He lay like that with his head resting upon the trunk of an oak when, through some knowing sense, he opened his eyes and saw that a man was making a slow way beside a mule along the track from which he and his men had just come. The man paused some distance away, and Etienne saw that he wore the garments of a peasant and that his face, what Etienne could see of it under the Spanish hat, was creased and brown and frowning.
He took the hat off, revealing an oversized balding head. He wiped his brow on his sleeve and left the animal to graze while he took a walk over to where Etienne lay.
Etienne had the sense, through the fever haze, that the man’s walk had a purpose to it, and he seemed to draw the world in so that it became diluted into dimness around him. Etienne, therefore, put a hand upon his short blade making, as it were, a feeble attempt to look less like this was his dying day.
The traveller paused a few paces from him and said something he did not understand.
Etienne shook his head and the man spoke again, this time in French.
‘Master.’ He bowed low. ‘I believe there are herbs in this valley to cure your ailment.’ His voice was a gentle rasp upon the half-dream of the day. ‘I shall find them for you.’
Not pausing to hear Etienne’s reply, he left his line of vision and came back a moment later carrying some green stems.
‘Put these in your mouth and chew them, don’t swallow mind, just chew.’
Etienne took the herbs, and if the thought of mischief had occurred to his dazzled mind it was immediately lost under the gaze thrown down from out of those kindly eyes.
It was surely a dream, Etienne told himself. ‘What is it?’ he said, looking at the herbs.
‘For your malady.’
Etienne, not removing his eyes from those of the man, put the greenery into his mouth and immediately the bitter taste made a grimace of his face and he was near to spitting it out when the older man cried out to prevent it.
‘No!’ He made a laugh. ‘No, master, it is more potent the more foul it tastes!’
This logic struck Etienne since he knew that goodness seldom walked hand in hand with pleasure and so he continued with his chewing and grimacing and chewing again, while the man sat not in the shade thrown by the young oak, but in the sun to watch him, taking a blade of grass and then another, weaving something small in his hands.
‘Where is your wound?’ he said, not looking at Etienne.
Etienne, still chewing, knew it pointless to pretend he was anything other than what he seemed, and so he lifted up his shirt and took away the cloth wadding that Jourdain had placed over it to reveal the meaty hole the size of a plum.
The man did not make a move to come nearer; he nodded and nodded again. ‘Chew . . . it will ease the fever in the chewing.’ Then, as if speaking to himself, ‘A dirty razored knife put into the belly of others or into wild animals, used perhaps to cut cheese or to flick dung from the floor of a boot, such a knife goes into flesh and makes a home there for all manner of foulness.’ Then out loud, ‘Come now, take out that paste and put it in the hole, squeeze the juice into it, that’s right, do that three or four times a day after you have washed out the dead flesh with spring water. That herb grows in this valley, you should find it everywhere.’
Etienne took the green substance into his hand and looked at it.
‘Go on!’ the man encouraged with his hands.
He put the green paste into the wound and drew in a breath when it touched the rotted flesh. He put the wadding back over it and raised his eyes to the man. It was a moment before he could speak and his voice sounded very far away to his ear.
‘Who are you?’
The man smiled a long straight row of teeth at him. ‘I am no one, and I am everyone!’
This strangeness seemed less strange to him since he was without pain for the first time in a week. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘I spend my days in forests and valleys.’
‘Do you not have a home? A village?’ Etienne moved to find a comfortable place.
‘God is my home,’ the man said simply.
The emphasis of these last words made Etienne cautious and he chewed the remnants of the bitter herb in silence, tasting heresy.
‘God is in that herb and in this blade of grass,’ he said, weaving the green things in his deft hands. ‘My soul creeps into the plants and it sees through them and I become one with them. In them I see how God rejoices. In the heart he is also to be found, but there he does not rejoice, he is made sad by sin. When you find God you find the healing power in everything . . . I have found the healing in those herbs in your wound . . . God shall work in them and it shall not be the cause of your undoing.’