Rachel spied women leaning from windows and standing in doorways beating pots. But where were the colorful jongleurs in motley? Instead, people ran helter-skelter in the streets, some carrying torches in broad daylight. She stopped abruptly on a slope of cinquefoil above a slope of evenly bound and piled sheaves.
Plague! she realized. She had read about plagues in the Bible and had heard from Grandfather about the scarlet death that had slain so many people in the northern cities that their bodies had been piled in mounds and they had to be buried in one grave. That had transpired many years ago, when Grandfather was younger than she. Could that dread evil now have come to Lunel?
A small figure scampered among the sheaves, then came sprinting uphill directly toward Rachel. She recognized the smudged and frightened face straining closer. Her village friend who thought God had cursed her with womanhood for missing Mass dashed to her side.
"Rachel! Rachel!" she gasped and nearly fell to her knees. "I came to find you."
"What's wrong?" Rachel steadied her friend. "Why is there such a clamor in the village?"
"They're killing the Jews!"
Rachel gaped, bewildered.
"It's a Crusader mob from the north," her friend explained, clutching at her, eyes wild. "They're going to the Holy Land to avenge the Christians killed at Hattin by the terrible Saracen lord Saladin."
Rachel did not understand. She had heard of the Crusades. Some of the men in the village had taken up the Cross and gone to Jerusalem to wrest the sepulcher of Jesus from the Turks, and the estate had lost some good workers. But Hattin—Saladin—she did not know these names.
"The Crusader mob is killing Jews wherever they can find them," her friend sobbed. "I heard the men talking about it. The mob has already slain all the Jews in Blaye, Agenais, and Auch! I've seen the men from the north with blood on their hands up to their elbows!"
"Are you sure?" Dare she believe this naif who thought her womanhood a curse?
"Rachel! They're charging through our village screaming 'Christ-murderers!' They've already set fire to your cousin Judah's house and dragged him, his wife, and his children through the streets by their hair! They're taking them to the church to be baptized. But he's spitting at them and I know they're going to kill him! Rachel—you must warn your family."
With wide eyes, Rachel looked past her friend and into the village. Plumes of smoke had begun to rise from the village's affluent center, where her cousins lived. Many of the people charging through the streets brandished torches, and several held crosses over their heads. Horror spiked through her.
Rachel spun about and ran hard up the hillside. The shortest route home lay directly over the knoll and down through the secret hedge paths. By the time she reached the crest of the hill, a cold, sticky sweat had soaked through her chemise and her heart boomed in her ears. She threw her head back to catch her breath and saw again the day moon, shaped like a sleeping swan.
From atop the shrine stones, Rachel gazed down in a fright to watch smoke piling into the sky. The heaped stacks of grain blazed. Swarms of banner-waving men ran through orchards and fields, smashing harvest carts and setting torches to the fruit trees. For a long moment, she stood transfixed, hardly believing her eyes. Then, she saw how the swarms of men had converged on the great house, and terror jolted through her. She could not stand there and simply watch. She had to be with her family.
As Rachel leaped down from the jumbled stones and skidded along the steep rill paths that slashed through dense hedges, she frantically considered what to do. Could she find a way past the furious mob? If she could, if she could find her way to her father and mother, she knew they would know what to do.
From on high, the rampaging mob had been a cloud of small figures. But as she descended to the rutted road that led to the village, she saw the gruff-faced, scowling men more clearly. Strangers, grimed from their furious march, they swung crude banners with lambs and crosses scrawled on them. Many wore filthy gray blouses marked with streaky brown crosses that, with a start, Rachel realized had been smeared on with blood.
A group of these men singing a Christian anthem in shouting, angry voices strode down the path where Rachel hurried, and she barely had time to duck into the hedges as they bustled past. They brushed by close enough for her to see their mud-caked leggings and thick hands. They dragged something behind them, and at first their legs blocked her view.
Rachel decided she did not want to see what they were dragging, and that instant the burdens swung by. Inches away, the blood-clotted corpses of her father’s brother Joshua and his two adolescent boys stared with crazed, sightless eyes.
They had been stripped naked, and she gazed with icy dismay at the first naked men she had ever seen. Where their genitals should have been only mangled flesh, streaked their naked bodies with butcher-bright blood, and sausages stuffed their mouths.
The realization of what she observed surged violently through her, and she shrieked. The instant her cry retched out of her, she froze. Icy terror locked her muscles. The murderers, with all their vehement singing, had not heard her.
Rachel crawled through the hedge to a narrow mule path that ran parallel to the road and tried to stand. Her legs, void of tension, kept dropping her back to the ground. She crawled along the path until feeling returned to her legs and she could rise. Staggering along the hedgerows, she advanced to the edge of the apple orchard.
Her ashen face, beaded with droplets of sweat, swung side to side looking for a clear way among the green doors and shadows of the trees. The fires that the mob had tried to start under the trees had died out, smothered by wet mulch and moist fruit. She stumbled, tripping on roots and slipping on rotted apples. When Crusaders appeared, she crouched behind burly trees and studied the fragrant, amber sap oozing from crevices in the trunks, willing herself invisible.
