In Pursuit of the Green Lion (43 page)

Each day he announced some new plan—to walk to Avignon barefoot, for example—and then he would beat his breast and shed tears and let himself be seen all prostrated before the chapel altar until absolutely everyone agreed he was the very model of holy repentance.

“Tell me,” he’d say, cozying up to some priest or other, “should I arrange to be scourged all the way to Avignon? Or would a procession of monks, chanting, be better? Should I enter the town gate in my shirt?—Oh, I see. Yes. Gray friars might well be best.—Oh, the sin of it, how it stains me! The Curse, the terrible Curse!” And, of course, the fact that some romantic-minded demoiselle was usually nearby to overhear didn’t hurt matters any. They loved consoling him, and drying his tears and offering him holy medallions and other tokens for his trip. In fact, his repentance soon caused dark circles to appear under his eyes, for in going from bed to bed all night long he never had a moment’s sleep.

But at last the trip could be put off no longer. A little page, one of Hugo’s paid informants, let him know that he was soon to be sent on pilgrimage to the next world by several aggrieved gentlemen of the court if he did not continue on his way to Avignon. Gregory was well enough to eat now, and to be propped half sitting in the litter, though the fever still came and went. And most convenient of all, we got news that the Bishop of Pamiers was dispatching a heavily guarded party to Avignon, and was well disposed to allowing pilgrims to travel in their company. We might perhaps have hesitated had we known that it was a gold shipment, and they might have hesitated had they known we were English. But once there, Malachi pleaded our case in Latin, rolling his eyes heavenward and crossing himself frequently while he explained our need to visit the holy places of Avignon for restoration of soul and body. Then it was all settled by the captain of the guard, who said, looking over our straggling party, that it might be just as well in case we met up with any English mercenary captains to have someone who could speak their language, though he himself found that tongue difficult to distinguish from the barking of dogs.

In this way we found ourselves crossing the devastated lands to the east, then following the banks of the Aude north to Carcassonne. There, our welcome was not entirely hospitable, for only recently had the lower city beneath the walls been burned by the English prince, on one of his forays from Bordeaux. But in general it is well to travel with an ecclesiastical party, for they get good accommodations at the monasteries, and in those times of trouble, often only the church had anything to spare for visitors. Then there were the disadvantages, too, for convents, churches, and the comfortable sort of traveling clerics were special targets for the raiders and marauders.

And then, naturally, there was the endless number of beggars and wanderers maimed and made homeless by the continual warfare. These our guard drove off without much trouble, shouting that their lords should take care of them. But of course their lords were off raiding, too, since it was good ready money. Anyway, those beggars couldn’t go home even if they had one left, since they hadn’t been forgiven their taxes, which you’d think any sensible lord would do, given the state of the fields. When we heard later that these same peasants had risen, and roasted and eaten their lords into the bargain, it certainly came as no surprise to me, for I have seen the tithe barns burned in England for far less. Why wouldn’t these hardened people meet such ferocity with equal ferocity?

At every place we stopped, the captains of our party made inquiries about the whereabouts of the local raiders,
écorcheurs
, mercenaries, and Free Companies. Then we’d halt, or change routes, according to the news. Most of all, our captains sought news of the “Archpriest,” the monstrous renegade priest turned mercenary commander whose immense traveling army, called the “Society of Acquisition,” was said to be somewhere between us and the papal city of Avignon. Cities and fortresses had fallen to him, and should we have the misfortune to cross his path, we had heard he’d more than likely drink our blood from the chalices of the churches he’d burned.

But God was with us; we avoided the
écorcheurs
and arrived eventually at Avignon having lost only one man, and that one a frail old clerk, to a fever in Narbonne. And we saw many curious sights along the way: some nasty, such as skinned or dismembered corpses, and some beautiful, such as ancient shrines and the ruins of shining buildings left by the pagan Romans. But the white gravelly roads across the dry hills, and the bleak rolling dunes and stunted pines by the alien ocean, made me weep for the comfortable green of England.

