Pilgrimage of Death

by Sally Spencer

  The pardoner rose to his feet, and I could see that he was trembling with anger.

  ‘Is that how you think of me?’ he demanded. ‘Do you see me as no more than a dupe’s dupe – a charlatan’s charlatan? If that be the case, you will sleep alone tonight!’

  From what little expression it was possible to see formed between the bumps and carbuncles on the summoner’s face, it was plain that – even in his drunkenness - he realised he had gone too far.

  ‘Dear friend, sweet friend, I am sorry if my words caused offence, for I never meant it so,’ he said.

  But the pardoner was clearly not to be mollified by so hasty, brief and whining an apology.

  ‘You think that because you can repeat the few of the Latin phrases you have heard in the ecclesiastical court, it makes you an educated man like me,’ he said. ‘But learning by rote is no learning at all. A jay can be taught to say ‘Walt’ as well as a pope.’

  ‘And do you think you can threaten me with an empty bed?’ the summoner countered, growing angry himself now. ‘I will soon find some jolly wench to share my pallet with me.’

  ‘Aye, so you may - if either she is blind or else you wear a sack over your cankered head,’ the pardoner retorted.

  And calculating, perhaps, that he would never find a better line on which to leave, he made his way unsteadily towards the door.

  The summoner, not knowing what else to do, buried his scabby nose deep in his ale pot. The reeve and the manciple smirked at one another and did their best not to laugh out loud. The cook, who had slumped, head-down on the table, long before the ‘lovers’ tiff’ truly got underway, began to snore.

  The pilgrims at the ‘professional’ table were pretending not to have heard the exchange, and began talking in loud voices about weighty and learned matters, while the five guildsmen clucked and tut-tutted, and told each other that such behaviour would never be tolerated in the town where they held some considerable sway.

  On the knight’s table, the good widow of Bath was giggling like a girl and tickling the young squire on his chin. The knight himself looked on in disgust at these proceedings, yet seemed uncertain of how best to intervene.

  I, having seen enough of my future characters’ antics for one evening, announced that I was almost dead with tiredness, bade my fellow pilgrims a hearty good night, and left the common room. Yet once I was in the yard I did not walk towards the steps up to the gallery, as they might have expected. Instead, I made my way across the yard to the stables, for even if my readers have forgotten about the two men who been following us all day, I certainly had not.

  All the pilgrims’ horses were there – my own, the clerk of Oxford’s skinny nag, the monk’s fine hunter, the knight’s charger – yet there was no sign of the dappled mount that the man who recognised me in the High Street had been riding, nor of the chestnut which belonged to his recently-vanished partner.

  I stepped back into the yard, almost expecting to find a suspicious leper lurking in the shadows, but there was no one to be seen but the tapsters on their eternal journey from the cellar to the common room and back again.

  Had I been letting my poet’s imagination run away with me? I asked myself. Was it possible that the two riders had been nothing more than men in no particular hurry to finish their journey? And that the leper had not been looking at one of them as he gazed down the High Street, but merely wondering where, exactly, one of his toes had fallen off?

  I climbed the steps to my bedchamber and, once shielded from the other pilgrims by a door, I opened my saddlebag, took out my quill, ink and parchment, and began to note down what I heard during the course of the long day.

  It was some time before I finished the task I had set myself, but when it was finally accomplished, I was well satisfied with the results. The cook’s tale, it was true, would require a great deal of work before it could assume any form in which I would be content to see it published under my name. The knight’s tale, on the other hand, would need very little re-writing and would well suit those who had read and enjoyed my previous work.

  And the miller’s and reeve’s tales? I was perhaps most pleased with them. They were like nothing I had ever penned before, and whilst they were undoubtedly crude and vulgar, there was a primitive vitality about them which I was eager to mould into a poetic narrative.

  Yes, the whole project was going splendidly, I thought, as I finally laid my head down on my pillow, and part of my Book of Tales of Canterbury was already as good as written.

