by Joan Aiken
‘Why should she wish such a thing?’ The question came from me half idly. I would never wish to enter a monastery, part of my mind was thinking. How glad I was to get away from St Just! And another part of my attention was concerned with my new pony, who, though so small, was amazingly strong, and not at all prepared to agree that, in our relationship, I was to be the master.
‘Why? To pray for the soul of her aunt, who had died tragically. And because – because the life she had was not to her liking.’
‘How strange! When there is so much to do -so many things to see!’
I guided the steps of my pony through a shallow, rocky brook – gaves, the Basques call them.
Juan said, ‘For boys, yes. Girls are not so lucky. If I had a sister, she must stay at home, and mind her sewing, and marry some person she had never met, chosen by her family because of his wealth.’
‘True,’ said I. ‘Well, I am glad that I am not a girl. Come up, son of Satan!’ and I dragged at the enormous head of my tiny mount, who was trying to take a late breakfast from the ferny riverbank.
We rode on, slowly enough, getting accustomed to our new mounts, and trying to decide what names to give them. Juan finally decided that his must be called Harlequin, because of the black and white patches, while I, after some experience of my pony’s temper, gave him the name of el Demonio; he was strong and full of spring, had a far better action than might have been expected from his uncouth appearance, had great sagacity, and also a wide range of vicious tricks, doing his best to break my leg against tree trunks, or taking a sudden bolt under low branches in the hope of dashing out my brains, so that I had continual battles with him, and must belabour him briskly on various occasions with my makhila before he learned to obey me. Harlequin was more docile; his faults were sulkiness and cowardice. He slouched along as slowly as possible unless continually kicked and urged on his way; and when the gaves that we crossed appeared to be more than knee-deep, his eyes had to be blindfolded by wrapping the blanket over his head before he would consent to cross. Despite these drawbacks, Juan’s delight in his new belonging was like that of a child with a new toy: at our rest stops he carefully led Harlequin to the best forage, found him handfuls of tender grass, brushed the pony’s coat with a wisp of bracken until it shone like a magpie, and, as we rode, would be continually patting and encouraging him with a flow of nonsense talk.
‘You treat that animal as if he were your brother,’ I said, laughing.
‘My brother! I would not give a cup of water to my brother!’ retorted Juan, solicitously escorting Harlequin to a convenient pool in a brook by the side of which we had paused to eat a merienda, or noon meal.
When saddling up to resume our journey, Juan discovered with dismay a small running sore on his pony’s shoulder, evidently caused by the clumsy, overlarge straw-stuffed saddle.
‘Miséricorde! What can we do about this?’ he demanded.
‘Best bathe it and protect it by a pad,’ said I. We washed the sore with river water, and contrived a pad from sheep’s wool (which, at that spot, hung in plenty from the brambles). But I could see that if Harlequin continued wearing that saddle, plainly not one suited to his size, the sore would become worse, and might, in the end, render him unfit to carry a rider. There was nothing to do, therefore, but repair to a town with a saddler’s shop. We accordingly consulted our map again and turned our course northeasterly, through wooded valleys, until we sighted the small town of Tardets, situated between a forest and a river, with mountains to the south. Here, fortunately, we found an excellent saddler’s, filled with piles of new leather mule collars, and wooden ox-yokes ornamented with bells, heaps of saddles, and whole groves of leather harness dangling from the rafters. We were able to sell the straw-stuffed saddle and purchase a smaller one, stuffed with wool, and we also bought some alforjas, saddlebags, to carry our food and the blanket. Also, at a feed store close by, we bought a sack of grain mixed with chaff for the ponies and a small quantity of caustic ointment with which to anoint the Harlequin’s sore shoulder. Juan accepted my word in all these affairs, for it was plain he had no experience in stable matters, whereas I had acquired considerable lore from Bob, my father.
