Prologue
HE IS GONE. MY LOVE. I feel it as a severing, a ripping away. Sudden and brutal and I am falling through the darkness, down and down like a stone cast into the ocean. Fading towards the black depths, cold and unbreathing. Memories and faces falling away from me like the last autumn leaves from the oak.
Disintegrating into my own wake as I descend. I am coming. Then light. A silver slash in the darkness. No! I am coming! Flying now. Whipping this way and that, my soul an ember in the storm’s maelstrom. He is gone and I reach out after him. Questing into the whirling dark. Grasping in vain as light flares. Wait! Flaring light. Too bright, so that I cringe away, seared with pain, gasping and tasting blood. Breathing iron and foulness. And somewhere in the thunderous clamour I hear myself shrieking. I feel my great muscles bunching, my heart thumping, the blood hot and urgent in my veins. Wait for me!
But he is gone. Up! I scream, silently. Get up! And the stallion, his stallion, flails and struggles in the mud. Rolls and screams in hatred and defiance. Rolls again, forelegs stretching, hooves plunging into the churned filth and the gore of men. His heart thumps. A thunder clap and his hind legs thrust us upward and now his voice and my voice are one and we shriek. Standing now, blood flowing back into muscle, my will raising the stallion as though the gods themselves had cast a lunge line over him and hauled him up onto his feet. But not just my will. His own pride, too. The stubbornness that they both shared. But he is gone, and I wheel round and round, tossing my great head, throwing men back. I scatter them. Those fiends who took him from me. Now galloping, hooves drumming the earth, parting the struggling, bellowing mass and running as though along a causeway with the iron sea on either side, closing in. Keep going, brave Tormaigh. Run! I feel the stallion’s life spilling away, as sand from a fist which I clench but know I cannot hold.
Yet I must. We are one, the stallion and I, and the world is madness. All hate and fear and death. The end of things. Run, Tormaigh. Run, my good boy. We burst from the swarming flesh and we stumble but do not fall, and now canter up the rise, coursing the channel through the tall grass, the channel of the stallion’s own making, when his master, his friend, drove him down towards the heinous strife.
Up now. The roar of it all receding, rolling away like a wave back down the shingle. Up. Panting. Each breath stolen. Up. Staining the grass with hot blood and sweat lather as we sweep along this pathway which leads back to the boy.
1
Voices for the Lost
THE INFANT LIVED FOR as long as it took the tallow candle beside his crib to burn down to the iron socket. When his blue-veined abdomen sucked against his tiny ribs for the last time, his life departed with no more fuss than the smoke from that sooty hempen wick curling up to the rafters. Earlier, when it was still hoped that prayer might bear the child through the mortal danger, as the basket had borne little Moses among the bulrushes, I heard Father Judoc moan to Father Brice that it was a waste to use a candle when a rushlight would serve.
‘You know as well as I that the child has been called to heaven to sit at our Lord’s right hand,’ Father Brice replied. ‘Let his poor mother keep vigil over her babe without fear that the flame might extinguish and she not know if the child will be in this world or the next when it is relit.’
The baby had come too soon and there had been no time to send for the nuns across the water, nor to send Father Yvain to take a cutting from the Holy Thorn to place in the woman’s hand as she laboured. The brothers had done what they could, but it was not enough, and Judoc had sent me to fetch Father Phelan and some of the others so that they might sing the child’s soul to heaven now that his leaving was inevitable.
By the time they had gathered in the infirmary and decided which hymn would best fit such a sombre occasion, it was too late. That scrap of a boy had left his mother alone in the world once more and gone to sing with the angels on high, or so Father Brice said, though the babe had barely squawked or made any sound at all since he had struggled into the world.
Neither did his mother shriek or wail. Not at first. From the stool beside the little bed, she turned tired eyes up to Father Brice, the stamp of the crib’s rail livid as a birthmark across her pale cheek. I saw such sadness in that face, a pure desolation, and felt ashamed to be there, helpless, as Father Brice nodded that the moment had come.
The old monk rubbed an ashen cheek as if suddenly aware of the new white bristles rasping beneath his fingers, and I saw in that moment how tired he was. Weary not from this vigil alone but from hundreds like it. From a lifetime of shepherding souls to the borders of hereafter. From simply enduring, too, year upon year, as our little island of Ynys Wydryn endured, though the world beyond failed as everything must. Because our tor, a hill rising from the murk of marsh and lawlessness, offered rare sanctuary from a land in turmoil.
Just as the marsh tides flood and recede, eroding our muddy shore little by little, day after day, so had the years and the lives and the deaths scoured Father Brice, body and soul. And now I feared that the angels’ wings which beat in that room, unseen by mortal eyes, might draw the tired old monk to heaven in their wake.
The mother – I did not know her name then – closed her eyes, perhaps to bid her babe farewell, and when she opened them again twin tears spilled onto her face. She stood, strength summoned from where I do not know, and stared at that silent little body. It possessed a stillness more profound than even the deepest sleep can induce. So much promise in those stick-thin legs. So perfect those knotty little hands, which would never clutch at his mother’s breast nor tug her dark hair nor grip her finger. I whispered a prayer that I might grow in God’s grace and one day glean some small understanding of His plan.
Then, with a gentleness beyond any mother’s for her living child, the woman picked up the little body and held it against herself. I thought that she was taking the last fading echoes of her little boy’s heart into her own.
Father Brice and Father Judoc looked at each other, their hands signing the Holy Thorn in practised harmony, the prayers on their dry lips as soft and quiet as the greasy tallow smoke wisping upward to the thatch.
Then the screaming. The tormented howl of an animal in pain. I had wanted to leave that place even before Father Judoc last trimmed the candle wick, but I knew I must stay.
‘Your novitiate draws to an end, Galahad, and you will be a brother of the order,’ Father Brice had said, soon after they noticed that all was not as it should be with the little one. ‘It is not enough merely to contemplate the mystery of salvation, to read and meditate on the sacred scriptures. You must experience at first hand the miracle of life … and the enigma of death.’ With that he had placed a hand on my shoulder, for he knew well enough that I had intimate knowledge of death, that the eyes into which he peered had borne witness to unspeakable violence. Years ago, now.
‘I should be out gathering thyme and parsley for Father Meurig and I must check the eel traps,’ I had protested. I wanted to be anywhere other than there in that room with that sorrow.
Father Brice’s eyes had hardened. ‘You will stay, Galahad, and pray.’ Then he had glanced over to where the woman sat by the crib, her linens fouled from the labour and staining the air with iron. ‘Let us hope that the child rallies. That the Lord will let him abide with his mother. At least a while.’