Pavane

Third Measure BROTHER JOHN

The workshop was dim and low-roofed, lit only by a pair of barred and round-topped windows at its farther end. Along the walls of rough-dressed ashlar, stone slabs stood in lines. In one corner of the chamber was a massive sink, fed by crudely fashioned pipes and taps, beside it a bench; there was a faint tang in the air, the raw, sharp smell of wet sand.

At the bench a man was working; he was short and ruddy-faced, slightly portly and robed in the dark crimson of the Adhelmians. As he worked he whistled between his teeth, faintly and tunelessly. The habit had more than once brought down on the tonsured head of Brother John the disapproval of his superiors; but it was a part of his nature, and unstoppable.

On the bench in front of the monk lay a slab of limestone some two feet long by four or more inches thick. Beside it were boxes of silver sand; Brother John was engaged in grinding the surface of the stone, pouring the sand through wells in a circular iron muller which he afterwards spun with some dexterity, whirling an emulsion of water and abrasive across the slab. The job was both tiring and exacting; when finished, the stone must have no trace of bowing in either direction. From time to time he checked it for concavity, laying a steel straightedge across its surface. After some hours the slab was nearing completion, and its most critical stage/The grained texture imparted by the muller must also be free of blemish; Master Albrecht would be certain to detect any irregularity, and Brother John knew very well what would result. From his scrip the master printer would produce a short steel bodkin, kept for the purpose, and with its tip incise a deep cross on the limestone slab, which it would be John’s pleasure to grind away. He had in fact just finished erasing one such insigne of the great man’s disapproval. He washed the stone down carefully, employing a length of hose attached to one of the taps. He checked its flatness once more, working delicately, avoiding all contact of his admittedly greaseless fingers. The slightest suspicion of grease, a smudge of fat from the tympan of a press, the brushing of a sweaty hand, would spell disaster; in fact for their finest work the monks of the lithography section wore linen masks, to avoid contaminating the stones with their breath.

All was in order; John proceeded, still whistling, to apply the last delicate graining, using for the purpose the finest of the stacked grades of sand. The job was finally done; a last critical examination of the beautiful creamy surface and he washed the stone down again, leaning it against the wall to swill the grit from its bottom and sides. Then he carried it puffing across the workshop, edged it onto the platform of a small lift set into the thickness of the wall. A tug at the bellpull beside it, a faint answering jangle from above and the object of his labour was drawn smoothly upward out of sight. He tidied his equipment, returning the trays of sand to their labelled shelves and scrubbing down the sink. The floor drain clogged noisily; he rootled in it with a stick till the last of the water had sluiced away, then followed the stone by a twisting staircase to the upper air. In contrast to the grinding shop, the main litho studio was lofty and bright. Tall windows opened onto a vista of rolling hills, the lush farm country of the Dorset and Somerset border, gay now with April sunshine. Along one wall of the room more stones were stacked; beside another a low dais gave to the desk of Master Albrecht a dignity fitting his position. Behind the desk was- the door to his diminutive office, a cubicle full to overflowing with bills, invoices, receipts for that and this; beside it another door opened into the ink store, where cans of delicious colour were stacked in rows on slatted pinewood shelves. The ink store too had its distinctive smell, rich and sweet. In the centre of the room two long white-scrubbed tables were spread with pulls of a current job; round them four of the half dozen novices attached to the department sat patiently, snipping out the work with scissors. Behind the tables, on a second raised plinth, stood the presses; three of them spaced out along the wall, gleaming clean, Master Albrecht’s pride and chief delight.

The machines were simply made. Each bed was lifted to printing height by a tall lever and propelled by a hefty wooden-spoked wheel; over the bed an iron frame supported a leather-covered wedge, adjustable for pressure. A brass tympan, hinged at the farther end of the bed and tensioned by lead screws along its edges, protected the stone from the wedge. The tympans had on one occasion in the past been the cause of a contretemps in which Brother John had figured prominently. They were labelled as bear fat but about the composition of which John had expressed the gravest suspicions. In warm weather it stank abominably; and John, to whose sensitive nostrils bad odours were an offence, had taken it on himself to scrounge from the town’s one garage a tin of the newfangled mineral grease, with which he had anointed the presses. The rage of Master Albrecht had known no bounds; for several weeks afterwards John had had visited on him penances of a peculiarly unpleasant nature, not the least of which had been the removal of the grease and the resubstitution of the time-honoured bear fat. The little Brother had submitted with as good a grace as was possible under the circumstances, though he had vowed privately that were he ever to rise to the dizzy heights of Master of Lithography the noxious compound would be banished utterly from his domain. Beside the presses were more sinks, and the upper outlet of the lift from the grinding shop; by it the stone, approved by Master Albrecht, was propped on its side being fanned dry by a boy armed with a rotating flag of cardboard on a stick. There were wall racks lined with the leather ink rollers, napped and smooth; beneath them more limestone slabs served as pallets. At one of them Brother Joseph was working; a fairhaired novitiate, skull as yet unshaved.

When Brother John entered he was still whistling; the sound died abruptly, scorched out of existence by Master Albrecht’s fiery stare. He threaded his way across the room, stood waiting impatiently while Brother Joseph finished spreading ink and kneading it into a roller. A stone lay ready on the bed of the nearest press, beside it a stack of two-colour pulls. John sponged the slab lightly, dipping water from the bucket alongside the press, stepped back as his assistant advanced with the roller. The image was charged, fed delicately at first then more firmly; John inverted one of the pulls, slipped through the paper the two needles mounted in paintbrush handles with which the prints were located on the crossed register marks. Then down with the tympan, lift to pressure; a small adjustment to the wedge and the job rolled through. John released the bed, hauled it back, raised the tympan, then more carefully the paper sheet, held the design up to the light. The colours glowed cheerfully; a drawing of a buxom country girl holding a sheaf of barley, and the inscription Harvesters Ale; brewed under licence at the monastery of Saint Adhelm, Sherborne, Dorset.

The ringing of the noon bell put an end to further work; the monks, freed temporarily from their vow of silence, filed out chattering to the refectory. John and Brother Joseph took their lunches to a corner table, sat apart while they planned out the afternoon’s operations; later they would lack the benefit of the spoken word and notewriting, as well as being tedious, was somewhat frowned on as an evasion. At two o’clock, as they were rising to return to the litho room, a novice approached bearing a slip of paper. He handed the message to Brother John; the little monk read it, scratched at his pate, showed it fleetingly to Brother Joseph and rolled his eyes in mock distress. He was summoned to the august presence of his Abbott; he scurried off revolving in his mind a list of sins both of omission and commission for which he might be being called to account.

A half hour’s wait in the great man’s antechamber did little to improve his state of mind; John sat and fidgeted and watched the squares of sunlight move across the walls while Master Thomas, the monastery’s accountant, alternately fixed him with a coldly accusing stare and inscribed, with a hideously squeaking pen, the endless rolls of parchment on which the records of the Order were kept. At two-thirty, Brother John was finally admitted to the presence of his spiritual superior.

