Between the Bridge and the River

  After three hours of walking Fraser eventually spoke.

  “Jeez, it never ends. Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?”

  “Oh yes,” said V.

  “’Cause I don’t get the impression we’re moving at all.”

  “That’s the soul for you. Infinite, you know—very big.”

  “If it’s infinite, how can we possibly cross it?”

  “Yes, it can take a while, no doubt about it, that’s why the storytellers are the guides.”

  “Sorry?” said Fraser.

  “Lovecraft, me, the new fellow, Brinsley—all the other guides of the soul. We’re all storytellers.”

  “Why storytellers? Why not Indian scouts or Sherpas? People with a sense of direction?” whined Fraser pointedly, hinting at a suspected incompetence on the part of the ancient Roman.

  Virgil didn’t stoop to defend himself but good-naturedly offered an explanation.

  “A good storyteller has an excellent sense of direction. Plus a good story helps pass the time crossing long distances. Wanna hear a story?”

  “No!” Fraser snapped.

  They walked on in silence for a while, V pouting a little at Fraser’s brusque manner. The light didn’t move or change, the temperature did not alter, Fraser felt no physical fatigue but he found himself sighing deeply, the old ennui needling at him.

  “Who was your guide?” he asked eventually.

  “John Lennon.” V beamed proudly.

  “That’s impossible. John Lennon wasn’t born until thousands of years after you died.”

  “Time is only linear for engineers and referees,” said V.

  They walked on in silence again, until again Fraser could no longer bear it.

  “John Lennon wasn’t a storyteller, he was a musician.”

  “He’s an artist,” said V. “All artists are storytellers.”

  “You make this crap up as you go along, don’t you?” growled Fraser.

  “I’m a storyteller.” Virgil smiled infuriatingly. “I can’t help myself.”

  And so they walked on. Fraser tried speeding up to put some distance between him and the portly poet but Virgil kept up with ease. On and on they walked.

  “Oh, go on then,” Fraser said after another six hours of silence.

  “Go on then what?” asked V.

  “Tell me a story.”

  “Hah!” said V. “I thought you’d never ask. This story is called ‘The Midwife.’”

  THE MIDWIFE

  ONCE UPON A TIME there was a soldier who believed in God. The soldier, whose name was Joshua, was from the North of England, a town called Newcastle. He had grown up poor and took to soldiering as a way to escape the miserable life of a serf in his hometown. He had become, at first, a pikeman—that is, he carried a pike, a long stick with a pointed hook that looked a little like the vicious freshwater shark of the same name, into battle and tried to stab as many enemy combatants as he could. He was good at this because he had played a lot of darts growing up so had had a certain amount of training.

  He stabbed horsemen, he stabbed horses, he stabbed knights, he stabbed infantrymen, commoners, and nobility. He stabbed anyone who needed stabbing in a battle and in all his stabbing he managed to never get stabbed himself. He was kicked and punched and knocked over and trodden on by horses but never stabbed. This had a beneficial side effect apart from not being killed. It meant he became a battle veteran, and as others fell to their deaths he found himself promoted and elevated through the ranks until eventually he was made a knight of the realm with his own horse and the promise of a little land if he ever got back to England, which by the time he was knighted, he hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years.

  That’s because he was on a crusade. A crusade to take Jerusalem from the infidel Muslims. The Muslims, of course, considered the Christians, of which Joshua was one, the infidels, so they weren’t too keen on giving it up. The fighting was bloody and sickening.

  Carnage.

  And, as usual, everyone had God on their side.

  Joshua became an expert on desert survival and learned the routes from the Western Sahara to the Holy Land. He would guide and protect knights who had arrived by ship, and help them to the battle-fields in the east. One day, as Joshua was leading a party of sixty knights on camels through southern Morocco, they were set upon by a hundred understandably irate Bedouins who were sick of the greedy Northern horses and soldiers drinking the oases dry and not burying their shit on the camel trails.

