Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  The horse tired and began to amble again, so that before noon by Roger’s stomach – which reminded his brain that today was the eleventh of November, and the eleventh of November was Martinmas, and Martinmas was the time to hang up salt meat for the winter, and there was salt meat in his saddlebag, and he was hungry – he was beginning to fear that he would have to spend the night out alone on the Plain. There was a good deal of danger in that, for the Plain was bloody ground, a favourite spot for pitched battles and for thieves alike.

  Nevertheless, Roger had to face the prospect. From this point in the road – little more than a track, meandering around the hills, following the contours of the land – there was no inn or habitation in sight, and none, very likely, this far out. It was, of course, perfectly possible that he had got lost.

  Abruptly, his eye was distracted by a flurry of movement ahead: straight out from behind the next wave of low hills something small, dark and compact went hurtling into the blue sky like an arrow. It was a hawk. Roger watched it soar with astonishment and increased disquiet, for he could not but regard it as ominous. No such bird would be hunting in the middle of the Plain at this time of year – it would be an unusual sight at any season – and why would a human hunter be hawking in such cheerless, unfruitful country?

  But hunter it was, human or devil; he topped the rise now on his horse, a tall burly figure, bearded and cloaked, and pulled to a stop while he was joined by two more riders. The hawk wheeled high above them, screaming disconsolately. The three, plainly regarding Roger where he had halted on the ancient, pre-Roman trackway, talked among themselves, leaning in their gear. After a while, the tallest of them raised his left hand as if in salute; cautiously – it could not but pay to offer friendship, or at least neutrality, especially as he was outnumbered – Roger saluted back, and immediately felt like a fool, for beyond him the hawk screamed again, stooped and came down, sculling to a perch on the gauntleted wrist with a noble display of wingspread.

  Roger lowered his arm and loosened his sword. Though, as a clerk, he was under the protection of the Church, he was not naive enough to expect this to be respected by a pack of highwaymen. Furthermore, as a clerk he had a right to the blade, and as a scholar, he was as expert with it as the next; the students were a squalling, brawling lot, very likely to summarize disputations with blood, and when one was not defending one’s self against some such ‘argument’, there were the burghers of Oxford to be on guard against – there had been four outright riots between the scholars and the townsmen in Roger’s time, in two of which he had had to slash his way out without wasting an instant on ethical or moral niceties.

  It certainly would not do to get killed now, with such great prospects a-dangle in the near future like the grapes of Tantalus, though rather more indefinite. Miraculously, Robert Grosseteste had cleaved to his life – or had been so cleaving still when Roger had left the Great Hall. He was still gravely ill, to be sure, and unable to see anyone except his physicians, and Adam Marsh his confessor, but the crisis seemed to be over, and Adam had estimated cautiously that three months of pottages, gruels and broths would restore him to something like his old strength. The death seemed to be generally on the wane; lectures had been resumed at the University, and trade in town was almost back to normal. The burghers buried their dead and agreed solemnly that it had not been a pestilence after all, but only a narrow escape from one.

  The party to the south was moving down the hill toward Roger now, and with every moment seemed to be growing larger; following the three leading horses came a train of pack-animals, heavily laden, two by two over the brow of the hill. Suddenly Roger realized what it was that he was seeing, and with a sigh of relief allowed his sword to settle again.

  The big man was obviously a wool merchant, his two companions prentices, chivvying a purchase of fells and hides over the downs. And in fact Roger knew the man; had he not been now close enough to recognize, the hawk should have given him the clue, for there was only one such merchant customarily buying in Dorset and Somersetshire who went about with a peregrine falcon on his wrist: William Busshe. The falcon’s name was Madge, and Roger even knew that the horse was called Bucephalus after the legendary animal of Alexander the Great, but was always addressed as ‘Bayard’; for he had watched this same man bargaining for the spring clip and the fall hides for ten years before leaving Oxford, haggling solemnly with his father until Christopher’s death, and thereafter, first with Robert and then with Harold.

