Relics

Chapter Five

It was dark and cold, and a dog barked in my ear. I floated, caressed by the cold which tugged at my fingertips and my feet. I was lying on my back, and found I could see stars through the branches of a tree. Then I understood. I was floating in the river, held somehow against the current. I felt about carefully, and found that my rolled habit had snagged on some part of a dead tree. Then I panicked, struggled, and almost drowned a second time. It was agony to twist myself around and grope with frozen hands until I had a firm hold on the branch and could pull myself close enough to it to free the cloth. Spiderwebs of pain shot across my chest, and the memory of the horse's terrible weight pinning me down came to me in a flash.

I do not remember how I dragged myself up the bank. Much later I awoke in a nest of dry grass and rushes. The dog was barking again, very loud, and I opened my eyes to find a wet snout a hand's breadth from my face. 'Hello, dog,' I said, and fell back into darkness. It was night again, or late evening. I sat up, and the pain rippled over my chest again, not nearly so bad this time. My clothes had dried, at least the front of them, so I must have slept through a sunny day. There was no dog to be seen, and I wondered if I had dreamed him. I got up and staggered away from the water. I was in flat country, that much I could tell in the fading light. I was in a swale of bulrushes that lay in a crook of the river, but all around me stretched fields, and I could see the dim shapes of cattle standing about, hear the soft scrunch of chewed cud. Away upstream a darker mass flecked with faint lights hunkered across the skyline. I was in the water-meadows.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. Pain clanged inside my skull and I began to understand. Dead to the world, I had floated right through the city and out the other side. How far -two miles? Four? Why had I not drowned? Now I remembered, in tiny, tattered rags of memory, a sensation of weightlessness, of flying, water dragging through my fingers. Some instinct had kept me on my back. Then I remembered my burden, and felt for the golden hand. It was still bound to me, but it had slipped, knocked in the fight, I supposed, and was now hanging against the small of my back. So there was part of the answer: St Euphemia's hand had been my ballast, my keel, keeping me face-up and arse-down. I rebound it tightly to my chest, but could not bring myself to look at the thing and recoiled from the oily coldness of the metal. I felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to tear it from me and throw it far out into the river, but Will's voice came back to me. 'It's all you have, Patch,' he'd said as he wiped the blood from the gold.

Sound advice as ever, dear friend, I thought. And then I remembered: Will was dead, lying in a ditch away on the other side of the city. A new pain flared in my breast, as if some part of my vitals had been torn away as I slept: the raw, bloody void was filling with grief and with an awful, bitter guilt. No more beer or whores for Will, no more laughter or warmth. He would never see Flanders now, and I would not see his crooked smile again in this world. I fell forward into the wet grass and his face swam before my mind's eye, slack and lifeless as it had been the instant after Sir Hugh's flail had caught him. I had killed Will as surely as if my hand had struck the blow: Death had followed me from the cathedral. And Sir Hugh himself? I seemed to recall the horse rolling over him as we went into the river. Dead as well, I supposed, the madman undone by his own madness, his game finished too. And the end of any hope for me. I had no doubt that these new corpses would be laid to my account. Night was coming in, and I felt Death, like an old friend, settle down beside me to keep the long vigil until dawn.

The water-meadows were ravishingly lovely in the dawn. They wore a shimmering silver cloak, dew clinging to festoons of spiders' webs, bright points of colour glowing through the sweet grass. The big red cattle grazed oblivious as they waded through the spectral veil. I must have slept: the spiders had woven me a glimmering winding-sheet of my own. The city-was close: much less than a mile lay between me and the last hovel of the tannery quarter.

