Pillars of Light

by Jane Johnson

  My arm was going to be boiled off. And where was the Moor? I remembered the way he had turned his half-moon eyes upon me, told me to trust him. Did I trust him? He was possibly a murderer, most certainly a trickster. But those eyes, and the way he had touched my face so tenderly through the bars of my cell …

  I swallowed, aware of Geoffrey de Glanvill’s burning, hate-filled gaze.

  “I will.”

  One of the guards grinned in my face, his teeth yellow as a rat’s, then took rough hold of my right arm and rolled the sleeve up to the shoulder. I’d never felt so naked. As I approached the table, the heat from the brazier crisped the hairs in my nose. The air hung still as the spectators anticipated pain and damnation.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven …” the officers dutifully chanted, so slowly that each syllable crawled into the next.

  Trying to blank out the panicking creature that chattered in my head, imploring me to push through the crowd and run like a rabbit, I closed my eyes. May I see the Moor in Hell if he fails me … And I plunged my right arm into the pitcher of boiling water.

  Shock engulfed me. I could not tell what I felt. The sensation was so brutal it transcended the definition of “hot.”

  “Thy kingdom come …”

  A foul odour bloomed in the courtroom—pungent, sulphurous—and a man in the audience made a joke about it smelling like his wife’s cooking. “I ain’t taking a bowl of soup at your house again!” his neighbour quipped. People laughed.

  I bit down on a scream. In my mind I saw my limb withdrawn into the light, revealing a vile mutilation, the flesh scarlet and melting …

  “And forgive us our trespasses …”

  My poor arm. What would I do without it? Then I remembered that it wouldn’t matter. If I failed the ordeal I’d not be needing the arm anyway, because I’d be getting hanged forthwith.

  “For ever and ever …

  “Amen.”

  “Remove your arm from the pitcher.”

  The voice of the judge broke into my cruel reverie, but I was so lost in my horrid imaginings that I simply stared at him.

  “The ordeal is over!”

  Slowly, I took my arm out of the pitcher. Little curls of vapour twisted up from the surface, spiralled lazily to the ceiling. The crowd gasped. The arm was pink—not a savage, raw red, but the pink of skin gently warmed in a salving liquid, the pink I saw the one and only time I ever willingly took a bath at St. Michael’s Priory—glowing, healthy, unmarked pink. In fact, I thought, my arm looked better than when it went in. Cleaner, certainly.

  Geoffrey de Glanvill stood for a better look. “God’s eyes, this is some trickery!” he growled.

  The judge reprimanded him for his blasphemy, then turned his attention to me. “John Savage, you have undergone the trial by ordeal of water and God has judged you and yours innocent of all charges. Your associates will be released. You are free to go.”

  I was carried from the courthouse on the shoulders of the crowd, who, in their fickle, superstitious manner, had decided that I was to be treated like a living relic, the beneficiary of God’s miraculous intervention. I was touched for good luck, bought ale—horrible, thick, porridgey stuff they had to skim the barley out of—and offered tarts, both edible and female.

  It was late evening before the Moor found me in an alley, alone at last, with a bellyful of ale.

  “What was in the pitcher?” I asked him as he helped me to the dormitory.

  “Water.”

  “Water and what?”

  He tapped his nose. “A substance that makes it smoke. A little trick I picked up from a sorcerer in Marrakech.” It was all he would say.

  “Are you a sorcerer?” I asked.

  He tipped his head back and laughed. “I’ve been called such in my time, among much else. But believe me, John, I would have let no harm come to you. You must always remember that, and trust me.”

  Through ale-glazed eyes I scrutinized him woozily. “How can I trust a man who won’t tell me his name?”

  His face became very still. Then he leaned towards me and whispered something close to my ear. I felt his breath, hot against my neck. But I was too drunk to catch the words, and seconds later I passed out.

  6

  On the road England

  On a bit of waste ground on the edge of Bath, we staged our rehearsals under a leaden sky.

  “Scream, Mary. Really scream! Clutch your bodice like a woman trying to preserve her last shred of decency.”

