Cockadoodledoo! A rooster, raucous in the rain. The symbol of France, here it craws and crows and makes its tiny thunder in the dampness of this barn. Pokes its pathétique head through the circle of this hole in this barn door.
WAR OF THE CENTURY RESUMED!
Vitalis of Assisi Dead. The noted hermit and holy man passed away without fuss in Santa Maria di Viole, as he had lived, in utter poverty. His one possession was an old container from which he used to drink water from a nearby spring. His reputation for holiness has already spread across Italy, and his intercession was often sought against sicknesses and in particular against diseases affecting the bladder and genitals.
PRINCE ON THE MARCH!
On manoeuvres: an Anglo-Gascon force of some 3,000 men, led by three sons of Edward III, including that flower of chivalry Edward, Prince of Wales, and accompanied by John of Gaunt the Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund of Langley the Earl of Cambridge, also accompanied by the Earl of Warwick and the renowned Sir John of Chandos, as well as such experienced soldiers as John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, Sir Walter Hewitt, Guichard d’Angle and the Captal de Buch.
CORRECTION: In our previous bulletin, we announced that Edward the Black Prince, that flower of chivalry, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, Count of Biscay, was ‘on the march’ in France with an army of 3,000 men. We have been asked to point out that the Prince, owing to some slight and temporary infirmity, is not marching, but is rather being carried in a litter.
CORRECTION: In our previous bulletin, we announced that Edward the Black Prince, advancing through central France, was accompanied by ‘the Earl of Warwick’ and ‘John of Chandos, Earl of Hereford’. It has been brought to our attention that both these noblemen are recently dead, and as such are not presently in company with the Prince.
Saw an eyeball peepin’ through a counterpane that hid
the gree-een knight
Don’t know what they’re doin’ but they laugh a lot, Gawain
and gree-een knight
Wish they’d let me in so I could find out what’s there behind
the gree-een knight
The procession marches, though the rain makes the banners dark and heavy to carry, and several of the bannermen drop their poles and bemerde their colours. The otherwise bright colours of Du Guesclin, the Duke of Bournon, the Duke of Anjou, the Duke of Berri . . .
The rain eases, and then comes down harder at dusk. This man is trying to cut edible meat from a mostly rotten pig carcass.
The procession continues: Jean de Kerlouet, Louis de St Julien, Guichard d’Angle, Louis de Harcourt, Thomas de Percy, Robert of Sancerre, John de Vienne.
He had good days and bad days, physically. Oh, but his will was iron-hard. Ah, but his will. He would march. Or his men would march, and he would be carried. Denis, always at his side, brought good news. The Duke of Anjou has chickened out of confronting you, Highness. Learned somehow of your preparations at Cognac. Too scared now to march on Bordeaux. He has dispersed his garrison.
The first goblet of wine did little for him, but the second dissolved and unknotted some of the pains in his torso and legs, and by the third he was able to feel a little more himself. He said:
—Fame. The hart we hunt. Our notoriety aids us.
—Highness, Denis agreed.
—Notoriety. It aids. But thank God the Father we have more than notoriety now.
He is God the Father, and his obedient army, ready to die for him, is his Son, and his great reputation is the Holy Spirit, that flies about the countryside like a dove, or burns through the late summer fields as fire. He checks himself: it is too close to blasphemy to compare himself to God the Father. Another beaker. Warm red and a little sour in the mouth, and afterwards he began to feel nauseous.
He asked after the levies. Specifics, to take his wandering mind off such thoughts.
Denis brought out a list and started to read: many of the levies are in, Highness. Poitou, Saintonge, La Rochelle, Quercy.
—Limoges?
—That city, my lord, Denis replies, uneasily.
—Limoges, Denis? What is it?
—That city has made declaration for the King of France.
As with any blow, first you feel nothing but a kind of disinterested registering of the impact, of the fact that you have been struck. Then, you pause, and note again, and only then does the pain and violation occur to you. Edward coughs, and rubs his face, and scowls, and says:
—Well, they are all traitors. We must deal justice to traitors.
He stops. Denis is looking at him.
So the force must alter its direction, and swing down towards the town of Limoges, with its high walls, and wide river. At least there will be no trouble keeping the horses watered. But the town is ready for them, and its walls are too tall and straight to permit climbing, or ladders. No hope of entering it, says the Earl of Pembroke, no hope at all. Look at those battlements!
—If not over the top then underneath, and we must give employment to our engineers, says the Prince. My lord of Cambridge, is there no chance we might make a swift breach in at the north wall?
—North or south or any, grumbled Cambridge, it will be like piercing an iron mountain. It would take at least a week.
He means a month, but courtesy does not permit unpalatable truths to be directly spoken. The Prince understands, though. Today is one of his better days, comprehension-wise.
—So so so, says Edward, struggling to contain a sudden wild tremor in his legs and feet, and holding back what would, he knows, be a noisome and possibly fluid breaking of wind. Set up camp here, my lords. And send the captain of sappers to me. His temper tips, and he barks at his litter-carriers to bear him somewhere discreet where he can void, and be quick. As he goes he calls:
—They call me black, and they mean my heart. They shall soon discover, lords mine, what colour my heart truly is.
It takes two days to set the camp up, and another day to clear some ground to the south where the horses can be exercised and knights can practise their battle riding. Edward feels a little better on day three, and then much worse on day four. The arbitrariness of this makes him furious. Days pass. The weather is mild and sunny; the nights display an improbable treasure of stars to the world, and Edward despises the way his mind cannot free itself from its own resentment. He seethes. He grinds his teeth at night. He is in pain all the time, except when he is so drunk he can no longer speak, and even then the pain does not entirely leave him, but lurks, wolf that it is, at the margins of his being.
The Earl of Pembroke attempts to beguile his time with a game of chess, but the Prince cannot concentrate on the board. Chess is the game of warriors. He must try. He sees an opening in the Earl’s defences, and pushes a knight through.
—Check.
The wind flaps the tent-wall like a sail at sea. There is a pleasant odour blowing in through the open door: citrus, herbal, dry. Pembroke grimaces.
—I regret this, your Highness, he says, countermoving. Sincerely. A queen captures the knight and checks Edward’s king. He moves the king, changes his mind, and moves it in a different direction. But it makes no difference. Pembroke moves a bishop up and the game is over.
The Black Prince stares at the horncarved pieces and wonders how much muscular strength it would take to grind each and every one to dust. More than he possesses, certainly. He tries to swing his legs over the side of his couch, and his man, seeing the action, rushes to help him up.
—How long, he asks, struggling across the tent to his shitting bowl.
—It will have to be soon, Highness, says Pembroke, averting his eyes. The garrison of Limoges is countermining. They will blow our sappers to the moon unless . . .
—Please, gasps the Prince, do not let me detain you, my lord. Pembroke hurries out. After he has voided, and drunk a posset, and slept for a short time, Edward feels a little better.
