Out in the Open (15 page)

‘That crippled bastard chained me up and then ran off to tell the bailiff.'

‘He, too, is a child of God.'

‘That “child of God” wants us dead.'

They woke before dawn and set off along the towpath. The old man riding the donkey, his head drooping, and the boy leading the way, with a stick in one hand and the halter in the other. Since the dog was no longer with them, the boy was the one who had to keep the goats moving whenever they stopped to graze.

While they walked, the boy kept thinking about the cripple. The image of that pile of flesh and bones he had left lying in the dust returned to him over and over. Would he still be there? Would he have been able to right himself and set his wheels on the road? As he recalled, the plank had very wide axles, which was good when it came to surviving potholes, but a problem should he fall over. The boy didn't know what he would feel when he saw him. The last time they had met, they were still
compadres
. Then came his captivity, the theft of the donkey, the cripple's flight, the stone aimed at the cripple's head, the kicks he had dealt him before abandoning him to his fate, and since then there had been no chance to explain or clarify anything.

As it grew light, they were able to make out the mountains in the distance. The plain was like a sea that ended abruptly at the foot of those northern slopes, but, at that moment, they were merely a watery illusion. A boundary, a goal, a reminder that a place might exist where one could breathe more easily. Those misty mountains held a magnetic attraction for him. He imagined himself reaching the end of the plain and entering those foothills. The goatherd, the goats and the donkey were with him. Together they entered via a fold in the hills and ascended to a high plateau, walking along a path that wound through unfamiliar trees. The path was raised up above wooded slopes and followed the comings and goings of shady gullies. Every now and then, they would stop to rest and he would amuse himself by making little boats from the bark fallen from tall pine trees. Higher up, in the meadows, they would find lodging in a stone shelter with a heather roof. In his dream, the herd of goats had grown in size and was scattered over the length and breadth of a green and fragrant plateau. Towards the north, the mountains grew steadily higher. They rose above the woods and scrub like stone nipples. Higher still were the white peaks, where the eternal snows filled crevices that appeared to have been gouged out by some giant. To the south, a dramatic overhang provided a balcony from which they could survey the plain. The same plain that they were now crossing, their eyes bruised by the pitiless hammer of the sun's rays. In the evenings, after they had milked the goats and the old man was settled comfortably on his blanket, they would sit on the overhang and contemplate the plain, which would seem to them a vague and distant place. From the vantage point of their abundance, they would summon the angels and archangels to carry to their village the rain that would restore fertility to the wheatfields. The men and their families would return and move back into their old houses, and the silo would once again be full. They would all be awash with money, the bailiff would receive his taxes, and no one would ever again recall the boy who disappeared.

They reached the sluice at an hour when the sun was at its most crushing. The boy helped the old man off the donkey and settled him down against a hollow ash tree. They drank some of the warm water they had boiled the previous night. The boy said to the old man:

‘We have no food.'

‘You'll have to go and find some.'

‘Why did we leave the salted meat back at the castle?'

‘It wasn't properly cured yet.'

‘It might have finished curing during the journey.'

Unaccustomed to having to explain himself, the goatherd shot the boy an irritated glance.

‘I didn't realise we would have to leave the castle so soon.'

‘We could have stayed longer if you'd wanted to.'

The old man raised his head, the way a flower on a dungheap might raise its head. He stared stonily at the boy, who immediately lowered his grubby chin onto his chest.

The goatherd then ordered him to dig up some liquorice root, pointing to the places where it would be easiest to find. With head still lowered, the boy took the knife from the old man's pouch and walked over to a low bank near the aqueduct. At that time of year, he assumed he would have to dig down deep to find anything fresh to chew on.

He returned with his sleeves all smeared with earth and holding a few twisted roots. Sitting down next to the old man, he cut the roots into pencil-length pieces and peeled the tips of two of them. The man began chewing on his, but immediately had to stop because even his jaw hurt him.

‘Are you in a lot of pain?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is there anything I can do?'

‘You'll have to clean my wounds.'

The boy pulled the old man's body away from the tree trunk, carefully removed his jacket and put it to one side. Then he unbuttoned the man's shirt, leaving his chest bare. Fortunately, none of the wounds were open or suppurating, but the goatherd was in an extremely weakened state. Following the old man's instructions, the boy dipped a piece of cloth in water and, taking enormous care, slowly drew it along the weals on his chest. The goatherd didn't complain at all; he merely gritted his teeth and closed his eyes when the boy pressed too hard. The boy wondered if the old man had broken something or was simply too old to withstand a beating like that. He remembered the first time he'd seen him wrapped up in his blanket in the middle of the night and how long it had taken him just to sit up. He realised then that before the goatherd had met him, his life had probably been limited to herding the goats from one grazing area to another, but never covering any great distances. Why had he been so generous in his help? Why had he tested his body to the limit by undertaking that brutal journey? Why had he not handed him over to the bailiff at the castle? His silence had cost him a large part of his herd and placed him at death's door.

He had the goatherd lie down on his side in the shade of the ash tree. Up until then, he had only cleaned the wounds on the old man's chest and sides; however, his back was criss-crossed by five long brown weals. The grimy fabric of his shirt had become stuck to his skin beneath a crust of dried blood. The boy told the goatherd what he could see, and the goatherd told him how to proceed. First, he poured bowlfuls of water onto the goatherd's back to soften the dried blood and allow him to unstick the cloth from the wounds without causing them to open up. He repeated this operation several times until, with extreme care, he began to peel the cloth away. When he had removed the whole shirt, he spread it out as best he could on the ground so that the old man could see on it the negative image of his back. The image troubled the old man even more than the pain from the wounds themselves, and he sat for a while staring at this image of his martyrdom. Then he suddenly lost interest and lay down again so that the boy could continue his work. Most of the wounds were swollen in places or had whitish pustules on them, signs of infection. The boy described these to the old man and, at that moment, the old man knew that without any alcohol to disinfect them, without any rest, it would be the infection and not his arthritis that would finish him off.

