Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Ha! See how clever the devil!’ he announced triumphantly.

  The priest who was standing behind the chair had not uttered a word since I had been brought before the bishop. He now looked down and seeing only a pair of dirty feet, asked, ‘What is it, my Lord Bishop?’

  ‘Use your eyes! Can’t you see, man! Satan has changed them back. Clever, eh?’

  The priest grunted, obviously bemused, unable to understand. ‘What see you, my Lord?

  The bishop jabbed his ring finger at my toes, the red jewel catching the light. ‘He thinks we are fooled! Ha! We have his measure! Every bit of it!’ he yelled, his little yellow teeth clicking. Then a cackle escaped from his throat, followed by an abrupt hiccup.

  ‘My Lord?’ the priest asked, now completely confused.

  ‘Hooves! Hooves, man! The devil thinks he can trick us. He’s changed her cloven hooves back into feet!’ The bishop stabbed repeatedly at my dirt-blackened feet with his bejewelled finger. ‘See? They are still black!’ He wriggled back into the enormous chair and his eyes now resumed their darting about. ‘The devil’s skin is black, black as pitch and can’t be changed,’ he declared gleefully. ‘We have all the proof we need!’ Then as suddenly he stopped and brought his hands together, his fingers touching as if he was about to enunciate a prayer. But instead he started to giggle in little bursts, as if he was trying to contain his mirth but with small spurts of inner merriment escaping. ‘The flames . . . put her to the flames?’ He shook his head, as if talking to himself. ‘Pope’s permission needed.’ He thought again. ‘Toenails . . . pull them out? Show them to be false, hiding cloven hooves.’

  He seemed to quite like this idea until the priest cleared his throat. ‘The people, my Lord. They would wish to see the Church punish this German pestilence inflicted upon us by the devil. This she-devil must be made an example for all to see. The people are very angry with these supplicating children and wish to see someone punished for their never-ending presence.’

  ‘What, no toenails? What then, speak out, man!’ the bishop chirped.

  ‘A flogging, a public flogging with you as chief witness,’ the priest suggested.

  The bishop began to clap. ‘Excellento! The Church, the Holy Roman Church, is seen to flog the devil in public!’ He hugged himself. ‘Oh, the archbishop will like this! Like this very much!’ he said gleefully. But then as suddenly his expression changed and he looked stern. ‘What about the toenails? The devil’s toenails?’

  The priest seemed to consider this, then said carefully, ‘Maybe not, my Lord.’

  ‘Why not?’ the bishop demanded.

  ‘The people may read into it wrongly, my Lord. The Scriptures tell us that Christ’s feet bled when he carried the cross to Calvary and then later with the driving of the great iron spike into his crossed feet.’

  ‘Good point!’ the bishop replied. ‘A good flogging then, eh? Plenty of blood!’

  The priest nodded. It was quite clear that the monkey bishop was mad, but that none would say so, least of all the priest who, like Master Nicodemus, found himself the power behind the throne. I now realised that the priest was not in charge of the local church but was the bishop’s assistant, the man who did his master’s thinking for him. With perhaps the exception of the allusion to the cloven hooves and our scampering over the Alps like goats, the missive he had earlier read out to me had most likely been composed by him and not by the mad little monkey seated in front of me.

  ‘I beg your mercy, my Lord. I am God’s child!’ I cried out.

  ‘Ha! Of course you’d say that!’ He turned to the priest. ‘She’d say that, wouldn’t she? Of course she would!’ he said, nodding his head in agreement with himself.

  The priest called out and the two brutes and the cleric, who must have been waiting for his call, returned. Both of the men now carried a length of rope and the cleric a strip of cloth. There was no escape and I had no defence, my precious stave lay outside, left beside the dying child. I backed into a corner and with my back against the wall I kicked and clawed at the two brutes. I could see the congealed blood where my teeth had bitten into the arm of one of them. I screamed and struggled and managed to bite one through the ear, the salty taste of blood again on my lips. They soon had me in their grasp, though not before the cleric holding the cloth to gag me came too close and with all my force I managed to kick him in the scrotum. He gave a loud groan and sank to the floor clutching his cassock between his legs. The two brutes turned me onto my stomach and tied my arms behind my back and my ankles. Blood dropped from the ear of one of them onto the back of my neck. Then the other one held my head while ‘bleeding ear’ bound the cloth tightly over my mouth to silence my angry screams. My last sight of the bishop was of him with his knees pulled against his chest and all of him squeezed back into the farthermost corner of the chair, a look of terror on his monkey face.

