that I could go no further. I raised my throbbing head and looked at Quitoon again. He was still standing in the midst of the mob, his armoured body shaking more violently than ever. There was a cry emerging from behind his faceplate now, and it was rising in volume and pitch as we all watched and listened. Up and up, louder and louder, until the sound he was making, like the sound I'd learned from Momma, scarcely seemed a plausible product of lungs and throat. Its highest audible notes were as shrill as a bird's shriek; its lowest made the ground beneath my feet shake, made my teeth and stomach and bladder ache.
But I didn't have to suffer its effects for long. Barely seconds after I had raised my head, the sounds Quitoon was unleashing became in the same moment both shriller and deeper, their new extremes accompanied by a sudden conflagration inside the armour, which spat shafts of incandescence out through every chink and seam.
Only now — too late, of course — did I understand why he had wanted me to be gone from here. I pushed my body against the knotted thicket, and was reaching behind me to try and pass the barbed branches when Quitoon exploded.
I saw his armour shatter like an egg struck by a hammer and glimpsed for the briefest moment the blazing form of the shatterer himself. Then the wave of the energy that had blown the armour wide open came at me, striking me with such force that I was driven backwards, over the dense thicket, landing amid the briar several yards from the grove. There was a thick, pungent smoke in the air that kept me from seeing the grove. I struggled to get myself up out of the barbed bed in which I lay; finally dragging back towards the grove. I was bruised, dizzied, and bloody, but I was alive, which was more than could be said for the rabble who had surrounded Quitoon. They lay sprawled on the grass, all dead. Some were headless, some hung from the low branches, their bodies pierced by dozens of holes. Besides the more or less complete corpses, there was a large selection of pieces — legs, arms, loops of gut, and the like — festively decorating the branches of every tree around the grove.
And in the middle of this strange orchard was Quitoon. A bluish smoke was rising from his naked body, the substance of which was sewn with seams of brightness that steadily became a little weaker as each seam gave up its intensity. The only place where the brightness remained undimmed was in Quitoon's eyes, which were like twin lamps blazing in the dome of his skull.
I picked my way through the litter of bodies, revolted not by the blood and body parts, but by the parasites that had flourished in their thousands on the bodies and in the clothes of the mob and were now rapidly exiting in search of living hosts. I had no intention of becoming one, and several times as I crossed the grove I was obliged to brush off some ambitious flea that had leapt upon me.
I called to Quitoon as I approached him, but he didn't respond. I halted a little distance from him, and tried to rouse him from this distracted state. I was uneasy about those furnace eyes of his. Until some sign of Quitoon himself returned to cool those fires, I was by no means certain that I was safe from the power he had called up. So I waited. The grove was silent, except for the tapping sound of blood as it dripped from one leaf to another, or down into the already sodden ground.
There were noises coming from beyond the grove however, as was a smell that I knew all too well from childhood: the stink of burning flesh. Its pungent presence made sense of the two kinds of cries that accompanied it: one, the agonized shrieks of burning men and women; and the other, the appreciative murmur of the crowd that was witnessing their cremations. I've never had a great fondness for human meat; it's bland and often fatty, but I had not eaten since taking Cawley's bait, and the smell of the cooking sodomites wafting from Joshua's Field made me salivate. Drool ran from the corners of my mouth and down my chin. I raised a trembling hand to wipe the spittle off, an absurd touch of fastidiousness given my general condition, and while I was doing so Quitoon said:
'Hungry?'
I looked up at him. The blaze in his head had been extinguished while my mind had wandered off to Joshua's Field. Now I was back, and so was Quitoon.
His pupils, like those of every member of the Demonation, were slits, his cornea rays of burnt umber flecked with gold. There were hints of gold too in the symmetrical arrangement of turquoise and purple patterns that decorated his body, though if they had ever been flawless many years of scarring had taken their toll.
'Are you just going to stand there staring or are you going to answer my question?'
'Sorry.'
'Are you hungry? I'm so starved I could even eat fish.'
Fish. Disgusting. Fish was the Nazarene animal.
'All right, no fish. Bread and meat. How's that?'
'Better.'
Quitoon shook himself, like a wet dog. Flecks of brightness, remnants of the power he'd unleashed that had been lodged between his scales, now flew off him and died in the sunlight.
'That's better,' he said.
'I… should be… no, I mean, I am… very…'
'What?'
'Grateful.'
'Oh. No problem. We can't let this human trash kick us around.'
'They made quite a mess of me.'
'You'll heal,' Quitoon said, matter-of-factly.
'Even if I got two knives in my heart?'
'Yeah, even then. It's when they start dismembering you that things become difficult. I doubt even Lucifer could have grown himself a second head.' He thought on this for a moment. 'Though now I come to think of it nothing's impossible. If you can dream it, you can do it.' He studied me. 'Are you fit to walk?'
I tried to be as casual as he was being. 'Sure. No problem.'
'So let's go see the Archbishop cook.'
Fires. They've marked every important moment in my life.
Are you ready to light one last fire then?
Surely, you didn't think I'd forgotten. I got a little carried away by the story, but all the time I've been telling it I've been thinking about how it'll feel when you do what you promised.
You did promise, don't say you didn't.
And don't say you've forgotten. That'll only annoy me. And I'd have every right to be annoyed, after going to all the trouble I've gone to, digging through my memories, painful many of them, and sharing what I dug up. I wouldn't do that for just anybody, you know. Only you.
I know, I know, it's easily said.
But I mean it. I've opened the doors of my heart for you, I really have. It's not easy for me to admit I've been as wounded and weak as I have or foolish or as easily duped. But I told you because when you first opened the prison door and I saw your face there was something about it I trusted. That I still trust.
You're going to set fire to this book very soon, aren't you?
I'll take your silence as consent.
You have a slightly puzzled look on your face. What's that about? Oh. Wait. I get it. You're expecting everything to be wrapped up neat and tidy, yes, like a story. This isn't a story. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.
This doesn't work like that. It's just some scraps of memory, that's all. Well no, that's not really right. I've told you things that were very important to me, because those are the things I've remembered. The Bonfire, The Bait, Killing Pappy, My First Love (though not my last), What Happened on Joshua's Field, Meeting Quitoon, and How He Saved My Life. That's about it.
But I can see from your expression that isn't what you expected. Did you think I was going to be telling you about the Great War between Heaven and Hell? Easy answer to that: There wasn't one. All papal propaganda.
And me? Well, I survived my wounds obviously, or I wouldn't be sitting in these pages telling you all this.
Huh. That makes me wonder — the idea of me
