Читать книгу To Calais, In Ordinary Time - James Meek - Страница 11

WILL WENT THROUGH the wood beyond the wall till Outen Green was hidden from his sight. The sun’s light beshone the path in flecks. The boughs of the trees were still and the only sound was birdsong, Will’s feet on the earth and the creak of the pack straps on his kirtle.

Deep in the wood, the shapes of a man in white and a great dark deer seemed to go ahead of him, and he stinted, and they weren’t there, and he went on.

Feet came quick behind him, twigs cracked, and Ness came, neb red of running. She threw her arms around Will and bade him bide longer.

‘I must go,’ said Will. ‘I’ll come again in a year, if you’ll have me.’

‘I’ll have you,’ said Ness. She took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘Swear you won’t be killed by no French. Swear you won’t sicken of no qualm.’

Will swore it.

Ness fumbled in her barmcloth, took out a tin token and gave it to Will. ‘It’s St Margaret,’ she said. ‘She was swallowed by the Fiend in the shape of a firedrake, and after it swallowed her the firedrake barst, and Margaret stepped out of the skin unhurt, with every hair in its stead, and the Fiend was ashamed to have been beaten by a maid.’

‘I would you kept her,’ said Will.

‘She’s done her work for me,’ said Ness, and shut Will’s fingers on the token. ‘I got her in an uncouth land, where I went with a child in my womb, and I came back heal without it. Where’s your freedom?’

Will showed her the letter, and Ness turned it in her hands, and rubbed the seal against her lips to feel the smoothness of the wax.

‘It’s but the deed of a deed,’ said Will. ‘The freedom will be redeemed by one in Calais.’

He took her hand and led her off the path to a dim stead under a low oak branch, horseshoed by holly. He set down his bowstaff and took off his pack and stroked Ness’s tits through her kirtle. She kissed him and put her tongue in his mouth and reached under his kirtle and into his breech for his pintle and stroked it. She lay on the ground on her back and pulled up her barmcloth and kirtle and shirt and pulled down her breech. Will let down his hose and breech and his pintle swung out stiff and thick. ‘It’s a fair one,’ said Ness. ‘If you ne put it in my cunny quick as a wink, I’ll die.’

Will knelt between her legs and shoff his length in and out and Ness squealed and thrashed her head about on the leaf-mould. Once Will dight, twice, thrice, four times, five, six, ten, and he stinted, and a sigh came of him.

He stood and righted his clothes and put on his pack.

‘Likes you my cunny?’ asked Ness. She bustled to him on her knees and put her arms about him.

Will ne spoke. He shoff her away roughly. His neb was red and he might not meet her eyes with his.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Ness. ‘How did it ne like you? Won’t you say nothing? Won’t you say you care? Won’t you say goodbye?’

‘I must go,’ said Will. ‘I’ll come again next summer.’

He turned and went away. Ness might not see his tears, for he ne looked again, and she might not hear how he wept, for she sobbed so loud herself.

WILL FARED TO the high road. He wiped his eyes and nose with his sleeve. He looked one way and the other. Flies stirred about his head. He sat by the wayside, pitched a twig in the dust, looked up at the sun and made marks near the twig the length of its shadow. The shadow nad crope to the first mark when a pig grunt in the trees behind him.

Under an elm stood Hab. He wore a high-born maid’s gown, made of the cloth Sir Guy had shown Will, gold and white and sewn with blossoms, and a maid’s white headcloth. By his side the boar Enker cast his snout about balefully. The pig was shod for a far fare.

‘You’ll hang,’ said Will.

‘You greet a maid roughly on the first meeting,’ said Hab.

‘You’re no maid. You’re Hab the pigboy and you wear a wedding gown you stole of the lady Bernadine.’

‘You mistake,’ said Hab. ‘Hab’s not here. I’m his sister Madlen. My brother gave me the gown and went away. Ne deem you me winly in silk and gold?’ He spun about with his arms stretched wide.

‘I’ve woned in Outen Green as long as you. You haven’t got no sister. You’ve got Hab’s neb, Hab’s steven and Hab’s shape. You’re Hab.’

‘We’re alike,’ said Hab. ‘So alike man can’t know one by the other. Hab speaks high for a man, and I speak low for a maid, so we meet there. But my brother hasn’t no tits, and I do, as you see, good ones.’

‘You stuffed it with moss to make it seem you’ve got them.’

‘If you ne true them, feel them,’ said Hab.

Will reached with his hand.

Hab thacked his wrist hard. ‘Ne be so bold, you know me but a handwhile,’ he said.

‘For the love of Christ, take it off and hide it in the wood before you’re seen, or you’ll be lolled up by morning.’

‘I go out of Outen Green today,’ said Hab.

‘What for?’

‘I go to Calais.’

‘You mayn’t go and you know it.’

‘Why may you go and I not?’

‘I’m a free man and you’re bound to the manor.’

‘I ne came into the world with no chain about my neck. I’ll come with you to Calais. How might you go so far without a friend? Tell the bowmen I’m your wife.’

‘I’m bethrothed to Ness Muchbrook.’

‘She’s all arse and tits. I saw you ride her and I saw it ne liked you. You were like to the woodpecker makes fast to peck a hole in a tree only so he might rest the sooner.’

‘You were wrong to bid me fuck her and walk away without a kind word,’ said Will. The tears came of his eyes again. ‘Now my heart’s sore, and so is hers, and the guilt’s all mine.’

‘I ne bade you do nothing,’ said Hab. ‘I’ve never met you before. That must have been my brother.’

‘Fiend fetch you, you’re a liar, and besides, you’ve no right to behold while I do to Ness what’s lawful in God’s sight.’

‘If I ne beheld, who would? God has better things to do than see a Cotswold churl and his burd go five-legged in the woods.’

‘Who learned you to deem the swive of others?’

‘Hab,’ said Hab.

‘To learn his own sister how to swive, there can’t be no sikurer way to the fire.’

‘So you own he has a sister,’ said Hab.

‘There’s no Madlen, you’re Hab in the likeness of a maid, and if you dare follow me, I’ll ding you and fell you and leave you to lie for Sir Guy’s men to find.’

He reached for Hab, like to he’d snatch the headcloth of his head, but Hab stepped back and said in a sharp steven: ‘Your bowmen are coming.’

Hab ran back into the woods, Enker behind him. Hooves rang on the road.

A SCORE HORSEMEN rode toward Will. The sun found the gleam of harness in the dust they made. They rode long grey horses, tall, lean, right-boned men with fair faces, clad in grey shirts and white kirtles marked with red roods. Swords hung of their belts and each second man bore a bow on his back. They ne spoke and their eyes rested on the road ahead, like to their only longing were for the fight to come. Among them was one horse without a rider, and behind them, at the same great speed, came a two-wheeled cart hued with the likeness of St George and the worm, driven by a knave with blue eyes and a golden beard, who stood upright, gripping the reins.

Will stepped into the road and lifted his bowstaff. The bowmen ne slowed. Neither the horsemen nor the driver of the cart looked at him as they clattered by and Will must press back against the hedge not to be struck by hooves or a wheel. Will picked up his pack and ran after them, calling into the dust that he was the bowman of Outen Green who was to go with them to France. He stumbled and fell. When he was on his feet again the riders had gone behind a crook in the road. The noise of hooves and harness and the chirk of axle wasn’t to be heard no more.

BERNA CONDUCTED HER horse from the forest. She hadn’t had time to assemble no baggage for the journey when she escaped from the manor. She possessed a saddle and harness, a blanket, and the clothes she wore when she departed.

She apperceived Will Quate by the roadside. He regarded the distance with visage dolorous.

‘Quate,’ she said, ‘you attend your archers, I suppose.’

He stared at her. She wore a white wimple, a veil covering her face, and her marriage gown, gold and white and sewn with flowers.

‘I would you ne looked at me in that way and manner, Quate,’ she said. ‘How I choose to go about my kin and family’s land is not for you to deem or judge. I bid and command you not to tell no one you meet on the road that you saw me here.’

Will Quate approached her, closer than a villain had ever stood, so close she took a pace back. At first, when he saw her, he’d appeared surprised, but now there was menace in his eyes.

‘Get away from me or I’ll have you beaten,’ she said. But Will Quate paid no attention.

‘Thinks you,’ said Will, ‘you might as well be hung for a horse as a gown?’

‘How dare you address me as an equal?’ said Berna.

‘First you steal a gown, then you steal a horse, then you steal the tongue of the manor. You took their words to make yourself sound like a high-born. Or was it your swine taught you to say “equal” and hack your speech into trim gobbets?’

‘You’re a lunatic,’ said Berna.

‘I warned you not to follow me, and now I’ll ding you, but I’ll have the moss of your false bosom first.’ He plunged his hand inside her gown and firmly enclosed one breast.

