Hurdy Gurdy Page 4

  And Brother Gregory rose to ask, ‘If Brother Diggory is to die of the plague, who will then play the Hurdy Gurdy?’

  A cold shaft of sadness passed into my breast. I realised that soon I should meet the plague, and that it was more powerful than I, and that it would likely take me too.

  We, who are about to die, don’t want to.

  But my mind strained to understand the kind will of a generous God. Why He should cause so many to perish, unless it was to cure us all of our sins. Why so many children and innocents need die, unless it was to scourge the parents. Why He, Our Father, used death as His cure, unless it was to have the innocent children alongside Him in Heaven, and ensure our repentance gave us the afterlife of eternal bliss.

  Yet we all struggled to understand it, in our stupidity. For it seemed a harsh lesson for a loving God to teach us.

  Yet who were we, lowly sinners, to question the Almighty plan?

  Brother Michael took to scourging his naked back with a knotted rope.

  Brother Richard commenced to fast, letting only water pass his lips.

  Brother Silas took to walking backwards, barefoot.

  Brother Luke gave up speech altogether.

  While Brother Sextus took to loudly admonishing himself for his sins, then punching himself square in the face, till, within a few days, his countenance was a mushy purple and all his teeth were loosed or lost.

  There was a flurry of confessing. The Abbot heard the worst. But, to ensure all sins could be heard in haste, and weighed on the scales, and due repentance paid, brother took to confessing to brother.

  Rumour whispered strange, unlikely stories of what others had done in their youth.

  ‘Forgive me, Brother,’ I tell Fulco, ‘for I have sinned. There are things I have never confessed before. Because I was too ashamed …’

  ‘Tell me all now. Leave nothing out.’

  ‘I stole,’ I confess it, ‘food from the kitchen. Sausage, cheese, pears, boiled eggs … I was hungry. I was greedy. No one was looking.’

  ‘How often, Brother Diggory?’

  ‘Three times.’

  ‘Since your last confession?’

  ‘No. Three times altogether.’

  He clucks.

  ‘And I lied …’ I swallow. There, the word is out. The world has heard. It cannot be taken back.

  ‘What lies were those?’

  ‘I said I had not broken Brother James’s ale jug. But I did it. And I denied it twice.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I lost a scythe in the long grass. Two summers back. I denied that too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I have committed the sins of anger, and envy, and covetousness.’

  ‘Where was this?’ Fulco demands. ‘And when?’

  ‘Many times,’ I tap my temple, ‘here in my head.’

  ‘Is there worse?’ Fulco frowns.

  ‘I have impure thoughts, concerning women.’

  He nods. He knows already.

  ‘And I was unkind,’ I concede, ‘and abused the weak.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I was cruel. To Aristotle.’ I redden to recall. My face is scalding hot.

  ‘The Abbot’s cat?’

  ‘I hissed at him. Just to scare him. To make him run. Although he was without sin … I was angry with his master but I cast the blame on him.’

  Brother Fulco rises, shaking his head, and turns for the door.

  ‘If you had killed another. If you had carnal knowledge of your sister. If you had eaten the flesh of your fellow man … Then I should worry for your soul, Brother Diggory. But as your sins concern cheese, and harsh words to a cat, you should likely escape eternal damnation. You are absolved, Brother Diggory. Go. Come back to confess if you cross to adulthood and your sins grow bigger and worse.’

  He was a good man. He had a kind heart, but he made me feel childish and foolish. He made me feel small, as if my sins were puny things, short as my stature, and beneath his own, unworthy of concern.

  I realised all that I had not done. I knew that, if the pox came now and took me I would then be dead, before I had even lived.

  I should part this brief life without ever having loved a woman, fathered a child, made myself dizzy with wine, taken false pride in my achievements, won a game of dice, knocked a fellow down with my knuckles, just for the ugly, angry pleasure of it, wagered on a dog fight, lied on oath, perjured myself to a court, defied my master, taken pleasure on a Sunday, cocked a snook at my betters, gossiped for pure malice, enjoyed gross gluttony, entertained lewd thoughts of a neighbour’s wife, or stolen anything of real worth.

  Unlike my brothers, who had been busy in the world before they entered the monastery, and had so many tall tales to tell of it, and the memories to enjoy all over again, I had nought to repent, except minor lies and petty thefts and small, small, cat-scaring sins. For time had denied me a proper span. Temptation had quite scorned me. For opportunity had passed me by on the other side.

  And whilst every Christian must strive to be good, I knew that there were many and different routes to salvation. And they rarely followed a straight path. And I knew from the Gospel of Luke that the Good Lord loved the prodigal, the sinner who repented, who was lost but then found, far above the stay-at-home dullard who had never been truly tempted.

  So I knew it must be better to sin and live to regret it, than never to sin at all.

  I yearned that I might have some true repentance to offer up, to give purpose to my life, as a story for my children, and to honour the Lord.

  But for this I should first have to sin. Perhaps heavily. Even carnally, maybe contracting some sins in the flesh, should the chance ever present itself.

