A man was following me. I’d seen him almost as soon as I left the town and now he came riding closer and closer, a man dressed all in black wool and on a black horse.
“Can I offer you my horse, Father?” he asked. It was the accent of the Dutch merchants. I knew it. I had heard it often enough in Florence and in Rome, and everywhere that I had been. I looked up and I saw his reddish- golden hair and blue eyes. Germanic. Dutch. It was all the same to me. A man from a world where heretics thrived.
“You know you cannot,” I said. “I’m a Franciscan. I won’t ride on it. Why have you been following me? I saw you in Florence. I’ve seen you many times before that.”
“You must talk to me,” he said. “You must come with me. The others haven’t an inkling of your secret nature. But I know what it is.”
I was horrified at these words. It was the dropping of a sword which had been dangling over me forever. My breath went out of me. I bent double as if I’d been struck and I went further out, that way, staggering, into the field. The grass was soft and I lay down, covering my eyes from the glaring sun.
He dismounted and came after, leading his horse. He deliberately stood between me and the sun, so that I could take my hand away from my eyes. He was powerfully built like many from Northern Europe, and he had the thick eyebrows those people have, and the pale cheeks.
“I know who you are, Ashlar,” he said to me in Italian with a Dutch accent. And then he began to speak Latin. “I know you were born in the Highlands. I know that you come from the Clan of Donnelaith. I heard tell of your birth shortly after it happened. There were those who caught the scent of it and spread the story-even to other lands.
“It took me years to find you here, and I have been watching you. I know you by your height, by your long fingers, by your power to sing and to rhyme, and by your craving for milk. I have seen you take the offerings from the peasants. But do you know what they would do to you if they could? Your kind would always have the milk and the cheese, and in the dark woodlands of the world, the peasants still know this and leave these offerings for you on the table at night, or at the door.”
“What are you calling me, a devil? A woodland spirit? Some demon or familiar? I am none of those things.”
My head was aching; what was real to me? This beautiful grass around me as I rose to my knees, and then to my feet? This cold blue sky above me? Or those wretched ghastly memories and the words this man spoke?
“Nights ago in Florence, you brought death to four women,” he said. “That was the final proof.”
“Oh, God, then you know it. It is true.” I began to weep. “But how did I kill them? Why did they die? All I did was what other men have done.”
“You will bring death to any woman whom you touch! Weren’t you told this before you left the glen? Ah, the folly of those who sent you away! And for years and years we have watched and waited for you to come. They should have sent for us. They know who we are, and that we would have paid gold for you, gold, but they are stubborn.”
I was horrified.
“You speak of me as if I were a chattel. I am my father’s son, those base-born.”
He went on worrying and wringing his hands, imploring me to understand him:
“They were told again and again by our emissaries, but they were superstitious and blind.”
“Emissaries? From where? The Devil!” Again I stared at him, this man in black with the black horse. “Who is blind? Dear God in heaven, give me the grace to understand this, to combat the artful lies of the Great Deceiver. You either stop talking in riddles or I will kill you! Tell me why I killed those women, or so help me God, I may break your bones with my bare hands.”
I rose up in a tempest of anger. And it was all I could do to keep from laying my hands on his throat. The anger was as everything else with me, instantaneous and complete. I frightened him as I came towards him. I was so much taller than he was, and when I put my hands out, he fell back.
“Ashlar, listen, for this is not the lies of the Great Deceiver. This is the perfect truth. No ordinary woman can bear your child-only a witch can do it, or a dwarfed monster-the half-breed spawn of your kind and the witches-or a pure female of your own ilk.”
The words dazzled me. A pure one of my own ilk! What did this conjure to my imagination? A tall beauty, pale of skin and fleet of foot, with graceful fingers like my own? Had I not envisioned such a being when I lay with the whores? Or had I dreamed? I was overcome suddenly, as if by incense or singing. But I remembered my mother. She was no pure one. She had held her hand out, and revealed the witch’s mark.
“You do not know the danger,” he said, “if the ignorant peasants of this or any land were to find out. Why do you think the Scots sent you away in such haste?”
“You frighten me, and I want you to stop it. I live a life of love and peace and service to others. They sent me away to become a priest.” At this the calm came over me. I believed these words so completely. I looked up at the sky and its beauty seemed to me the perfect proof of God’s grace.
“They sent you away so the peasants would not destroy you as they have always done with the remnants of your breed. The sight of you, the scent of you, the promise of your seed, could pitch them back into their cruel and pagan ways.”
“Breed. What are you saying? Breed.” I could not hear any more. I clenched my fists, unable to lay hands on him, unable to do him harm. In all my life of twenty years or more I had never struck another. I could not do violence. I wept, and I fled.
“You come with me now,” he cried, trying to catch up with me. “I can make all provisions for the journey. You have no cherished objects, no personal possessions. You carry your breviary with you. You need nothing else. Come. We will go to Amsterdam together and when you are safe, I will tell you the truth.”
“I will not!” I said. “Amsterdam! A stronghold of the heretics! You are speaking of hell by another name.” I turned around. “What are you saying? That I am not a mortal man?”
Again, he was frightened as I leant over him, but he was powerfully built and he took a stand.
“You have a body which can deceive others,” he said, “but no one can speak for your soul. In the most ancient legends, it was said your kind had no souls to be converted, no souls to be saved. That you could hover invisible in the darkness forever, between heaven and earth, because heaven was closed to you, so your only hope was to return in a likely form.”
I was awestruck, but not only for myself that someone could believe such a thing of me, but for the sheer possibility that such creatures could exist! Soulless. In darkness, with heaven closed to them! I started to weep.
I cleared my vision, and looked at this man, who’d given words to such a ghastly thought. His words were like sparks inside of me. Like the snapping and popping of damp wood. The more I stared at him, I sensed that he had to be evil, he was from the Devil, he was from some dark army that would carry my soul to hell.
“And you say that I have no soul? That I have no soul to be saved? How dare you say this to me! How dare you tell me that I am without a soul?”
In a fury I did strike him, knocking him with one fine blow all the way to the ground. I was stupefied by my own strength and as alarmed by this sin as I had been by my others.
I ran out of the field and home.
This man followed me, but he didn’t come close. He seemed in a great state of alarm when I entered the monastery, but he hung back, and I wondered if he was afraid of the Cross, the church, the sanctified ground.
That night I resolved what I must do. I went down beneath the church and slept on the stones before the tomb of Francis. I prayed to him. “Francis, how can I not have a soul? Give me guidance, Father. Help me. Mother of God, this is your child. I am bereft and alone.”
I fell into a deep sleep and I saw angels, and I saw the face of the Virgin, and I shrank down into a tiny child in her arms. I lay against her breasts, one with the Christ Child. And Francis said to me that that was my way; not to be one with the crucified Christ, leave that to others, but to be one with that innocent babe. I must go back to Scotland, go back to where it had begun.
I dreaded to leave Assisi so soon before Christmas-not to be here for the great Procession and to help make the creche with the shepherds and the Holy Family-but I knew that as soon as I obtained permission, I would go.
Travel north and find Donnelaith. See for yourself what is there.
