Bridle the Wind (26 page)

Ahead of us the walls of rock drew together.

‘Perhaps it is the cleft in the rock that Roland made with his sword Durendal!' Juan called back, trying to sound cheerful.

To me the narrow cleft seemed like a crack in the side of a house, which we must enter.

‘As if we were ants,' I muttered, but to myself, not aloud.

And then, out of the cleft, came filing a group of men, leisurely, taking their time, neither hurrying nor threatening, but quiet with satisfaction, like farmers who have concluded a bargain, seeing the new flock of sheep brought into the fold. There was a tall white-haired man with a black patch over one eye; a hunchback astride an ass; one man grossly fat, with a tiny pea-head sunk between his shoulders; two of them carried muskets, others had clubs; I lost count of them, I could not hold up my head long enough to take a lengthy survey. In any case, what difference did it make? They had us now, there was no question of that.

‘Grand Dieu,
' I heard Juan whisper.

The white-headed man said politely,
‘Bon soir, mes amis!
So we meet again! How pleasant that now we shall be able to invite you to dine and pass the night with us – on other occasions you have seemed so shy! You have not appeared anxious for our company. And yet we love you so dearly! We have such esteem for you. We have been so eager to entertain you.'

‘Cut the cackle, Cocher,' grumbled the fat man.

‘Let us by, Cocher,' said Juan. ‘We do not choose to remain here with you.'

His voice was as cold and thin as winter rain.

‘Ah, but it is we who do the choosing now, my little bird of paradise! So grand you are now, in
your fine new clothes – hardly the poor ragged sparrow that you were when you stayed with us. No, no, I can see that your new acquaintances have been feeding you up until you are as fat as a gamecock, and the result is charming. Plumet will be so happy to see you.'

‘Where is – Plumet?' breathed Juan. Though he did his best to disguise it, I could hear the fear in his voice.

‘Why, waiting for you in the cave, just up there, where else?'

At the thought of that black cave mouth, where, hidden inside the ancient cold and dark of the mountain, Father Vespasian, clad in Plumet's body, was hidden,
waiting for us,
I began to feel so dizzy that for a moment my spirit slipped away, entirely out of reach. I clung blindly to the saddle pommel, with sweat starting on my forehead. All my surroundings were a black buzz and crackle. Then, coming back, as it seemed, from immense distances of pain and shadow, I felt words on my tongue and heard myself speak. In a voice that I did not recognise as mine, so parched and hoarse was it, I croaked to Juan, ‘The
laminak
are waiting to help us….'

Why those words should have come into my head, God only knew. Doubtless He put them there.

‘Ay, that is so,' agreed Juan, sounding astonished. ‘The
laminak'
His voice, too, was different: higher, hoarser; it resembled the voice that he had used while taking part in the poetry contest. ‘You
had forgotten, I think,' he said to the group of men, ‘that the
laminak
are my friends? Mine, but not yours – oh, no, they are not yours!' And with an eerie change of pitch to a high, shrill, keening wail he suddenly lifted up his head and called,
‘Ohe! Ohe! Ohe! Laminak, laminak, laminak!'

The sound he let out was so piercing and so unexpected that our startled ponies let out high, terrified whinnies; and the notes of his cry and theirs flew upwards, echoing and resounding between the steep black rock walls of the gorge. The two results of this were wholly unforeseen: from somewhere high up above us a huge swarm of black bats abruptly wheeled out, keening, squealing, and dashing themselves blindly from one rock face to the other, whirling about our heads, causing the men to shout with fright and fling themselves back to avoid the cloud of flapping, fluttering leather wings and whizzing furry bodies.

But also – and much more awe-inspiring – either the echoes of Juan's first shout, or the bats in their sudden emergence, dislodged a great boulder and a series of smaller ones, which came volleying down from the heights of rock above, landing among us in a thunder of sound and a cloud of dust. And when the dust cleared, we could see that one man – the gross, pea-headed fellow – had been struck down by the biggest rock and lay lifeless with his head in the river.

