Knowledge of Angels

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Those that remain are the strongest, the most cunning,’ said Salvat, ‘like the one we killed last week. We wouldn’t have got her if she hadn’t been old. I thought our troubles were over for the season. And now this.’

  The shepherds had made a trap. They had staked out a weakling lamb as a lure and spread out a bale of fishing net. Someone had watched all night, with a cord in his hand. When the lamb cried, pulling the cord would engulf the predator in the net, and they would be able to bundle it up without getting near it. But it had not worked. The thing had come; the net had been cast. Jaime – it was he who had watched – had shouted; the others came swiftly with axes and lanterns. The thing growled and heaved in the trap. Then it had gone, leaving the lamb dead behind it. They showed the nevados the hole in the net, the slashed strands breaching it widely. They showed the stiff little carcass, its head nearly severed at the neck. The thing had left tracks in the snow; strange tracks.

  ‘Whoever heard of a wolf with spoor like that?’ Salvat asked. He pointed out the impression of the front paw, divided into four pads, the mark of the claws behind, not in front of the footprint. ‘I am nearly eighty. I have heard a lot, seen a lot. Never anything like this.’

  ‘We can track it to its lair now the snow is lying here,’ said Old Luis. ‘But we don’t know what it is. We thought it best to get help.’

  ‘At first light its time has come,’ the nevados promised. ‘Whatever it is.’ They were strong men, and numbered nearly a dozen. They were therefore only a little afraid, with that pleasurable thrill that comes from mystery and a promise of excitement. The shepherds’ cave was warmer and drier than the snow hut, and the roast meat better than their own salt fish and olives and stale bread would have been. The prospect of killing, of letting rage triumph, and of reaping admiration, not loathing, was as heady as Galceran’s wine. In the warmth of the night cave, the mysterious creature could not have been too large for them, or too appalling. The hugest wolf that ever walked would have disappointed them.

  In the morning the tracks were clear to see. The thing had taken another lamb in the night, as expected. About every three days it was raiding the flocks; but the night before last, when it had bitten through the net, it had left its prey behind. That it would be hungry was predictable. And though the shepherds had searched for it in vain for nearly the whole of their two weeks in the high pastures, the snowfall had entrapped the creature better than the net – it could be followed easily now. The trail led up to the top of the hanging valley, climbing the stark rock-face, ribbed with clefts and riddled with caves, where anything could hide. For the first half mile or more the trail was unreadable, because the creature had been dragging its kill, obliterating its footprints as it made them. Then in a snow-filled cranny made filthy with blood it had left the larger part of the lamb, dismembered and horribly torn, taking the left hindquarter onwards. Now the trail was marked with a line of blood drops, and the haunch had been carried in the creature’s teeth, leaving the strange trail clear.

  There was a marked difference between its front paws and its back paws – the back paws had long claw marks in front of the paw mark, only the front footprints had the strange inverted claws. Like a hare it left leg-marks as well as footprints from time to time, and now and then its bloody burden dangled low enough to scrape and stain the sunlit purity of the ground.

  ‘Look,’ said Old Luis, as they rested, nearly a thousand feet above the grazing grounds. ‘What kind of creature has a gait like that?’ The leg-marks, long and narrow, extended behind the prints of the thing’s front paws, and in front of its rear paws. They shook their heads and moved on. In a few more minutes they came round a rock bluff and saw the trail making straight across a level facet of rock, and into the mouth of a cave. It was a small cave. The finely balanced mixture of excitement and fear which had driven them urgently till that moment shifted suddenly towards fear. Jaime trembled. But it would be Galceran, surely, who went first?

  It was. They moved as quietly as they could, and they fanned out, in case it rushed out of the cave and escaped them. They could hear it snarling and growling.

  ‘Perhaps it has young,’ said Salvat. ‘It is feeding its young . . .’

  They closed in. Then, suddenly they could see into the hollow in the drift in front of the creature’s lair. The melt-cave at the door of the rock cave was abominable with scraps of slaughtered things – with blood and feathers and bones. Even on the nearly frozen air, a stench reached them. The thing held the stolen haunch of meat between its front paws, and was worrying it, snarling like a dog as it ate. It had a mantle of matted black fur over its head and shoulders, and bluish bald hindquarters. It did not hear or smell them coming, for it did not cease to drag off strips of meat from the bone.

