Circumstances
have made it impossible to write an entry for this week. So I
thought it might be amusing to post here an excerpt from the novel I
was writing 25 years ago on the Villehardouins in the Morea. This
is about Guillaume Villehardouin's childhood in Kalamata. This
is fiction.
* * * * * *
A naked
golden-brown child hauled kicking and choking onto a fishing boat,
pounding his rescuers and sobbing in fury, "I coulda gone that
far. I can swim farther than anyone!"
A stocky brown
boy on the battlements, leaping from one the top of one crenellation
to the next, shouting down the wind, "I am the king of the
castle! I am the king of the castle!" Shouting down to his
horrified parents who shouted back to him unheard.
A
black-and-blue-eyed, bloody-nosed gawk of a lad, hair bleached nearly
white by the sun, in torn, dung-smeared clothes, struggling up off
the cobblestones, hiccupping, rubbing snot and blood off his face
with a scabby brown arm, gasping, "I'm gonna show you mu'
fuckers." Hurling himself like a windmill onto two or three
larger boys who proceded to beat him up again with no respect for
rank.
A stocky,
tanned, scarred youth with crooked nose standing on the wall and
looking at his friends in a semi-circle below, around a horse,
chanting, "Jump! Jump! Jump!" Jumping onto the back of
the horse as they screamed. The horse whinnying, rearing, bucking,
he falling backward into straw and dung on cobblestones, and the
hoofs coming down on his face again and again . . .
. . . becoming
conscious under the faces of his parents: his father holding his arms
down firm against the bed, his mother holding out something in both
hands, a bearded stranger smashing his face. He tried to object, to
tell the stranger to stop hurting him, to explain he would be all
right if they would leave him alone, but all that came out was a
gurgle of mucus and blood which made him cough and choke and then the
terrible pain made everything dark again.
Coming sharply
awake to a new pain and the harsh smell of vinegar. "Siga-siga,
pedi-mou. It's all right, boy, I'm just cleaning you up." He
heard the bone grate in his nose, jerked to get away from the pain,
but his father was holding him. The stranger continued working,
speaking to him calmly, telling him what was happening: a voice
comforting in the pain. He put gum on the side of Guillaume's nose
and on the opposite cheek; then pressed a strip of parchment from one
to the other, pulling the battered nose back into position. The
sound of the grating bone made him pass out again.
The next time
Guillaume came to, the man seemed to be sewing something on his face,
still speaking soothingly, his mother was helping him, too, they were
both deliberately hurting him and his father was stalking back and
forth. Then the man was wrenching his jaw: blinding pain again, and
the smell of the gum. The man pressed a shape of leather onto the jaw
and secured it with straps around Guillaume's head. He sat down on
the floor, his face level with the boy's.
"Listen to
me, pedi-mou. This is to hold your jaw while it heals. The gum
makes it secure. It will wear away in time but the straps should
hold it well enough. Don't try to take it off; your face will only
hurt more. Now, you must have something to drink." He pushed a
reed between his lips. It hurt. He squeezed his eyes against tears.
Slept.
Mostly he moved
back and forth between drugged thought and half-dreamed images,
tangled ideas about looking at the horse more carefully next time,
positioning it better as regards the wall, leaping onto a horse both
of them fully armed now shining brandishing sword and banner at the
charge. Running on the wall, jumping, each jump making him weep in
pain, jumping into the sea to escape the pain, into the sea where he
could swim out farther than anyone else and diving like a dolphin
while they begged him to come back. In and out of the drugged dream
his mother stroking his head and washing his face, dreading lest he
flinch and she stop combing his hair. She kept working with a damp
warm cloth trying to remove the blood, silently picking out the straw
and dung, picking apart the tangles because he wore his hair long
like the Greeks. He heard his father say, "Just cut the damn
hair off," but she said nothing only kept stroking the hair
loose.
