by Robert Nye
My uncle Hugh saved me from the Black Death by giving me a hundred cups of wine.
Thus do things go by hundreds. Down the Hundred River. Which when it was frozen I rode on on a diamond as big as a dog.
My battles. A hundred speckled spiders. I fought at Agincourt and Shrewsbury and Patay and Orleans and the Battle of the Herrings. I fought at Troyes and Meaux and Caen and St Michael’s Mount. I fought at Harfleur and St Cloud, at Melun and Cravant. I was there on the five and twentieth of October in the year 1415, being then Friday, when it stopped raining, and the Feast of Crispin and Crispinian, a day fair and fortunate to the English, but most sorrowful and unlucky to the French. I was of the few, the happy few, the band of brothers.
Set down that –
Set down this –
One hundred, 100, a pissing hundred, 100, hundred.
It was hot inside that basket. The sides felt prickly. Margaret wore a gown of green silk and a girdle with little bells. She tinkled every time I touched her. Her breasts under the silk were like little apples. Or like grapes – they were so young, so tender, so beginning.
I owe my host at the sign of the Bull, in Oxford, 4d.
I owe my host Benet at Castle Combe 12d.
I borrowed from Worcester’s cousin Robert Ash 3s 4d.
Also for cucumbers 5d; for shoeing of my horses 12d; for half a gallon of wine 8d.
Mem: Mr Mumford gave me 3 venison pasties.
Set down this also:
for 2 Spanish onions 1d;
and – in the same month of September – I paid for a sugarloaf weighing 2¾ lbs, at 5½d per lb, 13d.
Not merely not Caesar, but the antithesis of Caesar.
There can be but one Caesar – imperator mundi, Hal, the keeper of the universal Roman peace. Hail Hal. A Caesar who is not Caesar, a Caesar who is not the keeper of the universal Roman peace, a Hal with a halo, is no Caesar at all. The history of the world thus falls into three peaces –
1. There was the peace of Caesar;
2. There is the peace of King Henry VI;
3. There will be the peace of God.
And, as a consequence of spiders, it follows, as the night the day:
1. In the peace of Caesar there was the Hundred Years War;
2. In the peace of King Henry VI there is the Hundred Days War;
3. In the peace of God I shall live until I am exactly one hundred years old.
Big letters HUNDRED and FASTOLF.
The HUNDRED Years FASTOLF.
Brandy! Brandy! God’s Nails! Brandy!
Dom Thomas Hengham, of Norwich Priory, did me this table.
What’s the time?
There’s Miranda at the door. Enough for today. Amen.
Chapter Ten
Sir John Fastolf’s invocation of Clio, Muse of History
9th April
Miranda is my niece. Hail, Clio, et cetera.
She’s my brother Adam’s daughter, a lively, lovely girl, with eyes like a fire that needs poking. Her hair is black and straight. It always looks as if it’s wet. Milicent had brown hair, gold in the ripples. She’d stand for hours braiding it before the glass. Miranda’s gown last night was of thin white silk. Her slippers had gold threads in them. Beneath her breasts a crossed girdle, also of gold. Miranda’s breasts are like handfuls of firm cream.
When she was little she liked to ride on my belly. She would sit astride it as though I were a camel. I used to hump up and down and from side to side and she would drum me with her tiny heels.
The day came when the sheet slipped off.
‘I know what that is,’ said Miranda, pouting, rubbing her cherry cheek in my crutch and looking up at me as wise as serpents.
‘What is it then?’ I asked her.
‘Your soldier!’ said Miranda.
You do not argue with a girl of twelve. With such an opinion, in any case, it was a matter of some ease to persuade her to give heed to bringing my eager soldier to attention. Her clever little fingers soon learnt how to do this. She liked to inspect him thoroughly, lingeringly, running her fingers up and down the length of him in loops. She liked to check his equipment underneath. To deck him with ribbons from her hair. To salute him. To drill him hard. To make him march on the spot. And at last and always to play the fumbling game in which she fought with my soldier and made him die. This was all done with her hands and wrists.
One afternoon in the orchard I sought to persuade her otherwise.
‘Miranda, my chick.’
‘Yes, uncle?’
