Crossing To Paradise (26 page)

“Some
people say the whole point of a journey is to reach your destination.”

Kit the Trader looked round his cabin, blue eyes sparkling, white eyebrows twitching with a life of their own.

“But some clever people,” added his brother Raven, “say the whole point of a journey is the journey.”

“Our lady did,” Gatty replied. “Lady Gwyneth. She said you're reborn each day on a pilgrimage.”

“Well!” said Kit the Trader. “You know what Saracens say?”

“What?” asked Snout.

Kit the Trader looked inquiringly at Gatty and Raven, and then at the quartermaster and the ship's two cooks.

“Travelers are blessed, even infidels! Five times blessed! They leave their worries at home; they learn about foreign people and foreign lands; they enjoy new company; they may trade and make a profit; and when they get back home, everyone's glad to see them.”

“But isn't there a saying,” Gatty asked, “about how getting back home is never as good as thinking about it?”

“What I say,” asserted Kit the Trader, “is the whole point of a journey is exactly that: getting back home. Here's a story to prove it.”

Gatty sighed with pleasure; she leaned back against the cabin wall and inched her buttocks forward.

“Long ago,” began Kit the Trader, “and not so long, there was a pedlar…”

Like that man who stole Sian's cat and turned her into white mittens, thought Gatty.

“…and this pedlar had a dream that he must walk to London. London Bridge!”

Gatty and Snout caught each other's eyes, and gave each other a knowing smile.

“London Bridge!” exclaimed Kit the Trader. “He'd never been a tenth as far before. But he couldn't get this dream out of his head, and the next night he had the same dream again: A man was standing over him, dressed in a surcoat as red as blood, and urging him, ‘Go to London Bridge! Go, good will come of it.'

“So that's what the pedlar did. He walked with his mastiff all the way to London Bridge. But when he got there, he didn't know why he'd come, or who to talk to. He felt completely lost.”

“Gatty got lost in London,” Snout remarked. “Didn't you, girl?”

“Sshh!” said Gatty.

“That night,” said Kit the Trader, “the pedlar stayed in a tavern.”

“The Three Archers?” inquired Snout.

“It was!” said Kit the Trader. “How did you know?” But he put his finger up to stop Snout from explaining. “Well! Three days went by. The pedlar admired a dancing bear. He saw a band of pilgrims set off for Walsingham, singing. But he was beginning to feel rather stupid.

“‘Why did we bother to come?' he asked his mastiff. ‘You tell me that.'

“This was when a shopkeeper waddled up to him. She looked more like a hen than a woman, she did.

“‘What are you up to?' she demanded. ‘Are you waiting for me to turn my back? I've been watching you loitering around for the past three days.'

“When the shopkeeper heard why the pedlar had walked all the way to London Bridge, she cackled with laughter. She nearly laid an egg!

“‘Only fools follow their dreams!' she exclaimed.

“The pedlar looked at her so dismally. He was almost penniless, and very tired, and more than one hundred miles from home.

“‘We all have dreams,' the shopkeeper told him. ‘Only last night I dreamed about a pedlar with a pot of gold at the bottom of his garden. I ask you! Nonsense!' She patted the pedlar on the shoulder and tutted. ‘Take my advice and go back home.'”

Kit the Trader looked round his cabin. Slowly he raised his left knee, his right knee, left, right; he reached out, he hugged himself; then he began to dig.

“He dug and he dug,” said the captain, “and right next to his gnarled hawthorn, the pedlar prised out of the clammy earth a very large metal pot.”

Everyone in the cabin held their breath.

“Yes,” said Kit the Trader, “and it was packed with gold coins.”

“What did he do with them?” asked Gatty.

Somewhere down on deck, two musicians began to play a pipe and fiddle. Then a third joined in, lightly tapping a tambourine. And a woman with a dark voice started to sing.

In the middle of Kit the Trader's cabin, a dozen little flies gyrated and twisted, as if they were tying complicated knots.

“Do with them?” Kit the Trader repeated. “Kept some, gave some away, paid for the church to be rebuilt.”

“All because he followed his dream,” Snout added.

“You see?” said Kit the Trader. “The whole point of the pedlar's journey was to get back home again.”

