‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in the world.’ But Father didn’t tell me to abandon Haddertun, did he? What he said was that I must be ready every hour of every day to govern my estates. ‘You have to be the strongest man, the bravest and the best. It is expected of you even by the peasants.’
Which didn’t mean I was to ride away, or steal the peasants from their homes, to die in Outremer for someone else’s idea of a holy quest. Well, did it?
I raised the subject with John Hideman, as we lay at ease beside the fire of an Apulian farmhouse at the end of a long day – stretched out on the warm beaten earth beneath a row of smoking hams.
‘What made you leave your mother’s cottage and come with me in the first place?’ I asked him (and realised to my shame that it was the first time since we’d sailed from England that I’d done so).
‘I think you said that you were ready for adventure?’
‘We all were, make no doubt of that, Sir. Aye, an’ found it too for certain sure. We’d never have rubbed shanks with kings an’ bishops an’ the like, without we came. Nor sailed the open sea to set our feet on God’s own holy shore.’
‘Nor died out there,’ I said, ‘like Jos and Bert. But wouldn’t you say, John, that…’
‘What I say, Sir Garry is that we all must die as surely as we live. Unless ye’r goin’ to tell me that they’ve found some other way of fillin’ graves?’
‘But not out there so far away from everything they knew. They should have died in Haywards Heath or Haddertun where they were born. That’s surely what they would have wanted?’
John disagreed. ‘Who told ye so?’ he asked the blazing logs. ‘’Tis how we die, not where, as matters. An’ our old manor boys all died good deaths, as swift an’ sure as any man could ask. Even Albie – swoopin’ like a blessed swallow from that bridge ’afore the angels had the time to show him how to fly.’
John smiled at that, his brown face ruddy in the firelight. And at the thought of anyone as hairy and ungainly as poor Albie, growing wings and soaring like a bluebird, I had to smile as well.
‘I’ll get you back, John, at the least,’ I promised him – the last of the men from Haddertun to put his trust in me as his Seigneur.
‘It’s all my purpose now; all that I want to see you safe at home where you belong.’
It’s likely I’d have done it too, but for the broken moldboard.
Somewhere about the time of Martinmas in mid-November, the peasants held a festival to mark the ending of the harvest. Sounding horns and beating drums, they bore a festal statue of the Virgin, with a big brass cross and the sad relics of some local saint, all through the olive groves and down the hillside to their church. With John and me behind them on our mules. We watched them take the painted effigy inside, and while they crowded the church doorway, turned the mules’ heads north. By then the weather had turned cooler. We rode in cloaks and woollen hose, and when it rained took shelter anywhere that we could find it. From the flat coast, the road wound inland through forests of dark pine, which seemed as much at home on rising slopes as in the deepest valleys. And if the mules made little of the climbs and sharp descents, their ill-fitted saddles gave some parts of us good reason to be grateful whenever the track found a level.
On the third day following the olive festival, we came on a small village hidden by the trees. Whether from war or pestilence, the place was dismally untended. Thistles choked its fields and gardens, seeding in its lanes. Doors gaped and shutters hung askew. Roofs here and there were stripped of shingles – and, in case some taint of sickness lingered, we slept that night in a nut coppice well beyond its ruins.
We were woken the next morning – not this time by human voices, but by the self-important crowing of a rooster over the next rise. We found him scratching in the stubble of a wheat strip – a big, red-feathered fellow, clucking in his hens to feed where he uncovered grain, and waiting only for the simple creatures to up-end before he hopped onto their backs to tread them. A group of grey stone buildings set apart were evidently occupied. Smoke hung about their roofs. A haystack had been breached. A cat sat in a doorway washing its black face, and in a field beside the barn a ploughman toiled to break the soil behind a single horse.
