Englishwoman in France

by Wendy Robertson

  Lists made, Tibery packs his leather bag – a new one out of Africa, given to him by a grateful merchant of Nicomedia – then sets out with Lupinus to make house visits in Cessero and further afield.

  Modeste and I – he still leaning on his stick – walk around our small domain. We note that the grapes are now plumped and bloomy under their leaves, and the ground has been cleaned and harrowed by the Cesseroneans, ready for new planting after being chewed up by soldiers’ boots. We go down to the hives and say hello to the bees as Léance has taught us. The slow hum within their house tells us all is well for now, in bee-world.

  Then Modeste sets out his planks on the trestles and builds again his large table under the shade of the ancient olive tree. He retrieves his boxes from the ox skins in which Léance has preserved them for these recent months. We find new documents in one of the boxes: a folded map and a letter on vellum. Léance must have put them in the box for our return.

  ‘Wasn’t Léance curious?’ I ask ‘Surely there’s danger . . .’

  Modeste laughs. ‘Léance is a practical man who lives in the present and the future. He’s more interested in filling his jars with oil and wine to send down the river to Good Fortune, than musty old papers that tell of things that happened here more than a hundred years ago. The old boy’s fond of Tibery and sees him as a healer, so he watches out for us. But Léance is no more interested in the Nazarene than he is in the Emperors or Jupiter or Athene. His gods are much older than them. They come from older ways.’

  Modeste picks up the map that’s made of fine lambskin and folded like a concertina. He lays it on his table and weighs it down with black stones. The map is a kind of pictogram with trees and plants and a river with spouting fish. It has been cleverly drawn and somewhere in the fog of my mind it reminds me vaguely of the endpapers of the Swallows and Amazon books from my wideawake time.

  The bright sun filtering through the old olive tree bathes the map in light. Modeste is excited. ‘See, Florence! This is the river above Good Fortune! And here’s the great bridge! And here’s Cessero! See the olive trees and the oxen and the little houses? But look here!’ His voice thickens with excitement. He points to two tiny figures in the left-hand corner, women in cloaks and hoods. His face, very close to the map, is alight, and stripped of the scars of recent torture.

  I look closer. The map’s not right. ‘Look!’ I say, catching his excitement. ‘That’s clearly an escarpment, just above the village. But . . .’

  ‘Yes. No, now there is no escarpment. Just a rise in the land . . .’ It’s so wonderful to hear this life, this excitement in his voice.

  ‘Perhaps a landfall, Florence?’ he says. ‘An earth movement? Not uncommon in these parts. See how close it is to where we’ve been digging? We’re on the mark, Florence. On the mark.’

  ‘We should go,’ I say.

  He’s already refolding the map and putting it in his shoulder sack. Then he returns his boxes to their ox skins and tucks them behind the back wall of the hut. Then, from the back of the shed he hauls the iron scythe and two iron mattocks we use for the garden. Clearly this morning he means business.

  I now have two choices of footwear, so I opt to wear the Empress’s sandals for luck: walking in Siri’s footsteps can do me no harm. We turn off the old river path and make our way upwards. We know the general direction but now and then Modeste stops to consult the map. He reads the land very well. We walk fast and he finally throws away his stick, takes my hand and we walk faster. I have to break into a run to keep up with him. It’s as though we are one body – just as we are when we make love. We are one thing, just as a tree with its branches is one thing; just as a turtle with its shell is one thing.

  We pass people as we go: children peer at us from behind squat olive trees; a man with a pack of sheep wool on his back trudges on, head down; a young woman helps a very old woman down the slope, both faces in shadow under long hoods. They stop us to ask the whereabouts of the young master, as their son and brother is hearing voices and seeing stars falling to earth.

  Then we come across a man with a towering pack of vine stems on his back. He’s wearing a green felt doublet and wooden soled clogs that I’ve never seen here before. The man acknowledges us. ‘Greetings, Doctor!’

  ‘Greetings, friend! You have a veritable mountain on your back.’

  ‘Vine stems for a bakeshop in Good Fortune, messire. There is a great oven there, famous for its bread, which has a very hungry stone mouth. The baker loves my vine stems. I take them down the river in my little boat and he pays me well.’

