The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  In the morning, Kate took a tearful leave of Marie, who had become like a sister to her. They hugged each other tightly and whispered womanly affections, and promised to remember each other always. Then, as Marie watched her and Karle leave through the same cellar door they had first entered, she fingered the coin Kate had given her, the price of a sheet torn into strips and a few lengths of string, and thought that Kate was a sister even a princess might covet.

  Burdened once again with all their possessions, their progress through the streets of Paris was slow but driven forward by purpose. When this day was through, if all went well, they would be outside the walls of the city and into the countryside in search of something to serve as their headquarters for planning the battle to come. Pace by pace, side by side, they went forward, newly pledged, full of both hope and trepidation.

  Alejandro stuffed everything he could into the pockets and crannies of his clothing, so his bag could be empty enough that the Abraham manuscript might fit inside without attracting undue attention. He had struggled all night with the wisdom of trying to take it with him; it posed grave risks because of its size, its distinctive shape, and the weight of its unusual brass cover. The papyrus was so light as to be negligible. For all he knew, it might have no weight at all. He pondered that notion for a moment, and it was a welcome distraction to his other worries. After a few minutes of serious consideration, he came to the conclusion that no visible item could be without weight, and then continued his packing, firm in his belief that to leave it behind would be a sacrilege against Abraham and all who had gone before him.

  About an hour before noon, the anticipated sound of the bell being rung could be heard throughout the house. A few moments later he heard de Chauliac’s footsteps trudging up the stairs, weighted with the frustration of yet another unwanted and frivolous summons. The Frenchman entered his small room without bothering to knock, and sat down heavily on a chair.

  “She is pale again. Can you not put some color into this woman’s cheeks, that we may have a day of uninterrupted work?”

  “There is only one sure way I know to do that, save having her pinch those cheeks with her own fingernails. And she will not take kindly to such advice. She will complain to the Dauphin. And while I will not suffer for her laments, you surely will, colleague.”

  “I rue the day that ever I invited that Chaucer to dine with us!”

  “Oh, be charitable, de Chauliac. One may not slay the messenger.”

  “One would like to slay this particular messenger.”

  “Then the world would be cheated of a very clever young man.”

  “He is a page. The world would not miss him. But I miss the peace of my days most dreadfully. She would have us come immediately. Chaucer waits in the vestibule now, for us to attend him.”

  Alejandro wiped his quill and carefully closed the book. “Then I need only freshen up a bit, and we shall be off. Tell him I need but a moment.”

  De Chauliac rose up slowly, as if his bones ached, and for the first time, Alejandro noticed the lines in the Frenchman’s forehead. “I shall await you in the vestibule.” He disappeared down the dim hallway.

  Quickly and quietly, Alejandro stuffed the manuscript into the bag, but it would not quite fit; the bottle of sulfur water would not fit into any of his pockets, and he had no place else to store it. So with great reluctance, he removed the bottle and hid it at the back of a deep drawer in the table. Then he shoved the manuscript into the bag and tied the closure. After one last look out the barred window, he left the room for what he prayed would be the last time.

  Chaucer nodded slightly to him, tipping his head a bit to the right, and Alejandro knew that the message had been delivered and the plan agreed to.

  The party of five left the courtyard of the manse shortly before noon and threaded its way through the foot traffic on horses. Their pace was slow, for it was marketing day, and though supplies were low and prices high many still came out just to see what might be had. Most went home disappointed. Alejandro did not mind their trudging pace, for his heart was beating wildly in anticipation of the events that would soon transpire. Chaucer seemed unbearably lighthearted. But then, Alejandro realized, he thinks this is all a harmless plot in support of some romantic lovers’ tryst. He thinks that this is merely trickery to bring an exotic Spaniard and a noblewoman of the Green Island together in privacy.

  “You seem distracted, Physician,” the lad said. “Are you nervous that the lady will not be there when you arrive?”

  “Oh, no. I put my entire faith in her. I am only anxious about Jacques’s part being played to perfection, for therein lies the key to the plan’s success.”

