I saw the Pope in a dream last night. He was kneeling on the ground in a bombed-out city, his arms stretched out in prayer and an expression of sorrow etched onto every line and furrow of his face. He was talking to God - pleading with Him in the sunset - and though I could not hear what he said, it was as if I had somehow got inside his head and could see the thoughts and images as they came and went like moving pictures in his mind.
Soldiers and security men stood around him in a ring. A scene of ruin and desolation surrounded them. The ground was littered with broken crosses and the shattered statues of saints and prophets. The pagan temples had been smashed up too, as well as the modern, post-Enlightenment shrines to commerce and leisure. It was as if the whole of the Western Empire, in all its aspects, had been put most hideously to the sword, hence the body bags, the ambulances shuttling to and fro, the helicopters overhead, and the dull, heavy thud of not too distant artillery.
I could tell what Francis was thinking; feel what he was feeling - a crystal-clear awareness of the shallowness of any notion of an 'era of peace' or a 'second spring' to follow this time of tribulation. That was the loosest of loose talk, another of the many disconnects from reality that had marked the previous era. No, he thought. Our God is not that type of God. He is a suffering God. He suffers Himself and he shares and inhabits the suffering of others. He stands with the dying child and the weeping mother. He knows that everything that is lost is utterly irreplaceable. Something - someone - that was once here is now gone forever and nothing in eternity can compensate for that. Every loss is a devastation, leaving a bottomless depths of roaring emptiness in its wake. Our God is there in that abyss though. He feels its weight. He seeks it out. It is where He sets Himself to work.
Francis looked up and seemed now to be gazing directly at me, or not at me precisely, but rather at my country, Britain. I was shocked by the pain and disappointment I saw in his eyes. It hit me then just how much hope he had invested in Arthur's Kingdom - 'Logres' we had called it - and the extent to which he had believed Merlin's prophecies: the establishment of a holy realm, a light to the nations, a sacred precinct setting the tone for the whole of the Empire - both East and West - a platform, as it were, first for the Grail and then for Our Lord Himself in His Parousia. The Pope wept bitterly at the thought. That the Second Coming itself should have to be postponed was such an overwhelming thing that it was barely comprehensible. But Logres had failed. Arthur, for his achievements, had not responded to the high vocation placed upon him. His mania for conquest, his egoism, the faithlessness of his Queen, the treachery of Lancelot - all these had come together in a perfect storm of madness and war as Arthur chased Lancelot into Brittany, while Gawain, driven mad by Lancelot's accidental killing of his brother Gareth, fought his own private, bitter campaign against the King's erstwhile right-hand man.
Into the void stepped Mordred, Arthur's bastard son, assuming the purple while his father fought in France. Bread and circuses he doled out in plenty, fuelling the baser instincts and making the British weary of the discipline and standards Logres demanded and the beauty and nobility it incarnated. The high vision was lost, Mordred's corruption grew wings, and all across the West the princes rejected the unity of Empire and focused solely on material, short-term gain. But there was no gain, no increase, only dissolution and destruction. Islam from the South and the wild men of the East bore down in a pincer movement, while the captains fought among themselves, famine grew apace, and wolves howled at night outside the rapidly emptying cities and towns.
The Roman lines along the Rhine and Danube faltered and gave way. The tribesmen from the steppes burnt and pillaged as they conquered, bodies piling high behind them. Yet the Pope prayed for them still. I saw him do exactly this. He prayed for us as well - that in our fear and desperation we do not demonise the enemy, do not begin to see him as subhuman and boast in our pride that we would never be capable of the evil acts he commits. Then I saw his body shake as a vicious spasm of pain shot through him. He bent slowly down, all the way over, until his forehead rested on the ground. Some fresh horror, on a different level to what had come before, came to him in a vision. But what was it? A chemical weapon? A nuclear assault? No. Something, in a sense, still more dreadful. The wizards that commanded the Eastern tribes had gathered together ahead of their troops The armoured columns stood waiting behind them as they knelt on the ground, drew pentagrams, lit fires, and uttered secret words that had never been spoken since before the creation. The earth cracked and split and the bones of the dead spilled out and took on the semblance of flesh and the simulacra of life. With arms stretched blindly out and mouths lolling open, the legion of the dead marched forward at the head of the barbarian forces. The Imperial armies quailed. Citizens threw up their hands and fled, their reason wholly overturned. The Pope flung himself forward and lay fully prostrate, all sense of goodness and of the God he had known totally and definitively gone. Destitution and annihilation was all he knew as his soul shattered and splintered into a million irrelevant, meaningless shards. Just as the component parts of the Empire were shearing off away from Rome and Constantinople, so in Francis's inner life all sense of coherence and pattern had vanished. As his spirit dissolved, so everything around him fell silent, as if tuning in to his spiritual death - the guns, the helicopters, the vehicles, the artillery pieces. Even the soldiers and the security men lowered their heads, grieving for the demise of the familiar and much-loved civilisation they had been born into.
