The Wanderer and the Way 19
The Cloud of Unknowing
This is Chapter 19 of The Wanderer and the Way, now available for purchase.
As they went onward, the way was at first easy but then grew steeper and rockier. It also became more exposed, but since the bulk of the hill was now between them and the supposed position of the Moors, Theodemir did not let the exposure trouble him. What troubled him more was that he could see no sign that horses ever traveled this way. It had every appearance of being a mere footpath, which said to him that if it did not simply peter out in nothingness, with no apparent reason for its being, or in some empty and long abandoned farm, mine, or petty habitation, that it would at some point come to a place that was impassable to horses. This would make sense of the path, he thought, as a shortcut for travelers on foot, but not one that could tempt any horse, mule, or cart off the main road. But he had journeyed long enough to know that not every path or way has any apparent purpose. On the other hand, this path, though not frequented, was not so untrodden that it had returned to nature, and so he pressed on with some hope.
It began to occur to him that while they might avoid the Moors, and keep Agnes from the eyes of the Moors, by traveling this way, that it was still a path known to and used by men and that they might at any time meet the men who knew and used it, and that they had no way of knowing if such men should prove Christian, pagan, or Moor, or how many they should meet, or what temper they might be in. His sword and dagger were hung from his belt, and he had a shield at his back but no helmet. But the scant experience he had had of war had been standing in a shield wall with other men beside him left and right and of making a couple of blind stabs with a spear into an opposing wall of shields until that small and outnumbered Moorish force had broken and fled, and had proved to have the heels of his own company. His spear had emerged from the affray bent but unblooded, and as a warrior, he was unblooded still. Other than having been beaten near to death by Eric the Northman in his youth, he had had no experience of single combat in anything but play. But it was not that he might have to fight that troubled him, nor that he might kill, nor that he might die, but that he might look a fool in front of Agnes, and that in being a fool, he should fail to save her.
He looked back at her from time to time but each time failed to catch her eye. She seemed as stoic again as she had so often been, as if her burst of emotion at her parting from Hathus had never happened, as if it never could have happened but must been some fancy of his, who longed to find in her some sign of caring to live. Instead, her entire attention seemed to be focused on the path ahead, though their horses were perfectly capable of seeing the path and following it without direction. He wished at many points to say something to her, just to tell from the tone of her voice in reply that she had any thought of a future beyond the next fall of her horse’s hooves. And yet to speak at all in the great whispering silence around them seemed too great a matter to contemplate. Even a word spoken in caution or affection, it seemed to him, would echo like thunder from the hillside and bring a band of bloodthirsty Moors galloping to carry Agnes away and send his own soul to a stony judgment.
As the day wore towards its close, he noticed a shadow running like a line across the face of the ridge they were climbing, and close to nightfall, they came into the lengthening shadow of an abrupt stony escarpment. It was not terribly high, about the height of five or six men, but it looked as if the whole mountain had fractured and slipped downwards, creating a rock wall that no horse could climb. The path here ran through dense and knotted undergrowth, all bristles and bent twigs and thorns, with exposed roots seeking cracks in the rock in which to anchor themselves and drink the moisture that gathered in the shade of the escarpment. The horses protested the narrow path, which gave little purchase for their feet while the crowding vegetation scraped at their flanks.
Theodemir found a spot wide enough and dismounted and walked forward until he came to the face of the escarpment. Here he discovered a crack where a man could scramble up to the top. This was indeed a trail for those on foot, not those with horses or wagons. Agnes had dismounted also and she came and stood beside him, looking upward at the crack.
“Easy enough,” she said. It was the first word either had spoken in hours. Somehow, in that tight little thicket, it did not seem like such a disturbance of the natural order. It seemed domestic, somehow, and comforting. But he had little time to ponder this, for suddenly Agnes was gone from his side and was climbing up the crack and out of his sight.
“It’s a good path above,” her voice came down to him. Then there was a shower of stones, and she clambered down the crack with casual ease and stood beside him again.
“No way to get the horses up,” he said.
“Is there another way round?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Even if there is another break in the escarpment, this undergrowth is impossible. And if there were an easier way, why would men have made this path here?”
She looked disconsolate at this—a welcome sight since it meant that she was still capable of disappointment.
“We can look in the morning,” he said. “It’s too dark now.” He said this because he thought it better that she should go to bed with a hopeful thought in her head.
“We can’t leave the horses,” she said, looking around at the scrubby landscape.
“The horses can fend for themselves until someone finds them and keeps them,” he said. “They are intelligent animals and have great endurance.”
Agnes patted the shoulder of her horse absently and then rested her cheek against its head. “Another abandonment,” she said. “I am always leaving people behind.”
“I will not abandon you,” he said, misreading her mood.
“I wish you would,” she said. “Or perhaps I should abandon you. I could take the horses and go back the way we came. You can walk over the hill and join Hathus on the other side.”
“And what do you suppose Hathus would do if you did that?”
She sighed and turned to look back down the way they had come. The land was orange and brown and filled with shadows. “He would come chasing after me, his mission forgotten,” she said.
“As would I,” he said.
