Sylvia (58 page)

‘And what of the sea?' Reinhardt asked with a superior smile. ‘It is in the direct way, methinks.' I could see he was taken aback by Nicholas's exuberance and utter conviction and determined to put him in his place. It was a task I knew to be futile – Nicholas was blessed and the children would have no other leader but him. If the ratcatcher was to come with us he must accept that God had chosen this vainglorious child to lead us to Jerusalem.

‘It will be as it was for Moses when he fled the land of Egypt,' Nicholas said, his eyes burning with conviction. ‘We will cross as if it were dry land, our feet upon the water as were the footsteps of Christ when he walked upon the sea. I have had this vision and know it to be a promise from Christ Jesus Himself.' Whereupon Nicholas called out that he would preach at this very moment to the multitude.

Reinhardt glanced at me and placed his forefinger to the side of his head. Then he shook his head slowly and I could see he was even less impressed with this bumptious child.

The children had not heard Nicholas preach during the time he had been in the monk's cell and others, newly arrived, not at all. There was enormous excitement as he mounted the steps of St Martin's. ‘Come, Sylvia, you must sing to His praise as always,' he called.

‘Nicholas, I am weary. It has truthfully been a very long day for us.'

‘But you
always
sing before I preach in the square!' he cried, alarmed at my refusal and not prepared to accept it. ‘What shame is this?' he asked scornfully. ‘You would end this day without singing to the glory of the Lord? Come now, be quick, it will soon be time for the sun to set and I wish to preach about the parting of the seas.'

The ratcatcher looked at me and shook his head, unable to believe the boy's tone of voice. But as always, since Nicholas had been called by God to lead the Children's Crusade, I was completely beguiled by him. I believed with every fibre in my body that he was God's purest instrument. I knew him as often churlish, and much taken up by sombre and brooding moods that often lasted days and increasingly even longer. Also, when, as now, he was approaching his charismatic state, he was utterly selfish and self-involved and could not be contradicted or he would fly into a towering rage. This was not a fit of temper as one might expect from a young boy denied his own way, but an outpouring of God's condemnation and wrath. His words burned to the very core of one's being and it seemed they came from elsewhere and were not to be found in his normal vocabulary. Reinhardt had not yet heard him preach, which was when all fell under his spell and seemed never to recover from the effect it had upon them. Nicholas of Cologne could not be resisted and when God was not at his side, even the devil waited, ever eager for his company.

And so I sang a Gloria but Reinhardt did not accompany me. ‘I will not be taken in by this young whippersnapper! Sylvia, you pay him far too much attention!' he chided.

While I knew that this was a fair comment and my intelligence told me that my behaviour was not what it ought to be and that a crusade involving children who were poverty-stricken, immature and unprepared was not likely to succeed, my faith told me to persist. I knew in my soul that this was God's will and my given task was to be with this blessed and difficult child no matter what should come to pass. Nicholas of Cologne was to be the cross I would have to bear.

It was customary when he preached for me to sing at the commencement and the end. I sang the first Gloria well enough but somewhat lacking in spirit. The absent Father Hermann would then say a prayer to bless the message to come. Now, in his absence, Nicholas waited, fidgeting and impatient for the Gloria to end, and then launched immediately into his sermon as if the words were rioting within him and demanding to come out. When he preached, he was as a being completely possessed and none could resist his voice in which he had that same power to throw to the multitude that I had first heard on the occasion of the Miracle at St Martin's square.

His message was the story of the escape of the children of Israel from the land of Egypt. He began to paint a picture of the pursuing Egyptians, the devil's infidels, that was so awesome that the children shook in fright. ‘The faces of the enemies of God,' Nicholas cried, ‘were smeared with the blood of Israelite children taken for sacrifice, then too, each deadly spear they carried they'd dipped in infant blood so it would know the taste and hunger for more of this flesh of children!' Then he went on to describe how when Moses reached the Red Sea, the children of Israel turned to see the dust clouds of the pursuing Egyptians on the horizon and cried out in mortal fear, ‘Today this water runs with our blood!' How Moses held his mighty stave aloft and called out to God to save the children of Israel. The gathered children in the square cried out in ecstasy when Nicholas told how God's hand pushed through the rolling clouds and with His forefinger dipped into the incarnadine sea and drew it across the breadth of the great waters. They gasped as he told how the waves reared up behind God's rippling finger, hanging motionless as they towered a full league up into the heavens.

