Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Sometimes it worked, but mostly not and Reinhardt would reluctantly persuade the town to undergo a rat-ridding in exchange for corn. This too did not always earn us the results we desired. The suspicious people of Lombardy and the Po Valley would not give us corn before the ridding took place, thinking we might be gulling them. Then when it was done and the rats marched into the river or an empty well, they would often halve the amount promised. We would barely have sufficient to get to the next destination and sometimes we’d go hungry for days on end, living on grass and weeds and water, with our children now forced to steal cabbages and turnips or anything they could find from the fields and from cackling barnyards, alas, Reinhardt having first stilled the dogs with his magic flute.

  But it was never enough and soon our children began to despair. They had endured the Alps with the knowledge that the drought would be ended on the other side and that the folk would embrace them and fill their bellies to every content. Now they were harassed and chased away and the smaller ones beaten and kicked. It seemed that their dislike for us as Germans could not be contained and the children became objects they would use to vent their hatred on.

  People constantly cried out the same words, and when we finally got the translation we discovered what they asked was, ‘Where is your priest?’

  ‘Mort!’ we taught our children to shout back.

  But without Father Paulus present the local priests were the first to chastise us, calling us the devil’s urchins, German piglets and other terms of abuse we thankfully did not understand.

  Many of the farm children, so they might eat, took work upon the land. I would later hear that most were harshly treated and some beaten to death. In every town we came to we left behind children to die in the streets and squares, too weak to continue. It became apparent that if we remained in one great multitude we had no chance of reaching the sea. So it was decided that we would break into groups of twenty or so, the better to scrounge and to beg and forage for food, taking various routes across the countryside so as not to overburden any district or town with the arrival of too many children.

  Nicholas preached that the hand of God still guided us, that we must all reach Genoa towards the end of August. Those who arrived first would wait for the others and all would wait for the day when God told him to still the sea. He would create a pathway on the top of the waves so we might walk over it all the way to Constantinople without fear of drowning. Nicholas painted a pretty picture of this glorious path, frozen but not cold, that stretched like a silver ribbon across the ocean. On either side of the path, fish would swim to be scooped up from hand to lip, scaled and cooked by the angels who hovered in attendance over us. Well fed and vigorous of spirit, we would be welcomed by the Greek Christians and together give thanks to God. Whereupon, with salutations and speeches, banners blowing in the wind and the sounding of brass trumpets, we would make our departure. There would be flowers scattered over our heads and palm leaves strewn at our feet as we left the empire of the Byzantine and crossed into the lands of the Saracens. Then onwards, following the cross and going steadfastly in peace and love and understanding to Jerusalem to recover the Holy Sepulchre for Christianity.

  Nicholas, who daily seemed to be jumping out of his skin, said he must be at the front with the strongest of the boys with their banners and brass trumpets, so that he could lead us to the sea. ‘It is our most important occasion, the moment when we tread upon the sea. I must proclaim the Children’s Crusade in the name of God and our precious Saviour Jesus Christ. I must be seen as the one inspired by our heavenly Father. The people must know that mine, and no other, is the hand that will receive the sacred keys to the Holy Sepulchre from the iniquitous Saracens!’

  Since he had returned to us after we had traversed the Alps, he seemed less and less inclined to have me by his side. Reinhardt said it was clear that Nicholas resented my presence since the preaching in the mountains, thinking I was attempting to take over and rob him of the glory he was entitled to as leader.

  I confess that on one occasion when I had suggested that we break his sermons, now growing too long and lugubrious for the weakened multitude of children, Nicholas had snapped at me. ‘You try to steal the power of Jesus within me! My voice comes from God, yours from that silly screeching girl’s choir!’

  Suitably chastened I’d replied, perhaps a little angrily, ‘Maybe you would prefer that we no longer sing? You have merely to say the word, Nicholas of Cologne.’

  ‘Do not mock me, Sylvia!’ he had cried. ‘Ha! You steal my voice and now, when I am returned to Jesus, you would judge the voice of God too long and interrupt it with the shrieking of hymns!’

  ‘No more singing,’ I’d said, now truly angry, walking away from him. I had expected him to call me back, but he didn’t and a little later he sent a message to say we should choose another route to Genoa, where he would wait for us.

  We would choose one less arduous for the smaller children who increasingly gathered around the healing angels. Reinhardt and I gathered a group we hoped would be no more than twenty but ended as more than fifty. In all, there were fifty-six and that included the remaining healing angels. Half of the weak were girls who were under ten and the rest were boys even younger who, remarkably, still survived. These were the smallest and the weakest, the ones we deemed most needed our care, though, in truth, if such care might be given, every child who marched was in need of some. Death had become so familiar in my life that the last tears I had shed were for Father Paulus. If it may be said that God grants us only a certain number of tears to use in life’s travail, then I had used my share. As we moved past the dead and dying children I could no longer cry.