Our first surprise when we approached, was to discover that our ploughman was a girl! The second thing that struck us was that she’d cut her hair extremely ill. It stuck out in awkward tufts around her pinched brown face as if she’d hacked it off with shears – and having never seen a woman with short hair, I fear we must have stared. The third, most shocking thing, was that the girl was weeping. She’d brought her old horse to a halt before we reached her, and the reason wasn’t hard to see. The wooden moldboard of her plough lay split in two beside the rock it must have struck when she looked up to see us coming. And now she stood and wept as if the accident was more than she could bear.
At which John Hideman did a thing that at the time astonished me. Dismounting, and without a word, he walked up to the girl and put his arms about her.
Well, to cut this part of a long story short, I stayed with them a fortnight. I say ‘with them’ because, almost from that first day, I knew that he was not about to leave her.
The girl’s name, she told us, was Michela. And although she showed us three graves in the plot behind the cattle byre – one old, and two much fresher – we couldn’t tell if they contained her parents, with a brother or a sister. Or her husband? We only knew for sure she was on her own.
John found a piece of wood to make a new board for the plough. Together we dug out the rock, along with several others in her way. Then John went on to yoke the mules. To plough, and then cross-plough the strip – to bring a whole lot more stones to the surface, for me to transfer to the boundaries.
There’s more to language than mere words, and despite their different speech, it was soon obvious that John Hideman and Michela understood each other very well. She treated both of us with equal gratitude for helping her about the farm, and always served me first at our plain meals of eggs and winter-greens or coarse frumenty porridge. But it was John’s solid form her dark eyes followed through the buildings and the yards – the more so when he shaved his beard to show her all his face. I noticed that, for any task needing a second pair of hands and regardless of the space around them, some part of John would always end up touching some part of Michela.
She wasn’t beautiful, or even handsome, with her thin little face and hedgepig hair. But she was young and quite alone, with land that needed working. Which made her irresistible of course to someone like my John.
As I’ve recalled before, he’d somehow learned from Jos the knack of knowing what I thought and what I’d say almost before I knew myself. So when I admitted that, in spite of all I’d done since Acre to seem hopeless and pathetic, I was certain I could manage on my own… ‘Aye, I know,’ he said impassively.
‘And if I told you that all I wanted was to see you safe at home in Haddertun,’ I said, ‘then I was wrong. It isn’t.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘What I really want is to free you, John, to do whatever you think best.’
‘Thing is I always have been free,’ he told the pigsty roof that we were busy patching. ‘An’ done what I thought best an’ all, Sir, all along.’
‘So, John?’
‘So’s I would say we’ve both known for a middlin’ while, that I am bound to stay.’
My turn to nod at the sty roof. ‘Then it’s agreed,’ I said.
‘Fact is, I reckon she needs me a deal more’n you do, Sir – an’ I’ll tell ye somethin’ else for free,’ John offered without looking up. ‘Time’s come for you to find yer own path home, an’ to learn the reason why ye’r doin’ it. ’T’isn’ me, Sir Garry, an’ never was.’
And that was all of our exchange until I came to leave.
I had already given John his mule and twenty silver shillings – a fourth part of all I had. Michela had packed food enough to last me several days, and did her best to hide her joy beneath a solemn face. She stood away for me to take my leave of him, with one hand on her beating heart – and all her thoughts, I have no doubt, bent on the question of how long he’d wait after I’d cleared the boundary of her land, before John followed her upsteps to the wide bed she’d sheeted fresh for them in her clean loft.
‘You’ll be wantin’ this to take along with ye, Sir Garry.’ He held up the plant he’d brought from Ashkelon. A twig with two small leaves attached, still in its earthen pot.
‘I’ll grant ye that she don’t look too clever,’ he confessed. ‘But see, here’s a bud and there’s another – now then, give her some air each night, a splash o’ water every second week. An’ take my word she’ll shoot for ye come spring, as sure as Sunday.’
‘But you should plant the rose here, John,’ I told him in a voice that sounded rougher-edged than I had meant. ‘Beside the cottage door where you can see it flower.’
‘See it eaten by the goats, more like.