Then, out of the void, unbidden and unexpected, a new and radically different scene appeared in the Pope's mind. He beheld Taliessin - Arthur's one-time Storyteller and Chief of Staff - sat at a desk in a high-ceilinged room on the Île de la Cité preparing for the defence of Paris. His eyes were tired and sunken but his expression was steely and determined. Francis had met him once, two decades before, when Taliessin had been honoured by the previous Pope for the tactical genius he had displayed in the Battle of Mons Badonicus. His hair had been blonde in those days. Now it was grey and a lot less of it too. But the lights were still on, and Francis saw and appreciated that here was one at least whose eyes were still raised to Heaven and whose spirit remained undaunted by the grand collapse unfolding around him.
Taliessin was no longer in Arthur's service. He had refused to follow him in his pursuit of Lancelot and now worked solely for the Emperor in Constantinople. There was no treachery or oath-breaking connected to this in Taliessin's mind. Both Arthur and himself, in his view, were servants of the Emperor and through the Emperor servants of God. Arthur, after Mons Badonicus, had himself been acclaimed Emperor of the West. So it was Arthur who had turned his back on the Most High and left the Empire's service and not him. That was how Taliessin saw it. He prayed constantly though that even at this desperately late hour the mists of illusion and wrath might pass from the King's mind and he might be reconciled again to his high and holy purpose.
Taliessin served the Empire alone now, but behind his head the Pope saw a large flag of Logres pinned to the wall - a red, rearing dragon on a background of burnished gold. Small icons were dotted around too - a couple on the window sill, one on top of a pile of books, one on the inside of the door - the Transfiguration, St. Michael and the Serpent, Our Lady of Logres, St. John of Patmos, and more. The sun was setting in Paris too. Its rays slanted down into the room and where its light directly caught the icons they seemed to shine and glow and be almost on the point of taking on a life of their own, stepping out of the picture-world and into the rough and ready milieu of affairs, which Taliessin was doing his best, with very limited resources, to mould and shape according to the will of God.
The door swung open and a group of people entered the room, six men and six women. Like Taliessin, they were all in uniform and they stood around the desk in a horseshoe shape, the women to his left and the men to his right. Taliessin rose and greeted them with an expressive, somewhat expansive gesture, as if he was embracing them, maybe for the last time. Then he spoke:
'Friends. You will remember how our Company began. After Mons Badonicus, when the Western Empire was reborn in Logres, we believed we were on the threshold of a golden age and that Arthur was another Constantine, a mighty Christian monarch and a bearer of the sacred flame. So he was, to a great extent. Gaul, Hispania and Italia rallied to him in the days of his glory but, as we know, he has turned his power against those values now and has lost his imaginative hold over those lands and over Logres itself. At the moment when he started to lust after Rome, to dream of military conquest, yea, on that very night, three of us met under the eaves of Canterbury Cathedral and we talked until dawn and in the clarity of that sunrise this Company was born. Placing faith in princes, we perceived - even the noblest - is a fool's game. We saw that the West was fractured at a much more foundational level. The stories we told ourselves as a people had lost their force. There was lip service to tradition but nothing more - no central narrative, no commanding myth to bind us together and propel us forward. Evil surged into the gap, in the souls of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere first, then down into Logres and the whole Western Empire. We refused the temptation of short-term, knee-jerk reactions and built from the bottom - finding new ways of telling the one transformative story - the truth, power and grace of the Logos - and of embedding that truth in ourselves and radiating it out to the world.
'Our poems, our stories, our songs, our art, our architecture - everything we created this past seven years has had this aim of renewal in view. We have preserved, I believe, the inner essence of the West and given future generations much to build on. But that renewal will occur after the outer collapse now at hand. Physical war is nigh. Our mission has been accomplished and the time is right to dissolve our bonds and disband our Company.'
