I

THE PHANTOM DESTROYER

UPPER NORMANDY, 26 SEPTEMBER 1066

The wind laughed. And the boy on the rock laughed back.

Wild-eyed and turning circles atop a massive boulder lodged in the face of a towering sea cliff, the smoke, smolder, and arrogant noise of the onrushing storm was just the thing to liven up an endlessly boring life lived on the thin edge of nowhere.

Demanding the boy’s immediate return to the safety of their shack, his mother’s shout that he was stupid—“A brain like a hoof!”—was nothing new to six-year-old Wido. Nor was ignoring any attempt to interrupt his fun. Pointing at his ears and feigning confusion at her too many, too fast words, with a big smile and a wave he, instead, dropped onto his belly and began inching across the rock’s rain-slickened surface much as a larval bug just washed up out of the dirt. Indeed, taking malicious pleasure in turning his mother’s tremendous love for her only child into utter anguish, with his arms thrown wide and pretending to glide like a falcon in flight, Wido then dropped his head over the edge of the rock as if ready to swoop upon whatever fantastic beast might come crawling out of the turbid water below.

Mother could scream all she wanted. Her threat of whipping his backside didn’t scare Wido a whit. The sky sizzling above him. The earth crumbling around him. None of it scared Wido.

God didn’t scare Wido.

Only, as many times before, Wido had already crossed that fine line between thrill and terror, and no full-throated squeal of death-defying joy could disguise it. Telling himself that the little flinching of his muscles, that twisting of his gut was not fear, he was determined to not turn back up the steep-sided gully. Flee into his mother’s arms. She would win. Scream. Call him stupid for doing such a dangerous thing. Punish him.

So ... no.

Rubbing down the gooseflesh on his arms, Wido again stood on the rock; glanced back at his mother; and then stepped a little closer to the edge.

Mother screamed.

Wido laughed.

And the thunder rolled.

“God’s Rock,” the cliff-dwellers called it. Huge. Black. Its smooth, glassy face bulging toward the sea. With deep fingerlike depressions grooving its sides as if grasped by a massive hand, the local legend was that God had flung the otherworldly rock through the stars and crashed it down on Earth in warning of the brutal end awaiting all who denied His existence and power.

But as a rock is a rock in the light of day, it was during the darkest and stormiest of nights—a night like tonight—that the beauty of the brute black stone came to shine: a yellow-green olivine glow as if encased in hot crystals. Resplendent atop the towering white limestone cliff, a beacon for sailors upon the sea, the rock burned through the night’s dark mists like a massive jewel in the crown on a massive god’s head. A guard of Heaven for time eternal.

Only, now—with a prideful planting of his little flag—Wido claimed God’s Rock as his own. For Wido, not God, was the supreme ruler of his life—God’s big, black book of laws be damned. And Mother? What with Wido always out playing on the rock in defiance of her loudly forbidding it, she called it the “Devil’s Throne.” That the name was meant to shame him to a better behavior proved a miserable failure.

Wido would do what he wanted to do, when and where he wanted to do it.

Although clouded in his memory by the smoke of his ongoing rebellion, there was a time when Wido believed his mother to be the most beautiful, pure, and innocent creature God ever put on the Earth. Her smile gentle and voice sweet, her every movement light as a butterfly in flight, he lived for those times when she would grasp his hands, swing his feet up off the ground, and twirl him around and around in circles, flattening “angel rings” in the tall grass fringing the cliff-top before drawing him back against her breast in a kiss-smothered hug. Her laugh loud and playful and her big green eyes alight with the joy of their spirited adventures in the forest, in the fields, and down on the beach, those days now seemed so long ago to Wido—that short time in his life when the rampant violence of the world was yet unknown to him. Before his father, a humble woodcutter—a man he had loved, followed everywhere, and mimicked his every action—walked off one summer day, ax in hand to fight for the glory of some heavenly king named God—or some earthly god named King. It hardly mattered which one to the blubbering three-year-old boy the woodcutter left standing at his wife’s side. A fortnight later—with Wido’s face buried in his mother’s skirt as she tearfully picked over a cart piled full of bloodied weapons and dead men in the village square—the splintered old ax made the trip back to the shack on the cliff. His father did not.

