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  SYLVIA

  Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia and The Persimmon Tree.

  The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries.

  Bryce Courtenay lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.

  BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY

  The Power of One

  Tandia

  A Recipe for Dreaming

  The Family Frying Pan

  The Night Country

  Jessica

  Smoky Joe’s Cafe

  Four Fires

  Matthew Flinders’ Cat

  Brother Fish

  Whitethorn

  Sylvia

  The Persimmon Tree

  THE AUSTRALIAN TRILOGY

  The Potato Factory

  Tommo & Hawk

  Solomon’s Song

  Also available in one volume, as

  The Australian Trilogy

  Bryce

  Courtenay

  SYLVIA

  McArthur

  &

  Company

  First published in Canada in 2007 by

  McArthur & Company

  322 King St. West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario

  M4V 1J2

  www.mcarthur-co.com

  Copyright © 2007 Bryce Courtenay

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Courtenay, Bryce, 1933-

  Sylvia / Bryce Courtenay.

  ISBN 978-1-55278-714-4

  1. Children’s Crusade, 1212--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.C598S95 2008 823’.914 C2008 904209-3

  eISBN 978-1-77087-038-3

  Cover images: Getty

  Contents

  PREFACE The Jerusalem Fever

  CHAPTER ONE Sylvia Honeyeater

  CHAPTER TWO The Ratcatcher

  CHAPTER THREE The Entertainers

  CHAPTER FOUR The Petticoat Angel

  CHAPTER FIVE Blood on the Rose

  CHAPTER SIX Of Whores and Heretics

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Shrine of Bread and Fish

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Reluctant Bride of Christ

  CHAPTER NINE Suffer Little Children

  CHAPTER TEN The Cross and the Fish

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Cross of Crows

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Rock of God’s Wrath

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN On the Road to Jerusalem

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN On the Road to Jerusalem

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Field of Forever Dreaming

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Bryce Courtenay

  PREFACE

  The Jerusalem Fever

  THIS WAS A STRANGE period, even for a time of civil war, when horrible surprise and uncertainty, sickness and blight upon the land seemed as commonplace as dogs barking in the night. People, sensible and devout, not given to open display and well knowing their lack of noteworthy lives, took to strange acts of sudden wilfulness. A vainglorious, corrupt and complacent Church, the only arbiter of right from wrong and well accustomed to owning all judgements, felt certain these signs and portents were visitations from the devil, while the ordinary folk clearly saw God’s mysterious hand at work in their lives.

  Though how God, one crisp March morning in the year of our Lord 1212, could cause two chaste women of Cologne to strip to public nakedness in the grey dawn light was a complex mystery even for those epochal times. That two fat women with no cause to want for anything, and at a time when to be rotund was a sign of contentment and privilege, took to behaving like drunken hussies seemed near impossible to explain as a divine manifestation.

  These, you must understand, were enormous women, their pendulous breasts lifting and slapping against great wobbling stomachs, each milk-white thigh shifting its weight first to the left and then to the right as they trundled barefoot across the wet, cold earth.

  The fact of the two fat women running was a near miracle in itself. But further to this, neither was known to the other – they came down different streets and it was well-known in their respective neighbourhoods that they would customarily walk only short distances before having to stop to recover their breath. But now they ran, if less the gazelle and more the hippopotamus, still it was running by any known description. They wept as they ran, constantly calling out the name of the most holy place in Christendom.

  If this was a Satan-inspired early-morning madness, then it was also an infection that seemed to be carried within the stinking city not yet cleansed of winter ordure by the spring rains. At about the time the Angelus bell rang and even before the sun was to rise fully that morning, as if to some unspoken command, hundreds of pious women rose from their beds. The fortunate and the desperate poor, all keepers of the faith, sat bolt upright, then, as if possessed, stepped urgently from their beds and hastily drew their woollen nightgowns or the rags they slept in over their heads, casting them to the floor, and stood naked before their Creator.

  To some further inward command, the women crept silently past sleeping husbands and children to emerge from the doorways of homes and hovels in every neighbourhood. That they regarded themselves as spiritually guided there is no doubt – foolishness and wanton display played no part in their chaste and pious thoughts. With their arms and faces raised to heaven, eyes tightly shut to the rising sun, they ran from every direction towards the square in front of the church of St Martin where from their collective lips issued the single chant, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

  The archbishop and his two attendant clerics, together with the small number of old women and a smattering of pilgrims seeking indulgences before the spring ploughing who were attending the early-morning mass, hearing the chanting that came from outside the church, hurried to the great doors. Some would later claim that at least a thousand women stood naked chanting in the church square. Later that day town officials would announce the figure at less than a hundred and then, as time wore on and at the insistence of the archbishop, it was further revised to a handful. Finally, when it came time to add the event to the pages of Church history, it was reduced to the original two fat women running, who, the Latin scribe was careful to add, were found dead, struck down by the hand of the Almighty.