  ‘Please, Reinhardt, pray to God that we might find a road to the sea that does not carry the corpses of children,’ I begged. But we never did find such a glorious path. All carried the reek of death and we could not avoid the sight of tiny ragged bodies cast aside as if they were carrion. Our nostrils were no longer assaulted by the stench and we had long since given up cursing the ravens, jackdaws, crows and hawks that feasted upon our dead. I would stop along the way to bring comfort and to recite a penitential psalm to any dying child we came across. Or when we reached the towns and villages, if there was a church I’d ask to see the priest and, speaking in Latin, beg him to give the dying children extreme unction. But they would invariably refuse and so I would try to bring these small souls some comfort.

  I had attended so many last anointings of children with Father Paulus that I knew all seven penitential psalms off by heart. I had sometimes repeated them for the dying child while he anointed their heads with oil. He had given me permission to administer a penitential psalm to a dying child and assured me God would most surely approve, so I now gave this small and abiding comfort to them whenever I could. It was so very little, yet sometimes it could be seen to bring peace in death to a frightened child. It was because so many lay dying and in need of final comfort and this small preparation for the journey to heaven that our group moved the slowest of them all towards the sea.

  Before we broke up into smaller groups I had prayed constantly that God should tell me what to do. We were now a ragged, desperate, starving mob. Nicholas seemed less in control and much of the fire was gone from his sermons to the children. I thought it as well that we now decided to break into groups so that the multitude did not see what I thought seemed like the waning of his powers.

  Whereas Nicholas appeared as lively in his movement and enthusiasms as ever before, he now seemed puffed-up with self-importance. Previously he had seen himself simply following the instructions received from an angel sent by Jesus. Now he seemed to believe, not in the guiding hand of God’s angel, but that he was the omnipotent, venerable and holy entity. Since the last deep, dark place – the longest he had ever experienced – he regarded his every decision and instruction as carrying the authority of the heavenly Father. He began to hint that he was himself the angel and that when he entered his dark place it was becau
se his body remained behind while his spirit had been temporarily transported to heaven, where Jesus spoke to him directly and gave him his future directions.

  In one of his sermons he told how, if the Saracens should attack us, where he walked the sand would be turned to gold dust and the infidels would grovel at his feet to scoop it up and so we would pass by safely. He spoke about how he intended to warn these heathens and devils that if any of his flock died by the infidels’ spears and arrows, his footsteps would turn from gold to golden serpents that would strike them down.

  As we crossed the lands of Italy his sermons became more and more exaggerated and bizarre and it astonished me that the four thousand or so children left in the crusade still believed. I confess myself grateful that we were separated for the last weeks on the road to the sea, that having endured near three months with the multitude I now need care only for the fifty-six children.

  I still believed that Nicholas was blessed and that he was divinely inspired to lead us. But I did not believe, as the children did, that the surface of the sea would harden and that, in the manner of Christ on the Sea of Galilee, we would walk with dry feet across the water. Instead I thought it a figure of speech, that boats would transport us in God’s name with the blessing of the Holy Father in Rome. This is sheer stupidity now when I think about it, for why would there be boats willing to transport four thousand ragged, penniless children for the glory of God as the boatmen’s only compensation? But faith is a blind maiden and in God’s precious name all things are possible. All I can say is I believed we would cross over the sea and eventually find ourselves in Jerusalem. I had no doubts whatsoever that this was God’s wish and that we must obey Him through every hardship we might encounter.

  The townspeople showed only animosity when we entered and would do all they could to make us feel unwanted. We had grown accustomed to them setting their dogs on us and their scowls and growls, the impatient shooing of the women as if we were a pestilence of persistent flies or a flock of parish pigeons underfoot. We had come to expect harsh and sometimes vile invective from the men and the spitting and punching of local youths as they beat our weakened, defenceless boys and grabbed gleefully at the breasts and crotches of the girls. Or if they came across one alone they were quick to rape her as if a yowling pack of dogs come across a carcass.

  These people on the other side of the mountains had never wanted us in the first place. Unlike our own folk they did not believe in a Children’s Crusade and their priests had warned them that ours was a false prophecy. With hundreds of small groups passing through their towns they had had their fill of desperate children falling to their knees, supplicating and sobbing while clutching their ankles and crying out piteously for food.

  Many of the children were kicked aside or spat upon as they begged in what the locals thought the harsh guttural accents of a Teutonic people whom they despised. Any Christian charity they may have initially felt, they had long since abandoned in favour of denying compassion to these starving Child Crusaders. (‘If you feed them they’ll only stay longer!’) They came to regard these German children, with their ragged banners depicting, of all things, a cross with a crow, as an invasion, no different to a plague of locusts come to steal their food and ravage their lands. The only certain cure for this infestation was to stamp it out as quickly as possible by refusing to give it food. The children who succumbed to starvation while in their towns were thrown into a communal pit and covered with quicklime before being buried in unconsecrated ground. This was usually accomplished without a prayer, the local priest being too busy with God’s important work to pray for the souls of this infestation of vermin.