He calls his secretary, and dictates a letter to his wife.
—My dear and beloved wife, he says. And at the words he pictures her, her unreadable eyes, her whiteness. The parfait balance of her visage.
The secretary has written, and is waiting.
—I have had news of the death of my mother. Scribble scribble went the secretarial pen. She was a good woman and I regret. He waits for the scratching to cease, the secretary to catch up with him. And I regret I knew her so little. You once said to me that my father the king converted her into a kind of machine for. Stop. Wait for the writer to catch up. A machine for for machine for the birthing of of of princes. Scribble scribble. But she played an heroic role, once, that the world is not likely. Wait. Likely to forget. The town of Calais has good reason to remember her kindly. As for the town of Limoges . . .
The secretary holds up his left hand, and Edward stops. The town of Limoges is there, outside his tent, in all its massy intractability. The town of Limoges is also down there, on the parchment, in still gleaming ink rebuses. So much more manageable. The scribe’s hand goes down.
—What were my last words? the Prince asks.
—‘As for the town of Limoges . . .’
— … there will be, if things go as I plan, nobody left there to remember anything. For a man must pursue his own destiny, bowing down before his own evil. It was granted only to a woman to be born with no trace of original sin.
The scribe is not writing, but waiting, uncertain, to see if the Prince really wants such words to be written down. Edward looks past him, through the open mouth of the tent.
at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the strawspread floor of a lurchedover cabin a man halfsits halflies propped by an old woman two wrinkled girls that might be young chunks of charcoal still gleam on the fire, and the straw around the blaze are scorched and singed the flicker rubs red and yellow from his doughsaggy face the taut throat the belly swelled enormous
the barefoot girl brings him a claycupful of water wipes sweat from his streaming face with her own hair the firelight flares in his eyes and in the blanched faces of the women. He will die, they think, and then the women will lay him out, because that is women’s work, and they will pay a neighbour some sous to dig a hole to bury him, for digging is man’s work.
foreigners what can we say to the sick? foreigners what can we say to the dead? He came nearly two decades before, with the swarm of English and Gascon who fought over this territory, and the olives were plucked unripe from the trees or the trees burned in a great bush of fire five times the size of the tree farmhouses smashed down, animals killed and eaten or simply killed and the people hurrying away with as much as they could carry belted round their waists or packed on their backs. He had peeled off from the mess of soldiery and hidden in the woods for a week on sourberries and rabbits, and then when the plague had passed over had come out and slowly made friends. He was skilled at bricks and stones, and helped rebuild, and learned the tongue, and made a handfast marriage with a local girl, and when she had given birth to her rapebaby he drowned it and told her it was stillborn, and then had given her two girls of her own. And from time to time the English and the Gascons would come back round and he would take the three of them up into the hills to the abandoned ancient caves, where people lived before Noah’s flood, they say, and moved as the waters rose, though God’s wrath caught up with them at the end
vistas over the lowlands with smoke rising in seven smudging pillars
until the morning came when there was no smoke and they went home
and foreigners what can we say to the sick? foreigners what can we say to the dead? the women have told him that he has camp fever, picked up from a trip down the valley to talk with some of the soldiers in the hope of picking up some extra food. But he does not have camp fever. He has the death, the plague, the blackness in his blood buboes big as ripe apples
seven towers of Jerusalem
news of the black devilprince’s return and the town locked itself away and the peasantry fled and he stayed, too sick to move. Once she asked him: why did you not stay with the army? and he said: killing makes for a dysentery of the soul, and I had had enough of it.
we have only words against
breathe
breathe
seven views of Jerusalem
His Da said: they used to call this Cornwall the Silver Lands, and not on account of the rain. The wealth of the world is hidden, and our job is to unhide it. His father dug tin out of the ground at Bere Ferrers, and then came to Somerset for the silver mining, on account of it being more lucrative, and Cas came with him, of course. But the most of the silver was all dug out long before he came along, and there was precious little to scrape from the belly of the earth. Then one day he was digging a long tunnel under the brow of rock and it chunked down upon him, all in one shuddering reposition of ground, like the hill shrugging. That was the end of him. The priest said, saves us the bother of burying him, and said a quick mass over the land, but still charged Cas the full fee. Bohemia’s your land for tin now, they told him, and with his Da dead and no other skill, he gave some thought to going over the sea and finding this place wherever it was, and digging at rich bright-coloured seams. He thought: to hand over most of his ore to his masters, but to keep enough for two coins in his cheeks, each day, and so get rich. But then his pal Bryn said: the army needs miners. Digging for tin, is it, for their tinpot helmets, is it? Ddim o gwbl you foolish Cornishman, said Bryn, it’s for digging under the walls of French cities and making them to tumble down, and from far below in the Somerset ground he heard his father rumbling or grumbling or bidding him swear to serve the king. Swear! So he and Bryn presented themselves in the city of Bristol (swear!) and were soon marched with three dozen other miners down to Portland and so over the seas to Normandy, and then across land to another port, and on the boat again for days. A big place next, pur dha city, called Bordeaux. This was the seat of the Black Prince himself but they were told they had just missed him, he was off on his wars again, and Cas didn’t even spend a night in the place before they were all marched along beside the river and inland. A week of sleeping under hedges, and once in an old barn with huge holes in its walls, and then they caught up with the carts, slowrolling their way along dust roads, cannon strapped underneath them and supplies piled high. The horses looked thin and uneager to Cas, but that wasn’t his concern.
Thunder grumbling over the horizon.
Swear!
Still, they were part of the army now, and not just any army but the army of the Terrible Black Prince himself, and when he got back to Cornwall, whenever that happened, he Cas would be able to say Ev yw ow howeth. Better than that, it was threepence a day, it was, which was a penny more than the soldiers got, and for a while Cas was happy enough. They marched for many days, and the food wasn’t good. Bryn approached a knight and explained how they needed to keep their strength up for the sort of work they were to do, and received for his pains a smite upon the head with a sword flat that made blood go in his eyes. Bryn was always a bit funny after that blow, prone to fall asleep at a moment’s notice. Had a lump the size of a goose egg on his scalp for some days, until it went down.
