Felipe nodded, and many people climbed into the carts and others took the place of oxen and pulled the carts, while a horde of men dressed in frayed sackcloth, their bodies covered with crusted filth and scabs and ulcers, barefoot and hirsute, flocked into the city, dragging themselves on their knees like wounded cats, flagellating themselves cruelly as they chanted Felipe’s words: “The time is now, the place is here.”
And Felipe placed himself at the head of the crowd and cried: “Jerusalem is near!”
And the multitude shouted and marched behind him, following him beyond the walls of the city into the fields; and as they passed, the hordes burned and leveled the fields, and a leper, reaching out his sore-covered arms to the black clouds of smoke, said: “The Parousia is near, the Coming! Christ will return for the second time to Earth. Burn! Destroy! Let not a single stone from the past remain. Let not a single affliction from the past remain. Let the new age find us naked upon a barren earth. Amen.”
Singing and dancing, the multitude advanced, scarring their knees and scourging their breasts; they attested that the river ceased to flow as they crossed it, and that its warm waters stood icy-still about their legs; that the hills flattened out before their march and the clouds visibly descended to touch the brittle crust of the earth and protect from the furies of the sun the new Crusaders of the millennium, the imitators of Christ, the prophets of the third Joachimite Age — the Age of the Holy Spirit — the exalted peoples living the last days of the Antichrist. This is what certain sweating monks proclaimed; the masses of Arabs and Jews following behind Felipe in this caravan muttered different things among themselves.
Then the singing, shouting children saw the castle resting beneath the low-hanging clouds, and they cried: “Is this Jerusalem?” But Felipe knew it was only his father’s castle. He instructed the men to prepare arms for the assault, but when they reached the castle moat they found the drawbridge already lowered, the huge doors opened wide.
Silently, they descended from their carts. Children clung to their mothers’ skirts. The flagellants dropped their scourges. Pilgrims from Rome peered from behind their Veronica cloths. Amazed, they entered the castle of El Señor, where a vast repast had been hurriedly abandoned; musicians’ instruments lay in disorder beside the cold, ashy hearth; black blood and grease seeped from the cadaver of a decapitated deer; the tapestries hung motionless, although their flat ocher figures of glittering unicorns and hunters seemed to welcome Felipe’s army. Then their amazement gave way to frenzied action; the crowd took up the wine flasks and the musical instruments, they seized the roast partridges and grape clusters; men, women, and children ran through the great halls and bedchambers and passageways, dancing, tearing down the tapestries and cloaking themselves in them, donning casques and caps and tiaras and birettas and steeple caps and airy gossamers; they adorned themselves in chains of gold and silver earrings, ceremonial medallions, even the emptied basins of oil lamps; they plundered every coffer, jewel chest, and casket that lay in their paths. Renegade monks offered indulgences to scarlet-clad whores in exchange for their favors, pilgrims from England mixed the blood of the saint with the blood of the wine, and a drunken cleric was proclaimed Dominus Festi and baptized with three pails of water, while during the height of the orgy a Brabantine heretic bellowed the catastrophes awaiting the world: war and misery, fire from the heavens and greedy abysses yawning at the feet of humanity. Only the elect would survive. Then the Jews rejected the plates of unclean suckling pig; the Moslems decided to swallow the pieces of gold they had found.
The celebration continued for three days and three nights, until everyone succumbed, overcome by love-making and lack of sleep, hysterical exaltation, bleeding wounds, by indigestion and by drunkenness. But during this frenzy — and its eventual attrition in mournful songs, renewed vows, and indolent gestures — the five friends first observed and then acted according to their own desires. Celestina and Felipe lay down together upon a soft bed of marten skins; the student Ludovico soon joined them, since in truth the three had thought of nothing else since El Señor’s son had imagined the story of their love-making on board the ship that never sailed.
The two older men, Simón the monk and Pedro the peasant, slowly left the castle. Once beyond the moat they clasped hands, then set out on different routes; Simón said the sick awaited him in other unfortunate cities; Pedro, that it was now time to return to the coast and begin to build a new boat.
As Simón and Pedro bade each other farewell, the drawbridge very slowly began to rise; the old men paused again as they heard the sound of heavy chains and creaking wooden planks, but they could not see who raised the bridge. Each sighed and continued on his way. Had they waited but a few instants more, they would have heard the violent pounding on the other side of the raised bridge, now become an impregnable barbican; they would have heard desperate cries for help, and the heart-rending weeping of the imprisoned.
THE REWARD
When the slaughter had ended, El Señor’s soldiers sheathed their bloody swords and returned to the soldiers’ huts where they had been hidden during the long feast of the brief Apocalypse. Felipe had asked that the cadavers lie exposed for one whole day in the great halls and bedchambers of the castle; then, when the stench became unbearable, El Señor ordered that they all be burned upon a pyre erected in the center of the castle courtyard. Felipe also asked his father that Celestina and Ludovico be spared any punishment, because they had afforded him great pleasure.
“That pleasure is now a part of my education, Father, a part of the pedagogy not to be found in the Latin texts, the things you wanted me to learn in order to be worthy of my legacy.”
El Señor approved what his son had done, for by his actions he had shown himself worthy beyond any doubt of the power that would one day be his. Playfully, he seized his son by the nape of the neck and murmured, with a wink of the eye, that perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that a father and a son should enjoy the same female. He laughed with prolonged pleasure and then, as a reward, he told Felipe he might have the thing he most desired.
“Father, I want to marry that young lady, our English cousin, who was reprimanded and expelled from the chapel by the vicar.”
“You could have had that wish at any time, my son. All you had to do was ask.”
“Yes, I know. But first I had to be worthy.”
THE SILENT HOUR
It was the deepest, darkest night of the year; the guards were dozing and the dogs lay exhausted from being chained all day. That day El Señor’s son had wedded his young Lady. In this silent hour Ludovico the student went to Celestina and told her to make ready, they must both flee the castle.
“Where will we go?” asked the bewitched young girl.
“First to the forest, to hide,” the student answered. “Then we will look for the old man. He has probably returned to the coast to build another boat. Or perhaps we can find the monk. He is sure to be in some afflicted city. Come, Celestina; hurry.”
“But we will fail, Ludovico, exactly as the young Liege told. I have dreamed it.”
“Yes. We will fail, once, and then again, then still again. But every failure will be a victory. Come, hurry, before the hounds awaken.”
“I do not understand you. But I will follow you. Yes, let us go. We will do what we must do.”