The Road to Damietta

by Scott O'Dell

  Difficult for you, most powerful count of the Assisi commune, because your Latin is not very good, I said to myself. He had told me once that he'd read the whole story of Abelard and Heloise, but this I doubted. Most likely he had heard it from a troop of wandering players.

  "Song of Solomon," he said, rolling the three round words on his tongue, casting his green eyes lightly upon me. "Well, well."

  "So, well, well," I said to have him understand that I was not embarrassed. "From the Bible, the Old Testament." I added the fiery warning Bishop Pelagius had flung from his high loft in San Rufino on Palm Sunday months ago: "Freezing hail and devouring fire await those who mock the Lord, those who use this song for a worldly purpose."

  "Ho! Protect us against devastating hail and devouring fire— Grando nec ignis edax peprimat hos nec mala pestis," his lordship exclaimed in halting Latin. Shining his candle on the open page, he gave me a daring, conspiratorial glance and began to read:

  "'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. His legs are as pillars of marble. His locks are bushy and black as a raven. I sought him, but I could not find him. I called him, but he gave no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me. I charge, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick with love.'"

  His lordship straightened himself and said, "Wheeeew! Whence comes this torrent? 'Thy navel is like a goblet, which wanteth not liquor.'"

  "Round goblet," I corrected him.

  "'His legs are like pillars.'"

  "Pillars of marble, your lordship."

  "'His locks are bushy and black.'"

  "Black as a raven."

  "But tell me, who speaks these ravenous words?"

  "The Rose of Sharon, the Shulamite."

  "To whom does she speak them?"

  "To her beloved, of course."

  He was silent for a moment or two, turning the ring on his left thumb round and round. "Taking note," he said, "of a pen on the bench beside an open ink jug, inkstains on your fingers, and a parchment sheet peering out from beneath the Bible on which are visible several words freshly written, I hope that you are composing a copy of the Song of Solomon in your beautiful spidery hand and that you will sign it prettily 'The Rose of Sharon,' and then, and then, send it off to me by the fastest of messengers."

  I closed the Bible and hid the letter I was writing to Francis Bernardone beneath it. My silence encouraged him. When I looked up, he had cocked his curly head to one side and his lips had broken into what he must have meant as a fetching smile. To me it held the faintest shadow of a leer.

  I didn't blame him. A girl who shed her clothes on the steps of the Santa Maria Maggiore palace before a gaping crowd. A girl who wrote down verses from the Song of Solomon. What was a warm-blooded man to think, though he was a lord and a gentlemanly knight?

  He glanced the full length of my figure, at my neck, my bosom, my waist. His glance fastened upon my golden slippers, sewn with rubies, the ones my father had brought home from France for my birthday, which were gossamer-thin and made my feet look smaller than they really were.

  He brushed the curls from his eyes to see me better. Having decided that Ricca di Montanaro was a wanton, he was now pondering what to do and what to say. He struggled. His forehead grew damp. Words came to his lips and stood poised there. One slipped out—"Please"—and another, "believe," then still another, "me."

  He would have finished the sentence, I am certain, had not a rout of huntsmen come singing down the Hall. Choking, clearing his throat, he bowed himself through the door and disappeared.

  I closed the door and was sliding the bolt when Raul announced himself with one of his secret knocks—three quick taps, a pause, then three more taps.

  "What happened to Luzzaro?" he said as I let him in. "I just passed the count stumbling along as if chased by the Furies."

  "Not all of the Furies, only one," I said.

  Raul picked up Solomon's poem. "Your father never gave you permission to copy this. What's it for?"

  "Why do you ask when you know it's for Francis Bernardone?"

  "You mean Brother Francis; Francis Bernardone is dead."

  "Not dead to me."

  "You are walking a path beset with trouble. Trouble for you and for all the family. All of us together. You do recall that Aga Akil brought her small unruly son to the wise Mulla Nasrudin's school?"

  "Yes."

