll dry up like a leaf.

NIKLAUS

Then dry up out there and see if the wood cares.

A silence. Lisbeth has gone very still.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Have you carved her yet? The one on the stave?

Goldmund does not answer.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

No. And you won't, for years. And when you do, it will cost you everything you have.

He turns back to the window.

NIKLAUS (CONT'D)

Go on, then.

Goldmund bows his head to Lisbeth.

She holds his eye for a moment. What is in her face is not heartbreak. It is relief, and she is ashamed of it, and he sees both.

He walks out into the night.

ACT THREE - THE MOTHER

INT. MARIABRONN - LIBRARY - NIGHT

The same table. The same lamp.

NARZISS, thirty-one, in an Abbot's robes now, alone in the enormous room. He is not reading.

A distant bell begins to ring for Midnight Mass.

He sits through the whole of it without moving.

INT. CATHEDRAL - SIDE CHAPEL - DAY

The Saint John stands in a bank of votive candles.

Narziss stands in front of it.

He is looking into his own face.

He raises a finger and touches the dry wooden lips. It is not a steady hand.

PRIEST (O.S.)

The sculptor was a beggar, Abbot.

Narziss does not turn.

PRIEST (O.S.) (CONT'D)

Carved that, refused a master's daughter, and went back on the road.

NARZISS

When.

PRIEST (O.S.)

Seven years ago? Eight.

Narziss closes his eyes.

NARZISS

Prepare my carriage.

EXT. SUMMER ROAD - DAY

Heat. Dust. Goldmund walking with a tool roll across his back, twenty-five and still golden and perfectly aware of it.

A GIRL driving geese along the verge looks at him for slightly too long as he goes by.

He looks back at her.

EXT. BARN - DAY

A door open onto white light. Inside, in the straw, the girl laughing at something he has said.

It is easy. It has always been easy. It is about to stop being easy.

INT. VILLAGE CHURCH - DAY

Goldmund up a ladder, regilding the hand of a wooden saint.

Below him a PRIEST stands with his arms folded, watching him. Not out of interest. To make sure the leaf all goes on the saint.

EXT. WINTER ROAD - DAY

Sleet. Goldmund walking into it. Older. The tool roll is thinner.

EXT. FARM DOOR - DAY

Him at a door, saying something, holding up his hands to show what they can do.

The door shuts.

INT. BARN - NIGHT

A small block of lime on the straw. Two candles.

Goldmund working. Fast, then slower, then stopping.

He turns the block round.

Whatever is in there, it isn't her. It is the empty head again, in a barn now, ten years on.

He does not smash this one. He is too tired.

He wraps his tools, and leaves the block sitting in the straw, and goes.

EXT. CITY STREET - DAY

The city he trained in. He knows the corner before he turns it.

The workshop windows are shuttered. There is a different name over the door, badly painted.

INT. MASTER NIKLAUS'S HOUSE - HALL - DAY

LISBETH stands in the doorway of her own house and does not ask him in.

She is older. Not by the years. By something else.

LISBETH

Two winters ago. It came up the river with the wool.

GOLDMUND

And you --

LISBETH

I had it and it left me. That happens. Nobody tells you that happens.

A silence.

LISBETH (CONT'D)

The Guild took the workshop. They gave it to Hans Muller, who is a joiner, and who could not carve a spoon.

GOLDMUND

Lisbeth, I --

LISBETH

No.

She says it without heat. That is the terrible part.

LISBETH (CONT'D)

He asked where you were. At the end. Twice.

She lets that sit exactly as long as it needs to.

LISBETH (CONT'D)

The Saint John's in the cathedral. Left transept. They put it behind a rail.

She closes the door.

INT. CATHEDRAL - SIDE CHAPEL - DAY

The Saint John stands in a bank of votive candles, behind a low iron rail.

Goldmund stands in front of it with his hands at his sides.

He is looking at Narziss's face.

He is exactly where Narziss will stand.

He stays a long time. Then he puts two fingers on the rail, and takes them off again, and goes.

EXT. WELL - DAY

He hauls a bucket up and sets it on the stone.

He looks into the water.

The face that comes back is thirty. Weather has been at it. There is grey in the beard, the jaw has gone hard, and the golden thing that used to walk into rooms ahead of him is not there any more.

He looks at it for a while.

Then he breaks it with his hand, and drinks.

