The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  He could sense that someone was watching him. He went searching around the outside of the house and eventually caught sight of a man dodging among the concealment of the trees. He was naked but partly covered by the length of his hair and his beard. Once he had been seen he began to laugh a shrill nervous laugh like the warning cry of some bird.

  The leper sat down with his back to the stone wall of the house and waited. Slowly the laughing man drew closer and closer, until he sat crouched in front of him, shivering and staring and only occasionally breaking out into a spasm of high-pitched laughter. “I’m the only man in the world left alive!” he announced in a language the leper could understand easily. “I’m the only man in the world left alive!” repeating the words, and with no others to follow, as if he had forgotten everything else that could be said.

  It was only then that the leper remembered how he had been to this island before on his previous journey and he had felt so isolated, so cut off from existence that he had considered staying here, occupying the ruins of a house, catching what fish he could from the sea, maybe even cultivating the scrap of a field where wild barley was growing. He realized then that he could have been this same man who sat shivering with loneliness in front of him.

  He returned to where his companions were busy making a fire. He said nothing to them about his meeting. He said nothing to them at all, but sat with them in the silence of his own thoughts.

  26

  The leper was lying on his mattress in the fusty darkness of the hold. The blanket rough on his bare skin. The smell of cat’s piss in his nostrils. The bilgewater slopping backwards and forwards underneath him. The struggle of the wind in the sails. The sense of the ship as some vast warm-blooded animal into whose belly he had been swallowed.

  Something rustled close to his ear; a cockroach perhaps. Something else pattered with nervous delicate feet over his legs—that must be a rat, there were a number of rats living in the hold and they were learning not to be afraid since nothing much could hurt them. They chewed at shoe leather even when the shoes were being worn and made nests in piles of old clothes, their pink babies squeaking for food.

  The door out onto the deck had been closed because a storm was rising and that meant there wasn’t even a glimmer of light. The old man who lay on one side of the leper started coughing and groaning and then he was pissing into a tin pot and sighing to himself as he did so, as if his life was escaping with this release of liquid.

  A cockerel started to crow, disregarding the fact that it was the middle of a starless night. A heavy object rolled across an uneven surface and came to a juddering halt just above the leper’s head. He wondered what it was. Once again he remembered the six horses and their hooves grinding down on him.

  He ran his hand over the mosquito bites on his calves, over a cut that hadn’t healed, over the soft hollow of his own belly, the slipperiness of his scars, the density of his pubic hair. He brought the hand out from under the blanket but he couldn’t see it even when he held it in front of his face. Nevertheless, he could imagine it: a pale, nervous, questing thing, with its five tentacle legs always trembling, even when he tried to hold them steady. He sent his hand to hunt blindly in the dark. It found the sticky damp of the wooden floorboards, then the smooth cold metal of the locked box of possessions. It went farther and reached the edge of the mattress on which Sally was lying, meeting with the warmth of an arm and a shoulder before withdrawing again.

  You could tell how everyone crowded into this cluttered space was wide awake in anticipation of the storm’s fury. They had seen the clouds thickening along the horizon. They had heard the captain giving the order to furl the sails. The ship’s two anchors had been lowered in the hope that the great hooks might catch hold of something on the seabed that would stop them from being swept along helplessly by the wind, but the water was too deep and the anchors had found nothing.

  Now the wind was coming from all four directions at once, making the ship thrash from side to side and while it was being held in this trap the storm broke directly above it. The singing cries of the sailors were drowned by the roar of thunder and the crack of lightning. The ship groaned as the tarred seams of her sides split and salty water began to seep down the inside walls, spreading over the floor and soaking into blankets and mattresses, into bread and biscuits, old clothes and saints’ bones.

  One wave hammered urgently at the closed door of the hold, while the next broke through the splintered wood and raced down the stairs, rushing among the men and women who lay there helpless in the darkness.

  Chests and boxes were smashed, bursting open and vomiting out their contents. Bottles broke and collided with piss pots and basins. Some of the pilgrims were able to cling to the central pillars for safety, the rest were swept like rubbish into loose heaps.

  The leper was lying in a corner, barricaded by mattresses that were not his own, soaking wet and dizzy from something which had hit him on the head. People were crying and praying and screaming in a great soup of noise all around him, but he felt very relaxed, and almost contented. He was not afraid. He thought that the ship was bound to sink and he was bound to die and he welcomed the idea of ceasing to be. It was after all something he had longed for ever since his first escape from Venice and now at last it was coming upon him and this was the end.

  He stared into the darkness and it was as if his eyes were emitting beams of light so that he could see whatever they gazed on. He saw the hold filled with dark water like some underground cavern and bodies lying on mattresses all around him as if on little rafts. He knew every one of them because they were all the people he had ever known in his life; friends, lovers and chance acquaintances, all floating and tilting around him. Coming to say goodbye perhaps, or just to witness his departure. On one mattress he saw the elephant’s skull which he had searched for as proof of his own veracity and on another there was an angel looking like a huge dragonfly, its wings bedraggled from the water. And Christ with bare feet and a man with a wide mouth and leaves growing out of his face and even a mermaid, her smile made lascivious by her sharp teeth. All companions of one sort or another.