At Montpellier, where there is a university, we were greeted outside the walls by a ferocious crowd, shouting and pelting a man in a scholar’s robe, tied backward on a donkey. Malachi, who had been there long ago, told us that is how they drive out those who practice medicine without a degree in that city.

“After all,” he said, “there’s a celebrated medical faculty here, and they have to keep control of trade.”

“Well, it’s just as well they don’t have that idea in England, or there wouldn’t be a donkey left in London,” I replied. “It would be much more sensible to drive off the doctors who kill people, and just keep the ones that make folks better.”

“Ha,” he said. “Then there wouldn’t be a donkey left in all of Christendom.”

“But Malachi, surely it is a terrible thing to drive a man out of the city walls in times like these,” Mother Hilde worried as we sat on our horses outside the city gate, waiting for the crowd to thin out so we could enter. The donkey was driven some distance beyond us down the road before its passenger was forcibly dismounted and abandoned there in the deep mud, the donkey being led back by the thrifty citizens of the town.

“Not entirely, my dear. Consider the good that is hidden within the situation. In times of peace, no city would have him, and he would wander homeless and without a trade. But in these times of trouble, he will soon have employment with the
écorcheurs
, if he has the slightest sense,” responded Malachi, as we dismounted to enter the city gate.

“But what will this poor country do if everyone becomes an
écorcheur?”
I asked.

“Margaret,” responded Malachi firmly, “thinking about big problems that you cannot solve will bring you nothing but grief. Do as I do and think about the small problems that are easily resolved. That is how God sends us nothing but joy. For example, I am currently pondering the wonderful fact that in the bosom of this extraordinary university may well reside the translator whom I seek. While you do nothing but fret, my next few hours will be full of happiness, the eagerness of the hunt, and the exquisite pleasure of anticipation. Think of that, and mend your ways.”

But after making inquiries, Malachi came back very discouraged, for the pestilence and the wars had shriveled the university to only a poor shadow of its former self—just a few hundred students and a handful of masters. He’d found three converts, several people who had claimed they had once known a Jew, a lunatic master who had told him that God had given him the power to read Hebrew scriptures in a dream, and an elderly doctor of theology who told him to go to Avignon. And no one, no one at all, was interested in his book full of strange pothooks.

Only Hugo found profit in our brief stay there. In the cold of the evening, when the winter rain had broken and the wind had pushed the dark clouds away from the moon, we heard the voices of students in the alley behind our lodgings. Their song echoed plaintively against the rain-slick stone walls, and we could hear the splash and clatter of their footsteps on the wet, uneven cobblestones. I opened the shutters to let the music in. There in the damp and moonlight, three young men, the one in the center with a beribboned lute, were strolling and singing together, as students have always done and always will do, in spite of war or plague, until the end of time. They paused at the end of the alley and began another song—one of the strange, lovely winding melodies of the south. Another pair of shutters opened, and a girl’s head peeped out in the shadows. Her heavy dark braids brushed the sill, and I could hear her laugh.

“Let me see,” said Hugo, pushing in behind me—for all of us were staying in the same room, even the squires and the grooms, who slept on the floor on straw mattresses at the foot of Hugo’s bed. And I could hear him mutter as I pulled my head in, “—A lute, yes. Just the thing. More romantic—”

It was at just that moment that I heard an older woman’s voice scolding and the shutters down the alley slam shut with a crash that ended the music. But the seed had been planted, and Sir Hugo’s baggage, when we left a day later, included a lute made in the Saracen style in strips of light and dark wood and with a sound-hole covered with a filigree of carved ivory.

“Quite a lute,” said Gregory, and a shadow of his old, ironic smile crossed his ravaged face. “It will be interesting to watch him learn to play it. Hugo as troubador. To think I had always underestimated his artistic side—” But then his head fell back against the pillow from the effort of speech, and he was silent all the way to the tomb of the blessed Saint Gilles, which gives great virtue to all those who visit it, for it contains the entire body of the holy confessor, except for one armbone, which was stolen to make a shrine elsewhere.

