by Adam Thorpe
Lo, how wonderingly I looked upon the great and unfathomable depths of the upper sea, its waters sprinkled with the lights of sea-monsters, and the moon floating as doth a wooden painted platter upon a lake. These monsters are yet so afar that their great lamps appear to us like pin-pricks in a black drape (as some men foolishly insist they truly be); and probable it is that they resemble the whale that swallowed Jonah, with glowing eyes. We do not know on what they feed, nor why they swim in the same direction, so that sometimes a shoal is clustered close into a constellation, while another is sparse and lonely-seeming. If one stays gazing long enough, the shoals increase, and one begins to descry in the thickening glitter ever fainter stars, that are really monsters of the same great bulk but deeper in the upper sea and thus further from us; and one is overcome by a giddying sense of what is wondermost, which replaces the quizzical searchings of the mind and is much to be preferred, for it is less dangerous.
It is not for man to question too closely mere natural occurrences that are God’s creation and not marvels to Him, let alone miracles, but only ‘a finite power working its own proper effect’, as St Thomas Aquinas termed it. Yet soon I could see huge fins and tails and mouths full of teeth, and looked at Ricchet for comfort, and then at our mules, who were nothing but shadows. Alas, I did not want to go to the felons’ wood for my harp, for I feared being torn limb from limb by those who had been made wolfeshede.46
But then a voice came into my ear and spoke in Latin, the words appearing before my eyes as if the voice bore an inkhorn at its side, writing them out. It ordained me to go and fetch my harp, for by so doing I would set myself upon a path by which I would attain a great name and gain wide renown in the land. If I did not do so, I would die a miserable death in years to come, all ambition quenched. And foolishly I took this to be the voice of God, and not the Arch-fiend’s honeyed hiss.
I rose immediately, setting off for the wood in brother Thomas’s hooded mantle [paenula].47 It being too large, I gathered it up about my legs, stumbling here and there into hidden holes and ditches, the rising of a thin moon and the starlight yielding me a brightness of air sufficient to glimpse my way along that dark-wrapt nomansland. In spite of my hide [pellem]48 that was black as pitch, I started hares into trembling haste, and recked not my rashness, that was the heat of any younghead.
And thus like a weasel I crawled the last distance uphill through short herbiage, and came to the edge of the wood that was like the wall of darkness about the Devil’s abode, and my blood was very fervent and I could feel every vein pulsing, most especially the one that runs up from the heart to the brain; fearing it might burst I prayed silently and felt God the king of glory walking beside me as I slipped through a fringe of birch towards the interior thicket.
Great was my horror when I struck my head against a dangling object, this being the head of a deer hung from a great bough. The sight and stench cast disgust and terror into my heart, for I knew then that this wood was given over to pagans, whose practices and superstitions still lie about the country in embers, ready to blaze at the slightest relaxation of our efforts; believing as they do that demons are gods worthy to make sacrifices to, when they are in truth once-angels too cowardly to take either side in the war between the Lord Our God and Lucifer, and who were thus righteously cast out to skulk in seas, rivers, forests and rocks; taking upon themselves the colours of their various abodes, forever dissimulating in their wild places and lying in wait for the unwary, who know not that one sign of the Cross is sufficient!
I took my knife and, climbing to the bough, sliced through the rope, that the offering fell with a thump, yet no thunder shook the wood, nor furious demi-god assailed me; but only I felt, on that night air, a sudden heat as of a demon’s nostrils close to my face. If I had owned an axe, I might have felled the tree itself, as St Amateur felled the pine long ago.49
Beyond the afflicted oak, stretched a thick-planked hurdle no higher than my chest, for a deep pit or trench lay behind it, that gave vantage to the defenders of the wood, when stood upon an earthen firestep. Yet no one lay on night-watch, and soon the true wood enveloped me as if there were no horizon but forest, and I was astonished by this. I could make little more perceptible to my eyes but a baffling tangle of branches and cold-hued leaves;50 I was like a blind man left in peril by the child that leads him. Yet I struggled on through the desolate thickness of boles and branches and creeper-weft, where no righteous man should be found, for all was waste. And it felt to me that I was making a great noise of rustling and panting, and that the felons should find me soon and draw out my tongue with a hook, to keep me silent after my great impudence.
