To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  Sweetmouth lifted the cloth of Hornstrake’s eyes and showed him the apples. ‘These are all your qualm,’ he said.

  Hornstrake squinted at the apples. ‘How did they come there?’ he asked.

  ‘Sweetmouth put them there while you snored,’ said Mad.

  ‘A sheep turd has more wit than this dote,’ said Sweetmouth.

  Hornstrake gazed at the apples. He made to cut Sweetmouth with his bloodletting blade, but his fellows were too quick and held him, and when he was held fast, his sinews slackened, and he began to laugh as a donkey.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF Sweetmouth’s ridicule afflicted his victim more severely than they did Sweetmouth. As extensive as the chaos was, the sense of relief experienced when it was confirmed the signs of pestilence were false was sufficiently intense to neutralise what resentment persisted. Rather than attempting to extract compensation from Sweetmouth, the hostelry’s residents purged the memory of their credulity by uniting in derision of the idiot who failed to discriminate between an apple and a plague-tumour.

  It was partly to secure refuge from these insults that Hornstrake came to me, and partly to initiate confession. Until this moment I have detected among the archers an absence of the potent terror of the pestilence that motivated the fraternity of Malmesbury. With the exception of Longfreke, my military companions considered the menace exaggerated, or false, a clerical concoction, or, like Hayne, had a fatalistic perspective on an imminent and inevitable apocalypse. Hornstrake was the prime exemplar of one urged to penitence by apprehension of the probability of rapid, unexpected mortality, an apprehension conceived at the time of Dickle’s accident, and reinforced by Sweetmouth’s joke.

  Impressing on him the need for seclusion, I conducted him to the culinary area of the hostelry, where they were preparing the furnaces to cook crustula. We stood in proximity to the flames.

  Hornstrake inquired if he should genuflect before me.

  It was not necessary, I replied.

  Hornstrake said he would make peace with God, confess his sins, do penance and be absolved.

  I advised him that Holiday must soon revene with an actual priest, and he might request absolution of him, for I had no sacramental powers. I simply offered an audience, a minor form of inquisition, an assessment of the sincerity of his penitence and the suggestion of some penitential acts.

  Hornstrake inquired as to the price.

  The transaction had no monetary element, I said.

  This caused Hornstrake to doubt. A service could not be of use if the vendor offered it at no expense, he said.

  I told him I required a graver price than money.

  Procrastinating, Hornstrake exhibited a sphericule suspended from his collar. He had protection against qualm, he said. They had attempted to vend him numerous parts of porcine anatomy in simulation of sacred relics, saints’ digits, portions of the tibia of the martyrs, dental extractions of the major ecclesiastics, but he had rejected their frauds and blasphemies, and extended his entire pecuniary provision on a sphere containing the very exhalations of Christ upon the cross. And, in his terror, he had nearly confractured it.

  I expressed relief that Christ’s final respirations remained secure.

  He inquired if it were very solid that I had perfect Latin and resided in Avignon, and, on my responding in the affirmative, inquired whether I had personal acquaintance with the Pope.

  I told him there had been an extremely brief colloquium between His Sanctity and myself at one of His Sanctity’s convivial events.

  Hornstrake inquired as to his character.

  His Sanctity Pope Clement VI, I said, desired that his terrestrial environs be as splendid as their prospective counterparts in heaven.

  This appeared to satisfy Hornstrake, and he requested that we commence.

  I said that in the circumstances I would confine myself to mortal sins. He need only confess to sacrilege, homicide, adultery, fornication, false testimony, rapine, theft, pride, envy and avarice.

  There was silence. Hornstrake inquired if I had finished, as he had expected there to be at least one sin he had not committed.

  I gestured to the furnace. Did he, I said, sense the fervour of the flames? Would he press his palm against the incandescent surface to experience the sensation? I did not opt, I said, to compel a confession by reminding him of the alternative, but eternity was of a very long duration.

