Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  We could hear then behind us, on the road between Yaghi-Siyan’s palace and the bridge, a trotting of horsemen coming and going and we could hear many shouts, now here, now there, of the sort that are heard when cavalrymen gird themselves for something of importance. The shouts, the clopping of hooves increased, horses whinnied, there was much shuffling, snuffling, snorting, stamping, jingling, clinking, slapping, and grunting as all of the sounds formed themselves into a concerted picture of dark colours, dark gleamings, dark horsemen girding.

  The sound-picture gathered itself into a forward movement, came towards us, passed beneath us, appeared in front of us on the bridge in the dark images of itself, the dark gleamings of iron and leather, the forested lances nodding, the shaking of reins and bridles as the horses tossed their heads. The clop of hooves, the clinking and the jingling passed into the darkness across the river, quickened unseen to a trot, a canter; for the first time then the kettledrums were heard, they pounded out the headlong gallop of the charge as voices whooped in war cries, voices called on Allah. There came then Frankish cries to Jesus, cries to God, cries of ‘Saint-Gilles!’

  Suddenly the clamour of the drums is heard again—a different beat, the choppy rhythm of unluck and about-turn. Here now the Turks are coming back in thunderous flight across the bridge. ‘To the gate!’ they cry. ‘Back to the gate!’ cries Yaghi-Siyan at the head of the rout. ‘Deus le volt!’ cry the Franks, ‘Saint-Gilles!’ ‘The gate!’ cry the Turks. With these shouts we hear the clash of weapons, the screams of the wounded and the dying, the screams of horses and of men, the groans and curses, the grunts and trampling and scuffling of men fighting for their lives, and the splashing of men and horses into the river. ‘Saint-Gilles!’ goes up the shout, it seems very close, almost beneath us. ‘Jesu!’

  Back across the bridge ebb the voices of the Franks. ‘There is no god but God!’ shouts Yaghi-Siyan, and once more the Turks gallop across the bridge and into the darkness beyond it. Now from across the river we hear again, but indistinctly and mingled with the running of the river and the subterranean roar of Onopniktes, the clash of weapons, the shouts and cries, the screams of horses and of men. Below us on the bridge the dead in their obscurity lie still, the wounded and the dying writhe and groan, both men and horses; the horses lift their long necks, their noble heads, and fall back; they can no longer gallop to the battle or away from it.

  Now with others Bembel Rudzuk and I go down to the bridge to bring in the wounded and the dead. The crippled horses are killed with a sword stroke to the neck, the blood spurts out on to the stones of the bridge. I think of how this blood would be better than wine to the starving Franks. The horses that can walk are brought back inside the walls with the wounded men. With their eyes the horses acknowledge that they are slaves; if they were owned by scholars they might have led quiet lives but as they are ridden by fighting men they must suffer these wounds, they can expect nothing else. In the fluttering light of torches the wounded men look at me with eyes like the eyes of ikons or statues or like the eyes made of white and black tesserae in mosaics. The heads from which the eyes look out have been vertical only a little while ago; now they are horizontal, and these men, like the horses, acknowledge with their eyes that they are the slaves of that in them which has used them up in this rushing forward and back in the darkness; having used them up it will find others for its purpose.

  These bodies that I try to repair, already have they been violated once by cold iron; now again I violate them, I intrude upon their privacy to stuff entrails back into the places where they belong, to sew up flesh that has been violently parted. How startling are the secret colours that in time of peace are hidden beneath the skin. We slaughter sheep and cattle and chickens as a matter of course; we are the vertical ones with the knives so we assume this as a right: we slit the throat, the heart pumps out its last bursts of blood into a basin, we open up their bodies and lay hands upon their varicoloured mysteries of red and purple, blue and yellow inner parts. But in time of war each man is a cattle to his enemy and they struggle to see which one will be the slaughterer. The stranger, the unknown to whom one must always offer hospitality, that sacred stranger has now become a murderer whom we must murder first. How strange that this is not strange.

  Certainly we are the slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn’t want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and the night.

  From the wounded we hear something of the fighting: when the Turks had first attacked the Frankish camp one of the Frankish leaders, Raymond Saint-Gilles, had immediately got together some of his knights and led a charge into the dark. Those Franks! You could wake them up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and they would open their eyes fighting. It was Raymond’s charge that had driven Yaghi-Siyan back across the bridge and had very nearly carried the Franks through the bridge gate and into Antioch. But when they were more than halfway across the bridge there had come galloping wildly back towards them in the darkness a riderless horse and the Franks faltered and fled, pursued by the newly confident Turks.

  The Franks put to rout by a riderless horse! Surely here is a sign for those who know how to read it! Surely here is an action parable! Now Yaghi-Siyan and his cavalrymen, blood-spattered riders on blood-spattered horses, return. They are many fewer than they were when they rode into the obscurity on the other side of the bridge. They are tired but their eyes are bright; for the moment they are the slaughterers and not the cattle. The green-and-gold banner droops proudly on its staff like a male member that has done a good night’s work.