  "'He is badly behaved, your honor,' she said. 'Our family has tried most everything but nothing has availed us and him.'

  "'Have you scared the boy?' the Mulla asked.

  "'No.'

  "'Then I will.'

  "Whereupon he waved his arms and ran screaming from the schoolroom. The woman fell in a faint. The Mulla returned and revived her.

  "'You frightened me, not the boy,' she complained bitterly.

  "'But did you not observe,' replied Mulla Nasrudin, 'that I was also frightened. Always when danger threatens, it threatens everyone alike."'

  Raul held the poem toward the candle flame. "Do you understand?"

  Having heard this parable several times, the first time when I was eight years old, when I held my breath because I couldn't have a piece of cinnamon cake and got black in the face while the family stood around wringing their hands, I snatched the poem from his hand.

  12

  I copied no more of Solomon's Song until the next evening and finished it two days later. I was then overcome by a week of indecision. Should I address him as "Dear Friend" or plain "Francis," or formally as "Esteemed Francis Bernardone"? Certainly not as "Brother Francis." I decided upon "Dear Esteemed Friend."

  A problem followed. Should I become a weasel and ask him if he thought the song was about a young man beloved by the Rose of Sharon or if the young man was meant to be the Church in disguise, as Bishop Pelagius believed? And if it were a young man and not the Church, did he think that such great love could exist upon this earth? I even thought of tearing the poem into very small pieces and throwing it away.

  Finally, at week's end, I signed all of my six names and affixed a seal of hot red wax into which I pressed the intaglio ring I wore on the little finger of my left hand, leaving the imprint of an angel holding a lamb in her arms. I wore other rings, but this was the most apt to please him.

  At first I thought of sending the letter by one of the guards, but not fully trusting any of them I decided upon Nicola. I was certain of her loyalty and confident that wherever Francis Bernardone might be—wandering through the countryside or in the city streets—she would find him.

  On the morning she was to start off with the letter Nicola fell ill with a fever of some sort. Hard upon this, at noon of that day, came something far more upsetting.

  Clare di Scifi appeared while I sat in the courtyard. I was turning the pages of the Collected Letters of Heloise, an unwieldy bundle of parchment as large as a pile of hay, which had just arrived from Paris.

  She rode in through the courtyard gate, sitting sidesaddle on a fractious black mare and accompanied by an escort of two men in light armor and carrying halberds. I recognized her from afar, the heavy, braided hair swinging to the motion of the horse, ashine like coils of honey in the sun. But when she slipped down from her mount and ran toward me, I saw that a vast change had come upon her. Though less than a month had passed since we were together, in that brief time she had changed. Always a beauty—nobles and serfs alike called her the most beautiful girl in Assisi—she was no longer a girl. She was now a woman and more beautiful than ever.

  As we threw our arms around each other and the first words were spoken, I felt the change. It was in her face, as we embraced, silently holding each other at arm's length, that I saw the difference.

  Clare's beauty had been the kind that I loved in some of the
statues the Greeks made. It reminded me of a statue we had in one of the niches in the Hall—a head of Princess Ariadne, giver of the golden skein that led Theseus to safety. In white, un-veined marble, a faint, dusky glow beneath the white, all of its features are harmonious, as if the artist had used a perfect mold, one made from the face of Venus herself. Such had been Clare's beauty, white and perfect and cold.

  It was her eyes that had changed, only her gray eyes. But they had utterly transformed the face that I was so familiar with. The icy mask had vanished and in its place was radiance.

  A varlet came to lead the horse into the shade. She stopped him, and when I offered her food and drink she refused them.

  "I mustn't stay," she said. "I wanted to see you again, if only for a minute. To say goodbye before I go."

  "Go where?"

