Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Do you need firsthand knowledge to write about it? Can you not glean what inspiration you need from others?”

  Shakespeare shook his head, finished his cup of wine, and poured a refill from the bottle on the table. “Ah, M’sieur Lefebvre, what I’ve read is too fantastical to be believed, and I do not wish to tread on ground so well packed by others. I need something compelling, a spectacle to grab you firmly in the nethers and refuse to let go. Even the fabulous must have been kissed by reality at some point to have the appearance of truth, and without that appearance it will not work in the theatre.”

  “Have you any idea where to find such a spectacle?”

  The bard leaned forward conspiratorially. “I do have an inkling. It is a new moon tonight, and I have heard tales that on such nights, north of town in Finsbury Fields, black arts are practiced.”

  I snorted. “Black arts? Who would report such things? If one were truly involved, one would hardly spread word of it and invite a burning at the stake. And if one witnessed such rites up close, it follows that one would hardly survive it.”

  “No, no, you misunderstand: These accounts speak of strange unholy fires spied in the darkness and the distant cackling of hags.”

  “Bah. Improbable fiction,” I declared, waving it away as folly.

  “Most like. But suppose, M’sieur Lefebvre, that it is not? What meat for my art might I find out there?” The innkeeper delivered a board of cheese, bread, and sausage to the table, and Shakespeare speared a gray link that had been boiled a bit too enthusiastically. He held it up between us and eyed it with dismay. “One would hope it would be better fare than this.”

  “Will you go a-hunting, then?”

  Shakespeare pounded the table once with the flat of his left palm and pointed at me, amused at a sudden thought. “We shall go together.”

  I nearly choked and coughed to clear my throat before spluttering, “What? Are you addlepated?”

  “You have a sword. I’ll bring a torch. If we find nothing it will still be a pleasant walk in the country.”

  “But if we find something we could well lose our souls.”

  “My most excellent Marquis, I have every confidence that you will protect me long enough to make good my escape.” His grin was so huge that I could not help but laugh.

  “I trust you would give me a hero’s death in your next play.”

  “Aye, you would be immortalized in verse!”

  I kept him waiting while I decided: If we actually found a genuine coven cooking up something out there in the fields, it could prove to be a terrible evening—they tended to put everything from asshole cats to cat assholes in their stews, simply horrifying ingredients to construct their bindings and exert their will upon nature, since they weren’t already bound to it as I was. But the risk, while real, was rather small.

  “Very well, I’ll go. But I think it might be wiser to go a-horseback, so that we both might have a chance of outrunning anything foul. Can you ride?”

  “I can.”

  And so it was settled. We ate over-boiled meat and drank more wine and I allowed myself to enjoy the buzz for a while, but when it was time for us to depart, I triggered my healing charm to break down the poison of alcohol in my blood. Some people might be comfortable witch-hunting under the influence, but I was not. I arranged with a stable to borrow some horses and, late at night, under the dark of the moon, went looking for the worst kind of trouble with William Shakespeare.

  By the time we set out, his cheeks were flushed and he was a far cry from sober, but neither was he so impaired that he could not stay in the saddle—writers and their livers.

  The smoke and fog and sewer stench of London followed us out of the city proper to Finsbury Fields, which are simply suburbs, a park, and St. Luke’s church now but were liberally fertilized with all manner of excrescence back then, and some had been gamely sown with attempted crops. Muddy wagon trails divided the fields, and it was Shakespeare’s idea that we would find the hags at some crossroads out there, if the rumors of witchcraft were true.

  “On the continent, one can still find offerings left at crossroads on the new moon for Hecate, or Trivia,” he said, and I feigned ignorance of the custom.

  “Is that so? I have never heard the like.”

  “Oh, aye. It is always at three roads, however, not four; Hecate has a triple aspect.”

  “So we are looking for worshippers of Hecate, then?”

  “The proceedings being held on the new moon would be consistent with her cult. It is a slightly different devilry from dealing with powers of hell but no less damned.”

