To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

so terrible I could not face it directly. ‘Were you to offer me some evidence that the suffering in Avignon is as severe as rumour reports,’ I murmured, ‘I would go immediately.’

      ‘That is your promise?’

      I assented. Immediately he gave me a letter from the city that he had previously kept secret.

      It was a difficult text. Some phrases appeared to resist vision, others to lacerate it: Sixty-two thousand corpses buried … all the auditors, advocates and proctors have either left, or died, or plan to leave immediately.

      ‘This letter declares that the papal court is suspended until the feast of St Michael,’ I said, attempting to conceal my desperation. ‘I should not progress south prematurely.’

      The prior studied my face as if at the prime encounter with a new animal. ‘You would annul your promise with such temerity?’

      ‘The circumstances have altered,’ I babbled.

      ‘You have no purpose here. You do not contribute to the defence of the abbey. You associate with the corrupt. Introduce yourself to the archers as their itinerant confessor, go with them tomorrow.’

      Marc, I must request that you share these notes and ephemera of mine with Judith. To know that you perused them together, even with contempt for my pusillanimousness, would be of enormous comfort.

      I ENCOUNTERED THE archers at the pilgrim hospital, where they had been assigned accommodation. With what terrific creatures was it proposed I itinerate! Their dux, Hayne Attenoke, is a giant, silent, intractable, with a gigantic, ornate crucifix suspended from his neck on a silver chain, and his comrades are percussors, brutes, squalid homicides. One has a cross sculpted in the skin of his front and a self-induced stigmata; another, the clement-voiced John Fletcher, alias Softly, gold dentistry, with sufficient oral opulence for a papal candelabrum; Gilbert Bisley, alias Longfreke, whose face is on a plane with my scapula, has a fissure dividing the dexter and sinister parts of his face, a cicatrix so profound it appears he has been formed of dual semi-humans, conglutined into unity. Their lingua anglica is dense, turbulent, spined, immune from the tactus of Gallic or Latin. They are squalid, rude, with a sanguinary odour. There is an exception, a novice archer, William Quate, alias Player, solid of form, pectorally muscled, but with the face of an angel, a tranquil gestus and an intelligent aspect.

      With them is a vehicle containing their armaments, and in it a captive female, Cecile de Goincourt, of uncertain status. The closure in her face is redolent of violence and abuse, yet she has a residual core of dignity.

      I erupted to the prior and explained that it was not possible for me to navigate with these predators to the pestilential, meridional territories that were our destination. They were as horrid as the prospect of the plague; and I was perplexed as to what mode of confession to accept, and what form of absolution to offer, when the archers itinerated with the permanent substance of their nefarious conduct, viz, a woman they had violated in France and subtracted from her family.

      The prior offered no alternative. ‘Investigate the circumstances of this alleged violation,’ he said, ‘congruent with your confessorial position, and care for her spirit as well as theirs. Confession is not an exact science; it more resembles the cultivation of fruit than the design of a cathedral. As terrible as the archers are, they are ab utero materno, like you, and ultimately as timid in the face of damnation.’

      Marc, Judith, I comprehend now how miserly I have been with my gratitude to you since my advent in Avignon decades ago. How vastly you improved my Latin and my French! With what grace you tolerated my vehement insistence on amicable dialogue with you and my conflicting desire to subordinate you, to dominate you, because I was your master and you my servants!

      WILL ASKED THOMAS the shriftfather if the monks ever stinted their song.

      ‘They reckon holy songs a wall to ward them of pestilence,’ said Thomas. ‘To stint were like to they lowed the stones between them and the Fiend.’

      Will said in his town they worthed the smoke of burned bones.

      ‘Bones outburn,’ said Thomas. ‘A bonefire’s not but work to an end. This holy song has at once an end and a lovely endlessness. Man likes any work that helps him forget his ghost’s bound to his body by a thread.’

      Will leaned his head back and said him thought he wouldn’t never tire of the awful might of the great stone posts that held the roof so high above them. Was there in the world, he asked, a bigger church than Malmesbury?

      ‘Behold, an uplandish scholar,’ said Thomas. ‘Offered a wonder, you seek another more wondrous. My namesake Aquinas would say a man like you won’t stop till he reaches the wondermost.’

      Will asked Thomas what he meant, but by now they were out of the church and saw Sweetmouth and Longfreke, who beheld the likenesses corven about the door. Will would stand to wonder with them, for to look on the doorway with its many hues and gems, and the likenesses of Adam and Eve, Moses and Noah, Christ and God and the angels, was like to the tale of the world went by.

      The bowmen couldn’t guess Thomas’s kind. He was long and lean, with sharp cheekbones, close-cropped grey hair and skin that ne feared the sun. He’d seen forty winter, and was rivelled about the mouth and eyes from laughing. When he spoke he smiled often, in such a way that those who listened smiled with him, till ferly his face went hard and cold, and listeners felt they’d misdone to smile. His clothes, rich, dark and plain, were more like to a dealer’s than a priest’s, and he wore no ring, nor spoke to them as priest to flock, but man to man, though he was learned, and gave them to understand he read books, and knew the gospel. His English tongue wasn’t southern nor western nor midland, not Kentish nor Cornish nor Yorkshire, but somewhat Scottish and somewhat French.

      ‘Shall I tell you of the likenesses?’ said Thomas.

      He showed them with his finger on the doorway where red-kirtled God lifted Adam from the slime of the earth, breathed into his neb the breath of life and pitched him upright, like to a ploughman set a new-born calf on his feet in the spring field. He showed where God took Eve out of Adam’s side when he slept, and God bade Adam and Eve not to eat no apple of that tree. Where the serpent wound about the tree and told Eve she might not die by death, for God woot that in whatever day she ate the apple, her eyes would be opened, and she might be as God, to know good and evil. Where an angel with a golden crown sent Adam and Eve away from God’s garden, and they wept that they must step out into the cold world with but one mean sheepskin each.

      Thomas showed where God told Noah how the Earth was full of wickedness. That he would bring great flood on Earth, and slay each flesh in which was the ghost of life under heaven, and waste all things on Earth, and how he bade Noah make a ship, and fill it with birds, work-deer and creeping deer, all living deer of all flesh, and his own kin.

      ‘Here’s Noah again,’ said Thomas. He showed the next likeness. ‘He shapes a beam with his adze. Behind him are the black clouds that bear the rain.’

      Sweetmouth said Noah mightn’t afill his work before the flood.

      ‘He afilled it,’ said Thomas, like to a man who brought news of a thing that happened last Friday. ‘He made the ship. Then all the wells of the great sea were broken, and the windows of heaven were opened, and rain was made on Earth forty days and forty nights. And look, here’s Noah and his kin stood in the ship, warded from the flood, with a roof over their heads to keep them from rain, and one of Noah’s sons steers with an oar. Now, you reckon the folk in the ship.’

      Longfreke told them on his fingers: Noah, his burd, his three sons, and their wives, eight in all.

      ‘Right,’ said Thomas. ‘Eight of mankind and womankind left alive in all the world. The masters that corve these likenesses chose their gospel tales well, for Noah was forefather to Abraham, and look here, next to Noah in his ship,