Hodd by Adam Thorpe

Author:Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

4

Yet the iron bonds are of my own making, and my master is the Lord God Himself.

Indeed, in these fallen days, clerks and scriveners form their letters better than my holy brothers, whose days are too full of idleness and vanity, save it be to brew intoxicating liquors – for they are mostly young, and soft as well-boiled fish in our fresh century. I am more wrinkled than any page in this fat volume,278 and as scabbed o’er and blemished as many a fine book in our library, in which youths have done their worst.

Yet it is life itself that hath mutilated me, as if I have been too much read or fallen into greasy hands, as so many of our precious books are marked in their favoured places by toothpicks and straws; and worms breeding in their pages as they breed in my own cheek teeth, and paining me so with their gnawing and digging (which neither prayer nor myrrh, nor hot mutton-fat, did ever relieve), that scarce one tooth remains in my jaw’s binding.

As we awaited brother Thomas and Henri upon the track, as wolves await their helpless prey, memories came unbidden of my earlier years, so that at times in my great weariness, and all but slumbering in the saddle, I pictured the hermit and Edwine approaching us, and not our true quarry. My greatest sin up to that time was the stealing of the harp, for the harp was my first master’s; and in seizing it I cast myself from him, to end in the thorny thickets of the fallen world wherein I was now caught fast.

Alas! that loved ones waxen dull and old, and felled are the favourite places, yet a man’s sins remain as ripe as a new-picked apple! For with these sins come the memories as fresh as a fragrance of the fruit, and so did I remember then, waiting on that wood-way, how I first slipped upon the ladder, and plunged from the Lord to this mortal risk to my soul. Yet what recks me, so long after, that I was on the verge of such a calamity – but that these words glisten in my head and bid me set them down?

So it was under the wood-weft that I saw again in my mind how, after playing and singing to the courtiers that dreadful day, gaining in that act what to my miserable condition was a veritable treasure, I hid this windfall [forte oblatum], amounting to over 10s, in an old cracked pot in a secret place near my home, this being in a corner of an overgrown meadow.279

Lo, under Sherwode’s tree-weft did I watch myself returning to the cliff that former evening with the harp, and the hermit (being long woken from his trance of prayer), gathering glaswort from the foot of the rocks.

I heard again my child’s voice, telling him how I had sung holy songs to the royal throng, that they might mend their ways: ‘And I secretly took the instrument from the cave, my master, for fear of disturbing you.

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