  The storm continued unabated for how long? Two nights at least, perhaps three. It was difficult to keep any track of time.

  And then something happened. The leper was drifting in the circles of his own thoughts when he noticed the change. “Listen!” he said to himself and to anyone else who could hear. “Listen!” And although the waves and the wind were still thundering and the ship was still groaning from the struggle, there was a silence like bated breath somewhere at the center of all the chaos.

  Within that silence the leper became aware of the sound of hands clapping in a fast rhythm of celebration and then voices chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy,” softly at first, but with a gathering intensity.

  He shuffled forward on hands and knees over the heaped bodies, the sodden mattresses, the broken boxes and through the swamp of dirty water. He clambered right over someone’s face and hardly heard the muffled cry of protest. He aimed for the broken door. He climbed up the five steps and out onto the deck. A group of exhausted sailors were gathered together, clapping their hands and chanting while watching a ball of fire that was balanced in the ship’s rigging.

  It was not a threatening fire. It quivered and shook with something like tenderness or benevolence. The leper saw how it crept with a tentative bouncing movement along the stretched line of a rope, pausing every so often to gaze at the men who stood and stared at it. They were still chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy,” but more softly now, as if they were afraid of disturbing the blessing they could feel dropping down on them like rain.

  It was Saint Elmo’s fire, everyone knew that. The saint had seen them being battered by the storm and he had taken pity on them. He had sent his fire as a sign that they would come to no harm. They would all live.

  The pilgrims began to creep cautiously up onto the deck to witness this miracle of light. It stayed there waiting for them, moving
with delicate curiosity from one part of the ship to another until everyone had been sure of seeing it. Then it was gone.

  The storm was not quite over but it had lost its fierceness, and anyway no one was afraid because they knew that they were safe with the saint watching over them. The sailors set to work, singing to each other with renewed courage in their voices. The pilgrims sang as well while they tried to put some order into the confusion of their sleeping quarters.

  Within a few hours the sea had become quiet and placid and a soft wind was blowing them towards a new island and the port of Modon. The leper felt very quiet too. It was as if he had died and had been brought back to life again.

  27

  They left Modon after a few days and were on their way towards the island of Candia when a calm descended. It was like that moment in the fairy story when all life stops and nothing moves except for the thorny bushes which go on growing, thickening around the castle and putting an end to any possibility of escape.

  The calm descended and they were trapped within it. The air tasted stale and unreplenished; you felt you might suffocate just from breathing it. The birds and the fish had gone. The sun shone within a sickly yellow haze and a mist hung over the motionless surface of the sea, obscuring the horizon and turning the whole world into this one small place.

  The oarsmen tried to pull them through, but it was as if the sea was holding them back and taking away their strength. After three days, what was left of the fresh water in the barrels had turned into a thick and putrid sludge. The wine was sour and too strong to drink. The meat was crawling with maggots that had all hatched on the same night. The biscuits were being devoured by weevils, the fruit and vegetables were rotten.

  Dark blankets of fleas had moved into the sleeping quarters, while the deck was dancing with biting flies and clouds of gnats. Even if you spent two hours combing the lice from someone’s hair, they had returned as a somnambulant army before the day was done. There was a disgusting white worm that crawled over you while you tried to sleep, its body filled with blood. The sailors said they had never seen such a worm before and it had no name.

  Rats and mice gnawed at blankets and shoes. They walked over faces and licked the moisture from the corner of closed eyes. They had lost the last remnants of their fear and no longer scattered when they were disturbed, but stood there trembling and defiant and seeming to beg for charity.

  The captain gave the order that no water was to be given to the animals which were tethered in pens close to the kitchen. During the heat of the day they were silent in their suffering, but they cried throughout the night and with the dawn they could be seen licking at the wooden planks to catch the thin covering of dew. All of the poultry, two pigs and a calf died, but since no one had the energy to gut them and cook them quickly enough, their rotting carcases had to be thrown overboard. Not a single shark appeared when the blood spread its message across the water.

  One man developed a fever and began to scream in his bed; several others caught the contagion from him. The shoemaker’s wife tried to comfort them, but they hardly noticed her presence. Three of them died where they lay.

  The leper sat with his companions. Although they had all chosen freely to go on this journey with him, he now felt terribly responsible for them. He felt he should know how to comfort them and to explain how best to endure the heat and the thirst and the agony of waiting for things to change, but he had no energy and no words.

  He looked from one to the next. Sally’s face was very swollen. She kept licking her parched lips and staring at the haze which covered and obscured the sea. “The horizon has gone,” she said, and she began to cry but without the relief of tears falling.

  The priest was bent over the book of travels. “We have reached this page and now we must go further,” he said, pointing with his finger at the scrawl of words on a line and then turning the pages on and on as if that was magic to undo the spell of their predicament.

