Crossing To Paradise (7 page)

Which
way; what weather; water and bread and Lenten stew and fish; caring for their horses; nursing their sores; the punctuation of prayers: After the pilgrims had landed in France, the ingredients of each day were the same, and yet their color, detail and mood kept changing. On the first day, they heard the music of French spoken by Normans, fresh and pretty as a meadow of spring cowslips and forget-me-nots; on the second, Snout's cooking pot sprung a leak, stirring Emrys to anger and delaying the pilgrims while a blacksmith hammered out a new one; on the third day, Gatty wore her soft yellow felt shoes for the first time and, like a tender April shower arrived a little too early, she wept sweet, warm tears when she thought about Mansel, the shoemaker's son; on the fourth day, a red-faced pardoner accosted the pilgrims at the gate of some town, which one Gatty couldn't remember, and as soon as he discovered Lady Gwyneth was Welsh, he tried to persuade her to buy Saint David's little toe.

“A little toe but a very large price!” Lady Gwyneth said, shaking her head. “
Dim peryg!
Not a chance!”

“Go away!” said Nakin. “You pest!”

The pardoner spoke only broken English but not so broken that he was unable to insult the Welsh. He angrily called them sorcerers, and fickle, and even bestial.

Lady Gwyneth was terribly upset. “Scabrous!” she exclaimed. “I'll have your name dropped to the bottom of each cursing-well in Wales. There was a Welsh pope, I hope you know. Kyric! The Welsh pope!”

On the fifth day, late March sunlight warmed the pilgrims' backs, and on the sixth a yapping dog attached himself to them for most of the morning, and exasperated them even more than Tilda's endless sniffing and sobbing, and Nakin said that difficult as their pilgrimage was becoming, it was still preferable to his quarrelsome wife.

“He's a strong man, is Emrys,” Nakin observed, “shouldering them both. This pilgrimage, and his wife as well.”

“Are you insulting Tilda?” demanded Emrys.

“Still, Everard,” Nakin went on. “Better a bad wife than no wife at all, wouldn't you say?

“
By all the silken hairs on my chin-chin-chin.
I wish I had a wife at home-home-home
…”

Which way; what weather; water and bread and Lenten stew and fish: So, like a cartwheel the slow week turned, and on the evening of the seventh day, unable to reach the pilgrim hostel at Reims before dark, the pilgrims rode into the scruffy yard of a tavern.

In the courtyard, a crowd of people were watching two pigs stumbling and tumbling around as if they were drunk.

“That's just what they are,” a French nun shrieked, almost helpless with laughter. “They're drunk!”

“How come?” asked Emrys.

“They knocked over a beer barrel,” explained a young man with a little forked black beard, “and drank some of the grounds.”

One sow advanced towards Gatty, snuffling.

“Come here, then,” said Gatty. There can't be no harm in tickling her, she thought. Lady Gwyneth won't mind, will she?

But as soon as Gatty tickled her right ear, the sow's front legs gave way beneath her. She rolled right over onto her back.

“I never seen that before,” Gatty laughed. “She won't be sober this side of morning.”

“Disgraceful!” said Austin.

“Desirable!” said Nakin.

That evening, the tavern served hot herring, and it didn't taste too good. In fact, it tasted bad, and no amount of beer could disguise it.

Lady Gwyneth spat hers straight out into the moldy straw covering the floor.

Everard chewed, and chewed some more, and screwed up his face, and swallowed his.

“Got the stomach for it, have you?” Nakin taunted him. Then he gulped down his portion as if it were the most tasty wild rabbit, or gosling fattened with groats and oatmeal.

Gatty stared at Nakin. His plan for me, she thought. The one he and Lady Gwyneth were talking about. I've got to find out what it is.

Snout shook his head and pushed his portion to one side. “Lent!” he said in disgust.

“Yes,” agreed Austin. “March is the cruelest month.”

