by Adam Thorpe
Then the poor juggler of wits hurriedly took out a tiny leathern pouch and opened it, and poked his finger within, that he began to lick. Whereupon Hod backed away a step, as if the conjuror might turn into a scaly serpent, and asked him [what he was doing]. The quack babbled of a powder that was the most precious in his possession, for it gave the man who drank it the power to grow wings and fly. He had great conviction in his eyes, under his bald head, and his goatee beard quivered as doth smoke when blown. Hodd, stepping forward boldly, forthwith snatched away the bag, opening it to sniff the savour. The other men laughed, but he silenced them with one look. It is known that certain cut-throats have the sway of kings, e’en o’er their burliest followers.
Then Hod said, ‘Where are your wings?’ The quack replied that sometimes they take many hours to grow. Robert Hode asked if they grew on a dead man, and the tregetour laughed and said, ‘Nay, for the body’s spirits are extinguished and cannot carry the powder to the bones of the shoulderblades, where the wings flourish like plants in rich soil.’ The outlaw asking what the concoction consisted of, the magician said that it was mostly the berries of pettie morel65 ground up with a feather of the rare phoenix, for morel climbs without fingers or hooks, but by its upward force alone. And that in return for his release, he might give the pouch and all its powder to the outlaw.
This last rubbed his face as if in reflection, then said, ‘Climb the tree, to see if thou canst fly from it when the wings are grown.’ And the tregetour, after much complaining, climbed from branch to branch like a boy, until our necks hurt from watching; the outlaws urging him on with great cheer and forcing him yet higher with the judicious use of their bows:66 the slender arrows swooping skyward and splitting the bark under his feet here and there with great accuracy, until he stopped.
Whereupon a point striking between his legs, seemingly an inch from his privy members, persuaded him to climb yet further up, so that we feared he might plunge to his end at any moment. He had shrunk to [the size of ] an acorn high in the bare branches, and his white face peered down, but I thought that he had at least escaped hanging – having no idea then of Hodd’s peculiar ways.
When it was my turn [to be interrogated], my courage failed me and I confessed all. Those then chuckled greatly, by whom brother Thomas and I had been robbed – including Hode. The harp was sent for, and I was mightily relieved to see my treasure unharmed. The chief villain bid me play, saying: ‘Sing a song to Robertt Hode, king of the outlaws and of the realm of the othair.’67
By ‘othar’ [sic] I assumed he meant the realm that was beyond the law of the forest justices and of the sacred Church of Our Lord that leaves the darkness to its devils, while emblazoning the righteous through her vitreous glory. I was used to contriving68 songs: it is not difficult to weave a new colour onto the loom of melody and words, if the original weave be strong enough. Seated upon a log, finding strength in holding the harp on my lap and tuning its strings of strong wolf-gut, I was less faint from fear and hunger.
I began to pluck a tune from the harp that was both plangent and lovely, as thinking of spring in autumn might be both forlorn and hopeful – thinking of what has gone and what is to come. I danced the words upon the tune, the known words that I would always sing with that melody, turning the huntsman into Robbert Hodde, king of the outlaws.
Whether an effect of the rocky bluff that, as I have said, made up one limit of the wood, or my state of giddiness, I do not know, but my song seemed to come back to me on the instant, louder than I meant it. I heard my own words, and in their clarity and in the brilliance of the strings of my harp, I heard my own treachery – for what else was I doing, but praising a horrible blasphemer, for whom men’s throats existed only to be cut? And yet I sang on, as if each step forward [in the song], each ripple [of my fingers] over the strings, was delighting me as [doth?] sin.69
I had a high boy’s warble, sometimes cracking to manhood, yet rarely at this time. Once I had a conversation with one of the brothers, a learned man only in his middle twenties, yet known for his brilliance of thought that darted about as a hare doth, jinking in a field. This was brother Edward, our expert in canon law. He asked me, ‘Dost thou think the singing voice lies within you, or without?’ I could not say, so he continued: ‘Doth it begin in the body, to be carried intact onto the air, thence to transport the spirits of the listeners by entering their own ears and stirring their humours? Or doth it materialise in the air itself, beyond the singer’s lips, mysteriously conjoining with the notes of the instrument, then to be taken in portions by the ears of each listener – as a bowl of soup or pottage is emptied by several persons at table, yet containing all the taste within each part?’
