[told by Malvolio]

Despite King Arthur's peculiar choice of companions, he was undeniably devout. This, in fact, was one of the things the rest of us found hardest to understand. In the worlds we had come from, urging someone to say his prayers was the bitterest insult available, implying that he was either so deranged that he must be demon-possessed (and therefore needed to pray in order to frighten the demons away) or so wicked that he needed to beg God's forgiveness immediately to avoid being struck down by a thunderbolt. It hadn't occurred to me that a decent, law-abiding man would need to get up early every day to talk to God, let alone that anyone would actually want to, as the King and Cheiron apparently did.

Sir John sometimes joined them, not, I think, out of any sense of piety, but perhaps just for company, like a dog laying its head in its master's lap, or perhaps to cut me out, because he knew that if he joined them, I wouldn't deign to be there, and vice versa. Whichever of us didn't get there first would sulk a short distance away, far enough off to be obviously not joining in, but visible enough to make everyone else feel uncomfortable. I might add that I was much better at sulking in a dignified fashion than Sir John. There is an art to holding the head and the shoulders at precisely the right angle to communicate both the messages: 'It is monstrous that you have excluded me from your company in favour of that disgusting wretch merely because he happens to be of higher birth than I am,' and: 'I scorn your probably heretical teachings and worship style and would not pray with you if you begged me to.' Meanwhile, Erik usually went off on his own to do his handwriting practice, either copying out poems or writing poetry of his own. Sir Andrew hung around with whoever didn't actually tell him to get lost.

Sundays were a different matter. Then, we all went to whatever church we happened to be passing, or, if we met a hermit meditating in the forest, we would ask him to break off from his meditations to teach us for a while. Either way, we were supposed to learn together, despite the fact that we didn't belong to the same denomination. King Arthur was fully under the thumb of the Pope, because there wasn't really any choice in his age – although I couldn't be sure quite when that was. I had thought that King Arthur, if he existed at all, had lived in Britain at a time when the Celtic church was diverging from Rome, but somehow his world seemed to have been coloured by pre-Reformation storytellers who took it for granted that all Christians were obedient little Papists.

Apparently Sir John had come from a Nonconformist background, as I had, even if neither of us had willingly gone into any place of worship in decades. Sir Andrew wasn't sure what religion he was, but was very clear that Puritanism was A Bad Thing. I suppose he was vaguely Church of England at times when the Anglicans happened to be in power. Erik had been born in France (despite his very Nordic name) and should probably have been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but, considering that he had been kept hidden away until he was five years old and then sold to a travelling fair, the phrase 'brought up' didn't really apply. He had travelled far enough to find out that there are different religions with different rules, so that Hindus don't eat beef, Muslims don't drink alcohol, and Christians are only allowed one wife, but nobody seemed to have explained to him that, for example, murdering people was wrong. On the other hand, he did understand music, and he took the view that, if Christianity had produced Bach and Handel, there might be something in it.

Inevitably, going to church led to arguments. The first time things came to a head was when, during a sermon on the passage in Matthew's gospel about knowing a tree by its fruit, Sir John growled, 'I'm not putting up with any more of this. I'm going to wait outside with Cheiron.'

'So am I,' chimed in Sir Andrew, randomly loyal to whoever had been the last person to speak.

'I'm not leaving you to your own devices,' I said. 'I'll come and keep an eye on you.' By now the entire congregation was turning round to stare at us, and the priest was obviously wondering why we'd come if we weren't prepared to listen to God's word.

'Maybe we'd all better go,' said King Arthur. We filed outside to where Cheiron was listening from the porch, and all set off away from the village, and through the woods to the clearing where we were camping. As soon as we'd left the churchyard, Sir John turned to King Arthur, eyes blazing with fury, and demanded, in the tones of a man pulling a dagger out of his chest, 'Why did you give me hope?'

'Sorry?' said King Arthur.

'You should be! It was all right back in my world, making jokes about how I knew I ought to repent but, now that my body was as clapped-out as my soul, I'd left it a bit late. But I could always put off thinking about God and judgement and things, until I knew I was dying, and then I was terrified that I'd go to Hell, but instead I came here, and you got me to come along to church with you, and I started to think that Jesus loved me and there was hope after all. And now it turns out that Jesus is just like all kings – well, maybe not you, Arthur, but you know what I mean – and at the end of the day, he's going to turn on the people who believe in him and say, "I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!" Why didn't you warn me, Arthur? You bastard!'

