Crossing To Paradise (9 page)

Gatty
urged Syndod up the steep slope until she caught up with Nakin, Austin and Tilda.

As the four of them breasted the hill, they all felt the chill breath of the hidden mountains ahead of them.

“I wish those clouds would hurry up and lift!” Gatty said impatiently. “I want to see a mountain.”

“We were talking about our fixed world and the spheres of gold and silver stars revolving around us,” Austin told her. “As I was saying, there can be no doubt, no argument, about the sky's curvature.”

“What's curvature?” asked Gatty.

Nakin reined in. “Let's wait here,” he said. “The others are falling a long way behind.”

“Curvature,” Gatty repeated.

“I'd have thought that was obvious,” Nakin said.

“Curvature,” said Austin. “It's…being curved. Yes, being round.”

“Like buttocks, you mean,” said Gatty.

Tilda laughed.

“They are,” said Gatty.

“Like an apple,” Austin said.

“And like the sphere of the world,” added Nakin.

“The world's not round,” Gatty said.

“It is, Gatty,” said Tilda, “and the stars and the planets dance round it.”

“It's not,” said Gatty, “otherwise we'd all drop off it.”

“The world is like the yolk of an egg,” Austin explained. “It has three lands with water all around them, like the white of an egg.”

“Who says so?” Gatty demanded.

Austin sighed.

“I'm only asking.”

“Astronomers say so. Mathematicians say so,” Austin replied. “Philosophers say so.”

“The Bible doesn't,” said Gatty.

Nakin clicked his tongue against his teeth and swatted the air. “You're as tiresome as a horsefly,” he said.

Gatty stuck out her chin. “The Bible says God is the Creator to the ends of the earth. If the world's round like you say, it wouldn't have ends, would it?”

Austin smiled. “That's very clever of you, Gatty, but the prophet Isaiah was writing hundreds of years ago…”

“And the earth was flat then,” said Gatty.

“People thought the earth was flat then,” Austin corrected her.

Gatty tossed her head. “It was flat then and it's flat now!” she said. “And that's flat!”

“Ignore her!” said Nakin.

“Gatty,” said Austin. “If you stop talking, I'll give you all the answers.”

“That's what the devil does!” Gatty exclaimed. “He promises people he'll tell them whatever they need to know if only they'll stop pestering him.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oliver! The devil silences people and then they're in his power. I don't want anyone to stop me asking whatever I want to ask.”

“What's got into you today?” Austin asked. “Ah! Here come the stragglers. See them down there?”

“I wanted to talk about the world's lands,” Nakin said. “You say three but I say four. Maybe four.”

“And I wanted to talk about the stars,” Tilda said, “how they control our lives.”

“There are miles and time enough between here and Jerusalem,” said Austin.

“As soon as I see the first star,” Gatty said, “I wish a wish.”

“So do I,” said Tilda, and she began to sing:

“
I wish this wish, this is my wish,
Star at dusk! Star of wonder!
”

Gatty joined in, singing those same words while Tilda continued:

“
While you shine, while you wander,
I wish the wish I wish comes true.
”

Then Tilda went back to the beginning again, and Austin joined in after the first line, Nakin after the third line. So there they stood, the four of them, little lower than the angels, singing a round, high on a green hill halfway between earth and heaven.

Lady Gwyneth looked up and listened to them and it did her heart good.

“The music of the spheres,” she said.

“No,” Gatty contradicted her.

Lady Gwyneth gave Gatty a stony stare.

“My lady,” added Gatty. “Everard says…”

“Later, Gatty!” said Lady Gwyneth.

Still standing on the hilltop, Austin and his fellow pilgrims gazed back over the land they had all just crossed: the attentive dark pinewoods, the cup of the valley, the bones of pink rock that had broken through the green skin, the close stitchwork of fields around a hamlet, the length of the horizon hemmed by white light.

The priest opened his arms. “What do you see?” he asked in a lofty voice.

Everyone heard the question but no one knew quite how to answer.

“Ah!” exclaimed Nakin. “Yes! Curvature!”

“Amen!” pronounced Austin.

Points and needles of light danced in Gatty's gold curls. She inspected her blunt, callused fingertips, and shook her head. “Not if you got your eyes to the ground,” she said in a quiet, flat voice. “Not if you worked the earth like I have.”

The
guide's eyes were bloodshot and his voice was a bark. He had guided travelers across the rough, gruff mountains for so many years he had almost become a wildman.

Ah! But when he gave tongue to the musical necklace of towns in Italy, on the other side of the mountains, it was a different matter.

“Susa,” he intoned. “Torino, Tortona. Piacenza and Cremona. Vicenza. Treviso.”

Gatty had never heard of places made of such sounds. “Tre-vis-o,” she sang, fluttering her tongue, laying it flat and pushing out her bottom lip, then rounding both lips.

“Treviso,” said Lady Gwyneth. “Yes, that's where we have to leave our horses.”

