The Road to Damietta Read online

  Raul, who was not so apt to agree with her as I, pressed a hand against his forehead and thought for a moment with closed eyes.

  "A misty cloud hovered above the tree, it's true," he said.

  "A glow," Mother insisted. "A light suddenly shone. Where else could the light have come from?"

  "I recall," Raul said, replying with a parable, as was his custom when pressed, "a night in my childhood. One night when my nurse, carrying a lighted candle, put me to bed, I asked her where the light had come from. She blew out the candle and said, 'Tell me, my dear, where the light has gone and then I'll tell you where it comes from.'"

  Mother pointed to the tree. "Look," she said triumphantly. "The leper has gone. He is nowhere to be seen. It was our Christ who stood there."

  I didn't dispute her, though when I glanced back after we had passed, I caught a glimpse of the leper. He was lying flat against the earth, hiding until we were out of sight.

  I was disturbed by this strange encounter. I dreamed about it at night. I became a leper myself and hid in the deep grass, rejected and sad. Then Francis appeared from somewhere and comforted me, kissing my hands. I thought of little else. It was on my mind when Bishop Pelagius visited the house to choose what I was to copy from the Bible.

  Assisi had become a nesting place for heretics. Why I do not know, except that it was a beautiful city resting like a jewel among meadows and mountains, put there by God Himself in one of His most gracious moods. But whatever the reason, heretics were with us in great numbers.

  To cleanse the city of heresy, old Bishop Guido was moved to the far north and Bishop Pelagius was brought in to take his place. Most of the heretics were Cathars, people who prayed by day and by night, yet thought that the Church's sacred cross was the symbol of Satan's victory over Christ. There were also a number of Manicheans in our midst—indeed, our master of guards was one of them—people who believed that Satan, not God, had created the world. And the Waldensians, the ones who preached that Christians should live in poverty like the apostles. And the many Donatists, Apollinarians, Sabellians, and one or two Priscillianists. In all, according to a careful count by Bishop Pelagius, there were some thirty different sects in the city.

  The bishop came to supper at my father's request, bribed by a vast gift to the cathedral. He was born in Lucia, a place near Granada. A tall, pale man, he had a hawkish nose and a bulging forehead that could easily hold the world's facts and wisdom. Impressed by his high office, Mother had a sumptuous meal prepared—eels, truffles, poached trout, roast pig, and several kinds of fowl. He ate heartily, unloosing his belt as the dinner progressed, studying me from time to time with sharp gray eyes.

  Afterward we went into the Great Hall, where dark shadows and the flickering light of candles surrounded us. Falling to his knees and inviting me to join him, the bishop began to pray softly in a melodious voice, asking various favors of God, one being the salvation of my errant soul.

  I didn't pray and I didn't listen to him pray. As soon as he had finished, I described the strange scene I had witnessed at the leper house and asked him if he knew Francis Bernardone.

  "I never met the young man," he said. "I've heard of the escapade, of course. The rude treatment of his father, which struck me as barbarous. He stole money from Signor Bernardone and then mocked him in a public place."

  "I am not disturbed about that, Bishop Pelagius. It's the leper that disturbs me. Why should Francis Bernardone want to kiss his hands when before he ran from lepers, holding his nose?"

  "A gesture. As with the scene at Santa Maria Maggiore, a plea for praise. I understand that he has always hankered after it. And always the zealot, whether in hot pursuit of pleasure or, as now, in the hot pursuit of Christ."

  "How does kissing a leper have anything to do with Christ?"

  "It doesn't."

  "The kisses make me shudder."

  "I shudder also."

  The bishop drew down his mouth and shuddered a little. He had two chins and the beginning of a third and all of them shook as he shuddered.

  "It haunts me," I said. "I see Francis eagerly approaching the leper. The man shrinks away and attempts to flee, but Francis seizes him by his bloody hands and holds him back."

