Bridle the Wind

by Joan Aiken

  How I longed to leave! I could see that the life led by the fathers in the Abbey was a noble one, devout, hardworking, every minute of every hour put to good use in prayer, work, and healing; yet something about the place both frightened and repelled me. It was because of Father Vespasian: he was so powerful, so unpredictable. And they were all bound in duty to obey him, no matter what he ordered.…

  I wondered if he had always been as he was now.

  Twice I looked back with longing at the door in the wall.

  But I had given my promise to Father Antoine. And perhaps the event which would release me, as he had suggested, would not be long in coming. Perhaps quite soon now I would recapture the memory of what had happened to me among the sand dunes.

  I pushed, again and again, at the closed door in my mind. But it would not open.

  Not until another ten days had passed did the memory return.

  2

  I find a victim in the thicket. The decision to leave for Spain. I am punished for obduracy

  It was a day of mild sun and trembling, vaporous sea-mist. Father Antoine and I had gone, as was now our twice-weekly custom, to gather seaweed in the larger of the two bays, and also collect such pieces of driftwood as Brother Guillaume could use for his kitchen fire. Larks and peewits were twittering in the marshes beyond the seashore. Once or twice I saw a pelican flap his stately way over the sand dunes.

  ‘Why does nobody try to cultivate the marshes, father?’ I asked.

  ‘The Marsh of Cuxaq? It is too unhealthy, child; pestilence and the lung sickness, they say, lie in wait for those who spend any length of time there. The only persons who can find their way through the boggy wilderness are brigands; for others, it is best not to venture far from the edge.’

  ‘Brigands?’

  ‘What you in Spain call the gente de reputacion – thieves, bandits, assassins. They, the Mala Gente, of course, cross all borders.’

  ‘Ah!’

  I myself had had a little dealing with the gente de reputation, when, on my way to England, I was unjustly imprisoned in Oviedo. The leader of a group of rateros, or brigands, in Oviedo jail had believed (wrongly) that I had some knowledge of the whereabouts of General Moore’s paychests for the English army – or maybe the treasure sent from Paris for the French army, chests of gold doubloons and crusadas; one treasure, it was said, had been lost in the mountains of Galicia, the other somewhere in the Pyrenees. I knew nothing of either treasure, hardly believed in their existence, and had told the chief so, roundly; but it was plain that he did not believe me. He knew that I had once met an Englishman calling himself George Smith, who claimed that he had seen where the English paychests had been left when Baird and Frazer retreated westward toward Coruna. This Englishman was now dead, and moreover he had told me nothing of his knowledge. I had spoken to him once, and he had sent me a letter about my own affairs. But I supposed that if the Spanish rateros had not yet found the money (if, indeed, it really existed) I would do well to keep out of their way, for they might yet believe that I would lead them to it.

  However, all this had nothing to do with the present occasion, I thought, with the Marsh of Cuxaq or the French bandits. The French wars were over, the Emperor Napoleon, imprisoned in St Helena, had died almost a year ago, and King Ferdinand the Desired had been let out of jail, where Napoleon had put him, and was once more on the throne of Spain.

  Reaching this point in my thoughts, I asked Father Antoine if he could give me any news of Spain. Now that I knew who I was, I began to feel homesick for my native country. Spain, to me, would always be that.

  ‘Ah, Spain!’ said Father Antoine, pausing to brush the sand flies from his bald tonsure before hoisting up, with my help, a gray-white log of driftwood into the cart. ‘Who ever knows what new frenzy will afflict that country, the land of bullfights and blood feuds? But I have heard that a rebellion, under Rafael Riego, is spreading and gathering power; King Ferdinand now pretends to proclaim himself king of the people, promising to restore all the liberal measures which, previously, he had annulled. They say that the Holy Alliance (that is, Austria, Russia, and Prussia) will not permit this; they are afraid of the Spanish revolutionaries; they will send Cossack troops into Spain to put down the uprising.’