‘No Sir. She’s for yer Lady’s garden, always was.’ John spoke, not to the barn wall or the mule, but for once directly face to face. ‘She’s all I have to give to ye now, Sir Garry, for a fact.’
His last gift of so many.
‘Well then, I’ll do my best,’ I said unsteadily, with one foot in the stirrup. ‘And thank you – thank you, John.’
He knew. I know he understood I wasn’t talking of the rose.
‘Make sure that she’s well wrapped, Sir, if ye get to frost.’ The plant was helpful in that way. It gave him something else to say.
John sent his duty to his dead father’s wife. ‘An’ tell Rob an’ Mat to be good boys for me. A’ give ’em each a kiss,’ he said.
And then before I mounted, he embraced me just as he had hugged Michela. Except the tears this time were on his brown familiar face, not hers. Nor yet on mine.
He hadn’t whistled for at least an hour. John looked as I felt when I cut Raoul’s throat, when I stood at the edge of Jos’s grave.
‘You’ll do, Sir Garry, on my life.’ His final words.
I turned away. I blinked. I closed my eyes, which felt as if two bony fingertips were pressing on their inside corners – did everything that I could think of not to cry. Although I’m not sure why, because a show of feeling then could hardly have disgraced me. I only know I couldn’t weep until I’d waved three times, and turned the mule that I called Jacomo out of Michela’s yard. To force out of him the swiftest pace he could produce (some kind of a fast dawdle).
You do know why you couldn’t weep in front of John. Why tell yourself you don’t? If his gift was the rose, yours was to leave without a scene.
Well then, when we were out of sight – I’m not ashamed to own it now, in view of all John meant. The sluice gates opened. I was blinded.
So what exactly DID he mean to you?
Admit it, yours weren’t just the feelings of a master losing a good servant. Well were they?
You wept because you lost a friend that day, one of the few. Perhaps the best friend you have ever had?
Later on my bed-roll – forlorn, damp-eyed still, quite alone beneath a clear night sky – I saw Elise’s privy garden at the manor with the rose grown at its centre, smothered in pink blossoms. John behind me. Khadija. Jos. Both dead. Elise at Haddertun. Had she forgotten me? Or, thinking I was dead, already planned to take another husband? A gentle man to suit her taste? Although I found it hard to form a picture of her face, I could recall the colour of her hair and feel the warmth and texture of her skin. Could see myself where John was at that moment – doing with my wedded wife what John was doing with Michela, performing deftly as in all he did…
For the first time in so many months, I turned to another old friend for comfort. The need was there, the means to hand. But somehow when it came to it, I’d not the heart to dust off
Fisty Flora
. But lay cupping my balls instead. For reassurance, nothing more – and fell asleep.
But now awake beneath another sky, with views between the stars of soft cloud-portals opening? With curtains parting and pink passages unfolding to my view.
Not NOW! Not Fisty Flora! Christ Garon, what in heaven or on earth can you be thinking?!
So, moving on – and at a swifter pace than Jacomo could ever manage…
Well, there’s no point in dwelling on the journey north. Not now. Enough for now to gallop through eight weeks of travel on the roads and waterways of the Italian Duchies. The Roman arch at Rimini. Bologna with its painted colonnades. Christmas in a rowdy tavern somewhere. The sale of Jacomo himself beside a causeway in Lombardia – a river barge, tall spires of poplars and the everlasting swamps… I’ll think of all that when I have more time.
For now, move on – move on to where I am, and what I’m doing here – and, most importantly, why I am doing it.
Well no, all right – perhaps not quite that far. Enough for now perhaps to reach the alps. Or come at least within clear sight of their amazing peaks. Enough to think about the Biellese and meet with my companions for the next stage of the journey. Thirty thousand of them. Mostly sheep.
CHAPTER THREE
Down there in the world of men, beneath the clouds, beyond the waterways. That’s where I spent the winter. In another life.
There was a carving back at Haddertun in the church of Saint Peter, which showed a sturdy shepherd with a lamb across his shoulders visiting the newborn baby Jesus in his stable.