Still, the black mood of last night had lifted a little, and I no longer felt brim-full of despair. It might be worth living a little while longer, perhaps, if for no other reason than to give Will's death some meaning. I had been skulking here for too long already. I took stock of myself. I had the golden hand, and the clothes I stood up in, which were dryish but by no means magnificent. Save for my tonsure, I looked like a farmer who had taken to sleeping in hedgerows – and there I had it. I was a farmer's son, sent up to one of the Midlands fairs with a load of wool, on my way home. I had fallen among thieves, and must needs go on foot. So it seemed I was going home – or at least towards it. I found I did not have the stomach for London now. Some linen torn from my gaiters made a passable head-cloth, and as I covered up my shaven scalp it came to me. There was one person left in the world who could help me. I turned to the west and set out on the long road back to Brother Adric.

There was much country between us. The Mendips, Sedge-moor, the Blackdown Hills. I travelled by starlight when there were people about, by day when I moved through empty country. It was a long journey, and a hard one, but there is little to tell of it. I ate berries, fish from streams, small beasts I could trap. I was a Dartmoor child – I would not go hungry outdoors. And luck paid me a visit in the guise of a halfwit carter who let me ride on his rickety old wain amongst a load of oakum bound for the shipyards of Plymouth. The man did not want money, which was fortunate. Carrying superstition about him like heavy armour, he took me for a wandering demon, I believe, and helped me in order to forestall any mischief I might work on him. We met at a crossroads outside Cullompton, and he carried me almost to the threshold of my destination.

So I was alone with my thoughts for the two weeks it took me to cross Somerset and half of Devon. I had little I wished to dwell upon from the immediate past, but still I worked the nightmare over in my mind endlessly until the colours and the horror had receded a little. It seemed as though not a minute passed when I did not think of Will, and how we should be sharing this adventure – although there was nothing adventurous about my condition now – and every such thought was a knife thrust. His death, and I suppose the likelihood of my own, followed me like ragged shadow and brought with it the chill of the grave. To escape it I thought about the past. I was a young man who, out of the blue, had lost his future, had been stripped of the life he knew. I had nothing left but my story, and I told it to myself, for it gave me comfort when hope felt stretched as thin as spider-webs wafting in the mist of an uncertain dawn.

The young man in this story is myself, but then again, he is as different from myself as the worm is to the butterfly. Although what I am today – worm or butterfly – is not so clear to me. Enough. The eyes, squeezed shut against the summer sun, preserve an image of the world that lasts for an instant and then changes, becomes grotesque, a shifting field of darkness and glowing patterns that mock reality. I wish to preserve that first moment, before the grotesqueries of the present blot out my past.

I was born in the twelve-hundred and seventeenth year of Our Lord, the second year of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, in the village of Auneford on the southern foot of Dartmoor. I was named Petroc for the village saint and for my grandfather. My father, like his before him, was a yeoman sheep-farmer, and grazed his flocks on the high moorland common that rose up behind our house. The house itself was long and low, built of granite the colour of a fox's tail, and stood on a south-facing slope a bow-shot from the village proper. A brook ran past the left wall, and below the river Aune flowed amongst smooth boulders and great oak trees. The water was clear and brown, and full of gold-green trout that hid under its rocks when I tried to grab them, and sometimes big salmon that would splash and flop in the shallows when night fell.

Lowland people are frightened of hills. Mountains and moors, which perhaps they have never even seen from a distance, are empty wastes where monsters play and set snares for feckless travellers. But our moor was anything but empty. Sheep wandered the high grassland, and the valleys and folds of the landscape swarmed with the works of man. Tin, copper and arsenic lay in the stream-beds, and Auneford men dug out the ore as they had done since the beginning of time, or at the very least since the Flood. Our village lay in the demesne of the abbey of Buckfast, but had never known a lord, and so formed a refuge for landless people, those with a past that needed escaping, or a future that did not include serfdom or fealty. As a result, the villagers were taciturn, rabidly independent and as turned in on themselves as any closed monkish order. Those who did not farm the valley bottom or run sheep over the moor worked the tinning pits, and they were the toughest of all.