EXT. CITY - CATHEDRAL SQUARE - DAY

A city. Bells, crowds, a procession coming through: banners, halberds, a canopy.

Goldmund stands at the back with his tool roll, watching it the way a craftsman watches -- the gilding on the poles, the carving on the canopy frame.

Under the canopy, walking beside a skeletal man in black: AGNES, twenties, in green velvet.

She is bored to the point of pain.

Her eyes go over the crowd and stop.

Goldmund does not look away, and does not bow, and does not do any of the things the rest of the square is doing.

The procession carries her past. She turns her head to keep him.

INT. HIRED ROOM - NIGHT

A cot, a candle, a window. Goldmund sharpening a gouge.

A knock. He opens it.

A MAID, fifties, expressionless, hands him nothing and says nothing except:

MAID

The orangerie. The hour after Compline. There's a door in the east wall that isn't locked.

She goes.

INT. PALACE ORANGERIE - NIGHT

A greenhouse of iron and glass. Orange trees in urns, in ranks. Wind screaming outside the panes.

Agnes steps out of the dark in black fur over the green velvet, a brass lantern in her hand.

AGNES

Do you know what the Governor did to the last man who lingered in my rooms? He had him broken on the wheel.

She comes closer.

AGNES (CONT'D)

Are you afraid of the wheel, artisan?

GOLDMUND

The wheel's a machine.

AGNES

And what am I?

He looks at her for a long moment. Longer than she expects.

GOLDMUND

Warm.

She pulls his mouth down to hers.

INT. AGNES'S BEDCHAMBER - NIGHT

Silk. Firelight. Later.

Agnes lies with her chin on her folded arms, watching him get dressed.

AGNES

The man who does the tombs here is sixty and he makes everyone look like a sheep. I've seen the Duchess. She has a sheep's face on a slab for eternity.

She rolls over.

AGNES (CONT'D)

Carve me.

Goldmund stops with his shirt half on.

AGNES (CONT'D)

Not a tomb. Now. While there's something to carve.

GOLDMUND

No.

The temperature of the room changes.

AGNES

No?

GOLDMUND

I've been trying to make one face for ten years. It isn't yours.

AGNES

Whose is it.

GOLDMUND

I don't know yet.

Agnes sits up. She is not a woman who has been refused very often, and she is working out what kind of injury this is.

AGNES

You walked four hundred miles to learn a trade, and now a man with a house won't have you, and a woman with a palace can't have you.

She reaches for the wine.

AGNES (CONT'D)

What exactly is it you think you're saving yourself for?

Goldmund has no answer, which is the answer.

She drinks and looks at the fire.

AGNES (CONT'D)

Come tomorrow anyway.

INT. AGNES'S BEDCHAMBER - DAWN

Silk. Grey light. The two of them asleep.

The oak doors go in.

Crossbows. Halberds. THE GOVERNOR, fifties, skeletal, in the doorway.

He does not raise his voice. He does not look at Agnes at all.

THE GOVERNOR

Lower dungeon. Gallows at noon.

Guards put Goldmund on the floor. As they drag him out he twists and gets one look back into the room.

Agnes has pulled the sheet up to her collarbone and turned her face to the wall.

She stays exactly like that until he is gone.

INT. GOVERNOR'S DUNGEON - DAY

A wet stone well. Goldmund at the bottom of it, wrists in iron, a chain running from them to a ring in the floor.

He is not despairing. He is working.

He has the chain doubled in his hands, testing the slack. He measures it against the distance to the foot of the stair. Not enough.

He lies down on the stone and stretches his arms out over his head. Now it is enough.

He lies there in the dark, running it: the man comes down, the man kneels, the chain goes over the head, the robe comes off the body, the robe goes up the stair.

He is entirely calm about it.

He has done this before, on a riverbank, with a stone.

INT. GOVERNOR'S DUNGEON - NIGHT

The hatch grinds open above. White light falls down the shaft.

A voice up there, muffled -- the Governor's man, and someone answering him in Latin.

Footsteps on the stair. Unhurried. A black robe coming down.

Goldmund gets his arms over his head. His fists close on the chain.

The robe reaches the bottom of the stair and turns into the light.

Narziss.

Goldmund does not move for three full seconds.

Then his hands open and the chain hits the stone.

NARZISS

Goldmund.

GOLDMUND

(a dry rattle)

Have you come to read me the Latin? Am I dead?