Tripping over tree-sprigs and lurking roots, the blindness that of a crypt, I more than once found myself stopped by a denseness of hazel brush or thorny matter, such is the pitiable state of nature when it is fallen and not tended by God, as it be tended in the sweet-scented garden of Paradise where all is virtuous and chaste and where, below the low murmur of prayer, through birdsong and the trickle of the fountains, only the laughter of innocent maidens is heard when the angelic choirs’ harmonies draw their breath.
An owl hooted close and I was startled. Then another, further off, its call seeming to echo. I waited a short while, gripping in my left hand the purse containing the lead ampulla and trembling with fear, for owls are portents of death and stare you into submission. And in places I thought I saw more dangling heads of wild beasts or game, but the shadows were shifting and the low moonlight playing its customary tricks that sorcerers and witches do love, so I could not be sure if it were not my eyes feigning. Then a peacock screeched, very horrible as it always sounded to me, for there were peacocks (bearing heads like serpents, yet puffed up with pride in their tails’ extravagant beauty) kept by the lord of the manor, whose lands abutted St Edmmund’s at that time.
O foolish boy! If I had known more about fowls I would have fled from that place, for peacocks do not inhabit wild woods. Yet I continued in my ignorance, thinking to come nearer to the camp, and saw a fitful red glow through the boles and branches amongst which I besought my way as stumblingly as a beetle, well scratched upon my hands and face; this illumination was not dawn, for the sky above was still brilliant with stars. And I hoped it was not Hell’s glow.
Many diverse woodland creatures who live night-wrapt were fearful of my presence, and rustled away unseen in the sodden undergrowth and through fresh-fallen leaves; it seemed wondrous to me that they could make their home in the same wood as the felons. And there were natural hollows and dips into which I stumbled: for the wood, though cloaking a hillock, was like a little country of uneven relief, with its own vales and crags and mountain ranges.
Then an unnatural silence fell upon the place; but it was I who had stopped, in truth, for chancing upon a meagre sylvan trail, I saw it led straight to a clearing, dimly visible in the glow of a banked fire (this being the source of the illumination), as once I spied a myracle51 in a grove, performed by buffoons with much dancing and shrieking.
Then as I crept forward the peacock made its screech again, driving into me as a nail into a board …
Alas, a crucial scene seems to be missing, the scrivener either omitting a section or following the damaged source; at any rate, we jump abruptly in the narrative to a scene in which the protagonist has been seized, and it is already dawn. I take the opportunity of this hiatus to begin a new chapter.
4
The fire was in the middle of the clearing, that had a great oak on its edge, with boughs thicker than a serpent. They kept that fire burning, or at least covered, night and day. Here and there in the trees stood huts of woven branches and bracken,52 as hunters and so forth build for hiding-places: it is said that goblins live in similar dwellings, only of a tinier size to suit their stature of half an inch.
A felon called Ives, whose breath smelt as foully of garlic as a demon’s, shoved me into one of these huts: he had a lip cleft at one side, no doubt from a wound, that resembled a st
raw pressed upon wet clay. I said yet again that I was a famished lad hunting for rabbits: ‘Well!’ cried he, with a foul oath, ‘now thou art a rabbit in its burrow, and when the pot is simmering, we will come for thee.’
There were no windows in the hut and it truly seemed dark as a burrow, the door being a woven plate of reeds like the lid of a basket, just short of the height of a man. A curious feigning of the eye is that small dwellings oft expand when entered, as woods do, or as foundations of houses seem very mean, until roofed: tiny as it was, the hut took five men easily. There were six other men within, and I fell among them, making seven.
