Startaker

by Marian Goddard

  I have seen soldiers in battle but never like those few knights. They fought like the angels of light gave them wings. I remember their battle cry and the way their swords hummed as they swung them through the dry desert air, like some kind of horrible music. They stayed, their backs to us, slashing and thrusting, covered in blood, crying out to God to help them in their holy mission. But it was impossible. From my hiding place, I saw them worn down and pulled from their horses by the mob and my friend cut to pieces on the sand.

  They found me in the wagon petrified with fright, holding this book as if it could protect me from their knives.” He held the small book reverently in his hand, the serene expression unwavering. “They tethered me to the wagon and forced me to walk on through the desert. They killed all the rest, my uncle too. But they had seen the book I held and the eagle sigils of the Caliphate engraved on the cover.

  They let me go when they reached the city gates.” He looked at Andre keenly, the steady eyes seeing more than he might have wished. He held out the book and Andre took it gently from the old man’s hands. “Take it now my son; keep it safe with the other, for it is still unwelcome in this place. Look upon it when you have need, for it is full of knowledge such as we in our calling, do not as yet possess. Think upon the things I have said, for if the boy lives, you are to be the one who sets him upon the path of Light.”

  Andre gazed at the abbot in wonder. How did he know what he had hidden under the boards to read in the dark?

  How did he know what he had hidden in his heart?

  He looked down at the small volume and opened it to the first, crumbling page, at words written in faded ink:

  Ala-al-din abu Al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi Ibn al- Nafis

  ‘Commentary on the Anatomy of Canon of Avicenna’

  He turned to another page and read:

  “…the blood from the right chamber of the heart must arrive at the left chamber but there is no direct pathway between them. The thick septum of the heart is not perforated and does not have invisible pores…”

  Andre remembered the prized copy of Galen in the library and its treatise on the heart:

  ‘Blood, reaching the right side of the heart, oozes through invisible pores in the cardiac septum, thereby reaches the left side…’

  Many times during his travels in the East he’d heard the name Ibn Sina spoken of with awe… the great and learned physician, Avicenna. He’d seen enough torn hearts on the battlefield and in the crude field hospitals to know the truth of the words in the old book. He lowered his head and the abbot raised his hand in blessing.

  “In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

  He left him standing, hands folded serenely as if in prayer, the enigmatic smile still gracing the gentle features. “Go my son, and look to the boy. Have faith in Our Lord’s wisdom and your own.”

  Andre hid the book in his robe and hurried to the infirmary. The child’s battle was yet to be fought.

  *

  Christian slept for three days, tossing and crying out in the small bed, sobbing for his father and mother, his fever rising and falling intermittently like the tides.

  One moment Andre, seeing the beads of sweat on his upper lip, believed that the fever had broken and the worst was over; the next, heat rose like a furnace and threatened to overwhelm the fragile body, exhaustion evident in the flaccid limbs and grey pallor. He remained by the child, holding cool cloths to his burning cheeks, spooning tiny mouthfuls of broth between his parched lips.

  The brothers prayed. They knew nothing of the boy’s strange arrival but they saw in Andre’s obvious concern and the abbot’s daily visits that here was a child of some importance.

  Berthilda hovered over them both, fetching cloths and bringing Andre food and watered wine. Relieved of his other duties, he’d left the boy only to observe the Rule. He prayed then, imploring on bended knee to the Almighty to intervene just this once and let the boy live, hearing his whispered words.” I am here to take up the light.”

  And he knew, as surely as he knew the sun would rise in all its glory in the morning that this was where his future lay. He was thirty one years old and had travelled over half the world, but now he knew that it was not in the Holy Land slaughtering Saracens, or among the horrors of the plague that his mission was to be fulfilled. It was here with this small boy, fighting his own battle with the Lord for his frail earthly form, that he would find salvation and in that salvation, peace.

  *

  Christian struggled to open his eyes. His arms and legs felt numb. He could hear a tinkling musical sound, distant and comforting. He thought of his mother when she came to kiss him goodnight, singing to him in her high lilting voice. Perhaps it was mother come to take him to heaven? He strained his ears to listen for her soft voice, the swish of her skirts against the bed, feel the warmth of her hand on his face. These were the things he remembered, before she was gone so suddenly from his life.

  But the memory of his father was still strong. He could hear his deep voice and throaty laugh, remember how he smelled, dark musky and clean. Not like the peasants who tended the gardens and smelled like the pigs he’d seen going to market in open rickety crates.

  He remembered the games they played on cold winter evenings and father’s gentle voice telling him that it was important to live his life well, so mother would be proud when she came to take him to heaven.

  He would come to his bed after supper and talk to him of the day. What had he learned? Had he said his prayers? Had he found any magnificent wonders of nature? And Christian would tell him of the big hairy, creeping spiders down by the well, their webs strung bravely between the trees, and after the women would brush them away clucking, their mouths turned down in disgust, the spiders would start all over again, spinning and weaving intricate patterns of sparkling gossamer threads.

  Father told him that it was a good lesson in life, to keep spinning your web no matter how many times it was knocked down. To try harder to make it more beautiful than the last so that one day people would see it for what it was, a magnificent wonder of nature.

