Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Oh, yes, sure! “Good people, as I stand before you covered in crow shit, I wish to make you a proposition concerning your rats!”’ He gave me a scornful look. ‘Remember, they thought the rats the work of the Virgin Maid. What do you think they would have thought if you should demand a ratcatcher’s fee and thus broke the spell created by the miracle of the birds?’

  It was a good point and I had no immediate answer. ‘What would such a fee be?’ I asked, my voice growing more accommodating. ‘As much as we received in alms?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘I think not!’

  ‘You are right.’ Scratching his chin he gave a rueful laugh. ‘We are a very good combination, Sylvia.’

  ‘Half as much?’ I demanded to know.

  ‘Aye . . . maybe.’

  ‘I think much less, but let us say it’s half. We must find a hermit and give him half our alms, the other half you may count as your ratcatcher’s fee.’

  ‘No! No . . . No!’ he protested angrily. ‘That is money hard earned and it is mine . . . ours.’ He looked at me pleadingly. ‘They say a Jew’s money is glued to the inside of his pockets. That if, at the moment a Syrian infant comes from the womb, you should place a piastre in his hand, he will close his fingers about it and thereafter no might on earth can pry this tiny treasure from him. Be that as it may, it is my experience that the German peasant is the most rapacious of all the moneygrubbers and will make the meanest Israelite seem foolishly generous. We will not see such alms again. Believe me, it was the donation those peasants gave to the Virgin Maid that proved the true miracle!’ He patted his satchel. ‘This money was given because they greatly feared your powers, we will need every penny for the hard days ahead in Cologne.’

  ‘Suit yourself, ratcatcher! Now I must bid you adieu.’ I pointed down the road. ‘Go on, be off with you, thief, rapscallion!’

  ‘You don’t mean that!’ he protested. ‘What of the words to the Gloria you sing, I know them all as well as the words to the Kyrie, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei. If you will tarry I can tell you their meaning in but a few days.’

  ‘Be off!’ I cried. ‘You said yourself I would sing no better for knowing them. Nor am I able to learn the Latin words for being created a peasant and ignorant. I am a sinner born, yes! But not one of my own true making. Now you would turn me into a thief and next thing . . . who knows . . . whore? A fine combination we’ll be, you say, but only for your own profit and your terrible lust!’

  While Sylvia Now spoke out thus, Sylvia Then was sorely tempted to accept his offer and take a chance on keeping my chastity. Why is it that the Christian conscience is always in turmoil? Is it that the devil is omnipresent? Lurking in the shadows of our minds? If I remained a pious maid, must I then remain ignorant? Or by wanting knowledge become corrupted? Was piety truly the greater of these two desires? Or dare I not ask such a question for fear of gaining the wrong answer?

  Reinhardt the Ratcatcher raised his hand and pulled his arm back as if to strike me. ‘You are a stubborn and churlish maid and I should beat you!’ he cried out, his pretty face all a-pout, although I could see his eyes appeared more uncertain than angry.

  ‘Go ahead!’ I spat. ‘If you should beat me and then rape me, will you then be satisfied? Ratcatcher, you will have changed nothing, you hear? It is as God wills, I shall remain a poor ignorant peasant and you a pretty ratcatcher!’ I spoke boldly, while my heart was sorely afraid. When dealing with my drunken father I had long since learned that my voice should seem defiant, so that he would not perceive my fear and only feel my loathing.

  ‘Rape you?’ Reinhardt’s expression was at first querulous then abundantly hurt. His arm fell to his side. ‘Sylvia Honeyeater,’ he cried, ‘I have given you my word!’

  ‘The widow Johanna says that you are just the type to pluck the rose,’ I said accusingly.

  He brought his hand up to cover his heart. ‘No, I swear it. You are safe with me,’ he repeated earnestly.

  The knife was in, but I felt the need to twist it, even though I knew I had the measure of this flighty piper. ‘You said that should we come across a Bible you’d swear upon it that the stories you tell of the pilgrimage to conquer the Holy Land were true. Would you also swear not to deflower me? Swear it before Almighty God?’