  Ah, how we plot and plan - and how life can so easily thwart those plans for us. When I fell asleep that night, I had not the slightest inkling that something was about to happen which would disrupt my careful scheme. And even had I tried to contemplate what could possibly go wrong, I would never have guessed that the disruption would come in the form of a loud and terrifying scream in the early hours of the morning.

  Day the Third

  Morning

  Were I more skilled in the techniques and conventions of this form of writing, I might at this point in the narrative, tease my reader a little. Indeed, that is what my artistic instinct tells me I should do.

  The mechanics of such a process, it seems to me, would not present much of a problem. Indeed, all I would need to do, I imagine, is hold back the details of the death I promised my readers earlier until their anticipation had – like the udder of an infected cow – swollen up well beyond its normal size.

  Yet on this occasion I will over-rule my instinct, since, as I have already openly confessed, I am not skilled in the techniques and conventions of this form. In fact, until I have completed the task that I have set myself – until, in other words, The Pilgrimage of Death is finally completed - the form does not even strictly exist. So let us therefore dally no longer, but – like explorers setting foot in virgin territory – travel cautiously but directly to the heart of the matter.

  The scream, of which I spoke earlier, came just before dawn broke. I cannot, in all conscience, swear that it woke every living soul staying at the inn that night in the same manner as it woke me, though, (God knows), it surely had the power to do so.

  Certainly it woke all the domestic animals around the inn. The landlord’s cock let out the strangled cry of a creature whose normal purpose has been supplanted and who, instead of heralding the dawn as he expected, found himself the harbinger of bloody murder. His hens squawked as they might have done had they spied a slavering fox. The horses whinnied worriedly in the stable. In the pen at the bottom of the yard, the pigs squealed like creatures being led to slaughter, and even the placid cows in the fields beyond moaned rather than lowed.

  Even as the horrific cry was still dying away, I sprang from my bed, slipped on my gown and stepped out of my chamber – still barefoot - onto the gallery. Yet despite my haste, I was not the first to arrive there.

  The knight, a sword held firmly in his hand, stood by his own door. The pardoner and the summoner – who had parted on bad terms the night before, but now seemed to have been reconciled – peeked cautiously out of the summoner’s chamber. The stable boys and less prosperous pilgrims had already begun to gather in the yard below. The whole inn, so it seemed to me, had come to life within moments of one poor soul - as yet unidentified - losing a grip of his own.

  ‘From whence came that fearful sound?’ demanded the knight, his voice filled with all the authority of a man used to exercising calm command in the face of flying arrows and enemy charges.

  The franklin, who had arrived from the other side of the gallery, pointed at the door of the chamber next to the summoner’s.

  ‘It came from there, or so I believe,’ he said.

  ‘Then stay back! Give me room to work!’ the knight ordered.

  Without the need of further urging, the franklin and I took several steps backwards. The knight lifted his sword until the tip of it was resting under the door latch, then gave a slight flick of his wrist so that the latch was raised. Next, he lifted his left foot off the grou
nd and pushed at the door with the toe of his boot.

  *

  His boot! I hear you repeating. How came he to be wearing his boots?

  Surely there had not been the time – between the scream and his arrival at the door – for him to pull on his boots? Did he, perhaps, sleep in them?

  No, he did not sleep in them. Of that much I will assure you. Yet the question of how he came to wearing them did not occur to me at the time for, unlike you, my reader, I was not sitting quietly at home with a manuscript on my lap, No. instead I was standing on a gallery of an inn, gazing in some trepidation at a bedchamber door from behind which had issued a bloodcurdling scream. And since I did not raise the question of the boots then, I feel under no obligation to provide the answer now. Instead, my dear reader, I crave your indulgence. Later, I promise, I will both ask the question and provide the answer. Until then, I think it were best if I continued with my tale.