The hut stank of sweat, urine and flatulency [ventus], and also most sourly of vomit.53 I knew from the same stench in the alleys of Dancaster, where bodily matter of both dog and man is left to rot in the gutter, or is cast on the foul heaps that swell e’en hard by the kitchen doors,54 that it would diminish as I became accustomed to it. Yet I also knew, because father Gerald himself had told me, that Satan’s realm smells disgustingly of new-spouted vomit in the day and of freshly dropped toordis55 at night: though you be there for all eternity, your nostrils suck in the vapour anew each moment. [It is as if ] they are smelling it anew at each moment.56
Lying there in the hut’s gloom among silent strangers whose breathing I could hear whistling through their noses, I remembered that this day was the holy day of St Narcissus,57 and drew comfort therein, for we were but two days from All Hallows’ Eve and the triumph of the saints. Men have long memories: the comfort and joy you feel from a nightingale’s song does not last longer than the song, but the hatred you feel from someone doing you wrong can last until death; a grudge may last longer e’en than grief.58
The prisoners were recovering from drink and its noxious fumes, yet told how they had been stopped on the road and invited to dine with Robert Hod and his men, whereby forced (for the felons’ merriment) to drink great quantities of the strong brew [they had been transporting?] to the priory at Blythe. The men were sick with the effects of the ale, and wished they were dead. It was an evil place to be a prisoner, which was why I had been cast into it like a bone into cannel donge.59 My eyes growing accustomed to the poor light, I saw the leech and next to him the rheumy friar – the same that had accompanied us on the northward road. I was extremely glad that Ricchet had not come with me, for mayhap he would raise the alarm, were I not to return: what great dearth of experience there was in my youthful brain, to hope thus.
Much astonied was I to see them, since it was the practice of felons in those parts only to rob those travelling south. The leech’s surcoat under his mantle was patched in coloured squares that were skilfully sewn, and the fur hat upon his head was like a mangy cat asleep. Being very near to him, I was afraid that I might touch his flesh, polluted with the feebler kind, for he had very long legs. And he had touched all over e’en the bodies of women no longer maidens, for virginity is a tender thing and soon deceived by the serpent, that draws open the treasure and plunders it with his horrible claws, and spares not even the handmaidens of Our Lord, though they be walled about by convent stone: for the shameful members of man, swollen and bulging in their stockings [bracis], are full of wicked intent.60
Then of a sudden I saw that the quack’s eyes were on me, even in the gloom of the hide, and he grinned and showed sharp teeth. Meanwhile one of the carters, snoring in his slumber, was woken by his own foul waters, soaking his stockings so that the ground was as sodden and stinking as a garderobe’s in an inn. He had a broken nose, dinted as deep as a loaf. ‘Benedicamus domino,’ said the friar, but the others cursed. I shifted away from him, thinking only of my harp, as a mother thinks of her infant missing from her lap. A minstrel had once offered me eighty pennies; which being the price in those days of a healthy ox, I had told him, ‘This harp be worth fifty oxen to me.’
I reflected, not on how it had led me into this danger – as the sweet odour of a rose, though needful to our hot brains in its coldness, might lead us to stray into carnal desire – but on how I might escape with it.
As the hours passed the men began to talk softly, recovering from their surfeit. The friar rubbed his paunch and said he would perish of cold and hunger: and his feet in their sandals were indeed blue, and his nose glimy. To which the others, holding their heads as if they were bowls of hot oats, said all his holy brethren should be cursed for brewing ale (though he was only a mendicant).
‘Rumm ram rufe,’61 said the quack, and he performed the trick [praestigias] with three cups, that some call an enchantment [fascinationem]; making three pebbles move from one cup to another, with a tap of his finger and a magic instruction. The others laughed and laid bets: but the tregetour62 – for so he was, [a fairground conjuror] as well as a quack – refused to gain from their present misery.
He was the best at this trick of any of the devilish tregetours I had seen already. At the end he put the pebbles back in his mouth and swallowed them, taking them out of his ear; swallowing them again, he produced them from his buttocks. He offered the pebbles to my broken-nosed companion – who would not touch them, but squealed like a woman, for they had travelled smoothly through the pipes in the quack’s body and into the heat of the stomach, emerging uncleanly from his buttocks! Whereupon the felon Ives burst in angrily, saying we would soon find ourselves laughing at crows from a high rope.
