(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea (15 page)

The old man, who walked on my left, was carrying, I noticed, an ax with a head made not of metal but of dark polished stone. That stone must indeed be hard, I thought vaguely, if it can be used for an ax head. It was exceedingly heavy, too, I could see that: the old man, who was very bent, slow, and stooping in his walk, could lift it for short periods only, and was obliged to stop and rest it on the ground at every third or fourth step.

I thought of offering to carry it for him, but my hands were tied.

Then I observed that the woman on my right wept as she walked; I could not see her tears, but she kept wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. I could hear her sobs, a faint miserable sound in the stillness.

"What is the trouble?" I asked her. "Why do you cry?" and she, unexpectedly, mumbled, "
I
had a boy once, long ago, but he died."

That brought Bernie into my mind, and her baby who had died, long ago; slowly I began to wonder: What am I, Felix, doing here on this mountainside? Where are we? Who are these people? What is happening?

We were making, I now saw, for the outcrop of rock under the jut of which the animals and the
haystacks had their scanty shelter. The outcrop, which formed the summit of the hill on which the village stood, was sharp and craggy and big as a castle; a path, which I could dimly see, circled around it and climbed to the very top.

I heard one of the burros bray, and this roused me a little from my dreamy state.

"I want to give my mule some water," I said to the woman, and she sobbed out, "Yes, yes, it shall be done. Very soon!"

"No, but I would like to do it
now.
Untie my hands, please!"

"Hush!" said the old man angrily. "No one should speak until the sun rises."

Far away, I saw there was a great gap in the saw-toothed range of peaks that rose against the strip of eastern light. From the growing color in the sky at that point, I guessed that when the sun did rise, it would show exactly in the gap, and its light would then strike the tip of the outcrop above us.

Suddenly three things happened. When I say "suddenly," I mean that they happened in the same moment, but it was a long, strange moment—as if time itself had stretched out so fine and thin that you could see right through it.

The parrot, tucked inside my belted jacket, began to mutter and scuffle, trying to flap her wings; and she suddenly poked her head through the opening at the front of the jacket, and shouted, "Six o'clock!" Then, at a very rapid rate and in a loud, raucous voice, she
began to recite a number of the Latin words I had been teaching her the day before:

"
Amnis, axis, caulis, collis, clunis, crinis, fascis, follis—
"

While I stood still, many of the villagers had caught up with us; now they stared at the parrot in stupefaction. There were cries of alarm.

A single eyeblink after that, the whole world around us was suddenly illuminated, not by the sun rising, but by a tremendous flash of lightning: not white light, but a great leaping reddish bronze-brown glare. Just for a second the scene reminded me of the fearsome picture of hell which hung in my grandfathers chapel: briefly this grim glare held over the landscape, and then there was an earsplitting clap of thunder, directly overhead, and rain began to come down as if the sky had fallen.

I heard the woman beside me cry out in terror, and then—while the echoes of the thunder were still dying away, muttering and grumbling farther and farther among the rocky peaks—I heard her whisper into my ear. "I am going to untie your hands. Go now, run,
run!
—otherwise they will kill you! They are going to kill you!"

As she said this she was fumbling with the strap that bound my hands; at last she had it undone—she gave me a push and said again, "Go—run—run!"

And so I ran! I could hear the villagers behind me, crying out distractedly in their fear and amazement:

"He has two heads!" "And one of them is a bird's!"
"The father of light must be angry!" "What did we do that was wrong?"

Most of them fell flat on their faces, excepting the old leader, who still stood upright, with one hand clasping his stone ax and the other covering his eyes from the dazzle of lightning flashes which followed one after the other. There was something lost and piteous about his appearance. "What
is
it?" he muttered.

But I did not wait to answer. During a brief period of glare I ran stumbling toward the overhang where the animals were tethered. Running with my head bowed against the rain, I was helped by the bawling of the burros, who seemed as terrified as their owners by the sudden storm.

And indeed, it was one of the worst storms I had ever been in.

