John the Pupil Read online

  The bag for treasure is a heavy cloth one, the sort the villagers use to gather the harvest of apples. The box is made of wood and stained a dark red colour like blood. A single green stone is set into its lid and green wax seals it shut.

  Do not open it. Promise me you will not open it.

  I will not open it.

  And you will carry this also.

  He gave me this final load without care, wrapped in linen and tied with twine.

  You will open this only when you have given up all hope. You understand me?

  The extra packet is heavy at the bottom of the sack I carry, further cloth around it with my bowl and spoon and knife and parchment and styluses wrapped inside. The device I am to demonstrate to the Pope and the box containing the Great Work are in Brother Bernard’s sack.

  I implore divine mercy that He Who is the One, the beginning and the ending, Alpha and Omega, might join a good end to a good beginning by a safe middle, my Master said.

  Brother Bernard is eternally phlegmatic. He stood there, ox-like, bearing the burden of our load. Brother Andrew looked as anxious as I must have done. He shivered, his eyes closing and opening and closing against the sunshine. Suddenly, the prospect of a journey was a matter of trepidation. I had never been outside the village and the friary, except on the wings of Master Roger’s knowledge, and during my imaginary journeys. The friars gathered at the gate, Master Roger wiped away something that was occluding his eyes, and the Principal gave the blessing of the Sarum Missal.

  The almighty and everlasting God, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, dispose your journey according to His good will; send his angel Raphael to keep you in this your pilgrimage, and both lead you in peace on your way to the place where you would be, and bring you back again on your return to us in safety.

  And so our journey began. We walked past the village on the way to the river. I fancied I saw my father in a field beating a goat.

  Saint Helena’s Day

  The wood of the cross was a vile wood, because crosses used for crucifixions were made of vile wood. It was an unfruitful wood, because no matter how many such trees were planted on the mount of Calvary, the wood gave no fruit. It was a low wood, because it was used for the execution of criminals; a wood of darkness, because it was dark and without any beauty; a wood of death, because on it men were put to death; a malodorous wood, because it was planted among cadavers. After Christ’s passion what had been low became sublime. Its stench became an odour of sweetness. Darkness turns to light. As Augustine says, The cross, which was the gibbet of criminals, has made its way to the foreheads of emperors. As Chrysostom says, Christ’s cross and his scars will, on the Day of Judgement, shine more brightly than the sun’s rays.

  After the murder of Our Lord, the Romans built a temple to Venus on Golgotha, so that any Christian praying there would be seen to be worshipping Venus. When Saint Helena, wife of the first Constantine, mother of the second, came to Jerusalem to find the True Cross, she commanded the temple to be razed, the earth to be ploughed up, and three crosses were disinterred, because Christ had been crucified beside two thieves. To distinguish between the crosses, she had them placed in the centre of Jerusalem and Saint Helena waited for the Lord to manifest his glory. At about the ninth hour, a funeral procession was going past. The dead man’s body was placed beneath each of the crosses, and beneath the third cross, the dead man came back to life.

  •

  The way cuts into us. Pebbles and twigs assail our feet, branches lash our faces and eyes. Our stops for rest are more frequent than I should have liked. The sun moves fast in the heavens; our feet go slowly on the ground. After the exhilaration of setting off on our journey when we took too fast a pace, stung by the novelty of strange trees and different faces, our bodies protested the labour. To Viterbo? To Paris? Canterbury, even Rochester would seem impossible. By the end of the day the next-but-one step would seem impossible.

  Brother Bernard hardly speaks. He grunts when he walks, our beast of burden, our donkey. It is forbidden to members of our Order to ride. It is also forbidden to carry. We carry and yet refuse to ride, when a passing merchant or farmer offers us room in his cart, as if resisting a second sin obviates the first already committed. We are not pilgrims, or penitents, we are on a mission to the Pope, but my companions, who are ignorant of the true reason for our journey, refuse to break the saint’s commandment. They are both perplexed by their supposed crime and banishment. Neither, I think, is unhappy to have left the friary. Brother Andrew’s good nature emerges in whistling and song and an excited regard of everything he sees.

