Fra Murta arrived at Alquiera at midday. He had a band of pious laymen with him, carrying staves. They prayed as they rode, incanting strings of invocation. Fervour burned in their noonlit eyes. They found Palinor drowsing in a hammock on his balcony, with a book upturned on his belly and his hand dangling, slack fingers trailing on the marble pavement as his hammock swayed.
‘Get up!’ said Fra Murta, standing over him, taking the book. His eyes narrowed as he saw it was St Augustine’s Civitate Dei. Palinor opened his eyes and stared sleepily at the dark-clad figure looming over him.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, whereupon Fra Murta’s stout fellows tipped him out of his hammock and pinioning his arms forced him to his knees at Fra Murta’s feet. Holding him down, they pummelled him with feet and knees. Joffre came at a run and hurled himself on his master’s assailants, but he was easily beaten back. He came again, half blind with blood from a running cut on his forehead and screaming. Suddenly forcing himself half-upright and looking round, Palinor cried, ‘Stop, Joffre!’ and the boy stood back against the wall. Palinor was being manhandled down the stairs.
At the foot of the stairs Fra Murta met with a hold-up. The estate servants were massed in the courtyard, standing several deep at every door, solidly filling the archway. The blacksmith stood below the doorway arch, in front of the crowd. He just happened to be holding his forge hammer. At his shoulder stood the butcher, who happened to be holding his boning knife. Fra Murta’s men were heavily outnumbered. They dropped Palinor and came to a halt.
‘I have a warrant to arrest this man on charges of heresy,’ said Fra Murta, loudly. ‘Excommunication awaits any who obstruct me.’
‘Show us the warrant,’ said the blacksmith.
‘My friend, you wouldn’t know an Inquisition warrant from a receipt for pudding,’ said Fra Murta scornfully. ‘Stand aside.’
‘Not until we see your papers, Brother,’ the blacksmith said. He swung his hammer idly as he spoke. Muscles rippled in his massive arms.
Fra Murta held out a parchment. At once a little clerk darted out from under the blacksmith’s arms, took it, and retreated. The crowd murmured. ‘What does it say, Mattheo?’ the butcher called out.
‘It is a warrant,’ said Mattheo, reluctantly. ‘It arrests him to stand question.’
‘Does it say he is to be beaten by ruffians?’ asked the blacksmith.
‘Not a word about that,’ piped up Mattheo.
‘A blow for a blow, then – huzzah!’ shouted the blacksmith, and he led a surge of the crowd forward to set upon the gang Fra Murta had brought with him. There was an ugly zest to it. Palinor struggled towards the well in the centre of the yard and scrambled on to the windlass cover above it. ‘Hear me!’ he shouted. ‘Hear me!’
The mayhem was suspended for a moment. ‘Thank you,’ Palinor said. ‘But take care not to share my danger. If the warrant is good, I must go with this man sooner or later. Ask him to let me put a shirt and mantle on, and let him go with me.’
Thus it was that Fra Murta rode back into Ciudad with a tatterdemalion escort of bruised rough-arms, caked with drying blood, black-eyed and broken-nosed, sore-buttocked and groaning in their saddles, and bringing a man riding in a clean shirt of fine linen, wrapped in a deep blue mantle and crowned with flowers.
Behind them as they rode, the blaze of sunset dropped behind the mountains, and the road ahead was cast into shadow. The walls of the city could be made out a distance before them, built in battlemented shadow and overtopped by towers and spires whose uppermost tips stood high enough to burn with the fiery touch of the last fingers of the sinking sun. Suddenly a river of light ran out of the gate towards them, flowing to meet them along the curve of the last mile. A few more minutes’ riding, and faintly there came towards them voices – a great choir of voices singing.
Fra Murta was riding alongside Palinor. Ahead of them the river of light divided, resolving itself into the spectacle of hundreds and hundreds of torches, carried by singers who stood lining the roadway left and right. To Palinor, whose nerves were stretched tight by fear now, they seemed the strangest vision. They were clad in dark garments that obliterated their bodies in the shadows. The torches they carried cast lurid light upon their heads and faces – their faces floating, of the hue of molten metal in the furnace, their tresses curling like the lick of fire – their eye-sockets pools of shadow, and in their eyes leaping flamelets of reflected torches, echoing their neighbours’ light. Left and right they lined the roadway, singing and crossing themselves as the riders passed.
At the entrance to the city the riders were confronted by a narrow street so packed with torch-bearers that it was hopeless to think of riding forward; uneasy at the ring of fire, the horses snorted, and started. With a word to the gate-keeper, Fra Murta turned aside. Coaxing the horses up the steps, they rode up on to the city wall and began to move along it. Below them the streets of Ciudad were mapped in fire. Plumes of light moved slowly in every alleyway, flowed in every street, massed in every square, fusing in blazing pools. The roofs between were quagmires of shadow, the churches were shapes of darkness, their outlines flickering in the moving illumination from below. A sonorous bell from the cathedral tolled relentlessly, and the spires and pinnacles and gargoyles of the cathedral appeared as in a mist, faintly through the smoke, smelling of tar and lit from below like the miasma of a bonfire. The voices brimmed in the streets below and overflowed, reaching the riders from many directions, unsynchronized and blended together, deep voices, and the soaring notes of boys, tune and words alike indecipherable.
As the turns of the wall brought them round nearer and nearer to the cathedral, the singing resolved itself, the voices of the vast crowd in the cathedral square sounding together. The riders dismounted to descend to the cathedral cloister. Palinor made out the words of the endlessly repeated singing: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom . . .
‘What is that they are singing?’ he asked Fra Murta.
‘It is the prayer of the Good Thief,’ Fra Murta told him. ‘He who repented at the last minute.’
‘And what is happening? What festival is this?’
‘It is a day of special prayer. Of petition for a special intention. The Inquisition is empowered to offer strong indulgences to everyone who takes part. Every person in that crowd has fasted all day today, and will carry torches and walk in pilgrimage, going from church to church all night.’
‘And what are they praying for?’
‘For you,’ said Fra Murta.
‘For me?’
‘That you may escape the fire.’
Palinor stood speechless, staring at the enormity of the myriad moving lights below him. ‘That I may escape?’ he said at last, extending a hand to encompass the scene below.
‘The fire in the next world, we mean,’ said Fra Murta grimly. ‘The fire in this world you have no chance of escaping.’