by James Meek
The other young men hooted and whistled and laughed. The penman set his chin on his hands and stared at the bowmen. Maestro Pavone came out from behind the board and nighed them. He ne unknit his arms, but stuck out his lower lip and stood so near they could smell a winly stink of seeds of heaven and spring blossoms of his smooth skin. He came up to Sweetmouth, so near their noses almost felt each other.
‘You’d be a player, would you?’ he said. ‘Stick out your tongue.’
Sweetmouth did as he was told.
‘Wag it up and down. Side to side. You have a grand tongue.’ He shuddered. ‘It is very horrible.’
Sweetmouth said he ne knew what horrible meant.
‘Horrible is what us needs,’ said Pavone. He lifted his steven and showed his teeth. ‘When you see a belle demoiselle all you do is speak evil of her.’
Sweetmouth said it wasn’t true.
‘You ne know aught of truth, Evil Tongue,’ said Pavone. He wrathed and darkened. ‘The first thing you think of when you see a woman is how to blacken her name in the minds of others. They knew what they were about when they set you to guard the Rose. Lying wretch! She mayn’t take a little sun on her cheek without that you spread a tale of how she and the sun be lovers. You mayn’t love, and mayn’t bear that others love, and so you use your tongue to foul all that’s fair and true. No more!’
With a shout, he drew his knife and dashed it over Sweetmouth’s mouth, and with his other hand snatched at a deal of flesh between Sweetmouth’s lips. Red ran down between his fingers and he lowered his blade and held up Sweetmouth’s sundered tongue for all to see.
The young men laughed and clapped their hands together. Sweetmouth’s mouth hung open, his jaw slack.
‘May you speak?’ said Pavone.
Sweetmouth said slowly and weakly that it had seemed to him he felt the smart as his tongue was shift of its root, yet it was still there.
‘The knife is true enough, but it ne touched you,’ said Pavone. ‘The red’s a cloth of Italy we use. It runs of the hand like to the fall of blood. Here’s your tongue, a piece of old leather. When you play the part tomorrow, you’ll have it in your mouth.’
He came to Mad, and nipped his black curls between his fingers.
‘Who do you think you may be?’ he said.
Mad said Pavone should tell him who he might be, and he would tell him if he were right.
‘Me thinks you might be the God of Love,’ said Pavone.
Mad said maybe he was the God of Love, but how could he be sikur?
‘You’d have wings like to an angel,’ said Pavone. ‘But we may lend you some if you lack them.’
‘I’ll borrow,’ said Mad. ‘I left my wings at home in Merioneth.’
‘You’d be able to shoot five arrows at a big much heart, and not miss once.’
‘I may do that, be the heart right much.’
‘And there’d be in you some lore, that those who watched you might know without words, for yours is not a speaking part.’
Mad began to sing a song without words. It was sweet and sad.
‘Who learned you that?’ asked Pavone.
‘Queen Gwenhwyvar,’ said Mad.
Pavone laughed. ‘I knew you from the start,’ he said. ‘You may play the God of Love. But ne speak of queens here.’
Pavone came to Will. He stared in his eyes, and Will stared back, until Pavone turned to Laurence. ‘This one comes with a mask already on,’ he said. ‘Where’d you find him?’
‘He’s new,’ said Laurence. ‘He was a ploughman till three days ago.’
‘And tomorrow he will be Venus. Who only shoots two arrows, but they must not miss their mark. Your arrows ne miss, do they, Venus?’
‘Answer,’ said Laurence.
‘My arrows ne miss,’ said Will.
‘Laurence Haket,’ said Pavone. ‘The Lover.’
Laurence mirthed and the other young high-born men looked sick.
Pavone turned to them. ‘You – Wealth, you – Idleness, you – Youth. You the Lover’s Friend, you Simplicity – but for Christ’s love, wipe that rouge of your cheek. You three may be Delight, Joy and Gaiety, if you learn to less resemble mourners at a burial.’
‘I’m pricked to play Humility, but the part’s too small,’ said one of the young men.
‘Such parts as Venus and the God of Love shouldn’t be played by common soldiers,’ said another.
‘Who are you?’
‘Noble Heart, you said.’
