John the Pupil

by David Flusfeder

  And in loud and solemn voice I announced that God would make a sign, that his hand would direct his magical finger towards the chosen sacrifice; and these men were afraid, Brother Andrew was unloosed, I held one arm out wide and the other in front of me, I looked down at the bar in my hand as if I too was afraid of what it might reveal.

  I walked forward, into the men. I held my hand flat. And now! I said, the Lord God will point His finger to choose His sacrifice.

  The men shrunk away from me, disputing amongst themselves. And the bar twitched and turned and pointed, as I knew it would, to the one who looked as if he had run away from an army because it was the remains of the armour across his shoulder that was attracting the attention of the magnet. His fellows drove him forward.

  God has spoken, I said. The axe has been laid to the foot of the tree.

  It’s a trick! he said. It just points in that direction.

  I motioned him to stand on the opposite side, and I held the magnet in my closed hand while he shifted, with the help of his fellows who made a space for him to stand but none for him to flee into. I held the magnet out in my hand again, I relaxed my fingers and let the bar turn and again it pointed to the cowardly warrior.

  God’s finger never lies, I said.

  The others gathered around him, ready to seize him, waiting for me to tell them the manner and place of his execution.

  And after him, there will be another, I promised.

  The designated sacrifice ran out of the door of the hospice, others followed him or threw themselves to the ground, feigned to sleep, or made desperate prayers of obeisance and abasement.

  All except for one. The men had been dispatched by my trick, the hospice near empty, some forlorn utensils abandoned in the fright. And there was just one man who was looking at me, from a corner, his eyes wide and shining, a figure so small and quiet that I had taken him for a bundle of rags; he looked like a hunted resolute animal who had found his last corner, which he will fight for.

  I asked him in Italian why he did not flee. He answered in English.

  Why should I be afraid of a magnet? he said.

  We had found the Second Messenger.

  His name is Daniel. He holds his left hand closed in a kind of claw, but otherwise he is as we remember him from the friary, a small mouseish boy who had been the uncomplaining mark for Brother Luke’s prankish malice and who had lasted longer in the schoolroom than most.

  He told us that Master Roger had sent him out a few weeks after our departure.

  This is not what I had supposed. I had thought that my Master had grown vexatious after we had gone, and then become inspired, of course, to write more, reconsider some of what he had written, adding further thoughts, withdrawing some previous ones. (And, to my shame, I hoped that he had taken out some words: the writing of Seneca is admirable, but in my Master’s humility to the Stoic – and too, in the spirit presumptive he has adopted, of being Alexander’s Aristotle, the wise, sometime prolix counsellor – there are passages of the Book that I carry that fall away from perfection.) I had not thought that he had given us so little time to prosper or fall.

  The second messenger could not have been constrained as I had been by my companions’ penitential conscience. Where we had walked, he must have ridden, or flown. I wondered where it was that he had gone past us.

  I would like to see what you are carrying, I said.

  It is not for you, he said.

  I had supposed that my Master’s thoughts had been with me throughout this journey. Lost on the Via Francigena, I had felt the fathering concern of my Master. I realise now that it had been the Book he was concerned for, not its messenger.

  You? You are making this journey just on your own?

  I had never heard Brother Andrew scoff before.

  At the beginning there were two of us. Do you remember Brother Luke?

  Brother Daniel was obscure about the loss of Luke. He would not describe how the former tormentor fell by the way.

  He fell victim to some disease?

  In a way.

  We looked at each other, Brother Andrew and I. We were equivalent once more, again depending upon a third to sustain us. What was this mouseish friar capable of? Both of us were questioning this; neither had the answer. Had Brother Luke been abandoned, or rejected? had some heavy ill fortune beset him that his companion had watched, maybe, even, in schoolroom revenge, advanced?