  ‘That I shall, kneeling at any altar in Christendom,’ he said, in an over-elaborate promise. ‘Forsooth, did I not accommodate you with the widow in the village?’

  ‘Ho! That well suited your cunning plan,’ I accused.

  ‘What plan? I had no plan. Only thought for food and lodging for the night and to keep you chaste.’

  ‘Ha! On the morrow you planned that I would be seen the Virgin Maid and you would use me to trick those simple village folk.’

  ‘Oh-ho! You think me too clever by half. I swear I simply kept my side of the bargain not to share your bed.’

  ‘Why? Am I not attractive?’ I asked perversely.

  ‘No! Yes, of course! An angel and most amazing pretty. It’sjust that I don’t care to . . . to . . . dance with Diana.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Sleep with you!’ he burst out. Then calmer, he looked at me and shrugged. ‘So what now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Will we stay together?’

  ‘Only if we give half the alms to a hermit!’

  ‘But I don’t know a hermit!’ he cried.

  ‘Then we will find one,’ I said calmly.

  I could see he was becoming exasperated. I had first belaboured the point of my chastity and now this. He fought to keep his voice calm. ‘They are not that easily found and live mostly in the desert . . . alone! St Simeon Stylites who lived in Syria seven hundred years ago spent thirty years chained to the top of a column sixty cubits high so that he might be alone! That’s why they’re hermits! Don’t you understand? They do not wish the company of men! They have no need for alms. Some eat only grass!’

  ‘Grass?’

  ‘Aye, and are said to lick the morning dew to quench their thirst.’

  ‘Ha! What of Peter the Hermit, he was not alone?’

  ‘Why? What do you know of him?’

  ‘Everybody knows of him, even we peasants. He led tens of thousands of pilgrims against the infidel to capture Jerusalem and regain the Holy Sepulchre.’

  ‘That was different, Peter the Hermit was called out of the desert by God to lead the People’s Crusade.’

  ‘And there are no hermits in the towns or in Cologne?’

  ‘Sylvia, I have travelled far and wide and sometimes have seen men who wear the russet gown of wool and carry the crooked stick. But they are no more a hermit than I. They are men who prey upon the poor and the gullible but, in truth, are footpads and vagabonds. Some, I have observed, have wenches who follow behind and at night in the woods at the edge of towns and villages you may see their fires and their drunken dancing and fornicating. To give alms to such scallywags, reprobates and cullions is to do a great disservice to hard-working entertainers such as we.’

  ‘Entertainers now, are we? What happened to the Guild of Ancient Ratcatchers?’

  Reinhardt grinned. ‘It is a vocation that is always there if we need it.’ He clucked his tongue. ‘But to tell the truth, catching rats is inglorious work. My flute and your singing will enchant the crowd and merriness is a far better pursuit than the rats that constantly remind me that they will be the certain cause of my death.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘The plague, it is the rat flea that carries it, when it strikes the ratcatcher is the first to die. My father and my grandfather both perished thus.’

  I could see no point in arguing further as he had, after all, come around to all my expectations. Besides, I quite liked the idea of being an entertainer. If it was less about warm loaves, hot soup and the comfort of the kitchen hearth, singing for my supper seemed a better life than that of a humble kitchen maid answering to a bad-tempered cook and a scolding mistress in a rich merchant’s ho
use.

  ‘If there are no true hermits to be found, then we must give half the alms to the poor,’ I announced.

  ‘But we are the poor!’ he protested.

  ‘You said yourself, the ratcatcher never goes hungry.’

  ‘But we are entertainers now!’

  I frowned. ‘And they go hungry?’

  ‘Very well, half to the poor,’ he sighed. ‘Then you will stay?’

  ‘Let me count the money, the alms.’

  He gave me a hurt look. ‘You still don’t trust me!’

  ‘Aye, of the honesty of a ratcatcher I know nought, but you have acquired a minstrel’s bad habits and his look of innocence when he plans to gull a peasant. It is this I do not trust.’ I held out my hand. ‘Give me your satchel.’

