you have lost this place, you have lost St. Ashlar.
That night, when they put me in my cell, I said, “You do not have to lock it.”
They were surprised and confused. They had not intended to do so, they said. Indeed, they showed me—there was no lock.
I lay there, remaining of my own free will, dreaming, in the warm night of Italy, dreaming, and from time to time, I heard them at their chapel song.
In the morning, when they told me it was time to go to Assisi, I said that I was ready. We would walk, they said, for we were Franciscans, and we were of the Observant Franciscans who were true to the spirit of Brother Francis and we would not sit on the back of a horse.
Thirty-five
LASHER’S STORY CONTINUES
BY THE TIME we reached Assisi, I had come to love these friars with whom I was making the journey, and to understand that they knew really nothing about me except that I wanted to be a priest. I was dressed as they were for this journey, in a brown robe, and with sandals, and with only a rope about my waist. I had not cut my hair yet, and I carried my fine clothes in a bundle, but I looked very much like one of them.
As we walked along the roadside, these priests told me the tales of St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their Order—of how Francis, the rich one, had forsworn wealth and become a beggar and a preacher, tending the lepers, of whom he was mortally frightened, and so loving to all living things that the birds of the air came to settle on his arms, and the wolf was tamed by his touch.
Great pictures were made in my mind as they talked; I saw the face of Francis, an amalgam perhaps of the radiant green-eyed Franciscan priest in Scotland, and their own innocent visages; or perhaps it was a mere ideal invented by some part of me which had already developed—to make pictures and dreams.
Whatever it was, I knew Francis.
I knew him. I knew his fear when his father cursed him. I knew the joy when he gave himself to Christ. I knew, above all, his love when he addressed all creatures as his brothers and sisters, and I knew his love for people we saw all around us, the peasants of Italy working in their fields, the townspeople, and those in the monasteries and manor houses which gave us gracious shelter by night.
Indeed, the happier I became, the more I was beginning to wonder if my birth in Britain had not been some sort of nightmare, a thing which could not have happened at all.
I felt I belonged with these Franciscans. I belonged with St. Francis. I had been born out of place. And if to be a saint meant to be like Francis, why, I was overjoyed. All this seemed natural to me. And it brought peace to me, as if I were remembering a time when all beings had been gentle, before something terrible had come.
Everywhere that we went we saw children, working in the fields with their parents, playing in the village streets. When we entered the high city of Assisi, it was filled with children of all ages, as is any city, and I understood without being told that these were small human beings, infants on their way to adulthood. They were not the dreaded little people, my enemies who would kill me from envy—that bitter gleam of knowledge which had only served to terrify me with no further understanding of what it meant. Ah, how beautiful were these merely unfolding humans, who grew slowly, taking year after year to attain the height and abilities which I had acquired during and right after my birth.
When I saw the mothers nursing, I wanted the milk. But I knew it was not a witch’s milk. It wasn’t that strong. It wouldn’t help me. But I was grown, was I not? I had become taller even on my journey. And I seemed to all the world a strong and healthy human of some twenty years.
Whatever my thoughts on all this, I resolved to reveal nothing. Rather I stepped out of myself, amongst those around me. I was charmed by the countryside, the vineyards, the greenery, and above, the soft light of the Italian sun.
Assisi itself was at a great elevation, so that from many promontories, one could see the surrounding country