To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  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 gest
us 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 repeat
ed 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.