The Pilgrim's Shell; Or, Fergan the Quarryman: A Tale from the Feudal Times

Colas the Bacon-cutter, finding himself, no more than some other serfs who still hesitated, sufficiently instructed by the monk's answer on the distance of the journey, asked again: "Father, it is said to be a long ways from here to Nantes. Is it as far to Jerusalem?"

"Oh, man of little faith!" answered Peter the Hermit, "dare you measure the road that leads to Paradise and to the Holy Virgin?"

"By the four swift feet of my good horse, the Sun of Glory! They are thinking of the length of the road!" exclaimed Walter the Pennyless. "See here, my friends, does the bird that escapes from its cage inquire the length of the road when it can fly to freedom? Does not the ass in the mill, turning his grindstone, and tramping from dawn to dusk in the same circle, travel as much as the stag that roves through the woods at pleasure? Oh, my good friends, is it not better, instead of, like the ass of the mill, incessantly to tramp this seigniorial soil unto which you are chained, to march in search of adventures, free, happy like the stag in the forest, and every day see new countries?"

"Yes, yes," replied Colas, "the stag in the forest is better off than the ass in the mill. Let's depart for Palestine!"

"Yes, let's depart for Palestine!" the cry now went up from several other villagers. "On to that land of marvels!"

"My friends, be careful what you do," insisted Martin the Prudent. "The ass in the mill at least receives in the evening his meager pittance. The stags of the forest do not pasture in herds, hence they find a sufficiency in the woods. But if you depart with this large troop, which swells as it marches, you will be thousands of thousands when you reach Jerusalem. Who, then, my friends, will feed you? Who is to lodge you on the road? Who is to furnish you with clothes and footwear?"

"And who is it that lodges and feeds the birds of the good God, man of little faith?" Cuckoo Peter exclaimed. "Do the birds carry their provisions with them? Do they not raid the harvests along their route, resting at night under the eaves of the houses? Answer, ye hardened sinners!"

"By the faith of the Gibbet-cheater, you may trust that man!" here put in Corentin. "As truly as Perrette is a daisy, our route from Angers to this place has been but one continuous raid to us big birds on two legs. What feasts we have had? Poultry and pigeons! Hams and sausages! Pork and mutton! Tons of wine! Tons of hydromel! By my belly and my back, we have raided for everything on our passage, leaving behind us but bones to gnaw at and empty barrels to turn over!"

"And if those people were to complain," added Perrette the Ribald with her usual outburst of laughter, "we would answer them: 'Shut up, ninnies! Cuckoo Peter has read in the holy books that 'the goods of the sinner are reserved for the just!' Are not we the just, we who are on the march to deliver the holy tomb? And are not you sinners, you who stay here stagnating in your cowardice? And if these ninnies said but a word, the Gibbet-cheater, backed by our whole band, would soon have convinced them with a thorough caning."

These sallies of Perrette and Corentin completed the conversion of those serfs who still hesitated. Seeing in the voyage but a long and merry junket, a goodly number of them, Colas the Bacon-cutter at their head, cried out in chorus: "Let's depart for Jerusalem, the country of beautiful girls, good wines and ingots of gold!"

"Onward, march, my friends! Trouble your heads neither about the road, nor about lodging, nor yet about food. The good God will provide!" cried Walter the Pennyless. "On the march! On the march! If you have provisions, take them along. Have you a donkey? mount him. Have you wagons? hitch on, and put wife and children in them. If you have nothing but your legs, gird up your loins, and on to Jerusalem! We are hundreds upon hundreds; we soon shall be thousands upon thousands; and presently we shall number hundreds of thousands. Upon our arrival in Palestine we shall find treasures and delights for all – beautiful women, good wine, rich robes, and lumps of gold in plenty!"

"And we shall all have gained eternal salvation! We shall have a seat in Paradise!" added Cuckoo Peter in a strident voice, brandishing his wooden cross over his head. "Let's depart for Jerusalem! God wills it!"

