The Walking Drum (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Her plump cheeks were wide with smile, her large blue eyes truly beautiful. Around her, like pigeons fluttering around a barn, were half-a-dozen girls.

  “Where is this paragon of a man? Where is he?”

  The group about the table parted, and standing, I bowed low. “No paragon, Claire, but who would be a paragon in company where you stand? How can the Good Lord have given you so much beauty when it meant depriving so many others?”

  “A gallant speech!” She came down the room to our table. “Now there’s a man, girls!”

  She took up our bottle and filled a glass. “They tell me you’ve a tongue for blasphemy. Is it true?”

  “Blasphemy? Not unless it is blasphemy to seek the truth. No, I am no blasphemer, but something worse, I am an asker of questions.”

  “And you are not a rascal?”

  “In this company?” I glanced around in mock horror. “How could anyone as innocent as I be considered a rascal in such company as this? No, the teacher was talking nonsense, and I stated a contrary opinion, that is all.”

  She seated herself, and the wenches gathered around, a comely lot and fit to start a man’s blood boiling had they been cleaner.

  “They tell me,” I said, straight-faced, “that you, too, are a professor.”

  “A professor? I? I have been called a lot of pretty things but never that. Perhaps a philosopher. Men come to me with their problems.”

  “And who could solve them better?”

  “I am Fat Claire, and I deny neither the name nor the title. Young man, Fat Claire is a name that is given respect!”

  “How could I believe otherwise? I had scarcely met these gentlemen before they were assuring me of the high quality of your accomplishments.”

  I called to the waiter. “Another bottle of wine. When I am out of funds, I shall leave.”

  “Stay, we need your kind in Paris.”

  “If you open a school,” Julot said, “I shall be the first to sit at your feet.” He turned to Fat Claire. “He is not all banter and wit. He has studied in Córdoba where they have more books than priests!”

  “And studied more than books, I should say,” she replied wryly.

  The girls gathered about with the students. “Stay with us, soldier, and we shall give you such entertainment as you will not find in Córdoba.”

  “I have heard of your entertainment. My father was here long ago. He fought Vikings on the river below Paris.”

  “Your father? And who might he have been?”

  “Kerbouchard. It is an old name upon the sea.”

  “The son of Kerbouchard.” Fat Claire’s look was appraising. “Yes, it could be, though no two men looked more and yet less alike. We know your father here, and bless him. He fought the Vikings well enough, fought them in the streets of Paris as well as on the river.

  “I was a girl then, and the Vikings came up the river, and our town was empty of soldiers. They came with no warning, and had it not been for your father and his men, much good French blood would have run in the gutters that night. He followed them up the river and arrived behind them when they had begun their rampage. We were ready to flee to the island and burn our bridges as we used to do when he and his men took them at sword’s point.”

  She put down her glass. “So you are the son of Kerbouchard? He was a strong man, and narrow in the hips.”

  Julot leaned toward her. “Claire, I have a thought the teacher was ill-inclined to our soldier. He might start an inquiry. If so, we might have to flee quickly.”

  She glanced at me. “Are you alone? Have you friends?”

  “None here. I go to meet them now. I have my horses, and some gear.”

  She did not ask where my friends were, for she had learned discretion in her own school. If the time came when I must escape, I preferred it to be by my own route. That man is a fool who would descend into a well on another man’s rope.

  For one day I had done enough, and I was uneasy, for that teacher had seemed a narrow, vengeful man who would not have enjoyed my comments. It was a night’s ride to the fair, and if I did not start soon, they might be gone.

  Peter Lombard, the student of Abelard, was no longer Bishop of Paris, and I had small hope such a straight-thinking man would succeed him. Had Peter Lombard still been bishop, I would have trusted my case to his hands, but I had no desire to lie in prison while they made up their minds about me or subjected me to torture. It had been my experience that the political or ecclesiastical mind is laggard in making decisions.

  Whatever plans one has were best kept to oneself, for those with whom you share them might themselves share them with someone else, and he is a wise man who mentally keeps a hand on the door latch.

  To die for what one believes is all very well for those so inclined, but it has always seemed to me the most vain of solutions. There is no cause worth dying for that is not better served by living.

  The air in the inn was close and hot, but the talk that ebbed and flowed in the room was at least the good talk of men of ideas. Yet a restlessness sat upon me, not alone because of what might come of my comments on Bernard of Clairvaux, but because of my realization that by coming here I had stepped back in time from Córdoba.

  The ideas that excited these young men with their good minds were ideas of the dead past. The ideas of Plato are also of the past, but they are fresh with each new generation. Many of the ideas here were ideas already passed by in Córdoba and elsewhere. They were going up the blind alleys of man’s thinking, bickering about ideas from the dusty corners of philosophy where old debris had been swept to be forgotten. It was depressing to see such eager young men, restless for change, obsessed with ideas, many of which had never possessed validity and would never have occurred to Plato, Avicenna, Aristotle, or Rhazes. What this generation needed was another Abelard, or a dozen such.