  With a final sigh he unstrapped the satchel from his waist and handed it to me. I quickly counted the contents and divided the money, keeping half and handing back the remainder.

  ‘I see the peasant is true to his calling,’ he smirked, plainly upset with the loss of half the alms. ‘She knows nothing of anything, but can count money more carefully than a Syrian Jew.’

  I ignored this churlish observation and grinned at his cleverness in putting both the Jew and the Syrian together to emphasise a peasant’s preoccupation with money. ‘I will guard the purse we will from now on set aside for the poor and you shall keep the one that lets us eat.’

  He looked at me first puzzled, then greatly alarmed. ‘Purse for the poor? Is it not just this once we give alms to them?’

  ‘You said yourself, we will be a goodly combination and make a pretty sum. From now on we will share our good fortune, half of all we earn we shall give to the less fortunate.’

  If you think this showed some good in my character, then that was not how I saw it at the time. While I cared somewhat for the poor, for I was to be counted among them myself, in my mind I had formed a plan and was about to put a proposition to Almighty God. Later, when I had the time to pray in earnest, I would phrase it more carefully, but what it was, was this: if God had created me a peasant and a woman with an immutable character and therefore by divine design unable to learn to read and write Latin, then only He, in His infinite mercy, could change the preordained circumstances of my birth. If I gave alms to God’s poor, then in return, I would be in a better position to ask Him to reconsider my destiny and to grant me the gift of learning.

  In later years I would blush to think that I possessed such effrontery and dared to think that I might make a bargain with the Almighty. But the young do not see these things as cut and dried and all things become possible when we have faith and hope and act in ignorance of the impossible. I did, as I recall, allow God the right to refuse me. I decided it would be a test. If, despite my efforts, I proved unable to grasp the task of formal learning, then it would be God’s indication that He had not changed His mind and that I was predestined to be ignorant. I told myself I would forever after accept His will and the lot in life chosen for me.

  ‘Then you will teach me the meaning of the Latin words in the mass?’

  Reinhardt nodded reluctantly. I then asked shyly and with my eyes lowered, for I had asserted myself overmuch to this point and it was time to assume a maidenly modesty so he might think himself back as the commanding male, ‘If I learn these well, can we purchase a slate and stylus and then, if God permits, will you teach me more of Latin?’

  ‘All I know myself,’ he promised, his lovely brown eyes the picture of sincerity. But then he added a cautionary note that indicated the slippery, sly nature beneath his acquiescence. ‘Rome was not built in a day. It will take time, much, much time, as learning is a difficult and tedious process and perhaps for you impossible, but it has always a slow beginning.’

  ‘Thank you, you will find me patient and tireless,’ I promised.

  He laughed. ‘It will go best if I be patient and you tireless, little sister.’ Suddenly, all business over, he rubbed his hands together. ‘Good! Now we must work out a way to best gull . . . er, set before the worthy citizens of Cologne a merry dish of entertainment so that we may profit from it.’

  In the next two days as I sang the words to each of the hymns he would translate the meaning. I do not wish to sound immodest, but from childhood I had practised memorising the sermons of Father Pietrus and the abbot, the pronouncements of the mayor and village officials, the conversations of the village fräuleins and others at the markets, so that my memory for words was most finely tuned. I think Reinhardt the Ratcatcher found himself truly flabbergasted when in less than two days I could recite the meaning of every line in every hymn. He then promised to teach me the Latin alphabet in sounds, and when we should reach Cologne we would purchase a slate and stylus and I would learn to write.

  So far I had not put God’s will to the test, since repeating the recitation of others, as I was well accustomed to doing, did not count in my mind for true learning. But now I was about to learn the actual letters contained in the Bible and then to join them so that they formed silent words upon the slate. Words produced by my own mind and scratched with my own hand. If God permitted me to learn, then I knew this would be a true miracle and that I would give praise to Him ever after.