“No meat,” Snout went on. “No eggs. No cheese. Rotten food.” He turned to Gatty. “I wouldn't, if I were you.”

Gatty smelled the herring and wrinkled up her nose, and then she ate it. “Known worse,” she declared.

After the pilgrims had gone out to the piss-buckets or the trenches, they retreated to the dormitory where all the women slept on straw at the far end of the room, and all the men slept at the near end. Emrys, Snout and Nakin played dice, and Lady Gwyneth told Gatty about her childhood in Clwyd and how her father used to call her his “Pearl.” Then they and Everard gossiped with some of the other travelers: the young man with the forked beard who was on his way to the University of Paris to study; a self-important German envoy whose mouth was stuffed with platitudes, and who refused to tell them whence he had come or whither he was going—“Walls have ears!” he kept saying. These two, and a friendly merchant from Norway with shining pale blue eyes, who was on his way south with amber, seal-skins and walrus tusks, and in clipped, clean English told them how in his country summer nights were days and the winter days were nights.

“That's nothing!” said the German envoy. “I've sailed to an island in the Red Sea, and in the night sky there are no constellations. No Little Bear. No Great Bear.”

“Great Bear?” repeated Gatty.

“The Plough,” murmured Everard.

“No,” said the envoy, pumping his elbows so that his cloak flapped and he looked like a stork settling on its nest. “Not even the hunter, Orion. There's just one star and the people there call it Canapos. The hills on the island are made of gold, you know. I've seen them. They're guarded by pismires.”

“Pismires!” exclaimed Gatty, and, the memory of Howell and Lankin sitting on the church wall at Caldicot and flinging insults at each other skipped through her mind.

“You bubble-butted bullfrog!…You clicking clinchpoop!…You piddle-scum!…You bug-eyed horseradish!…You pismire!”

“What are you laughing at?” Lady Gwyneth inquired.

Gatty shook her head. “Just remembering, my lady,” she said. “When I was at Caldicot.”

“I've seen the Merry Dancers,” the Norwegian merchant told them. “Streams ice-blue, violet curtains, streaks and bands, gold-and-silver—all of them swelling, trembling in the northern night sky.”

“A miracle!” said Lady Gwyneth.

“Probably not,” said the student with the forked beard.

“Who are we to say?” asked Lady Gwyneth, smiling an inward smile.

“What I say is that understanding explains many things we think of as miracles,” the student replied. “The tip of a black twig unfurling, soft as a baby's fingertips. Is that a miracle?”

“And a boy's voice breaking,” added Everard. “The same boy, the same body, but a different voice.”

“What I mean,” Lady Gwyneth replied, “is that these things are God's plan, and we should wonder at them.”

“Ah!” said the student. “
Mirare
. Yes,
miraculum.
”

At that moment, the French nun bustled into the dormitory, and plumped herself down on the straw beside them.

“What are you talking about?” she said, and she giggled. And without waiting for a reply: “Would you like to hear a story?”

“I'm sure we would,” said Lady Gwyneth. “Wouldn't we, Gatty?”

“If you would, my lady,” Gatty said carefully.

“Well,” began the nun, “this came from the Caliphate of Baghdad.”

“The what of what?” Gatty exclaimed.

“Beyond Jerusalem,” Everard told her. “Even further than Jerusalem.”

“What's a Caliph?” demanded Gatty.

“Sshh!” said Lady Gwyneth. “A leader.”

“A successor,” the student corrected her. “
Khalifa.
A successor to the Prophet Muhammad.”

“A pagan,” said Everard. “An enemy of God.”

“Will you all be quiet!” Lady Gwyneth insisted.

“Yes,” said the nun, “this is a Saracen story, but it doesn't matter. Now! There was this merchant. He lived in a street lined with palm trees and at the bottom of the garden there was a white fountain.”

Gatty didn't know what palm trees or a fountain were, but she saw Lady Gwyneth look at her out of the corners of her eyes, and kept her mouth shut.

