Chapter Five
It was dark and cold, and a dog barked in my ear. I floated, caressed by the cold which tugged at my fingertips and my feet. I was lying on my back, and found I could see stars through the branches of a tree. Then I understood. I was floating in the river, held somehow against the current. I felt about carefully, and found that my rolled habit had snagged on some part of a dead tree. Then I panicked, struggled, and almost drowned a second time. It was agony to twist myself around and grope with frozen hands until I had a firm hold on the branch and could pull myself close enough to it to free the cloth. Spiderwebs of pain shot across my chest, and the memory of the horse's terrible weight pinning me down came to me in a flash.
I do not remember how I dragged myself up the bank. Much later I awoke in a nest of dry grass and rushes. The dog was barking again, very loud, and I opened my eyes to find a wet snout a hand's breadth from my face. 'Hello, dog,' I said, and fell back into darkness. It was night again, or late evening. I sat up, and the pain rippled over my chest again, not nearly so bad this time. My clothes had dried, at least the front of them, so I must have slept through a sunny day. There was no dog to be seen, and I wondered if I had dreamed him. I got up and staggered away from the water. I was in flat country, that much I could tell in the fading light. I was in a swale of bulrushes that lay in a crook of the river, but all around me stretched fields, and I could see the dim shapes of cattle standing about, hear the soft scrunch of chewed cud. Away upstream a darker mass flecked with faint lights hunkered across the skyline. I was in the water-meadows.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. Pain clanged inside my skull and I began to understand. Dead to the world, I had floated right through the city and out the other side. How far -two miles? Four? Why had I not drowned? Now I remembered, in tiny, tattered rags of memory, a sensation of weightlessness, of flying, water dragging through my fingers. Some instinct had kept me on my back. Then I remembered my burden, and felt for the golden hand. It was still bound to me, but it had slipped, knocked in the fight, I supposed, and was now hanging against the small of my back. So there was part of the answer: St Euphemia's hand had been my ballast, my keel, keeping me face-up and arse-down. I rebound it tightly to my chest, but could not bring myself to look at the thing and recoiled from the oily coldness of the metal. I felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to tear it from me and throw it far out into the river, but Will's voice came back to me. 'It's all you have, Patch,' he'd said as he wiped the blood from the gold.
Sound advice as ever, dear friend, I thought. And then I remembered: Will was dead, lying in a ditch away on the other side of the city. A new pain flared in my breast, as if some part of my vitals had been torn away as I slept: the raw, bloody void was filling with grief and with an awful, bitter guilt. No more beer or whores for Will, no more laughter or warmth. He would never see Flanders now, and I would not see his crooked smile again in this world. I fell forward into the wet grass and his face swam before my mind's eye, slack and lifeless as it had been the instant after Sir Hugh's flail had caught him. I had killed Will as surely as if my hand had struck the blow: Death had followed me from the cathedral. And Sir Hugh himself? I seemed to recall the horse rolling over him as we went into the river. Dead as well, I supposed, the madman undone by his own madness, his game finished too. And the end of any hope for me. I had no doubt that these new corpses would be laid to my account. Night was coming in, and I felt Death, like an old friend, settle down beside me to keep the long vigil until dawn.
The water-meadows were ravishingly lovely in the dawn. They wore a shimmering silver cloak, dew clinging to festoons of spiders' webs, bright points of colour glowing through the sweet grass. The big red cattle grazed oblivious as they waded through the spectral veil. I must have slept: the spiders had woven me a glimmering winding-sheet of my own. The city-was close: much less than a mile lay between me and the last hovel of the tannery quarter.
Still, the black mood of last night had lifted a little, and I no longer felt brim-full of despair. It might be worth living a little while longer, perhaps, if for no other reason than to give Will's death some meaning. I had been skulking here for too long already. I took stock of myself. I had the golden hand, and the clothes I stood up in, which were dryish but by no means magnificent. Save for my tonsure, I looked like a farmer who had taken to sleeping in hedgerows – and there I had it. I was a farmer's son, sent up to one of the Midlands fairs with a load of wool, on my way home. I had fallen among thieves, and must needs go on foot. So it seemed I was going home – or at least towards it. I found I did not have the stomach for London now. Some linen torn from my gaiters made a passable head-cloth, and as I covered up my shaven scalp it came to me. There was one person left in the world who could help me. I turned to the west and set out on the long road back to Brother Adric.
There was much country between us. The Mendips, Sedge-moor, the Blackdown Hills. I travelled by starlight when there were people about, by day when I moved through empty country. It was a long journey, and a hard one, but there is little to tell of it. I ate berries, fish from streams, small beasts I could trap. I was a Dartmoor child – I would not go hungry outdoors. And luck paid me a visit in the guise of a halfwit carter who let me ride on his rickety old wain amongst a load of oakum bound for the shipyards of Plymouth. The man did not want money, which was fortunate. Carrying superstition about him like heavy armour, he took me for a wandering demon, I believe, and helped me in order to forestall any mischief I might work on him. We met at a crossroads outside Cullompton, and he carried me almost to the threshold of my destination.
So I was alone with my thoughts for the two weeks it took me to cross Somerset and half of Devon. I had little I wished to dwell upon from the immediate past, but still I worked the nightmare over in my mind endlessly until the colours and the horror had receded a little. It seemed as though not a minute passed when I did not think of Will, and how we should be sharing this adventure – although there was nothing adventurous about my condition now – and every such thought was a knife thrust. His death, and I suppose the likelihood of my own, followed me like ragged shadow and brought with it the chill of the grave. To escape it I thought about the past. I was a young man who, out of the blue, had lost his future, had been stripped of the life he knew. I had nothing left but my story, and I told it to myself, for it gave me comfort when hope felt stretched as thin as spider-webs wafting in the mist of an uncertain dawn.
The young man in this story is myself, but then again, he is as different from myself as the worm is to the butterfly. Although what I am today – worm or butterfly – is not so clear to me. Enough. The eyes, squeezed shut against the summer sun, preserve an image of the world that lasts for an instant and then changes, becomes grotesque, a shifting field of darkness and glowing patterns that mock reality. I wish to preserve that first moment, before the grotesqueries of the present blot out my past.
I was born in the twelve-hundred and seventeenth year of Our Lord, the second year of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, in the village of Auneford on the southern foot of Dartmoor. I was named Petroc for the village saint and for my grandfather. My father, like his before him, was a yeoman sheep-farmer, and grazed his flocks on the high moorland common that rose up behind our house. The house itself was long and low, built of granite the colour of a fox's tail, and stood on a south-facing slope a bow-shot from the village proper. A brook ran past the left wall, and below the river Aune flowed amongst smooth boulders and great oak trees. The water was clear and brown, and full of gold-green trout that hid under its rocks when I tried to grab them, and sometimes big salmon that would splash and flop in the shallows when night fell.