To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek
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Название: To Calais, In Ordinary Time
Автор: James Meek
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческое фэнтези
isbn: 9781786896759
isbn:
NOW IT IS night, when under the abbot’s regimen the monks would have been asleep. Under the invigorated rule, one third of the community chants, insomniate, sating the vacuum of tenebrous nocturnal silence between Compline and Matins with adamantine clarifications of the divine.
The abbot and his pomp are not part of this. The abbot, formally the monastery’s most senior cleric, celebrates mass in his private secretarium, absents himself from chapter, does not participate in processions, and has separated himself from the chanting of the liturgy. I have become the sole inhabitant of both abbeys, the decadent abbey of the abbot and the austere abbey of the prior.
Accordingly, I divide my hours. After Vespers I exit the nave and transit the area to the abbot, who tells me that the prior is a fanatical dictator, a usurper, a depraver of regulations, that he is ignorant of the furious verities of public administration. It is the abbot’s opinion that only the fatuous would find it credible for God to damn the carnivores and offer the herbivores and pescivores salvation, or exterminate humanity because an abbot in Malmesbury wears coloured velvets. ‘Are we to accept,’ the abbot says, ‘that God may perceive true fidelity only through the rags of penury, the habits of opulence rendering it invisible?’
But before Vespers, and at night, I regress to the nave, ambling between the pilgrims pressed to the pavement, supplicating miserably as they reptile to the sanctuary. I resonate with the chanting of the choir. The chancel exhales an incensed nimbus, mollifying the flagrant ardors of the candles, while the immense columns of pale native stone simulate the trunks of celestial arbors.
NB Marc. I should have conducted you with me to England, as you requested. I confess I was directed by an irrational resentment which is difficult to explain: I resented the contrast between your superior (in respect to me) command of Latin and your inferior command of rhetoric, which resulted in the more erudite of us – you – being subordinate to the more sociable, me. You remained my servant, when you might with facility have found an alternative master who honoured his dependency on you in terms more amiable than finance alone. I request that you absolve me.
PS The request for absolution to be extended to your wife – Judith having indubitably suffered indirectly from my resentment.
WILL WOKE ON a sack of straw in a hot dark room. Evening light came of small windows pitched in the wall and around him were the shapes of other men asleep.
His pack was by his bed-sack. Someone had taken the shoon of his feet and left them nearby. Will rose and did on the shoon. He’d go out the door, but a tall lean freke with a rood written on his forehead in blackneedle stood in his way.
‘By what right do you behold me?’ asked the man.
‘I’m thirsty,’ said Will. ‘You stand between my thirst and my whole hope to quench it.’
‘Would you go by me?’ said the man. ‘Would you? See how far you go.’
‘I wouldn’t strive with a man and ne know why,’ said Will.
‘For one, you behold my forehead like to you ne worth the holy rood of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ,’ said the man. ‘For two, your face ne likes me. I would work it to a better shape with the sharp end of my bollyknife.’
SOMEONE CALLED TO the man in a soft steven and bade him come away. ‘Your wrath were more worthed did you hold it back, my Dickle, that it mightn’t be fare for all, as bread, but doled out in shreddles, as saffron,’ said the soft-spoken one.
‘I wasn’t there when they made this gnof a bowman,’ said Dickle. ‘I’d have sent him home to his mother’s lap with his neb slit.’ He shoff by Will into the room where Will had been asleep and shut the door.
It was Softly John Fletcher who spoke. ‘Dickle Dene’s a fell man with knife, but ever holy,’ he said. ‘He fared the last fifty mile to Jerusalem on his knees, and had the rood written on his forehead in blackneedle that all might know his holiness.’
‘I’m ill of head and dry of mouth,’ said Will. ‘I ne know where I am nor how I got here since I drank the Scotch.’
‘You drank enough to make you blind,’ said Softly. ‘This is Rodmarton, a morning’s fare from Malmesbury. Hayne bore you on his back.’
He led Will to a long telded cart, with a ladder hung on hooks on one side, in one hern of the guesthouse yard. The moon had risen and the stars shimmered and cans of fleabane smoked at the doors. A light was lit in the cart and someone went about inside with a sound of clay and iron and thin timbers that knocked against each other.
Softly called into the cart and a woman brought out a can of ale, which she gave to Softly, who handed it to Will. Will drained the can and they filled it again. Softly bade the woman bring light and the woman brought a flame that gleamed in an ox-horn cup.
‘Behold, Cess, Player Will Quate,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he as fair a young freke as you’ve seen?’
Cess ne lifted her eyes to see. ‘I shan’t behold no other man but you,’ she said.
‘She makes a show of meekness for me, but she’s as all French maids, wanton and sly,’ said Softly. ‘Find you her fair?’
Will said he mightn’t deem the fairness of any woman but his own betrothed.
Softly laughed. There was gold in his teeth. He put his arm around Will’s shoulder, led him to the board and bade him take an old barrel-half for his seat. He was friendly, and asked Will many asks, and Will answered.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Softly. ‘I’ll learn you what’s what, for though Hayne’s leader, him ne likes the other bowmen to know what he knows. He leaves it to each man to choose his way, and if that way ne answers Hayne’s read, woe betide him, in war or frith.’
‘What’s war?’ said Will. ‘Is it a fight?’
‘War’s all the fights together, and all that betides on the days between the fights, which is the greater deal of soldiery,’ said Softly. ‘A man who lacks but war makes a poor soldier.’
‘I lack the sight of the sea,’ said Will. ‘I lack silver for my freedom.’
Softly nodded. ‘You’re right to seek your freedom in France in wartide,’ he said. ‘The English soldier has such freedom in France as no king ne gets in his own house.’
SOFTLY JOHN WOULD have Will know he was a God-fearing man.
‘I was a seafarer,’ he said, ‘and met a holy man, who gave me a golden rood, but I lost it. The holy man gave it me, for he saw in me an angel-light.’
Softly had sailed on a ship out of Weston took flour, ale, apples and candles to the holy man, an anchor who lived alone on an island. The anchor wone in a house made of stone and wood he’d gathered of the strand, and sat there all summer and winter, bidding his beads and writing. СКАЧАТЬ