  Busshe recognized Roger simultaneously and pulled to a second time, his shaggy eyebrows rising almost into his Flemish-style beaver hat. Wearing that expression, he looked almost like a sheep himself, despite his forked brown beard and the fact that his face was, of course, not black. His vaircollared cloak spread like Madge’s wings as he put his hands on his hips. Feeling the reins on his neck, the big bay promptly began to graze, and Roger had to hold John Blund’s head up sharply to keep him from following Bayard’s example.

  ‘How now, young Roger,’ Busshe said in his heavy, deliberate voice. ‘Little I expected to encounter thee on this dreary moor, and in sooth, I wis not whether’t be well met or ill with us.’

  ‘No more wis I,’ Roger said, with some return of his uneasiness. ‘Meseemeth ‘tis early for thee to be faring north with sealed bales, this being but Martinmas. Someone hath slaughtered early, and I greatly fear that ‘tis Yeo Manse hath done it.’

  ‘Thou Wert ever a gimlet-eyed youngster,’ Busshe said. ‘Thou hast seen to the heart of the matter. There’s a knight of the justiciar sitteth as lord in thy cot, hath ordered the slaughter a week ere we had arrived, would sell me the fells at half the prices I’d contracted for with Franklin Harold these eighteen months gone. And so much and no more did I pay him, seeing that the slaughtering had been hastily done to fill’s purse quickly, and the wool thus not of the first quality.’

  Roger felt a brief flash of anger, but after a moment, he realized that it should not be Busshe at whom it was directed. He was doubtless telling the exact truth – after all, he had no part in this quarrel – nor could it matter in the least which price he had paid, since none of it could go to the family under the circumstances. If Busshe had cheated the justiciar’s equerry out of his very shirt (though nothing could be more unlike Busshe), Roger ought indeed to be pleased. But it was hard to think of a year’s flock spoiled and knocked down for the enrichment of some marauding noble in de Burgh’s service without feeling a general anger at everyone concerned, even the silent prentices who were watching him with evident sympathy.

  ‘Then are we much despoiled?’ Roger said after a while.

  ‘Nay, this knight, a highteth Will of Howlake, hath far too stern a hand; a bath kept the serfs hard at it and much increased the rents and the boon work. All thy kin are gone, but for thy sisters, no man knoweth where. How farest thou?’

  ‘To the manse, to retrieve what I may,’ Roger said, preoccupied. ‘And my sisters?’

  ‘In the women’s houses, where, by order of Franklin Harold’s steward, they be so craftily clothed, this Will of Howlake knoweth them not from villeins’ women.’

  ‘I thank God for’t.’ Indeed, the whole situation as Busshe outlined it seemed far from the worst that Roger had imagined. Though he had had no experience of such an occupation as Yeo Manse was undergoing now, the pattern had been familiar for centuries, and Will of Howlake’s behaviour did not sound like that of a man who expected to remain lord of the property for long. He was wringing the good out of it with the stringency of a man who expects recall, and so was adding to his personal store, as well as to that, of Hubert de Burgh, by as many marks a day as the manse could possibly be made to yield. A brief cruel plundering of that kind had proven the ruination of many a holding – lords who expected to be awarded the property were kinder to it – but the orchards and fields and gardens of Yeo Manse were extensive, and Roger did not doubt that they would survive such treatment, were it only not much prolonged. It meant that the serfs and e
ven the stewards would be despitefully used while it lasted – but their days were miserable enough even in normal times – their reward only in heaven, never in this world.

  ‘Thou’rt ill advised to go hither,’ Busshe said in a troubled voice. ‘Howlake is wroth at having missed taking every man in the family; an thou becomest known to him, wilt go ill with thee. And thy fat gelding there wheezeth like a monk with the asthmaticks –’tis plain to see a’s all out of the habit of work.’

  Madge stirred her wings under the cloak, and Busshe lifted his left arm to the sky again. Reluctantly the red peregrine climbed on the air; being recently fed from Busshe’s own hand, she wanted only to sleep, or at least to perch quietly and pursue some single savage thought, but hawks had to be exercised or they would not hunt – indeed, would forget even how to come home. Busshe put his hand back on his hip again, and Madge began to circle at her pitch, crying Kyaa! Kyaa!

