Pillars of Light Read Free Page B

their ship had been caught in the storm and gone down on the rocks. He said he had come from Cordoba, a city far to the south, where he had spent years copying manuscripts in the library of a great man.
    “Are you a scribe?” I asked.
    “I’m a bit more than a scribe,” he said with an enigmatic smile.
    “I like to draw,” I said. I had watched the monks in the scriptorium at the Mount. Their scribblings fascinated me, and when they were gone for the day and I cleaned the room, I would gatherup the pieces of vellum and broken quills they had discarded. I poured gall-ink into whelk shells I had brought from the beach and tried to copy their work. I made lines on the paper—like writing, but not like writing. My lines looked like wiggly worms. I drew a wiggly worm, added eyes and a mouth. It made me laugh. Then a crow flew past, and I drew that, too. Soon I was drawing all sorts of things: black-backed gulls, arch-backed cats and bare-branched trees. Gargoyles with saints’ faces; saints with gargoyle heads. Caricatures of the monks, hoods up, scythes over their shoulders: Death’s army. And the strange visions that came to me in my falling fits. Those were the hardest images of all to draw. I could never master the trick of capturing in miniature the immensity of what I saw in my head. It frustrated me to the point of fury.
    The Moor regarded me with interest. “You are more than you seem, John. I like that.”
    No one had ever said anything like that to me before. It made me flush with pleasure. I decided I would follow him anywhere.
    “Where are we going?”
    “We are going to see the things we must see and do the things we must do. But travelling the world does not come cheap.”
    “We have some gold now,” I said brightly.
    “It will not last forever. Nothing ever does.”
    We were standing on the edge of Bodmin Moor in the early-morning sun when he said this. A buzzard passed overhead on slow, steady beats of its broad wings, and then it was gone. I blinked and looked back at him.
    “The monks always seem to have a lot of gold,” I said.
    “People give it to them for the favour of the saints whose relics they own—to grant their prayers, cure their ills or cancel out their sins.”
    I thought about that for a while. Somewhere in the distance there was a brief, agonized cry. It sounded almost human, but it wasprobably a rabbit, lost to the buzzard. Then I told the Moor about the “relics” of Saint Felec.
    A gleam came into his eye. “Bones,” he echoed speculatively. “Well, that is interesting.”
    A few nights later we found ourselves beneath a yellow moon at a charnel pit on Slaughter Moor. I blew on my hands, stamped some life into my feet. How could it be so cold in the middle of summer? “Hurry up, can’t you?”
    A laugh rumbled up from the pit. “There are some things, John, that can’t be hurried, and that includes the dead. If you want it done quicker, you’d best come down here yourself.”
    I wanted to please him more than anything in the world, but the thought of all those unquiet spirits … “I en’t coming down there for love nor gold.”
    He shifted soil carefully. Unearthing a skull sliced clean across, he held it for a moment, examining it in the golden glow cast by the oil lamp we’d bought from the fisherman. The flickering light picked out the hollow orbits and the triangular nasal cavity. Then he put it aside, tenderly, as though he knew the owner, and bent to his task once more. Not many would dare desecrate such a place, especially after dark, but the Moor said the dead were dead, and the body was no more than a vessel from which the soul wings free. He said spirits did not linger, and bones were only bones.
    “Those who owned them may have existed long ago, but before their carcasses were thrown down here like so much rubbish their lives were full of passion, sorrow and delight.” He sighed. “War is madness, John. Fighting never achieved anything of