by Alan Moore
So the days pass. A woman of Glassthorpehill over the Nobottle Woods is possessed of a spirit, and vomits up animal beings like little white frogs. This is told me by Sister Eadgyth, though I did not wait in her company long enough that I might come to know more. She endures constipations that make her breath foul, and her humour alike, but she is a good Christian and hard at her work.
I did not walk at all, from the time of my birth to my thirtieth year, when I lived in the yard by the chalk-merchant’s house that was over the way from the church. In a lean-to of sail-cloth and old, painted boards I abided alone, for my father had taken his leave while I was yet unborn and my mother had gone to the colic before I was ten. With the rise of the sun every morn I would crawl from my shack like a beetle and drag my weight over the stones of the lane to my place at the gate by my elbows, where until this day is the skin dead and worn, without feeling, and may be pinched up in grey folds that are like to dried clay.
On the boards of my lean-to were pictures of angels, but half unmade; drawn with an unpractised fist. It was sometimes my fancy that they were the work of my father and left incomplete by his leave-taking, although I knew them more likely the mark of a stranger’s hand, someone long dead, or passed over the river from Spelhoe to Cleyley. I had these boards turned with the pictures faced inward and, laid by my candle at night, I’d imagine the clumsy embrace of their arms without hands, these omitted for want of pictorial skill. I would think myself fanned by their unfinished wings.
Now the near-winter skies have a burnished and argent light to them, hung over the convent at Abingdon here in the far fields north-east of the old church where so long I lay. As the feast of St Edmund approaches, so too does my sleep grow more fitful and restless; fraught with the most wretched of dreams, where I ride through the hurricane night as a man with my thoughts in a bitter confusion and enemies hot at my heel or, worse yet, I will wake and cry out in despair at the death of my brother, though brother in truth I have none, nor have I ever wanted for such.
On the day of the feast I awake with such words in my mouth as to frighten the wits from my poor sister Aethelflaed, there in her cell next to mine. With the voice of a bear I am growling of murder: ‘In Hel’s Town was my brother Edmund flayed first from his neck to his loins, whence he wept and complained, lying spread as if garbed in a blood-shirt that Ingwar’s men folded back, shewing the red, stinking harp there beneath.’
I console Sister Aethelflaed, calming her, even though truly I am more afraid for myself. I have such thoughts inside me that make me ashamed before God; other voices and lives speaking in me, not only in dreams but throughout the day’s labours. I sit by the well in the yard with my better leg folded beneath me and busy myself with the washing of smocks, when I find myself thinking how foolish was my brother Edmund to hold with his faith through the earlier torturings, only to shriek out its renunciation in his mortal pain as he begged them for death.
Now my hands become still in the well’s freezing waters, the fingers grown numb that the smock I am rinsing falls from them and floats in a thin scum of November leaves. I am thinking that should I be captured then gladly will I offer praise unto Wotan, for all his one eye and the pale shyte of ravens encrusting his shoulders, if he will deliver me from this demise; this blood-eagle, that it may not unfold its bloody-ribbed wings and make naked my heart . . .
I may not say how long I am sitting there until I come to myself, and rise up with a cry at the horrors that visited with me while I sat in reverie. Shaking and pale, with my bad leg dragged useless behind me, I go to the Reverend Mother and tell her that I am afflicted by dreams such as may be the work of an incubus, asking permission that I might be scourged for to rid me of these noxious thoughts. Here she voices concern with respect to my frailty and age, bidding me reconsider and suffer some penance less strict and exacting. I tell her of my imprecations, alone in my cell; all the rosaries said but unanswered. I beg that she let me be scourged, that the flail drive away what the beads cannot halt, lest my immortal soul should itself be imperilled. At last she consents, with the penance to be undertaken the following day, that I might yet have time to more fully consider the rigorous path I have chosen with all of my heart to pursue. I must not shrink from this, for I fear for my faith in the face of these infidel visions and flukes of the night; Blessed Virgin forgive me, deliver me.
