Death and Mr. Pickwick (26 page)

And then, one morning, when he awoke, Bladud noticed a rash upon his forearm. He dismissed it as nothing. He said to himself that during physical exercise a wrestler had gripped him too hard.

The next morning the mark had spread. Soon marks were on his chest and thighs.

Now his sleeves were always down. He said he was too weary to wrestle. He refused the pleasures of women, confessing that he was too tired. But the spreading of the marks to his hands, calves and face made concealment impossible – and suspicion was aroused before that moment.

He entered the underground chamber and begged the shamans for a cure. They told Bladud that the disease was a sign that he must return to his homeland. They would teach him no more. He must leave their chamber, leave Athens, leave Greece.

He implored the shamans to allow him to stay, saying that his knowledge was but superficial, and he needed complete mastery. They turned their backs and vanished into the darkness. Their refusal distressed Bladud far, far more than the marks that were gradually spreading, and that threatened to consume his whole body.

So, leper that he was, Bladud, eldest son of Lud-Hudibras, eighth King of Britain, concealed himself in a hooded cloak and found passage on a ship, though it took great persuasion in gold for the mariner to take a diseased man as freight. For freight he was – kept in a hold, away from all others on the vessel.

The Giant Egg's cheeks boiled and cracked in rage when he saw his disfigured son. Athens was to blame, the king screamed, the city had poisoned his son with its disgusting food and pox-riddled women. Bladud confessed to his father, on bended knee, that he had studied secret arts, and believed that if he could but return, with the king's blessing, the shamans would accept him once more and cure the disease. This admission merely provoked the king. If Bladud practised the dark arts, children in Britain would go missing, the corn would not grow, the realm would collapse, and invaders would come from overseas. The disease was the prince's just and fair punishment.

Bladud left the throne room in disgrace. His brother, sure to inherit the kingdom now, approached and said, with a cruel smile: ‘You will need this.' It was a leper's warning clapper, to be sounded when nearing healthy folk.

Bladud might have seized the clapper, and used it to strike his brother around the face; instead he took it meekly, and saying no more, walked away.

Some believe that the king banished his son; others that, overcome with shame and despair, Prince Bladud quit the court of his own accord. Whatever the facts of the case, one day, at dawn, Bladud left to seek the wider world. A simple message was left behind: ‘Consider me dead.'

So Bladud wandered around Britain, cloaked and hooded, with no particular destination in mind. And although his strain of the disease was not the worst, still he was called leper. He was classed with those whose skin was rough and scaly, whose voice was hoarse, those who had lost all feeling in their bodies until only the tongue retained sensitivity, and that resided in a fog of foul breath. ‘And who,' said Bladud to himself, ‘would respect the proclamations of such a tongue, no matter how wisely it wagged?' He knew he had no right to be his father's heir.

At first, he sought the company of other lepers, sitting at night around a fire with men whose fingers bore burns and abrasions, because they could not feel the heat of a pot when lifted from the fire, as well as with others whose hands had stiffened and turned to claws. One leper, who ate a bowl of soup, had a noisome discharge from his nostrils, and when Bladud looked at this man he realised he had sunk lower than he had dreamt possible. He resolved that no more would he associate with human beings. He left the company of lepers and took the lowly, lonely occupation of swineherd.

Before long, Bladud started to enjoy the company of pigs. He imitated their grunts and their little woofs and came to know the sounds which meant satisfaction and the sounds which meant hunger. ‘Ah, pigs,' he said – for he spoke to them often – ‘I am not so sure that you eat too much. Poor maligned beasts.'

The pigs rooted around in the soft spring earth, seeking an old tuber or a piece of decayed bark. One pig would bite the ear of another, and even rip off flesh amidst much blood and shrieking; yet later the same day the two pigs would sleep side by side, as though they had infinite capacity of forgiveness. Deciding that Bladud was not too disgusting, they would sometimes lick his face – to them, in spite of his royalty, he was a pig. And when a pig was slaughtered, some of its lard was used by Bladud in a lamp: he watched its flame burn out upon the wick in the evening, and he would bid his brother farewell.

One day, a new pig was given into his care – one that had a bent foot. ‘It is surely not possible,' he said to himself.

