by James Meek
‘They ne laid a hand on her,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘Maybe truly she’s a witch.’
The riders flew by Will without stint. As they went by the bowmen, barely two hundred yard away, they ne looked to the right ne left, only stood in the stirrup and egged on their horses with wild yells. Soon they were gone.
‘Now there’s a wonder,’ said Holiday. ‘You ne know who God will lift a finger to help, and who he’ll turn his back on when she needs him.’
WILL CAME TO Imber and went to Madlen. She ne let go the neck of the lady Bernadine’s horse. She stared at Will with dismal cheer, her cheeks pale. Ash was minged in the ground with the mud of the night’s rain and the lower deal of the gown was stained black.
‘Look,’ she said. She showed with her finger a spot on the church steeple where the smoke of the fire had darkened the limewash. ‘They marked the church on their way.’
Will put his arms around her. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Did the riders hurt you?’
Madlen ne answered. Will beheld over her shoulder the leave of the bonefire. In the middle was a great whirl of white ash, and about the sides the bones that hadn’t burned through. They were the limbs of men made coal and one scorched skull. It seemed the bodies had been lain with their heads to the middle; that one head must have rolled out in the bonefire’s blaze. There were shrivelled feet, black as pitch, all about the brink.
THE END OF THE WORLD
WILL BEAT ON the church door. None answered. He rattled the handle but the church was locked. In the churchyard were five fresh graves. Work had begun to dig a great pit; the shape was marked out, but only a little earth had been dug. They heard a moan of the far side of the town, and walked through the streets, which were still, out-take a few cats and hens, till they came to a yard with an unmilked cow. Will and Madlen took it in turns to milk it while the other lay on the ground beneath the udders with their mouth open. They drank till they were full. When the cow was settled and ne moaned no more, they heard a groan of a nearby house with an open door. Will went to the threshold and called inside.
‘Ne come in would you not sicken,’ came an old man’s dry steven. ‘Bide there a handwhile.’ There was a rustle of straw and the scrape of earthenware and a can was thrust out of the doorway into the light.
‘Fill it with milk for me and lay it here again,’ he said. ‘Ne feel it with your naked fingers, let there be cloth between your flesh and the clay.’
Will pulled dock leaves of the old man’s yard and used them to hold the can while Madlen milked the cow into it. When it was full, Will laid it at the door again and saw it drawn into the darkness. He heard the old man drink. It must have slipped of his hands for he heard it hit the ground and break.
‘What else may we do for you?’ said Will.
‘Nothing, thank you.’
‘What ails you?’
‘Four nights ago it was sent us. They as might took their goods and cattle and went to hide in the woods, like to that would help them.’
‘Where’s your priest?’
‘He was one of the first to sicken, and the deacon with him. I ne know how we might fare further in this world now we’ve lost so many. My son and his wife are gone, and his three children, and the smith and most of his folk, and the greater deal of them with their yards on the back road that look south, which was what did for them when the wind blew of Dorset. I know all Danny Green’s kin gave up their ghosts for I laid them together on the bonefire, the smallest in the middle and the longest on the outside, as seemed meet. You saw the fire?’
‘Yeah,’ said Will.
‘Was all burned to ashes?’
‘Almost,’ said Will. ‘As near as made no shed.’
‘But you might know the bones that burned were mankind?’
‘Barely.’
‘You ne saw no child’s bones.’
‘None.’
‘Good,’ said the old man. ‘I ne would that aught of them were left out in the air for any outcome churl to see or fox to gnaw. I said I’d dig a pit for the dead after the leave had gone, for I knew I was already sick. I thought me I had the strength to work it, but no sooner had I marked the pit and begun to dig than I weakened and my brain began to whirl. So I thought me I’d make a bonefire, for if we make one anywise each year to clean the air, might it not hurt the Fiend to send our folk to heaven in a foul breath of smoke? The priest and deacon weren’t there to ask, for we’d already buried them, and the freke we sent to the next parish for help ne came again. So I drew all into a heap and tinded them, and they burned hot, God bless them, for they were good folk, even they that swiked you and overbeat each other. I barely might with it, and by the end I myself burned with such a fever I couldn’t stand. Then God sent the rain, and I thought me at first it was a token I’d done ill to burn my even-Christens instead of burial as I behest. But the rain ne quenched the bonefire, and it cooled me, and I took it as token I did right.’