Events tended to repeat themselves; Father Meredith reading at length from a file of notes, glancing up from time to time over his square-framed spectacles as Brother John fretted and puffed, red in the face now with concern. John’s visits to the sanctum had been few, and the memory of them was not on the whole encouraging. His eyes moved restlessly, taking in the remembered details of the room. The Reverend Father’s study was less austere in character than the rest of the monastery of Saint Adhelm; a carpet of intricate Persian design covered the floor, one wall was lined with books while in a corner stood a globe of the world supported by a group of handsome bronze zephyrs. On the leather-topped desk more books and papers were piled untidily. There too stood the Abbott’s typewriter; a monumental machine, its superstructure framed by Corinthian pillars that ended obnoxiously in cast-iron paws. A cocktail cabinet, its doors partly ajar, displayed well-stocked shelves; a late Renaissance pieta hung above it while over Father Meredith’s desk loomed a grisly Spanish crucifix.

Through the windows could be seen the hills, gentle in sunlight; Brother John moved his eyes from the disquieting Christ-figure, rested them on the horizon. Time passed as he watched the moving clouds, their slow miles-off white billowing; when Father Meredith finally spoke, his voice came as a faint shock. ‘Brother John,’ he said. ‘Something… ah… interesting has occurred.’

John felt a slight rise of hope. Perhaps after all his Abbott hadn’t sent for him to rap his knuckles over some half-forgotten crime. He contrived, as far as his mobile eyebrows would allow, a look of interest combined with a suitably devout submissiveness. The attempt met with a somewhat qualified success. Father Meredith clicked his fingers irritably. ‘You may speak, Brother…’ The Adhelmians were a mild order of artisans and craftsmen; the daily silence was about their only firm rule but it was adhered to rigidly. John swallowed gratefully. ‘Thank you, Reverend Father…’ He faltered. At this stage, there was little else to say.

Father Meredith scanned his papers again and cleared his throat; a little distantsounding noise, sheeplike. ‘Er… yes. It seems we have been asked to supply an… ah… artist. The whole affair’s a little mysterious, I don’t know a great deal about it as yet myself; but I felt a… change of air shall we say, Brother, might be… beneficial Brother John bowed his head humbly. It seemed likely Master Albrecht had had something to do with that last remark; John had never really seen eye to eye with him since the business of the bear fat. And something too in the intonation of the single word ‘artist’… In matters spiritual, John had always been more than willing to be led; in things aesthetic though, he was constantly guilty of the sin of Pride. ‘I am entirely,’ he murmured, ‘at the Reverend Father’s disposal…’

‘Hmph,’ said the Abbott, sharply. He continued for a moment to observe John over the upper rims of his glasses. He was well enough aware of the other’s background. John came of poor parents; his family were, and had been for generations, cobblers in Durnovaria. From an early age John had showed no inclination to follow the family trade; set to a last, he would be discovered chalking pictures on the workbench, making furtive crayon sketches of the faces of his brothers and the customers in the little shop. His father had more than once taken a broad strap to the miscreant and endeavoured to knock out Hell and make room for a little Heaven; but the plump little boy, in other respects an amiable and easygoing child, proved unexpectedly stubborn. Chalks or pencils were seldom out of his hands; when he could draw with nothing else he used charcoal from the grates or heelball. His pictures and scrawlings lined the rough walk of his room; his proper work became more erratic than ever. It seemed the only thing to do was to let him follow his bent; at least, his father reasoned, the family would be relieved of the necessity of feeding a useless mouth. In this England there was only one way in which John’s talent might be employed; he took Holy Orders and at the age of fourteen became a novice in the monastery of Saint Adhelm, some twenty-odd miles from his home.

The first few months were a trying time both for the young pupil and his instructors; as a working-class child John had naturally never learned to read, and this instead of art became the first concern. The novice sensed finally that only through his letters would he ever achieve his real ambition; he sweated over his books, and a year later was formally admitted to the classes held in the monastery by Brother Pietro, the drawing master.

Even then John was doomed to disappointment; life drawing was not permitted, and the young student spent restless hours working from the cast. The antique study improved his line and gave him a measure of discipline he had hitherto lacked, but left him unfulfilled. Lithography had been his salvation; though at first he loathed its complexity, and the long dry history of it from Senefelder’s laundry list onwards that Brother Pietro insisted he learn by heart, the colour and texture of the stones and the many ways ‘of working them appealed to the latent craftsman in him. While fine art was seldom required, there was technical challenge in the most mundane commercial jobs; John worked diligently, restyling over the years the entire range of bottle and package labels produced by the House. Master Albrecht, recognising if not a genius at least a firstrate craftsman, left him largely to his own devices, and by his thirtieth birthday John had become well known in professional circles. (He sometimes referred to himself, with wry humour, as the Master of the Bottle of Sauce.) Brewing was only one of the industries in which the Church had extensive interests, and commissions began to come in from other centres and ecclesiastic business houses lacking their own creative staff. The subsequent swelling of the coffers of the Adhelmians had been the main reason why John’s occasional outbursts of temperament had been tolerated without too much complaint, even by the peppery Master of Lithography. John was a good draughtsman and, left to go his own way, a keen worker; these qualities the Adhelmians had always valued more than slavish obedience to principles and a more or less sterile piety. Though there had been times, there had been times…

Brother John broke in on his superior’s thought stream. ‘Reverend Father, could you… I mean have you any idea of the nature of the work?’

‘None.’ The Abbott was being somewhat less than frank; he turned over the papers on his desk, shuffled them into a heap and spread them out once more. ‘I can tell you this much, it will involve a considerable journey. You’ll be going to Dubris; when you arrive you’ll put yourself at the disposal of Bishop Loudain. You can expect to be gone for some months, probably throughout the sittings of the… ah… Court of Spiritual Welfare, under Father Hieronymous. I can assure you the work will be of some… ah… importance, you’ll be holding a direct commission from Rome.’ He coughed again, looked embarrassed, fiddled with a stylus. ‘You’ll be performing a task of lasting value, Brother,’ he said stiffly. ‘A real service to the Church. Better than beer labels, when you’ve done and said all. Ehh…?’

Brother John stayed silent. His mind, accustomed to jogging in its own grave channels, was for once working furiously. There was a lot to be said for the proposition; as Father Meredith had pointed out, it would mean a change of air; and a journey across England in springtime, always to John’s mind the most attractive part of the year. And in any case it looked as if his freedom of choice was severely limited; if Master Albrecht, for his own purposes, wanted him out of the way for a time, it behoved him to go. There was professional pride too; his selection was a mark of honour, he knew that well enough. But… nothing decent, nothing good, would ever come out of the doings of the Court of Spiritual Welfare, Father Meredith knew that as well as anybody else. Because there had once been another name for the Court, a name that even in the Church-owned West had fallen into evil repute. The Inquisition…

John entered the great castle of Dubris by the Old Gate amid a noisy crowd of sightseers; mendicants, soldiers, townsfolk out for the day with picnic hampers and beer, the men swaggering in their Sunday best, the women with children hanging bawling round their skirts. Inside, the little monk paused involuntarily; the red-robed priest who was his guide waited impatiently, fidgeting with the heavy-bound books he carried, stepping from one foot to the other in the jostling of the mob. In front of John reared the second curtain; above it, sullen against the sky, was the huge donjon, daunting with its size and closeness. In the outer bailey, curving right as far as the great barbican of the Constable’s Gate, an entire fairground had established itself. Steam plumed in the air; organs, Marenghis and Gaviolis, bellowed and clashed their endless tunes; automata conducted jerkily; bare golden nymphs swirled, horses and fabulous beasts glared from the rides. Performing dogs barked and howled, dark-skinned men spat gouts of fire; dancers and jugglers postured, sideshows promised all the erotica of the East. Nearby, on platforms improvised from trestles and beer crates, cudgel-players split their opponents’ heads over boards already brown-daubed with blood, lithe boys in tight breeches of pale blue cloth lashed each other’s legs raw with thin switches of hazel. Between the stalls ran children, girls and boys; there were priests, fortune-tellers, sailors with tarred pigtails sticking out jauntily from their necks, arm in arm with bosomy laughing women; the Papal Blue was much in evidence, and the scarlet robes of Inquisition officers scurrying on various errands. All was noise, colour, and confusion. From near the donjon smoke rose in a column, staining the sky; over the great place, beside the cobalt pennant of Pope John, flew the blood-red standard of the Court.