  Hornstrake began to effuse a litany of blasphemies and felonies from his youth. He had appropriated a candle from Gloucester cathedral while inebriated, and, while he and his married aunt were similarly intoxicated, they had contrived oral contact with each other’s genitalia. A companion had perished several days after a tavern conflict in which he had been involved, although he could not be certain his had been the fatal blow. He had consorted with prostitutes. He and another person had attempted to separate a merchant from his property, but they had been apprehended. He envied Holiday his sartorial talent and his literacy.

  I interrupted and instructed him not to focus on misdemeanours when major crimes went unconfessed. Record must be made, I said, of his actions in France.

  Hornstrake protested. The archers’ commanders, and such clerics as accompanied the English military in France, had promised them that their cause was just, God approved their invasion, and acts committed by the archers in the course of the war that would normally be considered homicide, or arson, or robbery, were sanctified; those who exterminated the maximum number of French, and caused the maximum destruction to their property, were to have the sins on their conscience not increased, but remitted.

  Had his superiors, on divine authority, commanded him to kill Cess’s father and to violate and abduct her? I inquired.

  Hornstrake moved away from the furnace and curved his spine in abnegation. He was ignorant of such matters, he said. He had not injured Cess’s father, he said, nor abducted Cess; she was Softly’s. As for rape, he was the most minor archer, and had not desired to fornicate with Cess.

  I instructed Hornstrake to give an exact account of what had happened. Having received my assurances that I would protect him from the vindictiveness of Softly by the absolute confidentiality of his testimony, he proceeded.

  HAYNE’S ARCHERS, HE said, were part of a cohort assigned to cause destruction in Mantes, some days prior to the confrontation at Crécy between the French and English crowns. The labour, primarily incendiary in nature, was retarded by the city’s lapidary construction, by inter-military discord on the part of the English, and by the French merchants, who positioned containers of wine on the perimeters of their property in the often-realised expectation that the crapulous English would intoxicate themselves till they were incapable of doing further damage.

  At noon, Softly, Dickle, Holiday and Hornstrake were combusting a textile emporium when Sweetmouth passed by. Sweetmouth reported to them that he was in quest of Hayne, and had been reluctantly obliged to quit the vicinity of a young French virgin whom he had observed through a fissure in the portal of a sculptor’s court. She was, he said, desirable and decorous, and he intended to return to Mantes post-war, for she was such as he required.

  Holiday requested the location of the sculptor’s domicile, and Sweetmouth told them, but as he spoke, dolour transformed his face, and when they departed, he clamoured that they not abuse his candour.

  The four archers located the structure and forced entry into the court. Attempting to defend his family and property the sculptor sustained from Dickle a fatal abdominal injury. The archers entered the sculptor’s domicile, extracted Cess, closed the residue of her family inside, and proceeded to violate her in sequence on a mass of marble on which her father had sculpted the preliminary designs for a magnate’s sephulchre.

  Cess resisted and anathemised the archers with French maledictions until they restricted her arms with cords and obstructed her mouth. Softly was the initiator, then Holiday, and Dickle was to have been next, but in proximity to the injured woman, sanguinary and suffering c
ontusions, Dickle experienced a defect of fortitude, became lacrimose, and exited. Softly and Hornstrake discovered him behind an image of St Agatha, so terrified he had urinated inside his own vestments. Dickle could not endure the vision of a female’s private parts, he told them, it provoked in him a sense of incompleteness.

  They revened to the court, where Holiday had concluded his violation of Cess, and Hornstrake was to be the third to rape her. He exposed his member and positioned himself between her legs, but was incapable of performing the actions, partly, he said, out of pity for Cess, who was practically insensible and presenting obvious injuries, partly out of horror of the transformation of Dickle, whom he had known up to that point as an individual unacquainted with terror, and partly out of uncertainty, as he was unmarried and unpopular with females, and had previously coupled solely with prostitutes, whom he had generally found cooperative and amicable.