He was taken by a fit of coughing. Madlen came up to Will and laid her hand on his shoulder and her cheek against his.
‘I’m Danday,’ said the old man. ‘Thanks that you milked old Hurryhome. She was set to burst.’
‘Will and Madlen,’ said Will. ‘We’re Cotswold folk.’
‘I thought me I heard horsemen.’
‘We’ve one horse between us. We’re with a score of archers, bound for Melcombe, but lost our way.’
‘I never saw Cotswold. I heard it’s fair. You’re of the land?’
‘I was bound. I’m a free bowman now. I have a deed.’
‘I lived bound,’ said Danday. ‘I reckon by this time tomorrow I’ll be free. The priest shrove us all. He knew his end came and he said we were a heap of foul sinners, but he would see us all right with the Redeemer. And then he told us we must shrive him.’
‘I ne knew that might be done.’
‘And I. We were astoned. He told us how he’d swiken us on our tithes with a false weight, and before we could gather our wits, he swallowed Christ’s body like to it were a shive of bread and bacon and laid his eyes together.’ He coughed again. ‘Warned you your priest this death would come?’
‘We thought it were a new wile to make us buy more masses and candles.’
‘Yeah, we too.’
‘And those as believed him thought England shielded, for our land is girded by the sea, and it mayn’t overgo the water, and God loves the English more than the French.’
‘Yeah, son. We too.’
‘Must we all die?’
‘I ne know, son. I hope it be otherwise. Be bold and go on meanwhile. Ne linger here. The air’s bad.’
‘It ne likes me to leave you alone without no friend or kin.’
‘I’m not alone, son. I have my Sarah here. She sleeps and won’t wake again. She’s the dearest of my son’s children and I couldn’t bear to burn her.’
Will asked again if there was aught else he might do. There wasn’t nothing, and they bade each other farewell, and Will led the lady Bernadine’s horse on toward Heytesbury, with Madlen riding it that the gown not be worse befouled.
IT HAS FREQUENTLY been noted by those more familiar than I with calamity that one cannot determine one’s reaction to extreme situations in advance. Distance having been placed between the young nobles, the posse comitatus pursuing them, Will Quate and Madlen, and the remainder of the company – i.e. our constituent parts being dispersed over the elevated plains of Wiltshire – I was obliged to examine my consent to accommodate the aforementioned gentle-people with my horse. Had I been required to predict my response to the discovery that a paucity of hours remained to me before the plague extinguished my terrestrial consciousness, I would have fixed on the probability of my directing my horse, with the maximum possible velocity, to the most proximate infirmary, and abandoning my companions to their fate – not so much in expectation of a cure as in the desire to discuss my conclusive personal history in the relatively congenial circumstances of clerical assistance and abundant provision of wine.
In place of which I traversed as a pedestrian – a virtually senile pedestrian – the five miles from an area obviously abandoned by its inhabitants at the first sign of pestilence towards one I assumed was equally infected. The route was rendered more intolerable by the conviction among the archers, based on their unaccountable confidence in Holiday’s medical art, that Hornstrake was not exhibiting plague symptoms, but an acute form of a more customary febrile state.
I inquired of Holiday why he had insisted Hornstrake was not suffering from the pestilence.
‘YOU DEEM THE lack of folk in that town tokens it’s qualm-ridden,’ said Holiday.
‘I do,’ said Thomas.
‘Whoreish quick for your pestilence to get such a hold on Hornstrake in so short a time.’
‘We don’t know where the sickness first went in him,’ said Thomas. ‘He might have breathed in the evil a week ago, and it sit and bide in him till now. Who’s to say he found it here? Who’s to say he didn’t bear it with him from Bristol?’
‘Hornstrake’s not a Bristol man,’ said Holiday. ‘He’s of Nailsworth, far from any haven. Only I, Softly, Dickle and Hayne were in Bristol these days.’