“We were in a tavern,” Gatty told Kit the Trader, “and a French nun told us a story about a Saracen who walked all the way from Baghdad to Cairo because he had a dream he'd find his fortune there.”

“And did he?” asked Kit the Trader.

“Only when he got home again,” said Gatty. “Under a fountain. It's very strange. Your story and that one, they're the same but not the same.”

Down on deck, the tambourine trembled and the woman's dark voice became more wild and insistent; in the cabin, the insects whirled and giddied.

“They're Saracens from Spain,” Kit the Trader said. “We're sailing them home.”

“Their dream-songs are sailing them home,” Gatty said, without thinking.

Kit the Trader clapped his hands. “Exactly!” he exclaimed. “Songs! Stories! They help us on our way.”

Getting home is not the point of my journey though, thought Gatty. The point was to go to Jerusalem for Lady Gwyneth, and pray for her soul. Gatty crossed herself and shook her head. Anyhow, where is my home? With Lady Gwyneth dead, what am I going to do?

For many days, Gatty thought about the Holy Land and her six-month pilgrimage. She thought about Lady Gwyneth's and Nakin's plan, and how anxious she had been, and all for no reason. She thought about cradling Babolo in her arms, and Mansel so shyly giving her those soft yellow shoes, about listening to Aenor, the novice at Vézelay, telling her how she had to escape, about unbuckling Saviour's bridle on the precipice, and finding the gold ring on the beach of Saint Nicholas, and what Arthur would say when she gave it back to him.

One morning, sitting cross-legged on deck and listening to the Saracen musicians, Gatty thought to herself: I can't work it out! Oliver says hell's mouth is wide and waiting for Saracens. He told Arthur some of them have tails. And I know the Pope says they're God's enemies and we must kill them. Kill them or drive them out of Jerusalem, every single one.

Gatty frowned. They do look different, I know. Their clothes and that. But the Saracens I've met…Gatty began to tick them off on her fingers: those three traders in Venice; Osman, the astronomer; Signor Umberto's slave, Mansur; the musicians in Kyrenia; all the people in the pound at Acre—the snake charmer, the conjuror, and the crowd of laughing children, the wise old man; then Lady Saffiya; and that young boy in Holy Sepulchre…

Gatty shook her head, thoughtfully. I know some Saracens are evil, like those Bedouin who murder pilgrims, but that doesn't mean they all are. Anyhow, some Christians are evil too. The doctor's apprentices in the mountains. Those two boys who attacked me in Candia. And what about Gobbo? What about him? He didn't care at all about his passengers—he only cared for money. Maybe Saracens and Christians are the same: good and bad, all mixed up.

While Gatty was still thinking, Snout came and squatted down beside her.

“Horrible!” he said, with a cheerful smile.

“What?”

“The wild way she sings.”

“No, it's not.”

“So's her headdress.”

“Snout!” protested Gatty.

“A box with a frill on top, and white towels hanging down on each side and at the back.” Snout flapped his hands and grinned. “And a black veil over her face. I don't know!”

Days passed. Gatty cried out at fish leaping and flying; she was silenced by a starburst; she squinted at the ruined tower of a lighthouse so tall it climbed right into the sky.

“Before winds from heaven blew the top off,” Kit the Trader told her, “it was four hundred and fifty feet high. You could see it blinking from more than forty miles away. People call it one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

“What are the others?” asked Gatty.

“The three huge pyramids—they're only a day's ride from here. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And then the Colossus, an enormous bronze man…He was toppled by an earthquake…

“Journeys change us,” the captain told her. “They enable us. They make things possible.”

Sailing west through the Inner Sea, the sea in the middle of the world, the galley always had the morning sun at her back, driving her on, and the softer evening sun—on its bed of pink and rose—calmly awaiting her. For days on end the Etesian wind waffled from the northwest, soft and gentle; then somewhere far south, over the desert, it caught fire and came rushing out of Africa again, breathing flames.

“When you're on deck,” Raven told Gatty, “you must keep your head and face covered. This wind carries sand and eats people alive.”

But even when she wound her pilgrim's scarf around her face and neck, Gatty couldn't prevent dust and sand grains from getting into her ears and nostrils and between her teeth.

