by Rich Horton
Next morning he assaults a yeoman leaving the inn, gets three shillings but must hide in the woods for days, where rains fall incessantly and the boughs wave overhead as though bearing his swinging form. He crosses water, is attacked by dogs, travels roads by night and is set upon and beaten unconscious. Discovered by a constable searching for the robbers of a merchant party, he finds himself giving evidence with them before a Justice. Imitating the merchants’ accents and manner, he portrays himself as a journeyman bearing papers for his master, all now lost save for a scrap of ballad he had bought at a crossroad. He produces the scrap and is luckily not asked to read it.
Outside he is invited to accompany the travelers, who are going to Portsmouth. They are undeceived by his claim to be of their trade, but seem amused by his brass. Their party is bound for France, a land rich in opportunity, where gold flows only upward but one may catch some drops, like water from a fountain, as they flee the stony earth.
Jack accompanies them through counties he has never seen, past lands given over entirely to sheep, enormous manors glimpsed at a distance, and the occasional rubble of an abandoned monastery. These sights trouble him, stirring dim memories at the edge of sleep. Jack knows never to speak of the misted events of his sloughed-away past, and as they continue south (it is days before he wonders why merchants don’t ride) the recollection of monks driven forth, horsemen wheeling angrily, and ragged crowds waving sticks fill his dreams, spurring his impulse to keep moving, put distance between himself and the tall stone structures that loom in his memory’s mist.
They spend only a day at port and leave by night, which tells Jack all he needs to know about the nature of this venture. After crossing a stomach-tossing sea, they alight on a darkened coast, unload sacks on the beach, and take on bales after murmured converse with shadowy figures. The ship docks next day at Le Havre, but Jack never learns what becomes of its cargo, for he is taken by two of his partners to a tavern and bid watch the door as they meet with others within.
Until he learns the language, Jack is like a toiling ass, that obeys its master without comprehending his speech with others. No questions are asked him, and his only requital is the ass’s: that he is fed.
* * * *
The foreigners’ tongue yields its meaning only word by slow word, but Jack survives by reading faces, intonations, and the logic of the moment. It is a land of nothing familiar, where friars walk the streets like plump capons, villages are the size of market towns, and authority is everywhere. Ecclesiastical or seigniorial, its charge is ubiquitous, as though gold held the power of lodestones. The land is tax-ridden but people still need salt, needles, sometimes lace and ribbons. Jack carries loads and stands by during transactions, is taught little but learns withal. Conning is slow while cunning must be quick.
Jack dislikes voyages by water, during which he can see his death, so remains in the towns, with their crowded anonymity and city pleasures. It is a world at times comprehensible (men’s appetites and frailties do not change with their tongues) and at times cast upside-down: the flurry of laws and regulations, which bind the poor man, the farmer, and even the prosperous bourgeois, have left the modest fraternity of corn untouched, and their cost may rise unchecked as any bishop. Bakers labor under strict laws and may not raise their prices, but the loaves themselves can shrink as grain grows scarce, shriveling and hardening as they approach the condition of stones.
English prices soar in time of dearth, but there is something different here, though Jack cannot figure out how. He labors for his merchant masters, inherits their cast-off clothes, and after an eventual falling out continues on his own. He has learned to deal in cash, which fascinates him. Gold and silver have flooded into Christendom, from the cities and mines of distant lands. They pay for everything, including blackamoor slaves taken to other lands, from which sugar, tobacco and maize appear. Sugar and maize you can put in your stomach or sell for cash, which pays for everything. Listening to merchants discourse in taverns, Jack hears this and marvels, even as brown bread softer than he once imagined white could be rests on a plate before him, sliced rather than torn, and oft smeared with gold-colored butter.
A cold winter hones the edge of hunger, but it is the wet spring that fans the fear. Prices for grain—here called bled—begin to rise even before it is clear that the rains have sufficed to stunt or mildew it, and when the summer barley comes off the field it is not sent to market: noblemen, chapter-houses, millers, and the larger farmers hold onto their stores, waiting for the price to rise further.
This scarcity drives prices aloft like startled birds, and the market loaves cringe in response. Hungry peasants begin streaming into town, and are driven back through the gates. Jack, seeing his expenditures rise, knows he must venture out into the countryside, whence comes the produce that feeds and clothes the towns.
The chasse-coquins stare suspiciously as Jack strolls through, but their charge is to keep the poor out, not foreigners in. Solitary travelers look vulnerable, but Jack keeps to well-trafficked roads, conducts his business in busy market squares or the front rooms of inns, and is out of sight by nightfall. Other merchants have heavier pockets, but Jack moves faster, making small transactions quickly with coin kept on his person. Like a grain smaller than the gap between millstones, he moves through the workings unmarked.
Jack is used to avoiding the hand of authority, but discovers that its absence also grasps. Forestalling—the buying up of grain before the markets open—is not forbidden here, and it sweeps through villages like an invisible hand, gathering up what is suddenly precious. Jack had always assumed that grain was bound to the earth, to be consumed near the land that yielded it up. Here bled is like water, that can flow freely to reach its natural level: that being where the most gold lies. Such dissolution, as though by channels invisibly scored, draws the very substance of bread irresistibly through the peasants’ desperate fingers.