‘When was Hayne there?’
‘Nine days back. He came to bid Softly cleave to the score again and go with him to Calais. They spoke a few hours, then Hayne went back to Gloucester.’ He spat. ‘You goad your ox up the wrong furrow, proctor. There’s no pestilence in England, and I’ll tell you why.’ With his first fingers on either side of his noll he made the token of the horns. ‘Jews,’ he said. ‘France, Italy – all the lands that have the pest are thick with them, and they’ve always yearned to spill the Christens. But old Edward, the king’s eldfather, he kicked them out sixty winter ago. There’s not been a Jew in England since, and as long as we keep them out, they mayn’t work their pestilence on us.’
‘You truly ween the Jews have all the guilt for the plague?’ said Thomas.
‘All with a smit of kind wit know it.’
‘But there aren’t no grounds,’ said Thomas. ‘The Pope himself made it a sin to lay it on them.’
Holiday widened his eyes and proked Thomas in the chest with his finger. ‘There’s your witness show’s the Pope’s not but a tool of the horned folk. And maybe more than a tool.’ He looked about him and lowed his steven. ‘Why’s he got such a long hat, if not to hide horns under it?’
‘You deem the Pope a Jew?’
Holiday stuck out his lip and nodded. ‘If he’d show himself otherwise, let him die of the qualm himself. Then I’d worth him as a good Christen man.’
EVER SINCE THE excitement in the deserted village I have detected an alteration in the relations between us – i.e. between the nobles, the archers, and me, the simulacrum of a cleric. A familiarity, a diminution of habits of respect and subservience on the commoners’ part, and a degradation of comfortable assumptions of superiority on mine and Bernadine’s and Laurence’s. Even Holiday, in his state of denial, addresses me with a novel directness, not so much insolent as revelatory that if, previously, we treated them with open contempt for their minds and spirits, they, secretly, manifested an equal contempt for us. Are we now more inclined to regard each other according to our humanity, rather than to our civil status? Was it in this spirit that I spontaneously ceded my horse?
Here in this new sense of community it is facile to delude ourselves that universal fraternity is an inevitable consequence of a greater equalisation of social status. I suspect the majority, if required to celebrate this novel harmony of cleric, commoner and aristocrat, would consider the occasion ideal for persecution of the Jews.
Judith, Marc, would it not be the most atrocious of fates for you to survive the plague, only to be exterminated by the ignorant because you are kin to Moses? Is it not incredible that even as we are menaced by a disease that may eradicate the majority of humans, the military men with whom I travel are prepared to contemplate future conflict with the survivors?
WILL AND MADLEN fared by fields of ripe barley that lacked weeders and children to scare the birds. Sheep without shepherds wandered at will among the crops, where they foreswallowed their own weight in men’s food. Will ne bore the sight and must look away or drive the sheep of the fields himself. About them above the wrought land were old barrows made by the folk that lived in England long ago.
They came to a wood and saw men and women with scythes reaping corn that grew near the trees. When they saw Will and Madlen they ran away into the wood. Will called to them but they ne answered, and when Will and Madlen went by, these frightened folk beheld them from the shadows, still and staring like deer at the sound of a hunter.
They came to the brink of a cleeve that let on a great wold sprad out to the south, and at the cleeve’s foot, the roofs of Heytesbury. They met the other bowmen, and told them what they’d seen.
THEY CAME DOWN into Heytesbury, their nebs pale and their cheers grim. None spoke to no other, out-take that they bade Thomas go on the horse, for it wasn’t meet for no learned old man to go on foot while a hired maid rode, but Thomas said it liked him to stretch his legs. Madlen wouldn’t ride no more anywise, so she clamb down, and the horse was led riderless into town.
No sooner had they come to the high street than they heard the priest’s bell, and all fell to their knees, for the priest came by bearing Christ’s body and singing the paternoster. Behind him went a knave with a great candle half burned through, the flame hardly seen in the sunlight, and a crock of smoking reekles. Beside the knave a crookbacked man of forty winter, in a threadbare shirt and overworn breech, drove a handcart. Last came a small boy who rang a bell with one hand and bore a likeness of the mother of the maker of all things in the other. All four looked weary. The priest hadn’t shaved and though his neb and hands were washed the hem of his greasy kirtle was fouled with dust and mud.