Berna screamed. Will pulled his hand of her and his mouth fell open. He blenched, retreated and stammered his incomprehension; he was sure Hab had no sister, he said, he ne knew how she might be a maid.

Berna took her chance to mount her horse and ride away southward. The last she heard of Quate was of him crying for her pardon.

‘Is this what happens when we leave the places we were born?’ she demanded of her horse. ‘That a noble lady is deprived of her authority, and a villain transformed from an obedient servant into a savage, senseless beast?’

SOON AFTER THE sound of the horse’s hooves had faded, Will heard song. Four men came down the road from Gloucester in breech, shirt and thick shoon. They were white of dust, with packs and bowstaves on their backs. The singer sang in Welsh and wore a straw crown webbed with reed, pitched with stalks of pig’s parsley. He had long black hair in rings, and a nose like an axe-blade, and a string of onions hung of his belt. Beside him came a short freke, thick of body, with a deep wem aslant his neb, like to his head had been cloven and put back together; and the third was a sweaty man, crooked of his burden, his mouth hung open and his eyes turned down.

The fourth was a giant, as long as two of the others together, in a hide hat under which brim his neb was shaded. Hung from his neck by a thick silver chain was a great rood bearing a likeness of the Lord of Life nailed up. The likeness was hued so wonder like a man, the pale flesh sucked in between the ribs and blood that oozed of his wounds, it seemed Christ might ferly stir and call out to them for help.

They went by Will and ne stinted. Will went after them. He asked was one of them Hayne Attenoke.

‘I,’ said the giant, and his steven was like to thunder in the womb of a hill. His neb was as a rocky hillside, with eyes set deep within it like coves.

‘I’m the man you look for,’ said Will. ‘The bowman of Outen Green. I’d be of your score, and go with you to Calais.’

They ne shortened their stride. It was like to they ne heard him.

‘I’m a free man,’ said Will. ‘Strong, heal and I shoot well.’

The bowmen ne stinted. ‘We shan’t take you,’ said cloven-head.

‘Why?’ said Will. The bowmen ne answered but strode on.

‘I’ve seen one band of bowmen go by already, and I shan’t miss the second,’ said Will. ‘I shan’t go home again but if you show me to be no bowman.’

‘What band of bowmen was the first?’ said cloven-head. Will told them and the Welshman laughed.

‘He mistook the players for us,’ he said. ‘Maybe you were better as a player than a bowman. You’ve the face for it.’

‘I’ll show you I shoot true, and not in play, if you let me,’ said Will.

‘Have you arrows?’ said cloven-head.

‘I ne brought none,’ said Will.

‘The moon,’ said Hayne, who ne slowed, and ne beheld Will.

Still ne stinting, cloven-head strung his bow, took an arrow of a cocker on his back, nocked it, found a mark to his left and shot, all in one swift stir. The arrow hit an oak stump two hundred feet away in the sheep field above the road.

‘Fetch that arrow,’ said cloven-head to Will, ‘and if Noster ne shifts your mood, and you may shoot the arrow and hit the moon so it spins about, you can be of our fellowship.’

Will began to run toward the stump, and while he ran called out ‘How can I hit the moon?’

The bowmen ne turned and ne answered, and by the time Will had gone up the field, fetched the arrow and come again to the road, all the bowmen were gone, out-take the sweaty man, who sat on a stone, drank from a flask and cursed.

HIS NAME WAS Noster. ‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be a bowman no more. I’ll go home to the works of Dene. You owe to go home, too.’

‘I shan’t go home. I’d learn how I might shoot at the moon with an arrow and hit it so it spins about.’

‘Mad was right,’ said Noster. ‘You’re better fit to play a bowman than to be one.’

‘Ne unworth me till you know me.’

Noster’s mouth stirred like to a man who’d smile but had lost the lore. ‘You ween I worth you too low,’ he said. ‘No, you worth us too high.’ He ran his finger down the middle of his neb. ‘Does the sight of Longfreke’s wem ne tell you to shun the life of a soldier?’

‘What’s a soldier?’ said Will.

‘It’s a French word that tokens a fighting man, who fights for silver, far from home.’

‘I’d be a soldier, then,’ said Will. ‘I’d see uncouth lands, and win silver for my deed of freedom. My lord says an English archer in France wins silver as lightly as a knave gets apples of a widow’s orchard.’

‘Why so eager to steal of widows?’

‘Were it so fell to be a bowman, why are you one?’

‘None was there to learn me the truth when I cleaved to the score.’

‘If Hayne will take me to Calais, I’ll go.’

‘You ne know the shape of things,’ said Noster. ‘Hayne’s a vinter, which is to say the head of one score bowmen. Can’t you tell how far Hayne falls short of twenty? Without me they’re three. They’ve five more to pick up along the way. That’s eight. Where’s the leave?’

‘Maybe they fear the qualm.’

Noster laughed, shook his head and spat and said: ‘There’s one bowman. His name is John Fletcher. He goes by the ekename Softly. In a cart he keeps a stonemason’s daughter, a Frenchwoman he reft of her maidenhood in Mantes on the way to the fight at Crécy. She ne gave it willingly, nor did her kin leave him to take it but that he had to quell them first. Would you have such men as fellows?’

Will asked where Hayne stood.

‘On the side of right,’ said Noster.

‘Then I’ll stand with Hayne, and shun this Softly.’

‘But Hayne ne hinders Softly. So you fare to France in a body with men who keep a stolen Frenchwoman against her will.’

‘Anywise, I’ll go,’ said Will.

‘You make your choice,’ said Noster. He bade Will godspeed, and went again the way he’d come, on the road to Gloucester.

‘How can I hit the moon with an arrow?’ yall Will after him, but Noster ne answered. Will ne stinted no more and set off on the heels of the other bowmen.

IT IS TEMPTING to believe, as do the majority of common people here, that this island is immune to the pestilence. This island, that is, of England, Scotland and Wales, but also this island within an island, the abbey. Locally the foundation of hope is the prior. Calamity, it transpires, is the veritable patria of this inconspicuous man, who in normal times resembled an exile – obscure, ignored, uncomprehended. His firm actions give us confidence that no matter how intolerable the onus of authority, he will not fracture.

In consequence of the preceding period of extreme laxity under the abbot – was there a better example of the clerical corruption that provoked God to initiate the plague? – it was facile for the prior both to assume control from his nominal superior and to curate a restoration of the Benedictine rule, the perfect opposite to the abbot’s discredited ministry: simplicity, humility and traditional discipline. The prior prohibited absolutely the consumption of quadrapeds, except to the genuinely infirm, with bipeds and fish prohibited Monday, Tuesday and Saturday. Fornicators, masturbators and sodomites to be flogged for the prime offence, excommunicated for the second, expelled for the third. Pilgrims to be admitted gratis, but to approach the feretory prostrate. Monks to remit sumptuous vestments to the almoner. Monday and Tuesday, a procession of the fraternity around Malmesbury, with urban clergy and the lay.

Most significantly: incessant music. The prior has extended the liturgy to its ancient duration. He has constructed a fortress of sacred music, in which psalms, antiphonae, versicules and responses concinnate in aural simulation of the lapidary defences of a castle.

NB Marc. Many years ago Otto requested that I transmit a petition to Cardinal Roux, and I averred to Otto that I had done so, but I did not, out of some sordid malignancy – envy, I suppose. It is an insignificant matter, certainly, but it appeared important to Otto at the time, and it perturbs my conscience. Inform Otto that I repent sincerely, desire remission, and am prepared to make restitution.

I had an important question for Judith, but I cannot now remember what it was.

WILL CAME TO an ale house, a long cot of white stone. Three goats cropped the grass by the pale and Hayne, Longfreke and Mad sat in the yard with food and drink set before them. They ne greeted him but ate and drank like to he wasn’t there.

Will stood at the yard gate, strung his bow, nocked the arrow and shet it at a board hung over the ale-house eaves. The arrow struck the board with a mighty thock and the board span around twice on its pole before it came to rest.

The bowmen hearkened to the strike. Hayne rose, reached up and wrenched the arrow from where it was pitched in the board. The arrowhead had throughshove one eye of the likeness of the moon that was wrought there. Hayne smoothed the splintered wood with his fingers, dropped the arrow in a cocker and showed Will a free seat where he might sit with them.

‘Sweetmouth found that likeness in France and named his ale house the Moon,’ said Mad, ‘but the One-Eyed Cheese likes me better.’

The brewster came and put before Will a can of ale and a bowl of eggs and peas. Will said he bore his own bread, for he lacked the silver to buy aught else. Longfreke told him fall to and they’d stand him the fee.

‘What did Noster tell you of us?’ asked Longfreke.

‘That you’d meet more bowmen along the way,’ said Will. ‘One named Softly.’

‘Noster told the youngster all, yet he came,’ said Longfreke to Hayne.

‘Let him come another mile down the highway and be founded in flight,’ said Hayne.

