They reached the sluice at an hour when the sun was at its most crushing. The boy helped the old man off the donkey and settled him down against a hollow ash tree. They drank some of the warm water they had boiled the previous night. The boy said to the old man:
‘We have no food.’
‘You’ll have to go and find some.’
‘Why did we leave the salted meat back at the castle?’
‘It wasn’t properly cured yet.’
‘It might have finished curing during the journey.’
Unaccustomed to having to explain himself, the goatherd shot the boy an irritated glance.
‘I didn’t realise we would have to leave the castle so soon.’
‘We could have stayed longer if you’d wanted to.’
The old man raised his head, the way a flower on a dungheap might raise its head. He stared stonily at the boy, who immediately lowered his grubby chin onto his chest.
The goatherd then ordered him to dig up some liquorice root, pointing to the places where it would be easiest to find. With head still lowered, the boy took the knife from the old man’s pouch and walked over to a low bank near the aqueduct. At that time of year, he assumed he would have to dig down deep to find anything fresh to chew on.
He returned with his sleeves all smeared with earth and holding a few twisted roots. Sitting down next to the old man, he cut the roots into pencil-length pieces and peeled the tips of two of them. The man began chewing on his, but immediately had to stop because even his jaw hurt him.
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘You’ll have to clean my wounds.’
The boy pulled the old man’s body away from the tree trunk, carefully removed his jacket and put it to one side. Then he unbuttoned the man’s shirt, leaving his chest bare. Fortunately, none of the wounds were open or suppurating, but the goatherd was in an extremely weakened state. Following the old man’s instructions, the boy dipped a piece of cloth in water and, taking enormous care, slowly drew it along the weals on his chest. The goatherd didn’t complain at all; he merely gritted his teeth and closed his eyes when the boy pressed too hard. The boy wondered if the old man had broken something or was simply too old to withstand a beating like that. He remembered the first time he’d seen him wrapped up in his blanket in the middle of the night and how long it had taken him just to sit up. He realised then that before the goatherd had met him, his life had probably been limited to herding the goats from one grazing area to another, but never covering any great distances. Why had he been so generous in his help? Why had he tested his body to the limit by undertaking that brutal journey? Why had he not handed him over to the bailiff at the castle? His silence had cost him a large part of his herd and placed him at death’s door.
He had the goatherd lie down on his side in the shade of the ash tree. Up until then, he had only cleaned the wounds on the old man’s chest and sides; however, his back was criss-crossed by five long brown weals. The grimy fabric of his shirt had become stuck to his skin beneath a crust of dried blood. The boy told the goatherd what he could see, and the goatherd told him how to proceed. First, he poured bowlfuls of water onto the goatherd’s back to soften the dried blood and allow him to unstick the cloth from the wounds without causing them to open up. He repeated this operation several times until, with extreme care, he began to peel the cloth away. When he had removed the whole shirt, he spread it out as best he could on the ground so that the old man could see on it the negative image of his back. The image troubled the old man even more than the pain from the wounds themselves, and he sat for a while staring at this image of his martyrdom. Then he suddenly lost interest and lay down again so that the boy could continue his work. Most of the wounds were swollen in places or had whitish pustules on them, signs of infection. The boy described these to the old man and, at that moment, the old man knew that without any alcohol to disinfect them, without any rest, it would be the infection and not his arthritis that would finish him off.
‘When I die, bury me as best you can, and put a cross on my grave, even if it’s only a cross made of stones.’
The boy stopped cleaning the wounds.
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘Of course I am. Will you put a cross on my grave?’
The view the boy had of the plain from that wretched bit of shade turned watery. The slightly undulating ground, the aqueduct and the mountains they were heading for all grew blurred.
‘Will you put a cross on my grave?’
‘Yes.’
They waited drowsily for the heat to abate, then set off again, the boy having draped the jacket over the old man’s shoulders. A couple of hours later, they came within sight of the water tank, but there was no sign of the cripple. The boy thought that perhaps he had managed to drag himself into the shade. They walked on until they had a clearer view of the area, but still no trace. The boy let go of the halter and ran down to the tank. The cripple wasn’t inside nor was he leaning against one of the crumbling pillars of the aqueduct. The boy scoured the road in search of the exact spot where he had left the man and soon found some small telltale bloodstains and, a little further on, the sharp stone with which he had hit the donkey. He also found the hoofprints of at least two horses and noticed the scuffed-up earth on the embankment. Following those hoofprints, he saw that the horses had gone their separate ways, one to the north and the other to the south. Beside the road, he found a pile of fresh dung. Then the goatherd and the goats arrived.
‘He’s gone,’ the boy said, and with a lift of his chin indicated the pile of dung.
They spent the night in the tank. There was a gap in one side through which the boy had helped the old man to enter. The tank was scalding hot, giving back the heat it had absorbed during the day, but it was preferable to lying on the stony ground outside. They dined on goat’s milk and, chewing on the roots the boy had dug up that morning, the old man fell asleep. He had barely spoken during the day and, apart from when the boy had been cleaning his wounds, hadn’t uttered a single word of complaint. At night, though, it was different. Almost as soon as he fell asleep, the old man began to moan and didn’t stop until near dawn. The boy witnessed his delirium with a mixture of sympathy and torpor. He heard the first moans while he was still gazing up at the whitish glow of the night, waiting for sleep to come. He sat up and looked across at the old man, who was tossing and turning on his blanket. With every movement, his bones juddered on the hard floor of the tank, like a dice tumbling over marble, bringing new pain. At one point, in the crescent moon’s bluish light, he noticed that the old man’s eyelids were wet with tears that trickled down over his skeletal cheekbones. Shortly before dawn, the delirium ceased and only then did the boy go to sleep. A few moments later, at first light, he felt the old man’s hand shaking his shoulder.