Thick matted
dark hair not blond like his mother and Geoffroi and Alix but dark
like his father, bleached reddish now by the sun and salt water. At
two, it was white from the sun, they said. In his bath, shrieking
and splashing as usual, and his mother sitting before the fire
brushing out her hair. Long hair, longer than he in the firelight
all pale and gold. The maids had helped her wash it, she on her
knees before the copper tub, two of them holding ewers of warm water
to pour over her head. Shrieked with joy and danced when they lifted
the tub to the window sill, unfastened the shutters doubled against
the winter wind, and poured the water out into the blackness making
great clouds of steam from the crash of hot water onto cold wind and
stone. His nurse took a white sheet and lined the tub, then poured
in more warm water from the ewers waiting on the hearth. Shrieking
for the obligatory chase around the room until he was caught and
stripped and held and scrubbed and scolded for the grime ingrained in
knees and heels and elbows. Sputtering while his eyes and nose were
gouged and his chin yanked up so the rings around his neck could be
scrubbed clean. Fighting and drowning when they poured water on his
hair and yanked it clean. Drowsy watching his mother shining before
the fire, taking sections of her hair the width of the ivory brush
with thumb and two fingers and beginning at the crown and brushing
down. Slowly at first for tangles, then faster and smoother drawing
the white gold out glistening before the fire. He jumped out of the
bath and ran into the hair, under the tent of hair, turned pushed his
face through it to look up at her face, smiling, then tugging the
hair around him like a cloak or pelt. She laughed and drew her hair
loose from him, and then tossed her head easily from one side to the
other and he dodged back and forth through the soft and gleaming
curtain.
Catching it
again, hiding his face in it, coming up just as a voice said, "Opa!"
His big brother, shining grown-up Geoffroi back from adventures,
helm in hand, wearing boots in Maman's room. Who had been gone so
long he had almost forgotten how desperately he adored Geoffroi. And
Geoffroi put the helmet on his head and he couldn't see and he hid in
the hair and came out again, and Geoffroi got the bearskin from the
floor and growled, and he ran in and out of the golden forest of hair
to hide from the bear as his mother put her hands to her head and
held her hair protectively and laughed for mercy as the adventure
became more exciting.
Stopped when his
father at the door said, "Kalispera sas," and his mother
stood and Geoffroi bowed a little and then caught him up to plunge
him back into the tub to rinse. The nurse dried him and rubbed his
hair dry and it pulled and she poked in his ears and put on a clean
shirt and knit hose. The maids carried out the tub, and more people
brought in trestles and boards and made a table near the fire. They
brought in cheese and bread and figs and soup for Geoffroi who always
ate a great deal after adventures. They gave him bites but they had
wine, he couldn't have wine.
"Tell me
about Astros," demanded his father, and his mother said to him,
"Shhh," bending down because he was rolled up in the
bearskin and growling and Geoffroi began to tell about not an
adventure not at all interesting until rolled up in the bearskin he
went to sleep.
So tired, he
needed to sleep so much, but the stranger kept waking him up and
telling him to cough. It hurt unbearably and he badly needed to
spit, but he could only dribble into the leather chinpiece. The
stranger wiped his mouth each time and nodded and said something over
and over to him in a another language that sounded like a magic
incantation and most likely was, because he always felt better for a
little while after he was there though then his head started hurting
again and he was thirsty and he kept thinking he would be sick.
It was summer,
late summer, and the leather made him itch. His face was swollen
wide enough for two: that he could see clearly enough in his mother's
silver mirror. He was hungry after four days of nothing but what
gruel he could suck into the side of his mouth through a reed, and
everything the reed touched hurt and every time he swallowed he was
sure he would be sick. His mouth tasted like sour blood. He
couldn't sleep; they gave him possets, through the reed, of wine and
cloves and cinnamon boiled with opium. This masked the pain and made
him doze a while, but after an hour or two he would awake with a
throbbing head and dried blood and dribble caked around his cheek.