Later, alone in my cell with the candle-sketched devils of shadow that leap and cavort on its walls when I move, I am thinking of Ivalde, so many years dead now. He came and he sat by me there at the gate where I lay on a cold morning just before spring. In his slow, simple-minded inflection he told me of how he’d set forth on his pilgrimage that very day. He was going, he told me, to Rome, although Bruning had scolded and railed at him, saying that God and the Blessed St Peter had better to do than pay heed to a half-witted garden-boy.
Though I’d no liking for Bruning, it suited me on that particular day to agree with him and thus give vent to my spite, for I had not slept well and was weary of Ivalde and all of his unceasing chatter of Rome. ‘You should listen to Bruning,’ I told him. ‘It’s only the rich and the holy like him as should think themselves worthy of going to Rome! Why, you’re nothing but only a simpleton. You may be sure that St Peter would care not a bit more for you than he would a poor cripple like me.’ He looked hurt at my words, like a baby, and fell to a stutter while making attempts at professing his faith in the Drotinum. I turned away from him then, and would speak no more to him till he went away, seeming woeful and filled up with puzzlement.
Inside my heart I was sure that this fresh talk of pilgrimage would come to nothing; that on the next morn I’d see Ivalde stooped, tending his crops with his idle dreams yet again put to one side, as had often-times happened before, but it was not to be. He had gone, Bruning said, in the night; on a wagon that made for the coast in the hope that he would find a ship whereupon he might then work his passage to Normandy, thereafter Rome.
Ivalde’s leaving threw good Bruning into a temper so fierce as to last for some days, and it seemed to me that the priest knew a great scorn for poor Ivalde’s presumptions. No doubt Bruning felt that if anyone were to petition St Peter then he, Bruning, should be by right and by rank at the head of the line. I would see that stout priest red of face, cursing under his breath as he stooped to pull weeds from between parsnip rows in the untended garden, and knew it was Ivalde he cursed. So the days turned to weeks and not until the feast of the Passion was Ivalde returned to us.
That afternoon I was sat by the gate with the grey cloud hung heavy and low, fit to snag on the church’s low spire, and a sad, sagging heat in the air. All my clothing was damped in this miserable warmth so that I was for ever unpeeling my skirt where it stuck to the tops of my legs. I did not notice Ivalde until he had breasted the hump of the river-bridge, downhill and over the crossroads from where I sat ragged and slumped by the gate. Even then, when I noted the strange, shambling figure’s approach, I at first did not know it for Ivalde, so changed was the boy in the wake of his travels. Not till he had come by the crossroads and I saw the red of his hair did I know who it was, and confess a mean gladness to see that he could not have visited Rome.
As he walked up the hill with that shuffling gait that he had not been marked with before there was something about him that I cannot easily fit into words, as if here were a picture that I knew of old and had seen many times in the past, though I cannot think where: this wan fool with the yellowing darts of grass caught in his hair, stumbling over the bridge to the crossroads like one fresh returned from a battle; a look in his eyes as if he knows not where he must be, only that he must be there. He walked up the lane with the sky blinding white at his back, and I thought ‘This has happened before’, and I watched him come near, at once strange and familiar in aspect like one of the queer painted figures that grace a cartomancer’s deck.
‘I have come back, Alfgiva,’ he said when he neared me. His voice sounded hollow,
with none of the life it once had. All the nonsense was gone from him now, though I cared little more for the faraway oddness it left in its stead. He stood by me, and yet did not suffer himself to kneel down by my side when he spoke, nor did he look towards me but all the while stared at the church, and his face was without any feeling at all; without even a blink in his eye.
With my neck all craned back like a bird I spoke up to him as he stood dark there with bright silver sky overhead. ‘Ivalde? Where have you been? You did not go to Rome?’
He glanced down at me then, and a cloudiness came in his eyes as if he did not know me. The small birds fell quiet in the yew and what afternoon shadows there were seemed to pause in their crawl to the east, and at length Ivalde spoke with his voice small and wondering, almost as if he recounted the tale of another boy, someone he’d met long ago and remembered but dimly.
