The next page contained another section that was brought to his attention:
One morning as he was walking back along the rampart, he saw a fat pigeon basking in the sun on top of the battlement. Julian stopped to look at it. There was a breach at this place in the castle wall and his hand fell on a broken piece of stone. He swung his arm and the stone hit the bird, which plummeted into the moat.
He scrambled down after it, scratching himself on the underbrush, searching everywhere, more lively than a puppy.
The pigeon, its wings broken, was suspended quivering in the branches of a privet bush.
Its refusal to die irritated the child and he set about to wring its neck. The bird's convulsions made his heart beat faster, filling him with a wild, tumultuous joy. As the bird finally stiffened, he felt faint.
That was the connection, then, in his reader's mind: animals, the killing of. Henry was not shocked. The animals in his novel were not sentimental caricatures. Though used for a literary purpose, they were wild animals, which he attempted to portray with exact behavioural accuracy, and wild animals kill and are killed in a routine way. He intended his story for adults and he allowed himself all the animal violence it required. So a mouse and a pigeon killed by a child exploring the limits of life, getting a feel for death-that was nothing to ruffle him.
He turned the pages. Julian becomes a relentless hunter, with his reader's faithful highlighter as witness:
… preferred to hunt on his own, with his horse and his falcon… would soon fly back, tearing apart some bird…
… took herons, kites, crows and vultures in this way.
… loved to sound his horn and ride behind his dogs… the stag… as the dogs tore at its flesh…
On misty days… go deep into a marsh… geese, otters and wild ducks.
… slew bears with a knife, bulls with a hatchet and wild boar with a spear…
… basset hounds… rabbits… rushed at them… broke their backs.
… a mountain peak… two wild goats… approached barefoot… plunged a dagger…
… lake… beaver… his arrow killed it…
Then came a longer section that his reader had marked out:
Then he entered an avenue of tall trees whose tops formed a kind of triumphal arch leading into the forest. A deer leapt out of a thicket, a buck appeared in a clearing, a badger emerged from a hole, a pheasant on the grass spread its tail, and when he had slain them all, more deer appeared, more bucks, more badgers, more pheasants, and blackbirds, jays, ferrets, foxes, hedgehogs, lynx, an infinite variety of animals, more numerous with each step he took. They circled around him, trembling, gazing at him with gentle, pleading eyes. But Julian had not tired of killing, and again and again he drew his crossbow, unsheathed his sword and thrust with his knife, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing. He lived only for the instant, a hunter in an unreal landscape where time had lost all meaning and where everything was happening with dreamlike ease. An extraordinary sight stopped him short: a small valley shaped like an amphitheatre and filled with deer. The animals were huddled together, warming one another with their breath, which hung like a cloud in the surrounding mist.
The prospect of such carnage left him breathless with joy for several minutes. He dismounted, rolled up his sleeves and started to shoot.
At the whistling of the first arrow, all the stags turned their heads in unison. Gaps appeared in their ranks, plaintive cries rose up, and a great agitation ran through the herd.
The lip of the valley was too high for them to cross. The hillsides enclosed them and they leapt about frantically, trying to escape. Julian kept aiming and firing, and the arrows fell like rain. The frantic stags collided, bucked and climbed upon each other; their antlers became entangled and they collapsed together in a writhing mass of flesh.
Finally they all died, stretched out in the sand, their nostrils foaming and their entrails spilling out as the heaving of their bellies gradually subsided. Then all was still.
Night was falling, and beyond the woods, in the space between the branches, the sky was as red as a pool of blood.
Julian leaned against a tree. Wide-eyed, he surveyed the enormity of the massacre, unable to understand how he had managed to do it.
On the other side of the valley, on the edge of the forest, he saw a stag with a doe and a fawn.
The stag was huge and black, with massive antlers and a white beard. The doe, pale as the dead leaves, was grazing the grass, and the spotted fawn trotted along beside her, sucking on a teat.
The crossbow hummed again. The fawn was killed instantly. Its mother, looking up at the sky, gave a deep, heart-rending, almost human cry. Beside himself, Julian shot an arrow straight to her breast and brought her to the ground.
The great stag had seen him and it leapt forward. Julian fired his last arrow at the beast. It pierced its forehead and remained stuck there.
His reader's quoting ended there, so to speak. The neon yellow was turned off and the story left to continue on its own. This was curious, because the very next line mentions that the stag was not killed by Julian's last arrow. The stag rather strides up to him, faces him down, and to the sound of a distant bell breaks into speech and damns him with a curse:
"Accursed! Accursed! Accursed! One day, cruel heart, you will murder your father and your mother!"
This element in the story, surely pivotal, did not seem to arouse the curiosity of his reader.
Henry continued skimming through the story. After hearing the stag's curse, Julian forsakes hunting, leaves his parents and wanders the world. He becomes a mercenary, a very capable one, and much military mayhem ensues, costing the lives of many men from many nations, but winning Julian the affection and gratitude of the Emperor of Occitania, whom he had saved from the Caliph of Cordoba. As a reward, he receives the hand of the emperor's daughter. One of the prophecies about Julian, pronounced to his father, has now come to be: he is of the family of an emperor. But none of this seemed to hold his reader's attention.
One last section was marked in yellow, two paragraphs describing longings simmering below the surface of Julian's otherwise contented conjugal life:
Dressed in crimson, he would stand at a window leaning on his elbows, remembering hunts of years gone by and wishing he could ride across the desert after gazelles and ostriches, lie in wait in the bamboo for leopards, cross forests filled with rhinoceros, climb to the summits of the most inaccessible mountains the better to take aim at eagles, and sail the seas to ice floes to fight the white bears.
Sometimes in a dream he would see himself as our father Adam in the Garden of Eden among all the beasts: by stretching out his arm, he would make them die; or they would file past him two by two in order of size, from elephants and lions down to stoats and ducks, like the day they boarded Noah's ark. From the shadows of a cave, he would throw javelins at them, never missing his mark; more animals would come; the slaughter would go on and on;
Precisely there, at a semicolon, his reader stopped, not caring to light up the last sentence of the paragraph, short though it was:
Julian would wake from his dream, his eyes rolling wildly.
The rest of the story passed without comment, the essential part of it, in fact, how Julian comes to kill his parents, as predicted by the stag, and, even more importantly, how a life of sorrow, abnegation and service to others leads him to become the saint announced by the title of the story. No, his reader stayed with the animals and their bloody fate. Of Julian and his redemption, he seemed to have no interest.