Lasher

Thirty-five

BY THE TIME we reached Assisi, I had come to love these friars with whom I was making the journey, and to understand that they knew really nothing about me except that I wanted to be a priest. I was dressed as they were for this journey, in a brown robe, and with sandals, and with only a rope about my waist. I had not cut my hair yet, and I carried my fine clothes in a bundle, but I looked very much like one of them.

As we walked along the roadside, these priests told me the tales of St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their Order-of how Francis, the rich one, had forsworn wealth and become a beggar and a preacher, tending the lepers, of whom he was mortally frightened, and so loving to all living things that the birds of the air came to settle on his arms, and the wolf was tamed by his touch.

Great pictures were made in my mind as they talked; I saw the face of Francis, an amalgam perhaps of the radiant green-eyed Franciscan priest in Scotland, and their own innocent visages; or perhaps it was a mere ideal invented by some part of me which had already developed-to make pictures and dreams.

Whatever it was, I knew Francis.

I knew him. I knew his fear when his father cursed him. I knew the joy when he gave himself to Christ. I knew, above all, his love when he addressed all creatures as his brothers and sisters, and I knew his love for people we saw all around us, the peasants of Italy working in their fields, the townspeople, and those in the monasteries and manor houses which gave us gracious shelter by night.

Indeed, the happier I became, the more I was beginning to wonder if my birth in Britain had not been some sort of nightmare, a thing which could not have happened at all.

I felt I belonged with these Franciscans. I belonged with St. Francis. I had been born out of place. And if to be a saint meant to be like Francis, why, I was overjoyed. All this seemed natural to me. And it brought peace to me, as if I were remembering a time when all beings had been gentle, before something terrible had come.

Everywhere that we went we saw children, working in the fields with their parents, playing in the village streets. When we entered the high city of Assisi, it was filled with children of all ages, as is any city, and I understood without being told that these were small human beings, infants on their way to adulthood. They were not the dreaded little people, my enemies who would kill me from envy-that bitter gleam of knowledge which had only served to terrify me with no further understanding of what it meant. Ah, how beautiful were these merely unfolding humans, who grew slowly, taking year after year to attain the height and abilities which I had acquired during and right after my birth.

When I saw the mothers nursing, I wanted the milk. But I knew it was not a witch’s milk. It wasn’t that strong. It wouldn’t help me. But I was grown, was I not? I had become taller even on my journey. And I seemed to all the world a strong and healthy human of some twenty years.

Whatever my thoughts on all this, I resolved to reveal nothing. Rather I stepped out of myself, amongst those around me. I was charmed by the countryside, the vineyards, the greenery, and above, the soft light of the Italian sun.

Assisi itself was at a great elevation, so that from many promontories, one could see the surrounding country in all its soft splendor, so much more inviting than the threatening snow-covered peaks and cliffs which had surrounded Donnelaith.

Indeed, my memory of events in Donnelaith was becoming confused to me. If I had not learnt to write within the next few weeks, and not recorded everything in a secret code, I might have actually erased from my mind my origins. They certainly came to seem vague as time passed.

But let me return to the moment. We entered the gates of Assisi at midday. At once I was taken into the Basilica of St. Francis at the opposite end of the town-a grand edifice, though nothing as cold as the Cathedral in Donnelaith. Indeed the place had not pointed arches but rounded ones, and its walls were alive with wondrous paintings of the saint, beneath which was the shrine of the saint, to which the faithful came in droves as they had done for St. Ashlar in my home.

Hundreds proceeded to walk round the tomb of the saint, which bore no effigy of him, and was massive, and to lay hands on it, and give their kisses, and to pray loudly to St. Francis, to beg him for cures, for solace, for his special intercession with the Good God.

I too laid hands on the sarcophagus and made my prayer to Francis, who had for me now a personality, a figure wrapped in color and romance. “Francis,” I whispered to the stone. “I am here. I am here to become a friar but you know that I have been sent to be a saint.”

There was a surge of pride in me; no one knew the secret. That I would one day return to Scotland with the precepts of Francis, and possibly save my people as the good Father there had told me I must do. I was destined through humility to achieve great things.

But I saw this pride for what it was. “If you are to become a saint, you must do it truly,” I thought to myself. “You must imitate Francis, and these friars and the other saints of whom they have told you-you must forget that ambition. For a saint cannot have the ambition to be a saint. A saint is the servant of Christ. Christ may decide that He wants you to be nothing! Be ready for it.”

But though I made this confession or admonition in prayer to myself, I was secretly confident. I am destined to shine like the image of St. Ashlar in the colored glass.

For many hours I remained in the shrine, almost drunk on the devotion of those who passed the big stone tomb. I felt their fervor almost as if it were music. Indeed, it was now clear to me that I was hypersensitive, as you would say today, not merely to music, but in general to all sounds. The shrill of birds; the timbre of people’s voices; the rhythms and accidental rhymes of their speech, all this affected me. Indeed, when I encountered a person who spoke naturally with alliteration, I was near paralyzed by it.

But what paralyzed me here in the shrine was the delirium of the faithful and the particular intensity of devotion which Francis himself had inspired.

That very day I was taken up to the Carceri, the hermitage where Francis and his first followers had lived their solitary life. There were the first cells. There was the grand and beautiful view of the countryside. This was the place where Francis had walked, and prayed.

I had no thought now of ever leaving. What worried me was not the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience. What I feared was my secret pride, that this legend of St. Ashlar would eat at my soul, while in fact goading me on.

Let me now pause to make a most significant point. I was not to leave Italy, or this life of a Franciscan, for over twenty years. The exact count? I do not know. I never did. It was not thirty-three years, for that I would remember as the age of Christ.

