Hodd

by Adam Thorpe

  This striking them into silence, that the only noise was of the waves and the sea birds without, I cried to them, ‘Behold, the holiest man thou wilt ever see, ready to greet his Lord. Go home and pray for his soul, for he wishes to be left in peace.’

  Then one lean and mis-shapen fellow at the front cried, ‘He is not holy, for he engendered thee out of wedlock with Widow Margery!’ And this being my mother’s name, it was as if he had struck me in the face, and I knew not what to say. Then another, a woman with a spiteous face like a hog, cried also that he was not holy, but a lecher and a fraud; and her bearded sister next to her took up the shout and complained that she had given half her bread and meats to the hermit, who was no true hermit; and an old brute with a filthy wisp of straw for his hair shouted, ‘So are all hermits fraudulent, for they are idle and take our pittance, like the priests and the monks, while we labour in the ditch!’

  So fearful was I of their grimacing and cries, that I took a step back; and then one burly offspring of an ogre [montrum quoddam teterrimum] came forward fully into the cave, and seeing he was not struck down, laughed and turned to the others: ‘See, how very holy be-est I, fully equal to this blessed hermit’s cell!’ And another meagre fellow, limping like a hamelled dogge,398 stepped in and pointed at the mixen of bread, stale fish and other scraps and morsels, saying, ‘’Tis no surprise our bellies moan, half our victuals lie here! This be a thieves’ den!’ ‘Nay,’ another shouted: ‘it is the Devil’s! For dragons and monsters come here to sup with him, and why else were we forbidden to enter?’

  ‘Ay,’ screamed a scraggy woman, whose blotched face seemed known to me from when I was a boy; ‘and why else is our village so afflicted, that our children die, and our sons are snatched away, and our boats are lost, and half our beasts also from the murrain, and that the wind is ever blowing away our thatch and grows fiercer and more freezing by the year?’

  And all let out a huzzah of agreement, shouting that we were the very Devil and his son in disguise, living in such darkness as was found in Hell and thus agreeable to us – forever willing are the common folk to pin their troubles upon others, so buffeted are they in their sufferings by infirmity of faith. The scraggy woman, seeing the snake-stone in my father’s clutch, pointed to it and screeched: ‘He might turn us all into wolves or toads, so powerful is their malefice!’ Then with a start I recognised her, as being the mother of Edwynne: of foul-mouthed fame and a wicked gossip, ever the conduit for the cloven-hoofed enemy of mankind.

  Shouting at them all to go away, dismayed by this turn of events, I felt a shudder in my arms and saw it was my father: his eyes were open and staring, yet no longer piercing in their look, and his tongue lolled from his mouth. I clutched his body to mine and wailed, not believing the witness of my eyes, that can oft see a mountebank’s death and believe it, before the player springs to life again with a cackle, and a filthy story on his painted lips.

  Meanwhile, the bolder among them pressed in also, trampling their former offerings and making a great din within the cave. Having now retreated to its back wall, wherein no further escape was possible, I placed my father the hermit behind me and shielding him thus with my body, implored them to have mercy upon us both. But such force has a rabble when moved to anger and spite, it is not resistable by either pleas or reward, but moves willy-nilly as a tide between rocks, that is stronger e’en than those rocks. And the twisted, grimacing visages, very like those carved upon the water spouts of our churches and other places within them, that Satan himself be a-feared to approach the holy edifices, came closer towards us, yet hesitant still.

  Nimbly I snatched up the harp beside us and began to pluck, chanting the ballad of Robert Hodd in such a wise that all ceased clamouring and stopped, as if enchanted. Again the words unrolled in my mind as if writ on parchment, and again my suffering and guilt gave such colour to the song that all were struck dumb and grew open-mouthed, as had happened in the inns and halls and so forth.

  No man or woman can resist the charm of music, we know, if it be not discordant; but let me tell you, that song was scarce of my doing – my fingers barely my own as they pressed and plucked: it was as though my hands had been cut off and golden ones put in their stead, the same as have angels. Little did I know that this playing would be the last of its kind they would ever accomplish [confecerunt]!