  We walk on. When the man is out of earshot I ask Modeste, ‘Is he real, that man? Is he here in this time?’

  Modeste does not slacken his pace. ‘Are you?’ is all he says.

  Now we’re on the very rise of the land. Down below the luminous morning light shines on the scatter of low dwellings that make up the hamlet of Cessero. Some houses are fronted by clusters of olive trees as well as the odd row of vines. Here and there a field is under cultivation. Beside one hut stand a pair of tethered oxen, waiting for their working day to start. In the far distance we can even make out the spreading top of our own wild olive, older than any of the houses on this horizon. Weaving through the trees to the south of us the river glitters like beryl aquamarine.

  Now we’re standing on a kind of shelf spread entirely in dense underbrush and stunted fig trees, picked through with equally straggly bay trees. I pull a sprig of bay and crush it in my hand and remind myself of the fish pie my mother used to make. I always thought it strange that she took the leaves out after the fish pie was cooked. I start to tremble and blink and Modeste says quite sharply, ‘Not now, Florence. Not now!’

  My panic subsides and I watch as he peers again at the map and starts to hack away at the underbrush with the scythe, a thick iron blade set in a lump of wood. Then I pick up my mattock and work at his shoulder, scraping away the brush as he cuts it. I dig out the fig and bay trees that are in his way.

  We finally reach a layer of stones tangled in the starving tree roots. ‘Look!’ he says exultantly. ‘The stones. They show a mason’s hand. Sharp clear edges.’ He grabs his mattock and redoubles his efforts. I toil away, lifting the stones and piling them up to one side. Every stone is shaped with skill. Some are coloured marble, dark blue veined with red. By the time the noon heat stops our labours we have a small mountain of stone beside us and a marble-strewn space in front of us.

  Modeste is sweating and strained: his enthusiasm has outstripped his energy. It’s very hot. Even the birds have stopped singing. We sit down on a stone the size of a large suitcase to eat our bread and drink water from our stone jars. He closes his eyes and puts his chin on his chest for a moment. I wipe the crumbs from my mouth and lean back, offering my face rather than my back to its burning rays. My clutching fingers encounter something on the side of the stone. I get down on my knees to see better. ‘Look, Modeste! Look here!’ I hiss with excitement. Modeste leaps to his feet and comes to kneel beside me. His hand over mine, we trace the sign of the fish, an elegant design cut deep into the stone.

  Now there’s no birdsong, no movement in the undergrowth; even the leaves have stopped rustling. It’s as though the world is taking a breath; as though the past, present and future is held in that breath. Then someone, somewhere flicks a switch and the birds sing and the natural world comes alive again.

  ‘Messire! Messire!’ Léance comes labouring up the slope shaking his stick in the air. He’s shouting at the top of his voice. Modeste cups his ear and I strain to listen.

  ‘Leave it, messire, madam! Leave it! No good can come of it!’ Léance gasps as he reaches us. He stands beside us, looking down at the carved stone. He gulps for breath. ‘No good can come of it!’ he says, slowly pulling a hairy arm over his face to wipe off the sweat.

  ‘No good can come of what?’ demands Modeste. ‘What?’

  ‘Of that, messire.’ Léance gestures towards the hole we are making through the stones
.

  ‘What?’ repeats Modeste grimly. ‘You must tell me. You must know what we’re about. You saw the map. You followed us here. What is it here?’ He takes hold of Léance’s shoulders and pulls him down to sit beside him on the big stone. I sit in the dust at their feet.

  ‘Now,’ said Modeste more gently. ‘What is it that we must not do here, old friend? And why? Take a drink of water and tell us.’ He hands Léance his own flagon. ‘Drink!’ he says.

  Léance drains the flask and starts to breathe more easily. He looks from Modeste to me then back again. ‘Well, madam, messire, it’s a story from my grandfather’s grandfather. This man was not from Gaul; he was from another more faraway place and he was a stonemason.’ He runs his fingers over the fish sign. ‘I have his very tools in my house. He could have cut this with one of them,’ he said in wonder.

