by Adam Thorpe
At other times I grew restless and angry, feeling I was not advancing, for children think only on things that be and reck not of things that shall be; and my master would bring his harp from the cave and work my nimble fingers on the strings, and teach me songs, rather than serve me with stripes as any other schoolmaster would have done, for this is the only danger children dread.
In this he was strange, and not like other men, who believe that learning must be driven in deep by bruises, as leather is hammered for a shoe, or fall away unshod from our brains. And his face, though lined before his years and especially about the mouth, and yet with a smooth beetling brow and a large, well-shaped nose, was kindly upon its slender neck; although the rest of him was also slender, he had great strength, and his skin was hardened and chapped on the elbows and knees and such like where it did rub against the world, and even the whole of him was salted by the sea wind and dark as a sailor who reaches the limit of the lower sea and travels into the upper above the clouds; and sometimes upon his bare head he did wear a tattered cap119 like a labourer’s, made of woven reeds, to keep off the spray.
How oft did that sandy marge of the illimitable sea show itself to me in my brain, when I stood in the sodden wood of the outlaws – and more vivid to me was it than e’en the dry straw of the abbey, or its aisled choirs! For the wind would blow in that tree-roof, making a sound like the waves smiting the shore, that always broke asunder the wood before me, and drowned it in a memory of my first and holiest master’s simple habitation, as captives dream of sunlight e’en in the utter darkness of a dungeon. For, of my three masters, one was a villain, one was weak and foolish, and only the hermit bereaveth me in his loss e’en now, as a bird be pained by the cutting down of a fair apple-tree in which is lodged the nest. And this I shall explain forthwith.
Yet was I not dungeon’d in my own captivity, having a small hut to myself, near to Robertt Hod’s – this being my privilege as the chosen one. My hut’s floor was boarded and dry over a sunken pit in which straw had been packed, and its wattlework walls had been smeared with cow dung, so that it was little inferior to the cottar’s dwelling I had been born to, except that it was of one room only and had not a stick of furniture around the [central] hearth, save a heap of bracken for a bed and a ragged blanket, and was dark as a kennel when the woodland sunlight did not penetrate its many chinks.120
Its previous occupant had perished some weeks before in a skirmish with the bailiff’s men, who had also been waiting on the high road for a rich convoy of merchants, there to rob them secretly (and lay the blame upon outlaws), and were pounced upon by Hod’s men from behind; and this late fellow being of large girth and exceedingly sweaty, the hut and its bed still bore a lingering stink over the smokiness.
Yet its privacy [solitudo] was welcome, for the other huts, numbering some nine or ten among the trees and mostly of the same low-curved fashion and thatched in bracken (so that a stranger might think himself among charcoal-burners or woodsmen, and not felons), had two or three men in each. I was able to keep my harp by me in the hut and play upon it, to grow more nimble still.
Alas, my pride swelled e’en more fatally one day when H[o]dde told his men that I was granted my skills in a dream, and how this was the doing of an enlightened spirit of the same level as himself: ‘For the brave youth knoweth he is to be part of the subtle in spirit, and serve that vast soul until he achieveth union with the divine and be set entirely free!’121
And when he looked upon them each in turn as they sat before the fire, his gaze protuberant beneath his eyebrows – these last met together, just as Satan’s be – they nodded and lowered their heads as if fearful of what his serpent glance might do once entered into their bodies; all except for Lytle Johnne, closing his lower lip over his upper lip in a scowl, seeming defiant.
I felt anger with this felon – infected as I was by Hodd’s words. Everything the bandit leader said was a revelation to me, as though I were some hideous heretic who yet believes God has more to reveal – when every last morsel was revealed in the divine person of Christ Jesus until the end of the world, at which time He shall come again. For as St Judas says in his epistle, such false and unfaithful teachers are ‘waves of the mad sea, foaming out her confusions; erring stars, to which the tempest of darkness is kept without end’.
