The White Cross (55 page)

‘Muhibb
,
accept. There is a saying of my people: “If we could find a merchant for regrets, we must be wealthy all.” Death waits for us as Allah wills. We are as roses, we bloom then blow and fall in dust.’

It was another kind of way – another journey I suppose which from its start in Acre would lead me down into the very pit of hell, and out of it to take the steep path that’s brought me to this place. I discovered beauty – in Acre, in myself and in Khadija. Discovered it and lost it.

Have I? Have I lost it?

When you come to love a place you take possession of it in a way, and it possesses you, becomes a part of who you are. Who lives there now, I wonder, in Khadija’s house? Who tends her garden?

And what is love? Do joy and true affection have to reach a certain pitch before you call them by that name?

She said, ‘Al-Qalb al’Ashiq Yawa,’ and told me what it meant, ‘A loving heart will find love where it may.’ Was that too from her Qur’an? When I recall Khadija talking of incha-Allah with her hand upon my sleeve, I see three versions of myself – the Garon of the moment, gripping her and feeling fear. Another Garon, staring past her to a future that will hold the memory forever in his mind. And now a third – this Garon of the present high above the earth, groping through his memory to view the scene, and feel the fear, and live it all again.

I so much wanted to protect them, should have managed to protect them.

Why did they have to bind their hands?

I can’t, I can’t go on with this……

I’ve had a rest to set my thoughts in order. The Bérgé says that I must face it. He thinks I can, and I’ve agreed to try.

Oh God, if I could only lose my memory, halt time, or else jump clear from that day into this. Oh God, oh God, oh God! I’m sweating, panting – beseeching her God, my God, anyone’s idea of God, to intervene and save them! But I must look the devil in the face and enter hell. I must remember how it feels to be among the damned!

They held us back until the tumbrels were unloaded…

It’s said that when God seeks to punish you He grants you what you’ve prayed for. I prayed in the port of Tyre for victory and death to infidels, and I was punished. How I was punished! But not by God. Because it was as if a curtain had been wrenched aside to reveal an empty void. My faith was gone and with it everything that I believed in – and in its place a thought that terrified me. Because I knew that as a soldier primed to hate and trained to kill – knew then and know it now – I might myself have waded through the blood of men and women, even children. Because somewhere inside me, as I lay there with my knees beneath my chin, there crouched the monster that is man!

How long is it since then? Weeks pass these days without the nightmares. But they haven’t left me even here amongst the stars. Their spirits haunt me and perhaps they always will…

I had drunk steadily through the three weeks we spent in the green groves which grew on three sides of the ruined port of Joppa. I knew as well as any man that alcohol was not the answer. But it helped to drown the questions. And when the Bishop’s criers rode through the camp to summon us to join the force that was advancing on Jerusalem, it was the drink that helped me to deny them.

It was there that I first understood what made a villain of the king I’d worshipped for so long. What I had always seen in him was what I wished to be myself, a hero. But what I saw at Ashkelon was entirely the reverse. King Richard talked but wouldn’t listen. King Richard looked, but couldn’t see – had no idea of loyalties or commitments. Which meant he placed no value on the lives of others. Took all we offered him. Gave nothing in return.

Yet in the end was I much better? I who’d killed in Lewes and at sea, and on the River Belus and at Acre – and felt nothing at those times beyond a thrill of self-congratulation? A careless mummer with a real sword rather than a wooden one? Could I claim to be better than King Richard? It made me sick to realise I couldn’t…

Behind my misery, I think I’d always known that I would have to find the strength from somewhere to continue, and I believe it was the way those peasants lived and worked that finally began to lift the weight of guilt from my bowed shoulders. Whatever tithes or duties they might owe their lord, it had to be the cycle of the seasons – the soil, the sun, the rain, the crops and animals they raised – which gave these folk the sense of fitness I had lost. Or was there more to it than that? Did I respond to them because I missed the same thing back in Sussex?

A pair of urchins we found catching frogs in a green pool behind a village press-mill, were like – so very like my John and I had been as boys in the old days of the mudsquelch; in happy days at Haddertun before I trained to be a soldier.

Me as a boy? Me as I could have been if I’d stayed home to live a simple, useful life? Could I have done that? Held the manor, without my time in Lewes Fortress. Without my military training?

You do know why you couldn’t weep in front of John. Why tell yourself you don’t? If his gift was the rose, yours was to leave without a scene.

John behind me. Khadija. Jos. Both dead. Elise at Haddertun. Had she forgotten me? Or, thinking I was dead, already planned to take another husband? A gentle man to suit her taste? Although I found it hard to form a picture of her face, I could recall the colour of her hair and feel the warmth and texture of her skin…

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. The harder I attempt to pin them down the quicker they fly off into the night.

Which brings me back to where I started in the mountains looking down, from heaven as I’ve called it, on the story of my life. Or does it, Garon? Isn’t it too soon still to complete the circle?

‘It is for you to find the way by trial,’ Léonie said, ‘to your salvation.’

‘It seems to me that a belief in God enthroned in Heaven is very much about our own delusive quest for immortality, a basic fear of dying.’ The Bérgé smiled into the darkness. ‘In our arrogance and self-obsession, we judge ourselves too precious to be snuffed out like candles – and in seeking meanings for the things in life that hurt and puzzle us, we come up with a set of answers that defy our own intelligence.

‘D’ye see it’s not the fighting that’s important but the reason for it. These fellows battle to create lives rather than destroy them, and the creation of our own kind is what we’re all about. If you’d lived with sheep as long as I have, and with dogs, and watched the marmoté
sporting every summer since you were a boy – then you would see yourself as I do, Garon. Not as a lord of creation, but as a child of nature with no greater claim than any other creature to the gift of life.’