NARZISS

No.

Goldmund starts to laugh. It turns into coughing and does not stop for a while.

GOLDMUND

It's snowing up there. I could smell it.

NARZISS

Yes.

GOLDMUND

You said before the snow.

Narziss looks at him -- the chain, the wrists, the state of his face -- and something in him gives way.

He kneels down in the filth of the cell, puts both arms around the broken frame of his friend, and lifts him.

INT. CARRIAGE - DAY

Goldmund wrapped in wool. Narziss opposite, watching him.

GOLDMUND

(at the window)

The trees are the same. But the air smells dry. Like old paper.

NARZISS

You're going back to the spirit.

GOLDMUND

No. I'm going back to my hands.

He turns his head.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Have you ever been hungry?

Narziss looks down. His fingers move on the silver crucifix.

NARZISS

No.

GOLDMUND

Not one day.

He smiles. There is nothing cruel in it. That is what makes it land.

Narziss looks out of the window for the rest of the road.

EXT. MARIABRONN MONASTERY - COURTYARD - DAY

The black carriage comes in under the arch and stops.

Along the cloister walk, MONKS have come out to see. Twenty of them, in a row, not moving.

Narziss gets down. Then two lay brothers lift Goldmund out -- a filthy, bearded, chained-wristed layman with a tool roll -- and carry him past the chestnut tree, past the row of faces, into the house.

Nobody says anything. The tree moves in the wind.

INT. CHAPTER HOUSE - DAY

The ring of benches. Narziss at the centre now, in the Abbot's place. FATHER LORENZ, older, standing.

FATHER LORENZ

Three years of tithes.

NARZISS

Yes.

FATHER LORENZ

The roof of the south range is three years of tithes. The almonry is three years of tithes.

NARZISS

Yes.

FATHER LORENZ

And you gave it to a governor, for a layman, taken out of a bed that was not his.

NARZISS

That is an accurate account of it.

He does not elaborate. He does not defend it. The refusal to explain himself is worse than any argument.

FATHER LORENZ

The house will want a reason, Abbot.

NARZISS

The house may want one.

He stands.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

He will be given the old lay workshop in the outer cloister, and timber, and whatever tools he asks for. He is not to be disturbed at his work and he is not to be preached at.

He goes to the door.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

And Lorenz. If a single brother in this house lets him hear the word "charity", I will know which one.

INT. MARIABRONN INFIRMARY - DAY

Goldmund in a cot, washed, shaved, the iron off his wrists. He looks like a man who has been dug up.

Narziss sits on the stool in his habit, hands in his sleeves. Neither of them has said anything for a while.

GOLDMUND

Daniel.

NARZISS

Nine years ago. In the spring.

GOLDMUND

Did he say anything?

NARZISS

He said they would elect me and they shouldn't.

Goldmund laughs, and it hurts him.

Another silence. Narziss is not good at this and knows it.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I have thought about what I would say to you for twelve years. I had it in order.

GOLDMUND

And?

NARZISS

It was all definitions.

INT. CLOISTER WALK - NIGHT

Goldmund, in a borrowed lay cloak, walking the cloister alone with a candle.

He passes the door of the scriptorium and stops.

INT. SCRIPTORIUM - CONTINUOUS

Empty. Moonlight in the stripes across the floor.

Rows of slanted desks. Vellum laid out for the morning. Quills lined up.

Goldmund walks up the centre aisle, through the stripes, exactly as he did at nineteen.

He stops at one desk. He puts a finger on the vellum.

He takes it away and looks at the fingertip. Black.

EXT. COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

He comes out into the geometry.

The chestnut tree stands in the middle of it, in leaf, moving.

He crosses to it and puts his hand on the bark and stands there.

EXT. OUTER CLOISTER - DAY

Goldmund sits on a low wall in the sun, whittling something small, coughing occasionally.

ERICH, seventeen, a novice with an armful of psalters, has stopped to watch and forgotten to go.

ERICH

Is it true you were in Cologne?

GOLDMUND

Once.

ERICH

What's it like?

GOLDMUND

Loud.

Erich waits for more. There is more, and both of them know it.

ERICH

Brother Lorenz says the world out there is a slaughterhouse.

GOLDMUND

(still whittling)

It is.

ERICH

Oh.

GOLDMUND

It's also the only place anything happens.