“Well if you are all going to follow me wherever I go,” she said sulkily, “why are we going to Aachen? I don’t want to go there.”
“Where would you go then, lady?” he asked.
“In your uncle’s house, I heard men speak of a place they called Finisterre. The end of the world. Perhaps that is where I should go.”
“Is this not your wistfulness speaking, lady, that you say is the cause of all your woes?”
She turned on him, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes, and some part of him laughed to see them, for they meant she was not quite made of paint and plaster. She must have seen that laugh, for she ran at him and beat on his chest and cried, “Sometimes I think you are the most contrary man in creation.” And then she began to weep, and her head was in his chest, and he put his arms around her gently, and she did not pull away, and he held her until the weeping passed.
“Well, we had better get our camp set up before we lose the light,” she said after she broke from his embrace. She made no acknowledgment of what had just occurred but immediately set about unsaddling her horse and taking off the bags with which it was laden. “I don’t suppose we can have a fire,” she said, turning to him.
“Hathus would not approve,” he said, “And I don’t see much to burn.”
“Hurry up, then,” she said. “There are clouds coming over, and without a fire we’ll have no light at all soon.”
He did as she directed, making sure that both horses were securely tied to one of the scrubby trees, though he knew that they would be setting them free in the morning. She had already laid out a blanket for herself, and he laid his own out several yards from hers so that she should not feel any fear of him while she slept. The sun set, but to the west they could still see a handful of stars, though they did not give enough light to see anything else by, even their hands before the faces. And then the clouds rolled over those last stars and all was blackness. Theodemir pulled his blanket around him and lay down. For a while he was too alert to fall asleep. In the utter darkness his ears strained for any sound, but in that abyssal night, all things slept, or kept to their dens and nests. He wanted to call out to Agnes, to hear her voice in reply. He yearned for her to cry out to him, seeking reassurance of his presence. He cursed himself that he had lain so far from her that he could not hear her breathing. But at last his weary mind accepted darkness and he slept.
He was awakened by rain on his face. It came in waves, sounding in the darkness almost like wind in the trees. The darkness was as complete as before, and once again he wanted to call out to Agnes, to reassure her, to reassure himself that the whole world had not been consumed and swept away in darkness as it seemed. But if he called out, he might wake her to suffer wakefully the rain neither of them could do anything to avoid and must therefore simply endure. He tried to sleep again as the waves of rain soaked through his blanket and chilled him head to foot. At last he must have fallen asleep, for he next became aware of the world while the sun was reddening the sky in the east and the clouds and the rain had passed on to bring relief to the dry and dusty plains of the Douro.
Agnes was already awake, he saw, sitting huddled in her soaked blanket, staring disconsolately at the retreating clouds. Her cheeks were wet, and her black hair was plastered to her head. The first glance of the rising sun fell on her, and she seemed impossibly young, and impossibly fragile, and above all impossibly lovely, and he forgot all his misery in the sight of her, and gave thanks to God for her, and renewed in that moment his promise to the Lord that he would serve her in all ways and in all things until his duty to her was fully and finally revealed to him.
She became aware of his eyes on her and turned her eyes to him.
“Believe it or not, I have slept wetter,” she said.
“I cannot see how, lady.”
“I was many nights at sea between Northumbria and Asturias, and once there was a storm that lasted two days and two nights.”
“I walked through the rain many times on my journey from Rome,” he said, “but somehow I always found a way to sleep dry.”
“Perhaps God was not so far from you after all,” she said.
“Perhaps God is not so far from you either, lady,” he replied.
She pursed her lips but said no more. She rose and threw her wet blanket over a bush that was just starting to catch the morning sun. Her dress, the same simple smock that she had been wearing when he had taken her from his uncle's house since she had no other, was also wet and clung to her, and he at once turned away to spare her his gaze.
“Do you think it is worth looking for another route to bring the horses?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “Speed is our ally, and this must be the fastest route on foot. Hathus will be waiting for us at the road with spare horses and fresh clothes.”
Without saying anything, she went and untied the horses and removed their harnesses so that they could roam free. The horses wandered about looking for grass, but did not leave them.
“How much of this should we try to carry?” she asked, looking at the pile of things that had been attached to her saddle. She seemed to be possessed of a greater purpose than he was that morning.
“We’ll be with the caravan in a few hours,” he said. “We can just leave it.”
“Food, water, fire striker, and your arms,” she said. “We may have to wait for them. We should take the blankets as well, though they’ll be miserable to carry until they dry.”
“How much food should we take?” he asked. It was a way of asking if she expected the caravan to meet them.
“All we can carry,” she said.
He understood the answer and turned and looked at her. She shrugged. “Better to have it and not want it than want it and not have it, my mother used to say.”
He went and started to pick through his packs, seeing what was worth carrying. She did the same. While she worked, she sang the office of dawn, and he joined his voice to hers, though half the time he forgot the words. Shortly, laden with all the food that had been worth saving after the rain, his commission from the King, their still damp blankets, and the rest of their kit, they addressed themselves to the crack in the escarpment. When Agnes had ascended it the day before, it had been dry, and she had been unladen. Now it was slick with water and mud, and she carried a load. Still, Theodemir watched in admiration as she scampered up it with the agility of a child. He was a little less agile than she in the ascent, though he was more awkwardly laden, particularly with the shield upon his back, which he had been tempted to leave behind and had finally taken only because of a soldier’s unwillingness to appear before his captain without his full kit and arms.
