Crossing To Paradise (10 page)

In
the infirmary, Brother Benedict mashed the concoction in his mortar, and added a little more pig's fat and wine. Then he pounded it again and stared at Austin who was lying on his back on a trestle table, eyes closed.

Lifting the lid from a little stone box, the monk took a pinch of muddy gold powder and sprinkled it into the mortar. “Cumin from India,” he informed Lady Gwyneth and Nakin. “Very expensive. Dear Lord, you two look in greater need of treatment than he does! Slumped there like that.”

Lady Gwyneth straightened her back and pressed her shoulders against the rough stone wall. The bench squeaked.

Brother Benedict shook his head. “Coming up the last pitch,” he said, “not one of you was standing upright except the guide. One girl was crawling on her hands and knees, and so was the woman. One man was crouching lower than his staff and one had both hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him. And you, Nakin, you were supporting this priest.”

“And Gatty was supporting me, that's the truth of it,” Lady Gwyneth said meekly. “We all pulled together. We were all sisters and brothers.”

“It won't be long before everyone's accusing and blaming each other again,” Nakin predicted.

“A very brave girl,” said Brother Benedict. “Your Gatty.”

Austin moaned. His whole body shuddered. Then he opened his eyes.

“Quite so,” said Brother Benedict, punching his concoction with the pestle. “You need this poultice, not all these fine words.”

Now the monk busied himself with the tinderbox. In one corner of the room he teased a little nest of moss into flame, and added shavings and twigs to it. Then he positioned a four-legged tray over the fire and poured his concoction onto it.

Austin groaned. “How bad?” he asked.

“Mangled,” the monk replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “Four fingers broken. Not your thumb, though. Four knucklebones bared.”

“Oh! Austin,” said Lady Gwyneth tenderly.

“You, Nakin,” Brother Benedict said. “Come here and hold Austin's elbow. You talk to him, my lady, while I just try this.”

“Austin,” Lady Gwyneth said in a low voice, “can you hear me?”

Austin opened his eyes.

“Your saddlebags. What was in them?”

“Everything,” said the priest. “My altar. The silver crucifix. The linen cloth.”

Lady Gwyneth sadly shook her head. “And Gatty so nearly saved them.”

“My Bible,” said Austin.

“You're holding his elbow?” the monk asked Nakin.

“Your Bible,” repeated Lady Gwyneth.

All at once, Brother Benedict grasped Austin's right forefinger and tugged it and Austin shrieked and jerked his elbow back into Nakin's stomach.

“Very good!” said the monk. “That's straightened it.” He smiled down at poor Austin. “The other three fingers should mend fairly straight. I'll heat the poultice and bandage you now. This won't hurt much.”

Brother Benedict removed the bubbling poultice from the fire and, as soon as it had cooled just a little, he smeared it all over Austin's right hand and wrist with a wooden ladle. “Chickweed and smallage and groundsel,” he told Lady Gwyneth and Nakin, “if you're interested. Pound them together with pig's fat and sheep's fat. Yes, and a little cumin. Boil them in clear wine. Then add the dregs from a barrel of wine and wheat bran, and bring it back to the boil again.”

Before the monk had finished bandaging his hand, Austin had drifted into sleep again, exhausted by the pain.

“Wait here!” the monk instructed Lady Gwyneth and Nakin, and he strode out of the room.

Lady Gwyneth looked at Nakin. “He's very…imperious,” she said.

“High-handed,” said Nakin, and his dewlaps shook a little. “I don't know who he thinks he is. Well! God has spared Austin.”

“And Gatty and Emrys saved him,” Lady Gwyneth added.

“They did,” said Nakin, rather reluctantly.

“What have you got against Gatty?”

“Nothing,” said Nakin in a measured voice. “A peasant girl. I wouldn't have thought she'd be up to it.”

“That girl,” said Lady Gwyneth, “she never asks for praise or thanks.”

Nakin gave Lady Gwyneth a glum look. “She ran away in London,” he said, “and argued her way across France, and scarcely a day passes without your reproving her.”

“I know, I know,” Lady Gwyneth said. “But she's learning fast.”

“She needs to,” said Nakin. “She knows next to nothing. She even thinks the earth is flat!”

“Nakin,” said Lady Gwyneth in a serious voice, “this pilgrimage depends on each one of us. Where would we be without you and your knowledge of money?”