Sweetmouth said he had an ask: might they, as players, go hop to the pipes on the green?
‘Listen. Between you, the common soldiers, and you, the nobles, lies a cleft unbridgeable,’ said Pavone. ‘You soldiers are of the dirt and the dung-heap, you live of one day to the next and aren’t worth no more than the bread and ale you’re fed with. You haven’t no wit but what you need to drive a plough and shoot an arrow and that which goads you to breed, eat, get drunk, beat each other and find a warm stead to sleep. And you, nobles, who are so much higher, all you have is dreams and clean fingernails and bitterness that the money you got of your fathers is never enough to cover the promises you got of your mothers. Here you are, yearning to go out of your kind, to step through the golden curtain into the estate of play, where anyone may be another and all may speak to anyone. Men, I ask that when you’re in my domain, you set your ranks aside.’
‘Maestro,’ said the penman.
‘Here,’ said Pavone to Sweetmouth, ‘we ne hop. Toads hop.’ He set himself down on his hams, puffed out his cheeks and hopped like a toad. He stood. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘we dance.’ He went up to Will and set the flat of his open right hand against the flat of Will’s open right hand, while he looked into Will’s eyes. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and began to step and turn his hips from side to side. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘there is no hopping, and Maestro Pavone will dance with Venus.’
I SPENT SOME hours in Westbury attempting to establish the nature of the emergency that had closed the road to Dorset. I could not decide whether the ignorance of the inhabitants was sincere or pretend. They responded to my inquiries with gestures. They extended their arms, they agitated their hands, as if it were a mystery that could not be solved, and did not require to be. The flow of people in the direction of Edington ceased. Westbury was tranquil. I observed individuals congregate in twos and threes in tenebrous spaces, murmuring anxiously, or standing motionless after one had spoken with particular intensity, the one ruminating, the other observing him ruminate, each uncertain how to proceed, each expecting the other to provide guidance, or to explain how his proposition was ridiculous.
Noon came and went without the arrival of Hayne, Softly et al. I sat in the court of the hostelry and subjected Longfreke to my company. While he considers himself subordinate to Hayne, he is conscious of the giant’s defects – his unpredictability, his unresponsiveness to questions, his reliance on force and majesty as a substitute for persuasion. Longfreke is, in his own estimation, a translator of Hayne’s commands into terms comprehensible to the simple Englishmen of the score.
Yet none of the archers can be characterised as simple Englishmen except Longfreke himself, the sole member of the fractured company who preserves the notion of common purpose. His credo is that the tension caused by Cess’s rape and abduction, the hermeticism of Hayne, the malignity of Softly, the tendencies in Will, Sweetmouth and Mad in the direction of Pan and Venus as opposed to Mars – all these are distractions from the company’s unalterable military function, rather than that the military function is a remnant of former ideas, as it appears to me.
His injury, it emerged, occurred at Crécy, in the nocturnal, post-combat moments when the archers had descended furtively among the cadavers of the French in quest of spoils. Longfreke was at the remote margin of that sanguinary area, where the futile clamour for mercy of the not-yet-expired French and the rude response of the plunderers was muted.
THE MOON NAD risen, said Longfreke, and there’d been not but sta
rs and the light of the faraway on-blaze mill to see by. He walked through a wood and came to what he took in the darkness for a thick stead where two trees had grown together. It seemed to him a thing of steel or silver hung of one of the branches. He reached for it, and saw it was a spur, and then that it was still on a foot, sheathed in iron. What he’d taken for trees was a French knight in armour mounted on his horse. Longfreke ran away, tripped, fell and lay still. He listened. No sound came of the knight.
He stood. The first light of moonrise glew on the knight and his horse. They ne stirred. The horse’s head hung down and the knight, in armour from head to toe, held his bare sword upright in his hand. Longfreke took a step toward him, stinted, and took another step. He came to the horse and felt its neck. Its flesh was cold. Longfreke looked up and whispered to the knight. He spoke again, louder. The knight was as before, frozen. Longfreke stood up and began to walk about the horse.
