Bridle the Wind (24 page)

The Gente seemed able to follow us no matter how we dodged to elude them; had I saved him, or were they still on our track? In which case I might as well have left him to enjoy his contest.

Now it occurred to me that, since their apparent ambush at the grotto on La Rhune, they had made no attempt to close in or seize us; they merely followed. What was their purpose in this? Did they, I wondered, perhaps intend to dog our heels until we had found the rich Uncle León, and then abduct Juan when they could be certain of reaping
a reward for their trouble? Was that it? And was Plumet – the terribly changed Plumet – still with them, guiding them on our trail like some grisly bloodhound of hell?

And, if he was with them, how could they endure his company?

Occupying myself in these comfortless reflections, I rode almost unconscious of my own weary body until the Demon stumbled badly, reminding me of his equal weariness. Meanwhile the stars had vanished, and a fine rain had begun to fall. It would, I knew, be folly to continue any farther.

Under a thick stand of larches we found a tilted black shape, which on closer inspection proved to be an abandoned oxcart with a broken wheel.

‘This will have to be our habitation for the night,' said I, ‘since no other presents itself.'

Juan still made no reply. In silence he slowly and stiffly slid from his pony and I did likewise. The ground was thick and soft with larch-mast, and taking handfuls of this, having unsaddled our poor wet beasts, we endeavoured to rub them down, and then hobbled them. This was no country in which to lose them, though I thought that in any case they were probably too tired to stray far.

I drew out the blanket from one of my
alforjas
and climbed into the cart.

‘Come,' I said to Juan, ‘it is not the best bed we have slept in, but it is better than none.'

Slowly and with reluctance he followed me. The cart, like the ground, was lined with soft needles; plainly it had stood there for many months.

Pushing a good half of the blanket toward Juan I lay down and said,
‘Gab-boon,
Juan.
Buenas noches'
He did not reply, but remained sitting up, hunched, with his arms round his knees, staring out at the larch branches which drooped around us like a tent. I reached to pat his shoulder, but he flinched away, so I withdrew my hand.

That was a miserable night.

Juan must, at length, have lain down to sleep, for in the course of the night, since the cart was tilted at an angle, we kept rolling down into the lowest corner, one on top of the other, and having to pull ourselves straight and rearrange ourselves and the blanket.

When dawn came and I awoke, stiff, cold, and unrested, it was to discover that torrential rain was falling. Our larch grove gave us some slight protection from the downpour, but even the thickest trees had begun to drip, so that we were far from dry. Juan had awakened before me and was sitting in the same position as he had last night, arms round knees, staring, pale-faced and impassive, into the grey and misty wilderness which lay all around our grove. The higher slopes of the mountains about us were all veiled in rain-cloud, and nothing could be heard but the rain, the hurrying water of a brook somewhere close by, the cries of a few dispirited birds, and the occasional distant call of a cuckoo.

‘Well,' said I, endeavouring to make a jest of it, ‘if the Gente can find us
here,
they are indeed guided by Satan, for I doubt if even God knows
where we are…'and then wondered if this might be the case. I have seldom felt so unhappy, deserted, and forlorn as I did in that far corner of the mountains.

‘Come, Juan,' I said, when he did not answer. ‘Do not punish me forever! Indeed I am sorry that I had to whisk you away in the middle of your performance. I did it only for your safety and my own. I meant well, not badly, I promise you.'

He turned and looked at me, for the first time since the occurrence. I was much struck by his pallor and the grieved, bruised, hollow look of his eyes; their copper-brown sparkle was quite extinguished; they were like dark, peaty pools on a mountaintop.

I had, I must confess, last night thought his behaviour rather sulky and babyish; like that of a child, happily performing some conceited antics before company, who is reproved by his parents and sent to stand in the corner. But now I saw that the case was otherwise. His distress was of a different order, and went much deeper.

‘You can't quite understand,' he said slowly and hoarsely. ‘It was not vanity or vainglory that made me do it. To begin with … I wished to earn some money, to pay you a portion of what you have expended on me.'

‘But that is of no consequence!'

