Limping to Jerusalem, Post AD 1100

Hard as new steel the sun cuts from a lard of cloud, although its light seems wearied by the effort. I am old, yet is this ceaseless and exhausting world here still. My piles nag, saddle-chafed, wherefore upon this showery morning I am filled with a choleric bile and have twice cuffed my squire. As we descend the street of Jews into the reek and clamor of the horse-fayer he falls back to ride behind me that I may not see the poison in his look.

Ahead, my dogs run on among the market traders and their fly-chewed nags. With pink jaws wet and frilled like cunny, here and there they chop and snap upon an ankle or a fetlock, for the sport of it. The crowd fall back that I may pass, blunt-headed gets of Saxony with spittle on their chins, although the girls are often fair. The scuffle of my charger’s hoof is loud upon the hard-packed dirt, the fayer now fallen into quiet as whispers from a comely woman’s skirt may hush an ale room. Now they touch their scabby brows at me as I ride by, and look up fearfully. Were I not halt and aged I would bed their wives and daughters both before them ere I took their heads ...

I must not think of heads.

My squire and I pass on. The crowd is knit once more together in our wake and falls again to chattering and barter, with our passage through its midst a wound soon healed. Before and to the left of me the crumbling church looms heavy in its sandstone walls of dirty gold, named for Saint Peter, by whose intercession were the relics of Saint Ragener here found, or so the tale is told. A half-mad nun of Abingdon, dead twenty years or more, spoke of an angel or a holy bird within the church that healed her crippled legs.

That may be very well for her, yet I am lame and filled with aches, and know her vision to be but the ravings that are come upon a woman when her monthly bloods have ceased. Since the Crusade, I am made out of sorts with God. A ray falls out from Heaven now to strike the church so that its gaping windows seem to fill with brightness, yet I know the light is false, surrendered soon to squall.

This island rain: I am already wet inside my jerkin from the shower endured whilse hunting, early-on this day. The dampness hereabouts has raised a leather in my cheek that was not always there, but my complaints are weak, and lack conviction. Did there ever come a morning out there in those Holy deserts when I did not wake to find my belly black with flies, the sweat boiled out of me and pooled between my dugs, and pray to know again this sickly northern light, this drizzle in my eyes? The sun here throws us only scraps, already having squandered its great bounty on the distant Heathen, stood among his hills of sand.

The church is fell behind, and on our right hand here Chalk-monger Lane winds up towards the castle’s higher grounds as we descend upon the cross-roads at the bridge, whereby its gated yard stands opened out. We clatter in between the great brick gateposts and across the flags. Yard-boys, who not a moment since were no doubt cursing me as every harlot’s son, run out all smiles to take my bridle, crying, ‘See! It is Lord Simon. He is home.’

My eyes, without volition it would seem, climb up to where Maud’s chamber window over-looks the courtyard. No one there. Dismounted, with a yard-lad either side of me, I hang one arm across each of their necks, and with my weight supported thus am steered towards the great door, one leg dragged behind, scraped through the silvering of puddles as I go. Once, in a rage, Maud said that she would lie upon her cot and weep to hear that sound, that scraping, for it meant I was returned. Helped up the three broad steps, I am inside the castle. In my bag a brace of ducks are stiffening, cooling in their thickened blood. Black eyes that stare, unblinking, into blackness.

In the fastness of my chamber are the wretched, muddied garments pulled from me, whereafter I am dried and dressed to take my meal: cold mutton, warm bread and sour beers. Maud does not eat with me. The clatter of my knife and dish fall on a ringing silence.

Sucking lukewarm gravy from my mustache I can feel her pacing in the upper rooms and in my mind’s eye see her, all her bitterness made plain within her bearing. Now she crosses to the window seat, her head tipped down to gouge her breastbone with a small, sharp chin; her arms crossed tight below her budding teats; white, brittle fingers clasping either elbow. She is tall-built, twenty-nine years old and awkward in her gait. She does not laugh, nor yet make pleasant talk, but only sulks and scowls. It sometimes seems to me that it would be as well if I were married not to her but to her mother after all. Ah well. That’s done with now.

A knot of muttonflesh has worked into the socket of the sole back tooth, half-crumbled, that is left within my lower jaw, which morsel now my tongue makes secret, complicated motions to unseat. Maud, naked. Some fifteen years since. I had seated her upon my knee one night, our wedding not long past, pinched by her shoulders that she might not draw away. I tried to make her play with my old man but she made faces and vowed by the Holy Virgin she would not. When I released her upper arm that I might take her by the wrist and force her to comply she struggled free and jumped from off my lap to cower among the hanging drapes.

If I had only beaten her on that occasion more severely, she would surely have enjoyed a sweeter disposition to me since. If I had taken off my belt to her and thrashed her skinny rump until it bled. If I had seized her hair or twisted on her tit until she howled. The anger makes my chest thud, answered by a hopeless twitch from the forgotten beast that nests below my paunch. It is not well to stir my temper in this way, lest I should bring an illness on myself, and as the mutton-pellet holds its own against my questing tongue I turn my thoughts to gentler affairs.