  This news startled and shocked me. My Spanish grandfather, I knew (though it was long since he had quit politics), felt a sympathy for the Liberals and for Colonel Riego, who had wished to bring back the Spanish liberal constitution of 1812; whereas the rule of King Ferdinand VII was already noted for its despotism, oppression of liberty, closing of universities, banning of books, and exile or persecution of any men who dared to speak against the regime.

  But I thought that, while it was bad enough to have such a ruler, it would be even worse to have his rule enforced by armies from outside the kingdom. Spain, in the years when I was a small child, had been plundered and devastated, year after year, by the armies of Napoleon; was this now all to happen again, only this time with the armies of the Tsar Alexander?

  I was beginning to say something about these matters, when a very strange thing happened to me. Suddenly all my thoughts, all my faculties, seemed brought within me to a numbing halt, as if a pencil of ice had touched my brain.

  We were in the centre of the bay, we had just levered the length of timber into the cart, and I was standing with my hand on the cart tail and my face toward the sand dunes, when I became seized by an overmastering blind urge to pass through a narrow gully between two of the silvery hillocks and see what lay beyond.

  The violence of this urge hardly left me breath for speech. I knew – I felt quite certain – that something was waiting for me on the other side of the dunes.

  ‘Father Antoine – I believe I can hear somebody calling me.’

  ‘Why, my boy!’ he exclaimed. ‘What in the world is the matter? You have turned white as an altar cloth. Are you ill? Do you have pain?’

  ‘No, no – I am not ill – but I believe – I believe I am beginning to remember. There is something that I have to do beyond those dunes; I must go, at once; it is terribly urgent – ‘

  While I gasped out these words I had begun to run over the sand. Father Antoine, without more ado, dropped the asses’ reins over their heads, to prevent them from straying, and followed me, tucking up his robe and moving swiftly on his sandaled feet.

  ‘I will help you, my child, with whatever it is.’ He glanced about him, over the flat sand, and back to where the cart stood, and the donkeys with drooping heads. ‘I believe – yes, I am sure,’ he panted, following me, ‘that this is exactly the track through which you came running when I first saw you.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is! I remember now. I had wished to find a private place in which to kneel and thank God for my deliverance – ’

  ‘Very understandable, my dear boy!’

  ‘I came through the dunes – just here – and saw that clump of trees ahead. It was twilight then -but I am certain that is the place. Listen!’

  We were nearly at the thicket. My ears had caught something – a choking sob, a faint, pitiful cry for help.

  ‘I heard nothing,’ said Father Antoine. ‘But you are young. Your ears are sharper.’

  ‘Quick, quick!’

  Thrusting, grappling, kicking the boughs out of my way, fighting the tangled undergrowth, I forced my way into the thicket, with Father Antoine close behind me. Now I recognised again the sweet haunting fragrance of the yellow blossoms that hung overhead. I had smelled that scent before! And yet a part of my mind, cool, doubting, sceptical, said to me, ‘Come, now, Felix, it was the month of January when the Euzkadi was wrecked, and you were cast ashore. How could these blossoms have been in flower then?’

  But I was certain that I remembered their fragrance.

  Three or four more minutes of battling progress through the bushes, and we emerged, torn, bloodied, and panting, into a dappled, shadowed glade which also, now, I remembered. The ground here was fragrant with violets.

&nb
sp; And overhead –

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ whispered a choking voice. ‘Help me – please help me! I don’t – want – to -die-’

  High overhead hung a small, thin body, suspended from one of the arching boughs. It was still in motion – kicking, struggling -

  I scrambled up through the slender whippy branches, climbing as if they had been a ladder, thrusting myself upward, cursing and praying in the same words, to the same Deity. ‘Listen! You must, you must save him till I come – don’t let him die, only save him till I come – ’

  ‘Have you a knife, child?’ called Father Antoine in sudden agitation.

  Novices were not allowed to carry knives, but I had brought one from the garden shed for cutting through the tough roots of seaweed. It was tucked under the cord which formed my belt. With clumsy trembling speed I cut the rope, and Father Antoine below received the slight body into his capable arms. Meanwhile I pushed myself out of the tree, not caring how I fell, and landed crouching beside the pair of them.