  ‘Come thou with us till yon Howlake’s outworn his commission,’ Busshe said. ‘We’re to Northleach to cast a sort of fell and fifty tods of Cotswold wool, dear though it be at eleven shillings; thence to our offices in London forth’ assizes at the Leadenhall, and to pack sarplers for shipboard. Our quarters be in the Mart Lane, not over-far from where thy brother Robert doth deal in Egypt’s cotton and I wis not what else. An ‘tis money thou seekest, belike a will succour thee. Mene-whyles we’ll put thee on a proper horse, and give yon hay-bottle bales to carry; and thou’lt add thy blade to ours ‘gainst thieves or Lombards, as is equitable.’

  It was a generous offer, and for a moment Roger was tempted to accept it; he did not underestimate the risks he was taking. But it was not, after all, money that he was primarily hoping to recover, and he knew besides how little likely he was to be given any money to go back to Oxford from Robert Bacon’s hands; then he would be stranded in London, with no possible course but to ship with Busshe’s wool to Flanders and try his luck in Paris at the dormant University. That was out of the question; he was not ready for that by years.

  Nay, I cannot,’ he said. ‘God’s blessing on thee, William Busshe, but I’m bidden to Ilchester, and thence to Oxford, and will abide the course. I’ll recall thy kindness in my prayers.’

  ‘As it pleaseth thee,’ Busshe said. ‘Fare thee well, then.’ He called Madge home and hooded and jessed her; and in a while, the last of the procession had vanished to the north.

  Gloomily, Roger got John Blund into motion, more than half convinced that his refusal had been the worst kind of folly. He was not even much cheered by the sight of a distant inn from the top of the next rise, nor finding, as he drew closer, that the ‘bush’ or sign was up on the ale-stake, meaning ‘open for business’. Good wine needs no bush, but he was in no position to pay for good wine, nor bad, either. And there could hardly be any money for him at Yeo Manse; he was making this wittold’s pilgrimage for the sake of nothing but a few childish trinkets ….

  A few toys, and an ignis fatuus, a will-o’-the-wisp drifting far in the future, conjured into being by a Greek dead fourteen weary centuries already.

  *

  Yeo Manse was not, properly speaking, in Ilchester; legally, it was in the parish of Northover, on the other side of the river, connected with Ilchester by a low stone bridge. Northover was, however, nothing notable as a town, while Ilchester stood athwart Fosse Way, a major road through the district ever since the Romans had built it, and the Bacons had seen the advantages which would accrue from identifying with Ilchester quite early on – long before most of the other local franklins had, in fact. The parish church of St. Mary had been established by Christopher Bacon’s grandfather as a chantry where masses were to be sung for his soul by a single priest; later, Christopher’s father and two other freeman landholders had contributed the silver and the boon work which had raised the squat octagonal tower, so oddly pagan and brooding for a Christian temple, and since that time, all the Bacons who had died at home had been buried there.

  How the town had prospered since was clearly visible to Roger from where he had paused in the early morning light just over the rim of the valley. The chessboard of orchards and pastures was sere and without motion in the cold of Autumn-Month, but from the clustered house and shops south of the Yeo, there rose many slow-writhing lines of hazy white wood-smoke; and the bare trees of the churchyard could not conceal the elegance of St. Mary, with its new (no older than Roger!) horizontal building abutting the octagonal tower, which had piers formed of mouldings in stone at doors, windows and arcades. Ilchester was a borough of substance now: it even had bailiffs, though only as of last year.