Feeling better equipped, we left the town again, for since our alarming experience at St Jean we felt that towns were best avoided. While we were in Tardets, Juan continually glanced about in apprehension of seeing somebody from the Gente. I, too, was glad to be away from houses once more, and our horses’ heads turned towards the mountains. We soon forsook the highway and followed a bridle track that ran in the direction we wanted. From a hill not far from the town we were able to obtain a huge panoramic view of the land ahead: over the lower hills to the high Pyrenees, with a great peak to the right, another to the left, and a whole line of crests filling the horizon, along which lay the boundary line between France and Spain.
‘Now we have our ponies we shall make nothing of the journey!’ says Juan joyfully, patting Harlequin’s parti-coloured crest. ‘Oh, Felix! I am so very obliged to you for buying the pottoka. I have never had something of my own before. And, with all his faults, I love the Harlequin dearly.’
But then he fell into deep thought, and added in a troubled manner, ‘I fear, though, that this day’s purchases must have made a great hole in your money.’
‘It is of no consequence,’ said I. ‘Money is there to be spent. And we made a little by selling the other saddle. Besides, no doubt your Uncle León will reimburse me,’ I continued, smiling, a little, to myself, as it occurred to me how much more willingly Juan had accepted the pony than the suit of clothes, which cost only a few reales.
But Juan rode along plunged in concentrated reflection for several miles, and at length said, ‘If we could chance on a bertsulari contest, I could earn money by reciting.’
‘What are bertsulari?’
‘They are poets and musicians. At this time of year they hold spring festivals.’
‘And the contests?’
‘Oh, people in the audience call out a theme, and then the bertsulari make up a poem about it, or sing a song.’
‘Well,’ said I, humouring him, ‘if we come across such a contest, when your voice is mended, you must certainly enter it. You will very likely win, and then our fortunes will be made.’
‘Now you are teasing,’ said he, quite good-humouredly.
So we went on in friendship, and continued to teach one another portions of our languages. But I am bound to admit that Juan made much better progress than I.
Running southward, our path continued by the side of a river into wild scenery – deep, steep valleys, some of them gloomy with pine trees, others bare and rocky with heather and low shrubs. Steeper and steeper yet the valley sides rose about us. Sometimes cave mouths showed black among the overhanging rocks.
‘Do you think bears live in those caves?’ Juan said, shivering.
‘Oh, if they do, I daresay they are no more anxious to be disturbed than we to disturb them.’
It was not yet quite dusk, but the air was thickening, and after a while I began to wonder if we should consider passing the night in one of those same caves, for no village or farm or human habitation had come into sight for a long time.
‘Oh, Felix, look!’ whispered Juan suddenly, reining in his pony, and pointing ahead with a hand that trembled. ‘There is a bear, I do believe!’
The mountains were shrouding themselves in mist for the night, and the light was now very poor. The valley along which we rode was filled with the sound of tumbling water, from the river below us among its rocks, and numerous small cascades that leaped down the hillsides to join it.
And ahead of us, in a larch grove, we could see something perhaps the size of a bear, black in colour, moving about. Yet the ponies, strangely enough, showed no fear.
‘These fellows would shy and scamper off fast enough if it were a bear,’ said I, and urged el Demonio on with a kick.
The figure in the larch grove then turned and straight
ened, and we were able to see that it was a man. For a moment my heart thumped uncontrollably, because the man wore a black monk’s robe; could this, yet again, be Father Vespasian come back to haunt us? But as we drew nearer, I saw that he appeared wholly different from the Abbot – a small, somewhat puzzled-looking man, with scanty soft grey hair and a nut-brown complexion.
‘I did not expect riders to come along this path so late,’ he murmured, gazing at us as if we were members of some strange species. Yet he did not appear unwelcoming; only a little confused, as if, perhaps, he were not quite right in his wits.
‘God must have sent you,’ he added after a moment.
‘Certainly, my father,’ I said, dismounting and saluting him. ‘We travel in the hand of God.’
‘Well you had better come … to my… to my … house,’ he told us slowly; I thought that perhaps he had not used human speech for some weeks, or even months; it seemed to come away so rustily from his tongue.
