The View From the Cart (12 page)

Spenna walked a mile or so with us before finally tearing herself away, her clothing soaked and the world full of mist and moistness. We clutched hands, and wept. ‘Keep a watch for Wynn,' I begged her. ‘Tell her I'll never forget my child, and I wish her a good life.'

She promised, and then made a blessing over me, wishing me the recovered use of my legs and a new home which would be everything I could want. I couldn't watch her disappearing, faced forward as I was, only seeing the future and never the past. Left alone with my unwavering son, I knew a seething panic, my insides gripped by such pain that I thought I would soil myself with a bitter stinking flux from it. But before I could demand that Cuthman stop and lift me out to perform the business, it calmed a little, and I said nothing.

The rain abated and a weak sun appeared. Ahead there was no moorland, but gentle hills covered with trees. Our path was narrow, but level, and the cart ran smoothly, for the most part. With Spenna gone, I was able to take note of this peculiar means of travelling and resign myself to making the best of it. Behind me, Cuthman was almost silent. His breathing was not laboured, and he did not speak to me. I could not turn myself far enough to look at him. Almost I could believe that some creature had taken his place, and was moving me along with uncanny strength and gentleness.

Before long, I spoke. ‘Tired, son?' I asked.

‘Nay.' His voice was strong and joyous, altogether different from what I had expected. I understood then that he was indeed on some mission or pilgrimage which I could not properly share. I was his penance, just as some pilgrims put stones in their shoes, or carry burdens on their backs. Like me, he had his back turned firmly to our past life and was walking cheerfully to wherever the road might take us.

‘The barrow works well,' I said. ‘I shall not mind riding all day like this. At least when the day be dry,' I added.

‘All this day, and many hundred days hereafter,' he responded, almost singing the words. I wished I could look into his face.
Many hundred days?
I repeated to myself. A man could walk to Rome and back in a hundred days. Many hundred would take us over the edge of the world, for sure. I hoped he was making a jest of it, and chose to challenge him.

‘Not hundreds, I hope,' I said with a forced laugh. Cuthman made no reply.

As the day began to turn, and the faint sun to sink away behind us, hunger became my most urgent need. We had brought no food with us from the hut, but Spenna had pressed a small bundle into the cart beside me, filled with honey cakes and dried plums, before taking her leave of us. I opened it now, and held a cake over my shoulder for Cuthman. ‘Time to eat,' I said. ‘Rest yourself now.' He had walked without pause for perhaps five hours. We were already close to Spenna's hopeful guess of ten miles distance from our old home.

Cuthman was gracious in his acceptance of the cake, and said he would be happy to stop and eat it as soon as he'd found the right spot. He pushed me off the track down a gentle slope between great oaks until we were in a shadowy hollow with a sheltering bramble-covered bank behind us. He set me down, and walked round so we could see each other. He stretched his arms upwards and out several times, emitting great deep sighs of relief.

‘Aching, are they?' I asked. He shook his head.

‘Stiff,' he said. ‘Be better tomorrow. I'll have the cake now.' I gave it to him, and before he ate it, he closed his eyes and muttered a short prayer of thankfulness. I almost remarked that he should be thanking Spenna for it, not his blessed Saviour. But Cuthman was on a pilgrimage now, and behaving as he thought proper. He would strain his body to its utmost and subdue his will to what he believed was God's. Whether or not I joined in was unimportant to him. Tired and a trifle wistful, I waited for him to lift me out and help me piss.

My legs took some time to straighten from the crooked folding they'd suffered in the cart. I leaned against a friendly old oak, and ate two of the honey cakes and half the dried plums, giving first a brief thought to where we might find food the next day. I could have saved something, and yet Cuthman's faith was spreading to me, and I found it easier to forget the morrow than to worry about it.

The forest was loud with the sounds of creatures. Owls, wolves, barking foxes and some wild hogs all announced themselves, careless of our presence. A modest brook ran close by, just out of sight, and we could hear the water, swelled by a few days of rain. It felt peaceful to be sharing their home, with nothing of our own to mark us out as different from them. Deftly Cuthman fashioned us a shelter from dead wood and dry leaves. We lay down, close together for warmth and slept like contented babies until daybreak, never noticing the shower of rain that must have fallen during the night.