  We walk. We accept alms from strangers who have sins to expiate. We walk in the same rhythm. The road we walked on was wide. And there were others on it too, I had never seen such diversity of kinds. Farmers driving their pigs, merchants in carts, cattle for market grazing by the side. And sometime a fine horseman would gallop past down the middle of the road. And we would gaze upon the finery and the speed and the hoof prints left in the mud and the steam disturbing the air.

  Towards the end of the day, we had been singing to forget the pain in our legs and feet, until we had fallen silent, a little chiding, and then silent again, as we listened to the sound of our tread on the way.

  People are kind to us. At night we were invited to sleep in a barn, our new dormitory with its friary of donkeys and convent of hens. I was asked by Brother Andrew if I understood their language.

  Yes, I told him, they are saying, Please do not eat me. If you spare my life, I will lay you a very fine egg in the morning.

  And he looked in wonder at the hens and thanked God for the wisdom that can penetrate mysteries, and Brother Bernard grunted, and I might easily suppose that he is the one who can speak the languages of the animals.

  We slept on rough straw and as I fell asleep I felt, for the first time, the desire to be back in the friary where life is understood and I am under the shelter of my Master.

  We were woken by a child who had been sent to bring us bread and milk, which was still warm from the sheep. The first taste of the milk was the strongest and the fullest, as if our appetites had shrunk to the shape of their first satisfaction. Rain and sunshine dripped through holes in the roof. Brother Andrew was smiling as he led us through the prayers. You O Lord will open my mouth. And my mouth shall declare your praise.

  Our feet were aching to return to the journey. Bernard gathers his load, Andrew laid some stones into the sign of the cross. We stopped for breakfast and then Brother Bernard and I became impatient with Brother Andrew because he took so long to finish his food.

  When we stopped again, in the shade of a tree, by the side of a river, stretching our legs, resting our tired, beaten feet, after we had performed our prayers, Brother Bernard and I ate the food we had kept back from breakfast. The bread was stale, the milk was sour, but after the labour of our day’s walking, each bite and sip contained whole worlds. My body strengthened with every mouthful. I felt I had discovered something here today, to do with size and magnitude. If I had filled myself as quickly as Brother Bernard was doing, then I would not taste or feel or perceive so much.

  Brother Andrew was looking miserable. He confessed that he had consumed all his food at breakfast. I gave him half of the rest of what I had. Brother Bernard threw him a scrap of bread.

  A rainbow is ahead of us, which is either an auspicious omen or a signal sent to direct us by Master Roger. I explained to Brothers Andrew and Bernard that there are five principal colours, black, blue, green, red, and white. Aristotle said that there are seven but you can arrive at that by subdividing blue and green into two halves of dark and light. I could hear my voice above the music of a songbird and how preferable that music was at this moment so I became silent.

  We could hear the bird as we walked. Brother Andrew and I looked above our heads for the songbird but we could not see it in the trees, just heard its song. I looked around and saw Brother Bernard’s lips shaped forward, the whistling coming from
them. I had not thought he was capable of such game or skill.

  We wear the brown robes of our Order and the insignia of two keys on our chests, to signify our pilgrimage to Rome. The orders of angels watch our process towards Canterbury.

  • • •

  I have committed two sins, close to blasphemy, on the short way we have come. I have found myself wishing we were not carrying my Master’s Book and his device for the Pope and his packet that we are to open when we have abandoned hope or hope has abandoned us. I have even neglected to pick up treasure I saw in the woods. I made my companions stop. We must go back, I told them. Or at least we have to stop and you must wait for me. It was not hard to persuade them to drop themselves down in a glade in the forest.