Nakin slightly parted his fleshy lips.

“Gatty's like a diamond before it's cut and polished. Her manners are rough, and, yes, she may think the earth's flat, but she's bold. I tell you, Nakin,” Lady Gwyneth said, “you can teach someone a skill but you can't teach them spirit.”

“Now then,” said Nakin. “What about Nest, whimpering and screeching all the way up here? We should do as we planned.”

Lady Gwyneth nodded.

“To my mind, she's just as bad as she was when you warned everyone you wouldn't put up with so much arguing and complaining.”

Lady Gwyneth lowered her eyes.

“We can leave her in the pilgrims' hospice in Venice,” said Nakin, “and collect her on our way back home. What's more, it'll save us a good deal of money.”

“I don't know, Nakin,” Lady Gwyneth said. “There have been times
when I thought my head would split if I heard one more word from Nest. But we all have our own weaknesses. Even you.”

The merchant smiled and licked his lips. “My lady,” he said.

“And after all these weeks on the road, we've got used to each other. Not only that. I'm responsible for Nest, as you know.”

“She'll be perfectly safe in Venice,” said Nakin.

At this moment, Brother Benedict walked back into the infirmary. In his left hand he was holding a linen cloth, white as a field of snow, and in his right a small silver crucifix.

Lady Gwyneth and Nakin bowed their heads.

Then the monk stepped over to sleeping Austin. He spread the cloth over the priest's chest and stomach, and on the cloth he laid, lightly, the glistening crucifix.

Absurd,
really! Gatty knew it wasn't really like that, but from the moment she turned her back on the high mountains until she reached the stables at Treviso, fourteen days later, she felt as if she were traveling downhill.

To begin with, it was literally and steeply true, of course. Roping themselves together for safety, and leaving their horses to make their own choices, the pilgrims gingerly prodded and picked their way across a blinding field of snow strewn with boulders and slithered down precipitous, slushy paths.

Austin was white-faced with pain, and Nest and Tilda found the way down was even less comfortable than the way up. They couldn't bear to look over the edges. So the guide called a halt, and pulled a cowhide out of one of his mule's packs.

“Look at that!” marveled Gatty. “A mule carrying a cow!”

Snout guffawed. “The wrong way round!” he chortled.

“There's a riddle like that…” Gatty began.

“Gatty!” warned Lady Gwyneth.

The guide spread out the hide, and attached it to his mule's girth.

“Now sit on it!” he told Nest and Tilda. “And keep hold of it.”

So that's what they did. They clutched the hide for dear life, and the mule dragged them down the mountain, bumped and bruised, down and away from the snow and slush and sheer rock faces.

It all happened so fast. One moment, the pilgrims were picking their way through a cropped wilderness of clattering rockfalls and rushing waterfalls, home of the winds. The next they were crossing a meadow of sopping grass where cowslips and bright blue eyes looked up and winked at them. Small birds raced around them, scissoring the pale blue sky. In this
way, they left behind danger and disaster, and came down out of the mountains into Italy.

This was when the pilgrims met a young man shouting his four cows home. Gatty inspected them and one looked so like Hopeless that she caught her breath, and paused, and thought fondly of her cow.

The cowherd had long black hair that flopped over his forehead and fingered his collar, and when he saw Gatty, he just stood in her way, gazing at her and grinning. He gave a low whistle.

Gatty smiled back. She wasn't sure quite what to do.

Then the cowherd stooped, scooped up a cowslip, slipped it between Gatty's bruised and blistered fingers, and kissed the back of her hand—all in one breath.

And that was almost all there was to it. Gatty looked into the young man's eyes; she stared down at the flower, pale and shining. The young man stepped off the path, allowed the pilgrims to pass, shouted to his cows. And Gatty stumbled on.

“A spotted cowherd!” said Nest, wrinkling her pretty nose. “I saw how he looked at you.” But the envy in her voice was there for all to hear.

“And how Gatty looked at him,” Nakin added.

“Not a cowslip!” said Tilda. “When that fades and shrivels, you'll fade and shrivel. That's true as death.”

Gatty heard them, but she didn't care. Smiling to herself, she mounted Syndod and once (well, twice, actually) she turned round and looked over her shoulder. Only later, when she lent her cob to Austin, and rode pillion behind Nest, did she realize she was still holding the cowslip, hot and crushed, in her right hand.

