November Saints, AD 1064

With age, the act of waking has become a great confusion. I no longer know upon which decade of this life my eyes will open: lame and frost-burned by the old church gate or in my convent cell here, morning’s first sick blueness on the wall; blue of the dead.

My cot is hard, that I may feel the bones that are inside me, restless and impatient to get out. Not long, they think. She’s old. Not long. Beneath the rough dusk sheet a chill aches in my bad leg’s starving marrow and I know it is November. Last night, on All Hallow’s Eve, I dreamed I was a man.

Rain-blind, he rode the fierce night through upon a fever-horse towards Northampton here, though in my dream I thought of it as Ham Town and I know not why. The drizzle stung my face and cold drafts rattled in my ears, and as I rode it seemed that all the terrors of November were upon me, rude jaws snapping at the steaming fetlocks of my horse so that I wept in fright, and when I woke I did not know at first what year it was, and placed a hand upon my leathered sex for fear that I should find instead his instrument, mea culpa, mea culpa, Blessed Virgin forgive me.

Creaking inside my chest I rise from off my cot, the sour sheet flung aside, my burlap habit pulled on in a single, shivering movement; coarse folds, gray against gray dawn. I finish dressing in the half-light and I limp the damp stone passages to Matins where I offer up all thanks to God that I may limp at all and dwell instead upon the passion of Our Lord. I work the days, I count the beads and say the names.

When they are mindful of my halten foot they set me to a task where I may not walk far, as when I tend the gardens here at Abingdon. My bone fists tug among the weeds and often will my thoughts turn now to Ivalde, when he kept the graves and gardens in the old church and I lay against its gate-post, begging. Sometimes he would talk with me, his idiot talk that had no reason since a cart-horse kicked his head while he was but a mite. Now I recall his pale green eyes, his Norse-red hair. He was not more than sixteen winters old, without a jot of harm in him.

‘Alfgiva,’ he would say to me, ‘one day I shall set out and make a pilgrimage to Rome, all for the honor of the Drotinum. What do you think of that?’ Drotinum was a word by which he meant St Peter, blessed be his name. The word means ‘Lord’. He would go on and on with Rome and all the places he would go and I would lie against the gate-post with its bare stones digging in my back and, may the Lord forgive me, I would hate him. Hate him for the things that he might live to see while I saw nothing but that gray stone post; the same great wheel of tree and field that spun about it every day, the slow and shallow river downhill from that church, the bridge of blackened timber that had surely spanned it since the world was small.

He’d know the smell of foreign ports and cities all of gold, and I would lie and count the figures and the faces, raised up from the stone, that capered in the church’s eaves, and I would wonder, as I did each day, about the figures and the faces on the far side of the church, that I had never seen although they were so near. For these reasons would I hate him, may the Lord forgive me. In the winters I would freeze and in the summers did not have the strength to brush the flies from off my face or bosom.

Ivalde never went to Rome. A humor came upon his lungs the day that he and noble Bruning lifted up the flagstones of the church to dig the worm-laced earth beneath and I was with them there. His chest was never better from that day, and he was put below the ground before the month was done. I took my vows not long thereafter, in the year of Our Lord one thousand and fifty. It is fourteen years now since I last saw Ivalde’s face, or heard his senseless talk. May God have mercy on our souls, both his and mine.

I did not hate him all the time, except when I was bitter, which was often, but upon my fair days I would talk with him, and laugh, and wish him well upon his voyages. I never once saw Bruning laugh with him or heard him say a kind word to the boy, though Bruning was the parish priest and was responsible for Ivalde’s keep while Ivalde tended to the carrot crop and kept the graves. Nor, for that matter, did the noble Bruning ever throw a coin to me for all his wealth; for all he passed me every day there ragged by his gate. Still, that is in the past and Brunigus himself is dead these four years gone. I am the last alive who stood there in that church and saw: Alfgiva, who lay broken in its shadow all her life, then fled to see its light unearthed, there near the crossroads, by the river-bridge.

November grows long in its icicle tooth and I scrub the worn flags till the wet and the shine on them cast by the rare shafts of sunlight would blind you. I pray and I count off the beads. On the twentieth day of this month is the feast of the Blessed St Edmund, and we are shown pictures depicting his passion that we then may know him more nearly. We see him first scourged and then shot through with arrows, his faith yet unshaken, his God unrenounced. At the last is the head of him struck from his shoulders to roll at his feet, where a beast on all fours stands to guard it. The Reverend Mother would have it the beast is a wolf, though its image looks more like a dog, and yet monstrously big is it made so that I grow afraid of this picture and think of it even when it is no longer in sight. We can none of us know, what it is that walks under the ground.

