Severo was keeping vigil, lying face down before the altar, praying. He was consumed with bitter remorse, for Palinor and for Beneditx, who had both asked him to be set free and then been shipwrecked because he had refused them. In the darkest hour he rose and went to the great Bible that lay always on a golden lectern before the high altar. He opened it, at random. But there was no such thing as accident – the hands of angels, so he had believed, directed the fall of the page. The volume opened at Isaiah, chapter seven. ‘Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God,’ he read. ‘Ask it in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.” ’ Severo did not need a footnote, nor to turn a page, for his mind to jump to the words in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Jesus said, “It is written also, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” ’ And at last he understood what he had done. He had thought to use the snow-child to entrap his God.
Trembling, he returned to his prostrate position before the altar. He could not pray for what he desired now, for what he longed for was that he might not believe in God; that he might walk out from the darkness into a clear morning, in which the sky was empty and things had no meaning but simply were; in which one might be able to hate suffering without trying to believe that it could be just or could be corrected later. His God refused his unformulated prayer, but weighed him down with presence all night long and would not go away.
Palinor lay awake. This was not only because he was in pain, but because it seemed improvident to spend any of his last moments asleep when an eternity of unawareness lay ahead, and these were the last moments of consciousness before morning. Not one he could look forward to. He did not know what means Severo would take to kill him before the fire, but he didn’t expect it to be pleasant. For a while he let his thoughts wander amidst memories of his wife and son. He wished he had not sent Joffre with messages to talk to sea-captains who might in some distant harbour encounter a ship from home. This far-fetched attempt to save himself had not worked, and he thought his wife would sleep easier at night, his son grieve for him less mordantly if they never knew what had become of him. Well, after all, there was little likelihood they would ever know. He remembered a phrase in St Augustine, which had been his only available reading for so long, about the City of God, which he took to be located in the next world: ‘There our being will have no death, our knowledge no error, our love no mishap.’ In that world, if he had understood the saint correctly, suffering would be transfused with moral meaning and converted into joy. In the last hour before dawn he longed to believe this, and he even attempted a prayer, attempted in his mind to knock on the doors of the great silent universe, and shout, ‘Is there anyone there?’ Nothing answered him, and as the light of morning slowly flooded his cell, he wondered ruefully why it is those who believe most passionately in a merciful deity who are themselves most murderous and cruel.
When Josefa embraced her, Amara stiffened and clenched her teeth. She permitted herself to be held and kissed, however. Jaime stood waiting, carrying her bundle. The nuns were nearly all standing in the gatehouse to see their fosterling go; all but Sor Blancha, who was sitting by the abbess’s bedside, reading to her from the Book of Revelation. The abbess had been ill for so long that the book was nearly at an end.
‘I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star . . .’
‘It has been dark here for too long,’ said the abbess. ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus . . .’ Sor Blancha started up in alarm.
It was not safe to make so large a pyre in the city streets, and so the burning was to be held at a crossroads, some miles outside Ciudad, on the plains. The people came from far and wide to see the heretic burn; nobody could remember anyone being burned alive in living memory, although one or two who had fled had been burned in effigy some time back. The workshops were empty, the markets suspended, and the labourers given ‘Sunday grace’ to flock out to see it.
Severo’s clerk had bribed the executioner with a king’s ransom to garrote Palinor before lighting the fire, but the inquisitor watched him so closely that he did not dare to. Even so, Palinor did not die the death that Fra Murta had purposed for him, for at the cost of the whole of the gold that Severo had given her, Dolca had procured in a back street in the Jewish quarter a little brick of dark brown sticky substance which emitted when ignited an instantly lethal, invisible fume, and when Palinor was already stripped naked and bound to the stake, she climbed wailing upon the pyre and kissing his feet, thrust it among the faggots below his heels.