The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  Two brothers were shackled together with a chain around their necks, having come from a distant city to do penance for some terrible crime. They had covered the last stretch of the journey on their knees and now they sat side by side, nursing their torn skin and their bruises and muttering a stream of urgent prayer.

  A woman whose menstrual blood had not stopped pouring from her for more than a year was standing waist-deep in the river, her skirts pulled up and the water around her stained red.

  A man who was said to be as violent as he was mad, had been strapped to a plank of wood and carried to the shrine in a bullock cart. Now he and the plank that held him were propped against a tree and he was staring open-mouthed at the casket as if he saw within it the possibility of reason and escape.

  But it was the hermit whom the priest was seeking and he found him easily enough. His home was a hole cut into the riverbank and he was sitting beside it, basking in the sunshine.

  The hermit was filthy. His cloak was stiff with dirt and so was his long beard and his straggling hair. His skin was cracked and broken and he had rotten teeth. He was talking to himself in a nasal, high-pitched voice while scratching and twitching and searching his body for vermin. He smelt of excrement.

  The priest approached in trepidation.

  “Aha!” said the hermit. “I see a man of God!” and with that he began to laugh, but the laughing made him cough and the coughing made him spit.

  “I have come for guidance,” said the priest humbly.

  “Of course you have,” replied the hermit, “and I have it here for you.” He rummaged under his cloak until he had found what he was searching for and with a magician’s flourish he produced a small dried hand, severed at the wrist.

  “This,” he said, waving the hand from side to side, “this is the hand of the blessed anchorite Saint Anthony who lived alone in the desert of Sinai. Here is your guidance.” And he presented it to the priest.

  The priest took the hand. It was hard and smooth and very reptilian. It looked as though it would be quite capable of hopping across the hot sand, pausing to eat, scurrying into a hole for safety. The fingers and the thumb were clasped quietly together, giving the impression that the whole thing was asleep.

  “Thank you,” said the priest, at a loss for words.

  “My pleasure,” said the hermit, smiling to reveal the stumps of his teeth. “I was with the saint in a cave for many years. His lion was there as well and it slept beside me, as warm as a woman. I took the hand as a remembrance.

  “What else can I say?” said the hermit. “Bones,” he replied almost to himself. “Collect them. As many as you can find. With or without the skin. I had a basket filled with the fingers of Holy Innocents but I lost them in a storm at sea. And I had all the teeth of John the Baptist, but they went as well. At least I got Saint Anselm’s thigh bone and brought it here. When the shoemaker’s wife threw it into the river they said it was gone forever but I searched for it and found it caught in a branch. It’s safely back in its casket and now the river water performs miracles as well. It’s very good. It cures anything from nostalgia to the sweating sickness. I sell it in bottles.”

  Suddenly the hermit lunged forward and grabbed the priest’s hand, pressing his sharp nails into the palm. It was an act of such violence and intimacy that the priest was horrified. He wrenched himself free and ran towards the safety of the forest, chased by the hermit’s high-pitched laughter.

  He ran until he was exhausted and then he lay down among last year’s bracken while the trees whispered over his head. He noticed that he was still holding the saint’s hand in his own. It was as dry as old bread with hardly any weight to it. He put it in his pocket.

  And that was all. On the following morning he set off back home, but I was no longer with him. I had already returned to the village under the cover of darkness.

  14

  While the priest was making his slow way back through the forest, Mary, the woman who saw devils, was almost killed by her husband. Some people in the village said it was the priest who saved her, but the priest said it was Saint Anthony’s miracle and not his.

  I remember the first time that I caught a glimpse of Mary’s husband. He was there beside her in the room with the devils and although his face was turned from me I could feel the rage inside him, like a rat in a box. I tried to warn Mary, to tell her what would happen next and how she must escape quickly, but she didn’t hear me.

  She had changed a great deal since the day when she was tied down on the big bed with the manacles chafing at her wrists. She had seen the air around her thick with golden floating angels, and after that there were angels everywhere. They rose and fell within the shafts of light among the trees. They surged towards her in the mist that rolled in from the sea. They sang to her, they talked to her, they told her their secrets.

  Sometimes she would look up from whatever she was doing and one of them would be gazing at her solemnly from across the room. They were all similar in the way that they were neither young nor old, neither male nor female, but she learnt to recognize some of them and they told her their names. Gabriel and Ezekiel were her favorites. They smelled of honey and burnt cedar wood.

  The angels formed a ring of protection around her. They encapsulated her in a world of her own where she was no longer burdened by sadness.

  Before she had always resented the loneliness of her childhood, the unhappiness of her marriage, the death of three of her children and the arrival of the devils who had turned her into nothing more than a thing to be stared at and pitied. But now she accepted it all. She even accepted her husband and she was no longer afraid of him in the way that she had been.

  She continued with the usual pattern of her life, but her character had changed. She never stopped smiling a secretive, private smile and she would often pause to listen to words that no one else could hear. Then she would nod her head in agreement and even laugh out loud so that her shoulders shook and tears came to her eyes.