He came to believe – and then it became an unyielding conviction – that this was the very piglet he had freed all those years before, now fully grown. There was a look the pig gave him, which was
exactly
the look he had received from the piglet in the moonlit grasslands. Bladud needed no more evidence. He felt the greatest joy he had experienced in ages! To think they had been reunited, these old friends! The pig licked his face.

So life continued for Bladud, and he herded the swine into ancient forests of beech, where early spring flowers and fungi grew, to forage for mast; but pigs, being pigs, had wills of their own, and if they were herded one way, they would take it into their minds that the food was better the other. Indeed, it was most peculiar: they seemed to know which food would make them the tastiest to eat. The roast pork of Bladud's pigs was renowned.

As the pigs ate, Bladud stood against the trunk of the largest tree he could find, with foliage so thick that some lower branches were rotting for lack of sunlight. There was nothing to apply his mind to, except the appearance of trees. He knew trees by their frost-cracks and by their twig-scars, their roughnesses and irregularities. He admired in particular the ornamentation of ivy, and the pleasing way it wound around the bark of an oak. All the same, this knowledge was no substitute for the knowledge he desired. He carved Greek letters into bark, forming the start of an incantation, but he could not remember the end. He slapped the bark, as though fearing that soon all his knowledge would be gone.

One cold day, in late autumn, the pigs roamed far in search of mast. Bladud found himself among forest he did not know. Dead leaves were still clinging to some trees. Then one of the pigs – the one with the bent foot – wandered a long way from the others. Bladud called and the pig turned, but grunted and continued, and vanished behind a rock.

Bladud found the pig wallowing in a mudhole. He had seen pigs wallow many a time in summer to cool down, but it was a cold day, and steam rose from this mud, as well as a herby, sulphurous odour, which the pig must have scented from afar. The herbiness was easy to explain, for dead leaves and beechnuts were on the surface. Bladud bent and touched the mud, and rolled its warmth between his finger and thumb.

The next morning the corrupted skin of his fingertips was not as red as before. When he saw his friend the pig, there was a change in its appearance, too. Its skin looked softer overall, and a crustiness around its ears had lessened.

Bladud immersed himself in the mudpool. He rubbed mud all over his body, even around his eyes, and within his ears and nostrils. He felt the heat reach deep into his pores. He stayed in the hot mud, and his friend the pig joined him. Bladud let the mud dry on his skin, then he stood beside the pool, and gave praise to Sulis, goddess of healing. With beech twigs, pebbles, stones, moss and ivy, he decorated the perimeter of the mudpool. He decorated too the beech tree nearest the pool, whose large overhanging branch dropped its fruit into the hot mud. The pool and the tree formed a sacred pair in his mind. He also returned at night and stared into the black steaming mudpool, which reflected, unsmoothly, the stars and the moon. It was as though he knelt at the very entrance to the underworld, and the celestial bodies were torches to mark the way down. He praised the goddess Kerridwen, for whom pigs were sacred and magical.

For a full month, Bladud stepped into the mudpool. By the end of that time, his skin was as normal as any man's. With pride, he ran his hand over his smooth arms and chest.

He released all the pigs, and lingered over the goodbye to one.

It was now that he returned to his people. As he approached the city walls, he sounded the leper clapper – but now flaunting it proudly above his head, waving it as the one thing he did not need, to announce that he was leper no more.

Bladud would, in due time, exchange the clapper for a sceptre. He ascended the throne, married and ruled.

There were glories in Bladud's reign, and his foundation of the city of Bath, at the site of the mudpool, was certainly one of his finest achievements. The healthy hot springs that continue to attract so many travellers are Bladud's legacy.

Yet Bladud was unfulfilled. He yearned for shamanic knowledge. Often neglecting the needs of his subjects, he spent his days working on wooden contraptions, inspired by the arrow of Abaris. Sometimes it was said that the leprosy had been cured on his skin, but the true scar of Athens had been left in his mind – he had not completed the course he had set for himself.

