The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  He had brought a book with him called The Art or Craft of Dying Well and he showed it to the shoemaker’s wife. It contained illustrations of the stages of death: you could see the dying man in his bed being visited by grieving members of his family, by devils who reminded him of his sins and threatened him with damnation and by angels who reassured him with the promise of eternal life. The last picture in the book was of the soul escaping from the body and rising towards the ceiling of the room. The shoemaker’s wife looked at this image carefully and then held it in front of her husband’s face so that he could look at it as well.

  “Death is a going out of prison and an ending of exile,” said the priest.

  She nodded her head in agreement but kept her eyes fixed on her husband. “He will miss me,” she said. “I don’t think he minds dying, but he will miss me. And I will miss him.”

  The priest gave the shoemaker a crucifix to hold and he held it tight while gazing at his wife with tenderness and longing. He seemed to be about to speak, but he died without saying anything. His wife kissed his eyes closed just as before she had kissed them open.

  After the priest had gone she sat there next to her husband. She thought about the song she had heard him humming to himself during these last weeks. It was a dirge that people sang during the three days of waiting before a burial takes place. It told how the soul needs to go on a journey over an expanse of waste land. This land is covered with thorny bushes, but if the person has been generous to the poor and has given them the gift of shoes during his lifetime, then he can now have shoes to protect his feet.

  He travels until he reaches the Ship of Death, the flames pouring from its sides, but if he has given the gift of milk and meat to the poor during his life, then the flames won’t hurt him.

  The shoemaker’s wife sang for her husband and as she did so she could see him setting out across a wide, flat land on which the cruel bushes were growing. She saw him putting on a pair of soft shoes that he had made himself.

  Then the Ship of Death reared up before her eyes. She held her breath as she watched her husband pass quite close to it, but he was not hurt in any way. She thought she saw someone coming forward to meet him and welcome him, but she could not be sure. She wished that he might turn his head one last time to say goodbye, but he did not.

  Several men from the village lifted up one of the big yellow stones on the floor of the church and dug a deep hole beneath it. The coffin was lowered in and covered over. The shoemaker’s wife went to the church every day to kneel on the stone. She imagined her husband looking up at her from where he lay. She stroked the letters of his name.

  And then one night when she was sleeping and missing the warmth of his body even as she slept, he spoke to her in a dream. “You must go to Jerusalem,” he said. “The priest and two others will be going as well. I will come with you for some of the way, until you can manage on your own.”

  She went to the priest as soon as it was light to tell him what she had learned. She liked the idea of traveling to a strange country.

  16

  Autumn, winter, spring and summer. A year had passed, the seasons had come full circle and now it was September again with a low sun casting long shadows across the land.

  Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

  Then the oldest inhabitant, a man who usually never bothered to speak a word to anyone, suddenly began to talk and talk with the urgent inspiration of a prophet.

  “It began just like this,” he said, his voice sticky with age, his sunken eyes flickering as they searched for what they were looking for, settling on distant remembered images as a fly settles on meat.

  “The Great Pestilence began just like this, but we didn’t know what was coming because it had never happened before. The geese flew off too soon. The trees had too much fruit. Then the cold came. Birds dropped frozen from the sky. Fish died, animals died, people died in their beds. The sea close to the shore was covered with ice, cracking and splitting with the waves and the movement of the tides.

  “Winter passed but there was no spring at the end of it. Storms flooded the land, tore up trees, smashed boats and houses. We planted seeds but they never sprouted. We had no crops, nothing to live on.

  “The sun remained hidden behind a thick gray curtain which hardly let in any light. A big ship drifted into the bay and was caught on a sandbank, tipped helplessly on one side. Some of us managed to get to it in a boat and we found the deck covered with the bodies of dead men, blotched and swollen with some sickness.

  “But one man was still alive. He told us how he had traveled through France and Italy and had seen terrible things. A thick stinking mist was spreading over the land, killing everything it covered. A pillar of fire was burning above the Pope’s palace in Avignon. Clouds of locusts were falling dead in the fields, ankle deep. Earthquakes swallowed whole villages. Some women saw a river of blood surging towards them. They ran from it screaming and others joined them until there was a huge crowd. They reached the cliffs by the sea but they didn’t stop and they were all broken on the rocks beneath or drowned.

  “And now,” said the old man, “I can feel it coming back as it was before. We didn’t learn and we are being punished again. There is no hope. It will be the end of everything.”

  When he had finished speaking he made a dark rasping sound like a raven. He looked like a raven as well, with his black cloak, his wicked flickering eyes, his dangerous mouth.

  He died shortly afterwards. The priest sprinkled a great deal of holy water over the shriveled corpse and he was buried quickly with no family or friends to weep over him.