The church that I am building on the rise up by the sheep-track rests half-done, the pagan relic there before pulled down that we may use its substance for our own construction. Some of its bricks are carved with monstrous and obscene antiquities, much like the gape-cunt hag of stone that squats above the portico of old St Peter’s. These we shall discard, save where necessity and shortage of materials should otherwise dictate. Already we are forced by circumstances to retain a pillar inlaid with a barbarous, serpentine device, some leering Teuton devil-wyrm coiled down the column’s length. I should be anxious that this remnant not offend, were the good people not offended more by my proposal for the church itself.

‘Lord Simon, can it be you jest?’ they say. They say, ‘Lord Simon, reconsider your design lest it prove an affront to God himself.’ They say, ‘But my Lord Simon, what of the tradition in such things?’ (This same tradition being cruciform; it hardly need be said.) They carp and make complaint for all the world as if I had raised up a monument to Moloch or a tabernacle made for Jews. They mutter and they cross themselves and lay each stone with such grave faces, just as if they fear but that they wall up their immortal souls.

Round. All I ask is that they build it in a round, as was the Temple raised by Solomon there in Jerusalem so builded. Round, without a corner where the Devil may find purchase or concealment. Round, that God should likewise know no hiding place. If He is there, then He must show Himself. If He is there ...

The fringe of beard was fine and silvery. Its eyelids were stitched shut; the nose collapsed into a hole. It smelled of peppers, hot and dry. In its expression, something foreign and unreadable, there at the corner of the mouth where it had come unsewn, the small brown teeth revealed ...

I close my eyes and push my dish away. I lift my hand up to my face and cannot help but groan at what is in me, at the weight of it. The servants look toward me, mute and frightened, then toward each other. Gathering up my half-completed dish, my half-drained cup, they whisk away to tremble in the distant kitchens, hurried footsteps quick and soft as rain across the empty, echoing hall, then gone.

The brief screech of my chair, pushed back now from the table so that I may rise, is hateful and alone in this giant room. I call aloud for John, my squire, who comes after too long a time and helps me to my chamber, on which tedious and protracted journey do I scold him thus: ‘Why are you come so late upon my call? Do you suppose that I have grown new legs and so may dance back to my rooms without your aid?’

Staggering with his shoulder pressed beneath the hollow of my arm, he glares down at the flags and mutters all his ‘No, Lord Simons’ and his ‘God Forbids’, telling me that he’d been at stool when first I called to him, whereon I make remark that should he suffer me to wait henceforth then I shall have him whipped until he shits his breeches.

At these words a sense of that which is before-seen comes to me. Was I manhandled lame along these corridors before with thoughts of flogging hot upon my brow? I know a far-off, singing dizzyness: Saracen voices droning to their Devil-God across the dunes. I have stood from my meal too quickly, that is all. Dismissing John upon the threshold of my chamber I shut fast the door and make my heavy path towards the bed, using a chair-back as support along the way.

The room is cold, but I am warmed by beers as I surrender to the bedding. Here I may digest, and be alone without a thought of Maud to trouble me, her rooms being upon the castle’s furthest side. Though the November air be chill, it’s as nothing to the empty, bone-deep cold that falls on desert when the day is done, and resting here I am content. Above me, in the ceiling’s timbers, fissured lines and whorls call to my mind a map of ancient and unconquered territories ...

Good Pope Urban did as Peter, called the Hermit, had entreated him: he called on us to take the Cross; to join with his Crusade and rid the Holy Land of its Mohammedan oppressor. Though the early expeditions of both Peter and one Walter, called the Penniless, were cut to pieces by the Turks, we were not to be stayed. Thus, in the ninety-and-sixth year of this Millennium we set our sails for Constantinople and not a one of us thought other than that he would reach again his home a richer man.

Great God, but the immensity of that cruel Heathen sky. It made men mad. While on our way to join with Robert, Duke of Normandy, in setting Antioch to siege, we came across a fellow broiled as black as any Saracen who yet sang out loud hymns in noble French as he paced there in circles ‘midst the bare, slow-shifting hills. Alone without his comrades for who knows how many days or weeks, he’d patiently dug out a long and looping trench, deep as a man’s waist, that stretched back across the dunes as far as we might view. He cursed us when we broke a small part of its sides down as we led our mounts across. Upon his brown-seared chest the rags of Flanders hung, their bright green fading yellow in the shadeless desert light.