  Plaguey Mary waved an arm at her rapist—Red Will, hunched with embarrassment, the blacking on his face smeared by sweat. “He’s hopeless. You should make him the ravisher.” She winked at the Moor.

  “Do not ask me to play a Saracen as some brutish villain.” The Moor turned away.

  I took the curved wooden sword from Will’s hand. “Look, like this.” I brandished the weapon, snarling horribly. “You’ve just slashed your way into Jerusalem and now it’s time to take your prize. You’re going to sow your seed in every infidel woman you can lay hands on. It’s your right as a conqueror.”

  The Moor looked at me, slowly shook his head, then walked away.

  Will nodded uncertainly. He’d only ever lain with two women, he’d admitted to me late one night on the road. One of them was his friend’s sister when they were both off their faces on mead, and he couldn’t even remember if he’d managed to put it inside her. And the other was Mary, when he’d plucked up the courage to offer her his pennies; and then she’d laughed at his poor, nervous offering and deemed it too small to be a “William,” maybe just a “Bill.”

  He took the scimitar back and waved it overhead, pulling a face.

  “Grimace, don’t simper! And Mary, don’t flash your dugs. Remember, you’re a God-fearing woman who’s just seen her sons cut down by a pack of Saracens. Look terrified and pray for deliverance.”

  Mary snorted and tossed her unruly shag of hair. For the past decade she had been living off her wits. She didn’t care what any man thought of her; she knew perfectly well what she thought of them.

  “Much good praying ever did anyone. She’d be better off belting him with her piss-pot.”

  “For shame, Mary!” Will growled. He might have been a penniless minstrel and a thief, but still he prayed three times a day and meant every word of it.

  “It’s very simple,” I told them. “If you play your parts well we all make money, and if you screw it up we’ll be back in the gaol waiting for the rope.”

  This seemed to focus them for a while.

  Savaric and Bishop Reginald came to watch us rehearse. The bishop stood there with the corners of his mouth turned down when the play-acting got too coarse, but Savaric cheered us on.

  “You can’t underplay these things, Reggie. The populace doesn’t understand subtlety. The mummers aren’t here to appeal to their better natures—that’s down to you and me—it’s their blood they’ve got to rouse.” He leapt into the square we had marked out to represent the dais and he acted out both parts—Saracen marauder and abused woman—with unseemly gusto.

  “You’re remaking the world for them,” he explained, panting. “Here they are, tucked away in their safe little villages. For them, Jerusalem may as well be on the moon, or under the sea. It’s your job to make Jerusalem come to them. You’ve got to make them care enough that it’s lost that they’ll give up all they hold dear to go and win it back. When you,” he said to Red Will, shifting from foot to foot, “ravish Mary here, you have to make a man believe the Saracen could be beating down his door at any minute to carry off his wife!”

  He spun around to confront Hammer and Saw, who had come to practise their own scene. “And when you two piss on the True Cross, you have to make them want to kill you for it.”

  Saw looked to his twin. “That shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “You, Michael, yes?”

  Hammer nodded uncomfortably, not liking that anyone with authority should know his proper name.

  “Do
it with a real flourish, right?”

  Hammer hoicked the length of sheep’s intestine out of his breeches and swung it about with suitable abandon.

  Bishop Reginald tapped the Moor on the shoulder and they went aside to sit on a bench. I watched them with their heads bent together as if they were sharing secrets and felt a raging jealousy. When it became clear that Savaric had usurped my role as rehearser of the troupe, I crept away to find out if they were talking about me, just in time to hear Reginald ask of him, “You did not like the Lady Chapel?”

  I watched the Moor hesitate. “It is fine work. But something about it is … unsatisfying. The colours are visionary, and the arcades are lovely. But even with all the candles it was dark in there. The windows are too small, the pillars too thick. It does not lift the soul. The prayer hall in the Great Mosque in Cordoba, on the other hand, with its bicoloured pillars and infinity of arches, combines great power with a delicacy of effect. And I have heard that the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, based on the Prophet’s own mosque in Medina, is even more perfect in its design. I would dearly love to see it for myself one day.”

