The black prince, p.26
The Black Prince, page 26
‘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.
PART 7. ENGLAND
Newsreel (19)
PREORDER THE BRUS TODAY. John Barbour’s epic poem of Knights Errant and Chivalrous, a vivid recreation in verse of the celebrated Battle of Bannockburn: available from all good escritories and parchment titivators today.
‘Al fredome is a noble thing’
ANGLO-PORTUGUESE ALLIANCE SIGNED
PHILIP II OF TARANTO HANDS OVER RULE OF GREEK ACHAEA TO HIS COUSIN, JOANNA I OF NAPLES
DANCING MANIA IN AIX-LA-CHAPELLE
Prince returns to England. Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, Count of Biscay, heir to the throne of England and France, experienced a worsening of his medical condition in the town of Cognac, and has returned to England to seek the expert medical care only English doctors can provide.
The following statement from his office has been released: ‘the noble prince’s health has taken a temporary downturn, but with proper medical care we fully anticipate that he will be able to resume his military duties before the end of the year.’
* * *
FOR SALE. Treatises
A Treatise, entitled, The Enchantment of the Lullillus, and a Tract against such as Pray to Dæmons;
A Treatise against those that oppose the Pre-eminence of Jesus Christ and the Virgin;
A Tract against the Oath taken by the Pope and Cardinals after the Death of Urban V. and against the Letter of the University of Paris, proving beyond all doubt that Eymericus was not dead in 1370 as some have assured us;
A Treatise against the Chymists;
The Correctory of the Reprimand: A Treatise against those, who will define the Time of the End of the World;
A Treatise against Astrologers, Necromancers, and other Diviners;
A Treadle against those, who had broached this Heresy, That St. John the Evangelist was the Natural Son of the Virgin Mary;
A New Treatise of the Admirable Sanctity of the Mother of God-Man
* * *
THE BLACK PRINCE
He lay in his chamber at Westminster Palace, and listened to the sucking and cooing of the great river as it flowed. Sweet Thames. There was a wisdom hidden in those endless vowels, as in the hushing of the breeze, some hidden message the world was trying to convey to him. He had better nights and worse nights, but never, it seemed, good nights. His doctors said the wine was unbalancing his humours, but he was not beholden to doctors, and he drank a good deal of wine. One morning he woke to the cry of gulls and the splashing of the river as the tide fought the flow, and he felt he was on the very cusp of understanding what the waters were saying. But comprehension slid past him, and he let it go.
His whole body was covered in sweat, and his legs were shaking. A servant came to help him up, pointedly not mentioning the stink of piss – came to remove the sheets and wipe him all over with a square of damp linen, and feed him some gruel, like a baby. He preferred a posset of milk and wine to start the day, but the physicians had forbidden this. No wine at all until lunchtime, they said. He was a prince and they were mere commoners. How dare they command him? How could they? Yet he didn’t fight them. The fight was all gone out of him now.
He had them set a chair by his casement, so that he could look out. Down at the shores of Thorny Island, across at the far side of the river where buildings snaggletoothed the bank. A boat passed slowly upstream on four oars, in a pulsing forward-two-yards back-one-yard motion: forward two and back one, forward two and back one. There was something profound in that pulse – wasn’t there? He pondered it idly and didn’t plumb its mystery. Thorny Island was where King Canute had bid the waves retreat, and been made wet for his pains. And now there was a palace built here. One day the palace would be nothing but the outline of rooms, mud banks and river-grass, not one brick standing upon another. A seagull coasted the air like a skater, turned its head and shrieked at him: qui-ose? qui-ose? qui-ose?
—Begone, he yelled back, and shook a wobbly arm. But even so feeble an action wore him out. Once on a time city walls had tumbled, and a thousand fine French knights had died, from one gesture of this right arm. Now it ached and shivered even in the warmth of day. Allez! Allez! he croaked.
The bird took him at his word.
