Lasher (81 page)

Finally to the secret door came my father, Douglas of Donnelaith, a big shaggy man, more crudely dressed but nevertheless noble and decked in fur.

He had been in the castle and in great haste answered the Queen’s secret summons. When he was admitted to the birthing room, and beheld me, his face was a puzzle. I did not see in him the pure horror of the women. I saw something else, something vital and partial to me, something almost reverent. And he whispered, “Ashlar, who comes again and again.”

I saw that his hair and eyes were brown; from him as from the poor sad Queen I had these endowments. But I was Ashlar! I felt this news—and it was news—come into me as if my father had thrown his arms around me and showered me with kisses. I was happy. And when I looked at my mother, in her sadness, I wept.

I said, “Yes, Father, but this is no place for me. This is a place hostile to me. We must leave here.”

And I realized I knew no more of what I was or what he was than what had been said. It was the strangest kind of knowing, knowing without a tale to it, a knowing that was stable but out of time.

He needed no direction from me. He too was in terror. He knew that we must escape. “There is no hope now for the Queen,” he said softly, crossing himself and then making the Sign of the Cross on my forehead. We were already following the winding stairs.

We were out of the castle within moments, going down directly to a covered boat which waited for us in the dark waters of the River Thames. It was when we reached the Thames that I realized I had said no farewell to my mother and I was overwhelmed with sorrow, with a sense of horror suddenly that I had been born in this particular dreary and treacherous place and into this inexplicable time. My struggles were to begin all over again. I remember I would have died then if I could; I would have retreated. I stared down at the water, which stank of the filth of London, the filth of thousands, and I wanted to die in this darkness. Indeed, I saw in the mind’s mist a dark tunnel down which I had come, and I wanted to go back into it. I began to cry.

My father put his arm around me. “Don’t weep, Ashlar,” he said. “It is the work of God.”

“How so the work of God? My mother could be burnt at the stake.” I was already thirsting for milk. I wanted hers, and it embittered me that I had not taken more before I left. And the thought that anyone could commit this flesh of my flesh, my mother, to the flames, seemed impious and worth dying to prevent.

This is my birth I’m describing to you. This is a succession of hours, lived by the light of candles and never forgotten as long as I was in the flesh. This is what I now remember vividly, because I am flesh again. But the name Ashlar I didn’t know, I do not know now and never will know who Ashlar really was—as you shall see.

Mark me on this. Understand. Understand fully. I know nothing of
the original saint
.

Later I would see things; I would be told tales. I would see St. Ashlar in the stained-glass window in the great Highlands Cathedral of Donnelaith. I would be told that I was he, and I had “come again.”

But what I am telling you now is what I remember. What I knew!

It took us many days and nights to reach Scotland.

It was the dead of winter, it was in fact the first days after Christmas, when the worst fears grip the peasants, and it is thought that spirits walk and witches do their evil work. It was the time when the peasants forsook the teachings of Christ and, dressing in animals’ skins, went prowling door to door, demanding tribute of the superstitious inhabitants. Old custom.

We slept only fitfully in small village inns when we came upon them, usually amid the hay and with others, and often sickened and annoyed by the vermin. We stopped again and again so that I might have milk. I drank milk warm from the cow. It was good, but not as sweet as the milk of my mother. I ate the cheese in handfuls. It was pure.

We traveled by horseback, wrapped in heavy woolens and skins, and through most of this journey, I was gazing in quiet astonishment at the falling snow, at the fields through which we rode, the small villages where we sought shelter, with their half-timbered inns and scattered thatched huts. There were revels in the woodland, fires burning, men in the skins of beasts dancing. A fear gripped those who remained indoors.

“Look,” said my father. “The ruins of the great monastery.
See there, on the hill. An abbey built in the time of St. Augustine. Burned by the King. These are days of horror for all Christian men. Everything looted. The nuns driven out. The priests driven out. The statues burned, the windows broken, the cloisters now the shelter of the field rats and the poor. It is all gone, broken. And to think it is the will of one man. One man could destroy so much of the work of others. Ashlar, this is why you have come.”

