Pillars of Light Read Free Page A

again I ducked and waited for the blow to fall.
    When it did not, I glanced up and saw that the dark man had taken hold of Brother Jeremiah’s arms and was pushing him back against the wall. The monk struggled wildly, calling his attacker
infidel, unbeliever
,
blackie, wretch
,
ignotus
. But for a thin man the stranger was remarkably strong. Brother Jeremiah was subdued; his weapons clattered to the ground. Over his shoulder the dark man called, “Get up, John, and go outside.”
    But I knelt, rooted. I had seen Brother Jeremiah strangle one servant and bash the brains out of another. He might have been old but he was as grim as Death. Even the prior was frightened of him. Who was this stranger who knew my name, and must therefore havebeen here long enough to know the evil power of Brother Jeremiah? I risked a glimpse at his face. Fine-boned, ascetic: like a saint in an illumination. Except that his skin was as dark as leather. A vague memory stirred. Some weeks back, during the winter storms, there had been a wreck off the rocks of Tater Du, west along the coast towards Land’s End. Sailors brought three men in that wild night, to the hospital here at the priory, all as limp as knouts of wet kelp. The two bigger men died. Was this the third? The only survivor?
    I forced myself to my feet and shuffled outside. Night was falling. The sky and sea were the same deep shade of grey, the horizon merging into cloud. The distant mainland was a black whaleback in the gloom, tiny lights flickering from fires and candles in the village across the water. How often had I wished myself inside one of those tiny houses, away from the monks and the novices? But there was no escape from this place, except in death.
    Around me in the falling dark, small upright stones marked the passage between worlds of previous inhabitants: the priory’s graveyard, each man’s resting place memorialized in the same way as his neighbour, no difference in rank or degree made between them, as Saint Benedict decreed in the second chapter of his Rule. I had always thought I would join them there, sooner rather than later.
    I shivered in the rising breeze, then crept to the chapel door and pushed my head around the door jamb.
    Brother Jeremiah was on his knees in front of the altar, motionless, eyes closed, hands pressed together, palm to palm in prayer, like a good child. And beside him, the dark man, visible in the shadow only by the gleam of his eyes. As if he had intuited my presence by some minute shift in the air, he said, without turning, “Brother Jeremiah has passed away, and we should leave, too.”I left St. Michael’s Mount with the stranger, who told me to call him simply “the Moor,” in the small hours of that summer night.
    At last I was going to escape this hated place, and no mean-spirited novices would stop me. We left with some of the prior’s gold, but the Moor said that was all right, because we were going to put it to better use than that corrupt old churchman ever would. The first use we put it to was to bribe a young fisherman to row us across the narrow strait between the island and the Cornish coast. Then we walked the pilgrim’s way by night, and slept in the rough embrace of furze and bramble in the day.
    We kept out of the sight of other travellers, though the Moor did not appear anxious.
    “How did Brother Jeremiah die?” I asked at last.
    He did not answer for a long time. Then he said, “Best not to ask, John.”
    “Will they seek us as murderers?” I had seen men hang, could imagine the scratch of the rope around my neck.
    “There is no mark on him. God called him home. He was not a young man.”
    Might I, too, be unexpectedly called home one night as I slept beneath a gorse bush? I decided I had better make a friend of the Moor. I had never had a friend before, and I did not know what to do. I made a nuisance of myself, asking eager questions. In the end he told me he had been travelling with a master mason when