His ‘house’ proved to be an old barn, built perhaps for storing mountain hay. It was strongly constructed of round boulders mortised together, with a massive roof and deep overhanging eaves, and stood snugly at the foot of a hillock in a turn of the valley, protected from wind and weather by a clump of great chestnut trees.
Inside he had established his dwelling quarters at one end, and a kind of chapel at the other, with a shrine and statue of Ste. Engrâce, and a burning lamp.
We hobbled the legs of our ponies and let them stray outside, for the grass was sweet and plentiful and the air not cold.
A round pit, dug in the centre of the barn, showed where the hermit sometimes permitted himself the luxury of a fire, and I took the liberty of gathering sticks and lighting one, for we were somewhat stiff from the unaccustomed exercise of riding, and the warmth was welcome. Juan pulled out some of our provisions: ham of the mountains (said to be cured in snow) and bread, and milk, and ewes’-milk cheese, which we had procured in Tardets. The hermit provided a thin soup on which, he said, he mainly lived; from its bright green and bitter flavour it might, perhaps, have been made from wild sorrel and such herbs. He accepted a little of our cheese and a mouthful of milk, but would not touch the ham.
Slowly, through the course of the evening, we heard his story, which was a sad one: he and his brother, twin sons of a landowner at Bidarray, had both loved the same girl.
‘Ah, she had a wonderful beauty!’ he murmured reminiscently. ‘Like that of a waterfall, or the evening star! You could not take your eyes away from her. If I close mine, I can see her still. Indeed, all the young men from the whole region were after her – not only I and Laurent. There was another, also, a wild fellow – but we two were her favourites …’
‘What was her name, my father?’ I asked gently, seeing him so lost in the past.
‘Her name? Her name was Laura.’
I felt Juan beside me make a slight movement. Then he was still again.
‘And what happened?’
In the end, the hermit said, he and his brother had made the poor girl so unhappy, with their quarrels and demands and protestations, that at length she killed herself, by jumping off a crag, rather than be put to the pain, both to herself and them, of choosing between them.
This story made me very indignant. What a piece of folly! I thought. Surely any course would be better than that, which ruined three lives, and perhaps more. But of course I did not state my feeling aloud.
‘What did you do then, my father?’ quietly inquired Juan.
Then, the hermit said, in bitterness and grief, he and his brother had both abandoned the world and become priests, and, after some years in devotional houses, deciding that this was not sufficient penance, they had resolved to be hermits, and lived thus, each of them alone in the wilderness.
‘And I am glad you have come here,’ he told us, as if now beginning to see us a little more clearly. ‘For lately I have been certain that my brother – his name is Laurent, mine is Bertrand – I believe he is now very near to dying. Something tells me so. You say that you are travelling over the mountains to Spain?’
‘Yes, my father; that is our intention.’
‘You will go, perhaps, by the Pass of Larraun?’
We said we had as yet made no plan; the most direct route would be the best for us.
‘I think,’ said he, ‘that you will pass by my brother’s abode. He is in an ancient chapel – a ruined Roman tomb – on the slopes of Orhy. What great, great happiness it would give me if you were able to see him, and take my parting message to him.’
‘Of course we will, if we can, my father,’ I said, though feeling it highly improbable that, in all that great wilderness of peaks and valleys ahead, we should chance on the ruin where his brother lived. Juan made some affirmative murmur, and I asked, ‘What is the message?’
‘The message is that I love him as a brother. All anger and bitterness have long passed away, and I look to see him soon in a better place, where perhaps she will be waiting for us.’
We said of course we would do this if it lay within our power, and he then kindly inquired after our own fortunes; by now he seemed more easily attuned to human conversation. At first, I thought, he had hardly been able to catch or understand the words that came from our mouths, and took some time puzzling over them as if they had been in a foreign tongue.
