An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them. As these groups converge upon the town, the habitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.
"If Flake is escapism, this is going into a parallel dark time, which is sort of bleak, and unjust. Perhaps by visiting a parallel world, we’re allowed to subconsciously deal with what’s going on right now. It’s funny in a very dark way. There’s the horror of humanity in there. But when it’s that far away from you, in such a different time zone, you can laugh at it—because it’s not now. And by laughing at it over there, we can perhaps deal with it over here. Yes. It’s a bit like Blackadder , I suppose—which would use that same Venn diagram. There’s humour in plagues and death. There’s humour in bleakness. Yes, let me read you a bit. Saint John of Barrow, the fourth, the youngest, and the least of the retinue, hitherto unmentioned, a quiet child with two missing front teeth and shocking green eyes, waves the black cloth over his head back and forth, to signify that they are infected and to approach no closer, and the four gales start calling to them in at least two different languages, Manx and Gaelic, and possibly there are smattered smidgens of Catalan amongst their confusion of words. ‘They will not be diverted. They can see we aren’t infected,’ William says. ‘What are they saying?’ The flunkel asks. ‘The one on the right is questioning the legitimacy of our eldest sons.’ That’s obviously, like, a panto joke – you know? ‘Tell them to go back to their mountains, and to take their skinny sheep and phlegmatic wives with them.’ So it’s beautifully written insult comedy."