An arrow was pitched in the knight’s throat, right through the middle, between the scales of his armour. On the same side, the horse had been struck by five arrows, in a line from its shoulder to its behind. Horse and man had died this way, the knight in the saddle, held upright by his armour. Longfreke hadn’t been altogether wrong about the tree: somehow before it died the horse had thrown its forelegs over a bare forked trunk, and this kept it upright, the fork holding its belly, its legs locked stiff.
Longfreke read that he couldn’t bear away all the knight’s goods and thought to pull the dead man of the saddle that he might throughseek his gear to choose the best things. The horse was a long one, and Longfreke short, so he’d grip the knight by his armour’s knee-scales, and pull him down. But when he did this, and hung on the knight with all his weight, he couldn’t shift him. He went to the knight’s left side, away from the arrows, and pulled at the knight from there. It seemed to him the knight stirred a little. Longfreke took firmer hold of the knight’s knee armour, leapt up and planted his feet against the side of the horse.
Horse and rider leaned and fell. Longfreke let go and hit the ground a short while before the knight. He took the blow of the edge of the dead knight’s sword in the middle of his face, thrust deeper by the weight of the horse. He lay witless and bleeding till Dickle found him and bore him back to the English.
It seemed the knight’s knaves hadn’t sharpened the sword as keenly as they might, said Longfreke. The blade hadn’t broken the bones of his head, only hacked it a little and cloven his nose. A doctor sewed the two halves of his neb together with catgut, like a seaman righting a sail, and bade him wash the cleft with watered wine and bind it with fresh linen once a day. In six month he was heal, but no saint would give him back his fair face, and his betrothed left him for another man.
‘Your even-bowmen stood by you,’ said Thomas.
Dickle had, said Longfreke. Folk spoke ill of him, and he’d done wicked deeds, but it hadn’t been Dickle’s guilt that a much devil got in him. So much a devil that he mightn’t get out by himself and had to beg the Fiend to send a goat to open the way.
‘Is that what betid?’ asked Thomas.
Thomas had seen it with his own eyes, said Longfreke. Dickle had been great with one of the Fiend’s kind, that made him seek to fight any man he met. Why else would Dickle have got himself nailed up like to the Lord of Life, and have a rood inked on his forehead, if ne to halse the evil of his soul?
‘He sought to drive out the devil?’ said Thomas.
Longfreke nodded. Soldiers drew devils to them, he said, for he’d seen many like Dickle.
‘The other bowmen helped you,’ said Thomas.
Then and then, said Longfreke, it seemed to him they only did it for mirth. They’d start to speak to him and when he answered say they ne spoke with Longfreke but with the other half, Frongleke. He had a hundred pence owed him when they landed, and Sweetmouth clipped each one in half, saying Longfreke and Frongleke must have an even share.
‘Men ne like to show their love for their friends,’ said Thomas. ‘They fear to be deemed womanly. They hide their love under rough glee.’
Anywise, said Longfreke without bitterness, his betrothed went to another after she saw him, her ne liked his new face; he understood, for him ne liked it either.
He smiled and said Thomas looked like a priest stood over the shrift stool, hungry for a sinner’s tale.
‘You’re a small sinner, yet I got of you a tale,’ said Thomas.
Were he to seek shrift, said Longfreke, it were for the sin of anger toward Cess.
‘Why are you angry at Cess?’
She forgave Softly, said Longfreke.
‘Me ne thinks she forgives him,’ said Thomas.
When they landed in France, said Longfreke, and the bishops told them theirs was a right war, they hadn’t in mind no slaughter of holy-likeness carvers, nor the reave of maidenhoods, nor the theft of daughtren. What Softly did was wrong and after Mantes he and Longfreke had all but gone knife to knife over Cess. The others said Longfreke wanted the maid for himself, but it wasn’t true, he wanted her to be set free, and ill to befall Softly, to show there was some law. Instead, Softly came again to England heal and rich, and Longfreke lost his face and his wife-to-be.
Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘Why do you say she forgave him?’
She wouldn’t wed him when he asked, said Longfreke, but they lay together each night, she cooked and cleaned for him, like to a wife.
‘She hadn’t no choice,’ said Thomas. ‘Goes she against him, he beats her.’