  I spoke to him again,

  Our Master dispatched you because he was worried that I had failed. I have not failed. We have overcome many obstacles as you must have done. There is no need now for you to proceed. I have found the right road. Viterbo cannot be more than five or six days away. You have done well to get so far, and so quickly. But your mission is over now, you may rest, there are baths in the hillside, which are said to cure all ills, take yourself there, you have deserved it. One day, when my mission is over, when we are all long recovered from our journeys, you can tell me about the end of Brother Luke. The road has marked you as it has us, you can tell me how the road has marked me, or probably there is no need for that, because I will see it in our Master’s eyes in the moment of my return.

  He watched me talk. I resumed,

  You can give me your copy of the Book. I will take that one also, deliver it to its intended recipient. I am sure there are differences between the two versions, my Master’s imagination is always restless, but it is not our place to be the judge. We will leave that to the Pope, to whom I will commend your diligence and courage.

  The Second Messenger will not be deflected from completing his mission. He will not abandon his journey.

  The sun was rising outside. We performed matins together, and then the three of us, ignoring the residents of the hospice, who had great fear of us, went back outside to the day. Brother Andrew retrieved the donkey Bernard from the kind monk. We set off. We walk the same road but not together.

  • • •

  Saint Ursus’s Day

  And so we walk, Brother Daniel always ahead. When we rest he rests. When we resume he resumes. If we quicken our pace, he quickens his. He never seems to look behind, but he keeps the same distance between us.

  He does not pray with us. He prays on his own. He does not eat with us. Even if he has no food, he will not accept any of ours, our offering dies in the air. When we are having one of our battles with Bernard the donkey, Brother Daniel slows until we have set off again.

  He is playing a game with us, Brother Andrew said.

  We seem to take it in turns to make remarks that the other fails to show any sign of hearing. We have grown unused to conversation. The donkey Bernard too seems to yearn for a point farther back on the road, like Brother Andrew, who does not answer me as I do not answer him, as Brother Daniel keeps the same distance ahead of us, so that his package is perpetually closer to its recipient than ours.

  The way, beaten down to dust by earlier men’s feet, winds ahead of us, between tall trees. Beside us, through a knot of branches and thorns, a stream quietly follows the path of our road.

  When the road winds away, and Daniel is out of our sight, we no longer quicken our steps, because we know that he will be waiting ahead for us to return into his view.

  As we walk on, the stream becomes easier to access. I walk beside Bernard, one hand on his neck, the other on the packages he bears, and Andrew walks beside us, still unglad, but there is a reminder of the joy he has lost in the way he kicks splashing through the water.

  And maybe not entirely lost: Brother Andrew smiles at me, and I have not seen his smile since we were enjoying happier days, when his sincere heart was granted its expression. He steps out of the stream, walks swiftly along the bank by the trees, much faster than Bernard and I are travelling, and there is one last sight of him smiling behind the leaves and I can see him no more and I am afraid that he is gone. The road ahead is straight, Brother Daniel walks ahead at his usual distance. He looks behind and around, he is startled, a rustle of leave
s, a bird in the trees, a boar or a bear in the woods, and then he resumes his solitary march. I sing. I sing a song my Master and I would sing together.

  The road broadens, we are on the approach to a town or a castle. The woods had stretched far, we have seen hardly anyone since day began, a peasant foraging, a messenger on horseback, and in the way ahead, stretching towards a hill, the road is empty apart from Brother Daniel, the familiar brown of his cloak, the tear in it near the shoulders, the bottom part heavy with mud, the package slung over his shoulder; and a figure who is suddenly ahead of him, walking the same distance ahead of Brother Daniel that I am walking behind. In some confusion, Brother Daniel stops. I stop too, with Bernard the donkey. So does Brother Andrew stop up ahead. We stand there, we four figures, pilgrims who have forgotten our destination because we are so fixed on one another. Daniel takes a step forward, as does Andrew in front, as do I behind. Daniel stops, we stop. He walks more quickly to get closer to the one ahead, and I slip away with the donkey from the road into the woods.