  What of substance now remained for Roger of Yeo Manse was the question. Ilchester itself did not, from this distance, look at all disturbed by the incursion of the King’s justiciar, but that meant only that de Burgles knights had not burned anything down–for which, of course, one should thank God, but not too hastily, for there were worse depredations possible which would still leave behind just so superficially peaceful a scene as this. The problem now was to skirt Yeo Manse closely enough to assess how it had fared, and thence into Northover to find that inn called the Oxen by the serf Wulf (there were four or five inns by that name in Ilchester, at least two in Northover to Roger’s knowledge) without being recognized for what he was by some soldier of Will of Howlake. To do so without being seen by some such man was out of the question, but Roger was reasonably sure he could pass any casual inspection – after all, his breeches and coarse surcoat were just like those of a thousand other young men from the anonymous poor, except that they were slightly less threadbare. Unless he was incautious in his curiosity about the manse, he would probably not be picked up at all; and even if he were seized and searched thoroughly enough to turn up the manuscript in his gear, he could feign to be a goliard – one of the many raggle-taggle vagabond scholars who, eager enough for learning but utterly impatient of university routines, wandered from teacher to teacher and monastery to monastery, themselves teaching or writing anew the text of one or another of the Miracle plays in return for their instruction and keep. He would get by with such a deception if he had to practise it. The danger did not lie there. It lay in the good possibility that someone in Northover, someone who belonged there, would recognize him under the eye of someone of Howlake or de Burgh, and speak too soon and too loudly.

  He dug one heel into John Blund; the horse moved reluctantly, and just as reluctantly Roger gave it its head, for the side here, though only half as steep as a roof, offered no road – he had quitted that before topping the crest out of elementary caution – but instead slippery outcroppings of rock and moss, giving way farther down to a tumble of rubble, like a talus-slope at the foot of a cliff, full of incipient shifts and slides and glistening menacingly with frost. No man could presume to guide a horse over such ground, but instead, must let him put each of his four feet where he chose and as delicately as he could manage, until he showed himself willing to resume his gait.

  And, in fact, to Roger’s faint surprise, John Blund managed the sliding course without even a serious stumble, though there was one rock-tumble moment when he seemed certain to break a foreleg, and probably to pash his awn and Roger’s brains out as well. It was over in half the time it would have taken to say a pater noster, however (and in actuality, it had doubtless taken no more than ten pulse-beats); and then the horse was clump-clumping across rimed brown grass in a complacent trot he had decided to undertake all on his own. Roger found himself grinning. A lifetime of intimacy with horses had convinced him that nothing else on four legs can be BO stupid, but so frequently and humanly overwhelmed by its own good opinion of itself.

  He had, as well, good reason to be pleased with himself, for as he resumed the reins, he found himself and John Blund crossing a frozen ditch into a broad ploughland which he recognized at once as bordering on the west vineyard of Yeo Manse. He could hardly have arrived at a safer quarter of the estate, this time of year, for, to begin with, it had always been the poorest cot in itsfis
c, secondly, the most remote from the seigniorial manse and hence from Will of Howlake, thirdly, the cot (if Roger’s memory, dim here, could be trusted) of the serf Wulf (who could be presumed to be haunting some tavern in Northover to the detriment of his week work), and finally (though this, at least, could be laid to no foreplanning on Roger’s part) today was obviously a boon-work day: for on the other side of the vineyards, where the little group of sod houses belonging to this and three other cots were huddled, Roger could see a group of small hunched figures assembling, most of them carrying axes, mattocks and adzes – a wood-cutting gang – and hear the shouts of a dean, one of Tom the steward’s overseers, distant but clear. Shortly they would be moving off to give their one day’s work out of the week at the big house; in fact, they were moving away from him already. Thinly over the motionless fields a hoarse baritone voice began bawling:

  Bytuene Mershe and Averil

  When spray biginneth to springe,

  The lutel foul hath hire wyl

  On hyre lud to synge ….

  but the lyric, so plainly of spring and the gentry, came stiffly from amidst the rime-caked villein’s beard on to the November air and began to fade:

  Ich libbe in love-longinge

  For semlokest of alle thynge,

  He may me blisse bringe,

  Icham in hire baundoun ….

  and yet, just as the hewing party was almost gone entirely to Roger’s sight, other voices, equally unmusical, began to float back the round: