I’d never heard a man speak so. As if such heresies could be discussed as easily as a change in the weather.
‘But naturally there’s nothing new about dissention,’ he continued calmly. ‘Not every sheep will follow the flock blindly, and I’ve no doubt that in Babylon and Egypt there were men who questioned the idea of gods and of religion as earnestly as you and I do.’
He put it all so much more clearly than I could have done, that I was glad I hadn’t interrupted.
‘You may be sure that there were Greeks who questioned the idea of a Zeus, and Jews of a Jehovah who bestrides the world like a colossus, but doesn’t seem to have the first idea of how to benefit mankind. Or cure him of his futile rituals and appallingly obsequious forms of prayer.’ The mane of disordered hair the Bérgé ruffled as he spoke was a pale sandy colour, streaked with white. Unusual for a Piemontese.
Or would be if he was one?
I’ve heard it said that hill men and shepherds are a breed apart. But who is this one, really? Where was he born and when? And how was it that the consuj and the farmers and the shepherds of Biella came to choose him in the first place as their Bérgé dal Becce?
But that they’d chosen well was obvious. The next day from early dawn
’
til sunset, the Bérgé could be seen consulting with the shepherds, loading baggage beasts with nets and hurdles, scratching maps on slabs of rock – as first one flock and then the next, and sometimes two or three at once, climbed out of the green basin to the higher pastures he’d assigned to each. I followed him from fold to fold, helping where I could. I stood beside him, shading eyes against the sun to watch the plodding lines of sheep creep up the slopes – until, by mid-afternoon, the shepherds mounted and on foot, the barking dogs, the last signs of movement on the hillsides, all had disappeared. To leave in the stone holding pens, only the flock that we ourselves had brought up from Biella
.
On the third day we began our own ascent. In addition to the Bérgé and his wife, there were six more of us to move our flock of eighteen hundred sheep, our goats, our horses and our baggage beasts. A stooped, grey-bearded fellow called Bartholomeo was mounted on one of the shaggy little ponies I’d seen around the farmsteads of the Biellese. Three younger men with dogs followed on foot. A cavalin of twelve or thirteen summers, a cheerful imp who answered to the name of Aubri, brought on the goats. I led a pair of laden mules and two grey donkeys roped in line. Léonie rode a second pony in the rear – while the Bérgé strode lopsidedly ahead to show the way across a bed of broken shale into the beechwood hangers on the slopes above – where suddenly the patter of a multitude of hooves on shifting stone were silenced, as the flock surged onto leafmould in the aisles between the trunks.
He stood waiting for me, broad hands folded one upon another over the curved headpiece of his crook, as I persuaded the last donkey in the train to clear the far side of the trees, and panted up to join him.
‘Men call the mountains ‘alps’
,
’ he said. ‘But if you were to use that word in front of these old baas,’ he nodded at to the streams of woolly backs and munching heads that were already fanning out across the slopes, grabbing greedy mouthfuls as they ran. ‘They wouldn’t think of alps as windy slopes and barren rock, not they. They’d think of something sweet to taste and tender underfoot – fresh air, fresh water and warm sunshine on the high roof of the world. The
alp are not the mountains, but their pastures
– an’ the reason why sheep like to climb.’
He straightened up to sweep his crook-stick out across the landscape. ‘Take a good look at our alp, boy, and find me one good reason why they wouldn’t be the nearest thing to heaven any man or beast could dream of.’
As if I could have found one!
The mules and donkeys in their efforts to reach new grass, by then had dragged me past the Bérgé to a bluff that offered a clear view across the treetops to the nearest mountain peaks. Huge blocks of naked rock jutted like pillars through the trees. The faded plain so far away below appeared like something from another life and time. And what was real – the only things that seemed entirely real – were the great quilted fields of colour and abundance that lay all about us. Bright sunshine. Teeming insects. Spring flowers blossoming far later at this altitude than on the plain. Violets and primeroses, bluebells, globe-flowers, scented white narcissus, unfurling fronds of fern. A miser’s fortune in gold-besant dandelions, jostling for space amongst the grass stems.