“He was a poor man, though,” said the nun, “and it was his own fault. He wasted his money, gambling and dicing. Now one night this merchant had a dream. A man in scarlet clothing stood beside him and told him to go to Cairo in Egypt. He said the merchant would make his fortune if he went to Egypt.”

Gatty was sure she had heard the word “Egypt” before, but she couldn't think where.

“It took the merchant weeks and weeks to walk to Cairo—he couldn't even afford a horse, you know—and when he got there, he couldn't afford to stay in the tavern. He lay down that night in the courtyard of the mosque.”

“Where Saracens pray,” Lady Gwyneth whispered to Gatty.

“That night, robbers rushed into the courtyard, and into the house next to it,” the nun continued. “When the constables arrived, they thought the merchant was one of the robbers and beat him until he turned purple, and then they locked him in a prison cell. After three days this merchant was dragged before the Chief Constable.

“‘Where do you come from?' the Constable asked him.

“‘Baghdad,' said the merchant.

“‘Baghdad! That's three weeks away. What are you doing here?'

“‘I had a dream. A man in scarlet clothing stood beside me and told me to come. He said I'd find my fortune if I came to Cairo. And what is it, my fortune? The hundred strokes and stripes your men generously gave me.'

“‘You fool!' the Constable exclaimed. ‘You came all this way because of a dream? We all have dreams. Why, I had a dream last night about going to Baghdad, going down a cobbled street fringed with palm trees, and coming to a white fountain, and finding gold buried under it. You see? Nonsense.'

“‘I see,' said the merchant.

“‘Take my advice and go back home,' the Chief Constable told him.

“‘I will,' said the merchant.

“As soon as the merchant got home,” said the nun, “he started to dig up his fountain, and under it he found a pot full of gold coins. He found his fortune.”

The nun giggled happily, and Lady Gwyneth sighed. “A very good story,” she said. “Even the Saracens have good stories. Thank you for telling it.”

“
De rien,
” the nun replied.

Gatty didn't know what she meant, but she thought it better not to ask any more questions.

“Dreams,” mused Lady Gwyneth. “Partly true, partly untrue. Such a strange mixture.”

Everard coughed and swallowed noisily. He swallowed again.

“Everard!” said Lady Gwyneth. “Are you all right?”

Ashen-faced, Everard stood up, and without another word hurried out into the courtyard, and was at once violently sick.

That night, at one time or another, surrounded by a circle of indifferent pigs, Emrys and Snout and Nakin and almost everyone else who had eaten the herring was sick as well.

Not Gatty, though.

All night Lady Gwyneth's chamber-girl lay innocent, with her hands flung back above her head, palms up.

“So you slept?” Lady Gwyneth asked her.

Gatty gave a prodigious yawn, and then clamped her right hand to her mouth.

Lady Gwyneth gently placed her hands over her stomach.

“I known worse, my lady!” said Gatty, grimacing.

“No!”
said Lady Gwyneth. “Not today and not tomorrow. And not the next day either.”

“Why not?” whined Nest.

“How many more times do I have to tell you?” Lady Gwyneth demanded. “We've already forfeited two days. Gatty, you cost us one in London, and then there was the day after we ate that rotten herring.”

“So we can't have another rest day and it's all because of Gatty,” said Nest.

Lady Gwyneth sniffed.

“Austin could give me another reading lesson,” Nest said slyly. “And you, Gatty.”

“We've no idea what risks and delays lie ahead of us,” Lady Gwyneth replied. “We have to cross high mountains, and Nakin says there'll still be snow and ice on the high passes.”

Nest sighed noisily.

“How difficult you make life for yourself,” Lady Gwyneth said, “and for us all. Complaining. Whining. You must just accept your bruised knee, your hoarse voice, your…your neck. I don't know. What else?”

“My buttocks,” said Nest. “All this riding. Jolting.”

