The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  Everyone agreed that this must be the mermaid’s fault and they told the priest to do something. So the priest went with the man to where the hair was buried. He took a holy candle with him which kept on going out in the wind and he had a bottle of holy water to sprinkle over the sand. In his spidery handwriting he had copied three paternosters onto a scrap of vellum and he tucked these under the black stone while reciting a prayer to protect them all from harm.

  After that things were quiet again for a while, but it was as if a lid had been clamped down on a pot that was bound to boil over sooner or later. The mermaid had disturbed the pattern of life in the village and people waited with growing apprehension for what might follow.

  The man who had stroked her rough skin had a dream in which she slithered over his body like a huge eel and wrapped her tail tight around his legs. He was crying when he woke up. He kept on stumbling against her image in a corner of his mind. Whenever he went out with his boat he would hope to find her glistening among the fish he had caught in his nets. He began to travel farther and farther from the shore, searching for her.

  4

  The old fisherman stopped mending his nets. His hands were stiff and painful and he laid them side by side on his lap, the fingers bunched together like the feet of dead birds.

  For as long as he kept singing he was cocooned in images: he was out at sea among the rolling waves of a storm, the backs of whales and silver fishes breaking through the surface of the water all around him. A catch of living things was thrashing at his feet in the boat, struggling for breath. But then as soon as his voice was silent, he was only here, frail in the sunshine and thinking about his daughter Sally.

  She was not yet fifteen but already pregnant with her first child. The old fisherman was afraid that the birth might kill her and with that thought he realized he could not bear to lose her. She was what connected him to the village and to the land itself and if she was gone he would be homeless.

  Every night he dreamed of his fear. He saw her as a child giving birth to a child much bigger than she was. He saw her body split open like a ripe seedpod and a mass of maggot babies crawling over her, eating her flesh until there was nothing left but the clean white bones. He told no one of these dreams because that would only make them more solid and more dangerous.

  Sometimes in the morning he would wake to imagine finding her beside his bed, a tiny moonfaced child who had just learned to walk, staring at him with all the tenderness and seriousness of the very young.

  He rarely went out to sea these days, but when he did, Sally was the one who waited for his return. She would stand on the beach pulling at the thread which connected them as if he were a fish on a line.

  Her husband was also uneasy about what was happening to her; the skin of her swollen belly luminous and blue, so that you could see every detail of the vast creature inhabiting her.

  He gave her oily herrings to eat, saying the oil would help the baby slip out. He lay awake at night, watching her in the moonlight, her face flickering with shifting emotions, now peaceful, now in despair.

  The straw of the mattress rustled as she moved and turned. She often talked in her sleep, although he could never understand what she was saying. He stroked her damp skin and as he did so she sometimes became the mermaid lying next to him, rough and cold and smiling, with hair that wrapped itself around his fingers.

  On the morning when the waters broke and soaked into the straw they fetched the woman who knew how to deliver babies. She brought a flask of water that had been used to wash the hands of a murderer, ground pepper to help with the contractions, and a greasy salve smelling of rancid butter to rub over the tight belly.

  The yellow sunlight flickered on the walls of the room and the bed creaked when the girl was thrown sideways with the first spasm of pain.

  “You have to let go,” the midwife said. “It will be easier once you have let go.”

  She unplaited Sally’s flat hair and spread it loose across her shoulders. She opened the lid of a wooden chest and took out the few clothes and the sheepskin rug it contained, scattering them over the floor. She opened the door of a cupboard and removed a bundle of knotted ropes that had been left there, carefully undoing the knots and laying the pieces in straight lines. The spasms continued and became more violent than ever.

  Sally’s husband was sitting in the room next door, close to the smoking fire, gutting herrings and rubbing them with salt. When he heard his wife screaming he sharpened his blade and continued with his work.

  Her father was down by the shore but he heard the screams as well. They echoed in his head like the cries of seabirds.

  He rose slowly to his feet and walked to the church. Pushing the door open, he went to stand in front of the painting of Margaret of Antioch, the saint who is able to help women in labor.

  The painting was done on wood in dark rich colors. It was divided into six squares, and each square showed a stage of the saint’s life. In the first square Margaret was cast out of her house by her cruel father and you could see her walking into the hills with her head bowed. In the second square the Roman Patriarch, whose name the fisherman could not remember, tried to rape her, but she resisted him. In the third square she was hung on a rack that was similar to the racks used in the village for drying fish. Two soldiers were scraping at her body with an iron hook so that the bones were revealed, and the blood fell from her like red water. Next she was put into prison and the bars of her cage were all around her.

  While she was in prison the Devil appeared in the form of a green dragon and with its hot breath it sucked the saint into its mouth. You could see her standing with bare feet on the soft red tongue, the row of teeth hanging down above her like icicles around the eaves of a house. But now that she was inside the body of the dragon she held up an iron cross and spoke the name of God. The dragon exploded and she was delivered safely back into the world and out of danger.