They stopped finally at another fine city, not so big as Bordeaux, but highwalled and called Limoges, with the shh sound lovely and soft at the end of the word. Here there was a big siege, and the Prince gave orders the place was to be taken, so a knight and two sergeants came to talk to all the miners. They had selected the best place, they said, to dig under the walls and pack in gunpowder, but it was exposed to the defenders above, so we will need to build a protective roof to carry with us (they said) called a sow, you see. So, they scrounged some wood and pegs and tools from the carpenters and said, the Prince’s command was such and such, and could we have some nails, please, and they said: fuck off, you Cornishmen, fuck off back underground with the gnomes, which was hardly pleasant. So they had to build the sow with wooden dowels instead of nails. They built a sow on legs, and the knight strode by and said, pull it apart and make it bigger, and so they did that and strapped leather to the top and got up early one day with their kit and carried the whole lot to the wall. The ground was soft enough, and the defenders threw down some big stones but the sow held. But at the end of the day it was clear enough to Cas that they were digging in the wrong place to bring the wall down. Not that he had a lot of experience of this sort of thing, but it was common sense, really, to any miner. They needed to be taking the ground away from the wall near the tower – not digging through the solid rock on which it was erected, which would take months. They needed to be excavating next to the underground rockcrop and chipping away where the tower was slightly unbalanced on its foundations. Bryn agreed with him. Cas discussed the matter with the other miners but they took exception and there was a fight, and he got a punched head and swollen nose and spent a day lying under the trees feeling sorry for himself and fuck his threepence a day he was going home. That was the day the Limoges folk poured burning oil on the little structure of the sow and set it alight, and two men burned to death, and another one was shot in the shoulderblade by a crossbow bolt as they all ran for home, so it was a disaster, except for Cas, who missed all that. The man who was shot was called Aneiran, and when they pulled the bolt out it broke the shoulderblade clean across and he howled and rolled on the floor. The knight, a bastard from Surrey called Sir Wifwaf or Gifgaf or something, was all choler at this, and raged at them. He seemed to regard Cas as in charge now, and nothing the Cornishman said would dissuade him. Fetch some more diggers, you bastard, and build a new sow and get back at it.
So they built a new and bigger sow, on wheels this time, and Cas foraged some shields for them all to wear on their backs, and since he was in charge now, he took the team in closer to the tower. It was harder packed ground, and they needed to chip away some of the rock too, and things went more slowly. Exhausting work. They needed more muscle, so he asked Sir Wifwaf or whatever he was called, said ‘can we have more bodies, your honour?’ and was given four surly-looking youngsters from Wiltshire. The hardest part was the first week, when two of these boys got shot in the legs from not tucking in tight enough under the canopy, and a proper Cornish miner called Pen got his back broken by a throwndown rock and took three days to die. But once they cut through under an overhang, things got easier. Comfortable, back inside the womb of earth, his proper place. But it was slow work, and every time they got back to camp a succession of fucking knights and nobles came to badger them, why is it taking so long? Can you please hurry it up, sixpence a day my good fellows, a shilling a day. Cas had no objection to the extra money, but you can’t cut rock like it’s sand at the beach, your honour, my lord. There were bad words spoken, and Cas had to tighten his fists at his side, for striking a nobleman would be death. Then, sensing matters were growing dangerous, the town of Limogesssss seemed to wake up, and started really counterattacking: scalding oil, rocks, bolts. Once a troop of a dozen men came out of a postern gate and came at them with swords. The first Cas knew – he was at the rock face, fully underground – was shouting and screaming behind him. Some canny Cheshire archers saw the attack and fired a bunch of arrows, and the Limogeans lost two men before they ran back, and by the time Cas got his head out of the hole the attack had been and gone, as had the English counterattack and the English being beaten back by crossbowmen on the battlements. Three of his miners were dead, including Bryn, his old friend. He waited until darkness, and then made a run back to the English camp.
Ceasing the mine was not an option. He recruited more men and went on with the digging. Then they heard a countermine tic-tic-ticking away in the earth, not far, and had to come out. This was not news the knights and lords wanted to hear: but there was no help for it, except to start a new excavation. So they moved right round to a new tower, and this was perhaps an even better site, should have chosen it from the get-go. But the delay meant that the nagging from the knights and lords grew more insistent. An old sick man was brought through on a litter, carried by four soldiers, to look across the ground to the wall. After he had been carried away somebody told Cas that he was the Black Prince himself. Cas couldn’t believe it. More skeleton than warrior. Weakness in human form. There was something wrong about the whole show, Cas thought. Some malign spirit was joking with him. The Prince, as everyone knew, had conquered half of France more or less single-handed. This one was some sickly lordling, not the true Prince. Even if he were Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, he was in some truer sense not the real Black Prince. Reality, Cas knew, lies at a lower level than mere surface appearance, and can only be liberated with much backbreaking and dangerous work.
They needed to move quickly before the city got another countermine going, so Cas asked for and was given some more boys to help with the digging, and went back at it. The Limogeans threw down an absolutely massive piece of masonry, taken, Cas guessed, from the cathedral, or some building of similar bulk. It hit home. The sow was shattered to splinters when he wriggled up from his hole and one of his boys had a broken thigh. Getting back to the camp was a tricky matter that day, dragging the lad with him, and Cas was almost back when a crossbow bolt thwacked into his head and he fell straight down on the dry soil.
The bolt had struck the back of his head, just under the lip of his metal helmet, and gone in. He lay for a long while, on his side. There wasn’t any pain. The afternoon wore on. Somebody noticed that he was still breathing and dragged him into the camp, where a surgeon pulled the bolt from his skull – that hurt, a little – and packed the hole with strawy mud. ‘You’re lucky,’ he was told. ‘It didn’t go in very far.’
‘Didn’t go in very far,’ said Cas. ‘I’m lucky.’ Miners in Cornwall shouting chons da! to one another before going underground. He stood up, a little wobbly but able to walk, and he made his meandering way down to the river, where he was in the habit of washing himself after a day’s digging. He stripped naked, got in up to his neck, and scrubbed his skin with some river weed, the slime of which was good at removing dirt. Then he splashed himself with clean water.
He felt like a door had been opened in his head, his very head itself. He felt that glory was pouring into his soul.
Back on the bank he sat watching the sunset and it was the first sunset he had ever seen. There was such a treasurehouse of colour and light heaped up on the horizon that he was amazed. He was astonished. He was astonished by the colour, and astonished that he’d never noticed it before. He peered at his own skin, dotted and tattooed with dirt that would never wash off. And around him the world had gone dark. The moon was a silver coin at arm’s length and he could reach out and pluck it and put it in his pocket. There were more stars in the sky than he had ever realised. But then, he thought to himself, there were so many stars because there was so much sky to fill.
He was cold now, so he dressed and went back to the main camp and found a fire and warmed himself up. The flames were an intricate dance of fluid snakes, white-yellow and red, and this is where the stars were being born, in their great profusion, a constant upstream of bright sparks floating up to take their place in the firmament. He’d seen fire a thousand times, yet evidently had never really seen it before this night. The fire fizzed as a new branch was put on it. The sound was like the sea in the cove at Trethgowan.
In the morning he helped build a new sow, and the following day he was back underground as if nothing had happened. His head throbbed a bit when he exerted himself, and once his plug of mud popped clean out. But he simply fitted it back in and went back to work. The subterranean space in which he worked was transformed: the soil a wadding of fine fabric, the stone solid gold. And his Dad was down there with him, digging away.
‘Dad,’ he said, when he took a break for some water, ‘I’m glad to have you with me.’