  I went back to where the treasure was, cut it away from the earth, put it in my bag, and made my laborious way back to where my companions were, or at least should have been. I halted, went farther on, then back the way I had come. The trees looked like giants who were mocking me before taking me prisoner, casting their nets of leaves. I searched for different paths through the trees in the event I had taken a wrong turn in my tiredness. I stopped, I renewed my search; I went this way, and that, and returned again to the place where I first thought to find my companions – who, revivified by their rest, leaped out laughing at me from behind the trees.

  My companions question me about my Master. They ask what it is we do up in the tower. I may of course not tell them about the Book.

  We study, he teaches, I learn. Sometime we sing.

  Sing what?

  Different songs. The shape of music reveals the hidden structures of many things. Music is the power of connection coupled with beauty.

  You sing?

  In line with Aristotle’s teaching. Music also teaches the virtues, courage and modesty and the other dispositions.

  Who is Aristotle?

  A great teacher. Perhaps the greatest.

  A Franciscan?

  No. Not a Franciscan.

  A Dominican then?

  Not a Cistercian?!

  Bernard shows a particular antipathy to Cistercians.

  He is not attached to any order, I tell them.

  It is my favourite time with my Master when we sing. He strokes his beard, his eyes shine, his voice is large, full and profound. In singing we reach a communion. When singing he permits himself to be playful. He delivers a line, speaking of the earth, I answer him with the sky and stars, he repeats his, with more urgency, I hold fast, denying him his mud and earth; and then his voice rises higher lifting us both into a godly integration.

  When I first was raised from the village into the friary, my Master told me stories. These were legends of the saints and fables concerning the beasts, the cunning of the fox, the lonely hunger of the lion, the foolishness of the donkey. Mistakenly, this is how I thought life would proceed, my Master and I sitting in the room at the top of the tower, the other pupils ignored. It was as if he was narrating these tales purely for me, in his deep voice, animated by the characters of the beasts into tones of excitement and anguish and wisdom. In this manner, I learned Latin. Later, I would be set the work of rewriting the fables in my own words, in different concisions. The fable of the frog and the mouse in five hundred words, one hundred, in fifty, in twenty. And, despite my Master, the matter was transmuted, from the stuff of marvel and wonder into a schoolroom task.

  • • •

  Saint Augustine’s Day

  After the trouble in Rochester, it was a relief to be back on the road. Our spirits soared, hills and clouds, sunshine. Our paces grew longer, Brothers Andrew and Bernard whistled the melody of the songbirds. As the days have proceeded, our bodies strengthen, the way is not so hard, our load not so heavy. This morning I had to tally the contents of the bags I was carrying in case I had left something behind, leaves of my Master’s Book scattered in the road. We cover the ground with less complaint, with lightness.

  Rays emanate in all directions from every point in the cosmos, conveying the force of things to proximous objects. The act of looking is a reciprocal exchange of powers with the object being looked at. The act of looking is all one and multifarious, radiation of heat, the influence of the stars, the efficacy of prayer.

  Were it not that sin makes the body opaque, the soul would be able to perceive directly the blaze of divine love.

  But there are still those difficult nights, a long day’s walking behind us, the extra difficulty of climbing a hill to a town, which had seemed so close from the path, and finally permitted through the gates, but not to a bed – the bishop’s men bar us here, the Cathedral chaptermen bar us there, neither group has a tolerance for Minorites. The forest seems preferable to this, lying together in a bed of moss and leaves; until someone takes pity, a pure heart who has no taste for the chaptermen or the bishop, to whom we companions represent, perhaps falsely, a purer way.

  We wear the badge of the two keys to signify our ascent to Rome. There are other pilgrims on our way, some with the badge of the cross for their journey to the Holy Land, others with the shell for Santiago de Compostela. We climbed the hill towards Canterbury. Brother Andrew desired to sleep out in the open again, I suggested we find the Franciscan hospice, Brother Bernard said that we must visit the Cathedral first, shrive our sins at the shrine of Saint Thomas.