Out of the house came a man with a full beard, naked out-take white breech with green bars. It was the bowman they called Sweetmouth. Two little knaves followed him bearing rods of hazel. He sat on a log, straightened his back, knit his arms tight to his ribs, clenched his jaw, and said: ‘Begin.’

The two young knaves, his sons, of eight or nine winter, began to hop about him and beat him with the hazel rods. Soon his skin was streaked with red weals and the knaves were breathless. They stinted often to rest and to read them which span of skin to smite next, while the man cried he was ashamed to have begotten such weaklings, and egged them to beat him faster.

‘Beat him on the head!’ cried Mad to the knaves. ‘Let it find a use at last!’

They heeded him and whipped fast Sweetmouth’s noll till it bled.

‘His wife the brewster hasn’t the time to beat him herself and must leave the chore to the children,’ said Mad to Will.

When Sweetmouth’s wife came to fill their cans and behold the children’s work, Will asked what her husband had done to earn such blows.

‘Nothing,’ said the brewster. ‘But if we ne beat him now for all the wrongs he’ll do while he’s away, who will?’

Sweetmouth fell on his knees on the grass and his sons dipped their hands in a stop and sprinkled water on his noll.

He rose and came up to the board with blood and water dripping of his beard. He shook hands and asked after Noster.

‘Went to the iron-works of Dene again,’ said Longfreke. ‘Home to his mum and his burd.’

‘He’s a whore bitch’s whelp, damned to hang by his whore tongue from the Devil’s inmost arse hair,’ said Sweetmouth.

‘Sweetmouth means he wishes his even-bowman well,’ said Mad.

‘May the Fiend fuck me in the arse till my eyes weep shit if that were my meaning,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘Who’s the featous knave? He looks like he came down of a church wall. Are you in the score? I need a fellow like you.’

‘We’re to found him betimes down the road,’ said Longfreke.

Sweetmouth went into the house and came out later with the blood cleaned of him, a pewter St Christopher hung of his neck over a blue shirt, and a pack on his back. His wife stood in the doorway, the end of her barmcloth held to her mouth, her eyes sore of weeping. One of Sweetmouth’s sons handed him his bowstaff. Sweetmouth rubbed the knaves’ scalps with his knuckles and turned from them and the four men at board rose, nebs reddened by ale, and went on their way down the southward road.

The low sun gave the hayshocks long shadows in the cropped fields and made the bowmen squint. As they went by, the culver fowl that picked at the earth between the sheared stalks took fright, and flew into the sky, threshing the wind with their wings.

‘I SAW A wonder thing,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘A maid flew by on a dear horse like to the Fiend was at her heels. She’d hidden her neb with a cloth and wore a white gown sewn with flowers, like a king’s daughter would wear to her wedding, and she was alone, without friend nor kin to shield her. A handwhile later I saw the same maid walk by through the woods near the road, in the same dress, but with her neb not hidden no more, and instead of a horse she had with her a much boar.’

‘How did she ride?’ asked Mad. ‘Legs astride or hung off the side?’

‘It walked beside her,’ said Sweetmouth, ‘with her gear on its back.’

‘A witch,’ said Mad.

‘I ne spoke to her for fear of that. A maid who may craft a horse into a boar might hurt a man. But now it seems to me she looked too fair to be a witch.’

‘Now we get to it,’ said Mad.

‘She’s dark as a bourne on a summer’s night, and when I woo her it must be dreadful, like to the sun nears the moon and so heats her she’s bound to shed her gown and let him shine within her.’

‘A Saxon man outdoes my song,’ said Mad.

‘I ne know her name, nor where she goes, but she has a lickerous mouth and silk blossoms on her tits, and I’d spend the leave of my days in a monastery, with my flesh under a knotted rope, could I kiss her cunt but once.’

‘Sweetmouth likes to kiss a maid on the lips in such a way she may sing at the same time,’ said Mad.

‘A boar,’ said Longfreke, ‘is a right hard deer to break to burden, and a maid alone on the road with blossoms on her dress is not but a whore or wit-lorn.’

Sweetmouth’s eyes widened and shone. ‘My pintle would be to her cunny like to a naked king slid inside a bearskin on a winter’s night, a bearskin fit for a king, made of the smoothest, youngest bears, tight to his shape.’ He put his arm around Will. ‘I wived too soon. The dark maid is she our Maker wrought for me alone. I’ll meet her on the road, you’ll help me win her. There’s none better than me in the greater deal of wooing, but to draw a maid’s eye, man would have a fair neb, which I lack. So I’ll have you be the bait, to draw the maid in.’

‘Ne heed him,’ said Mad. ‘Sweetmouth speaks so much of maids only that none might know his shame, that he’s true to his wife.’

They went on, and Will and Longfreke fell behind. Will learned they were to fare on foot through Wiltshire as far as Westbury, where they’d meet one of the English lords who held Calais, who was to get them horses, and take them through Dorset to the ship that would bear them to France.

‘Then Hayne’s not our chief, this lord is,’ said Will.

‘This high-born fellow’s no lord. He’s lower, a squire or some such. He does the bidding of the lords that hire us. Laurence Haket by name.’

IT APPEARED TO Berna an over-eager suitor kissed her. She opened her eyes and regarded the salivating mouth of Enker, with Hab beside him. The boar pressed his nose to Berna’s cheek and grunted pleasurably. He was shod and had a sack tied to his back. Hab wore his usual patched tunic.

The lady was far from home, said Hab, her wedding was soon, and her folk would lack her.

Berna stood and brushed grass and leaves from her person. ‘Where I travel and fare isn’t yours to know,’ she said. ‘It’s not your place to wake a lady, sleeps she in her chamber or a forest. Who gave you leave and permission to quit my father’s manor?’

Hab said he sought his sister Madlen.

‘I know the names and faces of each of the servants and bound folk on my family’s estate, and even of servants’ servants like you,’ said Berna. ‘You have no sister. There’s no Madlen.’

There was a Madlen, said Hab, but she was shy, and versed in concealment.

‘Were you to have a sister indeed, why would she be here, half a day on foot from her right and proper stead and place?’ demanded Bernadine.

Madlen had left Outen Green that morning, said Hab. She loved Will Quate and sworn to follow him wherever he went, be it to the ends of the earth.

Berna laughed. ‘My poor pigboy,’ she said. ‘Your kind hasn’t the time, nor the letters, nor the fineness of mood and sentiment for love. Drink ale with your friends, wed and marry your sweethearts, bear and carry children, the Almighty won’t ask and demand no more of you. It’s only we of blood must endure love’s smarts.’

Hab’s face crinkled with subtlety, and he addressed Berna with a sudden directness, as if they were of one estate.

‘Is it for love you sleep in the wood, instead of being at your father’s side to meet your new husband?’ he asked.

For a moment Berna was incapable of response. She turned her head in esperance of aid, in vain; they were alone.

‘You may not speak to me in that familiar way and manner,’ she said, attempting to give her voice authority. ‘Depart from my presence this instant.’

‘In your sleep I took you for Madlen,’ said Hab.

‘How is that possible? Your sister mayn’t afford a cloth as rich as this,’ said Berna, holding out the flowery stuff of her marriage gown.

‘She stole it,’ said Hab.

Berna put her hands to her mouth, then to her cheeks. ‘Why, my dear Hab,’ she said with sincere pity, ‘if your sister is the thief who stole my first gown, she’ll rightly be caught and hung.’

The menace of penalty mortal failed to provoke the proper response. Hab ne trembled nor blanched. He regarded her disdainously. ‘You fear you won’t outshine Madlen unless she’s dead,’ he said.

‘Outshine?’ said Berna. ‘You demonstrate a marvellous ignorance of our different natures.’

‘Demon-straight a what?’

‘You see, pigboy? We scarcely speak the same tongue and language. You’re incapable of comprehending that were your sister to able herself in my gown, it wouldn’t change her into no demoiselle. The qualities that mark and distingue our kinds go deeper than outward seeming and appearance. Her lack of gentilesse, her coarseness of movement, the roughness of her shape, are in harmony only with dull colours and cheap cloth. In my gown, she would become discordant and odd. She would seem still lower and meaner than she already is.’

Hab beheld Enker and scratched an ear in thought, only instead of his own ear, he scratched the boar’s. ‘You ween Madlen ne look fairer than you, though she wear the same gown? How may you know, if you’ve never seen her?’

‘I ne say your sister’s not fair,’ said Berna more gently. ‘A daisy may be wonder fair, and never as lovely as the humblest rose.’

‘I saw Madlen in the gown she stole,’ said Hab. ‘She hight herself right winly. I saw her come again of the still water at the foot of the bourne and she seemed to me as fair as any rose. Truly, when I beheld you asleep, I took you for her.’

Berna coloured. ‘You lack the sense to apperceive and know the clear signs of my nobility,’ she said.

‘You’re like to her in other ways. She’s a thief, and you’re a thief, for you stole yourself from your own wedding.’