And as the bread flees the land, the countryside rebels. Throughout the summer it is war, as merchants seek to move their grain to higher-paying markets and the paysans, like headless armies, mobilize to prevent its leaving their county. Jack is traveling these weeks, and discovers that regrating is not only permitted, but is enforced by the Crown when the merchants are able to appeal for armed escorts. Disbelievingly Jack watches the marechaussée charging bands of thirty or more peasants armed with staves and pitchforks as merchants quickly load their sacks onto boats and push off downriver.
“Fewer customers?” he asks the innkeeper that night, for his tables are nearly empty. The man regards Jack without warmth, as though the ambivalence of his position were mirrored in the less than reputable-looking foreigner. The cost of bread has doubled for him as for everyone else, but the troubles have brought traders to his place, and he feels little affinity with the violent peasants in the fields.
“They will return for the harvest,” he says shortly.
When harvest comes, the large farmers hire fewer hands. There has been little work all summer, for the towns that purchase the countryside’s labor must now pay more for le pain, so can afford less of all else. The superfluity of workers drives down the wages of those who are hired.
These processes, running in train like an irresistible mechanism, first catch up the poorest, then the rest. By fall the peasants are seeking anything to put in their grain: chestnuts, millet, cabbage stumps and discarded husks, acorns not yet found by pigs, half-germinated seeds from their own small plots. Peasants mix darnel and hemp with their dwindling corn, and produce bread that makes them stagger and reel. As hunger turns to starvation, their skin begins to bruise black.
Jack would not scruple to haul bushels from the parish, but his practice lies elsewhere. A moonless night finds him at a crossroads watching as sacks are unloaded from a wagon and packed onto quiet horses. The sacks contain grain, their contents inspected by the buyer in a barn where Jack led him ten hours before; Jack has kept watch over them since. He is paid not on the spot but upon pr
esentation of a receipt hours later and miles away.
“Gold for paper,” remarks the trader, folding the scrap Jack gave him and tucking it away. His table is covered with papers, which he must hold close to his face to read in the early dawn.
“Paper is not gold,” Jack replies shortly. He only agreed to defer immediate payment because he knows the trader plans more purchases and shall need his assistance.
“You think not?” asks the trader. “Here is a kind of cash,” he says, picking up a sheet. “It is the receipt given a landowner when his grain goes to the warehouse.” There is an amount specified; Jack can see the number. It is not the price the landowner was paid, but rather what he wants for the grain, for which it shall eventually be sold. The paper is itself of value: the landowner has sold it, like gold.
Jack smells a gull: the man who accepts bills for cash will soon find himself holding trash, his labors and payment fled. He suggests to the trader what a man left clutching such paper might do with it.
“You are wrong there, my friend,” says the trader with a smile, as though to suggest that he who lives as a rat in the granary should not expect to understand the owner’s dealings. He explains that credit may connect seller to buyer when their lines are too short to meet. With credit—the assurance of gold, though it not be present—enterprises might expand, ventures find footing. Wealth that resides only in land cannot move, but credit can spread like knowledge, allowing at last money to grow.
“Then you are a Jew,” exclaims Jack, at last understanding.
The trader bursts into laughter. “What century do you live in?” he asks.
Jack does not trouble to answer that, for his country and time are unchanging. He lives in the land of le pain, without frontiers or landmarks save for the mill, the market, and the city gates.
In time Jack comes to buy and sell, though only in small, swift transactions. Sellers and merchants are not anxious to travel to meet, and Jack moves between them, first as courier then as agent.
Sometimes they write letters, which Jack conveys. He cannot read them, but the faces of the recipients as they scan them tell him enough. He is never cheated, and the grain spills quietly, some lodging in his pocket.
One afternoon he hears a mother sing to quiet her fretful babe:
“Our land is called poverty,
Where one does the dance of hunger.
You have milk now, but where shall come your bread?
Taller you may grow, thinner surely.”
A winter blaze crackles in the fireplace. Sitting before it as snowflakes fall through the night sky, Jack thinks briefly of children and mothers. It is difficult to remember that he once stole crusts and hid quaking.
“It is an old system,” the trader tells him, the last time Jack sees him. “The tenant’s share of his crop is too small for him to afford improvements, so the landlord’s share also remains scant. But it comes to him without labor; and it is moreover a difficult thing to combine fields and enjoy the resultant economies. Driving tenants off land brings difficulties: and not just angry peasants. Like the Earl of Leicester, remember? Who enclosed his fields, and later said in remorse: ‘I am like the ogre in the old tale, and have eaten up my neighbors.’”
Jack starts at this, but only for a moment, as the tale has none to do with him. You don’t eat up the one who escaped.
* * * *
Jack rarely eats fancy bread: it pleases him more to get good brown bread, not the kind here called cannine but the better quality, and eat it sliced thick with drippings. The innkeeper tells him that such barley bread is so called because many years ago it was judged good enough only for sheepdogs. They laugh at this together.
