Hollow by Brian Catling

Author:Brian Catling [Catling, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529366440
Google: bHcOEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08PHN4GMF
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2021-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

THE DIRTY BRIDE

The monks were preparing themselves for the austere privations of Lent while the town was deeply engaged in the debauched week of Carnival. Outside and against one of the walls, a ragged shadow hastily propelled itself home on long legs and flat feet. Meg had just left her drunken husband and his cronies pretending to joust. Cluvmux had once again slid off his barrel to lay giggling in the dirt.

She was coming to remind him that the most recent batch of sausages needed to be blooded again before he attempted to sell them. But first, she decided to watch the stupidity from afar. Entering the tight square from the south side, Meg was instantly framed by the town’s tallest building, the dark, brooding high church. Engulfed by an overcrowded squabble, she pushed her way through the swells and splutters of shabby humanity, finally finding protection beside the vast wooden tuns of beer outside the inn.

Stopping to gain her breath, Meg gazed into the writhing throng of more than two hundred filthy, raging souls, each out-shouting, out-stinking, and out-jostling their oblivious neighbors. Momentarily she lost her place in the real world as she looked into this mass of everyday life and beheld a thing unknown, trying to focus through all that spun, crawled, and ran in the square. Dashes and thrusts of color flared in the rampant air; mouth-stained voices furred and belched, coagulating in the upturned jigsaw spaces between every human shape. She breathed in the colors of woodsmoke and the smells of bread, herring, straw, and piss and the roasted bristles of hogs and swine, all mixed with the sugar of a waffle iron. Wet feathers were being lash-boiled to laughter and gutted to swearing. She heard the squeaking wheel of the town’s well pulling up slopping pails of water and saw the dusty yellow ocher of the earth as it gulped down the spillage for cleansing, gasping a retreat from the littering rabble who would bruise it black over the next three days of the festival.

Bagpipes scrawled the air, smearing the stink of fish-gutters and griddle smoke into the cries and the lute of “The Dirty Bride,” a farce being performed between the jostling tavern and a shabby canvas tent housing stained lepers: A bedraggled Nysa is pulled from a travesty of the nuptial bed. Mopsus, the groom, prances before her, indicating the physical joys of betrothal and occasionally forcibly inviting a passerby to visit the squalor of their domain. This little gem, which had been performed forever, was a debased transcription of Virgil’s “Eighth Eclogue,” the Roman poet’s famous version of the Greek Bucolics. Meg grinned at the lewd caravansary and the warmth overflowing from it and from its audience bubbling in the tavern. Other plays could be glimpsed between the crowds, but only by the artificial difference of their movement.

But now, on her way to find her useless Cluvmux, she thought she had already seen the Devil and Death that day. The Devil

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