The ground was wet and the branches dripping when we awoke. We had the last of the plums for our breakfast, grateful for the drying breeze which greeted us. We had foolishly left the cart in its normal position overnight, and water had collected inside it. I did not regard the prospect of sitting in the wet for another whole day's travelling with much enthusiasm. Cuthman tipped it up, and rubbed it with handfuls of moss he had pulled from the trees, until it was almost dry. We laid a carpet of fresh moss in it before he settled me down for another long ride. I looked around at our first night's resting place with some affection. It had been an ordinary forest and yet seemed to provide everything we needed. There were early flowers appearing under the trees, wood anemones in early bud and the green leaf spears of blooms that would carpet the forest floor in the spring.

Before we started off, I found myself staring intently at the anemones, remembering a copse beside our hut on the moor where I had watched so eagerly for the first white buds to appear and herald the spring. Grandmother's nightcap, we called them, because of the whimsical shape of them. There was a particular magic to these brave little flowers which stirred my heart. Finding them here, further from home than I had ever been, gave me courage for whatever might befall Cuthman and me. As he began to fix the strap around his neck, I suddenly said, ‘Gather me a few of the flower buds, son, will you? Just for a reminder of how we started on our journey.'

With a patient sigh, he let go the strap and walked over to the leafy patch, brave in the shadows under the trees, and quickly plucked three or four buds. I held them protectively as we pushed back up the slope to the track we'd left the evening before. They would surely not develop and open, plucked so long before their prime, but they pleased me and later in the day I tucked them into a damp mossy corner of the cart beside me.

It remained dry and we slowly climbed a long hill, following the morning sun until it hung overhead at midday. A shepherd saw us and waved from his vantage point on a little rise. What must he be thinking, I wondered, to see a lad pushing a heavy barrow containing an old woman? What other strange travellers did he witness from his roadside spot? Did he go home at nightfall and describe to his family the events of the day? Or did he have sons and a strong wife to care for the homestead, leaving him free to spend nights in a linhey with the sheep, as shepherds mostly did? Pity for Cuthman and the impossible task he had set himself after Edd had died filled me, and I bent my head to grieve for the life my boy had lived this past half-year.

I grew tired of watching the road forever ahead of us, narrow and tree-lined in most places, so that there was little to see on either side. Where the trees thinned, there would be open spaces with stumps showing where the timber had been felled for spears or ships or iron smelting. We passed one stretch of cleared land which was churned and broken, so the surface was all uneven, but there were clumps of strangely bright green grass growing through. ‘There's been fighting here,' remarked Cuthman. ‘Blood's been good for the grass, see.' I shuddered, wondering how he could know about such things. Our village had seen no battles in living memory, or for many lifetimes before that, but we had news of struggles and wars from the few who came through from other parts of the country. And the old stories often concerned fighting in all its awful detail.

I saw the man coming towards us before Cuthman did, but said nothing for a few moments. He was small in the distance, on a stretch of road which lay fairly straight, but undulating. He disappeared in a hollow before I saw him again, larger now and with his face easier to see. He had long fair hair and narrow shoulders. ‘Here be company,' I remarked, curious to observe the stranger's reaction to the odd pair we presented.

Cuthman continued to walk steadily, whistling in short snatches, which he had not done until now. I tried to sit up straighter, and compose myself as if it was a normal thing to ride in a barrow pushed by a lad. The sun shone full on the man's face, and I saw his sharp blue gaze flick from Cuthman to me and back again. At perhaps twenty paces distance, he nodded and said, ‘Pleasant day. Spring in the air, thank God.'

Cuthman paused, and stood still, waiting for the man to come level with us. I was smiling and agreeing about the weather. ‘Be you a man of God, then?' my son enquired, in a manner I thought needlessly rough.

‘Merely a Christian,' came the reply. His voice was strange to me, as if there were dough inside his cheeks. ‘And yourselves?'

‘We are pilgrims.'

‘And your goal? Where might you be heading?'

Cuthman stammered a few words about journeying eastwards, waiting for a sign from God that we had reached our goal.

