Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  However, I reminded myself that it was Father Paulus among the mice at the archbishop’s inquiry who had stood up to suggest that the naked women were overcome by a contagion. This single word, ‘contagion’, and the subsequent illustration he had given concerning a mob attacking a Jewish moneylender, had turned the inquiry in our favour. Perhaps there was more to this little man than I thought, though my commonsense told me I was clutching at straws; his faded blue eyes, pale freckled skin and sparse ginger hair peppered with grey formed a physiognomy that seemed to replicate almost exactly his character. At best Father Paulus was a shy, loyal and unworldly priest who craved isolation and peace and who wished the egregious babble around him to be drowned out by the clanging of church bells.

  On the first day we walked only a few hours until sunset and camped in a field on the outskirts of a small village the name of which, for the life of me, I cannot remember, even though it was important being our first place of sojourn for the night. Many of the smaller children were overcome with exhaustion and slept where they’d halted, on the side of the road beside the field, too weary to crawl the smallest distance into it.

  Before we’d left Cologne I had bade the sick come to the wagon each evening as I had stored large quantities of herbal remedies and ointment for use on the journey to Jerusalem. But on the first day away and just three hours journey from Cologne, my heart sank when I beheld the extent of the children that needed attention. We had barely left and already there were several dozen who had some complaint. I knew we would be on the road for at least half a year and now, but one day out, we were already busy with the sick. My only hope was that this was a hardening process, that the children would soon be calloused to the blisters and their stomachs grow accustomed to the conditions so that they were no longer possessed by the need for frequent evacuation of their bowels or given to vomiting.

  Previous to leaving I had created a group of young girls and taught them what herbs to gather and then how to make the basic unguents and ointments and the various medications for the stomach and ailments of the bowel. I don’t know how we would have managed without the knowledge Frau Sarah had taught me and I thanked her daily in my prayers. The girls were much taken by our secret women’s knowledge and soon proved most proficient in the basics of efficacious remedies and eventually became the very backbone to the task of treating the sick. They took great pride in the name Father Paulus gave them, for he called them the ‘healing angels’. Each morning before we left and again at night it was to become customary to treat the sick. And while I knew that this would be a busy time, I had no idea that we would soon come to call it ‘The Hospice of the Dying’ where, too often, we were required to act as the angels of death.

  I recall that first morning how the villagers arrived to wonder at so large a throng, some bearing food and all curious and much overcome with the sacred nature of the journey. Alas, the following morning they would lose all their children, the ploughboy and the shepherd, the goatherd and the goosegirl, the milkmaid, the swineherd and the children who laboured in the fields. All would forsake their homes to join the crusade. It was the first indication of things to come.

  Before departing Nicholas preached what for him was a short sermon. A mist hung over the field and the children’s clothes were drenched with the morning dew as we departed, the children singing hymns and blowing their trumpets to the glory of God.

  Nicholas was on fire with his message of hope and his energy knew no bounds. He had spent the night praying and possessed less than three hours sleep, yet seemed the most refreshed of all of us. There was no containing him as he walked among groups of children on the road who would burst into praising and song as he approached. The fever (or was it a contagion?) swept over all of us as we marched that first full day.

  We had received a gift of four bags of corn from the village to replenish what we’d used, as sustenance for the smallest children and to feed the mothers with babies to keep the milk at their breasts. But ‘gift’ was a relative word. It had been a hard bargaining process aimed at their collective conscience and it was Reinhardt, by piping the rats from their precious stores of grain, who would eventually shame them into giving.

  This reluctance to give was in part due to the weather. The rains had not come and the late spring weather was exceedingly hot for the time of year, so that the newly planted corn had not progressed well and stood less than two hands high. These were peasants and they knew the signs of a coming hardship and were aware that if a summer of drought was to follow, even four bags of corn might prove the difference between survival and starvation. ‘You will save more than four bags if you are rid of your rats,’ Reinhardt had pointed out. In the end, it was this reasoning that had finally persuaded them to part with their precious corn.

  As summer advanced and the drought continued, the ratcatcher was to strike his rat-ridding bargain on more than one occasion, though not always successfully. He would rid a place of rats and then the townspeople would go back on their promise of grain, often using the scurrilous excuse that his magic flute was stealing their children away from them. In fact, the children could not be prevented from joining us and I despaired as their numbers increased with each new town or city we visited. It was soon obvious that we could not hope to feed the multitude or even the smaller children or mothers with infants and that each must fend for himself.

  Soon enough we were joined by the ribaldi, unarmed scavengers and hangers-on, the dregs of society who stole what little the children possessed causing great consternation and grief. Yet Nicholas was oblivious to all of this and his message prevailed so that the children continued to believe with a passionate certainty that they would reach Jerusalem. When asked by the unbelievers how they could expect to do what kings, dukes and so many others, well armed and wealthy, had failed to do they replied, ‘We go with God. We will bear with a willing spirit whatever God places upon us.’ These were words constantly pronounced by Nicholas in his sermons and by now had become the common litany.

