The fair itself was much like those I’d known in Sussex, at Offham and Glynde Meadows – with at its heart long rows of pens, where cattle, goats, cull ewes, yearling lambs and breeding rams awaited buyers. A circular turnspit rotated joints of pork. Open tents sold lakes and mountains of refreshments, and closed ones peddled female flesh. Booths and stalls set up wherever there was space, sold hurdles, shears, sheep bells and crooks. And local wool – twilled, felted, woven, fulled and knitted.
I saw him first on my way to the ale tent with Fiorello and Stefano. By then I understood a little more of their rough dialect. So when Fiorello, pointing at a fellow on a bench, identified him as Bérgé dal becce, as ‘flockmaster’ – the man entrusted by the consuj of Biella, to lead the transumanza of the comun’s flocks up to their summer pastures in the mountains – I knew he was the fellow I had come to find. And thought him old, before I came to know him better than to think of age in his regard.
A man of theescore years or more, he sat with knees apart – a bulky individual in a sheepskin coat and low felt hat. Long-faced, big-nosed with weather-reddened skin. He held a shepherd’s crook in either hand. One old and dull, the other gleaming new.
‘So which is it to be?’ he asked, as we approached him. ‘Time, would you say, to let the old hook go?’
I looked behind, to see who he was talking to. Looked back and found that it was me!
‘Or am I being tempted by appearance?’ the Flockmaster said in a softly-spoken French that was so close to mine, the difference was unimportant.
‘What is your view, young man? Can you see any sense in seeking novelty, when what we have in hand still suits the purpose?’
His deepset eyes as they met mine were pale, sea-coloured – and so penetrating that I felt he might have read the very thoughts inside my head (if there’d been any in it worth the reading). And it was only later that I asked myself if he was talking less of crooks in that first conversation, than of my own confusion.
I muttered at the time that I’d no skill to help him choose. But when he pointed out that an untried sheep-hook might fail in use up on the mountain slopes, I saw my chance to introduce myself, and beg that I might travel with the flocks on my way to the pass of San Bernard.
‘You must of course.’ The Bérgé dal becce gave a little grunt as he rose stiffly from the bench. ‘I have already saved you a position up in front beside me, where we set the pace, Sir Garon.’
‘You have?’ I stared at him in blank astonishment – and then accusingly at my companions, who shrugged in unison.
‘But I don’t understand. How did you know my name? Or that I’d come to find you?’
The Bérgé’s mouth, which had a downward turn, stretched out and up into a wider smile than John’s – a smile as wide as Jos’s, maybe wider – tightening the loose skin of his neck and lifting his whole face. A network of deep wrinkles wreathed his eyes and fanned across his cheeks. And when that happened – when that happens, when the Bérgé smiles – you have no choice but to smile back.
‘It is my business to know who you are and see you on your way,’ was all he told me then. ‘Yours, my young friend, is to convince me that you’re worth the effort.’ And even now I can’t think how he came to know so much about me.
Unless he heard it from the cloth merchant, and I was even drunker than I thought?
Unless he has the second sight?
Sheep have been driven up to the high pastures since ancient times, according to the Bérgé – long centuries before the Church fixed on a mid-May festival to mark Christ’s own ascent (in His case higher still). These days it is the cows and pigs that leave Biella for the mountains on Ascension Day. And by that time we had already reached the snowline with the sheep.
A deluge of shorn backs and coloured tufts, of drumming hooves, bells, bleats and barking dogs – the spectacle of close on thirty thousand sheep embarking on their transumanza, is not a thing that anyone who’s been a part of it, is ever likely to forget. It made the daily journeys of our flocks at Haddertun seem paltry, less than nothing, as they moved about the chalkhills.