Yet I was fertile ground for this corrupted seed: many the times before when I felt that it had been better had I not been born, that I was nothing more than a miserable worm and deserved the stripes and blows given me by my master [brother] Thomas and the others and even the cook, for although I could read and write and play the harp, the holy brothers soon discovered I was from a ploughman’s litter, and that my stories of merchant feuds had been a lie. Now I was being seated at a veritable banquet of false blessings, when I should have been chastised with rods on the hinder parts, as a man may beat his wife for correction or pay the price. Yet many times had I been told [sentence unfinished].
And bloated I so became with presumption, that I did not feel the wood’s moistness, nor the roughness of our dwellings that were no better in truth than vile hovels, nor the frosty bite of the wind, nor even the bites of my pallet’s fleas, but reckoned myself to be under spring’s blossom, gorged with sunlight and joy. And I was blinded to the low banditry around me, merely by the contamination of words, whose venomous hiss I did not hear but took for the sweet drone of the honeybee.
Yea, nothing is sweeter and holier than silence, for which each day I thank the Lord, and praise its blessings, the greatest being that no fiend can carry its poison from lips to ear between e’en the best of men!122
That first night in my own hut I had a nightmare, dreaming that the poor steel-pinned quack fell down yet was halted in his descent by the arrow [in his hand], and hung there by his arm, and was Christ the son of God, and I myself a Jew or a Mahumetan who laughed to see Him thus; and danced about an idol made of a donkey’s skin stuffed with straw, that had three heads, being fashioned out of the lewd will of man.
So, for all that my head was filled up with evil, I still quickened to an impulse of mercy. The following morning I pleaded with Hod to release the leech, whose moanings were grievous to hear high above us; the crows were gathering in the branches about him, for at times he fell silent and did not move, as if dead; yet when they alighted upon him to try to peck out his sight as though no more than a dying rabbit’s, the poor leech did fright them away with his shouts.
Hod straightway summoned a slender-faced fellow with short crisp hair and a pale, ravelled growth on each of his fingertips that was horrible to see, as if he had touched burning coals delicately in the ordeal.123 Hode told me that this man was a master forger who, for feigning papal documents, had his fingertips cut away to the bone with a shard of glass (for they had touched many sacred words), and how this punishment of the Church was carried out by a master-leech.124 ‘And is that the leech who did this?’ I asked, sorely disturbed by the sight of the scars, and pointing to the sufferer in the tree. ‘No,’ quoth Hod, ‘but all leeches are liars, and this one most especially. For did he not say how he would grow wings with the powder? Yet he hath not,’ he added, like a child that is lightly wroth.
And I saw that many types of men were hated by Hod, and that lying made him hate a man most of all; though he did not believe in sin, the sin of lying made him choleric. And because I too had lied, I felt more fearful that he would discover me. And I had great fear of being cast into the great pit, for at the bottom its filth was now flooded, made for water-fowls not men.
The forger touched my face with his awful fingers, that had no heat in them, for the ends were grey bone (as I now saw). Wherefore methought I heard again the sea-surge that sounded in the air about the hermit’s cave, for I remember that holy man recounting how the Saracens obeyed their own sacred book, in smiting off both the heads and the fingertips of unbelievers – these being (to them) any follower of Christ the Redeemer, for my first master had e’en read the holy book o
f Mahumet.125
And then Hod said, after perverting both the Old and New Testament with many citations (for he knew them better than most priests do, as heretics are wont to): ‘So this lying be frequent with all Christians, for they are full of foul thoughts and yet are displeased, and are tormented greatly and dream of cutting [these thoughts] out with the knife of faith, when in truth they are heard only by our inward ears and are not the product of Satan; for neither he nor God exist, no more than two drops be distinguishable in the one boundless sea of spirit. And I am that sea,’ he went on, looking at me so intently that I felt I was bathing (no bigger than a shrimp) in that illimitable ocean; and that truly Hod’s power was greater than any pounding wave, and might put out the very consuming flames of the stake he so deserved.
I thought with pain, that night in my earthen hut, of the storm that had broken ships anigh the very edge of the world, where the upper sea beginneth. For that was when I first knew he who, being my chief rival and cause of my first-ever temptation, led me to this sorry pass.