  *

  Had the door been bolted from the inside – as it might well have been - it would not have given way under such a slight pressure as the knight exerted. But the door was not bolted, and the touch of the boot was more than enough to make it swing obligingly open.

  The knight, his sword held at waist height, took one step forward and then another. He crossed the threshold of the chamber, and the franklin and I, both grown rusty in the ways of violence and warfare, followed tremulously in his wake.

  ‘Sweet Jesu!’ said the knight, gazing down at the bed.

  ‘God’s wounds!’ the franklin gasped.

  The man who was lying on the bed, (for there is little point, having reached this stage in my narrative, in disguising his identity from my reader any longer), was the miller.

  *

  The miller naked looked even larger and grosser than he had done clothed. But it was to his face that the eye was drawn, and it was the expression on that face which had caused the knight to exclaim, the franklin to gasp, and me to almost faint away.

  Even now that expression still haunts me, yet though it is my chosen profession to bully words into patterns of meaning, I find it hard to describe. It was as if the miller had imagined the worst thing that could happen to him – nay, had gone beyond that to picture something so terrible it could never happen to any man - and then had been told that this imagining was to be his fate.

  That he was dead, I was in no doubt of, for though I have gazed on many dead bodies during the course of my life, I have never seen one that was half so convincingly expired as this miller was.

  ‘What has occurred in this room?’ the knight asked. ‘How comes the miller to be dead?’

  Neither the franklin nor I could answer him, for we knew not what answer to give.

  Yet even in the deepest darkest mystery there may lurk some clue which, if recognised for what it is, could cast a little light. And such a clue there was there, in that bedchamber - for sniffing the air, I caught traces of a faint smell which it did not take long for me to identify as burnt meat!

  *

  A crowd had gathered in the doorway, as on such occasions a crowd inevitably will. People in the crowd gazed into the chamber, their tongues hanging out with morbid fascination, and they would no doubt all have crowded around the bed had the knight allowed it. But the old warrior would not allow it. Other than those already there in the room, he announced resolutely, the only man who would be permitted to get any closer to the corpse was the doctor of medicine.

  The doctor arrived. He was dressed in a blood-red gown, and looked with disdain on those standing on the threshold of the chamber.

  ‘Close the door,’ he said to me, as if I were no more than a servant. ‘For I will not carry out my skilled and delicate work under the eyes of the mob, as if I were nothing more than a common conjurer.’

  I closed the door as I had been instructed, and the doctor advanced towards the bed. He looked down at the dead miller, but made no move to touch him.

  ‘Do you know what caused him to take leave of his life, learned sir?’ the knight asked.

  ‘Naturally I do,’ the doctor replied, self-importantly. ‘Of course, I cannot give as full a diagnosis as I might have done had I known the date of his birth, and so been able to plot his chart against his star sign. Still I understand enough, even from the outward signs, to be able to pronounce on the reasons for his demise.’

  ‘And what did kill him?’ the knight asked impatiently.

  A sudden sly look appeared on the doctor’s face.

  ‘You called me a learned man a moment ago, and you were right to do so,’ he said.

  ‘Yes … yes…’ the knight said, almost under his breath.

  ‘I have read the old masters, Aesculapius and Dioscorides,’ the doctor continued. ‘I have studied under John of Gaddesden in Oxford and also under Master Gilbertus Magnus in Montpellier. Long have I toiled far into the night, striving to understand the mysteries of both the stars and the human body.’

  ‘What of it?’ the knight demanded.

  ‘Knowledge is currency,’ the doctor said. ‘We live either by what we know, or by what we can do.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ the knight snapped.

  ‘If I am to give an opinion on this case, I should like to be paid for it,’ the doctor said, doing just that.

  The knight glanced towards the franklin, as if inviting him to share the cost, and the franklin nodded.

  ‘You will be paid in full for your learned opinion,’ the knight told the doctor gruffly.