‘Sacre nom de Dieu!
' gibbered Jorobado the hunchback. ‘The
laminak!
The
laminak
are angry
– are angry with us!' and he clapped heels to his ass and scampered off up the gorge, while the rest of the troop followed him helter-skelter. All but the white-haired man with the black patch, who bawled after them angrily not to be a set of puling children but to come back.

‘Dolts! Cowards! Imbeciles! Come back, there is nothing to fear but a couple of children. Come back, I say, or when I catch you I'll slit your tripes and drag the skin off your tongues!'

But they paid no heed.

Ignoring these shouts, Juan kicked the Harlequin into a walk, and made for the narrow gorge entrance. Cocher strode furiously to intercept him, standing in the middle of the way with arms wide.

‘You don't deceive me, you little rat, with your talk of ghosts and
laminak.
That rock –' He looked at his fallen comrade, crossed himself, and said hastily, ‘That rock falling was nothing but a strange accident.'

‘Eh, Cocher, is that what you think?' Juan answered, sweet as quince. ‘Then it will just be another lucky accident if it happens again?'

And he raised his voice again in that eerie ascending wail, ‘Ooooooooh! Ooooooooh!' until the cloud of bats flew round once more.

The combination of the sound and the bats proved too much for Cocher. Almost despite himself, it seemed, he drew back and let Juan ride past him. Shrouded in my fog of pain as I was, yet I had presence of mind enough to give the Demon a kick, and obediently he broke into an uneasy
trot – which, jolting me, almost made me shriek with agony – and made haste to follow his companion.

Sometimes still, in dreams, or if ever I am feverish, I find myself back there, in that hideous dark, slimy gully, with the horses slipping and trembling, the last light of the sky paling from blue to apple-green above, and the thought of those men behind us, hesitant, eager to seize us, angry at the death of their companion, yet cowed and indecisive, not able to pluck up courage to come after us. And behind
them,
in the dark cave, the Being that inhabited the body of Plumet.

What would he do now? Would he follow us, angry at their failure?

That ride through the gorge seemed to last for several lifetimes. I was too ill to measure time sensibly; inside my head I could hear a booming, and the light came and went as if veils were being waved before my eyes. I clung with my left hand to the pommel of the Demon's saddle; my knees felt as if they had melted away, my back was aching and stiff, and my right arm seemed the size of my whole body. The dank twilight of the place enwrapped me like a suffocating net.

Dimly, at last, I was aware that we had come out into clearer light and better air; then, later, that Juan had dismounted and was walking, leading my pony, while the Harlequin followed behind, on a long halter.

When had Juan done this? I did not know. Where were we? I did not know.

Sometimes I heard Juan murmuring words; I had no strength to follow the meaning, but the sound of them filtered slowly into my throbbing head like flakes of snow:

Then he would break off and say, ‘Felix? Can you hear me? Are you strong enough to keep on – to go a little farther?'

I would mumble some reply, and he would say, ‘Keep your heart up. I know, I know the pain is terrible. I do not understand how you can bear it. But I see that you can. I am trying to find a way out of this wilderness that we are in.'

Then we would plod on, league after league, up over ridges, down through valleys, and after a while I would hear his voice again, murmuring about the wind:

The lilt of these words, of Juan's voice, somehow formed a band of curving smoothness, like a path over gently rounded hills, which my spirit could follow while my wretched body obediently, doggedly
continued to sit on the pony and submit to endless pain. Could it have been like this for Juan, I wondered, when he was dangling by his neck from the branch of the tree? Did he suffer so? Why did I never think of that before?

And on we went, scrambling over uneven ground.

And his voice came, gentle but insistent:

Vaguely, through all my pain, I understood that what he said about the wind was
true;
all the time, since we had left the hateful gorge, it had been rising, and now moaned and battered around us like a live thing, pushing, fluttering, urging us forward; it held us in its cold arms; it led us, dragged us, pulled us, and thrust us. Great swags and wads of black cloud came hurrying over the sky, piling into thunderlofts; and then, with a loud hiss, a whole world of rain fell on us, plastering the hair flat against our heads, even under our hats, drenching our jackets, sleeking down the ponies' rough coats until they looked like satin.