Again, I could not give him an answer, never having considered it, nor aught else of that quizzing nature. Brother Edward also considered the workings of the echoes in church, when the brothers were singing together: believing these echoes to be fragments of the divine or angelic Voice accompanying us, but that Heaven being situated so far from Earth, the angelic accompaniment (a verification of the brothers’ holiness) took a little morsel of time to be transported to us on the intervening ether, though travelling swifter than an arrow. This did not satisfy me, as the echo existed even when a mason or a carpenter shouted a command or – as had indeed happened many times – swore loudly upon dropping a hammer on his foot, or some-such. But brother Edward did not hear the same sort of echo, in these cases: that, he claimed, was the Devil’s mockery; yet I doubted whether the Devil’s mocking voice could pass into the sacred space of any church.
We shared many such discussions, thenceforth: he had great hopes for me, and he said, one time: ‘Thou shouldst enter the monastery as a brother, when you reach maturity.’ But my ambition was to sing at court, not (as I thought to myself) to shave my head and be hated by the common people for feasting while they went hungry, and then taxing their hard-won harvest. What I saw of the brothers’ behaviour at that time did not endear me to the monastic way, though it did not occlude feelings of affection. The house was a roof and food and warmth and companionship: those elements of human sustenance that bring us close to the lesser beasts, who need no more, whereas we also need – if we are not the simpler type of peasant – learning and intelligence and love.
I scarce knew what I meant by love, for even as a jocatores I was praising in songs a higher type of carnal love, that is connected by a pipe from the brain to the shameful parts, and thus to the lower form of carnal love – which, as St Augustine writes:70 ‘upon reaching its apogee, causes an almost complete extinction of mental alertness;’ and such songs are therefore an encourager of lust in the expectation of such indecent pleasure, and might overthrow a man’s reason.
By ‘love’ I meant to myself at that time, foolish youth that I was, parroting my elders, the highest possible love for a woman: that prick of love that bleeds the heart and will not be staunched until her fair body’s warmth is felt softly against your own.71 My songs claimed this to be the very joy of life, of which I sang most often in my boyish warble. And often, too, I sang of the pain that will not be assuaged: the love towards which you run but that forever runs away from you, and faster than you; the love which you dreameth of whilst waking and sleeping, but that remaineth a dream. And sometimes I sang (though no higher than usual) in the voice of the girl, who is also sorrowing for her true love; a type of song taught to me by a Galician with a black tuft under his lip, and which is called cantiga de amigo.
When my song was finished, there was a silence, as if the whole wood and all its myriad creatures had stopped to listen. Then the chief felon approached and lifted me to my feet by the left ear, as a schoolmaster might, and as painfully. He said, in my pinched ear, so close that his breath seemed to embrace me in [the fug of ] a tavern: ‘You are one of the chosen. I choose you. Rise, and be blessed as one of us.’
Since I was already risen, I could ascend no further unless I stepped onto the hewn log. He walked away, having spoken to me in a h
oarse whisper, so that no one else could have heard; yet three of his men took me respectfully to one side, by the fire, and thrust a bowl of soup into my hands.
The other captives were delivered to the mercy of Hod’s men, and made to strip naked and dance horribly to a great drum struck by one of the outlaws as if it were corn being flailed; then they had to mime lewd and filthy acts together, resembling the devils that masked players [larvati] act. Outlaws with thorny whips shouted out instructions, and encouraged them when they were flagging; the felons laughed uproariously, as if at a tournament,72 when the waggoner fell off his stout donkey whose knees had buckled: this donkey being the friar. I looked up and saw the tregetour looking down from his great height of oak, and feared lest he might fall.
