‘I cannot save you once you have confessed,’ said Severo. He was standing beside Palinor’s pallet. ‘I thought I could make something of the fact that the child had been cursed. It isn’t watertight, of course; she couldn’t at first have understood a word of human speech, but Fra Murta doesn’t know that, and I have witnesses to the cursing . . .’
‘I don’t understand a word you say,’ said Palinor, speaking painfully. ‘One of us is demented, and I suppose it is more likely to be me.’
Brought up short, Severo remembered that from beginning to end Palinor himself had not known about the snow-child.
‘Don’t try to save me now,’ Palinor went on. ‘I don’t want years of crawling like a spider. Only . . . I am hideously afraid of the fire. Is there a better way than that?’
‘I can make sure you will be dead before the flame reaches you,’ said Severo. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘When they fished me from the sea,’ said Palinor, ‘I did not at first realize what had happened; I thought I was still myself, and I promised to reward them; I promised them gold and rubies. Such a debt ought to be paid; will you see to it for me? Don’t forget.’
‘No; it shall be done,’ said Severo. ‘Are you sure there is nothing else?’
‘This isn’t ancient Athens,’ said Palinor. ‘You can’t sacrifice a cock, but would you offer a prayer for me?’
‘You cannot think it makes any difference! But I will do penance for you and pray for you every day of my life remaining.’
‘It makes a difference to you, if not to me,’ said Palinor. The ghost of a smile hovered on his gaunt and pain-racked face. ‘Don’t spare yourself the penance!’ Then, as Severo, openly weeping, rose to go, he said, ‘Ah, friend, I should have swum the other way for your sake, as well as for my own!’
Outside the prison a few bystanders were lurking, drawn by a ghoulish curiosity. Among them Severo recognized Palinor’s servants. The boy looked at him with passionate reproach, and the girl with unbridled hatred. He gave them his heavy purse, but it did not lighten his tormented conscience.
On his way through the cathedral cloisters, Rafal accosted him.
‘I cannot serve you any longer, Holiness,’ the man said. ‘I am leaving. I no longer believe in God.’
Severo looked hard and long at the familiar, unobserved, modest features of his chaplain. He saw that Rafal was trembling – was he trying to elect the path to the fire? Severo did not answer him, he merely clapped his hands. Two servants and a clerk in minor orders came running to his command.
‘Bind this man hand and foot; gag his mouth,’ said Severo, wearily. ‘Take him at once to the quays and cast him into whichever ship is the next to slip hawsers and set sail, wherever it may be bound. Pay for his passage; I don’t mean him to be enslaved.’ To Rafal he said, ‘To return will be the death of you.’ To the astonished clerk, he said, ‘Come with me. You are now my chaplain, and we have jobs to do.’ Then he walked on.
When Beneditx returned to the Galilea, he declined to occupy his old cell. There were darker, remoter caves, deeper and higher on the cliff-face across which the monastery straggled and towered. He sat in darkness, silently. At last his confessor, an old colleague, rather a stupid man, Beneditx had thought when he was teaching him, ordered him on pain of sin to return to a cell with a window and resume the treatise on angels. Just as Beneditx now found it hard to eat – food was like ashes in his mouth – so he found it hard to think; thoughts were like cold ashes in his mind. Of course he still believed in angels – how else could the movement of javelins after they left the hand of the thrower, the movement of water, the unfurling of leaves be explained? In a world full of mysteries, and in which one should never explain with more entities what could be explained with fewer, there was no alternative to angels. What Beneditx no longer believed in was the beneficent purpose with which he had always relied on angels to operate; now he feared they might have malign purposes, or none.
The monks and priests at the Galilea were full of concern for Beneditx. Though they did not know what had happened to him, they knew the dark night of the soul when they saw it. It was a country some few of them had suffered in and struggled home from. They tried to cheer him by taking every opportunity to praise him, to mention his achievements, admire his scholarship. They meant well, but they made it worse. Beneditx was humiliated. His faith turned out to be less efficient, less sufficient, than that of the stupidest peasant woman. It was not enough without the help of reason. It did not reach down to the point to which he had fallen.
He could kneel, and he could wind words through his mind: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my prayer. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication . . .’ On the far side of space and time, his God could not hear him. Beneditx had failed to save Palinor, whose probable fate haunted him at night, after the last bell, the last hour of prayer in the Galilea, when all fell silent and the lamps were all extinguished. He had deserved to fail; he could not even save himself.
He opened the book at the marker he had put in it to hold his place, many months ago, when he had closed it and gone with Severo’s messenger to Ciudad. It was a volume of St Thomas – De Veritate. ‘Should morning knowledge in angels be distinguished from evening knowledge in angels? It seems not,’ he read. ‘There are shadows in the morning and evening. In the angelic intellect, however, there are no shadows, for as Dionysus says, angels are very bright mirrors . . .’
Beneditx left the pages unturned, set down his quill, and gazed out of his high window. The vale of the Galilea in all its beauty spread out before him, and he could watch the day move across it in a changing panorama of light and shade from dawn to dusk. Once he had seen the world drawn very fine and thin, transfused with the presence of God, a bright immanence giving all things solidity and meaning. God did not merely exist, but was present in every atom of his creation, so that every sight and sound was a sacrament, the flight of the smallest bird was a blessing. Now the world had come to seem a brutal and purposeless chaos, wholly contingent, not a noble building but a tumble of stones.
Where was comfort to be found? Once it had flowed unfailingly in the exquisite liturgy performed in the Galilea, where the voices of the boys of the oblate school soared so that he used to think the vault must be full of angels, hovering, hushed and envious. The liturgy was like a garden now, where he used to walk as of right, a son of the house, and which now he was cast out from, so that every beauty increased his sense of pain and loss.
Once there had been consolation in Scripture. Beneditx used to open the psalter at random, finding always comfort and joy abounding. Now he opened and read: ‘In the morning thou shalt say, “Would God it were even,” and at even thou shalt say “Would God it were morning.”’
How high he had once aspired! He had desired the knowledge of angels, in whom there was no difference between morning knowledge and evening knowledge – in whom knowledge of the world as it was created in the mind of God, and knowledge of the world as in reality it was were one vision, one knowledge, one seamless whole – like an angel he had sought a knowledge without shadows, holding up to the creation a very bright mirror. And now the mirror of his soul was so fouled and darkened that neither morning nor evening could be distinguished from the black onrush of night.