‘So do you think a man can change?’

‘Not in his essential nature, but in the way he sees himself perhaps?’

Memories like saint’s bones in a reliquary. Seen looking back and looking down…

‘Every day muhibb, a page of story.’ That’s how Khadija put it in her moonlit garden, her words alive in me when so much else has died.

‘Yesterday is flown,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow is, tomorrow is… TO-MORR-OW IS…’

Hullo, I must have dozed off. Christ, it’s cold!

Ouch, bloody foot… (How long for hob’s sake have I been asleep?) Light, it’s getting light – sun’s coming through…

Uh-ooh, a yawn – and another – and again… Oo-haa!

And… S-T-R—E—T—C—H!

That’s better! Christ in heaven, so much better – like letting out a fart. Before the stink arrives.

And here it comes – the sun!

So beautiful. So round and red – a rising cock, a breaching child, reborn like me. Oh God… (Stop calling on a god you don’t believe in, Garon!)

Well anyway, it’s going to be a wonderful new day!

The sheep trotting up already from the open cort – grass drenched with dew…

In my mind’s eye I can see Elise’s face – I really can! The way she lifts her chin when she’s about to smile.

‘So tell us what you think you’ve learned up there between the airs from heaven and the blasts from hell?’ He sounds almost impatient.

‘But no need to tell us if you’d rather not.’ Léonie hands me up the bowl. Warm goats’ milk, smelling of warm goats.

‘He may think that he has all the answers. But he hasn’t, no one has.’ She strokes my cold unshaven cheek. ‘You have to find your own way through, as do we all.’

‘So what d’ye think you’ve learned?’ the Bérgé prompts a second time, as if she hadn’t interrupted.

‘I see the truth is simpler than I thought. I’ve learned that life’s a gift we mustn’t squander – that men and women need each other, and children need protection.’

I’ve hardly slept. I should be tired, exhausted by the hours of silent memories and raw emotions. But I’m speaking fast, collectedly, and with a kind of freedom I have never known – ideas, beliefs are founting through my mind and out of my wide-open mouth into the mountain air!

‘I’ve learned that war’s inglorious, that men construct religion out of fear. I learned in Acre that there is no sin in carnal love when it is granted freely – that there’s as much to be gained from the giving as the taking – that virtue lies much less in winning than in tolerance and kindness.’ (All that in one long panting breath!) ‘I’ve come to understand that we are made to fight, but not for a white cross or an uncaring god. We should be striving rather to protect our own.’

‘Indeed we should.’ The Bérgé’s sitting by his wife with one arm round her shoulders – but pats me with the other hand as if to slow me down.

‘Which doesn’t mean that you can’t tolerate the beliefs of others without relinquishing your own. Or understand them when they’re frightened and confused, as you have been yourself. The problems of the world derive, as we’ve agreed, much less from people claiming to be right, than from believing others to be wrong, and venturing to change their minds for them by force.’

‘I know. I know that we are at our best when we are living simple, useful lives – and at our worst when acting blindly to impress false heroes. I see that I’ve been led too easily, have always been too eager for other men’s approval. I see I have been eager all my life to make a gift of what I am to anyone who’ll take it. My father said it was my destiny to fight, to be the strongest and the best. He didn’t say, but maybe… Maybe he meant to – that I should strive to be the best I can be, as a husband and Seigneur.’

‘Bravo! Your father would be proud of you. I am.’

The Bérgé smiles. ‘So would you say that in a night spent leafing through the pages of your past, you’ve seen the consequence of what you’ve done, and can begin to think of building something from the wreckage?’

Léonie, free of his embrace and on her feet now busy with her cheese curd, looks down to search my eyes, but doesn’t speak.

‘I know I have no one to blame for my misfortunes but myself, if that is what you mean? And no one to rely on but myself to set things right.’

‘I only asked to hear you frame it in the words I knew you’d choose.’ (Which is good as admitting he can read my mind.)

‘You couldn’t know what I would say, not word for word!’ If I can hear the bluster in my voice, he must as well. ‘I mean how could you know?’

‘In the way I always have – and if you don’t believe me, I will tell you what you’re thinking at this moment, and what you have decided. You’re thinking you need peace, security and love. You feel a need to make something, to see things grow. You need another chance to understand your wife and show her how you’ve changed. In other words you’re ready to go home.’

He’s rising to his own feet, holding out a hand to pull me onto mine.

‘And before you say it, Garon – you’re about to ask me if I can find time to show you the shortest way to the San Bernard pass – and I am about to tell you that I’m at your service. Unless Léonie has more food to cram into your belly, we’ll leave this moment if you like.’

So now he’s pointing down the valley to the road which rises through it to the the Hospice on the mountain pass. The tracks we’ve ridden have been steep and difficult in places, even for the asses’ little hooves.

But now I am dismounting, to leave my donkey in his care – telling him I never could have found my way alone (and of course I don’t just mean the way up to the pass). My thanks are heartfelt, and for once I can express them. Because that is something else they’ve given me, the Bérgé and Khadija, the words to say what’s in my heart.

‘Can lost time ever be made up?’ My final question.

‘It doesn’t need to be. We make time as we live it.’

He hands me cheese and mutton from his satchel for the journey, rests a paternal hand a moment on my shoulder.

Our eyes meet and we smile.

I set my foot with care upon the narrow path, to climb back into the world I’d left behind me – knowing that the figure on the donkey will watch me until I’m out of sight.