‘When I die, bury me as best you can, and put a cross on my grave, even if it's only a cross made of stones.'

The boy stopped cleaning the wounds.

‘You're not going to die.'

‘Of course I am. Will you put a cross on my grave?'

The view the boy had of the plain from that wretched bit of shade turned watery. The slightly undulating ground, the aqueduct and the mountains they were heading for all grew blurred.

‘Will you put a cross on my grave?'

‘Yes.'

They waited drowsily for the heat to abate, then set off again, the boy having draped the jacket over the old man's shoulders. A couple of hours later, they came within sight of the water tank, but there was no sign of the cripple. The boy thought that perhaps he had managed to drag himself into the shade. They walked on until they had a clearer view of the area, but still no trace. The boy let go of the halter and ran down to the tank. The cripple wasn't inside nor was he leaning against one of the crumbling pillars of the aqueduct. The boy scoured the road in search of the exact spot where he had left the man and soon found some small telltale bloodstains and, a little further on, the sharp stone with which he had hit the donkey. He also found the hoofprints of at least two horses and noticed the scuffed-up earth on the embankment. Following those hoofprints, he saw that the horses had gone their separate ways, one to the north and the other to the south. Beside the road, he found a pile of fresh dung. Then the goatherd and the goats arrived.

‘He's gone,' the boy said, and with a lift of his chin indicated the pile of dung.

They spent the night in the tank. There was a gap in one side through which the boy had helped the old man to enter. The tank was scalding hot, giving back the heat it had absorbed during the day, but it was preferable to lying on the stony ground outside. They dined on goat's milk and, chewing on the roots the boy had dug up that morning, the old man fell asleep. He had barely spoken during the day and, apart from when the boy had been cleaning his wounds, hadn't uttered a single word of complaint. At night, though, it was different. Almost as soon as he fell asleep, the old man began to moan and didn't stop until near dawn. The boy witnessed his delirium with a mixture of sympathy and torpor. He heard the first moans while he was still gazing up at the whitish glow of the night, waiting for sleep to come. He sat up and looked across at the old man, who was tossing and turning on his blanket. With every movement, his bones juddered on the hard floor of the tank, like a dice tumbling over marble, bringing new pain. At one point, in the crescent moon's bluish light, he noticed that the old man's eyelids were wet with tears that trickled down over his skeletal cheekbones. Shortly before dawn, the delirium ceased and only then did the boy go to sleep. A few moments later, at first light, he felt the old man's hand shaking his shoulder.

‘We fell asleep. We have to go.'

He had only slept for about a quarter of an hour, but when he sat up, he felt as if he had spent the whole night resting on a good wool mattress. He thought about the old man, about his moans and his tears, and for a while he wasn't sure whether that had really happened or if he had dreamed it. He cupped one hand and filled it with water from the flask, then splashed his face with it before standing up to peer over the wall of the tank. The morning breeze made his damp skin feel still cooler, and for a moment, he felt as if he were walking up a hill with the wind from a new valley beyond coming to meet him. A non-existent valley, unless one considered that endless plain to be the bottom of something bounded by the mountains to the north and by some other unknown mountain range to the south.

‘Hurry up, boy.'

The boy collected together their few belongings, rolled up the old man's blanket and helped him onto the donkey. He rounded up the goats and they went back to the road. Once there, they both simultaneously glanced to right and left, as if not having found the cripple had left them with nothing to do. The old man scratched his beard, then indicated with a nod of his head that they should go north, and they set off. Four hours later, they reached the oak wood near the deserted village and, without a word being exchanged, plunged into it.

When the old man was comfortably installed next to an oak, he instructed the boy to make a corral out of a rough circle of trees, filling up any gaps between the gnarled trunks with fallen branches. Once the goats were safely inside, the boy unloaded the donkey and sat down with the goatherd, awaiting new orders.

‘We have to leave.'

‘We've only just arrived.'

‘I mean we have to leave the plain.'

‘You can stay. I'm the one the bailiff's looking for.'

‘Look at me.'

The goatherd opened his jacket to reveal his body.

‘I have my own scores to settle with that man.'

His lacerated body made it clear enough what those scores were, although it did not even occur to the boy to ask if the old man was referring to the recent beating he had received or to some earlier offence. In such a sparsely populated area, it was quite likely, he thought, that the two men's paths would already have crossed.

The old man told him that they would escape into the mountains to the north, because it would be easier to hide there and he was sure that the bailiff would not take his pursuit of them into territory so far outside his jurisdiction. He explained, too, that it was an area where water could be found all year round and that, with luck, even the goats might improve. The boy listened in silence, nodding his agreement.

The journey would be long and dangerous and it was important that they start as soon as possible. He also said that they would have to travel at night so as to avoid meeting other people. They would need all the food they could lay their hands on.

They agreed that the boy would go down to the inn to see how the land lay. If the cripple wasn't there, he would come back to the wood and they would go down to the inn together, take the food and continue on their way north.

‘And what if the cripple is there?'

‘Then you'll come back here and we'll think of another plan.'

SO AS TO
avoid the path, the boy decided to take the same route across the fields as he had two nights before. The old man watched him go and, initially, heard the loose sole of his boot flapping on the ground, carving a leaf-free trail of its own. Before the boy left the shade of the trees, he turned and met the goatherd's eyes, but neither he nor the old man could possibly imagine the brutal nature of what awaited them.