Erich's face does something.

Across the cloister, in the shadow of the arcade, Narziss has stopped walking.

He stands watching the two of them on the wall in the sun. He does not interrupt. He does not have to be told what he is looking at.

He goes back the way he came.

INT. SIDE CHAPEL - NIGHT

Two candles. Goldmund on the low bench where he sat at nineteen. Narziss standing.

GOLDMUND

I killed a man on a riverbank. I put a stone through his head three times.

NARZISS

I know.

GOLDMUND

How.

NARZISS

You said it in the carriage, on the second day. You had a fever.

He comes and sits down on the bench. Not as an abbot. Beside him.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Do you want to confess it?

GOLDMUND

I'm not sorry for it.

NARZISS

No.

GOLDMUND

He had his hands on my throat and I would do it again tomorrow.

He turns the whittled thing over in his fingers.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

I'm sorry about a letter.

Narziss waits.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

He couldn't write. He gave me a coin to write to a woman in Kirchheim and tell her he wasn't dead. She'd had a boy off him.

A beat.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

I had nine days. I was busy. I was in a velvet coat being clever at a knight's table, and I had nine days, and it would have taken me the length of a candle.

He looks at Narziss.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

That's the one. That's the one I can't put down.

Narziss says nothing at all. He is not equipped for this and he does not pretend to be.

After a while he puts his hand flat on the bench between them.

Goldmund looks at it. Then he puts his own hand on top of it.

INT. MARIABRONN INFIRMARY - DAY

Goldmund, dressed, on his feet, pulling a cloak on. He is nowhere near well enough.

Narziss in the doorway.

NARZISS

No.

GOLDMUND

There's a woman.

NARZISS

There is always a woman. You cannot sit up for an hour without --

GOLDMUND

Narziss.

Narziss stops.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

There's a woman.

A long silence.

NARZISS

Take the grey. She's slow and she'll bring you back.

EXT. CITY - CHURCH STEPS - DAY

Goldmund waits at the foot of a flight of steps, in the cloak, holding the grey's bridle.

The doors open. A congregation comes down. Among them, AGNES.

She is beautifully dressed. She is laughing at something a man beside her has said.

She sees him.

Her step does not break. She says something to her companion, and comes down the last of the steps, and stops two yards away.

She looks at him.

She looks at all of him, and it takes about a second and a half, and Goldmund watches her do it.

AGNES

Oh.

GOLDMUND

Agnes.

AGNES

They told me you were hanged.

GOLDMUND

No.

AGNES

No.

She is not cruel. That is the entire problem. Her face has arranged itself into something warm and finished and closed.

AGNES (CONT'D)

I'm glad. I am, truly. I was sorry about it for weeks.

GOLDMUND

I'm at the monastery at Mariabronn. It's four days.

AGNES

Four days.

GOLDMUND

I could --

AGNES

Goldmund.

And that is all she has to say, because she says it kindly.

He stands there holding a bridle.

AGNES (CONT'D)

You should eat something. You've got very thin.

She touches his forearm briefly, the way you touch a man you knew, and goes back up to her companion, who has been waiting.

She does not look round.

EXT. ROAD - DUSK

Goldmund leading the grey along a rutted road. Not riding it. He cannot get up.

He stops.

He stands in the middle of the road for a while with his hand on the horse's neck.

Then he goes on.

EXT. MARIABRONN GATE - NIGHT

The grey comes in under the arch alone with the reins trailing.

Behind it, a long way behind it, Goldmund walks in.

Narziss is standing in the courtyard. He has clearly been standing there for some time.

He does not ask.

GOLDMUND

I want wood.

EXT. MONASTERY FOREST - DAY

Winter woods. Goldmund, thin, wrapped in a borrowed cloak, moving between the trunks with a LAY BROTHER trailing him and an axe.

He puts his palms flat on a lime and holds them there. He moves on.

Another. He shakes his head.

Another. He walks all the way round it twice.

He stops at one no different to look at than any of the others, and puts his forehead against it.

GOLDMUND

This one.

LAY BROTHER

It's no better than the last three.

GOLDMUND

No.

He steps back and looks up into the branches.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

It's the one that's her.

INT. MARIABRONN WORKSHOP - DAY

A bare room in the outer cloister. In the middle of it, on trestles, the block. Squared, seasoned, enormous.