Most of the mob had drifted away from the orchard. Some had gone off on the steep trails to the terraces, to raid the vineyards. Others had found the storehouse with the casks of wine and jubilantly doused themselves. Many more marched singing down the road to Lunel. Miraculously, the approach to the great house ascended clear.
Beside toppled and broken carts, several mules lay on their sides with legs sticking straight out. Rachel hurried past these unfortunate beasts, over mustard-colored grass at the roadside, across shimmering hay stubble and up the small, white stone path to the house.
The fire the rioters had set to the thatched roof of the servants' quarters had fallen in and gone out. None of the servitors, maids, or peasant workers remained. The great house itself looked empty, shutters closed. She went around to the back, keeping a furtive lookout for Crusaders. With the servants' entrance locked, she tried the double door to the kitchen, which would not budge. It had been barricaded.
Hope flared that her family had fended off the mob and hid within, still alive. She called their names against the door as loudly as she dared. No one answered. She crept around to the side and tried to pull back one of the shutters and found them tightly secured.
Unwilling to expose herself on the side of the house that faced the vineyard, where the mob milled, she returned to the servants' entrance and pulled at the shutters blocking the kitchen window. A plank pulled off in her hands with a loud screech, and she stood jangling with fear of discovery, looking about desperately for a place to hide.
Seconds passed, and no one came running. She put her attention on the opening she had made in the kitchen window.
Squeezing through, Rachel almost fell on her back in the washtub. Turnips sat in the tub, immersed in water. On the cutting board beside them, several white ones squatted in the nest of their peeled skins. The flensing knife had fallen to the reed-matted floor.
"Mama?" Rachel called, stepping from the kitchen to the dining hall. "Papa?"
No answer came. Had the mob carried them off as they had Uncle Joshua and his boys? That thought set her breathing quickly again. She rushed from room to room, crying out her sisters'
and brothers' names.
The door to her parents' bedroom stood slightly ajar. "Mama? Papa?" she called out softly. Noticing a peculiar, sticky odor wafting from the room, she stepped through the portal and then reeled backward with the force of her horror.
Her eyes felt a palpable stab of pain, and her legs lost all feeling. There before her, her mother lay on her back on the big canopied bed, the bed sheets crimson under her shoulders. A big red grin gaped under her jaw. Beside her on either side, Rachel's sisters sprawled, heads thrown back, necks split open. The family Bible lay open at their feet.
Rachel slammed hard against the door jamb, trying to retreat. Then, she noticed her brothers, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, heads slouched forward, glossy veils of blood soaking their shirts, puddled in their laps. Father lay on his side at their feet, a knife impaled in his gashed throat, his hand still clutching the haft.
Despair and panic thickened in her chest. She heaved herself from the room with the horrid stink of blood clogging her sinuses. In the passage, she collapsed. A cold fire rippled up and down her body, and she convulsed several times as the terror stained its images forever into her soul.
She heard footsteps, felt them through the floor. They were coming back! Like an animal, she sprang upright, all senses bright and humming.
The voices came next, laughing voices. "He killed them"—a big guffaw sounded from the main stairway—"the Jew locked his family in the bedroom with him and cut their throats! He killed them all, afraid we would baptize them. You have to see this."
Rachel flew away from the laughter, reached the servants' stairwell and, edging quietly down the squeaky stairs, lurched out of the kitchen.
She stopped in the servants' dining room, paralyzed inside the nightmare. With her parents' bedroom directly above her, she felt the pressure of their deaths, forcing the air out of her lungs.
No! She shook her head violently. Laughter burbled from upstairs and heavy footsteps thudded on the floorboards. No! She had to force herself to breathe. She pressed her palms to her eyes so forcibly her head lit up with radiance bright as blood.
In the kitchen, the servants' stairwell squealed, and footfalls came thumping down. "Killed his wife and children with his own knife!" a thick voice said. "Crazy Jew!"
Rachel began to tremble. They would find her now. They would slit her throat, and she would be with Mama and Papa again, with her sisters and brothers.
No! She wrenched herself free of her paralysis and bolted into the dining room and the main hall. The front door had been forced open and lay hanging from one hinge. The white woodmeat of the broken jamb gleamed in the sunlight. She jumped into the blazing day without thinking to peek first.
A figure knelt in the courtyard below, and she stopped as though she had slammed into a wall. One of the gardeners bent over an old horse whose belly had been slit open. When he spied her, he stood and waved urgently.
Behind Rachel, the laughter and heavy footfalls boomed from the dining hall. She scurried down the steps and into the arms of the gardener.
"Child, they will kill you!"
She shot a frightened glance over her shoulder.
The gardener glanced up and down the courtyard and identified nothing in the open space large enough to hide the girl. He knelt and with both hands pulled out the blue, ropy mass of the horses bowels. Prying open the long gash, he rasped, "In here! You must hide in here. Only for a short time. But hurry—or your life is forfeit!"
Rachel knelt down before she could think. Only as she jammed herself into the hot, wet interior and the gluey ichor washed over her neck and face did dread whelm up. The fetid fluid drooled into her nostrils, and she choked, believing utterly she would drown in horse bile. She shoved her face forward, free of the enwombing viscera, coughed and breathed shallowly through the gaping belly.