When we had ridden on a little way and left him raving far behind us, I glanced back and with a queer surprise saw that his endless trench, when looked at from afar, did not snake back and forwards without meaning, as it seemed to when close by. Viewed from a distance, it became a line of monstrous script reeled out across the dunes, scrawled in a giant and uneven hand. In many places words and letters had been wiped away by shifting sand, so that it came to me that this poor soul must spend his days in pacing up and down along the message’s drear length, digging anew its strokes and flourishes, hymns spilling from his parched black lips the while. The only words that I could read were ‘Dieu’ and one that may have been ‘humilité’, spelled out across a violet-shadowed slope’s soft flank. His message, and of this I have not any doubt, was meant for the Almighty, who alone resides at such a height as to review the text entire. We left him crouched upon the bridges of an ‘m’, frantically scrabbling to wipe away the hoof-prints where our steeds had damaged his calligraphy.

And so we ventured on, and sacked the smaller towns that lay along our route to Antioch. There is a sound that plunder makes; a hundred smaller noises all confused in one: a wailing baby, dusty thunder of collapsing stone and whine of injured dogs. Horse panic. Lost and trembling query of escaping goats with women weeping from their guts; men from their noses. Gruff cries, unintelligible, sunken to a language only made for war. The mortal chime of blade, the howl of buggered children, all one voice that spits and crackles in the moment’s smoke-black throat. I hear it now.

We set their shrines to torch. We took their lives, their wives, their horses, silks and jewels and some of us took more besides. One of my captains wore a belt hung round with Heathen tongues until we chided him about the stench of it. They were great black things, bigger than you might suppose, and no two quite alike. These barbarisms were not strange to us while we were in that place, though I have thought upon them since and know now that such actions lack all dignity. Still, others took far greater strides along that route than we. Some leagues from Murzak we rode for a way beside a company of knights from Italy who dined upon the flesh of slain Mohammedans, saying that since their foemen had not Christian souls they were more like to beasts and could thus be devoured without a breach of covenant. It was quite plain they were made lunatic by eating Heathen brains, and I could not but wonder how they’d fare on their return to Christian lands. As it occurred, returning through those territories back from Murzak at a later date we came upon their heads, daintily set there in an inward-facing ring between the shimmering drifts, scraps of their azure tunics tied about their eyes, blindfolding the already blind for cultish reasons that we could not guess.

I longed with all my heart to see Jerusalem, that city of the scriptures that the pagan Emperor Julian of Rome sought in his vanity to build anew and was struck down by God ere the foundations could be laid. A whirlwind and upheavals fraught with gouts of flame erased his works, in which some see a proof of the Divinity’s displeasure. (My round church at least has its foundations set in place, whatever may befall it hence.) I longed to walk among those hills, and see that ancient heart of piling stones from where the Holy verses sprang, but what I saw instead! Better my head were settled blindfold in that dismal ring of Roman cannibals, my blood congealed like egg-yolk in my beard.

I must not think of heads.

Somewhere below my bed, below my chamber floor, the castle is alive with catcalls, footsteps, and recriminations; grand and cold and echoing, and built to last a thousand years. I can recall when only Waltheof’s Baronial hall stood here, all wood and thatch that swarmed with fleas, before the King decided that a knight of Normandy might overlook these districts better than a Saxon Earl.

Poor Waltheof. I met him once or twice and he was likable, though quite without intelligence. As a reward for his collaboration in the Conquest did William the Bastard first give Waltheof the Earldom of North Hamtun, then a traitor’s grave when he had tired of him. Such calumnies and grave accusals did they heap upon his head that by the end the old man came himself to think his treasons actual. Had he conspired against the King? It seemed to him this must be so, for had his own wife Judith not thus testified? That William, being old and filled with panics, might seek merely to consolidate his own position by arraying fellow countrymen about him in the Baronies would seem a notion quite beyond the grasp of Waltheof. Nor did he grasp that Judith, being William’s niece, would testify in any way her Royal uncle might require. Led weeping to the block, he even called aloud for Judith to forgive him, whereupon at least the treacherous whore summoned the grace to wince and look away for shame. She was her uncle’s creature, quick to do as he might bid on all occasions.

All occasions save for one.

The light outside my turret window is grown wan with the progression of the afternoon. I doze, made drowsy by the beers, and when I wake to find the windows filling with November’s early dark I have a memory of nonsense, drifted through my thoughts while reason slept: out in the wastes of Palestine, caught in some mapless region quite devoid of landmark, I am come upon a human foot that sticks up from the sand. With much delight it comes to me that buried here is my true leg, the lame and hateful thing that I have dragged about with me these years being a mere impersonation of the same. Eager to walk as once I did, I kneel and start to scoop away the dust about the ankle and the calf, when of a sudden I am made aware of someone watching me.

I look up, not without a start, and see a woman crawling on her belly with a horrid speed across the lazy dunes to where I crouch beside the jutting foot. Dressed in the black robes of a nun and crippled in some manner I may not discern, she drags herself towards me down the baking slopes, and now I hear her calling to me imprecations, bitter curses, telling me the leg is hers and warning me to leave it be. I grow afraid of both her furious spite and beetle-like velocity as she propels her black-draped carcass down the hillock in a pittering hail of grit. Wrenching now frantically upon the ankle that protrudes, I here attempt to haul the leg up out the sand and make away with it before the nun has reached me, but it will not budge. Within the ghastly instant that is prior to waking, I become aware that there is something underneath the desert floor that pulls against me, something hidden and yet hideously strong that yanks upon the leg as if to draw it under from below, at which I wake to wet palms and the clanging of my anvil heart, here in this darkening turret.