  I suppressed a smile at that. The worship of Hecate had taken many forms throughout the centuries—her conception and manifestation was especially fluid compared with that of most other deities. Even today she is the patron goddess of some Wiccans, who look at her as embodying the maiden-mother-crone tradition, a gentler conception than the sometimes fierce and bloodthirsty manifestations she took on in earlier days.

  Shakespeare, of course, looked upon all witches, regardless of type, through the Christian filter—evil by default and allied with hell to destroy Christendom. I looked at them through the Druidic filter: Plenty of witches were fine in my book until they tried to twist nature’s powers for their own purposes. If they wanted to curse someone with bad luck or sacrifice a goat with a knife to summon a demon, that was their business and frankly not my fight. I was also grateful for those who tried to heal others or craft wards against malevolent spirits. But moon magic could be dangerous, and attempts to bind weather or possess people or animals would draw my annoyed attention rather quickly. The elementals would let me know what was up and I would come running.

  It was because of this that I tended not to notice the benevolent witches or even meet them very often; they did their thing in secret and harmed no one. All I ever saw were the bad apples, and it probably prejudiced me against witches in general over time.

  The dirt tracks cutting swaths through Finsbury Fields were not precisely dry, but neither were they muddy bogs. They’d be dry in another day or so, and the horses left only soft depressions in the mud, chopping up the ruts somewhat and moving quietly at a slow walk. The rustle of our clothes and our conversation made more noise than the horses’ hooves.

  That noise, however, was enough to attract four figures out of the darkness—that and Shakespeare’s torch, no doubt.

  “Please, good sir, could you give me directions?” a voice said in the night. We reined in—a terrible decision—and four unshaven and aggressively unwashed men with atrocious dentition approached from either side of our horses, taking reins with one hand and pointing daggers at us with the other. A very smooth and practiced waylay, and they knew it. We could not move without being cut, and they smiled up at us with blackened, ravaged teeth, enjoying our expressions of surprise and dismay.

  The leader was on my right and spoke again. “More specifically, can you direct me to your purse? Hand it over now and we’ll let you be on your way; there’s a good lad.”

  If it had been only coins in my purse, I would have happily obliged. Coins are easy to come by. But the piece of cold iron resting in the bottom was rare, and I didn’t wish to part with it.

  Shakespeare, who was not only deep in his cups but thrashing about deeply in them, began hurling insults at the leader, who found them rather amusing and smiled indulgently at the angry sot while never taking his eyes off me.

  “You raw and chap-blistered rhinoceros tit!” Shakespeare roared. “You onion-fed pustule of a snarling badger quim! How dare you accost the Marquis de Crèvecoeur!”

  The bandit laughed, polluting the air with his halitosis. Drawing on the stored energy in my bear charm to increase my strength and speed, I began to mutter bindings in Old Irish, which they would probably interpret as nervous French. “Visiting from the continent, are we? Well, me chapped tits and snarling quim would welcome some French coin as well as English.”

  His companions chu
ckled at his lame riposte, confident that they had the better of us, and the one on my left, with a broken nose and a boil on his cheek, gestured with his dagger. “Let’s begin with you getting off that high horse, Marquis.”

  Shakespeare wouldn’t let that pass without loud comment, still directing his remarks at the man on my right. “Cease and begone, villain! You have all the dignity of a flea-poxed cur’s crusty pizzle! You dry, pinched anus of a Puritan preacher!”

  Their gap-toothed smiles instantly transformed into scowls, and all eyes swung to the bard. “What!” The leader barked. “Did he just call me a bloody Puritan?”

  “Not exactly,” Cheek Boil said. “I think he called you a Puritan’s bunghole.”

  While keeping his hand on my horse’s bridle, the leader swung his dagger away from my thigh to point at Will, behind me. “Listen, you shite, I may be a bunghole,” he cried, brown phlegmy spittle flying from his maw, “but I’m a proper God-fearing one, not some frothy Puritan baggage!”