  I go ahead of myself. Everywhere we arrived in the first few weeks of the Children’s Crusade we were welcomed by the common people as a holy congregation and equally rejected by the Church as if a throng sent from the devil. But despite this early approval by simple folk I was often disconcerted by what we witnessed in the towns and cities and prayed that God would send me explanations. It was common to be met by naked women who ran ahead of us crying out, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’ At first we thought this a reaffirmation of God’s message first heard in St Martin’s square, but soon it seemed only a kind of madness in the air that was difficult to understand and did not have a feeling of God’s divine intention. Often people watching us started to foam at the mouth and throw fits. Others rent their clothes or beat themselves with whips or cut their arms and chests with knives. In one town an old man, well-dressed and from his plump appearance and well-barbered head not in need or taken up with any bewilderment of mind, fell to his knees in front of our procession and slit his own throat with a butcher’s knife. People would constantly throw themselves under the wagon wheels and some who were not pulled clear in time were injured.

  It seemed that the coming of the Children’s Crusade into a town or city had become a device for people to indulge themselves in a kind of temporary insanity, and witnessing all this, increasingly my faith was being tested. We had come in peace and everywhere we went we seemed to cause some kind of violence.

  It was in the town of Koblenz where an incident occurred that will forever haunt me. A priest, wild-eyed in appearance, spumed spittle about his mouth, began to shout at us, rushing back and forth and pointing, ‘You are the devil’s children and will all go to hell! Repent now and leave this unholy throng! Repent! Repent! Repent and be saved or all go to be consumed in hellfire everlasting!’ He continued yelling out at the children who marched behind the wagon, his arms flying wildly above his head, and repeatedly running up to the front of the wagon where Nicholas stood in his green robe w
ith the cowl over his head, his tau cross raised. This was the manner we always chose to enter a new town or city, although it was usually Father Paulus and not me who stood beside Nicholas. But on this day the good father must have been delayed somewhere in the procession, which now stretched four furlongs, and I found myself standing in his place.

  ‘Nicholas of Cologne, you are the devil incarnate!’ the priest shouted, standing half-crouched in front of the slowly moving wagon, pointing at Nicholas and running backwards just beyond the front hooves of the mules. Then he’d turn to the crowd who watched and yell, ‘This is the devil come into your midst! You must hang him! Hang him or put him to the flames!’ He kept repeating this procedure, running up and down, exhorting the children to repent and then returning to Nicholas and accusing him of being the devil and demanding his death.

  I stood beside Nicholas and each time the priest approached I urged Nicholas to remain silent. ‘It will not profit us to rebuke him,’ I said softly. ‘He is a priest and we must show respect, even if he does not deserve it.’

  ‘But he wishes me dead!’ Nicholas hissed.

  ‘Nay, say nought, Nicholas, or this crowd may turn. Let them see by his own actions that the priest is mad and that we come in peace with goodwill.’

  ‘I shall cast out the devil within him,’ Nicholas declared.

  ‘Nay, don’t! You have not the gift of miracles,’ I said urgently.

  ‘But the people who watch will see it as a worthy and Christlike act,’ he asserted.

  I was shocked. ‘Nay, I beg you, shut your gob! If you fail to quieten him they will see it as proof that you are not God’s messenger.’

  The priest returned once more and shouted as before. But this time he added, ‘You say you go to Jerusalem, Nicholas of Cologne? I say you go to hell, and all these children with you, where you will burn, burn, burn!’ And then the priest began to laugh, with a mad cackling and a-slapping of knees and throwing his head back and laughing and gulping and snorting and snotting, and saying in between this insane caterwauling, ‘Burn! Burn! Burn! Hell! Hell! Hell! Ha-ha-ha-hah! Ha-ha-ha-hah!’

  Nicholas could contain himself no longer and he shouted out, ‘No, Father, we children go to God!’

  The priest stopped as if frozen to the spot, one arm still raised above his head so that the boy driving the wagon was forced to draw the mules to a halt lest they trample him. The crowd lining the street was hushed as the priest’s arm descended slowly from above his head and pointed at Nicholas. ‘You say you go to God? These children go to God?’ He smiled and turned to the watching crowd. ‘Then let me be the instrument to send them to their heavenly Father!’

  He rushed past the mules to the back of the wagon where a fourteen-year-old named Katrina sat nursing her baby, born two days previously. I turned to see the priest rip the child from its mother’s arms, then grabbing it in one hand by both tiny ankles he stood to my side of the wagon. The baby now swung in a circle above his head. ‘I send this child to God!’ People broke from the crowd and ran towards him and I jumped, screaming from the wagon, but not in time, as he dashed the child to the cobblestones, its soft baby’s head striking the road to split open and spill its brains. I landed on the priest, knocking him onto his back while yet straddling him and beating at his chest. Then I was pulled away from him, my teeth bared and snarling. The priest lay still, not moving.

  Reinhardt rushed up to comfort me and several of the women in the crowd did the same. Four men in the crowd rushed up and began to kick the unconscious priest, just as Father Paulus arrived and quickly stepped in and bade them stop, while I was lifted, sobbing, back on the wagon where I lay weeping. Then two clerics pushed through the crowd and thanked Father Paulus for preventing the mad priest from being killed by the mob and carried the still-unconscious man away.