So the days pass. A woman of Glassthorpehill over the Nobottle Woods is possessed of a spirit, and vomits up animal beings like little white frogs. This is told me by Sister Eadgyth, though I did not wait in her company long enough that I might come to know more. She endures constipations that make her breath foul, and her humor alike, but she is a good Christian and hard at her work.

I did not walk at all, from the time of my birth to my thirtieth year, when I lived in the yard by the chalk-merchant’s house that was over the way from the church. In a lean-to of sail-cloth and old, painted boards I abided alone, for my father had taken his leave while I was yet unborn and my mother had gone to the colic before I was ten. With the rise of the sun every morn I would crawl from my shack like a beetle and drag my weight over the stones of the lane to my place at the gate by my elbows, where until this day is the skin dead and worn, without feeling, and may be pinched up in gray folds that are like to dried clay.

On the boards of my lean-to were pictures of angels, but half unmade; drawn with an unpracticed fist. It was sometimes my fancy that they were the work of my father and left incomplete by his leave-taking, although I knew them more likely the mark of a stranger’s hand, someone long dead, or passed over the river from Spelhoe to Cleyley. I had these boards turned with the pictures faced inward and, laid by my candle at night, I’d imagine the clumsy embrace of their arms without hands, these omitted for want of pictorial skill. I would think myself fanned by their unfinished wings.

Now the near-winter skies have a burnished and argent light to them, hung over the convent at Abingdon here in the far fields north-east of the old church where so long I lay. As the feast of St Edmund approaches, so too does my sleep grow more fitful and restless; fraught with the most wretched of dreams, where I ride through the hurricane night as a man with my thoughts in a bitter confusion and enemies hot at my heel or, worse yet, I will wake and cry out in despair at the death of my brother, though brother in truth I have none, nor have I ever wanted for such.

On the day of the feast I awake with such words in my mouth as to frighten the wits from my poor sister Aethelflaed, there in her cell next to mine. With the voice of a bear I am growling of murder: ‘In Hel’s Town was my brother Edmund flayed first from his neck to his loins, whence he wept and complained, lying spread as if garbed in a blood-shirt that Ingwar’s men folded back, shewing the red, stinking harp there beneath.’

I console Sister Aethelflaed, calming her, even though truly I am more afraid for myself. I have such thoughts inside me that make me ashamed before God; other voices and lives speaking in me, not only in dreams but throughout the day’s labors. I sit by the well in the yard with my better leg folded beneath me and busy myself with the washing of smocks, when I find myself thinking how foolish was my brother Edmund to hold with his faith through the earlier torturings, only to shriek out its renunciation in his mortal pain as he begged them for death.

Now my hands become still in the well’s freezing waters, the fingers grown numb that the smock I am rinsing falls from them and floats in a thin scum of November leaves. I am thinking that should I be captured then gladly will I offer praise unto Wotan, for all his one eye and the pale shyte of ravens encrusting his shoulders, if he will deliver me from this demise; this blood-eagle, that it may not unfold its bloody-ribbed wings and make naked my heart ...

I may not say how long I am sitting there until I come to myself, and rise up with a cry at the horrors that visited with me while I sat in reverie. Shaking and pale, with my bad leg dragged useless behind me, I go to the Reverend Mother and tell her that I am afflicted by dreams such as may be the work of an incubus, asking permission that I might be scourged for to rid me of these noxious thoughts. Here she voices concern with respect to my frailty and age, bidding me reconsider and suffer some penance less strict and exacting. I tell her of my imprecations, alone in my cell; all the rosaries said but unanswered. I beg that she let me be scourged, that the flail drive away what the beads cannot halt, lest my immortal soul should itself be imperiled. At last she consents, with the penance to be undertaken the following day, that I might yet have time to more fully consider the rigorous path I have chosen with all of my heart to pursue. I must not shrink from this, for I fear for my faith in the face of these infidel visions and flukes of the night; Blessed Virgin forgive me, deliver me.

Later, alone in my cell with the candle-sketched devils of shadow that leap and cavort on its walls when I move, I am thinking of Ivalde, so many years dead now. He came and he sat by me there at the gate where I lay on a cold morning just before spring. In his slow, simple-minded inflection he told me of how he’d set forth on his pilgrimage that very day. He was going, he told me, to Rome, although Bruning had scolded and railed at him, saying that God and the Blessed St Peter had better to do than pay heed to a half-witted garden-boy.

Though I’d no liking for Bruning, it suited me on that particular day to agree with him and thus give vent to my spite, for I had not slept well and was weary of Ivalde and all of his unceasing chatter of Rome. ‘You should listen to Bruning,’ I told him. ‘It’s only the rich and the holy like him as should think themselves worthy of going to Rome! Why, you’re nothing but only a simpleton. You may be sure that St Peter would care not a bit more for you than he would a poor cripple like me.’ He looked hurt at my words, like a baby, and fell to a stutter while making attempts at professing his faith in the Drotinum. I turned away from him then, and would speak no more to him till he went away, seeming woeful and filled up with puzzlement.