‘Seems as if you're doing penance for something,' remarked the man, fixing the cart with his light sky-hued eyes, one brow raised in quiet amusement. I stared defiantly back at him, less inclined to like him as we talked. There was no violence in him, and yet he seemed to have a power I did not understand. His easy words and quick grasp of what we were about seemed to diminish us. I remembered that we were fleeing from a helpless poverty, with not the least idea of where we might get to. We were contemptible in this man's eyes, I saw now. Ragged and ignorant, living like beasts under the trees. It seemed, though, that Cuthman felt differently.

‘Aye, I do penance,' he declared. ‘I killed my father - is that not reason enough for you?'

The stranger's mobile brows jerked up to meet his straight fair fringe, and he blew his lips out in a
pouf
of surprise. ‘Indeed?' he said. ‘And did man's law not mete out punishment for this desperate crime?'

Cuthman was silent, and I suspected he had not followed the man's meaning. I put in, ‘Take no notice - he never killed his Da. My man died from a seizure whilst threshing the corn. My son was a morning's walk away, minding the sheep when it happened. He's a Godly lad, and feels in need of a cleansing. My legs don't work right, so he made me this barrow.'

With narrowed eyes, the man tried to follow my explanation, evidently suspicious of us now.

‘You have no coin, I presume?' he said.

‘None,' I confirmed. ‘Folk like us have no need for suchlike.'

‘Then I wish you God's favour on your pilgrimage,' he concluded, before beginning to walk on his way. ‘For you'll be in need of it.'

‘Thank'ee for that,' I threw back over my shoulder. Cuthman said nothing, but lifted the barrow's handles and began to push again.

‘Don't speak of killing your Da again,' I said to him, after a little while.

‘What say?' he queried, bending forward so his cheek came close to mine. I turned my head and repeated my words.

‘Tis true, though,' he replied.

‘Whether ‘tis or no, it be a foolish boast to make to strangers.'

‘Hmm, hmm,' was all I could hear. Without seeing his face, I could have little notion of how he was taking my words, but I could guess that he was struggling with a sullenness at being accused of boasting. Annoyance washed through me. The boy was scarcely more than a child, for all his physical strength, and it was my place as his mother to see that he conducted himself wisely amongst people. I resolved to keep a close watch on what he said to anyone we met from henceforth.

‘Was that man English?' he said, later.

‘Seemed like.' I had been drifting, half dreaming, and couldn't think at first. ‘Light hair, and tall. We live in an English land, son. ‘Tis us that's the strangers these days. Remember that.'

The distinctions between English and British and Celt had never meant much to the folk in the village. We understood that there were struggles between the three - and others besides - each with their own ideas of church and government, each with Kings hoping to be lord over great parts of the country, but very little of this affected our lives. Now and then a village lad would be fired up by some news and declare himself a fighter for one side or another, but it would generally come to naught, unless he knew where he might go to join the battle. Outsiders such as Edd and I had been were careless and ignorant of such matters. Nothing would change the moors and the trouble it took to wrest a living from them. How it came about that Cuthman was so taken with Christ, with so few about to influence him, was a mystery I have never properly solved.

Cuthman whistled again, which quickly became a sign to me that he was deep in thought, working out some matter in his head. Finally he said, ‘But our people were living on this land before the English came. How can we be strangers?'

‘They defeated our kings,' I told him, feeling my head throb with the effort of making sense of the shreds of understanding I possessed. ‘They came after the Romans left, a great age ago.'

‘Ah,' he murmured, and said no more for a long time. I fell to wondering about the ways in which a youngster gained knowledge of the world, as he grew to manhood. Edd and I had never talked about such matters with the children. Rannoc had perhaps brought word from the wider world, gleaned from travellers passing through the village. Cuthman and Wynn had once or twice walked down to visit their uncles, staying a night or two, and hearing who knows what stories. But such thin gleanings scarcely accounted for the burning passion that now filled Cuthman's heart. He had a knowledge of Christ and the All-seeing God which seemed could only come from direct experience. Yet again, I relived the vision I had had of the angel who visited Cuthman on the moor, and knew that my son was blessed in a special way. That angel had taught him everything that mattered. It was the angel's doing that we were on our pilgrimage now, and there was no more that either my son or I needed to know.