  She no longer wanted to sleep in the big family bed with its heart and its unicorn, its dead and living children, its forgotten lovers. Instead she went into the barn and made a nest for herself in the hay. She enjoyed hearing the breathing of the cow and the rustle of rats and mice as they raced across the high roofbeam or over the floor. An owl lived in the barn as well but it flew on such silent wings that it never disturbed her.

  Her husband watched her. He followed her wherever she went and while she was sleeping in the hay he would take a lantern and come to stare at her there.

  He was full of strange fancies. “You are the Angel of Death,” he said to his wife. “And I am Michael, who stands at the gate and weighs the souls. Some of them are yours and some are mine. We must fight.”

  Mary, his wife, looked away and said nothing.

  “You pretend to be a saint,” he said, blocking his body in front of her so that she was trapped in a corner. “But I have the power to see what lies inside of you. I can see the filthy snakes in your belly.”

  The shoemaker’s wife overheard him. “You must do something,” she said to Mary.

  “But there is nothing to be done,” Mary replied.

  One night while she was lying in the barn, her husband came as usual to stare at her. And when she sighed and smiled in her sleep he took her neck in both his hands and began to shake her violently from side to side. He was screaming.

  Mary opened her eyes and saw his wild mad face close to hers. “Either I am going to live or I am going to die,” she thought to herself.

  Her body was limp in his hands. He knocked her head against a wooden partition, tightening his grip around her throat. She felt tired and empty but unafraid. There was a roaring sound inside her skull getting louder and louder.

  In the same instant when the balance seemed to have tipped irrevocably against her, she caught sight of a very old man standing just behind her husband.

  He was not one of her familiar angels, he was much too old for that; but nei
ther was he a devil. He had a long white beard and eyes that were so unnaturally bright it looked as though stars were shining through them. His skin was as dark as a chestnut and it was hard and scaly and wrinkled, like the skin of a lizard.

  “Perhaps he is an Ethiopian,” thought Mary, who had never seen anyone with a skin of this color before. “Or one of the Three Kings. The black one who brought gold.”

  The old man’s head was tilted to one side like a thrush listening for the movement of worms under the ground. Then with a sudden ferocity that didn’t belong to his extreme age, one of his hands shot out and grabbed Michael by the shoulders. This hand was a small and compact thing which seemed independent of the body that owned it. It swooped down hard and tight with the energy of a waterbird diving for fish.

  Mary felt the hold on her throat softening and she knew with a vague sense of surprise that she was going to live. She lost consciousness and tumbled into a quiet darkness that welcomed her but did not threaten to keep her for too long.

  She woke to find that she was back in the family bed with the priest sitting beside her. At first she thought he was the angel Ezekiel or perhaps the angel Zacharias, the two of them could be so easily confused. But angels always wore white and had the golden dish of a halo above their heads. This man was dressed in a black robe and she recognized the priest.

  “Are you in much pain?” he asked.

  Mary put her hands to her throat, which was bruised and swollen. She ran the tips of her fingers around the sockets of her eyes and they felt hot and soft. “No,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with me. But where is Michael, my husband? He was here.”

  The priest told her that as he walked into the village he had seen Michael with his legs in the stocks. They were new stocks and they had been made in such a way that a person’s legs were hoisted quite high so that it was difficult to move and impossible to sit up. It would be very uncomfortable in the rain, but the weather was dry.

  Michael was left there for several days. People made sure that he had water to drink and they gave him a little food. They had seen the bruises on Mary’s throat and the dark rings around her eyes and so they guessed what must have happened.

  The priest looked after Mary until he was sure she was strong again. He told her about his visit to the hermit and showed her Saint Anthony’s hand, which he kept safe in his pocket. She noticed how hard and dark the skin was and how it was covered with a patina of thin lines like a spider’s web.

  She thanked the priest for what he had done, but he said he had not really done anything, he had come after it was all over. He gave her the hand as a present and she was glad to have it. She used to place it on her lap and stroke it as if it were a cat. She felt sure it would protect her from any further harm.

  15

  Once the shoemaker’s madness had passed, a different level of closeness developed between him and his wife. He would stare at the intimacy of her face and in the lines around her mouth and eyes and across her forehead he could understand and accept that he was growing old. The whiteness that was creeping over her soft hair delighted him for its unexpected beauty. The pleasure he took from the sexual act was quieter and yet more profound, it was like dying, but without the fear.

  The two of them went walking hand in hand. They followed the raised path that separated the land from the sea farther up the coast. They climbed among the high sand dunes that were gathered there in great rolling waves, breaking and falling in silence and immobility.

  They settled themselves in a sheltered hollow on the side of a steep bank from where they could look out over the North Sea. Striped dragonflies were whirring sleepily in the air. The water was a uniform and almost transparent gray with the shadows of clouds shifting across it. They saw the dark back of a whale emerging briefly in the distance like a newborn island.

  “The whale is the largest of God’s creatures,” said the shoemaker, picking up a handful of fine sand and letting it run silky between his fingers.

