Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

They set off up the path to the door of the church, leaving me quite forgotten behind, though I called them. I watched them a while, and then made up my mind I would follow them, though it were further than I was accustomed to crawl. With my cold elbows soaked by the dew I dragged over the grass, my eyes fixed on the door and the crater-eyed vice that crouched leering above it. I feel to this day the dank slither of grass on my belly, the ache in my arms as I felt it then. It was the last time that I ever crawled.

Sister Aethelflaed snores in the next cell to mine and my candle is guttering. Now I recall that tomorrow I am to be scourged and a fear wells in me that I swiftly fight down; turn instead my attention to prayers, supplications that I may for once be spared terrible dreams in the hours before light comes again. With my rough sheets drawn fast all about my cold back I turn on to my side with my ear flat against the hard wood of my cot. The patch under my cheek, where the timber is dulled and made soft by the dribblings of hundreds of women, asleep . . .

I am leading my horse down a hill in the dark with the wild cries of Ingwar’s men over the crest far behind me, too far to make out what they say. Near the base of the hill is a treacherous mire where my steed loses footings and sinks to its haunches, eyes mad-white and rolling and all the time whinnying fearfully. I grow afraid that the enemies gaining upon me will hear it and so in my panic abandon it, making off over the fields, my feet heavy, gigantic with mud. Viking curses hang brutish and blunt on the night in my wake. The blanched rushes rear up in the moonlight before me, and there from their midst looms a great mound of earth like the skull of an ice giant, long dead, toppled face first in river-weeds. At my back, closer now, rough men are calling a word that grows gradually clearer, becoming a name, and waist-deep in the rushes I know that the name is my own. As their heavy fur boots tread the reeds flat behind me I know who I am, and this cold recognition has shocked me from out of my sleep to the dark of my cell with the dream-name still thick on my tongue.

Ragener. Blessed Ragener, brother of Edmund and murdered like Edmund before by the North-man invaders when he would not honour their gods. Sainted Ragener, wearing like Edmund the crown of the martyrs, his feast day a single day after the feast that’s afforded his brother. How could I, of all men and women that live, have forgotten?

I lie in the blackness alone with the blind hammer-beat of my blood, feel the spray smashed up over the sheer cliffs of blasphemy cold on my brow. In our lessons we are taught how the brother saints would not submit to the Viking usurpers, nor would they renounce the true God, and for this were they scourged and then shot through with arrows, beheaded at last but with souls yet intact. In my dream, things work differently. Edmund is dead with his lungs all but torn from his breast, his last agonized words a denial of God while his brother flees terrified into the night where he plans his conversion to Wotan that Ragener may thus avoid all the torments that Edmund has suffered. I cannot believe that these dreams come from God that so contravene all that is taught by his ministers. Wondering, ill at ease as to the source of my dreams if not God, I lie wide awake here in my cell until morning is come on this twenty-first day of November, the feast day of Blessed St Ragener, when I shall at last be scourged of these visions that now are so hateful to me.

Having noted the lack of my presence at Matins, the Reverend Mother is brought to my cell where I ask that I might be excused all my duties that day, so to better prepare for the scourging that I must endure when the evening is come. Here the Reverend Mother expresses again both her doubts with regard to the ordeal itself and her estimates as to my chance of surviving the flail, with my late years and lameness considered. At last, having seen my conviction, the Reverend Mother agrees I may stay in my cell the day long, that I may come to peace with myself and with God.

I sit there on my cot, one knee drawn to my breast, with the hours drifting by through a dulled gauze yet fraught with uneasiness. When at last Sister Eadgyth is sent to my cell that I may thus be brought to the scourge, I discover my good leg has fallen asleep while immobile these hours, so that Sister Eadgyth must carry me clung on her arm to the place of my punishment, head close to mine with her midden-breath full on my cheek. Thus unable to walk, I cannot but recall when my legs failed me last, as I slithered on elbows and belly across the cold stone of the portal and into the nave of the church where both Ivalde and Bruning were already stripped of their shirts, prising up the great flags of the floor with their spades, the flat slabs levered up on one edge then allowed to fall back, thus exposing the dark plot of bloodworm-crazed earth underneath.

As Eadgyth half lifts and half drags me the length of the passageway, I am unable to say where I am, or what year it might be; am as nameless as one freshly woken. I crawl through the nave of the church to where Bruning and Ivalde are digging,