The Lode Stone

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  A man and a woman came through the doorway, the man an older version of Pierre, the woman weeping great sobs and laughing at the same time. As if their appearance was a signal, the people gathered around the street let out cheers and whistles.

  Pierre raised his head without letting go of his wife and waved to his well-wishers, grinning broadly, setting off another round of cheers. Holding his wife firmly around the waist he bundled her and his parents back into the house, waving to Isaac to follow.

  Isaac dismounted and tied the horses to a post. They would be waiting inside for him to explain Pierre’s silence and to tell as much of Pierre’s story as he knew.

  ***

  Isaac stayed for two weeks, until the Feast of Assumption in mid-August. He would have been welcome to remain with them indefinitely, indeed they all pressed him to do so. It pained him more than they could imagine, their love, their eagerness to include him, as though he had delivered their Pierre home to them. Only Pierre did not look surprised when he gave his announcement and resisted all efforts made to dissuade him.

  “My brother will be in Lyon,” he told Pierre the morning he left, with more conviction than he felt. “He will have celebrated the Feast of Assumption in Cluny and will leave for Lyon soon after to attend their summer’s end fair.”

  If Pierre wondered how he knew this, he did not show it. And if he doubted the reason he had been given for Isaac’s leaving, he did not show that either. He hugged Isaac. His wife stepped forward and hugged Isaac also, with a pretty blush, before stepping back under her husband’s arm.

  Pierre fairly radiated happiness, a man transformed.

  Witnessing that daily was more than Isaac could bear.

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Man Unmoored

  He took several days to reach Lyon. During that time he spoke to no one, avoiding other travelers when he passed them on the road. He had stopped calling himself Jean. He was on his own now, completely alone for the first time in his life. He need not give a name to anyone. Let strangers call him ‘cripple’ or ‘peg leg’ as if what he had lost identified him. It did, oh yes, what he had lost defined him and had for many years, but it was not the leg.

  He tried not to think of himself as Isaac, either. He wanted to release himself from the expectations that a name implied, and from the associations that had attached themselves to it. Isaac had endured a great deal of pain and loss, of the body and the heart. He wanted to set that aside, to be no one, a man without a past, a man whose life was no more and no less than a series of moments in the present. He was not the kind of man who could live that way, he knew that about himself, though he had known some who did. If he had been made that way he would not be looking for his brother now. But for a few days, at least, he chose to be a man unmoored.

  He did not seek out his brother at once when he reached Lyon. He kept his eyes open, allowing fate to intervene if it would, but he had not yet gone to the fair. He had paid for the right to sleep on the floor of an inn for the duration of the week-long festivities; there was still plenty of time.

  The past caught up to him first in nightmares.

  ***

  He is lying on something, not hard like the ground, not soft like a mattress. He is gripped by pain, an agony that is all-encompassing. So many areas of his body are inflamed with it he cannot determine where it originates. He hears death calling to him and wants to let himself sink down into it, but the hands will not let him. Hands that raise his head and dribble liquids into his mouth, broth sometimes, or teas made to reduce his pain or the burning fever that takes hold of him at times. Hands on his leg below the knee, followed by a pulling that throws the pain in his leg into fresh agony, as though they want to break him, not heal him. Pain so great it occupies all his senses. Like a living thing inside him, hot and tight, it holds him in its grasp, his every nerve shrieking.

  ***

  He jerked awake in the middle of a cry of agony and looked around, disoriented. He was lying in the dark on the straw of the inn floor, the pain that woke him now gone. Not real, not a physical pain but a remembered one. A dream, nothing more. A true dream, though, the worst kind of dream, a dream from his past.

  The straw beneath him rustled as he moved. Someone nearby muttered angrily, a curse at having been wakened. He closed his eyes. He was nobody, he told himself. A nameless man dreaming of a past that belonged to someone else, someone he no longer was.

  ***

  He opens his eyes, moving only the lashes. It is daytime, the air still and heavy. A face looms over him, heavily lined with age and bearded. The mouth is smiling.

  A hand gently wipes the sweat from his forehead with a piece of cloth, while the unfamiliar face murmurs, “Modeh ani l’fanecha. Melech chai v’kayam, she’heh’chezarta bi nishmati b’chemla. Raba emuna’techa.”

  It is the first time he has heard the prayer of waking. The foreign words are meaningless to him but the voice is gentle, encouraging. There is a lilt to the words as though they hold a promise.

  “I do not understand,” he mumbles when the voice slips into silence. He does not understand where he is, who this old man is, why he is here. He should be somewhere else.

  The face above his recedes, becomes blurred...

  ***

  He shook himself awake once again. Rabbi David. It felt good to see him, to hear his quiet, calming voice even in a dream, even if he must lose him again on waking. He could have built a new life there, he was doing so until it, too, was torn away. How many times can a man lose his life and build a new one before there is no will left to build?

  He closed his eyes again, wearier than when he had first lain down, willing himself to sleep without dreaming. For all the good it did...

