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:
‘So you’ve read it,’ said Berna. ‘And you’ll know the response.’
‘I suppose you are Beauty and Simplicity and all the other arrows that have pierced him.’
‘It’s Love, not I, who shot those arrows.’
‘This was his sole desire,’ said Pogge. She took the rose and held it in her palm. ‘You refused it him, and he departed.’
Berna’s face turned crimson and she stood. She picked up the book and the blanket with impatient gestures, seized the rose from Pogge’s hand and threw it away. She began to walk towards the village, and Pogge hurried after her.
ON THE LEAVINGS of housewives’ stockpots the children laid owl pans and rotten crow, rib of vole and otter, a deal of brock rigbone, some small-fowl carrion and the shells of things that crawl in mould. All it ne gladdened us the pans of nightingales webbed with rat leg and snake rib in one mound of bone, Nack the hayward said a bonefire cleansed the air like no other, and held the saints their noses, their ears were open yet to beads, their gold eyes open to our candles’ light.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE abbot and the prior having degenerated so severely (the abbot now completely separated from administrative matters), the prior has assumed responsibility for the emergency. He is content to have me here as a distraction, until he remembers I have no capacity for music, and is dissatisfied. He suspects horror of the plague, rather than, as I insist, practical obstacles, postpones my exit.
‘I RECOGNISE YOU from the book,’ said Berna. ‘You’re she who imprisons Warm Welcome and the Rose together in a high tower that the Lover ne approach.’
‘Jealousy?’ said Pogge. ‘I’m not Jealousy. If I’m in the book it’s as you say, as Reason.’
She looked over her shoulder at the pigboy Hab, who hadn’t moved away with the swine, but remained sufficiently close to the tree roots to hear what the cousins said. He caught her eye, laughed, winked, clapped his hands together, dropped his head back and let a squeal. The swine trotted to him.
‘Reason,’ said Berna, ‘is merely Jealousy in disguise.’
Pogge pleaded that she not be angry and took her by the hand.
They passed the foragers and Berna demanded of the children their purpose. The oldest girl, who carried a baby asleep on her back, said they gathered bones for the Thomas’s Day bonefire.
‘You made that stinking smoke once this year already, on John Baptist’s,’ said Berna. ‘There aren’t but small bones here.’
The girl said they’d burned their best bones the first time, and Nack the hayward told them they must have a second fire, for Death bode for a fair wind from France, and must be met with bone smoke. They gathered what they could find. She took from her apron a bird’s skull of an apricot’s bigness. It was small, she said, but they’d been bidden not to come home till they’d got bones to the weight of her baby brother.
The demoiselles continued on their way. ‘Concerning the stories of the clerks,’ said Pogge, ‘is there any doubt of the verity of what they say? In Bristol we’re sure. It’s inevitable. Everyone’s afraid.’
‘Here most people believe it’s a ruse to enrich priests,’ said Berna. ‘And deny such a malady could cross the sea to England. But it pleases Cotswold peasants to pretend obedience. And some do believe. Our hayward, for example, and he has power here. Hence the bonefire.’
THE OLD PIGSTER Dor farrowed Hab, and none knew the sire. Dor spent her death pennies on Hab’s christening, so when God called her forth she hadn’t aught left for the fare, and Hab was left alone in the world, without no gear nor silver. He kept our swine and we kept him. As we to the high and proud, so Hab to us. He was knave to any churl. In winter he bode in Enker’s cot, in summer a wattle shelter in the woods, and was deemed true enough that twice he’d driven swine to a buyer in Melksham, and come again with the silver. He danced naked in the bourne, dark as any eel, and sang and rolled in the mud with the grice.
QUERY: HAVE I been honest? Response: No. In perscribing this commentary I create a substitute for my faith in the continued existence of home.
Today I went to the feretory. Six pilgrims had risen from the pavement to press their noses to the crystal aperture protecting the nail with which the Romans fixed Christ to the cross. I imagine they who buried him cared more for his corpse than for the ferrous fragments perforating it, or for the spiny crown with which his executioners derided him, a part of which is also supposed to be in the abbey’s possession. These are false relics, I suppose; yet I do not doubt that Christ was crucified. So do I not doubt that my villa outside Avignon is securely insulated from plague, even as I create these textual ephemera. The pilgrims would connect with Christ de facto did they remain at home in a state of piety and virtue, in patient expectation of his resurrection and their transmission into paradise. Yet they doubt paradise is their destination, they suspect damnation, and so prefer to frequent sanctuaries, to touch with their hands the luxurious fallacies of the cult of sacred objects.
So it is with me. It is my creed that, as I perscribe this in Malmesbury, the chanting of the fraternity perpetually audible, Judith and Marc move around the villa in Avignon in the chanting of the cicadas, picking basil and lavender, lighting the lamps, setting out wine and a volume of Ovid for my return. This is the paradise I expect. But instead of proceeding there with maximum velocity I retard myself here, perscribing. In the mode of the pilgrims, my horror of damnation intervenes with false objects. My creed is the paradise of home, but the pestilence that has not yet infected England has afflicted Avignon, and my terror is to arrive there to an absolute post-mortal silence, pure nullity, except the accumulation of cadavers, the putrefaction of familiar faces. The terror is not of my own mortality, but the mortality of those I care for, that they might perish before me, and I would be in solitude, like Adam without Eve. Best is to be certain they have not perished. But to be uncertain is better than to be certain that they have.
THE COUSINS AMBLED towards the church. ‘There’ll be free and villain, no gentry, just us,’ said Berna. ‘A place is kept for us, although my father attends mass elsewhere. It’s a mean church, with an indigent curate.’
The church was so full it would have been difficult for the demoiselles to push through the entrance had the villagers not pressed themselves against the walls to let them pass. Some of the better-arrayed free women tried to meet their eyes; the rest acted as if they mightn’t see them, or oughtn’t, save that they stepped aside to open a way through to a bench close to the jube. There wasn’t enough incense lit to cover the scents of sweat and newly laundered cloth. All talked.
In front of the jube stood a group of young men with bowstaves against their shoulders. Among them was Will Quate, who sensed the demoiselles’ regard and СКАЧАТЬ