The Leper's Companions (15 page)

The calm descended and they were trapped within it. The air tasted stale and unreplenished; you felt you might suffocate just from breathing it. The birds and the fish had gone. The sun shone within a sickly yellow haze and a mist hung over the motionless surface of the sea, obscuring the horizon and turning the whole world into this one small place.

The oarsmen tried to pull them through, but it was as
if the sea was holding them back and taking away their strength. After three days, what was left of the fresh water in the barrels had turned into a thick and putrid sludge. The wine was sour and too strong to drink. The meat was crawling with maggots that had all hatched on the same night. The biscuits were being devoured by weevils, the fruit and vegetables were rotten.

Dark blankets of fleas had moved into the sleeping quarters, while the deck was dancing with biting flies and clouds of gnats. Even if you spent two hours combing the lice from someone's hair, they had returned as a somnambulant army before the day was done. There was a disgusting white worm that crawled over you while you tried to sleep, its body filled with blood. The sailors said they had never seen such a worm before and it had no name.

Rats and mice gnawed at blankets and shoes. They walked over faces and licked the moisture from the corner of closed eyes. They had lost the last remnants of their fear and no longer scattered when they were disturbed, but stood there trembling and defiant and seeming to beg for charity.

The captain gave the order that no water was to be given to the animals which were tethered in pens close to the kitchen. During the heat of the day they were silent in their suffering, but they cried throughout the night and with the dawn they could be seen licking at the wooden planks to catch the thin covering of dew. All of the poultry, two pigs
and a calf died, but since no one had the energy to gut them and cook them quickly enough, their rotting carcases had to be thrown overboard. Not a single shark appeared when the blood spread its message across the water.

One man developed a fever and began to scream in his bed; several others caught the contagion from him. The shoemaker's wife tried to comfort them, but they hardly noticed her presence. Three of them died where they lay.

The leper sat with his companions. Although they had all chosen freely to go on this journey with him, he now felt terribly responsible for them. He felt he should know how to comfort them and to explain how best to endure the heat and the thirst and the agony of waiting for things to change, but he had no energy and no words.

He looked from one to the next. Sally's face was very swollen. She kept licking her parched lips and staring at the haze which covered and obscured the sea. “The horizon has gone,” she said, and she began to cry but without the relief of tears falling.

The priest was bent over the book of travels. “We have reached this page and now we must go further,” he said, pointing with his finger at the scrawl of words on a line and then turning the pages on and on as if that was magic to undo the spell of their predicament.

The shoemaker's wife confronted her suffering by withdrawing herself from it. She hardly moved her body at all, only the pupils of her eyes expanding and contracting like a
cat's. She had bought a silken yashmak from some Gypsies on the last island and she wore it all the time, making it impossible to see the emotion on her face. Sometimes she would talk to her husband, discussing things with him and listening to what he had to say.

“What is he telling you?” the leper asked her.

“He is preparing to let go of me,” she replied. “He says that soon he won't be able to visit me, not even in my dreams. He says he can see the path my life will take and that is enough. I will be cared for.”

The calm was going to lift in a while, but there was no way of knowing that with the air still so heavy and unchanged. Sally was gazing into the mist when suddenly she scrambled to her feet, shouting and pointing, “My husband! I can see him, there in his boat: He is waiting for me! I am going to him!” And before anyone had time to fully understand what was happening she leaped over the side of the ship. There was the sound of her body hitting the water's surface, and then silence.

The others were too stunned to speak. They stared at each other in disbelief, each hoping that what they had seen was nothing more than a private fantasy engendered by the claustrophobia of the day. And then, as the reality of what had happened grew stronger, they peered over the side of the ship, looking for a sign of life or death, but there was nothing there. They searched the mist for the boat which Sally had seen, but if it had been there before it was gone
now and so they gave up and sat huddled together, blank and desolate.

The leper was remembering everything he knew of Sally. He saw her as she first appeared to him when he walked into the village: her haunted moon face and how she had taken the book of travels and wrapped it close to her breast. He saw her again, poised by the seashore in the bitter cold when he had pulled her back to safety. Only now that she was gone did he understand how close he had felt to her and how much he would miss her.

The priest and the shoemaker's wife were also turning the thought of Sally over and over in their minds. She hovered close to them like a ghost, appearing and disappearing before their eyes, tantalizing them with her presence and her absence. And all the time the calm was shifting and dispersing, so that when they looked up it was gone and they could see the steep mountains of the island of Candia, silhouetted against a clear sky. Fish were in the sea. Birds were wheeling and calling overhead.

The town they entered was very beautiful, with watercourses and windmills and fine houses. An ostrich in a walled garden was stalking among the wilting flowers on big feet.

At this time of year hundreds of falcons flew over the island and the people caught them in nets and sold them in the market. The leper bought one: tethered and hooded, fretful within its sudden captivity, uttering little screams of rage and despair.

He went with it on his arm to the high plain of Lessithi. The people who lived here had been driven out long ago; their houses destroyed, their fields laid waste, their fruit trees cut to the ground. Herds of wild ibex moved among the ruins. It was here that the leper released the falcon. He watched it fly in widening circles until it was out of sight.

T
he journey continued. They spent several days on the island of Rhodes but avoided Cyprus because it had been raided by pirates: houses burning in the town of Paphos, dogs howling and no people anywhere.

They followed the coast of Turkey and were close enough to the land to see men riding on donkeys and the tombs of the dead cut into the white cliffs of rock like giant doorways into another world. But they only stopped briefly to replenish their water supply. The wind was behind them, they had enough food and they were afraid of being attacked by the Turks.

A mood of elation was growing among the pilgrims because the Holy Land was now so close. People sang and
danced. One man climbed up into the ship's rigging and said he would not come down until they had arrived.

