“Are you talking about the Cathedral of the Pelerines?”

The old woman nodded sagely. “There, you said it yourself. You’re making the same mistake they did. It wasn’t the Cathedral of the Pelerines, it was the Cathedral of the Claw. Which is to say, it wasn’t theirs to burn.”

To myself I muttered, “They rekindled the fire.”

“I beg pardon.” The old woman cocked an ear. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I said they burned it. They must have set fire to the straw floor.”

“That’s what I heard too. They just stood back and watched it burn. It went up to the Infinite Meadows of the New Sun, you know.”

A man on the opposite side of the alleyway began to pound a drum. When he paused I said, “I know that certain persons have claimed to have seen it rise into the air.”

“Oh, it rose all right. When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool — it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can’t see the Hand in nature.”

“He didn’t see it himself?” I asked. “The cathedral, I mean.”

She failed to understand. “Oh, he’s seen it when they’ve been through here, at least a dozen times.”

The chant of the man with the drum, similar to that I had once heard Dr. Talos use, but more hoarsely delivered and bereft of the doctor’s malicious intelligence, cut through our talk. “Knows everything! Knows everybody! Green as a gooseberry! See for yourself!”

(The insistent voice of the drum: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)

“Do you think the green man would know where Agia is?”