Crusade of Tears: A Novel of the Children's Crusade (17 page)

Wil’s face paled in the early day’s light and perspiration beaded on his brow. “B-but, the … the priest ordered it be given to Mother … and …”

“Hear me, lad,” Pieter offered gently, concerned for the boy’s sudden terror. “I am certain your memory is a bit confused. For all their wicked ways, I’ve yet to know a priest to give such to a living soul, and …”

“But he did, he did! He said it would end m’mother’s fever.” Wil wrung his hands and looked fearfully about the circle of blank faces staring at him. “He did … I swear it.” The boy slowly backed away from the camp before fleeing into the shadowed woodland.

Karl returned with some water and the troubled priest began to prepare the brew. “Young fellow,” Pieter said, “would you recall any instructions for the remedy your village priest offered for your mother?”

Karl thought for a moment and then answered casually. “Methinks something of an infusion from an herb called
Bella … Bella Atrop
… I do not actually remember for certain…. Why do you ask?”

Pieter nearly dropped his pail and his face darkened with rage. He pursed his lips and breathed through pinched nostrils, but held his tongue. With a sad look to the forest he answered mercifully, “’Tis no matter.”

Early in the evening of that same day the cold hand of death plucked a soul from the faithful band. Maria the Younger had drawn her last breath and now lay lifeless and stark-white on the dry grass. Poor Marta was failing and the sight of Maria’s drawn face gave her fair cause to cry out in fear. Two others had shown symptoms of the same distress and Pieter suggested the three be taken by first light to a small village he had noticed in the distance.

But before the stars could find their place, poor Marta had passed to her rest as well. Both girls’ bodies were washed by loving hands in the dark Rhine and tenderly and tearfully laid in shallow night-dug graves. The weeping children stood respectfully on the moonlit riverbank and stared at the stony mounds as a heavyhearted Pieter addressed the Almighty.

“Pater, Filius, Spiritus Sanctus
… Oh, Lord of all Creation, we know not why You chose to withhold Your awesome might from these helpless ones. We know not why the Great Physician heals not on most occasions. We understand little of You, but You are our God. Help us understand so we might be empowered to love You more deeply. Now we beseech You to spare these departed souls the horrors of the Pit and receive them into Your heavenly realm, forever. Amen.”

Wil stood at a distance, still reeling from Pious’s betrayal, and observed his weeping band with some disdain. His grief and frustration had turned inward and an unrequited wrath seethed in his bones. The haunting awareness of his own ignorance and his misplaced confidence fed his fury. He yearned for vengeance and vowed to never trust again.

Maria cuddled with Solomon between the two graves and sobbed quietly to sleep. Others slowly drifted to their grassy beds at the roadside and stared sadly into the late July night’s sky. Only Pieter’s restless groaning broke the silence of that sorrowful night and soon all were fast asleep.

The rustle of birds at prime stirred the travelers and set them to their morning’s tasks. After bidding a sad farewell, the fevered children were escorted to the nearby hamlet while others prepared for first-meal. Before long a few eels were roasting over a snapping fire and three good, round turnips were boiling in the pot. Pieter had finished his morning prayers and returned to the camp quietly.

“So, Father Pieter,” smirked Tomas, “resolve this riddle: Say how you use these deaths to understand your God.”

Wil stared hard at the troubled priest and stepped to Tomas’s side. Pieter looked first at his feet and then at his beloved Maria who was holding his bony hand in a firm grip. He stroked Solomon’s head and sighed. “I … I am without a reply, my son. I simply do not know.”

Pleased with his perceived victory, Tomas sneered and walked to the far side of the camp. The other children soon finished their small portions and reassembled, the escorts having returned. All tucked their crosse securely into their rope belts and now waited patiently for Wil’s command to march. Pieter dragged himself to his position but his mind was plagued by the vision of the pale cheeks and purple lips of the two girls he had interred the night before. He turned one final look at their graves and shook his head.

The crusaders marched silently southward that day with little to distract them from their exhaustion other than an occasional peddler or passing pilgrim. Pieter, determined to leave the past in its place, leaned hard on his staff and bent low to scratch Solomon’s ears. “Ah, Karl… I’ve a bit of bad news for you.”

Karl stepped quickly to his side. “Bad news?”

“I’ve the answer to thy riddle.” He smiled weakly.

Disappointment shrouded the boy’s round face and he kicked at a stone in the dust.

“’Twas a fine riddle, though, one I’ll endeavor to remember in m’old age.” Pieter chuckled. “By the look of you I should have been better to fail at it.”

“Just end m’misery, Pieter.”

“The husband plucked the bloom that had no dew upon it.”

Karl shrugged and reluctantly affirmed the grinning priest’s answer. “I’ll confound you yet… priest.”

