Knowledge of Angels
It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.
But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death…
Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael’s Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her adult novels are Lapsing (1986), A School For Lovers (1989), Knowledge of Angels (1994), which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Goldengrove Unleaving (1997) and The Serpentine Cave (1997). She has also won many awards for her children’s literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award. Her latest adult novel, A Desert in Bohemia, is now available as a Doubleday hardback.
She has three children and lives in Cambridge.
www.greenbay.co.uk
Also by Jill Paton Walsh
A SCHOOL FOR LOVERS
GOLDENGROVE UNLEAVING
THE SERPENTINE CAVE
and published by Black Swan
A DESERT IN BOHEMIA
and published by Doubleday
‘I read Knowledge of Angels straight through one night: it was the best read of a novel I have had for years’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘If I were a Booker judge, I would select this [Knowledge of Angels] as most worthy of the prize’
DAILY MAIL
‘My favourite [book] this year. The book I would have most liked to win the Booker. It reworks ancient legend to tell a modern tale’
SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘Knowledge of Angels has the pace and velcro-grip of a whodunnit. It is no surface-skimming thriller, rather a profound and subtle book of contemporary allegorical significance’
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
‘A novel that tests the intellect yet also excites the imagination. Paton Walsh’s novel grips the mind and the heart. It ought also to grip the Booker Prize’
THE ECONOMIST
‘Although Knowledge of Angels is about questions of faith and intolerance, it is never boring. This is thanks, in part, to the compelling nature of its various stories. It is also thanks to Jill Paton Walsh’s beautiful spare language’
NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY
‘Jill Paton Walsh’s passionate fable, a novel about the extremes to which adherents of faith will go to attack those who differ and a search for meaning in an age in which faith has lost much of its edge. It is an important book because its subject touches all of us’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Paton Walsh draws sparkling dialogue from the bare bones of mediaeval theologians and her apparently simple tale is alive with multiple ironies’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Clarity of line and tone, intelligent sensitivity to the human condition, graceful, beautifully balanced prose’
THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT
‘Jill Paton Walsh’s mediaeval historical novel did more than stick in my memory. For many days the book’s powerful mixture of vividly clear writing, strong characterisation and intense theological argument haunted my daylight hours and troubled my dreams’
THE TABLET
‘An incandescent novel . . . a mesmerising story populated by provocative characters in vivid atmospheric landscapes’
BOSTON GLOBE
‘Knowledge of Angels is several different kinds of novel that come together astonishingly well. It is a philosophical argument in a line that stretches from Swift to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It is as if she has set her text down on parchment and illuminated it. As a mediaeval courtly manuscript displayed trees, rabbits, hilltop villages, swooping angels, knightly processions and peasants reaping or making love, Knowledge of Angels – by means of writing alone – is a series of brilliant illuminations. They do not outshine the text so much as place it in a more spacious human context’
LOS ANGELES TIMES
‘[The author’s] lapidary prose leads the enchanted and unsuspecting reader from escapism to self-scrutiny’
NEW YORKER
‘An illuminated and illuminating book . . . [that] advances to a brilliant and relentless conclusion’
NEWSDAY
‘An immensely powerful and intelligent novel, beautifully written and filled with resonances for the dilemmas of our own time’
SUSAN COOPER
‘A disturbing and beautiful novel of ideas’
URSULA LE GUIN
‘What a marvellous and arresting fable! . . . I was reminded of The Name of the Rose and I suspect this novel will have an equivalent success’
ANNE STEVENSON
‘Rather like looking at a mediaeval illuminated manuscript recreated by a clever modern artist . . . luminous’
INDEPENDENT
www.booksattransworld.co.uk
Knowledge of Angels
Jill Paton Walsh
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446423042
www.randomhouse.co.uk
KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS
A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552997805
Originally published in Great Britain by Green Bay Publications in association with Colt Books Ltd
printing history
Green Bay edition published 1994
Black Swan edition published 1995
15
Copyright © Jill Paton Walsh 1994
The right of Jill Paton Walsh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or ootherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers,
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,
a division of The Random House Group Ltd.
Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK
can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk
The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
<
br /> Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
For Jane Langton,
and to the Aclaridians, wherever they may be found,
especially J.R.T., B.H., P.M.H.W., B.L., P.D.,
Margaret, Edmund,
and Clare
This story is based very remotely on the true story of the Maid of Chalons – vide Rousseau, Epitre II sur L’Homme.
It is set on an island somewhat like Mallorca, but not Mallorca, at a time somewhat like 1450, but not 1450. A fiction is always, however obliquely, about the time and place in which it was written.
Suppose you are contemplating an island. It is not any island known to you. You are looking at it from a great height – you see fig orchards, vineyards, almond orchards, and apricot orchards. There are little towns topping the gentle rises on the ample plain, the houses with their pantiled rooftops like so many tiny ploughed sloping fields clustered round the naves and towers of churches. If you looked for rivers, you would see courses of tumbled stones, with exhausted water lying in discrete pools – the hallmark of a Mediterranean land watered by intermittent violent torrents, and both parched and fertile. You see the wooded cliffs of the shore, the beaches of bright sand, the principal city, ringed by walls and rising from its harbour. You see along the northern and western shores the great mountains, the complex of ridges and green, well-watered valleys, the woods and rocks, and the high pastures, and above the tree line the towering summits, so tall that they keep their thick mantles of snow all through the heats of summer.
At this height your viewpoint is more like that of an angel than that of any islander. But after all, the position of a reader in a book is very like that occupied by angels in the world, when angels still had any credibility. Yours is, like theirs, a hovering, gravely attentive presence, observing everything, from whom nothing is concealed, for angels are very bright mirrors. Hearts and minds are as open as the landscape to their view, as to yours; like them you are in the fabled world invisible.
The time of your contemplation is as mysterious as its place – it is a strange translation of the time known to the islanders, it is the time of the angels, to whom everything is always present. You have only to open a book to find Hamlet eternally bracing himself to murder his uncle, when from Hamlet’s point of view he has done the deed, and lost his life and been laid these many centuries beside Yorick, whom he knew. You are looking long ago – at a time before large ships, or tarmac roads, or any of the deep scars on the land made by more than muscle power; you are looking some time in the eternal present, in the long slow centuries of the deep past.
You see now a party of young men, a line of donkeys, slowly and laboriously ascending a mountain path, while on the deep-drift clefts and buried ridges far above them another young man struggles, wrapped in the dark fleeces shepherds wear, descending towards the same destination. Their climb is present to your quiet observation, present to their struggling bodies as they painfully ascend. They will climb as often as you or anyone opens this book and reads; but the climb is to them irrevocable; each footfall as they make it vanishes into the past.
1
Once they had climbed through the woods of pine and holm oak which covered the lower slopes of the mountain, the nevados would be visible from the town all day. Above the woods the mountain was almost sheer for thousands of feet, and they moved slowly on the narrow shelves that served for paths. They had donkeys with them, bearing rolls of reeds, and simple food for their sustenance in the snows. At midday, under a pale clear sky, they climbed through a ragged strip of cloud that hung across the peak, well below the shining summits. From below it appeared a soft and narrow scarf of cloud; to the nevados it was a region of blurred footholds, and sudden chill – they could feel how high they were as soon as the sun was veiled – which took an hour to climb through. Still another hour scrambling on the nearly bare rocks of the crest, where the scrubby vegetation of rosemary and thorns had given place to lichens and tiny plants shrinking in clefts and crevices, and their destination was in view.
They had reached the snows. The fall was late in the year – it was April already, and in the valleys the almond blossom was over and the figs were slowly unrolling pale green fingers of foliage on the tips of their skeletal branches. But the fall was heavy and had blanketed a wide sweep of the summit. The sharp crenellations and broken cliffs of the mountaintop were softened and smoothed; the deepest shadow on the sunlit snows was paler than the grey rocks underneath.
The snow was lying forty feet lower than it usually extended and had engulfed their workplace. The snow-house itself was covered over, and the treading platform could never have been found had they not known exactly where it was. The mountain hut was half hidden in a deep drift, and they had to dig their way into it. The youths unloaded the donkeys’ burdens, excavated the hut door, and drove the donkeys within. Half the hut was a byre; the animals’ body warmth helped to soften the biting cold. A copper brazier stood on the floor between byre and sleeping platform, and they filled it with the charcoal that had been carried up in the summer, when the journey was easier. Outside, the men had already begun to work.