I am so afraid. I am afraid of being dead, I am afraid of being nothing, and that great unease that I have kept so long at bay is made companion to me now. I see the life of me, the life of all of us, our wars and copulations, all our movement and philosophy and conscience, and there is no floor beneath it, and it stands on naught. Beyond my window, early stars emerge into a firmament with purpose fled.

After a time, I call to John, at which he answers with such haste that I half fancy he has sat betimes without my chamber door for fear of being absent when I summon him. Raised up now on the bed and pulling on my breeks I bid him fetch the Lady Maud to me and, after his removal and the lighting of a candelabra, kneel beside the bed to make my water in a chamber-jug. The stream is thick and brownish and with melancholy I observe my prick to be yet chancred and inflamed: one more among the relics brought back from the Holy Land.

I never saw Jerusalem. It had become quite plain that by the time we came to Antioch the greater part of all the fighting (and the pillage) would be done, and so we were content to take a more meandering route that brought us upon towns and Heathen settlements both less defended and less likely to already be picked clean. I took a native woman up from one of these to carry on my travels, and for some nights had great sport with it, though on the ninth such night she killed herself. The women of this like were plentiful. Once, when such things became the fashion with us for a while, I tried a boy, though never liked it, for the smell of Heathen boys is not a pleasing one. In time, such pleasures anyway were overcome by heat; a carnal lassitude; a deadening of ambition in the flesh.

We had veered far, come almost into Egypt when we chanced upon the knights in red and white. All of that week our travel had been hard and filled with queer occurrence, as when five days sooner we had seen the ground beneath our largest and most deeply-laden wagon crack apart, so that the whole front end of it plunged down into the sudden cave that yawned beneath. We clambered down through rising veils of dust to look upon the damage, where we found an ancient buried tomb or bone-room stretched about us in a stale dark, whereupon the sun’s harsh, brilliant shafts now fell after a wait of centuries. It had almost a chapel feel, its huge descending pillars fashioned not with mortar but with light. Piled all about were skulls, some of them crushed like morbid eggs beneath the iron wheels of our fallen cart, sharp flakes of yellowed shell upon the whiter sands. It took the most part of a day to raise the wagon up from out its pit, and by the close of it we all were coughing fearfully and spat great quids of jelly. Some time later, in the lower ranks, a fellow named Patrice swore that he’d watched a bright and quivering city hanging in the dawn, all of its frightening weight suspended high above the further dunes. There were more instances akin to this in those last days before we happened on the stranger knights.

We saw their lights at dusk, when the distinctions between sky and sand were lost and we had not ourselves made camp. Fearful lest we had come upon the enemy, we broke procession to a hush in which the scuttling of sand-rats and the night-call of green beetles might be heard. Borne on those serpent winds that rake the wilderness we heard their singing, lusty, full and French, and were relieved, at which we hailed them and were so made welcome by their fires.

The leader of their company, which numbered eight or nine, was one I had known distantly before, called Godefroi, come from Saint-Omer. He seemed pleased enough to meet with me, and thus it was we sat and talked together while my comrades clattered and made oaths in darkness as the Nobles’ tents were raised, there in the endless gloom beyond the firelight’s reach. I marveled that Saint-Omer had a skin of wine perched on his lap, since nothing in the manner of strong drink had passed my lips for near to half a year, whereon he kindly offered some to me. It quickly warmed me, and a little more engendered in my ears a low and pleasant singing that dispelled the vile, incessant whisper of the desert insects, thought by Saracens to be the howl of Pandaemonium itself.

Above, great constellations wheeled to which our bonfire sparks ascended in their tiny mimicry. I quizzed my host upon the curious device that he and his companions wore, with rose-red cross arrayed upon a field of white, whence he confided that they were a fledgling order, not yet fully birthed, and yet complacent of their greater destiny. I liked him, for he did not seem to boast, but only spoke of his designs dismissively, as though they were already made accomplished. Although younger by some years than I, it seemed to me he had a wisdom and firm certainty about him that bespoke an older man, and so I listened on, entranced and not a little giddy from the wine.

After a time, another of Saint-Omer’s order came to join us where we sat, this being one called Hugues, of Payens. While younger still than Godefroi, his zeal toward the fledgling brotherhood surpassed that of his elder, though in this it may be that he had partaken of more wine. Brazen where Saint-Omer had been restrained, he spoke of all the wealth and influence that would be theirs once time had run its course; a fortune that might span the world in its effect. At this I gently chided him, and said if words were wealth then he should be alike to Croesus, asking whence he fancied that these riches might appear.