At Crécy, said Longfreke, she fetched fresh arrows for them without Softly’s bidding. When Noster mightn’t shoot no more she’d asked could they learn her to bend a bow, for she’d shoot at the French too. At the French, her own kind! And in Bristol in May, when Softly had taken up thieving, she’d helped him. The woollens he gave so freely were stolen by her of a ship in Bristol haven.
‘I would speak to her,’ said Thomas.
Softly would kill him if he did, said Longfreke.
ON THEIR ARRIVAGE at the joust, Madlen secured Berna a fine tent with a couch, a wicker table, a screen and a pot. Berna paid for the tent for two nights, for payage into the jousting place for her and her servant, and for bread and milk for their breakfast, lightening her purse sensibly. Madlen would take her gowns to be cleaned immediately, but Berna ordained rest. Madlen lay on the grass on the tent floor, close to the entrance, with her cheek pillowed on her arm. Berna removed the gown she wore, lay on the couch in her underclothes and fell into a sleep profound.
She was woken by the cry of a vendeuse, who sold her a towel, soap and hot water from a barrel on a handcart. Madlen was absent, and the gown Berna had worn had disappeared, but the stolen gown, clean as new, hung of a nail cloyed in the pole that supported the roof of the tent. Berna laced shut the entrance, laved her hair, laved her body and put on fresh linen and the clean gown. She chewed on a grain of paradise while she towelled her hair, combed and plaited it and tied it up with silk. She spat out the chewed grain in the pot, cleaned her teeth, frot her face with cream and touched her throat with pearls of piment. She put her mother’s ring on her finger and her mother’s nouche on the chain around her neck. She put on the poignet of red and white cord they had given her to confirm payage. She regarded her remaining possessions, took Le Roman de la Rose and departed.
At the entrance to her tent she encountered the vendeuse, come again for the basins she had rented her customers.
‘Have you seen my maidservant?’ demanded Berna. ‘A long, dark, meagre girl in a blue gown and white wimple?’
The vendeuse inquired whether the servant was a maid Berna had brought from home or one she’d hired on the road.
‘She’s of my father’s manor, as if it were your business,’ said Berna.
The vendeuse said she had seen a maid creep of the lady’s tent with a gown the very image of the one the lady now wore.
‘Your use of the word “creep” is misplaced,’ said Berna. ‘My servant simply went to have
the gown I’m wearing cleaned, then must have returned with it and taken the other while I slept.’
Every year, said the vendeuse, there were one or two demoiselles ran of their people to a joust, hungry for the wide world. They always came to a bad end.
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Berna.
Murdered, or worse, said the vendeuse, with amiable cheer. Had any of the young lady’s possessions vanished along with the maidservant?
‘Cease your accusations,’ said Berna. ‘Do you have a mirror?’
Would she know how she looked? said the vendeuse.
‘There is one I’d have see me, and regret,’ said Berna.
The vendeuse pointed to her own eyes with two fingers. She’d be Berna’s mirror, she said, and bade Berna listen: with her neb’s skin white as lily out-take the bloom in her cheek, her lips as red as holly berries, her hair like to a raven’s wing and her eyes aglitter like gold of candlelight, all men would look on Berna and regret she wasn’t theirs.
BERNA PASSED BETWEEN the files of tents. Pots of fleabane sent up coils of milky smoke and there was a scent of crushed grass and roast trout. Groups of young men and women in bright chargeous clothes sat in circles on cushions and blankets. They drank from bottles and ate from baskets, laughed and sang and listened to poetry. Gittern strings were plucked and reeds made to pipe, but the very music was in the distance, not there. Berna had slept late. The low late sun gave all skin a clean copper colour. Tall, pure white clouds presented in the sky like an excess of geese pressed in nets. The air was warm and moist enough to feel its touch.
She tailed four people of her age, two demoiselles and two gentlemen, who emerged from a tent in front of her and went in the direction of the music. The men were in parti-coloured hose of white and scarlet and plain white tunics and the women abled in simple red and blue gowns with tight sleeves. Their necks and the tops of their shoulders were bare and the liripipes of their dainty hoods were wound around their heads. They moved quickly, half running, the women raising their gowns of the ground, all of them talking and laughing at the same time.