  The old fisherman stood there in the dim light of the church, gazing at the white face of the saint, at her gold halo like the sun at harvest time, at the dragon’s scaly skin, the teeth, the blood. And he began to sing the story of what was happening. He sang the saint out of the sorrow of leaving home, out of the fear of rape. He gave her courage when the metal hook bit into her flesh. He comforted her in the loneliness of the prison and he prayed for her when she was trapped inside the dragon’s body until he could feel her breaking through and escaping.

  When the story was completed he told the saint that if his daughter survived he would show his thanks by setting out as a pilgrim to Jerusalem. He would go in a boat across the North Sea and then he would walk to Venice, where a ship could take him to the port of Jaffa. From there he knew it was not far to the Holy City. If he died on the way he would accept that the saint was exchanging his life for his daughter’s.

  He returned to the house and went to sit by the fire next to his son-in-law. The noise had subsided and everything was poised in the quiet of anticipation. The midwife appeared with blood on her clothes and said the two men could enter the bedroom. There they found Sally as limp as a fish with a little baby suckling at her breast.

  Her father fulfilled the vow he had made to Saint Margaret. He left early one morning and his boat faded from sight as it approached the horizon.

  Before he went he explained to Sally what it was that he had to do. She did not disagree with him or try to make him stay, but as soon as he had gone she was as desolate as a child for whom the present moment has no end.

  Her husband spent more and more time out at sea searching for the mermaid, coming back with his nets empty. Finally he did not come back at all for several days. Sally found him washed up by the tide, naked and cold, not far from the black stone under which the lock of hair was buried.

  5

  A group of people from the village were running to the house of the woman who saw devils. Sally was there with them and so was the shoemaker and his wife, the red-haired girl, the man who could remember
the Great Pestilence and several others whose faces were turned from me.

  They came to a halt in front of an open door, jostling awkwardly against each other like sheep in a pen.

  “We must do something!” said one voice and everyone waited to be told what was to be done.

  “She has bitten her husband, who is such a gentle man!” said another voice, urgent with indignation. “She has tried to murder her new baby! She is tearing at her own flesh and pulling out her hair! She can see thousands of devils, the room is thick with them!”

  Even though there was no wind the door was swinging backwards and forwards on its hinges and the creaking sound it made was like a warning. Only a few of the people gathered outside were brave enough to cross the threshold into the kitchen, which smelled of wood smoke and through into the bedroom, where the air was sour and oppressive.

  A piece of leather had been hung across the window. It flapped like the wings of Satan himself, sitting there hunched and terrible, watching what was going on.

  The shoemaker’s wife stepped forward and unhooked the leather from the nails holding it in place. At once a stream of pale light spread out over the walls and ceiling and over the rushes on the floor.

  The woman’s two youngest children were huddled silent in a corner of the room with their arms wrapped tightly around each other and their eyes wide. Her husband was beside the door, four red scratches running down his cheek and a thin trickle of blood dripping from his ear where he had been bitten. The baby was in a cradle and appeared to be asleep.

  The woman was lying on the big four-poster bed, but the moment the covering was removed from the window she hid herself under the blanket so that she was reduced to nothing more than the heaving of the breath in her body. You could hear her breathing too, a rasping hissing sound like the blacksmith’s bellows.

  Everyone stared at the bed with its mound of hidden life. It was a very old bed that had been in the family for generations. The four carved oak posts were polished by the many hands that had grasped them. A jumble of names, dates and initials had been carved into the slab of wood that was the headboard, and you could also distinguish the shape of a heart pierced by an arrow and a curious prancing creature with a spike growing out of its head that must have represented a unicorn. The woman’s mother had kept a record of the arrival of her numerous babies with a little line for each one and the line crossed out with a slash of the knife if that baby died. Her daughter had considered marking the birth of her babies in the same way but she couldn’t bear the idea of crossing through the lines. Instead she had simply carved her own intial, M for Mary, and next to it another M for her husband Michael.

  She remained quite still under the scratching weight of the blanket that covered her. Her naked body felt huge and hollow. Her breasts tingled with the milk she was carrying and she could smell the cloying sweetness leaking from her swollen nipples. She remembered again how sad and lonely she had suddenly felt when this last baby slipped out of her womb and into the world.

  It must be like that when you die, she thought, and the soul has to take its leave of the body. For three days it hovers close and then it must go and never return. That is when your body begins to change and turns into nothing more than a corpse needing to be buried under the ground. That was when the devils had come to her, three days after the baby’s birth, while she was feeling like an empty and abandoned shell.

  It was her husband Michael who had seen the devils first. He told her how they were crawling all over her, their mouths filled with flames, their teeth stained with blood, their goat-penises as sharp as spears. She could hear him explaining what he had seen to the people who were gathered in the room now. His voice was clear and authoritative and she could imagine the horror on everyone’s face.