To the clearing then he led us, where the fire was smoke more than flame, for rain had fallen. I could see a mass of blackness through the trees, this being a rocky bluff with deep caves within. We thought we might be murdered by the men gathered about, whose appearance was at first sight savage: they were dressed, many of them, in rough-stitched goatskin, bearskin and suchlike, and their faces were dark and worn from their wild, forest ways, and mossed with hair, their nails filthy as a peasant’s.
I trembled, for whoever these outlaws were – whether of noble stock or serfs, or mere cut-throats – I knew that they would show no mercy if they were so inclined. A life following the way of a beast, that skulks in the forest without a decent roof, makes the man beastly. Also, the magnificence of certain great oaks about that clearing, that towered above the forest sward, struck terror into me more than wonder, for they made e’en the horses tied below them look like kittens. Among these horses, it must be said, I recognised my master’s mount, stood beside another grey that dimmed even the former’s splendour. It seemed that none so far had perceived me as the page of the monk they had robbed.
[There were?] some twenty men in all, including several with each a crossbow [arcum]63 resting in his arms, fixed upon us. And that weapon’s sound, like a great crow snapping its beak against the thread of life, still wakes me from sleep, that I think I am struck by its point; thus memories grow more robust with old age, as the vital fires of the body gather in older rooms of the brain.
A man appeared from one of the bigger huts, beyond the smoke of the central fire. A certain movement among the assembled men scattered about, leaning against trees or squatting on their haunches, gave sign that he was the chief. His tightly woven mantle kept off rain most nimbly, for I could see that it was greasy and the drops that fell from the branches were disperpled by it. It might once have been a fine red, but was now the colour of dried blood, and had a great hood behind, in which several faces might have been concealed, and beneath the cloak was a thick pellice [of wool].
He came towards us, stopping at some three yards’ distance. The smoke thickened and, hiding all behind him as the sea-fog doth our present coast, made it look as the underworld must appear beyond the Prince of Hell.
I recognised him as the very villain (calling himself the chief) who had taken my master’s purse and examined the coins most lustily; his eyes were still somewhat swollen in their sockets, as one sees in drowned men, and the blemish on his brow most like a splash of molten wax. I did not realise that drunkenness was so deep in him that it did not show upon the surface, until he was angered. I guessed his age at twenty-six or -seven, although he w
as at that time over thirty.
‘This must indeed be Robert Hode,’ I said to myself, with a pang of fear.
He sat down upon a hewn log, staring about him as if weary. Having talked softly to a felon beside him, his gaze falling once more upon us, he made a gesture, and a rope was thrown over a smooth branch that grew from the most towering of the oak trees.
Thereupon the tregetour was pushed under the branch, his mangy hat falling off, to reveal a head quite bald. His eyes grew wild with fear, but also with the cunning that all such tricksters show, for they draw upon the powers of the Devil e’en when they do naught but juggle and feign. And we saw that the rope was a noose and that execution was to be carried out, and the tregetour asked what was to happen to him in a most trembling voice. The outlaw chief stood up and told him that if he had magic powers – nay, any powers at all – he should show them now to save himself; for he had heard he was both a lecherous meddler in women’s flesh and also a magician: which observation made all the felons in the clearing laugh.
And the tregetour replied, trembling in his limbs, ‘I would rather pray to God, being a devout man who wishes no harm to others.’
Hodde then shouted, as if he had been touched on a wound, that there was no God, and no Heaven, and not even a Hell (in which, of course, such hideous blasphemies might meet their just punishment). Then he declared: ‘There is less than nothing, not even an eternal darkness, for darkness is a thing in itself, whereas nothing comes out of nothing!’64 And he was screaming his words now, as if suddenly choleric. The words echoed between the trees, e’en on that sodden, dismal day full of the smoke of the smouldering fire, the whiles the rope swung above with its ghastful noose. And the felons gathered there cheered at this terrible blasphemy, like fiends; and I felt I should faint, for it seemed we were in the court of Satan himself. And I saw again how strangely over his crooked teeth his speaking mouth moved, as though sucking upon a plum.