* * *
It was like this. There burst such a great storm in that part of the sea that ended where the hermit lived, that a ship’s broken remains were left upon our beach. The local populace, poor and part-famished at this time, came as was their right to recover its cargo, rumoured to be Arabian gold bound for Yorke. The ship was in truth carrying only sacks of grain to Caledonia.126 There were some thirty or forty people on the hermit’s strand when I arrived that day; slitting open the sacks of sodden grain or kicking aside the shattered timbers, they made a low tumult on the shore as do gulls over bread. Several of the ship’s drowned crew lay about or wallowed in the shallows, but these were ignored by those careless of the fate of souls.
Among the people was a boy of twelve or thirteen, brown as a nut and restless and loud, that I noticed without hailing him, for I was eight or even nine by now,127 and of a timid disposition. It was hateful to me to see our strand invaded thus by loud and ignorant strangers, the news of the wreck having travelled far.
I perceived my first master standing by his cave, among the great rocks. It surprised me that he was showing himself, and I scrambled up to him; laying his arm upon my shoulder, he drew me to him, as if to ward off an impending evil. It came soon enough: two of the men, pointing at him from the beach, clambered up to us and asked, in harsh tones, where we had hidden the gold.
‘The ship was carrying grain,’ said my master the hermit. And one of the rascals said, ‘Liar! Yea, I know you holy men too well!’ Ten or more of the others joined the men in searching our cave, including a scraggy woman with a foul-mouthed tongue. They had no tapers, as it was day, and the darkness of the cave defeated them. ‘Give us a tallow,’ they demanded; and my master did so.
Its light throwing wicked-seeming shapes over the stone walls while they searched, cursing and shouting, it was as if their bodies were secretly inhabited by demons. My master sat on a rock by the cave-mouth and together we gazed upon the wreckage: shredded canvas and timbers and the foremast entire, along with broken casks and several more drowned men in the shallows whose souls he bid me pray for.
Having no beard, as do most such holy men, and shaving his chin and cheeks with a sharp-edged seashell and likewise his scalp unto the smooth brow, he did look strangely to others, and the restless boy I had already noted approached us with trepidation. My teacher asked him his name, and the boy answered that it was Edwinn, and asked, ‘Are you mad [insanus], as certain men say?’ And my master replied: ‘It may or may not be so, for if I was truly mad, no answer of mine would be trustworthy.’ At which reply the boy called Edwyn spat upon the ground128 between the holy man’s feet; but I was too small and timid to strike him for his insolence.
The men and women’s shouts echoed in the cave like cries from Hell-mouth in the [miracle] play, that is also like the brawling of a tavern. When they emerged from the cave, they looked at my master with anger and one said, ‘Box his ears!’ And another with the hands of a butcher took out a long knife and threatened the holy man as if he were a mere huxter cheating them at dice. And my master looked up at them unflinchingly from his seat on the rock, saying, ‘Who told thee there was Arabian gold on board?’
‘Everybody,’ said the one with the knife, whereupon my master stood: ‘Yea, everybody,’ he said, ‘and thus nobody.’ A man shouted again, ‘Liar!’ Then the scraggy woman, who now doth forever kiss the fiery flinders served to her by fiends in their leathern barmfells,129 pointed at my master and shouted: ‘You holy men and monks and priests alike are robbers and thieves, and take goods on pawn from the poor, and e’en sons from their mothers, and stink like five-day-old fish, and your souls are like wine that smacks of pitch from the cask!’ And it was certain that she spake thus because she was a witch and the servant of the Devil, who spoke eloquent wickedness through her, with interjected oaths I cannot repeat. The gulls were screaming over the wreckage on the sand, some of them alighting on the sacks and stabbing at them, and in all this tumult of voices I felt afraid, and certain the mob would make us suffer a great hurt.
Then the boy called Edwyn shouted jestingly: ‘He was a monk, and then he was found with a woman, and she sprouted a beard, and he lost all his hairs!’