  People began to see signs everywhere. A robin was found lying dead on the altar of the church and no one had the courage to remove its tiny frozen body. The mermaid could be heard singing under the icebound sand and her voice was sour and threatening.

  At the convent one of the nuns began to mew like a cat. The sound took possession of her and even when she was beaten with a stick she could not be silent. The contagion spread among the other nuns for a while so that they all mewed and cried together in one piteous chorus, but then it stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  The cold became so intense that people could hardly speak, hardly move. They sat in a hibernating silence and grew thin.

  A few men from the village gathered enough energy to go to the priest to ask him what was the cause of this punishment and what could be done to lift it. But although before he had always had some words of prayer or explanation, he was now at a loss. He sat in bed with his shoulders hunched and a cat sleeping across his knees. The room was hardly more protected than the world outside and it had no fire burning in the grate.

  The priest didn’t bother to look up when the men entered and he made no attempt to answer their questions. “I want to go, but I don’t know the way,” he kept saying to himself and when they shook him and asked him to explain what he meant, he said they should go to Sally, she might know the way because she had swallowed the map.

  The men could not understand what the priest was talking about, but nevertheless they struggled through the snow to where Sally was living with the red-haired girl and the child.

  They stumped into the kitchen and stood there, shifting their feet, their heads lowered like cattle, their breath steaming.

  When Sally appeared pale and subdued from the other room, they crowded around her. She felt the danger in their presence. She felt how they might close in and trample her to the ground.

  “You have to do something,” said on
e of the men and the others muttered in agreement. “The priest said you knew the way to save us. He said you can do something because you have eaten the map. You are our only hope.” And again there was a muttering and a sense of threat growing stronger.

  “I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know what the priest thinks I can do,” said Sally, “but I will try.” With that she wrapped herself in a heavy cloak and with a blanket around her shoulders she went out of the house, walking in the direction of the sea.

  When she got within sight of it the wind was so fierce she could hardly breathe and she had to lean forward against it just to keep herself upright. Great swathes of sand were being blown along the beach and the sharp grains bit into her exposed skin and stung her eyes.

  She stood and stared towards the line of the horizon, searching for something that would offer reassurance and comfort. Far away, within that uncertain distance, she seemed to see a whole crowd of human figures waving and calling to her. There was her mother and her father and so many others she had lost and missed over the years and there finally was her husband, beckoning for her to come back into the warmth of his arms. All she had to do was to break through the battering of the wind and then she could run until she reached that other place where they all were. That surely would bring an end to the grip of cold that had trapped the village and everyone within it.

  I saw her standing there, tiny and frail, doing battle with the elements. I saw the effort she was making and how at last her strength failed her and she fell to the ground.

  I thought she would die and when a figure dressed in black appeared and scooped her up in his arms I thought it was Death come to get her. But as he turned towards me, carrying the limp body, I saw it was the leper.

  He took Sally back to the village. He pushed open the door of her house and laid her down gently on the floor in front of the fire.

  The red-haired girl removed the blanket and the cloak and dressed her in dry clothes. Her little son came and sat beside her. The men from the village were still gathered like a herd of cattle in the room and they watched what was happening.

  When Sally opened her eyes again it was evening and the light from the fire was dancing on the walls. Many more people had come by now and they were all waiting for this moment. As soon as they saw that she had returned to them, the leper said, “Now I will tell you about my travels and how I was healed of my sickness.”

  The thaw started once he had begun to talk, the sound of his voice interrupted by the sound of ice dripping from the eaves of the house and the soft thud of snow as it fell in heavy lumps from the roof and from the branches of the trees.

  17

  Looking back, I can see now that I was spending more and more time in the village simply because I did not know what else I could do, where else I could go. I was so empty I could have been blown across the land like a leaf, so lost, I had no idea how to begin to find my way back to some sort of quiet. The one thread that held me was the knowledge that I could always enter that other place in that other time. I was not made welcome there, but neither was I told to leave.

  I became very ill. A sense of utter exhaustion had invaded me and I could feel it spreading through my body, coursing with the blood in my veins. I could not fight what was happening because I had no energy with which to fight. It was not that I wanted to die, but I would have welcomed the chance of ceasing to be, at least for a while.

  And then I suppose I could have died. The days and nights became merged into one endless babble of time. Until at last I was taken to the hospital for an operation.

  I lay in a strange trance waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. Everything around me was white: white curtains, white walls, white sheets; even the garment I had been given to wear was a stiff bright white cotton.

  The anesthetic was drifting through me like smoke, and then it became heavy like water, pulling me down into itself and the secret of its own oblivion.

  But as I sank and surfaced and sank again within the whiteness that surrounded me, I turned to the leper. I saw him with Sally and all the others from the village. He was telling them the story of what had happened since he left and how it was that he had come back again. His voice rose and fell in a rolling monotone and behind it I could hear the muffled drip of melting ice, the soft thud of heaps of snow falling to the ground.