  Then words start to stream from him. ‘I’ll tell you. You may have heard of this. A great Emperor, a very sad man, once came to this place and liked it. He built a shrine, a small place but very beautiful. The floor had all the colours of the rainbow. It was entirely underground but it had a great chimney that opened on to the hill, letting the light flood down into the shrine.’

  ‘You saw this place, Léance?’ says Modeste.

  Léance shakes his head sadly. ‘No, messire. I know the story of its building, which was told by my grandfather’s grandfather to his son and so on. I heard it from my own father.’

  ‘Why was it built, this shrine?’

  Léance hesitates. ‘They say Tiberius, an emperor who was then a very old man, had a vision here and caused it to be built.’

  ‘He lived here?’ I ask.

  Léance shakes his head. ‘They say his ship landed in Good Fortune and he came up here with the Governor on a great hunt for a bear which was well known in these parts and twice the height of a man. He liked to hunt, just like the boy doctor’s own father, messire. Anyway, when they cornered this great animal, the spear of the Emperor was raised for the kill and he saw something. Some say it was a great column of light. Some say it was a bolt of lightning. Some say it was the face of his brother who had been murdered by their own mother. Whatever it was, the bear got away. Whatever it was, Tiberius left gold, and orders for the secret shrine to be built on the very spot by stonemasons from his own land.’

  He went on. ‘Our own village, Cessero, was named for him. From Caesar, do you see? The village grew from the people who had worked on the shrine and were pledged by Tiberius to guard the secret. They gave up being masons and made themselves farmers, though all around you and down in Good Fortune you may see fine stonework that comes from those old skills.’

  ‘So that was it? A shrine was built and a village grew? Because a great bear escaped.’ I whisper. The great bear is in my mind. Ursa Major. I have this pain at the pit of my stomach.

  Léance waves his hand to shut me up. His story is not finished. ‘Then a message came from across the sea that the Emperor had died and not long after two women and two men came to the village. They were very sad. They knew of the shrine, knew the place and had this picture of the inside, drawn on fine calf skin. This picture could only have come from the great man’s stonemason.’

  ‘Did they bring something with them, these women?’ says Modeste quickly.

  Léance eyes him. ‘They say – and remember, messire, this may all have grown in the telling, as flour and water transform to bread – they say that in their baggage they had a crude box made from ship’s timbers and inside that a beautiful box in sandalwood.’

  ‘And inside that?’ says Modeste.

  Léance shrugs. ‘Who knows? No one has seen it. But in my family there have been many speculations about what was inside. It could have been jewels, or fine possessions. But the legend in my family is that the women carried it with too much reverence for mere gold.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s a very old story. Could be mere fancy. Sorcerors’ tales.’

  ‘Well . . .’ I try to express my wonder.

  He flaps his hand at me again. ‘There is more! In the time of the ancestor who came after the first mason, there is this great movement of earth on the ridge. That’s not unusual here. The ground here on this coast is even now still in the making. In those days the ridge was twenty feet higher. But this earth movement was so great that the top of the ridge toppled entirely. And in the space of an hour the whole land from here to the river was churned up. Good Cesseroneans died, including three members of my own family. The course of the river changed. And so, you see, the Emperor’s wonderful shrine was eaten up by this great stirring up of earth.’

  He took a good swig from the bottle and went on. ‘Now, I must tell you that this grandfather was of the old religion, so much older than your old Roman fellow Jupiter and his hordes. He said the old earth’s convulsion was a sign that the shrine must stay hidden and be safe. It also was a sign that the people of Cessero were released from their pledge to Tiberius. Now they could go from this place as they willed.’

  That shrug again.

  ‘Not many did that. Old habits bury deep in a man’s bones. Anyway, they planted the whole ridge with olive and other trees so it would look no different from any other part of Cessero.’

  There is a long pause and then Modeste takes Léance by the shoulder and pulls him to his feet. ‘If you were so determined to keep the secret, old man, why did you pass on the map to me? Why did you not hide it? Burn it?’

  Léance looks him in the eye. ‘That time before, when you were walking in these parts, messire, we watched you on your wanderings around Good Fortune and around Cessero. We saw you find that older place near the river with Madam Florence here. I noted how you were squaring the land like a hawk and would not cease till you found the place. And then with you came the doctor boy with his miracles, whose name was Tibery, like the great man who built the shrine. Our wise man here said this was a sign.

