To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

haven’t no arrow, and it needs us a true one,’ said Mad. ‘Where in this wood might we get such?’

      They turned to Will, gripped him with firm hands and tore the pack of his back. Will strove to free himself but the other two were stronger together and they laid him down with his rigbone flat against the bowed birch.

      ‘An ill token he ne struggled much,’ said Mad.

      ‘I ne used but half my strength,’ said Will.

      ‘A proud arrow that backbites,’ said Longfreke. ‘We’d best found it. Shoot!’

      They loosed the knitted rope and let Will go. The birch whipped and Will was flung upwards. He flew through the air and came to earth through a holly tree. He fell on his shoulder and cried out once, then cried no more, but ne rose, and lay still.

      ‘He flew true,’ said Sweetmouth.

      ‘He flew crooked,’ said Mad.

      ‘True,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘I took the holly as the mark.’

      ‘Crooked,’ said Mad, ‘I took the nettles.’

      ‘Player!’ called Sweetmouth to Will. ‘You’d best have shielded your neb from scratches, for I need it whole.’

      ‘How did the world look when you saw it as the birds do?’ asked Mad.

      Will groaned and stood up. Hayne loomed over him and said: ‘Would you be a bowman in my score, and come with us to Calais?’

      ‘Yeah,’ said Will.

      Hayne clasped Will’s head in his great hands and looked at it from this side and that like to he’d made Will out of straw and sticks and rags, and would see he’d made him right. He stepped away and bade Longfreke take the oath.

      Longfreke took Will’s wrist and put his bowstaff in his hand and bade him swear by the blood and bones of Christ, by their Clean Mother, by St Sebastian and by St George, and by his bow, to be true to Hayne Attenoke and to his even-bowmen of the Gloucestershire score, to do the bidding of the master of the score faithfully and without backbiting.

      Will swore it.

      Longfreke bade Will say after him:

       Feathered tail but I ne sing

       I rise high without a wing

       I am but a wooden freke

       Yet I have an iron beak

       As a falcon so my flight

       Of my master’s will and might

       Ne to think on flying’s end

       Free in air to while and wend

       Faring far in light and dark

       Blind to my high master’s mark.

      ‘What are you?’ asked Longfreke.

      ‘An arrow,’ said Will.

      ‘Who is your master?’

      ‘The bowman.’

      ‘And who is that bowman?’

      ‘Hayne Attenoke.’

      ‘It is the Lord God Almighty,’ whispered Longfreke. He took a flask of his pack and gave it to Will and bade him drain it to the bottom. It was a Scotch drink, he said, of frozen ale. Will drained the flask, sat on the ground, shut his eyes and slept.

      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,’