Goldmund walks around it.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

He walks around it.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

He sits on a stool in front of it with a candle, not working.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

He has started. Rough work, mallet and gouge, fast.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

He stops.

He steps back and looks at what is coming out of the wood.

It is nobody. It is competent, and empty, and it is precisely the head he put a hatchet through in another country ten years ago.

He stands there with the mallet hanging in his hand.

Then he goes to the wall and takes down the axe.

NARZISS (O.S.)

Don't.

Narziss is in the doorway in his habit, holding a lamp. He does not come in.

GOLDMUND

It's the same face. It's Niklaus's face. It's a shop sign.

NARZISS

Put the axe down and tell me what is missing.

GOLDMUND

I don't know what she is.

NARZISS

Then tell me what she isn't.

Goldmund turns and looks at him.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

It's the only thing I was ever any good at. Say what she isn't.

A long pause. Goldmund lowers the axe.

GOLDMUND

She isn't kind.

NARZISS

Go on.

GOLDMUND

She isn't the Virgin. She doesn't intercede. She doesn't forgive anything, because she has never once been asked to.

NARZISS

Go on.

GOLDMUND

She isn't sad. Everyone carves her sad.

He has begun to move. He is walking round the block again but differently now.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

She isn't looking at the child. She's looking past him. She already knows what happens.

He stops.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

And she doesn't mind.

Narziss stands very still in the doorway.

NARZISS

Then that is what she is.

Goldmund turns back to the wood and does not notice him leave.

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Working. Fast, absorbed, breathing badly.

He coughs -- and it is a bad one, and it doubles him, and when he takes his hand away from his mouth there is blood on the heel of it.

Some of it has gone onto the pale timber.

He straightens up, wiping his mouth, and stops.

The grain has drunk it. Where the blood went in, the wood is no longer white. It has gone the colour of skin.

He looks at his hand. He looks at the wood.

He coughs again, deliberately this time, into the linen cloth -- and then he presses the cloth flat against the timber and works it in with his thumb.

INT. CLOISTER WALK - NIGHT

Narziss with the INFIRMARIAN, sixties, walking.

NARZISS

How long.

INFIRMARIAN

If he lies down and stops? A year. Perhaps two.

NARZISS

And as he is.

INFIRMARIAN

It's in both lungs and he's breathing wood dust twelve hours a day.

A beat.

INFIRMARIAN (CONT'D)

Lent, Abbot. Perhaps Easter.

Narziss stops walking. The infirmarian goes on without him.

EXT. WORKSHOP DOOR - CONTINUOUS

Narziss stands outside it. Light under the door. The sound of a gouge inside.

He puts his hand on the latch.

He does not lift it.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

Narziss comes in. Goldmund does not stop working.

NARZISS

Stop.

GOLDMUND

No.

NARZISS

You'll be dead by Lent. He says Lent.

GOLDMUND

Then I'd better get on.

Narziss crosses the room and takes hold of the gouge, not roughly, and holds it still.

NARZISS

I gave three years of this house's bread for you. The south range leaks. Lorenz has written to the bishop about me.

Goldmund looks up at him. There is no cruelty in it at all, which is what makes it land.

GOLDMUND

Then you bought her. You didn't buy me.

Narziss's hand opens.

He stands there a moment. Then he takes off his outer habit, folds it, sets it on a stool, and sits down on the floor with his back against the wall in his shirt, in the sawdust.

NARZISS

Work, then.

Goldmund looks at him for a second.

Then he works.

SERIES OF SHOTS -- THE MOTHER

-- Goldmund kneeling in a drift of shavings deep as snow.

-- The cloth going to his mouth and then to the timber. The grain drinking.

-- Narziss on the floor against the wall, night after night, in his shirt, asleep, awake, asleep.

-- The gouge finding a jawline. A throat. A mouth that isn't smiling and isn't sad.

-- A hand emerging. Not folded. Open, and turned down, and enormous.

-- The line of a jaw under the gouge. Nothing else. We are never given her whole.

-- Narziss standing in front of her at midnight. We stay on his face. Whatever he is looking at, we do not see it.

END SERIES OF SHOTS

INT. WORKSHOP - DAY

Goldmund steps back from her.

He puts the gouge down on the trestle, which is a thing he has not done in four months.

Then his knees go and he sits down hard in the shavings at the base of her, and his hand opens, and the chisel rolls out of it across the floor.

