A Crusader's Tale

          Let me remind you of the colour in my story while we sit here in the smoky dark of our peat-roofed hide-away. I have told you before of my journey from green to gold. It was a crisp iced morning in January when the Knights arrived from the castle, urging us with prayers and promises, to go with them on their crusade, to seek a place in heaven by our deeds just as the new church spires did in their determined climb skyward.
        "Go with us to the heathen land and claim what is ours. The land of our Lord is sullied by men in Turbans wielding Satan's own curved blade. We need only go with the Lord in our hearts and we will reclaim what is rightfully ours."
         I was not highborn but I had a working brain even as a young man. Do not scoff so child! I knew this to be the fools errand. It had a lot less to do with men's hearts than it did to do with the caravans of silks and spices that traded those routes. We would be laying down our lives for the lining of gold in another mans pockets. Still, I was a young man of France and had done some wrongs that were in need of confessing to a mightier ear than Frere François. I thought I may get closer to forgiveness by this undertaking, so, I gathered my bed roll and followed the Knights on their sturdy limbed horses into folklore.
       You, who have only been to the market or to the crossroads cannot imagine what it is to make such a journey. One day maybe you will go for yourselves and you will see the truth of it. It is a timely undertaking to cross a whole country and then another. From our gathering in Lyon we were to make our way to  the heel of Italy, to cross the Mediterranean seas from Bari to Alexandria on the Spring tides and then again on foot to Jerusalem. But life is a journey and the journey became my life, I was enriched. There were so many sights to behold. Mostly we were at the mercy of strangers for our lodging and counted ourselves fortunate for a warm hearth and some bread at the end of the day but more often than not the sky's midnight cloak was our roof. I remember we rested a day outside Venice on the hospitality of a Miller, where I tasted the most delicate confectionary made with sugared almonds and eggs baked soft in the warmth of the sun. Putting it into your mouth was to experience the sweet kiss of a longed for lover.
         After many weeks of footsore toil and dusty beds beneath the stars we reached the ocean.
The ship had its own rookery of messengers that cawed to the winds and screamed their psalms to God and the ship creaked in the curl and foam of the ocean as if writhing with the Holy Spirit. I dreamed of animal spirits leaping through the dusk light, a hare chasing a fox, a badger following a raven. And through these dreams of prophesy and portent, I was brought to a shape shifting land of dunes and goat-skin-tented caravans, a land of succulent dates and warm skinned women with smiling eyes. A land of unknown promise. It was there that I met your mother.