The Leper's Companions Read Online Free

to the bedpost. Her feet were exposed and were also bound and tied. Only then were they ready to pull back the covering from her face.
    They were all staring at her. “You are safe now,” said Michael in his gentle voice and he stroked her hair with his fingers. With all her strength she twisted around and tried to bite him, her teeth lightly grazing his skin. He smiled as he withdrew his hand, but when she looked at him all that shecould see was his savagery and his cruelty. She realized then that she was more afraid of him than any number of devils.
    It was decided that someone must stay with her to keep watch, and the shoemaker’s wife said she would be glad to. They gave her a big chair to sit in and she pulled it close to the bed. Once the others had gone and the room was quiet the shoemaker’s wife made Mary more comfortable, loosening the ropes that were too tight on her wrists and putting a feather bolster behind her back. Then she began to talk.
    She told Mary that when she gave birth to a baby with the head of a monstrous fish people said that this was the Devil as well and they blamed it on the mermaid. “But I loved him all the same,” she said, “and so did my husband. He died on the day he was born and we had to bury him outside the churchyard, so now we don’t know where he is.”
    Mary smiled. She was watching particles of dust floating in the beam of sunlight that came in through the window. Each one was a gleaming speck of powdered gold. “They look like angels,” she thought to herself. “An army of bright angels has come to drive away the devils.”

6
    T he shoemaker and his wife were sitting side by side in another room in this village that has become a sanctuary for my restless thoughts.
    He was quite a small man. His eyes and his hair were gray. The skin of his face was as pale as parchment and stretched so tight across the bones of his skull that only when you looked carefully could you see the tracery of thin lines showing his age.
    His wife was the same height and with a strong body, although her hands and feet were surprisingly delicate. She had pendulous breasts and a softness of skin and hair that had increased over the years. Her eyes were the same color as her husband’s but with a dark rim around the iris and thepupils were as sensitive as a cat’s, expanding and contracting at the slightest change of light.
    The physical closeness between these two was apparent in everything they did: the slightest look, the touch of a hand, it was all part of a ritual which reminded them of the sexual act. They had been married for a long time and yet they both often remembered the first night they spent in each other’s arms, and how their bodies had joined with such ease, the pleasure rising and overflowing and leaving them content.
    They had made love in open fields and under the shelter of trees, in darkness and daylight, in winter and summer. They had made love in spite of the fact that a new baby was on the edge of being born or that her menstrual blood was mixing with his seed. The slow process of growing old had hardly diminished the intensity of their desire.
    But then everything changed. The shoemaker began to go blind. He noticed it first when he was standing in the church in front of the row of brightly painted alabaster figures crowded along one wall. He realized with a shock that he was unable to tell if that was a dragon crushed under the heel of Saint Michael or a gold key gripped in the hand of Saint Peter. He turned to gaze at the stained-glass window but all he could see was a shifting pattern of color in which there was no form: no angels or devils, no Heaven or Hell. It must be the dim light he told himself, anyone could be confused by it.
    Soon the darkness was growing thicker, so that hedreaded opening his eyes in the morning for fear of what else he would not be able to see. And when his wife gave birth to the baby with the