John Saturnall's Feast

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ings raise their Statues and Churchmen build Cathedrals. A Cook leaves no Monument save Crumbs. His rarest Creations are scraped by Scullions. His greatest Dishes are destined for the Dung-heap. And as those Dishes care naught for their Origin, so None now, I aver, could name the Rivers that watered Saturnus's Gardens, nor number the Fishes that swam in those Quanats and Jubs. But swim they did, those Salmons, Sturgeons, Carps and Trouts. And Eels called Lampreys did nourish themselves upon those Fishes, which Beasts I learned to dress from an Heretical Friend.

  Heat water in a Kettle so that you may endure to dip your Hand in but not to let it stay. Put in your Lampreys fresh from the River for the Time it takes to say an Ave Maria. Hold the Head in a Napkin lest it slip. With the Back of a Knife scrape off the Mud which rises in great Ruffs and Frills all along the Fish until the Skin will look clean and shining and blue. Open the Belly. Loosen the String found under the Gall (cast that out and the Entrails) and pull it away. It will stretch much. Pick out the black Substance under the String, cutting towards the Back as much as is needful. Dry the Fish in Napkins. Now the Lamprey is dressed.

  For the cooking, throw the Eels boldly in a great Pan foaming with Butter or slip them at your Ease in a simmering Kettle for no longer (as my Acquaintance put it) than a hurried Miserere. Add a Bay Leaf. Let your Fishes swim till the Waters be cold.

  For the Broth take Mace, crushed Cumin, Coriander seeds, Marjoram and Rue, and at last (if you may find it) add that Root, famous in Antiquity for its healing Properties and its peculiar Scent, being at once bituminous and having the sweetness of flowers . . .

  THE SMELL OF ROAST rabbit wafted up with the woodsmoke. A hazel-wood spit twisted over the fire. The three sat in silence, Josh leaning forward now and again to sink his knife into the haunch. The fire hissed as the blood dripped out. When the juices ran clear he lifted the spit and set to carving the meat. Ben's stomach growled in anticipation. The boy fell on his portion, blowing on his fingers when the hot juices scalded them.

  ‘You can't eat like that at the Manor,’ warned Josh. ‘You have to cut your food first. Even the kitchen boys have knives there.’ He turned to Ben. ‘I heard some of ‘em even have forks.’

  The tuft-headed boy paid no attention, pecking at the meat like a ragged bird.

  ‘Have to give that coat a brush,’ Josh continued, looking him over.

  ‘And the rest of him,’ added Ben.

  The three of them slept around the fire that night. In the morning, the broken walls glowed in the sun.

  ‘That's Soughton stone,’ Josh told Ben. ‘Romans dragged it all this way. Now here it is and they're all gone.’

  ‘Can't say I blame ‘em,’ declared Ben, looking gloomily around the woods. His belly gurgled. ‘I think that rabbit's still kicking.’

  The packhorses tramped back through the wood. Past a chapel, the road split. They took the ox-path around the hamlet of Fainloe. Ahead, a cart piled high with firewood rocked from side to side as its wheels climbed in and out of the ruts.

  ‘From Upchard,’ called the driver when they overhauled his lumbering animals. ‘Bound for the Manor. You?’

  ‘Same.’

  They passed a chapbook seller from Forham, a cooper's wagon with barrels from Appleby and another carrying sacks of charcoal. A man with bundles of withies on his back claimed to have walked through the marshes all the way from Zoyland. All were headed for Buckland Manor.

  The mule limped on its left leg when descending, Ben noticed. It switched to the right for the climbs. His stomach churned as he strained to make conversation with the silent boy. Then, near the top of a rise, Ben clutched his midriff, hurried to the side of the road and scuttled down into the ditch.

  Josh halted the piebald then glanced at the boy. By daylight his haircut didn't look so neat. More like he had been attacked. From the ditch, an effortful grunt reached his ears. The smell of Ben's success wafted up.