There was silence for a while. Then one of the women, whose name was Anastasia, said, 'My Lord. 'Everything you say is true and all things naturally run their course. But be not over-hasty, I pray. Whatever happens in this war, we know to our cost that the Second Coming has already been postponed. So the world will keep turning, no matter what, and our work should carry on likewise, for those who survive will have need of it and need of us as well. I humbly submit that our task is not yet accomplished and that more is still required of us.'
Taliessin bowed his head and reflected. 'Yes, Anastasia,' he replied. 'Your words ring true. Our story is not yet completed. Let our mission and vocation continue.' Then he took down the flag of Logres from the wall, laid it out on the desk and cut it with bis pocket-knife into thirteen pieces. He handed them out one by one to each of the Companions and kept the thirteenth for himself.
'The pressures and responsibilities of war have weighed heavily on me, I have let pessimism and even fatalism take an uncharacteristic hold. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. Grant that we all win through, and let us solemnly swear hat we will meet again once this war is won and knit back together the fragments of this flag.'
They knelt and gave each other their hands and swore a solemn vow and the Pope was hugely heartened. He hauled himself back up until he was once more kneeling on the pock-marked gravel. He thanked God for the witness of the faithful few and asked Him that their dedication to the high values might continue through this time of purification and extend forward far into the future.
Then he beheld a greater wonder still. A bright light dawned in his mind. The men around him sensed it, lifting their heads and looking at him, alert and focused again, sensing that something important was about to happen. The light, the Pope realised, was coming from a long way away - from the island of Sarras, the land of the Trinity far to the West - so far West that it was to all intents snd purposes East.
He saw the three leaders who had remained unaccounted for after the Grail Quest had failed - Galahad, Percivale, and Bors. They were lying asleep on the deck of a ship. The sky was grey but with hints of rose and pink. Dawn was not far off. The ship was in a harbour in the middle of a semi-circular bay. Francis saw rocks and crags at either end and battlements and watch towers on top with small white shapes flying around them. Then, all together and all at once, the shapes cried out - the dawn chorus of a colony of gulls - wheeling and circling not just around the weatherbeaten, archaic crags but what the Pope could now see in the growing light as the spires, domes, towers and turrets of a great city built into the mountains.
Bells rang out - slowly and deliberately. The sun peeped over the rim of the horizon and gently lit the deck where the sleepers lay. Francis saw the Grail right there in the midst of them, ringed around by their sleeping forms. Its colour changed continually in the first rays of the sun - from gold to silver to white to blue to purple to green and back to gold. It had been a long night in Sarras, one year and one day to be exact - a night of silence, penance and deep reparation - and now it was ended. The three lords awoke and the sun spilled forth fully onto the harbour. The bells rang out gladly now, resounding and rebounding in the air, as Galahad picked up the Grail and carried it tenderly as they stepped off the ship and onto the quay. saints and angels - the Pope could see them all - watching on as the trio made their way through the city's winding streets, up the Hill of Churches to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity at the top. Prester John - Priest, Prophet and King - was waiting for them at the High Altar. Galahad handed him the Grail and together they sung the High Mass while Percivale and Bors served as deacons.
As they sang the Kyrie the Pope saw and felt Christ Himself, dressed in white with a great light around Him, descend into the depths of his heart and and pull him out of the black night of sorrow and back into the sunlit lands of faith, hope and possibility. And as the Lord did this, He did it to the world as well. Francis rose purposefully to his feet and in that moment the legion of the dead stopped in their tracks and disappeared, their bones returning instantly to their graves. The sorcerers trembled with foreboding while Taliessin and the Imperial captains rejoiced. The forces of Islam to the South felt the change too. The Muslim guns fell silent and their troops absorbed themselves in prayer in their makeshift battlefield mosques.
I saw the Pope walking towards a squat, still intact building with a cross etched in the stone above the doorway. His security men were lighting candles on an altar while a young boy in ragged clothes brought out a chalice and ciborium. Francis began a Low Mass and between the Kyrie and the Gloria he paused and blessed the Lord, thanking him for the mercy He had shown and the great gift he had given - the staying of evil's hand and more time for the world to turn back to the light of Sarras. For all the darkening of the Empire, and the loss of Logres and the hiding of the High Prince, Francis felt the Empire revive in a live hope of the Sacred City.
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