  Galceran let out a bloodthirsty yell. He raised his snow-mattock high above his head and swung it murderously. It was Jaime who stopped him. He jumped forward with a wail and, grabbing Galceran’s sleeve, deflected the blow. Then he lurched backwards, doubled over convulsively, and vomited. He had seen, just in time, that the monster was a human child.

  A child. It had hair matted into a thick pall that spread over its back and shoulders – that was what they had taken for fur. Otherwise it was naked. The terrible fangs with which it had slaughtered lambs and cut free from the entrapping net were only an old, rusty knife. It held the knife between its teeth. It ran away on all fours, zigzag in the space left by the line of men. It tried to run between two of them. But they were armed with nets and poles and caught it easily. Holding it by the hair, and beating it till it howled, they forced it to drop the knife. Then they bundled it up and carried it, slung from the longest pole, and dumped it into a sheep-pen made of wattles outside the shepherds’ cave. It fought them all the way.

  In the pen it ran from corner to corner, round and round, with a loping four-footed gait. It ran on the bent back knuckles of its hands and on bent forward toes. Huge hardened overgrown nails protruded from its hands and feet. They watched it in silence for a while and then retreated, averting their eyes, occupying themselves with making supper. At first light the nevados would return to the treading floor.

  ‘Shall we feed it?’ said Salvat, as they ate.

  ‘Feed it?’ said Luis. ‘It’s full of our lamb already!’ But Salvat sliced a length of meat from the bone on the spit and took it on the end of his knife to the penned and running child. It sniffed at the offering, recoiled, and trampled it untasted, in the dirt. They tried bread, with a like result. At last, gagging slightly, Galceran took it the bucket of raw offal left from the evisceration of the roast carcass, and it ate.

  ‘How old is it?’ Juan asked.

  ‘Hard to say. Nine? Younger? Older? It’s all skin and bone and rage,’ said Galceran.

  ‘How has it survived?’ another of the nevados asked.

  ‘A wolf has suckled it,’ said Old Luis, wiping his knife on a hunk of bread.

  ‘Is such a thing possible?’

  ‘It might be. There have always been stories.’

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Galceran asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Luis. ‘To my mind your first thought was the best.’

  ‘I would have killed it . . .’

  ‘You should have done.’

  ‘But that would be murder!’ cried Jaime. ‘Murder . . .’

  ‘It would have been merciful,’ said Luis. ‘But it’s too late now.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Salvat.

  ‘How many are we?’ asked Luis. ‘Twelve nevados and three of us. Could we be sure that not one of fifteen people, as long as any of us live, would breathe a word to a wife, to a bishop, to a priest in the confessional, to a mother, a sweetheart by moonlight? Never, when living, drunk, or dying?’ Glancing meaningfully at Jaime as he spoke, Luis made very clear where he thought the dangerous member of the party was sitting. ‘There was just that one moment, when Galceran could truthfully have said that he did not know what it was – and the moment
is gone. One whisper from any of us if we kill it now, and we would all hang.’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ said Salvat. ‘A pity.’

  ‘It would be murder!’ Jaime insisted. ‘God would know, even if we all kept mum for ever!’

  ‘Holy Catalida!’ said Old Luis. ‘Do you think there could be a God – supposing that there is a God – with no more common sense than a bishop? Do you think that . . . thing is one of us?’

  But the older men looked at one another. Luis was right. Something which they might have risked doing if they had been alone – grizzled heads only, in the mountains – was far too risky with a mawkish youth as witness, one with a tender conscience, the smell of his mother’s piety still hanging round him.

  Just then the thing began to howl. It set up a blood-curdling baying, that rang round the summits above them.