  I was carried down into the crypt and thrown into a small cell with the blood from the brute with the torn ear dripping down and soaking the front of my gown. The two, having dropped me unceremoniously to the floor, paused momentarily, one cupping his ear in an attempt to stem the flow of blood. Then they leaned over me and spat into my face, cursing me in their own language before departing. I felt a small satisfaction that both men would forever wear a permanent scar by which to remember the German she-devil. Nor would I ever confess this as wilful behaviour nor confess the kick to the priest’s unneeded manhood. I knew that if I’d had the opportunity I would have gouged an eye out or even worse. I was too angry to weep and managed somehow to pull myself up into the corner of the cell so that I could sit up in the dark.

  Two hours or more passed, some of which I spent in prayer and some, I confess, silently cursing my tormentors in language I had heard as a peasant in the marketplace. I finally wept, though not for my parlous state but over the loss of my precious stave and Father John satchel. I felt sure the stave must be stolen and also the satchel, though of the two the stave was the most important to me. The stave was my talisman, sprinkled with holy water and blessed with the promise to guide me across the rocky paths of life. Father John had led me to believe, or perhaps I had simply come to believe on my own, that with it at my side, I would always be safe. Now it was gone and soon the flesh of my back would be flayed and I would be lucky to remain alive. Alas, my luck had deserted me.

  It must have been towards noon when the cleric entered carrying a candle. With him came a lay sister who bore a clay pot and what looked like a crude brush, a stick with rags tied to its end, these no longer than the top joint of my finger. He placed the candle down close to my feet and, rising, placed his right leg over my body to straddle me with his broad backside facing me. He then lowered his fat arse down onto my thighs, wincing as he sat down. I could only hope that my kick would cause him to remember me for several weeks. Leaning forward he took hold of my legs just below my knees, pressing my shins hard against the flagstones so that I was unable to move them. Whereupon the lay sister proceeded to brush my feet with a wet substance, presumably from the jar, which I could feel but not see, brushing the contents onto the skin. Why, I wondered, would they wish to paint my feet? The lay sister soon completed this task and, taking the candle, rose, whereupon the cleric stood up and they hurried out of the cell so that the darkness returned and I was unable to see what she had done.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Field of Forever Dreaming

  LESS THAN AN HOUR passed from the time my feet had been mysteriously painted by the lay sister to when the bishop’s assistant arrived carrying a lantern and accompanied by two strapping young monks, one of them a blackamoor. I had never seen a black man in a cassock and had always supposed that the black moors were infidels. I was also to learn the name of the bishop’s assistant was Father Pietro, the same name as the priest who had baptised me. At least there seemed to be some symmetry – a Pietrus at the beginning and Pietro at the end of my life. Even more curiously, both Peters had pronounced me possessed by t
he devil.

  If I appear reconciled to the almost certain prospect of death at the hands of the little monkey, this was not because I was without fear. I was mortally afraid, but not for my body, poor feeble corrupting flesh, but for my immortal soul. I had seen too much death and almost all of it among children. Emotionally I had become an old crone who, having witnessed the horror of life on earth, craves blackness, stillness, an absence of little children dying in the name of Jesus.

  My despair was for what I had personally allowed to happen. I knew that my own blinding stupidity could not be expunged, wiped away with a confession and a penance even of the most arduous nature. I could not see how even the most generous and forgiving God could forgive me for what I had done. I had reached a point where the only thing I craved was eternal damnation. As a child, when my father took me to the pigsty I believed that his wanton actions had condemned me to hell and that I had no possibility of remission through no fault of my own. Now it was my own actions that condemned me. If I feared for my mortal soul it was because I knew I could expect no redemption for my sins.