I tell you this so that you will understand two things. That I do not rush to Donnelaith in this tale, for it is not time yet, and that during that time my body remained vigorous and quite limber, quite strong, and quite the same. My skin thickened somewhat, losing its baby softness, and my face gathered expressive lines, but not very many. Otherwise…well almost…I remained the same.

I want you to understand how happy I was in this Franciscan life, how natural it was to me, because that is to some extent the heart of the case I wish to make.

Christmas was a great feast in Italy, as it had been back in the Highlands of nightmare which I had so briefly seen. It became to me the most solemn and significant of all Holy Days, and wherever I was in Italy I went home to Assisi at that time.

Even before my first Christmas there, I had read the story of the Christ Child born in the manger and looked at innumerable paintings of it, and I had given myself heart and soul to the little infant in Mary’s arms.

I closed my eyes and imagined that I was a tiny baby, which I had never been, that I was helpless and yearning and innocent. And the feeling which came over me was one of rapture. I resolved to see Christ-a pure child-in every man or woman to whom I spoke. If I suffered a moment of anger or annoyance, which was unusual, I thought of the Christ Child. I imagined I was holding Him in my arms. I believed in Him utterly, and that someday when my destiny was fulfilled-whatever and whenever-I would be with Christ. I would kneel in the manger and I would touch the Christ Child’s tiny hand.

God, after all, was eternal-Child, Man, Crucified Savior, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit-it was all one. I saw this with perfect clarity almost immediately. I saw it so completely that theological questions made me laugh.

By the time I left Italy, I was a priest of God, a renowned preacher, a singer of canticles, a sometime healer and a man who brought consolation or happiness to all he knew.

But let me now explain with greater care:

From the beginning, my innocent manner and my directness astonished everyone; they never guessed the real reason for it; that I was a child. That I feasted on milk and cheese seemed humorous to people. My speed at learning also drew love from everyone around me. I could write Italian, English and Latin within a short time.

Uncompromising saintliness took me body and soul.

There was no task too low for me to perform. I went with those who tended the lepers outside the gates of the town.

I had no fear of the lepers. I could have had it, I think, but I did not cultivate it, and therein lies a key to my nature. I seemed to be able to cultivate what I wished.

Nothing to date had severely repelled me, except hatred and violence. And this attitude remained constant during all my years on earth. I was either saddened by something or seduced by it. There was seldom a middle ground.

Indeed, I had a fascination with the lepers because other people were so frightened of them; and of course I knew how Francis has fought to overcome this, and I was determined to be as great as he. I gave comfort to the lepers. I bathed and clothed those who were too far gone with the disease to care for themselves. Having heard that St. Catherine of Siena once drank the bathwater from a leper, I cheerfully did the same thing.

Very early on, I became known in Assisi-the innocent one, the dazzled one, the fool for God, so to speak. A young monk who is truly on fire with the spirit of Francis, who does naturally what Francis would have us all do.

And because I seemed so completely unsophisticated, so incapable of conniving, so childlike if you will, people tended to open up to me, to tell me things, egged on by my bright curious gaze. I listened to everything. Not a word was wasted. Imagine it-the great infant that I was, learning from people’s smallest gestures and slightest confessions all the major truths of life.

That is what was happening inside my mind.

By night I learned to read and finally to write, and I wrote constantly, taking as little sleep as I could. I memorized songs and poems. I studied the paintings of the Basilica, the great murals by Giotto which tell all the significant events of Francis’s life, including how the stigmata came to him-the wounds in his hands and feet from God. And I went out among the pilgrims to talk to them, to hear what they had to say of the world.

The first year of which I knew the date was 1536. I went often to Florence, to give to the poor, to visit their hovels and bring bread and something to drink. Florence was still a city of the Medici. Perhaps she was past her great glory, as some have said since, but I don’t think at the time that anyone would have said such a thing.

On the contrary, Florence was a magnificent and thriving place. Printed books were sold there by the thousands; the sculptures of Michelangelo were everywhere to be seen. The guilds were powerful, still, though much trade had moved to the New World; and the city was an endless spectacle of processions, such as the great Procession of Corpus Christi, and performances of beautiful tableaux and plays.

The bank of the Medici was then the greatest bank in the world.

Everywhere in Florence men and women were literate and thoughtful and talkative; this was the city which had produced the poet Dante and the political genius Machiavelli; the city which produced Fra Angelico and Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, a city of great writers, great painters, great princes and great saints. The city itself was made of solid stone and filled with palaces, churches, wondrous piazzas, gardens and bridges. Perhaps it was a city unique in all the world. It certainly thought that it was, and I did too.

As my duties expanded, I soon knew every inch of Florence, and heard one way or another all the news of the world.

The world of course was on the brink of disaster! People spoke continuously of the final days.

The English King Henry VIII had abandoned the true faith; the great city of Rome was only just recovering from its rape by Protestant troops and Catholic Spaniards alike. Indeed the pope and the cardinals had had to take shelter in the castle of Sant’Angelo, and this had left with people a deep disillusionment and distrust.

The Black Plague was still with us, rising every ten years or so to claim victims. There were wars on the Continent.

The worst tales, however, were of the Protestants abroad-of mad Martin Luther, who had turned the entire German people against the Church, and other rabid heresies-the Anabaptists, and the Calvinists, who made great gains every day in the realm of Christian souls.

The pope was rumored to be powerless against these heresies. Councils were called and called but nothing really was done. The Church was in the midst of reforming itself to answer to the great heretics, John Calvin and Martin Luther. But the world had been rent in half it seemed by the Protestants, who swept an entire culture before them when they broke with the authority of the pope.

