One such was the camel that carried Peony.
McLennan, himself not far from panic, glanced back – not to look for his little slave but instinctively, to see if they were being pursued – and saw the man who had charge of Peony drop the lead rope and run away up the mountain, looking so comically terrified that McLennan might have laughed at any other time.
The camel gave a last rebellious snort and then stood still in the flux of men and animals around it. Peony, gripping the wooden burden-frame, seemed paralysed, hunched over, her eyes tightly shut.
McLennan stopped.
Terrified cameleers and their stampeding animals pushed him off the rocky trail, thrusting him aside, rushing by him. He stood behind a rock and stared back, his eyes moving between Peony perched aloft and the scene far below. The invading horde had reached the gates and were swarming around the walls, surrounding the doomed town.
‘Lucky for us it’s the town they’re after. If they knew what rich pickings there are on these beasts, they’d come after us, no doubt.’ He thought of the wealth the camel carried. Yes, that was what interested him, surely – not the little frightened girl clinging there like a kitten stuck in a tree on top of the silks and the fine, well-wrapped porcelain and the boxes of tea. Of course it was to save the valuable goods that he slid and scrambled back to the abandoned camel and grabbed its rope after the rest of the caravan had gone.
When they had regrouped on the safe side of the pass, the cameleer who had abandoned Peony’s mount crept back and tried to take the rope out of McLennan’s big fist.
‘I’ll see ye roast in hell first!’ shouted the Scot, threatening to knock him down. ‘It’s mine now, for if I hadna gone back, the beast would still be standing there, with ma wee slavie on its hump!’ The man whined and pleaded and called on Allah; when that failed, he appealed to his comrades for support, but they only laughed at him. Several of the men had abandoned their camels, and there was considerable bickering, and some serious brawling, over the loads. But in the end the caravan set off again, hungrier than ever.
Fortunately, within two days they passed into a green valley to which the surrounding mountains gave rainfall, where the famine had not struck, and there the famished travellers managed to secure food supplies.
Now McLennan had a camel of his own and the wealth it carried. This put him in a good humour, and as usual Peony caught the overspill of his mood. He let her keep her sheepskin, and gave her adequate rations as well.
‘I didna go back for you, mind!’ he said jovially one night when she brought him his tea, brewed over the communal campfire. ‘But ye brought me luck, just the same.’ And he put a titbit of roast pheasant into her mouth and even patted her on the head, as one might pat a dog. If he left his hand there a moment too long, and then almost snatched it away, there was no one to take note of it.
But she had felt the warmth of his hand for once, instead of the sting of it. She went to sleep happy, and had a strange dream. She dreamed she invited her father – so long dead that she scarcely remembered him – into her garden, that they strolled there together along the patterned pebble paths with her hand in his, and that he admired her work. But when she tried to show him the dragons, pointing upward to them guarding the roof-corners, they turned their grotesque but beloved heads away. ‘Please look, it’s my father!’ she cried out, but then, looking herself at her companion, she saw that he was bearded and huge and not her father at all. But she kept her grip on his hand just the same, as if, were she to let it go, some wild wind would sweep her away.
Chapter Six
At long last they reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
They had travelled west by the southern route. They were not in Constantinople, but in St. Jean d’Acre, in what Christians called the Holy Land – the goal of the Crusaders, who had come here in waves till late in the last century to commit hideous slaughter upon the infidel. A great castle, that these ‘soldiers of Christ’ had built there some two hundred years before, stood up against the sea and sky. While waiting for a ship, McLennan sold his camel, and they spent several nights in a sort of makeshift inn in the castle crypt. During the days, McLennan wandered around the narrow, malodorous lanes of the market, Peony at his heels.