The guide's face was criss-crossed with as many cracks and crinkles as an unstretched parchment. “Mountains first,” he barked. “Mountain music!
Sì
?”

“We're ready,” Lady Gwyneth said.

But the pilgrims were not ready. Only Nakin had crossed the Alps before, and the pilgrims had somehow skated and slid over his warnings.

“Your skin will burn,” he'd warned them. “Even your eyes will burn…And you, Everard, with your bald pate, you'd better keep your hat on, or the sun will scalp you…You'll sweat like pigs…And when you stop to recover your breath, you'll begin to freeze…The cold will make your teeth ache.”

The guide insisted the pilgrims should wear every stitch of clothing they had brought with them. But when they saw him stepping into a fleece and hauling on oiled leather breeches and wrapping a bandage of felt round his head, when they watched him stepping into high boots with iron spikes in their soles, they began to feel uneasy.

No, the pilgrims were not ready when their horses dug in their newly-shod hooves, and they had to dismount and lead them. They were not ready for the string-thin path that kept doubling back on itself, climbing the left side of a narrow valley, nor for the steep ascent that stretched their calves and thighs, the sudden short drops that jarred their kneecaps and lost them ground so hard won. And they were certainly not prepared for their first sight of a high peak, dazzling and crystalline, so high in the sky that it was nearer to heaven than to earth. The mountain's icy breath caught them by the throat; their own breathlessness caught them by surprise.

Mountain music! In the misty pastures on the floor of the valley, it was the tinny clanking and tonking of cowbells so large they would not have disgraced wayside chapels, interspersed with the pretty chinking of smaller bells. Then it was the light
shisshh-shisshh
of firs and pinetrees; the rushing of a lacy horsetail of a waterfall always shape-changing, always keeping its shape.

Gatty felt as if she were hearing with her eyes and seeing with her ears. The music of the bells and the trees and the water. Her own voice bouncing back from a rockface, huge and hollow, like the voice of a giantess. This, and then the sudden grim roar of the mountain ahead of them, followed by bottomless silence.

“We have mountain called Ogre,” the guide growled, baring his black teeth at Gatty. “It always has a black face but in summer its body is made of flowers.”

Gatty knew what the guide meant. In May and June, Pikeside and the cow pasture and even the headlands and balks were made of flowers. As she led Syndod upward through muddy shale, through mushy patches of snow, she kept trying to remember the story about the Welsh magician who made a woman out of flowers. Then she heard someone shouting.

It was Tilda and she was pointing at something high up, almost above their heads. The whole train of humans and horses came to a halt.

“Did you see them?” Tilda cried. “Did you?”

The pilgrims shielded their eyes, frowned, and stared up at the angry, simmering clouds hugging the huge rock wall to their left.

“Angels!” cried Tilda. “Angels!”

The guide looked at Tilda with a knowing eye. In his time he had accompanied many a pilgrim who had seen angels or saints descending from heaven.

Tilda raised her right arm, as knobbly as the exposed roots of fir trees in the forest below them. Then she slumped onto her knees and began to sob.

Gatty stared at the misty rock wall, and the patches of snow on the pasture leading across to it.

Nakin had all the answers as usual. “It was just a cloud window,” he explained. “A glimpse of snow.”

“Wings!” cried Tilda.

“A dazzling peak.”

“Shining wings! Three angels.”

“Angels!” said Nakin, grinning. “Tilda! Really!”

Gatty wasn't so sure. She sucked her cheeks, and gazed at the rock wall, the pasture around them…She blinked, she screwed up her eyes. The white patches on the pasture were no longer snow. They'd turned into flowers. Little tiny flakes of flowers, hundreds, thousands of white crocuses, sprung up in the winking of an eye.

The pilgrims had to walk in single file, silent and wary of each step, imprisoned inside their own heads, and except for Gatty and Tilda, they did not see the mountains as the home of angels or made of flowers. They were in the wilderness; waves of chill mist somehow clung to them; the taste in their mouths was sour.

In mid-afternoon the guide called a halt.

“One hour!” he called out, and he pulled off a mitten and wagged his right forefinger. “Hospice of Saint Peter! Top of this pass. Beef stew on brown beer mush with corn.”

“I could eat a horse,” said Austin.

“You will,” said Nakin, with a grim smile. “In Italy.”

Lady Gwyneth gave Gatty a wan look.

“Are you all right, my lady?”

“I think so,” said Lady Gwyneth. “I keep feeling faint. That's all.”

Gatty dropped Syndod's reins, and edged past her. Then she opened her arms and Lady Gwyneth stumbled into them.

“Oh! Gatty,” sighed Lady Gwyneth, eyes closed. “Worthwhile is hardwon. Isn't it? We'll rise through this…this cloud of unknowing. We'll see God's shining truth.”

As the train plodded on, picking its way across a recent rockfall, the mist at last began to lift. Gatty could see how the ground on their right sheered clean away, plunging into the depths of the valley. After a while the path opened onto a wide, flat ledge between the rock wall and the precipice, where all the pilgrims could stand in a circle and catch their breath.