My mule, thanks to her morose and taciturn nature, did not seem greatly affected by the weather; she snorted and grumbled as I untied and led her out, as if to draw my attention to the fact that she had been given a very indifferent stable and no breakfast, but she paid little heed to the lightning flashes and the terrific peals of thunder overhead. Flinging myself onto her back, I urged her past the great crag—as soon as we were out of its shelter the wind nearly blew us over—and away from the dome-shaped huts. In the next flash I perceived a rough track leading down between low, rising cliffs, and I turned the mule's head in that direction. I did not dare urge her into a gallop,
for the light was still very dim, in between the flashes; day seemed to have turned back into night. But, glancing over my shoulder, I could see no sign of pursuit; perhaps the villagers had been so stricken with terror at the suddenness of the storm that they had lost interest in me, and given up their intentions.

As to what those were, I could only guess; and would rather not. I thought the woman was probably right when she said they meant to kill me. I hoped they did not kill
her
instead, for letting me loose.

What use killing me would be for their bees or their goats, I could not fathom.

As the mule hurried grumbling down the narrow rocky pass, while the rain sluiced over my bare head, I slowly struggled out from the strange, dreamlike mood which had held me in its power for what, now, seemed a very long time; I could not remember when it had begun; only that when the old man had told me I would walk the path of cloud, it had seemed a perfectly sensible suggestion.

After a while I realized with dismay that I had left my hat and one of the saddlebags in the hut; luckily it was the bag that held my two pistols and most of the food, not the more precious one which contained my fathers papers and his book. I was sad about the pistols—but nothing in the world would have made me go back to that place, even if there had been no danger. I had conceived a mortal horror at the very thought of it; I could hardly bear to remember the hours passed in the disgusting fetid smell of that
round hut, or the food and drink I had been given; indeed, I have recalled those events only two or three times, with the greatest reluctance, up to this very day.

After an hour or so, we came to a mountain brook, where the mule and I both drank thirstily; then I was obliged to vomit, ridding myself of that evil liquor and disgusting food; then I drank again, washed my head, and felt a little better. Resolving to try and put the whole occurrence out of my mind, I climbed back into the saddle and rode on; and presently, as the clouds parted when we reached the top of a long, slow climb over a stony hillside, I was hugely relieved to discover again, far, far off, the thin silver line of the sea. By that I realized how very far I must have come out of my way in the fog; I would have almost a days journey to regain the lost ground. This made me resolve, if caught in a mountain mist again, to stay still and wait patiently, no matter how long the mist took to shift, for there is no gain or sense in traveling on the wrong road.

Then I began to notice that the mule was walking lame, and, dismounting, I discovered with concern that she had cast a shoe, and had picked up a stone in her forehoof. The stone I was able to remove with my knife, but the shoe was a serious loss, for it might have been thrown off leagues back, there was no hope of coming by it once more. I therefore dismounted and walked by the mule, leading her, in hope mixed with dread: hope that we might find a village where a smith would provide another shoe; dread that if we found a
village it would be another of the sort from which we had fled.

However, no village of any kind did we discover until the day was well advanced, and we had descended from the high peaks and slowly made our way across a wide region of barren, desolate uplands. At last we did come within sight of one or two scattered hamlets. These, I was relieved to find, were composed of ordinary houses, a few barns, dovecotes—not the round huts, thatched with turf, of
that place;
but these villages were poor and tiny, none of them boasting a smithy, or even the rudest kind of inn.

A farmer, whom I overtook riding his burro loaded with so enormous a mound of hay that one could see only its legs and his hat, told me that I would find both a smith and a
posada
at Llanes, a village on the coast about three leagues farther on.

Those last three leagues seemed a weary way! Both I and the mule were limping by now, for one of my shoes had split, and chafed my foot at every step, though I tried to pad it with grass.

Llanes, when at length we reached it, proved to be a fair-sized little port, of prosperous-looking timbered houses set on either side of a rocky river which dashed through and then wound its way to a harbor between two claws of cliff, where small brightly colored fishing vessels lay moored.

Now, however, I came up against a new difficulty, which was that all my stock of money—scanty enough, God knows—had been in the bag that was
left behind. I and the mule were hungry, tired, thirsty, low-spirited, and footsore; I felt somewhat unwell; we both needed new shoes and a good dinner; and we had no money to pay for any of our needs.