‘I lose all rule by which to measure your offensiveness,’ gasped Berna.

‘And you’re like her that you fare for love, Calais-bound. Madlen yearns for Will Quate, and you, I guess, for Laurence Haket.’

‘Shut your mouth!’ cried Berna, so furiously that her horse, tethered nearby, reared and whinnied. ‘I shan’t accept no comparison of my fare and journey to no errand of a pigboy’s sister.’

Hab shrugged. ‘High-born as you are, you’re alone in the wood without friend or kin to help.’

‘Ne harm me,’ said Berna, ‘or you’ll be pined and made to suffer.’

‘How?’

‘I am imaginative,’ said Berna.

Hab’s demeanour changed again; the familiarity that had so troubled Berna disappeared, and his consciousness of the lady’s superiority seemed to return. Humbly he proposed to accompany the lady on her journey, that she might appear to have an entourage. Together they would attempt to travel under the protection of the archers. Somewhere on the road to Calais, Berna was certain to encounter Laurence Haket; while Hab, if he kept close to Will Quate, would surely catch his sister.

‘But Will Quate will know me,’ said Berna. ‘He’ll see I’ve fled my marriage. He will betray me to my father. I already know he’s not to be trusted. I met him as I left Outen Green and he behaved despicably towards me, without honour or worth, like to we were equals – as you did just now, but worse.’

Hab said no doubt the lady’s face had been veiled; no doubt Will, thinking like Hab that the lady was occupied with marriage preparations in the manor house, had mistaken her for Madlen.

‘Another one?’ said Berna. ‘Do I seem so like a low-born woman?’ She examined the backs of her hands. ‘Is it because I’ve let the sun brown my fingers?’

She could turn it to her advantage, said Hab. The other bowmen would accept her as she was, as the lady Bernadine, but providing she went veiled, Will would assume she was Madlen.

‘That Lady Bernadine should pretend to be Madlen pretending to be Lady Bernadine?’ said Berna. She laughed. ‘You’re imaginative.’

Hab said it was her second usage of the word, but he ne knew what it signified.

‘As you may understand it,’ said Berna, ‘it is the sleight of mind that gives the speed to know things not as they are, but as they might be, were God or man to work them otherwise. Have you any food?’

WILL AND LONGFREKE next came upon their even-bowmen in the cool shade of a wood. Hayne lay stretched on the leaves, eyes shut, the likeness of Christ flat on his chest, while Mad and Sweetmouth made a rope fast to the crown of a young birch, drew it down and knit it to the trunk of an oak.

‘It’s a proud young birchling, and we’ll learn it to know its stead in the forest,’ said Longfreke.

‘We’ll make of it a bow, bound to its lord the oak,’ said Sweetmouth.

‘We haven’t no arrow, and it needs us a true one,’ said Mad. ‘Where in this wood might we get such?’

They turned to Will, gripped him with firm hands and tore the pack of his back. Will strove to free himself but the other two were stronger together and they laid him down with his rigbone flat against the bowed birch.

‘An ill token he ne struggled much,’ said Mad.

‘I ne used but half my strength,’ said Will.

‘A proud arrow that backbites,’ said Longfreke. ‘We’d best found it. Shoot!’

They loosed the knitted rope and let Will go. The birch whipped and Will was flung upwards. He flew through the air and came to earth through a holly tree. He fell on his shoulder and cried out once, then cried no more, but ne rose, and lay still.

‘He flew true,’ said Sweetmouth.

‘He flew crooked,’ said Mad.

‘True,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘I took the holly as the mark.’

‘Crooked,’ said Mad, ‘I took the nettles.’

‘Player!’ called Sweetmouth to Will. ‘You’d best have shielded your neb from scratches, for I need it whole.’

‘How did the world look when you saw it as the birds do?’ asked Mad.

Will groaned and stood up. Hayne loomed over him and said: ‘Would you be a bowman in my score, and come with us to Calais?’

‘Yeah,’ said Will.

Hayne clasped Will’s head in his great hands and looked at it from this side and that like to he’d made Will out of straw and sticks and rags, and would see he’d made him right. He stepped away and bade Longfreke take the oath.

Longfreke took Will’s wrist and put his bowstaff in his hand and bade him swear by the blood and bones of Christ, by their Clean Mother, by St Sebastian and by St George, and by his bow, to be true to Hayne Attenoke and to his even-bowmen of the Gloucestershire score, to do the bidding of the master of the score faithfully and without backbiting.

Will swore it.

Longfreke bade Will say after him:

Feathered tail but I ne sing

I rise high without a wing

I am but a wooden freke

Yet I have an iron beak

As a falcon so my flight

Of my master’s will and might

Ne to think on flying’s end

Free in air to while and wend

Faring far in light and dark

Blind to my high master’s mark.

‘What are you?’ asked Longfreke.

‘An arrow,’ said Will.

‘Who is your master?’

‘The bowman.’

‘And who is that bowman?’

‘Hayne Attenoke.’

‘It is the Lord God Almighty,’ whispered Longfreke. He took a flask of his pack and gave it to Will and bade him drain it to the bottom. It was a Scotch drink, he said, of frozen ale. Will drained the flask, sat on the ground, shut his eyes and slept.

NOW IT IS night, when under the abbot’s regimen the monks would have been asleep. Under the invigorated rule, one third of the community chants, insomniate, sating the vacuum of tenebrous nocturnal silence between Compline and Matins with adamantine clarifications of the divine.

The abbot and his pomp are not part of this. The abbot, formally the monastery’s most senior cleric, celebrates mass in his private secretarium, absents himself from chapter, does not participate in processions, and has separated himself from the chanting of the liturgy. I have become the sole inhabitant of both abbeys, the decadent abbey of the abbot and the austere abbey of the prior.

Accordingly, I divide my hours. After Vespers I exit the nave and transit the area to the abbot, who tells me that the prior is a fanatical dictator, a usurper, a depraver of regulations, that he is ignorant of the furious verities of public administration. It is the abbot’s opinion that only the fatuous would find it credible for God to damn the carnivores and offer the herbivores and pescivores salvation, or exterminate humanity because an abbot in Malmesbury wears coloured velvets. ‘Are we to accept,’ the abbot says, ‘that God may perceive true fidelity only through the rags of penury, the habits of opulence rendering it invisible?’

But before Vespers, and at night, I regress to the nave, ambling between the pilgrims pressed to the pavement, supplicating miserably as they reptile to the sanctuary. I resonate with the chanting of the choir. The chancel exhales an incensed nimbus, mollifying the flagrant ardors of the candles, while the immense columns of pale native stone simulate the trunks of celestial arbors.

NB Marc. I should have conducted you with me to England, as you requested. I confess I was directed by an irrational resentment which is difficult to explain: I resented the contrast between your superior (in respect to me) command of Latin and your inferior command of rhetoric, which resulted in the more erudite of us – you – being subordinate to the more sociable, me. You remained my servant, when you might with facility have found an alternative master who honoured his dependency on you in terms more amiable than finance alone. I request that you absolve me.

PS The request for absolution to be extended to your wife – Judith having indubitably suffered indirectly from my resentment.

WILL WOKE ON a sack of straw in a hot dark room. Evening light came of small windows pitched in the wall and around him were the shapes of other men asleep.

His pack was by his bed-sack. Someone had taken the shoon of his feet and left them nearby. Will rose and did on the shoon. He’d go out the door, but a tall lean freke with a rood written on his forehead in blackneedle stood in his way.

‘By what right do you behold me?’ asked the man.

‘I’m thirsty,’ said Will. ‘You stand between my thirst and my whole hope to quench it.’

‘Would you go by me?’ said the man. ‘Would you? See how far you go.’

‘I wouldn’t strive with a man and ne know why,’ said Will.

‘For one, you behold my forehead like to you ne worth the holy rood of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ,’ said the man. ‘For two, your face ne likes me. I would work it to a better shape with the sharp end of my bollyknife.’

SOMEONE CALLED TO the man in a soft steven and bade him come away. ‘Your wrath were more worthed did you hold it back, my Dickle, that it mightn’t be fare for all, as bread, but doled out in shreddles, as saffron,’ said the soft-spoken one.

‘I wasn’t there when they made this gnof a bowman,’ said Dickle. ‘I’d have sent him home to his mother’s lap with his neb slit.’ He shoff by Will into the room where Will had been asleep and shut the door.

It was Softly John Fletcher who spoke. ‘Dickle Dene’s a fell man with knife, but ever holy,’ he said. ‘He fared the last fifty mile to Jerusalem on his knees, and had the rood written on his forehead in blackneedle that all might know his holiness.’

‘I’m ill of head and dry of mouth,’ said Will. ‘I ne know where I am nor how I got here since I drank the Scotch.’

‘You drank enough to make you blind,’ said Softly. ‘This is Rodmarton, a morning’s fare from Malmesbury. Hayne bore you on his back.’