  Adding to all this was the lack of a common language. While still with the multitude I could sometimes communicate in Latin with the local priest or beg an audience with the bishop, though they would seldom accept an emissary from the Children’s Crusade. Moreover we could not speak to the commonfolk. If Father Paulus had been with us, then at the very least we might have had access to the local priest; without him we lacked any credentials and were regarded as an invading mob.

  The fact that we carried the cross of Christ and sang in praise of the same God seemed of little or no consequence. The sensibilities of the particular God who watched over these pious Italians were not to be compromised by the extra-territorial burdens unfairly imposed on Him by His cruder and more tempestuous German alter ego. Ours was a lesser God, if one at all, who guided the Children’s Crusade. If I managed to see a priest or even, once or twice, have an audience with the local bishop, all we received were harsh words of admonishment and the demand that we return from whence we’d come.

  A ragged, young brunhilda in broken boots, attired in the rough woollen garb of a peasant, her blonde hair denoting her Saxon beginnings, her face blistered from exposure to the sun, but one who spoke Latin with a fluency beyond the ability of the bishop, was not a welcome emissary. A mere female, who could quote the Bible chapter and verse with a greater facility than most priests and, if necessary, remind them of Christ’s words about charity and little children, was a furtive stab to their ecclesiastical consciences and they resented me deeply.

  Furthermore, I didn’t make a fuss when I first came into their presence, but instead I played the pious and compliant maid and let them huff and puff and admonish me over our cause before parrying with arguments in the classical scholarly Latin of an educated cardinal. This Latin eloquence was, of course, due to Brother Dominic, who had taken great pains to remove all traces of the peasant German inflections from my Latin tongue and had taught me its syntax and grammar as spoken in the presence of the Pope.

  In other words, I was no dummkopf whom a churchman could remove from their presence with a backward flip of a priestly hand, a priest who was more accustomed to blessing and head-patting and gesticulating while his tongue prattled inanities than he was in arguing the Holy Scriptures with a biblical scholar whom they’d completely underestimated.

  However, I soon grew to realise that my intellectual acuity stood no chance of winning priest or bishop over to our side. In fact, it proved to be a hindrance. I was a young peasant woman of no possible influence or benefit to them, possessed of an argumentative manner better suited to an aging abbess. This, in one so young and unpropitious, was in itself a paradox and the Church, where men reign over God’s earthly kingdom, does not like uncertainty and contradiction, especially coming from a woman. One Mother of God who is known to keep her mouth shut is sufficient for its needs.

  And so, now that we were a small group at the tail-end of the marchers with the smallest and the weakest to look after, I asked the heavenly Father for His guidance to overcome these uncharitable people and their mean-spirited priests. I asked God to show me how we might survive these last weeks with these angry people on the far side of the mountains.

  In asking God for guidance, unlike Nicholas or Father Hermann, I did not expect God to speak to me directly. But that night I dreamed of birds, every kind, in a chorus fluttering above my head. Standing with me was a choir of fifty-six children who sang with the voices of angels to open the hearts of all who heard them and who placed food in baskets at our feet. In the dream I heard a disembodied voice call, ‘Hark! The Silent Choir of God’s Little Children.’

  Now I know, before declaring I had received a message from God, there may seem a simple enough explanation, as dreams are often only the ragged ends of the previous day’s thinking. Besides, I dreamed often enough of birds and had done so since a child. We had fifty-six children in our group, among them the healing angels. Such a dream did not seem to contain any special quality – birds, children and the healing angels who sometimes sang as a choir being a simple enough explanation. Nevertheless I woke up quite sure the voice I had heard was from the heavenly Father and that the Silent Choir of God’s Little Children was God’s name and His will for us. If people refused to give us alms as a gesture of Christian charity they might feel better disposed towards us if we gave them s
omething in return, and a children’s choir was not a common experience. My only dilemma was the injunction to be ‘silent’, for how could a choir be silent? It seemed such an obvious contradiction. No choir may be silent.

  I took God’s instruction to Reinhardt, who laughed. ‘A silent choir? Nay, Sylvia, not God’s directive this one. Just a silly dream, eh?’

  ‘NO!’ I cried, surprised at the sound of my own vehemence. I shook my head vigorously. ‘I prayed and the answer came – it must be a silent choir! I am certain of it.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. A silent choir?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Aye!’

  ‘Let me think.’ He scratched his head. ‘Let me think . . . Think, Reinhardt, think,’ he said, urging himself and slapping his forehead in the exaggerated Pied-Piper-of-Hamelin manner he sometimes affected. Then suddenly, as only Reinhardt could, he cried, ‘Aha! A silent choir!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Got it!’

  ‘Reinhardt, what?’

  ‘Well, think how the children enter a town. They swarm in, using every mendacious trick in the book, some even beat themselves with willow rods to make their backs bleed and cry out that it is flagellation in the name of Jesus. But mostly the children beg, cry, sob, plead. They accept the kicks and blows they receive and come back for more until someone wears down and throws a scrap of food at them.’