His voice gathering in speed and urgency, Nicholas continued. ‘And ever closer came the infidel hordes while the children of Israel began to cross the dry seabed. Then a mighty roaring and thunder of hooves was heard as the chariots drew nearer and nearer, ten thousand entering that same God-drawn road across the gaping waters before the fleeing Israelites had a chance to entirely reach the other side. With cries of triumph and blood-curdling yells, the Egyptians, whipping their horses so that they foamed at the mouth, began closing in. The hapless children of God ran and stumbled, shouting in terrible anguish as the thundering war chariots were now near close enough to throw the deadly spears that hungered for more of the flesh of little children. The snorting of the wild-eyed horses was clearly to be heard when the last Israelite, a lame shepherd boy, limped exhausted to the far shore.' Nicholas stopped and his eyes travelled across the heads of the awed and silent children in the square. Then in a voice slowed and deepened he all but growled, ‘Then came the roar of doomsday as God's finger again appeared and touched the towering edge of the dreadful hovering waves. The earth shook so that the sound of it was heard across the great desert, carried by the howling wind to faraway Jerusalem. Whereupon the waters thundered to earth to fill that divinely created path of escape with the terrible judgement of God's awful wrath.'

The gathered children now roared their approval. These were not the children of Israel that Nicholas preached about, but they imagined themselves as holy pilgrims voyaging to the Promised Land. This was confirmed in their minds when Nicholas reached out and took up the tau cross Master Nicodemus had given me and held it above his head. ‘Hear ye, all!' he shouted. ‘Just as Almighty God parted the waters for Moses, so also will He make a dry path on the stilled and adamantine waves for Nicholas of Cologne and those pious Christian children who go with me to Jerusalem. With one heart and one voice we shall pass through the seas on dry land to recover the Holy Land and Jerusalem, where we will kneel within the Holy Sepulchre and pray in the presence of the true cross!'

If, from my telling of this sermon, you think me a bystander looking on, then I have misled you. I was as much awed and taken with his words as the smallest child listening and I had not the slightest doubt that the Holy Spirit was present, for we all felt as one being, cleansed and renewed in the spirit and glory of the Lord. No priest alive or dead – by this I mean also my beloved Brother Dominic – could have persuaded me otherwise. I glanced at Reinhardt and I could see that his once-suspicious eyes now burned with a newfound faith and that he too had fallen under the spell of the preaching of Nicholas of Cologne.

And so began the last of the preparations for our departure. Father Hermann returned from the Cistercian convent at Hoven surprisingly cheerful and perhaps less grateful to be rescued than I had supposed. ‘I am well-liked by the nuns and they wish me to return as a part of my ministry,' he declared.

‘Does that mean you will not be coming on the Children's Crusade?' I asked.

He nodded his head and was slow to reply, this to indicate that he had given the matter a great deal of thought. ‘I have prayed to the Virgin for guidance and she has forbidden it. She says my health will not survive the journey, and besides, she needs her earthly husband by her side as the Christ child is going through a difficult stage. Also, the nuns at the convent now need my ministrations as their priest has recently passed away.'

‘Then will you administer the oath of allegiance to the true cross so that the children may be permitted to wear the cross emblazoned upon their chests?'

He looked doubtful. ‘Sylvia, they are for the most part penniless and have not yet reached their majority and so are not old enough to be accepted to the true cross.' He cleared his throat a little guiltily, then said, ‘I must have the permission of the bishop.'