He led Will to a long telded cart, with a ladder hung on hooks on one side, in one hern of the guesthouse yard. The moon had risen and the stars shimmered and cans of fleabane smoked at the doors. A light was lit in the cart and someone went about inside with a sound of clay and iron and thin timbers that knocked against each other.

Softly called into the cart and a woman brought out a can of ale, which she gave to Softly, who handed it to Will. Will drained the can and they filled it again. Softly bade the woman bring light and the woman brought a flame that gleamed in an ox-horn cup.

‘Behold, Cess, Player Will Quate,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he as fair a young freke as you’ve seen?’

Cess ne lifted her eyes to see. ‘I shan’t behold no other man but you,’ she said.

‘She makes a show of meekness for me, but she’s as all French maids, wanton and sly,’ said Softly. ‘Find you her fair?’

Will said he mightn’t deem the fairness of any woman but his own betrothed.

Softly laughed. There was gold in his teeth. He put his arm around Will’s shoulder, led him to the board and bade him take an old barrel-half for his seat. He was friendly, and asked Will many asks, and Will answered.

‘I’ll help you,’ said Softly. ‘I’ll learn you what’s what, for though Hayne’s leader, him ne likes the other bowmen to know what he knows. He leaves it to each man to choose his way, and if that way ne answers Hayne’s read, woe betide him, in war or frith.’

‘What’s war?’ said Will. ‘Is it a fight?’

‘War’s all the fights together, and all that betides on the days between the fights, which is the greater deal of soldiery,’ said Softly. ‘A man who lacks but war makes a poor soldier.’

‘I lack the sight of the sea,’ said Will. ‘I lack silver for my freedom.’

Softly nodded. ‘You’re right to seek your freedom in France in wartide,’ he said. ‘The English soldier has such freedom in France as no king ne gets in his own house.’

SOFTLY JOHN WOULD have Will know he was a God-fearing man.

‘I was a seafarer,’ he said, ‘and met a holy man, who gave me a golden rood, but I lost it. The holy man gave it me, for he saw in me an angel-light.’

Softly had sailed on a ship out of Weston took flour, ale, apples and candles to the holy man, an anchor who lived alone on an island. The anchor wone in a house made of stone and wood he’d gathered of the strand, and sat there all summer and winter, bidding his beads and writing. There wasn’t none more holy, said Softly, though his teeth were rotten and his feet bare and he hadn’t but sea-calf skins to wrap him in. Lord Berkeley was bound to send him goods twice a year, but it ever fell short, and Softly went about the staithe begging stuff of folk for the leave, so the holy man ne storve. When the ship landed and was unladen, the holy man would kiss Softly’s hand and weep and tell him he was a true Christen, and read to him golden tales of the saints from a book, and behest that should he die, Softly might have his golden rood.

One winter, when they were to go to the island, a snowstorm came, and blew for a fortnight. After the storm had gone they sailed forth. They found the anchor in his house, sat at his writing board as if he were yet alive, a feather in his hand, his eyes open and his skin clear, pale and dry, like to a skin cut for a book before it’s written on. A sweet stink came of him, like to reekles on smoke in church, and when they came to lift him, he weighed no more than a sparrow, for his ghost was so great that when it left him there wasn’t but a shell left. He’d burned his books for to heat him, out-take the book of golden saints’ tales, of which the greater deal was left, and Softly minded the holy man’s behest and took the golden rood, which he’d since lost.

TWO MORE BOWMEN, Holiday Bobben and Hornstrake Walt Newent, came into the light, sat down and began to play at dice. The dice belonged to Hornstrake, yet it was Holiday who won most throws. Hornstrake was a lank freke, shaved in patches and bald in patches, whose clothes hung loose, and who sat bent, with his head lower than his shoulders, and sniffed and rubbed his nose.

‘Hornstrake bought a set of weighted dice,’ said Holiday, ‘but they cheated him. The sellers were so false the dice they sold him were true.’

All Holiday wore was of the newest and best, like to a rich young knave from a much town, out-take that his kirtle was sewn with hooks and straps and slit with leather mouths for hidden bags. One leg of his hose was red, the other black, and he’d oiled his hair. He had fat whirled cheeks and sharp quick eyes.

‘A Player must play,’ said Holiday, showing Will the dice. ‘I’ll lend you sixpence against your first week’s fee if you lack the silver to lay on a game. Or would you be read to from a book?’

‘Have you truly a book?’ asked Will.

Holiday reached inside his shirt and drew out a bundle hung from his neck on a cord. He brought it up to the light. ‘I keep it for Softly,’ he said.

‘I can’t read bookstaves, but Holiday learned himself,’ said Softly. ‘It likes me to hear of a saint’s deeds with my ale.’

Will asked to see the book, and Holiday took the cord of his neck and gave it him to hold.

It was made of dry, stiff leaves of thin calfskin bound together, with bookstaves written in, and likenesses of men and fowls and worms of many hues around the hem. One hem was burned black, like to it had been pulled of the fire, and the first leaf was spotted with brown.

Will stroked the first page with his fingertip. ‘I ne know how a man might get words out of these little black bookstaves,’ he said.

‘Each staff tokens a littlewhat of a word. The first staff, that’s like to a snake, tokens “s”, as the hiss of an adder. The second, like to a house on two floors, tokens “a”, as comes of your mouth when you fall of the upper floor. The third is “i”, like to a shut eye, the fourth, “n”, like to the house on two floors, but it lacks floors, and the fifth is “t”, like to a crossbow, and like to the sound when the bolt is let. T-t-t. And next comes an empty spot, that tokens the end of the word. Now you read it.’

Will spoke the letters in their turn. ‘Sss-a-eye-ne-te,’ he said.

‘Go at them quicker, like an arrow through five rooks on a branch,’ said Holiday.

‘“Saint”,’ said Will. ‘“Saint!”’ he said again, and his face was lit with mirth, and he looked blithe from neb to neb around the light.

‘“Saint”,’ said Holiday, ‘and the word after it is “Agnes”.’ He could read it, he said, but the pith and marrow of it was that Agnes was a holy young Christen maid in Rome who wouldn’t take the hand of the knave that would have her, and the knave’s father, that was constable there, stripped her naked to shame her in front of the townfolk, but God made the short hair on her head grow long, so all her limbs were hidden from their eyes. So the constable put her in a whorehouse, and bade the men of Rome have their will with her as them liked. But God filled the house with light, that none might see her, and when the knave came to reave her maidenhood, he dropped down dead. And Agnes was dight saint.

‘There it is in the book,’ said Softly. ‘See you we know God’s ends better than Hayne?’

Will showed by his stillness he ne understood.

‘There was one,’ said Hornstrake, ‘on whom no hair grew, and there wasn’t no light from our Maker, and God ne stirred himself to kill the reavers. So it was reft, and she wasn’t dight saint.’

All three men looked on Will, like to they bode some words of him in answer, but he sat still and beheld the flicker of the candle in its horn.

‘I told you he’d be of Hayne’s mind,’ said Holiday to Softly. ‘Now Hayne’ll have five, and we but four.’

Softly said, in his low sweet steven like to a busy beeskip, that it was the hour for Holiday and Hornstrake to go to bed. The two of them nearhand ran from the board, and Will and Softly were let alone, out-take that at the nigh end of the cart, Cess sat and sewed a glove in the moonlight.

Will yawned. Softly took a woollen from the cart. He nodded at Cess.

‘Would you have her tonight?’ he asked Will.

Will beheld the ground and ne answered.

‘You’re right,’ said Softly. ‘I ne sell her cunt to no one. I’m bound by oath to gut the man who lays a hand on her. I might have left her there but now she’s my burd and burden for ever.’

Cess murmured something, and Softly bade her go in. ‘There’s nothing worse than pride in a maid,’ he said when she’d gone. ‘It’s the first thing to take of them.’

He held out the woollen. ‘Take it as a gift,’ he said.

‘I mayn’t. It’s too dear,’ said Will.

‘I bought them to great cheap of a ship in Bristol,’ said Softly. ‘Take it.’

‘It’s warm,’ said Will. ‘Now’s harvest weather. I ne need it.’

‘Come winter you’ll sleep in a cold Calais harbour. Take it. If a man withsay a gift a third time, the giver might think himself unworthed.’

Cess cried out in French from the cart, and Softly turned. Will took the woollen, thanked Softly and went to bed.

Emerging from the abbot’s house this evening I was asperged with holy water by a trio of masked monks chanting ‘Sicut tabescit cera a facie ignis pereant impii a facie Dei,’ as if the abbot were a centre of evil and I must be instantly isolated and purged in my transition from his location to that of the prior, lest the army of demons encamped outside the prior’s musical fortifications conceal themselves on my person, secretly enter the abbey and destroy it from within.