M
ENACING BLACK CLOUDS WERE
rolling overhead, and the first big drops of rain had begun to fall as we reached the great bridge that leads to the papal city of Avignon. The yellow-white stone of the span and of the domes and turrets that rise on the hill within the city’s massive walls, all shining with the damp, glistened like gold against the seething black of the sky. The river here runs swift and green, too wide and dangerous to bridge except by a miracle. But indeed there was one, for God Himself gave orders that the bridge be built, and told a little shepherd boy named Bénézet how to do it. Of course, the bishop threatened to cut off Bénézet’s hands and feet for proposing it to him. But once this difficulty was past, Bénézet became a saint, which is what happens if you can survive the instruction of heavenly voices. The bridge is very fine and fair, with a chapel in the middle, just like we have on London Bridge at home, which I must say I consider to be far finer, even though it wasn’t designed by heavenly instruction. But God did not warn Bénézet about how slippery it would be for horses to make the roadway of such fine white close-set stone. So everyone must dismount and lead their animals across by the bridle, if they do not wish to risk injury. Of course, this may have been God’s way of humbling everybody equally and reminding them that Our Savior did a lot of walking.

But Malachi said that was the sort of thing I would say, and went on counting. “One, two—yes, there’s one,” as if he’d finally lost his mind. And then he explained to me that there’s an old saying that you can’t cross the bridge at Avignon without meeting two monks, two donkeys, and two whores, and he thought if it came true, he’d have good fortune in Avignon. It turned out the donkeys were the most difficult to come by, for in a city populated by churchmen and students it turns out that there are an extraordinary number of the other sort of person.

The rain began to fall in earnest as we clustered with the other pilgrims and marketwomen, waiting for the bishop’s armed party to be admitted and pass through the town gate. I paused to pull the furs over Gregory’s face before Robert helped me to remount. Gregory’s breath was wheezing, and his eyes looked all glassy, as if his mind were wandering again. I wished we were all inside; watching the strangers hurry by us in the street as they dashed for cover, all with someplace of their own to go, made me feel desperately homeless.

By the time we’d ridden into the courtyard of the first inn we found inside the wall, the downpour had turned the dust to heavy mud that caked our horses’ feet. The rolling thunderclouds had darkened the sky even before the sun had set, and we were soaked through. As we tried to huddle in the shelter of the overhanging second story, Hugo reached up from horseback and rapped on the closed shutters of the room above the arched entrance to the inn’s courtyard.

A woman’s head popped out, addressed us briefly in an incomprehensible language, disappeared, and reappeared with another woman—the firm, matronly sort. The new woman, obviously the mistress, shouted in French with a rolling southern accent: “You want places? Who are you?”

“Foreigners of high degree in need of shelter, good woman,” shouted Sir Hugo over the thunder.

“What’s that you’ve got there? A corpse? I run a good house. No corpses,” shouted the woman.

“It’s a wounded knight,” shouted Hugo, taking some license.

“Wounded? Ha. Probably sick. And catching. You think I need sick foreigners? Go away!” and she started to close the shutters.

“Close those shutters and I’ll burn your house down!” shouted Hugo, and Robert shouted a fierce second.

“Talk, talk, talk,” said the woman. “Go to the
quartier des soldats
and ask at the Moor’s Head. She’ll take anyone. A proper case of plague would do her good.” So we waited, drenched and freezing, for a break in the pounding rain, Hugo’s men growling as their horses shifted and whinnied under the overhang.

By the time we reached the Tête du Maure, it was dark and I was shivering, and praying that we would not lose Gregory to the soaking rain. But with the litter laid out by the great fire in the room downstairs, and with everyone drying and regaining warmth, it soon became apparent why we’d been sent there. Women were playing dice with drunken soldiers, women were drinking with elderly priests, women were fondling tipsy students in corners. There were old women and young women, fat women and thin women, light women and dark women. They looked at us curiously for a moment, and then resumed their business. A very large woman, with a vast tissue-thin headdress that revealed mountainous braids of false black hair and immense tinkling silver combs and earrings, approached us. Her face was unusually red and white, with rolls of rice powder settled in all the creases. Just now, the creases were smiling. She spoke to Hugo, who was shaking the water out of his hair like a dog, making little
splut-splut
noises as the drops hit the fire.