Drawing offense from this, he turned at once more arrogant and curled his lip into a sneer of such lop-sidedness I knew him to be in his cups. He hinted, though obscurely, at a certain secret guarded by his order, before which the Pope himself might soon be brought to kneel. Here, Saint-Omer did lay a counseling hand upon his fellow’s arm and whispered something past my hearing, after which the pair excused themselves by virtue of their weariness, and soon retired. I sat below a thin-pared Heathen moon until the embers palled and gave play in my thoughts to all that they had said, their hints and wild assertions, being in the last resolved to press them further on the morrow. Had this resolution been forgot in sleep, as are so many nobler urges, then might I have come upon my dotage and my death a happy man. The sudden yet half-hearted tapping on my chamber door now rouses me from out my arid reveries, and when I bid the one who knocks to enter, there is Maud, with young John fidgeting and shifting in discomfort by her side until he is dismissed, closing the door behind him as he goes.

She stands composed there in the creeping silence, gazing on me without kindness, nor with fellow feeling. Next she stares down at my chamber-jug and makes a face, so that I hide it back beneath my bed before I turn once more to face her.

‘I would have you sit.’ I gesture here towards the chair, halfway ‘twixt bed and door to aid my passage to and fro across the room.

‘As my Lord wishes.’ Now she brushes off the seat before she sits, as if to rid it of contaminations. In this manner is she wont to craft all of her words and deeds into some subtle, ill-concealed rebuke. As if her cunny does not reek. As if her shit were made from gold.

‘How fares my son?’

The look she gives me in reply, blank and unfathoming, is in truth all of the reply I might require: she neither knows, nor cares to know. The child is in the charge of nurses, somewhere in the castle’s eastern mass. His mother took against the child from birth and will not see him, hating as she does the man who got him on her and the manner of that getting.

Now she glances to the side and speaks, indifferently. ‘The young Lord Simon, I am told, has been afflicted with the grippe, yet otherwise fares well, if it should please my Lord.’

Her eyes, hoar-frosted with disdain, cast insolently back and forth across such few effects as I have gathered in my chambers here: a casket with four angels of Mohammedan attire in gold relief upon its lid; a Merlin stuffed with shavings and a Tartar’s finger on a fine, bright chain. With every piece, with every look, she judges me.

After the death of Waltheof, William the Bastard was concerned that I should take up Waltheof’s position here. More than position: it was meant that I should take Waltheof’s widow, Judith, as my wife, so that my claim to all his lands was given strength. Now, she was William’s niece and had until that time obeyed her uncle’s every charge, and yet at this she balked. Judith, who with false witness had her husband parted from his head for no more reason than it was the Bastard’s will. Judith, who knew should she refuse her Liege that all her land and titles should be forfeit. Judith, who would sooner copulate with goats than lose her uncle’s favor.

Judith would not marry me.

She said it was because I had a halten foot, and yet in this I know she lied. What is it that they see in me, these women?

Maud is watching me from where she sits. She waits for me to speak, or to dismiss her. I do neither one. In these brief years since when she was delivered of our son her youthful bloom has gone. The teeth she lost from the fatigues of motherhood have stripped the vestiges of plumpness from her face that made it comely. More and more I see now Judith’s chin and Judith’s nose, the mother’s hard, sharp features mirrored in her child.

When William said that Maud should be my bride in Judith’s stead, still she did not relent, though it should spare her daughter’s maidenhead, and all of Maud’s wet-cheeked entreaties could not shake her from her grim resolve. Why did she fear me so, to offer up her daughter’s hairless little Cat upon my altar in place of her own?

The silence in this chamber is no longer to be borne, and so I turn instead to talking of my church, its glorious chancel windows; the unique arrangements of its nave.

‘The nave is to be in a round, Maud. There! What do you think of that?’

She stares, with Judith’s eyes.

‘I’m sure it is no matter what thoughts I may have, my Lord. I am not witting of such things.’

Knowing a criticism to be hid within these bland assurances, my ire begins to rise, and I press further on this selfsame tack.

‘If I have asked, you may be sure it matters. If you be in truth unwitting of such business, why, then I shall be amused to hear your witless thoughts. Now put off your delays and answer plainly: what are your opinions of a church built in a round?’

She shifts upon her chair, and I am pleased to see she is discomfited. Become less certain in her insolence she does not meet my eye, and in her speech I fancy that I hear a trembling, absent hitherto.

‘There are some who might say, my Lord, that it was a configuration not hospitable to Christian worship.’ Here she swallows and pretends to lose herself in study of the Heathen angels raised upon my casket’s lid. Turned to the side there is still beauty in her face. It comes to me that were I yet equipped to plow her she would not raise such a fury in me, at which thought the fury doubles.

‘Do you think I care a fart what some might say? The counsel I am seeking is your own, and I shall have of it for all your damned evasions! Let the ignorant hold that my works do not well suit their low-born Christianity, still shall I hear what you would say in this!’

Brief silence from her now that is much like the rolling of a drum, in that it has the same air of anticipation.

‘My Lord, you force me to admit I must agree with those that say these things.’