‘If I had won,' he went on, ignoring my interruption, ‘if I had won that contest – and I believe I had the chance –'

‘Indeed, I believe so, too. It seemed very prob-
able.' I could not help breaking in, doing my best to comfort him. ‘The crowd liked you best. That was very plain! And you spoke very well, Juan.'

As on other occasions he seemed to find my praise irrelevant.

‘If I had won,' he said, ‘there would have been a prize of two gold louis.'

‘Twenty francs? As much as that? Indeed, that would certainly have been useful,' said I heartily. ‘But remember – after the contest there would certainly have been great rejoicings, and a feast, and you would probably have been expected to spend some of the money on buying wine for your defeated competitors.'

He turned his eyes on me in surprise. ‘Yes -perhaps. That may be true,' he acknowledged, after thinking about it; and then, broodingly: ‘The old man was good. Very, very good. He was so quick-witted – and he had a sharp, shrewd turn of speech – like a spade slicing through turf. I could not have given my answer so quickly, or bettered his lines. But the other' – he shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with his hand – ‘worse than weak soup! And too much of it, all the same. Flat and dull. It was a piece of luck for me, though. Gave me time to think. But, oh, Felix – what a joy it was!' At the memory, he kindled, his remaining anger and stiffness falling from him. His eyes shone once more. ‘To stand up there, like a runner, waiting to start, poised ready to leap at the sound of the bell – one's mind alert, set to spring in any direction –'

‘And I had to come and spoil it!' I said, remorseful, beginning now to realise more of what he had felt. It was like the sight of some rare beauty of a plant, which one has heedlessly trodden down, lying there in the path, bruised and broken ‘But surely there will be other contests, Juan – many, muny of them! I can see now that your ambition is right for you; you must become one of the
bertsulari.'

He gave me a very strange deep look, eyes wide and grave, then slowly shook his head.

‘No, never again. But I am glad that I had the one chance. And I think that I would have won. I do believe so.'

‘For sure, you would have! What was the last question that man shouted out?'

‘The sailor? He called, “How do you make a sailor's pie?”'

‘What kind of a question is
that}
How can one answer it? How did
you
answer it?'

Without replying he stood up, shook himself to throw off the pine needles, and dropped out of the cart.

‘Maladettal
I am stiff as a plank. Have we any food left?'

‘Only a few mouthfuls of bread.'

‘And I had bought all kinds of good things!' said he crossly. ‘Sausage, and cheese – and cakes. I had them hidden under the platform.'

‘Well; we shall just have to manage without. Perhaps we may come across a shepherd. Just at present, though, I think we should be foolish to
move; the mist is too thick. While he was shoeing el Demonio the smith warned me that higher up in these mountains there are many terribly deep gorges. We had better remain in what shelter we have until the clouds rise.'

He yawned, stretching. ‘Oh, well, in that case, if we are not going anywhere, I shall bathe in the brook.'

‘In all this rain?'

‘Why not? I prefer to be clean.'

He went off upstream out of sight, as was his habit, and presently came back, clothed once more and shivering, but with a better colour, to announce,
‘Quel bonheur,
Felix, the brook is full of fish! If we can only get a couple out, there is breakfast provided. But how to do that?'

‘Oh, there is no difficulty,' said I. Pablo, one of my grandfather's shepherds, had, when I was eight or nine, taught me how to catch trout with my hands. So I went and lay on my stomach in a wet patch of bracken by a rocky pool, and in twenty minutes or so had the satisfaction of catching three fish. Juan, meanwhile, had collected kindling for a fire, picking out dry sticks from under rocks and tree roots. This I lit with flint and steel (no chance to use Father Vespasian's lens today) and, in due course, we had a fire hot and glowing enough to toast our fish on larch prongs, which gave them a very choice aroma. While Juan tended the fish, I managed to tip the cart onto its side by tethering the ponies to it and making them pull it over, so that it formed a kind of sloping shelter, and we
were able to sit under it, on the dry patch that it had protected. There we retired to eat our breakfast.

‘This is not so bad!' said Juan, whose spirits appeared to have risen a little. ‘In fact it is a better breakfast than those poor little Cagots were able to give us.'