"Forward, let's depart for Palestine!" cried out a hundred of the villagers, carried away by Colas, despite the prudent advice of Martin. These ill-starred men, a prey to a sort of delirium, ran to their huts and gathered up the little that they possessed. Some loaded their asses in haste; others, less poor, hitched a horse or a yoke of oxen to a wagon and placed their families on board; while Peter the Hermit and Walter the Pennyless, to the end of inflaming still more the ardor of these new recruits of the faith in the midst of their preparations for the journey, struck up the chant of the Crusades that was soon taken up in chorus by all the Crusaders:

"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! City of marvels! Happiest among all cities! You are the subject of the vows of the angels! You constitute their happiness! You will be our delight!

"The wood of the cross is our standard. Let's follow that banner that marches on before, guided by the Holy Ghost!

"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! City of marvels! Happiest among all cities! You are the subject of the vows of the angels! You constitute their happiness! You will be our delight!"

Joan the Hunchback, having succeeded in freeing herself from the hands of Corentin and his wench, had pushed herself not without great pains, out of the compact mob, and was about to start back to her humble home by cutting across the skirt of the village, intending to wait for the return of her husband and child, a return that she hardly ventured to hope for. Suddenly she turned deadly pale and tried to scream, but terror deprived her of her voice. From the somewhat raised ground where she stood, Joan saw, down the plain, Fergan carrying his son in his arms, and running with all his might towards the village, with Garin the Serf-eater at his heels. The latter, giving his horse the spurs, followed the serf, sword in hand. Several men-at-arms on foot, following at a distance the tracks of the bailiff, sought to make up to him in order to render him armed assistance. Despite his efforts to escape, Fergan led Garin by barely fifty paces. The lead was shortened from moment to moment. Already within but two paces, and believing the quarryman to be within reach of his sword, the bailiff had sought to strike him down by leaning over the neck of his horse. Thanks to several doublings, like those that hares make when pursued by the hound, Fergan escaped death. Making, finally, a desperate leap, he ran several steps straight ahead with indescribable swiftness, and then suddenly disappeared from the sight of Joan as if he had sunk into the bowels of the earth. A second later the poor woman saw Garin reining in his horse with great effort near the spot where the quarryman had just disappeared from view; he raised his sword heavenward, and then, instead of proceeding straight ahead, turned to the left and followed at a full gallop a hedge of green that traversed the valley diagonally. Joan then understood that her husband, having jumped with the child to the bottom of a deep trench, which the bailiff's horse could not clear, at the very moment when he would have been struck down by the bailiff, the latter had been compelled to ride along the edge of the trench to a point where he might cross it, in order to proceed to the village, where he counted upon capturing the quarryman. Joan feared lest her husband and child were hurt in the leap. But soon she saw her little Colombaik climb out of the trench with the aid of his little hand and supported by his father, whose arms only were visible. Presently Fergan also climbed out, picked up the child again, and carrying that dear load, continued to flee at a full run towards the village, which he aimed at reaching before the bailiff. Despite her weakness, Joan rushed forward to meet her child and her husband, and joined them. Fergan, without stopping and keeping the child in his arms, hurriedly said to his wife, almost out of breath and exhausted: "Let's reach the village. Let's get in ahead of Garin, and we shall be safe!"

"My dear Colombaik, you are here at last!" Joan said, while running beside the serf and devouring the child with her eyes, forgetting at the sight of him both the present perils and the past, while Colombaik, smiling and reaching out his little arms, said: "Mother! mother! How happy am I to see you again! Dear, good mother!"

"Oh," said the serf while redoubling his efforts to gain the village before Garin, who was driving his horse at full speed, "had I not been delayed burying a dead woman at the egress of the tunnel, I would have been here before daybreak. We would have met to flee together."

"My child! They have not hurt you?" Joan was thinking only of her child, one of whose hands she had seized and was kissing while weeping with joy, and running beside her husband. At that moment the chant of the Crusaders' departure resounded from afar with renewed fervor: "Jerusalem! City of marvels!"

"What songs are these?" inquired the quarryman. "What big crowd is that, gathered yonder? Whence come all these people?"