‘I was never properly buried, son,’ his father replied, speaking Cornish. ‘I’ve been an unsettled spirit since that day. But if you can dig this grave, the grave of a whole city – if you can dig it – and leave me here, under the weight of this tall tower, then I’ll be at peace.’
‘Gonvedhav,’ he replied. I understand.
‘Oh, you understand, my lad,’ said his Da. ‘You’ve always had your quickness for understanding. But for how long do you intend to remain content?’
Cas had no answer to that. That evening he ate his ration beside a campfire, and talked to nobody. Then he wandered off.
Afterwards he looked again at the moon. Not living, like the sun, but not dead and gone either. A bright ghost, in the sky. The flames in the fire were spectres, too: ghost snakes still writhingly in motion. The whole world was a kind of shimmering, beautiful haunting. He was weeping. Tears were cutting through the grime on his face. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t on account of his father. It had something to do with the brimming excess of beauty that there was in the world, and the weak foundations on which that beauty had been erected.
He came as still
To his mother’s bower
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.
POPE URBAN V DIES IN AVIGNON
Most learned man of his generation?
Let his epitaph be: he tried to move the papacy back to Rome, failed, and returned once again to Avignon, the fool the fool the fool the fool the fool.
The Fate of Aimeric. In late 1349 Geoffroi hatched a plan to retake Calais from the English by stealth. The scheme involved bribing one Aimeric de Pavia, who was commander of one of the city gate towers, to open a side-gate to the city so that Geoffroi and his accomplices might come inside at night. Aimeric was happy to take Geoffroi’s money, but happy also to take Edward III’s, and so betrayed Geoffroi to the English. They ambushed Geoffroi as he came through; his men were killed and Geoffroi himself badly wounded and taken prisoner. He languished in England for several years until a substantial ransom for his release was finally paid in July 1351. It so happened that Aimeric fell into Geoffroi’s hands some years later. Geoffroi had not forgotten. He had Aimeric taken to St Omer, where, in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd, he had him tortured with red-hot irons and dismembered, limb by limb, with an axe.
Solitary I am, and solitary I wish to be,
Solitude is all my sweet love left to me.
Alone without a friend without a mate
And all appalled and mournful and irate.
LIMOGES FALLS
Town’s futile resistance to the glorious Black Prince overcome
Walls tumble to the sound of Edward’s mighty trumpets
TOWN AFIRE
for an old man he is old
for an old man he is grey
but a young man’s heart is full of love
get away old man get away
underlying such year by year fluctuations it is easy to detect the swell of a secular tide the latter rose slowly and gently but with sufficient consistency to bring the prices of what on the eve of the black death of 1348 to a height nearly twice as great at the point at which we find them in the first two decades of the century whereas in the twenty years from 1210 to 1230 the price of wheat fluctuated around 3/– it climbed eventually to a bidecennial average of 6/– in that period of the second half of the fourteenth century the prices rose to a new
RENEWED CONCERNS FOR THE HEALTH OF
THE BLACK PRINCE
but a young man’s heart is full of love
BULGARIA WEAKENED
Rival half-brothers Ivan Sratsimir and Ivan Shishman become co-Emperors of Bulgaria after the death of their father, King Ivan Alexander. Bulgaria is weakened by the split, according to reports from the capital city
LATIN PATRIACH OF CONSTANTINOPLE DIES following long illness all Constantinople instructed to mourn
but a young man’s heart is full of love
The order was no quarter, so no quarter was given. D’Angle had been a personal friend of the Black Prince for a decade now, and knew the man well enough to know he meant what he said. The wall came down with a strangely muted thunder, like a storm on the other side of a hill, and threw up a new wall twice as high, but this battlement was composed only of dust and soon this curtain fell away too. D’Angle was in with the first men at the breach, choking and coughing, swords out. No quarter meant none for ransom, but then again there would be plunder enough inside. Prince Edward was making an example of Limoges for disloyalty, and it would be a poor idea to disobey his commands. The city had it coming, anyway. They shouldn’t have made the Prince wait for so long. A month!
Then again, a month is not so long in terms of a siege, so Limoges was still well supplied. The people he met on the other side of the breach were generally plump and well fed, and that disconcerted him. He was used to breaking down cities, sure, but by the time you get inside the folk are usually scarecrows and skeletons in old rags, covered in sores, eyes bulging and shining with suffering, and you’re doing them a favour by cutting them down. But these people were like … well, they looked like people.
Ah well.
The first people they encountered were soldiers, but they were easily killed. Hundreds of English and Gascons were running through the gap, as the dust sifted down and cleared, and hundreds more lining up behind them, axes and swords ready. The men were bored, and now they had something to do, and the something was no quarter. So d’Angle cut down two Limoges soldiers, and by the time he was ready for the third the defenders were already throwing down their weapons and kneeling and begging for mercy. No mercy, though. A kneeling man’s neck is at exactly the right height for a hearty swordswing. He cut a third of the way into one neck, hauled the sword out, and chipped away a glancing blow at another – it wasn’t a good blow, but it nonetheless drew a bright red springspout of blood – and by then the others had grasped the fact that kneeling and surrendering would do them no good, so they were scrambling to their feet and trying to run off, only to get an axe in the back, or a sword, or get bashed over with a shield and stabbed on the ground.
They had the nearby gate open now. Archers were coming in behind him, and taking positions. The Limogean crossbowmen were giving up their weapons and attempting to surrender. Not that it did them any good. The sight of these men – paid by the city to defend it, throwing aside their heavy crossbows, the cowards, and screeching for their lives – made d’Angle furious. Cowards! He ran at the nearest and swept his sword right-left with full strength. The blade cut through the man’s left leg entire, and chopped through to the bone of the left, and the coward went down in a pissgush of bright red. Screamed like a hog in the shambles. D’Angle swept his sword back left-right, pulling it up and the top scored across a second soldier’s face in a rattle of flying teeth and blood: cleaving his upper lip, his nose and eye and sending his metal helmet popping high up in the air. D’Angle roared, and turned, but the remaining half dozen men were already running, so he leapt forward and cut at a retreating back, straight through the padded cloth, but the blade bounced off the shoulderblade and although the man stumbled he did not fall.
D’Angle stopped to regain his breath. The fury was draining out of him now. The street was full of English and Gascon raiders, hurrying forward, eager to kill and even more eager for plunder. D’Angle ran down a side street, stopping at the houses and shops on the way. Some had locked doors, some of the doors had no locks, and some had no door at all. He entered where his fancy took him to discover cowering and shrieking women, children, men in their dotage with liverspots on their bald heads like splash patterns of blood. They were mostly down on the ground, huddling against the wall, and that meant a series of sharp downward chopping motions, which was a problem because the blood tended to splash forward and wet his legs. But downstrokes were at least quick, since of course none of these people were wearing helmets, heads could be eggcracked easy enough; and the blows put an end to their skreeks of ayez pitié! ayez pitié! His hose was sodden by the time he emerged. He made his way towards the cathedral tower, and the streets were full of people killing other people.