  ‘We'll reach the Manor tomorrow,’ Josh told the boy. ‘Old Holy paid your way that far. After that it's down to you. Pouncey's not what you'd call the soft-hearted kind.’ The boy seemed not to hear so Josh drew nearer. ‘I can't feed you, lad. If that's what you're thinking. It's hard enough feeding the horses.’

  In the ditch, Ben grunted again. Josh followed the boy's gaze across the hedges and fields.

  ‘I know you can talk,’ the grey-haired man said. ‘You talk in your sleep.’

  A flicker of expression passed across the boy's dark face.

  ‘Spiced wine you were jabbering about,’ Josh said. ‘When'd you ever drink that?’

  The boy only pulled the grimy blue coat tighter. Josh shook his head. His stubbornness would land him in the Carrboro Poorhouse, he thought. Not that he cared. The world was full of rag-headed urchins. If he didn't want to talk, that was his lookout. The boy was nothing to him, he told himself. Nothing at all.

  ‘You keep your counsel then, John Sandall,’ Josh said finally. But as he bent to tighten the piebald's belly-strap, a voice sounded behind him.

  ‘John Sandall's not my name.’

  Dry leaves and catkins rustled beneath their feet. The ancient trees wrapped John and his mother in shade. High above, a pigeon clattered. John looked up into the chestnuts’ crowns. The great trunks grew thicker the deeper they moved into Buccla's Wood then split into copses with younger trees surrounding massive gnarled trunks. As John walked among them he saw that they formed an avenue.

  He looked up at his mother but she strode forward as if nothing were amiss. Clearings opened on either side. Familiar smells drifted in the air: fennel, skirrets and alexanders, then wild garlic, radishes and broom. John looked about while his mother tramped ahead. Then a new scent rose from the wild harvest, strong in John's nostrils. He had smelt it the night the villagers had driven them up the slope. Now, as his mother pushed through a screen of undergrowth, he saw its origin.

  Ranks of fruit trees rose before him, their trunks shaggy with lichen, their branches decked with pink and white blossom. John and his mother walked forward into an orchard. Soon apple trees surrounded them, the sweet scent heavy in the air. Pears succeeded them, then cherries, then apples again. But surely the blossom was too late, John thought. Only the trees’ arrangement was familiar for the trunks were planted in diamonds, five to a side. He knew it from the book.

  The heavy volume bumped against his mother's leg. He gave her a curious look but she seemed unsurprised by the orchards. As the scent of blossom faded, another teased his nostrils, remembered from the same night. Lilies and pitch. Looking ahead, John saw only a stand of chestnuts overwhelmed by ivy, the glossy leaves blurring the trunks and boughs into a screen. Then he looked up.

  Above the tops of the trees, a narrow stone tower rose into the air. John gripped his mother by the arm.

  ‘Look, Ma.’

  The top pointed up like a jagged finger. The tower's sides were riven with cracks. But his mother merely nodded and pulled aside the curtain of ivy. John looked through an archway of crumbling stone to an overgrown courtyard.

  Heavy stone slabs reared from the floor. Rough blocks lay where they had fallen. Walls smothered by ivy and creepers enclosed the long rectangle of a roofless hall. The tower was a chimney, he realised. Below, the hearth grinned a toothless welcome. Suddenly John knew where he was. He had seen this place a dozen times, growing grander with every page. He turned to his mother.

  ‘This was Buccla's palace.’

  She shook her head. ‘I told you before. There was no Buccla.’

  ‘But the witch . . .’

  ‘There was no witch.’

  He looked at her in exasperation. But before he could frame his retort, his mother spoke again.

  ‘She was called Bellicca,’ she said. ‘She came here when the Romans went home. She grew every green thing. It was she who brought the Feast to the Vale. Until Saint Clodock swore his oath and marched up here with his axe and torch.’

  ‘So it was true . . . ‘

  She looked
down at John.

  ‘It wasn't his true name. That was Coldcloak, just like Tom Hob said. Shelter of the Forest, that means. He came up here every year for Bellicca's Feast. He sat with her among her people. They were lovers, some say. But then he swore an oath to the priests of Zoyland. He came and chopped her tables to kindling. He stole the fire from that hearth. He tore up her gardens and fled . . .’

