Nathaniel Spain

EASTER MONDAY, 1360

Ham stood chest-deep in silty muck and thought of the girl in Longjumeau. His horse bobbed on the curve of the river. The creature had screamed and churned the black water, until a hailstone the size of an egg had smote its skull. Now the slow lap of the Eure pressed the creature against a drowned tree, legs at strange angles.

The cursed beast had dragged Ham miles from the column. Nothing could restrain the creature as it pounded the freezing sod, driven by wind and hail across the plain, tripping and screeching over abandoned fields. Ham had seen dozens of panicked horses in a trampling mass, slamming down their riders, braining them with their hooves.

Ham could not feel his legs. He was half-submerged in the muddy riverbank, arms stiffened, hands useless. His mail had frozen to his flesh, anchoring him. While the storm raged for hours about him he had struggled to pull himself free. The impact-craters of the hail still lay about him. A small mercy, he supposed, that he had not been struck like the horse. Like the knight back at the column, whose head had been caved efficiently inward by a plummeting ball of ice.

Months before the knight had come to Ham’s freehold in the frost of an early morning. He rode assuredly with his reins in his remaining hand – his right arm had been lost to past battle and bloodshed. A red cape spilled down the horse’s withers. A posse of retainers escorted him, grey and cowled, shadows spilling back from their hoofprints. Ham’s boys were lighting candles in the windows of the house at Binnulbrook. Ham was feeding the hogs and the goats. Sesily milked the cow in the old barn. The damp bark of the trees. The rich black sod. The smell of it wet and frost-bound in the dawn.

Ham heard the riders coming down the track. He went out, muddied and curious. The knight dismounted. He wore a presence so fierce and hot that the rain seemed to sizzle from his skin and rise as mist. There were rumours of sorcery; a crone had supposedly been dragged from the fen to rub ointments and frankincense on his gangrenous wound. Now here the knight stood, offering his hand towards Ham for another war. Bring out the old mail, your sword and poleaxe. Edward is going to France. The pay would be good. Ham’s boys were old enough to keep the farm. So a yeoman became a man-at-arms once more.

Ham tried once more to drag his legs from the mire. He sunk a fraction more, sternum-deep now. The Eure slid by. Broken trees hung from the banks spectatorially, enjoying the slow sport. The river stank. Ham cursed. The horse’s corpse broke free and slipped downriver, leaving nothing but a profound sense of abandonment in its wake. Ham thought of the girl in Longjumeau.

A hatred of all that is not English had been nurtured in Ham and his contemporaries from the moment of their birth. They were made in the image of weapons, to be raised against the outside world. Blunt implements. When they set forth to the coast, making camp in the southern counties, the knight reminded them of their hate. The French are pigs, he had said. They eat swill. They bathe in shite. They do not follow the will of God. And so on.

It was easy to reave down that country. Easy to burn those strange villages. Burn the barns. Keep the livestock in the barns and burn them all. Burn the peasants in the barns. Steal anything not burnt. These were not crimes, for you cannot commit crimes against animals which do not have souls nor minds in their bodies, only a pretense of such qualities.

One night Ham had vomited and vomited until there was nothing left. His dreams were filled with flames. The knight said he had eaten something which had disagreed with him. Cheese coated in ash. The meat of pigs burned in barns, where peasants had burned also.

Ham looked at his fingers. They had gone beyond blue to a sickly grey. He turned his neck stiffly to look at the other hand. Perhaps he would turn to stone, or mud, or ice.

The girl. The Parisians had seen the smoke from Longjumeau and shut their gates. They would not come out for all the jeers and jibes. Edward had nothing to scale the walls with so they had left for Chartres.

Ham watched a water-vole slide from the opposite bank with a dull plop.

Longjumeau burned and a girl ran from a flaming door. She had probably been no older than his youngest son. Eleven or twelve years of age. She had run from the house and he had cut her down. That was the sum of it. He had stood while smoke drifted down the street. The child sprawled at his feet, her breath coming in harsh shuddering waves. It slowed and then stopped.

There had been no time for a thought to form between the girl running from that flame-licked doorway and then falling upon the blade. Sunlight had followed the steel as it stroke downwards. A pair of shears cutting through whatever might follow. But there had been time, as much as he told himself otherwise, and he had simply not thought.

Ham was pulled from his thoughts by a voice. He tried to crane his head. It was a child’s voice – the voices of children. He did not know their language. They had curious tones. He caught sight of them from the corner of his blurring vision. ‘O God,’ he prayed, ‘O God, O God.’ His voice came thick and harsh.

A peasant-boy stole down the bank and fetched a broken branch. Ham watched with the half-fearful, half-hopeful expression of an animal in a trap. The children chattered. Anglais. Anglais. The end of the branch slapping down in the mud beside him. He reached for it, fingers bending crudely. The boy drew it away with a giggle. The branch slapped down on Ham’s other side. He lurched for it dumbly and they drew it away again. The game continued. Next time he did not reach for it. The children tapped his arm, tapped the back of his head. Ham cursed at them and they laughed. Stuck bear in the mud. Stuck hog. A hog stuck in his own filth, weighed down by his metal suit. Impotent old man.

The peasant-children threw dirt at him. They threw stones. They tapped the back of his head with the branch. Ham could not stop them. They began to push his head forwards and he began to sink further. Ham’s nose moved towards the grey mud. Slouching forward, degree by degree, to eventually be swallowed by freezing muck.

As he stared at the mud rising to meet him, Ham did not feel remorse. He felt a cloying, heart-stopping rage. He would have burned the world and everything in it for one more second before the mud seized him. O he would. O God, he would. He flung a throzen limb out. He roared as the mud entered his mouth. Then the mulch shifted. He submerged, like the vole, with a plop, and was gone.

Nathaniel Spain is a writer based in the North of England. He has previously been published in The Fiction Pool and the The Thorn Journal, and studied English and Creative Writing at Lancaster and Durham University, UK. His work can be found at www.nathanielspain.co.uk.