unhappy. I did not feel absolved. My eyes were wide and I was walking in a staggering way. I had killed those women, I knew it. I had thought them witches! But they were not! The face on the back of the head, all that had been trickery and illusion! And they had died as the result!
Oh, but what was the larger truth! What was the real story? There was but one way to know! Go to England, go as a missionary to England, to fight the Protestant heresies there, and seek the Glen of Donnelaith. If I found the castle, if I found the Cathedral, if I found the window of St. Ashlar, then I would know I had not imagined these things. And I must find the clansmen. I must find the meaning of the words once spoken to me. That I was Ashlar, that I was he who comes again.
I walked alone in the fields, shivering and thinking that even my beautiful Italy could be cold at this time. But was this cold a reminder to me of where I had been born? This was for me a solemn and terrible moment. I had never wanted to leave Italy. And I thought again of the priest’s words, spoken in Donnelaith: “You can choose.”
Could I not choose to stay here in the service of God and St. Francis? Could I not forget the past? As for the women, I would never touch them again, never. There would be no more such deaths. And as for St. Ashlar, who was this saint who had no feast in the church calendar? Yes, stay here! Stay in sunny Italy, stay in this place which has become your home.
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