They linked arms and danced on the treading floor, their stamping feet packing the snow down hard. As soon as it looked translucent they stopped, and began the harder task of cutting it into blocks and putting the blocks into the snow-house, spreading reeds between one layer and the next, to make it easier to lift in summer. While three of them, hands wrapped in rags, lifted and packed the blocks of snow, the others shovelled more snow onto the treading floor, and the dance began again. Warming up as they worked, the dancers began to sing. Their voices dispersed in a vast silence. They were sustained by the thought that a little straw basket of ice, the size of a man’s fist, would sell for a king’s ransom in the towns, in the heat of summer.
By and by they were interrupted by a call, a cry like a gull’s, far off, drifting down to them. They stopped work at once, and listened. They shaded their eyes. The sun had begun its descent, turning a mellow gold, and blazing on the brilliant slopes of snow. And a young man was coming down to them, moving as fast as he could. His snowshoes seemed clumsy – great baskets on his feet – but he moved steadily towards them on the snow face; they could not ascend towards him themselves. Long before he reached them, they could see from his fleecy cloak that he was one of the shepherds.
The flocks had been driven up into the high valleys earlier than usual, the spring having been soft and warm until this unseasonable heavy fall of snow. But the shepherd should not have been above the snow-gatherers. Trouble.
The confabulation began as soon as he came within shout of them.
‘Something is taking the sheep. We need help.’
‘A wolf?’
‘No. Something . . . It doesn’t kill like a wolf. We are afraid. Bring your cutting tools.’
‘Of course it’s a wolf. What else could it be?’
‘Come and see. Come at once – it will be dark.’
‘How far are you?’
‘An hour, along the foot of the snows. We are roasting a lamb for you. You can eat, and then help us watch.’
They left fodder for the donkeys and went with the shepherd at once. It would delay the work of taking snow but it was something new. Their lives were starved of surprises or events; the island was remote.
The shepherds would stay in the high mountains all summer long; they had made themselves comfortable. They lived in a large cave, across the mouth
of which they had built a rubble wall with a door and windows. A cleft in the cave roof had been used to make a chimney for a charcoal fire. There were only three of them, two old men and a very young one. They had sent the youngster to fetch the nevados.
‘Old Luis is beginning to see the other world, admit it,’ said Galceran to the messenger as they went. It was well known that thin air and solitude drove the shepherds crazy after months aloft. By September they would come down burned as brown as walnuts and barely able to speak, flinching at the racket of the streets. Their wives and mothers would comfort them with basins of hot water, with clean clothes and fresh fish baked in crushed lemons and sun-dried apricots from the little gardens behind the simple houses. By and by they would recover, and begin to shout and drink, and cavort with their friends again. But now, of course, they had been in the mountains only a fortnight or so.
‘Not a wolf?’ Galceran asked. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jaime.’
‘Ah, Esclamonda’s son. Aren’t you too young for the mountains?’
‘My brother is just married. I’m taking his place for a month.’
‘Good lad,’ said Galceran, grinning. ‘How can Old Luis be sure what it is? Have you seen it?’
Jaime shook his head. ‘It bites very deep,’ he said, shivering. ‘Luis says it must have fangs so long . . .’ He placed his hands inches apart.
‘We’ll kill it for you, never fear,’ said Galceran, cheerfully.
It was warm in the shepherds’ cave. The promised lamb was roasting on a spit; the bread the nevados had brought from the valley that morning was not yet rock hard; Galceran had a flagon of wine in his pack. It felt like a holiday, but the old men were afraid.
‘A large wolf,’ Galceran insisted. He imagined himself felling it with a titanic blow from his snow spade and being acclaimed as the hero of the hour.
‘Our troubles are with eagles now. They can take a new born lamb,’ Old Luis said. ‘There are hardly any wolves left. They are dying out. They’ve mostly finished up as pelts in the tannery at Ciudad.’