One morning they were awakened by the blowing of trumpets much earlier than usual, and when they stumbled out onto the deck the sailors pointed at a range of mountains that looked like a bank of pale clouds. And that was their destination.

They sang the Te Deum. They cried and kissed one another and some even fainted with emotion. A man who had been drunk since they left Venice was suddenly sober and a man with a fever was carried up from the sleeping quarters and left to blink in the bright sunshine, a wild delirious smile on his face.

They dropped anchor in the shallow waters of the Bay of Jaffa, and a school of dolphin came to leap around the ship. Everyone felt this was a good sign. But they could not go ashore until permission had been granted by the governor of the region, so they had to wait for him to arrive, gazing longingly at the land from the sea.

The leper remembered how the city of Jaffa had been bustling and prosperous the last time he saw it. It was now in ruins; and nothing was left except for a line of broken towers and walls among the rocks and the encroaching sand. He wondered who had attacked it and why, but there was no way of finding out.

He knew that Jonah had been vomited from the belly of the whale onto this beach and the giantess Andromeda had
been chained to these rocks while she waited for the dragon to come for her. He could just see a few rusty links of the chain fixed to the rocks that were still stained with the dragon's blood and several huge rib bones were sticking up out of the sand like the wrecked hulk of a ship. And there were the dark mouths of the caves where Saint Peter had lived while he was preaching here and where the pilgrims would be expected to stay.

The ship remained at anchor in the shallow nervous sea. More and more people were congregating within the ruins of the city. They came drifting in from the parched landscape on donkeys and camels and on foot. They set up their mushroom tents among the broken walls and tethered their animals to the stumps of pillars. The smoke from their fires dissolved into the blueness of the sky and the smell of spices and roasting meat was carried on the air. The pilgrims stood in anxious groups on the deck and watched the Saracens; they were so close you could count the rings on their fingers.

Finally after nine days of waiting there was a change. The people on the land began to wave and beckon excitedly. The governor and the prior from the Monastery of Saint George had arrived. A table had been set up on the beach and the pilgrims could go ashore.

As soon as they landed the Saracens surged around them, snatching at the hem of a cloak, reaching out to touch hair or skin, grasping at sacks and staffs and bodies. A man tugged at the leper's sleeve with a look of desperate entreaty on his face. A young boy thumped the shoemaker's wife on the
back with the palms of both his hands, but when she turned to shout at him he offered her the gentlest of smiles, as if the attack had been intended as nothing more than a form of greeting.

The pilgrims were herded together to stand like sheep in front of the governor, the prior, and a scribe who was seated between them. The prior nodded his head wearily and made the sign of the cross over each man or woman who was presented to him. The scribe was fluent in many languages. “What is your name and your country?” he asked, first in Italian and then trying German, French, English, and Dutch, spitting the words out like the accusation of a crime. The governor hardly bothered to look up, but signed the documents that were set before him with an expression of utter despair on his face.

And then they were driven stumbling forward into the caves of Saint Peter, where the stink of stagnant water, human excrement and rotting meat was so overwhelming that some of the pilgrims tried to escape back into the fresh air. But their way was blocked by men with swords.

After a little while flaming torches were brought in to illuminate the rough walls, the high ceiling, the pools of dirty water, and the carcasses of two sheep. But before the pilgrims had lost all hope a crowd of noisy strangers burst in bearing a whole market of goods for sale. There was brushwood to lie on, and rushes to cover the filth on the floor. The scent of aromatic gums and sweet spices filled the stagnant air. One man had a roll of white muslin cloth, which he sold
in lengths that could be hung in drifting folds around a bed. Another had a box of sparkling jewels. Two women carried trays of bread and cakes, fried eggs and fresh dates. A donkey bore the weight of a metal urn filled with a warm honey drink.

At night a man with a club stationed himself at the entrance to the cave and anyone wanting to go outside had to be polite to him and pay him a fee. But during the day the pilgrims could go wherever they wished.

So there they were, helpless and passive, unable to continue on their way until some new order was given. The leper passed the time by going walking on his own along the shore. He examined the dragon's bones. He picked up the black oyster shells that were scattered everywhere on the sand, their thick-lipped bodies buckled and twisted with age and the battering of the waves. He found a freshwater spring that bubbled into a pool only a few yards from the reach of the sea, but it was only when he put his hand into the water and it was so icy-cold it made his bones ache, that he suddenly found himself remembering how the first signs of his sickness had crept up on him, all those years ago.

Then, just as now, he had been staying with the other pilgrims in the caves. From the moment of arriving at Jaffa he had been strangely elated with a sense of having escaped from the net of his own sadness, a new life lying ahead of him and the door of the past banged firmly shut. But then one night he had become aware of a sensation like fear itself rushing with the blood in his veins and beating with the
pumping of his heart, and in the morning he saw that red swellings were appearing on his body, starting with the left side of his neck and spreading down across the shoulder and up into his jaw, making his tongue bloated and slurring any attempt at speech. He felt then as if he was metamorphosing into some other creature, his skin so tight and hot it must burst open to reveal whatever monster lay beneath its surface.

For three days the swellings and the fear that went with them moved over his body, but at the last they began to subside and he presumed the danger was gone. He went walking along the coast. He stopped to look at the dragon's bones and picked up the black oyster shells. He reached the spring and put his hand into its icy-cold water. And that was when he noticed how his hands were covered in scaly patches, the skin breaking off into silvery fragments like fish scales. Even as he watched he could see this transformation taking effect and could feel the sickness tightening and shrinking over the entire surface of his body. His scalp became bumpy and rough to the touch. An exhausting, aching pain was devouring his flesh and hammering at his bones.