The gardener pushed the slither of bowels close to the horse to hide the girl's face from view and bowed over the creature, bemoaning the loss of a beast too old to be stolen.
In the gummy heat, Rachel wept, her eyes pressed closed to keep out the burning syrups, and her teeth aching with the sobs beating against her locked jaw.
-/
"Come forth, child." The gardener’s voice spoke loudly, assuring Rachel that the mob had departed beyond earshot.
Even so, she did not move. The slippery interior that held her had cooled and congealed. Its embrace had become comfortable, and she might have fallen asleep. She was not sure. Maybe she was dreaming now. Her eyelids, glued shut with the drying jellies, would not open.
"Come out now, young mistress."
She moved her face, testing her wakefulness, and felt the stiffening tissues pull from her cheeks. I must be awake, she reasoned. But what was this crimson cloud all around her? Inside loomed her father’s muscular face and his red hand clutching the knife at his torn throat. And there, Mama reclined on the bed with her daughters at her side. The red pipes of their open throats gleamed. Was that their voices she heard sparkling? They were singing something. She could not hear them clearly. The faces of her brothers made noises, too, bent forward, heads lowered in prayer.
"They are gone now. You are safe."
The startle-eyed faces of Uncle Joshua and his sons also floated in the fiery cloud with the bloody rags of their penises jammed in their mouths.
Trying to pry open her stuck eyelids, to stop seeing the horror, she felt as if ripping fire from darkness. And she screamed and screamed—and there was no sound.
-/
The gardener pulled open the rubbery flesh and reached into the slippery entrails for the girl. She slid out in a glim of blood and oily fluid, her body cauled in blue membranes, her face clotted with black curds.
The girl lay on the ground curled in the shape that had hidden her in the beast’s belly. She lay still as a thing born dead.
"Get up now," the gardener coaxed. "You are safe. The Crusaders are gone."
She did not stir.
Pitying her, the gardener lifted her in his arms and carried her across the courtyard and down the path of white stones to the water trough before the stables. All the good horses had been taken, the stalls charred from the small fires set in the hay. The wood, damp from autumn rains, did not permit the fire to do much damage.
He lowered the girl into the water, and she startled like a baby. With her neck braced in his hand, he used his other hand to cup water over her face and wipe the mucus from her face.
When her eyes winced open, she looked up and seemed to stare through him. He stood her up in the trough, and her legs wobbled, and he had to lift her out and sit her on the edge.
Soaked, the drapery of her garments stuck to the contours of her body. The gardener stood back, roused at the sight of her. "You are out of danger now," he said. "Will you come back to the house for dry clothes?"
The girl did not answer him. She appeared nearly blind, and he passed his hand before her face. She blinked and did not look at him.
"Perhaps it is best we remove this grimy garment," he said and began unbuttoning her chemise. She did not object, and his fingers trembled as he tugged at the buttons. He had saved her life, he reasoned as he peeled the wet cloth from her small breasts. The others were dead, and he had saved her life—and now he would at least inspect what he had saved.
The air blasted from his lungs, and he shot forward, falling to his knees before the half-naked girl. His hands braced himself against her shins. His surprised face jerked around, and he confronted a man in an iron gray beard rearing over him. The stables' dung-turning spade shook in his fist.
"Old Master!" the gardener gasped and stood up. The narrow rectangle of pain on his back throbbed as the shock wore off. "I saved her life. Praise God! Your granddaughter is spared."
-/
The peasants who worked the fields and the servants who had fled the great house when the Crusader mob attacked came from hiding at the sight of the Old Master striding out of the forest. He had heard the
clanging church bell and seen the smoke of the burning sheaves from his cottage on the hillside and had hurried down the slopes.
The sight of the looted storehouse, the dead animals, the scorched servants' quarters had set a chill in his bones. He remembered as a boy hearing about the slaughter of the Jews in Worms and how eight hundred were martyred with the declaration of the Shema on their lips.
The servitors, wailing with the grievous reports of the evil that had befallen the estate and its proprietors, flocked around the Old Master as he emerged from the copse below the vineyards. His worst fears babbled in the air around him, and he bellowed for silence. The peasants cowed, and the servants covered their faces in grief.
In the great house, the old man entered the master bedroom and fell back from the gory sight. With a hand over his eyes, he quoted the Shema and crawled out of the room of his ruin on his knees. Blinded with anguish, he staggered from the house and wandered drunkenly until he came to the stables where he found his granddaughter Rachel being stripped.
Striking the gardener furiously with the spade, the old man heaved the tool aside, and covered his granddaughter’s nakedness. She blinked at him as if she did not recognize him.
"Did she come from inside the house?" he asked the gardener.
The servant nodded and explained how he had hidden her from the mob in the belly of the dead horse.
The Old Master gently stood Rachel upright and helped to balance her. The afternoon rain had descended from the mountains in towers of purple thunderheads, and he led her to the orchard and the shelter of the gardener's shed. As big dollops of cold rain began to fall, two of the maids came from the great house with towels and dry clothes.
Servant of Birds Page 9
