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:
Berna regarded her cousin uncomprehendingly, and laughed. ‘You favour him? He’s no gentleman.’
‘My father says a family that ne breeds in a peasant every third generation grows away from its proper nature.’
‘Pogge, as you see, I converse with one as low as a pigboy, even cherish the boar he guards, but I wouldn’t marry it. Quate ploughs and weeds for a penny a day and lives with his mother. She’s villain-born, and the father free-born, so by his father’s blood he should be free. But his father went to be an archer and died at Sluys, so as far as my papa is concerned, the Quate boy is unfree again.’
‘And does Quate think he is free?’
‘He would be free. My father prefers him to be unsure. He tells him he’s at liberty, then offers him villain land to farm.’
‘Is that a bow he carries?’
‘After Crécy, they all practise archery after mass.’
‘He follows his father.’
‘Papa is supposed to send an archer for the Calais garrison, but Quate is to marry the village beauty, Ness. She lost a child in March, probably his, so he’s not such an angel. Anyway, Quate mayn’t go to France, so that beefy person next to Quate, the miller’s son, he’s going.’
Pogge whispered in Berna’s ear: ‘You should go. You desire to go to France so fiercely, and have already pierced the heart of a man with five arrows.’
‘Par amour, par amour,’ whispered Berna. ‘It was Love that shot those arrows; all I may do is make him apprehend the value of the pain.’
HAB CAME OF the wood at noon and made Enker, by his craft, bide at the lichgate. He came in the churchyard and went to the outer door of the church, which stood open, the inner door wedged wide by us that thrang there. Hab listened a handwhile to the priest through the open doors. The qualm would come to Gloucestershire, the priest said, to pine lewd folk for their sins.
Hab came away from the church door to where the Fishcombe women had left their gear ready to sell their wares after mass. He put the market boards on their trestles under a tree and sang
To whom should I, the wolf said,
Tell of my sins ere I am dead?
Here ne is nothing alive
That me could here now shrive.
The women came out of church with baskets of cheese and orchard stuff. Hab said he’d set their boards under the tree so they’d be in shade and they gave him a garlicle, a thick long stalk with fat red cloves below. He took it to the bowman’s field and sat on his haunches to bide till the bowmen came.
IT WAS THE first Sunday since the field was mown, the best time for bowmen, when the weather was good but they wouldn’t lose time looking for untrue arrows in the long grass. Four came from church to shoot, and chid each other as they went.
Those days, with Calais won for England, high folk lacked Lord Berkeley that he ne met his due of fresh bowmen to man the walls of the town so the French ne take it again. As the high folk stirred Berkeley, so he stirred his under-lords, and so Sir Guy stirred us for a bowman to join Hayne Attenoke’s Gloucestershire score when it went by Outen Green, Calais-bound.
Will Quate was our best with bow, but he was to wed Ness Muchbrook. Some gnof had got her with child, and she went to Santiago de Compostela with her mother, and came back a fortnight after, not great no more, with a likeness of St Margaret stamped on a littlewhat of tin. We ne knew how long it took to wend to Spain and back, but we believed it to be further. Maybe, the godsibs said, she ne fared to Spain. Maybe she went to see a woman in Bristol who knew how to make the unborn never-born.
Some of us reckoned Will Quate the sire of the get, as we’d seen them hop together at other folk’s weddings, but most of us reckoned it was Laurence Haket, Sir Guy’s kinsman, who was his guest when the get was gotten.
Anywise, Will and Ness were betrothed, and besides, the greater deal of us ne deemed Will a free man, so us thought Cockle, the miller’s son, was the man for Calais. He was free and full barst to go, to wear the iron cap and drink wine and know the French maids. When he told his father he was going, his father called him a dote and smote him on the ear. But now Cockle’d shifted his mood. He’d met a pedder of Bath who told him the qualm was right fell in France, and all the French were in hell anywise, without his help. So he wouldn’t go. And when he told his father, his father called him a canker and smote his other ear.
Sim, the master-bowman, who lost an eye to one of Despenser’s churls when we weren’t mostly born, said Cockle was a wantwit.
‘I’m a free man,’ said Cockle. ‘I’ll live as it likes me.’
‘It needs find a bowman by Michaelmas, and I’m too old,’ said Sim.
‘I’d go,’ said Whichday Wat, ‘only my wife’s got great, and the youngest is sick, and the ox is lame.’
They looked at Will.
‘He mayn’t go,’ said Cockle. ‘He’s not free. He’s bound to the manor.’
They heard a stir in the middle of town, over by the green. The priest flew out of the church in his mass-gear and ran toward the hooting, followed by his altar boys. The bowmen went to see, out-take Will, who bode in the field and shet an arrow at the mark.
THE MARK WAS a gin of straw and wattle meant to be in the likeness of a French knight, and the arrowhead blunt. But when the arrow struck the mark a keen cry of sore seemed to come of it, and a long, low moan. Will looked round and saw Hab on his haunches in the shade of the yew tree. Hab dropped his hand off his mouth and laughed. ‘Mind when I made Bob Woodyer think his cow could speak, and the cow told him she was the angel Gabriel, and God had hidden a golden crock in her arse?’ he said.
‘And Bob went about all week beshitten to the armpit,’ said Will.
Hab held the garlicle out, the stalk thick and right and the cloves red and full.
Will unstrung his bow, set it against the tree and sat by Hab. He took the garlicle, ran a thumbnail down the garlic sack and slote the rind. He bade Hab put out his hand and pushed the cloves into it. He told seven, white and clean. Hab did six in his bag and one in his mouth. He chewed and said: ‘I lack sweet meat to clean my breath.’
‘There’s none,’ said Will.
‘There is, would you give it me. A kiss.’
Will laughed and shook his head.
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