Once they were above the escarpment, they found the path easy and were presently descending to where they expected to find Hathus and his men waiting for them. As they descended, the trees grew taller around them, so they had little fear of being seen by any but their friends. There was one clearing where they paused to look carefully about from the edge of the trees, but there was no sound or movement there to alarm them, and they went on as quietly and as swiftly as they could until suddenly the path turned left and then right and immediately emerged on the road.
The road was empty. It was, indeed, as silent as the wood, though they could hear the burble of running water somewhere off on the other side. Agnes looked up and down the road and then walked across and looked at where the path ended, with its abrupt dog leg that meant that there was no obvious break in the trees.
“It’s hard to see,” she said. “Do you think they missed it and are further up the road?”
“Hathus would not miss it,” he replied.
“No,” she replied. “No, of course he wouldn’t.”
“He told us to wait for a day if he was not here,” he reminded her. “Even if he did miss it, he would soon know he had gone too far and send a rider back to look for us.”
“So we wait,” she asked.
“He told us to wait, so we wait,” he replied.
They retired back into the trees where they could watch the road without being seen, still damp amid the damp wood. As the hours passed, Agnes would sing the appropriate office in whispers, but Theodemir had not the heart to join her.
Towards the end of the day, a pack train appeared coming from the opposite direction, a chain of twelve mules attended by three grim-looking and ill-favored men, dirty and ragged.
“We could ask them if they have seen them,” Agnes whispered.
Theodemir shook his head. “An ugly crew,” he whispered while the men were still a way off. “If they saw you… Well, I reckon they don’t see a woman often, and they’ve never seen one like you.”
“You ask them, then,” she said, a look of annoyance crossing her face at his mention of her appearance. “I’ll stay here.”
Hathus had urged stealth upon him, but Theodemir, fearing that it would diminish him in Agnes’s eyes to remain in hiding, summoned whatever bravado had come to him in the blood and stepped out into the road, his shield upon his back and his sword and dagger in his belt.
The men of the pack train stopped short when they saw him. The man in the lead waited until his companions came up, and then they advanced on Theodemir, three abreast, their hands held close to the daggers in their belts.
“Salvete amici,” Theodemir said as they approached.
They stopped and the leader replied in a language he guessed to be Vascones. “Euskaldun?”
“Vidisti equitem turmam?” he asked, without much hope of being understood.
The three men looked at one another, but clearly none of them understood. Without much hope, he tried them in the Visigothic tongue. One of them tried him in what he assumed was some language of the Moors, to which he could only shrug in incomprehension. He tried to mime his question to them without success. He could imagine Agnes seething in frustration in the trees, believing that she would be able to get through to them, yet obedient to his injunction that she should not show herself, something he fancied would be a peril to any woman, not just her. He then tried to give them some warning not to proceed down the road because of the Moorish raiding party, but to this they replied with a gesture that could hardly be mistaken and urged their mules forward.
“I should not have done that,” he said when he joined Agnes in the trees. “I think one of them spoke the language of the Moors. There are some among the Vascones who have submitted to Islam. They may be friends of those Moorish horsemen and may tell them where we are.”
“I’m sorry, then,” she said. “You should not listen to me. I say the wrong things, and men die.”
He sat down in the place he had sat beside her all the long day, saying nothing.
“Should we go, then?” she asked.
“Hathus told us to wait,” he said. “If there is a company of Moorish horsemen looking for us, it will do no good to flee on foot. They will soon overtake us.”
They ate a cold and meager meal, not willing to light a fire, even if they could have found dry wood after the rain.
“They will be here tomorrow,” he said as the shadows of evening gathered around them. He did not believe it. He hoped that she would choose to do so, though he knew now that she was not less wise in these matters than he. That night he laid his blanket down near hers, hoping to hear her breathing in the darkness.
Morning came.
“We have waited a day, as he commanded,” she said.
“We did not reach here until near noon yesterday,” he said. “It is not a day until near noon today.”
She sang Lauds at dawn in a whisper.
At the first hour, she sank Prime quietly.
At the third hour, she sang Terce in her natural voice.
At noon, she walked into the middle of the empty road and sang Sext as if she were entertaining lords in a noisy hall, her notes echoing off the hill behind them.
“Well that will fetch them if they are near,” he said.
“They are dead,” she said. “They loved me, and so they are dead. They are dead to a man.”
“Let us wait until tomorrow and then go,” he said. “But do not sing so loud again, I beg you. There may still be Moors around.”
She sang None quietly and Vespers the same. They ate another cold meal and sang Compline together as the shadows lengthened.
“I cannot bear not knowing,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, and she allowed him to wrap his arms around her and comfort her.
“Tomorrow we must go,” he said.
They wrapped themselves in their blankets, which at last were dry, and fell asleep beneath a heaven of bright, cold stars.
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