There was so much to see! She was briefly tempted by the overflowing stalls of fruit and nuts and sweetmeats – so easy for quick little hands to snatch. But Li-wu had said, ‘Never take what is not yours. That which is stolen may fill the mouth with sweetness, but it burns holes in the spirit.’ It never occurred to McLennan to buy her a treat, but he bought nuts and sweetmeats for himself and – a novelty which caught his eye – a folded sheet of dried rolled apricot, as big as an apron. He couldn’t finish it, and it was attracting flies, so he tossed her the last strip, still marked by his teeth. The sour-sweet, ‘orange’ taste and the delicious chewiness made the saliva flood her mouth, but the fact that he’d given it to her, however carelessly, flooded her mind, too, and her smile broke through every time his eye fell on her. But something in that smile made him scowl and look quickly away.
McLennan could hardly wait for a ship for England. He put the word about, and every night would go back to the harbour beyond the great Crusader walls, and besiege the captains for news. The sight of the Crusader castle had made his own castle more vivid in his mind, made his eagerness for it sharper, and there was far to go yet! It seemed to his impatient nature, now he was on his way, that he would never get there, never see his castle or take possession of it.
Sometimes when he’d been drinking the powerful local spirit, with its strong, exotic taste of aniseed, he got drunk enough to talk to Peony as they sat on folded sacks on the stones of the crypt, with their backs to the boxes containing McLennan’s appropriated goods.
‘It’ll be waiting – the grandest castle – not as big as this one, maybe, but big enough! Aye! Big enough!’ Though she understood most of his speech now, she was not sure she followed his meaning, even when he slapped his hands on the stone walls the Crusaders had built and said, ‘Castle, girl! Like this! Like this!’
‘Castle like this?’ she said softly.
‘Aye! It’s my home, ye ken! My home! My refuge! My fortress! From it I shall get my revenge at last! He shall pay, by God, I say he shall pay for what he did to me and mine!’ And once, in this drunken state, he put his big head in her lap and cried. When he remembered this the next day he was so ashamed of his maudlin weakness, and her witnessing it, that he didn’t speak a word to her all day. What he didn’t remember was that she had stroked his greying hair and wept with him for the sorrow that had broken him, whatever it was. She knew it must be a great sorrow for him to behave as he did, showing his soft side only when he was in drink.
At last he found a ship, and for once didn’t bargain, but paid the captain all his camel-money and gold besides, to take him and his slave-girl to England.
At first the ship sailed the smooth blue waters of the Mediterranean, and McLennan felt sure that his seasickness had been conquered. But as soon as they passed the Straits of Gibraltar and entered the Atlantic, the grey waves rose, and with them McLennan’s gorge. He lay below, his stomach heaving. He groaned and cursed and lashed out at anyone who came near him, crying out for tea.
Peony set off to explore the ship. A Lascar seaman took pity on her, and smuggled her into the hold. There, crawling perilously in the torch-lit darkness over the boxes and barrels, she managed to locate McLennan’s goods, which had been the last to be loaded before the ship left Acre. With the Lascar’s help, she made a small hole in one of the tight-sewn sacks and extracted a small box of tea.
Next she found the galley, and with signs and smiles coaxed the ship’s cook to let her make a brew. When his back was turned, she took a little honey from the ship’s store. For her master, it didn’t count with her as stealing.
McLennan knocked the first cup from her hand. She waited for a lull in his vomiting, then brought him another. This time he drank noisily – th
e vomiting had dehydrated him – let the cup roll from his hand, and slept.
She cleaned the floor, then sat at the side of his bunk and watched him. McLennan was all she had as a companion; she utterly depended on him. But she didn’t imagine he depended on her. If he thought of her at all, she supposed it was as something he owned, something to serve his needs. Believing this caused her a deep, dredging sadness. But she knew sadness was bad for her spirit. She tried to push it away. She wouldn’t let anger and bitterness into her heart. Instead, her small hand reached out by itself to touch the wild red beard she had so often trimmed.