He left bloody footprints as he stalked.
D’Angle was starting to get tired. Killing people with a sword is like chopping wood: the muscles of the arms soon enough begin to ache. Still: best press on. Best get it out of the way. The sooner we crack on, the sooner we finish. A mob of twenty or so people were running towards him, mouths wide, eyes terrified, some already bleeding, chased along by some leisurely-jogging Gascon axemen. D’Angle took his stance; and as the crowd came on he cut right-left, left-right, right-left. They were a mixed bunch: various old men, half a dozen men in uniform, a nobleman holding an expensive looking hat in his hands to stop his head-wound getting blood all over it, some women, some children. As a nobleman himself, d’Angle was of course taller than the commoners, so his chest-level sweeps tended to cut into their faces. He managed a particularly good strike at the Limogean noble’s neck that severed everything except the skin at the back so that the fellow’s head flopped over against his spine in a spurt of red. Of the twenty, only four got past him, and one of those slipped in the spilled blood and lay on the ground sobbing. D’Angle stamped his leather boot – absolutely dripping with blood, it was, surely stained forever and the pair had cost him fifty shillings in Southampton – on this one’s head, but that proved an error. The sobbing stopped, yes, but the thrust unbalanced d’Angle and he almost fell, as if tripping over a boulder. He had to dance along on his other foot to regain his balance. He could hear the Gascons laughing at his impromptu ballet. This fired up his anger again, and he ran at the civilians who had run past him and cut them all down with sharp strikes to the back and neck.
He stopped at the corpse of the near-decapitated noble, just to see if he had been carrying a purse or anything of the sort, but there was nothing except a ring on one finger. D’Angle took this. With all the blood it slipped off easily enough. Then he was off again, jogging in the direction of the cathedral. Some Welshmen were joking and laughing, bows slung over their backs, daggers out, stabbing at figures kneeling, or writhing on the ground, or pressed up against a wall. The plaster behind them had a vineleaf pattern, complete with grapes, all of it overpainted with fresh blood. And here was another coward-soldier, hurrying round the corner. d’Angle took pleasure in hacking into his flank with his sword. The man went down on all fours, like a dog, and d’Angle swiped down and took his head off, and then regretted having given him so honourable a death. Two of his comrades, cowards both, were limping after him, trailing blood over the pavingstones, and d’Angle cut at their faces, and when they turned away screaming, cupping their shredded visages in their hands, he cut at their legs and buttocks, taking chunks of flesh out like a butcher.
Round the corner were some priests, tubby-bellied and weeping, trying to run but getting tangled up in their own robes. No armour here, so d’Angle impaled the first on his sword, forcing the tip in just under the ribcage. The others were begging, ne occide me! ne occide me! as if Latin would save them. d’Angle took an ear off with a swift upcut, and then brought the blade down again and cut the same man’s arm clean off at the shoulder. Hoicking the sword up again opened a new mouth in the fellow’s fat belly.
Limogeans were rushing up the steps to the main door of the cathedral, as if that would save them. Nothing would save them. The terrible prince noir had ordered their deaths, and so death was inevitable. It annoyed d’Angle that they couldn’t simply accept it. He waded into the mass of people, hacking and chopping. A head bounced free like a dropped cabbage. People tumbled left and right. He splashed through puddles of gloop. A bloodsoaked cloak got itself tangled around his sword and he had to stop a moment to pull this free. With one stroke he took a woman’s jaw off, and it fell away, tongue and all.
Some of the English foot soldiers were going into the cathedral after the civilians, but d’Angle stopped for a while, leaning on his sword. The steps were carpeted in dead bodies – or most of the bodies were dead, and some were dying. A noblewoman came hurrying towards him, arms out, shrieking ayez pitié bon monsieur ayez pitié douce monsieur ayez pitié. A good-looking woman. Very expensively dressed. He swung his sword and it stuck in her chest, in amongst her ribs, and when she dropped down clucking and gasping and spitting blood the motion of her falling body yanked the sword from his hand. He retrieved his weapon and examined it: getting blunt: a great many little indentations and pits in its two cutting edges.
He sheathed his sword and took out his dagger. Then, walking unhurriedly back towards the gate, he took stock. Here were three citizens banging at a housedoor begging to be let inside, but the folk inside were not loosing the lock: d’Angle stabbed one in the side, grabbed the hair of another and slit his throat, and watched the third – a woman – dash off in so blind a terror that she ran straight into a wall and fell down. He went over to her and coupez’d her gorge. He walked on. Here were half a dozen children, all gripping one another in a shuddering mass cuddle, eyes wide, and he cut all their throats. Here was an ancient old man, maybe a hundred years old, and he had a fancy engraved buckler in his left hand and an antique sword in his right, and he staggered towards d’Angle, offering combat. D’Angle sidestepped him and knifed him in the flank. The oldster dropped to both knees, weeping, letting the sword go, and d’Angle stabbed him again in the other flank, and left him. Here were more of those civilians pestering ayez pitié ayez pitié and he swept his knife very rapidly in a series of Z patterns and they went down clutching their faces, or else ran off. As if running would save them. There was nowhere to run.
D’Angle left the city through the breach in the wall, and washed himself quickly in the river. Then back to his tent, where he told his boy to sharpen his sword, and be quick. Then he presented himself at the Prince’s tent and was received. ‘How is the passage of arms, my friend?’ Edward asked him, in English. He was increasingly prone to speak English these days, which forced d’Angle to reply in his awkward, accented version of that barbarian tongue. ‘It will be quick, Highness,’ he said. ‘The Limogean soldiers have all thrown down their weapons, the cowards, and the civilians are sheep, bleating and flocking together, as they always are in this situation. You have men beside all gates? They will try to open them and flee to the countryside.’
‘Oh,’ said the Black Prince, his face set with determination. ‘We have men at all the gates.’
D’Angle gratefully accepted a flagon of wine, which he drank in one draught. His hammering heart relented a little. He closed his fingers into two fists, and then opened his fists, like a flower greeting the sunlight, and felt calmness trickling back into him. Some knights brought in the Bishop of Limoges, his hands bound, his face bruised, into the Prince’s presence. ‘Ayez pitié de moi, grand prince,’ this cleric begged. But Edward was in no pitying mood. He lectured the Bishop about his disloyalty in closing the gates of the city against him. The Bishop tried to protest, swearing on the Holy Cross that he had personally counselled against such treachery, that he had begged the lords and constables of the place to uphold their oaths to the English crown, but that he had been ignored and overruled. The Prince was having none of this. ‘Take him outside and cut his head off, right away,’ he ordered. And so the prelate was dragged outside.