The guide tugged at John’s sleeve; he followed, bemused by the uproar. They headed for the inner barbican, the priest shoving and pushing to clear a way through the crowd. Against the bailey wall was an added attraction; a line of cages, open to the sky, housed the first batch of prisoners. Round them the crowd boiled and yelled. John, staring, saw a man lashing at his tormentors with a staff he had somehow wrested from one of them; his eyes were suffused, flecks of foam covered his beard. Further on an old woman railed, shaking scrawny fists; her head had been cut, it seemed by a stone, and blood striped her face and neck brightly. Next to her a pretty, long-haired girl defiantly suckled a baby. John turned aside frowning deeply, followed the flapping robes of the priest into the upper bailey. His duties had already been explained to him; he was to record, for the benefit of Rome, all stages in the procedure of the Court of Father Hieronymous, Witchfinder in General to Pope John. His task would begin with the Questioning of prisoners.

The room set apart for the purpose was located beneath the donjon itself, and reached by a spiral stair. John passed through the Great Hall, its crosswall hung now with scarlet in preparation for the work to come. At the head of the recessed stairway a man in Papal Blue stood at ease, halberd grounded on the flags in front of him. He came to attention stiffly as John’s guide passed. The priest descended the stairs stooping, sandals flopping on stone; John followed clutching sketchbooks and a satchel crammed with bottles and jars, inks and paints and brushes, pens, erasers, all the paraphernalia of an artist. The little monk was apprehensive already, trying to quiet his jangling nerves. The room in which he found himself was long and wide, devoid of windows except where to one side a line of grilles set close under the roof admitted livid fans of light. At the far end of the chamber an oil lamp burned; beneath it clustered a group of figures. John saw dark-dressed, burly men with the insigne of the Court, the hand wielding the hammer and the lightning flash, blazoned on their chests; a chaplain was mumbling over trays of instruments whose purpose he did not recognise. There were spiked rollers, oddly shaped irons, tourniquets of metal beads; other devices, ranged in rows, he identified with a cold shock. The little frames with their small cranked handles, toothed jaws; these were grésillons. Thumbscrews. Such things then really existed. Nearer at hand a species of rough table, fitted at each end with lever-operated wooden rollers, declared its use more plainly. The roof of the place was studded with pulleys, some with their ropes already reeved and dangling; a brazier burned redly, and near it were piled what looked to be huge lead weights.

The priest at Brother John’s elbow continued in a low voice the explanation on which he’d felt impelled to embark while crossing the town from their lodgings. ‘We may take it then,’ he said, ‘that as the crimes of witchcraft and heresy, the raising of devils, receiving of incubi and succubi and like abominations, the trafficking with the Lord of Flies himself, are crimes of the spirit rather than the body, crimen excepta, they cannot be judged, and evidence may neither be given nor accepted under normal legal jurisdiction. The admission of spectral evidence and its acceptance as partial proof of guilt subject to confession during Questioning is therefore of vital importance to the functioning of our Court. Under this head too belongs our explanation of the use of torture and its justification; the death of the guilty one disrupts Satan’s attack on the Plan of God, as revealed to Mother Church through His Vicar on Earth, our own Pope John; while dying penitent the heretic saved from greater relapse into the sin of subversion, to find eventually his place in the Divine Kingdom.’

Brother John, his face screwed up as if in anticipation of pain, ventured a query. ‘But are not your prisoners given the opportunity to confess? Were they to confess without the Questioning—’

‘There can be no confession,’ interrupted the other, ‘without compulsion. As there can be no answering the challenges of spectral evidence, the use of which by definition invalidates the innocence of the accused.’ He allowed his eyes to travel to one of the pulleys and its dangling rope. ‘Confession,’ he said, ‘must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.’

The muttering of the priest at the far end of the chamber ceased abruptly. John’s guide smiled thinly, without humour. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Your waiting is ended, Brother.

They will start soon now.’

‘What,’ said Brother John, ‘were they doing?’

The other turned to him vaguely surprised. ‘Doing?’ he said. ‘They were blessing the instruments of the Questioning, of course…’

‘But,’ said Brother John, rubbing his pate as was his custom when bewildered, ‘what I don’t seem to understand is the question of impregnation by the incubus. If as you say the incubus, the demon in its masculine form, is able physically to fertilise its victim, then the concept of diabolic delusion is invalidated. Creation by a minion of Satan is surely -’ The priest turned on him quickly, eyes glittering. ‘I would advise you,’ he said, ‘to understand very clearly. You are on dangerous ground here, more dangerous than you realise. The demon, being a sexless entity, is unable to create; as its Master is impotent in the face of God. But by receiving as succubus the seed of man, and transporting it invisibly through the air, the thing can be arranged; and is arranged, as you will see. I am not a heretic, Brother.’

‘I see,’ said John, white to the lips. ‘You must forgive me, Brother Sebastian; we Adhelmians are technicians and mechanics, mere journeymen not noted in our lower orders at least for learning of such profundity…’

There was a distant flourish of trumpets, muffled by the vastness of the walls.

Brother John left Dubris by a rutted track that wound through the scrubland to the north of the town. He sat his horse untidily, slumped forward in the saddle with his eyes on the ground. The dusty red gown, soiled now and frayed at the hem, flapped round his calves; he held the reins slackly so the animal meandered from side to side of the road, picking its own way. When it stopped, which was often, John made no attempt to urge it forward. He sat staring fixedly; once he lifted his head to gaze blankly at the horizon. His face had lost its colouring, acquiring instead a greyish sheen like the face of a corpse; fits of shivering shook him, as though he was suffering from a fever. He had lost a great deal of weight; his girdle, once tightly drawn, now hung loosely round his stomach. His satchel of equipment still swung from the pommel of the saddle but the sketchbooks were gone, were already if Brother Sebastian was to be believed on their way by special courier to Rome. Before parting, the Inquisitor had complimented John on his application and the fineness of his work, and attempted to cheer him by pointing out the immense setback the hearings had been to the cause of the Devil in Kent; but getting no answer had left him, not without a backward glance or two and a searching of the spirit. For he had become convinced during the weeks of their association that heresy burned somewhere in the heart of Brother John himself. There were times when he had almost felt tempted to bring the matter to the attention of Father Hieronymous, but who knew what repercussions might have resulted? The Adhelmians, in spite of what John himself had described as a certain lack of scholarship, were a valued and respected Order in the land, and the limner had after all held a commission from Rome. Brother Sebastian was a zealot, tireless in the prosecution of his Faith; but there are times when even the devout find it advisable to turn a blind eye…

