Then the woman they called Linnet brought me alms of goat’s liver and bread, and tripes for Flynn. She sat me in the sun against the wattled wall of her hut, bade me chew slowly, and returned inside.

‘The boy Griffin!’ ‘Yes.’

‘He is the younger brother of my husband, Connor. He was barrow boy in the mines. He loaded the bodges.’

Thus she whispered to me through the cracks, unseen.

‘Griffin had the gift of foresight. When Black Jacob’s horse was stolen the boy described a meadow five miles from here, where the horse was found — that was the sort of thing. He was a dreamer, but the gift never set him apart from our people.’

Griffin had the gift of foresight.

nwards she spoke,

‘If aught did, it was his love for Connor, such a love as made my heart melt. Connor was often gone, for ours was the dominant house here, and he was the one to market

the copper blooms in the lowland towns, and to bargain on the corn tithes, and the King’s tax. And Griffin always fretted when Connor was gone.

The boy had a small Celtic cross of tin his brother had once brought him from the low- land towns and when Connor was gone too long you’d always see him holding it.’

nd then there was a time when Connor was gone much longer than usual, and the boy began to dream.

Why, I would often find him standing in the lake at dawn, and the dream was always the same.’

He saw a chasm. He saw the miners underground — Connor, Searle, Ulf, Arno, Martin and himself — in fevered work around a strange engine.

They would draw back its iron-tipped ram by windlass and fire it, and the air was full of dust and shouting, and full tilt, again and again they battered at the rock, that they might tunnel at great speed and they burst out at the far side of the earth!

Now Linnet’s story made me smile, for perhaps the boy might predict the location of a horse, yet that gave no credence to a dream of tunnelling through the earth, to fall out into the blackness below. Yet I had seen something more solemn in the eyes of the villagers, and I picked at this tale but gently.

‘And what purpose had this strange journey?’

‘I asked the boy that very thing, monk, and he knew nothing, except they must beat the evil. It was a journey to beat some terrible evil. It was a fragment without sense. Then a week after the dreaming began, the faggot seller came to our village. He was the first to tell us of the powerful evil on the move. And though it seemed far away, he said, still it was coming closer, hopping toward twenty miles on every full moon.’

Will the prophesy save the village, or will the full moon, pregnant with contagion, draw suffering and death upon them?