He was a good boy in his way, Rhys the novitiate, a lovely tenor, but Saint Dunstan was right, the lad cared more for singing profane songs than psalms, and the other monks constantly berated him for it, keeping him busy to cure his idleness. Tired out now, he merely grunted and slept on.

Well, well, let him rest. Caradoc began writing again. He hadn’t yet recorded the fissure in the graveyard. Yes, he must put that in. For as he’d run from the quaking buildings, he had seen a deep hole opening up in the abbey’s burial ground between the two pyramids that had stood in it as long as time had gone. “As if,” he wrote, “the end of the world had come and the Almighty had sounded the Last Trump so that the dead might rise from their graves.”

“The Book,” Saint Dunstan shouted. “Caradoc, would you leave the record of our days to looters?”

No, he couldn’t do that. So Brother Caradoc put down his chalk and, though his shivers were becoming uncontrollable and the pain across his chest an iron bar, he made for the door of the chapel and began stumbling down the winding terrace of the Tor. He knew now that the last trump had sounded for him and that even if he couldn’t save the Book, he must die trying, or at least take his last breath in the beloved abbey that had been his home.

A lot of precious breath it cost him as he wavered downward, falling over hummocks, his gasps sending sheep galloping, but gravity was on his side, and it propelled him down to the gate, which swung open at his touch under the chevroned Norman arch and into the grounds. He staggered onward as far as the vegetable garden, where he collapsed among Brother Peter’s lettuces, unable to go farther.

Now he could peer down the incline toward the towering church. There had been damage; the old bell tower had collapsed, and gapes showed where some corners were sheared away. The waters that circled the grounds had not reached so far; therefore, the Great Book and all the relics of the saints would still be untouched. Beyond them, though, the village outside the walls was still and smokeless, its pasture littered with dirty white lumps that were the corpses of sheep.