  The cave made my voice and instrument greater still in sound, that some of the peasants turned their heads all about, thinking others were singing and playing, when it was but an echoing of the rock; then as I finished, many demanded another song of this outlaw, Robert Hod, for he pleased them greatly, being despisers of monk, baron and sherf alike. And they called him ‘Robben’ in their thick tongues, as though in their minds they knew him familiarly already and were clapping him on the back and saying, ‘Ho, Robbyn, my good fellow!’

  But then the misshapen, lean rascal – no doubt of the Devil’s service, from his forliven looks – stepped forward and addressed them, saying, ‘Do ye not know, fools, how Satan beguileth through music, and how the filth spewed forth by minstrels enchants us like any sorcery, preparing us for Lucifer’s feast, at which our souls shall be the mutton, boiled and seethed and chewed, and that pain we cannot imagine renewed each day – for the fiends are ever famished, and gluttony rules them?’

  He pointed at me as I protested, and cried in a most horrible and harsh voice, ‘Beware this Devil and most especially his son, that he hath hid all this while in the shadows, only as a trap to lure you in, singing of felons and outlaws and their wicked murthers – for the Arch-fiend grows weary of stale morsels of bread, and craves thy flesh to slobber on, and thine eternal souls to swallow limb by limb!’ And an oaf cried from the crowd, ‘He slew a woman through sorcery, that her body was cut in ribbons by a black lion!’

  So terrified then did the rabble become, that some scrambled out of the cave’s opening, while all pressed together, backing away. Then this vicious fellow was joined by Edwyne’s mother, that oath-fond gossip, who declared that she had known me when I was a boy (which was true, though a fact despised by me), and that I had ever had something strange about me. ‘Pray, where did this rascal vanish to? For he brought his foster-mother to an early death from grief, by leaving his home without so much as a farewell – and she having replaced his own poor mother, good Widow Margery, that perished of a cancre, growing on the very spot his infant lips would suckle upon! Ay, he hath been hid here all along, for he is the filthy, unlawful offspring of this false hermit and sorcerer, and ’tis said that he can slip in and out of Hell by the cleft there, like a rat doth!’

  And so saying, she pointed to the back of the cave where I had lain my poor father, there being in that rock a cleft too narrow for a body, but of infinite depth and blackness within. ‘What doth he bring, but the shadow of Death where’er he passes? And this I did ever believe, but none heeded me, by God’s blood! For my dear son Edwine was snatched by them both from his mother’s bosom, and puffed up with learning, that he left his proper hearth and perished in the city, where plague and ruin await all!’ She burst into tears, whereupon the fellow with the limp cried: ‘’Tis never too late to make amends!’

  Much confused by the news of my foster-mother’s death, and of Edwyne’s perishing, I had no words to say in my defence, but felt the harridan’s words like blows upon my face; for it is easy to succumb to such accusations, when your life is spotted and filled with fault in word and deed. While a clamour again arose among the invaders, I saw Henri’s face, and brother Thomas’s, and Edwyinn’s, and even the fat gaoler’s, among many others that included the one-eyed serjeant’s, swirling before me like phantasms; and then my father the hermit’s face joined them, though its bodily twin was but a few feet away – and I knew at that moment that he was indeed expired.

  Bewildered by this, and nigh swooning, I crawled to my progenitor’s side and fell prostrate upon him, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, for he still had warmth. Thereupon there was more scre
eching, and shouting, and I felt blows flying into my face, and my father being torn from my grasp, so that I was certain my last hour had come as well as his: and more afflictions would I have suffered, but that I fell unconscious under the kicks and blows and tramplings, as if the waters themselves were stifling me.

  The Lord spared me, and I woke from the dead in a pale light, smarting from my bruises and with blood dried upon my face. I had dreamed I was being scourged and lashed by priests at the very gate of Jerusalem, which holy city was regained and lost twice in my lifetime, and remains still to be won from the hands of the infidel.399 ‘Spare not the stripes,’ I was crying in my dream, while the priests (among them the long-fingered minx from the tavern, in the ridiculous garb of a nun)400 shed tears as they beat, just as they do when striping the tender limbs of child pilgrims, for the good of the sick and the afflicted. And in the sky I saw a banner unfurling, that said Hod instead of God. Wishing to tear it down, I could not, for Hodd himself was lashing me the fiercest, standing of great size among the priests and saying, ‘Wretch! Dost thou belch forth words for flattery’s sake?’ And I was [shrieking], ‘Bring me water in a bowl, dear God!’ – yet substituting ‘Hod’ for ‘God’ each time, against my own volition.