‘My soldier is cold.’
Fondling me, a bright embroidery of colour in her cheeks. ‘He doesn’t look cold, uncle.’
‘You little witch. He is though.’
Rolling me like pastry between her palms. ‘He feels very hot, uncle. And oh, how hard he’s getting.’
‘Yes. Miranda …’
‘Look: he’s come to attention.’
‘That’s all for you, my dear.’
‘Good soldier. Brave soldier. Oh, how big he is!’
At this, I nearly shot off in her face. I pulled her down across me. I had to make a tent of her black tresses. I could feel her hot little gasps as she bent to her task of fascinated inspection. Her cool hair was all about the throbbing subaltern.
‘Miranda.’
‘Yes, uncle?’
‘The soldier’s very cold. Pop him in your mouth and warm him up, will you?’
My nice niece flung herself away from me, rolling in the fallen apples, giggling uncontrollably. ‘Oh no no, uncle, I couldn’t do that!’
‘Why not in heaven’s name?’ I cried.
Miranda’s fingers flew to her mouth. She sucked them saucily as she looked at me. Her cheeks were scarlet. Her blue eyes blazed. ‘I couldn’t let your soldier come in my mouth, uncle,’ she protested pertly, prettily, wriggling, giggling. ‘Because I don’t know where he’s been.’
We put that right a few nights later in the bath. A lovely, lively girl. She’s fifteen years old now. I’ve educated her. I’ve brought her up to know all a soldier’s ways and needs. Her little cunt is sweet and quick, brisk as a honey-bee, tender as a nut, nimble as a squirrel, tight as a glove, wide-awake, dusky, burning. Yesterday evening she sat on my knee and played with my prick, then punished it mercilessly with her little fists because she thought I was going to come to the boil before she was ready, then wanted me to tickle her as she lay face-down across my lap, finally had me fuck her on the skins in front of the fire.
‘Uncle …’
‘What is it now?’
‘Wasn’t I a naughty girl, playing with your whatsit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t Aunt Milicent be mad if she was still alive, and found out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t she be jealous that all that hot milk came shooting out of it just for me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, seeing that I’ve been so bad, and deserve it, I think it’s only fair if you carry me up to Aunt Milicent’s bed, and spank me on it – and then do it again.’
So you see, Clio, Muse as you are, I’m whacked. I spent all night invoking a lovely piece of lively girlhood, and I’ve nothing left for you.
Chapter Eleven
About Sir John Fastolf’s belly & his rat
10th April
I have a biggish belly.
No doubt there have been bigger ones. There was a Roman senator I heard of who wobbled and waddled up and down the Forum needing three slaves staggering backwards in front of him to carry his belly. My fellow is not like that. It is not a collapsing or reluctant belly. It is not the corporation of a treacherous alderman. It is not a cormorant or a sink. It goes proudly before me, or I come modestly after it, one or the other, and one way or another I resemble a galleon in full float on the Spanish flood, or a pregnant whale. Yet neither likeness will do, for both are womanish. There is nothing like a princess about my belly. There’s too much sack in it for a start.
Avoi
d all pickles.
My belly in size and form is something like a badger. Put it down to the short woolly hair, mixed with long straight hairs, and the general shaggy aspect. The colour of this fur is blackish-brown, darker in winter. I comb it a lot. I pomade it. I comfort it with oils. It’s an inquisitive creature, my belly, and a voracious. It feeds on brewage and burnt brandy, champagne cup and puddings. That is, mutton puddings, with the occasional custard. No eggs. No eggs in custards or in sack. No pullet-sperm in my brewage.
Talking of pickles, the emperor Heliogabalus ate nothing else. This emperor had a moderately famous belly. In his garden was a forest and in this forest an elephant with tusks of fire. No one dared go near the elephant. Heliogabalus called his politicians together and asked them what was the nature of the elephant.
‘The elephant approves of virgins,’ said X.
‘The elephant approves of musical virgins,’ said Y.
‘Virgins who can sing will please the elephant,’ said Z.
WANTED: SINGING VIRGINS. Heliogabalus advertised and got two. He had them stripped and they danced down his garden into the forest. The first virgin carried a basin. Her name was Scholastica. The second virgin carried a silver sword. She did not give her name to the civil servant.