  Chaucer chuckled. “I too should be worried, were I required to depend on a man with a young and luscious wife to keep him distracted from the task at hand.”

  Alejandro deliberately slowed his horse. “Wife?” he whispered, almost a hiss. “I know of no wife.”

  “Nor does his uncle,” Chaucer confided. “He has kept it a secret from him, although I cannot see why. I saw her when I delivered your message. She is a comely young woman with golden hair and the bluest eyes, and for a moment or two I thought her to be the very image of my lord Lionel. I told her as much when we spoke, and she seemed somewhat offended.”

  Alejandro’s horse was now nearly at a standstill; Chaucer pulled slightly ahead of him, against his better judgment, but he did not wish to give the guards cause for concern. “Do not slow your animal, Physician, or you shall ruin everything; pick up your pace now and go ahead of me, as we planned for you to do.”

  Through his sudden confusion, Alejandro managed to do as he was bidden, and in a moment he was once again slightly ahead of the page. He heard the boy say softly, “The meeting point is just ahead, around this corner.”

  Forgetting his unhappiness, Alejandro looked ahead, through the throngs of milling people, and saw several men who might be Karle. But it seemed impossible to tell which one was he. Alejandro knew he would simply have to wait until Karle revealed himself, then react as quickly as possible. His blood rushed faster through his veins and sweat began to form on his forehead. He scanned the crowd nervously. The sound of human voices and horse hooves clopping on the pavement, the clucking of fowls, the barking of dogs—it suddenly became a din, and it was only because it was shouted that he heard Karle’s voice say, “Alejandro!”

  He turned in the direction of the voice and saw a cripple, bound in bandages almost from head to toe, waving a white-wrapped crutch. But within a second or two the item was unwrapped and transformed into a sword. And then Karle took hold of the reins of his horse and was pulling him through the crowds, shoving the objecting masses aside, brandishing his sword over his head like the devil himself.

  Chaucer set his horse horizontally in front of the guards and tried to look as confused as possible. He effectively blocked their way with his horse’s nervous prancing, until finally one of them managed to charge past him and through the melee of shrieking citizens in pursuit of Alejandro. “Abduction!” the guard shouted. “Kidnap! Stop them.…”

  He got close enough to Alejandro’s horse to reach out and grab hold of the saddlebag, and for a moment or two the caravan of horses fronted by a seemingly mad cripple was suspended in equilibrium of motion. Karle pulled, but so did the guard. Finally Karle shouted, “Untie the bag!”

  Alejandro stared at him. He turned and looked at the guard, who was groping about with his free hand, searching for the hilt of his sword.

  It was a painful decision, but in the end, a clear one. It was life or learning. He chose to survive. With one quick pull on the leather cord that bound it, the saddlebag with its precious manuscript came free, and he and Karle were propelled forward, leaving the guard behind, clutching the bag, as the crowd closed around him.

  Through back alleys and side streets barely wide enough to accommodate them, Karle pulled the frightened horse, and all who saw them pass stared in wonder at the sight of a cripple in ragge
d bandages running before the horse, while the traditional robes of a healer billowed out from behind the man who rode. And when Alejandro realized why people were staring, he threw off the outer garments, which only called attention to them and impeded their progress.

  Finally, gasping for breath, Karle slowed his pace to a trot. He looked back and wheezed, “Just beyond the corner,” and Alejandro nodded. And after the next turn, Karle opened a wooden gate and led the horse into the courtyard of a house whose overlord was away at the wars, a man who had wisely sent his wife and children south for the duration. And behind a tree, out of view of the street, waited Kate.

  “Père!” she cried wildly as she emerged from her hiding place. She rushed over the stones of the courtyard and fell into Alejandro’s arms as Guillaume Karle secured the gate.

