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

as a bird but a terrible fluttering fan of pale green luminescence that trembles and whirls in the dazzle of white, scarcely solid, so that parts of it will appear to pass through other parts without harm, or to slice through the great wooden pillars supporting the church just as if they were air? There’s a terrible clattering, clattering. Blinded and frantic with terror, I leap to my feet and run out from the church. Not until I am halfway down hill and approaching the crossroads do I understand what I’ve done.

In eight hundred and seventy they have cut open my chest. I had not believed any plight suffered by man could be equal in horror to this, that is happening now, in this moment, to me. They reach into the cavity, seizing the ribs to pull upwards and out, and I pass beyond pain. I am straddling a carpenter’s horse in a cold room and know that I am an old woman. My back hangs in ribbons. I call out to Wotan for succour and at this the woman who flogs me flogs harder. I lie on a smouldering pyre with my throat cut, and cook, in a great skull of iron or bound to a post, and I rot as the head of a traitor hung high on the gates of this town. I am child. I am murderer, poet and saint. I am Ragener. I am Alfgiva, and gone beyond hurt to a flagellant rapture that only the martyrs may know, coming bloody to Paradise, hands burned to stumps or all bristling with arrows, our breasts rendered open whence spills the great light of our hearts.

I am lifted above, with the noise of the world a great roar in my ears, and if I am in Heaven then where come there so many fires?

Limping to Jerusalem

Post AD 1100

Hard as new steel the sun cuts from a lard of cloud, although its light seems wearied by the effort. I am old, yet is this ceaseless and exhausting world here still. My piles nag, saddle-chafed, wherefore upon this showery morning I am filled with a choleric bile and have twice cuffed my squire. As we descend the street of Jews into the reek and clamour of the horse-fayre he falls back to ride behind me that I may not see the poison in his look.

Ahead, my dogs run on amongst the market traders and their fly-chewed nags. With pink jaws wet and frilled like cunny, here and there they chop and snap upon an ankle or a fetlock, for the sport of it. The crowd fall back that I may pass, blunt-headed gets of Saxony with spittle on their chins, although the girls are often fair. The scuffle of my charger’s hoof is loud upon the hard-packed dirt, the fayre now fallen into quiet as whispers from a comely woman’s skirt may hush an ale room. Now they touch their scabby brows at me as I ride by, and look up fearfully. Were I not halt and aged I would bed their wives and daughters both before them ere I took their heads . . .

I must not think of heads.

My squire and I pass on. The crowd is knit once more together in our wake and falls again to chattering and barter, with our passage through its midst a wound soon healed. Before and to the left of me the crumbling church looms heavy in its sandstone walls of dirty gold, named for Saint Peter, by whose intercession were the relics of Saint Ragener here found, or so the tale is told. A half-mad nun of Abingdon, dead twenty years or more, spoke of an angel or a holy bird within the church that healed her crippled legs.

That may be very well for her, yet I am lame and filled with aches, and know her vision to be but the ravings that are come upon a woman when her monthly bloods have ceased. Since the Crusade, I am made out of sorts with God. A ray falls out from Heaven now to strike the church so that its gaping windows seem to fill with brightness, yet I know the light is false, surrendered soon to squall.

This island rain: I am already wet inside my jerkin from the shower endured whilse hunting, early-on this day. The dampness hereabouts has raised a leather in my cheek that was not always there, but my complaints are weak, and lack conviction. Did there ever come a morning out there in those Holy deserts when I did not wake to find my belly black with flies, the sweat boiled out of me and pooled between my dugs, and pray to know again this sickly northern light, this drizzle in my eyes? The sun here throws us only scraps, already having squandered its great bounty on the distant Heathen, stood amongst his hills of sand.

The church is fell behind, and on our right hand here Chalk-monger Lane winds up towards the castle’s higher grounds as we descend upon the cross-roads at the bridge, whereby its gated yard stands opened out. We clatter in between the great brick gateposts and across the flags. Yard-boys, who not a moment since were no doubt cursing me as every harlot’s son, run out all smiles to take my bridle, crying, ‘See! It is Lord Simon. He is home.’

My eyes, without volition it would seem, climb up to where Maud’s chamber window over-looks the courtyard. No one there. Dismounted, with a yard-lad either side of me, I hang one arm across each of their necks, and with my weight supported thus am steered towards the great door, one leg dragged behind, scraped through the silvering of puddles as I go. Once, in a rage, Maud said that she would lie upon her cot and weep to hear that sound, that scraping, for it meant I was returned. Helped up the three broad steps, I am inside the castle. In