‘Not Rome. I did not go to Rome. Thrice I boarded the boat, but he came to me so that I fell in a fit, and he told me that I must return.’ His eyes drifted away from me, back to the church, and I tugged at the leg of his breeks as I spoke to him.
‘Who sent you back? Is it Bruning you speak of? He’s been at this church since you left.’ Slowly, and without looking away from the church as he did so, Ivalde shook his great copper head so that sharp stalks of grass were dislodged from his hair. I followed their fall with my eyes to his feet, which I saw with alarm to be bloody, the boots hung in rags.
‘No. Not Bruning. The Drotinum. He sent me back. Him or one of his angels.’ Ivalde looked once more to me and I could see that his green eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Oh, Alfgiva,’ he said. ‘Oh Alfgiva, whatever has happened to me?’
As his face grew first pink and then crumpled itself as he wept, I could but stare at him. Quite unable to answer his question, I ventured one of my own: ‘Ivalde, what are you saying, the Drotinum sent you back here? You do not mean St Peter?’
He started to nod, then instead deigned to shake his head violently, eyes clenched and streaming. ‘I don’t know. It looked like an angel, with folded green wings and it stood twice as tall as a man. It said I should come back.’ Here he opened his eyes and he stared at me fiercely. ‘Alfgiva, it spoke down a flute, and it walked through the wall upon great spindled legs like a bird.’ He looked back at the church, and I saw he was shaking. ‘The room was too small to contain it, and yet it stood tall and the ceiling was melted like smoke so that I might look up through it to where the Drotinum stood there above me, with eyes full of care.’ He fell silent. A pennant of black cloud was slowly unrolled, hung up over the church with its shadow fell on to the garden and graves, the turfed humps of them, pregnant with skeletons.
This was not Ivalde, his nonsense of old to be lightly waved off, for I saw that a change was in him, and I shivered and knew I believed what he said, though I did not feel glad. For a moment I sat with him, sharing his silence, but could not long keep from my questions and asked if this angel, this Drotinum had come to Ivalde on more times than one. He looked full of such misery then as he nodded, I knew that if Ivalde had ever in innocence craved for a sign from above, then he’d surely repented and now wished his visions behind him.
‘The first time it came to me, I did not see it, but felt as I walked up the boards to the ship as if something more big than a horse were stood blocking my path, and my face and my fingers would creep if I made but to take a step forward. At this, I grew frightened and would not set foot on the boat so that it sailed without me and left me to wait on another ship bound for the Normandy coast. I grew vexed with myself as I waited and, cursing myself for a coward, I vowed I would board the next vessel to dock.’
Seeming now to regain his composure, he gazed at the church. Squatting over its door, carved in stone, was the token of Lust with her legs set apart and the cold, mossy lips of her sex gaping wide, her six fellows beside her with three to each side.
Ivalde’s face seemed to slacken and settle. The vague fogs of distance were risen afresh in his eyes as he spoke. ‘When it came, it was due to set sail with the dawn, and I said I would sleep until then in some fisherman’s sheds I had found on the edge of the sand, up above the sharp grass. I awoke in the night with my feet tangled up in the slippery fish-nets, to find that the angel was standing above me. Its sorry green feathers were dripping with wet and though I dare not look I was filled with a queer understanding that smaller things, hairless and blind, struggled down by the stumps of its awful thin legs. It had eyes like an unhappy man, but it spoke through a beak like a flute, and it told me that I must return. I woke up with the piss on my legs and dare not leave the hut the next day till I knew that my ship had put forth.’
‘The third time, I boarded the ship and was sent below that was the time that I spoke of before, when it came through the wall while I sat there awake and instructed me, so that I ran from the ship in my fear and so too did I run from that town on the coast. I have run, and when I ran no more then I walked, till I came here. I came by the brow of the hill to the west of the town. It was there that I saw him again, and less time ago than it would take for a candle to burn half its length.’
