The White Cross (51 page)

‘Wouldn’ happen hereabouts,’ I once heard the manor shepherd, Harald, telling Father Gerard. ‘Ewes drop their lambs by Candlemas for certain-sure. They’d never keep the Chris’child in his straw so long to see a sock lamb, would they Father? Wouldn’ make no kind o’ sense, that wouldn’t!’

But if Christ had first seen light of day in the shadow of the alpine range, he might have seen a newborn lamb at Christmas. For in the sheepfolds of the Biellese the ewes lambed through the autumn into winter.
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Though truly most were half the size of their own mothers when I first saw them at the start of Lent.

I came to work amongst the folds on the advice of a cloth merchant I met up with in a river tavern on the Lombard marshes in view of the high mountains I must cross – a man who’d taken something of an interest in me, when he heard the journey I was planning. Another episode among so many looking back in which I played the fool!

The merchant was a portly, self-important individual in an expensive fur-lined surcoat – so tall he had to stoop beneath the ceiling of the inn. A native of Biella, he spoke its local dialect until he saw I couldn’t understand – then changed to French and ordered me a mug of German ale to go with my stale bread and stew. While he was bound for Venice with a bargeload of cloth for sale on the Rialto – my own best plan, he told me firmly, was to join the transumanza with the shepherds.

‘You’d have to be a wealthy man to pay for guides and sleds to try a winter crossing. And then you’d likely lose to frost some part of you you’d rather keep,’ he said. ‘Much better wait until the spring, lad, and climb the mountains with the flocks.’

Which came to me as a surprise, because I’d hardly seen a single sheep north of Bologna, leave alone a flock.

‘You will,’ the merchant told me with a fat sort of chuckle. ‘There’s more wool this side of the Biella I dare say, than anywhere on God’s good earth. We think sheep, eat sheep, fuck sheep in the Biellese. And if you’ll listen to a man who knows, you’ll go by water to Cossato where the river narrows.’ He used both hands to demonstrate.

‘Then join a fold somewhere between the landing and the old walled town. Stick to the wool, is what I’m saying, lad. Do everything the shepherds do. Tup ewes if you’ve a fancy for hot mutton!’ He demonstrated that as well, obscenely – laughed again at my embarrassment, and ordered me a second draught of ale.

There would be work aplenty on the levels, the cloth merchant assured me. From Lent clear through to transumanza. ‘Then when they drive the sheep up to their summer pastures, you’ll go with ’em, do you see – and know that way for sure that the San Bernard pass is safe to cross.’

So that’s just what I did (well, not the thing about the ewes).

Nor were the Biellese flocks hard to find. Before I’d even left the river at Cossato, the ceaseless bleating that would fill my hours awake and sleeping through the weeks that followed was carried to me on the breeze – and with it the piss-mutton stench of multitudes of sheep. Their folds were set in rows and patchwork patterns for as far as you could see across the plain. The woolly squares they occupied, the green they’d move to later, blocked out like a giant chessboard beneath the mountain wall.

The Comun of Biella was famous for its woollen trade from Amiens to Antioch, or so the merchant boasted. And when I confided to my beaker in the tavern that I’d never heard of it, and wouldn’t know a comun from a bull’s foot if I should stumble on one, he set himself at once to educate me.

‘A comun is the best and fairest form of government there ever was or will be. Never doubt it, lad. You’ve heard, I take it, of Amalfi, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, Ancona and Ragusa,’ he asked, ‘to name but six of our great maritime republics?’

The alcohol was working fast on me. Well I was thirsty and it had been a while since I’d laid hands on quite so much of it. So
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though I’d heard of only three of the republics that he mentioned, I nodded at him with the utmost gravity. And although the tavern’s beery atmosphere was pressing on my eyelids, I tried my best to concentrate on everything the merchant said, while staring at my own reflection in the ale.

‘So if I tell you that our Biellese share with those states the freedom to conduct their own affairs without the interference of a king, a duke, a count or any overlord except their bishop. Then you will understand,’ he said, ‘that comuns are created for the benefit of all.’

It was a subject, I could tell, that was dear to the man’s heart.