  In Moorish Spain, in Baghdad, Damascus, Hind, and Cathay, even in Sicily, the thinking was two hundred years in advance of this.

  The merchants of the caravans, while they kept their thoughts to themselves for safety’s sake, were generations ahead of these students, for they had traveled and they had listened. Yet the spirit of inquiry was alive here, and where it has a free existence, ignorance cannot last. There was fresh air entering the dark halls of ignorance and superstition.

  Such men as Robert of Chester, Adelard of Bath, and Walcher of Malvern were making astronomical observations, or translating Arabic books into Latin. This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part.

  In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.

  “Fill up, soldier!” Julot clapped my shoulder. “Fill up and tell us more!”

  How much could I tell them? How much dared I tell them? What was the point at which acceptance would begin to yield to doubt? For the mind must be prepared for knowledge as one prepares a field for planting, and a discovery made too soon is no better than a discovery not made at all.

  Had I been a Christian, I would undoubtedly have been considered a heretic, for what the world has always needed is more heretics and less authority. There can be no order or progress without discipline, but authority can be quite different. Authority, in this world in which I moved, implied belief in and acceptance of a dogma, and dogma is invariably wrong, as knowledge is always in a state of transition. The radical ideas of today are often the conservative policies of tomorrow, and dogma is left protesting by the wayside.

  Each generation has a group that wishes to impose a
static pattern on events, a static pattern that would hold society forever immobile in a position favorable to the group in question.

  Much of the conflict in the minds and arguments of those about me was due to a basic conflict between religious doctrines based primarily upon faith, and Greek philosophy, which was an attempt to interpret experience by reason. Or so it seemed to me, a man with much to learn.

  The coins in my pocket were few, the hour late. “It is time to go, Julot. I shall leave you to Fat Claire and The Cat and your friends.”

  “But you have just come!” Julot showed his dismay. “Soldier, we would learn. You have knowledge we need.”

  “You are your own best teacher. My advice is to question all things. Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.”

  “It is very hard,” The Cat said.

  “Listen to him,” Fat Claire said, “what he says makes sense.”

  “Ask her,” I suggested, “the value of experimental science.”

  “Soldier,” one of the girls interrupted, “you told us of the poetry spoken in Spain, poetry often made upon the moment. Make us a poem for Fat Claire!”

  She was an elegant wench, this one who spoke, a buxom lass whose best features were quite outstanding. She was a bold hussy with a swish to her hips, red gold hair, and lips…!

  “A rhyme, soldier! Give us a rhyme? Give us a song!”

  “It was their ability, not mine. I would make a sorry poet.”

  “Your father was not so hesitant,” Fat Claire said, “but the poetry he made was of a different kind.” Her eyes sparkled with humor. “Of course, I was many pounds younger then!”

  “My father was a seagoing man,” I admitted, “and no doubt he laid the keel of many a pretty craft. It is the way of seafaring men and has no doubt contributed much to the spread of knowledge. It is possible that the Greek approach to Trojan women inspired an appreciation for their philosophy.”

  It was in my mind to give them a poem, however, and I stood in my place, putting a foot on a bench, and was about to speak when the door opened.

  There stood the teacher, pointing a finger at me. Behind him were a dozen soldiers.

  “Take him!” he said. “That is the man!”

  32

  “Quick!” Julot caught my arm. “Out!” We sprang through a sudden opening in the crowd as a brawl exploded near the door, blocking the path of the soldiers. A glance over my shoulder let me see The Cat struggling along with two other of my attentive listeners.

  Ducking around the chimney, we escaped through an almost hidden door in the chimney corner and out through the kitchen.

  The stable showed darkly under the trees, yet even as we approached it, two soldiers with pikes intervened. One held his pike leveled at my stomach while the other stepped forward to disarm me.

  As the pikeman reached for my sword, I grabbed him by the upper arm and spun him into the man holding the pike, throwing both off-balance. Julot was already moving to the stable. Whipping out my blade, I parried a thrust of the pikeman, and stepping past the pike, I put the point of my blade through his thigh.

  As the second man started toward me I said, “My friend, if you wish to see another sun, step back. I have no quarrel with you and want none, but if you step closer, I shall spit you like a duck.”

  “Why, I have no quarrel with you, either, so away with you. I shall see to my friend.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “and Godspeed.”

  Julot appeared with the horses, and I sprang to the saddle, breaking away down the lane between rows of poplars. There was a shading of lemon light in the sky where the sun would be an hour from now.

  “Julot,” I said, “this is no quarrel of yours, so be off for Paris and lose yourself there. I’ve a fast horse and can play hare to their hounds as long as it amuses me.”

  “You ask me to leave a friend?”