  ***

  Light and darkness move through the house where he lies, alternately heating and cooling the air around him. He is growing stronger. Strong enough to think beyond the pain, strong enough to bear it, though he would take release if it was offered. But each time he opens his eyes he longs for that less, and wonders more where he is and what has happened to him.

  Gingerly he explores his face, which aches constantly. The skin on his left cheek is rough and tight as though it has been pulled together to cover a gap. He feels a row of stitches and winces. The left eye has less range than the right; the lid, he discovers, droops half-closed over it. A patch of hair beside his left ear is missing – it should have grown in by now if it was going to. He has a dim recollection of himself as a tall man, even-featured and handsome by some standards; he is not sure he wants to know what he looks like now.

  His hands slide down his side where a second focus of pain emanates. Sore ribs, probably broken but already healing, and just below them more pain. He lifts his shirt, holding his breath as the pain escalates when he twists his body. A sword cut. Deep, by the looks of it, sewn together by someone who knew what he was doing. The cut is still an angry red outlined with dried blood, but there are no black streaks under his skin to indicate an infection.

  The greatest pain comes from his right leg. He tries to move it. The sheet moves slightly, close to his body. He breaths in deeply, and pulls aside the sheet. Below his knee his leg ends in a red and wrinkled stump.

  He cries out before he can stop himself, and then cries again, a shout of anguish. What impulse of cruelty inspired the old man to save him? A man cannot live like this!

  The old man hurries over making desperate ‘shushing’ motions. He takes in the discarded sheet and the exposed leg. He speaks quietly, urgently, as he pulls the sheet back over the amputated leg, but his words are unintelligible.

  “Why did you let me live?” He allows the tears to fall freely. A man could weep for such a fate and still be a man.

  The old man makes more shushing motions until he quietens. He helps him sit up, leaning him back against the wall, but when a cup is raised to his lips, he turns his head aside. There is nothing to live for.

  The old man leaves. When he returns someone new is with him, a you
ng man whose beard is just growing in, with dark worried eyes and a turban wound round his head. He wears a light under-gown with a dark blue kaftan over it much like the old man’s except his is striped.

  “Quod nomen tibi est?” the young man asks, crouching beside the pallet.

  He shakes his head. He recognizes the words as Latin, but he has never learned Latin. He waits for them to realize he is not a nobleman, that they will gain no ransom from saving him. Will they kill him, or merely send him away before his presence is discovered? With luck they will kill him, quick and clean, for he will die slowly if he is given to the Saracens.

  “Que s’appelle toi?” the young man asks.

  “Comment est-ce que je suis arrive ici?” he demands. How did he come here?

  “You are French.” The young man grimaces, self-deprecating. “Mon Francais n’est pas bon.”

  “What am I doing here?” he demands again. “Where is my sword, my clothes?” He looks bewildered at his shoulders, at the light linen shirt that is all he is wearing below the sheet that covers him to his waist.

  “Your tunic is gone.” The young man sounds apologetic. “We had to burn it, and your hose and...and every other item that proclaimed you a crusader. They are looking for you, for any who escaped the slaughter. They won’t look here, at least it is unlikely, in the house of our Rabbi, but we could not take the chance. It would not be safe for you to wear them, now that your armies have retreated.”

  The man caring for him is a Jew. He is not thinking right or he would have realized that earlier from his dress and beard. Still, it makes even less sense that the old man—the rabbi—is taking care of him. Jews do not participate in the fighting, in this war for the Holy Land, but it is known that their sympathy lies with the Saracens, for the Saracens respect them and treat them as equals.

  He must look as shocked as he feels, for the young man adds, “We found you collapsed against the city wall at night. You must have crawled there after the battle for Acre. You were not too far from the battleground.” He paused. “Well, maybe very far for a man as badly wounded as you. You must have a great will to live.”

  “I have no money,” he explains slowly, choosing simple words. Whatever their decision, best to know it. “I cannot pay you.”

  The old man’s eyes, lined with age but bright with understanding, crinkle above his beaked nose. His mouth is hidden in the beard, but he gets the impression it is smiling.

  “Why...” his voice is a dry croak. The young man lifts a cup to his lips. He swallows a mouthful. “Why are you doing this? Taking care of me?” he asks the old man.

  He is sure the old man understands his question, the nature of it, anyway, but his response is unintelligible.

  “What does he say?”

  “He says, ‘Do not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ Exodus 23:9.” It is a Mitzvot... a Word we must obey.”

  He does not know what to answer. He knows almost nothing about these people except for stories of their wickedness. He catches himself looking at the thick curls of their hair below the turbans, wondering if he might spy two horns growing from their heads if they unwound the folds of cloth. He looks away, ashamed. They have saved his life, out of duty, perhaps, and perhaps he will still be captured and tortured, but it has also been done out of mercy. And here he is, looking for evil when he has received only good.

  “How long ago?” he asks. His head aches, he is getting weary. The young man looks puzzled. “When did you find me?” he tries again.

  “Three Sabbaths,” the young man says.

  Two or three weeks then, depending on which day of the week he was brought here. How long does it apply, this Mitzvot? Until he is well enough to travel, or is there a set limit on hospitality?

  “You must sleep now.”