  “Yes,” said his wife, and although they didn’t say anything more they were both thinking about the occasion when a whale was brought ashore in a storm. It lay helpless and gasping on its side and everyone from the village gathered around to watch it with a mixture of fear and pity. And impatience as well, because they were all hungry and they would hack it to pieces and eat it as soon as it was dead.

  The shoemaker’s wife remembered how the whale’s eyes were brown and sad and could have belonged to a cow. The shoemaker saw again the pink and ragged scar that cut across its body close to the tail, and he wondered if it was the same creature that capsized the old fisherman’s boat so that he was left clinging to its useless shell.

  A tuft of coarse grass was growing close to where they were sitting. The shoemaker saw a glittering object lodged among the sharp leaves, but when he reached out to grasp it something stabbed him or bit him and with the sudden rush of pain he withdrew his hand.

  “What was that?” asked his wife.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, sucking the palm where the hurt lay.

  His wife parted the grasses, and nestling among them she found a gray worm with a round black shiny head like a little seed. “It must have been this,” she said, picking the worm up between her finger and thumb and throwing it away.

  She examined her husband’s hand. There was a tiny puncture mark and a drop of blood, but nothing else. “Does it still hurt?” she asked.

  But her husband was lost in thought. He stared out at the sea. “It will pass,” he said and smiled at her. There was a coating of sweat on his upper lip and his face looked suddenly exhausted.

  They walked home slowly, the shoemaker leaning against his wife’s shoulder and concentrating on each step he took. Neither of them spoke.

  That night he became ill. His wife wished she had not thrown away the worm because if she had kept it she could show it to the woman who knew about such things and she might have helped with a cure. A gray worm with a black head had bitten her husband, and that fact could not be undone. You could never tell where danger was coming from or who it was going to strike next.

  The shoemaker talked continuously while the fever raged through him and his body was hot and wet. His wife did her best to follow the racing of his mind. “The clock,” he said, and she realized he was referring to the big clock they had seen on the tower of the cathedral. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live near a clock. That long metal chain pulling down the minutes and the hours, step by step, as if it were measuring the length of life itself. I watched the clock. I had never seen such a strange thing before.”

  “I was there too,” said his wife. “I went there with you to the city. We watched the clock together.” But her husband did not seem to hear her, or at least he made no sign that he did.

  “When the king of France died in battle,” he said, speaking more quickly now with the heat racing over the surface of his body like a fire spreading across a field of dry corn, “they boiled him. In a pot. They buried his cooked flesh there where he had fallen with an arrow through his heart. But they put his clean bones in a box and sent them to his wife. So that she could have them. And remember him by them. Her king.

  “But I don’t want to be boiled in a pot. Ask the priest to bury me. Inside the church. I would like that. Under the floor. Close to everyone I know. Listening to you all talking together. Hearing the approach of your feet. Knowing that you think of me when you look down and see my name written on a big flagstone.”

  The shoemaker’s wife tried to calm her husband. She held him in her arms, glad for the familiar smell of him.

  The shoemaker talked in his fever about his blindness. “I was afraid when the scales fell away from my eyes,” he said. “I felt as if I had been flayed alive, the skin peeled from my body. I had no protection. I was so cold! I am so cold now as well!”

  His wife held him while his body burned.

  He talked of his madness and how his tears would not stop falling. “Hold me! Please ho
ld me!” he said with desperation in his voice because he could not feel the pressure of her embrace even though she held him with all her strength.

  By the morning he was quite peaceful. The fever had left him and his body seemed to have shrunk to half its size. He kept running a hand across his face to reassure himself of his own existence.

  “Do I look strange?” he asked his wife.

  “No,” she replied, but this was not true. He looked as if he had seen a ghost and was seeing it still.

  Shortly afterwards a storm passed right through him, shaking him with such a force that his wife thought it would kill him in the way that a bolt of lightning can kill a man.

  He never spoke again, although he often hummed a particular tune, over and over, very softly.

  He couldn’t dress himself or feed himself or look after any of his basic needs, and so his wife did it all for him. Her children had grown up and he had become her new child. She loved him with the same patient love she had felt for him from their first meeting.

  Throughout the weeks that followed he would sit in front of the fire watching the flames. He hardly ever slept and so his wife kept the fire burning during the night as well.

  When his trousers were soiled she would change them, endlessly busy with the task of washing and drying and coaxing him to eat small morsels of food. He followed her with his eyes and fretted the moment she was out of his sight.

  Sometimes in the evening she would sit next to him by the fire and he would lay his head in her lap and suckle from her dry breast.

  When it was obvious that he was close to dying she asked the priest to come. She explained that her husband must be buried under one of the heavy stones on the floor of the church. That was his wish. “He doesn’t want to be shut outside in the rain and the cold,” she said.

  The priest agreed even though there had been a terrible stink of corpses in the church during the last hot summer and whenever possible he persuaded people that it was better to be buried outside in the graveyard.