But he was quick to respond. As I walked out alone with my unlighted lantern in the tall grass, each step an ordeal since I was so sore from the ride, he came with a great cooling breeze, and made the grass bow to me in a huge circle.
“I am not angry with you, Julien,” he said. But his voice was thick with suffering. “We are in our land, the land of Donnelaith. I see what you see, and I weep for what I see, for I remember what there was once in this valley.”
“Tell me, spirit,” I said.
“Ah, the great church which you know, and processions of the penitent and the ill come for miles through the hills and down to worship at the shrine. And the thriving town full of shops and tradesmen, selling images…images…”
“Images of what?” asked I.
“What is it to me? I would be born again, and never waste my flesh this next time as I did in those years. I am not the slave of history but rather the slave of ambition. Do you understand the difference, Julien?”
“Enlighten me,” I said. “There are few times when you make me genuinely curious.”
“You are too frank, Julien,” it said. “What I mean to say is this. There is no past. Absolutely none. There is only the future. And the more we learn the more we know-reverence for the past is simply superstition. You do what you must do to make the clan strong. So do I. I dream of the witch who will see me and make me flesh. You dream of wealth and power for your children.”
“I do,” said I.
“There is nothing else. And you have brought me back to this place, which I have never left, that I might know it.”
I was standing there idle under the darkling sky, the valley huge, the ruins of the Cathedral just ahead of me. These words sank into my soul. I memorized them.
“Who taught you these things?” I asked.
“You did,” Lasher said. “It was you and your kind who taught me to want, to aim, to reach, rather than to lament. And now I remind you, for the past calls to you under false pretenses.”
“You think so,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “These stones, what are they? They are nothing.”
“May I see the church, spirit?”
“Oh yes,” said he. “Light your lantern if you will. But you will never see it as I saw it.”
“You’re wrong, spirit. When you come into me, you leave something of yourself behind. I have seen it. I have seen it with the faithful crowded to the doors, and the candles and the Christmas green-”
“Silence!” he declared and I felt him like the wind wrapping me so roughly suddenly he might knock me over. I went down on my knees. The wind ceased. “Thank you, spirit,” said I. I struck a match, shielding it carefully, and lighted the wick of the lantern. “Won’t you tell me of those times?”
“I’d tell you what I see from here. I see my children.”
“Do you speak of us now?”
But that was all he would say, though he followed me as I made a path through the high grass, over rocky and uneven ground, and came at last to the ruins themselves and stood in the giant nave looking at the broken arches.
Dear God, what a grand cathedral it must have been. I had seen its like all over Europe. It was not in the Roman style, with rounded arches and paintings galore; no doubt it was cold stone, and lofty and graceful as the Cathedral of Chartres or Canterbury.
“But the glass, does anything remain of the glorious glass?” I whispered.
And in mournful answer the wind swept broadly and serenely across the entire darkening glen and passed through the nave, once again, making the wild grass bend to and fro, and ruffling around me as if to embrace me. The moon had risen a bit, and the stars were shining through.
And suddenly beyond the very end of the nave, where the rose window had once been, where the arch stood at its height, I saw the spirit himself, immense, and huge and dark and translucent, spread across the sky like a great storm rolling in, only silent, and collecting and re-collecting and then in one sudden burst dispersing into nothingness.
Clear sky, the moon, the distant mountain, the wood. All that was plain and still and the air felt cold and empty. My lantern burnt on bright. I stood alone. The Cathedral seemed to grow taller around me, and I to be dwarfed and vain and petty and desperate. I sank down to the ground. I drew up my knee, and rested my hand and my chin upon it. I peered through the dark. I wished for Lasher’s memories to come to me.
But nothing came but my loneliness, and my sense of the absolute wonder of my life, and how much I loved my family, and how they flourished beneath the wing of this terrible evil.
Maybe it was so with all families, I thought. At the heart a curse, a devil’s bargain. A terrible sin. For how else can one attain such riches and freedom? But I didn’t really believe this. I believed, on the contrary, in virtue.
I saw my definition of virtue. To be good, to love, to father, to mother, to nurture, to heal. I saw it in its shining simplicity. “What can you do, you fool?” I asked of myself. “Except keep your family safe, give them the means to live on their own, strong and healthy and good. Give them conscience and protect them from evil.”
Then a solemn thought came to me. I was sitting there still, with the warm light of the lantern about me, and the high church on both sides, and the grass flattened like a bed before me. I looked up again, and saw that the moon had moved right into the great circle of the rose window. The glass of course was all gone. I knew it had been a rose window because I knew what they were. And I knew the meaning as well, the great hierarchy of all things which had prevailed in the Catholic Church and how the rose was the highest of flowers and therefore the symbol of the highest of women, the Virgin Mary.
I thought on that, and on nothing. And I prayed. Not to the Virgin. No, just to the air of this place, just to time, perhaps to the earth. I said: God, as if all this had that name, can we make this bargain? I will go to hell if you will save my family. Mary Beth will go to hell, perhaps, and each witch after her. But save my family. Keep them strong, keep them happy, keep them blessed.
No answer came to my prayers. I sat there a long time. The moon was veiled by clouds, then free again and brilliant and beautiful. Of course I did not expect to hear any answer to my prayers. But my bargain gave me hope. We, the witches, shall suffer the evil; and the others shall prosper. That was my vow.
I climbed to my feet, I lifted the lantern and I started to walk back.
Mary Beth had already gone to sleep in her tent. The two guides were smoking their pipes, and invited me to join them. I told them I was weary. I’d sleep and wake early.
“You weren’t praying up there, were you, sir?” asked one of the men. “ ‘Tis a dangerous thing to pray in the ruins of that church.”
“Oh, and why is that?” asked I.
“ ‘Tis St. Ashlar’s church, and St. Ashlar is likely to answer your prayer and who knows what will happen!”
Both men roared with laughter, slapping their thighs and nodding to one another.
“St. Ashlar!” I said. “You said Ashlar!”
“Yes, sir,” said the other, who had not spoken till now. “Was his shrine in olden times, the most powerful saint of Scotland, and the Presbyterians made it a sin to speak his name. A sin! But the witches always knew it!”
Time and space were naught. In the quiet haunted night of the glen, I was remembering: a boy of three, the old witch, the plantation, her tales to me in French. “Called up by accident in the glen…” I whispered to myself, “Come now my Lasher. Come now my Ashlar. Come now, my Lasher! Come now, my Ashlar!”
I began to murmur it, and then to say it aloud, the two men not understanding at all of course, and then out of the heart of the glen came the roaring wind, so fierce and huge it wailed against the mountains.