The merchant galley zigzagged between dry islands and scruffy ports on the African coast. Sicily and Malta, Sousse and Tunis, Bune, Sardinia, Algiers: a litany of names, a saltspray of syllables.

The crew unloaded bars of smelted iron, anchors, locks, brass cauldrons and pewter plates, bulky rolls of cloth, boxes full of hides, goatskins and fox pelts, a few sacks of beeswax, barrels of saffron, walrus tusks, tapestries, baskets piled with amber. In gloomy warehouses and
fonduks
, noisy souks and bazaars, and sitting on bollards and upturned boats, Kit the Trader and Raven bargained and exchanged them for casks of olive oil, barrels of red wine and sweet white wine, sacks of sugar, glittering blocks of salt, hard white soap, layers of linen, silks and samite and brocades, costly spices and perfumes. They measured with rods and weighed with scales; they haggled and argued; they laughed and wagged forefingers; then they clasped hands, and paid the balance with pieces of silver.

As soon as the galley had passed between the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean, the sea somehow became much bigger, with huge swells and deep troughs. Sailing north along the coast of Portugal, Gatty began to wonder more often what her life would be like when she got back to the Marches.

When you're a pilgrim, she thought, people honor you, they do. They welcome you and feed you and help you on your way. Brother Antony at Saint Mary of the Mountain. Brother Gabriel. We'd never be here now except for them.

And when you're on a pilgrimage, you're free to choose. You can choose when to set off in the morning and when to rest, and sometimes you can choose what you want to eat. I never chose nothing in my life before.

Being a pilgrim is a kind of escape, it is, but in the end you got to go back, don't you? What if I have to work on the land again? Will I wish I was sitting by that fountain and watching Sir Faramond's fish?

I know what I thought in Holy Sepulchre about my whole life being different now, but how can it be? I can read and write, but without Lady Gwyneth…

“What will happen?” Gatty asked Snout. “Without Lady Gwyneth.”

Snout scratched the back of his neck. “Too many bugs on this boat!” he complained.

“And all!” agreed Gatty. “My arms are all swollen.”

“Well,” said Snout, “it's different for me, girl. I got Hew. He'll be six very soon.”

“Dusty's ten,” said Gatty. “Except he died.”

“None of us knows what's going to happen,” said Snout, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “That's the truth of it.”

“Maybe it's best if Nest stayed behind in Venice,” Gatty said. “It is if Sei loves her and marries her. She'll be showing by now.”

“She'll be scared to death,” said Snout. “What I want to know is, who will be our new lord? Will the Earl of Chester appoint someone? Will young Llewelyn see his chance and try to seize the castle?”

“When I think about home,” Gatty said, “I think about Caldicot. It's where I was before I knew it. Where me and Dusty picked up mast for the pigs, and me and Arthur got them bulls apart, and my mother sang me stories. I wish I could remember them. It's where I was going to be betrothed to Jankin, and where Arthur…”

“This Arthur!” said Snout, smiling. “What is he to you?”

Gatty stared at Snout, wide-eyed. “Oh Snout!” she cried. “He's the person—the one person—I can always tell everything to. I tell my heart to Arthur. But now! Now he's a knight and he's going to marry Winnie.”

“You can still talk to him,” Snout said.

Gatty shook her head slowly. “Winnie will stop him.” She gave a heart-felt sigh. “She makes me feel so worthless.”

“That you're not!” said Snout loudly.

“Will the others be home by now?” Gatty asked.

“Not for several weeks yet,” Snout told her. “Not by my reckoning.”

“I want to hear about everything! And I got to talk to Austin.”

“And give him something,” said Snout.

“How do you know?”

“You said so, in Jerusalem. What is it?”

Gatty almost told Snout about her silver seal, but she heard Lady Gwyneth's voice, warning her, and thought better of it.

“Go on!” Snout urged her.

“Nothing,” said Gatty. “A dragon.”

“You've got to talk to Austin about a dragon?”

Gatty nodded.

“I keep thinking,” Snout said slowly, “how you're, well, you're…”

“Betwixt and between,” said Gatty.

“You are,” said Snout. “You're not a field-girl. Not no more. And not a chamber-servant.”