‘You were going to tell me about your poem,' I reminded him, licking my fingers.

‘I had not forgotten. I was trying to turn the Euskara into English. Well,' he said, ‘it went something like this:

‘Tell me, pray, if you may, how to make a sailor's pie?

First, then, you must take a teacup full of sky!

A strand of hemp, a silent star

And the wind's lullaby,

A flake of foam, a scent of night

And a gull's cry;

A taste of salt, a touch of tar

And a sorrowful good-bye:

Mix all these together, to make a sailor's pie.'

 

‘A teacup full of sky!' I said. ‘Where
do
you find such notions, Juan?'

‘Teacup is not quite right,' he muttered. ‘Wineglass? Salt bowl? No, that is not it. Such notions? Oh, inside my head. There are plenty more; if only I can find a way to make use of them.'

‘Well, I feel certain that you will be able to do
so. I wish that J had such a talent! All I am good for is to light fires and catch fish.'

‘And to keep me alive,' said Juan with a sigh, and a wry grin.

So we became friends again, and since the weather continued our enemy, we spent all of that day squatting under the cart; Juan told me tales and recited many more of his poems, I taught him a great quantity of English, and he endeavoured to teach me more Euskara, kindly not laughing too hard at my many mistakes. By the end of the day I had learned
‘Atharratz jauregian bi zitroia doratii,
In Tardets Castle there are two golden lemons'; that seemed as much as my thick head would accommodate.

‘They do say,' Juan told me comfortingly, ‘that it took the devil seven years to learn ‘yes' and ‘no' in Euskara. Then he forgot the words again, and so threw himself into the river Nive.'

We fed and watered our tired ponies, groomed them, washed the Harlequin's shoulder and anointed the Demon's fetlock, and in general made much of them; they, as much as we, seemed glad of the rest. And we talked, a little, of the Gente and Father Vespasian, puzzling over what it could be that made them consider it worthwhile to keep so pertinaciously on our trail.

‘Do you believe that it was what Brother Bertrand said – about the shadows?' demanded Juan. He cast a somewhat fearful glance at the gloomy sky and cloud-wrapped peaks. Any kind of demon, dwarf, or spectre might, it seemed,
come out of those high and misty regions; if we had heard a Satanic cackle or hobgoblin howl we would not have been much surprised. Yet we heard nothing but the scream of eagles and the lonely call of the cuckoo.

‘How can I tell? I do not understand, though, why the Gente should follow us – unless they are too frightened of – of that Being – to break away.'

‘Perhaps they think that we shall lead them to a hidden treasure,' said Juan fancifully; and then, with a shiver: ‘Do not let us talk about them any more. I will tell you, instead, about the
laminak.
'

‘What is the
laminak?
'

‘Are, not is. They are little people. They live in the forest over the mountains to the south – the Iraty Forest.' He waved an arm to where the pale sun, momentarily, was trying to peer through wreaths of mist. ‘They are little old ghosts, very,
very
old, they have been in the world since long before human people came here. Once they had the whole globe to themselves. But then the people came and built houses and towns, so the
laminak,
who hate noise, went away to live in the forest. But they are not enemies of men –
good
men; in fact they would dearly like to be friends with us, and help us. During daytime they hide in dark corners, under yew trees' roots, or behind carts in barns, watching, watching, watching the way that people do things; then, at night, when the farmer is in bed, out will come the
laminak
to try to help him, churning his milk or turning his cheese or leading the horses out to plough or collecting the
eggs in the henhouses. But they are so clumsy! They drop the eggs, they spill the milk, they break the ploughshare. They have no proper fingers, only ugly small stumps. And they are stupid, poor things; however often they try, they can never learn human ways of doing tasks.'

‘Like me trying to learn Euskara.'

‘Never mind, Felix!' said Juan kindly. ‘You are good at many other things. Whereas the poor
laminak
are good for nothing at all. And this makes them sad, so sad that sometimes you can hear them crying, crying, in the forest or farmyard, as if their hearts were ready to break; as if they could not endure their existence one moment longer. Poor little outcasts! It must be dreadful to feel that you have no place in the world, that nobody values you or can use what you offer.'