“On Palm Sunday,” Lady Gwyneth said loudly, “on this very day, Jesus meekly rode on the colt of an ass from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem. He chose to suffer, Nest, he chose to die, and you complain to me about your buttocks!”

This tirade shamed Nest into silence.

“Do you remember my warning everyone on the boat?” asked Lady Gwyneth. “We've come too far for anyone to turn back now, but if you go on like this, I'll leave you behind in Venice, and you can wait for us there.”

Gatty rode beside them. Her eyes were lowered and her eyeballs burned. She kept thinking about overhearing Lady Gwyneth and Nakin talking about her on the boat, and Nakin saying he had a plan. What plan?

It wasn't very long before Emrys rode up alongside them. “My lady,” he said. “Our horses could do with a rest day.”

“They'll get one,” Lady Gwyneth snapped. “They'll get three. Good Friday and Easter Eve and Easter Day. But first we have to reach the great monastery at Vézelay.”

Lady Gwyneth's grey wheezed.

“Hear that?” asked Emrys.

Lady Gwyneth leaned forward and patted her Arab's neck. “I've told her Good Friday,” she said brightly. “Our aches and pains—our small sufferings—they're part of our pilgrimage. We must learn to welcome them.”

“You've told the horses that, have you, my lady?” Emrys asked.

“Emrys!” exclaimed Lady Gwyneth.

“As with humans, so with horses,” Emrys warned her. “Ignore a small complaint and you risk a greater one.”

“We'll rest over Easter at Vézelay,” Lady Gwyneth assured him. “We really have no choice but to ride on. We mustn't run the risk of missing the last sailing from Venice.”

So while Jesus rode on a colt into Jerusalem, and overturned the stalls of all the wheelers and dealers in the temple, while He gave a blind man back his seeing eyes, and infuriated the chief priests, and while He was betrayed by Judas Iscariot—while all these things came to pass, the pilgrims rode south.

Emrys had pockets of pus all over his face; Tilda had such pain in one arm, the left one, that she kept it strapped up the whole time; Snout's throat glands were swollen; Nakin had too much evil-smelling gas in his body; the pilgrims were all aching, limb-weary, bone-weary.

The next morning, it began to rain. Not a clean, sweet, early April shower but a persistent drizzle that worked its way through the pilgrims'
hats and cloaks and inside their boots, until they were all drenched and bone-cold and miserable.

For a while, they plowed on because there was nowhere to shelter. But when they came to a small wooded cliff, and saw through the mist a shallow cave, Lady Gwyneth agreed to call a halt, worried though she was about the slow progress they were making.

When they got there, she and Everard were both so stiff in their saddles that they needed help to dismount.

“My fingers won't work,” Lady Gwyneth said.

“Now you know what mine are like,” Tilda told her. “And my toes. The whole time.”

While Nest helped Lady Gwyneth to undress, and the other pilgrims squelched around and peeled off their sodden clothes and pulled on whatever dry clothing they had in their saddlebags, Gatty found in the back of the cave the remains of a fire—charcoal, a few sticks and branches, ashes—and settled herself beside it.

She burrowed into her scrip. “My fire-starter,” she said to herself. “Where is it?”

Gatty pulled out a little wooden box. Inside it, and mercifully still dry, were little strips of char-cloth, mouse-nest fibers, the thinnest strips of birch bark. Those and Gatty's lumps of grey-green flint and steel, with which to strike sparks.

Holding them close to the box, Gatty clashed the flint against the steel over and again. But when at last she did strike a spark, it flew in the wrong direction. Patiently, Gatty kept trying until a spark landed on the mouse-nest, and at once she cupped it between her hands and very gently, very steadily blew on it.

As soon as the first flame flickered, Gatty tipped the nest onto the floor of the cave, added little sticks to it, and asked all the others to hunt for wood.

“Anything lying around in the cave,” she called out. “And fallen branches outside. It doesn't matter if they're damp. Anything!”

