The Burning Road Read online

  “No true knight would behave poorly against me!”

  Karle’s horse pranced nervously in response to his unfamiliar rider, all the more so because of the rider’s agitation. “But the deeds of the false ones cannot be anticipated,” Karle told her, his tone hard and unreassuring. “How is it that you are so sheltered from the truth of these times? Has your père kept you locked in a cabinet as well?”

  She looked away in shame. She could not explain the reasons for the isolation in which she and Alejandro had lived.

  “Let me tell you how knights, even the truest, behave these days,” he continued. “They run wild all through France, without patronage. There are no lords to pay them, for those lords grow fat as hostages at Edward’s generous table. And should a lord be foolishly inclined to give up the luxury of life in the English Court and return to the chaos of France, his vassals have not the means to buy his freedom! Knights now crave the comfort of any allegiance, and to find it they join the Free Companies. Everything not lashed down has been stolen by these ‘heroes,’ including women, whom they use for their pleasure and then discard.”

  “This cannot be true! They cannot all be such fiends as you describe.…”

  “Forgive me,” he said sarcastically. “I exaggerate. One or two have come to our cause. A few who serve God before king will not join in the desecration of France. But you will not be safe from the others. Not alone.” His hard blue eyes bore down on her, full of condemnation. “How can you not know this?”

  What could she tell him to excuse her ignorance? She had come by it honestly enough. She groped for a plausible answer. “I have devoted myself to—um—ststudy …” she stammered, “of midwifery.”

  “A fine bit of good it does to know midwifery if you are dead on the side of the road, ravaged by some supposedly ‘noble’ knight. You must try to stay alive, so you can put your skills to proper use,” he said. “If your claims are true, you would be of great help in our cause.” He dared her with his eyes. “Come with me now, and you shall see.”

  He heeled the horse in the flanks and rode off. And against all that made sense to her, she followed.

  But this time she did not wait outside. They were greeted at the door of a small, decrepit stone house by a cheerless woman with stick-thin arms and a belly swollen by pregnancy, and by the hollowness of the woman’s cheeks, Kate could see that the babe within had taken what it could get, and left the mother with little sustenance for herself.

  May God grant that I shall never know such want myself, she prayed silently as she gawked at the woman. The desperate prayer seemed so loud that she wondered if anyone had heard it.

  The woman stared back at Kate with great suspicion, but when Karle vouched for her they were invited to enter.

  The house was bare except for the most rudimentary furnishings. It was dim, for there were no candles to be seen anywhere, and chilly, for the hearth was cold. The air was foul with the musty-dank smell of sickness.

  “Bonjour, madame,” Kate said with quiet politeness and a nod of her head.

  The thin woman made a small curtsy, surprising Kate. Then she smiled hopefully at Karle, who returned her salutation with a little incline of his head, and the question “What of your husband?”

  The madame gestured toward a pallet of matted straw before the cold hearth. The husband lay on it, unmoving, silent, thin as a branch, pale as the moon. “He rises only to empty himself,” the woman said. “Thank God he can still do that much, for I have not the strength to lift him anymore. Everything he takes in still comes out of him as dirty water,” she whispered sadly. “Though he eats almost nothing.”

  “What of the little one?” Karle asked, looking around.

  The woman extended her hand in the direction of a shadowy corner; there they saw a small boy, who stared out from the darkness with the hollow, vacant eyes of one who thinks of nothing but food.

  “This one’s not taken sick, thank God, but he’s no bigger than he was two summers ago. And he says nothing anymore,” she added with a pained look. “I fear he’s become addled.”

  Kate looked around, but saw no other children. “Are there any others?”

  With an agonized sob, she clutched at her breast and said, “Gone! By the hand of the plague itself!”

  Kate and Karle stared at each other. “There is plague about?” Karle whispered.

  Through her tears the woman managed to say, “Now and again it visits, and always it takes someone with it before it slinks back into its hole.”

  Kate came forward and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She meant it as a comfort, but the woman shivered slightly, and Kate thought the bones might be protruding from the skin underneath the ragged dress. “When did your child die?”

  “At the last turn of the moon.”

  “And you buried him?”

  “As best I could … I dug a shallow hole on the edge of the west field and laid him in it, then covered him in rocks. I pray the animals have not gotten to him.”

  As well you ought, Kate thought. “Madame, are there often rats about?”

  The swollen-eyed woman stared at her. “You need make such an inquiry?”

  “I ask because there are physicians who think that rats may be the source of plague.”

  “Then we shall all die, for we have been forced to eat them.”

  Her gorge rose. “And your son who died? Did he eat a rat?”

  “He may have; I cannot say for sure. He was of an age where he could hunt on his own. And we reached the point where we did not always share what we caught with each other.” She crossed herself quickly. “May God save us from that sin. The boy might have caught one, and in his hunger, eaten it before he ever brought it home. But I do not know.”

  Without the benefit of the cooking pot’s cleansing of the flesh, Kate thought. “No one is to eat rats,” she said firmly, “ever again. To do so is almost sure death.”

  “We are sure to die anyway.”