  ‘Fled where?’ John asked.

  ‘Who knows?’ his mother said with a shrug. ‘He disappeared down the Vale.’

  John thought of the bare patches on the green. ‘But he cried for her.’

  ‘What if he did? He betrayed her. The priests cursed Bellicca and condemned her for a witch. They took the Vale for Christ, and themselves. The people here forgot Saturnus. All but a few. Bellicca and her people were driven out of the Vale, all the way into these woods.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ asked John.

  ‘They're still here.’

  John stared, baffled, then looked around the ruins as if Bellicca's people might swing down out of the trees. ‘Where?’

  A faint smile passed across his mother's face. ‘First they hid in these woods,’ she said. ‘They ground up chestnuts for their bread. They took apples from the orchards. They kept the Feast as best they could. Later they remembered Saturnus a different way. They still do.’

  John's eyes scanned the cracked walls, the hearth, the thick undergrowth beyond. Were Saturnus's people watching them now? But as he stared, his mother chuckled.

  ‘They took his name,’ she told him. ‘Saturnall.’ She looked around the broken walls. ‘That is our name, John. This was our home.’

  The bag held a tinder box, his mother's cloak, a short-bladed knife, a cup and the book. They slept wrapped in the cloak, huddled together for warmth in the hearth. They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose.

  ‘That was called silphium.’ His mother stood behind him. ‘It grew in Saturnus's first garden.’

  She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone.

  Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Bellicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds’ eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries. But each morning was colder. Each day, John had to venture further. Each night, he and his mother lay down with aching bellies.

  When the first frost came, the ground froze. John's mother huddled and coughed in the corner of the hearth beside their flickering fire. Each morning John broke the ice in the trough with the cup. His damp clothes clung to his skin until the cold and fatigue melded to become one sensation.

  The roads would reopen in spring, he told himself. He and his mother would go to Carrboro or Soughton. But returning one day he found her crouching outside the hearth, hunched like a beast over its prey, the ground before her spattered with blood. Staring down at the bright red flecks, he felt a new kind of cold, as if he were freezing from the inside.

  ‘What will we do?’ he asked her that night. In answer, once again, she took out the book. The volume shook as she struggled to lift it.

  ‘I promised to teach you,’ she said.

  ‘You said we belonged here,’ he reminded her.

  ‘And we do.

  He watched her open the book. Once again he looked down at the goblet filled with words, the three scripts written over each other. His mother's fingers brushed the vines that curled about the cup.

  ‘This was the first garden,’ she said.

  ‘That was Eden,’ John told her.

  ‘They called it that later.’ She tapped the page. ‘In the beginning every green thing grew here. Every creature thrived. The first men and women lived in amity together. They knew no hunger or pain. Saturnus's people kept the Feast.’

  The other gardens, remembered John. Saturnus's long-dead people in their long-gone garden. But where was their own feast? His and his mother's?

  ‘But their enemies came,’ his mother continued. ‘They worshipped a different god. A jealous god. His priests called him Jehovah. They condemned Saturnus as a false idol who had led his people into sin. Their amity was lust, the priests said. Their ease was sloth. The Feast was greed.’

  He watched her hands, red from the cold, follow the lines of faded ink as if she could discern the alien words through her fingertips.

  ‘This life was meant as a trial, Jehovah's priests claimed. In this world, men toiled in the fields for their bread. Women brought forth their children in pain and the strong had dominion over the weak. Only in Jehovah's kingdom would their tribulations end and only Jehovah's priests could guide them there because that place lay beyond death. So the priests told their people. But Saturnus's people knew different. They needed no priests, or guides. They knew there was no kingdom beyond death. Their heaven was here.’

  ‘The garden,’ said John, shifting on the cold hard ground.

  ‘Yes,’ his mother answered. ‘And Jehovah's priests knew it too, and knowing it kindled a terrible anger in them. So they tore up the garden. They told their people that Jehovah had expelled them all for Eve's sin. Saturnus's people were scattered.’

