The Wanderer and the Way, Chapter 1
The Long Road
This is the first chapter of the fourth book of my Cuthbert’s People series of historical novels set in eighth-century Northumbria, and, in this case, the Kindom of Asturias in Northern Spain, the last holdout against the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.
I will be publishing one chapter a week, on Saturday, for the next 28 weeks. I will also be bringing the book out in ebook and paperback either at the end of the serialization period or during it. (Help me decide which approach to take in the comments.) Regular posts will continue on their current random schedule.
Here’s the book cover.
And here is the banner that I will be including in every post.
And here is the blurb:
The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, now the most famous pilgrimage route in the world, was founded in the early ninth century, largely due to the efforts of Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia. As with most people of this period, nothing seems to be known of his early years. What follows, therefore, is pure invention.
Theodemir returns footsore and disillusioned to his uncle’s villa in Iria Flavia, where he meets Agnes, his uncle’s gatekeeper, a woman of extraordinary beauty. He falls immediately in love. But Agnes has a fierce, though absent, husband; a secret past; another name, Elswyth; and a broken heart.
Witteric, Theodemir’s cruel and lascivious uncle, has his own plans for Agnes. When the king of Asturias asks Theodemir to undertake an embassy on his behalf to Charles, King of the Franks, the future Charlemagne, Theodemir plans to take Agnes with him to keep her out of Witteric’s clutches.
But though Agnes understands her danger as well as anyone, she refuses to go. And Theodemir dares not leave without her.
I would appreciate any comment you have on any of the above items, and on the story itself. I would also appreciate your letting me know about any errors you find in the text. You can let me know about errors by replying to the email or by sending an email to author@gmbaker.net.
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And without further ado, Chapter 1 of The Wanderer and the Way:
1 The Long Road
Somewhere on the baked plains of the Douro, Theodemir of Iria Flavia came to repent of the impulse of virtue that had caused him to sell his cloak and horse and the other trappings of his rank and fortune and distribute the proceeds to the poor of Rome. The mendicant way turned out to have greater practical trials and fewer spiritual consolations than he had been promised. He was sore-footed and weary. Flat ground seemed like a mountain. Every hill seemed like scaling a cliff face. His face was burned and cracked like an old, worn-out saddle. Flies buzzed around him, trying to drink at the corners of his eyes. His neck was swelled with stings. His right thumb throbbed where a splinter from the rough wood of a barn he had slept in had lodged itself too deep under his skin for any but a surgeon to remove. And yet the burden of his sins seemed no lighter on his shoulders. The fire of his concupiscence burned no less brightly than it ever had. He felt no more compassion for the poor, no more tolerance for fools, no more love for his enemies, no more delight in prayer than he ever had.
The monk who had gathered a crowd around him in the precincts of the Colosseum, that blessed ground of so many martyrdoms, had seemed to speak with the very voice of the Holy Spirit, his words impassioned with divine madness. But where had that loquacious monk gone at the end of the day, Theodemir now began to wonder, with all the money that his awed listeners had cast into the bowl that had lain at his feet as he preached? Had he taken it and given it to the poor or poured it into the coffers of his monastery for the use of divine works and then retired to a hard bed in a dry stone cell? Or had he cast off his undyed habit, put on rich garments, and taken himself to a tavern where he took steak and wine to his belly and a small dark girl to his bed?
Yet supposing the monk had been false, did that mean that his words had been false also? Could a man speak true words falsely, for his own enrichment, and yet his words still win souls for Christ? No, surely not. And did the lack of the promised rewards of poverty not prove that the monk had been false? And so did it not follow that he had been swindled of his horse and his cloak and his boots and his purse with false promises of spiritual rewards?
But if so, was not his present predicament a just punishment for his gullibility and enthusiasm? Was this unkind road not God’s correction for the dereliction of his proper part in life, the part that was native to his blood, the part of a soldier and a leader of armies, a part necessary to the governance and protection of Christian people against the incursions of the Moors?