  ‘Is – is he still alive?’

  Father Antoine had already, with great care, loosed the choking cord that constricted the thin neck; then with his gnarled but gentle hands he pressed the sides of the frail chest: pressed, pressed, pressed, and released.

  ‘Blow into his mouth, boy,’ he directed me. ‘Breathe for him! As I release my hands each time, you blow. Yes, yes, that is the way.’

  Kneeling on a huge patch of crushed violets I blew – waited; blew again; while Father Antoine doggedly continued to press, release, and press, forcing the emptied lungs to take up their task again. If Father Vespasian could see us battling like this! I thought, and was infinitely glad that he could not, that there were only the two of us working desperately hard without the need for speech in the quiet glade. But, oh, supposing our work was in vain?

  It seemed like half an hour that we had been kneeling there, though in reality perhaps it had been three minutes, four minutes, five minutes -

  At last there came the slightest, weakest sound from the body between Father Antoine’s hands -a faint, choking cough.

  ‘Ah! Grace a Dieu! I think we are going to win. Do not stop blowing for a single instant, my son!’

  I blew – waited – blew; and then suddenly we were rewarded. The face below mine – which was blue-white, waxy – contorted and crumpled; the chest contracted, expanded, filled with air, and expelled it again in a violent sneeze.

  ‘We’ve done it! We have saved him! He is alive!’ In my joy and relief I grabbed Father Antoine’s hands; I could hardly forbear from embracing him. Perhaps I did.

  ‘Gently, my son. We are not quite out of the wood yet.’

  He continued with his massage, pressing the ribs, rubbing the dreadfully bruised and discoloured neck.

  But his words went on echoing in my mind. Not out of the wood. No; and very likely neither were the people who had hung up this poor victim. They could not be very far away; the deed was too recent.

  I sprang to the side of the glade from which we had come and began to hack at the whippy stems with my knife, to make a wider passage through. On the far side, I now noticed, there were signs that somebody had entered recently; branches were broken, grass was crushed. But that would be no way for us to take.

  A few minutes, and I had cleared a path wide enough for our purposes.

  ‘Father Antoine,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Do you not think we should carry him to the shore?’

  While saying this, I opened my eyes very wide, laid my finger on my lips, and silently gestured toward the depths of the thicket – from which, indeed, I thought I had heard a slight crack, or crunch. He took my meaning instantly.

  ‘It is well thought, my boy. Yes, let us go.’

  Gently and most carefully he raised the head and shoulders, I laid hold of the bare, scratched legs, and painfully, with great trouble, we proceeded back along the little passage I had cut, and so out into the fresh reviving air of the seashore. Only then did I realise that the person we had rescued was hardly taller than myself: a boy, no more; and pitifully thin. His jerkin and breeches were of old, threadbare material; his hair was long and so matted that it looked like tar; he had no hat, shoes, or stockings. He was dirty, bedraggled, and dreadfully bruised. He weighed – luckily for us who had to carry him – little more than the seaweed that we had been handling.

  But why should they have hanged a boy? And who were they? Who in the world would do such a deed?

  And why – at this thought, which came to me while carrying him over the soft, slippery sand, I almost stumbled in my astonishment – why should I have been given a foreknowledge of this event? For that, I now saw, was what had been sent to me. Three months ago, on that stormy evening in January, God had granted me a prevision of what was to come. Why?

  Had it happened simply because, exhausted, gasping with fear and fatigue after my own narrow escape from death, I had been flung up on this very spot, where his murder was later going to take place?

  Or had my destiny planned the whole happening, the whole connection, from much further back? And was that why I had been sent here?

  The asses still stood with drooping heads just where we had left them; we placed the rescued boy in the cart, on a mattress of seaweed.

  ‘Can you talk at all, my poor child?’ Father Antoine asked quietly.

  Two wild dark-brown eyes opened at him for a moment, enormously wide, and there came a faint, negative movement of the head.

  ‘No matter; just lie still; we are going to take you to a place of safety.’