  With the hairs prickling on their scalps, they rose from the circle round the fire in which they had been sitting and went outside. A half-moon cast barely perceptible shadows, and the child sat on its haunches in the middle of the pen, just visible, its head thrown back, howling full-throated. Far, far off, the cry was answered, faintly. A brother brute had heard it, from a distant cave. Someone lit a torch. The child cowered away from the light, as if afraid. In the flickering light it looked more terrible than ever – covered with blood from the offal bucket and hiding its face in its hair.

  Galceran drew his knife and vaulted over the fence into the pen. ‘I’m going to cut its hair,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t, Galceran, you’ll spoil it!’ said Juan.

  ‘Spoil it?’ Galceran paused, amazed.

  ‘We could earn a pretty penny taking that round the markets and charging for a look,’ said Juan. ‘The wolf-boy. Think of it!’

  ‘Pah!’ said Galceran. ‘You disgust me.’ And he advanced on the child. Terrified, it fought back. It took four of them, in the end, to hold it down, small though it was, while Galceran hacked through the pall of hair, cutting it off at the neck. They held torches to light the struggle. Before it was done, Jaime retired to the back of the cave, and curling up on his pallet wept bleakly and silently. He was thrown into the pit of dejection by the knowledge that a child could become no more than a wolf – worse – less than a wolf, for a wolf at least is natural. He gagged on his own tears at what he had seen under the bright torches, as Galceran tore away the masking hair. The child was a girl.

  The nevados were three more days on the mountain, treading and cutting snow. They kept the wolf-girl tethered and staked on a leather thong. She refused their food and howled at night. When the time came to descend, they had trouble. The donkeys were terrified of her and refused to carry her, baring their teeth, and stubbornly resisting. She would not run on a lead, but would have needed to be dragged over every stone on the paths. When Luis tried to carry her, she bit his hand to the bone. They got her as far as the pine woods slung on a pole, bound wrist and ankle, like a carcass for the butcher, and stopped at the first band of trees to cut branches and make a cage. She seemed terrified of the cage, and they had to beat her unconscious to get her into it. After that they took turns, carrying the cage on poles. Before they reached the first farms, Galceran had had enough of it. There would be no glory in having captured a child. He let Juan take her in exchange for the promise of a bottle apiece, and a basket of olives to share.

  2

  As you saw, as well as mountains the island contained an ample undulating plain, assiduously farmed by the inhabitants of the little hill towns scattered across it. Each had its splendid church and its square planted with trees for shade. The lines of round or square towers that clustered on the margins of the towns looked from a distance like fortifications but were actually disused windmills; built not to forfend a flow of blood but to obtain a flow of water, of which the plains were usually short. When a well ran dry, the farmers built new towers to support the spinning wheel of sails, leaving the old ones standing. Only the towns very near the coast were actually fortified; all through the island’s history there had been danger from pirates. Here and there on the plain were steep hills, each topped with a sanctuary, and in the south there was a second range of heights, which would have counted as mountains in another country, but here were reduced to hills by comparison with the precipitate, spectacularly towering range of mountains in the north, on which the snow shrank into ragged patches but never vanished, even at the height of summer.

  The coastline was alternately rugged and incurved by shallow, sandy coves, and the only large, safe harbourage was in the south, where Ciudad, the principal town, had a fortified and defended anchorage. Elsewhere the coastline was resorted to only by fishermen, a cheaper defence than walls being merely to build settlements a little inland and out of sight from the sea. On the shore itself the fishermen sometimes built themselves little shelters, though more often they simply pulled their boats up the beaches to the margins of the pine woods and slept, if they were not going home, in makeshift tents of spars and sails. Fish were plentiful and, except for the storms at either equinox, the waters were usually calm, so the fishermen were somnolent fellows, plying their trade in leisurely fashion. The islanders had a passion for fish, and whatever was caught could be sold.

  On one of a thousand fine days, Miguel and Lazaro sat under the pine trees, mending nets. It was very early in the morning, and the light shone levelly below the branches. Later there would be shade. Later it would be welcome. The nets were dyed with indigo, in a forlorn hope of catching the colours of the ultramarine and turquoise waters beyond the line of soft surf breaking on the sands. The men sat cross-legged, heads bent over the work, raising the shuttles of cord to pull the knots tight. Now and then they straightened and looked vacantly out to sea for a moment. Nothing was to be seen except the iridescence of the morning light on the silken expanse of water.