  From within the hot darkness, she began to tremble and cry out as if in pain.

  “Look, she is fighting with the devils!” said Michael, and then he began to shout, “We must save her! We must tie her down!”

  She wanted to escape but it was not possible. Someone grabbed her by the shoulders and it felt as if someone else was sitting on her head. Her hands were extracted from under the blanket and tied together at the wrists before being attached by another cord to the bedpost. Her feet were exposed and were also bound and tied. Only then were they ready to pull back the covering from her face.

  They were all staring at her. “You are safe now,” said Michael in his gentle voice and he stroked her hair with his fingers. With all her strength she twisted around and tried to bite him, her teeth lightly grazing his skin. He smiled as he withdrew his hand, but when she looked at him all that she could see was his savagery and his cruelty. She realized then that she was more afraid of him than any number of devils.

  It was decided that someone must stay with her to keep watch, and the shoemaker’s wife said she would be glad to. They gave her a big chair to sit in and she pulled it close to the bed. Once the others had gone and the room was quiet the shoemaker’s wife made Mary more comfortable, loosening the ropes that were too tight on her wrists and putting a feather bolster behind her back. Then she began to talk.

  She told Mary that when she gave birth to a baby with the head of a monstrous fish people said that this was the Devil as well and they blamed it on the mermaid. “But I loved him all the same,” she said, “and so did my husband. He died on the day he was born and we had to bury him outside the churchyard, so now we don’t know where he is.”

  Mary smiled. She was watching particles of dust floating in the beam of sunlight that came in through the window. Each one was a gleaming speck of powdered gold. “They look like angels,” she thought to herself. “An army of bright angels has come to drive away the devils.”

  6

  The shoemaker and his wife were sitting side by side in another room in this village that has become a sanctuary for my restless thoughts.

  He was quite a small man. His eyes and his hair were gray. The skin of his face was as pale as parchment and stretched so tight across the bones of his skull that only when you looked carefully could you see the tracery of thin lines showing his age.

  His wife was the same height and with a strong body, although her hands and feet were surprisingly delicate. She had pendulous breasts and a softness of skin and hair that had increased over the years. Her eyes were the same color as her husband’s but with a dark rim around the iris and the pupils were as sensitive as a cat’s, expanding and contracting at the slightest change of light.

  The physical closeness between these two was apparent in everything they did: the slightest look, the touch of a hand, it was all part of a ritual which reminded them of the sexual act. They had been married for a long time and yet they both often remembered the first night they spent in each other’s arms, and how their bodies had joined with such ease, the pleasure rising and overflowing and leaving them content.

  They had made love in open fields and under the shelter of trees, in darkness and daylight, in winter and summer. They had made love in spite of the fact that a new baby was on the edge of being born or that her menstrual blood was mixing with his seed. The slow process of growing old had hardly diminished the intensity of their desire.

  But then everything changed. The shoemaker began to go blind. He noticed it first when he was standing in the church in front of the row of brightly painted alabaster figures crowded along one wall. He realized with a shock that he was unable to tell if that was a dragon crushed under the heel of Saint Michael or a gold key gripped in the hand of Saint Peter. He turned to gaze at the stained-glass window but all he could see was a shifting pattern of color in which there was no form: no angels or devils, no Heaven or Hell. It must be the dim light he told himself, anyone could be confused by it.

  Soon the darkness was growing thicker, so that he dreaded opening his eyes in the morning for fear of what else he would not be able to see. And when his wife gave birth to the baby with the head of a monstrous fish, he took the creature in his ar
ms but was spared the shock of its deformity and only guessed that it was dead because it was cold. They buried it beyond the boundary of the churchyard, and as he struggled to see the shape of a wooden box being lowered into the unforgiving earth, he knew that something must be done.

  “Look at my eyes!” he said to his wife as they made their way back along the village street. “Look at them! What is wrong with them?”

  She stopped and pulled his head towards her with firm hands. She put her face close to his so that her warm breath flowed over his skin. She said, “It’s as if milk has been spilt into them. Your eyes are covered with a layer of curdled milk.”

  He had no wish to go to a doctor who would only suggest cutting and bleeding, so he went instead to the woman who could use charms and herbs.

  She made a mixture out of wild honey and fox fat and the marrow from a roe deer. She sang over it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as she rubbed it sticky onto his closed eyelids. But it did no good.

  He went to the priest. The priest listened quietly and said the best thing to do was to buy an eye made from wax and take it to the church, leaving it in front of the statue of Saint Clare who could always be trusted to help with such afflictions.

  So the shoemaker bought himself two eyes, smooth unblinking things as big as hens’ eggs. He kissed them carefully and presented them to the saint.

  But his sight only got worse. There was a dark crack opening across the left eye now, so that he saw a remnant of the world torn through the middle as if it had been slashed with a sharp knife. A shadow was creeping around the edge of his vision as well, like the sky before the eruption of a thunderstorm.