  The morning comes again, every time is like a first time, every time the morning happens it seems surprised at its actuality but it offers no opinions, it only reckons up what has happened in the night. ‘Here there are so many dead horses, so many dead men,’ says the morning. ‘See how they are dead. These men will not do anything more. They have no more to say. The horses will not walk, trot, canter, gallop. They will do nothing. Here there is only so much dead meat.’

  Now in the first light of this grey and impassive morning this dead meat becomes newly active and inspires new activity in both the Franks and the Turks. While the Frankish bowmen shoot up at us and we on the walls shoot down at them, some of the Franks, protecting themselves as well as they can with their shields, gather up their dead from the river bank and the bridge. Some of the dead they sling over their backs to be newly killed by our arrows, some they drag away, some they carry off on litters. The arrows glance off their helmets, stick in their shields, stick in the rings of their mail shirts; at this close range some of the arrows pierce the mail and some find a naked throat. One of the Franks falls and lies shuddering with an arrow in his back, then is still, requiring now the labour of his comrades. There are some dead horses beyond the far end of the bridge; all the closer ones were dragged (by teams of horses that shied and danced sidewise and showed the whites of their eyes) into Antioch last night. These dead horses on the other side of the river, each of them may well have carried a man to his death last night; now each will give life to many men for several days. The shocking thought arises: how much better off everybody would be if the Franks would go away somewhere and butcher their horses and live quietly on the meat.

  There are dead Turks beyond the far end of the bridge, and there are now seen among them other Franks who are not like the Franks that I have just been speaking of. These men move with perhaps something of a birdlike hop in their walk; one can imagine that a moment ago they have flapped down from the grey sky on bla
ck wings and turned into men. Some of the dead Turks they drag away by their legs, others they tie by their arms and legs to poles to be carried off by two men. The air is blackened with our arrows but at that distance they are only like bee-stings. Later we smell the smoke of the cooking-fires of these Franks.

  Seeing all this in this grey dawn that is surprised to be here but is not surprised at anything else I have in my eyes what I see but I have also that riderless horse that I did not see, it is an image of green fire in the obscurity of last night that is still in my eyes.

  There is in the light of this grey morning something that moves with a sickening motion behind the curtain of grey light. It is not like the riderless horse that galloped across the bridge, it is like those horses of last night that lifted up their heads and fell back again, lifted and fell back. This morning is seen as if in a flawed mirror. The curtain of air shakes and sways, one feels drunk, the ground beneath one’s feet will not maintain its proper plane, its proper steady stillness. The earth seems to be retching, shuddering.

  Bembel Rudzuk and I fling ourselves to the ground, others do the same. Perhaps the earth itself is a riderless horse, showing the whites of its eyes and galloping to its death. Lying prone on the top of the wall I feel the stones beneath me shift, I see cracks where there were none before. Hidden Lion cannot be seen from where we are but with the eye of the mind I see the tower on David’s Wheel tottering, shaking, bricks are jumping off it; I see the tiles of Hidden Lion lifting, moving, leaping out of the pattern, breaking, crumbling. The thought comes to me that the earth is sick of humankind, it is trying to vomit itself up to be rid of us.

  The curtain of grey light is still shaking, the world still looks out at us from a flawed mirror. Several horses have broken loose and are galloping through the streets as if in a dream; from the Frankish camp we hear singing and praying; in its caverns underneath the city Onopniktes shouts in the darkness, ecstatic like a prophet as stones topple from the four hundred towers, from Justinian’s wall, from the bridge across the Orontes. I see in my mind the river, roiled and muddy, strangely heaving, shuddering as it runs with its surface pocked and dimpled by the trembling beneath the river bed. There is a gabble of voices all around us and a continual sobbing and praying. With my cheek against the stones and my vision at an unaccustomed angle I see the spire of the minaret of the central mosque slowly sway and fall.

  In the gabble of voices on the wall and rising from the streets below we hear in Turkish, in Syriac, in Arabic, and in Greek the words ‘punishment’ and ‘judgment’. Some think the punishment is for one thing, some think it is for another; the Christians beheaded on Hidden Lion are spoken of by many. There is also some lamentation for the destruction of a shrine of Nemesis and the pulling down of a statue of Tyche, the Goddess of Fortune. (‘All that happened centuries ago,’ says Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but still they talk about it when the earth shakes, all these good Muslims lamenting the departed goddesses of Rome.’) Many think that the Christian Patriarch John, who is in prison, ought to be freed. It is thought by some that if he is freed he will pray for the safety of Antioch; others think that he is more likely to pray if he is kept in prison. All this time there is a wild neighing of unseen horses. Soon a wagon rattles past, it is pulled by men, the horses are too unmanageable to be put in harness. In the wagon is an iron cage and in the cage, desperately clinging to the bars, his face white, his beard flying, is the Patriarch. Later we hear that the cage has been hung by chains from the wall and that he has prayed constantly for God’s mercy.