“A shaft of sunlight!” said Lady Gwyneth.

“What, my lady?”

“A shaft of sunlight for your thoughts. Are you still back up there in the mountains?”

Gatty gave Lady Gwyneth a slow, rather wistful smile.

“You're not still thinking about that boy?”

“She is,” said Nest.

“I didn't even hear his voice,” Gatty said. “Well, only his shouting! Not what he sounded like inside his body.”

Lady Gwyneth smiled gently. And after a while, she said, “Nothing goes to waste, even when we think it does. It's all part of God's plan.”

Gatty stuck out her lower lip.

“I was a faithful wife,” Lady Gwyneth told her. “I was a mother. Nothing goes to waste, Gatty.”

Once the pilgrims had passed through the old Roman gate at Susa, their road headed east to Torino; and throughout those lovely last days of April and first days of May, the mountains were always sitting, as it were, on their left shoulders.

A ring of children holding hands and singing high and even higher, like larks climbing, and then bursting into peals and squeals of laughter; green barley blades, all shotsilk and shiver; a slender belltower with humming bells; two talkative Italian pepper merchants on their way home to Milan from Bruges; a stand of mysterious dark cypresses, utterly still, furled as tight as winding-sheets; a party of French pilgrims drinking wine and singing under a walnut tree, solitary and as beautiful as the trees that grew in Eden; and at last the fork in the road they'd followed for so long—one way leading south to Rome, the other to Venice and Jerusalem: Each fresh and scented day brought its own marker, and no day seemed arduous compared to those preceding it.

The pilgrims had not enjoyed such warm sunlight since they left Ewloe, and one afternoon, while they were picking their way across a stony, sparkling stream, Gatty dismounted and just threw herself into the waiting water.

Tilda followed her, gasping and laughing, and before long all nine of them were splashing around. First they gamboled and stumbled; then they washed themselves; and then they scrubbed their tunics and gowns before they rode on, steaming, under the sun.

Daydreaming, almost asleep in the saddle, Gatty sometimes felt as if she were alone, completely alone on this middle-earth, but at other times
she sensed she was part of an immense human procession—one with all the quick, all the dead who had ever made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, plowing along gouged and muddy tracks, lifting their eyes to fierce mountains, quickstepping across Lombardy to Venice.

“I'm both, aren't I?” Gatty said to herself. “Always in company yet always alone. One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.”

Three days later, exactly ten weeks after leaving Ewloe, Lady Gwyneth and her companions at last rode into the livery stables at Treviso, where the elderly stablemaster and his daughters welcomed them. The pilgrims relieved the beasts of their burdens, and then the two women spread out a sky-blue cloth on the ground and covered it with food and wine.

“Morterel!” Gatty exclaimed.

“What's that?” asked Nest.

“Bread. You boil it in milk.”

Nakin took Nest's right arm. “Peasants' food!” he sniffed.

“Leave me alone!” said Nest.

But Nakin changed his tune as soon as he'd tasted a mouthful. This Italian morterel, if that's what it was, was made of boiled cake, not bread, and the cake was laced with wine and spotted with currants and diced almonds.

“I'll make this when we get home, my lady,” the cook promised Lady Gwyneth. “I can get almonds in Chester. Or else I'll use hazelnuts. They'll taste just as good.”

While their horses and ponies wandered round the livery courtyard, now and then pausing to slurp a mouthful of water or chew a mouthful of hay, the pilgrims sat with the old stablemaster and his daughters; and weary as they were, but still quite clean from their splash in the stream only three days before, they felt the early evening sun on their backs and gave thanks to God.

“You can sell your horses to us,” one of the women said in good English, “or stable them here while you sail to Jerusalem, and collect them on your way home. The choice is yours.”

“And either way,” said Nakin, “the profit is yours.”

“We've already decided,” Emrys said. “Lady Gwyneth will keep her Arab.”

“Forever and a day,” Lady Gwyneth sang out. “I'll ride him back to London and then I'll buy him from the stables there.”

“If Solomon says so,” cautioned Snout.

“I'll buy him and bring him to Ewloe,” Lady Gwyneth said.

“And Gatty here,” Emrys continued, “she'll keep her Welsh cob.”

Gatty nodded vigorously.

“She's valiant!” said Austin.

“What's that?” asked Gatty.