  John frowned. ‘But Bellicca brought the garden here. She brought the Feast. How?’

  ‘They wrote it down, those first men and women.’ His mother laid her palm fiat on the book. ‘In here. And those that came after them wrote it anew, generation upon generation. They hid their garden in the Feast. Every green thing that grew. Every creature that thrived. They all had their place at Saturnus's Table.’

  The fire glowed red between them. The broken walls and the heavy crowns of the trees loomed behind. Thin wisps of smoke rose from the embers and up the chimney. John watched his mother's fingers brush the trunks of the great palms with their bunches of dates. From the branches hung hives flowing with honey. Below, crocuses studded the ground. Then her fingers traced the strange symbols in the goblet and she began to recite.

  "Date ‘Palms grew in the First Garden. Bees filled the Combs in the Hives and Crocuses offered their Saffron. Let the first Dish be great enough for All to dip their Cups. Let the Feast begin with Spiced Wine . . .‘

  As she worked her way down the cup, John felt his demon creep forward. A new warmth crept through his limbs, not the anger he had felt at the villagers but a gentler heat as if the warm wine were filling his belly, soothing the scorching coal with its balm. The heady fumes wafted in his nostrils. The liquor steamed in its imagined urn, as vivid to John as if he had dipped his own cup beneath the glossy surface. This was what she had waited to teach him, he thought. This was why he had spent the long hours hunched over the book. As his hunger abated, so did his anger. The Feast was theirs, he thought. It would always be theirs. As his mother spoke, a strange contentment stole over him.

  The second Garden was planted in the Air. Saturnus fattened Larks and Herns in the Treetops. ‘Plovers and sharp-billed Snipes swayed on the high Boughs . .All the Fowls increased in their Nests . . .’

  The villagers had chanted of blackbirds and pigeons, John remembered. Chicken-feet for candies, the women had said in the hut. Now strange birds fluttered up from treetops. Each garden yielded a surpassing dish. His stomach rumbled and growled. But beneath his hunger lay a new understanding, as if the dishes of Saturnus's Feast had always been waiting for them up here.

  Tha
t night his mother's coughing seemed to abate. Even her shivering calmed. John slept soundly in the hearth.

  After that, his mother took up the book every night. The third garden was the river where fishes jumped in and out of the water. The fourth was the sea with its scuttling crabs, then came the orchards. The ‘cottage’ he had spied grew with each appearance, becoming a great house then a palace with a towering chimney. By day, John's stomach ached as before. But when darkness fell, Saturnus's Feast filled Bellicca's ruined hall. Night after night the fruits of the old god's gardens entered on a procession of platters until John could lean back against the hearth's ancient stones, close his eyes and recite the words with his mother. When he asked his mother how she could voice the alien symbols, her expression darkened.

  ‘A clever man told me their meaning,’ she said shortly. ‘A man who could speak any tongue under the sun.’

  Couldn't tell the truth in any of them, John remembered. He leaned forward to ask more but at that moment his mother's cough returned. He bit his tongue.

  As the winter deepened, she tired more quickly. Her arms sank under the weight of the volume. At last John took it from her hands and began to recite the words of the dishes himself. He saw his mother sink back gratefully against the wall of the hearth. His voice was enough to feed her, she said. When he spoke, she felt no hunger or cold. Every night, he ventured deeper into the book and its gardens. Every night the dishes of the Feast multiplied and his mother smiled as if she could taste the rich flavours and feel the warmth of the fires.

  They made the chestnut bread. Loaves of Paradise, his mother called the charred twists of paste. Bellicca's people had fed themselves the same way. Saturnus's people had always lived in the Feast, she told him. Now she and John would do the same.

  Of course they would, John thought as he foraged for scraps among the bare branches. The Feast was theirs. He scooped up the last wizened chestnuts from the frozen ground and searched the orchards for fruit. Each night, after he read, he pressed himself against his mother for warmth and felt her shiver through the hours of darkness until dawn came. Then it was time to forage again.