I’VE HEARD ABOUT GREAT BEDS. NOT SIR JOHN’S AND LADY Helen’s, that’s just their name for it. The one in Chester sleeps thirteen people, and the one in Canterbury fourteen. But the Great Bed here holds sixteen!
I can’t get back to sleep, so I’ve put on some clothes and come across the courtyard to sit with Lord Stephen and write.
What with buying the horses, and having them shod, and hiring a man to make a litter with straps for Lord Stephen, so he can lie between two horses and it’s not too bumpy for him, we stayed five nights in Venice.
When it was time to leave, Simona and I had very little to say. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see each other again, and without hope, words soon run out of breath.
“What’s England like?” she asked.
All at once, I saw Tumber Hill. Green and growing. Wild raspberries. The new beech leaves, soft as fingertips…
I swallowed. “Well, it’s home!” I said. “An ostrich’s head!”
“Why did the trader say that?”
“Because England looks like that on a map. That’s what he told me before.”
We sat side by side, staring at the dancing water.
“You made Serle happy,” I said.
Simona didn’t say anything.
“That’s what I’ll remember most,” I said. “Yes, and you knowing about love and being betrothed to an Englishman, and being a boygirl, and teasing Lord Stephen, and that periwinkle, and looking like an apricot!”
“Oh Arthur!” cried Simona. She crowded against me, then she hugged me. “You!” she said. “You saved my life.”
“Sometimes the full moon looks like an apricot,” I said.
“Sometimes like an ostrich-head!” Simona replied. She was laughing and sobbing.
“I know!” I said. “Let’s think of each other at each full moon.”
“And send a blessing,” said Simona. “I’ll send you a blessing and say a prayer for Lord Stephen.”
As soon as we left Venice, we saw wonders. First a trembling rainbow encased us, and painted us orange and green and blue and violet.
Merlin told me rainbows are spirit-bridges between earth and heaven. Lying in the quivering light, Lord Stephen kept smiling and nodding; he looked quite blissful, as if the rainbow were all his idea.
Between Padua and Vicenza, we saw a tree throbbing with goldcrests, hundreds of them, all twittering; and then in a forest glade on the way to Verona, we met a wandering scholar with his back against a tree, reading a little book of poems. He had a pointed black beard, and was wearing a dirty old sheepskin.
“Rus habet in silva patruus meus,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“My father’s brother has a farm in the middle of a forest.”
“So does mine,” I said. “Sir John de Caldicot. In England.”
“Huc mihi saepe…,” the scholar went on. “I often go there to get away from ugly, unhappy things.” He looked up. “Do you go to quiet places?” he asked me.
“Yes, a glade like this,” I said. “And my climbing-tree.”
“Go there again,” the scholar told me earnestly, “…et me mihi reddunt. These places give us back ourselves.”
“I will,” I said.
Between Verona and Cremona, we met a knight out hunting with his hawks. His falconer was carrying a muzzled animal. Its coat was fawn with dark brown spots.
“I’ve never seen a beast like that before,” I said in English, then in French. “What is it called, sir?”
“Pard,” the knight replied. “Some people say Leo-Pard.”
“Leopard!” I exclaimed, and I remembered our steersman Piero telling me about the beast in the church north of Zara that leaps out and attacks crusaders. “He’s very beautiful.”
“She,” said the knight.
“Did you catch her?”
The knight laughed. “Here in Lombardy? No, she comes from Tartary. Far east. Beyond the Saracen lands.”
“Do you hunt with her?”
“One leap,” said the knight, “and she kills a deer or a goat—meat for me and my hawks.”
I gave the leopard a long, wary look. And with her burning eyes, she gazed at me.
The knight smiled and rubbed the leopard’s white belly. “Like Italian girl, yes?”
“Well…yes,” I said.
All this, and then in Piacenza I started talking to a trader in the market, and ended by buying a glass wand with a curved handle. It’s full of thousands of tiny, colored seeds and the trader told me that if I put it in Lord Stephen’s bed it will protect him from night demons. He said as soon as a demon sees the wand, he has to count all the seeds, and that keeps him busy all night.
Why did I half-believe him?
Because I’ll do anything to help Lord Stephen to get well again, I suppose.
Yes, and now this Great Bed.
The straw mattress is covered with several layers of dried bracken, and the men sleep on one side, the women on the other, separated by a long bolster.
Until I got up, there were thirteen of us mother-naked under the men’s bedcover—the six merchants we’re traveling with, and Turold and Rhys and me, and two pilgrims and a trader and a messenger—and I’ve never heard so much belching and farting and snorting and gurgling.
There were three women on the other side: a mother with a squashed nose, and her pretty daughter, and a French nun.
“If two or three lie together, then they have heat,” the nun said, “but how can one be warm alone?” She peeled off her habit and crossed herself, and then the mother and her daughter made a tent of their bedcover and took off their clothes too.
“Amen,” said the woman with the squashed nose. “May God save us from the dangers of this night.”
Then the three women snuggled into one another, and scarcely made another sound.
For a long while the men sang songs, and told jokes, and guffawed, and snatched the bedcover off each other. But at long last, it grew more quiet, and I couldn’t stop yawning. I must have fallen asleep.…
What woke me up were the women’s squeals.
Turold had got up in the dark and pissed in the pot outside the door, and then he carefully felt his way back into the wrong side of the bed.
“Let go!”
“Wooh!”
“You hairy warthog!”
It was only when I heard Turold harrumphing and groaning that I knew for sure it was him.
“Go on!”
“Get off me!”
Turold rolled over the bolster and right onto me, and of course by then most of the men were awake.
“You over there!”
“Squash nose!”
“What about me?”
“Have pity on a poor pilgrim!”
The women giggled a little, and I could hear them whispering, but they didn’t reply, and after a while it grew quiet again.
I couldn’t get back to sleep, though.
Lord Stephen is making little sipping and sucking sounds.