NB Marc: In infancy I contrived to attribute culpability for the destruction of a valuable crystal reliquary to my younger brother Gavin, who was, in consequence, gravely battered by our father. In fact it was I who fractured the object. I have never admitted this to him.

WILL WAS WOKEN by snorks and cratches outside. He got up and went to the window that looked out on the orchard side of the guesthouse. Enker dug there at the roots of an apple tree.

The other bowmen ne stirred. Will did on his shoon and went out into the yard. The first cock nad sung and the sun wasn’t but a fallowing of the darkness on the dogs asleep and on the wakeman who slumbered at the timber-haw gate, his cheek pillowed on his fist. Will came through the gate and went round the back to see Enker come out through the gap he’d made in the orchard hedge.

He followed the boar out of town and into a wood, till the first light of morning glimmered in a ridding. There he found Madlen in the lady Bernadine’s gown, sat on a tree stump, at work on her fingernails with a little knife. She looked up when Will came towards her and bent to her nails again.

‘Why won’t you let me alone, but follow wherever I go?’ she asked.

Will sat at her feet in the grass and looked up at her. ‘You’re so like to Hab, God’s bones I’d swear you were he, had I not put my hand in your gown and found tits instead of moss.’

‘You nad no right to grip a maid there without her leave.’

‘You were full of high French words when we met before. Who learned you?’

‘A maid learns by listening,’ said Madlen.

‘Where were you when Hab and I were children?’ asked Will. ‘Where were you when we swam in the bourne and caught fireflies?’

‘I was there, but you ne saw me,’ said Madlen. ‘Would you keep me with you now?’

‘I’m still betrothed to another, and a sworn bowman, and you still wear a stolen gown. Bury it and go home.’

‘Is that your last word?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’d truly go to the ends of the Earth alone, rather than have me with you?’

‘I have my even-bowmen.’

Madlen stuck out her lip and plucked at the silk flowers on her barm. ‘Then I’ll leave you for ever,’ she said. ‘But first, while the ridding’s heavenish, and the birds sing and there are pearls on the grass, tell me what kind these bowmen are you go among.’

‘The leader Hayne is a giant who barely speaks, who wouldn’t take me to France and ne worths me. Yet it was he bore me the last mile to Rodmarton after I’d drunk a flask of strong Scotch wine and went asleep witless, when he could have left me in the wood. And Hayne’s first underling is a free handy gome called Softly John who seems to be my friend, yet keeps against her will a maid he stole in France.’

‘Is she fair, the French maid?’ asked Madlen.

‘It was too dark to see.’

‘Oh.’

‘One of my new fellows learned me to read words,’ said Will. ‘Of a book.’

‘How nimble you are!’ said Madlen.

‘He learned me a bare five bookstaves, but it was enough to read a whole word.’

‘Shut your eyes,’ said Madlen. ‘Bide a handwhile and open them and I’ll be gone.’

‘Light as that?’

‘Shut your eyes.’

Will shut his eyes. The grass rustled and feet trod the earth. ‘God be with you,’ Will said. ‘I’ll see you next year.’

He opened his eyes. Madlen’s eyes stared into them from six inches away.

‘It wouldn’t be right for me to go,’ she said. ‘You ne sold me to our lord, when you might have done it lightly, and won of it. This tokens that in the dern hollows of your heart, you care for me.’

‘I wouldn’t never sell no man to nobody,’ said Will. ‘That’s my own worth I love, not you. You showed yourself too late to get love of me.’

‘Without me, you won’t have no kin to tell of the wonders you see.’ She came to sit by Will and laid her head on his shoulder.

‘I’ll come home again and tell everyone,’ said Will.

‘You won’t come home again. The priest said so. All will sicken.’

‘I told you, the qualm’s a priest’s tale to win silver,’ said Will.

‘Oh, loveman,’ said Madlen, and held his cheek in her hand. ‘I ne durst leave Outen Green but that I believe the qualm will slay us, every one. When all must be quelled I ne fear no gallows, for you and I may love and die and go on to the next house together.’

‘It mayn’t be.’

‘Two nights ago, my brother asked if you would take me, were you and I the last folk left on earth. You ne forsook me.’

‘I ne said yeah.’

‘You ne said no.’

The first bell rang in Rodmarton.

‘I’m a soldier now, and must go,’ said Will. He freed himself from Madlen’s arms.

Madlen caught his wrist and bade him give her one kiss before he went as token, but Will wouldn’t. Madlen looked in his eyes, dight her head at his neb like a cat on a mouse, and smote him on the mouth with her lips.

‘When you understand,’ she said, ‘I shan’t be far away.’

‘I would you were.’

‘On the far side of Malmesbury, Hab and I will cleave to you and your bowmen.’

‘Ne dare.’

‘I’ll wear a cloth on my neb and use French words and make a show that I’m the lady Bernadine.’

‘I’ll tell them otherwise.’

‘If you do they’ll send me back to Outen Green to be hung as a thief.’

‘Won’t you let me be?’

‘I may only let you be with me.’

WILL CAME AGAIN to the guesthouse. The other bowmen were at board, their dishes nigh to empty. Will came up to Hayne and asked to be forgiven his late. He’d risen early, he said, and gone out to see what kind of town Rodmarton was, for he hadn’t never seen it. But Hayne wouldn’t behold him.

There was a free stead next to Hayne on the bench, and a stead free by Softly, and Softly called to Will to sit by him, and Will took his seat there.

A maid came from the guesthouse and set before Will a can of ale and a dish of hot collops. He put egg and pig-flesh on the bread with the flat of his knife and fell to as one hadn’t eaten a fortnight.

Hayne spoke, and it was like to a hill shook. It was his law, he said, that all must be together in his sight at cock-crow, and all must be together in his sight at sundown, and Will Quate had broken this law. When one of his score broke this law by going his own way, said Hayne, those as hadn’t broken the law would be hurt.

All the bowmen fell still but Softly, who spat on the ground.

Hayne rose and bade them gather their gear and get on the road.

THE LAND ABOUT them fell away. Ahead of the bowmen to the south lay a wide flat wold, and at the far brim of their sight, a line of hills. Between them and the wold a great dark blade reached into the sky, like to a giant under the ground had pitched his spear through the world’s hide. Longfreke saw Will stare and told him it was the spire of the church of the abbey in Malmesbury. In all England, he said, only Sarum’s was longer.

They came to the Fosse Way, that marked where Gloucestershire and Wiltshire met. After a mile’s fare they met a gooseherd and his knave, who drove a flock of geese northward. The gooseherd went in the midst of the geese, and greeted the bowmen as they went by. The knave walked last, at the end of the flock, and when Hayne went by him, he smote him in the head with his fist, and the boy fell to the ground without a sound.

Hayne struck his blow so quick and true that the gooseherd, in his dreamy fare, ne saw nor heard, and walked on, and the knave lay still in the road.

Will opened his mouth but before he could speak Holiday had dight his hand over it, and Holiday and Longfreke between them held him back from going to help the knave. They made him go on till they were out of hearing of the gooseherd, then let him turn his head to see the knave sitting up with his noll in his hands.

‘Mind what Hayne said,’ said Longfreke. ‘When one of us breaks Hayne’s law to go his own way, one that ne broke no law is hurt. Smarts it to see the gooseboy, who hadn’t done us no wrong, struck down by Hayne?’

‘It smarts,’ said Will.

‘Mind it next time you’re out playing the ram and the sun comes up.’

Will turned and caught the eye of Cess. No light came in her grim cheer, and she dight her headcloth lower on her forehead.

‘I would that they who made the laws might learn me what they are before I find a way to break them,’ said Will to Longfreke.

‘Hayne’s laws are such that the man who breaks them knows them in his heart, whether he’s told or not,’ said Longfreke. ‘But I’ll tell you one.’ He nodded at the spire. ‘In half a mile we leave Gloucestershire. After that you mayn’t go home again out-take by France or in a shroud. My read’s to turn now and go home.’

Will ne heeded him. He went with the bowmen when they turned from the Fosse Way, and crossed from Gloucestershire into Wiltshire, and all, even Hayne and Dickle Dene, shook Will’s hand, and said Player Will Quate was of their fellowship, ale, bed, board and threepence a day. From there they went the last mile to Malmesbury.

I DISCOVERED THE prior at his usual post in a recess near the choir, considering with the precentor a table on which coloured wooden symbols on a chart depict the disposition of the choristers – those who are singing, those who are absent, asleep, in the refectory, in the infirmary. Other symbols signify the sites of suspected eruptions of evil and the commitment of mobile anti-demon choirs to counter them. The mental labour is immense; the prior must continually visualise his invisible defences and his invisible opponents, assisted only by the chart, by reports from the perimeter, and by his divinely-inspired vision, capable of detecting the Satanic multitudes projecting themselves against the monastic harmonies with teeth and claws and red eyes, and, worse, calling to their compatriots whom they have previously inserted in us, telling them that now is the moment to surge out and join the assault.