He had seen his error in the resentful faces of the peasant folk from whom he had nightly begged his bread and a place to lay his head. Such folk, he supposed, must have an instinctive recognition when a true holy man entered beneath their door and would have received him with joy and begged for his blessing, rapturously laying before him food out of their own mouths and drink out of the mouths of their children, confident that these gifts would be returned to them tenfold as a reward for welcoming a saint. But no such welcome, no such generosity, had attended any of his mendications. No, it had been crusts and gristle and cloudy beer that they had laid before him, watching with sullen eyes as he ate and then sending him out to find a hard bed among their beasts and cattle. They knew him for a fraud and a fool, and they rejoiced in their hearts to be God’s instruments to rebuke and mortify him.
It was in this mood, having woken that morning to the reek and too-close company of hairy brown pigs and breakfasted on the dried rinds of oranges and a hard cake made with pig fat and bitter herbs, for which he had thanked his hosts with a canker of bitterness bringing bile to his throat, that he passed through the dry village of Herbon under a baking sun and came to a crossroads where two choices lay before him. If he turned to the left, half an hour more of walking would bring him to the precincts of the Church of Santa Maria in Iria Flavia, where he would first fall upon his knees in prayer to give thanks to God for the safe conclusion of his long journey, and from there go to the house of the bishop and present himself as a mendicant and pilgrim and one who meant to dedicate his life, his breath, his sweat, his voice, his purpose, and his strength to the service of God in a life of poverty, sanctity, and celibacy. The bishop would recognize him, for he was a man of that place and well known to its lords and clergy alike. The bishop would question him carefully, wishing to be certain that this radical change of life was genuine, and he would assure the bishop, by every oath that was fit to be spoken, that his change was sincere and irreformable. And then the bishop would send him to the monastery, where he would be given a mess of beans and herbs to eat and buttermilk to drink and a hard, narrow bed in a stone cell to sleep in.
Or he could turn to his left, and, in hardly a third part of an hour, he would come to his uncle’s villa set amid cooling trees where the sweet waters of the Sar flowed into the broad calm waters of the Ulla as it wended it way down towards the Arousa and the Mare Oceanus. There he would be welcomed as a son, for he had been, before his sojourn in Rome, both favorite and heir to his uncle, his father’s brother, who had no son of his own to whom his fortune and his responsibilities might fall. A strange prodigal he would be, arriving before those gates, for his fortune had not been wasted in riotous living but freely given to the poor—or, as he now thought more likely, into the purse of a lascivious and fraudulent monk—and he would be returning not in the guise of a pauper but as a mendicant. Nor was there any good and faithful brother at home to resent his homecoming. No one, therefore, would raise any objection as the fatted calf was slain and the roasting fires lit. Though it would more likely be a pig upon the spit, for his uncle’s taste, like his own, ran more to pork than beef.
Upon his arrival, a small dark girl would show him to a cushioned chair in a shaded spot under the veranda, where cooling airs would waft in from the river. She would bring a jug and a basin and would untie his sandals and wash his feet and his legs up to the knee with soft warm hands. How long had it been now since last he had felt the hand of a young woman upon any part of his flesh? How long since anyone had stooped to wash his feet for him after a dusty day on the road? How long since he had sat on cushions in the shade and listened to the babble of sweet waters flowing by while birds sang in the branches of whispering trees?
His uncle would come and embrace him and welcome him home. He would send the small dark girl to bring wine and sweet cakes and fresh oranges flowing with juice. He and his uncle would sit on the old stone veranda where he had so often lounged through the heat of the day, attended by small, dark girls. His uncle’s particular predilection was for women of Moorish or Iberian stock rather than women of their own Visigothic race. Theodemir had grown to manhood surrounded by such of these, and was well used to the grace and warmth of them, to the fineness of their features and the deep-hued bronze of their bodies.