  The bishop leaned back, musing. “I have such plans for Wells, you see. The foundations are laid, but I want to be sure … not to repeat the mistakes of the past. The problems of combining height and the need for light with sufficient strength in the structure …” He dipped his head so that I had to strain to hear and by a prodigious effort caught “fountains of light” and “soaring pilasters,” “great arches reaching skywards.”

  My skin began to tingle. Blood rose in my cheeks, beat in the tunnels of my ears. When I succumbed to my falling sickness, I would smell the scent of roses and see a pair of tall doors opening before me, beyond which impossibly tall pillars, joined at their apex by sharp arches, rose into a light-filled dome or a golden sky. The sensation that overtook me at these times, after the initial panic, was one of intense serenity that enfolded me like angels’ wings. I had no control over these fits, or of the images that accompanied them. How were a churchman and an infidel privy to my visions? I had never spoken of them to anyone.

  The Moor’s brow smoothed as if he had solved some puzzle in his mind. “To make a place where contradictory elements may be reconciled.”

  The bishop sat back with a look of fierce bliss upon his face. “To invite the immanence of the transcendent.”

  “A place where earth touches Heaven.” The Moor looked right at me with a gaze so penetrating that I felt my soul peeled naked. “John, fetch your drawing things.”

  I had been drawing—little caricatures and portraits of the troupe, trees and churches, bits of building—for some weeks, but secretly, fearing ridicule and reprisal. I had hidden my poor efforts from everyone beneath my pallet. But one day, a few weeks ago, I had come upon the Moor with my tattered drawings spread before him on the floor of the dormitory at Bath Abbey while the others were at prayer—or more likely in a tavern.

  “These are good,” he’d told me, a curious expression on his face.

  I tried to gather them up, but he put his hand on my arm. His touch made my heart thunder. I shook him off in another sort of terror, grabbed my drawings and ran away, down the stairs and outside, where I dropped them down the well.

  The next day, like a man attempting to charm a wild animal, he’d found me when I was alone and held a small packet out to me.

  No one had ever given anything to me without expecting something in return.

  “Go on, take it.”

  It was a bit of old oiled cloth. “What have you given me this for?” I was disappointed and angry.

  “Open it!”

  Inside the cloth were leaves of creamy white, bound with fine silk. I touched them with wonder—so soft, so smooth. “What are they?” I had never seen anything so white—it was like being given pieces of the moon.

  “Paper,” he said. “For your drawings. And this, too.”

  Out of his satchel came a small stoppered bottle and a reed cut into the form of a pen. He dipped the reed in the ink and ran a black line down a page, spoiling it. Three more strokes, four, then he turned it to me. It was his face, but it wasn’t. I laughed out loud. The proportions were all wrong.

  I took the pen from him and did what he’d done, but I had only used quills before: I used too much pressure, and made a hole. The next time I left a blot. The third time in a few swift lines I drew his profile: his long, straight nose, cheekbones like carved wood, strong chin. It was not difficult, I had drawn his likeness about a hundred times before.

  He stared at it, astonished, then at me. I held his gaze, trying to be the man I hoped I had become, but then quailed and looked away. We never spoke of this moment after—of either the drawing, or the touch.

  The next day, on a pretty sward of land at the foot of the Mendip Hills some miles to the southwest of Bath, back on the road towards Glastonbury, we pulled up our horses and dismounted, in my case with some relief.

  Bishop Reginald spread his arms wide. “This is Wells, the Place of Many Streams,” he told us, beaming with pride, “where all the holy springs meet and join as one. It is the most beautiful and blessed place in all of England.”

  Between the willow trees, over a gleam of water, I could see some small stone houses, a cluster of ecclesiastical buildings, a jumble of cottages and some barns and pigsties. There was also a great pile of rubble and evidence of what must once have been an ancient church, now no more than ruins, a scurry of men with barrows and picks, and innumerable trenches and holes in the ground. It looked more like a battlefield than a blessed site.