The prior was exhausted, unrazed, red around the eyes. Extraordinary that he should have organised such music with the debilitated instruments his community offers, the senile and the juvenile, the crapulent and the insane, the tone deaf and the monolingual, ignorant of the significance of the words they chant.

The precentor, conscious of the uses of Paris, disposes triple organa of tenor and descant – a minimum of forty-eight choristers for the tenor, twenty-four for the vox organalis and twenty-nine for the vox principalis. He and the prior have decided that should the descant and tenor combined fall below ninety-six, the integrity of their exaltation will erode, and God will project pestilential affliction through the ruptures in their vocal edifice. Every hour, determined by an horarium, spent choristers depart the choir, to be replaced by rejuvenates.

When I arrived, the grains in the superior part of the horarium had almost descended into the inferior. Simultaneously each of us around the table detected a diminution in the vigour of the music. Panic manifested itself in the fraternal faces. Their terror communicated itself to me, and I sensed, with them, the fracture and rupture of our defences, the strident ululation of the demons as they triumphantly surged through the fissures between the diminishing chords and prepared to feast on our souls.

Only the prior remained calm. He admonished a novice, who ran off and revened with the alternate choir, recently sleeping, their faces engraved with fatigue. The precentor urged them to the chancel. One by one the voices of the revived monks integrated with those of the attenuated brothers, the sound of the psalm expanded, the density of sacred incantation firmed our fortifications, and we relaxed.

The magnitude of sound oppressed our ears and forced us to clamour in order to be heard.

‘The archers have arrived,’ exclaimed the prior. ‘I desire that you go with them. Their dux Hayne Attenoke requires a cleric in the company, to take confession should the plague erupt tumultuously when they are far from any chapel.’

‘I am a proctor, not a priest,’ I said.

‘In extremis there is no requirement for confession to be heard by an ordained priest. In the circumstances of proximate pestilence, as homo literatus with a pulse, you are super-apt. Spend tonight in the library with the penitentials and you will comprehend the scheme better than the greater number of vicars. Nobody demands that you celebrate the eucharist. They will demand your services only in the ultimate exigency.’

‘The choral obstacles you have erected against Beelzebub are so magnificent, so splendid,’ I said. ‘Let me remain and record for posterity how the demonic legions were repulsed by the power of Malmesbury.’

The prior inspected me sternly. ‘Do you not have friends, colleagues, valued servants in Avignon?’ he said. ‘Are you not anxious to discover their fate?’

His aspect was so terrible I could not face it directly. ‘Were you to offer me some evidence that the suffering in Avignon is as severe as rumour reports,’ I murmured, ‘I would go immediately.’

‘That is your promise?’

I assented. Immediately he gave me a letter from the city that he had previously kept secret.

It was a difficult text. Some phrases appeared to resist vision, others to lacerate it: Sixty-two thousand corpses buried … all the auditors, advocates and proctors have either left, or died, or plan to leave immediately.

‘This letter declares that the papal court is suspended until the feast of St Michael,’ I said, attempting to conceal my desperation. ‘I should not progress south prematurely.’

The prior studied my face as if at the prime encounter with a new animal. ‘You would annul your promise with such temerity?’

‘The circumstances have altered,’ I babbled.

‘You have no purpose here. You do not contribute to the defence of the abbey. You associate with the corrupt. Introduce yourself to the archers as their itinerant confessor, go with them tomorrow.’

Marc, I must request that you share these notes and ephemera of mine with Judith. To know that you perused them together, even with contempt for my pusillanimousness, would be of enormous comfort.

I ENCOUNTERED THE archers at the pilgrim hospital, where they had been assigned accommodation. With what terrific creatures was it proposed I itinerate! Their dux, Hayne Attenoke, is a giant, silent, intractable, with a gigantic, ornate crucifix suspended from his neck on a silver chain, and his comrades are percussors, brutes, squalid homicides. One has a cross sculpted in the skin of his front and a self-induced stigmata; another, the clement-voiced John Fletcher, alias Softly, gold dentistry, with sufficient oral opulence for a papal candelabrum; Gilbert Bisley, alias Longfreke, whose face is on a plane with my scapula, has a fissure dividing the dexter and sinister parts of his face, a cicatrix so profound it appears he has been formed of dual semi-humans, conglutined into unity. Their lingua anglica is dense, turbulent, spined, immune from the tactus of Gallic or Latin. They are squalid, rude, with a sanguinary odour. There is an exception, a novice archer, William Quate, alias Player, solid of form, pectorally muscled, but with the face of an angel, a tranquil gestus and an intelligent aspect.

With them is a vehicle containing their armaments, and in it a captive female, Cecile de Goincourt, of uncertain status. The closure in her face is redolent of violence and abuse, yet she has a residual core of dignity.

I erupted to the prior and explained that it was not possible for me to navigate with these predators to the pestilential, meridional territories that were our destination. They were as horrid as the prospect of the plague; and I was perplexed as to what mode of confession to accept, and what form of absolution to offer, when the archers itinerated with the permanent substance of their nefarious conduct, viz, a woman they had violated in France and subtracted from her family.

The prior offered no alternative. ‘Investigate the circumstances of this alleged violation,’ he said, ‘congruent with your confessorial position, and care for her spirit as well as theirs. Confession is not an exact science; it more resembles the cultivation of fruit than the design of a cathedral. As terrible as the archers are, they are ab utero materno, like you, and ultimately as timid in the face of damnation.’

Marc, Judith, I comprehend now how miserly I have been with my gratitude to you since my advent in Avignon decades ago. How vastly you improved my Latin and my French! With what grace you tolerated my vehement insistence on amicable dialogue with you and my conflicting desire to subordinate you, to dominate you, because I was your master and you my servants!

WILL ASKED THOMAS the shriftfather if the monks ever stinted their song.

‘They reckon holy songs a wall to ward them of pestilence,’ said Thomas. ‘To stint were like to they lowed the stones between them and the Fiend.’

Will said in his town they worthed the smoke of burned bones.

‘Bones outburn,’ said Thomas. ‘A bonefire’s not but work to an end. This holy song has at once an end and a lovely endlessness. Man likes any work that helps him forget his ghost’s bound to his body by a thread.’

Will leaned his head back and said him thought he wouldn’t never tire of the awful might of the great stone posts that held the roof so high above them. Was there in the world, he asked, a bigger church than Malmesbury?

‘Behold, an uplandish scholar,’ said Thomas. ‘Offered a wonder, you seek another more wondrous. My namesake Aquinas would say a man like you won’t stop till he reaches the wondermost.’

Will asked Thomas what he meant, but by now they were out of the church and saw Sweetmouth and Longfreke, who beheld the likenesses corven about the door. Will would stand to wonder with them, for to look on the doorway with its many hues and gems, and the likenesses of Adam and Eve, Moses and Noah, Christ and God and the angels, was like to the tale of the world went by.

The bowmen couldn’t guess Thomas’s kind. He was long and lean, with sharp cheekbones, close-cropped grey hair and skin that ne feared the sun. He’d seen forty winter, and was rivelled about the mouth and eyes from laughing. When he spoke he smiled often, in such a way that those who listened smiled with him, till ferly his face went hard and cold, and listeners felt they’d misdone to smile. His clothes, rich, dark and plain, were more like to a dealer’s than a priest’s, and he wore no ring, nor spoke to them as priest to flock, but man to man, though he was learned, and gave them to understand he read books, and knew the gospel. His English tongue wasn’t southern nor western nor midland, not Kentish nor Cornish nor Yorkshire, but somewhat Scottish and somewhat French.

‘Shall I tell you of the likenesses?’ said Thomas.

He showed them with his finger on the doorway where red-kirtled God lifted Adam from the slime of the earth, breathed into his neb the breath of life and pitched him upright, like to a ploughman set a new-born calf on his feet in the spring field. He showed where God took Eve out of Adam’s side when he slept, and God bade Adam and Eve not to eat no apple of that tree. Where the serpent wound about the tree and told Eve she might not die by death, for God woot that in whatever day she ate the apple, her eyes would be opened, and she might be as God, to know good and evil. Where an angel with a golden crown sent Adam and Eve away from God’s garden, and they wept that they must step out into the cold world with but one mean sheepskin each.

Thomas showed where God told Noah how the Earth was full of wickedness. That he would bring great flood on Earth, and slay each flesh in which was the ghost of life under heaven, and waste all things on Earth, and how he bade Noah make a ship, and fill it with birds, work-deer and creeping deer, all living deer of all flesh, and his own kin.

‘Here’s Noah again,’ said Thomas. He showed the next likeness. ‘He shapes a beam with his adze. Behind him are the black clouds that bear the rain.’

Sweetmouth said Noah mightn’t afill his work before the flood.