"Those are people who are going, they say, to Jerusalem. A large number of the inhabitants of the village are following them. They are like crazy!"

"Then we are really saved!" exclaimed the quarryman, seized with a sudden thought. "Let's depart with them!"

"What, Fergan!" demanded Joan out of breath and exhausted with her precipitate gait. "We to go far away with our child!"

But the serf, who found himself at the most a hundred paces from the village, made no answer, and followed by Joan, he finally reached the crowd, into the midst of which he dived, holding Colombaik and exhausted with fatigue, while, muttering to his wife: "Oh, saved! We are saved!"

Garin, who had continued driving his horse along the trench until he reached a spot where he could cross, observed with astonishment the crowd of people that blocked his way and access to the village. Drawing near, he saw coming towards him several of the serfs who preferred their crushing servitude to the chances of a distant and unknown voyage. Among these was old Martin the Prudent. Seeking to flatter the bailiff, he said to him trembling: "Good master Garin, we are not of those rebels who dare to flee from the lands of their seigneur to go to Palestine with that troop of Crusaders, that are traveling through the country. We do not intend to abandon the domain of our seigneur. We wish to work for him to our last day."

"S-death!" cried out the bailiff, forgetting the quarryman at the announcement of the desertion of a large number of the serfs. "The wretches who have thought of fleeing will be punished." The crowd, opening up before the horse of Garin, he reached the monk and Walter the Pennyless, who were pointed to him as the chiefs of the Crusaders. "By what right do you thus enter with a large troop upon the territory of my seigneur, Neroweg VI, sovereign Count of Plouernel?" Then, raising his voice still more and turning to the villagers: "Those of you, serfs and villeins, who had the audacity of following these vagabonds, shall have their hands and feet cut on the spot, like rebels – "

"Impious man! Blasphemer!" exclaimed Cuckoo Peter breaking in upon the bailiff in a thundering voice. "Dare you threaten the Christians who are on the march to deliver the tomb of the Lord? Woe be unto you! – "

"You frocked criminal," the bailiff in turn interrupted, boiling with rage, and drawing his sword, "you dare issue orders in the seigniory of my master!" Saying which, Garin, driving his horse towards the monk, raised his sword over him. But Peter the Hermit parried the move with his heavy wooden cross, and struck the bailiff such a hard blow with it over his casque, that the latter, dazed for a moment, let fall his sword.

"Death to the bandit, who would cut off the feet and hands of the avengers of Christ!" several voices cried out. "Death to him! Death!"

"Yes, death!" yelled the serfs of the village, who had made up their minds to depart for the Holy Land, and who abhorred the bailiff. "Death to Garin the Serf-eater! He shall eat none more!" With that, Colas the Bacon-cutter threw him from his horse, and in a moment the bailiff, trodden under foot, was slaughtered and torn to pieces. The serfs broke his bones, cut off his head, and Colas the Bacon-cutter, taking up the livid head of the Serf-eater with the prong of his pitch-fork, raised the bleeding trophy above the mob. Carrying it on high, he rejoined the troop of the Crusaders, whereupon the crowd marched away singing at the top of their voices:

"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! City of marvels! Happiest among all cities! You are the subject of the vows of the angels! You constitute their happiness! You will be our delight!

"The wood of the cross is our standard. Let's follow that banner that marches on before, guided by the Holy Ghost!

"God wills it! God wills it! God wills it."

PART II.

THE CRUSADE

CHAPTER I.

THE SYRIAN DESERT

The sun of Palestine inundates with its blinding and scorching light, a desert covered with reddish sand. As far as the eye reaches, not a house is seen, not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass, not a pebble. Not a sparrow could find shelter in this vast expanse. Everywhere a shifting sand, fine as ashes, radiates back in more torrid temperature the heat imparted to it by that flaming sun, vaulted by a fiery sky that dips in the western horizon into a zone of burning vapor. Here and yonder, half buried in the waves of sand that are periodically raised by the gales of these regions, appear the whitened bones of men and children, horses, asses, oxen and camels. The flesh of these bodies has been devoured by vultures, jackals and lions. The Saracen proverb is verified: "The Christians find here shelter only in the belly of the vultures, the jackals and the lions!" These decomposing human and other débris trace across the desert the route to Marhala, a city situated ten days' march from Jerusalem, – the holy city toward which converge the several armies of the Crusaders from Gaul, Germany, Italy and England, marching to the conquest of an empty tomb.