  I conjured up the Holy Land. Her mother, Ortolana, had gone there with my mother and some Assisi women soon after peace was signed with Saladin, sultan of Egyptian infidels. They crossed the Mediterranean Sea, reaching Damietta in Egypt by galley. From there they traveled, often on foot, through the desert, where robbers were numerous and water was scarce. Once they followed lion tracks to find a spring. They came to Gaza and the fallen city of Jerusalem. Clare, as devout as her mother, had spoken to me about this pilgrimage, which had made a great impression upon her. She had asked me if I would make the same pilgrimage, just the two of us, and I had shuddered at the thought.

  "Clare, where are you bound? Not to the Holy Land, I hope. Not on a pilgrimage!"

  "Yes, in a way of speaking, it's a pilgrimage."

  I waited, holding my breath, still struck by the light that suffused her face.

  "You've heard about Francis," she said. "He's getting together a band of men. They'll call themselves Friars Minor. He's going around right now picking up stones for a church."

  "He came here asking for stones," 1 said. Suddenly I felt the sharp thorn of suspicion. "How do you know so much about Francis and what he's doing?"

  The sun was overhead, beating down upon the stones. Sweat showed on Clare's forehead. She asked for a drink of water, but when it came she still didn't answer. I asked her again about Francis.

  "I know because we have talked," she said stiffly, as if I had accused her of some indiscretion. "Months ago. We talked about an order for women, single women. Provided he receives permission to preach."

  "Heavens!" I exclaimed. "I thought your heart was set on a fine marriage. Not to the one your family has picked out but to someone worthy. Fifty young nobles are breathlessly waiting for a chance to win your hand."

  She smiled. For a moment I thought that she might be playing a game. Clare loved games and had fooled me before. Once she had packed her carrying bags while we were in her room talking, and when I asked her where she was bound, she had said, "To Jerusalem; do you want to come?" She left the next day with an escort but only went to see her aunt who lived in Siena, a few short leagues away.

  "The marriage you wish to hustle me into is not the dream you envision so sweetly," she said. "Your mother and my mother, both of them, have lost children in childbirth. And some of the children who didn't die died soon after. On this very square of San Rufino, in the past year, two of our friends have died giving birth. It's not an inviting picture, is it?"

  "No, but children do live and grow up, by the thousands."

  "You're younger than I, some two years and more. Besides, you've lived a sheltered life in a quiet family. Mine spreads over the whole countryside—fierce uncles, baleful aunts, shoals of arrogant cousins, and cruel brothers. I've learned much about marriage from them, mostly against my will."

  "I am not the innocent you take me for," I said, standing up for myself. Clare was strong-willed. She could run over you like a hay cart filled with flowers, so softly that sometimes you didn't notice until many days later. "I have read about people a lot—Caesar and Nero, Plato, Sophocles, Alexander the Great, Ulysses, Cleopatra, Sappho, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Heloise ... I've read the Bible from 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' to 'Christ be with you all. Amen.'"

  "You've read a lot, dear Ricca. So much that you're developing a squint."

  "I never met Heloise or Eleanor of Aquitaine, not in real life. But reading about them I've lived their lives. I myself have lived one life only, just one, but I have been many people in that time—a dozen, fifty, a hundred. So I am not so innocent as you make me out."

  "Reading," she said, "is not living. It's life secondhand."

  "That sounds like Francis Bernardone," I said.

  "It is."

  A sharp thorn of suspicion was still there in my breast. Had Clare fallen in love with Francis Bernardone? How else could a beautiful girl, raised in a noble family, even dream of dressing herself in sackcloth with a rope belt and tramping barefoot through the streets, begging for stones!

  "This nuptial couch," she said, "which you wish to hustle me into, can be a bed of sorrows. I think of my cousin, Amalia Sciprione. At fourteen she married a widowed nobleman who on her wedding night took full possession of her in the dining hall before their drunken guests. On some of our farms, to this day, my own father claims the ancient right and beds with the bride before the bridegroom does."

  Clare nodded to one of her escorts, who ran forward to help her into the saddle. She brushed the hair from her forehead and frowned.