INT. WORKSHOP - NIGHT

Empty. One lamp on the floor where somebody set it down.

Narziss stands in front of her.

The camera stays behind him. We see the lamp, and the shavings, and the back of an abbot in a black habit, and the edge of something pale at the top of the frame.

He does not touch her, and he does not pray, and he does not move.

He is still standing there when the lamp starts to gutter.

INT. MONASTERY INFIRMARY - TWILIGHT

Late slate-blue light through a high gothic window lies across the room like a blade, splitting it into cold stone and indigo shadow. One beeswax candle on a stool.

GOLDMUND lies flat on a narrow cot. Thirty-one and a hundred years old -- skeletal, translucent, golden hair matted with wood dust. His chest rises and falls in shallow wet gasps.

NARZISS sits on the stool. His black habit is white with lime shavings at the cuffs. He holds Goldmund's right hand in both of his own.

That hand is a decade of road: scarred knuckles, black in the creases, the thumb joints cracked and stained brown from working blood into wood.

Wind, somewhere outside the stones.

Goldmund turns his head on the flat pillow. His eyes are sunk deep and completely clear.

GOLDMUND

The room doesn't move.

NARZISS

No.

GOLDMUND

For twelve years, every time I shut my eyes, the world was moving. Roads. Rivers. Bodies. The eyes of dead women in the snow.

A breath.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

It's very still here.

NARZISS

You're home.

A pause. Narziss has been waiting to say the next thing for four months.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I wrote to Kirchheim.

Goldmund's eyes come round to him.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

There's a woman there called Anna. She has a boy of about eleven. I told her that Victor served a knight in the east, and that he was a steady man, and that he spoke of them both, and that he died of a fever in the winter and was buried properly.

GOLDMUND

He wasn't.

NARZISS

No.

He does not look away.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

She doesn't need that. She needs the other thing.

Goldmund looks at him for a long moment -- the definitions man, the law man, telling a lie by post to a stranger.

GOLDMUND

Narziss.

NARZISS

Mm.

GOLDMUND

That's the first thing you ever made.

Narziss's jaw goes tight and he does not answer.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

The road was inside me, Narziss. It didn't stay outside.

He coughs -- deep, wet, bubbling. It shakes the cot. He wipes his mouth on his forearm.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Have you looked at her again?

NARZISS

Three hours.

GOLDMUND

And?

Narziss takes his time.

NARZISS

Everything I have ever written. Every sermon. Every prayer I sent up into a silent room. All of it, made physical, by a man with no Latin left.

GOLDMUND

She's a woman who died.

He shakes his head, barely.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

That's all. She's Lydia. She's Lene. She's a girl who sat down next to a fire her father was on and told me to go away, and she was right. She's my mother, who I was taught to hate.

He looks down at Narziss's hands on his.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

I had to pull her out of my chest in pieces. I used my own flesh for the chisel. There's nothing left in me now. Not one image.

NARZISS

(his voice going)

Then let me fill you. Let the house hold you. The Order will keep her for six hundred years. Long after we're dust, men will stand in that hall --

GOLDMUND

Keep.

He lets the breath out.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

That's your word. Keep. Preserve. You build walls to preserve the spirit, you write books to preserve the thought.

He looks back at Narziss.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Nature doesn't preserve anything. She blooms and rots and eats her own young and starts again.

A beat.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

That's why this house is so quiet. You're trying to keep a fire by freezing the flame.

Narziss bows his head. His knuckles go white around Goldmund's fingers.

NARZISS

Do you think I don't know that?

He lifts his face. His eyes are full.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

Every night when the bells go for Midnight Mass I sit in that stall and I listen to the silence of these stones.

Goldmund looks at him.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I told you you'd be back before the snow. Do you know why I said it?

GOLDMUND

Because you thought it was true.

NARZISS

Because I wanted it to be.

He touches the scarred knuckles.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I was afraid of the world. Of the mud, and the sickness, and the heat that lives in women. I hid behind Aristotle because I was certain that if I went past that gate the wind would take me apart. I chose the spirit because the spirit can't bleed.

A beat.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

You went out into the slaughterhouse. You let it stain your hands. And you came back carrying God in a block of wood.

Goldmund lifts his left hand. It shakes. It comes to rest near Narziss's cheek.

GOLDMUND

Neither of us could have been the other.

Narziss presses his cheek into the rough palm.

