the novel
the route
the author
the novel
the route
the author
Two people set off from Avignon to Santiago de Compostela, a 1500 kilometre walk. Though centuries apart, they share more than their choice to go barefoot. More, in fact, than they may wish to find out.
2002. Nasty starts her summer vacation with a black eye that reflects her mood. Named Nastasha after her Russian grandmother, it was her Spanish grandfather who gave her the nickname. To him it was just a doting diminutive. Nobody ever corrected him, and the name stuck. She likes it. Probably because her father hated it. Barely 17, she has just finished Highschool after a difficult year. She resents her mother for having married Nick, just when they were finally free of a man around the house. She resents him for bringing them to Brussels, a place she finds cold, hard and grey. And she hates her formal obligations as sudden daughter to the Australian Ambassador. All so different from the sun and colour, and the barefoot freedom of her native Cairns. Off to discover Europe by train with some friends, the first night out in Paris goes horribly wrong. Waking up naked next to somebody else, with no recollection of what happened, she realises she has lost something she can never recover. And it’s not just her shoes. Feeling ashamed and abused, she runs away, drifting through a series of strange coincidences that take her to the old pilgrim’s way from Arles to Santiago. But while walking helps her forget, she is troubled by disturbing dreams that seem to predict the future, and frightening visions of a boy crossing her path, in an apocalyptic landscape, in another time.
1348. Not yet 13, Dominic can read and write, but knows no other life than that of a mendicante friar, together with his father, Francesc, unofficial envoy of the Pope. They flee from Rome after the brief revolution of Cola di Rienzo, and the promise of freedom and justice for all, fails in pools of innocent blood. The first to come down with the plague, Dominic wakes up in a monastery in Genoa after a long, delirious fever, to find Francesc is no longer with him. Blaming himself for his father's death, and for bringing the scourge, he manages to deliver Francesc's last letter to the Popal Court in Avignon, where he stays on at the make-shift hospital to help out. As the plague subsides though, he feels increasingly out of place. Torn by grief and guilt, he sets off to Compostela, where his mother abandoned him at birth, in the idle hope of finding out who she was, who he is, and where he belongs.
What starts off as a vague distraction becomes a pilgrimage to their very soul, that will change the way they see the world and themselves.
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
Marco Peel, © 2009