A farm cart passed rumbling, trailing a cloud of whitish dust. John’s horse curveted; the priest chided gently, vacant-faced. Through the deep channels of his brain noises still echoed. A susurration, rising and falling like a shrill and hellish sea; the shrieks of the damned, and the dying, and the dead. And the sizzling of braziers, thud of whips splitting flesh; creaking of leather and wood, squeak and groan of sinews as machines tested to destruction the handiwork of God. John had seen it all; the white-hot pincers round the breasts, branding irons pushed smoking into mouths, calf-length boots topped up with boiling lead, the heated chairs, the spiked seats on which they bounced their victims then stacked the lead slabs on their thighs… The Territio, the Questions Preparatoire, Ordinaire, Extraordinaire; squassation and the strappado, the rack and the choking-pear; the Questioners stripped and sweating while the great mad Judge upstairs extracted from the foamings of epileptics the stuff of conviction after conviction… Pencil and brush recorded faithfully, flying at the paper with returning skill while Brother Sebastian stood and frowned, pulling at his lip and shaking his head. It seemed John’s hands worked of their own, tearing the pages aside, grabbing for inks and washes while the drawings grew in depth and vividness. The brilliant side lighting; film of sweat on bodies that distended and heaved in ecstasies of pain; arms disjointed by the weights and pulleys, stomachs exploded by the rack, bright tree shapes of new blood running to the floor. It seemed the limner tried to force the stench, the squalor, even at last the noise down onto paper; Brother Sebastian, impressed in spite of himself, had finally dragged John away by force, but he couldn’t stop him working. He drew a wizard in the outer bailey, pulled apart by four Suffolk punches; the doomed men and women sitting on their tar kegs waiting for the torch; the stark things that were left when the flames had died away.’ Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,’ Sebastian had said at his parting. ‘Remember that, Brother. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live…’ John’s lips moved, repeating the words in silence. .

Night overtook him a bare half dozen miles from Dubris. He dismounted in the dark, awkwardly, tethered the horse while he fetched water from a stream. In the stream he dropped the satchel of brushes and paints. He stood a long time staring, though in the blackness he couldn’t see it float away.

At his rate of travel it took many weeks to reach his home. Sometimes he took wrong turnings; sometimes people fed him, and then he blessed them and cried. Once a gang of footpads jumped him but the white mouth and staring eyes had them backing off in fear of one bewitched, or taken by the Plague. He finally entered Dorset miles off course at Blandford Forum. For a time he followed the westward meanderings of the Frome; beyond Durnovaria he turned north for Sherborne. Somebody recognised the crimson habit, put him on the road, filled his scrip with bread he never ate. In mid-July he reached his House; at the gates he gave the horse away to a ragged child. His Abbott, appalled, had him confined in the sickbay and took immediate steps to recover the animal, but it had vanished. John lay in a room bright with summer flowers, with fuchsias and. begonias and roses from the monastery grounds, watching the sun patches glide on the walls and the fleecy piling of clouds in the blue sky. He only spoke once, and then to Brother Joseph; leaning upright, eyes frightened and wild, gripping the boy’s wrist. ‘I enjoyed it, Brother,’ he whispered. ‘God and the Saints preserve me, / enjoyed my work….’Joseph tried to calm him, but to no avail. A month passed before he rose and dressed himself. He had taken little food; he was thin now to the point of gauntness and his eyes were feverishly bright. He put himself to work on the litho presses; Master Albrecht chided, but he was ignored. John toiled all day, through the lunchtime break, through supper and the vesper bell. Night and the moon found him still working, inking the stone he could no longer see, swabbing, dropping the tympan, hauling the spokes of the wheel, lowering the bed, inking, dropping the tympan… Brother Joseph stayed with him a time, watching huddled in the shadows; then he too left, appalled by something he couldn’t understand.

It was early morning before John faltered in his penance. He stood slightly bowed, a dark shape outlined by a sheen of moonlight, listening, screwing his face as if trying to catch the echoes from some noise outside the range of human ears. Whimperings came from him; he staggered like a drunken man to the middle of the floor, dropped prone with arms outstretched. Over him a rooflight rattled in a sudden wind; he sat up, glared round straining for the sound, if it was a sound, he’d heard. It was then he suffered the first of the visions or hallucinations that were to haunt him for the rest of his days. Its onset was a quick thudding, like a drum rushing at night over a great tract of land. The room darkened, then glowed. John babbled, clawed at his face and tried to pray.

There had been a country girl at Dubris, a pretty wench whose crime, monstrous and unnatural, had been the receiving of an incubus. Her they released, finally; but before they let her go they clipped the fingers from one small paw, and gave them to her in a cloth. Brother John saw her again, clear in the moonlight. She passed across the room, mewing and dissatisfied; and after her traipsed the host of horrors, the cut legs and arms, the severed heads, the bodies broken on the wheel, pierced and burned by the hot iron chairs. A bawling came from them and a howling, a lowing like the noise of the ghosts of cows, a dead-bird chittering, a crying, a wanting… John’s face suffused; round him lights shone, the wheels of the presses seemed to spin like dark-spoked suns. He was assaulted by thunders and strange rattlings; his eyes rolled upward; disclosing the whites; he hammered at the floor with his fists, cried out and lay still.

In the morning the Brothers, not finding him in his cell, searched the workshops. Then the whole monastery, then its grounds. But it was useless; Brother John had gone.

His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Londinium sighed heavily, rubbed his chin, yawned, and took a turn up and down the office from his desk to the windows that looked down on the grounds of the Episcopal Palace. He stood at the windows awhile, hands clasped behind him, chin sunk on his chest. The gardens were alive with colour now, with lilies and delphiniums and the newest McCredy roses; His Eminence was a gourmet in all things temporal. His eyes saw the display vaguely, and the fishponds beyond where aged carp rose to the tinkling of a handbell. Beyond the ponds again, beyond the herb gardens with their twisting paved walks, was the outer wall. Over it, gloomily, rose the slab side and lines of windows of the prison-like College of Signallers. Noises from Londinium’s maze of streets reached the study faintly; cries of hawkers, rumble and crash of waggon wheels, from somewhere the pealing of bells. The mind of His Eminence noted the sounds automatically; he pursed his lips, following his own tortuous and none too pleasant train of thought.

He returned slowly to his desk. On it, an open file disgorged a small flood of papers. He picked one up, frowning. Under the formal heading and more formal speech the rage of a pious and honest man was very plain.

The Cardinal lifted the document carefully with his fingertips and redeposited it in its file. He picked up another, terser and to the point, from the commander of the garrison stationed at Durnovaria.

His Eminence dropped the letter impatiently. That and a dozen more like it had prompted his own formal document of excommunication. Sentence had been passed on Brother John six months ago; but it would seem the disavowal of the Church and the consequent damnation of his soul had had little effect. His followers had in fact been fired to greater excesses; a detachment of two dozen horse pulled down and massacred in broad daylight, their arms and equipment stolen; a Captain of the Roman Dragoons set on and beaten, sent cantering into Durnovaria with insulting messages pinned to his tunic; the Pope burned in effigy at Woodhenge and Badbury Rings. The Cardinal was only too uncomfortably aware of the dangers inherent in martyrdom; he would have preferred to ignore John altogether, let the whole wretched business die a natural death, but his hand was being forced.