After this, Snout set up a tripod, and filled the cooking pot with water from the pool at the entrance to the cave, and put vegetable stalks and oatmeal into it; Emrys, meanwhile, built a frame behind the fire so the pilgrims could at least dry their stockings.

Snout's soup slowly warmed the pilgrims. Sitting close to one another around the fire, they began to steam. To talk. Even to laugh again.

Gatty looked hungrily at Lady Gwyneth. She hoped so much for just a spark of approval for lighting the fire, but Lady Gwyneth kept her thoughts to herself.

Grey mist stood outside the smoky cave. Inside, the nine pilgrims coughed and huddled together for warmth, they drowsed and fell asleep.

When the pilgrims woke, all the rain clouds had blown away.

South they rode, under the sun's primrose eye, and before reaching Auxerre they came to the banks of the River Yonne. There they boarded a flat-bottomed ferry, but the ferry began to rock from side to side and Lady Gwyneth's stallion whinnied and kicked out at the passengers standing behind him. Then he leaped right out of the boat. He swam ahead of it to the riverbank, shook himself until he whirred, and then stood quite quietly, waiting for Lady Gwyneth to disembark.

“The distance from success to disaster,” Lady Gwyneth told Emrys, “is no wider than this milky French river.”

Now the pilgrims saw the Morvan hills rising up ahead of them, and before long they breasted the first of them. They picked their way down into sloping valleys past little hillside vineyards, they padded through whispering pinewoods.

After three more days, they crossed the great pilgrim road leading west all the way to Saint James of Compostela in Spain. And, as Lady Gwyneth had predicted, they rode into the great monastery of Saint Mary Magdalen in Vézelay in good time to die with Jesus, and lie with Him in the cold rock tomb, and on the third morning rise with Him again.

While all the others hurried straight to the stables, Gatty stared about her in absolute amazement. A giant courtyard! Walls so white and bright they half-blinded her. Chapels and colonnades and pointed towers and granaries. The monastery was a town in itself. Nuns and monks, hundreds and hundreds of them, all wearing black habits, were striding and streaming and criss-crossing and huddling, busy as ants. And up in the high belfry bells chorused with rich, shining voices, the fruit not only of their tongues and throats but their whole bodies.

“
Pays de dieu!
” a monk called out. “
Pays de la Madeleine!
”

Gatty frowned.

“D'où venez-vous? D'Espagne? D'Angleterre?
English?”

“English,” said Gatty.

“Ahh!” said the monk, and he spread his arms. “This Vézelay! God's own country! Home of
la Madeleine.
”

“What's Madeleine?” asked Gatty.

The monk looked at Gatty strangely. “
Sainte Marie,
” he exclaimed.

“Oh! Saint Mary Magdalen, you mean,” Gatty said.

“
Enorme!
” said the monk. “Big in Europe.”

“What's Europe?” Gatty asked.

The monk opened and closed his mouth like a fish. “Europe,” he repeated. “Europe!
Nom de dieu!
” Then he showed the palms of his hands to heaven, and walked away.

Inside the guesthouse reserved for pilgrims, women and men went two different ways—even those who were married, like Tilda and Emrys.

In the refectory, Gatty found herself sitting at one of three long tables between Lady Gwyneth and Sister Hilda, a dumpling of a nun whose dewlaps rested on her breasts and breasts rested on the table.

Opposite Gatty sat Aenor, a pale girl who was much the same age as she was, and still a novice.

Both of them spoke English.

“Jerusalem, you say?” Sister Hilda demanded.

“God willing,” said Lady Gwyneth.

“Why?”

“Why?” exclaimed Lady Gwyneth. “Let me finish this excellent trout, and I'll explain.”

“From everything I've heard,” the stout nun announced, “it's quite obvious you're likely to fall by the wayside on pilgrimage. Reeling drunkards, swearing gamblers, whoremongers! Foul songs in the taverns!”

“It's not like that at all,” said Nest. “You can't imagine the hardship. Each day's a penance.”