  "So I have heard. He forced the leper to submit to an unwanted embrace, which startled and embarrassed the leper, rendered him speechless, made him run and hide. This act could have happened simply. Bernardone might have gone to a leprosarium. There are three around Assisi. You seem to be visited by a plague of lepers. God's punishment, perhaps. Bernardone might talk to the unfortunates and take them presents. Instead, he tries to play the gallant knight and makes a fool of himself."

  But the scene with the leper he did not explain. Unexplained was the Francis who had treated the running bull with courtesy, who persuaded me to free my falcon. Neither of these things, as far as I could tell, was done to serve himself.

  After the bishop left, while I sat at my bench copying the verses he had suggested, ones from the Bible which he thought might lead me down a more narrow path, I asked Raul how he would explain the scene between Francis and the leper.

  "And please, not in a Sufi parable," I added. Raul's cryptic tales from the sect of Moslem mystics often irritated me.

  "It can't be explained in everyday words. A parable would explain it better, but I can't think of one," Raul replied. "You know the story of Saul—how he persecuted the Christians, jailed them, and burned their houses, how on the road to Damascus he was struck down by a sudden burst of light and heard a voice speaking to him."

  "I have been told this, how he regained his sight, became a Christian himself, and changed his name to Paul. Do you think that something like this happened to Francis?"

  "Certainly he was converted, and it might have happened in the same way."

  "But Francis was a Christian already. When he returned his clothes to his father he was a Christian. There's something else."

  "How he was converted I can't explain, for there are as many ways of conversion as there are those who are converted. Bernardone's act of stopping the leper and kissing his hands can be explained, however. By embracing the lowest, the unfortunates that all his life he had shrunk from, he was surrendering himself to Christ. But he could have done so in a more modest way, without the whole populace as a witness."

  "That they are a witness, that they do know about it and do talk about it, may be exactly what Francis intended. He may have wished to set an example."

  "I doubt it," Raul said. "Francis is a heedless young man."

  "Whether he is heedless or not, and for whatever reason he did it," I said, "the act is still there for everyone to see."

  "Who knows, it may start a new fashion," Raul said sarcastically.

  When Bishop Pelagius came again for supper he brought with him the most shocking news. As usual Mother had arranged a feast—two varieties of soup, one recipe from Rome and one from Venice, poached fish, a haunch of venison, and a brace of geese. The bishop ate with gusto but it was not the food that brightened his eye.

  He kept the awful news until he and I were alone in the Great Hall, sitting beneath a painting of Christ, the painting my grandfather had brought home from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade.

  He pulled up his robe to warm his legs before the fire—they were white and hairless like the legs of a scholar—saying in his melodious voice, "You will not be surprised to hear about Bernardone's latest escapade."

  He paused to pluck a sweet from his robe and placed it carefully on his tongue.

  "Bernardone," he said, "has taken the vow of chastity. He has attired himself in a ragged gown and a rope belt and has thrown away his shoes. He's the leader of a band. They proclaim that poverty is a virtue. They go about the environs with wooden bowls, begging supper from our housewives."

  Francis sworn to chastity, in a ragged robe and bare feet, begging for his supper! The ceiling spun. The marble floor heaved beneath me.

  The bishop went on, his
voice crackling like the logs burning in the fireplace: "Not content with begging for his own supper, he goes about the city pleading with people to give up what they own, clasp poverty to their breasts, and like him wander about with begging bowls. In time, everyone will be poor and nothing will be left to beg. What's worse, he presumes to advise the Church. He thinks that it, too, should beg for its supper."

  The bishop took another sweet from the folds of his gown.

  "He is a dangerous man, this new fanatic. He preaches heresy. Heresy attracts those who are bored in their faith, who find it too harsh or not harsh enough, who seek what is new and novel. And like all heretics, Bernardone will pay a price. He'll be punished."

  Pelagius spoke these last words in a threatening voice, raising a fist and bringing it down hard on the palm of his hand. I had the feeling that he himself was anxious to deliver the punishment.

  We prayed again and he left me with an admonition. "Francis Bernardone is lost to you, which is God's blessing. Accept it graciously. And do not embroil yourself in his dangerous life."

