It was, Duncan thought fleetingly, as if someone had struck him hard across the mouth. It was only with an effort that he kept his knees from buckling. And even as he reacted to the profanation and the sacrilege, wondered why he should–he, the mildest of Christians, with no great piety or devotion. And yet a man, he thought, who risked his neck and the necks of others to perform a service to the Church.
The crucifix was a mockery, a gusty whoop of pagan laughter, a burlesque of the Faith, a hooting, a ridicule, a scoffing, and, perhaps as well, a hatred. If the enemy cannot be conquered, at least he can be ridiculed and laughed at.
Conrad had pointed out that despite the pagan ground on which it had been built, the chapel had been allowed to stand. And in this observation there was implicit the question of why it had been allowed to stand. And this, the reversed crucifix and the violence that had been done it, was the reason. Years ago a man of Christ had come, a militant man intent on ramming Christianity down a pagan throat, and had built the chapel. And now the joke had been turned upon him and the chapel stood a mockery.
He heard the gasps behind him as Conrad and Andrew saw the crucifix and caught, for an instant, the impact of the horror.
Duncan whispered at them, “A mockery. A living mockery. But Our Lord can stand that. He can take a little mockery.”
The chapel, he saw, was clean and well cared for. There was no sign of the ravages of time. It had been swept but recently. It had been kept in good repair.
Slowly he began to back out of the door, Conrad and Andrew backing with him. On the steps outside sat a huddled Meg.
“You saw,” she said to Duncan. “You saw?”
Dumbly, stricken, he nodded his head.
“I did not know,” she said. “I did not know we were coming to this place. If I had, I’d have told you, stopped you.”
“You knew what was here?”
“I had heard of it. That was all. Heard of it.”
“And you do not approve of it?”
“Approve of it? Why should I disapprove of it? I have no quarrel with it. And yet, I would not have had you see it. I’ve eaten your food, ridden on your horse, your great dog did not tear hunks of flesh from me, you ran no sword through me, the big one reached out his hand to help me rise, he boosts me onto the horse. Even that sour apple of a hermit gave me cheese. Why should such as I wish any ill for you?”
Duncan reached down and patted her on the head. “It’s all right, grandmother. We take it in our stride.”
“Now what do we do?” asked Andrew.
“We spend the night here,” Duncan said. “We are worn out with our travels of the day. We’re in no shape to go on. We need some food and rest.”
“Not a bite of food will I be able to swallow,” said Andrew. “Not in such a place.”
“What do we do then?” asked Duncan. “Go running out into the hills, fighting through the woods in the dark? We’d not make a mile.”
Thinking, even as he said the words, that were it not for Andrew and Meg, he and Conrad could go, leave this pagan place behind them, find a safer camping place. Or keep going all the night, if that were necessary, to put some distance between them and the Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills. But Andrew’s legs were tottery from the punishment they’d taken, and Meg, although she probably would deny it, was near the end of her endurance. Back at the hermit’s cave he’d worried about the volunteers they were taking on, and here was evidence that he’d been right in worrying.
“I’ll get some wood and start a fire,” said Conrad. “There’s a stream over to the right. I heard running water there.”
“I’ll go and get some water,” Andrew said. Duncan, watching him, knew the kind of courage it had taken for him to offer to go alone out into the dark.
Duncan called Daniel and Beauty in, took the saddle off Daniel and the packs off Beauty. Beauty huddled against Daniel, and he seemed quite content to have her there. The two of them, Duncan thought, know as well as we that there is something wrong. Tiny prowled restlessly about, head held high to catch any scent of danger.
Meg and Conrad did the cooking at the fire that Conrad lighted only a short distance in front of the steps leading up to the chapel. The lights from the flames of the fire washed across the whiteness of the tiny structure.
Up on the hill to the west a wolf howled and was answered by another from the north.
“Some of those we saw early in the day,” said Conrad. “They are still around.”
“The wolves have been bad this year,” said Andrew.
The glen, as full night came down, held the dank, wet feel of fear, of danger walking on soft pads, moving in on them. Duncan, feeling this, wondered if this sense of apprehension arose from having seen the defamation of the crucifix, or if it would have been present if there had been no chapel and no crucifix.
“Conrad and I will do double watch tonight,” said Duncan.
“You’re forgetting me again,” said Andrew, but with something in his voice that sounded to Duncan as if it might be relief.
“We want you rested,” said Duncan. “The both of you, so that we can put in a long day tomorrow. We’ll start as soon as we can see. Well before full morning light.”
He stood beside the fire, staring out into the dark. It was hard, he found, not to take alarm at an imagined shape or an imagined noise.
Twice he thought he saw movement out beyond the campfire circle, but each time decided it was no more than his imagination, sharpened by the fear that he sought to conceal but could not, himself, deny.
The wolves occasionally howled, not only from the west and north, but from the east and south as well. This country, he told himself, was crawling with the beasts. However, the howls still were from a distance; the wolves did not seem to be moving in. They might come later, Duncan told himself, after they had worked up more courage, and the activity about the campfire had quieted down. Although of wolves, they need have no fear. If they came in, Daniel and Tiny would wreak havoc on them.
If there were anything to be feared, it would be something other than the wolves. Remembering, once again he saw the frog’s mouth full of teeth, the glowing eyes, the suggestion of a face that was made up of smooth planes and sharp angles–the face that had stared out at them from beyond the campfire of the night before. And the snaky evilness that had surged out of the black pool in the swamp.
Meg called them in for food and they squatted around the fire, wolfing it down. Andrew, despite his assertion that he would not be able to swallow a single morsel, did full justice to the meal.
There was little talk, only a sentence now and then and of inconsequential things. No one talked about what they’d found inside the chapel. It was as if all of them were busy in an effort to wipe it from their minds.
But it was not a thing, Duncan found, that could be wiped away. Never for a moment since he first had seen it had it been more than a short distance from his consciousness. Mockery, he had told himself, and it was that, of course, but it also would be, he thought, more than mockery. Hatred, he had said, almost as an afterthought. But now, having thought on it, he knew that there was in it as much hatred as there was mockery.
And that was understandable. The pagan gods of ancient days had a right to hate this new faith that had risen something less than two millennia ago. But he chided himself that he should think of the pagan gods as somehow legitimate in their hatred, that he should admit, even parenthetically, that they had existed and did now exist. This was not, he reminded himself, the way a Christian should be thinking. A devout Christian would consign them all to limbo, would deny there ever had been such as they. But this, he knew, was a viewpoint that he could not accept. He must still conceive of them as the ever-present enemy, and this was especially true in this place, the Desolated Land.
His fingers dropped to the purse suspended from his belt and beneath them he felt the crinkle of the pages that he carried. Here lay his faith, he thought; here, in this place where he sat, lay another faith. Perhaps a mistaken faith, perhaps a faith that should not be accepted, that instead should be opposed with every power at one’s command, but a faith nevertheless–a faith that man, in his ignorance, with no other faith, and yearning toward something that could intercede for him against the vastness of infinity and the cruelty of fate, had embraced despite all its cruelty and horror, thinking perhaps that any fate that was worth embracing must be horrible and cruel, for in those two qualities lay power, and power was something that man needed to protect himself against the outer world.