I was very doubting of this. In fact, it frightened me that my father would think this, that he would express his faith in such simple terms. It was as though I knew something different, and this sense of knowing something different was merely what you call incredulity. I felt an innate doubt, an innate sense that my father was misguided, and dreaming. Yet why I couldn’t know.

I saw the vision of the circles again, the many widening circles of figures dancing. I tried to see the stones which were almost at the center, surrounding the first circle of figures inside.

I searched my mind consciously and rigorously for the full extent of the knowledge with which I was endowed. That I had lived before, yes, this was certain, but not that this man knew my purpose or who or what I really was. I trusted that the truth would come to me. But then again, how did I know?

We rode through the ruins of the monastery, our horses’ hooves clattering on the stone floors of the roofless cloister. I began to weep. I felt an uncontainable sorrow. The desolation of the place, the loss—it filled me with a crushing sense of hopelessness. I shrank from the pain of being flesh. My father reached out to comfort me. “Be still, Ashlar, we are going home. This has not happened in our home.”

We entered the dark forest, barely able to see our way. It seemed wolves ran in the darkness; I could smell them near us, smell their fur and their hunger. When we came upon small huts, those within would give no answer, though smoke came from a small hole in the roof.

The deep high forest crept up into the mountains. The roads grew steeper and steeper, and the vantage points more splendid of coast and of sea. At last we had to sleep in the woods without shelter; and we huddled together, my father and I, beneath heavy blankets, with our horses tethered at our feet. I felt defenseless in the darkness, and all the more so for I thought I heard whispers and strange sounds.

It must have been midnight when my father woke and uttered
curses, and rose to his feet and swung his sword. He seemed in a fury; but the darkness gave no answer back to him.

“They are helpless, and stupid and eternal,” he muttered.

“But who, Father?”

“The little people. They will not get what they want. Come, we can’t sleep here any longer, and we aren’t far from home.”

We rode cautiously through the darkness, and then through a forlorn winter day that scarcely gave us any light.

At last we entered the narrow rocky path of the secret pass to the Glen of Donnelaith.

My father told me the story. There were two other known entrances to our precious valley—the main road over which the wagons traveled incessantly, bringing produce to market, and the loch where the ships docked which took the goods to sea. By both routes came the incessant parade of pilgrims to lay gold at the altar of St. Ashlar, to seek his healing miracles, to lay hands upon the sarcophagus of the saint.

This story struck terror. What would these people want of me! And I was hungry already for milk, and for cream, and for things that were thick, and white, and pure.

There had been much war in the Highlands, said my father. There had been pitched battles; and our kind, the Clan of Donnelaith, he said, had resisted the King’s men and would not burn the monasteries nor sack the churches nor take a vow against the pope in Rome. Only under heavy guard did Scotsmen come into this valley, did the traders come into the small port.

“We are of the Highlands; we are the Christians of St. Columba and St. Patrick, we are of the old Irish church, and we will not yield to this pompous King in Windsor Castle who shakes his fist in the face of God, or to the Archbishop of Canterbury, his lackey, let both of them be damned. Let all Englishmen be damned. They are burning the priests. So they make martyrs. You will understand all in time.”

These words brought a peace to me, but I could not claim that I knew the name Columba or Patrick, and when I tried again to recollect all I knew it seemed that my inborn knowledge had become smaller even as we had traveled north. Had I known things in my mother’s arms which I had forgotten? Had I known things in her womb? I could not chase these receding phantoms with any success. They were gone from me, leaving only a shimmer.

I am born. I am flesh! I was living and breathing again. The darkness is dispelled and even this soft snow surrounding me is part of the living world, and look! The sky above, a blue no painter could capture, and then the deep glen spreading out before us, as we came out of the mountains—look, the great church.

The snow fell in small soft flakes around us. I was so used to being cold I had forgotten to dislike it. I was charmed by what I saw.