  When I awoke, however, I saw merely the desecration of my hopes; for my new-found father the hermit was gone, taken by the rabble, of which the only sign was a threadbare shoe. And lo, I saw the harp smashed and trampled into pieces in a corner: for nothing abates the fury of the mob. Yet why had they not returned to burn me also? Mayhap they thought me dead, or were afraid of the Devil’s vengeance in that cavern, that oped to his smoky kingdom in their foolish minds: thus the Lord protected me, saving me for further penance.

  Alas, when I tottered from the cave, it was into a blear dawn of mist and obscure shapes, in which e’en the sea-surge was muffled. The air being so full of moisture, it was resolved into a rain that besprinkled my clothes and my hair, as though the air itself was sorrowing. I called out, lest his final migration had been a false vision: ‘Father! My father!’ – but no answer came, and my own voice was stinted by the moistness and thickness of the clime.

  Perceiving then a dark shape by the edge of the waters, like a [beached] boat with a furled mast, I advanced cautiously towards it: and there I found a martyr’s end! My hermit father, fastened by the wrists to a ship’s timber, hung perished, with his body half burned from below, upon a pyre that the moistness had no doubt extinguished: and the mob departing before the fall of night (of which darkness they are always terrified), and happy with their task, they had left the execution half complete.

  How wretched was my grief, as I raised my father’s head, that was miraculously unblemished by the flames that had destroyed his nether regions! I had believed him to be expired in the cave, yet terrible it was, despite his pure faith and trust in the eternal physician, to see (by his open mouth and tormented brow) an expression of agony, and the same pain in his hands by which the rabble affixed him on the pyre (as Our Lord was affixed upon Golgotha hill): for though blackened and blistered, his hands were as an old beggar’s are in palsy, most twisted in the fingers.401

  Seized by choler, I purposed to slay every man and woman in the farms and thorpes about – lumping them all into one, innocent and guilty alike, that I should not waste time in scattering their brains upon the earth. ’Twas in my mind just as Abbot Arnold said of the people of Biders, who had Albigensians mingled among them: ‘Slay the good and the evil alike, for God shall well know if one of the two wishes [? si uter volet].’402

  O wretch that I was! What had the hermit my father taught me, when speaking of his childish part in that ill-fated Crusade? That he had not slain a single Jew, for ‘they knew not what they did’. Similarly, the rabble of serfs and cobblers and ploughmen and carters and so forth knew not what they did, for extremely fearful and ignorant are these people, turned like a weather-vane by the slightest wind. So horrible (I reflected) would now be their pain-to-come in the after-life, as the flames consumed them for ever and ever – watched from Heaven by the very saint they had burned in like manner – that I might have wept for them, too: though I was not yet merciful enough for such a selfless pity, and my head and body ached from their blows, and e’en I had lost a tooth.

  I buried my father in the hollowed-out cleft in the cave floor (wherein he had always requested to be so consigned), leaving the remains of the harp upon his poor breast, then pulling the slab across, that he be quite hid, all the time praying fervently. I remained there until the evening, scarce knowing what day it was, or how long I had remained without consciousness in the cave – my poor brain beleaguered by an armed host of thoughts, all striving as one to press in to its narrow gate: meanwhile my liver swelled to no avail, for by this member we love, and loss of the loved one heats it and pricks the liver sorely: and so I spouted much foul matter outside, from my bowels, and nigh succumbed to wanhope.

  Recovering with a youth’s pliancy, I climbed the cliff as in years past, to view through the mistiness what had become of the little oratory of stones and reeds; and there I saw a modest heap of offerings beside it, under a shelter as for farm beasts, that the rabble had evidently plundered – for much was scattered, and the oratory itself blackened by flame and roofless, the stones still warm to the touch. And lest more ignorant pilgrims come, not knowing the holy hermit was now a sinner and heretic, and that a gratuitous sanctity had been placed upon him, they had thrown briars and brambles all about and also on the track in a great thicket, as though upon a path to perdition.