Yet our world of Assisi, and Florence and the other cities and towns of Italy, seemed splendid and rich and dedicated to the True Christ. It seemed, when reading Scriptures, impossible to believe that Our Lord had not walked on the Appian Way. Italy filled my soul-with its music, its gardens, its green countryside-it seemed to me the only place that I should ever want to be. Rome was the only city I loved more than Florence, and only perhaps because of its size, because of the splendor of St. Peter’s. But then Venice too was a great marvel. For me the poor of one city were pretty much as the poor of another. The hungry were the hungry. They were always waiting for me with open arms.

I found it easy and natural to be a true Poverello-to own nothing, to seek shelter wherever I was at nightfall, to let the Holy Spirit come into me when I was asked a complex question, or asked to declare a truth.

I knew joy when I preached my first sermon, in a piazza in Florence, with arms outstretched, eschewing, as was our custom, all squabbling about theology, and talking only of personal dedication to God. “We must be as the Christ Child-that innocent, that trusting, that good.”

Of course this had been the very wish of Francis, that we be true beggars and vagabonds speaking from the heart. But our Order was much torn by matters of interpretation. What had Francis truly meant? What kind of organization should we have? Who was truly poor? Who was truly pure?

I avoided all decisions and conclusions. I spoke aloud to Francis; I modeled my life upon him. I lost myself utterly in good works, and I cared for the sick with good results.

It was no miracle. A man would not drop his crutches and cry, “I can walk!” It manifested itself first in a talent for nursing, for bringing the dangerously ill through the fever, back from the brink. It may have been what men call natural. But I began to feel its power in a way; to learn from little things how to enhance it-that if I held the cup myself for the sick one he would fare better from the drink of water than if I let this be done by someone else.

During these early years another form of knowledge came to me: that many of my brothers in the Order did not keep the vow of chastity. Indeed, they had mistresses or went into the legal brothels in Florence, or bedded down with each other under cover of the dark. In fact, I myself was noticing beautiful boys and girls all the time, and feeling desire for them, and waking sometimes in the night with sensuous dreams. I had been fully grown by the time I reached Italy, with dark hair around the genitals and under my arms. I had always been as other men in these respects.

I remembered the words of the Franciscan in Donnelaith. “You must never touch the flesh of a woman.” I thought about this a great deal. Of course I’d come to realize that coupling led men and women to create children. And I concluded that I had been given this severe warning for one reason: so that I would not father another monster like myself.

But what sort of monster was I? I wasn’t sure anymore. My birth and origins became a torture to me in memory, a disgrace that I could not confide to a soul.

At this time too-during those first few years, as my personality formed-I began to think that certain persons were watching me, persons who knew about my imposture and would someday reveal me for what I was.

Often in the streets of Florence I saw Dutchmen, recognizable by their distinctive clothing and hats, and these men seemed always to have their eyes fixed on me. And then once an Englishman came to Assisi and stayed there a long time and came back day after day, simply to hear me preach. This was the beautiful springtime. I was telling the stories or exempla of St. Francis; and I remember the cold eyes of this man gazing upon me as I spoke.

Always I confronted these spies. I would stare at them. Sometimes I would even turn and start to walk towards them. Always they fled. Always they returned.

Meantime the question of chastity was torturing me-the question of whether or not I could do it with a woman, and whether or not a monster would be born.

There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to do what was right in the eyes of God. It seemed a very simple matter to take a mistress, to take a lover. It seemed an immense challenge to enjoy no pleasure of the flesh at all. To live without knowing the answer to the mystery.

I chose the path of the saint.

I allowed no fire to kindle in me, and consequently there was never a blaze.

I became well known for my purity, that I had no eye for women whatsoever, and my healing became more and more accomplished, though still I did not know if it was miraculous and thought it was perhaps a matter of skill.

Another passion meantime swept me up. It was the simple idea current at the time that singing could bring the faithful to Christ, as easily perhaps as evangelical preaching. I began to write my own canticles, simple poetry which I made up, using much rhythm, and to sing these songs at informal gatherings. I much preferred singing to preaching. I was tired of hearing myself promulgate simple truths. But I never got tired of singing.

Soon people knew that when I appeared, there would be music from me-a brief song, sometimes little more than a poem recited to the stmmming of a small lute. And I played a little game of which no one else was aware-I tried to see how many days I could go with no speaking, only singing, without irritating anyone or attracting notice to my little sport.

Ten years after my arrival in Italy I was ordained. It would have come sooner if I had wanted it but my study for Holy Orders was deliberately meticulous and slow. I was all the time traveling, walking the roads, and meeting with people and greeting them with the word of God. Time did not seem important. In fact, I had no sense of hurrying towards any destiny at all.

I had become by my ordination utterly fearless of disease. I sang to those who were past all need of physical comfort. I sat in many a room where others feared to step.

But things were not perfect. They were not right. From time to time I remembered my birth with startling effect. I’d wake, sit up, think, Ah, but it’s not possible, and then lie back in the darkness, realizing of course it was possible, for I had no other mother, father, sister, brothers! I was not what others believed me to be. I would remember the Queen and the river and the Highlands, as if they were elements of a nightmare.

And sometimes it seemed that after these tumultuous moments, I would see those people following me, spying upon me more than before. Of course I faulted myself for imagining it, but the longer I thought of all this, the more strange my life became.

Then there were times when I betrayed my nature in a particular and spontaneous way. I loved the taste of milk. The Devil was always tempting me with visions of women’s breasts. Even during Lent I had to have milk, and I could not endure the fast, and the breaking of the fast for milk was my worst sin. I sometimes grasped handfuls of cheese and ate it. Any soft food was delicious to me, but the craving for cheese and milk was especially bad.