  I was there in a dark room lit by the dancing flames of a log fire. I could smell the salted herrings that hung in a bunch from a hook on the ceiling. I could smell the sweet resonance of hay, the cloying sweetness of excrement and rotting vegetables, the sharp stink of urine and the pervasive musty odor of damp and slow decay.

  The room in which we were assembled was breathing and shaking like a living thing because of the battering of the wind outside. I knew that these walls were made from a mixture of cow dung, horsehair and lime. There was a cat skeleton hidden within the blackened tower of the chimney and next to it a pair of leather shoes, small ones for a child. Rushes cut from the reedbed were spread out on the floor and they felt slippery under my feet.

  I could hear the restless activity of rats and cockroaches and two thin cats going about their business and I could just distinguish the outline of a broody hen sitting blank-eyed on a pile of old rags in a corner. A little boy sidled up to me and climbed onto my lap. He fell asleep as abruptly as a door closing. I saw lice moving through the tangles of his hair.

  The people around me shifted and changed like fleeting shadows when I tried to see them all together in a group, but if I concentrated on them one by one their faces slid into focus and I could recognize them individually and remember everything I knew about them. The whole village seemed to be gathered here, even those who I had thought were dead and gone.

  The leper was telling his story and his words were becoming more clear to me now that I was growing accustomed to the sound of his voice. He had reached the port of Great Yarmouth and he had just persuaded the captain of a ship to take him on board in return for a large sum of money. He agreed to keep himself hidden throughout the journey, because the other passengers must not see him. I suppose a member of the crew would bring him food under the cover of darkness.

  The ship was carrying pilgrims to Finisterre, on the north coast of Spain, from where they would walk to Santiago de Compostela. But it never reached its destination; there was a storm which swept it against a rock and shattered the hull.

  Everyone was drowned except for the leper who was carried miraculously ashore and washed up on a sandy beach. He lay there facedown, stripped of his clothes, his body twisted into a loose curl.

  “I was found by an old man and an old woman,” he said. “They thought I was some sort of sea monster because my skin had turned white and ragged from being soaked so long in the water, making me appear more like a fish than a man.

  “The woman took hold of my shoulders and rolled me over onto my back. She saw a flicker of life in my eyes, and even though they were afraid of me, she and her husband fetched a handcart and brought me to their house.

  “I was weak and helpless and they looked after me as if I was a baby. They fed me on goat’s milk and dressed me in loose clothes that wouldn’t hurt my skin.

  “Every day they would strip me naked and rub my body all over with oil and then they would carry me into the sunshine and leave me with a cloth tied over my eyes so that the brightness would not hurt me. I lay in a sort of trance, the sun, as it felt to me, munching into my skin like a caterpillar on a leaf.

  “At first I resented being found and cared for in this way. I felt it would have been better if I had drowned with the others, or if I had died alone on the shore like a stranded fish.

  “I tried to fight my despair by remembering how I had been before the sickness disfigured me, so that I needed to hide my face and warn people of my approach. But all I could see was a tiny distant figure lost in the landscape, a stranger who would not come close.

  “Then I let my despair sweep over me and I drifted, pas
sive and inconsolable, while the old man and the old woman moved me from sunlight to shadow and back into sunlight again.

  “As the days passed I began to be aware that the outer surface of my body was changing. My skin was becoming tighter and tighter. It gripped me and held me like a metal casing, and I thought it would kill me, but then it began to split and tear and fall away in thin, ragged patches.

  “I could only see what was happening to my hands, because I was always dressed in loose robes when I was brought in from the sun and the blindfold was removed. But my hands, which had been pockmarked and covered with a white mildew of sickness, were now pink and smooth. It looked as though they had been burnt by the flames of a fire, but they were healthy.

  “I decided that if I was completely healed, then I would go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I had once been as far as the gates of the city and I had seen something of the desert that lay beyond it. I wanted to return, to tread in my own footsteps for a second time.

  “And because the change in me had begun in this village, I thought to come back here as soon as I could. I felt sure that the priest and Sally would come with me and perhaps others as well. I knew that this was the place from which I must set out.

  “Slowly my entire body grew smooth, until I no longer needed to be rubbed with oil and laid under the sharp gaze of the sun. I began to go walking in the mountains. It was a beautiful land, harsh but beautiful.

  “The old man and the old woman had been watching over me as I grew from childhood into manhood all within the space of a few weeks. When they saw that I was cured, they knew that they must lose me. They wept and embraced me but made no attempt to persuade me to stay.

  “Before we parted we set out to Compostela, where the body of the Apostle James was brought after he was washed up on those shores in a stone boat.