'There's no need to speak to the King like that,' I said. 'It's not King Arthur's fault or God's if we choose to go on deluding ourselves even after we've been taught to know our place.'

'If it comes to knowing your place, why do you think you can speak to a knight like that?' put in Sir Andrew.

'Because this knight made exactly the same mistake I did,' I said. 'I don't have much in common with you, Sir John. I was good at being a servant, at least; you were useless at being a soldier, far worse than useless as an officer, and not even very good at being a criminal. But we were equally stupid if we expected to be promoted to being counts just because we loved people who had the power to make us great and who we thought loved us; and we were both humiliated and locked up as a punishment for presuming too much. Can't you see that expecting God to love us is just making the same mistake at a higher level? Surely the sensible, grown-up thing to do is to learn not to love or trust anyone or hope for anything, so that we can't be disappointed.'

'Do you think George Eliot would have agreed with that? Was Silas Marner wiser when he lived that way?' retorted Sir John. I had unwisely let Cheiron talk me into telling the story of Silas Marner the evening before, and, to my horror, it had proved very popular. By the time I reached the part where Eppie, learning that her biological father is the wealthy Godfrey Cass, rejects him for her adoptive father, Silas the weaver, everyone had been crying with relief and joy, and I realised that I didn't care about Silas or Eppie at all any more. The story wasn't mine if other people liked it; it was just sentimental garbage.

'We don't need to do without love,' said Arthur firmly. 'God loves each one of us as His son. He doesn't change his mind, because he isn't as frail and capricious as earthly kings like me. God is love, and love always protects, always hopes, always perseveres.'

'Well, yes, but He's got different ways of showing His love,' I said, trying to remember how the pastor had explained it to me when I was young. 'He shows His love to the Elect by granting them the grace to believe in Him and repent of their sins and be saved, and He shows His love to everyone else by letting them be an example of His power to destroy them. We can't choose to be in the Elect, any more than we choose what colour hair to have.'

'Do you think I ought to dye mine?' asked Sir Andrew, who was the only one except Cheiron who hadn't yet gone grey or bald. 'I think my blond hair looks quite nice, but do you think maybe God prefers auburn?'

'No,' I said. 'Esau had red hair, and God hated him before he was even born.'

'Was Esaup the one who wrote stories about tortoises?' asked Sir Andrew.

'That's right,' said Sir John. 'He never got paid for writing all those fables, though, because he'd sold his copyright for a potted message. Right, Cheiron?'

'Jack, stop winding him up; Andrew, God isn't bothered about your hair,' said Cheiron, 'and Malvolio, you're...'

'I'm what? Insane? Demon-possessed? They said the same of Jesus.'

'No, of course I don't think you're insane,' said Cheiron, 'but I don't know how long you can stay sane if you try to believe things like that. Do you think that you're predestined to go to Hell, or only that the rest of us are?'

'I know I am, because I've tried to live a virtuous life,' I said. 'Don't you remember that sermon at the church we went to last week, on why Pride is the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins? The priest there was saying that the most dangerous and terrible form of pride isn't boastfulness and vanity, but what we call self-respect, and that when parents and teachers try to teach children to be clean or honest or hard-working by appealing to their self-respect, the Devil rejoices. And I know that's true of me. When I was a boy, my mother used to send me on errands to the grocer's shop, and I knew that I could easily sneak just one sweet out of the jar while the grocer's back was turned, and nobody would notice. But I wouldn't do it because I didn't want to have to think of myself as "Malvolio who steals sweets from a half-blind old grocer", and so I told myself that I didn't like sweets anyway. And I thought I was a good boy, and now it turns out that I was committing the sin of Satan by being too proud to be a thief, and God would rather I had stolen the sweets!'

'But can't you be proud of being good at stealing?' asked Erik. 'Once when I was running a protection racket and the victim didn't pay up on time, I came up to him when he was alone in a locked room, slipped out the envelope containing my 20,000 francs that he'd safety-pinned into the inside pocket of his waistcoat, replaced it with an envelope containing 20,000 francs of toy money, disappeared, and was back in my den below the Opera House in time to switch on the listening-device and hear him swearing when he discovered the theft. Did you ever pull off anything that neat, Jack?'

'No!' said Sir John, laughing. 'If I managed to steal anything valuable, it was usually stolen off me before I got home. But anyway, being proud of being clever at stealing is just worldly vanity, so it isn't as bad as spiritual pride.'