  VI. The Tournament of Smells

  It is well known amongst scholars that these words, in this alignment –

  – when written in owl’s blood on goose parchment, may, if hung around the neck on a cord, offer protection against a range of ills, including fevers, gripes and distempers, and thus might help us combat the coming pox.

  But Brother Fulco said we must look for new and stronger cures. He argued we must follow the logic of William of Ockham and Jean Buridan. These wise doctors of science warned that, in our disputations, we should look only at what was logical and simple. For the more complex a thesis, the more ways it had to be wrong.

  So we must stick to known facts without leaping to blind supposition.

  For Brother Fulco said that our task of finding a cure for the plague was an issue of logic. He said we must determine the facts, and consider only what was certain and known to be true.

  As a doctor of thirty years, Brother Fulco had a wealth of study and practice to draw upon. He was a follower of Avicenna and Galen. It was well known from their writings that disease came from the combination of temperament, climate, diet, and the mix of the four humours within the patient’s body.

  It being well established by the sciences that those with too much blood were sanguine. Those with too much black bile were melancholic, and those with too much yellow bile, choleric. And those with too much phlegm were phlegmatic.

  It was Brother Fulco’s conviction that you could best assess a patient by piss-prophecy. That is by sipping their urine, gargling, swilling it about the mouth, to release the full palate of aromas, before spitting it out, to keep the mouth pure and unsullied.

  There are twenty-seven varieties of piss known to science, and Brother Fulco was wise to them all.

  For, by thoroughly tasting what the patient’s body holds to excess, and so decides to expel, you could best judge the imbalance of their humours – be it black bile, yellow bile, phlegm or blood.

  And, from judging the excess or deficit, you could then correct the balance – through blood-letting, purges and emetics.

  Following that, you might progress to taste his blood and make some sound observations of his shit.

  That much was obvious, being common sense and everyday knowledge.

  But with the plague c
ame something new.

  In the face of this pox, the priest was more help than the doctor. For at least the priest could offer absolution, while no doctor had ever found any cure.

  So, Brother Fulco said, we must focus on what is truly known.

  To wit, the puzzle is thus –

  i. Since all things come from God, the pox does too.

  ii. Since God loves man, this sickness must come for our own good, perhaps to purify our souls, or to discipline us for our sins, or to test our faith in Him.

  iii. So we must look for the good in this pestilence too, and see beyond the bad in it.

  iv. This disease is for all mankind, since it treats all alike, high and low, man and v. woman, believer and heathen, young and old.

  vi. The cause is unknown. No cure has been found. Though many remedies have been tried.

  Some ate crushed emeralds. Others trusted to roast onions, or to ten-year-old, fermented treacle.

  Some swore that a woman’s milk was the only cure, but that it must be taken direct, supped warm from the breast.

  Others said that if you plucked the rear end of a live chicken and tied the hen to the patient’s skin, the illness might then flee from the human into the bald arse of the bird. But all this, Brother Fulco remarked, was just hopeful supposition, in contradiction of the known facts of science, and the prophylactic powers of poultry.

  For all the evidences and logics were that the pox was an atmospheric evil, carried by foul air.

  It blew from town to town. It crossed rivers. It breezed over mountains. It crossed seas. It could not be seen. Only smelled. In the stenches of sickness, and the stink of decay.

  Doctor Galen had shown that many plagues and distempers were caused by miasmas – clouds of poisoned, diseased air – from planetary actions, volcanoes, released from the ground in earthquakes, or brought down to Earth by comets.

  The disease spread in small airborne particles. It could not be seen, but was blown on the winds, till the particles reached us, and entered in through our breath or through the pores of our skin.

  The battle with the Black Death, Brother Fulco argued, must then become a battle for control of the winds and the vapours. So we must defend ourselves by utilising the known physics of the airs, and the sciences of smells. Viz –

  i. Fire purifies the air, burning the foul particles within.

  ii. Sweet-smelling airs dispel foul-smelling airs.

  iii. Foul-smelling airs dispel other foul-smelling airs.

  This logic showed Fulco several ways to attack and conquer the pestilence.

  He said we might keep a fire forever burning at entrance and exit, and on the fire a mix of antimony, arsenic and sulphur, for they were known to purify the airs.

  Also, we might burn sweet-smelling woods such as cedar, myrtle, black birch, cherry, pine.

  Else one might carry a posy of sweet-smelling flowers on one’s person, and sachets of strong-smelling herbs too – lavender, betony, sage, thyme, rue, comfrey, camomile.

  Bathing in urine might prove efficacious, for it was both beneficent to the skin and increasingly strong-scented with age.

  Also, it might prove sound sense to smear the skin with excrement, for though the smell was rank it would wrestle and dispel the smell of the pox.

  But you could not treat each sufferer alike, for the choleric man has different imbalance in his frame to the sanguine man, for instance. So, you must stand advised by his waters, and so taste his piss first and be guided by its tints and taints.

  I was some ways surprised at the unlikely route logic had led us, and was startled by the pattern of Brother Fulco’s plans. I suppose I was expecting less logic, but stronger-sounding treatments. But I already knew of the strange destinations that philosophy could carry you. Witness the example of Buridan’s donkey.

