At the edges of the trodden path that stretched between the bridge and the south gate there were no sunken homes, but only turnip fields to either side, with elms and birches in a fringe beyond them. These were interrupted here and there by rotted stumps so that the tree-line called to mind a ghostly likeness of his dream-hag’s smile, her knowing ridicule insinuated now within the landscape that encircled him, or at the least such was his fancy. Peter thought it better he did not indulge this inward shadow play and so turned his attentions from it, noticing instead the true substantial meadow, plain and without mystery, through which he passed. On trembling sprigs there nodded cowslips, green-gold as the cattle-slimes from which they took their name, and he heard skylarks trilling in the grasses bordering the planted crops. It was a fine day to conclude his journey, and there were no apparitions here save those that he himself had dragged along for company.
This patch of earth was where the west-east river made a sudden bend towards the south, leaving a hanging bulge of land before its proper course was once again resumed, a swelling like that on his bitten cheek. Four narrow ditches had been cut through the promontory, perhaps for irrigation, forded by stout logs that he was forced to teeter over awkwardly, one hand clutching his precious burden to his bosom with the other stretched out at the side and waving up and down to balance him, before he came to Hamtun’s southern gate. This stood a little open from the fence of tall and sturdy posts that made the settlement’s south wall, and had a single thin and gloomy-looking man who held a spear stood by it for a guard. There was perhaps but one day’s growth of beard in a grey blot about his mouth, so that he had in some ways the appearance of a threadbare and indifferent dog. He did not call a greeting, but leaned idly there against the gate and watched the monk’s approach with listless gaze, obliging Peter to announce himself.
“Hail, fellow, and good day to thee. I am a brother of the blessed Benedict whose order is at Medeshamstede near to Peterboro, not far off from here. I have gone many leagues over the sea and am now sent to Hamtun, where I bring a token …”
He was fumbling within the sack, about to take the thing inside out into daylight as an illustration, when the watchman turned his head to one side, spitting out a gob of bright green jelly in the paler straws beside the gate, then looked again at Peter, bluntly interrupting him.
“Es et un axe?”
The guard’s voice was at once flat and without real interest, spoken partly down his long beak of a nose. Peter looked up from the jute bag’s dark mouth at his interrogator, puzzled and surprised.
“An axe?”
The gateman sighed elaborately, as though one wearily explaining to an infant.
“Aye. Un axe. Un ef I let yer en, shell yer go smashen people’s eds wuth et, un fucken boys un wimmen fore yer sets us all on fire?”
Here Peter merely blinked uncomprehendingly, then noticed for the first time how the wall and nearer gatepost both had wavering tongues of soot extending raggedly from near their base to almost at the top. He looked back to the languid guardian and shook his head in vehement denial, reaching once again into his sack to bring his treasure forth, this time as reassurance.
“Oh, no. No, it’s not an axe. I am a man of God and all I seek to fetch here is – ”
The sentry, with a pained expression, closed his doleful eyes and held the palm not wrapped about his spear towards the pilgrim, waving it dismissively from side to side as he declined to view what was contained in Peter’s bundle.
“I em not minded ef et be the left leg o’ John Baptist for so long uz et’s not put about the smashen o’ men’s eds, nor that ets ragged end be lit un made a torch fer burnen. Not last month were one like thee uz ad the skull-bone of the Lord, un when I asked em ow et were so small, e sed et were the skull o’ Christ from when e were a babe. I erd uz the good folk as dwell beside Saint Peter’s Church ad depped ez cods en tar un sent em cryen ome.”
His eyes were open now to stare unblinking at the monk as though his words were no more than plain fact, requiring no response of Peter save that he pass on and leave the sentinel to his bored watch over the turnip patch.
“Then am I thankfully advised. I shall be sure to sell no relics here, whilst in the same wise making certain that I smash no heads, nor yet put anyone to rape or fire until I am past Hamtun, e’en in genuine mistake. I bid thee well.”
The guardsman pointedly stared off towards the distant elms and muttered something indistinct that ended with the words “away und melk a bull”, so Peter hung his bag once more across his callused shoulder and went on, in where the gate was open, to the hill-path that climbed from the bridge towards the settlement’s high reaches. Here he could see thatch-topped homes dug into rows beside the slanting street not very different from the witch’s burrow in his dream, though not he thought so palled with smoke. Nor did those several people that he spied who were the huts’ inhabitants appear to have a strangeness to them in the way that she had, with instead the semblance of ordinary men and maids, in cap or shawl, that pulled their children, carts and hounds behind them through the lanes, else travelled on shit-spraying mares. He was yet mindful of the sleeping vision gifted him, however, and resolved he would not judge the gentles here as common until he was safely come among and through them all. He plodded on and up along the track, skirting a sump close to its bottom where both recent rain and passing horses had conspired to make a filthy slurry there. Off to his right not very far, beyond some huts, the posts that made the settlement’s east wall climbed up the hill abreast with him towards the high ground in the north.
