The Pilgrim, already halfway down the rise, calls out the answer that Stephen most dreads. "I choose one who follows my profession." The innocent sheep kneel as one beast across the field, praying for absolution.
At night, after bringing his flock in, as his family gathers noisily around its late meal, Stephen announces into his soup, "I must go to the city."
His father bats him across the head with an elbow, automatic, businesslike. The younger ones snicker, and receive similar treatment.
Comic interlude turns into clamor when Stephen clarifies. He doesn't mean Vendôme or even Orléans, an already-impossible fifty miles away. "I must go to Paris." Father looks wearily at mother to discipline the outrage. She brains the boy and washes his mouth out with scalding lard. Dinner breaks up early.
He could tell them of the message and the man who set it in his hands. One word, and his family would fall at his feet and beg forgiveness. Instead, for reasons left undrawn, he chooses to slip out early, before daybreak, stealing the best pair of trekking shoes and some stale rinds destined for the feed bin. He ties the letter firmly to his forearm. He runs from the farm in the dark, choosing a random direction, running anywhere, so long as it is away and unseen.
When it grows light, Stephen stumbles upon a village and orients himself. He points himself northeast and keeps walking. It will take weeks to reach the goal he's been given. He wanders alone at a time when the average adult traveler would not last an afternoon against human ingenuity. "The Pilgrim would not have sent me off without providing for my safety." He puts up for the night in a hayrick, his belly nagging like a scythe wound.
An angel wakes him at daylight. Graphic match: a beautiful girl, perhaps a year younger than he, shakes his shoulder, calling, "Wake up! What do you think you're doing here?"
He begs some milk and a bit of bread, which his angel supplies with scorn. Then he tells her, whispering, that the Savior has sent him to the king of France, bearing a message about the end of the world. She hisses at him until he pulls up his sleeve and shows her the letter fastened there. She touches him gingerly on the muscle, and a delicious pain shoots through him, a change he can't understand. She studies him, amazed, and begs to be allowed to come along.
"Go on, then. Collect provisions, as much as you can carry. Then meet me down by the stile." She returns with a sister, also inflamed by the cause, carrying food, clothing, even a blanket. By midmorning, they are five, having met and bragged of the goal to two of the girls' village friends along the road. They sleep in an open field, together, happy as they have never been, singing religious tunes until they pass unconscious.
They travel in greater safety now, occasionally stealing an egg or two for the Lord's breakfast. To the rare adult who stops and challenges the little band upon the route, the girl lies sweetly, "We are cleaning the weeds off roadside crosses." Stephen cannot help noticing: her face grows beautiful, flushes rose with excitement when she invents the truth. They are joined by a boy named Luc, richer than all of them combined, and another named Henri, who has a dog that knows the useful trick of digging up carrots. They share all things among them, as needed. At night, they trade off standing watch.
Before the week is out, they number twenty. Stephen finds it steadily harder to keep track of this swelling flock. They can no longer move without attracting attention. But something astonishing happens as they reach this critical mass. A family of farmers offers them shelter inside a basse-cour and sends them off the next morning laden with goods. The same implausible transaction repeats itself the following evening. People ask for nothing but to be remembered along the pilgrimage route.
They lie in such a courtyard one night, four dozen children from eight to sixteen, decked out happily amid the animal stalls. They have already reached the woods that ring the royal domains. They will enter the capital in just days. Stephen lies quietly in the stall next to his angel girl. One of the older boys, a monastery runaway, finds him there.
"What does the letter say, Stephen?"
Stephen smiles inwardly and recites the passage the Pilgrim told him. The whole band knows the message by heart, and the runaway novitiate asks for it much the way that the youngest asks for the same story about the cock, the hare, and the cow each night before she can fall asleep.
"Is it in French?"
"How should I know?" Stephen shrugs. "Is that important?"
"The words allude to those of Saint John, describing his vision on the island of Patmos."
"A-allude?" Stephen stutters suspiciously.
"Do you know what the note means? It means our parents have failed us."
Stephen rubs the back of his head, still smarting from the punishment his mother never suspected would be his send-off.
"And not just our own parents." The older boy employs all the rhetorical skill the monks imparted to him. "The entire older generation. They have lost sight of God's desires." In quick pastel flashback, he tells Stephen of the four great campaigns to retrieve the Holy City, narrating the sad degradation of the blessed quest over a century and a quarter — from the first inspired flame to the sack of the Church's Eastern capital.
A change works its way over Stephen as he considers the message he has been entrusted with. Suddenly, its import is clear. The king they must serve as messenger is not the corrupted, human one. They, this band of a few dozen children, are meant to satisfy the Creator's will all by themselves. They will succeed where their parents failed. They must convert the unbeliever, recover the Holy Sepulcher, besiege the city of Jerusalem by love, doing what force of arms could not.
Yes — this was the Pilgrim's intention from the start. I choose one who follows my profession. By morning, Stephen finds a new strength and gentleness. He addresses his collected charges after breakfast with a mix of love and fervor. "We are not on our way to Paris after all." Not? Where then?
To the sea, by the most expedient route. Over the water to the towers of Civitas Dei. Let anyone who cannot aspire to reach there in perfect love turn back now, to France, to the world of things.
Not a child does. The band reconnoiters momentarily at St.-Denis, where a flaming sermon by the boy contrasts the conditions of the two sepulchers, this one flourishing, while the Lord's decays in pagan hands. The ranks of infant infantry swell with all those young enough to hear. Parents cannot reduce the stream of volunteers. The French king, as Stephen feared, bans the crusade, and professors at the earthly university declare it satanic. This is all the confirmation he needs: they must brave this alone.
Aching with resolution, Stephen turns away all petitioners over sixteen. The cause must be pure this time, untainted by anything past the first stages of innocence. The angel, his first recruit, infected by his seriousness, shaves her radiant hair and takes up walking in the rear, with the baggage train. Stephen continues to think of her at night, despite fasting, flagellation, and prayer.
They walk along in immense double file, a thread so long the middle can't see the end. A mélange of dialects fills the air, translated by magic. Here and there, children adopt a uniform — gray shift, palmer's staff, scraps of cloth sewn into a cross on the breast. Nights are steeped in fireside telling: fables, tales, legends, gests, sparked inventions to link each life to the great contour. But none of these asides can match the allegory they make now. By days, marching, they sing, several thousand voices in monodic unison, "O Lord, restore us to the True Cross."
The year is strange beyond interpreting. Overland reports tell of epochal animal convocations — fish, fowl, frogs, insects — massing for deciding diets. Dogs from all France and beyond assemble to fight their civil war. The beasts, in their spotlessness, know.