  In a state of conturbation out of anxiety that he act incorrectly in front of his companions, Hornstrake decided to simulate intercourse, but it was not necessary, for Softly apprehended his collar, retracted him and declared that Cess was not theirs to use, because he was accepting her as his trophy. He said he would abduct her, and that he would not permit any man to converse with her, or to report even the most minor aspect of events at the sculptor’s, on pain of extermination. There was a cart and a horse, which they took, and deposited Cess in it, and exited the area.

  Hornstrake ceased. It was necessary for me to prompt him to account for subsequent events, which he did not consider relevant. Softly had tended to Cess, but had castigated her violently on the many occasions she attempted escape, communicated with potential accessories to her liberation, or refused to submit to his authority. As her original injuries were cured, new injuries appeared on her face, until the archers revened to England, and she abandoned fugitive notions.

  The abduction of Cess caused a schism in Hayne’s company. Some relinquished their affiliation. Sweetmouth and Mad condemned Softly, but not to his face. Only Longfreke declared to Softly explicitly that he must liberate Cess, and there would have been actual conflict between them, conflict that would undoubtedly have proved mortal, had Hayne not intervened, saying the privilege of superior powers to judge the rapists might not be usurped.

  Subsequently, said Hornstrake, Softly proposed marriage to Cess, and she rejected him, and this partially removed the hostility between the two elements among the archers. Ultimately she was French, an enemy, female and plebeian, and they had not injured her permanently. Even supposing his companions had sinned mortally, he said, he, Hornstrake, was not responsible for the extermination of the father, or Cess’s abduction; he had not even fornicated with her. How stood his case, he inquired?

  Despite my non-clerical status, I replied, as proctor I was intimately acquainted with the ecclesiastical justice system, and I assumed divine justice operated in a similar manner. On that basis, I concluded, he was damned to demonic torment for eternity.

  His mouth became an extended pescatory aperture. He implored me to advise him how he might achieve salvation.

  I was not convinced, I said, that he felt genuine pity for Cess. If he had, why had he mounted her, when she had already been raped by two of his companions? Where was his compassion? Was he incapable of imagining the suffering of Christ on the cross?

  With a mendacity so flagrant it provoked a certain tenderness in me, Hornstrake said he imagined it frequently.

  Why then, I inquired, could he not imagine the suffering of a woman powerless to resist the soldiers who raped her, the sanctity of her person violated in proximity to the corpse of her father, a victim of homicide from the same soldiers?

  He failed to comprehend the comparison.

  Those who tormented and executed the martyrs, I said. Hornstrake was directly comparable.

  She could not be a saint, said Hornstrake, because God did not come to her aid, and could not be a martyr, for she was not dead.

  I said the simplest course of action for Hornstrake would be to place himself in a furnace there and then, as it would merely accelerate the process by a fraction. But if he desired to demonstrate genuine penitence in the audit of God, I would advise two actions. Primo, that he destroy the most precious of his possessions.

  I was not required to press the point, as his hand closed instantly around the sphericule at his collar.

  He did not want to concede it, I said; he would suffer if he were deprived of it. So, in the most minor way imaginable, would Cess’s experience be reflected in his spirit.

  Hornstrake said indignantly that I had promised to act for him without an honorarium.

  I did not intend to confiscate his relic, I said, but to observe him destroy it, as Softly had not purloined Cess’s virginity for his own use, but obliterated it.

  Hornstrake said that without his relic he’d be undefended from the pest.

  With it, I said, he would be undefended from damnation.

  He removed it from his collar and projected it into the furnace, where it was immediately consumed.

  I congratulated him, and informed him that he must now perform the second, more difficult action. He must egress to the court of the hostelry, go to the cart, genuflect to Cess, express his sincere contrition for his action in Mantes and plead for her pardon.

  Hornstrake said Softly would exterminate him if he did. He requested that he might rather make a vow of abstinence, or renounce meat, or repeat the Ave Maria, or dedicate a multitude of candles, because it was God’s pardon he required, not Cess’s.

  He had no option, I said. Only Cess’s pardon might magnify his voice sufficiently for God to notice him and extract him from the channel of the damned flowing towards the inferno. Dickle was in his final mortal hour, I said, and I was required there; Softly and the other archers would be with him, and no one would observe Hornstrake if he visited Cess in the cart.