I walked in front with the Flockmaster, as he’d promised. A risky place to be – when you consider what a stampede of thirty thousand animals, with four times that number of small pointed hooves, might do to a prone man – had not the multitude been broken into smaller flocks of fifteen hundred. Or at most two thousand sheep, with groups of milking goats dispersed between them. Each flock was led by a horned billy goat and a castrated wether, with harsh-toned clucket bells around their necks. On either flank were shepherds with their horses and their dogs, and larger hounds on leashes to keep the wolves at bay. The laden donkeys with the baggage mules, the carts that carried tents and hurdles, fold-nets and cheese presses, moved as they must in the flat centre of the road surrounded on all sides by sheep.
But that was only part of what it meant to join the transumanza.
‘There’s riches for you if you like,’ the Bérgé said when we looked back across the sea of bleating heads. ‘There’s wool, meat, gut and sinew, leather, horn, hoof, bone and marrow to be got from every sheep, leaving aside the dung they make to sweeten soil. You could say each of them’s more valuable in any sense that counts, than a king’s golden crown. And we have more of them back there than you could ever count.’
The day we left the plain, it seemed to me
that the whole population of the Biellese were there to cheer us on our way – the townsfolk of Biella and Cossato with their consuj and the soldiers from the garrison. Their priests to bless the enterprise. Workers from the fulling mills in aprons soaked with urine. Weavers and wool dyers, with their arms stained red or green or blue – woodsmen, stockmen, dairymaids with flowers in their hair. Bargees from the waterways. Cowherds blowing horns and guardsmen beating drums – and someone up on stilts with raucous children running circles round them. The noise deafening.
‘Sheep don’t like it, nor do dogs,’ the Bérgé shouted through the din – holding out his crook-stick level with his shoulders, to signal the flock leaders to keep back.
‘Old Barbon here could tell you.’ He nodded at the sheepdog trotting at his side. ‘Dog ’ud tell you that he hates their blessed racket – wants to round ’em up and pen them somewhere out of trouble.’
He reached down with his free hand to fondle Barbon’s ears. ‘So do I old feller, so do I.’
I noticed that he walked as I did with a slight halt to his step. A thing that neither of us mentioned to the other. Just then a shout of laughter from behind drew our attention to a pair of ewes, who’d run out from the flock to prove his point by stamping fiercely at a screeching child.
‘These lowland folk have never learned to gentle livestock, an’ never will – can’t be taught and can’t be driven. Can’t even manage to walk far. Which you may say is just as well, for otherwise the beggars might come with us!’
The Bérgé made a sound I couldn’t hear distinctly, but might have been a chuckle. ‘You’ll see, young man. Before we pass Tollegno, half of them will fall into the river, and the other half will have recalled a score of things they’d rather do than climb a mountain greased with sheep-shit.’
Which was what happened, more or less.
Further up the valley, where the road narrowed to less than fifteen paces between the surging river and a solid village wall, the flocks themselves became a torrent – bell-clenking, jostling for footspace, until they could spread again across the bottom in a surge of cobbled rumps and bleating heads. It was there we turned them to the higher pathway, jogging ahead to lead the way, while shepherds clicked and whistled to their dogs. And those who’d followed from Biella – the few who still remained – dropped back at last to watch us make the climb.
The sloping track, an ancient senté, took us around the outskirts of the village. Past fenced-in plots defended by men waving hats and women flapping aprons. Then upwards through the ash woods, to a view of snow-capped mountains sparkling against the wide blue sky.
I can’t find the words to say what that sight meant to me when I stepped from the trees – except to say it seemed a place without restrictions. It took away my breath. Or what was left of it after the long climb from the river. The Bérgé pointed with his chin to where the track unspooled across the sunlit slopes, rebounding from one rise to another.
‘Come. This is where it all begins,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Which brings me back to where I started in the mountains looking down, from heaven as I’ve called it, on the story of my life.
Or does it, Garon? Isn’t it too soon still to complete the circle?
I would have cut the story shorter long ago if I’d believed that it would work. Now I’m almost there, not far to go. But if I don’t continue with the climb, and think through everything the Bérgé had to say along the way, it’s likely I could miss the point of this and end by drawing all the wrong conclusions.