The weary column finally arrived at the top of a long, upward grade and the crusaders threw themselves on the hard ground. They had barely closed their eyes, however, when a light breeze filled their nostrils with a terrible, odious stench. Pieter groaned and begged God’s mercy, for the air bore him a dreadful familiarity, an unwelcome and horrible memory that awakened every unpleasant emotion in his anxious soul.

Wil ordered his complaining soldiers to their feet and drove them over the crest of the hill, hoping all the while to escape the noxious odor. But as they descended, the air became more rank until each whining pilgrim had pulled his tunic over his nose. Wishing to get past whatever ghastly rot was near, Wil led them at a quick pace and the column was soon charging down the roadway. They rounded a sharp bend where their advance was suddenly arrested. With a single gasp the band halted, most turning their faces away, for they had come upon a spectacle which so sickened and dismayed them, so wholly overwhelmed them, that they could barely endure the sight.

Piled at the side of the roadway was a tangled, putrefied heap of fellow crusaders. Their tiny corpses were bloated and bursting in the heat, their flesh torn and ripped by dispassionate vultures now crowing high overhead. Their trickled blood had dried in a ghoulish, dark cascades which spidered over them and puddled in blackened, grassy pools beneath. Those eyes not yet gouged from little faces stared helplessly toward heaven itself, as if begging for some explanation. But none was offered.

Pieter stiffened and, submerging all emotion, advanced solemnly with Solomon by his side. He stood silently a few paces from the pile and considered each body singularly, wishing to grace each child with at least a moment’s dignity. He then dropped slowly to his knees, raised his hands in blessing, and moaned a benediction for their departed souls. When he finished he kissed his cross and pulled himself upright to trembling legs.

Pieter leaned hard on his staff, lost in thought and entranced by the buzzing of the swarms of flies shrouding the corpses. He finally furrowed his brow and leaned over the mound to discern any sign of wound or injury. All his trained eyes could detect, however, were tiny lesions on a few faces. The old man was still curious, though fairly certain of a diagnosis, and reached out his nimble fingers to probe the children’s thin limbs and protruding ribs. Having concluded that these crusaders’ ends were wrought by starvation and fever, the priest turned to his flock.

“My soul cries within me.” Pieter’s face twisted in a building rage and he roared to his crusaders. “I yearn for judgment against those wicked, heartless demons who have stacked these poor little ones like so much tinder! Had they no heart at all for such as these? We’ll not simply pass them by.”

He quieted. “There are too many for us to bury and some were beset with fever, so, dear lambs, we must … burn them.” His voice choked on his command but his fellows understood.

Pieter was not pleased, however, with his children’s response, for though they dutifully set upon the task at hand they did so with steely resolve and not so much as a whimper. The man’s heart ached for them.
Gott im Himmel,
he moaned to himself.
Can they have been so hardened in so short a time?

Tomas intruded. “All’s ready for the torch.”

Pieter looked speechlessly at the boy and the circle of children staring at the wood-ringed bier waiting before him. And, without a word, he set a thin branch ablaze from an ember in the coal-pot and slowly touched it to the bramble piled at his feet. He dropped it from a quivering hand and retreated to the side of his fellow pilgrims. With eyes reddened by sorrow and glowing with anger, he watched as the fire crept over the unsuspecting kindling and rose to pounce from one darkening corpse to another.

The heat and stench soon drove the poor company backward as the flames flared like the torches flanking the gates of hell. For Pieter it was as if Lucifer and his demons were laughing at him from the fire, dancing and frolicking, taunting and hissing in a gleeful celebration of death and damnation.

Chapter 8

GOOD GEORG

Q
uietly, Wil continued to lead his crusaders south through the Rhine valley. Each haunted face now belied a young soul in turmoil, save the dark-hearted Tomas who found it amusing to share his morbid satisfactions regularly. And who could dare refute his endless commentary on the spectacle they had left behind? Karl, bewildered and utterly undone, spent the hours choking on tears and dodging the apparent logic of his black-haired foil. He had nothing to say, no answer for the doubts swirling about his own mind let alone the outrageous blasphemies of Tomas. The abiding agony for poor Karl was the insufferable vision of tiny red crosses curling in the flames of the burning crusaders. His ears filled with the echoes of the past, those joyous cries in the abbey: “We go to God, we go to God.”
Indeed they did
, he thought as he clutched his necklace, though not the way he had imagined.

Wil’s hard eyes gazed steadily at the horizon before him. Anger raged within and he felt little else. He was neither willing to reject nor embrace his faith but the sights and smells of the day prior had seared his soul. He had become a young man with a crumbled foundation, filled with confusion yet secretly desperate to retain some remnant of the hope now fleeting away. He withdrew deep into other memories, at which point he marched more contented for having found some rest within. But such respites were short-lived at best, for no sooner would he submerge his mind to far places when the ghost of his poisoned mother burst from the shadows to accuse him. It was at those moments he was glad he had taken his apple-wood cross and thrown it into those dreadful flames.
Better to trust in this dagger than in that cross
, he thought.