From the doors of the church, as if birthed from the chill cunt that gaped in the stonework above him, fat Bruning came striding out over the wet grass, through which trailed the hem of his dark robings so that he seemed more to glide, without feet. He was shouting at Ivalde, his mouthings too angry to forge any sense from, yet Ivalde ignored his approach and continued to speak with me, gazing above Bruning’s head to the tower of the church.
‘It was waiting when I reached the crest of the hill and could see the town spread out before me. It stood far away from me this time, alone in a scorched patch of grass, off across a great ring where the trees had been cleared. Tall and green, I mistook it at first for a sapling and then was struck still as stone, cold with a terrible fear when it waved to me. Though it was too far away to be heard, and I cannot recall any sound being made, yet it seemed that I heard its flute voice just as if it were stood by my shoulder. It said the remains of a friend unto God were hid under the church, and that I must tell Bruning. I hurried on. When I looked back all I saw were two saplings, their trunks close together and like unto legs.’
Puffing mightily, Bruning himself was upon us now, bullying Ivalde and jeering at him for his failure in visiting Rome. ‘So the Lord did not see fit to favour your pilgrimage after all? What did I say! You have come crawling back in hope, vain hope I say, that I may yet have saved you some task. Well . . .’ Here, Bruning trailed off, made uncomfortable both by Ivalde’s remote unconcern and his silence. A look of uncertainty clouded the face of the priest, and it was in that moment as if he first knew himself outdone; could tell by some mere thread of meaning, some clew in the garden-boy’s stance that Ivalde had passed nearer the world of the spirit than Bruning himself ever had.
When the priest had grown silent and shaken then Ivalde related the tale of his travels to Bruning as he had revealed them to me, thus coming at last to the spectre’s instruction to dig neath the floor of the church, where a friend unto God would be found.
Bruning stared at the lad while he spoke, but did not once break in with a jibe or remark, and when Ivalde had finished the priest was grown pale, and could not seem to speak for a while. When he did, there was nothing of rancour nor superiority that might be read in his voice, which was faint and unsteady. ‘Come, Ivalde,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll find for us spades.’
They set off up the path to the door of the church, leaving me quite forgotten behind, though I called them. I watched them a while, and then made up my mind I would follow them, though it were further than I was accustomed to crawl. With my cold elbows soaked by the dew I dragged over the grass, my eyes fixed on the door and the crater-eyed vice that crouched leering above it. I feel to this day the dank slither of grass on my belly, the ache in my arms as I felt it then. It was the last time that I ever crawled.
Sister Aethelflaed snores in th
e next cell to mine and my candle is guttering. Now I recall that tomorrow I am to be scourged and a fear wells in me that I swiftly fight down; turn instead my attention to prayers, supplications that I may for once be spared terrible dreams in the hours before light comes again. With my rough sheets drawn fast all about my cold back I turn on to my side with my ear flat against the hard wood of my cot. The patch under my cheek, where the timber is dulled and made soft by the dribblings of hundreds of women, asleep . . .
I am leading my horse down a hill in the dark with the wild cries of Ingwar’s men over the crest far behind me, too far to make out what they say. Near the base of the hill is a treacherous mire where my steed loses footings and sinks to its haunches, eyes mad-white and rolling and all the time whinnying fearfully. I grow afraid that the enemies gaining upon me will hear it and so in my panic abandon it, making off over the fields, my feet heavy, gigantic with mud. Viking curses hang brutish and blunt on the night in my wake. The blanched rushes rear up in the moonlight before me, and there from their midst looms a great mound of earth like the skull of an ice giant, long dead, toppled face first in river-weeds. At my back, closer now, rough men are calling a word that grows gradually clearer, becoming a name, and waist-deep in the rushes I know that the name is my own. As their heavy fur boots tread the reeds flat behind me I know who I am, and this cold recognition has shocked me from out of my sleep to the dark of my cell with the dream-name still thick on my tongue.