Lantern Night

They came for her at three.

It was still light, in the way of the shortest day: a low flat bleached light, without warmth, slanting in at the barred window and lying on the whitewash like milk. She had not slept. She had sat all night on the cot with her hands on her belly, singing under her breath, and the pains had come and gone and come again, and the midwife had sat with her through the small hours, a heavy silent woman with red hands, and had said at last in a flat Kentish voice, "It's not time. But it's not far."

Now the door opened and three women in gray came in with a bundle.

It was a shift. Coarse, unbleached, cut like a sack. It had been painted on the breast and the back with a red cross, and below the cross, in small black flames, a ring of little devils with forked tails and hooked noses. The eldest of the women held it out in both hands as if it were a thing that might bite.

"It is the custom," she said. "For the penitent."

Ixara looked at it for a moment.

Then she stood up, slowly, with a hand against the wall, and took the gray gown from her shoulders, and let the women dress her.

…

She did not remember the passage afterward.

There had been a corridor, and a door, and a stair. There had been the smell of incense and cold iron. There had been the sound of the bell, a single flat iron stroke that came every few seconds, until it seemed the beat of her own heart. At the head of the stair a pair of great oaken doors stood open on a courtyard, and the light struck her in the face, and she stopped.

It was a wall of sound.

She had thought she was prepared. She had listened to the crowd through the window all the day before, the murmur, the shuffle, the endless low mutter of thousands of people gathering. But it was a different thing to stand at the mouth of it. The courtyard of Lanternhold was a great square, paved with granite, and it was full. It was full to the walls. It was full to the roofs. People hung from windows and clung to chimneys and sat in rows along the parapet of the priory like starlings. A forest of hats and bare heads and lifted children stretched away through the gate and out into the street and beyond, as far as she could see, a vast shifting sea of faces turned toward her.

Ten thousand, she thought. Twenty.

And all of them silent.

It was the silence she could not bear. She had expected shouting, the roar of a mob. This was something worse: a reverent, hungry, enormous stillness, the hush of a congregation at the elevation of the Host. They were watching her. They were waiting. Somewhere at the back a baby cried and was hushed. A woman muttered a prayer. The great black bell struck.

Dong.

She went down the steps.

…

They had made a road for her through the crowd.

It was a lane of cobbles, six feet wide, kept clear by two rows of gray brothers with halberds, and it ran across the courtyard, through the gate, and into the open square beyond. She walked it barefoot. The stones were cold as iron. The sackcloth chafed her shoulders. Her hands were bound before her with a cord, and a young priest walked on either side, holding the ends.

She held her head up.

She did not know how. Her legs shook; the tightening came again, an iron hoop round the belly, and she stopped, and shut her eyes, and breathed. The priests waited. The crowd waited. Somewhere a man coughed. When it passed, she opened her eyes and went on, and she felt the child turn inside her, slow and heavy, like a sleeper rolling over.

Not yet, she told it. Not yet, please. Wait a little.

They came out of the gate into the square, and she saw the stake.

…

It was larger than she had imagined.

They had built it on a platform of rough timber, twelve feet square, raised on trestles to the height of a man's head, with a flight of steps on one side. From its center rose a post of black oak, thick as a mast, driven deep into the planking and bound round with iron hoops. Faggots were piled about its foot, dry brush and furze and split billets of pine, stacked three feet high on every side, with a gap left on the steps for the executioner. A great iron cresset stood at each corner, burning with a smoky flame. And above the stake, hung from a gibbet of black beams, swinging gently in the cold wind, was the lantern.

It was the size of a man. It was made of iron and horn, with panels of yellow glass, and a flame burned inside it, tall and steady and pale. It threw a yellow light on the faces of the crowd and the planks of the platform and the black pillar of the post.

Lantern Night, she thought.

The first time in her life, she understood the name.

They led her up the steps.

She counted them, from habit. There were seventeen. At the top, the wind struck her, sharper and colder, smelling of the river and of woodsmoke and of a thousand unwashed bodies. She looked out over the heads. She saw the red tiles of the priory, the gray bulk of St. Paul's behind the roofs, the river glittering like pewter, with its forest of masts. A flock of gulls wheeled over the water, white against the sky.

It is beautiful, she thought, with a kind of wonder. It is a beautiful day.