Beside the sunken houses further up the unmown slope were taller dwellings also, though not many, and not far inside the gated wall he passed some ground that had a pox-barn set aside where there lay ones who moaned and worse ones who did not, betwixt small fires that had been set to clean the poison humours from the air. Some of the figures were made incomplete by parts decayed or some of them perhaps hewn off in accident, and back and forth between their mats crept old wives tending them, with faces marked by ailments they had in their time survived and now were proof to. He was grateful that the wind today came from the west, but turned his face off in precaution from the pest field when he passed it by and carried on uphill, where there thronged fellow beings in their dozens such as he’d not known in a great while. The slow climb made him puff, on this close day with all its warmth held in beneath the sky’s low quilting, raising sweat upon the sweat already there, yet was he joyous to be once more in the company of men and went amongst them gladly in good spirit, marvelling as though one unaccustomed at their great diversity.
Old men whose parsnip noses almost met their jutting chins pulled sleds with cords of oak-bark piled upon them that were dark red and alive with pismires on their undersides. Peter was made to wait idly upon the corner with a cross-path, by an ale-yard that had high stone walls, until a horse-pulled cart weighed down with troughs of new-worked chalk had rumbled past and aged those in the billowing suspensions of its wake by ten years in as many instants. As at last he made his way across the side street to continue up the hill, he ventured to look down it after the departing horse and wagon. There were not a few mean dwellings at its borders and then black briar hedgerow further down, where Peter saw a mother and her flock of children picking diligently at the brambles, with their findings stuffed into a bag the woman carried. He supposed they were wool-gathering, and that it might be they were family to a woolmonger living hereabouts, so busy and so enterprising did the hill town seem to him.
Indeed, he was surprised to find it so, as he strode up the incline to a crossroads at its top. When he had been a lad named Aegburth growing up at Helpstun near to Peterboro and then later been a monk named Peter cloistered in that place itself, he had heard tell of Hamtun, but not often. It had always been there, he had the impression, though not very much there, and remarkable only in that it never was remarked upon. It was apparent there had been some Roman presence in these parts and he th
ought savage settlements perhaps before those times, but there was never more to Hamtun than the airy rumour of a place where no one ever went. To see it now with all its barter and its bustle one might, with good reason, ask whence it had come. It was as if, when finally the night and winter after Rome’s demise was lifted from the land, Hamtun was simply found here, thriving in its present form, come out of nothingness to occupy this prosperous vantage ever since. And still no person spoke of it.
He knew King Offa, when not building his great ditch at Mercia’s edge with Wales, had planted new towns in these territories that were doing well, though Hamtun was not one of them, and had the markings of some earlier vintage. Offa kept a Thorpe as well, a country dwelling off the town’s north end, with Hamtun as the nearest port of trade, though Peter was of the opinion Hamtun’s prominence had come before the time of Offa. He recalled his grandfather at Helpstun making mention of the place as though of some importance when it had been Offa’s predecessor Aethebald who’d reigned, and further still, back in the mists of lost antiquity there’d been a place here that men knew of, yet did not know what it was they knew. Perhaps it was as with a circle, drafted by a knob of chalk upon a string, where only the perimeter was noticed with the centre that the shape depended on not seen at all, or thought to be a hole, like through a ring-loaf. How, though, in an empty hole, was there such furious activity?
When he had lately passed through Woolwych to the east of London he had met a drover of those parts who said he’d heard of Hamtun, once he had been told that it was Peter’s destination. This man mostly knew it for the sheep flocks herded down from there, but said that one of Offa’s kin was at a manor in the settlement, which had a fine church of its own built near to it. If this were true, Peter supposed it to be in some far part of the town that he was yet to see, although it might be that the dwellings all about him were in lease to such a place, that they would likely pay some small part of their keep unto the manor through the agency of what was called a Frith Borh, who was like a tithing-man. His intuition had been well, he thought, to bring him to this spot, when all he had been given for direction were instructions in a foreign tongue he was not certain that he’d understood, urgent and vague entreaties that the object in his bag should be delivered “to the centre of your land”. He knew that Mercia surely was the heart of England and, to see the crowds at work and leisure now about him, was convinced that he had come to Mercia’s heart in turn. Yet where, he wondered, was the heart of Hamtun?
He’d by now achieved the crossroads of his path that led up from the bridge, an area where the slope was somewhat levelled out before continuing to climb straight on and to the north. He set his baggage down and looked about him here, that he might get his breath and bearings both, and wiped the drench from off his forehead with one woollen sleeve. Ahead of him, after a mostly flat expanse, the track that he was on resumed its steep ascent past huts and yards where there were mainly tanners from the smell, while at his left and down the hill that was the crossroads’ other leg were sheds with smoking forges from where came the clamour of hot metals being wrought. Upon his right, past houses that had fields of pigs and hens and goats attached there stood the open east gate of the settlement, with off beyond its timbered yawn a church of sorts, outside of Hamtun’s limit, built from wood. He smiled to greet a woman who was passing and, when she smiled back, asked if she knew about the church and if it was the one that had the manor near. He saw about her throat a pendant stone, this with a rune on that he recognised as sacred to the demon Thor, although he thought there to be no more in this than a peasant charm to ward off thunderstorms. She shook her head.
“Yer wud be thenken o’ Sunt Peter’s, dayn away there.”