Once I wandered into a field filled with cattle. It was sunrise and no one was about. Or so I thought. I went down on my knees and drank from the udder of a cow, squirting the warm milk out of the udder right into my mouth.

When I had drunk enough I lay in the grass, staring at the sky. I felt bestial and ugly for what I had done. An old farmer came. He was in worn clothing, though neat and well mended, and his face was darkened from working in the sun.

He whispered something to me, full of fear, and ran away. I got up and ran after him, lifting my robes so that I wouldn’t trip.

“What did you say to me?” I asked him.

He then whispered something hostile, a curse perhaps, and fled away.

I was overcome with shame. This man knew I wasn’t a human being. And gradually from that day forward my deceit of those around me began to prey on my mind.

I saw the farmer again in the city. He saw me. I could have sworn I saw him with others, and that they were whispering, but this might have been fancy. I let it go. Then one morning I came out of my cell in the cloister to discover a great pitcher of fresh milk there. This froze my soul. For a moment I did not know where I was, or who, or what was happening. I knew only this was an offering, and that it had happened before and before and before. The glen, the little people, and one single giant among them walking down to the edge of the circle, and the offerings of milk. My head swam. For the first time in many many years, I saw the circle of stones, and the circles of figures, so many circles of figures, each wider than the other, and going on so far that I lost count.

I picked up the pitcher and I drank it down greedily the way I always did milk. When I looked up, across the monastery garden, I saw, in the shadows of the cloister, people moving who then darted away.

I think some of the monks saw this. I didn’t know what to think of it. I didn’t dare tell anyone about it. I dismissed it. I told St. Francis, I was his instrument, and I cared only for serving God.

That night for sure a Dutchman was following me. And in the morning I went back to Assisi, to talk to Francis, to renew my vows, to cleanse my soul.

In the days that followed, many people came to me asking to be healed. I laid my hands on them and sometimes with startling results. There was no doubt that the peasants were whispering about me. And offerings of milk began to appear for me in strange places. I might come up a street alone and at the top of it find a pitcher of milk sitting there on the stones.

A certain fact also began to cause me pain. Perhaps I had never been baptized! Unless we can assume the terrified midwife and the ladies-in-waiting had done this. I don’t think so. And now as I brooded on this, as I began to try to remember all the details of the northland where I had been born and exiled, I realized that if I had not been baptized, then I could not have received Holy Orders, which meant that when I changed the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ it was nothing of the sort.

Indeed, nothing that I had done could bear fruit. I fell into a state of melancholia. I would talk to no one.

And then it became very plain to me that I must have imagined this birth in England! That nothing of that sort could truly have occurred! Donnelaith. I had never heard mention of a cathedral there, of monks of our Order. But of course for years Henry VIII had persecuted the Catholics. Only recently had Good Queen Mary restored the true church.

If my fancies were true, I had been by my own reckoning alive just over twenty years. Unless my lost childhood was just that-a history lost to the memory, buried experiences, something which I could not call back. But it didn’t seem so; and the more I brooded, the more everything about me began to look suspect to me, and the more tormented I became.

Finally I decided I must know a woman. I must know if I was to that extent a man. I was burning to do it, of course. I always had been! And now I knew this was my excuse. Find out.

It was as if in a woman’s arms I would know if I was animal enough to have an immortal soul! I laughed at the contradiction, but it was there, and it was true. I wanted to be human, and had to commit a mortal sin to find out if I was.

I went into Florence, to one of the many brothels I knew, where I had in fact brought the sacraments to women when they were dying, and once gave Extreme Unction to a poor merchant who had the misfortune to die in a woman’s embrace. I had often visited this brothel in my priestly robes. It was not a shocking thing to do.

So I entered it now on a silent rampage. And the women came to greet me, “Gentle Father Ashlar!” for they talked to me always as if I were an idiot or a child.

It disgusted me for the first time. I walked out and into the piazza and down to the Arno and across the nearest bridge. It was crowded with shops, very busy, people were coming and going, and when I happened to look I saw a man watching me and knew again that it was a Dutchman just by the look of his clothes. I went towards him, but he fled into the crowd, and I couldn’t find him. He was gone in the snap of my fingers. Just gone.

I was then very weary, and finally I threw out my arms and I began to sing. I was on the middle of the bridge, and mad with fear and grief, trying to reconcile my memories with my devotion to Christ, and I began to sing. It wasn’t so unusual really, the streets were crowded with all kinds of distractions at such an hour in Florence. One crazed Franciscan swaying and singing was not peculiar at all.

Gradually some people took notice, as they are wont to do. They stopped their tasks and a little crowd gathered. I was rocking back and forth, holding myself with my arms and singing, and when I looked up, very lost in my song, I saw a beautiful woman staring at me, a woman with green eyes like those of the Franciscan priest in Donnelaith, and long fancy blond hair.

Then the most astonishing thing happened. This woman lowered her veil and walked away! And I realized that the face which had been peering at me was turned to the back of her body, as if her head was put backwards upon her neck. I was fascinated!

My passion was unbearable, but another even more evil excitement leapt in my heart. This is a monster like me.

I let the song die away, and spurned those who would have given me alms. Take them to the church, I said, to those who deserve them. And then I went after the woman, who had waited for me in a side street. Once again, she revealed the face, then walked off. Soon we were in a small alleyway. I was clearly staring at her back when she lifted her veil and revealed her face again.

Finally she spun round in a blur of black garments, silks, satins, velvet and jewels, and rapped hard upon the door. It was opened in the wall and as I rushed up to catch a glimpse of her before she disappeared through it, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside.