  As we drew closer to Cologne the villages grew more frequent and the ox-drawn carts more numerous. Many contained winter produce for the great city – mostly cabbages, turnips and pumpkins ripened at the end of summer and stored for winter sale. Bark cages on the back of carts carried rabbits or pigs, ducks, geese and chickens. Often flocks of shorn sheep led by a shepherd boy blocked the road, withers all, destined for the butcher’s block. Soon the wooded slopes ceased and no natural land existed. Fields stretching to the farthermost horizon now lay fallow, the summer wheat and barley crop they’d carried long since harvested. A few willows beside a crooked stream dotted the landscape, stripped as bare as witches’ brooms. We heard no birds calling other than an occasional raven cawing mournfully against the lowering sky. But if the land lay empty and silent, not so the road. Here a great conglomeration of farmyard birds and beasts mixed their discordant cries with the creak of wagon wheels working through the muddy ruts to the urging curses of the peasant farmers.

  And through this city-bound cacophony we rehearsed our act, a bit of everything for everyone, folksongs funny and sad, randified and of a sweet maiden plucking flowers in a field. Hymns for the pious, and always Reinhardt the Ratcatcher’s flighty-flirty flute to cause the young to jump from their skin and the old and the infirm to do a merry jig and so remember days of yore when they too were young and bold-eyed lads and lasses.

  At last, in the early morning light, we saw in the distance the ancient Roman city built in a crescent shape and enclosed by a huge rampart with walls and numerous gates. I was happy to see that to the eastern side of the city beyond the walls were wooded hills. ‘There is a river that runs through the centre where I once piped rats to drown,’ Reinhardt said a little boastfully.

  ‘Did that not befoul the stream?’ I asked.

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Your world of silver streams that tumble crystal clear o’er rocks and moss are over, Sylvia. This is a river most foul. It is called the Blaubach, but it has long since lost its colour blue. It is mainly used to carry the shit and piss from the open drains that run through the streets and the waste from the tanners’ and dyers’ vats, abattoirs, fishwife stalls, dog skinners and other foul and noxious wastemakers and to deposit the effluent into the Rhine. My rats caused to drown in it would not have made a scintilla of difference. If you should perchance swallow a thimbleful taken from its banks you would most surely perish.’

  It was not long after the ringing of the Angelus bells on the third day after we’d agreed to stay together that we arrived at one of the city gates. We’d sojourned at a village inn an hour from the city the night before, where we’d slept together on a straw pallet, this being the cheapest accommodation. Reinhardt, true to his word, did not lay a finger upon me but lay with h
is back turned to me all night. I lay snug, wrapped in a fine sheepskin coat the ratcatcher had won for me at dice from a merchant who dealt in scissors and knives who was tarrying in the tavern where we had agreed to entertain in return for our supper and ale.

  Mist hung over the great river Rhine as we crossed an ancient bridge Reinhardt said had been built by the Romans. We had left the village while it was yet dark to make an early start. It was market day and all the carts we’d passed the day before now stretched endlessly along the road to Cologne. ‘They will be nose to back all the way to the city gates to await the ringing of the Angelus,’ Reinhardt had explained. ‘They must pay tax to the city before entering. Most pay in kind, a rabbit or a pair of chickens or a duck or half a sack of vegetables. It is a bargaining process and peasants, as you well know, do not part lightly with their property. Having waited all night they consider time well spent when arguing the price of entry. Those waiting behind them often grow angry and quarrel among themselves, afraid they’ll miss the markets, but when their turn comes they bargain just as hard and long. Those on the very end will not gain the gates until noon and so must sell their produce cheaply before the markets close mid-afternoon. If, for want of time, they cannot sell their produce or their wares, then they must stay the night in the city to sell what they have left to poor widows and the infirmaries.’ He laughed. ‘This keeps the inns and taverns busy, which is good for us.’ He then explained. ‘The curfew is at nine of the clock when the church bells ring and the town crier comes to urge the city folk indoors. Only the homeless poor are left on the streets and they too must creep into dark alleys and corners safe from thieves. So, you see, there is sometimes work for entertainers in the taverns and inns where the merchants and peasants sojourn.’

  I did not reply, but wondered how I might stay awake, much less sing, at such a late hour. As we approached the gates the ratcatcher stopped and pulled me aside and asked, ‘Where keep you the alms purse?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ I replied, suspicious.