  History, when it is recorded from only one determining source, is usually as unreliable as it is self-serving. It consists, in the main, of what the Holy Father in Rome or the Princes of the Church, archbishops and proctors cared to acknowledge, and is usually rearranged to suit the political or doctrinal agenda of the day. The truth in those medieval times, as often as not, was placed in the custody of the eyewitness, where it too became degraded when carried forward in song and legend. This communal voice, if not entirely reliable, at least has the distinction of being neither politically inspired nor self-serving and therefore has no reason to conceal the facts.

  Accepting that two people who witness the same event may see it quite differently and allowing for exaggeration and the usual ale-house talk, the layman’s truth may yet be the more reliable of the two versions. The Church historian says two fat women possessed of a satanic frenzy entered the square where they were struck down for their sin of nakedness. The secular voice claims more, many more, naked women swept up in a common religious zeal inspired by the Holy Gh
ost gathered in the church square that early March day in the year 1212. We may choose to believe one or the other account, but the common voice possibly explains what the Church was never able to: how the Children’s Crusade was initially inspired.

  To continue the popular account, the congregation, watching from within the church, had barely sufficient time to gain a glimpse of the naked chanting women before the archbishop ordered them to return at once to kneel before the high altar. Whereupon the church doors were closed with a great banging and echoing and shooting of bolts into place by the two templars, who traditionally stood as the night watch for the few coins it earned. Alarmed by the echo of the doors, a blur of pigeons rose into the sky from the hundreds of carved and crenulated tucks, nesting nooks and crannies and from the snarling jaws of the granite gargoyles.

  Inside the church the two ineffectual and near-hysterical clerics, shouting and wringing their hands, implored the morning congregation to stop their excited chattering and to kneel alongside four nuns at prayer in front of the great altar. These four devout figures, three nuns and a lay sister, oblivious of the events taking place outside the church, had remained steadfastly at prayer throughout.

  With his flock finally gathered and silent at his feet, the archbishop reminded them that at the very moment Adam, tempted by a recalcitrant Eve, had taken a bite from the forbidden fruit, innocence in the world had ceased to exist. From that time, with the eviction from the Garden of Eden, public nakedness had become a mortal sin.

  He informed them that, because they had been witnesses to this flagrant act of sinning, they too were no longer pure in spirit and therefore the wine of Christ’s blood and bread of His flesh was withdrawn until they’d received confession. They would, the archbishop hastened to declare, be allowed to receive mass only if they confessed the sin of Eve and, as penance, purged their memories of the event they henceforth imagined their eyes had recently witnessed. This they all readily agreed to do; better to accept a Church-sanctioned lie than be forever damned by a satanic truth. The archbishop accepted their collective confession and pronounced them cleansed in sight, memory and mind.

  In the re-telling of any event, a brief glimpse is far more dangerous to the truth than a good hard look, so that not everything ‘apparently not seen’ in the church square by the women attending mass that morning can be absolutely relied upon. What is certain – for it took place in front of their very eyes and after their minds had been cleansed, their memories expunged and their tongues hopefully silenced – was the subsequent behaviour of the three nuns and the lay sister kneeling in prayer.

  Just as the archbishop pronounced the penance of compulsory memory loss and began the final benediction, the four kneeling forms rose simultaneously to their feet and commenced to disrobe. In a matter of moments they stood naked with their eyes tightly closed, arms raised towards the statue of the crucified Christ and in clear voice simultaneously pronounced, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

  Outside the bolted church door the two old templars, setting aside their pikes, seated themselves on the topmost step. Slapping their knees in delight they cackled gleefully as they watched the curious proceedings in the square. They, who while twice serving as crusaders in the Holy Land believed they had witnessed every manifestation of the Christ passion, now found themselves confounded. They had seen pilgrims who had marched on their knees until the cobblestones ran red with blood; they had witnessed rape and pillage, mass hysteria, the eating of human flesh, ecstatic rending of garments, legions dressed in sackcloth and ashes, male nudity and self-mutilation, all in the name of the Christ figure. But now they merrily agreed that nothing they had hitherto seen compared to the situation evolving in front of their eyes on this early-spring morning. They proceeded to scan the chanting women for every lurid detail, knowing that for years to come no alehouse in the land would refuse to fill their tankards in return for their personal account of the onset of Jerusalem fever.

  The two old soldiers watched as panting husbands, carrying garments of every description, some in possession of whips and stout sticks, began to arrive. Gesticulating wildly the husbands shouted out the names of their wives, while for the benefit of each other, they cursed the gullibility and hysteria of the weaker sex. But their presence did not diminish the spiritual exhilaration. Meek and untroublesome women, caught up in this moment of ecstasy, brushed their husbands aside as if they were beggar children tugging at their skirts.