Inside my heart I was sure that this fresh talk of pilgrimage would come to nothing; that on the next morn I’d see Ivalde stooped, tending his crops with his idle dreams yet again put to one side, as had often-times happened before, but it was not to be. He had gone, Bruning said, in the night; on a wagon that made for the coast in the hope that he would find a ship whereupon he might then work his passage to Normandy, thereafter Rome.

Ivalde’s leaving threw good Bruning into a temper so fierce as to last for some days, and it seemed to me that the priest knew a great scorn for poor Ivalde’s presumptions. No doubt Bruning felt that if anyone were to petition St Peter then he, Bruning, should be by right and by rank at the head of the line. I would see that stout priest red of face, cursing under his breath as he stooped to pull weeds from between parsnip rows in the untended garden, and knew it was Ivalde he cursed. So the days turned to weeks and not until the feast of the Passion was Ivalde returned to us.

That afternoon I was sat by the gate with the gray cloud hung heavy and low, fit to snag on the church’s low spire, and a sad, sagging heat in the air. All my clothing was damped in this miserable warmth so that I was for ever unpeeling my skirt where it stuck to the tops of my legs. I did not notice Ivalde until he had breasted the hump of the river-bridge, downhill and over the crossroads from where I sat ragged and slumped by the gate. Even then, when I noted the strange, shambling figure’s approach, I at first did not know it for Ivalde, so changed was the boy in the wake of his travels. Not till he had come by the crossroads and I saw the red of his hair did I know who it was, and confess a mean gladness to see that he could not have visited Rome.

As he walked up the hill with that shuffling gait that he had not been marked with before there was something about him that I cannot easily fit into words, as if here were a picture that I knew of old and had seen many times in the past, though I cannot think where: this wan fool with the yellowing darts of grass caught in his hair, stumbling over the bridge to the crossroads like one fresh returned from a battle; a look in his eyes as if he knows not where he must be, only that he must be there. He walked up the lane with the sky blinding white at his back, and I thought ‘This has happened before’, and I watched him come near, at once strange and familiar in aspect like one of the queer painted figures that grace a cartomancer’s deck.

‘I have come back, Alfgiva,’ he said when he neared me. His voice sounded hollow, with none of the life it once had. All the nonsense was gone from him now, though I cared little more for the faraway oddness it left in its stead. He stood by me, and yet did not suffer himself to kneel down by my side when he spoke, nor did he look towards me but all the while stared at the church, and his face was without any feeling at all; without even a blink in his eye.

With my neck all craned back like a bird I spoke up to him as he stood dark there with bright silver sky overhead. ‘Ivalde? Where have you been? You did not go to Rome?’

He glanced down at me then, and a cloudiness came in his eyes as if he did not know me. The small birds fell quiet in the yew and what afternoon shadows there were seemed to pause in their crawl to the east, and at length Ivalde spoke with his voice small and wondering, almost as if he recounted the tale of another boy, someone he’d met long ago and remembered but dimly.

‘Not Rome. I did not go to Rome. Thrice I boarded the boat, but he came to me so that I fell in a fit, and he told me that I must return.’ His eyes drifted away from me, back to the church, and I tugged at the leg of his breeks as I spoke to him.

‘Who sent you back? Is it Bruning you speak of? He’s been at this church since you left.’ Slowly, and without looking away from the church as he did so, Ivalde shook his great copper head so that sharp stalks of grass were dislodged from his hair. I followed their fall with my eyes to his feet, which I saw with alarm to be bloody, the boots hung in rags.

‘No. Not Bruning. The Drotinum. He sent me back. Him or one of his angels.’ Ivalde looked once more to me and I could see that his green eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Oh, Alfgiva,’ he said. ‘Oh Alfgiva, whatever has happened to me?’

As his face grew first pink and then crumpled itself as he wept, I could but stare at him. Quite unable to answer his question, I ventured one of my own: ‘Ivalde, what are you saying, the Drotinum sent you back here? You do not mean St Peter?’

He started to nod, then instead deigned to shake his head violently, eyes clenched and streaming. ‘I don’t know. It looked like an angel, with folded green wings and it stood twice as tall as a man. It said I should come back.’ Here he opened his eyes and he stared at me fiercely. ‘Alfgiva, it spoke down a flute, and it walked through the wall upon great spindled legs like a bird.’ He looked back at the church, and I saw he was shaking. ‘The room was too small to contain it, and yet it stood tall and the ceiling was melted like smoke so that I might look up through it to where the Drotinum stood there above me, with eyes full of care.’ He fell silent. A pennant of black cloud was slowly unrolled, hung up over the church with its shadow fell on to the garden and graves, the turfed humps of them, pregnant with skeletons.