Scholastica started singing.
‘I have a young sister far beyond the sea:
Perrie, Merrie, Dixie, Domini.’
The elephant heard her and came running through the forest, smashing the trees and beetles of course.
The unnamed virgin added her voice to the song.
‘And she has sent a dowry to me:
Pelrum, Part rum, Paradisi, Temporie.’
Both were sopranoes, did I say?
The elephant stopped. It shook its head like Africa. Then it walked slowly towards them, tusks blazing, trunk swaying. The girls sang on. Perrie, Merrie, Dixie, Domini. Such nervous music! They stroked his trunk. The elephant for his part fondled the girls and slapped their bottoms with his ears. At last he lay down and fell asleep with his trunk in Scholastica’s lap. While he dreamt of cherries and chickens the anonymous virgin killed the elephant with her silver sword and the two of them filled the basin with his blood. They took the basin back to the Emperor Heliogabalus. He drank the blood in one go and never touched another pickle as long as he lived, although truth to tell that was not very long.
Now my belly, on catching sight of its enemy, death, before determining finally on flight, will sit on its haunches and, in order to get a more philosophical view of the danger, shade its eyes with one of its fore-paws. Pressed for sack or sugar it grows fearless, this same increasing belly of mine, and has been known to come roaring on board an ice-bound vessel, and in presence of the crew seize a barrel of beer and down it in one long suck. My belly when I am gone will be valuable for its fur. It will make an elegant hearth rug. Heliogabalus had an armchair made of the elephant’s skull.
‘He-whore! He-whore!’
‘God save the King!’
At the siege of Meaux, Horace and his ass’s head. It was a French ass. Horace was a man of Meaux. Hal busy pounding the walls with his cannon when this Horace appears on the ramparts in his nightshirt, capering round with an ass’s head the French have crowned, and going hee-haw through a trumpet. Every now and again he thumps his oracle, encouraging it to give tongue, and shouts down to us to listen to what our King has to say. (I should tell you that Henry was at that time the nickname for an ass in France.)
‘He-whore! He-whore!’
‘God save the King!’
This Horace, French patriot and comedian, the mayor of Meaux eventually awarded us, in accordance with the town’s terms of surrender.
‘He-whore! He-whore!’
We assed him good and proper. O rare.
I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine. I can belch in Greek, hiccup in Latin, and fart with a convocation like the fall of Babel. Fart, that is, when my belly and my bowels are on speaking terms. My bowels are laughing bowels – not a square inch of compassion in them. As for that, I can make my belly smile and sneer, as well as speak. My belly is a wise, loquacious teller of stories. On winter nights it usually tells me lies. I lean back and I listen to my belly, my portly tutor, my companion in crime. And my belly reminds me of adventures past.
That time, for instance, when my belly saved me from an exorcism. It was in St George’s fields, outside the city, where I had gone to play the Devil. I mean, I had taken the part of this representative in a drama of the Seven Deadly Sins, acting out Old Nick for all that it was worth and causing an embarrassing deal of conversion. The play over, the audience dispersed, I set out in the cool of the twilight to go home to my lodgings in the Inns of Court. I had no change of costume with me so I walked in the cloak and clothes I had worn for the morality: that is, a tail and two horns and various tattered silks depicting hellfire, with my face all horribly slobbered with black and green and silver. On my way across the fields I passed by a rabbit warren, belonging to my Lord the Bishop of Southwark. Now it happened that this same bishop was served in part by a very slippery priest, one Friar Puck, and that this Puck, together with a small gang of ecclesiastical scoundrels, had come to the warren that evening to pervert young rabbits. They had a horse and a ferret. The ferret in fact was loose and in the hole, and their net cast over the only exit, when I chanced upon the scene of the crime.
‘Ooooh!’ shrieks Puck, perceiving me loom up mighty in the gathering gloom, the moon above my horns and the night at my elbow. ‘Run, girlth, run! Here comes Myth Lucifer!’