“Wrap the wool around you,” said my father. “We are going into the castle, that is our home.”

I didn’t want to follow the path up to the castle. Rather I wanted to go down into the town. It was a great town then, you cannot imagine. It had nothing to do with the small pathetic village that grew up on its ruins later on. It had its walls, its battlements, and within were its citizens and its merchants, its bankers, and its great Cathedral! And all around lived the farmers, said my father, on rich land which, though it was now covered with snow, gave good harvests, and provided for fat and healthy sheep.

Beyond in the hills, here and there, and there, where he pointed, were other strongholds, in which lesser chieftains loyal to Donnelaith lived under our protection and in peace.

Smoke rose from a hundred chimneys pressed within the battlements and from the towers scattered and barely visible in the high woods. The air was thick with delicious smells of food cooking.

And there rising out of the center of the town stood the massive Cathedral, quite visible beyond the houses and the walls, the snow sliding from its steep Gothic steeples and peaked roof, and light blazing inside it so that its great windows were filled with myriad colors and enchanting designs. I could see, even at this late hour, hundreds moving in and out of the Cathedral doors.

“Father, please let me go there!” I begged. I was drawn to this place as if I knew it, yet I did not. I hungered for the discovery of it.

“No, my son, you come with me.”

We had to go to the castle, high above the loch, which was our home.

Down below, the water was covered with ice, but in the spring, said my father, the merchants would come by the hundreds, and so would the salmon fishermen, and the banks
would be full of traders, and men would come to trade linen for the wool and skins and fish which we had to sell.

This castle was a series of round towers, no more beautiful than the ominous heap of stone in which I’d been born. Once inside, I perceived it was less luxurious, but nevertheless filled with a bustling life.

The great hall itself might have been a mountain cave, so crude were its adornments—its few grand arches, its staircase—but it was all decorated for a great banquet, and the fairies of the wood could not have created a scene of greater warmth or charm.

The floor itself was entirely covered in green. And great garlands trimmed the sides of the stairway, and were placed above those arches deep enough to hold them, and placed all about the huge hearth. Indeed green branches of the Scots pine were everywhere laid, fragrant and beautiful, and mistletoe and ivy were likewise used in decorations, and I knew these lovely evergreens. I knew their names.

I saw the splendor with which the woods had been brought indoors. Candles by the dozens blazed along the walls, and down the length of the banquet table, and benches were being brought up for those who would dine.

“Sit down at the table,” said Father, “and keep quiet, whatever you do.”

It seemed that we had arrived at the very moment of the banquet, which was only one of the twelve banquets of Christmas, and the entire kindred was gathering for the feast. No sooner were we seated at a bench at the far end, than in came the ladies and men in gorgeous attire.

This attire did not match the clothes given me at the London court, but it was nevertheless very fine, and many of the men wore Highland dress of belted plaid. The ladies had the same fine headdresses as those worn in the King’s castle, though their sleeves and skirts were simpler, but nevertheless brightly colored, and there were many who wore jewels.

I was dazzled by the jewels. It seemed to me that in the jewels, all the color and light I beheld around me was concentrated, as if it had been drawn into the bits of glass by magnetism. In sum, were I to drop a ruby in a glass of water, I thought it would sparkle and glow, and that the water would turn bright and red.

My mind was delighting in this sort of mad perceptual error. I beheld that in the fireplace there lay a log so big it seemed
an entire tree. Indeed, one could see its various branches still, burnt off at the ends like limbs from which the hands had been cut. It was blazing away furiously and my father gave me to know in a whisper that that was the Yule log, and that his brothers had dragged it out of the woods and into the great hall.

It would burn the full twelve days of Christmas.

And now as dozens of people took their places on either side of the long table, there came the Laird himself down the stairs, my father’s father, Douglas the Great Earl of Donnelaith.

He was a white-haired man with close-set very red cheeks, and a full white beard, and he wore his tartan or plaid with a great flourish, and had with him three beautiful women who were his daughters, my aunts.