More even than she needed to be cared for, she needed to care for someone. Her way of caring was to forgive Bruce McLennan all his unthinking, selfish cruelties, and remember only the good: that he took her with him when he could have abandoned her; that he rescued her when she was clinging in abject terror on the back of the camel; that he sometimes spoke a word to her that, if not kind, was at least not harsh or cold; that he had once covered her with his own quilt in the night. That in that cold stone place he called a castle, he had wept with his head in her lap. Most of all, she remembered that he had unbound her feet. These things, like the fires in the winter camps where you could warm yourself after the cold, weary days of the long march, glowed in her mind. They comforted her more than they should, for out of them and her deepest need to revere him, she made of McLennan the man he had been, once, and no longer was.
On shore at last in England, the Scotsman soon felt better.
He left Peony in a dreary quayside tavern while he loaded his Chi-na treasures on a hired cart and took them in to the markets of London to sell. Before he went he handed her a bale of red silk.
‘Guard this,’ he told her. ‘Don’t ye go leaving dirty fingermarks on my silk! I’m taking this back to Scotland with me to make sheets for my bed. I fancy sleeping in luxury after these years of hardship.’ He grinned suddenly. There wouldn’t be another laird in all Scotland who slept on silk sheets! And the colour! The brilliant red would brighten his chamber and remind him of his travels.
Peony was alone for two days. If the innkeeper’s wife hadn’t taken pity on her, and brought her some bread sopped in hot milk – the dregs of what her children had had – Peony would have been very hungry as well as lonely and cold.
She had never eaten with a spoon in her life, and her eating sticks, carefully preserved throughout the long journey, couldn’t pick up the soggy bread. She gave up trying, and brought the bowl to her lips. The innkeeper’s wife pulled a face.
‘What a little pig-dog it is, lapping its food! What foreign gutter d’you suppose the big Scots lummox found that in?’ Peony couldn’t understand an accent so different from the one she was used to, but she understood she was being sneered at. Hungry as she was, she laid the bowl down half-full.
When McLennan came back, he was full of vigour, and had had new clothes made. He had done well selling his goods, and his leather purse once again chinked with sovereigns. He had bought a big, strong horse, and now packed his few things, including the red silk, some Chi-na cups and several boxes of tea, into large saddlebags. He couldn’t wait to get home! He hiked Peony by the arm on to his horse behind him and together they crossed the Thames on a ferry and began the last part of their long journey to Scotland.
As often as possible Bruce McLennan put his horse to a gallop. He didn’t trouble himself about Peony who had never sat on a horse before, who had no saddle or stirrups to steady her and whose short legs were stretched across the horse’s great flanks, with the lumpy saddlebags digging into her. It was worse than the camel, much worse! The camel’s hump had merely swung and rocked and gyrated as it walked sedately along. The horse went like the wind in a thunder of hooves, with clods of earth and grass flying around Peony and sometimes dealing her bruising blows. She clung to her master with all her strength. She hid her face in his back and struggled with her fear.
Once it overcame her. They were riding across a desolate moor. She peeped around her master and saw a big dry-stone wall looming ahead. The horse rose up, then plunged downward. Peony was so frightened she fainted as they landed. McLennan felt her slip from the horse’s back and fall to the ground.
Cursing, he pulled the horse up. He turned his head to look. He could see her lying near the wall he had jumped. She didn’t move. A pang of unlooked-for, sudden anxiety struck him, mingled with impatience. He dragged the horse’s head round and rode back.
He jumped off and picked her up. She stirred in his arms, and looked up at him with those black, unreadable eyes of hers. She moved her hand as if to touch his face. He jerked his head aside before she could.
‘So you’re aw’richt,’ he said, too loudly. ‘If ye dunna like the jumps, keep those half-eyes of yours shut altogether! And hold on tight, ye wee monkey! Next time ye come off, I’ll leave ye for the buzzards!’
They rode on, stopping at inns along the way. The food in England seemed delicious to Bruce McLennan, and he ate hugely. To Peony it was almost inedible. Despite her rough life, she was a dainty eater. She couldn’t pick up these big hunks of meat with her chopsticks, and to use her hands as McLennan did was unthinkable. Other unfamiliar foods she couldn’t touch. They didn’t seem to her like food. Only the sweet puddings tasted good, but she got precious few of those, for McLennan still paid for nothing special for her.