Now the Prince declared he wanted to see the city, so his people took up his litter and carried him towards the gate. D’Angle begged the honour of accompanying him, and ran back to his own tent to retrieve his sword. His boy had done an indifferent job sharpening this, but it was better than it had been, so he changed out of his bloodsoaked hose and strapped on his now-clean breastplate and ran back to the Prince’s litter.
Back inside the city, every street was strewn with dead bodies. The Prince’s men had some difficulty stepping over the corpses to keep their charge on a level, unjolting path. Some Limogeans, seeing the Prince’s blazon on his litter, ran forward to beg mercy. D’Angle, and some others, made short work of these: a downstroke opened a V in the skull of one, and sliced across to open the belly of another and so permitted the guts to come roping out and down. A third tried to run, and d’Angle sprinted after her, and speared her with swordpoint through the small of her back. This cut made her legs stiffen abruptly, such that she leapt into the air like a hare and fell with a thump to the ground, which was comical to watch. Other citizens, poorly dressed and whimpering, were crawling on all fours along the gutter beneath a high wall, and d’Angle strolled along, holding his sword with two hands, point down, and jabbing at them, one after the other.
Two English foot soldiers, armed with axes, were chopping at a locked door, and from the other side the shrieks and wails of a large group could be heard. The wood was soon shards and the men went inside, and d’Angle and four others went in too. A merchant’s house: several items of furniture, and hangings on the wall, and a dozen Limogeans cowering against the wall. One held his hands out at d’Angle, palms front, and a sweep of the sword took the fingers off. But d’Angle’s muscles were starting to ache with all this heavy swinging and swinging, so he sheathed his sword and took out his dagger. The English axemen had gone through to the back of the house, from where the sound of axeblows and screaming could be heard. D’Angle worked his way methodically along the line of people with his knife ayez pitié grand chevalier ayez pitié ayez pitié and found the easiest thing was to grasp a hank of hair with his left hand and push the knifeblade down behind the collar bone with his right. The blade was long enough to kill quickly, and there was less blood that way. On his way out he spotted a golden candlestick, and tucked it into his belt. It was, he reflected, surprising that there was only one. He could imagine somebody had already pilfered the other, but if they had taken one why not take both?
Outside d’Angle set off to rejoin the Prince’s litter. Round a corner he came upon a little scene: some Welshmen had dragged a priest out of his church, stripped him naked, and castrated him. They were holding the severed testicles in the direction of his church and genuflecting, drinking wine from the rich-looking communion goblet they had presumably taken from that very building. The priest writhed on the floor. On the far side of the road, behind a little heap of corpses, two more Welshmen were ripping the habit from an elderly nun. D’Angle hurried past, over a carpet of civilian corpses.
He chanced upon some youngsters, apprentices perhaps, judging by their clothes, wringing their hands and hooting like little birds with ayez pitié milord ayez pitié. He beat one of these on his head with his metalled fist until the skull caved, stabbed another, and tripped a third who tried to run, and then put his knife in at the back of the lad’s neck. Four got away, but ran straight into some Welshmen, who struck them down with maces and left them motionless on the ground. Here were three nuns, and d’Angle was made inexplicably furious by the sight of them – strange, really, for his own sister was mother superior of a convent – and he battered them with his fists and cut them with his knife and left them dead and their flesh all ripped and tattered.
By the time he caught up with the Prince’s litter again, the Earl of Cambridge, blood smoking on his armour, was trying to persuade Edward to permit the taking of prisoners. ‘It would be a mistake to lose so many rich ransoms, sire, surely,’ he said. ‘No quarter, I said,’ the Prince croaked, not looking at the noble lord. ‘No quarter, I meant. Kill them all, my lord.’
Cambridge loped off, looking piqued. D’Angle understood his anger of course; but then again – this was to be a long campaign, all the way across country to Paris, and there would be plenty of chances for rich ransom and plunder before the end of it. For now the best bet was to finish this town quickly. No point in drawing everything out. Half a dozen young women, maidens of good family according to their own cries for pity, tried to approach the Prince’s litter and beg mercy, or ransom, but Edward turned his face away from them, and soldiers made quick work of them. D’Angle stabbed a plump youngster in the breast, and cut the throat of a skinnier girl, perhaps her younger sister. He noticed that the first was on the floor but still alive, and decided he hadn’t cut her deep enough; so he crouched down and drew the knife along her throat to her wet-sounding gasps.
Some soldiers had set fire to a small church, and the people inside – scores and scores of them, hoping perhaps for sanctuary – were tumbling through the door coughing and vomiting and barely able to voice their ayez pitié pitié pitié. Most ended up in a writhing heap, and d’Angle joined in the killing: stabbing down with his dagger right-handed, left-handed, into backs and fronts, faces and arses, cutting and slicing. He stood back when he thought he had finished, but one of the soldiers – a Spaniard, by his face – said he knew how these heaps of civilians went, people lay quiet but alive under the press of corpses and hoped thereby to survive the assault. So the men-at-arms pulled dead bodies from the top, and soon enough they uncovered a layer of the still-living, who tried to wriggle away, or who begged for mercy, or thrashed in panic. All these must be cut to pieces. One wormed its way along the ground towards d’Angle, and as the other men-at-arms stabbed and hacked he put his foot on the small of this thing’s back and slid the knife into its fundament, slicing up and away to release a quantity of blood from the lower end and a quantity of screaming from the other. Smoke was spewing blackly from the door of the church now, and rolling into the sky. The Prince had not specifically given the order to fire the town yet, so this was premature and possibly dangerous, but surely such an order would come. There were yelps and shrieks from inside, but they were soon silenced.
Two musicians ran at him, holding their musical instruments in front of them, perhaps believing they could buy their lives with a song. A lute. A horn. D’Angle cut one in the throat just under the Adam’s apple, and chopping the other across the face so deep that his brains were put on show, and that was the end of them.
A large group of Limogeans had been herded into a street impasse, or else had run down there in panic. Some Englishmen with axes and cudgels were working away this group but the clogging of the narrow way was making progress hard. D’Angle joined in. Never let it be said he shirked his duty, no matter how laborious. He cut left and right with his sword, and outheld hands were lopped clean off, elbows smashed, as the citizens tried to protect themselves. He pushed out with three swift backhand strikes, flexing at his elbow, and cut deep gashes into the fronts of two wailing women. Back again and he heard the collar bone of one haggard-looking man snap like a stepped-on twig. He was an elderly fellow in a stained linen shirt, but his moustache and beard were well-trimmed and his skin was pale, so perhaps he was a nobleman hoping to disguise himself as a poor man and so escape justice. Justice was not to be avoided, though. A couple of the Englishmen recognised d’Angle, and cried joyfully ‘Sir Guichard! Sir Guichard, you French bastard! Welcome to the coal face, Sir Guichard!’ and he grinned at them and went at it again. A woman was trying to protect her baby by huddling round it: d’Angle cut several times into her back and then she slumped to the side, spilling the wailing infant onto the floor. This latter d’Angle speared with the tip of his sword, like a piece of meat on a plate; but that only made it scream louder. Its little face was as red as the setting sun. D’Angle stabbed it again and again, but the tough little creature refused to die. Annoyed, he set his foot on it and cut away at its little neck until the wailing stopped.
