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

voices droning to their Devil-God across the dunes. I have stood from my meal too quickly, that is all. Dismissing John upon the threshold of my chamber I shut fast the door and make my heavy path towards the bed, using a chair-back as support along the way.

The room is cold, but I am warmed by beers as I surrender to the bedding. Here I may digest, and be alone without a thought of Maud to trouble me, her rooms being upon the castle’s furthest side. Though the November air be chill, it’s as nothing to the empty, bone-deep cold that falls on desert when the day is done, and resting here I am content. Above me, in the ceiling’s timbers, fissured lines and whorls call to my mind a map of ancient and unconquered territories . . .

Good Pope Urban did as Peter, called the Hermit, had entreated him: he called on us to take the Cross; to join with his Crusade and rid the Holy Land of its Mohammedan oppressor. Though the early expeditions of both Peter and one Walter, called the Penniless, were cut to pieces by the Turks, we were not to be stayed. Thus, in the ninety-and-sixth year of this Millennium we set our sails for Constantinople and not a one of us thought other than that he would reach again his home a richer man.

Great God, but the immensity of that cruel Heathen sky. It made men mad. While on our way to join with Robert, Duke of Normandy, in setting Antioch to siege, we came across a fellow broiled as black as any Saracen who yet sang out loud hymns in noble French as he paced there in circles ‘midst the bare, slow-shifting hills. Alone without his comrades for who knows how many days or weeks, he’d patiently dug out a long and looping trench, deep as a man’s waist, that stretched back across the dunes as far as we might view. He cursed us when we broke a small part of its sides down as we led our mounts across. Upon his brown-seared chest the rags of Flanders hung, their bright green fading yellow in the shadeless desert light.

When we had ridden on a little way and left him raving far behind us, I glanced back and with a queer surprise saw that his endless trench, when looked at from afar, did not snake back and forwards without meaning, as it seemed to when close by. Viewed from a distance, it became a line of monstrous script reeled out across the dunes, scrawled in a giant and uneven hand. In many places words and letters had been wiped away by shifting sand, so that it came to me that this poor soul must spend his days in pacing up and down along the message’s drear length, digging anew its strokes and flourishes, hymns spilling from his parched black lips the while. The only words that I could read were ‘Dieu’ and one that may have been ‘humilité’, spelled out across a violet-shadowed slope’s soft flank. His message, and of this I have not any doubt, was meant for the Almighty, who alone resides at such a height as to review the text entire. We left him crouched upon the bridges of an ‘m’, frantically scrabbling to wipe away the hoof-prints where our steeds had damaged his calligraphy.

And so we ventured on, and sacked the smaller towns that lay along our route to Antioch. There is a sound that plunder makes; a hundred smaller noises all confused in one: a wailing baby, dusty thunder of collapsing stone and whine of injured dogs. Horse panic. Lost and trembling query of escaping goats with women weeping from their guts; men from their noses. Gruff cries, unintelligible, sunken to a language only made for war. The mortal chime of blade, the howl of buggered children, all one voice that spits and crackles in the moment’s smoke-black throat. I hear it now.

We set their shrines to torch. We took their lives, their wives, their horses, silks and jewels and some of us took more besides. One of my captains wore a belt hung round with Heathen tongues until we chided him about the stench of it. They were great black things, bigger than you might suppose, and no two quite alike. These barbarisms were not strange to us while we were in that place, though I have thought upon them since and know now that such actions lack all dignity. Still, others took far greater strides along that route than we. Some leagues from Murzak we rode for a way beside a company of knights from Italy who dined upon the flesh of slain Mohammedans, saying that since their foemen had not Christian souls they were more like to beasts and could thus be devoured without a breach of covenant. It was quite plain they were made lunatic by eating Heathen brains, and I could not but wonder how they’d fare on their return to Christian lands. As it occurred, returning through those territories back from Murzak at a later date we came upon their heads, daintily set there in an inward-facing ring between the shimmering drifts, scraps of their azure tunics tied about their eyes, blindfolding the already blind for cultish reasons that we could not guess.

I longed with all my heart to see Jerusalem, that city of the scriptures that the pagan Emperor Julian of Rome sought in his vanity to build anew and was struck down by God ere the foundations could be laid. A whirlwind and upheavals fraught with gouts of flame erased his works, in which some see a proof of the Divinity’s displeasure. (My round church at least has its foundations set in place, whatever may befall it hence.) I longed to walk amongst those hills, and see that ancient heart of piling stones from where the Holy verses sprang, but what I saw instead! Better my head were settled blindfold