If in this solitude there are skeletons and corpses half devoured, there are also dying and living beings. Numerous are the dying, few, on the contrary, the living; and the latter would count themselves happy if the dead and the dying around them were the worst of their plight. Here are the Crusaders, who, in their credulity, left the year before the "ungrateful soil of the Occident" for the "miraculous land of the Orient," where they arrived after a voyage of eleven or twelve hundred leagues. The bulk of the army that left Gaul, then under the command of Bohemund, Prince of Taranto, slowly melted away yonder, in the midst of the thick cloud of dust raised by the marching Crusaders. In their wake followed a long train of stragglers, scattered helter-skelter, – women, children, the wounded, the infirm, the sick, a mass of wretchedness dying of thirst, heat and fatigue. Here and there they drop down by the way in this boundless desert, never to rise again.

The least to be pitied among these stragglers are those who, having lost their horses, resolutely mounted an ass, an ox, a goat, occasionally one of those huge Syrian mastiffs, three feet in height. They thus drag along at the gait of the animal they ride, their swords on their side, their lances at their backs. In order to protect themselves from the consuming heat, that, descending at right angles on their skulls, often caused insanity or death, they carry strange head-pieces. Some shelter their heads under a piece of cloth spread out by means of sticks, that they hold in their hands in the manner of a dais; cleverer ones have plaited the dried leaves of the date plant into broad chaplets that shade their brows; the larger number wore a species of mask made of shreds of cloth, and perforated with a hole at the place of the eyes to protect their eye-lids from a dust so scorching and corrosive that it produced painful inflammations, and often led to death.

At a great distance from these Crusaders followed the foot-passengers in grotesque costumes, and sinking to their knees in the shifting sand, whose mere burning contact rendered intolerable the excoriation of their feet, worn to the quick by the road. Their limbs bandaged in dirty rags, the wounded tramped along painfully, leaning on their staffs. Women, gasping for breath, carried their children on their backs, or dragged them heaped upon rude sledges that they pulled after them with the aid of their husbands. Among these wretches, almost wholly in tatters, some were seen in bizarre accoutrement. There were men, who barely covered with a crazy frock-coat, yet sported on their heads a rich turban of Oriental material; others, out at toes, wore a splendid cloak of embroidered silk, dashed with spots of blood, like all the other spoils of pillage and massacre.

Suffocated with stifling heat, blinded with the dust that the march raised, streaming with perspiration, parched with a devouring thirst, their skins burnt by the sun, ill of humor, gloomy and discouraged, these wretched beings were tramping along, muttering imprecations against the Crusade, when they perceived a numerous and brilliant cavalcade approaching through thick clouds of dust from a great distance in the rear. At the head of the cavalcade and mounted upon a spirited Arabian horse, black as ebony, advanced a young man in splendid accoutrements. It is William IX, the handsome Duke of Aquitaine, the impious poet, the contemner of the Church, the seducer of Malborgiane, whose portrait he carried in Gaul upon his shield. But Malborgiane is now forgotten and cast off, like so many other victims of this great debauchee. William IX is advancing at the head of his men-at-arms. His face at once bold and bantering, is partially covered by a wrapper of white silk that falls upon his shoulders. The outlines of his elegant and supple figure are set off by a light tunic of purple color; his broad hose, worn loose in Oriental style, exposes his boots of green leather, wrought in silver and tipped with gold. William carries neither arms or armor. With his left hand he guides his horse; on his right, covered with a gauntlet of embroidered leather, sits his favorite falcon, hooded in scarlet and its legs ornamented with little gold bells. Such is the courage of this bird that often does its master fly it against the vultures of the desert, as he more than once starts against the hyenas and jackals, the large hunting dogs with red collars that, breathing heavily, follow his horse. At the crupper of his prancing horse is a negro boy, eight or nine years of age, and quaintly arrayed. He carries a large parasol, whose shade shelters the head of William. At the right of the duke, and towering above him with its large body, ambles a camel richly caparisoned. Another negro boy guides the animal seated in front of the double litter, which, closed in with silken curtains, is fastened with girths to the back and body of the animal, and is so contrived that in each of its compartments a person can be comfortably seated, protected from the sun and the dust. William often ensconced himself in one of them.