  A fierce battle ensued and many were killed on both sides but after a while it became clear that the Bedouins were losing the day. A call went up among their ranks to order a retreat. The tribesmen fell back but one of their number, not hearing the call, ran to Joshua, who had been looking in the opposite direction, and knocked him from his horse. Joshua panicked; his heavy armor would be a handicap once he was off the horse. He stood up as quickly as he could but felt a knife tear through his chain mail and slice deep into the flesh on his arm. He shouted, more in surprise than pain, then brought his broadsword down heavily on his attacker’s right shoulder. The Bedouin was almost cut in half from the blow and fell to the ground, dead.

  Joshua strode angrily over to the corpse and pulled at its head-dress in order to see the face of the first enemy who had managed to pierce his skin. He pulled back the black cloth that the Arab had worn and looked upon the face that changed his world forever.

  It was a young girl, she couldn’t have been more than thirteen, with clear coffee-colored skin and the darkest brown eyes, which were now as lifeless as polished gems. She reminded Joshua of a prostitute he had adored in Tangier.

  He stumbled away and vomited on the corpse of a fallen comrade. It took him a moment or two to come to his senses, and then he knew. He was finished. He couldn’t do this anymore, his time was up. With a heavy heart, he surmised that if a country is even sending its young women to fight you, it is because they are desperate for you to leave.

  He threw down his sword, he took off his heavy armor, he took off his chain mail, he tied a tourniquet on his arm, he picked up a water canteen, looked at the position of the sun, found north, and started walking toward it.

  The surviving knights called after him, asking where he was going. He told them he was going home.

  He walked without stopping, without eating or sleeping. He never met a soul, friendly or no, until he reached the coastal town of Fez. He was in horrible condition when he arrived, his skin blistered and burned by the sun, his lips and eyelids cracked and chapped, the wound on his arm festering and infected. He fell at the city gates but was recognized by an English sentry who had served under him. He was taken to the town infirmary.

  There he rested and was cared for but, as soon as he had recovered enough to move, which is to say not recovered much at all, he left his bed and walked down to the harbor, where he begged passage on a ship that was sailing to the Spanish port of Algeciras.

  He hid belowdecks for the stormy five-day voyage, and when the ship arrived, the crew were happy to be rid of him, convinced by his brooding presence that he was accursed and that he was responsible for the savage crossing they had experienced.

  As soon as he got off the ship, Joshua headed north. He walked out of town, through the hot, dry countryside, until it began to chill and grow greener, and still he walked. He walked through rain and sun and night and day until at last he fell into a muddy puddle at the side of a country road, his body racked with fever and completely unable to function, having taken so much punishment. His wound was now infested with little white maggots.

  As he was about to die he looked up and saw the face of the ugliest old crone imaginable staring down at him. He saw the warts on her fat neck, her broken, spreading nose, and her piggy little eyes framed by her blond eyelashes. He saw the pockmarks and liver spots on her skin. He believed her to be an instrument of Satan, about to initiate his eternity of torment for all the killing he had done.

  Especially the
young girl.

  His heart was broken and he was in hell.

  He closed his eyes and tumbled into the darkness.

  When he awoke he found himself lying on a bed of straw in a spotlessly clean, windowless room with a dirt floor. He had been stripped and washed and his wound had been cleaned and dressed. He felt like he had been away for a long time. He sat up, feeling a little dizzy, and saw that there was a black cat lying at the far side of the room in front of the embers of a dying fire. The cat, seeing he was awake, trotted over to him. It purred and arched its back as he rubbed the soft fur behind its ears, then, tiring of him, it trotted out the curtained door, leaving him alone.

  He felt terribly thirsty, though the fog in his head began to clear a little and he no longer had a fever. He felt as weak as a kitten and, like a drunk who comes to after an elongated bender, he pored over his recent history. He wondered what had made him desert his comrades and start to walk home.