  Too weary to protest, he lets the young man help him lie down. So they will not turn him out yet. The urge to sleep over-rides any other concern for the moment. That and the pain which sitting up has brought back. He swallows the moan that rises in his throat and closes his eyes, drifting on the pain, letting it have him and then release him again to sleep.

  ***

  He groaned and woke himself, and lay staring into the darkness. Surely he was not doomed to spend this night reliving everything since Reb David found him crawling half-dead away from the battlefield outside the gates of Acre, bleeding and delirious with pain? The weeks he lay on a pallet in the old man’s house while his wounds healed, longing for death. Wanting to beg the old man to end his life. First the pain had kept him from making his wish known, and then shame. He would not ask another to sin for him. Nor would he take his own life there in the stranger’s home. If God wanted him to live, he would live, although it was no kindness to help him do so.

  The old man taught him his language. Day and night he drifted, sometimes conscious, mostly not, and always the pain ate at him. Slowly the Hebrew words began to make meaning. It kept his mind occupied while he healed, while he learned to walk on his wooden leg, while he reconciled himself to living. It kept him from dwelling on all that he had lost.

  He shook his head. What was he doing, lying here in the dark of night remembering things that were better left in the past? He should be sleeping, not wasting his rest dreaming of wounds that had healed. What was done was done. A man should bear all things with fortitude, not cry out in his sleep like a child.

  What a fool he had been, riding off to war. He had not wanted to go, but he had not resisted, either. He had believed he was doing his duty.

  Duty. What a vain, senseless reason it was for anything. A man should live with joy for the brief time that he had. He should listen to his soul singing within him, not to some other man telling him where his duty lay. He had had a time in his life when his soul sang in his chest so loudly he thought it would burst—

  He stopped that thought immediately. That was the most dangerous dream of all.

  He did not want to sleep again but weariness overcame him.

  ***

  Riding to war. Riding into battle. The wild noise when enemies engage, the cries of men and screams of horses, the clanging of sword hitting sword. Flashes of sun on metal and the scarlet rain of blood...

  The scenes fade. Reb David’s voice floats over him. ‘You shall not refrain from helping him (who hates you). Exodus 23:5.’ That is how Reb David answers his question when he understands Hebrew well enough to ask it again.

  He has not seen much kindness since he left home. Killing he has seen. Looting and greed and violence in every form a man could devise, that he has seen. But not kindness, not mercy. He has trouble believing in it after these three long years. It is easier to interpret the fear that comes to the old Jew’s eyes when he makes a noise or when they hear footsteps approaching the door as fear for his own safety, rather than concern for him. Either way, the old man continues to care for him—and hide him, as apparently he is doing—and at some risk to himself. He never did believe the tales of human sacrifice told about Jews. But kindness to a stranger—no, to an enemy—is equally unbelievable.

  ***

  He struggled awake once more. The memory of kindness burned inside him with its own kind of pain, a pain that did not fade on waking. He longed to be Isaac, but Isaac was dead. Isaac had been a charade concealing him from the Saracens. Wearing the dark blue kaftan and turban Reb David gave him, he limped awkwardly on his wooden leg with the help of a cane among the houses in the Jewish quarter. Of necessity he joined them at their worship, standing and kneeling with the men as the Rabbi chanted from the Torah.

  “Jesus was a Jew,” the Rabbi reminded him. “Your Jesus worshipped as we do.”

  He had not thought of that before. Perhaps he was closer to his own faith here, hidden by the kindness of these strangers, worshipping quietly among them, than he had been swooping with his own people into savage battle. He had wanted to free the Holy Land from the heathen, but he had lost sight of who th
e heathens were. He had not raped or stolen or murdered anyone who did not wield a sword against him. This he believed, but perhaps he had done things no man would want to remember. Whatever his past, he could do worse than worship as the Lord had worshipped among these quiet and dignified people.

  When the crusader armies returned and took Acre, driving out the infidels, Isaac had asked Reb David if he could stay and become his disciple. He had wanted no part of the cruelty of victory, of the madness that came upon men after battle.

  Isaac had been a time of healing, a necessary interlude, a dream he had pulled himself into to escape the pain when he awakened in the house of Rabbi David, and he had not found it easy to let go. He had known the pain would return when he did.

  It had returned now, partly from seeing Tomas reunited with his family, partly from being in Lyon, so near to his own and yet so impossibly far.

  ***

  He slept late the next morning. By the time he finished breaking his fast the inn was empty except for a sulky serving wench wiping down the table. The sun was high in the sky as he walked to the market fair.

  He stopped twice on the way. Was this what he wanted? As soon as someone knew who he was, everything would become much more complicated. He could not return to the life he had had no matter how much he longed to. The wise thing to do would be to make a clean break. And yet Tomas’ face, suffused with happiness, haunted him. Surely he could at least regain a brother?

  He took his time going from stall to stall, stopping to watch the jugglers and to buy a sweet fruit pasty, walking slowly past the metalsmiths, admiring their wares. On a whim he bought a silver brooch and walked away humming, only to fall into a fury of self-reproach. As if he had anyone to give it to.