Here she gestured back the way that she had come, along the crossing’s other path up by the sparking, belching forges, then looked back towards the building just beyond the eastern gates that Peter had enquired of.
“Thet one there’s All Hallows what wur only belt when my mam was a child. Ef et’s a church yer arfter we’ve Sunt Gregory’s near by Sunt Peter’s, or else the old temple ayt upon the sheep trail, not far up ahead und en the way as yer be gooen.”
Peter thanked the wife and let her pass on by, while he stood at the corner there considering if this might be the centre he was seeking, thinking that a crossroads or its like might suit the crucial item carried in his sack. He asked, below his breath that those about him did not think him lunatic, “Is this the place?” When there came no response he tried again yet louder, so that idle boys across the street from him all laughed.
“Is this the centre?”
Nothing happened. Peter was not sure by what signs he expected the location that he sought would be made known to him, if signs there were to be, only that nothing in his instinct found such signals here. With people looking at him in bemusement now he felt his cheek made redder yet, and so picked up his bundle and went on, over the crossroads in a hurry that he might avoid its rumbling carts and next straight up the hill, where did the tanners and drape-makers of the town conduct a goodly trade.
Here was a fantasy of things to be remarked on following those long legs of his pilgrimage where novelty was scarce or not at all. Beside the noisome tanning-pits he’d caught the reek of from downhill were boards set out that were all over shoes and gloves and boots and leather leggings, of more styles and hues and sizes than he’d previously thought were in the world entire. The brothy scent of them alone was an intoxication as he struggled up the gradient between the trading posts and stalls, bearing the weighted bag that bumped on his stooped-over backbone now and then. His eyes and ears alike were near to overwhelmed by all the sights and noises that there were, the chatter and the conversation. People gathered in a breathless huddle at a stand where garments were displayed, having the items that were meaner and more easily afforded set about a show-piece, black-tanned leather armour in a full dress outfit decorated by a trim of bird skulls worked with silver. Peter doubted that this suit should ever find a buyer or be worn, yet estimated from the crowd about it that it must already have repaid its workmanship in countless smaller purchases. Having this opportunity to look upon the locals whilst they were distracted so that he might not offend, he saw more plain or ugly faces in the throng than he saw fair, and was surprised to find how many of the men had wild designs of pigment dug into the skin upon their arms, where had they stripped their clothes off on this humid day and these were visible. Not only patterns were there, drawn this way on flesh, but likewise images in crude, of herlots or the saviour or else both at once, together there on the same shoulder, wearing but a single loin-cloth ’twixt the two of them. He chuckled to himself at this and went on up the path where men with dye-stained hands were selling cloth, a richer red than any he had glimpsed in Palestine.
After a time he passed beyond the market street to higher ground, though not the highest, with superior rises still in the southeast. The settlement’s east wall, that had breaks in it now and then, continued to climb up the slope beside him, not far off and to his right, while on his left side there were many lanes and passages run off downhill. While he would own that there was little aim to his meander, Peter thought perhaps that if he walked the town’s wall in this way then he would have a sense of its extent and its dimension, so that he might more exactly plot its middle being thus informed. His plan, then, was so vague and slight as hardly to be there at all, and now he felt a pressure in his bladder and a hunger in his belly both, distracting him still further from it. He was still on the same northward path that he’d been walking since he crossed the bridge, but had again reached meadows where the ground was flattened out, atop the slope that had the drapery. Here was a fleecy multitude steered into pens by silent and stem-chewing men with noisy dogs, so that he was reminded of the dame who wore the Thor-stone who had counselled him, and what she’d said of an old temple on a sheep-trail, further up along his way. Though he was still to see a church up here, he was yet certain this must be t
he trail of which she’d told him, as judged by its traffic.
Bleating beasts were everywhere about him as he walked now down into a gentle hollow, creatures driven here in great hordes beggaring imagination with the land made white, horizon to horizon, this in summer and not winter-time, come from the west of Mercia and Wales beyond. Now that he reckoned it, Peter had known since boyhood that the western cattle-trail was ended somewhere not far off from Helpstun or else Peterboro, in the middling hamlets of the country, though he had not thought its ending was in Hamtun. Out of here the drovers would take on the herds to other parts, along the Roman road that brought him hence from London and the high white coast, or else out past the district of Saint Neot on to Norwych and the east, delivering the mutton in this way throughout the land. Were all of England’s tangling lines met here, he wondered, tied into a knot at Hamtun by some giant midwife as it were the country’s umbilicus? Peter waded in a wool-tide, on and down the broad street pebbled with black turds, still headed north, his bag now hanging in one hand there at his side so that his aching shoulder might be rested.
When he had come almost through the great stupidity of animals, he saw up on a mound towards the right of him a kind of mean church, built from stones, that Peter hoped to be the temple that the woman had informed him of, although it seemed unused and no one was about it. Thinking to have pause there for a pissing-while and eat the cheese and bread hid with some coins in a tuck-pocket of his smock, he turned east from the foul mires of the sheep-path and went up a brief walk overhung by boughs that blossoms fell from in a pretty pepper, to the church-house as he thought it, at the slant’s top end.