‘But who is there… I mean, how can such places be defended?’ I thought confusedly of Haddertun without its service to the Honour of Warenne – without the Earl’s protection.

‘How can that be expected to succeed?’ I waved my tankard, splashing ale across the table. ‘Who judges their disputes, Iwant’erknow?’ I said, running the words together. ‘Who caresfor’emwhentheycan’twork?’

‘Aside from our own garrison, the Lombard League protects us from the German Empire,’ the cloth merchant patiently explained.

‘Each year at Martinmas four consuj are elected from the populace, tasked by our bishop to pass judgement in its courts, inspect its hospital and keep its soldiery in order. You may be interested to hear, lad, that I myself have held the bâton of a consuj, when…’

But that was all that penetrated. For it was then that I fell forward senseless in a puddle of spilled ale.

Luckily, the worst effects of my instruction had more or less worn off when I came to Cossato. To leave me with little more than a foul aftertaste, a beard that stank of ale, and a familiar ache behind the eyes.

At the third farm I reached on the road to Biella, I was taken on as a hireling under-shepherd, a ‘cavalin’ – which in the dialect of Piemontèis means ‘colt’. (I would have said I was a
dogsbody, if that position was not already filled by working dogs, who knew more of the business than I’d ever learn.)

As a boy at Haddertun I’d watched the manor shepherds with their flock. But now I saw that there was more to what they did than I supposed. Within a week I had been shown a dozen ways to make a fold, and how to use a pitching iron and carry hurdles on a pole. I learned how long to leave the tegs on kale for the first folding, when to chase them out before they blew, and when to bring them back. If I’d but had a penny for each gate I opened and each hurdle I set down and shackled to its neighbour, I’d have needed something a great deal larger than the leather bag I carried in my tunic to contain my earnings. But even as things stood, I was still paid a silver ‘sold’, the local version of a shilling, for every second week that I worked in the pens.

The other shepherds shared their knowledge gladly, treating me much as the olive pickers of Apulia had, with a strange blend of courtesy and curiosity – watching all my movements, ready to correct me when I went astray, and calling me Sgnor, although I’d told no one I was a knight. Well used to solitude by then, I gave them little cause for friendship. But still they taught me how to use a crook to catch a ewe, a knife to trim a hoof, a dirt-knocker to loosen mud from wool, a drenching horn for medication. I learned their given names; Nicolo, Elijo, Fiorello and Stefano – all the o’s. On my first visit to the town I bought myself a sheepskin coat like theirs, with felted leggings held in place by thongs – and in the evenings at the farmstead, rubbed the sore bones in my broken foot and tried to learn their language.

The husbandman who hired us was not a man to show an interest in anything about his shepherds but their work. So long as we did all he asked of us for six days out of seven, he was satisfied. On Sundays, when the sheep were safely folded on their turnip-tops or kale, he undertook to mind the pens himself, while we were free to lie at ease within our huts. Or else to walk the half league to the Comun of Biella – perched on a hill set like a footstool before the great rock settle of the alps, and fortified with walls and gates against attack.

To say the comun rode to fortune on the broad backs of its sheep, is but another way to prove the merchant’s boast. It seemed to me when I first saw it, that every yard and building in the place which wasn’t occupied with carding, spinning, weaving, fulling wool or dyeing it, must be employed in making clothing out of sheepskin. Or jointing what remained of the sheep’s carcase. There were three hundred looms, so I was told, within the town walls of Biella. Its inns were mostly patronised by men who worked with sheep. And as I found, the three or four times that I sought relief there – its brothels followed the old practice of dipping rams before a shearing. As a matter of routine the putane
washed all their clients in hot water. Shepherds, fullers and sheep-butchers – soaped and scrubbed without distinction, to save bed linen from the greasy taint they all called ‘mutton-sweat’.

The snow had fallen and had melted, before I ever came to work amongst the folds. It fell again before the end of Lent, to spread the whiteness of the mountains all across the plain. Then froze, to clothe the sheep in icy mailcoats, and keep us busy thatching shelters for them or carrying fresh hay. By Lady Day, when sheep were dipped to cleanse their wool of winter grime, the last of the snow had thawed. And by the first Wednesday in Holy Week, the time by long tradition for sheep-shearing to begin, the spring was well advanced.