Beside William, rode the chevalier, Walter the Pennyless. Before his departure on the Crusade, the Gascon adventurer, pale, bony and tattered, bore a strong resemblance to the poor devil sketched on the upper part of his shield. Now, however, thanks to the sumptuousness of his dress, the knight recalls the second picture on his shield. From the pommel of his saddle hung a Venetian casque, which he had doffed for a turban, a more comfortable head-gear on the route. A long Dalmatic of light material, thrown over his rich armor, kept the latter from being heated in the burning rays of the sun. Of his poor equipment of yore, the Gascon preserved only his good sword, the Sweetheart of the Faith, and his little horse, the Sun of Glory. Surviving by the merest accident the perils and fatigues of the long passage, the Sun of Glory testified by the lustre of his coat to the good quality of the Saracen fodder, that he seemed to run short of as little as his master lacked provisions.

Behind these personages followed the equerries of the Duke of Aquitaine, carrying his standard, his sword, his lance and his shield, on which William was in the habit of carrying the pictures of his mistresses, the ephemerous objects of his libertine whims. Accordingly, the picture of Azenor the Pale, replacing that of Malborgiane, now occupied the center of the buckler; but, with a brazen refinement of corruption, other medallions, representing some of his numerous other concubines, surrounded the image of Azenor in token of homage.

The equerries led by the reins the duke's chargers, vigorous horses, covered and caparisoned in iron, carrying pendent from their saddles the several pieces of their master's armor. He could thus don his war harness when came the hour of battle, instead of supporting its oppressive weight during the long route. After the equerries came, led by black slaves taken from the Saracens, the mules and camels that were laden with the baggage and provisions of the duke. If hunger, thirst and fatigue decimated the masses, the noble Crusaders, thanks to their wealth, almost always escaped privations. One of William's camels was loaded with several bags of citron and large pouches filled with wine and with water, – inestimable commodities in a journey over the deserts.

About three hundred men-at-arms constituted the cavalcade of the Duke of Aquitaine. These cavaliers, the only survivors of a thousand warriors who departed on the Crusade, now habituated to battle, inured to fatigue and bronzed by the sun of Syria, had long braved the dangers of the murderous climate. Their heavy iron armor weighed on their robust bodies no more than a coat of gauze. Disdain for danger, together with ferocity, was depicted on their savage countenances. Many among them bore from the pommels of their saddles, as bloody trophies, some Saracen head freshly severed, and suspended from the single lock of hair that Mohammedans keep at the top of their skulls. The cavaliers of the duke were armed with strong ash or aspen-tree lances ornamented with streaming bannerets, and double-edged long swords, besides a battle axe or a spiked mace hanging from their saddles. Oval bucklers, hauberks or steel coats-of-arms, braces, greaves, iron jambards, – of such was their armor. The troop was rapidly riding through the bands of stragglers, when a white slender hand parted the curtains of the litter beside which rode the duke, and a voice was heard calling:

"William, I am thirsty, let me have some water!"

"Azenor wishes to refresh herself!," said the noble Crusader reining in his horse and turning to Walter the Pennyless. "Fetch some water for my mistress. I know woman's impatience. Besides, the lips must not be allowed to languish that ask for a fresh drink or a warm kiss!"

"Seigneur duke, I shall fetch the drink, do you take care of the kiss," retorted the adventurer, turning his horse's head toward the baggage, while, stooping down on his horse, the duke pushed his head under the curtain.