  The shaking of the earth stops, the grey light of the day is once more steady. There are cracks in the walls, cracks in streets and houses, fallen bricks and stones here and there but no serious damage and no one killed as far as we know. Bembel Rudzuk and I go to Hidden Lion. The tower stands intact and unmarred and the pattern has suffered no damage whatever although there are cracks in the streets all around and in the nearby shops and houses. ‘Its time is not yet come,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.

  When we look at Hidden Lion now it is difficult to recall the feelings we had when the pattern was first assembled. Now Bembel Rudzuk’s idea of observing ‘that point at which stillness becomes motion’ and that other point ‘at which pattern becomes consciousness’ seems altogether ill-conceived and the words with which he described his intention make me shudder. When I call to mind those early days of Hidden Lion when the tiles were arriving from Tower Gate’s brickyard and his foreman and workmen were with their swift and dancing movements putting the pattern together, when I remember how we walked about and viewed the expansion of those tawny and red and black triangles with a commanding eye as if we were in charge of the thing, I cannot help making a face of embarrassment.

  As we stand there looking at Hidden Lion I find myself shaking my head; I no longer know how to approach this place in my mind, I no longer know what to think of it. Up until the time when the Syrian and Armenian Christians were beheaded it was everybody’s good-luck place; afterwards I expected it to become a bad-luck place but I was wrong. Until the next rain the bloodstains remained to mark the tiles, and to those tiles during those few days came many people who stood and looked at them and pointed them out to other people who then stood and looked at them. All of these people who came and looked were Muslims. One day I saw a man squat and rub his hand over one of the tawny bloodstained tiles, then he put his hand inside his robe and rubbed his chest. After that many others did the same, and children began to walk in special ways on those tiles and to dance on them.

  The tiles being glazed, the blood had not permeated the clay; when the rain came it washed them clean. The tiles that had been stained with blood did not, however, become unknown: by some general understanding amongst themselves those who took an interest in the tiles had noted their positions relative to the tower, and by counting carefully they found their way to them again. This was a source of great amusement to the headless and maggoty tax-collector, who now appointed himself a guide and would stand where the blood had been, stamping his foot and pointing with his finger to the tiles. I could of course not see his smile but I could hear his laughter and there was no mistaking the mockery in the way he stamped his foot and pointed with his finger.

  One day a boy of eight or nine came and prostrated himself on some of the tiles that had been stained with blood. He was dressed the same as any other child, he was not wearing a blue turban. I recognized him as the same boy who had come to the paved square and drawn on the stone the morning after I made my first chalk drawing for Hidden Lion. After a few moments he stood up and looked all around at everyone, then walked away. The next day there appeared on those tiles an earthenware pot which filled up with money. The butcher volunteered to divide it among Christian orphans. This was done, and each day after that the pot was filled up and emptied in the same manner.

  Now on this day of the shaking of the earth the shaking has stopped and people are returning to their ordinary activities; the stallholders are again at their places on Hidden Lion. Trade here has of course diminished with the progress of the siege; the caravans have left off coming to Antioch, the road from Suwaydiyya is dangerous, and goods are scarce. Vendors, having little to sell, have lately been reduced to trading among themselves; their collective scanty stock distributes itself anew every day: the copper pot with the hole in it that used to be at the stall of A makes its appearance at the stall of B, while the haftless dagger that was a veteran non-seller with B now tries its luck with A. Eventually, perhaps with P or Q, the pot and the dagger assume with the new venue a new aspect that gets them sold, proving yet again to those who knew it already that action creates action.

  Today, however, the merchants sit or stand listlessly by their wares as if all buying and selling are gone out of the world. Most of them pack up and go home early. The man at the coffee stand by the tower puts his coffee pot and his little brass cups into their wooden box, picks up the box by its leather strap, slings it from his shoulder, takes his brazier, says,
This place is finished’, and turns to go.

  ‘Why is it finished?’ I ask him.

  ‘Look,’ he says, pointing to the pattern with his foot, ‘there’s not so much as a single tile cracked, it isn’t natural.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’ I say.

  ‘It means that this place is being saved for something worse,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want any part of it.’ He recedes into the distance, never looking back.

  The butcher comes, takes the pot of money for the Christian orphans, spits on the tiles, and walks away.

  ‘Wait,’ I say to him. ‘Why did you spit on the tiles, why do you look that way?’

  Without saying a word the butcher makes with his index and little finger the sign against the evil eye and off he goes.

  This day that has begun with the shaking of the earth moves on and there are more wonders to be seen: the dreadful grey curtain of the day becomes the darker curtain of night and there are seen moving behind it strange red lights in the sky that shift and slide from one shape to another. More praying and singing from the Franks and many voices lifted to God on our side of the walls as well. The Patriarch, who was taken out of his hanging cage and put back in prison when the earth stopped shaking, is brought out again to offer an opinion on the strange lights. He sees very plainly in the sky the sign of the Cross and is put back in prison. Bembel Rudzuk and I look up at the sky but we say nothing to each other of what we see—there is perhaps too much motion becoming stillness, too much consciousness becoming pattern for us to respond with anything but silence.