And still we rode on, on.

Now a bright sabre of lightning cleft the sky, and not long after there came a giant crack, as if the whole nut of heaven had been split open, and the rain fell even faster.

‘The storm is our friend,' remarked Juan with satisfaction, ‘for the Gente won't be able to follow our tracks.'

Indeed, the path we followed was like a running brook. Even the water-shy Harlequin seemed not to heed it, but patiently followed while Juan trudged up to his shins in mire and water.

‘Ah!' I heard him exclaim some while later. ‘Now I truly do believe that God must have been guiding us.'

I pulled up my head and stared about. For some time I had been aware that we were descending, not climbing; I saw that we were coming down a narrow col, or mountain pass; around us lay a jumble of woods and rocky peaks, illuminated from time to time by the lightning flashes. To the side of our track, ahead, stood a crude stone cross, and beyond that was a small stone building, square, with a domed roof, and a door supported by two solid stone columns. The building was almost grown over with creepers and vines; ivy and wallflowers sprouted between the cracks of the masonry, which was plainly very old. Behind the building rose a rock wall; there was a lean-to
at one side, and, close by, a spring trickled into a stone trough.

There were some words carved over the lintel.

Juan led my pony up to this building and knocked on the heavy wooden door with my
makhila,
which he was carrying.

A faint voice called from inside: ‘Come in! Whoever you are! And heaven bless you!'

Now, with the most solicitous and tender care, Juan helped me dismount. I rolled off the saddle like a sack, supported by my left hand on his shoulder, and somehow landed on my feet. He pushed open the door of the cabin and helped me inside.

A tiny lamp, placed in a niche in front of a crucifix, faintly glimmered and illuminated the place.

On a bed of leaves and straw in a corner lay a desperately pale, emaciated man dressed in a canvas robe. His long shaggy white hair had not been cut, by the look of it, for years; his eyes were sunk back in his head, he held a rosary in his sticklike hands. He looked like a corpse; yet he still had strength to turn his head and gaze at us.

‘Are you Brother Laurent?' said Juan.

The answer was a faint nod.

‘Then we come to you with fraternal greetings from Brother Bertrand. But my companion here is sick – as you can see – he was bitten by a snake. May I take some of these things to make him a bed?'

Taking the faint croak of assent as permission,
Juan found a pile of dirty sacks and a bundle of hay; my legs were on the point of collapsing under me, but just before they did so he carefully assisted me to lie down. Oh, the blessed relief of reposing full length on that unsavoury couch!

Then Juan went outside to see to the ponies and bring in our saddlebags.

While he did so I gazed up at a crucifix above me on the wall; the life-size figure upon it was made of black, polished bones.

‘Cordial
– ‘faintly articulated the hermit when Juan returned. ‘In the chest – by the holy book.'

Juan knelt at a chest under the crucified skeleton. Its skull stared down at him as he pulled out a little flask. Matter-of-factly he administered a few drops to the sick man, and then a mouthful to me. At once a wonderful tingling warmth ran through me from head to toe, and I began to realise that, in fact, my state of sickness had turned, at some point on that agonising ride, and that I had commenced the process of recovery. Perhaps the storm and the rain had done me good, washed the poison out of my arm, and now this cordial helped knit my faculties together. I felt more like Felix; understood that before too long, next day if God willed it, I should be restored to normal health.

Thanking God in my heart, I was able to smile at Juan, thank him, too, and whisper, ‘Take a sip of cordial yourself! You must be worn to the bone.'

His look lighted up at my smile. He said, ‘Well, I will just have a taste!' and did so.

Then he busied himself kindling a fire in the
crude hearth (fortunately there were dry sticks in a heap), heated water, and – since there was no food in the place – with a handful of herbs he made a kind of tisane, of which he gave cupfuls to the sick man and me and drank some himself.