Edris sees the next plague
Cenwulf dropped wearily onto the couch and pressed his fingertips against his burning eyes.
All day long the wind had howled, whipping the heads off the meager stalks of grain, ripping the limp and yellow leaves from the bean plants, stripping a layer of dust from the earth and whirling it up to choke and blind the men and the animals.
If Alred were home, he thought, no doubt he would have a passage from the Exodus for the occasion, telling of one of the plagues that the Lord sent down on the Egyptians.
“Clouds they are without rain,” he mumbled, thinking of the ominous thunderheads that had overflown the valley all evening, grumbling and flashing but never letting fall so much as a drop of water. “How does it go?” he asked Edris.
“‘Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds,’” she replied softly. “It is from the Book of Jude. Alred says it is a very poetic passage. ‘Trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots – ’”
“That’s enough, Edris,” he sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. It is only too true. The fruit is indeed withering on the trees, if it ever began to grow at all. How does the rest of it go? What new plagues await us?”
“‘Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“The rest doesn’t seem to apply to us.”
“God help us if it does. It sounds like exile.”
“Oh, no. Don’t think of that.”
“I often do. I’m sorry. I suppose I can’t help but fear the worst.”
She did not answer, but he could hear her put down her sewing and move closer to him on the couch. He wondered whether she meant to touch him, and he stiffened.
Instead she asked uneasily, “Cenwulf, what is that?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her, and then turned to follow her gaze out the window, where a mass of smoke was billowing out of the forest to the north like a fledgeling thundercloud.
“Good God!” he cried, leaping to the window. “The hills are ablaze!”