He thought of asking for Joan, but then remembered she was not in London. His son was in the palace though, so he struck the bell and summoned his servant to get him dressed. That took them both a long time. He had heard Wycliff preach, and would hear him preach again, he decided. But not today.
He was carried out onto the small well-kept lawn of one of the palace’s inner courts, and settled in a chair. The sun was warm on his face. Two thrushes bickered in the branches. A bird-husband and bird-wife? A maid-of-honour cleared her throat.
And here was Richard: sweet-faced but sombre, dressed exquisitely in a miniature surcoat with the three lean lions and clusters of trifoil feathers. He greeted his father with his piping boy’s voice. Like a woman’s voice.
—The feathers, said Ned, in a creaky voice. Did I tell you where they come from?
—Yes, Father.
Ned didn’t hear his son’s reply, or didn’t understand it, and so explained yet again how he had fought at Cressy in France when he was not much older than the boy was now (the boy was not yet nine, so this was not quite the truth). How he had discovered the corpse of the good old King of Bohemia, dead honourably in battle, blind but brave, fallen on the ground.
—Yes, Father, said Richard, obediently. His two nurses hovered in the background.
—So that’s where it comes from, said Ned, truncating the story, his tiredness suddenly swimming up and taking him. The three feathers and the motto as well. The King of Bohemia had a son who was fighting for the French. Blind and old he was, the father I mean, and he asked to be led into the fighting. He was killed – not by me, thank God – and I took over his emblem and his motto. I was only a boy, not much older than you are now. Sixteen I was.
—Yes, Father.
—Blind, but brave. His son was fighting for the French. I suppose he knew he would die in that battle, but he rode into the fight anyway. That’s where I got it from.
Something in his son’s expression stung him. He realised he was rambling. He tried to gather his strength, inwardly, and sat up a little straighter.
—I serve, he said. I didn’t realise what a responsibility it was.
—I serve, repeated Richard. And then, in his clear, flute-like voice: I serve what?
—Oh, something very vague – honour, chivalry. God. What it ought to mean (he thought, for some reason, of the endless song of the river) what it ought to mean is doing something for the people. When you become Prince of Wales – if you become Prince of Wales – try and do something for the people.
—You said if, Richard said, quickly. Sharp little eyes.
—In the first place that depends on your grandfather. But in the last place it depends on Parliament.
—The little men?
—Not so little, said Edward, feeling a huge weariness pushing up inside him, like a tide. Not so little.
Not so little. He was exhausted and trembling, and the nurses led the boy away. His people took him to the main hall, and he ate some fowl and creamed turnip, and drank two goblets of wine, and almost immediately threw the whole lot straight up into a bowl they had ready. He was sweating. His whole body was trembling, his arms like pennants in strong wind, and he was sweating so hard it dribbled into his eyes. He was carried, as a wounded knight is borne from the battlefield, by two strong men and taken to his chamber. A physician bled him with sharp little knives, and in his increasing delirium he thought he was being attacked by Frenchmen with crossbow bolts, or that he was Christ on the cross and the Romans – Italians, Genoese, mercenaries – were stabbing him in the arm with their spears, aiming for his flank but striking only his side. He wept, and railed, and struggled, and his man had to hold him against his bed whilst the physicians took more blood. Eventually the letting calmed him, and he breathed shallowly, and felt very thirsty. When he tried to say j’ai soif the words stuck in his throat and would not come out, but when he said I am thirsty the words came babbling out.
His people brought him something to drink. He dozed, and woke with a gasp. A dove was perched on his windowsill, but it was much too big to be a regular dove, and there were many brilliant hues somehow tangled in with its white feathers, and its beak was red like a ruby, and its eyes were blue like a sapphire, and the whiteness of its feathers was of a clearness like snow or milk or the desert sky at noon or bleached bones that have lain in the sun for decades or the central whiteness of a star that has looked, coldly, down upon humanity for unimaginable eons and will continue to look down for eons more, equally indifferent to caring or uncaring.
—Sir? Sir?
His man is touching him on the shoulder. Ned comes fully awake.
—What? he croaks. What?