  And then there was something to be seen. Something floating, far out. Lazaro frowned into the rising sun, and was dazzled. A drifting lobster-float, no doubt. What else could it be? Then, when he looked up again, a time-span later, for the sun had risen enough to enlighten rather than obliterate sight, it was much nearer, and moving. He pointed and spoke to Miguel. They got up and walked to the water’s edge, watching. Soon they could discern clearly what they were seeing – a swimmer, slowly and wearily struggling from the far horizon towards the golden shore. He seemed to be failing as they watched; he seemed to be drifting offshore again. They ran to the little white-painted boat that bobbed in the shallows beside a rocky jetty and rowed out to bring him in.

  He had been in the water a long time. His skin was swollen, softened, pallid and wrinkled like the hands of their womenfolk on wash days. His lips were cracked. He was naked, except for a sodden loincloth. Tumbled into the bottom of the boat he lay, eyes closed, face upwards, for a while. Then he groaned and rolled over and tried drinking the brackish slops in the bilge. They grounded the boat and carried the half-dead stranger up the beach. They laid him in the shade of the sailcloth tent and stared at him. He was a splendidly built man of middle age, bronzed-skinned and dark-haired, fully bearded. He reached for the water-flagon, but they withheld it. Instead Lazaro dipped a sponge and held it to his lips, letting him suck and sip a little at a time. Miguel brought the oil jar – olive oil was plentiful on the island, and they would have cooked their fishes in it at supper time – and rubbed oil into the waterlogged skin of the man’s feet and hands. Then they pulled a sail over him and left him to sleep; his eyes were closed already in the utmost weariness.

  They rowed far out – not as far as he had been when Lazaro first saw him, yet as far as they ever went, bundling the pile of nets over the back of the boat and rowing gently to trail it in the deep behind them. The bobbing floats and the weedy line of the floating edge of the nets broke the sparkling surface, and below the fish were gathered, in unfailing plenty. It was so ordinary a day, the unchanging and endlessly recurrent aspects of rocky headland and swirling waters and soaring birds so comple
tely like yesterday and tomorrow, that they thought they must have dreamed the swimmer. They scanned the shores behind them for any sign of a wreck and the horizon for any sign of a ship, but not a scrap of explanation for the swimmer could be found. Not even a drifting spar.

  Nevertheless, they had not dreamed him; when they returned in the afternoon for the invariable siesta, he was still asleep where they had left him under the trees. At their approach, the swimmer woke. He tried to sit and failed, groaning. Lazaro offered him the water flask, saying, ‘You can drink now.’

  ‘He won’t understand a word,’ said Miguel. But the swimmer understood enough to take the flagon and drink deeply. Lazaro offered bread, and Miguel rubbed on more oil. Then at last the stranger spoke. He said, with a musical and marked accent, but perfectly intelligibly, ‘I will reward you.’ It was so unexpected, and so preposterous in the mouth of a nearly naked man lying helpless and wholly destitute, that the fishermen laughed. They roasted fish on a little driftwood fire and shared the bread and olives three ways.

  ‘You shall have gold and rubies,’ he said, and they laughed again.

  At six the swimmer could still hardly stand unaided, let alone walk. They put him on the donkey, sitting him awkwardly on the fish panniers, but they had to unburden the beast first of the huge pile of green that usually topped its load, for it carried its own fodder home each evening. That evening Miguel hoisted the bundle of grasses onto his own shoulders for the trudge to the village. It was a small village – a church dedicated to St Anne, a little square, a few narrow streets of plain houses, gardens behind them, orange trees in every nook and cranny. At dusk the shopkeepers opened their doors and shutters again, the simple tavern was ready to serve the habitual customers, a scatter of lanterns at doorways lit the square. Throwing off the lassitude of the afternoon heat, the people woke up and took a turn in the open air, strolling and chattering under the stars. Every day was the same, except that now and then a wedding or a funeral party brought a little joy, a little change. The appearance of the rescued swimmer was a sensation.