All this resembling very greatly the scenes of Hell freshly painted in our abbey church, showing the damned souls’ shivering nakedness and the devils with their whips, howling their delight, I wondered if, after all, the fiends’ true kingdom was not elsewhere, but secretly here on this earth. Yet my harp was beside me, and I had little doubt that I would soon be on my way back to the monastery, for I had taken no heed of Robert Hodde’s last words. While these devilish antics were going on, a great spit was erected over the fire, on which a wild pig was turned, beside a brace of thin rabbits and a plump goose; and from another part of the contraption hung bags like giant purses, in which meat of other beasts was seethed, for the bags were their own skins – the outlaws having no cauldrons.
It seemed, from the banter of the felons near me, that this meat was venison and mutton, being the flesh of sheep and deer snatched from one of our lord king’s estates – and the goose likewise, from a farm five miles away. I had never before seen beasts boiled in their own skins.73 And I did not refrain, hungry as I was, from swallowing all of my soup; yet feeling myself in a giddiness, being as though taken from the real world into dream.
5
While the drum was still beating for the hostages’ mortification, I was led into the largest hut, that displayed either side [of its entrance?] a deer’s skull upon a short pole; and therein sat Robert Hodd, looking down at the ground, who did not stir a limb when I entered, so he resembled a graven image.
The hut was dry, and given comfort by fine woven carpets spread upon the straw of the floor. The dimness was relieved by two candles in silver prickets either side of the chief outlaw, and I said within myself: ‘He looks most horribly like a god, that heathens worship.’ He bade me sit down, amidst a sweetness of incense that was no solace, for it was a false sacredness. The white bark of birch trees, stitched together so that they resembled the scaly skin of a snake, glimmered upon all four walls. Upon this white skin were scribbled words and phrases in a language I did not recognise, along with lewd diagrams and drawings that sorcerers oft use: this had been done with charcoal, or a burned stick.
When the felon began to speak, he fixed his head very still throughout, but little looked at me – his eyes darting about as if seeing presences invisible to others. This frightened me more than his words; and as long as I am in this corruptible body, I shall feel that fear still. He knew that I was from the monastery of St Edmund’s of Dancaster, which owned this very land and thus the wood itself, and he furiously cursed the abbey and its monks, for they wished to cut down the wood to the last tree, to feed the fiery furnace of their glass-making: ‘Felled will be this forest, for thus they fatten upon every living creature, yet give naught back, for covetousness is their only badge.’
I was sore amazed that the holy brothers wished to fell the wood, and he perceived that my ignorance was true. Upon asking me many details, he enquired about my parentage; being most puzzled that, as the orphan child of a cottar,74 I could read and write and play the harp. He asked me how this was possible, and I told a great lie which was to dog me ever after: ‘I woke up with the skills complete in my head, one day, having been very near death with a fever.’
‘You have been summoned by the hother,’75 he said, which I took to mean Satan, because he had said he was an unbeliever. He had returned from travelling upon the Continent to put all to rights in this benighted country. He then told me an extraordinary thing, pouring its potion into my eyes with his sudden gaze. I have no doubt, now, that he had this power latent in all of us, but that is rarely used except by players [mimis] in a shallow way, or when a woman wishes to cleave your heart to hers and thus torture you with her beauty: that is, the power to influence you [through the eyes] by means of an invisible pair of slippery darts, each of which is continuous to its full length, which is about three feet; and that would, if materialised, be of the substance of meat jelly, and warm.
He told me, not that he was God, but that he was more than God.
By way of explanation of this profound blasphemy (that I had only ever heard before from the mouths of mad beggars sitting in their own dung), he said that everything in Nature is inhabited by the Spirit [spiritus], and that when it dies this Spirit within us, which is called anima, becomes the othwre [sic], that is not anywhere but in this world and merely invisible, like many floating veils, until it is required to inhabit another material being, whether a tree or an infant rabbit or a rock or e’en a person. ‘God is merely an invention, as is the after-life. At first I believed God to be the Spirit, but now I see deeper into the truth and know that God does not exist, that there was only Spirit, and Spirit was not God.’