  Then one cold, wet day, when the last of the tinder had been used to light a sputtering fire and they’d huddled as close as was safe to the feeble flame, his father was taken to heaven too.

  The beautiful angel voices were fading now but he could still hear father, strong and insistent. “Not yet, my boy, not yet. Be brave and live well…and we will be waiting for you in heaven.”

  He could not go with his mother. He had done nothing to make her proud. He must stay. He struggled upward through a grey fog and opened his eyes.

  He was in a long room, with many beds. Some had people in them; others were empty and neatly made. Sunlight shone weakly through the glass windows, making dark shadows dance along the wooden roof beams, and as he turned his head, he saw the man who had taken him from the cart seated beside him, his eyes closed, his fair hair shining round him like a halo.

  But the only thing he wanted in all this painful world was the strong arms of his father.

  He felt the warm tears that had been sitting in his eyes slide down onto his cheeks.

  *

  August

  In the year of our Lord 1393

  Bebenhausen

  “Christian, come down from there! The Lord will not give you wings to fly if you fall, you foolish boy!” He’d climbed on to the parapet and was sitting like a roosting hen on a nest.

  Berthilda stretched out her arms as if to catch him if he lost his footing, anxiety clear in her wrinkled face, and using the age old threat of mothers everywhere “Come down or there will be no supper for you tonight!”

  A distant boyish voice called back “Have no fear for me Mistress Berta. I am waiting for the storm.”

  She called up through cupped hands “What storm? There is not even a cloud in the sky.

  And the faraway voice piped back “Brother Alberto said there will be a storm, that the end of the world will star
t with a storm of locusts and they will eat all the food and leave us to starve. I am waiting for them to come.”

  She noticed Brother Andre standing beside her, concern showing equally in both their faces, but his voice calm where hers was shrill. “I think he means swarm Mistress, a swarm of locusts.”

  Berthilda clucked. “The things they put into that boy’s head, it beggars belief. The end of the world indeed! Don’t those scribblers know that the end of the world has come already? Mayhap their bellies are too full and their brains too small to see about them. Get down from there young man, or the abbot will hear of this!”

  Andre smiled. Christian haunted the scriptorium, watching the brothers transcribing, and followed him around the infirmary asking interminable questions. He pestered Gaspard in his workshop and fidgeted in the chapel, but it was in Father Abbot’s book lined study that he found his most joy. He’d seen it when he was young, his eyes bright with wonder as he traced the anatomic drawing of a mouse found in an old book, the living animal in the palm of his hand and the abbot smiling, pointing to the small body parts with the tip of a rheumatic finger; “vertex, iugulum, ventriculus.”

  And he saw it now at his lessons, in his look of triumph as he laboriously translated a passage from the Greek to the Latin and read it out loud, his breaking voice stumbling clumsily over the words.

  The cooks saved small titbits for him and watched in joy as he relished every mouthful. The pigs vied for his attention when his chores took him to the piggery. The horses called to him in the fields. He was fifteen years old and loved by all who knew him. If sometimes Andre saw a sadness in him, especially at prayer, when he never failed to offer up his hopes of seeing his mother and father in heaven, he made no mention of it.

  The boy had seen much death in his ten years at the abbey: a litter of pigs born in winter and frozen in the night, a tangle of abandoned kittens, no mother’s milk to feed them, dying one by one in his hands and then as he grew older, those in the infirmary expiring of disease and hopelessness. He was well acquainted with the vagaries of nature. Life was hard and Christian knew it more than most.

  Andre had not spoken of his family’s fate, but he knew that soon the time would come for him to be told. He was already long past the age of childhood and a nobleman’s birth demanded a debt of responsibility. Had his mother and father not incurred the wrath of the church and paid with their lives, even at half the age he was now, Christian would be a lord in his own right and ruling his own lands and serfs.

  Andre knew he had kept him sheltered for too long.

  But the name Germelshausen would be forever tainted with the curse of heresy and anonymity had been the only thing keeping him safe.

  Christian scrambled down from the high battlement, using his fingers and toes to grip the crumbling stonework, eliciting a gasp of fear from Berthilda and a stab of pain in Andre’s chest. He moved to sit in the shade of the gnarled ash that the monks had planted when the monastery was built and waited. There was something he wanted to give the boy.

  He sat quietly, watching the dapple and play of the leaves in the gently swaying tree, the rumble of the wagons carting wine to the cellars, the call of the ploughmen in the fields, the clattering of pots in the kitchens. The busy, workaday voices of the people he loved.

  This was the closest thing to home he’d known for a long time. He was fortunate to have been accepted here. The brothers were tolerant and of a stable disposition. His tasks were not onerous and the food plentiful. Why then had the urge to leave these peaceful surroundings become so strong?

  Nowhere now in his dreams and meditations could he see his future welded to Christian’s. Perhaps all the boy had really needed from him was the chance to grow up in safety.

  He looked up from his musings. The lad stood before him, tall for his age, limbs long and slender like a newly born foal; blond hair standing out at all angles, blown adrift by the wind. It was impossible to be angry with him. He had won all hearts at the monastery, Andre’s most of all. He was a gift from God.