Hands took her. They turned her. They backed her against the post, and wrapped her in a chain of iron, round the waist and the thighs and the breast, and drew the links tight with a rattle and a click. A cord went round her wrists. The oak was cold at her spine. She felt it through the sackcloth, rough, damp, smelling of pitch.

The child kicked.

…

Crale stood at the foot of the steps.

He wore his full vestments: a white alb with a black cope, stiff with silver thread, and a tall pointed hat like a mitre. In one hand he carried a book. In the other, a long thin taper, unlit. He did not look at the prisoner. He stood with his face turned to the crowd, a gaunt dark figure against the yellow glare of the lantern, and the silence rolled over them like a wave.

"Brethren," said Osmund Crale.

His voice carried to the walls. It was not loud. It was clear, and calm, and very sad.

"We are gathered here on the shortest day of the year, on the eve of the great darkness, in the sight of God and of His holy angels, to witness the justice of the Church. We do not come in anger. We do not come in vengeance. We come in sorrow, as a shepherd comes to the fold where a lamb has strayed into the wolf's mouth." He lifted the book. "For this woman, whom you see before you, is no common sinner. She has trafficked with powers that are not of God. She has bewitched a Christian nobleman. She has sullied the temple of the Society with her unholy lights. And she carries in her womb a thing that has been conceived in darkness, and will be born into darkness, unless we cast it out."

A groan went through the crowd.

"It is a terrible duty. But it is a sacred one. For it is written that the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." He turned, at last, and looked up at her. "We have asked her to repent. We have asked her to confess. She has refused. She has turned her face from the mercy of Christ."

He paused.

"I ask her now, a last time, before you all. Will you renounce your master? Will you name the powers that you serve? Will you give up the secret of your craft, and be received into the Church?"

The wind blew. The lantern swung. Ten thousand faces turned up to her, white as plates.

She looked at him.

She thought of a thousand answers. She thought of a speech, a curse, a plea. She thought of her mother, and the green dusk, and the song.

Then she opened her mouth and sang.

…

It was not loud. It was a thin cracked ribbon of sound, hardly more than breath. Six notes, and a pause. Six notes, and a pause. The wind caught it and tore it away. But the square was so silent that it carried, and as it carried, a ripple went across the crowd, a strange shiver, like a wind in standing corn.

She sang the Song of the Leaves. She sang it to the dusk and the river and the bleached sky. She sang it to the gulls. She sang it in the old tongue, and not one person in that vast throng understood a word, and not one of them could look away.

"Stop her," said someone.

"She's charming us."

"It's a spell—"

"Silence her!"

A young priest on the platform took a step toward her. Crale raised a hand.

"Let her sing," he said, very low. "It is her last."

She sang.

The song rose. The sun was falling now, a cold red coin dropping toward the roofs of the City. The shadows of the crowd lengthened across the stones. The first star came out above the river, small and white. She sang, and the child within her answered, with a slow rolling pulse that she felt in her bones, and for one wild instant she thought she heard it, far away, faint and sweet, an echo from the east: the beat of the Heart, awaking.

She was wrong. It was only the bell.

Dong.

She ended on the sixth note. She let it hang, and die.

Crale lowered his hand.

"It is time," he said.

…

The lantern was lit by the Magister himself.

It was the ancient rite. He mounted the steps of the platform, slow and stiff in his heavy cope, and took the taper in his hand. He held it to the flame inside the lantern's horn door. It caught. A small pale fire bloomed on the wick, and he turned, with the burning taper held high above his head, and the crowd drew in its breath.

"By this light," he said, "we cast out the darkness."

He descended the steps. He crossed to the foot of the pyre. Four men stood waiting with torches, big men in leather aprons, their faces hidden by gray hoods. He nodded to each. They lowered their torches to the heap of brush.

The faggots caught with a soft crackle.

Smoke rose, thin and white, and the smell of resin. Flame licked along the dry furze at the edge of the heap. It ran in a ring, hissing, and grew. She felt the heat on her bare feet, faint, then fierce. The crowd began to murmur. A woman wept aloud. Someone began the psalm, De profundis, in a deep trembling voice, and others took it up.

Ixara closed her eyes.

Mother, she thought.

Mother of leaves. Mother of roots.

If you are there, I am here.