  For this murderous crime, I did not think punishment would be forthcoming, were I to report it; for that part of the coast was wild, and the local priests were drunken and incontinent, and ever hateful of hermits and holy men who berated them for falling from the true way; indeed, the rabble might well be congratulated for their action, as the pharisees were in the time of Our Lord.

  Then did I regret once more my return to the hermitage, for it had brought disaster in its wake – and oft ’tis better to be ignorant! A small voice said to me in mine ear, as I wept: ‘Nay, he hath burned away the last morsel of his mortal sin, suffering upon a martyr’s pyre; and is now in Heaven as pure as a naked babe. What are a few mortal moments of awful agony, compared to an eternity of bliss?’ And I was much comforted by this, though my heart was yearning for extinction – as doth a duck yearn for flight, caught fast in an iced pond.

  The mist slowly clearing as the day ebbed, methought to walk to the abbey by the strand, for the sea ever gives a glimmer of light, if there is any moon (which there was, and near waxed full): the waters’ foam being of such a similar whiteness, that it attracts the light. With many a prayer on my lips, I left my father’s remains in their simple bed (though wishing to return soon, to erect a great tomb of stones fastened by proper cement), and trod my weary way to Wittby, commending myself to God and the saints’ protection.

  Determined was I to abandon all worldly ways, and to love filthy lucre as little as personal ambition – lies and deceit and greed and fraud being each the hook [uncus403] that together drag the whole human race to primaeval chaos, even more so now than before. I thought also to recover my father’s bones, and carry them about in a shrine, in a full procession of monks, that poor cripples with their feet twisted up under their thighs, and the most miserable and sore-sewn of beggars, and all of any station who wished to be healed, such as soldiers without an arm, might crawl up to it and be made whole.

  Very soon, not halfway along that darkling strand, was I trapped by the high tide upon a rock, with naught behind me but a sheer cliff ! Why was this, when I had prayed so fervently to God and all the saints? Alas, I had fashioned in my teeming brain such glorious pictures of that aforesaid procession, with the wooden shrine covered in gold leaf, and its [carrying] poles hung with blue satin, and such chantings and sighings and bewailings and utterings of holy words, and all covered in clouds of incense from the swung censer carried before, that e’en
kings bowed down, and queens knelt in their snow-white garments, and warrior-knights of hugest renown lowered their swords in homage.

  Miserable worm! Now what wouldst thou picture, hugging the naked rock, drenched to the skin by the salt waves eager to suck thee into their black maw, with naught but the inconstant moon as thine eyes’ guide? Do the ocean’s seethings about thy knees speak any holy words, other than Death’s importunate chatter and moan? What garden of delights dost thou see now, in this savage place, wherein a glimpse might be had of the end of the human race and of this earth, that shall be purged even to her inmost bowels, as land moveth and becometh water, and all be swallowed up to the greatest and highest of our human works in stone,404 and down to the tiniest, fleetest louse?

  Yet I lived, as thou must have already perceived, to sit here upon this cold bench in an autumn of some eighty years later, writing out my early life in faltering confession. After entering the holy house of Whittbey, wherein I was received with kindness, as coming directly from that most holy hermit (though I told not a soul there of my true connection to him), I was several times pierced by the sweet pain of love in the years that followed, but always I vanquished its wound in prayer and fasting, as I have vanquished all temptations, both of the mind and of the flesh.

  The greatest sin is pride, with envy on its heels; both these horrible afflictions of the Devil I have wrestled to the ground, and covetousness likewise, which is a form of lust. Yet they are never lifeless, quickening into breath when my guard is dropped: thus each day is a never-ending vigilance.

  The grossness [crassitudo] of the world outside, adrift in greed and lechery and bloodthirsty wrath, and growing worse with every year that passes, as the winters grow icier likewise and the summers e’en cooler, harries our walls: yet all within is peace and contemplation, or upraised voices of exultation, e’en when the sea rages at our easterly stones, and the wind buffets our hoods upon the parapet or in the cloister.