I rise up from the bed where I am sat and, clinging to its foot-boards lurch towards her so that she shrinks back.

‘What do you know? What do you know of Christianity, of its antiquities? Come! You shall come with me to view my church this instant, that I may instruct you to a proper sensibility!’

She starts at this.

‘My Lord, it is too dark. I cannot venture out with you this night, when it is sure to rain.’

I take a further step towards her, one hand gripped yet on the foot-boards of my bed and hear the thunder crashing in my heart.

‘By God, were we made sure of Armageddon on this e’en, yet would I see you do my will in this! Get up!’

Now she is weeping, furious because she knows that she may not gainsay me. Wet-ringed eyes spit venom, and without much thought of it I find that I am rubbing with the hard heel of my palm against my loins, the old thing in me come awake to find such passion in her. When she speaks her voice is rough and hateful, like a cockatrice. I know that she would strike me if she dared.

‘I will not! Drag yourself through storms to gloat on your misshapen relic if you will, but I’ll not come with you!’

Risking my balance I let go the bed and topple forward, catching at her chair-back with my hands so that I come to rest propped over her, gripping the chair on each side of her arms, my face pressed not a hand’s width from her own. Speaking, I see the white froth of my spittle fleck against her hollowed cheek where she has turned her face away, eyes wrinkled tight.

‘Then I shall drag you by the hair, or have men do it for me! Shall I make you bare and thrash you? Shall I?’

Defeated now, she shakes her head; takes small hiccuping breaths, gulped deep into that narrow chest, snail-path of snot upon her upper lip. I let the silence simmer for a moment, wherein nothing save my breathing may be heard, then, lifting up to stand beside her with one hand still on the back-piece of her chair, I call to John.

When he appears, his pallor and timidity are such that he must surely have been listening, beyond the chamber door. He glances to the Lady Maud, who turns her face away from him so that her discomposure might not be in evidence, and then he looks to me.

‘My Lord?’

I bid him summon men at arms and next deliver Lady Maud and I to horse, saying that we are wont to visit church and would that he make company with us and with our mounted yeomen. He seems puzzled and afraid, and gives a glance of silent question to the Lady Maud, who will not look at him, and so he bows and makes away, and all is done according with my will.

At length, we quit the castle by its bridge-side gate, with Maud still weeping as she rides beside me, while John and the men at arms stare straight ahead, affecting not to notice this. The rain that stripes the dark is thin and spiteful, does not quite remove a scent of distant woodsmoke lingering upon the air, and when I ask as to the source of this, my squire reminds me that this is the night the villeins light the bel-fires that they drive their cattle in between to make them proof against disease. As we ascend from cross-roads up to horse-fayer I can see the sky a hellish red behind St Peter’s crumbled spire, that marks where such a fire has been assembled on the green towards that church’s rear. Much merry-making can be heard come from this quarter as we ride our horses by and on towards the street of Jews.

Upon the threshold of those teeming Semite hovels we break left and so begin our weary and prolonged ascent of that steep path that runs from the horse marketplace, up to the outskirts of the boroughs and the sheep-track just beyond, where is my church in its inchoate state.

The reek of fire is everywhere upon the wind, so that I cannot but recall the smell of older fires, in older darknesses. The fire where I first sat and talked with Saint-Omer; the fire we built our camp about that next night, after riding with Saint-Omer’s strange-garbed company a day. Sat there about the burning brushwood’s hurried and imprudent blaze, I quizzed him further on the claims that he and young Hugues had made when last we spoke. The foresaid Master Payens was not present on this new occasion, having gone with several of his fellows to a spot remote from where we camped, for purpose of some service or observances peculiar to their order.

Crouched beside me, face made brazen by the flames, Saint-Omer made again his boast that with his order he should rise until they were made rich beyond the dreams of Avarice, with influence to beggar Alexander’s. Urging me to join my cause with theirs, he promised all who stood beside them at the outset should come into greatness and reward, when they at last laid claim to their inheritance.

‘As you shall see, my Lord of Saint-Liz, though our rise may be assured, there are yet certain preparations to be made that would assist us greatly when we come at last to power. Our form of worship, as an instance, makes requirement that we gather in a circle, such as is not easily accomplished in the common style of church. We shall therefore need churches raised across the world according to our own design, these fashioned after Solomon’s great temple in Jerusalem.’

He paused here with significance, as if to make me plainly understand the offer he extended: should I aid his venture by the building of a novel church then would I be repaid a hundredfold when his new order’s hour was come about. I shook my head in heavy protest.

‘By my faith, Lord Godefroi, I should need more than air and promises e’er I was made enthusiastic for such ventures. Though I doubt not your intentions, how is this great wealth of which you speak to be achieved? Whence is this awful power to come?’

He turned towards me, half his face in flame, the rest in darkness, and he smiled. ‘Why, from His Holiness the Pope. I have no doubt Rome’s coffers will prove adequate to our demands.’