  While they were all looking at Will, I triggered my camouflage charm, taking on the pigments of my surroundings and effectively disappearing in the dim torchlight. Using the boosted strength and speed I’d drawn, I slipped my left foot out of the stirrup and kicked Cheek Boil in the chest before falling to the right and landing chops on either end of the leader’s collarbones. They broke, he dropped both his knife and my horse’s reins, and I gave him a head butt in the face to make sure he fell backward and stayed there.

  My attack drew the attention of the men watching the bard, and he was not slow to seize advantage of the opportunity. With the gazes of the two men pulled forward, he dipped the torch in his left hand and shoved it into the face of the man on his left. The man screamed and dropped his weapon, stepping back with both hands clutched to his eyes. That startled Shakespeare’s horse and it shied and whinnied, ripping out of the grip of the rogue on Shakespeare’s right. He began shouting, “Oi! Hey!” and then, seeing that his companions were all wounded or down and he wasn’t either quite yet, he muttered, “To hell with this,” and scarpered off whence he came, into the dark wet sludge of Finsbury Fields. The leader was discovering how difficult it was to get up with a couple of broken collarbones and called for help. Cheek Boil, who’d not been seriously hurt, recovered and moved to help him, not seeing me.

  Fire Face, meanwhile, had morphed from mean to murderous. Nothing would do for him now but to bury his knife in Shakespeare’s guts. Growling, he searched for the knife he’d dropped in the dark. I scrambled in front of Will’s horse, dropping my camouflage as I did so, and drew Fragarach, slipping between Will and Fire Face just as he found his knife and reared up in triumph.

  “Think carefully, Englishman,” I said, doing my best to emphasize that I was very French and not an Irish lad.

  Fire Face was not a spectacular thinker. He was a ginger like me, perhaps prone to impetuousness, and he bellowed to intimidate me and charged. Maybe his plan was to wait for me to swing or stab and then try to duck or dodge, get in close, and shove that dagger into my guts. Perhaps it would have worked against someone with normal reflexes. I slashed him across the chest, drawing a red line across his torso, and he dropped to the ground and screamed all out of proportion to the wound, “O! O! I am slain!”

  “Oh, shut up,” I spat. “You are not. You’re just stupid, that’s all.” Turning to Will, I said, “Ride ahead a short distance, Master Shakespeare. I will be close behind.” I slapped the rump of his horse, and it surged forward despite the protests of its rider. I kept Fragarach out and stepped around my horse to check on Cheek Boil and the leader. Cheek Boil was trying to help the leader to his feet but was having trouble without an arm to pull on. The pigeon-livered one who ran away could be neither seen nor heard.

  “I’m leaving you alive, monsieurs,” I said, as I sheathed my sword and mounted my horse. “A favor that you would not likely have extended to me. Think kinder of the French from now on, yes?”

  A torrent of fairly creative profanity and the continued wailing of Fire Face trailed me as I goaded the horse to catch up to Will, but I was glad I didn’t have to kill any of them. William Shakespeare would probably exaggerate the encounter as it was, and I didn’t need a reputation as a duelist or fighter of any kind.

  The bard was jubilant when I caught up to him. “Excellent fighting, Marquis! You moved so quickly I lost track of you for a moment!”

  Ignoring that reference to my brief time in camouflage, I said, “You were quite skilled with the torch.”

  Shakespeare grinned at it, jiggling it a little in his fist. “And it’s still aflame! Finest torch I’ve ever carried.”

  “Shall we return to London, then?”

  “What, already? Fie! That passing distraction is no matter. We have hags to find.”

  “I doubt we will find them in these fields. They seem to be populated by villains and pale vegetables, and fortune may not favor us a second time.”

  “Tush! Think no more on it! You are more than a match for any bandits, M’sieur Lefebvre.”

  “I may not be a match for one with a bow.”

  “Anyone skilled with a bow would be patrolling a richer stretch of road than a wagon trail in this mildewed fen, m’sieur.”

