“Begging your pardon, sir watchman,” a hoarse voice whispers.
You jolt awake, hand on cudgel, heart hammering. You stand, straightening your uniform.
“Might I have a bit of sorrel for my pottage?” asks an old crone.
“From the Lord’s garden?” Your head is groggy, thick from too much mead. You have fallen asleep on duty again. The last time you were pilloried.
“Please, kind sir. Sorrel is good for vitality—” She offers you a gummy smile, nearing the edge of the guardhouse, holding out a willow bark basket. Sensing your displeasure, she pulls her thin shawl about her stooped frame.
“Are you a man?” You needle her, mocking her ugliness, kicking her soundly. “Surely you are no woman any man has ever wanted!”
She falls to the ground. She wrests a dagger from her pocket and holds it in a trembling hand. You laugh until she gashes your forearm.
“Hag!” You slap her face, your blood dripping in rivulets down the yoke of her dress. “How dare you cut me? I’ll gouge out your eyes!”
“No, please!” She cowers in the dirt. “Surely you have been in want—”
“I have all I want,” you say. You spit on her. As you do, she reaches up with dirty hands to tear out your hair and rake your cheeks with her broken fingernails.
You grimace in pain, retreating to the garden’s armory in search of a spiked polearm.
Intent on murder, you return to find her gone.
As dawn creeps through the darkening clouds, the day guards find you sick and enraged. You tell them your tale, but they jest at you and your injuries.
“Some strumpet you didn’t pay, no doubt.”
“Attacked by a bear whilst taking a piss!”
“Did your family beat you for gambling your wages?”
You storm off to the sounds of their laughter.
You return to your dwelling to find a willow bark basket with three jars of mead on the kitchen table. With your wife and son in the fields, it’s your time to eat and rest before the night watch begins.
You drink one jar with your breakfast of rye bread and cheese curds while swatting away bitter tears at the memory of the night’s events. You polish off the second jar by itself.
Drowsy, you stagger to the outhouse and fumble with your breeches. As you pull out your cock, you notice it’s festering, mottled with black lesions that seem to be devouring it from the tip.
Shrieking, you run back into your home, back to the kitchen table, back to see a note in your wife’s scrawl. Walter, your whoring has given me the pox. I’ve gone to the Abbey of Saint Mary to heal.
Blubbering, you cry until sleep overtakes you.
Until your son comes home. Until he drinks the third jar of mead, deadlier than the others, cursed with blood from your arm, spit from your mouth, hair from your head, skin from your face — and a bit of sorrel.
INSTANT NOODLES 