  I stop my progress to watch him. When he sees that I am no longer on the road, he suffers an agony of choosing. He runs after Brother Andrew and then he stops, looks in every direction, runs back away from him, looking for me, and then towards Andrew again.

  When the donkey and I come out of the woods and rejoin Andrew, Daniel is that same distance behind.

  He shouts something at us, but the words are lost. I think it is Andrew who sets to running first. We run, even though we first have to pull at Bernard to get him to run along with us, but he takes to it too when he sees there is no danger, that we are not fleeing from enemies – or going to cross water, which he suffers from a dread of doing – but running for the sheer joy of it, his ears rise and fall like wings, and he is faster than we are, which in turn makes us run faster than we thought we knew how. It is not as keen or pure as when I was running down the mountain with Aude my mountain girl, but it is glee all the same, and heart-lifting and joyous, the body sings praise to its Creator when it runs.

  We laugh as we run and laugh harder, despite the price as it pulls at our breath choking it in our throats, when we look behind and see Brother Daniel running too, so awkward, like an insect trying to escape a fire. We run until we may no longer run, until our bodies fall laughing and exhausted to the ground. And when Daniel reaches us, he is laughing too, as he falls beside us. And Bernard comes back to rub at Brother Andrew, for whom he has the greater love, and then grazes where we lie.

  When we are recovered, after we have drunk in the stream, we share our meal for the day. Brother Daniel brings the food to his mouth with his right hand, because of the perpetually closed claw of his left.

  There is brotherhood here, three men and a donkey making the same journey for the same purpose, and it seems foolish to me that we should resist a natural confederacy.

  I cannot remember my exact words to him. This is written in a different place, where it is marvellous to be, but I am under an obligation to chronicle how I arrived here. Each minute might seem to be unconnected to every other, but we are all the grateful fulfillers of God’s love for us, and everything has been written, everything has been said, if only in a whisper, from the mouth of the Lord.

  I said something like,

  Come. Let us walk together. Even if we have discord, we are travelling to the same place. Our journey will be a better one if we make it all together.

  Brother Daniel has finished eating and he considers what I have said. He wipes his mouth with the part of his sleeve that is not dusty and torn. He makes no reply, just picks up his package and resumes his walk.

  He permits us to catch up with him, and then he stops. We reach him, the donkey Bernard knocks him with his nose as if he too is of our mind and desires unity where previously there has been division. We stop. Brother Daniel takes a step back. He intends us to be walking ahead of him. If we are kept in his sight then he may prevent the guiles that he imagines we desire to play on him.

  And so we resume and so we proceed, until night, the company of three followed by the legion of one, whom I have come to hate, his perpetualness, his claw. As we walk I imagine dreadful injuries besetting the body and soul of Brother Daniel.

  We made our camp in the woods by the stream. We had drunk from it, Brother Andrew had splashed in it, Bernard the donkey had pissed in it. Despite the heat of the day, the night was cold. Brother Andrew and I curved into each other as we do on the colder nights, and in this silent touch of each other, in sleepy concord, our friendship was closer to what it had been, as if words can separate more strongly than they bind.

  My brother Andrew took me by the wrist in the night and woke me. He pressed a finger to my lips and another to my ear. I listened to the sound, which was of feet on the grass, and I thought, as he was thinking, of the Ghibellines, the Blind Monk come to steal the source of greater power than he had wisdom or skill to gather on his own. The night was like a blanket that wrapped around us, befolding our senses, and we shivered, and could hardly move our slothful entwined limbs, and it took longer than it would have at daylight to see and to hear that the sound was not made by the Emperor’s wizard or any Ghibelline man, and it was not a beast of the woods, a bear or a wild dog or a snake, or an outlaw or robber approaching with unholy malice. It was Brother Daniel, alone and cold, slipping across the damp earth to join us for our warmth.

  And on the following morning, which is the Feast Day of Saint Neot, who was a friend to the poor, and whose relics were stolen from their rightful place, it all resumed as it had the previous day. Bernard the donkey drank from the stream. We gave our separate orisons. When we walked, we walked separately, Brother Daniel following us, determined and alone.