  He had a point, damn him. Using one of my charms—newly completed at that time—I cast night vision as a precaution and didn’t look toward the torch anymore. If another set of bandits wished to ambush us, I would see them coming. I was so intent on scanning the area on the right side of the road that Shakespeare startled me after a half mile by saying, “There.” He pointed off to his left, and I had to lean forward and crane my neck to see what he was looking at. It was a faint white glow on the horizon, a nimbus of weak light in the darkness near the ground. It flickered as if something passed in front of it and kept moving. “What could that be?” he asked. “ ’Tis the wrong color of light for a campfire, wouldn’t you say?”

  I grunted noncommittally but could think of no good reason to ignore it. I followed Shakespeare’s horse once we came to a track that appeared to lead directly to the light.

  As we drew closer we could hear chanting floating over the fen, and I realized that we might have actually found the witches Shakespeare was hoping to find and I was hoping to not. There would be no telling him to turn back while I investigated on my own—and I did need to investigate, in case their ritual proved to be an attempt to usurp some measure of the earth’s magic. But I couldn’t risk revealing myself as a Druid to him if I was forced to act. I would be every bit as damned in his eyes as the witches if he discovered my pagan origins.

  We dismounted to creep forward on foot. I doubted the horses would still be there when we returned, but we couldn’t take them with us; even though they were quieter than usual in the soft earth, they weren’t stealthy creatures. One impatient snort could give us away.

  Keeping my voice low, I said, “Conceal the torch behind my body,” and watching him step uncertainly in the mud, still quite drunk, I added, “preferably without setting me aflame. It will allow us to see while hopefully preventing our detection.”

  “I approve of this plan,” he said, enunciating carefully, and we stepped forward into the mud. The macabre sounds of muted chanting pounded nails of dread into our hearts. With every step nearer, I grew more certain that we had, in fact, discovered a small coven of witches. The light was indeed from some kind of fire, but the wood wasn’t burning orange and yellow as it should. It was silvery, like moonlight. Perhaps there was phosphorus at work. Or something arcane.

  I began to worry about Shakespeare’s safety. I had my cold iron amulet tucked underneath my tunic to protect me against magic, but the bard had nothing. I wanted to tell him I had protection but couldn’t tell him I had bound the cold iron to my aura. I had to craft a lie that he would accept. “Master Shakespeare, should we be discovered, let me go ahead. I have a blessed talisman that may shield me against their, uh, infernal practices.” I wasn’t sure where he stood on the Holy R
oman Church, so I settled for the generic blessed rather than Pope-licked or Cardinal-kissed or any number of other vaguely holy-sounding phrases. I drew Fragarach from its scabbard. “I also have this, should it be necessary.”

  Shakespeare’s breathing was coming quicker and his eyes had widened. “Your plans continue to be well conceived, Marquis.”

  We crept closer still, the voices growing louder, and a faint rumble and hiss could be heard, which I imagined to be something boiling in the cauldron. It was a large black iron affair, the sort one uses to feed armies and that’s usually transported in a wagon, and I could only imagine how they had lugged it out there and what might be boiling inside it. Perhaps the darkness concealed an ox and cart nearby. The unnatural white flames glowed underneath the cauldron and licked at its sides, consuming what appeared to be normal firewood.

  As we grew close enough to distinguish words, I recognized that the chanting was in Greek, which Shakespeare did not understand but I understood very well. I chose to be a classically educated marquis and translated for the bard in whispers when he asked me if I could make sense of their babble.

  “It’s an invocation to Hecate, pleading for her guidance—no, her personal guidance. As in guiding them, in person, right here! They are trying to summon her.”

  “A summoning! For what purpose?”

  “I know not.”

  We were close enough now that I, with my aided vision, could distinguish shapes in the darkness; I doubted that Shakespeare could see anything, except something that kept moving in front of the firelight.

  There were three witches circling the cauldron, naked but smeared with dark streaks—blood or animal fat would be my guess. Their ages were indeterminate; by appearance they were somewhere on the happy side of middle age, but I knew that in reality they could be much older than that. As they circled the fire they also spun around, raising their arms and voices to the sky. I wondered how they kept from getting dizzy.

  Their right hands each held a short dagger—no special curved blades or gilded guards, nothing you might call an athame; they were merely sharp, efficient knives.