  All this I was later told, as I was in too great a state of shock to be aware of what was happening around me. It seemed that throughout the ordeal Nicholas had remained standing motionless, his face hidden deep within his cowl and with the tau cross held to his front. If this seems unworthy of him, it was to prove most fortunate. The townsfolk then told how the mad priest had come among them several days before and had been tormenting their children. They had reported him to their own priest and then to the abbot at the nearby monastery but neither would take responsibility, saying he was an itinerant and a prophet and would move on.

  The mood of the crowd remained hushed as Father Paulus said a prayer over the dead infant and a piece of sackcloth was found to wrap the tiny corpse and this was placed next to Katrina who sat, blank-faced and dry-eyed as if uncomprehending, her naked breast exposed. Her milk had only that very morning arrived and her swollen pink nipple where the tiny urgent mouth had suckled, now dripped wet.

  Reinhardt, it seemed, was the only one to keep his wits active. Even Father Paulus, having prayed for the infant, was in no further state to respond to the crowd. While he had every day been surrounded by the dead and dying, it was the manner of the infant’s death at the hands of a priest, albeit a mad one, that now brought him undone and he too climbed onto the wagon and wept softly to himself.

  ‘Good people of Koblenz!’ Reinhardt shouted. ‘Come now in God’s name to hear our prophet preach!’ He pointed to the motionless Nicholas. ‘There is war and evil in our land and God is angry! Our crops shrivel and death and pestilence abound. Come, let us gather in God’s name to bury this murdered infant and hear God’s verdict pronounced so that we may all beg for His forgiveness!’ Whereupon he motioned to the mule driver to proceed and for those of our children who stood close to sing as he piped.

  We were eventually to find ourselves on the outskirts of the town in a small valley nestled between wooded hills, one of these slightly taller with a rocky cluster extended above the trees. Below it, almost halfway up the valley lay a great flat rock large enough to carry more than twenty or thirty people, with one side sloped so that it was easy to climb upon. It must at some time past have separated from the cluster that had crashed down into the valley below and was an ideal platform from which Nicholas could preach as it stood well above the heads of the crowd. We made this rock the centre of our camp, preparing a gravesite on the leeward side for the dead infant.

  Reinhardt now stood with me by the grave of Katrina’s child, the poor girl herself still too shocked to weep for her lost baby, and with me shivering and shaking and not yet fully in control, though I had by now ceased my sobbing. The ratcatcher placed his arm around my shoulders to comfort me, while Father Paulus conducted the funeral surrounded by our own Crusade Children and many of the townsfolk.

  From the first day after we’d left Cologne we had every morning conducted burials of small children who had died during the night. It was impossible for Father Paulus to pay due ceremony to these as there was scarcely time to say a hurried prayer, committing the infant souls to God’s mercy. Then, at best, a shallow grave of scraped earth covered the tiny body with perhaps, should a weeping mother or one of my healing group think to provide it, a single blossom, usually a wild poppy plucked from a field, placed upon the hump of dirt. Now this child, least known of all the dead, not yet baptised and sans a soul, was to receive a burial attended by a vast multitude of mourners.

  Still shaking, I said to Reinhardt, ‘We must sing a requiem, Libera Me.’

  ‘You are too weepy and upset,’ he replied in a consoling voice.

  ‘Nay, I will try. It is the least we may do to bring comfort to the poor mother.’ He nodded and withdrew his arm from about me and took up his flute. People would later declare that my voice was as if an angel of God had come down from heaven to sing to the dead child and Reinhardt’s flute an instrument played in some celestial choir. Many knelt in prayer. Then we followed with a second hymn, one that was well-known. This time the voices of several thousand children sang with us and now all fell to their knees as God’s glory shone down upon the unnamed baby’s grave.

  Then Nicholas preached what would become one
of his most famous sermons. He spoke of peace and love and of God’s desire that this time children should journey to the Holy Land. He stressed that there was no papal promise of our sins redeemed and that the only purity to be gained was on the pilgrimage to Calvary and then to enter the tomb of Christ Jesus. He told how the almond trees would blossom in the coming spring and at summer’s end the ripened corn would neither be stolen nor be put to the avenging torch. Nicholas then promised that in return our glorious heavenly Father would grant us the keys to the gates of Jerusalem and allow us to climb, unhindered and unopposed, the sacred steps to enter the Holy Sepulchre. Whereupon the Sultan of all the Saracens would be so confounded with the piety and peace that prevailed in this joyous throng of Christian children that he would return the true cross to us.

  Nicholas, then concluding, stood on the great rock and raised his cross to a cloudless pewter-coloured sky and promised that God would soon send rain to nourish their failing crops. He followed this improbable pronouncement with a blessing to the town and its people and commended them for their piety while, at the same time, softening them up for what he hoped would prove a demonstration of their charity. He asked that they, in God’s name, feed the children. It was during this sermon that the exhortation, ‘In every home one extra mouth for God,’ was first created, which was to become our future plea to townsfolk in an attempt to feed the children of the crusade.