He turned to the brief account of the rebel’s life and accomplishments, brought to Londinium at his request by an unusually subdued Adhelmian whose ears His Eminence would very much have liked to send back to Father Meredith on a plate for letting his confounded people get so far out of hand in the first place. The Adhelmians, admittedly through no fault of their own, were rapidly becoming the leitmotif of a new and disquieting popular movement. The resurging power of Anglicanism fed on such relics of ancient worship; for had not Saint Adhelm himself converted vast stretches of the country to the Faith centuries before the clergy flocking in at the heels of the conquering Normans restored Britain to the rule of Rome? The Anglican Communion had been a historic fact, however strenuously the Church tried to deny it, and the case for it could still be made out. Many years had elapsed too between Henry’s abolition of Papal rule and the excommunication of Elizabeth, years in which the English Church had presumably coexisted in a state of Grace. Greasy apologetics maybe, but dangerous ideas to let loose among a population lacking in general the fine points of theological instruction. The old cry of the Church, to submit and to adore, was no longer enough; the people were. being tempted once more to set up their own spiritual hierarchy, and John or some such figure was tailor-made to head it.

The renegade then had attended the last sitting of the Court of Spiritual Welfare; that, thought His Eminence as he reread facts already learned by heart, was clearly the beginning of the whole ridiculous affair. He shook his head. How explain? How quiet the rage of a man like Loudain with figures and facts, political argument? His Eminence shrugged tiredly. In the history of the world, there had been no power like the power of the second Rome. To hold half a planet in the cup of your hands; to juggle, to balance one against the next forces nearly beyond the mind of man to grasp…

The rage of nations was like the anger of the sea, not to be contained with straws. Anglicanism had torn the country once, the history of it was all there in the great books that lined the study walls. Then, England had glowed from her Cornish toe to her Pennine spine with the light of the auto-da-fe. Against that set a little pain, a little blood, soon gone and nearly as soon forgotten; that, and the mighty wisdom of the Church.

Once too often, mused the Cardinal; the goad, the threat of hellfire, applied instead of the lure of the Kingdom of Love… Father Hieronymous, mad as he undoubtedly was, had been useful in the past; but this time his gory circus had triggered an uproar that could easily involve all England. Uncharitable and surprising thoughts whirled through the head of the Archbishop of Londinium. He rose again to stand brooding, looking down on the gardens that were his chief delight. He seemed to see the roses smashed by irreverent feet, the lilies trodden into a bloody soil; his house destroyed and burning, its wine cellars desecrated, its pantries and kitchens, its studies and libraries in flames. So blast Father Hieronymous, and blast the Adhelmians, and above all blast Brother John…

His Eminence by nature of his position was economist and politician as much as churchman; in his more cynical moods he seemed to see the whole vast fabric of the Church stretched like a glittering blanket, a counterpane of cloth of gold, across the body of a giant. At times like this the giant moved and grumbled, turned in a restless sleep. Soon, he would wake.

He resolutely put the idea aside, returned to his bureau, slid out from a drawer the formal document he had spent most of yesterday morning dictating to his clerk. Whereas the heretic known as Brother John, ex of the Order of the Adhelmians, whose body we have pronounced excommunicate and whose soul we cast down to the Fire that is eternal, continues to flout the Will of God and of His true Church in this land, it is our duty to convey this solemn Notice and Warning: Any person harbouring the heretic or any of his band; any person supplying it with food, drink, arms, shot and powder or any like victuals; Any person found in possession of letters, proclamations or other matter originated by Brother John or any of his band, or contriving the distribution of such pamphlets to further the cause of Satan against the glory of God; Any person concealing information as to the whereabouts of the said heretic or any of his band; any person attending any meeting, orgy, or like exhibition held by them who shall not declare the same, with all he may know touching the same, to a priest, a garrison commander, or a Serjeant of law within one day of the offence; Shall be declared excommunicate, and heinous in the sight of God; and on conviction before any Justice of the Peace or any Clerical Court, shall be hung and drawn, and his quarters salted and tarred, and displayed in such manner as be deemed fitting for the warning and education of other heretics or traitors to God and the cause of His Church.

Further it is our duty to proclaim the following rewards: For information leading to the capture, alive or dead, of Brother John or any of his band, twenty-five pounds in gold. For the capture, alive or dead, of any of the band of Brother John, fifty pounds in gold.

For the capture alive or dead, of Brother John himself, two hundred pounds in gold; to be paid at our Episcopal Palace of Lambeth on receipt of the body of the heretic, or of good and sufficient evidence of its destruction.

Given under our hand this twenty-first day of June, Year of Our Lord one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five.

The Cardinal nodded his head finally with gloomy approval. The Church stood in grave need of a well-disciplined Saint or Two; John was a first-rate man going to waste. His Eminence shrugged and called for a secretary to bring his private seal.

At the head of the coomb the infantry had deployed in a half circle. Other soldiers, the blue of their uniforms showing clearly, lined the rocks of the gully, beneath the brow of which were the mouths of several caves. Sporadic bursts of smoke blew from them as the defenders, outnumbered and surrounded, fought on pointlessly. Two hundred yards from the stronghold a demiculverin was being trained. The piece had been protected by a hastily built demilune of rocks; behind the breastwork sweating men applied levers to the wheels of the carriage. Baulks of timber thrust beneath their rims were raising the gun by degrees but the elevation was impossibly high; on its first discharge its captain confidently expected the trail to smash, driven back by the recoil into the ground on which it rested. Near the gun a shakoed major, sword unsheathed, sat a fretting horse and tongue-lashed the men into greater efforts. Frontal attacks had already proved costly; further up the coomb scraps of blue cloth showed where the heretics had taken their toll of the infantry. The major, not a man to risk troops uselessly, swore and waved the sword at the stronghold. A puff of smoke answered him, the ball splitting a rock twenty feet to his left and singing off into distance. A ragged volley from the troops sheltering in the gully drove the defenders back; the major thought he heard, mixed with the echoes of the shots, the noise of a scream.

The first round from the great gun sent stone chips whining from the ledge a yard below the cave mouths; the second started a small landslip above and to the right. The third discharge knocked the piece from its crudely built platform, smashing the legs of a gunner. The captain swore, wishing for a pot-mortar, but there was no mortar to be had. The barrel was remounted and elevated more securely; the Papists settled down to batter the rebel position to fragments.

The small figure in the dark crimson robe was twenty yards from the fissures, scuttling over the rocks of a goat path, before the first piece was brought to bear. Puffs of dust rose from the rock face around and above the fugitive; the major, yelling, rode across the line of sight of his men, forcing them to aim. The renegade, brought down within twenty feet of the top of the cliff, slithered a great distance before coming to rest; but he still had life enough in him to aim a pistol, blowing off the kneecap of a man on the major’s right as the infantry charged home. The major grunted, stooped to pull aside the cowl of the Adhelmian. Tumbling fair hair was disclosed; the boy grinned up at him in pain, blood showing round his teeth. At the major’s side his aide said disgustedly, ‘Discipulus…’

‘Catamite more likely,’ growled the other. He seized the hair and shook. ‘Well, you nasty little fellow,’ he said. ‘Where’s your ass-chafing master?’

No answer. Another shaking. Brother Joseph half raised himself, spat redness at the face above him. The aide shook his head. ‘They won’t talk, sir. None of the Bulgarians…’ ‘Of that,’ said the major crushingly, ‘I was in fact aware. Stretcher-bearers here, Serjeant…’

The soldier doubled back down the hill. The boy panted, lifted himself again, proffered before collapsing a stained fist. The major knelt, delicately avoiding the seeping blood, to prise the fingers apart. He straightened up turning over in his palm the tiny medallion with the crossing crablines. ‘This,’ he said softly, ‘is all we needed…’ He thrust the fairy mark into his uniform pocket, before his aide could see.