“Brave.”

“She is and all,” Gatty exclaimed.

“So that's two,” said Emrys, “and…I'll keep my Frisian. He's alert. He's kindly.”

“He's got an ugly mug,” said Snout.

“So have you!” Emrys retorted. “Yes, I'll keep him. He's strong. He'll last.”

The old stablemaster looked puzzled. He counted the pilgrims on his fingers, then counted the horses.

“Yes!” said Emrys. “Eight horses. Nine pilgrims.”

He pointed to Austin's heavily bandaged right hand, and told the stablemaster and his daughters about the disaster in the mountains, and his description was punctuated by much tooth-clicking, many exclamations and little cries.

One of the young women laid her hand on the priest's left arm. “But God saved you!” she said.

“How does your hand feel now?” Lady Gwyneth asked Austin.

“Hot,” replied the priest. “Throbbing.”

“So, then,” Emrys told the stablemaster, “we must pay you for Austin's horse…”

“…and you must pay us for five horses,” Nakin said quickly. “The other three we'll keep and collect on the way home.”

The stablemaster laughed and said something to his two daughters, and they both put their hands to their cheeks.

“He say,” one daughter translated, “he say you take us instead.”

“Really!” murmured Nakin in an oily voice.

“Joke!” said the daughter.

“It's all decided, then,” said Emrys.

“Thank you,” Lady Gwyneth said. “We all have good reason to thank you, Emrys. And so do our horses!”

Then Gatty led Syndod to her stall. She checked that her manger and trough were well-stocked, and then she rubbed her cob's poll and nose.

“You're so strong,” she told her in her rich, low voice. “My marvel!”

Syndod stood foursquare and, with her slightly bloodshot eyes, gave Gatty an alert look.

“I'm going to Jerusalem,” Gatty told her. “Then I'll come back to you.”

And with that, she kissed Syndod on the side of her nose.

That night, the pilgrims ate and slept in the tavern at Treviso and, close at last to Venice, they had every reason to sleep content.

But when Snout went out to the latrines for “deliverance,” as he put it, he saw a corpse-candle and lumbered back into the tavern still clutching his breeches.

“It came out of the churchyard,” he panted. “Straight at me.”

“A flame,” said Tilda.

“A small flame, yes. A ball. It passed right by me.”

“Then it wasn't for you,” Tilda reassured him. “What color was it?”

“Blue. Ghost-blue.”

Tilda nodded. “It was on its way to collect a child's soul,” she said.

“Not Hew?” Snout said anxiously.

“Of course not,” said Tilda. “There'll be a dead child here in Treviso before daybreak.”

As if the corpse-candle weren't enough, Lady Gwyneth three times heard something whistling in the dark. Lying on her pallet of bristling straw, she thought of all the things she'd heard about whistlers, and none
of them were good. How many times had her father warned her that any kind of whistling after dark meant danger? Was the whistler a witch raising a wind, and would dark waves drown them on their way across the water to Venice? Or was it a night-bird? Not one of the Seven Whistlers! No, surely not. It couldn't have flown all the way from Ewloe to Treviso…This is when Lady Gwyneth fell asleep.

As soon as day dawned, Lady Gwyneth told her companions about the night-whistling, and Tilda wore a funeral face.

“We must wait here then,” she said, “wait for a day and the danger will pass.”

“We can't!” cried Lady Gwyneth. “We've got to get to Venice as soon as we can!”

“My lady,” said Nakin. “The last pilgrim ship doesn't leave until the first day of June. We do have time.”

“And I can sleep,” yawned Nest, “and then sleep.”

Lady Gwyneth wrung her hands. “We've faced so many dangers already,” she said. “Losing Saviour, and rockfalls, and that revolting butcher, and food that made us ill! Those thieves in London!”

“I'm not going one step further,” Tilda said firmly.

Lady Gwyneth locked her fingers and twisted them. “What do you think, Austin?” she asked.

“I think,” Austin said slowly, “I think you're fortunate to be able to twist your fingers!” He looked solemnly at the dirty parcel of cloth covering his own right hand. “Let us put our faith in God and continue on our way.”

Tilda looked at the priest angrily.

Austin raised his right paw and carefully made the sign of the cross over the bowed heads of the pilgrims.

Lady Gwyneth looked up; the light of Venice was dancing in her eyes.