The air was clearer, brighter, fresher than anything I’d known. I saw the dog, Barbon, lift his black nose to savour it – and for myself felt like the cowherd in the fable, who scaled the highest beanstalk anyone had seen, to find himself above the clouds in an enchanted world where hens laid golden eggs, and vines grew silver leaves.
‘Al-Jannah, same word for paradise and garden.’ ‘Alp, the nearest thing to heaven any man or beast could dream of.’
It was then I think, when I first found myself in paradise, that I decided not to press the Bérgé for directions to the mountain pass.
That evening and every evening since then, the shepherds have sent out the dogs to fetch the grazing sheep back to the temporary cort we make for them from netting, hurdles, deadwood from the forests – anything that we can find to keep them safe from wolves. Those creatures hunt in darkness. So we and all the other flocks who’ve made the climb, light fires and keep them burning through the night.
I see them all about me winking in the darkness, hear the wolf packs howling their frustrations to the moon. We reinforce the cort each night, until the melting snow uncovers fresh green swathes of grass still higher on the slopes.
‘This way of life is older than nations, older than their fields and furrows,’ according to the Flockmaster. ‘I sometimes think that mankind makes his greatest error,’ I have heard him say, ‘when he abandons herds and flocks to work the land instead, and build his squalid cities from its profit.’
Every second day the Bérgé mounts a pony or a donkey to ride out round the other flocks within his care and see how they are faring. Each morning when the sheep have been released, Léonie and Aubri milk the goats and separate the curds from whey, and hang out bags of soft white cheese to drip from the wooden tripods they set up in the grass. Then every night we sit and talk beside the fire. Léonie cooks. Bartholomeo plays a flute made from the hollow shinbone of a ram, and afterwards we roll ourselves in our warm sheepskin coats – the Bérgé and his wife apart from us yet very much together – to sleep the light sleep of the watchful shepherd.
With natural springs fed by the melting snow, we’re never far from water. Where two streams meet or under falls, pools here and there have been contrived as drinking wallows for the sheep. It’s not unusual to find shrines there to the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, crudely painted, with round peasant cheeks and haloes that look like yellow sunhats pushed back from their faces. And at one such place I happened to be kneeling with cupped hands to drink the icy water, when the Bérgé stooped to do the same.
‘The image makes you angry, Garon?’ he observed. ‘Now why is that?’
‘Why? Because I’ve seen what Christian soldiers do to mothers with small children, and watched vultures tearing at the flesh of someone who’s still living!’
I had to raise my voice for him to hear above the tumbling of the water. ‘Because I don’t believe in any sort of god, that’s why!’ I shouted, snatching up a fern frond from the rocks that fringed the pool and stripping it of leaflets one by one. ‘You don’t believe in him either,’ I added sullenly. ‘You told me so yourself.’
‘I think I said that I could see no sense in a belief in the overbearing grandfather-god that Jews and Christians call Jehovah and the Moslems know as Allah, and suggested their belief in him was mostly about a fear of death and personal obliteration.’
He sat down heavily beside me on a rock, stretched out one leg and rubbed the bent knee of the other as if to ease some pain. ‘Although why death should concern them quite so much, I’ve never understood. We have no memory of life before our births when our minds were unformed. So why should anyone expect his brain with all its thoughts and images intact to go on functioning after his body dies? It makes no sense to wish for it, or fear to end as we began in darkness.’
He looked up from massaging his knee. ‘In spite of which I do revere a force, a power, a kind of deity,’ he said. ‘And so do you, my friend.’
‘Not me!’ I tossed the naked fern stem back into the pool and watched it slowly turning in the current. ‘No loving god could have allowed what I have seen, what I have done – and I’m no better than the rest. You’ve said yourself that there’s no sense in believing in a god who’s violent and uncaring.’
‘Look here then at this painting, and tell me what you see.’ He pointed at the figures in the shrine.
‘I see a mother, with a son sent down to her by a cruel father who plans to have him whipped and crowned with thorns, and watch him die in agony nailed to a wooden cross.’