  Kate had no reply for that hopeless remark. She was appalled by the desperation she saw, and gave the last of their apples to the woman. She was suddenly ashamed of her own glowing health, embarrassed by the flesh on her bones. “Have you no bread at all?” she asked.

  “How are we to make bread? They’ve taken the plow—so there is no wheat, and therefore no flour. And my husband cannot till the soil; he cannot stand up long enough to turn one row. We cannot even grow a turnip. And all of our livestock have been claimed by Navarre!” She turned her head to one side and spat viciously in the dust of her floor.

  Then she began to weep and the little boy came out of the corner to cling to her skirt. “How have we come to this state?” she sobbed. “We had so much to give praise for! And now it is all gone!”

  Guillaume Karle leaned closer to Kate and whispered, “Is there nothing you can do for this man? Midwife?”

  She gave Karle a look of dreadful uncertainty, then went to the bedside of the sallow-looking peasant. She took in what information she could without touching him, for to do so might bring the man’s sickness upon her. The cholera, she concluded from her brief observation. Alejandro had often described the symptoms to her; he had spoken with bittersweet fondness of his old soldier comrade who feared war’s cholera to the very depth of his soul, only to give that great soul to the plague instead.

  She turned back to Karle. “There is little that can be done,” she whispered. “But I dare not leave them with no hope at all.” She looked at the woman and said, “You must gather what fuel you can, for all your husband’s water must be boiled before he drinks it. He must drink as much as possible. By the look of his skin, he is quite dry.” Then she turned to the child. “Do you know the dandelion?” she asked him.

  He nodded dully.

  “Then you must harvest as much of it as you can find, for it will help your père to recover. Bring the leaves to your maman and she will make a tea for him.”

  She turned back to the woman again. “The tea made from dandelion l
eaves may help his stomach; perhaps then he will be able to keep some nourishment inside him.” She reached out and placed a hand on the woman’s swollen belly. “You must dry the leaves that are left from making the tea, then grind them and take them as a powder. There is a magic in them that will strengthen both you and your child.”

  The woman, who appeared to be at least twice the age of the girl who now served as her advisor, gave Guillaume a suspicious look. He passed the look directly on to Kate.

  She understood their hesitation and said firmly, “These are things my père taught me.” Then she lowered her eyes and whispered to Karle, “When he spoke to me through the door of my cabinet.”

  Karle could not help but smile, though he tried to hide it from the sickly woman. “This is good advice,” he told the woman, “and you should heed it.”

  “But she is such a young one—” the woman began to say.

  “But her père is a physician. And though she is young, this midwife has acquired much wisdom from him.”

  This seemed to satisfy the woman, so she fortified the child with a hug and sent him out to gather the required leaves. “There may be wood enough for a fire, perhaps,” she said as she wrapped a tattered shawl around her thin shoulders. “Behind the house.”

  They followed her out and brought back enough wood to get the fire going. Then Karle bade the woman farewell. “I will pray daily for your husband’s recovery.”

  They left the house and its pathetic occupants, and remounted their horses. “Why did she curtsy to me?” Kate said curiously.

  “Because it has been so long since she has seen healthy flesh like yours, she must take you for some kind of goddess.” He smiled cynically. “Or at the very least, a princess.”

  She stared at him for a disconcerting moment, and when she realized he was joking, regained herself. The desire to move onward came over her with great and sudden urgency. She looked up into the sky for the sun, and then pointed.

  “West,” she said, and turned her horse.

  “Where are you going?” Karle called as he followed her.

  “To the west field,” she cried back.

  They found the grave quite easily. Some of the rocks had been shoved aside, but whatever beast had tried to dislodge them had not managed to finish the job. Still, Kate was grateful to see that much of her work had been done already by something with claws.

  As she dug at the remaining rocks with her small hands, Karle watched in curious awe. When he tried to come closer she waved him off. “Stay back—then no one will be able to accuse you of participating.”

  “But this is punishable by death—you must stop!”

  Rocks flying as she tossed them away, she said, “I cannot. This is of great import.”

  “But why? What can a maiden want—”

  “Right now my deeds are those of a midwife, not a maiden. So stand guard.…”

  The pile beside her had grown considerably, and she began to wonder if the woman had been right in saying that the grave was shallow, when she came upon what she thought was the rotted flesh of a thigh. She shoved away a few more rocks until she found the arm that rested against the thigh of the dead child, at its end a withered hand. And as Karle watched in horror, she reached into her stocking and pulled out her knife, then severed the hand from the body at the wrist joint. She tore off a strip of her shawl and wrapped the blackened appendage in it. And after a hasty restoration of the cairn, she stood, swooning, and retched in dry revulsion.

  When their gazes came together, Karle saw the briefest flash of the driven animal in her eyes. “You are mad,” he hissed.

  But then she was the maiden again, and fully aware of the nature of her deed. “Do not say it too loudly, Karle,” she whispered as she regained herself. “God will hear you. You must believe me when I tell you that it is a bit of good fortune that we found this, for we may need it.” She held it out at arm’s length. “But the greater fortune is that it no longer smells.”