  “Here I shall dedicate to Saint Andrew a wonderful new church, the largest and most beautiful ever built in England.”

  I’d never seen the bishop so animated. He ran from one place to another, pulling the Moor along by the sleeve, pointing up and down and sideways, talking, talking. Dawdling behind them, I saw the Moor stop suddenly and describe an arch in the empty air, his hands flowing up to a point, then sweeping down again. Then they were off, chins wagging, heads nodding, leaping over the trenches into the centre of the sward. Dodging a pair of workmen staggering under the weight of a huge stone, I ran after them, my satchel banging against my hip.

  “The cloisters are extraordinary,” the Moor was saying as I caught up to them. “I have visited the Qairouan Mosque, and at Puy they have experimented with new forms influenced by Islamic designs, a method of spreading the weight of the walls in such a way that the space between them may be opened high and wide. It is quite breathtaking. Something about the angles of the sekonj, which support the vaulting, setting it at a diagonal between two walls. And the formation of the cupolas. Domes like a golden sky.”

  “Puy is one of the points of departure for the pilgrimage route to Compostela,” the bishop said.

  “I have read the Kitab Ruyyar, describing the route.” The Moor nodded. “But I have not yet walked the Way. You know the old story is that they brought Saint James’s body back from Jaffa in a ship made of stone? I have always believed that image to be symbolic of the church there.”

  A mason was summoned and another earnest conversation ensued. The mason called a new man over and he went running off, to return a few minutes later with a flustered-looking greybeard. Then the whole long conversation was repeated, with the Moor making wild gestures in the air and the old man furrowing his brow.

  “John, if I describe something to you, can you draw it for me?”

  I had been kicking at a stubborn tuft of grass, bored by their chatter. A beetle was burrowing its way into the earth, away from the disturbance of my boot. I looked away from it unwillingly. “I doubt it.”

  “Come here, John.”

  His eyes locked on mine. I walked towards him, drawn by the dark lodestone of his gaze. Quite against my will I found myself saying, “I can try.”

  It took several attempts, for I couldn’t visualize what he meant, but at last we had a sketch of what he was trying to convey.

  The old man
clucked his tongue. “Ah, you mean squinches.”

  “Sekonj.” The Moor grinned. “Yes!”

  The greybeard shook his head. “Can’t be done.”

  There followed a protracted argument, during which my attention wandered. Light and strength; strength and light. In my head danced a procession of pillars and arches. Fair white stone, hard as iron, gave way to softest petals. The scent of roses.

  The edges of my vision began to haze. I swallowed, braced myself. I would not fall, I would not shame myself …

  When next I was aware of myself I found that my lap was full of drawings. Sweeping lines, elegant curves. Had some angel entered my body and guided my hand? For once it appeared that I had not measured my length on the ground and jerked and jinked, but had sat quietly, sketching like a man possessed. Once conscious, I drew on, letting the Moor’s words push the charcoal across the surface.

  “That’s it, John. But even taller. Up to the sky!”

  We ran out of paper. A boy was dispatched to fetch it from the church stores, and I sketched some more.

  “It’ll never hold,” the greybeard opined, shaking his head grimly over my drawings.

  “It will,” cried the Moor. “It’s stronger than the Roman arch, see?” He made an adjustment to a sketch.

  By the end of the day they all seemed very excited.

  “And then a great window here, and tall, pointed inlets of light …”

  “But I can’t work from mere sketches,” the greybeard warned at last. “It’s all very well striving for something so new, but it carries a great risk if it goes wrong. Towers collapse, and if there’s a congregation gathered beneath …” He spread his hands. “I’ll need mathematical plans, master masons used to working with these foreign forms. It’ll be costly. Very costly.” He sucked his teeth.

  Bishop Reginald patted him on the shoulder. “We will get you masons and mathematical plans, good Adam. One way or another.”

  The old man squinted at the Moor. “And what’s to say this Saracen here don’t mean to undermine your entire scheme, on purpose, like?”