  I believed in the Miracle in St Martin’s square with all my heart and soul. I had heard and been a part of the naked women’s assiduous cries, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’ These words had formed on my own lips and the subsequent confirmation given to Nicholas by an angel sent by Jesus to instruct him was all it took to seal my faith. I truly felt that I had been the recipient of a personal message from my Redeemer. I accepted that God, grown weary of the bloodshed and the slaughter committed in the name of the true cross, intended to show that the purity of a child’s heart was the true requirement for a pilgrim if Christianity was to regain the Holy Sepulchre.

  I had counted myself as one of the chosen by God to create this pilgrim’s path to Jerusalem. I now knew, at the cost of countless tiny lives, that it was my own vanity and misbegotten faith that had brought about this terrible catastrophe known as the Children’s Crusade. I prayed that the flogging ordered by the mad little monkey bishop would bring me the blessed release of death and allow me to suffer the eternal flames of hell I so completely deserved.

  Father Pietro instructed the white monk to remove the gag. Interspersed with my cussing had been a rebuke that they hadn’t even bothered to use a clean strip of cloth to gag me and this one had reeked of rotten fish. ‘Will you walk or must we carry you?’ Father Pietro asked sternly.

  ‘Walk,’ I replied through bruised lips. To be carried to the punishment for which I hungered was an insult to God. They had not carried Christ Jesus to the cross. He had not resisted the Roman soldiers but had only asked the heavenly Father why He had been forsaken. I had no reason to ask why I was being abandoned and led to my death. I already knew.

  The black monk untied the rope about my ankles and the two of them helped me to my feet, though my hands remained bound behind my back. I was unable to stand by myself and the black man, who I now saw was a truly huge man, went down on his haunches and massaged my feet and ankles, my entire foot disappearing into his enormous hands. I soon felt the blood return and with the two monks again at my side I was able to hobble. Both were large men, but the black monk especially so – the top of my head reached no higher than his armpit. No doubt aware of the damage I had inflicted on the previous two brutes, Father Pietro was not prepared to take any chances with me and so had chosen the two biggest monks he could find in case there was need to subdue me. Now to my surprise, with Father Pietro out of earshot, the white monk said to me politely in German, ‘Please do not try to run away, we have orders to beat you if you do, fräulein.’

  ‘You are German?’

  ‘My mother was German, I was raised in Genoa.’

  ‘What will you do to me?’ I asked, but received no answer except the single quiet admonishment, ‘Stumm!’

  They led me up from the almost dark crypt into the main body of the church where my eyes slowly grew accustomed to the light, and it was here that I saw my feet. They had been painted jet black using an emulsion of soot, probably boot blacking, that had dried to a matt finish. Father Pietro was leaving nothing to chance and the people would have their evidence of the devil’s cunning trick to hide the cloven hooves of a she-devil. The front of my peasant’s shift was splattered with dried blood and I could feel the stiffness where it had dripped from the brute’s ear onto the back of my neck and no doubt also my shift. My eyes, I felt sure, were red and swollen from weeping. I must have looked a frightful mess and every bit the demonic creature I was meant to be.

  Gathered further up the centre aisle a group of priests, clerics and monks, perhaps thirty in all, waited. They stood in line, two by two, each carrying a wooden cross. Father Pietro walked ahead of us and came to stand at the head of the procession, signalling that we should fall in behind him. He started to move towards the open church doors, the priests behind us intoning a Gregorian chant, no doubt to give an appropriate church-sanctioned solemnity to the deliverance of Satan’s child to the whipping post and waiting mob.

  As we walked out of the semi-darkness into the blinding Italian sunlight I was forced to close my eyes, the sharp sting being too bright to endure. But from the sudden roar I knew that a large crowd had gathered. Then they began to chant, ‘She Devil! She Devil! She Devil!’, obviously previously primed for my arrival.