  The eyes closed again. Not, I thought, in relief at the monk’s promise, but rather to keep their secrets hidden.

  As we began to cross the causeway, and the cart shook violently, bumping over the uneven edges of rock, the eyes flew open again in alarm, then shut resolutely. I was leading Berri, and could not forbear, in quick glances over my shoulder, to study the boy whom I had been the means of saving from death. What a singular link now lay between us, I thought! We had been, as it were, bound together by three months of time, three months that had been removed from my life by the mysterious hand of God.

  What had become of those three months? I would never know.

  And suddenly I remembered Father Vespasian. ‘Where has your soul been hiding since that day? Under whose dominion?’ Why should he ask that? What did he expect to hear?

  Another thought struck me: that I, only, in the entire human race, had knowledge of the bond between me and the hanged boy. Father Antoine might well guess at some part of the whole, but unless I chose to tell him, he would never know the complete story.

  Slowly, doubtfully, I pondered this. In a way I felt that Father Antoine had a right to hear about it. He had been kind, understanding; had not pressed me; had helped me, by arranging my visits to the shore, to be in the right spot when memory caught up and became linked with reality. Yes, he had a right to know the whole. But, apart from him, I did not wish anybody else to learn about this mystery. It was my secret – mine and this boy’s, whoever he was – it belonged to no one else. Especially, I thought, I would not wish it to come to the ears of Father Vespasian. Why not? I could hardly frame the reasons to myself, but they were there, solid as mountains in my mind. Father Vespasian would wish to know for the wrong purpose. He was not sane; he was not quite human; there was something wild, ungovernable, dreadful about him. He did not belong to God. His motive for doing what he did came from some other quarter. No, the less he knew about this boy, the better, I decided; and I felt a strong wish to protect the frail, bruised body curled up among the seaweed in the cart. He ought not to be exposed to the Abbot’s baleful scrutiny.

  Thinking this, I turned for another glance at the boy. He was little more than a skeleton covered with skin. The velveteen jerkin and canvas pantaloons he wore were so filthy and tattered that they hardly did more than decently cover him. His feet were bare; the colour of legs, arms, and face was a kind of bluish brown, like the mud of a tidal river
. His cheeks were so gaunt from starvation that his chin stuck up sharp as the point of a spade. Here is somebody, Felix, I thought, whose sufferings make your own seem like a fiesta. What troubles have you ever endured? A scolding tutor and some peevish old aunts, a few days in prison, a couple of uncomfortable sea-passages? But this poor creature has probably known terrible hardship all his life.

  And following this feeling came one of downright guilt for all the luck, friendship, and unfair spoiling that had come my way; upon which I resolved to befriend the boy, since we had been so significantly flung together, and do all that lay in my power to help him.

  At the foot of the steep zigzag that led up to the Abbey gate, I brought Berri to a halt and faced Father Antoine.

  ‘My father – perhaps before we reach the entrance I ought to tell you that I have remembered fully what before I had forgotten.’

  He gave me a beautiful smile, filled with understanding and sympathy.

  ‘My boy, I was sure that you had! The manner in which you hurled yourself from the beach -like an arrow from a crossbow into that thicket -showed me that some pattern had come clear in your mind, instructing you to act without wasting a moment.’

  ‘It happened in this way, father – ’

  But now, to my surprise, he laid a finger on my lips.

  ‘Hush yet awhile, child! I believe that you should wait and think carefully before imparting the story to me, or indeed to anybody. Take counsel in prayer before any action. There is without doubt some further mystery which still remains to be solved. Perhaps we shall learn it when we hear the history of this poor one. Or perhaps future happenings will reveal God’s purpose. But – in the meantime – do you not think that our first care should be for our hurt lamb, who is in urgent need of Father Pierre and his salves and tisanes?’

  At once I felt humbled and reproved for thoughtlessness. Here I stood, who not two minutes previously had resolved to help the victim in every possible way, proposing to waste precious time in recounting my own tale. Very self-important, Felix! Abashed, I tugged at the bridle to urge Berri on his way up the hill.