My father was a big man who talked little but laughed more, a kind man who had spent too much time wandering the moors to be very adept with words. Although his sheep had made him quite wealthy – certainly the richest man in Auneford, if not exactly a second Midas – he preferred to live the life of an ordinary shepherd, roaming with his flocks with only his two dogs for companionship. When I got older, I would trespass on his happy solitude. We would hardly ever speak, but he taught me every inch of his grazing land. Green Hill, Old Hill, Gripper's Hill, Heap of Sinners, Redstairs, Black Tor Mires – remembering these names is the only way I can recall his voice. He would show me larks' nests, and how to tickle the little trout parr – speckled red and marked with blue thumb-prints along their flanks – that swarmed in the brooks. We would build a fire amongst the boulders and toast them on blackthorn twigs. We watched ravens soar and tumble, and picked bilberries until our hands and mouths were stained dark purple.

My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a man of energy. As a youth he had performed some service for the Abbot of Buckfast, and as a result enjoyed the abbey's special favour. God alone knows what that service was – something to do with boundary stones that left him with a game leg, Father once let slip – but Grandfather was able to sell his wool for the highest price and pay the lowest tithes of anyone in the Aune valley. He built our stone house, and must have had some status, as well as money, for my father married above his station. My mother was the daughter of a minor knight, Guy de Rosel, who held lands in the South Hams, that broken, hidden country that lies between the moors and the sea. Life had reduced my maternal grandparents to genteel wrecks. Taxes, obligations and the workings of fate had paupered them, and their manor, more wood and mud than stone, was falling down. The match was brokered by, of course, the abbey, and the old knight jumped at the chance. My mother was, I think, happy to leave the priory where she had been sent and find the pure air of the hill-country. I truly believe that she loved my father, and I know that she loved me. She was beauty itself to me, and words and laughter where my father was touches and secret smiles. She was tall for a woman, straight-backed, long of neck. Her hair was the colour of candlelight through amber, and her eyes were green.

Perhaps my father was not quite what my mother's family had in mind, but in the event he proved an excellent choice. The abbey, of course, obtained the promise of the de Rosel lands in return – generous as the abbot was, the aggrandisement of a yeoman sheep-farmer would have been out of the question. But it was a fine match even so. Mam gained the freedom of the high places, and a quietly adoring man. Father found, I think, an anchor for his soul.

And I learned to read. The priory had managed to teach Mam her letters – Latin and French – and infected her with a passion for them besides. She had no luck with Father, who, while he did not have the rustic's usual fear of books, felt that he would be an unworthy student, that in some way his shepherd's attentions would corrupt the written word. But he would sit by the fire for hours and watch my mother at work over the lives of the saints or holy martyrs. It was a sight that seemed to enthral and comfort him.

The little scholar soon came to the attention of the abbey, like a branded man is noticed by bailiffs. In my innocence I presumed that I would be a shepherd like my father, but in reality I had been chosen for a loftier destiny. And if I had suspected what that destiny was to be, how I would have savoured every single moment of my simple and ordinary life. I would have walked every hill, picked every flower and thrown a stone into every pool. But, to trim my tale a little, I did not. Instead, in my tenth year I became a novice monk.

Mam and Father must have been sure that they would have other children to offer up their only child so willingly. But a year after I left home they fell sick with a brain fever and died within a day of each other. My mother's parents having also been carried off by old age, I was left with no other family but my brothers in the abbey, but because a religious community is in itself a family I did not feel the shock of my parents' passing at the time. It was a slow, creeping bereavement, and I am still surprised by how deeply it cuts me even now. But I still loved the hills, and would slip away from the abbey whenever I could to walk through Holne Chase or beside the river Dart where it runs through the forest of Hembury. At the age of seventeen I left that paradise, to study under the scholars who in those days had formed a college in the cathedral city of Balecester, a day's ride east of Bristol. The abbey itself remains with me as nothing more than a medley of smells: candle-wax, boiling cabbage, spilt beer, old parchment and leather. I made only one friend, and a peculiar one at that.

