Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Bleating beasts were everywhere about him as he walked now down into a gentle hollow, creatures driven here in great hordes beggaring imagination with the land made white, horizon to horizon, this in summer and not winter-time, come from the west of Mercia and Wales beyond. Now that he reckoned it, Peter had known since boyhood that the western cattle-trail was ended somewhere not far off from Helpstun or else Peterboro, in the middling hamlets of the country, though he had not thought its ending was in Hamtun. Out of here the drovers would take on the herds to other parts, along the Roman road that brought him hence from London and the high white coast, or else out past the district of Saint Neot on to Norwych and the east, delivering the mutton in this way throughout the land. Were all of England’s tangling lines met here, he wondered, tied into a knot at Hamtun by some giant midwife as it were the country’s umbilicus? Peter waded in a wool-tide, on and down the broad street pebbled with black turds, still headed north, his bag now hanging in one hand there at his side so that his aching shoulder might be rested.

When he had come almost through the great stupidity of animals, he saw up on a mound towards the right of him a kind of mean church, built from stones, that Peter hoped to be the temple that the woman had informed him of, although it seemed unused and no one was about it. Thinking to have pause there for a pissing-while and eat the cheese and bread hid with some coins in a tuck-pocket of his smock, he turned east from the foul mires of the sheep-path and went up a brief walk overhung by boughs that blossoms fell from in a pretty pepper, to the church-house as he thought it, at the slant’s top end.

Some of the flat-faced and incurious woollen-backs were grazing here in shelter of the spreading trees, where Peter set his baggage down and drew aside his habit to unleash less of a stream than he’d expected in the puddled rain that was between a beech’s knuckled roots. His water had a strong and orange look about the little that there was of it, and he supposed the greater measure of its fluids had been lost already through his gushing pores. He shook the meagre trickle’s last few droplets from his prick-end and arranged his dress, looking about for somewhere he could eat his food. At last he was decided on the green, luxuriant sod about an aged oak that he would sit and lean his back against, but a few paces from the temple’s weathered pile.

Now that he looked at this, sat rested on the sward with sack at rest alike beside him, chewing on the crust he had retrieved from its compartment in his robe, he was less certain of the low construction’s Christian provenance and was made more alert to its peculiarity. He settled back against his oaken throne and slowly worked the bread and goat-cheese to a sodden, undistinguished lump between his teeth as he considered what the lonely building was or once before had been. The old stone posts to each side of its door had winding round them graven dragon-wyrms, much longer than the poor thing he had seen caught in its muck-hole out near London. If it were indeed a home of Christian worship, Peter knew it for a Christianity more old than his and come from the traditions of three hundred years before, when the forebears of Peter’s order had been forced to seek appeasement with the followers of peasant gods by mixing in Christ’s teachings with their rude and superstitious lore, preached from the mounds where shrines to devils were once raised. The carvings snaking down the pillars were a likeness of the serpent wound about the world’s girth in the old religions where our mortal realm was held to be the middle one of three, with Hel below it and the Nordic heaven built across a bridge from it above.

Leaving the detail of the bridge aside, this was not so unlike his own faith in a life that was beyond this brief span and in some means over it, at a superior height from which the traps and snares of this world were more clearly seen and understood. Though he had never said this while about the monastery of Saint Benedict, he did not think it much a matter if it were a bridge or flight of steps that led to paradise, or by what names the personages dwelling there were known, or even if the gods were made with different histories. It was, he thought, a failing of the Christianity that was in England now that people were so taken with the truth or otherwise of writings that in other lands should be admired as only parables, and nothing held amiss. From what he knew of the Mohammedans, their bible was a book of tales meant only to illuminate and teach by an example, and was not to be confused with an historical account of things. This too was Peter’s understanding of the Christian Bible, which he had read all there was of, just as he had likewise read Bede’s history and so too, secretly, had heard a telling of the Daneland monster yarn then being talked about by all, yet when he tried to teach the Christian doctrine he would find himself confronted by a narrow-mindedness, by dull demands to know if truly all Creation was accomplished in six days.

The faith that Peter had was in the value of a radiant ideal, with this ideal embodied in the Christ, who was a figure of instruction. Faith, to his mind, was a willed asserting of the sacred. If it were made more or less than this then it was mere belief, as children will believe the goblin tale they hear for just so long as it is being told. To hold belief in a material fact was only vanity, easily shattered, where the ideal was a truth eternal in whatever form expressed. Belief, in Peter’s private view of things, counted for little. The eternal, insubstantial ideal was the thing, the light that orders like his own had shielded in the night and sought now to extend across the fallen, overshadowed world. He did not have belief in angels as substantial forms, and as ideals had no need to believe in them: he knew them. He had met with them upon his travels and had seen them, though if this were with his mortal eyes or with the ideal gaze of vision he cared not at all. He’d met with angels. He did not believe. He knew, and hoped his creed would in a hundred years from that time not be foundered in a quagmire of believers. Was this what befell the old gods, near whose temple he was squatted now to eat his bread and cheese?

His ruminations done, he brushed the crumbs from out his beard, where they would do for all the pigeons that there were about the ruin. Standing up and shouldering his bag once more, he made off down the little hill that led back to the sheep-track, with his drab rope sandals kicking through a fallen frost of blossoms from the trees that reached above. The cattle path by now was emptied saving for its carpet made with dung, and for the patterning of hoof-print everywhere upon it like a pricked pot. He went on along it but a trifling distance until he was come upon the town’s north wall and the pitch-painted timbers of its northern gate, which stood a little open as its counter-part down by the river in the south had done.

There was a different air about this quarter of the settlement that had a quality of harm and malice, and to which he thought those several severed heads set onto spikes above the gate may have contributed. With such fair hair as yet remained upon the melting skulls worn in the long style, he supposed them to be butchers come from Denmark or nearby, that looked surprised to have discovered there were butchers here in Hamtun just the same. One of the heads was blurred, that made him think his eyes were wrong, though it were only meat flies in a swarm about the remnant, hatched from out its hanging mouth.

He’d walked, then, from the settlement’s south end up to its north. It was not very far. Confronted by the barrier of posts he turned towards the west there at his left and started off downhill, to find an edge of Hamtun he had not yet seen. Descending on the valley’s side, once more towards the river as he found, he saw the glorious spread of land that stretched away towards where twirls of smoke rose up to mark a district reaching out on Hamtun’s west and to the far side of the Nenn. This was a grey and silver braid that wound through lime or yellow fields beneath the distant trees, and had a bridge across it in a wooden arch that by his reckoning would be where all the sheep came in from Wales. He saw a high wall too, not far off from the river on its nearer bank, built out of posts like the town’s wall. It mayhap was a cloister or a lord’s land, where its east wall served to mark the western limit of the town.