The heat rose. The smoke thickened. The child twisted in her, wild, a fish in a net. She heard the crackle of the fire, the roar of the crowd, the psalm, the bell. She heard her own heart. She heard a sound like thunder, far away, a deep flat dull report that she had never heard before, and thought, It is the pyre. It is the wood.

It came again.

Boom.

The psalm faltered.

Boom.

She opened her eyes.

…

The crowd was turning.

It happened slowly, as a field turns when a wind comes from a new quarter. A few heads at first, then dozens, then hundreds, all swiveling away from the stake, toward the river. She saw a man point. She saw a woman put her hand to her mouth. From the direction of the water, across the flat gray roofs of the warehouses, a column of black smoke had begun to rise, thick and oily, and beneath it, a bright quick flicker of orange.

Boom.

It was a cannon.

There was no mistaking it now. She felt it in her feet, the thud of the concussion coming up through the planks. Another answered, and another, a ragged rolling cannonade, from the river, from the wharves, from the great dark stretch of water beyond Blackfriars Bridge. A line of white smoke stretched across the Thames. Masts she could see, black and tall, with sails the color of night.

Black sails.

Her heart leaped.

"What is that?" cried someone.

"It's the river!"

"It's a ship, they're firing on the wharf!"

"The Dutch—"

"The Papists—"

"Fire!" screamed a woman. "The warehouses are afire!"

It was true. She could see them now, beyond the roofs: a long line of flame running along the waterfront, leaping from one tarred roof to the next, red and gold against the darkening sky. Smoke rolled across the square in a thick low cloud. The crowd, which had been a single patient beast, heaved and broke. A hundred voices shouted at once. People ran. People fell. A child shrieked. The brothers with halberds closed ranks and shouted for order, and nobody heard.

Crale stood at the foot of the pyre with the taper still in his hand.

He had not moved. His long face was turned toward the river. For the first time she saw him afraid, a bleak, naked, uncomprehending fear, the face of a man who has built a clock and watched it strike the wrong hour.

"Hold!" he cried. "Hold your places! It is a diversion! It is a snare of the Evil One—"

"Magister!" A young priest ran up the steps, his hood fallen back. "The river gate has been breached! There are boats at the stairs, hundreds of them! They have cannon! They say the Wynmore ship—"

"Wynmore."

The Magister turned his head.

His eyes went, slowly, up the platform, to the woman chained to the stake. She looked back at him through the thickening smoke. And she smiled.

She had not meant to. It rose in her quite of itself, from somewhere deep and simple and fierce, a smile like sunrise.

"Light the rest," said Crale hoarsely. "Light it now."

The men with the torches plunged them into the brush.

The fire roared.

…

She felt it on her skin.

It came in a wave, a physical force, a blast like the breath of a furnace. The faggots on her left side went up in a sheet of flame, and the heat struck her face, and her eyes streamed. Smoke poured round her. She coughed. The chain was hot against her ribs. Her feet were burning. She heard herself cry out, a thin high sound that she did not recognize.

Garrick, she thought.

Garrick, Garrick, Garrick.

And through the smoke, through the swirling roaring murk, through the crowd and the cannon and the shrieking of ten thousand voices, she saw him.

He stood on a rooftop.

It was a long way off. Seventy yards, perhaps, across the heads of the crowd: the slate roof of a tall house on the far side of the square, a black angular silhouette against the sunset. A man stood on the ridge with a boy at his side. He was hatless. He was bare-armed in the cold, with one sleeve hanging in bloody rags and the other fist clenched on a naked sword. His face was white. His hair streamed in the wind. He was looking straight at her.

Their eyes met.

It was across seventy yards of smoke and fire and screaming. It should have been impossible. She could not have seen the color of his eyes. But she did. She saw the gray, the wide gray terrible blaze of it, and she saw his lips shape her name, and she knew that he had seen her, and that he had come.

You came, she thought.

You came.

The shock went through her like a blow.

It started in the pit of her belly, a sharp, hot, tearing wrench. She doubled against the chain. Something gave, with a pop she felt in her teeth, and water ran hot down her thighs, soaking the sackcloth, hissing on the planks. A band of iron closed round her middle and did not let go. She screamed.

It was not a scream of fear. It was older. It was the cry of a thousand women in a thousand huts, in the green dusk, in the long hours of the night: the cry that the body makes when it opens.

"The child!" shrieked the midwife, from somewhere in the smoke. "Oh God, oh Christ, the child is coming!"