  And while he held her in his arms, every minute of her time with him passed through his mind, from the moment they set foot on the ship to France until his last sight of her behind the cottage where Karle had first encountered them. He finally let go, held her out at arm’s length, and stared into her eyes. They were the same bright blue, though now they overflowed with tears of joy. He stroked her yellow hair, and felt it slip through his fingers as it had a thousand times before. He touched her cheek and felt its familiar glowing warmth. He looked her up and down, and as his own tears flowed, he said, “You are well. Thank God. Your God. My God. All gods who have ever been or ever will be.” They embraced again, rocking in each other’s arms, father and daughter at last reunited.

  The horse secured, Karle flung away his wrapping rags and came up behind Kate, smiling, eager to shake the hand of his accomplice in escape. “All gods be praised indeed, Physician, we thought never to—”

  And suddenly the amber-haired Frenchman found himself slammed against a wall, with the physician he had just rescued upon him like a bear and pummeling him savagely. Kate jumped on Alejandro’s back and clawed at him, crying, “Père! Dear God—oh, Karle, he does not know what he is doing—I fear he is insane from his ordeal.”

  And Alejandro was screaming, “Wife, you call her wife, you fiend, they will call you newcomer in your Christian hell before I have done with you.”

  Finally Kate forced herself between them, and when he saw her tender face, Alejandro’s fist stopped in midair, short of her nose by no more than a few hairs’ breadth. She reached up and took his hand and drew it to her face and kissed his bleeding knuckles, softly weeping as she whispered, “Père, oh, Père, what have they told you?”

  “These rags turned out to be an uncannily wise investment,” Kate said as she dabbed the blood from Guillaume Karle’s face. She spit on the one she held in her hand and wiped his forehead tenderly. Karle stayed very still, wincing when she drew the rag over a long gash that had been delivered by Alejandro’s raging fist. The imprint of Countess Elizabeth’s ring was emblazoned red and raw on his cheek.

  The Jew sat in a bewildered daze and watched quietly as Kate attended to the Christian man, the rogue into whose reluctant care she had been given, the rebel whose care she now saw to herself. She behaves as if she were a wife, Alejandro admitted to himself with a stab of almost killing pain.

  And it had been only a short time, a matter of a few weeks at most—or had it even been less than that? No, more, surely—the truth was that he couldn’t say precisely what the time had been since he last saw her. Long enough for her to learn to love this man, and for him to love her. Too long for him, the father, to have any right to say, “Cleave to me still, daughter, for I am yet thy father and keeper.” She had learned to keep herself, and she had learned to give herself away. He had not been there to stop her. And now, it seemed, it was too late.

  Newly freed, unshadowed by de Chauliac for the first time in far too long, and all he could think to do was to kill the man who had rescued him for imagined offenses against his daughter, who seemed, by all accounts, more offended by his own behavior than by Karle’s.

  When Karle’s wounds were seen to, Kate turned back to Alejandro and looked at his hands. “What can you have been thinking, Père? You almost ruined your hands. Your wonderful skilled hands.”

  He turned his vacant gaze in her direction and whispered, “I was envisioning my child in the arms of a ruffian.”

  “He is no ruffian, Père. You know that. Else why would you have put me with him at all?”

  “You must understand, child, that to me all men who even look upon you are ruffians, beasts even, and can be nothing else.”

  She wiped the blood from his knuckles with unimaginable tenderness. “I am no longer a child, Père. Must I tell you that again? My childhood seems a thousand years ago. And you trusted Karle then, you must trust him now.”

  Must I? he asked himself. Is that the only path open to me? He wondered how he would phrase that question to her. Should he simply say, “Will you choose one or the other of us? And if forced to choose, will you go to him, and abandon me?”

  He looked at her as she fussed over his fingers with all the skill and gentleness he had fostered in her. She no longer had the chubby, dimpled hands of a child but the slender strong hands of a woman. She glowed, radiating a kind of happiness and inner peace he had never noticed before. But then, he told himself, she had never loved a man in this manner before.

  Now she clearly did. “He has cared well for you, then?”

  “Better than you can imagine.”

  Better than I want to know.