  “I do so ask,” I said, “for I have a place to go.”

  “Fat Claire would skin me alive. She had a feeling for you, and you have no idea what you missed.”

  “There are other women, but I have but one neck. Be off with you now.”

  “You take this too lightly, my friend. Talk such as yours is not tolerated. There has been too much freethinking, and even we of the schools must bridle our tongues. If you are found, you will burn as a heretic.”

  “But I am a pagan!”

  “Who is to say? They’ll burn you, soldier, for there are those about who have a liking for the odor of burning flesh—and no taste at all for the teaching of Peter Abelard.”

  The fields were white with frost, and we kept our horses to a brisk trot, saving them for swifter flight if need be. An immediate return to the caravan might involve my friends, for which I had no desire. Yet escape I must, and once with them, they would hide me. It had been done before, with others.

  “There’s a small village this side of Melun. Fat Claire told me of it. If we are separated, go there and ask for a man named Persigny.”

  “Is it far from the road to Provins?”

  “The direction is right.”

  If I could meet the caravan at Provins, at a fair to be held there, it was unlikely I would he found. Search in such an unlikely place was almost out of the question, for I had not the look of a merchant.

  During an hour we made many turns and twists among farms and lanes. Once when a party of horsemen appeared, going toward the city, we took hasty shelter in a stable where Julot relieved the hens of several eggs.

  Day came to a land brown with autumn and a gray sky with lowering clouds, a sky that promised rain.

  Julot shivered in his rag, nor was I clad for the weather. From time to time I thrust my fingers into my shirt to warm them.

  “There is a castle nearby, a place called Blandy. The lord of the castle is a brigand with a penchant for attacking merchant caravans, which we must avoid. But there is a chapel at Champeaux, built in the time of Clovis, and the monks are friendly. Abelard was a teacher there, and most are of his persuasion. The man Persigny is their friend also.”

  A fine rain began to fall, turning the atmosphere to a steel mesh, but we huddled our shoulders against the rain and the cold and hurried on. There was need for shelter and warm food, for Julot’s hands were turning blue, and his cheeks were drawn, his eyes hollow. He looked half starved, and no doubt he was, for many students barely existed while carrying on their studies.

  Monks had scattered gardens and vineyards through the Brie forest, and here and there were old farmhouses, lying in ruins from past conflicts. The woods were dismal, a web of black branches interlaced overhead, a track marked by pools of rain that lay like sheets of steel across the way. Riding past such a ruin, we came in behind it to leave no tracks where we entered. We rode through weeds and brush and walked our horses through a breach in the wall, entering an ancient hall where a few disconsolate bats hung from the ceiling.

  Gathering sticks for a fire, we built it carefully wanting no visible light nor smoke to warn a passerby. When flames sprang up we stretched our cold hands toward their heat, two dark and crouching figures, rain-soaked and cold, seeking as man has ever sought, the consolation of fire.

  “It is good, the fire,” Julot said.

  “The companion of vagabonds. Few men are so poor they cannot have fire.”

  “You knew your father?”

  “Aye.”

  “My mother was a peasant girl; my father, a soldier in some army or other. She never knew which army or where he was from. He was a gentle man, with a handsome beard, so much and no more could she tell me.”

  “Men without fathers often place more emphasis on them than others would. A mill does not turn on water that is past.”

  “Perhaps, but without family a man is nothing.”

  “You are mistaken. Your church has g
iven opportunity to many men without family, the army, also.”

  “One must conform, and I conform badly.”

  “Be a philosopher. A man can compromise to gain a point. It has become apparent that a man can, within limits, follow his inclinations within the arms of the Church if he does so discreetly.” I smiled at him. “Remember this, Julot, even a rebel grows old, and sometimes wiser. He finds the things he rebelled against are now the things he must defend against newer rebels. Aging bones creak in the cold. Seek warmth, my friend; be discreet, but follow your own mind. When you have obtained position you will have influence. Otherwise you will tear at the bars until your strength is gone, and you will have accomplished nothing but to rant and rave.”

  “Compromise is an evil word.”

  “Think a little, Julot. All our lives we compromise, and without it there would be no progress, nor could men live together. You may think a man a fool, but if he is an agreeable fool you say nothing. Is that no compromise?

  “Victory is not won in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more.

  “A man should not compromise his principles, but he need not flaunt them, as a banner. There is a time to talk and a time to be still. If a wrong is being done, then is the time to speak out.

  “Study, Julot, gain prestige, and people will ask you solemnly for advice about things of which you know nothing.”

  “I like not the sound of it,” Julot grumbled. “I am a fighter. I fight for what I believe.”

  “There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

  “The important thing is to know where you stand and what you believe, then be true to yourself in all things. Moreover, it is foolish to waste time in arguing questions with those who have no power to change.

  “There! My sermon for the day is finished. No doubt I will make at least some of the mistakes I have advised you against.”