  Before the door closed behind him, I made a vow and sealed it with a holy sign. Whatever happened and however long it took, with God's help I would somehow win Francis Bernardone away from the new life he had thoughtlessly chosen. With his high spirits and gentle ways, he was never meant to be a prisoner of the wild idea of poverty, the same idea that the heretical Cathars believed in.

  9

  Bishop Pelagius didn't come again for nearly a month. During that time all sorts of tales were brought home by the servants from San Rufino, from Santa Maria Maggiore, from the markets and taverns and countryside. The tales varied but a common thread ran through them: A crazy man was loose in the streets.

  The bishop himself brought the latest tale. He told it with relish after a serving of skewered quail. "On my ride this morning," he said, "less than a league beyond the Roman gate, I saw Bernardone on the path a short distance beyond me. Wishing to avoid an encounter, I was turning back when the sound of his voice caught my ear. We were in an open field, only a tree or two beside the path. There was no one within sight, yet he was talking to someone, pausing to listen, then talking again. To himself, I thought.

  "Curious, I got down from my horse and made a show of adjusting the bridle while I listened. The talk stopped the instant he recognized me.

  '"Good morning, Bishop Pelagius. Come and join the conversation. The sparrows and I are talking,' he said, pointing to a flock of drab birds perched on a fence.

  "Convinced that he was playing the fool with me, and more than a little angered at his effrontery, I said, 'What is the topic of conversation? The state of the commune's treasury now that the lords have refused to pay their taxes? Or is it the rumor of a new crusade, which reached us only yesterday?"

  '"No, it is something of more importance,' he said. 'I asked them if they had thanked God for this beautiful day.'

  "'And what did they answer?' I asked.

  "Yes, yes, yes,"' they said. Now I will ask them what their wishes are for the coming day. Listen!'

  "I cocked my head and listened intently. All I heard was the familiar sparrow chirp and chatter.

  "'I have trouble with their Latin,' I said. 'It's a trifle too courtly for me. Something you might hear in the pope's anteroom from the duke of Syracuse.'

  "'Yes, their Latin does have a courtly ring,' Bernardone replied.

  "'What did they say?' I asked, determined to bring him to his senses.

  "'Things more important than the lords' refusal to pay their taxes or a new crusade,' he said. They are asking God for a south wind, which is the best for flying, and for fields of fat worms, not too large and not too small.'"

  The bishop wiped his brow and took a second helping of quail and three ladles of rich brown gravy. The anger Francis Bernardone had aroused in him was still there in his sharp eyes.

  Rinaldo was off in the city somewhere. Mother was in bed suffering from a cold that had come upon her while kneeling on the chill stones of San Rufino. But my father was at table and had given the bishop his close attention.

  He now cleared his throat and said to the bishop, "There are hundreds, yes, thousands, who have fewer flies in their heads than this Bernardone. It's not bad for a man to talk to the sparrows. It can't harm anyone. And it's better than talking to oneself."

  "Not harmless," the bishop said. "Far from harmless. It's a symptom of a most distressing malady. It can lead him to the brink of excommunication and over the brink, shunned by the Church and all its faithful."

  I sat with downcast eyes, wishing terribly to say: I have seen him talk to a bull here in our courtyard. He spoke softly to the enraged beast and it grew gentle. It must have understood what he said. It must have talked back to him, if not in words, then in some wordless way that together they had discovered.

  When we left the table, the bishop and I went again to the Great Hall and prayed. After prayers, he sat in silence, thinking, no doubt, of how best to curb Francis Bernardone, to put a chain around the neck of the man he felt certain was possessed by the Devil. It was a moody silence and to me fraught with danger.

  The bishop was in a better mood when he again appeared for dinner. With him he brought a stranger. Her name was Nicola Ascoli, and she was my age, a bedraggled little thing, all eyes, with a shy smile that showed two rows of pointed teeth.

  The bishop had found her on his doorstep that morning. "She was there," he told us, "but fled when I approached. I sent one of my acolytes to bring her back and here she is, what's left of her."