Seeing the speechless, blank discomfiture with which I greeted this announcement, he pressed on, while in the deserts all about us devils sang through insect throats.

‘It is as my Lord of Payens said when too filled with wine to be discreet: we have a mystery in us. We have a secret hid within our order not a few would soonest were not made instead a revelation. But to say more, I must have your pledge of silence. Further to this, I must have assurance that if this great knowledge is made plain to you, and having seen yourself the means by which we shall make good our boasts, then shall you build for us the place of worship that I have described.’

I thought upon this for a time, and at last gave assent, reasoning that if Saint-Omer did not make good his promise that I should be satisfied by that which was revealed, then I should likewise not be bound to carry out his last conditions. Having sworn an oath of silence, I inquired when I might be at last made privy to the great concerns of which he hinted.

‘Why, upon this very Sabbath night, should you desire.’

I frowned here, having lost all notion out among those timeless sands of month, or week, or day. Was it in truth the Sabbath?

Saint-Omer continued in his speech without regard for my confusions. ‘Even now, the young Lord of Payens and all my fellow knights are gathered at a place not far from here, where they make preparation and await my coming that their service may be thus commenced. If you would go there in my company, then all that I have said shall have its proof.’

Decided thus, we rose up from the halo of the fireside and excused ourselves before commencing on our trudge across the dunes to where Saint-Omer said his comrades were retired. My leg was not so bad then as it has become of late, yet still I hung upon Saint-Omer’s arm as we went wading through the dust, the same encumbering dust that slows my legs in ghastly dreams of flight I’ve lately suffered.

Overhead, the quantity of stars was frightful; that vast multitude of ancient silver eyes that saw so many generations come to dust, and never blinked, much less allowed a tear, and as we labored through the cooling drifts I asked Saint-Omer when his order would attain the station they foresaw.

‘Five years,’ he answered, adding, ‘if not five, then ten,’ as if it were the merest afterthought. Since then I have learned, with some bitterness, that if not ten, then fifteen would suffice; or if not fifteen, why, then twenty. As I climbed those showering, sliding mounds with Godefroi Saint-Omer on that distant night, I was as if lulled by the beetle-choirs, and did not think to ask of such eventualities.

Besides, we were by then come high atop a ridge, the slopes of which fell down before us to an even plain, where there were lights; a ring of candle-flames that stuttered in the darkness, with another ring alike, save smaller, set there at its center. In the circled track between these fiery boundaries, pale figures moved in slow procession, from where came an oceanic murmuring that was resolved into a mournful plain-chant as we stumbled further down the hill towards the candles and the circling, singing knights. The inner round of flame was set about a flat stone called to service as a makeshift altar. Something rested there upon it I could not make out, beyond the squinting stars of brightness dancing on the wicks that hemmed it round. We lurched downhill towards the glow, Saint-Omer and myself, and as we went the air about was filled with hideous, hurtling blossom: monstrous desert insects headed for their brilliant, brief extinction in the candle-flames. Heedless, with Saint-Omer leading me on, I could but follow their example. Mournful voices lifted up and we went down, and we went down ...

The rain that beats now hard against my cheek is like the fluttering insect carcasses that beat against it then. Beneath our party’s hoofs the green and fibered smears of horses’ shit give way to hard black jewels of dung, whereby it is made plain that we have reached the sheep-track, where the matted, tick-infested herds are brought from Wales. Maud stops her weeping for a time as we descend, although her cheeks are wet, but this may be the rain.

A blackness that appears more present and more solid rises now atop a hillock to our right, against the paler dark behind. It is my half-made church, its eight great piers reared up towards the churned miasma of the heavens. Signaling to John and to the solemn men at arms, I reach across and take the bridle of Maud’s horse, reining us both outside the low stone wall that binds the church-land’s lowest edge. It looms above us, incomplete and yet suggestive of its final gravity, as we are aided by our yeomen to dismount and climb the wet grass slope towards it. From the shadow comes a dreadful bleating and the scattering of bone-shod feet, so that Maud cries out in alarm, but it is nothing, only sheep that graze the pasture here and crop the weeds about the church.

I take Maud’s arm in such a grip she winces, hanging on her to support myself as I step nearer to the ring of piers that soar up massively into the starless dark towards their rounded, many-scalloped capitals. Between the eight great columns now the yawning chasm of the open crypt comes into view, where rough stone steps lead down into the rain-stirred mud, and though she shrinks away I draw Maud to the very edge, so that we stand between the piers, on which I lean and find support.

Now Maud renews her weeping, and as I look back to where my squire and men at arms stand at some small remove behind, I see that they are also disconcerted, whether by the hulking church or by my manner I know not. I shout, that I am heard above the bluster of the wind and sizzle of the rain, gesturing to the oblong-cut foundations and half-built walls of the chancellery that lie upon the far side of the gaping vault.

‘There! Do you see? That shall be the Martyrium, that represents the Passion of our Lord, whereas these vaults, once closed, shall signify the cave wherein he lay, there at Gethsemane. Come! Come down to them with me. I shall show you ...’