The day passed to night and the next morning brought its routine of duties for the crusaders. Wil sent several of the boys to fetch water, others to break kindling, and still others to beg provisions with Pieter at a forester’s cottage by the road. The girls were set about the chores of ferreting through the blankets and bags for what few provisions might be discovered for a morning’s mush when Jon I suddenly burst from the trees. “Wil! Wil! M’brother’s in a well! Come help afore he drowns!”

Wil, followed by the others, raced behind Jon I to an abandoned stone-lined well the boys had discovered deep in the wood. He could hear the trapped boy’s cries echoing eerily through the forest and soon was peering into the dark hole. Wil could barely see Jon III but knew the boy could not hold fast to the slippery walls much longer.

Jon III could see only dark silhouettes ringing the bright opening above him. “Help!” he pleaded. “I think m’leg to be broken … it hurts and I cannot climb … I cannot hold … I fear to drown … hurry, I beg you!”

“We need rope to pull him up or branches for him to climb,” Wil ordered. “Hurry! Find me a stout branch … or…”

Pieter burst through the wood. “Aye, but we’ve no rope, no ax.”

Suddenly Karl cried out, “I have it. I have it!” He turned to Wil and Pieter, his face flushed and his eyes wide. “Pieter, remember m’riddle? The riddle … do you remember my riddle?”

The old man stared blankly.

“We needs dump all we can lift to the well and rise the bottom ‘til we float Jon up.”

Wil and Pieter’s eyes met as Karl’s novel idea settled. “
Ja
! By the saints, boy, you’ve settled it!” exclaimed Pieter.

The words had barely left the old man’s lips when the crusaders began heaving rocks, brush, logs, and whatever other rubble they could handle over the well’s wall. Poor Jon III was ignorant of the fine scheme and protested loudly as he dodged the falling debris. But soon, to the delight of all, the boy began to float up a little … then a little farther.

“More!” squealed Karl. “More! He’s coming up.”

The gleeful children charged back and forth, dropping whatever they could manage past the bruised and bleeding face of a very hopeful boy. At last, the lad stretched his fingers to the top edge of the well and was plucked to safety by the strong arms of Wil and Tomas. He collapsed to the ground exhausted but quite content to spend a few moments basking in the love of his cheering comrades.

Though the boy’s leg was badly broken, Pieter was able to make a sturdy splint of stout sticks and knotted vines.

“Good fellow,” comforted Pieter. “I’ll find you a worthy household for healing and you shall dance the ringdance by Christmas feasts.”

Karl, pleased with his own good sense and relieved for good news, boasted to the others, “God is still with us. We have been worthy crusaders and God
does
care for us.”

Tomas shrugged indifferently. “If God cared I should think Jon would not have dropped into the well at all.”

Karl dismissed Tomas’s remark with a sweep of his hand and a wrinkle of his nose, for his mood had changed. In fact, the whole company was now encouraged, happy for a bit of light on a darkening journey. The black fog that had enshrouded them all was once again pierced by a merciful glint of hope.

By prime of the following morning Pieter set out to make good his pledge to Jon III and climbed beyond the crest of an eastern knoll in search of a good home for the lad. Some might say it was rare fortune, indeed, that led him to a nearby cluster of tidy cottages placed neatly in the shadow of an orderly manorhouse where Pieter soon found himself in the company of a kindhearted lord. And somewhere between the courtesy of a good cheese and the bond of a hearty laugh, the priest and the gentle lord agreed on a fitting household for Jon III. The lord promptly ordered his servants to fetch the lad, and they returned quickly with the splinted boy and a column of curious crusaders.

In the meantime, the manor’s fuller, his wife, and three children had been summoned from the wash-house so that their duties as Jon Ill’s caretakers might be firmly imposed. To Pieter’s cautious eye, the fuller seemed to be a decent man, young and soft-spoken, sturdy of build and quick to laugh. His wife, he thought, was gracious for a peasant woman, ample and ruddy.

Jon III was introduced and seemed pleased to imagine life with these good folk. He smiled shyly as the woman embraced her new charge, and he yielded to the teasing of his former fellows with a deep-hued blush.

The lord’s wife beckoned the crusaders to enter the great hall of her gracious home and commanded her servants bring a generous assortment of foods and beverages to the wide table at its center. The odd time of day notwithstanding, the children spared no reserve and soon filled themselves with early fruits, wheat bread, mead, cider, honey cakes, and pork.

