Sustained by Fergan, who preceded Colombaik, carrying the lighted wick, Isoline descended with difficulty the steps of the staircase. Penetrating ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, the fugitives arrived at the bottom of the stone spiral that connected with a tunnel, bored through the living rock at such a depth that, passing under the sheet of water of the gigantic pit, from the midst of which the donjon rose, it issued out into the open half a league away from the castle at a place concealed amid tumbling bowlders and brushwood.
CHAPTER X.
CUCKOO PETER.
Day was slowly breaking upon the fateful night during which the fugitives effected their escape from the manor of Plouernel. Joan the Hunchback, seated at the threshold of her hut, which lay at the extremity of the village, incessantly turned her eyes, red with weeping, towards the road by which Fergan, absent since the previous morning in quest of Colombaik, was expected. Suddenly the female serf heard from afar a great tumult, caused by the approach of a large crowd of people. At intervals confused and prolonged clamors were heard rising above the din, frantically crying out: "God wills it! God wills it!" Finally Joan saw a crowd of people turning a road that led to the village. At the head marched a monk mounted on a white mule, whose bones protruded from its skin, together with a man-at-arms astride of a small black horse, not less lean than the mule of his companion.
The monk, called by some Peter the Hermit, but by most Cuckoo Peter, wore a tattered brown frock, on the left sleeve of which near the shoulder was sewn a cross of red material, the rallying sign of the Crusaders on the holy march of the Crusade. A rope served him for a belt. His unhosed feet, shod in worn-out sandals, rested on wooden stirrups. His cowl, pushed back, exposed a bald head, boney and grimy like the rest of his face, bronzed by the hot sun of Palestine. His hollow eyes, glistening with a somber fire, flamed from the depths of their orbits. His haggard looks expressed savage fanaticism. In one hand he held a cross of rude wood, hardly planed, with which ever and anon he smote the crupper of his mule to quicken its pace.
The companion of Cuckoo Peter was a Gascon knight surnamed Walter the Pennyless. Of a physiognomy as grotesque and jovial as that of the monk was savage and funereal, the mere sight of the knight provoked a smile. His eyes, sparkling with mischief, his inordinately long nose, that almost kissed the chin, his rakish mouth, slit from ear to ear, his features hinged on a perpetual grin, amused from the start, and when he spoke, his buffoonery and his mirthful sallies, delivered with southern spirit, carried hilarity to its highest pitch. Wearing on his head a rusty, cracked and knocked-in casque, ornamented with a bunch of goose feathers, his chest covered with a breast-plate no less rusty, no less cracked and no less knocked in than his casque, Walter the Pennyless also wore the red cross on the left sleeve of his patched cloak. Shod in cowhides, fastened with cords around his long heron legs, he bore himself with as triumphant an air on his lean black hirsute horse, that he named the "Sun of Glory," as if he bestrode a mettlesome charger. His long sword, sheathed in wood, named by him the "Sweetheart of the Faith," hung from his leathern shoulder belt. On his left arm he bore a shield of tin, covered with vulgar pictures. One of these, filling the upper part, represented a man clad in rags, knapsack on back and pilgrim staff in hand, departing on the Crusade, as indicated by the cross of red stuff painted on his shoulder. The lower picture represented the same man, no longer wan and haggard, no longer dressed in tatters, but splendidly fitted out, bursting with fat, and spread upon a bed, covered with purple cloth, beside a beautiful Saracen woman, with nothing on but collar and bracelets. A Saracen, wearing a turban and humbly kneeling, poured out the contents of a coffer full of gold at the foot of the bed where the Crusader was frolicking with his female bedfellow in an obscene posture. The very crudity of the idea expressed by these vulgar pictures was calculated to make a lively impression upon the childish imagination of the multitude.
At the heels of Cuckoo Peter and Walter the Pennyless followed a mob of men, women and children, serfs and villeins, mendicants and vagabonds, prostitutes and professional thieves, the latter distinguishable by their cropped ears, as well as the murderers, some of whom, in a spirit of sanguinary ostentation, bedecked their breasts with pieces of black cloth bearing in white one, or two, sometimes three skulls—a sinister emblem, denoting that the holy Crusade gave absolution for murder, however frequently committed by the criminal. All bore the red cross on the left sleeve. Women carried on their backs their children too young to walk, or too tired to proceed on the route. Other women, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, leaned on the arms of their husbands, loaded with a bag containing all their havings. The least poor of the Crusaders traveled on donkeys, on mules or in wagons. They carried all their belongings with them, even to their pigs and chickens. The latter, fastened by the legs to the rails of the wagons, kept up a deafening cackle. Other poor people dragged their milk goats after them, or a loaded sheep, or even one or more cows.
Contrasting with this tattered multitude, here and there some couples were seen, the cavalier in the saddle, his paramour on the crupper, happy to escape through that holy pilgrimage the jealous or disturbing surveillance of a father or a husband. These runaways also took the route of the Orient. Among them was Eucher with the handsome Yolande, dispossessed of her father's heritage by the seigneur of Plouernel. They had sold a few jewels, given one-half the proceeds to Yolande's mother, and with the rest the lovers bought a mule on which to follow the Crusaders to Jerusalem.
This mob, consisting of three or four thousand persons, moving from Angers and surrounding localities, recruited its forces all along the route with new pilgrims. The faces of the serfs and villeins breathed joy. For the first time in their lives they left an accursed land, soaked in the sweat of their brow and in their blood, and to which, from generation to generation, they and their fathers had been chained down by the will of the seigneurs. At last they tasted a day of freedom, an inestimable happiness to the slave. Their joyous cries, their disorderly songs, gross, licentious, resounded far and wide, and ever and anon they repeated with frenzy the words, hurled out by Cuckoo Peter in a hoarse voice: "Death to the Saracens! Let's march to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre! God wills it!" At other times they echoed the Gascon cavalier, Walter the Pennyless: "To Jerusalem, the city of marvels! Ours is Jerusalem, the city of pleasures, of good wine, of beautiful women, of gold and of sunshine! Ours is the Promised Land!"
Singing, dancing, uproarious with gladness, the troop crossed the village and passed by the hut of Fergan. The serfs, instead of betaking themselves to the fields for their hard day's labor, ran ahead of the train, shut in at that moment between two lines of ruined houses that bordered the road. Joan, standing at the threshold of her door, looked at this mob as it passed, with a mixture of astonishment and fear. A big scamp of a gallows bird, nicknamed by his companions Corentin the Gibbet-cheater, was giving his arm to a young wench that went by the name of Perrette the Ribald. She noticed poor Joan the Hunchback at her door and cried out to her, alluding to her deformity: "Halloa, you there, who carry your baggage on your back, come with us to Jerusalem; you will be admired there as one of the prodigies among the other marvels!"
"By the navel of the Pope! By the buttocks of Satan! You are right, my ribald!" cried the Gibbet-cheater. "There can be no hunchbacks in Jerusalem, a land of beautiful Saracen women, according to our friend Walter the Pennyless. We shall exhibit this hunchback for money. Come on!" said the bandit, seizing Joan by the arm, "follow us, you camel!"