  Alejandro watched from the small window of his attic room on Rue des Rosiers as an old woman in a simple gray frock and white apron greeted the day with a broom in one hand and a bucket in the other. First she swept the stones clear of the night’s droppings, shoving them decisively away from her stoop, muttering as she banished the cursed brown piles to the gutter. Then she emptied her bucket of water over those same stones and swept them yet again, with vigor enough to ensure that nothing offensive would survive her rough treatment. He had watched her do the same thing the day before, and the day before that as well.

  Had the citizens of London only been so fastidious, he mused regretfully, perhaps more would have lived … but plenty of Parisians had died in the first wave of the Black Death, despite the relative cleanliness of the city, so he could not fault the filth of London entirely for the devastation that had occurred there. Many claimed the English were a different sort of people than the French, more savage, nearly barbaric, some even said. And in truth, he could not recall ever seeing an Englishwoman attack the ever-present ordure on the London cobblestones with as much ferocity as this elderly Parisian dame now demonstrated. But he would not agree with the notion, widely held among the French, that the English were a slothful people, for they attacked many other things with great ferocity.

  The French, for example. As often as possible. He smiled to himself in his attic aerie.

  The old woman was now busily undoing the shutters that kept her rounds and crocks of cheese safe from those who would liberate them, sans sou, in the night. Food was dear with the shortages of war, and a generous portion of cheese had become a great luxury, to be enjoyed only by the very rich or the very cunning. Released from the night’s entrapment, the pungent, curdy odor wafted upward and across the street; it was all the enticement Alejandro needed to leave the cobwebs and dank straw of his temporary hideaway to search for something with which to fill his growling stomach.

  A huge wooden sign hung over the tiny shop, fashioned in the shape of a wedge and painted yellow, with the word fromages carved into the surface. Bits of soot and dirt clung to the hollowed-out letters, for it was beyond the reach of the old woman to clean them. He thought momentarily of offering to do the work for her. It would be a great kindness, and even after all he had been through Alejandro was still a kind man.

  But he was not fool enough to make the offer, for such a kindness would implant him in her memory. Since arriving in Paris, Alejandro had taken care to avoid doing the same thing twice, lest he attract the notice of someone with nothing more to do than watch the comings and goings of the inhabitants of that particular arrondissement. Beyond Abraham’s book it was all that he himself had to do, and he was amazed by how much he noticed when he had the time to observe: the sultry young woman who invited gentlemen up her dark stairway over and over again, all day and into the night; the rough boys who played at sticks and often made each other bleed in their otherwise good-natured contests; the shy young widow draped in black, pulling along a sniffling child and carrying a basket that always seemed so terribly empty. These people were all familiar to him now, and he had been in their environs only a few days. How long would it be before one of them noticed him, and wondered?

  The day before he had heard the sweet voice of a little girl—she had cried out, “Père!” and the sound of it had robbed him of his breath. He’d whirled around just in time to see the happy homecoming of a lucky père returning from somewhere with things that his little one needed, not the least of which was his heart and its abundant affection. He swept a laughing child up into his arms and covered her rosy little face with fatherly kisses as Alejandro watched, feeling painful envy.

  He does not know how quickly it will pass, how soon she will be a woman and no longer in need of him.

  He would rotate his visits to various shops, never lingering too long in one place, and he never stood in the same location for more than a few minutes. But he always watched, wherever he might be standing, for it was on this street, in this group o
f small shops and markets, among the last few Jews of Paris, that Kate would come looking for him.

  He was not yet worried that she had not arrived, for he himself had had the advantage of riding, and she was traveling on foot. Or had they somehow managed to acquire horses? Was it still “they”? The physician worried belatedly, with a terrible sense of impotence, if the Frenchman Karle was as trustworthy as he had judged him to be or if he would take the gold that had been given for her care and abandon her. She had more gold of her own tucked into another secret pocket of her skirt, one with a button so the coins could never slip out accidentally. He had taught her that she must never allow herself to lack an item that could be readily exchanged for the necessities of survival. One gold coin could buy her a journey halfway across Europa, if she spent it right, and he had raised her to be frugal. She would make a good wife, he thought with pride, despite her vagabond upbringing. Should the day come when she might marry, she would manage her husband’s affairs and household with care and teach her children well.

  May God grant that the world will once again come to sanity, and that such simple joys will someday be hers.

  He found himself somehow standing before the cheeses, and heard the gray-frocked old woman ask him his preference in a voice more firm than he would have thought from her. He pointed out his modest choice from among the temptations and paid her price in small coins. After thanking her with a smile and a nod, he quickly crossed the street and headed for the boulangerie, where he bought a long golden loaf of still-warm pain. He spoke not one word from the time he left the room to the time he returned with his food.

  He sat down at the window again, and watched.

  Kate was quiet and sober as they rode, and barely spoke until they stopped at the next stream. “The tale that woman told—it shames me to know that such things happen! To steal a man’s wealth is dishonorable enough,” she said as the water dripped through her silk. “But to rob him of the means to provide for his family is quite another thing entirely. Surely this is the most grievous of thefts.”