Lying amidst the faded yellow windrows of late September leaves and staring up at the stars on a cloudless night, Wido snuggled against his mother’s side and asked: “Is God here with us right now, Mother? Like your big storybook says—in every rock, every tree, and every cloud in the sky? Even in the air we breathe?”

“Yes, Wido,” his mother answered as she stared into his keened green eyes and traced a light finger over the curve of his spine. “He is everywhere.”

“And if I talk really loud, can He hear me say how much I hate Him for killing Father? How much I hate Him for making you cry?”

Adelvia of Arques, barely twenty years old and already three months a widow, jerked her head up off the ground as if stuck by a knife. Shocked by the sudden blasphemy spewed from her son’s mouth like the Devil’s own venom, she smacked a hand across Wido’s wan, guileless face, then grabbed him by the shoulders and, shaking him hard, admonished him for his hateful words. “We do not speak such words, Wido! We do not think such words! We do not question God! He is our Lord. Our God. Our Savior. Ruler over the highest mountain in Heaven down to the deepest cavern in Hell. He sees all, knows all, and is all. Everything to come in our lives is by His command. And His every act has a purpose beyond our understanding.”

With Adelvia’s voice breaking and her heart in tumult—never before having struck Wido—she then pulled her trembling son close and, telling him how sorry she was, smoothed a hand over his reddened cheek. Kissing his forehead and gently hushing his loud sobs, she spoke to him in words now soft and slow. “I fear for you. Fear for your soul. You must believe that God is a good and loving God. For to believe in Him with your whole heart will keep the Devil’s head pinned under your heel forever.”

Her eyes glistening with tears, Adelvia then picked up her son’s chin and looked into his red, swollen face. “Only, sometimes it’s hard. Serving God blindly and without question, following where He leads you, trusting His plan. Our place among the angels must be earned. The climb to Heaven is steep. And we will not pass through its gates without a struggle—the struggle of faith.” Adelvia’s voice again rose. “Bow down to Him, Wido. Praise His Holy Name. Honor Him as King of kings, Creator of every creature of the Earth. God must be loved! He must be feared! Do you understand me, Wido?”

Wrapping the bewildered boy in a crushing embrace and kissing him all over his downcast face, Adelvia let out a sudden sob and started to cry. Wiping his mother’s big, scalding tears from her cheeks with his little fingers, Wido quietly asked her through a sob of his own: “But why, Mother? Why does God do bad things to people? Why does God make us sad?”

Trying to force a faint smile through her tears, Adelvia answered, “God will test us. Test our faith in Him. Test our love for Him. Test our worthiness for the life He has given us. And through these trials, He will reveal His plan for our lives, make us understand how much He loves us, and make us love Him even more with the promise of our eternal lives to come.”

Running her fingers through his dark, wavy hair, Adelvia pulled Wido close and whispered in his ear, “Ours is a big, powerful God, Wido.” She opened her hand under his thoughtful gaze. “He can hold the whole world in the palm of his hand. And, remember—like Father always told you—the bigger our God, the smaller our Devil.”

Walking hand-in-hand with his mother back toward their little one-room shack on the edge of the cliff, Wido looked up to the sky and mumbled under his breath, “Maybe our god is too big if we always have to be scared of Him squashing us like bugs anytime He feels like it.”

Adelvia jerked Wido toward her and asked him to repeat what he said.

He responded, “Nothing.”

The slap across his face hardly hurt at all.

As defiance ignited an excitement that obedience did not, Wido—who lived so close to Heaven—seemed destined to burn in Hell. A sinner from the day he was born—lo, a victim of Adam’s original sin—rebellion was in his blood. And he would eat as many apples off that forbidden tree as he pleased.

Of an age when peace and innocence flourish in the hearts of most young...