  Of course, he regretted killing the girl but he had seen and taken part in many atrocities in war. That was what war was yet he somehow knew he was not going back. He knew he had not died and he knew he wanted, more than anything, to go home.

  The old crone he had glimpsed walked into the room, hunched over a walking stick.

  “You are awake?” she croaked in a voice that implied a rusted larynx.

  “I am, madam,” he said, surprised that she spoke his language. “I take it I have you to thank for saving me.”

  She nodded an assent as she poked her stick into the dying fire, stirring it a little. She poured him a cup of water from a wooden bucket and handed it to him. He drank gratefully.

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded again.

  He looked at the dressing on his arm. “Did you also attend to my wound? Did you bleed it?”

  “I attended to it but I did not bleed it. You had already lost far too much blood. Let the leeches grow fat on the healthy,” she cackled.

  “It was infected. It must be bled,” he protested.

  She looked him in the eye, her left iris vibrating slightly, which he found unnerving. “If you want to die of superstition, go ahead, but I say to you: A wound must be cleaned and dressed. No more. Let the body do the work.”

  Somehow he knew she was right. Somehow he trusted her, and after all, she had undoubtedly saved his life as surely as that of the fire she poked with her stick.

  He felt very tired and lay back down again, falling fast asleep once more.

  When he awoke for the second time he felt much better. He was able to stand after a few moments. He saw that his clothing had been cleaned and mended and placed next to him, folded on the floor. He put on his breeches and shirt and walked outside.

  He found he was in a clearing in a green forest. The room he had been in was all there was to the house.

  A little shack in the woods.

  There was no sign of the crone but the cat was watching him intently.

  A chicken was roasting over an open fire. It smelled delicious and he realized it was the smell and his hunger that had awakened him. He almost ran to the fire, pulling the bird from the spit and devouring it, animal fat running through his cleaned fingers.

  When he had eaten his fill, he sat back.

  The cat was gone and the crone reappeared, riding through the forest on the back of a gaunt and depressed-looking mule.

  “You have eaten?” she said.

  He nodded, guiltily looking to the bones at his feet.

  She was greatly amused, her laugh like the sound of coins rattling in a can. “Men! You are slaves to your appetites.”

  He smiled, agreeing, the grease from the chicken still shining on his chin.

  And so began their happy interlude.

  It turned out that the crone, whose name ironically was Bonita, was the midwife to a small town a few miles away through the forest. Like all the women of her profession at that time, she was treated with great suspicion by the ignorant populace, for often midwives were considered witches.

  This was because their art and skills were misunderstood greatly by men.

  Bonita’s appearance and the fact that she very rarely lost a child or a mother didn’t help much either. She was altogether far too good at what she did, so it was only a matter of time before the ignorant pitchfork mob came calling.

  It happened after Joshua had been there for three months. He lived happily with Bonita, he read, for she had many interesting books, he swam in the river near the shack, and he ate her delicious cooking. She would occasionally venture into town to deliver a child but he never went with her, having grown tired of the world and its opinions.

  He began to forget about England, thinking perhaps that this was his home. In the forest with the ugly old woman.

  Then, one night, after a tasty supper of clay-baked stoat, as Bonita and Joshua sat quietly together as was their habit, a mob of villagers led by a priest came marching to the cottage. Joshua picked up a stick to fight them but Bonita made him put it down.

  The priest, a handsome black-haired young man, his brown eyes glinting in the drama and torchlight, read from a parchment that Bonita was to be charged with the heinous crime of dabbling in black magic, specifically concerning a vicious unsolved murder in the nearby town. It seemed that a beautiful local teenage girl had been horribly mutilated and her little body dumped by the city wall. The conclusion was that only one in league with the devil could have committed an act so dastardly.

  To the mob the answer seemed simple, as it always does.