“I should have liked to go on a pilgrimage,” said Aenor, the young novice.

Sister Hilda snorted. “You wouldn't get as far as Autun,” she said. “Not with your weakness. Your place is here, my girl.”

The novice laid a white hand over her chest, and coughed delicately. But her sepia eyes. Gatty saw how they were burning.

“Your English is strong, though,” Lady Gwyneth said kindly.

“She was brought up in England,” Sister Hilda said. “Bury Saint Edmunds.”

“I know that saint,” said Gatty. “He's in our church at Caldicot.” She grinned at Aenor, and the novice nervously smiled back.

“Aenor's half-English and half-Italian,” Sister Hilda said stiffly. “Now, you've finished that trout, haven't you?”

Lady Gwyneth licked the tip of her right forefinger and dabbed the corners of her mouth. “Yes! Well, I can tell you I've brought three sacks with me on this pilgrimage. One sack is full of patience, one contains as much money as we will need, and the third sack's brimming with my belief, my faith.”

At this moment, the nun sitting at the head of the middle table vigorously shook a handbell. All the nuns at once stood up, and the pilgrims followed them.

“
Benedicamus benedicantur,
” intoned the nun at the head of the table. “
Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.
”

“Amen,” everyone responded.

“That's it!” Sister Hilda said in a hoarse voice. “Silence now until morning—after we've broken our fast.” Briskly, she made the sign of the
cross over her place at the table, picked up her wooden trencher and mug and, with a purposeful nod to pale Aenor, stumped out of the refectory.

As Gatty followed Lady Gwyneth, she felt a hand on her elbow. The hand guided her to the left, at once to the right, and away into a dark cloister.

“What is it?” asked Gatty.

Aenor led Gatty through the cloister garden ashen in the moonlight, and over to a lime tree.

“
Tandaradei!
” she sang in a low voice. “We got away!”

“I'll get into trouble,” Gatty said.

The pale novice gazed at Gatty. “Sshh! Whisper! Your mother…”

“My mother?”

“She loves you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lady Gwyneth. I can see how she does.”

Gatty guffawed, then clasped a hand over her mouth. “I'm not Lady Gwyneth's daughter!”

“You're not?”

“I'm a field-girl. Well, I was.”

“You mean…lowborn?” The pale girl considered Gatty.

“I got to go,” whispered Gatty. “I'll get into trouble. We can talk tomorrow.”

The pale girl grasped Gatty's right wrist.

“What?”

“Please! I must ask you.”

“What?”

“Can I come?”

“Come?”

“With you. To Jerusalem?”

Gatty drew in her breath. She had no idea how to reply.

“I can't stay here. I can't. Not one day longer.” Aenor's breath quickened. “Not with what she does to me. God doesn't want me to. I can walk and ride. I can.”

Gatty stared at the girl. She could hear her desperation.

“Will you ask Lady Gwyneth?” she asked, standing in the moonlight like a wraith.

Gatty reached out. She wrapped her arms around the pale girl. Fiercely she hugged her frail, flat-chested body.

“I'm afraid,” Aenor whispered.

Dog-tired as she was, Gatty couldn't sleep for a long time that night because of all the thoughts and questions giddying round inside her head.

Why can't she stay one day longer? Why's she so afraid? What does that lump, Sister Hilda, do to her? I must help her, but how? How can I? It did just cross Gatty's mind that Lady Gwyneth could leave Nest and all her complaining behind at the monastery and take wretched Aenor with her instead. But then she gave a start. Is that Nakin's plan, she thought. To persuade Lady Gwyneth into leaving me here? What if she decides to take Aenor instead of me? What will I do?

In the roof of the women's dormitory, the beams cricked and creaked; and in her sleep, Tilda was talking metrical nonsense in a completely reasonable voice. In the darkness, someone sighed. Someone sniffed. And then, somewhere up on the pantiles, a monastery dove cooed promises. Gatty fell asleep.