NARZISS

Without you I was half a man. The cold half.

GOLDMUND

And without you I'd have died a beast in a ditch. You gave me my eyes. You told me I had a mother.

His breathing slows. A dry whistle comes out of his chest.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Now the sun's going. And I have to ask you something you never answered in any of your books.

NARZISS

Ask me anything.

Goldmund's hand slides off the cheek and comes down onto the blanket.

His eyes widen slightly. He looks straight into Narziss.

GOLDMUND

When your time comes. When the candles burn out and the library's locked for the last time.

A beat.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

How will you die?

Narziss does not move.

Every sound in the room goes.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Your mind is a perfect temple. But you have no mother, Narziss. Your father was the dogma. Your mother was the wall.

His voice drops into a rhythm, almost a lullaby.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

Without a mother, one cannot let go. How will you die, when you have no womb to go back to?

Narziss's lips part. Nothing comes out of them.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

She isn't an idea. She's the earth. She's the dark water under the ice. She's the one who takes the seed and rots it so the leaf can come.

A beat.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

If you've never put your face in her mud and wept -- how will you open the gate when she calls you?

Narziss's chest is heaving.

NARZISS

I don't know.

He can barely get it out.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

I've spent my whole life building a fortress. And I'm inside it.

Goldmund smiles at him. It is a very small smile and there is nothing in it but kindness.

GOLDMUND

Don't be frightened. It's simple.

A beat.

GOLDMUND (CONT'D)

You only have to stop holding your breath.

He closes his eyes.

And Narziss -- who has nothing, who has never had anything, who has spent his whole life acquiring things that cannot be given away -- finds that he has one thing after all.

NARZISS

Goldmund.

Goldmund's eyes stay shut.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

The year you came here, your father endowed a chapel. It is in the muniment book. I read it when I was twenty years old.

Goldmund's eyes open.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

"Given by Konrad von Kern, in expiation of the sin of his wife."

He has to stop. He makes himself go on.

NARZISS (CONT'D)

And underneath, in the margin, in a hand that is not the clerk's -- somebody wrote her name.

GOLDMUND

(barely audible)

Say it.

NARZISS

Marthe. A dancer, out of Hungary.

Goldmund lies very still.

Something goes across his face that is not grief and is not joy and has no name in any language Narziss has ever studied.

GOLDMUND

Marthe.

NARZISS

I have known for twelve years. I could not think of a single hour in which to give it to you.

Goldmund's hand moves an inch on the blanket, toward him.

GOLDMUND

This one.

He closes his eyes again.

The wet rattle in his chest thins out, and thins out, and becomes one long, slow, unhurried exhale.

His chest falls.

It does not rise.

The lines around his eyes and mouth let go.

Narziss sits absolutely still in the blue light.

He looks at the face. He looks down at their two hands.

A tear comes off his eyelashes, falls through the cold shadow, and lands on Goldmund's scarred knuckles.

Then another.

Then the posture -- the razor-straight, thirty-year posture -- goes.

He falls forward and puts his face down into the dead man's lap, both hands fisted in the coarse wool blanket, and his whole body comes apart in silent, convulsing sobs.

The camera lifts, straight up, toward the vault.

The room opens out beneath it -- vast, bare, one small cot, one candle, two men.

The sound of Narziss weeping comes back off the slate walls like wind through a ruined cathedral.

The candle gutters, spits, and goes out.

Only the cold indigo of the window is left, lying across both of them.

EXT. MARIABRONN MONASTERY - COURTYARD - DAY

The same high, symmetrical frame that opened the film.

Slate-grey stone. Geometric arches. Parallel pathways. Every line true.

And at the dead centre of it, the chestnut tree, in leaf, moving.

A figure crosses the courtyard below and stops at the base of the trunk.

Narziss.

He stands there. He looks up into the branches for a long moment.

Then he reaches out and puts his hand flat against the bark, and leaves it there.

INT. MARIABRONN WORKSHOP - DAY

The room is empty. The trestles are empty. The shavings have been swept into the corners and left.

Dust turns in a column of light.

And in the middle of it, for the first time in the picture, we are shown her.

The Mother.

She is not beautiful and she is not kind. Her hand is open and turned down. She is looking past the child at her breast, out of the frame, at something a long way off.

She has known about it for some time.

She does not mind.

Hold.

FADE OUT.

THE END