These days Jack rides, as beggars do not. Vagrants cannot accost a mounted man, although he once has to lash at the face of one who tries to seize his reins. What he sees mostly on the road are children: beggars sent wandering by parents with families too large to feed, and all less fortunate still. They look up beseechingly but offer no threat. Did Jack’s taste run to boys, he might have his fill.
One he sees as he stops to drink at a stream. Jack has pulled off his boots to cool his feet, and is sitting at his ease, eyes half-closed, before he sees the boy standing in the bush. At first he supposes an attempted ambush, but then realizes that the whelp is simply too slight—too faible, as they say—to notice immediately.
“Abandonné par tes parents?” he asks lazily, pulling his boots closer.
The boy simply watches him. The fact that he does not shift his gaze past Jack tells him that he has no confederates nearby.
“They are good boots,” he tells the boy. “You are right to covet them.” He wishes to draw attention from his saddlebag, where the gold is. It occurs to Jack that the gold he is carrying constitutes, in a sense, the corn that this boy has not eaten, whose lack broke his family apart.
The boy’s attention, however, is fixed upon Jack’s wallet. “Do you have any bread?” he asks at last.
Of course Jack has bread in his wallet, and meat besides. “There was bread in my stomach this morning,” he answers. “But where is it now?”
“Shit along the road,” the boy replies.
Jack realizes the boy is older than he looks, meaning small for his age. “Older brothers, eh?” he asks. “Too many competing mouths.”
It is his third question, but the boy has answered only the second. He does not look as though he could last long on his own, so must have been cast off recently. There is no sign of emotion on his face, only a certain cunning, which did not this time avail him.
“The boots would have bought you food, had you got them,” Jack says. “You have to snatch fast, if you would rob an ogre.” As he returns to the road, he sees a stretch of stone wall beyond the trees farther downstream. An old mill, where stone teeth grind the farmer’s grain (and swallow much of it), or a monastery, where the flour rests comfortably? Neither holds terrors for Jack.
A cold wind rises, but Jack’s coat is leather. You need not answer riddles to survive, for riddles only answer what others think to pose, and it is what they don’t think that you must know.
Jack once heard a riddle, and now knows the answer. Though the heart is closer to the stomach, it is the head that feeds it. All else is fairy gold and melts into air: the realm of mere wind and words, the province of the faible.
SUNBIRD, by Neil Gaiman
They were a rich and a rowdy bunch at the Epicurean Club in those days. They certainly knew how to party. There were five of them:
There was Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, big enough for three men, who ate enough for four men and who drank enough for five. His great-grandfather had founded the Epicurean Club with the proceeds of a tontine which he had taken great pains, in the traditional manner, to ensure that he had collected in full.
There was Professor Mandalay, small and twitchy and grey as a ghost (and perhaps he was a ghost; stranger things have happened) who drank nothing but water, and who ate doll-portions from plates the size of saucers. Still, you do not need the gusto for the gastronomy, and Mandalay always got to the heart of every dish placed in front of him.
There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.
There was Jackie Newhouse, the descendant (on the left- handed route) of the great lover, gourmand, violinist and duelist Giacomo Casanova. Jackie Newhouse had, like his notorious ancestor, both broken his share of hearts and eaten his share of great dishes.
And there was Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, who was the only one of the Epicureans who was flat-out broke: he shambled in unshaven from the street when they had their meetings, with half a bottle of rotgut in a brown paper bag, hatless and coatless and, too often, partly shirtless, but he ate with more of an appetite than any of them.
Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy was talking—
“We have eaten everything that can be eaten,” said Augustus TwoFeath
ers McCoy, and there was regret and glancing sorrow in his voice. “We have eaten vulture, mole, and fruitbat.”
Mandalay consulted his notebook. “Vulture tasted like rotten pheasant. Mole tasted like carrion slug. Fruitbat tasted remarkably like sweet guinea pig.”
“We have eaten kakopo, aye-aye, and giant panda—”
“Oh, that broiled panda steak,” sighed Virginia Boote, her mouth watering at the memory.
“We have eaten several long-extinct species,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We have eaten flash-frozen mammoth and Patagonian giant sloth.”
“If we had but gotten the mammoth a little faster,” sighed Jackie Newhouse. “I could tell why the hairy elephants went so fast, though, once people got a taste of them. I am a man of elegant pleasures, but after but one bite, I found myself thinking only of Kansas City barbecue sauce, and what the ribs on those things would be like, if they were fresh.”
“Nothing wrong with being on ice for a millennium or two,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. He grinned. His teeth may have been crooked, but they were sharp and strong. “But for real taste you had to go for honest-to-goodness mastodon every time. Mammoth was always what people settled for, when they couldn’t get mastodon.”
“We’ve eaten squid, and giant squid, and humongous squid,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We’ve eaten lemmings and Tasmanian tigers. We’ve eaten bower bird and ortolan and peacock. We’ve eaten the dolphin fish (which is not the mammal dolphin) and the giant sea turtle and the Sumatran Rhino. We’ve eaten everything there is to eat.”
“Nonsense. There are many hundreds of things we have not yet tasted,” said Professor Mandalay. “Thousands perhaps. Think of all the species of beetle there are, still untasted.”