  I kept catching flashes of the large crowd after each attempt to open my eyes until they eventually adjusted to the harsh light. I stood between the two monks on the topmost step of the church, looking down into the crowded square below. To my left sat the little monkey bishop, still in the giant’s chair that had been moved onto the church steps for the occasion. He now wore his bishop’s mitre and vestments, the mitre sufficiently high to conceal the carving of the angels and the cross behind him. Further to his left the priests, monks and clerics lined up in two rows and continued to chant. Father Pietro stood in his accustomed place beside the bishop’s chair.

  To my right a whipping frame that was used to punish thieves had been erected. We had seen these in the market squares of most of the towns we’d passed through. As though a silent warning to any miscreant, the timber was stained dark with crusted blood and always buzzing with swarms of flies. The frame, in the shape of an ‘A’, was fitted with a leather strap at each base of the ‘A’ and these were used for fastening the prisoner’s spreadeagled legs at the ankles. The crossbar at the centre could be adjusted up or down to fit any body size and contained a rounded dent halfway along where the victim’s chin rested. The apex held a second set of straps to bind the wrists, so that the felon’s arms were tied high above the head exposing the naked back to the flailing whip.

  For all my brave resolve to face my death calmly I began to tremble and turned to Father Pietro. ‘Will you grant me extreme unction, Father?’ I asked loudly in Latin, as the chanting made speech difficult to hear. He did not reply but simply shook his head to deny me.

  The tiny bishop reached out and tugged on the sleeve of Father Pietro’s cassock and said something. Father Pietro cupped his ear, not hearing him because of the chanting. ‘What, my Lord?’ he shouted.

  The bishop turned around to face the priests. ‘Shut up!’ he screeched furiously. ‘Shut the hell up!’ With the startled entourage silenced he turned back to his assistant. ‘What does she want?’ he demanded again.

  ‘She wants a final anointing, my Lord!’

  ‘Final anointing? The devil wants a final anointing? What new satanic trick is this? Tell her nay, nay, nay! I will not have it!’

  ‘I have already done so, my Lord.’

  ‘But not from me! You didn’t tell her from me! The devil may trick a priest any day of the week including Sunday, but he can’t trick a bishop. No, he can’t, it’s well-known he can’t! Not even in a month of Sundays!’ Then he glanced down at my feet. ‘My goodness, would you look at that!’ He clapped his hands gleefully. ‘See, I told you, didn’t I? The devil can’t fool me! Not for a moment!’ A tiny ringed finger pointed at my feet.
‘Black as the hole into hell! Ha-ha! We have her now! Oh yes, yes!’ He rubbed his palms together. ‘No extreme unction! Lots of blood! Tell her! Tell her!’ he screeched.

  Father Pietro turned to me. ‘No final anointing!’ he growled.

  ‘Now show the people her feet! Her black devil’s feet!’ the bishop cried excitedly. ‘No, don’t, I will do it myself.’ With surprising alacrity he slipped over the edge of the giant chair, landed lightly on his feet and came to stand beside me. ‘Lift your foot!’ he commanded, pointing to my left foot.

  ‘I will fall, my Lord,’ I protested.

  To my surprise he bent down and grasped my left ankle with both hands and yanked. I felt myself starting to lose my balance. While I cannot say I did so on purpose – but then, nor can I deny it – my foot shot out with some force so that the tiny bishop went flying backwards to lose his footing and tumble down twenty steps where he lay motionless. Halfway down his mitre left his head and slid past him to land on the stone apron just four steps from the square.

  The monk on my left attempted to stop me falling and grabbed at the neck and top of the sleeve of my shift. I felt it tear down the centre tothe waist as I fell tomy right and onto my bottom where I sat unable to rise, my hands still bound behind my back. My left breast was exposed where the top half of my shift had been torn away.

  The black monk was the first to react to the bishop’s tumble. ‘Oh, my God!’ I heard him cry, and then he leapt down the steps three at a time, the first to get to the tiny form of the inert bishop. An anguished shout rose up from the crowd and they surged forward. The monk, thinking they might crush the motionless bishop, scooped him up into his arms as if he was a small child and, turning quickly, ran back up the steps.