  When they had finally restored themselves to the appearance of ordinary citizens and roughly healed the wounds between them, they decided it would be best to leave Paris as soon as possible—before sunset, if it could be done.

  “But there is a difficulty—I cannot retrieve my horse,” Alejandro said. “I have nothing to redeem him with—de Chauliac has kept my gold.”

  “I have not spent much of the gold you gave me, Physician,” Karle said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the satchel, then thrust it forward eagerly, as if proof of his careful stewardship might improve him in Alejandro’s eyes.

  And indeed, it did. “Well done, Karle,” he said as he counted the coins. “But what of your own horses?”

  Karle went back to the steed Alejandro had ridden to freedom and inspected the large animal, running his hands down the horse’s long neck, peering at his hooves and ankles. “This seems a decent animal, and de Chauliac’s groom outfitted him well. He might carry two.” He looked at Alejandro and said, “I say we retrieve your horse and leave the others. Kate can mount up with”—he was about to say me, but finished his sentence otherwise—“with one or the other of us. Then we will still have some coin left to see to other needs.”

  “A sensible plan,” Alejandro said. He sighed deeply. “For the first time in my life, I find myself a poor man.” He looked up at Kate and Karle and said, “I have always guarded my fortune as if I were poor, but the comfort of the fortune has always been there. Now it is not. I do not quite know how I should proceed.” He turned to Kate and smiled apologetically. “I am sorry, daughter, I had always hoped to provide well for you.”

  “You did, Père. We will never be poor in knowledge.”

  “Nor shall we ever be able to eat it.”

  “Nor shall we have to, for we will never know deprivation that terrible. I am certain of it.”

  Karle interrupted them, and pointed toward the sky, where the sun was hovering above the rooftops, leaning toward disappearance. “It is the advice of this poor man that we get out of Paris before the sun goes down.”

  Geoffrey Chaucer stood before the furious Countess Elizabeth and protested his complete innocence. “I beseech you, madame, to believe me! I was more duped by his wicked plan than you!” He was stooped in shame and humiliation, very much the foolish young boy who had been well and carefully used by a wicked and clever man of greater worldly experience.

  Chaucer took his dressing-down in the countess’s bedchamber, amid the flurry of frantic housekeepers—for when the spurned Elizabeth had re
turned, raging, from her failed rendezvous in the Dauphin’s rose garden, she had ordered the immediate reversal of every change Alejandro had suggested for the benefit of her health and that of her family. Bring back my ermine bedcover, she had ordered the maid, all fleas be damned! I will not be reminded of him. And tell cook to prepare such rich foods as he sees fit—we will not follow this revoltingly lean diet any longer.

  Somehow, in the middle of all that activity, Chaucer found the wherewithal to say to the countess, “I think his affection for you was genuine. At least he told me that it was! But he needed to escape. And you provided him with a most convenient exit. I am sure he is very grateful.”

  Elizabeth turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. “You are kind, young man. I hope you are right. Else I shall do my best to see that his heart is ripped from his breast, one way or another.”

  The horse was thinner than he’d hoped to find it, but still a sturdy animal. His feet had been seen to, and the equipment well serviced, so Alejandro paid the man the agreed-upon sum and took back possession of the animal. The transaction seriously depleted their remaining store of gold—but they simply could not do with fewer than two horses.

  He cooed familiar gentling words into the stallion’s ears, hoping the big animal would remember him, which he seemed to do. He mounted and settled himself into the saddle, then leaned down and extended a hand to Kate to pull her up behind him.

  She did not reach out to take his hand, but looked instead toward the other horse, on which Guillaume Karle had seated himself. Then she looked back at Alejandro and said, “I think your horse looks a bit thin to take two riders—let us fatten him up a bit first. I will ride with Karle.” And before he could protest, she was climbing up behind Guillaume Karle and settling herself against his back as if she knew the nature of its curves. She put her arms around the Frenchman’s waist, a bit too tight, and when she leaned her head against his shoulder it was a bit too gladly.