Flogging my weary wits in vain to think of an escape from this predicament, I tethered the mule to a roadside tree, and sat down, dispiritedly, on the parapet of the bridge which crossed the river in the middle of the town. To add to my vexation, I could see a smithy on the quay, down below; I caught the glow of the smith's fire and could hear the roar of his bellows and the clang of his anvil. But he was a dour-looking, bracket-faced fellow, who worked at his task without a smile or a word to the passersby; it did not seem to me at all likely that he would be prepared to shoe my mule in exchange for a spinning top or a wooden flute.

(I was mistaken about the smith, as it turned out, but that I did not discover until later.)

There I sat on the bridge, so tired out and dejected that I was quite unable to decide what would be best to do next. About the previous night I did not dare let myself think; that was just a blind patch, to be ignored; but I was somewhat concerned in case the
alguacils
from Oviedo might have come this way inquiring after me, or have sent word about me here; I glanced nervously at the passersby, in case one should suddenly exclaim:

"That is the boy who escaped from the jail in Oviedo—seize him!"

But nobody spared me a look. The mule shook her head and snuffled as if to remind me of my duty to her. I supposed drearily that it would be a practical measure to sell her, for by now it was not too great a distance to Santander to be covered on foot; but, to tell the truth, I had not the heart; I could not bring myself to sell so staunch a comrade until the last possible minute. Likewise I could, I thought, have sold the parrot; but then the parrot had, in some measure, saved my life; it would have seemed too ungrateful to dispose of her for cash.

Lost in these unhelpful reflections, I dawdled on the bridge, my stomach rumbling with hunger, my head weak with sickness, watching the customers enter a nearby
posada,
and sniffing the good smells that came out from it.

Then my notice was attracted by the sound of music, and a voice singing a very lively song. Looking to find the source of this heart-warming melody, I observed a man seated on the quay near the blacksmith's shop. He it was who sang, and at the same time played on a small kit, or traveler's fiddle.

The song he sang was one I knew very well, one that Bob had often sung me. It was in English; it was called "The Faithful Farmer's Son."

The words of the street singer's ballad came floating up in snatches to me, where I sat on the bridge:

"Come all you pretty maidens
And listen to my song..."

I knew the music so well that it made my heart swell inside with sorrow. It was a ballad that Bob had sung to me many and many a time.

"I live on yonder riverside
Where fishes they do swim
And you may gather lilies there
Beside the water's brim..."

It was a tale of a girl refusing all her suitors, because she loved a lad who had been dragged away by the press gang to fight the French at sea.

"I have a sweetheart of my own And he my heart has won He lived in yonder village And was a farmer's son..."

At last a stranger shows her the other half of a broken ring, and declares that he is her long-lost sweetheart.

"Though I was pressed away to sea
And many a battle won,
From you my heart did ne'er depart—
I'm your faithful farmer's son!"

I used to think, though, when Bob sang me the ballad, that the girl must have been a great simpleton not to recognize her lover at the first; if she had really loved him, I thought, however long he had been gone, surely there would have been something so familiar in his step, his air, his voice, his whole bearing, that she
must
have known him?—Besides, what did the half of a broken ring prove? He might have received it from a dying shipmate, or taken it from an enemy. If I did not recognize the man himself, I used to think, I would need more proof than that!

"While these familiar thoughts raced through my head, I had slipped off the bridge, and, without considering what I did, walked down onto the quayside, to get a closer glimpse of the singer. He had placed himself not far from the smithy, where the surly-looking smith was still clanging away with his hammer. The singer, seated on an upturned dinghy, was a lanky-looking fellow, clad in a velveteen jerkin and canvas pantaloons. His hair was brownish-fair, his eyes
gray; his face was ugly, with a wide mouth, snub nose, and big ears that spread out so wide you could see the light through them, like those of burros. Despite all this, there was something very taking and likable about his looks; he kept glancing up and smiling at the people passing by, as if this town had taken his fancy more than any other in the world; and he had such an honest, simple, hopeful air, as he sang his music, with his hat before him on the ground, that I could not help hoping with him that folk would be generous; so far, though, I saw, the hat held only a copper coin, which very likely he had put there himself to encourage business.