Read Online Morality Play by Barry Unsworth - Free Book Online

is difficult to believe as it would cause an eclipse ...
    I was near to sleeping when Martin got up and came over to me and asked me to walk with him, speaking quietly, not including the others. I rose at once.
    i cannot sit still or keep in one place after the playing,' he said, as we crossed the inn-yard. 'I am too stretched in my mind over it, not in the body so much, but the mind draws the body with it. It is not work like labouring, to make the limbs heavy and bring sleep, unless one is like poor Springer, who has fears but no nerves and is only fifteen and still growing. It is worse tonight because of the money.'
    For a while we walked through the streets of the town. There were not many folk abroad now. The mud was hardening with frost. It was a black night with no stars visible - that earlier clearness of the sky was quite gone. We carried a lantern on a stick and this swinging light was all we had to see by. I could smell snow on the air and feel the massing of snow clouds in the dark, making the night thicker. We came to a small tavern, a single mean room with benches and rush mats on a floor of beaten earth. The light was poor and the smoke stung our eyes but there was a fire burning and places near it.
    We drank thin ale and ate salt fish - all the place could offer. Martin was silent at first, staring into the fire. When he spoke it was again about playing and he kept his voice low so as not to be overheard - he guarded all to do with his trade very jealously. 'My father was a player,' he said. 'He died of the Plague when I was the age Springer has now. When we played in the towns, the folk came in numbers to see us. Now a few jugglers and a dancing bear can take half the people away. We are only six. For our playing in Durham before the cousin of our lady we can do
    the Play of Adam and the Play of Christ's Nativity, since these we have practised. With time for preparing we can also do the Play of Noah, the Rage of Herod and the Dream of Pilate's Wife.'
    He looked up sombrely and met my eye. 'We are only six,' he said again. 'What can six do? All we own goes on the back of a cart. Now there is coming more and more the big cycles of plays that are put on by the guilds. From Scotland to Cornwall it is happening, wherever people live together in numbers. In Wakefield now, or in York, they will put on twenty plays, they will go from the Fall of Lucifer to Judgement Day and they will take a week to do it. They have all the wealth of the guild to call on and they do not count the cost as it serves the fair name of their town. How can we match them?'
    His eyes had widened. He spoke feelingly, but there was a look of vagueness on his face as if the words he was saying were not the true source of his feeling. 'We cannot match them,' he said. 'In Coventry I have seen Christ resurrected from the tomb with block and wheels and hoisted up to heaven, where clouds were hanging from cords not visible to the eye. I have seen a beheading of the Baptist where the player was changed for an effigy by the use of lights and trap-doors and so cleverly was it done that the people noticed nothing and they shrieked to see a headless corpse. I knew it then, when I heard them shriek at a bundle of straw dripping with oxblood. The day is over for poor players who travel with the Mysteries. We have worked and done our best and we are skilled and we sit here and drink stale beer. Between here and Durham we shall have little more than acorn meal to swallow, with our own snot for a sauce, unless Tobias can wire a rabbit, which in this frozen weather is not easy. No, brother, we must find another way. The others look to me, I am the master-player.'
    He nodded heavily as he regarded me, but there was a brightness now in his look. 'Springer spoke good reason, even though he slept as he spoke,' he said. 'The story of the Fall is an old one, the people know how it ends. But supposing the story were new?'
    'A new story of our parents in