The girl stared at him in blank incomprehension; then her hands went to her mouth, and she started again to cry.
John lay that night in an outbuilding, mumbling and tossing on a pile of hay; it was only towards dawn that the trumpets and drums stopped beating in his brain and he slept.
The quarryman rose before the first light and dressed silently, not hurrying. Beside him his wife lay still, breathing steady; he touched her arm, and she moaned in her sleep. He left her and walked through the cottage, horny fingers gentle now touching furniture and the familiar backs of chairs. He unfastened the door, felt the morning air move fresh and raw on his face. Once outside he needed no more guides. The lives of the people round about were governed by the working of stone; the tiny quarries scattered through the hills were handed down from father to son through generations. Over the years his feet and the feet of his forebears had worn a track from the cottage out across the heath. He followed it, face turned up to catch the grey smearing that was all his eyes could show him of the dawn. Habit had made him take the lantern; it bumped his knee hollowly as he walked. He reached the quarry, lifted aside the pole that symbolically closed its entrance. He stood a long time inside, leaning his palms against the coolness of the stone; then he found his tools, fondled them to feel the worn smoothness his hands had given them. He started to work.
John, roused by the distant tap of hammer against stone, shook himself free of a feverish dream and turned his head to locate the sound. He rose quietly, slipped his feet into the sandals laid ready for him and padded out into the cold morning, breath rising in puffs of steam as he walked.
The girl was already at the quarry; she crouched on the ground outside, staring dumbly. From within came the rhythmic clinking as the blind man worked at the stone face, measuring, feeling, cutting by touch. A heap of rough-dressed blocks already stood by the entrance; as John watched the quarryman emerged hefting another slab, walked steadily back to his task.
The girl’s eyes were on John’s face, wonderingly. He shook his head. ‘I can pray,’ he muttered. ‘I can but pray…’
The morning passed, wore on into afternoon, and the noise of the hammer didn’t stop. Once the girl fetched food but John wouldn’t let her near her husband; the swinging mallet would have brained her. When the sky began to darken the pile of stone stood six feet high, blocking his view; he moved his position from where his knees had dented the rough ground, to where he could once more see. The short day, halfway between winter and spring, ended; but the man inside needed no light. The hammer rang steadily; and John at last divined his purpose. He prayed again feverishly, prostrating himself on the ground. Hours later he slept despite the bitterness of the wind. He woke nearly too stiff to move. In front of him the hammer clinked in blackness. The girl returned with the dawn, carrying the baby beneath her cloak; someone brought food that she refused. John was racked by cramps; his hands and feet blued with the cold. All through the day the wind rose, roaring at the heath.
They were strange, black-spirited folk, these Dorset peasants. The men of the village came one by one and squatted and stared; but none of them tried to take the worker from his task. It would have been useless; he would have returned, as surely as the wind returns again and again to the heaths and half-seen hills. The hammer rang from dawn to nightfall; rain gusted on the wind, pelting John’s back, soaking his body through the robe. He ignored it, as he ignored the frozen aches in belly and thighs, the flashing and fainting thunders of his brain. The Old gods would have understood, he thought; they who roared and sweated through the day, hacking each other’s guts in endless war to fall and die and be raised each dusk again, carouse the night away in their palace of Valhalla. But the Christian God, what of Him? Would He accept blood sacrifice, as He accepted the torn souls of His witches? Of course, mumbled John’s tired brain, because He is the same. His drink is blood, His food is flesh. His sacraments work and misery and endless hopeless pain…
By the second dawn the piles of stone stretched yards across the heath; and the hammer was still falling, faltering now and erratic, cutting more. Stone for the palaces of the rich, cathedrals for the glory of Rome… The huge wind roared among the hills, flapped the cloak of the girl as she sat patient as a cow, hands crossed in her lap, eyes brimming with half-comprehended pain. John crouched defeated, unable now to stand, fingers frozen in their clasping, while the villagers watched dour from across the heath. And it was ended, the sacrifice made and taken; the worker of stone lay face down, the stuff of a score of legends. A vein pumped in his brown leather neck, blood glowed brightly on muzzle and throat; his body coughed and moved, settling, and John, shuffling forward on useless knees and hands, knew before he reached him he was dead. He raised himself, with an agonised creaking of bones. At his feet the girl stared greyly, stone herself among the grey stone hills; his shadow reached before him, thin and long, wriggling on the tussocky grass of the heath.
Brother John turned slowly, the rushing and the drumming once more in his brain, raised a white face as above him a weird sun glowed. Brighter it grew and brighter again, a cosmic ghost, a swollen impossibility poised in the blustering sky. John cried out hoarsely, raised his arms; and round the orb a circle formed, pearly and blazing. Then another -and another, filling the sky, engulfing, burning cold as ice till with a silent thunder their diameters joined. became a cross of silver flame, lambent and vast. At the node points other suns shone and others and more and more, heaven-consuming; and John saw quite clearly now the fiery swarms of angels descend and rise. A noise came from them, a great sweet sound of rejoicing that seemed to enter his tired brain like a sword. He screamed again, inarticulate, staggering forward, shambling and running while behind him his great shadow flapped and capered. Then the people ran; out into the heath, back along the village street, spreading out from round him as from a focus, tatting and pecking at the shuttered houses while the word spread faster than feet could move, quicker soon than the quickest horse; that round Brother John the heavens opened, transfiguring with glory. The tale grew, feeding on itself, till God in His own person looked down clear-eyed from the azure arch of the sky.
The soldiers heard, at Golden Cap and Wey Mouth and Wool inland on the heath; the clacking telegraphs brought the news of a countryside on the stir. Messages flew for reinforcements, shot and powder, cavalry, great guns. Durnovaria answered and Bourne Mouth and Poole; but the hurricane was in the towers, felling them like saplings. By midday the lines were silent, Golden Cap itself a jumble of broken spars. The garrison commander there mustered a platoon of infantry and two of horse and force-marched across country, hoping against hope to nip rebellion in the bud. One man and one only could hold the rabble, make it fight; Brother John. This time, one way or another, Brother John had to go.
The glory faded; but still the people came, flocking across the heath, fighting their carts and waggons over the hills, bogging in the squelching lanes as they strove to reach him. Some came to him with money and clothing, food, offers of shelter, fast horses. They begged him to run, warned of the soldiers racing to cut him off; but the noise still roaring in his ears deafened him and the sun dogs, glowing in his brain, blinded the last of his reason. The host, the ragged army, grew behind him as he reeled across the heath, face to the great wind from the south. Some brought arms; pitchforks and scythes and knives on poles, muskets hauled from the thatch of twenty score of cottages. Chanting, they reached the sea; following-still, on horseback and on foot, down the steep roads of Kimmeridge, out to the black bite of a bay and the savageness of the water. There they collided at last with the contingent from Golden Cap. The soldiers of the Blue attacked; but there were too many. A charge, a scattering, a man pulled down, trampled and cut; screams tossed away by the wind, a red thing left shaking on the grass, a horse running riderless stabbed bloody by the pikes… The Papists withdrew, following the column just inside long musket shot, sniping to try to turn its head.