The cave, searched, yielded a mass of trophies. Six bodies, three of them intact, enough of the rest remaining to satisfy even a suspicious Papal clerk. The price had risen now to a hundred and fifty pounds a rebel; that made nine hundred quid’s worth, over a thousand altogether. A nice little haul for the battalion. In addition there were supplies of food and arms, books and heretical documents, stacks of leaflets waiting distribution. These the major ordered burned. At the back of the chamber, fairly well knocked about by the cannonade, lay the remains of an ancient Albion press and scattered cases of type. The major sent for sledgehammers and stirred the mess of leaflets with a booted toe. ‘Well at least,’ he remarked philosophically to his aide, ‘there’ll be less of this bumph floating about in the future…’

But the manoeuvre had failed in its main objective. Once again, Brother John had escaped.

Over the weeks the rumours grew. John was here, he was there; troops rode hurriedly by night, villages were ransacked, rewards were claimed a score of times but never paid. A tale arose that John, in league with the People of the Heath, could be transported by magically swift means away from danger. ‘Transvestism,’ snarled Rome, and doubled the head money. Informers flourished; cottages were burned, whole towns fined. Bodies swayed at crossroads, gruesome in their chains, foci for black towers of birds. The giant grumbled and tossed, restlessly.

Wells Cathedral was desecrated; though the desecration didn’t in fact amount to very much. There was no indication that the High Altar had been approached with aught save deep respect but placed on it, in full and hideous view, was a placard carrying certain writing. The document was seized of course and instantly burned but the rumour went out that the words had been a text from Scripture, heretically translated into Middle and Modern English. ‘My house shall be called a house of God, but ye have made it a den of robbers’… The same thing happened at Aquae Sulis (’Give all that ye have to the poof) and at the residence of the Bishop of Dorset himself. (’It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’) But such foibles were the work of disciples, declared or secret; John himself travelled continuously, teaching and praying. Sometimes the visions tormented him so that he rolled and frothed, beating his fists bloody on the ground, tearing at clothes and skin till his followers huddled back in frowning fear. Maybe the phantoms, the drumming and screaming, the hacked hands and limbs, followed him still across the gorse deserts of the West; maybe the Old Ones did meet him and comfort, sit and talk their ancient faith by the stones of temples old before the Romans came, under the wheeling clouds and the spinning fantasies of moon and sun. John gave away his shoes and cloak, his staff; some whispered it was struck into the ground and flowered, like the staff of the blessed Joseph at Glastonbury.

If the rumour reached John’s ears he gave no sign. He moved like a ghost, lips mumbling, eyes unseeing, the rain gusting round him and the wind; and somehow the people hid him and kept him fed while the soldiers of the Blue quartered Dorset wearily from Sherborne to Corvesgeat, from Sarum Rings to the Valley of the Giant at Cerne. John’s nuisance value rose steadily; from five hundred pounds to a thousand, from a thousand to fifteen hundred, and from that to an incredible two thousand pounds, chargeable against the accounts of the Episcopal Palace of Londinium. But of the man himself there was no sign. The rumours flew again. Some claimed he was planning a revolt against Rome, that he was lying low till he had raised a sufficient army; others said he was sick, or injured, or had fled the country; and finally, the whisper went out that he was dead. His followers, and by this time they numbered thousands, waited and mourned. But John wasn’t dead; he had moved back into ‘ the hills, following the lepers now, tracking them by their lonely, angry bells.

The clustered houses of the village lay or huddled on an exposed sweep of heathland. The cottages were of grey stone, storm-shuttered and desolate. The few trees that grew were stunted and low, carved by the wind into strange smooth shapes; their branches leaned towards the roofs as if for protection. From the place a rutted road ran, winding out across the wasteland to lose itself in distance.

Across the heath, vaguely visible in the strange light, ran a high curve of hills. Over them on a brighter day a white glower would have told of the closeness of the sea; now the dead, dust-coloured sky was empty and flat. Out of it skirled a March wind, wet and hugely blustering. It plucked at the cloak of the girl who sat patiently by the roadside a hundred yards beyond the last of the cottages. With one hand she held the rough cloth tight against her throat; her hair, escaping from the hood, flacked long and dark round her face. She watched steadily, staring out across the grey-brown of the heath towards the distant silhouettes of the hills.

An hour she waited, two; the wind seethed in the bracken, once a squall of rain lashed across the road. The hills were fading with the coming dusk when she rose and stood staring under her hand, straining her eyes at the grey gnat-blur on the very fringe of vision. For minutes she stood motionless, seeming not to breathe, while the blur advanced steadily, turned to a dark pinhead, resolved itself finally into the figure of a mounted man. The girl moaned then, an odd noise, a half-whimper deep in her throat; dropped to her knees, glared terrified at the houses and out along the road. The rider advanced, seeming to her frightened stare to move without progression, Jogging like a puppet under the vastness of the sky. Her fingers scrabbled on the road in front of her, smoothed the skirt across her thighs, touched her side as if to ease the thudding of her heart.

The man sat the donkey slackly, letting the beast pick its way. On either side of its belly his feet hung, swaying rhythmically, scraping the tops of the grasses. The feet were bare, brown-striped with blood from old cuts; the gown he wore was torn and stained by long use, its original maroon faded to a reddish grey. His face was thin, sag lines in the flesh marking former fullness, and the eyes above the tangled beard were bright and mad as those of a bird. From time to time he mumbled, bursting into snatches of song, throwing his head back to laugh at the sullen sky, waving a hand in vague gestures of blessing at the desolation round him.

The donkey reached the road finally and stopped as if uncertain of its way. Its rider waited, chanting and muttering; and the brilliant restless eyes slowly became aware of the girl. She still knelt in the road, face downcast; she lifted her head to see the stranger regarding her, hand still half raised. She ran to him then, fell to clutch the rough hem of his robe. She began to cry; the tears spilled out unchecked, coursing pathways down her grubby face.

The rider stared at her, vaguely puzzled; then he reached down and attempted to lift her. She quivered at the touch and clung tighter. ‘You… come…’ she muttered, as if to the donkey. ‘Come…’

‘The blessings of an outcast be on you,’ mumbled the stranger, tongue seeming to stumble unused over the words. He frowned, as if striving to recollect; then, ‘How beautiful on the mountains,’ he said inconsequentially, ‘are the feet of him who brings good tidings…’ He rubbed his face, tangled his fingers in his hair. ‘There was a man,’ he said slowly, ‘who talked of cures… Who needs me, sister? Who called on Brother John?’ ‘I… did…’ Her voice was muffled; she was scrabbling at the cloth of his gown hem, kissing and rubbing her face against his foot. John’s wandering attention was riveted; he tried to raise her again, awkwardly. ‘For what purpose, sister?’ he asked gently. ‘I can but pray; prayer is free to all…’

‘To cure… ‘ She swallowed and snivelled, not wanting to say the words. Then they

burst from her. ‘To cure…. by the laying-on of hands…’

‘Up…!’

She felt herself yanked to her feet, held where she had to stare at blazing eyes, their pupils contracted to pinpoints of darkness. ‘There is no cure,’ hissed John between his teeth, ‘but the mercy of God. His mercy is infinite, His compassion enfolds us all. I am but His unworthy instrument; there is no power, save the power of prayer. All else is heresy, an evil for which men die…’ He flung her back from him; then the mood passed. He wiped his forehead, slid clumsily from the donkey. ‘You shall ride, my sister,’ he said. ‘For it is not fitting I should emulate Him who entered once upon His Kingdom, riding such a beast as this…’

The words lost themselves in mumbling, blown ragged by the wind. ‘I will see your husband,’ said Brother John.

