Nicholas Messenger - Background lyrics

Conquering William puffed up with the recent title and a previous pack of Norman bandits seeing easy pickings pitched camp lazily besieging Dol before John, by a hundred years. But that time Alain Fergent was at hand and the very rumour sent them drumming. Something of a reputation had le duc Alain ! A bigger gang or a greater braggadocio. But after seven years crusading a decline set in, returning almost wistful, unreliable. He later joined a monastery – How's that for an insidious Antichrist ! The Duc was far too tough and easy in his cups to be converted by the infidel; but in the desert something speaks to tough men. Whispers of sand. The silence ratified by metaphor seduces. Faith ! The clamour ! Flapping trees crowd round you in this Brittany. The cows, the carts, the birds, the gossiping bells all night make inroads on the silence, swapping the time of day from town to hamlet, each a little more delayed.. The peasants teasing quarrel out of pretext chew their tongues. And though the sea speaks with a little voice on mud flats, still the gulls must shout above it, so you come back from the beach more weary than you went, the gritty mussels husks, belying tight beaks clucking in the sack! The trees as well as our own clamouring ancestors evolved all by themselves. But the sand was ground by God declared the heretic.