When all had finished, Pieter stood and bowed respectfully to the lord and his lady and blessed them for their kindness. “You shall be remembered in all eternity for your selfless kindness this day, my good lord and lady.”

The pleased man bowed and took Pieter by the shoulder. “It is but a pittance, Father, a modest token of the bounty of blessing which this household has enjoyed.”

“And would that we could repay such …”

“Ah, yes. Truth be told, you may indeed offer something in return.” The lord’s face broadened. A timid boy emerged from behind a tapestry, red-faced and nervous. The lord beamed with pride. “Father … crusaders … permit me to introduce my son, Georg.”

The boy stepped to his father’s side and stared at the floor. The lord wrapped an arm around the boy’s sloped shoulders and continued. “Indulge me, I beg. Would you follow me to my courtyard?” The man’s amiable, bearded face lighted with joy and his eyes twinkled. He led the assembly out of the hall and into the sunny gardens just beyond the manorhouse gates. He chuckled to himself, excited for the moment, and clapped his hands. Then, from the corner of the orchard wall came a peasant leading a donkey laden heavily with sacks of provisions.

The lord ran to the beast and helped his servant unload the stock. He spread baskets and satchels at the feet of the wide-eyed children, uncovering a storehouse of smoked fish, smoked venison, salted pork, onions and leeks, turnips, millet, oats, and fresh beans.

Pieter was astounded. “May God bless you, m’lord,” he offered quietly.

“Think nothing of it, nothing of it at all. The pleasure is surely mine to savor as I humbly share my bounty with such a noble company.” The man summoned his son close to his side once again. “Ah, but I should fail you lest I not confess my own selfish ends in this.”

Pieter’s ears cocked.

He gripped the edges of his purple cape. “I do so wish to bless your pilgrimage, but I find it doubly comforting to be certain that my own crusader, my sole son, Georg, has ample provisions as well.”

Pieter and Wil winced at his words, though the wise priest was the more careful in revealing his mind. Wil blurted, “My lord, I think n—”

Pieter hushed the boy with a raised finger and stern eye. He smiled politely at the lord and turned to study the blushing candidate. Pieter thought the lad to be about fourteen years and considered “plump” to be the kindest word of choice.
Nearly as round as tall, and not the sort that has the look of adventure
. Unlike the peasant children, this youth had doubtless never missed a meal.
A dandy with kindly eyes
, mused Pieter.
Though ’tis hard to discern them ‘midst the puffed cheeks that squeeze them so
.

Georg’s broad head was covered by a fashionable, wide-brimmed hat which was pressed snugly over his long, straight, brown hair. But, fancy as was the
hut
, the peasant children paid more attention to his linen breeches. His were the new-fashioned leggings some had heard of: belted at the waist, worn to the knees, and suspending long hose which stretched over the feet. Most thought them to be unnecessary. After all, their own simple, one-piece leggings had served folk since the dawn of time.

Instead of a tunic, the boy wore a white linen shirt with cuffs and a collar, and over that he sported a green waistcoat embroidered with a newly stitched, bright-red crusader’s cross. He shuffled slightly in his thick-soled shoes.

“Good and gracious sire,” said Pieter finally, “my fellows are surely enlivened by the noble tender of your valiant son. We’ll march on, all the more secured by the knowledge that such as he is hoping for us, yea, perhaps yet praying for us from within the sanctuary of this home so blessed by God. It is more comfort than my humble words might express for us to know that Georg is serving the cause of Christendom, ah, even our cause, from within the sound walls of this blessed manor.”

The lord’s mood changed and he spoke deliberately from behind fixed eyes. “It is my behest as well as Georg’s firm resolution that he join with you.” Softening his tone, he added, “He … he would have joined another company had he not suffered a great pain in his belly a fortnight past.”

Georg’s face paled at the snickers born of that remark.

“And now it is my wish and the wish of my Frau that you receive him as one of yours.”

Pieter raised a brow to Wil, shrugged his shoulders, and embraced the trembling boy. “Welcome, Georg, welcome. And may God go with us all.”

The old priest stepped aside as the lord and his wife hugged their son. “Go, Georg, go with God and return to us soon.”

Georg closed his eyes and received a final stroke of his mother’s hand across his face. He met his father’s moistening eyes with an anxious, though determined gaze and walked cautiously toward his new comrades.

The peasant-warriors eyed him suspiciously. Serfs and nobility rarely shared a word, let alone a pilgrimage, but they were grateful for the lord’s kindness and yielded dutifully to Pieter’s threatening stare. They lined up behind Wil and bowed respectfully to their hosts before bundling their new supplies in their blankets. Then, with a few tears for Jon III and a chorus of thanksgivings and gratitudes, the crusaders filed out of the courtyard and disappeared over the hill.