Brother Adric was the abbey librarian. He was tall and sepulchurally thin, with the sharp nose and sunken eyes of a gargoyle. He was interested in me, I think, because I was interested in his precious books and had a wolfish appetite for knowledge. I do not believe that Adric had taken orders to be closer to God, or to atone for any grave sin. He simply wished to be as near as possible to books and learning. One day, soon after I joined the school, he found me peering through the library keyhole and, instead of sending me away with a clout, as I had expected, opened the door and let me look around. After that, I came to rely on the library and Adric – whose ghoulish looks hid a sweet soul – as an escape from the monotony of monkish life. But Adric was not tied to his books like some librarians I have known: the pallid creatures whose skins gleam like fish from underground caves (I have seen such monsters) and who guard their lairs like basilisks guard treasure. My friend liked to wander the villages and fields, talking to the people he met there about their customs, old stories, odd beliefs, and soon I was accompanying him on these 'investigations', as he called them. He was a collector of strange facts, which he noted down in a vast ledger that no one else was allowed to read. And what fascinated him most of all were the numberless ruins that dot the moor: the circles and rows of stone, the mounds and cairns that hang above the valleys and crown most hilltops. I, of course, had learned of these from my father, something which made Adric value my company as something more than simple friendship.

As far as I knew, the stones had been put there by the faery folk – except, that is, for the ones that were the work of the Devil himself. Adric, however, had another idea. He believed that the moor had been settled by the Trojans who, led by Aeneas, had escaped from their burning city as the Greeks put it to the sword. One of the Trojans, Brutus, had founded the city of Totnes – that was a well-known fact. But Adric theorised that, after Brutus had defeated Gogmagog (one of the terrible giants who, as any schoolboy knows, once guarded Britain), the grateful people had given him the moors upon which to build a new Troy. I think that Adric wanted to prove this theory so that he could rewrite the history of our islands. He would be a new Geoffrey of Monmouth, and put Devon in its rightful place at the centre of the world, which he, I and everyone else I knew believed to be the case anyway.

This picking through the past reminds me of two apes I once saw, sitting on a prince's throne and sifting through each other's fur in search of tasty fleas. When one beast found a particularly toothsome morsel he would pop it between his jaws and chew ecstatically, and then give his fellow ape a little pat, as if to thank him for harbouring such a flavoursome insect. The prince and his courtiers watched this spectacle in fits of laughter, pointing and cheering whenever the little ritual of thanks was played out. The world regards historians thus, I have found: the spectacle of the poor, half-blind bookworms seeking out tasty nuggets of fact is far more amusing than the finds themselves. I am neither ape nor scholar, but mine is a long story and there is a single flea that I would bid you chew upon before I continue. It was the spring of my last year at school. I was in the library, trying to concentrate on a gloss of Augustine, when Adric hurried in, looking excited. 'Petroc, I would like your company, if you please,' he said.

I need no persuasion to leave my studies, and followed him to the stables, where one of the grooms was holding two saddled ponies. Where are we going, brother?' I asked.

'Vennor,' he said. Then, seeing my concern: 'Mount. I shall explain as we ride.'

Vennor is a mean little hamlet about five miles to the northwest of Buckfast. I had been there once with my father to look at some breeding stock, and could not imagine what the present excitement could be about. Nevertheless I obeyed, and we set off at a lively trot.

The sunken lanes of Devon make for pleasant riding. Their high, tree-lined banks are shady, and in places the way has been worn down so much that one could almost be passing through green tunnels. Adric and I rode side by side. I had accompanied him on his investigations before, but this was obviously something special, and he was not able to contain himself for long.

'A pack-train passed through early this morning,' he began, 'and the drover had a message for me. A peasant called Beda has cleared a patch of waste-ground and when he ploughed it yesterday, he turned up an ancient grave.' He glanced at me, knowing very well that I was almost as passionate about the long-gone moor-dwellers as was he.

'I was not able to gather much from the drover, but evidently this Beda assumes whatever he has found to be the work of Satan, refuses to go near it, and has summoned me to prevent or remove the inevitable curse he has stumbled upon.' Adric chuckled happily. What do you think we will find?' I asked.