The sky was blue. The cuckoo called, and butterflies emerged to dance in sunlit spaces. The dense coppices which fringed the plain were hung with saffron catkins. Wildflowers carpeted the earth between their trunks; anemones and aconites and clumps of the yellow pampocét
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the flower the monks call ‘prima rosa’ and we call ‘primerose’… Which prompts me to recall that other rose, the plant from Ashkelon. Because that too survived. All through the winter frosts I’d kept it wrapped in sheepswool in the hut I shared with Fiorello – and in the spring, to my surprise, it sprouted two green shoots which opened in the sun to four, then eight small glossy leaves with jagged edges.

The seasons turned, is what I’m saying. And we turned with them, following the cycles of the sheep.

The cycles of the seasons and the sheep. The circles of our lives… Is that the way we live and think? In loops and circles meeting and repeating? Is it what I am doing now?

I’m such a clod, so thoroughly confused still. I scarce know what I’m thinking. The thoughts keep looping, spinning through my mind like the repeating verses of a chanson. Chains of recollections and results – all linked together, but in ways that I can’t seem to grasp. I never have been good at finding words to fit ideas. And the harder I attempt to pin them down the quicker they fly off into the night!

It was something I heard from a French native of Orléans that started it, while he and I were being dipped. Had I not heard that my King Richard had been captured on his way home overland from Outremer? – the Frenchman asked, as we sat back-to-back in the whores’ soapy bath. Now prisoner of the German Emperor, the King of England had been accused of ordering the death of the Emperor’s own kinsman, Marquess Conrad, whose birthplace of Montferrato was – as I must know – less than a day’s ride from Biella.

Except I didn’t know. How could I? No one had told me that the man who’d starved us in the camp at Toron, had first seen light of day here under these same mountains. And that coincidence came somehow more as a surprise to me than news of our King’s capture and disgrace. I can’t explain it now, I couldn’t then. But I could not believe that it was all by chance – the Marquess Conrad’s birth in this strange land of sheep – his death at Richard’s hands – the way I came to hear it…

Circles, loops and circles deliberately inscribed. As if someone is drawing them with a fine pen? Or someone else is rambling on without a clear thought in his head – someone by name of Garon, catching water in a sieve!

I knew I wouldn’t be much good at this, am so confused, need something solid to rely on. Could it be Fisty Flora?

NO GARON! No, just stick to facts. Go back to what you know and can recall – the Shearing Fair outside Biella.

Take it from there – the Wednesday after Easter, the day that you first met the Bérgé…

The Shearing Fair the Wednesday after Easter marked the beginning of Biella’s pastoral year. The shearing gangs of ten or a dozen brawny fellows – some local men and others from as far abroad as Novara or Vercelli – pursued their trade from farm to farm, overseen by officers appointed by the consuj, who claimed one fleece in every six for use or resale by the comun.

In the clear light of early April, the gangs toiled manfully in yards spread with clean canvas. Or else in barns with doors flung open to admit the sun. On our farm Nicolo and I were set to work as catchers, lugging ewes into the holding pens where they’d be handy for the shearers. Elijo and Stefano wound the fleeces. A boy stood by to stamp each shaven ewe with a bold ‘B’ for Biella in cold tar. Then Fiorello daubed the sheep with two sticks dipped in dye, to show the colours of our flock. Red on the rump – green on the neck, where the shearers had left woolly tufts to make the creatures easier to catch.

It was thirsty work for all. Back-breaking for shearers, who were tasked with stripping up to forty animals a day, with little time for rest. We toiled all day from dawn to dusk, until the Vesper bell of the Biella Baptistery signalled for the last sheep to be shorn and marked – and dusty gullets to be sluiced with ale in barns and sheds across the plain.

The drinking continued steadily throughout the day they called ‘final’when gangs foregathered at the Shearing Fair outside the town – to spend their earnings exercising upright at archery and quarter-staves. Or prone on mattresses with the putane, who knew the best ways to ease aching spines
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