He pulled back from the impasse, and looked at his blade. It was getting blunt again, but it would be bothersome to go beyond the walls, sharpen it and return. If he did that he’d miss all the rest of the killing. So he went on and set to with his sword, using it now as a club. It worked pretty well at fracturing bones, breaking open skulls and so on, although this resulted in rather more bloodspatter than was ideal in terms of his own cleanliness. Couldn’t be helped. Eventually all the civilians in that blocked-off street were dead.
D’Angle wandered back out to the square. There were civilians on the roofs, and several fell off, or perhaps jumped. There were children running naked through the streets covered in blood, their own or others’. One young girl grasped d’Angle’s knees. He hadn’t seen her coming, and was startled by the pressure on his legs. But it was not enough to topple him, and he cut the back of the kid’s neck with his dagger, but though this killed her she didn’t release her grip and he had to prise her off. A very old woman stood in one small square, apparently unnoticed, back straight, singing en contemplant la croix benie in a clear, thin voice. It was a hymn he remembered from his childhood. There was something rather fine about this, so d’Angle put his knife away, and caved-in her head with a single heavy blow of his sword. Her head lolled at a crazy angle, but she dropped to her knees as cleanly as if she were at prayer.
The Prince’s litter had been set down, so that Edward could watch the combat of three French knights: Sir John de Villemur, Hugh de la Roche, and Roger de Beaufort, this last gentleman son to the Count of Beaufort – governors of the city, and leading figures. Panting a little, splashed all over with blood, d’Angle came to stand beside his leader, and watched. The three knights were fighting well, holding off three English lords with a series of fluent moves.
The Duke of Lancaster was engaged with Sir John de Villemur, who was a hardy knight, strong and well made. The Earl of Cambridge had singled out Sir Hugh de la Roche, and the Earl of Pembroke was fighting Roger de Beaufort.
D’Angle might have been watching a practice bout at tourney, or on a training day. It was clear that these three knights had resolved to sell their lives dearly, and for the first time since the wall had tumbled d’Angle felt a twinge of pity that such chivalrous gentlemen must die. But must is must. He was about to say something to that effect to Edward, when, astonishingly, he saw tears rolling down the Prince’s lean face. ‘Oh,’ he croaked, slipping into French for the first time that day, ‘oh, give them quarter, such chivalrous brave knights, they must have quarter.’ Several other nobles shouted the words through to the English lords, who drew back and rested on their swords. The Frenchmen grasped what had happened. ‘My lords, we are yours,’ shouted one, in a clear voice. ‘You have vanquished us. Therefore by God we beg you, act according to the law of arms.’ ‘By God,’ replied the Duke of Lancaster, ‘Sir John, we do not intend otherwise, and we accept you for our prisoners.’ As these three knights were taken, English and Welsh cheers echoed around the little square.
Still, some three thousand Limogeans had been killed to these three prisoners spared. Prince Edward ordered the sappers to stay back. There was no need to dig a pit, he said, for they would not occupy the city, which would instead burn, and so provide a decent pyre for the fallen. D’Angle supposed the sappers were happy at this news since it saved them an afternoon’s labour; though it also meant that some plunder would inevitably be lost. He strode back out of the city, stripped, washed in the river for a second time that day, and regained his tent in that pleasant state of physical weariness one experiences after prolonged physical labour. He ate a little food, and drank some wine, and then he lay on his couch and slept for an hour. When he woke it was still afternoon, and he dressed and returned. A great deal of booty had been removed from Limoges, and more was coming out. The fires were not supposed to be set until the following morning. But then somebody or other got too eager, and a line of houses was aflame by dusk and the flames spread quickly. By nightfall the Black Prince’s camp was pitched alongside the world’s biggest bonfire. There was grumbling at this, at the loss of treasures yet to be winkled out of Limoges. The shrieks from inside the flames suggested that people had hidden in upper-rooms and cache-holes, hoping to escape their fate, and were now being burned alive – and if people were hidden, then surely treasure was too. But when d’Angle joined Edward in his tent for a select victory feast the Prince was blithe about the loss of money. ‘There are a hundred towns between here and Paris,’ he told the half dozen lords assembled around the table. ‘After today it will be a brave town who shuts its gates against us. We shall have rich pickings through the heart of France.’
They all toasted the Prince’s victory.
D’Angle complimented the Prince on the wine he was serving.
‘Where is this from?’ Edward asked his secretary.
‘From the Bishop’s own palace, your Highness.’
‘A very treasonable bishop,’ Edward grumbled. The memory of the treachery lit his eyes with a hectic flame. He really, d’Angle thought, did not look very well. ‘At any rate,’ the Prince said. ‘I suppose he will bring a handsome ransom.’
There was some discussion amongst the noble lords as to whether the Bishop had indeed been beheaded as the Prince had ordered, or whether he had been pardoned at the last and so could be ransomed. Edward was in no mental condition to confirm or deny. He was barely awake. His hands were shaking so hard he could only drink when an attendant held the cup to his mouth. He made a series of odd wheezing, whistling, keening noises. He kept drifting off into a stuporous doze.
‘A fine word, chivalry,’ announced the Earl of Cambridge, to the company as a whole. ‘It means what is appropriate to a chevalier. And what is a chevalier? A man on a horse.’ He laughed at this, as if he had said something very witty.
‘Treasonable bishop,’ murmured Edward. ‘Bishopable treason.’ His attendant once more angled the goblet of wine at his mouth, but the red juice fell from his lips and dribbled down his neck. He closed his eyes. When his attendant attempted to mop this spillage up Edward made a series of indignant baby noises. His arms flapped vaguely at his side.
The Earl of Cambridge drained his drink, and stood up. ‘And a man on a horse,’ he announced to the company, ‘is little different to a man on foot, or on a litter. Man is man, man is damned. Man is God’s one mistake.’
There was total silence in the tent, until the Prince farted, giggled at his own emission and then slid down his couch. The Earl of Cambridge unbuckled the garter he was wearing, and threw it to the ground. ‘So much,’ he announced, ‘for chivalry.’ And with that, he left the tent.
He was in some place he did not recognise. It was hard to make out the sort of place it was, France or England, summer or winter. There was light, but of a strange quality, like the light of twilight or early dawn except that it filled the whole sky. George looked up and saw, isolated against the brightness, spots of intenser brightness like great sprawling constellations of stars. Beneath his feet a table-flat green field stretched before and behind, left and right.