Whatever it is, it will not be the work of the faery folk-' and here Adric shot me a look'-or the Devil. But perhaps we might find something of the people of Troy. Maybe Brutus himself?' The laugh that followed told me that my companion fervently wished that this could indeed be so, despite his self-mockery.

And so we rode, through the fly-buzzing lanes, until the land started to rise. The lane became a track through a wind-sculpted oak copse, then we splashed through the Vennor Brook and into Vennor itself. The hamlet was a group of five houses – little more, in truth, than cob huts – around which fowl, dogs and a couple of mat-haired, snot-faced children chased one another joylessly. It was, like many another moorland village, a hard place where the people worked so savagely to extract a pittance of livelihood from the land that they became almost savage themselves. We dismounted, Adric rather monkishly choosing a dung-free spot to plant his sandals, and called out to the children, who wandered over to us looking sullen and frightened. Adric asked for Beda, and after a little coaxing one child, possibly a little girl, was induced to point directions.

We found the peasant on the edge of a newly turned patch of ground. The field – more of a clearing in the surrounding jumble of bracken and boulders – was three-quarters ploughed, and the farthest ridge came to an abrupt end a good fifteen paces shorter than its fellows. The plough was still there, a marker to whatever it was the ploughman had found. After a brisk conversation with Beda, who looked scared out of his wits by the librarian's ghoulish visage, Adric beckoned me, and we picked our way over the broken earth.

The plough had struck the edge of a stone chest which was made up of separate granite slabs, crudely worked so as to fit together. The lid, a bigger slab, was askew.

'Aha,' Adric muttered. 'The man must have taken a look inside – not so frightened, then.'

I saw my friend could hardly contain himself. 'Give me a hand with this, Petroc,' he said, already tugging at the lid. I bent down beside him and together we heaved the flat rock up and dropped it to one side. At first we saw nothing but loose earth. Adric reached in and grabbed a handful: it was very fine, almost like dust. I joined him, and together we ladled the dust out with cupped hands. I was the first to find something: a round bead, as big as a sheep's eyeball and covered in a sort of hard ash. Adric grabbed it from me with a most unmonkish haste.

"What have we here? Eh, my lad?' The monk spat on the bead and polished it on the rough wool of his robe. The ash came away and amber glowed dully at us.

After that we fell upon the stone chest, digging inside it in a frenzy. I dread to imagine what poor Beda made of the sight of two monks kneeling over the work of Satan he had found, gibbering to each other and hurling fistfuls of earth around and about us. Soon our scrabbling fingers found other prizes. I felt something rough, hard and rounded, and dug out a small clay pot, about the size of a beer mug. It was a sandy colour, and when I brushed off the dirt that clung to it, I saw it was covered in patterns, bands made up of myriad tiny impressions in the clay. I turned it upside down and shook, and amongst the dust that fell out I saw more beads. I heard Adric suck his breath in sharply. He tugged, and suddenly he was holding up a skull, two fingers crooked into the eye-sockets. There was a muffled shriek from where the peasant stood, and I turned to see him on his knees, crossing himself like a man trying to beat out a flaming smock.

Adric thrust the skull at me. In his urgency he misjudged his aim and the bony lump hit me on the nose, hard enough to numb it and for the taste of blood to come into my throat. I smelt damp soil and crushed lobworms. The librarian was prattling at me as I rubbed my bruised snout.

Ancient, Petroc, ancient! Mark me, we have found our Trojan. Stop picking your nose and help me dig, for God's sake.'

Our frenzy continued until the stone chest was empty. On the flattened earth in front of us lay a heap of bones, stained almost chestnut by their peaty grave, a handful of beads, three axe-heads made of polished stone, and a few other lumps of dirt that might or might not be treasure in disguise. Adric's face was flushed with joy – for a few moments his true character displaced the gargoyle mask he was fated to wear.