  Joshua approached the priest and protested, saying that Bonita was a good, kind woman and this could not possibly be true. The priest, knowing from local gossip that Joshua was a Holy Knight who had fought in the Crusades, was duty bound to hear the plea and offered a compromise. Rather than burn the old woman on the spot, they would take her to town and submit her to a proper trial and torture. If she confessed, all well and good; if not, what was left of her would be free to go.

  Joshua protested still, so the priest asked Bonita what she would prefer, death now or maybe life but definitely torture first.

  She chose life, as she always did.

  Joshua had to be restrained as she was taken away.

  He followed the mob to the village and watched as they threw Bonita into the local jail.

  He then followed the priest to his apartments and cornered him.

  He asked why Bonita had been chosen. The priest said that he had attended the body of the girl when she was found, that he had never seen such a horrific sight in his life.

  The girl had been hacked apart, there was a wooden stake stuck in her vagina. There had been semen and mud sprayed on her innocent face.

  Joshua asked why, if there was semen on the body, they had arrested a woman. Surely a man would be a suspect.

  The priest replied that the semen had come from Satan or one of his demons who had committed the act along with Bonita. Then he summoned some officers and had Joshua thrown out onto the street.

  Joshua went to the jailhouse where the old woman was being kept.

  He could not see her but he sat underneath the barred window in full view of the guards.

  He thought about his life in the Crusades, he thought about all the killing, killing in the name of God. He thought of the good men he had seen die, he thought of all the death he had seen, the death he had inflicted.

  Then he thought of Hughes, the only man he had killed in anger.

  Hughes was a knight he had served with almost ten years before. Not many men take pleasure from killing, although Joshua admitted to himself he had felt satisfaction in the act of surviving an enemy in combat, but every now and again he had encountered men who loved to kill. As an officer, Joshua had placed these men in the front of any battle, for they were fearless warriors who fought bravely but always ended up being killed themselves because they were reckless and bloodthirsty, therefore they made mistakes.

  Once, though, he’d met a killer unlike any o
ther; this was Hughes.

  Hughes was a redheaded Welshman, a small, squat man with a strange intensity in his sharp green eyes.

  For Hughes, killing was sexual.

  Infantrymen hated to go into battle next to him, for they could see him masturbating as he sat on his horse, his chain-mail gloves drawing blood from his erect penis.

  Joshua had heard rumors of Hughes’s perversity but ignored them, for the man was a fearsome killer and he needed as many of those as he could get to fight for God against the heathens.

  After a long battle just outside of Damascus, Joshua was heading to an oasis to wash the blood from his clothes when he came upon Hughes.

  Hughes had grabbed a young Arab prisoner and taken him to a quiet spot. He had slit the boy’s throat and, as the young man was dying, was anally violating him. The boy was crying and his blood sprayed and squirted over Hughes’s filthy, grasping hands.

  Hughes was whispering coarsely in the boy’s ear, “You like it! You like it! You like it!”

  Joshua was horrified. He took his sword from its scabbard as Hughes turned to look at him. Far from being afraid, Hughes thought his captain had come to join the fun. He offered the boy to Joshua. Disgusted and repelled beyond reason, Joshua severed Hughes’s head from his body in a single forceful sweep of his weapon.

  He had buried the Arab boy and left Hughes’s body for the vultures.

  He thought of Hughes again.

  The one who had killed the young girl would have to be one of the thankfully rare creatures like Hughes.

  As the sun rose over the small town, news reached the jailhouse that another murder, exactly like the one before, had occurred. Joshua, although saddened by the murder, was relieved for Bonita. Surely now the authorities would set the old woman free.

  But he was wrong.

  The mob formed again outside the jail, demanding the burning of Bonita, claiming she must have taken the form of some kind of animal, a familiar, and crept out of her cell during the night to commit the crime.

  The priest arrived and quieted the mob by promising them a burning but saying that she had to be tortured first, lest they leave any of her accomplices undiscovered. With this he gave a pointed look to Joshua, who was relieved to have sat the entire night through in full view of the prison guards.