Thirsty and needing to pee but unable to get up. Spluttering
incomprehensible syllables till one of the menservants brought a
pitcher and assisted him to an unsatisfactory and partial emptying
but when he tried to sit up so it would go better his head throbbed
too much so he had to lie down and then he felt like he would wet the
bed.
After a week, he
was allowed up. The swelling in his face had mostly gone down,
though it was brown and yellow and blue and purple and miserably
tender. The leather sling on his jaw chafed; his mother tried to
work in some salve but he couldn't bear to be touched. Then his
friends were allowed in to visit and they immediately got to clowning
and jumping and one thing and another and then all of a sudden he was
too tired and too sore to be entertained, and was nearly in tears
when his father and the stranger came in and thundered the boys out.
"Guillaume,"
his father shouted, "this is Rabbi Benjamin from Corone. He
studied medicine in Spain and Damascus, and he has been good enough
to take care of you."
"Prince,"
the Rabbi bellowed, "I hope you are feeling better." The
Rabbi had so much beard that his mouth seemed to be covered and
Guillaume decided groggily that the Rabbi didn't eat either. His
head was throbbing and he couldn't understand why they were shouting
at him when he was hurting so much. He nodded at first, to be
polite, but his eyes got full of tears and he pointed to his head.
"Of course," said the Rabbi, and went away and came back
with a small glass vial and a reed. "Willow bark," he said
and held it while Guillaume sipped painfully. Then the Rabbi had
Guillaume get out of bed. He was wobbly so he sat on a stool why the
manservant washed him and pulled a clean tunic over his head, and
then the Rabbi massaged his temples and the back of his neck. It was
only when the headache had gone away that the Rabbi allowed him to
get back into bed. He slept.
The first real
sleep in a week. He slept through the evening without stirring, all
night, and into the middle of the next day. When he finally woke up,
he was ravenously hungry, and consumed -- through his reed -- milk,
porridge with honey made thin with milk, then an egg beaten in milk,
Without the soreness once making him pause. The tenderness went away
over the next few days, faster than the blue and purple on his face
which gave way to brown and yellow. The Rabbi had the leather strap
removed -- excruciating pain again as it was tugged away from the gum
-- and replaced with several windings of linen. He no longer needed
the opium possets. He was also permitted to leave the castle with a
servant, though when he did, he had to wear the leather sling on his
jaw.
So it was a
shame that when he was finally able to go back outside on his own, he
went immediately down the hill to the town, met up with his friends,
persuaded one to hold a horse's head, climbed stiffly back onto a
wall, and jumped. And fell off again. And was kicked and trampled.
The Rabbi had,
of course, returned to Corone, so it was hours and hours of pain and
not until evening before a horseman could ride south, locate the
Rabbi, find fresh mules, and ride back. Hours filled with more pain
and little sympathy mostly fury from his parents, guilt and misery
watching while the boy who had held the horse's head was beaten.
Knowing that when he was healed enough, his own beating would be
double that.
The weary Rabbi
gave him another dose of opium in wine and then set to work. After
some maneuverings and the terrible shriek of bone against bone, he
shook his head and sank back. "So," he said to the Prince.
"It will mend, but it will always be crooked. It can't be set
back the way it was."
"Do what
you have to do," said the Prince, but his mother said, "How
will he look?"
"There is
always some mercy," said the Rabbi. "Fortunately, the boy
does not have to be beautiful -- it is enough that he is a Prince.
Now if he were a girl, God protect us all! The jaw, here, will be
crooked, and the teeth, here, will protrude." He touched,
Guillaume winced. "When he grows up -- he should live to grow
up! -- he can always say he was in the wars. And why not? He lives
in a continual war with life."
"Grosse-dent,"
they called him when the bandages were finally off. "Big-tooth."
Sometimes they called him "Jaws."
The next spring, when
they hanged Judas in Holy Week, the effigy of Judas had an enormous
protruding jaw. He was mortified. The Prince laughed until the
tears came to his eyes, and his mother was furious and said a thing
so obscene and insulting should be forbidden.