  "Besides all that," she said, "parents choosing partners for their children at age twelve and thirteen, the brutalities my cousin suffered, the awful deaths in childbirth, the sad deaths afterward—there are other indignities. A woman loses all her possessions the moment the marriage vows are spoken. And worse yet, she comes a slave to her husband."

  She took up the reins. Her face changed. It was radiant again as she looked down upon me.

  "I haven't told my family," she said. "When that is settled, I'll come for you. We'll be Friars Minor together, by the side of Francis Bernardone."

  She didn't wait for an answer. Raising her hand in farewell, she passed quickly through the gate. The sound of hoofs died away as my heart ceased to beat.

  She had lied to me. From the very beginning, before I disrobed on the church steps, long before that, during the running of the bulls and the wild dances of the tripudianti, on the feast of San Niccolo, on the day youth took over the city and Francis had strutted around in the robes of a bishop leading a licentious rout, during the nights he sang ballads in San Rufino Square—that long ago, she was in love with Francis Bernardone. And she had kept it to herself. Carefully and secretly, pretending otherwise.

  I fell to my knees and pressed my brow against the stones. "Please, God," I prayed aloud, "don't let Clare win him away! Prevent this with Your might!"

  13

  The letter to Francis Bernardone I recopied twice, added to it five songs, took out three, made the capitals more ornate, changed the colors to a darker shade of red lined with blue, and in place of the intaglio used my Florentine ring, which was carved in the semblance of an apostle preaching to the multitudes, while doves hovered overhead. The barefooted figure dressed in sackcloth, his hands raised in benediction, I hoped would remind Francis of himself.

  I swore Nicola to secrecy and sent her out every afternoon, sun or rain, to the places where he might be. But the month of April passed, and half of May, before she caught a glimpse of him as he entered the cathedral of San Rufino.

  "I didn't follow him," Nicola said when she came to the scriptorium to report the happening. "I didn't want to disturb him during devotions, so I waited on the steps until he came out. But when he came out he was with your friend, Clare, and they were talking. I decided it was not a good time to hand him your letter. It might have been, I don't know. Perhaps I should have. What do you think?"

  I caught my breath. It took me a moment to quiet my anger. Nicola didn't help by casting sympathetic glances at me beneath her lowered lashes.

  "You were wrong," I said. "I don't blame you, but you should have pa
id no attention to Clare di Scifi. It's none of her business."

  "She's such a beautiful girl and dressed so elegantly with a fur mantle and all, I was scared. Besides, they were busy talking."

  "About what?"

  "She said she hadn't told her family and he asked her if it would help if he told them."

  "What did she say to that?"

  "'No, oh, no, it will only cause a terrible fight. Every one of my brothers and uncles would lift their swords against you, sir."'

  "What then?"

  "Then they parted, right at the door, and he said, 'Peace be with you,' and she repeated his words, saying something else I couldn't hear. He went down the road to San Damiano, skipping along barefooted with his ragged gown aflap. I had a notion to run after him ..."

  "Why didn't you, ninny?"

  "He was running too fast."

  Three days later Francis went off to preach in the dusty little villages on the long road to Florence, and not until he returned at the end of summer did he receive my letter. When he did, it was from my hands.

  I was busy in the scriptorium, working on the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis. I had just finished writing down, "And Husham died, and Hadad the son of Bedad, who smote Midian in the field of Moab, reigned in his stead," when the door opened and my father beckoned to me.

  Holding my arm, he walked to the door and flung it open. The morning sun poured in upon us.

  "You've been a faithful daughter," he said. "I'm proud of the work you have done and proud of your comportment while you were attending to it. May the Lord now give you peace and guide your hand."

  I didn't go back into the scriptorium. The first thing I did was to call for horses. With Nicola riding beside me, I took the road to San Damiano, where, word had it, Francis Bernardone was to preach that day. In my purse was the letter that had taken so long to write and so long to deliver.

  So that we would not be conspicuous among the country people who would be there, Nicola had suggested that we borrow clothes from the servants.