George’s hand went to his neck. It felt rough, but then it always felt rough. It didn’t feel – what? Stretched? Raw? He wasn’t sure, now he came to think of it, that it felt at all. Then he noticed his arm was clad in a sleeve of feathers: a sleeve of blue feathers, green feathers, black feathers, each plume streaked with lime or purple or maroon. Both his arms were so sleeved, as was his torso. He brushed at the feathers covering his left arm, and puffs of golden dust came off.
He had noticed his approach, but the cleric was standing beside him – the same cleric he had paid three pounds, back in London, for the letter to introduce him to the White Company. Was it the same cleric? He appeared, now, to be wearing a bishop’s garb, although one with strange colouration. Or was that the odd light? But he recognised the man’s face. Did he?
‘What are you doing here?’ he growled at the cleric, fondling his own throat again.
The fellow was reading something from a small green-bound book, occasionally marking something in the margins with a feather-pen. He looked up at George, and his eyes were owlbig and gleaming.
‘I am not here,’ he said. ‘Only you are here.’
‘Where?’ George demanded. ‘Is this still Provence? I was in Provence until a moment ago. Unless I was in France. Not London though, I think. Or I don’t think.’
‘Where,’ agreed the cleric. ‘When.’
‘This?’ George growled, looking around. ‘This is what being dead is like?’
‘Being dead,’ said the cleric, a little primly, ‘is like being alive. Only – less so.’ He showed George the open two pages of his book, but the writing was in a strange squaresquiggly alphabet George couldn’t read. To be fair, he could barely read English. This, though, was well beyond him.
‘So is this Purgatory? Am I to be purged?’
‘You were dead already,’ the cleric said. ‘You were always already dead. All in Adam are dead. Only in Christ are you made alive.’
‘Christ is indeed my saviour,’ George said, feeling oddly inhibited from saying so. Why the reluctance? These were the proper things to say. ‘Christ,’ he growled, pushing the words out, ‘is truly my salvation.’
‘There is the question,’ said the cleric, ‘of sins.’
George didn’t reply. Of course there were many sins. That surely goes without saying. He was born into sin, and people don’t rise above the station into which they are born. Society requires order and harmony, heavenly society just as much as earthly society, and any too-rapid zigzag changes in one’s circumstances would destabilise that. It would have done a violence to the structure God ordained to have shucked off his original sin, and therefore this was not a thing even to be attempted.
He waited.
‘Paperwork too,’ said the cleric. ‘That’s more pressing. We have to determine that before we can go any further. There is, for instance, an earthly documentation from the Pope at Avignon excommunicating you.’
‘Ah, no,’ George was eager to explain. ‘He did excommunicate us, yes, on account of the captain I was fighting under. But he undid that.’
‘And later redid it.’
‘I wasn’t told about that.’
‘Whether you were told or not,’ said the cleric, mildly, ‘is hardly relevant.’
‘Surely,’ said George, ‘that won’t stand in my way? Of getting into heaven?’
The cleric looked hard at George. There was something odd about his eyes – beyond, that is, their bizarre size and luminosity. ‘Let’s run through the order of judgements. Were you always obedient?’
‘I served in the army of Edward the King and Edward his son, the Prince of Wales,’ George said, standing up straighter. ‘I followed orders.’
‘That’s not a very full answer, now, is it? You see, obedience is the prime thing, and from what I’ve got written down here, you’ve never been awfully good at it. Remember: Adam and Eve’s first sin was disobedience, and the divine judgement for that was death, and the infirmities and miseries of mortal life. Then there are the sins of violating love, insulting the Holy Ghost and so on. Shall I tell you what is highlighted in my book, here, under your name?’
‘Tell me.’
‘You shall not kill.’
‘I have a clean conscience, on that front,’ said George, firmly. ‘It doesn’t mean all killing, that commandment. It means unlawful killing. Well. I was a soldier, and I killed a lot of people. But that’s what soldiers do.’ Something came back to him and he spoke it: ‘God made me a soldier.’
‘God made you a man,’ replied the cleric. ‘You made yourself a soldier.’ George got a sudden flush of realisation as to whom it is the cleric recalls to his mind. Not his wife, who was love and beauty and gentleness in a single human form. But his wife’s sister, who was sharp and insightful and full of judgement.
‘I am damned, then?’ he demanded, trying at least for the rude dignity of the dying soldier. Jesus may promise life, but soldiers know that there is a deeper truth, one that was true before Christ came into the world, and which remains true even after his mission. That everybody dies. That death cannot be defeated, or shirked, or avoided. That the only thing that matters is how you encounter death. Very well, he thought: I’ll not snivel.
‘This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away,’ said the cleric. ‘The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.’
‘You’ll have to run that past me again,’ said George, narrowing his eyes.
The cleric, looking increasingly ambiguous between masculine and feminine, smacked shut the book in his, or her, hands. ‘Well, let me explain what happens now. There are, I’m sure you’ll remember from your Sunday School, two judgements. One when you die, individually; and another when the whole world dies – the last judgement, when Christ himself comes to separate the, well, you know.’
‘So,’ said George. ‘And what follows?’
‘Now,’ said the cleric, ‘I will take the amount of pain you have caused other people and the amount of pleasure you have caused other people. I will subtract the smaller amount from the larger, and you will experience – you yourself, all at once – the remainder. The remainder of pleasure, perhaps. Or of pain. Depending on how you have lived your life. It might be a blast of pure bliss that will carry you, wonderfully, through to the end of time. Or it might be … otherwise.’
‘That’s not fair,’ George complained. ‘Nobody told me that my business in the world was to bring pleasure to other people.’
‘I think, if you look back,’ the cleric said, ‘you’ll find that everybody was telling you that, all the time.’
A flicker of hope. ‘Well, this depends, I think, how we are to define the two terms. If the French army had invaded England,’ he insisted, warming to his theme, ‘there would have been a great deal of pain to a great many people. I fought in the army, and prevented that. Surely that counts for something?’
The cleric said nothing to this, although his, or her, expression was eloquent enough.
‘Do I have a choice about this?’ George asked, quietly.
‘Life is when a person has choices,’ the cleric said, briskly. ‘Choices stop when you’re dead. That’s very nearly the definition of death, you know. Shall we?’
‘Let’s get it over with,’ George grumbled.
The whole green world tilted, swayed, rolled back. The rocking was centred on his body. His body was swaying. What is happening? he asked. But the cleric was no longer a cleric, and was now unmistakeably a vision of his sister-in-law, clothed in light, a bird, a beautiful bird, holding in her winged arms a book made of light. They’re loosening the rope, she sang. Untying it. In a moment you’ll drop to the ground. Untying the rope, he said. Dropping the body, she said. You’ll feel the release, and then the plunge will register in your stomach and the sensation of falling in your inner ear. But, for you, it will be a very long time, a very long time, a very very long time, before you feel the thump of striking the dusty ground. He reached out to her then, for he could sense gravity shifting the terms of its grip upon him. He was about to say something else when the whole world dropped, and him with it.