Numbers prove pliable. Sooner discard the calendar than the drift toward cartoon apocalypse it was built to predict. "Not the year 1000!" a Gnostic calculator proclaims in his cold stone cell, the astonished correction coming out his mouth in a speech bubble as old as Romanesque ecclesiastical comics. "The thousand-year reign of majesty here on earth!" Then two frames, scalloped to show they come from his monk's mind's eye: crypts opening, the martyrs resurrected to serve as kings in the new world's political machine, perfected at last.
Broadly announced now, bruited about all lands in caption and image: the Last Emperor, the ultimate successor of the Prankish kings, will soon assemble a host and make the long passage across the Middle Sea to recover by force the earthly sign of heavenly metropolis. There men will prepare the way for the Second Coming. Pilgrims return molested from the Holy Land, cries of protest filling the air above their heads. When a bubble-call for help comes from Pope Urban II, standing on a balcony in the South of France and beseeching a crowd to turn its random havoc into a single, sanctified, militant pilgrimage, his "Deus volt" is magnified a millionfold. All ranks and social stations catch fire. Europe launches itself into the new age it has long been predicting.
But the fall of the Holy City fails to bring on the last battle. Muslim and Jew are duly slaughtered to make way for Jerusalem's new inhabitants. Sovereign states are drawn up on the Levant map, diamonds designating the cities the pilgrim generals dole out among themselves: Antioch to one, Tripoli shores to another, Acre and Beirut to a third. No sooner is the new world order established than Zangi, Nureddin, and Saladin mount holy encircling maneuvers of their own.
The West, flexing itself in foreign contact, launches another wave of its eschatologically charged faithful into the World's Debate. France and Germany, the princes of Bohemia, Swabia, Poland, and Byzantium join forces under the cross. Armies of incompatible nationals pour into the Near East. But rival millennial expectations among allies prove fatal. The Second Crusade ends with a senseless attack on Damascus, executed in a disastrous fade to indigo and black.
The City of Heaven on Earth, ruled for a while by a thirteen-year-old leper, teeters on the brink, shattered by sectarian bickering. The crusader armies mass yet again for Armageddon, and are once more destroyed. Jerusalem falls again and is lost before God has a chance to install His transcelestial bureaucracy. The end of history is postponed for another few pages.
A third call for a God-willed showdown sounds across a catholic confederation too sophisticated now to hear it the way it first did, a century before. England's Lion-Heart signs on, along with Sicily, Flanders, and the Danes. They grab Cyprus as jumping-off point. Frederick Barbarossa, a furious seventy, leads the Germans cross-continent to a brilliant victory, only to drown — in intricately inked irony — crossing a stream.
Spiritual fervor degrades into a cynical race for fiefs. Holy war gives way to political shrewdness, the deftly drawn fourth campaign. The international hammerblow aimed at recovering Jerusalem, deflected by backroom Venetian power broking, ends not in sieges of infidel strongholds but in a brutal sack of Christian Constantinople. The soldiers of the cross succeed in tearing the two churches apart forever. They shatter and slice up Byzantium — beautifully penned in strategic and tactical views — the jewel that for so long formed the first line of defense against encroaching East, dealing it a wound from which it never recovers.
All this unfurls in four and a quarter pages, a dozen hand-colored rectangles per side. Then focus narrows another notch. The centuries-meandering road cants into a valley where the story's boy hides this time. (Watching these accounts of upheaval pour in, the flashlight reader marvels at how it is always them, the brigade of the displaced, each time out with the same names, the same age, the same slim chance of ever arriving by candlelight, let alone getting back again.)
"In the spring of the year 1212," a text box authoritatively interrupts, "a young boy no older than you tends sheep in a pasture near the tiny town of Cloyes-sur-le-Loir in central France." Two hundred years from now a little girl saint will lead an army through this hamlet on its mission of salvation. "A boy on the threshold of his teens, Stephen, who has never needed a last name until now. Soon the world will know him as Stephen of Cloyes." His flock is agitated and expectant, despite the sweet weather.
He lives in fabulous times, although he cannot know it. Deployments are everywhere in the air. Just outside his cleanly inked borders, towns busily receive city charters, universities spring up, cities band into trade leagues. A fever of new building spreads like flowering weeds across the champaign. The last westwork of Our Lady of Paris and the first stones of Rheims are laid in place even as Stephen keeps the two-year-old ewe with the weak left fore from sliding down a pebbled pitch.
He cannot write or read, has never even needed to sign anything. Simple arithmetic, certainly: lambs, ewes, rams, weight gains and losses, hours spent grazing. His grasp on medicine, meteorology, even natural history has all the finesse of a field practitioner. He can recognize 113 varieties of plants, diagnose fifteen different illnesses, and predict the weather for the next four hours. He once visited Vendome, and last St. Mark's Day he attended a Litana Major in Chartres, a chance service that will charge the conscience of the race. He takes the flock out after sunrise, ranging them from field to field until hail or darkness forces them in. He converses with his animals, calling each by name.
For a frame, he prays, singing psalms to himself. But now that the flock is safe, the dog content, the weather solid, the spring too sweet to admit danger, he sleeps on the sly, fifteen minutes this afternoon, his attention unneeded. The dog wakes him from his secret nap, barking in confusion at a dark figure climbing their remote rise up the path toward them.
The figure is not his father, nor any acquaintance carrying alarm from the village. Stephen can think of no reason short of catastrophe why anyone would hike all the way out to these fields. Thieves would wait for dusk; others are bound to their labor.
As the apparition approaches, Stephen makes out a pilgrim's cloak and cap. The man must have strayed miles from the cathedral route. And alone! Stephen calls out to the wanderer, thinking to set him straight. But the man preempts him, cuts off his speech bubble with another, and greets the startled shepherd boy by name.
"Who are you?" Stephen asks as the man draws closer. "I don't think I know you."
"Don't you?" the stranger smiles. A shiver runs up the boy's spine. "I woke you?"
Stephen manages a terrified, close-up shake of the head. The Pilgrim scolds him gravely with a look. "I would like you to deliver a letter."
"I can't read," Stephen blurts.
"A messenger shouldn't know how. But I will tell you what this note says. 1 have seen the Lord's City, arrayed as for her bridegroom. Why fail her now when the feast is so close?' "
Stephen taps his staff against the dog's flank, to keep her from snarling. "It's in code?" The traveler grubs about in his sack. He withdraws a moldy crust, which he shares with the boy. The man's poverty boosts Stephen's confidence. Thanking the man for the food, he asks, "Where should I deliver the letter?" He adds hopefully, "The village is just that way."
The Pilgrim places a parchment, heavy under its seal, in the child's hands. "You will bring this to the king of France."
At the touch of the man's hand, Stephen falls to his knees and begins crying. Sucking air, he manages to gasp, "Why me?"