The cottage was low and cramped, sour-smelling; somewhere a baby bawled, a dog scratched for fleas on the hearth. John ducked through the doorway, guided by the timorous grip of the girl’s hand on his wrist; she closed the door behind him, fastening it by its peg and thong. ‘We keeps it dark,’ she whispered, ‘cause he reckoned that might halp…’

John moved forward carefully. Beside the fire a man sat rigidly, hands resting on his knee’s. He wore the coarse dress, the leather-reinforced jerkin and trews, of a quarryman. Beside him on a rough table stood a partially cleared plate of food and a tankard of beer; a pipe lay untouched in the hearth. His hair was over-long, hanging in thick sweeps beside his ears; his brows were level and thickly black but the eyes were invisible. Round them as a blindfold he wore a coloured kerchief, knotted behind his head.

‘He’s come,’ said the girl timidly. ‘Brother John, as’ll cure thee… ‘ She rested a hand on the man’s shoulder. He made no answer; instead he reached up gently, took her arm, and pushed her away. She turned back to Brother John, gulping. ‘Bin comin’ on this six months an’ more,’ she said helplessly. ‘First he reckoned… ‘twas like cobwebs, laid across his face. He couldn’t see no more, only in the sun. Kept on sayin’, ‘twere. dark. All the time, ‘twere dark…’ ‘Sister,’ said John quietly, ‘have you a lantern? A torch?’ She nodded dumbly, eyes on his face. ‘Then fetch it here to me.’

She brought the light, lit it with a spill from the fire. John placed the lamp where its open side glowed on the face of the blind man. ‘Let me see…’

The eyes, uncovered, were dark and fierce, in keeping with the proud, stern face. Brother John raised the lantern, angling it at the pupils, turning the head of the peasant with his fingers under the black-shadowed jaw. He stared a long time, seeing behind the corneas the milky paleness reflect back the light; then he lowered the lamp to the hearth. A long silence; then, ‘I pity you, sister,’ he said, white-lipped. ‘There is nothing I can do but pray…’

The girl stared at him in blank incomprehension; then her hands went to her mouth, and she started again to cry.

John lay that night in an outbuilding, mumbling and tossing on a pile of hay; it was only towards dawn that the trumpets and drums stopped beating in his brain and he slept.

The quarryman rose before the first light and dressed silently, not hurrying. Beside him his wife lay still, breathing steady; he touched her arm, and she moaned in her sleep. He left her and walked through the cottage, horny fingers gentle now touching furniture and the familiar backs of chairs. He unfastened the door, felt the morning air move fresh and raw on his face. Once outside he needed no more guides. The lives of the people round about were governed by the working of stone; the tiny quarries scattered through the hills were handed down from father to son through generations. Over the years his feet and the feet of his forebears had worn a track from the cottage out across the heath. He followed it, face turned up to catch the grey smearing that was all his eyes could show him of the dawn. Habit had made him take the lantern; it bumped his knee hollowly as he walked. He reached the quarry, lifted aside the pole that symbolically closed its entrance. He stood a long time inside, leaning his palms against the coolness of the stone; then he found his tools, fondled them to feel the worn smoothness his hands had given them. He started to work.

John, roused by the distant tap of hammer against stone, shook himself free of a feverish dream and turned his head to locate the sound. He rose quietly, slipped his feet into the sandals laid ready for him and padded out into the cold morning, breath rising in puffs of steam as he walked.

The girl was already at the quarry; she crouched on the ground outside, staring dumbly. From within came the rhythmic clinking as the blind man worked at the stone face, measuring, feeling, cutting by touch. A heap of rough-dressed blocks already stood by the entrance; as John watched the quarryman emerged hefting another slab, walked steadily back to his task.

The girl’s eyes were on John’s face, wonderingly. He shook his head. ‘I can pray,’ he muttered. ‘I can but pray…’

The morning passed, wore on into afternoon, and the noise of the hammer didn’t stop. Once the girl fetched food but John wouldn’t let her near her husband; the swinging mallet would have brained her. When the sky began to darken the pile of stone stood six feet high, blocking his view; he moved his position from where his knees had dented the rough ground, to where he could once more see. The short day, halfway between winter and spring, ended; but the man inside needed no light. The hammer rang steadily; and John at last divined his purpose. He prayed again feverishly, prostrating himself on the ground. Hours later he slept despite the bitterness of the wind. He woke nearly too stiff to move. In front of him the hammer clinked in blackness. The girl returned with the dawn, carrying the baby beneath her cloak; someone brought food that she refused. John was racked by cramps; his hands and feet blued with the cold. All through the day the wind rose, roaring at the heath.

They were strange, black-spirited folk, these Dorset peasants. The men of the village came one by one and squatted and stared; but none of them tried to take the worker from his task. It would have been useless; he would have returned, as surely as the wind returns again and again to the heaths and half-seen hills. The hammer rang from dawn to nightfall; rain gusted on the wind, pelting John’s back, soaking his body through the robe. He ignored it, as he ignored the frozen aches in belly and thighs, the flashing and fainting thunders of his brain. The Old gods would have understood, he thought; they who roared and sweated through the day, hacking each other’s guts in endless war to fall and die and be raised each dusk again, carouse the night away in their palace of Valhalla. But the Christian God, what of Him? Would He accept blood sacrifice, as He accepted the torn souls of His witches? Of course, mumbled John’s tired brain, because He is the same. His drink is blood, His food is flesh. His sacraments work and misery and endless hopeless pain…

By the second dawn the piles of stone stretched yards across the heath; and the hammer was still falling, faltering now and erratic, cutting more. Stone for the palaces of the rich, cathedrals for the glory of Rome… The huge wind roared among the hills, flapped the cloak of the girl as she sat patient as a cow, hands crossed in her lap, eyes brimming with half-comprehended pain. John crouched defeated, unable now to stand, fingers frozen in their clasping, while the villagers watched dour from across the heath. And it was ended, the sacrifice made and taken; the worker of stone lay face down, the stuff of a score of legends. A vein pumped in his brown leather neck, blood glowed brightly on muzzle and throat; his body coughed and moved, settling, and John, shuffling forward on useless knees and hands, knew before he reached him he was dead. He raised himself, with an agonised creaking of bones. At his feet the girl stared greyly, stone herself among the grey stone hills; his shadow reached before him, thin and long, wriggling on the tussocky grass of the heath.

Brother John turned slowly, the rushing and the drumming once more in his brain, raised a white face as above him a weird sun glowed. Brighter it grew and brighter again, a cosmic ghost, a swollen impossibility poised in the blustering sky. John cried out hoarsely, raised his arms; and round the orb a circle formed, pearly and blazing. Then another -and another, filling the sky, engulfing, burning cold as ice till with a silent thunder their diameters joined. became a cross of silver flame, lambent and vast. At the node points other suns shone and others and more and more, heaven-consuming; and John saw quite clearly now the fiery swarms of angels descend and rise. A noise came from them, a great sweet sound of rejoicing that seemed to enter his tired brain like a sword. He screamed again, inarticulate, staggering forward, shambling and running while behind him his great shadow flapped and capered. Then the people ran; out into the heath, back along the village street, spreading out from round him as from a focus, tatting and pecking at the shuttered houses while the word spread faster than feet could move, quicker soon than the quickest horse; that round Brother John the heavens opened, transfiguring with glory. The tale grew, feeding on itself, till God in His own person looked down clear-eyed from the azure arch of the sky.