Then the youth that I was, forgetting the danger my tender soul was in, asked him how he could think he was more than God, if there was no God (brother Edward having taught me the rudiments of logic). He laughed, as if he liked the question, the which [laughter] seemed to wrestle with the stitched walls of pale birch, upon which floated many colours; and I found myself transported by the laughter into a delightful foolishness of mood, where nothing could disturb me. Yet I was indeed more present in my body, that felt the softness of the fine carpet, and smelt the sweet aroma of the incense, than I had ever been before.
‘My good friend,’ he said, ‘for a time we need God, so we create Him that we name God, and worship Him and fear Him; as did the dwellers of Canaan dread Him, and e’en the strong men of Edom and of Moab. When we achieve perfection and dwell in our original being, which is the divine essence, we can throw God away as the snake discards its skin. Then we fear nothing, because there is no sin. The only sin is not to recognise that we are more than God.’
‘“Thou shalt not slay,”’ I cited, marvelling at the way my words came out of my mouth as if writ there by a pen. ‘Nothing is a sin,’ he replied, ‘when you are pure essence and the source of all Creation.’ Then said I: ‘This that you say being the sin of presumption,’ accepting with equanimity the manner in which the walls were covered now in shifting shapes as brilliantly hued as the freshly painted walls and columns of a church.
‘There is no sin,’ he repeated, his words blurring deliciously [suaviter] inside my head. ‘The one who is perfect, who has attained perfection, cannot sin even if he wished to, for everything he does is necessarily perfect.’76
I blinked and his face became fifty eyes, all gazing upon me with great solicitude. I opened my mouth and again the words came out in a strip, as if painted on a cloth: ‘If, however, he decides he is no longer perfect, then he would be sinning, you said. Thus a perfect man can sin by thinking he is no longer perfect.’ I was delighted by my chopping logic, and wished … [hiatus in the MS ].
That wicked heretic (for so he was) then leaned forward and struck me across the face as a schoolmaster might, yet so hard that I fell to one side; but my pain floated above me and not on my cheek. It was even more of a marvel, to be lying on my side, and I fingered the carpet’s weave, now as vast as a wild wood seen from a cliff, and more wonderful and precious than damask silk from China. And my nether lip began to stretch exceedingly in order to cool my face from the sudden heat, and I had a plain face without nostrils, and found myself likewise tongueless and with only one great foot, beshadowing myself with the foot,
as the satyrs that go about and stare in the desert of Libya.77
And he said to me, that I had been summoned, but was not yet innocent. This was a strange phrase, which the effects of my intoxication did not fail to repeat in my head, over and over, as softly sounding as the chants of Terce heard through slumber. Little did I know that my mind had been polluted by a soup of mushrooms,78 of the kind that sorcerers oft use, and that fill certain chambers of the brain with a fumosity of pictures, every one of them false.
I lay all night in the villain’s hut, having visions. It would be tedious to relate them all, or all those I could remember afterwards; but in one I dreamed that Hode was the Antichrist, and that in order to test the truth of this, I arose from the straw where I was lying and cut his cheek with my knife, so that the blood flowed over the carpet of the hide. It was black, which is the colour of the blood of the Antichrist. I wanted to tell my father, but my father (being long dead) was nowhere to be found. I ran through the wood at great speed, and the white trunks of birch trees in a grove at the wood’s marge [limes] flashed either side, as the sea’s foam doth under moonlight.
Then I found myself in a great palace, drinking from the crystal waters of a fountain in one of the courtyards of the palace. I knew I was in the Holy Land, but the palace was deserted except for the cadavers of Crusaders, bloated and blackened, lying about in a drone of flies. Eventually I came across a wizened old man, squatting against one of the walls of the shattered temple of Jerusalem. He told me that he was doing penance for a lifetime of dissolution as a travelling minstrel. I asked him his name and he replied with my own: he was myself, in many years to come.
I fled, coming to somewhere I had never been to before [in reality], although I seemed to know it well: this was a farm, with a midden before its tumbledown house, set in a valley of poplars and a stream that flooded into marsh either side. Silvery rushes waved in the breeze, the flooded stream sparkled, and I felt a great happiness.