  ‘Then the Governor’s soldiers came to get you, even the woman, and we were very sad. So while you were away I prayed to our great god Taranus that you would be safe. While you were away two men came from Setus and asked for you by name. I showed them your camp and said you would return. They lodged the map with me and I put it in your box. I tell you, messire, when that map was brought from Setus I knew it was a sign. So I sacrificed again to Taranus and promised that if you returned safely I’d let you have the map and allow you to complete your quest.’

  Modeste nods slowly. ‘I understand that, but what about today? Why do you come galloping up the hill to stop us?’

  Léance smiles sheepishly. ‘It’s hard, messire, to squeeze hundreds of years of custom from a man’s thoughts. Despite my promise to Taranus I still doubted that I’d done the right thing.’

  ‘But now the cat is out of the bag,’ I say. That phrase again.

  Léance frowns a moment, then understands. ‘I don’t know this, madam. I think that would only be so if you returned the cat to the bag. My ancestors promised to keep the secrets.’

  Modeste reaches out to hug Léance and the old man wriggles free of his grasp. ‘Go back to your house, Léance,’ says Modeste. ‘I thank you for your story but you should not be here.’

  ‘What will you do, messire?’ asks Léance.

  ‘I’ll do what is right but that will mean no betrayal to you. Your secret will remain.’

  Léance nods, satisfied, and turns and climbs down the hill, using his stick only occasionally for balance. On his way down he passes Tibery and Lupinus, who are on their way up.

  Modeste looks at me. ‘Now, Florence, we will begin!’ he says.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Salt and Sandalwood

  We dig on through the morning, the four of us taking turns. We use the dug out stones and columns to support the trench so that it does not fall in on us. We’re aware of being watched, from all sides, but we keep digging.

  Tib and Lupinus lend an energetic hand, not questioning the task. When they arrived Tib told us that the villagers had sought them out, t
old them to come to this place. He eyes Modeste thoughtfully. ‘So this is what you’ve been searching for, Modeste? Ever since we came to Good Fortune?’

  ‘So it is,’ says Modeste calmly. ‘Now I’ve found it, and now I must dig. So it’s fortunate that we have four pairs of hands instead of two.’

  ‘And what will we find? Great treasure?’ Tib’s excitement is childlike, untroubled.

  Modeste sits down and drinks the water they’d brought for us. I tell him the tale that Léance had told us.

  ‘So now,’ says Modeste, ‘we must dig, to find out why Tiberius – your namesake, remember – had them build such a beautiful shrine.’

  I thought it was curious that there was no talk between them of the Nazarene. Tib runs his fingers lovingly over the crisply carved outline of the fish but says nothing.

  The steady rhythm of digging with the mattock leaves me room for reflection. Modeste has taken on so many different guises to fulfil this task. He was searching for this shrine in my waketime; he’s been searching for it in this dreamtime. And probably in other times about which I know nothing. He’s driven to find the shrine and name its contents. He’s the perpetual unsatisfied scholar, the doubter who looks for truth and needs proof. Perhaps in his first incarnation his name was Thomas.

  Odd then that Tib, Modeste’s own convert, needs no proof. His faith shines from him; it is his fingerprint. It’s as genuine as it is unquestioning. In him there is no doubt. His faith joins his intelligence to inform his kindness to people, his proven ability to heal. Tib lives in his present, not other people’s past. Perhaps this is the sign of a very old soul.

  And it looks now as though Modeste’s search is reaching its end. Why now? Perhaps this is because in this time, in this place, he came across the boy Tibery? Perhaps it’s because I, in my savage mourning for Siri, am here travelling with him, jumping from my own waketime to this dreamtime? It looks like the time and the place for the discovery of the shrine has to be here and now. The Cesseroneans are the key. They recognize Tibery and allow Modeste into their secret, which has no written record but must rely on the truth pulsing from generations of storytelling. Believing in gods much older than Rome or Nazareth, their craftsmen’s pride ultimately means that it was they, not the Romans or the followers of the Nazarene, who possessed the secret of the shrine. And it’s Léance who, in the name of his craftsmen forefathers, was the one to let Modeste into this old secret.