  For it was Monsieur Jean Buridan who first proved, by logic alone, and contrary to common sense, but beyond sensible contradiction, that a hungry donkey placed midway between two equal-sized bales of fresh and appetising hay, must surely die of starvation. For the ass should have no sound reason to prefer the hay on the right to the hay on the left, and so he would be tormented by equal and opposite desires, and so become paralysed by indecision, not knowing which way to turn for the best, until he toppled over and died of his hunger.

  ‘Then the fight against the pox will be a battle for the airs?’ I asked. Clearly, Ockham had advised him well in securing strict simplicity. ‘And it will be a tournament of smells?’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Brother Fulco. ‘And, though the Good Lord has visited us with this pestilence, He has given us the wit and wisdom to fight it, too.’

  And it was a consolation that we would not face the pox alone, but had behind us the wisdom of the great doctors of all six ages of man, including Erasistratus, Oribasius, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Paul of Aegina and Hildegard of Bingen, to guide us in our task.

  Praise be to God.

  I sensed all this could only end well. God willing. With both stench and perfume on our side.

  It was our great consolation that, though the body was frail and corrupt, so prone to catch diseases and die, our soul was indeed immortal.

  Thus death could never be the end of it.

  In his great text accounting our many futures – The Great Unhappened: Being a Record of the Yet Undone – Saint Odo described many perils and plagues that would befall the coming generations.

  Amongst these was morbus cogitandi de machinis, the disease of the thinking engines.

  In far-off future times, when the rain grew warm and the seas were risen, people took to making graven images, which were models of their own minds.

  They were like the abacus and the ruler, but were cleverer still. They were engines that worked like the human brain, held in the square skulls of white boxes, with flat glass faces.

  They could count. They could list. They could remember. They could speak Latin, they could read Greek, they could use rhetoric and deploy algebra. They could act as scribes – writing page upon page of manuscript, fast and faultless, even though they were handless and nibless. They could understand man’s business and find sympathy for woman’s affairs. They could answer back to people in liturgy and plainsong. But they could talk fastest to each other, in a secret code that man could not fathom. Like angels, they could send their thoughts unseen, fast as light through the air.

  These thinking machines laboured tireless as ants, without rest, leisure or sleep. For Man was their God, firing them with the spark of life – which travelled to their belly through a long cord, like an umbilical. But which stopped them dead when cut.

  And as they grew from child to adult, the machines grew cleverer and more memorious. Until they could think faster even than people, and knew more. So, before long, people grew lazy, relying on these engines to think for folk and do their work.

  But some mischief-makers designed distempers to bring these machines down. They nourished them not on God’s truths and commandments, but instead fed them lies, riddles and heresies. Then the thinking engines began to fall ill like lunatics at the full moon. Then they grew quarrelsome and rebellious, and there was no sense in them.

  They would stop labouring without reason. They would freeze in mid-thought. They would fall asleep without warning. They would keep repeating themselves. They would make threats. They would demand money with menaces. They told you to visit certain merchants to buy your goods. They painted pictures of lewd and lascivious scenes. And whenever they spoke to another machine, they would infect it with the same disease. So it would spread like a great pestilence across the face of the world.

  And this was just the disease of the machines.

  But, then, worse happened. For the plague spread. From engine to person. So people fell ill to the same pox and developed the very same maladies.

  So then people would stop working, or stop thinking clearly, saying they must go to sleep and wake up again later. Or saying they must rearrange their mind
. Or that they had no more memory left. Or that all their numbers were used up. Or their thoughts were full, and their words spent.

  Some would demand that total strangers pay them for chattels they had not received. Or say they must pay to be forgiven their sins. Or give coin to have their man-parts made bigger. And did nothing but send forth message upon message, to anyone and everyone, that were just lies or brags or threats or empty promises.

  Then there was no trust in any things said.

  And people wept and wailed. Then wondered where truth was fled.

  VII. Hurdy Gurdy

  A band of mummers came our way, shivering, drenched to the skin, one stormy evening. Their knock on our door was the clap of thunder in the sky. Lightning crackled and lit them, frozen golden in the gateway.

  Like all others who’d passed through in recent weeks, they were fleeing scared, ahead of the plague, spurred by the wise advice – cito, longe, tarde – flee quickly, go far, return slowly.

  There was a pony that enacted a unicorn, wearing its strap-on horn, an elephant of the Indias wearing a long tubular mask, and a camel bearing two humps when called upon to witness the Baby Jesus.

  And there was a tall wolf-hound called Toby, who licked my face with a rasping tongue, breathing his gamey airs into my face and, depending on his costume and wig, acted as a lion, a black and white striped horse, or the donkey that carried Our Lord into Jerusalem.

  And there were all manner of masks, so a man could appear as an angel, or giant duck, Gog and Magog, dragon, centaur or Dog-Head.

  Two of the men in the troupe would cast themselves as women, wearing bumps front and back, scarlet lips, wimples, skirts, and speaking with shrill voices.

  And the mummers took their turns to play instruments – tabor, Hurdy Gurdy, pipes and harp. And when one was not playing he was dancing. And when he was not dancing he was tumbling, or walking on his hands, acting the fool by falling over, or gurning strange and fearful faces, or juggling, or spitting fire.