In Trinovantum, the place now called London, Bladud climbed to the top of a wooden tower, the height of twenty men. He wore a knee-length tunic; around his neck was a beechwood amulet in the shape of a pig with a bent foot; and strapped to his back was a structure of timber, cloth and feathers, which he could flap by ropes attached to his hands and feet. He said incantations. He moved to the edge of the tower. ‘I will do what birds do,' he proclaimed to the crowd below. ‘I will do what gods do!'

The tower stood upon a hill. There was an uplift of wind, which he felt upon his face at the tower's edge. Soaring jackdaws came close, and looked him in the eye.

‘I have the
will
to soar,' he said, in a low voice. ‘I
believe
I shall soar. I
imagine
I am soaring.'

In the crowd below, Bladud's son looked up, hand over his mouth. At one shoulder stood his mother the queen, who covered her eyes; at the other shoulder stood a boy his own age, dressed in a jester's outfit – an exact copy, in miniature, of the outfit worn by the boy's father, Bladud's jester.

‘I say that if your father thinks he can fly,' remarked the little jester, ‘he must be feather-brained indeed.'

‘I'll have you whipped!' said Bladud's son. ‘We must pray for a storm or a hurricane to lift him up.'

Bladud now raised the wings, and they filled with the wind. He said one more incantation with his eyelids firmly closed. Then he opened his eyes and launched himself off the edge of the tower.

An updraught caught his contraption and for a moment Bladud attained flight. He laughed in triumph and was lifted higher.

Then he twisted in midair, and Bladud plummeted down, down, down. At the instant he struck the earth, the crowd, acting as one, drew in their breath, and this covered the sound of his neck snapping.

*   *   *

‘It is easy to see,' said Moses Pickwick, leaning over the bar of the Hare and Hounds, ‘that Bladud inspires our modern architects, who lay out our city on strict Grecian principles, honouring the studies that Bladud pursued. And I am quite sure that Bladud was a swineherd in the area of my farm at Swainswick. There aren't many beech trees on the hills now, but there is a place called Beechen Cliff, and surely there he took his pigs. That is my belief.'

A bearded amateur historian, who occasionally drank in the Hare and Hounds, had been listening to Moses' account.

‘I've heard that the story of Bladud is pure invention,' he said. ‘The pigs were not even in the earliest known version.'

‘You insult me, sir,' said Moses Pickwick. ‘You insult the people of Bath.'

Moses Pickwick retreated to the back of the inn. He did not emerge until the evening, when he boarded his own late coach to the White Hart.

*   *   *

After staying overnight at the Hare and Hounds, Seymour took the short walk, of about a mile, to Corsham House. He and several other portfolio-bearing students of art approached the Elizabethan building via a long avenue of trees, and through gardens laid out on picturesque principles. At ten o'clock precisely they were admitted by a liveried footman, who led them across a checkered floor, past bronze busts, a coat of arms, two small flags and up two grand flights of stairs, and then were introduced to a young female guide – the possessor of a doe-like face, a pear-shaped figure, and a timidity which comes from too much study.

She led the party into the crimson-walled State Dressing Room, and stopped at a Rubens, in which a satyr squeezed grapes beside a tiger and a leopard. She showed them the State Bedchamber, with its fine satin hangings, and Rembrandts for a lullaby. Then the Cabinet Room, with its ottomans and decorative china jars, and Titians, and Raphaels – and all this before one entered the room actually called the Picture Gallery. There was also the Music Room, the Saloon and the Dining Room, each with its overwhelming share of Van Eycks, Van Dycks and other Old Masters. Seymour was especially interested in the works inspired by Cervantes and Tasso – but there were so many paintings he might advantageously study, until his money ran out. For that long he would stay in the village of Pickwick.

 

*

IT WAS A GREAT ANNOYANCE
to Mr Inbelicate that the historical record of Robert Seymour's works at this time is so slender. There was, however, a large Seymour painting he owned, inspired by Cervantes, called
Sancho and the Duchess
. It is a scene of sunset falling upon a meadow. Don Quixote is a small thin figure in the background, lance raised, on the edge of a wood. The duchess sits upon a milk-white horse, with a cloth-of-silver side-saddle. Fat Sancho kneels in the foreground, having dismounted from Dapple, his ass, as he imparts a message from his master.