On his arrival, messengers would be sent forth to summon friends and men of consequence, and they would come, with their wives and with any such daughters as might have come to marriageable age in his absence, dressed in every kind of finery, for he was well known to them as a bachelor, a handsome and vigorous man, and heir of one of the finest estates in the Kingdom of Asturias. And while these gathered to hear his tales of Rome and to boast of the accomplishments and beauty of their daughters, the pig would slowly roast upon its spit, basted with honey and with wine, until the aroma of the flesh brought water into the mouth of all those present. And then they would feast and tell tales and sing songs. And in the evening, after the guests had departed, he would go to his bed in the room that had so long been his, and there he would find waiting for him a small, dark girl, perhaps she who had first greeted him and washed his feet, for he supposed that she, and her warm, soft hands, would have been much on his mind through all the festivities. And she would come to him and show him the parts of herself that pertained not to reason but to desire. And thence through her ministrations would come blissful rest.
Oppressed by the burden of this decision, he went and sat beneath a tree by the side of the road. It felt foolish to rest here, with each of his possible destinations so close, particularly as there was no stream from which he might draw water to slake his thirst. There was a powerful longing on him to finish his journey. Once arrived, he could cast away the rough staff that he had carried since Civitavecchia. He could consign to perdition the broken and worn-out sandals that had so miserably failed to protect his feet from the stones of the road. He could cast into the fire the filthy rags in which he was dressed. He could cut his hair and trim his beard and make himself a man again, rather than the wild, mad, stinking thing of the road that he had become on his long footsore trek from Rome. And yet, the dice that he had cast that day before the Colosseum, under the spell of the monk’s oratory, were still bouncing toward their last and final rest, about to show the numbers that would say if his cast had been a wise one. Would that he had dice! He would cast them now and put the decision in the hands of God. Evens to the right; odds to the left. But dice were the Devil’s tools, or so the monk had said, and so he had cast his into the Tiber with all his other tools of wickedness. Oh, that mad, false monk with his damnable orations!
As he sat there in the paroxysm of indecision, an elderly couple came by, leading a donkey with heavy packs on its back. “Look,” the old woman said to her husband. “There is a holy man sitting under that tree. Let us give him some water and an orange to eat and ask him for his blessing.”
Though the words were whispered, they came to his ears clearly enough in the singing silence of that lonely place. He was about to raise his voice and protest that there was no part of holiness in him, but the old man immediately assented to his wife’s request and pulled a bright orange from a pannier on the donkey’s back. He then took a waterskin that hung from the saddle and used it to fill a small bronze cup. They came and stood before him and offered him these things, and his desire for the water and for the orange was so great that he made no protest but took the cup, drained it, and then bit eagerly into the orange, the sweet juice seeming to drive all the bitter taste of the road from his tongue.
“Give us your blessing, Father,” the old woman asked, she and her husband bowing their heads before him. He wished to say to them, “I am no monk. I am a fraud, and I have tricked you into bestowing a charity on me to which I have no right.” He put his head down to avoid their eyes, but they asked him again, more ardently than before. He wanted to say to them, “I am no priest but a soldier and a roue. I have the blood of men and the virtue of maidens on my head.” He looked up at them. It was more than he could do to abuse their simplicity with these words. Instead, he raised his hand over each of them in turn, made the sign of the cross, and pronounced a blessing over them, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A fraud! A fraud! As mendacious a pilgrim as any in Christendom! Oh, the world was too full of mad, bad monkish frauds!
They left him then and resumed their journey. He watched them until they were out of sight, for he did not want them to see which path he chose. He knew very well that they would not know the significance of his taking one direction or the other, and yet somehow he could not bear to choose until they were gone from his sight.
Once they had turned the corner, leaving the road empty in every direction, he stepped out of the shade of the tree onto the dusty, stony road, took a deep breath, and turned to the left, taking the road towards his uncle’s villa.