His acolytes knew no better than to take this Puck for an authority on the subject. They dropped their sticks and bolted. Puck went first, his curates after, skinny, skirted virgins pursued across St George’s fields (as they thought) by seven demons with big pricks lit in hell. In fact, their own brown sins.
As for me, God’s holy thistle, madam, but I didn’t see their thin net in the owl-light. My feet caught in it and I fell.
This columnar neck of mine was not quite broken on that occasion. When I came to my senses I saw that I was tangled in the net across the warren, and guessed the mean, filching trade of Friar Puck, and that he and his vestals had fled for fear of me. Looking about, I saw their nag parked nearby, tethered to a bush, dripping with coneys that the sods had taken. There are no thieves in the world can rival a parcel of priests with their minds on the job. That poor horse looked like a butcher’s shop, there were so many little bleeding rabbits hung about it.
I determined on morality. My performance in the Deadly Sins had shaken me to the fundament, I confess it, and I decided now in a flash of misbegotten right-thinking to ride this horse to the Bishop’s house and return to him his rabbits, even if they were the worse for wear. I mounted with a couple of ‘St Georges!’ on the horse’s back, and clapped my heels to him. The creature sagged at the middle but did its best to support me in my fool’s errand.
Arrived in the full moon at the Bishop’s house, I knocked at his gate. A servant opened the hatch.
‘Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us now,’ he whispered, ‘and at the hour of our death.’
Now on my voyage across St George’s fields, and to fortify me from my fall into the net across the warren, as well as to prepare me for the pain of parting with the rabbits, I had taken one or two little sucks at my bottle. I was in no mood therefore to hear this amateur say his angelus.
‘Let me in!’ I instructed him plainly. ‘Open the gate!’
‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he answered. ‘Go back to hell!’
I began to feel insulted. A man does, when his morality is not appreciated. I could have wished that I had kept the coneys.
‘Please yourself,’ I said. ‘I won’t come in. You may well be mad, and it might be catching. But tell my lord the Bishop that I want to speak to him.’
The servant shut the hatch. I heard his footsteps go. They came back quick, and another’s with them. But it was not the Bishop. It wa
s his steward.
‘You see!’ whispers the first servant. ‘It’s the Devil himself perched on a black horse, with coneys hanging down about him bleeding front and back!’
‘That’s not coneys!’ says the steward. ‘I know a pack of separated souls when I see ’em. The Devil has come for our bishop’s immortal part!’
I now perceived the state of the case, but before I could open my mouth the fools had slippered off inside again. I took another swig at my bottle. ‘Jack Crack,’ says I to myself, ‘let this be a lesson to you. Doing good is not your line. Morality’s a steaming heap of trouble.’
I turned my horse’s head about to go, rabbits and all. But at that moment the gate groans open and out processes my lord the Bishop, complete with mitre, cope and candle and a trough of holy water. Before I can address him, he asperges me.
‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost I command and charge thee to get behind me, Satan!’
At this I parted company with my reasonableness. If there is one thing that annoys an Englishman, it is being conjured. ‘You silly bishop!’ I said. ‘I’m not Beelzebub. I’m not even Belial or Mahomet or a cacodemon. Look! It’s a good devil. It’s Jack Fastolf, your sometimes faithful servant. I only played the Devil in the play.’
The Bishop however is into a very potent and interminable prayer in Latin. He hardly heeds me.
‘Fastolf!’ I roar. ‘It’s Fastolf, not the Devil!’
And at this point I stood up in the stirrups and Puck’s horse buckled, broke, grunted and died under the weight of me and the Bishop huffs out his holy candle in a great absolution of laughter.
‘It is Fastolf!’ says he. ‘He’s bust the horse. By God, I’d know that belly anywhere!’
I have a pet rat. Her name is Desdemona. She is a black rat. Her skin is glossy, her tail is long. She has a stout skull, bright eyes, twelve teats. I had her from Nym, who caught her in a colander on the Isle of Dogs. She cost me five farthings. Desdemona comes when I whistle ti-fa. It is my pleasure to let her run up and down and round about my person, while I lie on the floor of the great hall here in Caister or on the bed now vacated for a colder one by my late sharp wife, Dame Milicent. I prefer to be naked for these exercises. I take off my red velvet jerkin and stretch out.