I noticed that the Bérgé’s lips moved slightly as I spoke, as if my words were known to him already.
‘You see a mother and a manchild. Forget the rest, it isn’t represented here,’ he said. ‘This mother in this place stands for Creation, all of it. The child she holds is you, the human creature.’
He waited for the sense of it to sink into my brain. ‘As a goddess she’s been known as Gaia by the Greeks, Uni by the Tyrrhenians, Dea Matrona by the Celts and Romans, Mare by the Piemontese. She’s been worshipped in all those guises in this region, likely at this very shrine. She is ‘Natura’, the Eternal Mother, the womb that bears all living things. She orders sun and rain and fills us with the need to reproduce our kind. She is the force of life itself, within whose governance we all must live from the moment we draw in our first breath to the day that we breathe our last.’
He flung out a broad, short-fingered hand in an expansive gesture which embraced the moss and fern around the wallow, the flowering alp, the distant landscape of the valley.
‘She is the earth and everything that it supports. In death we all return to her and from her comes new growth. She pre-dates cities, armies, kings, and yet survives them all. And who’s to say (except a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew) that other creatures are not as deserving as we humans of all Natura has to offer?
‘Men seek wonders beyond existence. But ask yourself what is more wonderful than life itself. We’re born to live on earth, not up in heaven. We see the sky. We feel the warmth of sunlight on our skin – and it’s ironical you must agree, that those who turn their eyes from it to contemplate a better world may miss the best of this one. We grow, we love, we wither and we die as flowers do, as every other living creature must, we simply cease. What’s wrong with that?’ he asked.
‘Rain falls, grass grows, cows crop it an’ men milk ’em.’ John said. ‘’Tis what they’re fashioned for I reckon, an’ all must take what’s sent.’
The Bérgé dal becce rose to take a closer look at the flaking figures in their gabled shrine.
‘Simple people need someone to represent all that, a mother they can speak to face to face. But how surprised you’d be, my anything-but-immaculate little Mary-Miriam, to see yourself enthroned and aureoled and venerated as Mare-Madonna,’ he told the painted image in her halo-hat. ‘A dusky little peasant girl, fifteen or sixteen at the most, much less concerned with mothering the world than how you’re going to cope with your first baby!’
The Bérgé has a greater gift with words than any man I’ve met. Perhaps because he spends so many months of every year high in the mountains looking down, he sees the world of men long-sightedly and likes to speculate on all the whys and wherefores of their being.
‘Abraham and Moses, King David and Muhammad, all minded sheep at some time in their lives,’ he said another day at noontime, as we sat with Aubri and Léonie, eating salted mutton from the woman’s store. ‘We shepherds have a history as thinkers and as guides. It’s why the Kings of Egypt and the bishops of the church hold shepherd’s crooks, to show the people they’ve a true head on their shoulders.’
‘Or else to warn them that flockmasters love nothing better than the sound of their own voices,’ Léonie put in with a wink at Aubri, who gave a snort of laughter.
‘Why wouldn’t we, my dear?’ her husband asked, ‘when it’s the instrument we have been given for the purpose? Although I think you do know there is something that I love more?’
He leant across to brush a cheese crumb from Léonie’s smiling lips.
But if he likes to talk, the Bérgé’s also a good listener. Through all the weeks I’ve spent with him, he’s constantly encouraged me to tell him what I think and how I feel about the places I have seen, the people that I’ve met, and everything about my former life. In his company and in his mountain world I felt – I feel, as I once felt at Acre in the siege. Apart and separate from all that’s gone before.
The rams we’d brought up with us from Biella were constantly at work through spring and early summer, tupping ewes for autumn lambing on the plain, and challenging their rivals for the right to do it. With hardly time for them between the fucking and the fighting, poor beasts, to snatch a living from the grass. They normally began by circling each other at close quarters.
‘And will fight unless the challenger decides the other is too big or heavy for him,’ the Bérgé explained when we came on a pair of them about the business. ‘Silly as a sheep’, the saying goes. But sheep know what they are about as well as you or I.’