This was not Ivalde, his nonsense of old to be lightly waved off, for I saw that a change was in him, and I shivered and knew I believed what he said, though I did not feel glad. For a moment I sat with him, sharing his silence, but could not long keep from my questions and asked if this angel, this Drotinum had come to Ivalde on more times than one. He looked full of such misery then as he nodded, I knew that if Ivalde had ever in innocence craved for a sign from above, then he’d surely repented and now wished his visions behind him.

‘The first time it came to me, I did not see it, but felt as I walked up the boards to the ship as if something more big than a horse were stood blocking my path, and my face and my fingers would creep if I made but to take a step forward. At this, I grew frightened and would not set foot on the boat so that it sailed without me and left me to wait on another ship bound for the Normandy coast. I grew vexed with myself as I waited and, cursing myself for a coward, I vowed I would board the next vessel to dock.’

Seeming now to regain his composure, he gazed at the church. Squatting over its door, carved in stone, was the token of Lust with her legs set apart and the cold, mossy lips of her sex gaping wide, her six fellows beside her with three to each side.

Ivalde’s face seemed to slacken and settle. The vague fogs of distance were risen afresh in his eyes as he spoke. ‘When it came, it was due to set sail with the dawn, and I said I would sleep until then in some fisherman’s sheds I had found on the edge of the sand, up above the sharp grass. I awoke in the night with my feet tangled up in the slippery fish-nets, to find that the angel was standing above me. Its sorry green feathers were dripping with wet and though I dare not look I was filled with a queer understanding that smaller things, hairless and blind, struggled down by the stumps of its awful thin legs. It had eyes like an unhappy man, but it spoke through a beak like a flute, and it told me that I must return. I woke up with the piss on my legs and dare not leave the hut the next day till I knew that my ship had put forth.’ ‘The third time, I boarded the ship and was sent below that was the time that I spoke of before, when it came through the wall while I sat there awake and instructed me, so that I ran from the ship in my fear and so too did I run from that town on the coast. I have run, and when I ran no more then I walked, till I came here. I came by the brow of the hill to the west of the town. It was there that I saw him again, and less time ago than it would take for a candle to burn half its length.’

From the doors of the church, as if birthed from the chill cunt that gaped in the stonework above him, fat Bruning came striding out over the wet grass, through which trailed the hem of his dark robings so that he seemed more to glide, without feet. He was shouting at Ivalde, his mouthings too angry to forge any sense from, yet Ivalde ignored his approach and continued to speak with me, gazing above Bruning’s head to the tower of the church.

‘It was waiting when I reached the crest of the hill and could see the town spread out before me. It stood far away from me this time, alone in a scorched patch of grass, off across a great ring where the trees had been cleared. Tall and green, I mistook it at first for a sapling and then was struck still as stone, cold with a terrible fear when it waved to me. Though it was too far away to be heard, and I cannot recall any sound being made, yet it seemed that I heard its flute voice just as if it were stood by my shoulder. It said the remains of a friend unto God were hid under the church, and that I must tell Bruning. I hurried on. When I looked back all I saw were two saplings, their trunks close together and like unto legs.’

Puffing mightily, Bruning himself was upon us now, bullying Ivalde and jeering at him for his failure in visiting Rome. ‘So the Lord did not see fit to favor your pilgrimage after all? What did I say! You have come crawling back in hope, vain hope I say, that I may yet have saved you some task. Well ...’ Here, Bruning trailed off, made uncomfortable both by Ivalde’s remote unconcern and his silence. A look of uncertainty clouded the face of the priest, and it was in that moment as if he first knew himself outdone; could tell by some mere thread of meaning, some clew in the garden-boy’s stance that Ivalde had passed nearer the world of the spirit than Bruning himself ever had.

When the priest had grown silent and shaken then Ivalde related the tale of his travels to Bruning as he had revealed them to me, thus coming at last to the specter’s instruction to dig neath the floor of the church, where a friend unto God would be found.

Bruning stared at the lad while he spoke, but did not once break in with a jibe or remark, and when Ivalde had finished the priest was grown pale, and could not seem to speak for a while. When he did, there was nothing of rancor nor superiority that might be read in his voice, which was faint and unsteady. ‘Come, Ivalde,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll find for us spades.’

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 honor 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, prizing 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, 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 colors 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 among 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 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 succor and at this the woman who flogs me flogs harder. I lie on a smoldering 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?