It was a narrow, crowded garden, like many a courtyard in Florence, with old peeling ocher walls, and bright flowers flourishing in the sheltered sun. Three other women sat there, together on a bench beneath a tree. All wore wide and beautiful skirts, rich sleeves, and had high bosoms which began to drive me mad. And the one who had brought me in, I saw now she was an ordinary woman! Her face was on the front of her body, like that of anyone else. It had all been some kind of illusion with the veils she pulled from her hair. Some little trick.

She confessed this to me, and this set them all to laughing so much I thought they would never stop.

I was dizzy. Suddenly these women were crowding about me and saying, “Father, take off your clothes. Come, stay with us in this garden.” And the blond one, who bore the famous name of Lucrezia, said that she had bound me with spells to make me come, but not to fear, they weren’t witches, rather their men were gone off to hunt in the country, and they would do as they pleased.

Their men gone off to hunt? This sounded bizarre. But I perceived the truth beneath it. These were whores, but whores free for the day, and I was the object of their desire.

“We are proud to initiate you, virgin child,” said the eldest of the women, who was as beautiful as all the rest. They drew me across the tiles and into the bedchamber. They took off my sandals and removed my robes; then they flung their dresses this way and that, crying out in jubilation, and they danced about me, naked as nymphs, singing some little song. It was all a joke to them! It was all a game. They were shocking the young Franciscan, who though he had a full beard still had the expression of a child.

But I was not shocked. Once more a strange knowing came to me of a time when all the world had done these things; the Garden of Delights it had been, with all romping naked, and playing and singing and dancing; and flowers all about us, and plenty of fruit to eat.

Then fear took hold of me. Gone, all that. Blackness.

I was meantime making like a satyr for these women, which they found very amusing, and which I could not help. At last they tumbled into the bed next to me, covering me with kisses, and I grasped the breasts of the closest woman, and began to suck tenaciously so that I made her cry in pain. The others planted kisses on my naked shoulders, my back, my organ, my chest.

In a twinkling I was back in the birth chamber in England, in the arms of my mother, knowing the fierce pleasure of drawing the milk savagely from her breast. I was drunk with the pleasure, and now it found its worst culmination in the organ, and I soon rode all the women, one after another, crying out in ecstasy, and then beginning with the first to take them all again.

It was now evening. The stars were visible above the courtyard. The roar of the city was dying away. I slept.

I was with my mother, only she was not hating me and crying in terror, but a long slender creature such as me, much too long to be a real woman, and stroking me with fingers which like mine were too long. Didn’t everyone see I was a monster like this woman? How could people be so easily fooled?

I drifted into dreams. I was in a mist, and people were crying, and sobbing, and men were rushing to and fro. It was a massacre. “Taltos!” Someone shouted it, and then I beheld in my dream the farmer from the field near Florence, and heard him whisper, “Taltos!” and I saw before me again a pitcher of milk.

Thirsty, I woke, and sat bolt upright as was my custom, and stared around me in the dark.

All the women were still, but with their eyes open. This struck me as horrid, horrid as the illusion that the woman’s face had been on the back of her head. I reached out to shake awake the blond woman, so rigid was her gaze. And I perceived the moment I touched her that she lay dead in a pool of her own blood. Indeed, all of them were dead, one on either side of me, and the three who lay on the floor. They were dead. And the bed was soaked with the blood and it stank of human people.

I rushed out into the courtyard in uncontrollable cowardice, and collapsed near the fountain, on my knees, trembling, unsure of what I had seen. But when I finally rose to my feet and returned, I saw it was true. These women were dead! I laid my hands on them repeatedly but there was no waking them! I couldn’t cure them of death!

I gathered up my robes, my sandals, dressed again and ran away.

How could these women have died? I remembered the words the Franciscan had said to me. “Never touch the flesh of a woman.”

It was the dead of night in Florence, but I managed to return to the monastery, and there I locked myself in my cell. When morning came, news of the deaths was all over Florence. A new form of plague had struck.

I did what I have always done at such trouble. I went home to Assisi, walking the whole way. The mild winter was coming, which is nevertheless a winter, and the journey was not easy. But I did not care. I knew someone was following me, a man on horseback, but I only caught glimpses of him from time to time. I was in despair.

As soon as I reached the monastery I prayed. I prayed to Francis to guide me and to help me; I prayed to the Blessed Virgin to forgive me for my sins with these women. I lay on the floor of the church, arms outstretched as priests do when they are ordained. I prayed for forgiveness and understanding, and I wept. I didn’t want to think my sin had killed these women.

I envisioned the Christ Child, and I became the small helpless baby, and I said, “Christ, succor me, Holy Mother the Church, succor me. What can I do on my own?”

I went to confession, to one of the oldest priests there.

He was Italian, but had only just come home from England, where many Protestants were now being put to death. We were rebuilding our monasteries in that land, sending priests back to serve the Catholics who had kept the faith during times of persecution.

I chose this priest because I wanted to confess all-my birth, my memories, the strange things said to me! But when I was kneeling in the confessional these things seemed the dreams of a madman! And it really did seem to me that I was a man only, and had had some proper childhood somewhere which had somehow been erased from my mind and heart.

I confessed only that I’d been with the women, that I had brought death to all four but did not know how.

My confessor laughed at me, softly, reassuringly. I had not killed the women. On the contrary, God had preserved me from the plague which had killed them. It was a sign of my special destiny. I should not think of it anymore. Many a priest has stumbled, taken to his bed a whore. The important thing was to be larger than that sin and that guilt, to carry on in the service of God.

“Don’t be full of pride, Ashlar. So you finally succumbed like everyone else. Put it behind you. You know now that it is nothing, this pleasure, and God has spared you from the plague for Himself.”