  Nicola's home, we learned, was a village in a northern province. Her mother and father, inspired by the village priest, had set off with her for Jerusalem. Across the mountain from Assisi in Ancona, which was a port on the Adriatic Sea, they found a ship bound for the Holy City. Only a day from land, the ship was driven ashore and everyone was drowned except the captain and Nicola, who found her way back to Assisi, taking months to make the journey.

  Introducing Nicola into our family, I later discovered, was a plot hatched by Bishop Pelagius and my father. She was to be both an admonition and a model. Nicola had experienced weeks of the direst hardships—cold and hunger, even fears for her life—while during this time I, Ricca di Montanaro, had lived a pampered life, loved by doting parents, my smallest wish attended to. A spoiled child, in other words—selfish, indifferent to the thoughts of others, and, above all, careless of the family name.

  The next day Nicola moved to the castle in her tattered dress and broken shoes, her few belongings wrapped in a soiled scarf. I welcomed her with a reserved kiss and half a smile, as the family looked on, yet I was overjoyed because she would lighten my burden. Now they would have two girls to watch in place of one.

  Her father, we learned, was a baker and she had helped him bake bread. For a week or two she helped me in the scriptorium, mixing paint and cleaning brushes, but she disliked this task and asked if she might work in the kitchen.

  At home her father had never allowed her to make pastries but she had watched and learned. So this is what she did in our bakery, making confections in all shapes and colors and tastes, especially those that sparkled like diamonds and tasted of cinnamon—which was rare and cost as much for a handful as a plot of good farm land.

  Father liked her pastries. And Mother, adoring Nicola as a tragic young thing, was determined to make her forget. She encouraged her to become a girl with no past, only a bright future. To that end she had me copy on parchment a set of rules of etiquette compiled by the fashionable poet Robert of Blois, and read them aloud to Nicola, who could not read.

  My mother tried to guide Nicola in other ways. She thought of her as a doll and dressed her in that fashion, in the finest of beribboned underclothes, shoes of the softest leather and thinnest soles, and velvet tunics with fluffy sleeves laced to the elbows.

  Nicola liked her clothes, but when my mother suggested that she learn to play the lute and when Rinaldo requested the pleasure of guiding her
through the labyrinths of chess, she smiled her diffident smile and refused them both.

  She was excited, however, by the two mammoth ovens, so huge you could walk into them without ducking your head. The ovens baked ten dozen loaves of bread every day, sometimes more, and could roast a whole cow and two pigs at the same time. She was fascinated by the three leather tanks where long-legged frogs and squirming eels and various kinds of fish were kept ready for the frying pot, and by the sides of beef and pork stacked in huge pickling tanks to keep them from spoiling. The row of condiments above the working table interested her, too: sage and parsley, marjoram and mint, and strange spices—peppercorns, saffron, nutmeg, the priceless cinnamon.

  Nicola was just as excited about the cathedral and its glittering angels. She went there every day, often at matins and vespers both. Sometimes she listened to Francis Bernardone give one of his speeches on the street. I always knew when she had listened to him, for her eyes would be shining with tears.

  One day as the bells of the cathedral rang for vespers, she came running to the scriptorium. She stood, covered with flour, in the doorway and shouted, "He's here. He's here!"

  I was at my bench, printing an initial for the twenty-third chapter of Exodus. It's a delicate task that takes a steady hand. I put down my brush.

  "Who's here?" I asked, though I knew.

  "Francis Bernardone. And he needs stones. He's gathering stones to build a church."

  I took my time with the brushes. I cleaned them and put them carefully side by side in their enameled box.

  There were reasons why I should not let Francis Bernardone gather stones in the courtyard. Rinaldo and my father were away, but they would learn about it when they returned. I would be blamed for giving away things that didn't belong to me. There were stronger reasons, too. I was struck by the awful thought that he had seen me standing beside the palace steps, my clothes in a heap. If not, he would certainly have heard, for, if my brother was truthful, it was talked about not only in Assisi but also among thousands in the smug city of Perugia.