‘He afilled it,’ said Thomas, like to a man who brought news of a thing that happened last Friday. ‘He made the ship. Then all the wells of the great sea were broken, and the windows of heaven were opened, and rain was made on Earth forty days and forty nights. And look, here’s Noah and his kin stood in the ship, warded from the flood, with a roof over their heads to keep them from rain, and one of Noah’s sons steers with an oar. Now, you reckon the folk in the ship.’

Longfreke told them on his fingers: Noah, his burd, his three sons, and their wives, eight in all.

‘Right,’ said Thomas. ‘Eight of mankind and womankind left alive in all the world. The masters that corve these likenesses chose their gospel tales well, for Noah was forefather to Abraham, and look here, next to Noah in his ship, in a green kirtle, you have Abraham. Abraham kneels on the ground before God, and tells God he’ll be childless, and God for his answer shows him the night sky and the stars. Look, you can see it, the dark hue of the sky and the fires of the stars within. And God asks Abraham if he may tell how many stars there are, and Abraham mayn’t; and God tells him his seed will be such on earth, like stars, more than can be told. Do you see what it tokens?’

The bowmen were still.

‘The meaning is that when the Lord would be wreaked on mankind for the wrongs we do, he won’t kill all. He lets enough folk live to seed the world again. Be there eight folk left on one bare ship when all the leave are drenched to death, it were enough, and the children of the eight and their children’s children and all their kin afterwards will be untold as the stars in heaven. So owes it to be with the pestilence. Let the Lord slay folk in their thousands on thousands; be a handful left, or only two, like to Adam and Eve, they might spread mankind again, after the pestilence is spent.’

Longfreke said God must be more angry than in Noah’s time, for he pined them with pestilence, not flood; and what kind of ship might keep a good man from that evil?

‘On the road, each must build a ship out of rue for his own done wrongs,’ said Thomas, ‘which is a better ship than Noah’s, for Noah’s ship fared safe but on this world’s seas, while the ship man makes of the beams hewn of his own heart’s wood bears him safe from this world into the next.’

The pestilence was a priest’s tale, said Sweetmouth. Even were it true, he said, Thomas’s read was horse-dung. The good of Noah’s ship was that all his kin was in it, and if they overlived the flood, they overlived together, and if they died and their ghosts went to the Lord’s house, their ghosts went together. Let the wayfarer make of his heart the cleanest ship there was, he was alone in it, and his dearest weren’t with him. They might be drenched while he yet float, and he mightn’t know.

Now Thomas was still, and sorrowful again. He was about to speak when Hayne and Hornstrake came from the church with the infirmarer, a weary monk with glass yolks fastened to his eyes on hide string. Hayne bade the other bowmen go to the infirmary, and hear what the infirmarer would tell them, for he’d speak with Thomas alone.

SWEETMOUTH’S FACILE DESTRUCTION of my argument humiliated me. It was not my intention to deliver a sermon. I desired to demonstrate to my new companions an incidental mastery of priestly matters, even though I stated to them candidly that I was not a priest; a point I repeated when Hayne and I sat adjacent in the church porch, his gigantic head inclined and mine facing up.

Among the archers, said Hayne, were obstinate spirits who had not attended confession for many years, yet whose spirits were gravid with crime. The conditions of our itinerary were such, the moment of mortality so unpredictable, that one of our party might perish when we were a considerable distance from a church. It was important to him, he said, that the archers under his command confess before they were exterminated. He made this lamentable prediction with such tranquillity – ‘before we be quelled’ was the English expression he used, a very severe form – that I had to verify he referred to the plague. He did; I apprehend that he considers the archers’ deaths from the pestilence, and mine, to be quite inevitable.

I reminded him that I lack the clavial power to absolve an individual of crimes. I can only obtain an account of those crimes, to adduce a person’s conscience out into the light, to probe and ameliorate it till it attains a state acceptable to God. Perfect contrition, I explained, was visible to the Deity, but the penitent could not assess his contrition for himself. He required the assistance of another, i.e. the confessor.

Concerning crime, I said, I had expected him to make some reference to the archers’ captive, de Goincourt, whose presence among them under duress perturbed me. I said I had originally intended to commence my penitentiary work by attending to her confession.

Hayne advised me that Softly, de Goincourt’s custodian – he referred to her as Softly’s possession – was not convinced of my bona fides, and any attempt to converse with her prematurely would be fatal.

Would he not protect me? I inquired. He did not respond. This was characteristic, I discovered. Colloquium with Hayne cannot consist of question and response; all one can do is to move into proximity with him and speak. Statements may issue from his lips, or not; when they do, they may appear to be responses, or not.

In terms of the events of Mantes, two years previously, said Hayne, he had not been in the vicinity of the house from which de Goincourt (the archers refer to her as ‘Cess’) was abducted, and precise details of what occurred might only be obtained from the archers directly responsible. Certainly Softly had been involved, and certainly none had disputed his control over her person since.

As an account of what occurred, this is evidently unsatisfactory. Yet as frequently as he failed to respond to my interrogation, he anticipated a question I had not articulated. It had been his intention since the company’s foundation, he said, to select such archers as would benefit from maximum liberty to act in accordance with their consciences. Even though matters had not evolved as he desired, he could not now restrict those liberties, or dissolve the company, without assisting their evasion of the just retribution towards which their actions inevitably led.

‘And Will Quate?’ I inquired.

Here Hayne did respond. He turned his eyes to me; and his attention was so much more terrible than being ignored by him that I regretted my question. He said only that he had provided Quate with the necessary terms on which to base his decision to join the company.

I remain convinced that Quate’s conscription disturbs him.

Hayne said that responsibility for the company’s actions were ultimately his; yet this did not absolve the archers of culpability for what they did.

I trembled. In his crude English diction he had enunciated, unconsciously, the precise paradox that led to my rejection by the magisters of Paris after their initial audit of my capabilities. Requested by them to discuss the contradiction between God’s omniscient omnipotence and man’s liberty of action, I was expected to summarise and comment on the perspectives of Augustine, Aquinas and Boethius. In place of this I questioned, and speculated, and advanced my own peurile ideas. Accordingly I was not admitted to the faculty.

Marc, in privileging you with the occupation of copyist, and you, Judith, with the occupation of domestic servant, I desired not only to alleviate tedious labour, but to create in our common domicile a miniature form of the scholarly paradise, university, from which my mistakes excluded me. I expected you to alternate between labour and academic discourse to my benefit. I have confessed as much to you previously. I am impelled at this hour, however, to confess a novelty, that in attracting you to my service there was a third factor, your affection towards each other. I confess that I envied it. I could not acquire that love for myself, but I desired to contain it, as a bottle may not imbibe wine, but must satisfy itself with preventing its escape, and protecting it from corruption.

THE SICKHOUSE STOOD east of the church. In the sickhouse yard, twenty feet from the door, stood a wicker stall with a roof of rough cloth. The stall had four openings, one on each side. None might go in the sickhouse, said the infirmarer, but that they go through the stall first, to be undersought for sickness.

Afterwards they might come out three ways – one door to the sickhouse, if they might be helped; another door to go again whence they’d come, if they were heal; and the third door for those too far gone to be helped by any doctor.

‘What owe those unhappy dogs to do?’ asked Longfreke.

‘Seek a priest,’ the infirmarer said, ‘or a friend or kin to comfort them, or at worst a lonely stead where they ne have none near to spread the pest further.’

Longfreke asked how long the stall had stood, and the answer came, a fortnight.

‘Have we missed news?’ said Longfreke. ‘Has the pest reached England?’

‘It must come soon,’ said the infirmarer. ‘Too many of our brethren in France and Italy have gone to Christ for me to ween otherwise, and I’d be ready.’

Each bowman went into the stall, one by one. Within, the infirmarer and two knaves tied handfuls of wool soaked in vinegar to their mouths and noses, groped under the bowmen’s arms and between their legs, pinched their necks and looked at their tongues. They asked each bowman where he was born, and on what day, and wrote it down in a great book. All deemed heal, the infirmarer led them into the sickhouse. He stood them about a board where lay pots of treacles and sheaves of dried worts and glass flasks of many hues. Behind him in the hall were a score empty bedstraws, each made with good clean linen. In the middle of the hall a knave let fall leaves into a smoking fire. The sickhouse stank sweetly of vinegar and rue.

The infirmarer coughed, clasped his hands together, made a steeple of his first fingers and lifted them to his lips.

‘The qualm, or as it is rightly called the pestilence, pest or plague, is airborne, as a sickly mist, and spreads from stead to stead when the wind blows from the south,’ he said. ‘Once it lights on a town, it spreads between folk like to fire in a dry wood. It may reach England in two ways: in clouds, blown by the south wind over the sea, or in ships, either from bad air caught in the sails or in the bosom of the ship, or in the bodies of the seafarers. Comes it thus, it’ll most likely be through London, or Bristol, or Kent, or one of the southern havens, Southampton or Plymouth. Where d’you ship for Calais?’