I was right – Father Hermann, for all his goodness and faith, was not a character independent of mind and would always be subservient to any authority placed above him. He had been an eager participant before he had been sent to the Cistercian convent and had now returned doubting our cause. This served to confirm my previous suspicion that he was not of a suitable nature for the large and forbidding needs of a crusade. The Virgin Mary is always shown as a strong woman and I thought to myself, though somewhat amusingly, perhaps she had chosen him as her earthly husband for his ready and unquestioning compliance to her every demand, that in his mind this sojourn with the Cistercian nuns had been a respite both from a nagging wife and her precocious Child. I thought this not as blasphemy, but because in Father Hermann's frequent conversations he spoke of Mary as his earthly wife as any husband might and of the Christ Child as if still in His infancy. He saw no contradiction in the fact that Christ had grown to manhood, been crucified, risen from the dead and ascended to heaven. Instead, in Father Hermann's mind he was still a mewling infant at Mary's breast who had teethed but one day before receiving all His teeth. Perhaps this miracle of sudden teeth had caused an equally sudden and painful consternation at His mother's breast.

‘I have gained the bishop's permission for you and Father Paulus to administer the blessing and the oath,' I replied. Then, perhaps a little cruelly, added, ‘I promise you won't get into trouble this time, Father.'

My sarcasm was lost on Father Hermann, who immediately brightened.‘If you have His Lordship'spermission then you have mine. I shall be glad to accept the children's oaths.'

Father Paulus had also returned from the monastery at Disibodenberg, which I must say came as a surprise. I had expected Father Hermann to return to his beloved St Mary's and his Holy Virgin wife with tearful gratitude, whereas I was sure that Father Paulus would wish to remain at the monastery where he would continue in the footsteps of the great Brother Dominic. After all, at the monastery he had a warm and comfortable cell, good food, solitude and silence; at St Martin's he lived in a cramped cell within the belltower where the constant clanging was making him deaf.

In the next three days, in batches of fifty at a time, the two priests officiated at the oath of allegiance to the cross and the children were given a cross to wear on their tunics. Initially this presented a problem as we had no red cloth available and no money to buy any. So I had made both priests declare that the cross each child wore was forbidden to be bigger than the hand of the wearer, this as a symbol that they, by their own hand, placed their faith in God and agreed to become a part of the Children's Crusade. The cross was to be placed over their hearts so that they might renew their faith by placing their hands to cover the cross and know that they, the children of the Crusade, were of one heart and one cross.

As no red cloth was available, in fact no cloth of any colour of the large quantity required, we were reluctantly forced to use the green canvas Master Israel had given me to cover the wagon ready for when Nicholas sank into his moods of despair. Each child received a square of green canvas no bigger than his hand and from this the cross was cut. Of course I never mentioned that the cloth had been a gift from a Jew. This is the first time I have ever spoken of it to anyone. If it was to prove an evil portent, which I think not, then no harm came to my beloved Master Israel for his generosity. I recall his lamentation when I went to fetch the cloth that he had sent to Bonn to get.

‘My dearest Sylvia, I am a Jew and so cursed to remember that in the name of your Jesus my people have been killed in great numbers in your past crusades. In the Third Crusade King Philip cancelled all debts that were owed to Jews and many Jews were killed and others driven out of Spain. Already your Church in Rome talks of a badge of shame we are soon to carry, a yellow patch, that folk may use to identify us wherever we go. No matter how honourable and chaste our lives, now we may be chastised and persecuted by any Christian, be he of the lowest rank, a thief, vagabond or worthless scoundrel, he will feel himself more important than a dirty Jew.' There were tears in his eyes as he looked up at me. ‘Sylvia, Frau Sarah and I have learned to love you – to us you are neither Jew nor Gentile but a person of rare worth and to us always a devoted daughter. If I could persuade you, though I know I cannot, to abandon this Children's Crusade I would do it with joy in my heart, for I would know I had saved your life. I cannot refuse you this gift of cloth, though my greatest hope is that it is not used as your shroud. I shall weep and pray each day for you until we meet again.'