  The shoemaker’s wife confronted her suffering by withdrawing herself from it. She hardly moved her body at all, only the pupils of her eyes expanding and contracting like a cat’s. She had bought a silken yashmak from some Gypsies on the last island and she wore it all the time, making it impossible to see the emotion on her face. Sometimes she would talk to her husband, discussing things with him and listening to what he had to say.

  “What is he telling you?” the leper asked her.

  “He is preparing to let go of me,” she replied. “He says that soon he won’t be able to visit me, not even in my dreams. He says he can see the path my life will take and that is enough. I will be cared for.”

  The calm was going to lift in a while, but there was no way of knowing that with the air still so heavy and unchanged. Sally was gazing into the mist when suddenly she scrambled to her feet, shouting and pointing, “My husband! I can see him, there in his boat: He is waiting for me! I am going to him!” And before anyone had time to fully understand what was happening she leaped over the side of the ship. There was the sound of her body hitting the water’s surface, and then silence.

  The others were too stunned to speak. They stared at each other in disbelief, each hoping that what they had seen was nothing more than a private fantasy engendered by the claustrophobia of the day. And then, as the reality of what had happened grew stronger, they peered over the side of the ship, looking for a sign of life or death, but there was nothing there. They searched the mist for the boat which Sally had seen, but if it had been there before it was gone now and so they gave up and sat huddled together, blank and desolate.

  The leper was remembering everything he knew of Sally. He saw her as she first appeared to him when he walked into the village: her haunted moon face and how she had taken the book of travels and wrapped it close to her breast. He saw her again, poised by the seashore in the bitter cold when he had pulled her back to safety. Only now that she was gone did he understand how close he had felt to her and how much he would miss her.

  The priest and the shoemaker’s wife were also turning the thought of Sally over and over in their minds. She hovered close to them like a ghost, appearing and disappearing before their eyes, tantalizing them with her presence and her absence. And all the time the calm was shifting and dispersing, so that when they looked up it was gone and they could see the steep mountains of the island of Candia, silhouetted against a clear sky. Fish were in the sea. Birds were wheeling and calling overhead.

  The town they entered was very beautiful, with watercourses and windmills and fine houses. An ostrich in a walled garden was stalking among the wilting flowers on big feet.

  At this time of year hundreds of falcons flew over the island and the people caught them in nets and sold them in the market. The leper bought one: tethered and hooded, fretful within its sudden captivity, uttering little screams of rage and despair.

  He went with it on his arm to the high plain of Lessithi. The people who lived here had been driven out long ago; their houses destroyed, their fields laid waste, their fruit trees cut to the ground. Herds of wild ibex moved among the ruins. It was here that the leper released the falcon. He watched it fly in widening circles until it was out of sight.

  28

  The journey continued. They spent several days on the island of Rhodes but avoided Cyprus because it had been raided by pirates: houses burning in the town of Paphos, dogs howling and no people anywhere.

  They followed the coast of Turkey and were close enough to the land to see men riding on donkeys and the tombs of the dead cut into the white cliffs of rock like giant doorways into another world. But they only stopped briefly to replenish their water supply. The wind was behind them, they had enough food and they were afraid of being attacked by the Turks.

  A mood of elation was growing among the pilgrims because the Holy Land was now so close. People sang and danced. One man climbed up into the ship’s rigging and said he would not come down until they had arrived.

  One morning they were awakened by
the blowing of trumpets much earlier than usual, and when they stumbled out onto the deck the sailors pointed at a range of mountains that looked like a bank of pale clouds. And that was their destination.

  They sang the Te Deum. They cried and kissed one another and some even fainted with emotion. A man who had been drunk since they left Venice was suddenly sober and a man with a fever was carried up from the sleeping quarters and left to blink in the bright sunshine, a wild delirious smile on his face.

  They dropped anchor in the shallow waters of the Bay of Jaffa, and a school of dolphin came to leap around the ship. Everyone felt this was a good sign. But they could not go ashore until permission had been granted by the governor of the region, so they had to wait for him to arrive, gazing longingly at the land from the sea.

  The leper remembered how the city of Jaffa had been bustling and prosperous the last time he saw it. It was now in ruins; and nothing was left except for a line of broken towers and walls among the rocks and the encroaching sand. He wondered who had attacked it and why, but there was no way of finding out.

  He knew that Jonah had been vomited from the belly of the whale onto this beach and the giantess Andromeda had been chained to these rocks while she waited for the dragon to come for her. He could just see a few rusty links of the chain fixed to the rocks that were still stained with the dragon’s blood and several huge rib bones were sticking up out of the sand like the wrecked hulk of a ship. And there were the dark mouths of the caves where Saint Peter had lived while he was preaching here and where the pilgrims would be expected to stay.

  The ship remained at anchor in the shallow nervous sea. More and more people were congregating within the ruins of the city. They came drifting in from the parched landscape on donkeys and camels and on foot. They set up their mushroom tents among the broken walls and tethered their animals to the stumps of pillars. The smoke from their fires dissolved into the blueness of the sky and the smell of spices and roasting meat was carried on the air. The pilgrims stood in anxious groups on the deck and watched the Saracens; they were so close you could count the rings on their fingers.