He told me that the time would come perhaps when I was to go to England, that England would need us as never before. “Queen Mary is dying,” he said. “If the crown goes to Elizabeth, the daughter of the witch,” he said, “there shall be terrible persecutions of the Catholics again.”

I left the confessional, said my penance and went out into the wintry windswept fields.

I was unhappy. I did not feel absolved. My eyes were wide and I was walking in a staggering way. I had killed those women, I knew it. I had thought them witches! But they were not! The face on the back of the head, all that had been trickery and illusion! And they had died as the result!

Oh, but what was the larger truth! What was the real story? There was but one way to know! Go to England, go as a missionary to England, to fight the Protestant heresies there, and seek the Glen of Donnelaith. If I found the castle, if I found the Cathedral, if I found the window of St. Ashlar, then I would know I had not imagined these things. And I must find the clansmen. I must find the meaning of the words once spoken to me. That I was Ashlar, that I was he who comes again.

I walked alone in the fields, shivering and thinking that even my beautiful Italy could be cold at this time. But was this cold a reminder to me of where I had been born? This was for me a solemn and terrible moment. I had never wanted to leave Italy. And I thought again of the priest’s words, spoken in Donnelaith: “You can choose.”

Could I not choose to stay here in the service of God and St. Francis? Could I not forget the past? As for the women, I would never touch them again, never. There would be no more such deaths. And as for St. Ashlar, who was this saint who had no feast in the church calendar? Yes, stay here! Stay in sunny Italy, stay in this place which has become your home.

A man was following me. I’d seen him almost as soon as I left the town and now he came riding closer and closer, a man dressed all in black wool and on a black horse.

“Can I offer you my horse, Father?” he asked. It was the accent of the Dutch merchants. I knew it. I had heard it often enough in Florence and in Rome, and everywhere that I had been. I looked up and I saw his reddish-golden hair and blue eyes. Germanic. Dutch. It was all the same to me. A man from a world where heretics thrived.

“You know you cannot,” I said. “I’m a Franciscan. I won’t ride on it. Why have you been following me? I saw you in Florence. I’ve seen you many times before that.”

“You must talk to me,” he said. “You must come with me. The others haven’t an inkling of your secret nature. But I know what it is.”

I was horrified at these words. It was the dropping of a sword which had been dangling over me forever. My breath went out of me. I bent double as if I’d been struck and I went further out, that way, staggering, into the field. The grass was soft and I lay down, covering my eyes from the glaring sun.

He dismounted and came after, leading his horse. He deliberately stood between me and the sun, so that I could take my hand away from my eyes. He was powerfully built like many from Northern Europe, and he had the thick eyebrows those people have, and the pale cheeks.

“I know who you are, Ashlar,” he said to me in Italian with a Dutch accent. And then he began to speak Latin. “I know you were born in the Highlands. I know that you come from the Clan of Donnelaith. I heard tell of your birth shortly after it happened. There were those who caught the scent of it and spread the story-even to other lands.

“It took me years to find you here, and I have been watching you. I know you by your height, by your long fingers, by your power to sing and to rhyme, and by your craving for milk. I have seen you take the offerings from the peasants. But do you know what they would do to you if they could? Your kind would always have the milk and the cheese, and in the dark woodlands of the world, the peasants still know this and leave these offerings for you on the table at night, or at the door.”

“What are you calling me, a devil? A woodland spirit? Some demon or familiar? I am none of those things.”

My head was aching; what was real to me? This beautiful grass around me as I rose to my knees, and then to my feet? This cold blue sky above me? Or those wretched ghastly memories and the words this man spoke?

“Nights ago in Florence, you brought death to four women,” he said. “That was the final proof.”

“Oh, God, then you know it. It is true.” I began to weep. “But how did I kill them? Why did they die? All I did was what other men have done.”

“You will bring death to any woman whom you touch! Weren’t you told this before you left the glen? Ah, the folly of those who sent you away! And for years and years we have watched and waited for you to come. They should have sent for us. They know who we are, and that we would have paid gold for you, gold, but they are stubborn.”

I was horrified.

“You speak of me as if I were a chattel. I am my father’s son, those base-born.”

He went on worrying and wringing his hands, imploring me to understand him:

“They were told again and again by our emissaries, but they were superstitious and blind.”

“Emissaries? From where? The Devil!” Again I stared at him, this man in black with the black horse. “Who is blind? Dear God in heaven, give me the grace to understand this, to combat the artful lies of the Great Deceiver. You either stop talking in riddles or I will kill you! Tell me why I killed those women, or so help me God, I may break your bones with my bare hands.”

I rose up in a tempest of anger. And it was all I could do to keep from laying my hands on his throat. The anger was as everything else with me, instantaneous and complete. I frightened him as I came towards him. I was so much taller than he was, and when I put my hands out, he fell back.

“Ashlar, listen, for this is not the lies of the Great Deceiver. This is the perfect truth. No ordinary woman can bear your child-only a witch can do it, or a dwarfed monster-the half-breed spawn of your kind and the witches-or a pure female of your own ilk.”

The words dazzled me. A pure one of my own ilk! What did this conjure to my imagination? A tall beauty, pale of skin and fleet of foot, with graceful fingers like my own? Had I not envisioned such a being when I lay with the whores? Or had I dreamed? I was overcome suddenly, as if by incense or singing. But I remembered my mother. She was no pure one. She had held her hand out, and revealed the witch’s mark.

“You do not know the danger,” he said, “if the ignorant peasants of this or any land were to find out. Why do you think the Scots sent you away in such haste?”

“You frighten me, and I want you to stop it. I live a life of love and peace and service to others. They sent me away to become a priest.” At this the calm came over me. I believed these words so completely. I looked up at the sky and its beauty seemed to me the perfect proof of God’s grace.