  But first we must get through this, Brother Andrew said pointing ahead at the crest of the hill, where a throng was filling the road.

  Two men in red jerkins were blocking the road with staves. A smaller man also in red was moving at the front of the waiting people. The men with staves had the heaviness and placidity of oxen whereas this one showed the narrow face and sudden movements of a quick river animal.

  Brother Andrew tried to see over the heads.

  What are they after? he asked me.

  I do not know, I said.

  Money, said Brother Bernard.

  We watched the ox-men raise their staves and let a merchant pass in exchange for a coin that went into the scrip of the narrow man.

  My hand went, as if in sympathy, to the clasp of my own scrip, in which I carry the Great Work.

  It is a mockery that they use the bag of the pilgrim for profit, Brother Bernard said.

  Brother Andrew and I looked at each other in wonder, partly because of his tone of indignation and partly too because this was the longest speech that either of us had ever heard him make.

  Some of the pilgrims in the throng had moved away to stand at the side of the road so that they could beg the toll from others. Brother Bernard thrust a way through for us to stand at the front. A family had just been permitted past without any exchange of money.

  A penny for strangers, a half-penny for pilgrims. Locals do not have to pay the toll.

  This was told to us by a woman who carried a basket of fish. Have a fish, she said offering one to Brother Andrew. Because of your fairness, she said. Brother Andrew reddened, looked down to the ground. When you eat my fish you can say a prayer for me, she said.

  We have no money, I told the man with the scrip.

  He ignored me, held out his hand for a penny for the toll from the woman with the fish.

  We go as pilgrims and strangers in the world, I said.

  Then that should be a penny and a half for each of you, he said talking out of the side of his mouth. The rest of his body was still, just his eyes always in motion.

  We serve God in poverty and humility. We do not use money.

  Everyone knows how you friars live. God does not need your riches or your greed, the man said.

  The conversation seemed to gladden him, as if it gave him the opportunity to display his wit. Many gave loud assent to his words and I marvelled at and feared this godless, upside-down place where pilgrims are exacted a toll to visit a shrine and the best men of learning and devotion are seen as exemplars of vice.

  What is in your bag? the man said. Treasures, I expect.

  None that you would recognise, I said.

>   We will not pay, Brother Bernard said.

  Then you will not pass, the man said.

  Brother Bernard lifted the man away from the ground as if he was shaking a fallen leaf, and coins rolled out of his scrip, and the throng at first did not know how to respond to this turn of events. But when Brother Bernard had hurled the man into one of the guards with the staves, and was already moving to the other, who hesitated, as if he could not decide whether to set upon him or flee, members of the crowd were scratching around on the ground for the fallen coins, and Brother Bernard was advancing upon the second guard, who made his decision, to flee, and we watched him run, and then Brother Bernard said, in his usual tone of plain announcement,

  We should go on.

  We went on.

  In Rule Three of our Order, the blessed Saint Francis counsels, admonishes and begs his brothers that when we travel about the world, we should not be disputatious, contend with words, or criticise others, but rather should be gentle, peaceful and unassuming, courteous and humble, speaking respectfully to all as is due. Behold, he says, I send you as a sheep in the midst of wolves. Be therefore wise as serpents and as simple as doves.

  Of the three of us, only Brother Andrew’s behaviour in the matter of the toll men was without sin. The Cathedral rose above us, as we made our slow process towards it through elbows and shoulders of pilgrims, and Brother Bernard denied that he had behaved improperly.

  It was right, he said.

  When Brother Bernard takes a position he is unyielding.

  Those men were demons, he said.

  We must give greater penance, I said.

  You do as your conscience tells you and I shall do likewise, he said.

  I had not been prepared for such multitudes. Brother Andrew thrust himself for safety between me and Brother Bernard. We were the sick, we were lepers and cripples, madmen, peasants, noblemen, pilgrims, all come to visit the relics of the saint. Beggars outside, preaching monks, merchants selling badges of the shrine.