Free John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk Page A

again, oily tallow-smoke laced the night air and the banging of pots and pans mixed with the villagers’ shouts. Once again John heard his mother's breath rasp in her throat. Arms flailing, they hauled themselves up the first slope, the heavy bag bumping between them. Then the next and the next in a furious scramble. Only when the ghostly banks of furze and scrub rose around them did they look back.
    Flickering lights ringed their hut with fire. The villagers were gathered all around. Then, as John and his mother watched, the first torch was thrown, tumbling end over end, drawing an arc of flame through the darkness to land on the roof of their hut. The pale yellow flames flickered, licking the thatch then spreading over the roof.
    A tongue of red fire rose into the night. Around the hut the villagers were a dark mass, surging back and forth. He did not need to see their torchlit faces. Not only Marpot and his Lessoners but all the villagers were there: the Fentons and Chaffinges and Dares and Candlings, all the rear-pew women who had knocked on their door and their children too. As if Ephraim's thick-browed face were stamped on the faces of Seth and Dando and Tobit. Only Abel had stood by him, dying of fever in his bed. The fire took hold and it seemed to John that the flames ran through his own veins, their heat spreading through his frame. He had been right, he thought. He and Ephraim both. They did not belong here. They had never belonged.
    He looked up at his mother. Her hands were pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide. Below, the hut blazed, the smell of smoke strong in the air. John reached up and took her hand.
    ‘Ma?’
    But she could only shake her head.
    They resumed their climb. Soon the banks of brambles stretched out thick arms. The bag bumped between them as John and his mother edged their way into the thickets. When they reached the final bristling barricade, his mother wrapped her arms about him. A moment later she had plunged them both into the thorns.
    The spines would tear his skin as they had Cassie's, thought John. He flinched as the first canes scraped his legs . . . But the stems and leaves rustled harmlessly. His mother seemed to part the brambles as easily as Moses did the sea. Emerging on the other side, he found himself unmarked. As he wondered at the miracle, his mother gripped a stem and ran her hand down its length, shucking the spines like peas from a pod.
    ‘Fool's thorn,’ she said.
    John nodded and looked up. At the top of the bank, sheathed in deep-lined bark, the ancient trunks of Buccla's Wood leaned like pillars supporting a massive canopy. John scraped together a heap of dry leaves and lay down with his mother. Far below their hut smouldered, a red eye glaring out of the darkness. Deep inside him, John felt his anger glow like a hot coal.
    A magpie cackled. Sunlight glittered. John opened his eyes and blinked in the glare. For one blissful moment, he wondered how he came to be lying on a bed of leaves at the edge of Buccla's Wood. Then his memory blew the hot ember into life: the shouts and cries, the flames, the familiar faces turned to a chanting mass. He felt the red coal lodge itself deeper inside him.
    Beside him, his mother slept, her long black hair spread out over the ground. As John rose, she stirred. He looked down the slope to the roofless shell at the edge of the meadow. Smoke still rose from the blackened walls. His mother placed a hand on his shoulder.
    ‘You said we belonged there,’ he told her. ‘You said we belonged more than any of them.’
    ‘We do,’ she answered.
    But she paid no attention to the hut nor even the village. He followed her gaze down the Vale, leaping hedgerows and woods, tracking the river until it disappeared. There was the ridge and the gatehouse, the tower of the chapel and the great house beyond. Buckland Manor. That was it, he realised.
    ‘You served there,’ he said.
    His mother rubbed her red eyes. ‘Yes, John. I served