“They sent you away so the peasants would not destroy you as they have always done with the remnants of your breed. The sight of you, the scent of you, the promise of your seed, could pitch them back into their cruel and pagan ways.”

“Breed. What are you saying? Breed.” I could not hear any more. I clenched my fists, unable to lay hands on him, unable to do him harm. In all my life of twenty years or more I had never struck another. I could not do violence. I wept, and I fled.

“You come with me now,” he cried, trying to catch up with me. “I can make all provisions for the journey. You have no cherished objects, no personal possessions. You carry your breviary with you. You need nothing else. Come. We will go to Amsterdam together and when you are safe, I will tell you the truth.”

“I will not!” I said. “Amsterdam! A stronghold of the heretics! You are speaking of hell by another name.” I turned around. “What are you saying? That I am not a mortal man?”

Again, he was frightened as I leant over him, but he was powerfully built and he took a stand.

“You have a body which can deceive others,” he said, “but no one can speak for your soul. In the most ancient legends, it was said your kind had no souls to be converted, no souls to be saved. That you could hover invisible in the darkness forever, between heaven and earth, because heaven was closed to you, so your only hope was to return in a likely form.”

I was awestruck, but not only for myself that someone could believe such a thing of me, but for the sheer possibility that such creatures could exist! Soulless. In darkness, with heaven closed to them! I started to weep.

I cleared my vision, and looked at this man, who’d given words to such a ghastly thought. His words were like sparks inside of me. Like the snapping and popping of damp wood. The more I stared at him, I sensed that he had to be evil, he was from the Devil, he was from some dark army that would carry my soul to hell.

“And you say that I have no soul? That I have no soul to be saved? How dare you say this to me! How dare you tell me that I am without a soul?”

In a fury I did strike him, knocking him with one fine blow all the way to the ground. I was stupefied by my own strength and as alarmed by this sin as I had been by my others.

I ran out of the field and home.

This man followed me, but he didn’t come close. He seemed in a great state of alarm when I entered the monastery, but he hung back, and I wondered if he was afraid of the Cross, the church, the sanctified ground.

That night I resolved what I must do. I went down beneath the church and slept on the stones before the tomb of Francis. I prayed to him. “Francis, how can I not have a soul? Give me guidance, Father. Help me. Mother of God, this is your child. I am bereft and alone.”

I fell into a deep sleep and I saw angels, and I saw the face of the Virgin, and I shrank down into a tiny child in her arms. I lay against her breasts, one with the Christ Child. And Francis said to me that that was my way; not to be one with the crucified Christ, leave that to others, but to be one with that innocent babe. I must go back to Scotland, go back to where it had begun.

I dreaded to leave Assisi so soon before Christmas-not to be here for the great Procession and to help make the crèche with the shepherds and the Holy Family-but I knew that as soon as I obtained permission, I would go.

Travel north and find Donnelaith. See for yourself what is there.

I went to talk to the Guardian, our Father Superior, a wise and kindly man who had served all his life in the place of Francis’s birth. He heard me out calmly and then spoke:

“Ashlar, if you go it will be to a martyr’s death. Word has just reached Italy. The daughter of the witch Boleyn has been crowned Queen of England. This is Elizabeth, and the burnings of Catholics have once again begun.”

The witch Boleyn. It took me a moment to remember who this was, ah, the mistress of King Henry, the one who had enchanted him and turned him against the Church. Yes, Elizabeth, the daughter. And so Good Queen Mary, who had tried to bring the land back to the faith, was now dead.

“I cannot let this stop me, Father,” I said. “I cannot.” And then in a rush I told him the whole tale.

I walked back and forth in the chamber. I talked and talked. I told all the words that had been said to me, trying not to fall into a cadence. I told about the strange man from Holland. I told about the old Laird, and my father, and St. Ashlar in his window, and the priest who had said to me, “You are St. Ashlar come again. You can be a saint.”

I thought surely he would laugh as had my confessor at the mere statement that I had brought the women death.

He was thunderstruck. He remained quiet for a long time, and then he rang for his assistant. The monk came in. “You can tell the Scotsman that he might come in now,” he said.

“The Scotsman?” I said. “Who is this man?”

“This is the man who has come from Scotland to take you away. We have been keeping him from his mission. We did not believe him! But you have confirmed his claim. He is your brother. He comes from your father. Now we know that what he says is true.”

His words caught me utterly unprepared. I realized I had wanted to be proven a liar, to be told this was all devilish fantasy and that I must put such thoughts out of my mind.

“Bring the young Earl’s son to me,” said the Father Superior again, to send the baffled attendant on his way.

I was a cornered animal. I found myself looking to the windows as a means of escape.

I was in terror that the man who came into the room would be the Dutchman. This cannot happen to me, I thought, I am in the state of grace. God cannot let the Devil take me to hell. I closed my eyes, and I tried to feel my own soul. Who dares to tell me I have no soul?

There came into the room a tall red-haired man, clearly recognizable as Scots by his wild and rustic attire. He wore the tartan of plaid, and ragged untrimmed fur and crude leather shoes, and seemed a savage of the wood compared to the civilized gentlemen of Italy, who went about in hose and fine sleeves. His hair was streaked with brown and his eyes dark, and when I looked at him I knew him, but I could not remember from where.

Then I saw in memory…the men standing by the fireplace. The Yule log burning. The Laird of Donnelaith saying, “Burn him!” and these men about to obey the command. This was one of the clan, though too young to have been there, then.

“Ashlar!” he said in a whisper. “Ashlar, we have come for you. We need you. Our father is the Laird now, and would have you come home.”

And then he dropped to his knees and he kissed my hand.