As the priest went by they saw a wonder thing. A woman came between two houses bearing two buckets of water on a yoke. Her head, mouth and nose were hidden so only her eyes showed. She overwent the road ahead of the priest-gang. She turned her head to look at the priest, but instead of going on her knees and bidding a bead in sight of Christ’s flesh, she ne stinted, and went on her way, through a gate in a wall, into a yard and out of sight. The priest-gang ne heeded the woman and went into a house at the far end of the street that had a cloth hung of an upper window. Cloths of other hues hung of many windows in the street.
Hornstrake wouldn’t wake. His breath was shallow and his forehead hot and clammy. He whispered in his fever of a dog he’d befriended outside Calais that had run away, and of how he’d cast God’s breath upon a fire in Melksham.
They went to bide in the churchyard, where there were many new graves and an open pit. Last night’s rain had begun to wash away the new earth and in spots the winding sheets of the heaped dead showed through white. When they saw this the bowmen ne would bide among the graves but went into the church. There they found a few folk on their knees before the rood or being led in beads by a lewd man with a little knowledge of the gospel. These folk were ware at first of the uncouth bowmen, and made fearful by the sight of Longfreke’s cleft neb, but it came out Laurence Haket and the lady Bernadine had come to town already, and, before going to the bailiff’s house for food and rest, warned that the bowmen were on their way.
‘Imber folk aren’t right in the head,’ they said when they learned what Will and Madlen had seen. ‘They’re ungodly up on the downs.’
The death, as they called it, had come to Heytesbury five days before, and already slain forty folk, men, women and children, a third of the town. None would go to their neighbours’ houses no more for fear they’d sick. Folk would hang cloths of their windows, one to send for the priest, two to ask for food and drink to be left for them, three to have a body borne away. The priest and the bell-ringer had gone to and from the homes of the sick so often none paid them heed no more. The inn was shut, none came to town to buy the cloth they made, the crops were ripe but none
would harvest them, and half the cattle lacked a master.
The priest-gang came again. The crookbacked man, whom they called Stucken, drove the cart before him with the body of a tucker, Ed Sutton, in his winding sheet. All made the token of the rood athwart their chests and the priest blessed them while his knave shook holy smoke at them of the can of reekles. In the midst of his blessing the priest stinted to cough and when he was done the townsfolk melted away.
‘It needs one of our men to be aneled,’ said Longfreke to the priest. ‘And we’d have you hold a mass for us. We have silver.’
‘I held mass this morning. I haven’t slept two days,’ said the priest. ‘I’ve three more houses to go to. I must see to my own folk first, and lay poor Ed in the ground. And your captain would have me wed him to his burd.’
‘Have the wedding and the burial at the same time,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘Afterwards we’ll leap in the pit together, bride, groom and guests, and there’ll be less work for the cooks at the feast.’
‘Anele our man,’ said Longfreke to the priest. ‘He’s an English Christen too.’
Thomas took the priest by the wrist and led him over to the cart, where he spoke with him a while. The others heard Thomas speak, though they ne could make out the words, and they heard the priest cough, and Cess let fall an iron pot onto the ground.
Thomas and the priest came again, and Thomas said the priest would anele Hornstrake, and bury him in a hallowed spot in the churchyard, were he to die before they left town in the morning. Before nightfall, the priest would hold a mass for them, and shrive them, if they would.
The bowmen asked where they might eat and drink, and the priest said even without the harvest, the town had more food than it knew what to do with. The cattle couldn’t be milked fast enough, and what milk there was sat spoiling for lack of use. Hens and pigs ran free. They lacked bread, for the baker and his knave had died, and none knew how to work the ovens hot enough. Instead of bread and pottage the children ate pancakes and shives of sheepflesh the thickness of their fingers. So many houses stood empty the bowmen might hire one each for the night and sleep alone.