—You were shouting, sir. A tree, a sword, a great crowd of leaves.
Ned looked about.
—Bring me something to drink, Ned croaked. Then fetch my priest.
The priest came, clutching one of Ned’s fine illustrated Gospel Books. He heard the Prince’s confession, and absolved him, and set him the kind of penance a very sick man might be capable of, and afterwards Ned told the holy man his dream. He had planted his sword in a wide, flat, green plain, and the ground had bled like it was flesh, but afterwards his blade had turned into a tree and branches had creaked out, and many leaves – a great mass of leaves – an uncountable number of leaves. And each leaf bore a human face. Pray to Christ, was the priest’s advice, and to his holy mother, and to God himself. Pray for peace and recovery. Pray for understanding, too, of your dream and of anything. For understanding only comes from God.
Ned tried eating once more, but once more vomited up his meal. An hour later, as the light over the Thames dimmed and sweetened, and a golden hue lay upon his windowsill, he drank a little milk, which he was able to keep down. He was too weak to stand. Each breath was a little hill he had to, as it were, march up and over. Each exhalation was a struggle and a small victory.
The vision of the dove had been the Holy Spirit. Or he had feverdreamed something along those lines. Idly he thought to himself: why three? Why not seven? Or many millions? Would not that speak more magnificently to the splendour of God? But then he knew from experience that though a larger army might overawe the eyes, it was in reality a tiresome entity: more mouths to feed, more people to discipline. The smaller army beats the larger, as at Cressy and Poitiers, provided only it is tighter and more disciplined. And so, with the divine. What God prized was not hugeness, but purity. So the real question was not why not three million?, but rather, as the Mohammedan might ask, why so many as three? Why not one? It must, Ned thought, drowsily, speak to something fundamental about the cosmos. Above, and here, and below. Father, son and what? What? Spirit, spirit, spirit. As opposed to: body. To body. To body. He looked at his own wasted and uglified corpus and told himself: you have been too concerned with the things of the body, the pleasures of the body, and the discipline of the body. Bodies fighting other bodies on the battlefield. Bodies arrayed in glory. Bodies tangling with one another in the bedroom. He had neglected the spirit. And that was what the Holy Spirit meant: that there was spirit, and that it was holy. It was so obvious it almost shocked him. He began to sweat, as if with fear, or exertion. God was – God, Himself, neither body nor spirit but rather the ground of everything, the page upon which the manuscript of the universe was illuminated. Christ was the body, who must have experienced the blisses of the body when he was on Earth, and who certainly experienced the pains of the body when he was crucified. If it were merely God and Christ, then religion would be saying: the cosmos is God, and inside it God has created these puppets of flesh. But of course that would not be enough. That was the impious parody of God he had made himself, as a general – seeing not eternal souls, parading in rainbow beauty past him, but only manikins of flesh to do his bidding, to go when he said go and come when he said come. To encounter others of their kind and chop them to pieces. The Holy Spirit was also God, because God was spirit as well as Everything. And the Holy Spirit was Christ, because Christ was a man and so more than just a body, was a spirit himself. And the Holy Spirit was itself because the whole universe was suffused with spirit, and was the Father and the Son because they were both spirits too. And Edward thought to himself: I have neglected spirit, and abused spirit, and repudiated spirit. I was too focused on God the father, on my father, on the Son, on myself, and though the spirit was some emanation of me, or my military victories, or or or. Peace is harmony and wholeness and tranquillity and balance and war is the undoing of that. The Holy Spirit is both a dove, which is of peace, and a flame, which is destruction. The screeches of people trapped inside their houses as Limoges burned. The birdsong outside his window, right now, right here. A green force that erupted after fire had made hospitable ashes of the old order, and fresh rain had fallen from God’s sky. A viriditas. The Earl of Derby had smashed Poitiers to pieces, and yet only a few years later it was restored, its walls built back up, its people working and growing and making and paying taxes. The same was probably true of Limoges, by now. And the Prince thought: I break them down, they build them up again.