“Don’t do this,” I said gently. “I am only an instrument of the Lord. Please embrace me, man to man, if you will and tell me what you want.”

“I am your brother,” he said, obeying me and caressing me. “Ashlar, our Cathedral still stands. Our valley still exists by the grace of God. But it may not for long. The heretics have threatened to come down upon us before Christmas; they would destroy our rites; they call us pagans and witches and liars, and it is they who lie. You must help us fight for the true faith. England and Scotland are soaked in blood.”

For a very long moment I looked at him. I looked at the eager excited expression of the Guardian, our Father Superior. I looked at the attendant, who seemed himself carried away by all this as if I were a saint. Of course the heretics did these things-denounced us in those terms which more properly applied to them.

I thought of the Dutchman outside, waiting, watching. Perhaps this was a trick from him. But I knew better. This was my father’s son! I saw the resemblance. All the rest was true.

“Come with me,” said my brother. “Our father is waiting. You have answered our prayers. You are the saint sent by God to lead us. We can’t delay any longer. We must go.”

My mind played a strange trick on me. It said, Some of this is true and some is not. But if you take the horror, you must take the illusion. The veracity of one depends upon the other. Yes, the birth happened. And you know that a witch was your mother! And you even suspect who that witch might be. You know. And therefore you are the saint, and your hour has come.

In sum, I knew full well that what lay before me was a likely mixture of fancy and truth-a mixture of legend and puzzling fact-and in my desperation, horrified by what I could not deny, I accepted all in one fell swoop. You might say, I bought the fantasy. I could not be stopped now from going home.

“I will come with you, brother,” I said. And before I could form any thoughts in my mind to the contrary, I submerged myself in the sense of my mission. I let it seduce me and overtake me.

All night, I prayed only for courage, that if there was persecution in England, I would be brave enough to die for the true faith.

That my death would have meaning, I never doubted, and by dawn I think I had convinced myself I was meant to be a martyr, but much adventure and excitement lay ahead before the final flames.

But at early morning, I went to the Guardian of our congregation, and I asked him, to help me in my courage, would he do two things? First, take me into the church, into the baptistry, and there baptize me Ashlar in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, as if it had never been done before. And then would he lay his hands on me and give me Holy Orders, as if that too were happening for the first time? Would he give the power to me as a priest had given it to him, a priest who had been given it by one before him, who had got it direct from one before that, all the way back to Christ putting His hands on Peter, and saying, “Upon this Rock, I shall build my church.”

“Yes, my son,” he said, “my beloved Ashlar. Come, if you want these ceremonies, if they will give you strength, in Francis’s name, we shall do them. You have in all these years asked for nothing. Come, we shall do as you wish.”

Then if it is true, I thought, if it is, I am nevertheless a Child of Christ, now born of water and the spirit, and I am an anointed priest of God.

“St. Francis, be with me,” I prayed.

It was determined we would travel overland mostly through Catholic France and then over water to England. I was dispensed from my vow not to ride a horse. Expediency demanded it.

And so our long journey began. We were five men, all of us Highlanders, and we traveled as fast and as rough as we could, sometimes making camp in the forest. All the men except for me were heavily armed.

It was in Paris that again I saw the Dutchman! We were in the crowds before Notre Dame on a Sunday morning, going to Mass with thousands of others, in this a Catholic city, and the Dutchman came near to me.

“Ashlar!” he said. “You are a fool if you go back to the glen.”

“You get away from me!” I cried.

But something in the man’s face held me-a coolness, a resignation, almost a sneer. It was as if I were behaving predictably and wildly, and he was prepared for this, and he walked along with me. My brother and his men glared at the Dutchman and were ready at any instant to sink a dagger into him.

“Come to Amsterdam with me,” the Dutchman said. “Come and hear my story. You go back to the glen and you will die! They are killing priests in England and that is what they think you are. But in the glen you will be an animal of sacrifice to those people! Do not be their fool.”

I drew up close to him. “Tell me now, here in Paris. Sit down with me and tell me the story now.”

But before I could finish, my brother had drawn the Dutchman back and struck him a blow that sent him backwards into the crowd, creating screams and panic, as he tumbled over others and fell to the ground. “You’ve been told before,” he declared to the Dutchman. “Stay away from our ilk, and from our valley.” He spat in the Dutchman’s face.

The Dutchman stared up at me and it seemed I saw hatred in him; pure hatred; or was it merely the thwarted will?

My brother and his men pulled me into the church.

Animal of sacrifice! Death to any ordinary woman…

My peace of mind was destroyed. The wonder of the journey was destroyed. I could have sworn that various persons in the Cathedral had seen this little drama and understood it, and that they were staring at me in a wary and cunning way. That they were almost amused. I went to receive Communion.

“Dear God, come into me, find me innocent and pure.”

The crowds of Paris are filled with bizarre figures. It was my imagination, surely, that those on the fringes stared at me, that the gypsies looked, and the deformed ones, those with humps and stunted legs. I closed my eyes and sang my songs in my head.

The next night, we put on plain clothes, and we sailed for England. The mist was thick over the sea. It was now very cold. I was entering the land of winter again, of low skies and dim sunshine, of eternal chill and mystery, the land of secrets, the land of terrible truths.

We made landfall four nights later, in Scotland, surreptitiously, for priests were being hunted by Elizabeth and burnt. We proceeded inland and up into the Highlands, and the winter came down around me like a spider’s web which had waited. It was as if the craggy mountains said to me, “Ah, we have you. You had your chance and now it’s gone.”

I could not stop thinking of the man from Amsterdam. But I had one purpose. I would reach Donnelaith and demand the truth from my father, not the legends and the prayers, but the reason for the fear I had seen in my mother and in others-the whole tale.