Gatty gave Emrys Syndod's reins, and pulled herself forward on her stomach so she could look over.

“Don't,” gulped Nest.

Gatty took no notice.

“Gatty!” screeched Nest. “You're making me giddy.”

“Don't look, then,” said Gatty. She got down onto her knees. “Just look at the clouds.”

Nest whimpered. “When I do,” she said, “the rock wall looks like it's toppling over me.”

“Dear Lord!” exclaimed Lady Gwyneth. “Stop complaining, Nest. You're making it worse for all of us.”

Then a buzzing devil-insect, bigger than a hornet, disappeared into the left ear of Austin's horse and stung him with a hellish sting. Later some of the pilgrims swore they had seen it, just as Tilda swore she had seen three angels.

Saviour reared up on his hind legs, snorting, and the priest was pulled and jerked behind him with the horse's reins wound round his right wrist and hand. Then a loose rock gave way under Saviour's left foreleg. His shank twisted and cracked—everybody said they heard that too—and he crashed to the ground, only to rise again, twisting and whinnying in pain.

On three legs, Saviour waltzed towards the precipice, and Austin was unable to restrain him, unable to disengage himself.

With a fearful whinny, the horse launched himself over a boulder and landed on a much smaller, sloping shelf overhanging the huge drop. The priest was pulled right off his feet and slammed straight into the rock, face first. His left shoulder was crushed, and the boulder was the only thing saving him from being flung over the precipice.

Saviour yelped. He kept straining at his reins, dragging Austin's arm further and further down towards him, cutting through the flesh of his right wrist, and almost pulling his shoulder out of its socket.

Gatty and Emrys both advanced to the boulder, one on either side of it, but neither could reach down as far as Austin's wrist and the reins, let alone haul him back up again.

“Nakin!” yelled Emrys, without turning round. “Everard! Grab Austin's ankles. Hang on to them! We've got to be quick.”

Gatty drew her knife. “Hold my left hand,” she told Emrys. “I'll go down.”

“No!” shrieked Tilda.

Lady Gwyneth and Nest couldn't even bring themselves to look.

“Don't cut it!” cried Tilda.

“Saviour's dead already,” Gatty said under her breath.

Emrys heard her. “You're right, girl,” he replied.

“Please!” barked the guide. “Please!” He stepped up to Gatty with a coil of rope. “Yes,” he said, “you are the lightest. You go!” He tied one end round Gatty's waist and then looped the rope behind Emrys's back.

“Sit!” he told Emrys. Then the guide grasped Emrys's belt and sat down behind him. “I hold the holder,” he said in his gruff voice. “And you,” he said, pointing to Snout, “you hold me. Gatty, go now! Brave girl!”

Slowly Gatty climbed down onto the sloping ledge. When she looked down over the drop into the sage-green valley far, far beneath, her stomach turned over inside her. Stay calm, she told herself. Don't look down.

But then Gatty slipped on loose pebbles, and just for a moment her
feet were dangling over the drop. She cried out in terror. She grabbed at the rope and her knife slipped out of her sweaty right hand, bounced on the shelf and fell over the precipice.

Gatty gasped for air; her legs were shaking.

“It's all right!” Gatty could hear Emrys's voice above her. “I've got you, girl! I've got you!”

“God save her! God save her!” Gatty could hear Lady Gwyneth's voice crying.

Nest and Tilda both got down onto their kneebones, whimpering.

“I'll pull you up!” Emrys panted.

“Wait!” Gatty called up to him. She wanted so much to come back up, but she couldn't abandon Austin. Her eyes were streaming; tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I got an idea.”

Then Gatty squatted on her haunches. She leaned forward until her heels and her calves were stretched tight, she gently rocked forward and with her fingertips touched Saviour's withers.

Saviour was sweating. He was blowing steam out of his nostrils. Gatty laid both her palms against him, and spread herself alongside the horse's quivering body. Crooning and saying words so softly it was impossible to hear what they were, she unbuckled Saviour's bridle, and pulled off his headpiece, his browband, his noseband. Saviour had taken hold of his bit but Gatty gently coaxed him to let go of it.

At once the reins slackened, and Austin was no longer trapped. The priest was lying on his stomach and his forehead and nose and chin were gashed and bleeding; his right hand and wrist were mangled.

“Merciful God!” he said, and that was all he said before he fainted. Then Nakin and Everard dragged him back from the precipice by the legs, and with lumps of snow Tilda began to clean Austin's wounds.

“I'm pulling you up, girl,” Emrys called down.

“Austin's saddlebags,” Gatty said. “Wait!”

“Be careful!” Emrys warned her. “I've got you.”

As Gatty put one hand on Saviour's girth, he twisted back his head. Gatty looked right into his eyes, and they were rolling with terror. Then
the horse sobbed and gulped, and tried to get to his feet, and in doing so he lost his balance.

Still carrying the saddlebags, Saviour slid off the little shelf and over the precipice; he slid and fell, writhing and screaming, onto the scree far beneath.