On a sudden impulse I told him the strange tale of Father Vespasian. I told it from the beginning: the unusual power of healing that he possessed, how it had come to him; his fear of death, or the sight of any dead thing; his unnatural, feverish curiosity in Juan and myself, particularly as related to our periods of unconsciousness; our escape from the Abbey and his pursuit of us over the causeway; then his apparent drowning and later reappearance in St Jean with the Gente, wearing the clothes, and some of the outward look, of Plumet the brigand.
Brother Bertrand listened to all this with silent attention, questioning me now and then.
‘You were out of your wits, my child, for how long?’
‘Seven or eight weeks, my father. They told me that I was walking about, working, eating, and going to Chapel normally during that time; but I was not conscious that I, Felix, was doing those things.’
‘And shortly after you recovered you were able to rescue your friend, who had been hanged by those evil men?’
‘Yes, my father.’
I saw Juan’s great eyes turn to stare at me won-deringly in the firelight. I had not told him, before, about the period of my unconsciousness, and I could tell that he was profoundly struck by the tale. I added, ‘And it was the very man who hanged my friend – Plumet – who has now – who seems to have – to have become Father Vespasian.’
I stammered slightly as I said these words. Who would not have? They sounded so strange, so mad.
But Brother Bertrand remarked, placidly enough, ‘Ah, it will not truly be Father Vespasian. Only part of his external semblance. An unclean spirit from outer darkness has unquestionably been making use of his body. Do you know, my child, what was Father Vespasian’s name before he entered that Order?’
‘No, my father. I never heard it.’
Vaguely I remembered Madame Mauleon saying, ‘He was a strange man. I never thought he had a genuine vocation.’ Had she mentioned a name? None that I could remember.
‘Ah, well,’ said Brother Bertrand vaguely, ‘I merely wondered. … But it is no matter.’ He resumed: ‘I have encountered such cases of possession before. Then, when he was drowned, the spirit will have been driven forth, with great wrenchings and rackings, to take up some other habitation where best it could. And its first choice would be the one nearest to hand, the one waiting on the shore, ready and prepared for any kind of wicked deed.’
To hear him say these things, to have my wild guess confirmed, should have been a kind of comfort. But it was not. I felt even more afraid; the blackness and silence of the huge night outside, the great expanses of unseen mountains and empty country seemed pulsing with danger, which
we could do nothing to avert. Juan and I huddled together, as close to the fire as we could draw, sensing the strength of the darkness even in this homely, holy place, with the shrine, and lighted lamp, and Ste. Engrace at one end, the crackle of the fire beside us.
‘What can we do, father? We are very afraid of this man. And he seems able to pursue us wherever we go.’
Juan cast a glance at the door and I could not forbear to do likewise; neither of us would have been at all surprised if the scarecrow figure had appeared there at that moment. But, by God’s mercy, it did not.
‘I feel certain that you are in God’s keeping and will, without doubt, escape in the end,’ slowly answered the hermit. ‘Yet it is indeed strange how he has such power to follow you. I must devote thought to that. You seem good children. … What does he want of you? And why should this evil yearning have been awakened because you have both been so close to death, your souls, as it were, separated for a period from your bodies? Damned spirits, of course, are always drawn to children,’ he went on, more to himself than to us.
‘Why is that, my father?’ asked Juan, in a low, trembling tone.
Brother Bertrand lifted his eyes from the glowing embers.
‘Every being is divided between good and evil; God has willed it so, that each of us resembles a coin, with a white side and a black side. Both sides are required; take either away, and what you have left is not a complete soul.’
‘I think I understand that,’ said I.
‘Doubtless in the next life it will be otherwise; or, perhaps, endlessly on up through every stage of heavenly excellence, there will always be two sides, but of a different nature. But here, in children especially, the difference between the bright side and the shadow can be very complete; for children are born innocent, straight from the hand of God, and yet the shadow they cast is a long one, long and black, like that of a man at the rising of the sun.’
I heard Juan draw a long, deep breath, and then he asked, ‘What does the evil spirit want, then?’