Well then… We spent the first night of the transumanza at the highest point to which the mule carts could be dragged – in a broad, grassy basin caught between two ridges, where a shallow lake provided drinking water for the thirsty beasts. That other flocks had rested there in years gone by, was obvious from the pattern of stone walls which crossed the valley floor. A low barn and two shepherds’ huts, with tidy stacks of firewood underneath their eaves, provided some rough shelter. And a number of small rings of blackened stones, showed where the hearths were set.
It took an hour or so for all the flocks to reach the place, and the remainder of that day for gaps in walls to be made good and divisions to be made with netting in the larger folds. One of the mule carts with our flock was driven by a woman in a hooded cloak. I’d first seen her talking to the Bérgé at Biella, and noticed her again each time I turned to look behind me – whipping her mule up the steeper sections of the senté and calling to the crofters at their orchard gates. But when the Bérgé introduced her as his wife, it came as a surprise. I’m not sure why. He’d given me no reason to believe him solitary.
A pretty, round-faced woman with a direct unflinching look and thick grey hair pulled back into a plait, she asked my name over her shoulder as she descended backwards from the cart – and then while she unstrapped its breeching, if I was fond of mutton stew?
‘You will be when you’ve tasted it the way I cook it, lad,’ she told my nodding head – and I found then, as I have found repeatedly through all the days and nights between that time and this, that there are few things as reassuring to a man as the motherly attention of a woman.
That first night in the mountains, in air thick with the sound and smell of sheep, the Bérgé and his wife and I sat stirring the red embers of the fire she’d lit. And as they burned to ash, we traded stories from each other’s lives. (This story in my own case. But not all of it. Not that night, anyway.) Encouraged by a bowl of stew, and more than one mouthful of harsh wine from a goatskin flask, I told them about Haddertun, my parents and my father’s words – and then of Lewes Fortress – and then, because I’d seen the way the woman looked at me when I described the rigours of my training, I told her what I’d never told before.
‘I tried to smile when I was hurt, to cover up my pain,’ I said, ‘and if I sometimes missed my old nurse and my mother, and wept upon my pallet, I made sure that I did it quietly in the dark.’
And then the Bérgé’s wife, whose name she told me was Léonie, confessed with a wry smile that as a child she had been warned a hundred times never to unsheath her father’s knife. But that one day she disobeyed, and fumbling with the blade had cut her finger to the bone. Like me she’d cried alone, and bound the wound and hidden it from both her parents rather than admit to weakness. Or to disobedience. But when her mother found her kerchief soaked in blood, she took Léonie up into her lap to clean the cut and kiss her pain away.
‘Remember, little one, that God forgives his children everything,’ she’d said. ‘And so do we. We guide your steps, but will not punish you for straying. It is for you to find the way by trial to your salvation.’
‘You should know that her parents were of the Albigensian persuasion,’ Léonie’s husband put in quietly. ‘Some people call it “The Good Faith” in this part of the world. It came originally from Albi in the Languedoc, where they were taught that God is gentle, all forgiving – that killing men or animals is wrong. That everything we have should be shared equally between us, and that salvation will be universal. Whereas the Catholic Church, which sent you off on your croisade, believes in a merciless Creator whose word, you have been told, is sharper than the sharpest sword – and who will grant a place in Paradise to anyone who slaughters unbelievers for His sake.’
He pulled off his black felt hat to scratch his head. But before I could tell him that there was no God and never had been, he was giving me the reasons why he thought the same.
‘It seems to me that a belief in God enthroned in Heaven is very much about our own delusive quest for immortality, a basic fear of dying.’
The Bérgé smiled into the darkness. ‘In our arrogance and self-obsession, we judge ourselves too precious to be snuffed out like candles – and in seeking meanings for the things in life that hurt and puzzle us, we come up with a set of answers that defy our own intelligence – turn from an open road into a winding labyrinth of superstition and restriction. You could say that the faithful use the idea of an all-seeing god to frighten themselves into obedience, and then attempt to force its contradictory terms on all who disagree.’