  Christian flopped down on the grass at his feet and looked up into his smiling face. Andre took two apples from his pocket and gave one to the boy.

  “I’m sorry to have frightened Mistress Berta… but Brother Alberto in the scriptorium told me the locusts would come and I had to see for myself.”

  He gazed at the earnest young face “Yes Christian, you must always see for yourself. Have I not always told you that you must not accept anything until you are sure of it in your heart? And what did you learn from your perch in the sky?”

  Christian wrapped his thin arms around himself. “It’s very cold up there. And the wind almost blew me off the ledge.” A frown of worry crossed Andre’s face. “And there is bird dung on the stonework, many different colours. The robin’s is watery and tastes of apples from the orchard; the raven’s dark like pitch and tastes of berries.

  The monk tried not to laugh out loud, Christian’s expression always one of serious thought. It surprised him not a bit that he would taste the bird droppings to analyse the contents. “And what of the coming storm?”

  Christian looked thoughtful” The sky is clear, I can hear the bell ringing in the chapel in the town, people working and singing…”

  “And the locusts?”

  “I can see no sign. Perhaps Brother Alberto made an error in his calculations?”

  Andre nodded “Are you glad that the locusts didn’t come?”

  Christian’s face brightened as he bit into the apple with his strong white teeth. “Yes. Mistress Berta is making me dumplings for supper. They are my favourite and Brother Alberto has told me that food cannot be hidden from God’s locusts.”

  Andre made a mental note to speak to the others about frightening the lad with tales of end of days. It had become the all too familiar lament of many of the brethren in these dark times. “And the end of the world?”

  “Brother Ames and Brother Peter say there is too much wickedness in the world for the world to bear, that God shall give up and start anew, like after the flood.”

  He determined not to lecture the boy, but felt that here was too pure a spirit to be damped down by doomsday fables. “We are men of reason, are we not?” the boy nodded.

  “What think you that wickedness is?”

  The boy looked thoughtful “Like when the boys in the town steal the loaves from the baker and run off?”

  Andre smiled “And what if those boys had no one to look to them, no-one to give them food? Would you not steal bread to live?” He saw something flicker across the young face, something full of sorrow. He laid his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, to encourage him.

  “Brother, I must confess that I too have stolen food.” He lowered his head in shame. “I remember a long time ago, before I came here, being cold and very hungry. I hid behind a wagon load of turnips and took two to eat.” He looked up through thick pale lashes.

  Andre felt a stab of pity, remembering a frail child in tattered rags. “You have committed no sin. The Lord sometimes assists us to stay alive, so we can do His work. The turnips in the wagon, the baker’s loaves…could they not be a gift from God?”

  Christian’s face lightened. “Do you think so Brother Andre?”

  “Indeed I do. I remember as a child stealing grapes from a farmer’s vineyard. I was sure I was going to starve to death if I didn’t. My father beat me for the theft after I’d spent the whole day on the latrine. That was the gift from God, a painful lesson in gluttony.” He smiled at the remembrance.

  “Is it wickedness when the townsfolk throw rocks and spit at the Jews in the marketplace?” asked Christian.

  “Not all the townsfolk treat them so. Do you think that the Lord would end the world because of a few bad people when all the others keep His word?”

  The boy looked thoughtful “I have read the book in the abbot’s library about how the knights fought in the Holy Land, and their commander ordered them to kill everyone, Christian and Mohammedans toge
ther, because they could not tell them apart.”

  Andre felt another stab of pain in his chest, but this time he recognised it as the bitter lance of guilt and not the twinging soreness of an old battle wound. He had seen and been a party to, much wickedness and here he was instructing a young boy on the nature of sin. He felt ashamed.

  “We are getting much too serious on such a beautiful day, my friend. Your observations on the ramparts have reminded me that there is a gift I wanted to give you.” Christian’s face broke open in a smile. “But only if you promise not to climb up there again. At least until we make you a sturdy ladder and safer platform.” He jumped to his feet in excitement and followed Andre into the scriptorium.

  No-one had ever given him a gift.

  *

  Christian turned the strange brass disc over in his nimble fingers. “What is it Brother Andre?” He was trying hard to conceal his disappointment. He thought the gift would be a knife or slingshot. All the boys in the town had slingshots. He’d heard them yelling and cheering each other as they practiced at targets in the fields, flinging small stones with fatal accuracy.

  “It is an astrolabe, Christian. A very old one.” He laughed. The boy could not hide his thoughts; they were always plain to see on his open face. “I see you are not bubbling over with excitement at my gift.”

  Christian blushed. “No sire. I know it is of great value. It is finely made and very beautiful. But I am not worthy of such a gift.”

  Andre had presented it to him with much ceremony. Nineteen years ago he’d brought it with him to the abbey, wrapped carefully in a lambskin, with other ghosts of his past. The abbot, reminding him of his vows of poverty, locked them in a chest in his apartments, with the promise that if he should ever feel the need to return to his Order, they would be his once more. “Why are you not worthy? Did you not make a weaving loom for Mistress Berthilda? Does not the abbot instruct you in Aramaic so you can read the words of Our Lord in His own tongue?”