LITMIR.BIZ

      WILL CAME TO an ale house, a long cot of white stone. Three goats cropped the grass by the pale and Hayne, Longfreke and Mad sat in the yard with food and drink set before them. They ne greeted him but ate and drank like to he wasn’t there.

      Will stood at the yard gate, strung his bow, nocked the arrow and shet it at a board hung over the ale-house eaves. The arrow struck the board with a mighty thock and the board span around twice on its pole before it came to rest.

      The bowmen hearkened to the strike. Hayne rose, reached up and wrenched the arrow from where it was pitched in the board. The arrowhead had throughshove one eye of the likeness of the moon that was wrought there. Hayne smoothed the splintered wood with his fingers, dropped the arrow in a cocker and showed Will a free seat where he might sit with them.

      ‘Sweetmouth found that likeness in France and named his ale house the Moon,’ said Mad, ‘but the One-Eyed Cheese likes me better.’

      The brewster came and put before Will a can of ale and a bowl of eggs and peas. Will said he bore his own bread, for he lacked the silver to buy aught else. Longfreke told him fall to and they’d stand him the fee.

      ‘What did Noster tell you of us?’ asked Longfreke.

      ‘That you’d meet more bowmen along the way,’ said Will. ‘One named Softly.’

      ‘Noster told the youngster all, yet he came,’ said Longfreke to Hayne.

      ‘Let him come another mile down the highway and be founded in flight,’ said Hayne.

      Out of the house came a man with a full beard, naked out-take white breech with green bars. It was the bowman they called Sweetmouth. Two little knaves followed him bearing rods of hazel. He sat on a log, straightened his back, knit his arms tight to his ribs, clenched his jaw, and said: ‘Begin.’

      The two young knaves, his sons, of eight or nine winter, began to hop about him and beat him with the hazel rods. Soon his skin was streaked with red weals and the knaves were breathless. They stinted often to rest and to read them which span of skin to smite next, while the man cried he was ashamed to have begotten such weaklings, and egged them to beat him faster.

      ‘Beat him on the head!’ cried Mad to the knaves. ‘Let it find a use at last!’

      They heeded him and whipped fast Sweetmouth’s noll till it bled.

      ‘His wife the brewster hasn’t the time to beat him herself and must leave the chore to the children,’ said Mad to Will.

      When Sweetmouth’s wife came to fill their cans and behold the children’s work, Will asked what her husband had done to earn such blows.

      ‘Nothing,’ said the brewster. ‘But if we ne beat him now for all the wrongs he’ll do while he’s away, who will?’

      Sweetmouth fell on his knees on the grass and his sons dipped their hands in a stop and sprinkled water on his noll.

      He rose and came up to the board with blood and water dripping of his beard. He shook hands and asked after Noster.

      ‘Went to the iron-works of Dene again,’ said Longfreke. ‘Home to his mum and his burd.’

      ‘He’s a whore bitch’s whelp, damned to hang by his whore tongue from the Devil’s inmost arse hair,’ said Sweetmouth.

      ‘Sweetmouth means he wishes his even-bowman well,’ said Mad.

      ‘May the Fiend fuck me in the arse till my eyes weep shit if that were my meaning,’ said Sweetmouth. ‘Who’s the featous knave? He looks like he came down of a church wall. Are you in the score? I need a fellow like you.’

      ‘We’re to found him betimes down the road,’ said Longfreke.

      Sweetmouth went into the house and came out later with the blood cleaned of him, a pewter St Christopher hung of his neck over a blue shirt, and a pack on his back. His wife stood in the doorway, the end of her barmcloth held to her mouth, her eyes sore of weeping. One of Sweetmouth’s sons handed him his bowstaff. Sweetmouth rubbed the knaves’ scalps with his knuckles and turned from them and the four men at board rose, nebs reddened by ale, and went on their way down the southward road.

      The low sun gave the hayshocks long shadows in the cropped fields and made the bowmen squint. As they went by, the culver fowl that picked at the earth between the sheared stalks took fright, and flew into the sky, threshing the wind with their wings.