'Look at these axes, my son,' he gushed. 'See how dark and smooth the stone is, and flecked with red. This is not Devon stone, nor Cornish or Dorset either.'

The stone was indeed beautiful, but I suddenly felt uncomfortable as I realised what it looked like: the liver of a freshly slaughtered hog. I dropped the axe I was holding, and started to polish an amber bead instead. Adric did not notice my discomfort. He was rubbing the dirt from one of the encrusted lumps, jabbering away to me, or to himself, about Brutus, Aeneas and a score of the other wondrous facts on which his mind so often dwelt. A tiny arrowhead emerged between his fingers, tanged and with a wicked-looking point. It was of chipped flint, and very beautiful. I was about to tell the librarian that at last I recognised something, that this was a faery arrow, and that my father had found several on the moor and brought them home for us to wonder at, when I realised that he had fallen silent, and was staring over my shoulder. I turned as well.

The peasant Beda had been joined by a gaggle of other wretched-looking men. I counted eight in all, and they were all carrying scythes, pitchforks or billhooks. One man was hefting a long and gnarled club of bog-oak. They were staring at us and our finds and I fancied that I could actually feel the terror and hatred they held for us. Fear rose in my chest like a bubble rising from a marsh, and I coughed, a pathetic little sound that nonetheless broke Adric's trance. He blinked at me, and I saw that the gargoyle had returned. He hissed at me under his breath.

'Petroc, my son, do you mark them?' I nodded, and he went on: 'They see devils doing the Devil's work, there is no doubt.' He bit his lip. 'Follow me, and by Christ, say nothing.'

He gathered up the front of his robe and began shovelling the grave-goods into the pouch thus formed. He motioned me to do the same. When everything, bones and all, were gathered in bundles, we stood. The thought came to me that we must look ridiculous, not frightening, like goodwives out mushrooming, but one look at the gaunt librarian, with his death's-head visage perched atop a great cloth belly full of bones, put that idea to flight. He began to lope towards the peasants, and I could but follow. All at once I realised that, in all likelihood, I was about to be rendered as dead as our jumbled Trojan.

But Adric did not falter as he marched up to the little mob and came to a halt in front of Beda. There was a moment of silence. The peasants' faces were like the faces of the damned in the painted hell above the altar of our church, I noticed absently. Then the monk spoke.

'Beda of Vennor, and you good men: you are witness to a miracle today,' he said, and his voice fairly rang out across the field. "Your plough was guided by Divine Grace, for it has discovered the tomb of a Holy Martyr, one whom I have sought for years, and who will rain down innumerable blessings upon this fortunate place.' Beda gasped, and the group all took a step back as Adric reached into the bundle at his waist and drew out the skull. He held it up to the men and with it made the sign of the cross, as if he were blessing a congregation. I saw the man with the club drop his weapon, and then a scythe and two billhooks wavered and were slowly laid down.

'These are the bones of the martyr ^Flfsige of Frome, who brought the Scriptures to the ungodly Briton before the time of great King Alfred. On your knees, lucky men!' he boomed, then turned his head for a moment: You too, Petroc,' he murmured.

I fell to the soft, ploughed earth, and my loot clattered as I did so. To my amazement, Beda and his companions were on the ground as well, genuflecting and praying. Some wept. Adric's sermon rolled on above us.

'The very air is tinctured with the scent of holiness – these bones might be a meadow of sweet flowers! Smell, and know that you are blessed.' I recalled the aroma of blood and worms, and shuddered, but the club-carrier and one of the billhookers were snuffling like otterhounds, rapture lighting up their pinched features. But now Adric was drawing matters to a close.

'I will take these relics with me and place them before the Abbot. We will go to the Bishop himself, and you will have a church for Vennor, my sons.'

