Brother Damian stood with a hand held up to shield his eyes against the sun and watched the man, still far off, making his slow way up the steep track towards the monastery. It was April, but ragged patches of snow still clung on in the lee of drystone walls and in the blue-shadowed hollows under overhanging rocks. Below, the village nestled in the valley floor. The grass down there seemed unnaturally green, after the ice and storms of a long winter. The village, with its timbered houses and steeply slanted roofs, its narrow streets, its clock tower and steeple, was as quaint and timeless as a picture on a postcard.

Faint sounds of village life could be heard on the clear, chill air: the chatter of housewives, the voices of children at play, the ringing notes of a blacksmith’s hammer. From the far side of the valley came the distant dinning of cowbells, and the soft, querulous bleating of unseen sheep.

All round the skyline stood the soaring Alpine peaks, glassy and glittering, silver-blue, indifferent. Although he had been here for more than twenty years, at the monastery of Sankt-Fiacre, Brother Damian still found it hard sometimes to believe in the reality of this vast ring of mountains. In spring sunlight, as now, they looked flat and semi-transparent, as if they had been painted onto the sky in washes of water colour.

Strange, he thought, not for the first time, that a place that had seen so much history, that had watched so many armies surging across its rocky landscape, should look so much like a chocolate-box picture of itself.

Everything in the valley spoke of old days, old ways. The men of the village dressed in braided jackets and knee breeches and carried alpenstocks, while the girls wore dirndl dresses and arranged their wheat-coloured or inky-black hair – here was where the blonde north met the dark-eyed south – in long, gleaming plaits that they shaped into flat coils and pinned against their ears like big spiral-shaped pastries.

Often, encircled here in the high Dolomites, the friar found himself longing for the soft grey rain and heaving purple seas of the far west of Ireland, his birthplace, his lost land, the home he had forsaken when, as a young student, he decided to pledge his life to God.

The man wending his way up the dusty path had to stop frequently and mop his brow with a blue bandana. Then he would stand a while to rest, looking back down at the village, or upwards to the snow-capped peaks.

He wore a faded green loden jacket, twill trousers, stout boots and a battered black hat with a yellow feather in the band. His stick was a shepherd’s crook. A small canvas knapsack was strapped to his back. He also seemed too convincing to be true. He might be a figure out of one of the tales of the Grimm Brothers, or a lone wayfarer in a story by Stifter or E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But Brother Damian knew who he was. The man was expected. He should have been here three days ago. The delay was worrying. Had he been stopped at the border? Had he been noted and identified, and tracked, perhaps, as he made his perilous way south and up to this high place?

The man arrived now at the top of the track.

They met under the arched stone entranceway to the courtyard, around the four sides of which the ancient monastery was built. It had originally been a stopping place for Crusaders on their way to the Italian ports to board ship for the Holy Land. The Franciscan Order had taken it over in the fourteenth century, under the benefice of one of the Avignon popes, and had occupied it ever since. It was a self-sufficient establishment, with its own herds of cattle and sheep and flocks of poultry, its piggery, its bakery and brewery, its dairy, its orchards and extensive vineyards.

Brother Damian had been Minister Provincial here for a decade now. His duties lay heavy upon him. In his heart he felt he wasn’t fitted for a position of authority. However, God had willed it that he should be raised up, and who was he to object to or complain of the Creator’s agency?

The man had a wedge-shaped face, tapering from a broad, unlined brow to a thin-lipped mouth and small, sharp chin. His eyes were remarkable, the irises a shade of pale, translucent grey and the lids as fine as folds of crêpe paper. They were never still. He kept darting quick glances this way and that, as if he felt himself surrounded on all sides by unseen foes. He looked exhausted, and his breathing was shallow and rapid, as if he had been running for a long time, running hard. Which, in a way, he had.

‘The air up here is so thin,’ he said, panting, and fixed his distressed gaze for a second on the heavy iron cross the friar wore on a chain around his neck. ‘I feel light-headed.’

‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ Brother Damian said. They spoke in English. The man was fluent in the language, with hardly a trace of an accent. He had lived for some years in London, the friar recalled.

They set off across the courtyard. When they had got halfway, the man had to stop again and stand a moment to catch his breath, one hand holding on to the friar’s arm and the other pressed to his heaving chest.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It has been a long journey.’

‘Were you stopped?’

‘Stopped?’

‘At the border.’

The man took his hand from the friar’s arm and wiped the back of it across his almost colourless lips. He shook his head.

‘No, no. No one stopped me. But twice I had to leave the road and take shelter. It was all very difficult, very dangerous. There are soldiers everywhere, their insignia torn off and discarded but still carrying their weapons. Worse than them are the bands of children, young boys and girls alike, starving and lost. They are like wolves, roaming the countryside and the streets of the ruined towns, searching for food.’ He looked aside, nodding. ‘The world has become mad.’

‘Yes,’ Brother Damian agreed, ‘it has been mad for some time.’

They walked on, and entered through a studded doorway into the refectory, a long, high-ceilinged room with a massive oak table running the length of it.

‘I’m hungry,’ the man said, in a tone of mild surprise, as if he had just that moment realised what it was that had been nagging at him for so long. ‘My store of food ran out very quickly. I stole two pancakes in one of the villages I passed through. And yesterday a child, a little girl, gave me half of an apple she was eating.’

‘What will you take?’ the friar asked. ‘Some bread, and a dish of coffee? Our bread is very good, baked fresh every day. And there might be a bit of soup left over from last evening. I’ll go and see. Sit down there. I won’t be long.’

The man nodded dully. He had become childlike suddenly. The mention of food seemed to have unmanned him.

He sat down carefully on one of the backless stools that were lined up at both sides of the table. He laid his shepherd’s crook on the floor at his feet and unbuckled his knapsack. He looked about almost timidly. The silence buzzed in his ears. The air was so light and featureless it hardly seemed air at all, but some far thinner, hardly substantial medium.

‘You’re in luck,’ Brother Damian said on his return. ‘There is vegetable broth left over, it will probably be better today.’

Another friar appeared now, a tiny, wizened creature, his face burnt to a leathery brown by countless years of exposure to the Alpine sun. His arthritic hands were gnarled and claw-like. He bore before him a wooden tray on which were set a bowl of greyish soup with wobbly lozenges of fat floating on it, a plate with rolls, butter in a dish, a coffee pot and an earthen bowl. He set the tray on the table in front of the man, murmuring unintelligibly and smiling. His front teeth were almost entirely worn away; all that was left of them were sharp, yellowish spikes.

‘Thank you, Brother Anselm,’ the Minister Provincial said.

‘Ja ja, danke schön, heiliger Bruder,’ the man joined in quickly. He sounded like a little boy remembering his manners a shade too late.

The old friar retreated backwards, bowing and mumbling and smiling his gap-toothed smile.

Brother Damian ladled soup into the clay bowl.

‘Eat,’ he said to the man, and added, in the easy tone in which he would have commented on the weather, ‘God is good.’

The man ate with conscious restraint, willing himself not to gobble down the food. It must have been a long time since his last proper meal, the friar thought, watching him as he crumbled a bread roll into the soup with unsteady fingers. What things he must have seen, what horrors he must have witnessed. The country he had come from had been devastated, bombed back to the Dark Ages. Such vast destruction, such a merciless avenging. Its people had been told they had brought their troubles on themselves. Perhaps they had, without meaning to. Yet God is good.

‘Your family,’ the friar said, ‘your wife, your son, are they safe?’

‘Yes. At least, they were, when I left them. They are with a...