  We were a day closer to the Pope. The trees, the stream, the clouds, all seemed brighter, the leaves and water more colourful, their species stronger upon our senses. Every point on the earth is an apex of a pyramid filled with the fires of the heavens. As we drew nearer to the holy father, the heavens burned more brightly.

  But we were being followed. This was not the fancy of night, when an insect scratching on a blade of grass becomes a beast in the woods preparing to strike, when lonely Daniel becomes the Emperor’s Blind Monk supported by a company of desperate men, when a thought of loneliness, a regret of the passed day, the memory of Aude, becomes a desolating engine powerful enough to dislodge the Almighty One from his throne.

  Maybe, I said to Brother Andrew, this is the sickness that ails the lord Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, which I could find no herb to remedy. He is one of the afflicted, who is besieged throughout the day by the thoughts that the Devil whispers to us at night when our defences are so weak.

  He did not answer. He is not accustomed to answer me, and he was listening to the sounds behind us on our path. He stayed the progress of Bernard with a hand to his halter. Brother Daniel saw us stop, so he stopped.

  As did our pursuers. We saw their movement more than we saw their shapes, to and fro behind trees by the side of the path behind Brother Daniel.

  In our shared peril, we talked again. We discussed our situation without sentiment or pride. There was no discord. If these were pilgrims or merchants whose path happened to coincide with ours, they would not have walked when we walked, stopped when we stopped. We walked on some more until the road had curved, whereupon we drove Bernard complaining into the brambles and hid in the leaves, the stream murmuring beside us, until Daniel had reached the spot on his path which we were hiding beside, and then we gripped him and pulled him towards our hiding place.

  He fought against us, he wrapped his arms around his Book, we held on to him. Quickly, because now that we were all out of sight, our pursuers were advancing more swiftly towards us, and they could be seen now, and counted, five of them, in remnants of armour, we strove to reassure him that we were not the ambushers, murder and theft were far from our minds, we were in the same situation as he, the danger was behind us, not before him.

  We must leave the road,
I said. Cross the stream, find a different path to follow. Whoever these men are, they do not intend us good.

  Daniel had always been a quick pupil, and a virtuous one. If he had not, our Master would not have entrusted him with such a precious burden; if he had not, he would not have outlasted, perhaps outlived, Brother Luke. Blessed is the man who resists temptation, for when he has been proved he shall receive the crown of life that God has promised to those that love him. He understood my words and their meaning. He joined us in the thicket as we drove Bernard before us.

  Quietly! we exhorted one another, as his hooves dragged in the earth, as he endeavoured to double his weight, to triple it against us, as we heaved him towards the bank of the stream. Our pursuers called out to us, we drove harder at the donkey, who, in his hatred of water, held fast.

  His ears were flat back on his head, his eyes wide and long, his hind legs kicking out. I went ahead of him, pulling him by the halter; our pursuers, in confidence, had stopped on the path to watch us.

  This is what happened, this is how it happened, we drove harder, Bernard’s hooves slid down the leafy slope and Bernard makes a noise I have never heard from him before, that sounds more like a bird’s expulsion than a donkey’s, and he kicks out with his hind legs and jumps forward with his front legs, and it looks as if he is going to fall, and his eyes open wider, his ears drop back over his skull, but he does not fall over, it is the prelude to running. I try to take hold of his neck but my hands slide back over the coarse hair that cuts into my skin like a thousand needles, so I try to hold him back by gripping on to the packages he bears and I do gain a hold of those, and hug them, but he keeps going, and there is a moment when my feet are off the ground, but I dig in to the ground and hug them even more tightly, and the packages slide away from their straps and drop around me as I fall backwards, and Bernard the donkey, unencumbered, leaps over the stream, bank to bank, without being touched by any of the hateful water, and climbs over the other bank, half-falls, gathers himself, drives through the trees and runs, faster, away.