To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek
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to you and your bowmen.’
‘Ne dare.’
‘I’ll wear a cloth on my neb and use French words and make a show that I’m the lady Bernadine.’
‘I’ll tell them otherwise.’
‘If you do they’ll send me back to Outen Green to be hung as a thief.’
‘Won’t you let me be?’
‘I may only let you be with me.’
WILL CAME AGAIN to the guesthouse. The other bowmen were at board, their dishes nigh to empty. Will came up to Hayne and asked to be forgiven his late. He’d risen early, he said, and gone out to see what kind of town Rodmarton was, for he hadn’t never seen it. But Hayne wouldn’t behold him.
There was a free stead next to Hayne on the bench, and a stead free by Softly, and Softly called to Will to sit by him, and Will took his seat there.
A maid came from the guesthouse and set before Will a can of ale and a dish of hot collops. He put egg and pig-flesh on the bread with the flat of his knife and fell to as one hadn’t eaten a fortnight.
Hayne spoke, and it was like to a hill shook. It was his law, he said, that all must be together in his sight at cock-crow, and all must be together in his sight at sundown, and Will Quate had broken this law. When one of his score broke this law by going his own way, said Hayne, those as hadn’t broken the law would be hurt.
All the bowmen fell still but Softly, who spat on the ground.
Hayne rose and bade them gather their gear and get on the road.
THE LAND ABOUT them fell away. Ahead of the bowmen to the south lay a wide flat wold, and at the far brim of their sight, a line of hills. Between them and the wold a great dark blade reached into the sky, like to a giant under the ground had pitched his spear through the world’s hide. Longfreke saw Will stare and told him it was the spire of the church of the abbey in Malmesbury. In all England, he said, only Sarum’s was longer.
They came to the Fosse Way, that marked where Gloucestershire and Wiltshire met. After a mile’s fare they met a gooseherd and his knave, who drove a flock of geese northward. The gooseherd went in the midst of the geese, and greeted the bowmen as they went by. The knave walked last, at the end of the flock, and when Hayne went by him, he smote him in the head with his fist, and the boy fell to the ground without a sound.
Hayne struck his blow so quick and true that the gooseherd, in his dreamy fare, ne saw nor heard, and walked on, and the knave lay still in the road.
Will opened his mouth but before he could speak Holiday had dight his hand over it, and Holiday and Longfreke between them held him back from going to help the knave. They made him go on till they were out of hearing of the gooseherd, then let him turn his head to see the knave sitting up with his noll in his hands.
‘Mind what Hayne said,’ said Longfreke. ‘When one of us breaks Hayne’s law to go his own way, one that ne broke no law is hurt. Smarts it to see the gooseboy, who hadn’t done us no wrong, struck down by Hayne?’
‘It smarts,’ said Will.
‘Mind it next time you’re out playing the ram and the sun comes up.’
Will turned and caught the eye of Cess. No light came in her grim cheer, and she dight her headcloth lower on her forehead.
‘I would that they who made the laws might learn me what they are before I find a way to break them,’ said Will to Longfreke.
‘Hayne’s laws are such that the man who breaks them knows them in his heart, whether he’s told or not,’ said Longfreke. ‘But I’ll tell you one.’ He nodded at the spire. ‘In half a mile we leave Gloucestershire. After that you mayn’t go home again out-take by France or in a shroud. My read’s to turn now and go home.’
Will ne heeded him. He went with the bowmen when they turned from the Fosse Way, and crossed from Gloucestershire into Wiltshire, and all, even Hayne and Dickle Dene, shook Will’s hand, and said Player Will Quate was of their fellowship, ale, bed, board and threepence a day. From there they went the last mile to Malmesbury.
I DISCOVERED THE prior at his usual post in a recess near the choir, considering with the precentor a table on which coloured wooden symbols on a chart depict the disposition of the choristers – those who are singing, those who are absent, asleep, in the refectory, in the infirmary. Other symbols signify the sites of suspected eruptions of evil and the commitment of mobile anti-demon choirs to counter them. The mental labour is immense; the prior must continually visualise his invisible defences and his invisible opponents, assisted only by the chart, by reports from the perimeter, and by his divinely-inspired vision, capable of detecting the Satanic multitudes projecting themselves against the monastic harmonies with teeth and claws and red eyes, and, worse, calling to their compatriots whom they have previously inserted in us, telling them that now is the moment to surge out and join the assault.
The prior was exhausted, unrazed, red around the eyes. Extraordinary that he should have organised such music with the debilitated instruments his community offers, the senile and the juvenile, the crapulent and the insane, the tone deaf and the monolingual, ignorant of the significance of the words they chant.
The precentor, conscious of the uses of Paris, disposes triple organa of tenor and descant – a minimum of forty-eight choristers for the tenor, twenty-four for the vox organalis and twenty-nine for the vox principalis. He and the prior have decided that should the descant and tenor combined fall below ninety-six, the integrity of their exaltation will erode, and God will project pestilential affliction through the ruptures in their vocal edifice. Every hour, determined by an horarium, spent choristers depart the choir, to be replaced by rejuvenates.
When I arrived, the grains in the superior part of the horarium had almost descended into the inferior. Simultaneously each of us around the table detected a diminution in the vigour of the music. Panic manifested itself in the fraternal faces. Their terror communicated itself to me, and I sensed, with them, the fracture and rupture of our defences, the strident ululation of the demons as they triumphantly surged through the fissures between the diminishing chords and prepared to feast on our souls.
Only the prior remained calm. He admonished a novice, who ran off and revened with the alternate choir, recently sleeping, their faces engraved with fatigue. The precentor urged them to the chancel. One by one the voices of the revived monks integrated with those of the attenuated brothers, the sound of the psalm expanded, the density of sacred incantation firmed our fortifications, and we relaxed.
The magnitude of sound oppressed our ears and forced us to clamour in order to be heard.
‘The archers have arrived,’ exclaimed the prior. ‘I desire that you go with them. Their dux Hayne Attenoke requires a cleric in the company, to take confession should the plague erupt tumultuously when they are far from any chapel.’
‘I am a proctor, not a priest,’ I said.
‘In extremis there is no requirement for confession to be heard by an ordained priest. In the circumstances of proximate pestilence, as homo literatus with a pulse, you are super-apt. Spend tonight in the library with the penitentials and you will comprehend the scheme better than the greater number of vicars. Nobody demands that you celebrate the eucharist. They will demand your services only in the ultimate exigency.’
‘The choral obstacles you have erected against Beelzebub are so magnificent, so splendid,’ I said. ‘Let me remain and record for posterity how the demonic legions were repulsed by the power of Malmesbury.’
The prior inspected me sternly. ‘Do you not have friends, colleagues, valued servants in