Whereupon the hermit, in his wisdom, stretched out his arms and cried, ‘Hic genuflectitur!’ – as if he was a priest with the whole parish assembled before him, telling them to kneel. And the assembled mob laughing as one, it seemed as some stupidity had broken in them, for they descended onto the beach forthwith. Edwinn alone remained, and I believed my master was going to berate him, but instead he said to him, ‘I thank you, for you saved me from injury or worse.’
I could not help scoff at this, and asked how was this, that the boy saved him so; and my master looked down at the men picking their way over the wreckage. Some were carrying off the drowned for burial, in case of hauntings, and the dead men’s hands swung as if they were living. ‘By making me a kindred spirit,’ my master replied, rubbing his hairless skull with the flat of his hand, as he oft would. ‘That I, being no longer set above them, was not a mystery and a terror to their simple-mindedness.’
I much marvelled at this, thinking it over-tender, for I did not believe the lad worthy to be thanked: he had not intended this outcome, but something fatal to us both. And then it was that the fiend flew into my mouth like an owl, bruising my heart with the claws of jealousy [livore]; for the boy called Edwyne said, ‘I watch thee write words.’ And when my master asked how this might be, the boy pointed to the cliff-top and my master nodded, for we had seen figures appear and disappear on the cliff’s rim as we worked at our lessons. And Edwyn said that he, too, wished to understand words, and stepped closer to my teacher as if to hang off his tattered raiment, as the sons of the prophets clung around Elisha,130 but instead said, ‘I see words in the church, but understand them not one jot.’
I groaned inwardly with jealous thoughts, for it turned out that he hailed from a village nearby, and could come regularly to be taught in the same manner [as me]; for the only disciples the hermit of the cliff adopted were those he might easily fashion, as a young vine against the wall of a house might be trained in a certain way.
And now I understand that much of my joy in my learning up to that moment was on account of it not being shared; for each time I saw, in my own village, the unlettered folk all about me in the fields and houses, my joy increased; just as we know that the joy of the blessed shall be further sweetened upon seeing the damned, squirming below in fiery torment, deprived of blessings, even when they be our own parents and friends. For this is written in the Psalms; though simple folk wonder at this, conceiving not how a parent can watch its child writhe in the flames and iciness of Hell, or the child its own parent, without suffering sorrow – forgetting that this is a matter of divine justice, to which no earthly grief, once blended with this divine liquid, can possibly remain material.
My master went inside the cave and we followed him. The
men had kicked over the plank that was his table and befouled the cave wall with their bowels’ matter, so that the gloom was already stinking.131 Being a man of prudence, he had concealed the harp in a cleft in the cave floor, hidden under a slab: it was where he himself would hide if in danger, and be buried within after his migration to the Lord.
My master finding his pen on the cave floor, he showed it to Edwin; and now I felt the fiend within squirm in my belly. Edwyn said the feather was that of a goose, and twirled it in the dim sea-light as if it were of no matter, for he had never seen the like in use as a pen. And my master explained to him as he had explained once to me: ‘With this men may write letters of treason or love, or Bibles entire, or orders that assign thousands to a hideous death in war, or learned works from the ancients, or revelations, or terrible prophecies, or lives like that of St Gerald’s,132 or chronicles, or cruel laws and statutes, or fiery sermons. And I do not use the ink of squid, but write on smooth, nesh sand, that no harm be done for the sea cometh and wipeth away all.’ And he told Edwynn to return on the morrow, or the day after.
And at that very moment (which I did think the work of God) came a harsh shriek from below and it was the scraggy, foul-mouthed woman, who then called out the boy’s name, crying, ‘My laggard son, where the Devil be ye, get thee down here to aid us or I shall beat thee senseless, so help me God!’ And Edwin blushed, and ran out from shame, to my infinite delight – for I was but a child of eight or nine, that kens not right from wrong.
And later, when the raucous flock [of salvagers] had gone, my master wondered why I looked so forlorn. ‘What do you think,’ he rebuked me; ‘that I am a school of but one pupil?’ I shook my head, blushing in shame.
