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

great shovels of earth flung up careless and high to come rattling down on the flags where I drag my weight over the dirt to the edge of their hole. Now, face down in the earth, I am Ragener, weeping and pleading as strong Viking hands seize me hard underneath my arms, wrenching me upward to stumble beside them towards the pale mound hulking up from the rushes. Their hands are become those of Sister Eadgyth, now helping me into the little stone room where the leather-backed horse made from wood is prepared and the Reverend Mother is waiting.

Her voice sounds so far away. Sister Eadgyth is stripping me bare to my waist and arranging me face down the length of the horse with my flat nipples tightening, pressed to the chill of the hide, and the cold in my chest is like that when I lay on the floor of the church, with my fingers hooked over the edge of the flags that now bordered the hole where both Ivalde and Bruning were digging, with Bruning stood there on the slabs to one side of the pit mopping sweat from his pendulous bosom, while Ivalde, the ribs showing through at his sides, stood waist deep with the earth raining up from the blade of his shovel. I’d only just pulled myself up to the edge to peer down when the dirt-floor collapsed beneath Ivalde to wide yawning dark and the rattle of loose soil below.

Showers of dirt trickle down from the bare knoll to fall in the rushes encircling its base. Ingwar’s brigands are hauling me up to the flat rock on top of the mound, where they laugh at my tears and pathetic attempts to befriend them while dragging the clothes from my body, and when I am naked they laugh at my manhood and throw me down hard on my face with one of the men kneeling before me and pinning me down by my forearms. I gaze at him with the blood gumming my eyes. It has leaked from my scalp where they cuffed me, and through it his face is more terrible than I had e’er hoped to see in this life, with the plaited beard dyed into stripes of all colours and maddening drugs on his breath in this year of Our Lord Christ eight hundred and seventy.

Stood at the top of the leather horse holding my wrists, Sister Eadgyth breathes rancid and hot in my face and the year is one thousand and sixty-four. Somewhere behind me the Reverend Mother is raising the flail of raw hide past her shoulder. For what seems an unending while I can hear the uncured thongs as they whistle down through the chamber’s cold air and a blind, searing pain rips from shoulders and back to engulf my whole being in terrible light.

In the Lord’s year one thousand and fifty Ivalde screams to Bruning for help as his legs churn through waterfall dirt in attempting to run up the sides of the hole while its floor falls away into dark down below. The fat priest lurches forward to pull the boy clear as I lie peering over the rim of the pit, flagstones chilling my belly. Beneath me, I see that the base of the hole has collapsed into caverns or tunnels existing below. For a moment it seems that I make out the indistinct bulk of the tomb that is later revealed to be hidden therein and containing the bones of the martyred St Ragener, brother of Edmund. At most, squinting into the black, I perceive its vague outline for only a moment before my attention is called to the sense of another large shape in the darkness beneath me, this one with a sound that suggests a huge, shuffling motion. I have but an instant to marvel before the uncanny thing happens. Good Bruning, when he has recovered, will later describe what we saw as the Holy Ghost made manifest in its terrible radiance, but I am flat on my face with my head hung out over the mouth of the pit and I see. When it opens its monstrous eyes I am staring straight into them. Smothering brilliance is everywhere. Off in the empty white nothingness Bruning makes sounds like a woman.

I scream as the first of the Viking men plunges his hardness inside me, but after the third I sob only a little and then to myself at the thought of my life and this terrible end. As the last of the men takes his weapon from in me I’m turned on my back, whereupon I start pleading again and profess my allegiance to Wotan. The sound of my terrified voice is a curse in my ears until one of my captors brings silence by raping my mouth to the jeers of his fellows. I try to take in the immensity of what is happening to me. The smallest amongst my tormentors now brings out a knife, and before he has touched it to me I am screaming.

The scourge cuts my back and I writhe. Sister Eadgyth holds tight to my wrists while away in the distance the Reverend Mother is praying and there is a high noise that goes on and on.

Bruning screams, Ivalde screams and the white light is everywhere. Something of hideous size flutters over my head as I lie on the floor of the church. Later on, when the light has gone and I go back to find Bruning and Ivalde both sat by the wall staring blank into space with the floor gaping open before them, the fat priest will claim that the wings brushing over my neck are the wings of the Heavenly Spirit; the dew that it scatters to fall in my hair he will call holy water, yet why is it slippery and thick like the seed of a man, or the slime of old rivers? And why is the Heavenly Spirit not manifest here