  Neither of them felt it worth inquiring of me whether we should split the bill into three parts, I noted bitterly, realising that, like many men who congratulate themselves on how well they are concealing their financial disasters from others, I had been living in a fool’s paradise.

  The doctor had still not touched the dead man, but in recognition of the fact that he was now being paid, he had at least moved a little closer to the bed.

  ‘It is my belief that this man’s planets were in an unfavourable orbit - a very unfavourable orbit,’ he said. ‘And this heavenly displeasure put so much strain on his heart that it finally burst.’

  ‘No more than that?’ the knight asked.

  ‘No more than that,’ the doctor concurred.

  ‘Then why is the expression on his face so full of fear?’ asked the franklin, who was clearly as troubled by the doctor’s diagnosis as I was.

  The doctor shrugged. ‘What man ever born of woman did not look fearful in the face of death?’

  What he had said was undoubtedly true, I thought - yet the smell of cooking meat was still in the room.

  ‘Will you examine him?’ I asked the doctor.

  ‘What need is there of that?’ he replied. ‘Even a man of my undoubted eminence cannot cure him now. No, not even if all the orbs of heaven conspired to help me. For only Christ may raise the dead.’

  I moved a little nearer to the miller’s corpse, in order to be able to examine him the better. It was then that I noticed the red marks around his biceps which, I was sure, would soon darken and become bruises!

  Perhaps my reader is already ahead of me, and it necessary to say no more - but in case he is not, let me add that the marks were roughly round and about the size of fingertips. In other words, they were just the kind of marks which would have been left by a man holding the miller down.

  ‘If you examined the body, you might possibly find some cause of death other than an unfavourable movement of the planets,’ I suggested.

  The doctor looked at me for the briefest of moments, then, since he who pays no piper calls no tune, he turned to the franklin for guidance.

  I saw immediately that the franklin looked displeased, but it took me a few seconds to come to appreciate that I was the subject of his displeasure, and several more to understand why.

  I pictured him on his estates - dispensing justice and offering advice which had the force of a command. A man in his situation, in total control of his own little world, can soon come to think of himself as infalli
ble and all-knowing. But this was not his little world, and it annoyed him that though we both suspected the cause of the miller’s death was not as clear-cut as it seemed, it should be I – a former servant of the crown living in reduced circumstances – who appeared to know what to do next.

  ‘I think it would be useful if you gave the miller a physical examination,’ the franklin said, as if this were the first time such a thought had been aired.

  ‘Very well,’ the doctor agreed. He placed his fingertips lightly on the miller’s chest. ‘It is as I said. The heart has burst.’

  ‘We should turn him over,’ I said.

  ‘And what purpose would that serve?’ the doctor asked, testily.

  ‘A man does not buy a horse without inspecting it thoroughly,’ I replied. ‘Should we give any less consideration to a human being?’

  The doctor sighed. ‘We are intending to bury the miller, not to buy him,’ he said.

  ‘It has always been my motto that if a job is worth doing, then it is worth doing well,’ the franklin said. ‘I believe the miller should be turned over.’

  ‘If that is what you wish,’ the doctor agreed. ‘But it will do no more than waste time.’

  The physician would not soil his own hands by engaging in such a physical task, and the franklin clearly saw his own role as supervisor of the operation, so it was left to the knight and myself to grasp the miller and flip him over onto his stomach.

  The sight we revealed by this action was not a pleasant one. Scabs, both old and recent, festered amongst the thatch of red hair which covered the miller’s broad back, and his arse housed a veritable mountain range of pimples.

  I let my eyes travel further down the body. The miller, it was plain, did not set much store by personal hygiene, and several weeks’ layer of dirt was encrusted on backs of his thighs. Yet there was one area, close to the cheeks of his backside, where there was no dirt at all – only raw flesh. And it was from here that the smell of cooking meat emanated!

  ‘What does this mean?’ the knight asked, looking at the wounds.