The soldiers heard, at Golden Cap and Wey Mouth and Wool inland on the heath; the clacking telegraphs brought the news of a countryside on the stir. Messages flew for reinforcements, shot and powder, cavalry, great guns. Durnovaria answered and Bourne Mouth and Poole; but the hurricane was in the towers, felling them like saplings. By midday the lines were silent, Golden Cap itself a jumble of broken spars. The garrison commander there mustered a platoon of infantry and two of horse and force-marched across country, hoping against hope to nip rebellion in the bud. One man and one only could hold the rabble, make it fight; Brother John. This time, one way or another, Brother John had to go.

The glory faded; but still the people came, flocking across the heath, fighting their carts and waggons over the hills, bogging in the squelching lanes as they strove to reach him. Some came to him with money and clothing, food, offers of shelter, fast horses. They begged him to run, warned of the soldiers racing to cut him off; but the noise still roaring in his ears deafened him and the sun dogs, glowing in his brain, blinded the last of his reason. The host, the ragged army, grew behind him as he reeled across the heath, face to the great wind from the south. Some brought arms; pitchforks and scythes and knives on poles, muskets hauled from the thatch of twenty score of cottages. Chanting, they reached the sea; following-still, on horseback and on foot, down the steep roads of Kimmeridge, out to the black bite of a bay and the savageness of the water. There they collided at last with the contingent from Golden Cap. The soldiers of the Blue attacked; but there were too many. A charge, a scattering, a man pulled down, trampled and cut; screams tossed away by the wind, a red thing left shaking on the grass, a horse running riderless stabbed bloody by the pikes… The Papists withdrew, following the column just inside long musket shot, sniping to try to turn its head.

Brother John ignored the skirmishing; or perhaps he never saw. Riding now, driven forward by the voices and the noises in his brain, he reached the cliff edge. Below was a waste of water, wild and white, tumbling to the horizon and beyond. Here were no rollers; the hurricane, into which a man might lean, flung the tops off the waves. From a score of runoffs the cliffs spouted water into the bay; but the streams were caught by the wind and held, flung bodily back over the edge of the land, wavering upward arcs that fed a ruffled lake of flood. At the cliffs, John reined; the horse turned bucking, mane streaming in the wind. He raised his arms, calling the people in till they crowded close to hear; black-faced men in sweaters and caps and boots, stolid women clutching scarves to their throats; dark-haired Dorset girls, legs sturdy in their bright bluejeans. Way off on the left the cavalry bunched and jostled, carbines to their shoulders; the smoke of the discharges was whipped away in instantaneous flashes of white. A ball curved singing above John’s head; another smashed the foot of a girl on the edge of the crowd. The mob turned outward, dangerously. The riders pulled back. A gun was coming, dragged by mule teams from the barracks at Lulworth, but until it arrived their captain knew he was helpless; to throw his handful of men into that rabble would be to consign them to death. Miles away, out on the heath, the teams strained at the limber of the culverin; square ammunition carts jolted behind, heading a column of infantry. But there were no more cavalry, none to be had; there was no time…

Over Brother John the seagulls wheeled. He raised his arms again and again, seeming to call the birds in till the great creatures hung motionless, wings outspread a scant six feet above him. The crowd fell silent; and he started to speak.

‘People of Dorset… fishermen and farmers and you, marblers and roughmasons, who grub the old stone up out of the hills… and you, Fairies, the People of the Heath, you were-things riding the wind, hear my words and remember. Mark them all your lives, mark them for all time; so in the years to come, no hearth shall ever be without the tale…’ The syllables ran shrieking and thin, pulverised by the wind; and even the injured girl stopped moaning and lay propped, against the knees of her friends, straining to hear. John told them of themselves, of their faith and their work, their lonely carving of existence out of stone and rock and bareness; of the great Church that held the land by the throat, choking their breath in the grip of her brocade fist. In his brain visions still burned and hummed; he told them of the mighty Change that would come, sweeping away blackness and misery and pain, leading them at last to the Golden Age. He saw clearly, rising about him on the hills, the buildings of that new time, the factories and hospitals, power stations and laboratories. He saw the machines flying above the land, skimming like bubbles the surface of the sea. He saw wonders; lightning chained, the wild waves of the very air made to talk and sing. All this would come to pass, all this and more. The age of tolerance, of reason, of humanity, of the dignity of the human soul. ‘But,’ he shouted, and his voice was cracking now, lost in the great sound of the wind, ‘but for a time, I must leave you… following the course shown me by God, who in His wisdom saw fit to make me… the least worthy of His people… His instrument, and subject to His will. For He gave me a sign, and the sign burned in heaven, and I must follow and obey…’

The crowd jostled; a roaring came from it, faint then louder, rising at last over the sound of the wind. A hundred voices shouted, ‘Where… where…’ and John turned, gown sleeve flogging at his arm, and pointed into the brilliant waste of the sea.

‘Rome…’ The word soared at the people. ‘To the earthly father of us all… the Rock, guardian of the Throne of Peter… Christ’s designate, and His Vicar on Earth… to beg wisdom of his understanding, mercy of his compassion, alms of his limitless bounty… in the name of the Christ we adore, whose honour is stained too often in this land…’ There was more but it was lost in the noise of the crowd. The word spread like wildfire to the farthest members of the mob that a miracle was to be performed. John would go to Rome; he would fly; for a sign, he would walk on water. He would command the waves… The more levelheaded, still carried away, set up a cry for a boat; and a woman shrilled suddenly, her voice rising above the rest. ‘Thine, Ted Armstrong… Give him thine…’

The man addressed waved furious arms. ‘Peace, woman, ‘tis all I own…’ But the protest was lost, swept aside in a surging movement that bore John and his followers down the cliff path, through the singing stands of gorse and bramble that lined the sea. To the watching soldiers it was as if the mob thrust out arms into the water; men, skidding and tumbling in mud, hauled the vessel to her slip, launched her down it. She lay heaving and rolling in the backwash of the waves; oars were shipped, John tumbled aboard. Girls swarmed atop the piles of lobster pots stacked and roped on the beach, climbed back up the cliffs under the reversed firehose-spraying of the springs. The boat, cast off, corkscrewed violently, rolled to show her bilge, straightened as the wind caught her stump of mast, headed for the first of the seething ridges of white. To either side the vast headlands of peat, black iron against the glaring sky; in front the miles on flattened miles of water seething in over the rim of the world. The watchers, straining against the brilliance, saw the keel lift to a hammer blow, surge off one-sided into a trough. Swamped, the craft rose again tinier and dwindling, a dark blob against brightness. And again, further out still in the yeast boiling and roaring surge of the sea; till tired eyes, streaming and screwed against the wind, could no longer mark her progress against the tumbling plain of the ocean.

They hauled the great gun up to the western headland, and primed her and loaded with canister; she rumbled threatening over the brink as dusk was settling on the waste of water below. But she menaced an empty beach; the whole huge crowd was gone. The soldiers stood-to till dawn, huddled in their greatcoats, squatting backs to the wind against the cold iron of the gun while the hurricane, dropping, blew itself away. And the waves, frothing still, slapped at the upturned keel of a boat, urging it back gently towards the land.