Here, and with a throttled cry, Maud breaks away from me and runs back from the crater’s pillared rim to where John and the men at arms stand dumb-struck, pausing there to turn and stare at me, her eyes wide and afraid, her pointed chin now quivering like a compass needle fixed upon my North. I rail at her and at the men who stand there idly by yet make no move to drag her back to me.

‘What? Are you made afraid by this mere shell, this mere anatomy that is not yet a church? How much more frightened should you be to see its spire! If you will not come with me to the vaults, then damn you, for I go alone!’

I half expect at this that John might move to my assistance, but he merely stands beside his Lady Maud and gazes at me in a trance of fear alike to hers. Cursing them both I turn and, gripping on those stones that jut out from the vault’s completed walls, I make my slow way down the moss-slicked stairs. With one leg dragging, I descend into the mystery.

Back in the desert we came down upon those circling knights, Saint-Omer and myself, that we could hear their song more plainly as they trudged in their great ring above an altar rimmed with candles. In their tuneless moanings now and then I heard the blessed name of Jesu, so that I became assured there was no Devilry attendant on their ritual. We stepped across the outer ring of candles, and at our approach the chanting knights fell back to let us pass on to the inner ring of lights, and to that altar which they guarded.

Nearing to it, Saint-Omer stooped low to whisper in my ear, his words plain even though we were amid the chanting of his brothers. ‘Do you see, My Lord of Saint-Liz? Do you see the face of our Baphomet; of our praised one before whom the nations of the earth shall surely bow? Look closer.’

There, beyond the winking flames ...

I stand now in the slime made by the rain here in the lidless vault of my unfinished church. Above me, peering from between the columns, are the faces of my yeomen and the Lady Maud, who have with trembling step come to the edge, that they might view me better in my ravings.

Though the fierce rain pools within the sockets of mine eyes I lift my face towards them as I bellow. ‘Here! Here is the cave in which Christ slept, while up above me in the nave’s great round shall be the symbol of his resurrection ...’

Of his resurrection. Standing with Saint-Omer there beside me I leaned forward, squinting so that I may see beyond the ring of lighted candle-stems to what sat there upon the rough stone altar in their midst. Ringing about us in their vests of ghostly white with bloody cross upon the breast of each, the knights were singing, Jesu, Jesu ...

Clinging to the crypt’s dank walls for purchase, I begin to hobble round the great stone ring, hauling my lame foot through the deep brown puddles, shouting as I go. ‘You think, alike with fools, that this is blasphemy, this Holy circularity? Why, if you knew what I had seen ...’

It lay upon the altar, and its skin was black and shriveled up with age. Those hairs that yet clinged to the scalp or chin were long and silver, glistening in the light of star and candle.

‘There,’ came Saint-Omer’s breath beside my ear. ‘There. Do you see?’

The eyes had been stitched tight, and there remained a strange, unreadable expression in the corner of the mouth, there where the lips had sagged and come unsewn. It was a head, but whose I might not guess, that was expected to reduce all Popes and Potentates to merest servitude.

‘There,’ said Saint-Omer. ‘Do you see?’

I splash on in my lumbering circuit of the vault, and yet the words I shout have no more sense in them than there is in the spit and crackle of a villein’s bel-fire. I am weeping, stumbling, roaring, while from up above the frozen masks of Maud and John and all the startled yeomen hang there, staring down at me, my judges.

‘I am old and almost in my grave, and still they make no move! They have no care for me! They will achieve their kingdom only after I am gone, so that there shall be no reward for me, not here, nor yet in any other life! If you knew what I know ...’

I knew whose was the head. It came to me with such a force and certainty I stumbled back, as if the sands beneath my feet might of a sudden open up and plunge me straight to Hell.

‘There,’ said Saint-Omer. ‘Do you see?’

I slip, and fall down cursing in the mud. Still neither men nor Maud make any move to aid me. I am weeping as I drag myself upon my knees about the crypt, hanging upon the stones that jut from the uneven brick to pull me half erect.

I gazed in mortal terror at the head, whose features seemed to jerk and twitch their shadows in the candle-light. Then it was all a lie, all the Crusadings and the Christenings alike. The central stone on which faith rests was pulled away from me, and in its stead was left this hateful relic, mummified and black, that seemed to fix me with its catgut-threaded stare; that seemed to twist the untied corner of its mouth into an awful smile. I shall be dead, and nothing shall be left of me but worm and bone. I shall be wiped away, be absent in the endless and insensate dark where no thought comes. I shall not rise into the nave of rebirth, echoing with angel voices, and no more shall any of us, for the Heavens are become an empty place and dead men do not rise, nor push back stones. Our souls know no ascent, nor have they final destination.

Laughing, weeping, with my dead foot dragged behind, I circle, circle round, forever round beneath an empty sky that neither man nor martyr ever rose toward, nor ever saw the flame of man relit when once his spark had gone, nor ever knew of any resurrection.