  Soon the homeless, mostly street urchins and cretinous youth, rapscallions all, sleeping under dirty rags in the dark, stinking narrow alleys that surrounded the church, wakened to the strange, high-pitched chant and descended upon the naked women like a pack of hungry wolves. Whooping and caterwauling they barged and darted among the frenzied gathering, groping unfamiliar parts, grinning lewdly for the joy of pawing and fondling female flesh while stealing bangles and beads from pliant wrists and necks. Husbands ceased from beating wives and fell instead upon the invaders from the alleyways. This seemed only to increase the fun for the errant halfwits and snot-nosed urchins who easily dodged their blows and were seen to lead the older men a merry dance. It was not long before their attackers grew short of breath and stood panting, stooped, with their hands upon their knees, whereupon the garments they clutched were ripped from their grasp as they now became the object of attack and robbery.

  Yet the women remained oblivious to the mayhem surrounding them. No amount of promiscuous patting or licentious groping was to any avail; ignoring the errant hands, the thieving fingers, and the cajoling, cursing, bloody blows and cries from their anxious and angry menfolk, they chanted on and on, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sylvia Honeyeater

  I AM SYLVIA HONEYEATER. I came originally from Uedem, a village some distance from Cologne. This is the story of my life. I will relate it as honestly as I may, for they say confession is good for the soul and my soul, poor dead thing, is much in need of some good. If I should attempt to justify my deeds with the adage that the alley cat cannot choose the bowl from which it laps, you must accept that the truth is often painful.

  To begin, I think myself born in 1196, whether at the beginning or the end I cannot say. It was an unpropitious year of great starvation when sickness and blight visited the land and half the village perished from the terrible epidemic that scourged Germany and all the lands surrounding. For the four years before, it had rained and flooded so much that the crops could not be harvested until late August when the seed had mostly rotted. Many folk, in an attempt to stay alive, ate the grass along the streams and the rotting flesh of dead animals, and if there were woods nearby they gathered acorns to grind into bread. It was also the year of recruitment for the German Crusade that failed in its attempt to get to Jerusalem.

  I was the seed my father deposited in my poor mother’s womb prior to his departure as a foot soldier and crusader for the Holy Land. He became a crusader not from any sense of piety, but to escape the sickness and in return for the promise by his Holiness the Pope that if he served in the attempt to regain the Holy Sepulchre from the vile hands of the infidels he would be forgiven his sins. It was a deal in which the Almighty most definitely got the worst of the bargain. My father was a drunk, a huge, bellicose brute, by trade a carpenter but one seldom seen to do an honest day’s work. But then again, he was not alone. In order to escape from justice, many a layabout, drunkard and thief wore the Cross emblazoned upon his soldier’s tunic. While playing the pious pilgrim my father was interested only in profit, in looting, the maddening frenzy of killing for Christ, rapine or some other nefarious mischief, with the forgiveness of his sins past being the glorious prize to be awarded at the conclusion of his pilgrimage.

  True to my nation I was blonde and blue-eyed and later, as I grew into a woman and lost the starved look that comes with poverty, I was known to be of comely appearance and, more importantly, I knew from their constant flattery and attentions that men found me desirable. For
all the advantage this was to give me I would have been better served with squint eyes and a harelip for I always find myself attracted to a rogue’s bed. They say the nature of all humans is born within them, that what we are we cannot change. I am cursed as an optimist and a dreamer, a dangerous combination, for I seldom see the traps that men set for me and see only the excitement in the brute and the tedium in the good man.

  If, as they say, I am as I was born, my social nature immutable, then my attraction to bastards is not something I may change, although my father, the first of many in my life, was one of the few not chosen by myself and also the first to cause me to commit the sin of hatred. As a child I grew to regard him with a great malevolence and in my thoughts he remains so to this day. May he rot in hell!

  Let me begin with him then. A year after his departure my father returned from the siege of Toron in Galilee, which the crusader army abandoned in panic at the first news that the Muslim army of al-Aziz approached from Egypt. Despite this fiasco the Pope’s promise of redemption carried a ‘no cowards’ clause and my father returned cleansed of all his past sins. With a clean slate and a missing right leg he claimed to have lost in the siege while demonstrating great valour, he took up the life of a wastrel. A carved wooden peg with a brass tip replaced his former leg and was further fitted with an embossed camel leather cup and straps decorated with small metal studs that bound it to a purple stump of scar tissue. Henceforth he was known as Brass Leg Peter the Forgiven Coward, a name he never saw for the cruel joke it was intended to be. He argued, too vehemently for credence, that due to his war wound and the courage he claimed had earned it, he was the exception, one of the few German crusaders to be forgiven of cowardice. I would later learn that he had lost his leg acting in a foolhardy manner while drunk when working on the construction of a siege engine.