But she thought of old Li-wu’s words, ‘Hunger doesn’t matter. It’s not important. The spirit needs no food.’ She survived on scraps as she had for years.
As they crossed the border between England and Scotland, McLennan began to ride faster. His horse went lame, but he drove it on till its heart failed. When it felt the whip, it bolted forward, tried to rear up, then stumbled and fell. Its rider flew over its head and crashed to the ground.
Peony fell with him. The searing terror as she left the horse’s back ended with a thump as she landed on top of McLennan. She was stunned, not hurt, but McLennan was groaning and cursing. She scrambled up, looking round first at the horse, which lay ominously still. Next, she looked down at McLennan, and gasped with dismay. His bare leg below his new kilt had an angle to it that no leg should have.
Peony began to pant with fear like a frightened cat. She stared all around. Not far away was a little stone cottage in a dip in the moor, with smoke coming out of its chimney. Peony didn’t stop to think. She ran down the slope, falling and rolling twice and scrambling up again, and when she reached the low wooden door under its deep lintel, hit it with the flat of her hand.
An old woman came. She stared in amazement at this black-haired, slant-eyed, flat-nosed little creature, dressed in filthy rags.
‘Who are ye? What d’ye want?’ she croaked fearfully, half-closing the door.
‘Master!’ cried Peony in her high, fluting voice. ‘Bad hurt! You come!’
The woman hesitated. Then she called back into the house.
‘Hamish! Come quick and see this!’
Soon a young man came. He, too, stared unbelievingly at Peony. She started back up the hill, beckoning urgently. As if he couldn’t help himself, he followed her.
He found the horse dead and McLennan semi-conscious from pain. Hamish lifted him with difficulty, and hung him over his shoulder. The injured leg dangled at an unnatural angle. Sick and frightened, Peony nevertheless remembered her responsibilities. With great difficulty, she untied the saddlebags from the horse and half-carried, half-dragged them after the young man, back to the cottage.
The old woman didn’t want to let her in.
‘Och, tak’ it awaw, Hamish! ’Tis nothing human, ’tis a moor witch! ’Tis her made the horse fall, most like, and she’ll bewitch us both!’ she cried, hiding her crinkled face in her hands but peeping through her fingers in irresistible curiosity.
Her son brushed past her, laid McLennan on a straw-stuffed mattress and began, straining and grunting, to pull his leg straight. McLennan let out a terrible scream and a string of oaths. ‘Bring warm watter a
nd cloths and some wood for a splint,’ Hamish ordered his mother.
Peony, her very skin a-creep from her master’s screech of pain which she could almost feel in her own flesh, looked about her in terror. There was only one room in the cottage, with beds in box-like openings in the walls. There was a fire burning. Peony, suddenly feeling deathly cold from the long ride and from shock, edged towards it. After a scared glance over her shoulder at McLennan, now lying in a dead faint, she crouched down near the saddlebags, hugging herself, staring into the glowing heart of the flameless peat fire. It was as if, without McLennan’s will, she became a figurine without life of its own.
All the time the old woman was helping her son to set the stranger’s leg she watched the ‘moor witch’ fearfully, waiting for her to lay a spell on them. But Peony just crouched there and shivered. After a while the old woman got her courage and common sense back. When you didn’t look too closely at the strange colouring and alien features, this visitation looked no worse than any half-starved child. She went to the fire and ladled something out of a pot hanging from a hook, poured it into a rough wooden bowl, and held this out to Peony at arm’s length, as if to an animal that might bite.
Peony took the bowl and drank from it. It was hot mutton stew, and though it tasted very strange to her, it was good. In the bottom of the bowl were bits of vegetables and soft grains of barley. They looked quite like rice. Peony got out her chopsticks and picked the bits up delicately and ate them, leaving the meat.
The Dungeon Page 5
