coat came shuffling in.
He was very sharp: he took a seat right near the door, with his back toward the wall, and he looked around carefully before he sat down, but he didn’t recognize me. I had waited two days for him in Senlis before giving up. I had walked north for five days through Ile de France and followed the Somme River into Picardy; the weather had broken and rain kept coming down in hard spring showers; three nights I had slept in the open in abandoned ruins. No wonder the soldier didn’t recognize me from the bathed and brushed gentleman who had given him a letter to take to Dammartin.
He was actually a nasty-looking fellow with a foxy yellow face, but I didn’t think he had played me a trick. “My courier!” I shouted, extremely pleased, and jumped up with a smile at him. He stared at me, then walked out of the inn. There was no time to put my boots back on; I ran after him in my stockings. When I came outside he was just mounting his horse. I slithered in the mud. I was bewildered; for a wild moment I imagined that he must have murdered Claudia to run away like that. I picked up a stone and threw it as hard as I could.
My throw met with unexpected success: I hit him square on the back of his head and he fell off his horse. I was on him before he stirred and got hold of his right arm; the left one was pinned behind his back. When he opened his eyes I had my knife out.
He looked at me without uttering a sound; then he made a gesture with his chin toward his breast. I put my knee on his arm and opened his moldy coat. Wound several times around his middle was a blue silk scarf. The scarf was so shiny, the man’s blouse so filthy, that just by looking at the two any judge would have hanged him for a thief. “Did the lady give you that for me?” I asked, and he nodded.
He carried a long knife in a sheath at his belt. I grabbed hold of it and jumped away from him, facing him with the two knives. Short of killing him on the spot with my own knife I didn’t quite see what else I could have done; luckily for me he wasn’t too much of a soldier. He stood up, unwound the scarf, tossed it to me without any expression on his face, and walked toward his horse which was grazing near the ditch.
I went back inside with the scarf. I was covered with mud but highly pleased with myself. I put it around my neck; one end almost touched the ground. Knights travel like that, wearing the scarves of their ladies; and blue is the color of fidelity.
Claudia was my lady now, and my journey would be in her honor. She couldn’t have a lover on foot, I decided. I had to buy a horse, even if I starved it.
The flat countryside of Picardy was lying under the rain, left to itself by men who no longer had the strength to organize it. The water had risen from the choking ditches and spread over the fields. There seemed to be no life present but in weeds, rats, mangy dogs, and wolves; yes, even wolves, not seen for a century in the land of the Northwest. Preying plants and beasts, and birds: clouds of crows kept sweeping and circling over the trees and the lanes, cawing for corpses to alight on, rising and falling in a great rush of wings.
Men-at-arms had parceled up the land, gangster knights like Albrest the Ox and Pierre of Audley, killing the poor farmers and ransoming the rich again and again until they were poor. Half the villages I passed were in ruins; the others had become fortresses. Churches were strongholds, peaked-looking children stood on guard like soldiers. Church bells were rung only to give alarm, whenever a band of armed men came in sight. Then the peasants fled or barricaded themselves and waited.
I’d hear those bells from far off and it was as if they were rung prophetically for a fire which hadn’t yet started: for often some time after the bells a column of smoke, smoke from burning huts, rose in the distance. What peasant would fight back against armed and mounted men, men who fought as a profession?
The peasants withdrew and withdrew, they dug in, they hid, they buried themselves, they made themselves well-nigh invisible; and still the men on horseback returned.
Rain fell, and then the sky cleared again, the sun stood on beams of light in the heavy clouds and a moist stench rose from the land.
It was as if the world, as if the earth itself, were tensely waiting, with tired and bated breath, smarting for deliverance.
In one day I became the owner of a horse and saw the sea.
The horse was a rather sorry creature, dazed-looking and so thin that you could follow each rib from beginning to end. But its stomach wasn’t swollen, which, I’ve been told, is a very good sign, and its walk was easy. That was important enough for I hadn’t been on a horse since I was ten. I liked her from the start—it was a mare—and since the dubious fellow who sold her to me (for eight francs with saddle and bridle) claimed she had no name, I decided to call her Melody. My only problem with her was that she kept shaking her head and pulling it down, and soon she thus broke one of the badly worn reins. That took me by surprise and somehow made me fall off; but it was the only time and she didn’t use the occasion to run away from me. I was now the visible owner of property worth having my throat cut for, and I was thankful for the ex-soldier’s long knife. When I went to sleep I held it in my hand.
It was late afternoon when I came to St. Valéry at the mouth of the Somme River but I rode through the village and on. A path led gradually to the top of a dune; the soil here was sandy, shining through the sparse redtop leaves. The hard wind carried a smell of brine and swept deep patterns in the grass. There was a new, an unheard sound in the air.
I came to the top, I hardly dared look; there it was. The sea—very much not a canting glossy plain of water as I’d imagined it, but a wide huge gray swell, waves coming in endlessly, line after line from far out and breaking in foam, gulls crying painfully and a wind which brought tears to my eyes. Opposite me the sun was just visible through a thin cloud layer. Dark clouds, much lower, raced across the sky.
I stood there and stared, and the thought that there was nothing before me but water until the end of the earth made me dizzy and almost sick to my stomach.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