'God doesn't want anyone to steal or boast about it,' said Arthur. 'And I'm sure the priest didn't really mean that about self-respect. Oh, Malvolio, have you been worrying about this all week?'

'I'm not worrying. If God is like that, I don't want to know Him, anyway.'

'And if He isn't like that?' asked Arthur.

'If God was the "loving Heavenly Father" most Christians believe in, he'd be more of a myth than Zeus ever was. Don't you see? If God was lovely, then it would be natural for everyone to love Him, so it wouldn't take any special grace. But if God is everything we'd naturally consider hateful, then it takes a miracle for even a few people to be able to love Him unconditionally.'

'If God's that bad, we'd better hope we're going to Hell so as to be as far away from him as possible,' said Sir John.

'Yes, but you can't, because Shakespeare says you're not in Hell,' pointed out Erik. '"A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child," – that's what they said about you when you died.'

'I don't remember feeling like a child being christened,' said Sir John. 'Not unless they meant screaming and crying and not understanding what's going on, anyway. Still, if my friends want to remember my death as more peaceful than it was, I suppose it makes them feel better, and everyone's allowed to be a bit sentimental about the dead. That's why you don't often see the headline: "Local lad killed in war was disgrace to the regiment," or, "Bratty juvenile delinquent run over by cart," or...'

'Or tombstones that read, "Feckless brother-in-law, conned me into mortgaging my house to finance his hare-brained business scheme, never paid me back but could somehow afford to keep pedigree hounds, not much missed," I suggested.

'Exactly. If Nell Quickly wants to think of me as a christened child, instead of moaning about how I never paid my bills, that's fine by me.'

'Anyway, christening babies is theologically unsound,' I said. 'They're not old enough to know whether they believe in God or not, so it reduces sprinkling them with water to a superstitious ritual.'

Sir Andrew's eyes widened in horror. 'You weren't even christened?'

'Not as a baby, no. I was baptised when I was twelve years old, just before leaving school and home to start my first job, as page to the Lady Olivia's father.'

'Maybe that's a better idea,' said King Arthur. 'It ought to be a rite of passage, like when Kay was doing his vigil to prepare for becoming a knight, and I sat up with him because I was going to be his squire. It seems rather a waste to use up the most important experience of life on babies who won't even remember it.'

'When I came to believe in Jesus, Jewish believers weren't even convinced it was all right to baptise Gentile humans, let alone centaurs,' said Cheiron. 'And they were particularly wary about me, because I was related to the pagan gods, and because by that time I'd died of blood poisoning and been made immortal and turned into a constellation in the heavens, so that I was almost a god myself. In the end I just waded out into the sea and dunked myself under the waves.'

'I don't think I've ever been christened,' said Erik. 'If I had been, I'd have been given a name, wouldn't I? I only decided to be Erik when I wanted Christine to think of me as a man and not just call me "Angel" all the time. But when I was a little boy, I don't remember my mother ever calling me anything, except "Shut up!" sometimes.'

'Would you like to be baptised, Erik?' asked Cheiron.

'What, now?'

'Well, not right this second,' said Cheiron. 'For a start, we're back at the campsite, and I don't know about you, but I'm about ready for lunch. How do you feel about fresh pea and mint soup, by the way?'

We all murmured our approval. The place we were camping was a patch of common grazing-ground, much of it overgrown with brambles, with a few oak-trees and crab-apple trees. We had arrived early the previous day, and spent much of the afternoon cutting the less fruitful bits of trees and brambles, so there was no shortage of firewood. Some of the blackberries looked dark enough to be ripe, but still tasted sour. Cheiron knelt down to kindle a fire, and then put a pot of water on to heat up.

'Secondly,' he continued, as he worked, 'after the kind of insane conversation we've been having this morning, you must be pretty confused about what Christianity actually is. I hope that as you live with us, we can show you God's love, instead of just talking to you about what the Bible says. And then you can think about whether you want to be a Christian, and if you decide you do, we can look for somewhere for you to be baptised.'

'Not in a church,' said Erik. 'I want to be baptised in a river, like Jesus.'

When we'd finished lunch, as I was washing up, Cheiron said to me quietly, 'This isn't just about Erik, you know. I hope that you can experience God's love through our love, too.'

I said nothing. I had found out the hard way that God loves rogues, not boringly law-abiding people like me. But if God wanted so save Erik, perhaps He would want me to help Erik learn to study the Bible, at least.