To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek
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behind the rood-pale and led Will by the wrist to the likenesses on the north wall. On any other day we ne heeded the likenesses. We knew them too well. Yet now, tight together in the candle stink, it were as if we’d seen what they showed. When the priest spoke of Christ it were like to he told of a kinsman who’d gone out of Outen Green and fell in with uncouth churls that ne knew his worth, and scorned and slew him. It were like to we stood in the garden in Jerusalem, and smelled onion on false Judas’s breath when he kissed us in the murk, and felt the chill on our bare backs when the shirt was torn of it, the smart of flesh when the knotted rope struck, the uncouth spit wet on our faces, the weight of the rood like to a house-cruck, the hawthorns that pricked our brows and the nails that went between our hand-bones and foot-bones. It were like to we were pitched in the wind to hang like flesh on the butcher’s hook. And we saw him rise to heaven, like lightning shotten upward of the earth.
The priest went again to the altar. When the sacring bell rang we shoff up against the rood-pale and went on our knees and lifted our hands. Some of us saw our Maker in the priest’s hands and they at the back yall at the priest to lift our Lord higher. Buck and Whichday took Will by the arms and lifted him up out of the heap of folk, that he got good sight of Christ, for he that saw the Lord was shielded were he reft ferly of life. Then the priest ate Christ’s flesh, and drank of his blood.
After mass Will went from hand to hand, for each of us would wish him well, and give him some thing or useful word. His mother dight her hands on his cheeks and made a show of a smile, for she’d sworn to hold back her tears till he was gone.
Will walked away up the road with his pack on his back and his bowstaff in his right hand, the children after him. They stinted at the top field wall, and Will clamb over it, and ne looked again, and we couldn’t see him afterwards. That was how Will Quate left Outen Green.
When he’d gone we minded how mild he was with the old and children, how good a neighbour, how right he sowed and ploughed and sheared, how it comforted to see his cheer behind an ox-gang in the rain and hear his feet breaking ice in the puddles on the back road on a winter morning. We felt bare shame to let such strength and manship go, with his neb like an angel’s. And we felt bare glad the Green had such an offering to make. It lightened us to think us strong enough to send so handy a man away to where, the priest said, the Fiend had free hold. Let the world see, we kept no jewel back.
SOMEONE CRIED THE pigs were loose, and we ran to shield our orchards, and called for Hab, but he wasn’t there.
Whichday and Cockle bode at the church, and when the priest came out, Whichday went to him and said the night before he’d had a dream of Will walking through a cornfield ahead of him, but Will wouldn’t turn when he called, and did the priest know the meaning?
The priest was a ploughman’s son like us, who’d gotten Latin of the Gloucester monks. He said many men dreamed of their corn before harvest, and Whichday most likely feared hail.
Whichday said it wasn’t that. He lacked Will, and wished they hadn’t let him go. He’d know where he was, and what he did, and how he fared. Wasn’t there, he asked the priest, a way to ward dreams, to reach what you sought of them, not to be at the dream’s bidding?
The priest said man’s lot wasn’t to choose his dreams, nor win of them, and dreams fell upon us, like wild deer in darkness, while we slept. Yet there were some folk who warded their dreams, as shepherds warded sheep, and kept them as easy by day as by night, and won of them, as of their herd shepherds won wool. These folk, he said, were called writers, and they were close to the Fiend.
Yet, he said, there were holy among them. He told us he’d met a book in the getting of his priest-lore, a book by a man of Italy, about the life of Christ, and in this book was written of deeds by our Lord that weren’t in the gospel.
Like for one the gospel told how the Fiend tempted our Maker in the desert, and how Christ fasted, but the gospel ne told whence came the meat with which Christ’s fast was broken. So the man of Italy wrote a thing that seemed what our meek and simple son of God might do, that Christ bade angels fly to his mother’s house and fetch meat of her, and Christ, wrote the man of Italy, ate alone in the desert, with angels to serve him.
Whichday and Cockle were astoned. Cockle asked had Christ in truth sent home for meat to break his fast?
The priest said we mightn’t know, for the man of Italy ne wrote of what was true, nor what wasn’t true, but what might be true, by his conning of the lifelodes of men, and the things and deeds he minded, that he crafted with his mastery of dreaming into a likeness of truth.
Cockle said the man of Italy was a liar.
The priest pulled Cockle’s sleeve and asked was the seamstress who made it a liar, for making a thing out of flax in the likeness of another sleeve, and calling it a sleeve?
Cockle said he’d like to see a man ride to Brimpsfield on the likeness of a horse.
The priest bade Cockle beware to call those who made likenesses liars, for the gospel told us how our Lord made man in his own likeness. And Cockle shouldn’t rue the way he was, for God had made so many likenesses of himself, it wasn’t no wonder his fingers slipped once in a while.
All this time Whichday stood and stared about and played with the two hairs on his chin. He said he would ward his dreams that night. He would make a likeness of Will Quate.
WILL WENT THROUGH the wood beyond the wall till Outen Green was hidden from his sight. The sun’s light beshone the path in flecks. The boughs of the trees were still and the only sound was birdsong, Will’s feet on the earth and the creak of the pack straps on his kirtle.
Deep in the wood, the shapes of a man in white and a great dark deer seemed to go ahead of him, and he stinted, and they weren’t there, and he went on.
Feet came quick behind him, twigs cracked, and Ness came, neb red of running. She threw her arms around Will and bade him bide longer.
‘I must go,’ said Will. ‘I’ll come again in a year, if you’ll have me.’
‘I’ll have you,’ said Ness. She took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘Swear you won’t be killed by no French. Swear you won’t sicken of no qualm.’
Will swore it.
Ness fumbled in her barmcloth, took out a tin token and gave it to Will. ‘It’s St Margaret,’ she said. ‘She was swallowed by the Fiend in the shape of a firedrake, and after it swallowed her the firedrake barst, and Margaret stepped out of the skin unhurt, with every hair in its stead, and the Fiend was ashamed to have been beaten by a maid.’
‘I would you kept her,’ said Will.
‘She’s done her work for me,’ said Ness, and shut Will’s fingers on the token. ‘I got her in an uncouth land, where I went with a child in my womb, and I came back heal without it. Where’s your freedom?’
Will showed her the letter, and Ness turned it in her hands, and rubbed the seal against her lips to feel the smoothness of the wax.
‘It’s but the deed of a deed,’ said Will. ‘The freedom will be redeemed by one in Calais.’
He took her hand and led her off the path to a dim stead under a low oak branch, horseshoed by holly. He set down his bowstaff and took off his pack and stroked Ness’s tits through her kirtle. She kissed him and put her tongue in his mouth and reached under his kirtle and into his breech for his pintle and stroked it. She lay on the ground on her back and pulled up her barmcloth and kirtle and shirt and pulled down her breech. Will let down his hose and breech and his pintle swung out stiff and thick. ‘It’s a fair one,’ said Ness. ‘If you ne put it in my cunny quick as a wink, I’ll die.’
Will