With this he grabbed my cowl and hauled me to my feet. I followed him at that pace which is a walk trying not to be a run, and together we hurried back to where our ponies were tethered. Adric did not pause and, thrusting the hem of his robe between his teeth, fairly leaped into the saddle. I followed suit, trying not to spill my own cargo of bones and beads. Looking round, I saw that the peasants had followed us at a distance and were gazing at us like rabbits tranced by a weasel. As Adric kicked his mount into life, and as we took off down the path and splashed through the ford, I heard the men cry out behind us: 'God keep you, Father!'

We were soon out of sight and earshot of the hamlet, and Adric reined his pony to a halt. His face was filmed with sweat, and was as white as his robe, but he was smiling a wide, skulllike grin, and his eyes sparkled. He pulled the cloth from his mouth.

'God forgive me,' he said, with no trace of repentance. 'In one day I have discovered a Trojan warrior and created a martyr. Hold up, Petroc, and help me squirrel our treasure away.' We busied ourselves with the saddlebags, taking care not to break the beautiful pot, then dusted the russet soil from our habits as best we could. I could not contain myself any longer. 'Brother Adric,' I quavered, 'who was Saint Elfseed?'

'Elfsige,' he corrected me cheerfully. 'I have no idea. Now he's the pride of Vennor, of course, but a new church will do their muddy souls no harm.'

'Do you mean that we invented a saint, just to save our hides?' I suddenly felt the hot breath of damnation.

'Perhaps, Elfsige indeed saved our hides,' said the librarian. 'Do not be concerned, my son. The Abbot will understand. And besides, you saw those men. They truly felt the miraculous, and that can only be God's work. That, I do believe' -and he fixed me with those shining eyes – 'and so must you.'

'But…' I began. Adric waved the skull in my direction to silence me, and the empty sockets dried the words on my tongue.

'People of that sort believe many things that I, the Bishop, the Pope himself know to be rank paganism,' he said. 'Devils, imps, sprites and the old gods are as real to them as the lice that bite their flesh. If it will comfort you, look upon our work today as a mission to the Infidel. Do not worry, Petroc. It was a little harmless trickery that may bring forth much good.'

I was as eager to believe this as the men of Vennor had been eager to believe in our new saint, but I still hesitated. Adric read my face.

'Have you ever been bitten by a viper?' he asked. I thought of the little adder that had nestled in the crook of my neck that afternoon on Black Tor. I shook my head.

'I have,' he went on. 'I was a little older than you, picking bilberries on the heath near my home. The snake bit my hand. I knew I was going to die, but my father sucked out the venom and told me not to despair. "Grown men should not die from snakebite," he said, "only young children and the very old. But men do die, because they believe that they must." So he said, and I trusted him, because he was my father. And indeed, I had a day's sickness, a week's stiffness of the arm and no more pain than from a hornet's sting.' 'I was taught to fear adders,' I said.

'As you were taught to fear the saints,' Adric said. 'But the saints cannot harm us. Their greatest gift is the good they allow us to bring to the credulous and ignorant. If the Church can use that good, then that is pleasing to the Lord. The people of Vennor would die if an adder bit them, because they believe it to be evil, and that is how the Devil works amongst men. What we have done is use the Devil's methods against him, nothing more.'

I admit that even then I was somewhat baffled by Adric's argument, but it had the ring of conviction to it, and besides, was not the librarian a good and learned man? I felt my doubt and my guilt lift and vanish in the summer air. As we tied up our saddlebags and climbed back on our ponies, however, I wished to know more.

'Father, what made you say those things? Was there any truth at all in what you said?' I finally asked.

Well,.Elfsige was a name in an old ledger that stayed in my mind. I have been reading Gildas on the English invasions -De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a fascinating work, Petroc, you should glance at it – but of course the poor old Britons were as Christian as you or I, and not given to killing bishops. I am afraid the desperation of the moment wrought a convenient alchemy and brought forth our saint.' And why Frome?' I persisted.

Where I was born, my son!' And with that the cadaverous librarian spurred his pony on down the track, and I followed him down through the deep green lanes, a dead man's bones in my pack, a miracle behind me and a monk's laughter leading me home.