Do they find the joys of love more sweet? Do their children love them more? No, these questions of comfort, they are not the important ones.

“For remember, we Starbridges have a purpose. Now, even now, a great war is being waged for your safety, not sixty miles from our north gate, against heretics and tyrants. Tonight I have heard news of a great victory against the forces of our enemies.”

To make this announcement, he had presented the congregation with the living side of his face. But now he turned to look at them head on. “My children, our victory has come at bitter cost. Many thousands of our soldiers lie dead upon that field. And of those regiments of dead, how many of my family? I hear that my own brother and my own nephew also, my sister’s son, have purchased your continued safety with their blood. Now, warm in this beautiful church or safe in your homes, would you be willing to change your places with them? My children, these Starbridge officers are your bulwark and your shield. We would have no war or victory without them. The ones that still survive, do you envy them their comfort as they stretch out their blankets in the rain?

“Or perhaps it is I you envy. Then tell me, is it my hand, my manhood, or my leg? Is it the mark of scourges on my back? Or perhaps you remember how on this very altar, on the feast of St. Delphinium, I dedicated my eye.” He showed them the dead side of his face. “That is what it means to be Starbridge,”

he said. “Don’t forget it.

“Now we are at the start of a great trial. One of my predecessors in this pulpit recorded in his diary that in the ninth through nineteenth phases of last spring, it rained for seven thousand days. Many will die, rich and poor. But our survival as a nation, and a culture, and a race, depends on us. Now I have heard some of you whispering that great changes come with spring, great miracles, great new freedoms. But I say, if we cannot keep God’s laws, the laws that kept our ancestors from harm during this long storm, then God will squeeze us like a sponge. Tonight from this pulpit I heard you singing, high and low together, and the beauty of it brought tears to my eyes. I tell you, I make that song a metaphor, because it is in the harmony in which we live together that we can hope to touch God’s pity. And in those harmonies, there must be high and low. Without it, all the sense is lost. Without it, there is no beauty, no achievement. I tell you, high and low together, together we will raise an anthem to our God!”

* * *

When the parson had finished, the people sank down on their knees for the compulsory prayers before the next part of the service. “Now,” whispered Spider Abject. “Go now. They’ll take him back soon.”