  Judith, Marc, in my attempt to apologise and confess honestly my errors, I have probably offended you de novo. How might these notes affect you if only one of you has survived? Possibly it were preferable for me to destroy all these manuscripts. Or possibly it is incitement to immerse myself in a more profound state of honesty.

  THE ARCHERS GATHERED in the room where Dickle lay. They bode on Holiday, who must come with the priest, but he’d been gone a long time.

  Dickle’s breath was weak and his forehead cool. Softly sat by his bed, lifted his head and brought a can of ale to his mouth. Dickle ne opened his eyes and his lips ne showed no token of life. Each archer had some kind of light in his gear, and they lit them, and it became so bright there weren’t no shadows in the room, out-take Hayne, who reared over them all, like to a post that underset the roof. Mad sang the Latin song the monks had learned him.

  ‘Dickle’s dad did his mum in when he found out she’d fallen into spousebreach with a fishmonger,’ whispered Sweetmouth to Will. ‘And the dad took his own life, and Dickle was raised in Bristol by his uncle, and fought four stepbrothers for every scrap of food.’

  ‘Tell Player how bold and keen a fighter he is,’ said Softly to Sweetmouth. ‘It was he dragged Longfreke of the field when he’d been struck in the neb by a dead man’s sword and lay witless and blooded on the ground.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Longfreke. ‘I thank him for it. All the same I fear for our brother’s soul if the priest ne come.’

  ‘Dickle Dene’s a better man than any of you,’ said Softly. ‘He’ll wake in the morning and not see no priest till he’s ready, when his life’s near to done.’

  ‘His life is near to done,’ said Hayne.

  ‘Is there aught Hayne ne knows?’ said Softly. ‘Where’s your false priest, Thomas?’

  Thomas had come in unmarked. He said: ‘If this man is near death, and there’s no priest, I may hear his sins.’

  Softly said Dickle slept deeply, and mightn’t speak.

  Thomas came up to the bed, knelt beside it, turned his head and set his ear by Dickle’s mouth.
‘He ne sleeps,’ he said. ‘There’s a little voice in him may yet find a way through the dark to one with sleight of ear to listen. Dickle! Dickle Dene! Will you list your guilts to Thomas proctor, that God might hear, and know you’re truly sorry for the wrongs you’ve done?’

  Thomas seemed to listen, then lifted his head and spoke to the other archers. ‘He says he will.’

  Softly shoff Thomas aside. He shook Dickle by the shoulder, spoke in his face and told him to wake, for his brother archers were false, and they’d blacken his soul in the name of making it clean. He listened at Dickle’s lips and said the man slept and mightn’t speak.

  ‘Let Thomas work,’ said Longfreke. ‘Dickle’s near to forthfare, and there’s none else to handle a soul on the wend.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what he says,’ said Thomas, ‘and if you hear me say things I couldn’t know otherwise, it’ll be shown I’m no liar.’

  Softly beheld Thomas like to he would slay him, but stood aside. Thomas brought his ear to Dickle’s mouth again.

  ‘I listen, brother,’ said Thomas. ‘Good. He says all his life he’s been a wrathful man, and been vexed from childhood by demons that egged him to fight those who would be his friends as eagerly as he fought his foes. All those who’ve wronged him he now forgives, and begs forgiveness of those he’s wronged.’

  The archers yeahed, out-take Softly, who said it wasn’t Dickle’s voice they heard, but Thomas’s.

  ‘He says he hasn’t no more to say.’

  Softly laughed and struck the air with his fist and said that was the Dickle Dene he knew.

  Thomas’s steven roughened and rose. ‘Ne withhold your sins,’ he said.

  ‘“I’ll withhold as it me likes, son of a bitch, and set my ghost on you of the other side.”’

  ‘But your ghost will be bound in hell for ever, Dickle, if you ne sorrow for the worst you’ve done in life. You’ll be meat for the Fiend.’