by Dan Abnett
"Of course we haven't been authorised," they'd say, "but it's the Masque Holiday, innit?"
"Aim for the sky," they were told.
"Of course we will," was the response, as the soldiers handed round rum for the umpteenth time, continued down the street, came back for the cannons which they had left behind and smiled, completely unreassuringly, at the Militia.
A profusion of floral sprays decorated every surface not occupied by a ratty flag or a box of festive explosives. Somewhere, vast meadows, glades and dells must have been denuded of flowering undergrowth. The demand for bouquets was so great that by the time the florists got to Denmark Hill, they were putting up nettle nosegays, which frankly lacked in everything except effort.
Triumff led Doll and me, your reliable servant, Wllm Beaver, from the Swan to a tea shop called the Conifer in Skitter Lane. Since before six, it had been doing a roaring trade in sweet tea and filled cobs with all those up early on flag-hoisting, spray-nailing or firework-priming expeditions, which was nearly everybody.
Behind its leaded, sooty windows lay a modest chamber where even the air seemed to have been stained brown with tannin. A rich mix of camomile and lavender filled the room, oozing out of the steamy clouds that billowed from the hearth kettles. Two dozen or more patrons sat in the dim booths, smoking, draining china cups of hot brown fluid, and discussing such things as the subtleties of halyard tugging, the bannerol versus the pencel as a patriotic statement, and whether a privy would offer sufficient protection in the unlikely event of, hypothetically let's say, all twelve Grand Combustive Number Four Sky Rockets being ignited simultaneously.
"A pot of Assam and a plate of fruit cake," Triumff told one of the serving girls, once he had got her attention away from a conversation about waft, waif and flaunt.
"Excitin', innit?" she asked him with glee as she took his order.
"You've no idea," he said with a thin, artificial smile.
Triumff took Doll and me to the back of the shop, and installed us in a booth that hid us from the street windows and casual glances.
"I'm not sure I should be associating with you," I mumbled wearily as the tea arrived. I gingerly kneaded my bruised, swollen face.
"Your choice," said Triumff, passing me a steaming cup, "but drink this before you go. You've had a rough time, and your nerves need calming."
Your humble servant took the cup, silently, and sipped, deep in thought. Triumff and Doll began to devour the cake in a way that suggested eating had just become a timed sport.
"You're a member of the fourth estate, Beaver," said Triumff through cake crumbs. "I assume, therefore, that you can string a word or two together. I have a story for you. It'll make your reputation, and I'd be obliged if you took it down for my sake."
I looked at him, any amount of curiosity, and any number of questions in his expression.
"By tomorrow, I might be dead. I'd be happier about that if I knew someone was going to relate the truth after my death," said Triumff.
They ordered a second pot and another cake. I produced a pencil and my notebook.
"Tell me all about it, then," I said.
At Richmond, grumpy workmen did the rounds and shook fried moths from the lantern boxes. There were over four thousand lantern boxes, so that meant a lot of moths, not to mention the number of stubby wicks that had to be tweaked to ignition readiness.
Behind them came the groundsmen, raking up fallen leaves and a not inconsiderable number of dead moths from the dewy lawns. The park braziers sparked and burnt with a strange, lepidopterous odour.
The cavalcade began to roll through the Palace gates: carts and wagons laden to axle-warping with foodstuffs, wine, and enough theatrical equipage to put on the complete plays of Jonson simultaneously. Gaggles of musicians flocked in with the carts, some playing jaunty tunes on their instruments as they strolled along. The carters gave the players sour looks; they had been on the move since four in the morning, and the last thing they felt like was a jolly almain. Palace stewards bustled through the mob, organising, advising and directing, each of them beginning to realise, with a sick feeling, that what had looked terrific on paper was going to be a logistical nightmare in practice.
Rain-clouds admonished the sultry skies, but their threats were empty, and the sun seemed to have got all dressed up for the occasion, roughly pushing aside all hints of inclement weather.
It was going to be a fine Saturday, no matter what. Twenty miles south of the Capital, amid the slumbering corn fields of the North Downs, Giuseppe Giuseppo clambered down from the wagon he had been riding in, and looked out into the middle distance. London seemed as far away as the sleepy sun. Out here, on the Downs, there was nothing but the breeze, the nodding corn, an occasional droning bumblebee and the promise of the perspective-eating trackway.
"Well?" he asked the carter, one Chub Blackett.
Chub proffered a clump of torn-up cowgrass to his horse and said, "Sure and be as right as rain in a day or twa."
Giuseppe swallowed hard, and wondered if his command of English was failing him.
"I have to be in London at once," he reminded Chub, smiling.
"As if," said Chub, scowling as his panting horse refused the cowgrass.
"Sir, I don't think you understand. Forgive me if my English isn't making my purpose clear. I must be in London with all haste. It is vitally important."
"As if," replied Chub, stroking the sweat-drenched flanks of his weary workhorse.
"But-" said Giuseppe.
"Listen now, mister. This horse has run as far and as fast as it will and no more. If I put the lash to him now, he'll drop rightly dead at once."
"But-" added Giuseppe.
"Innt no point complaining. I can gets you to London for Sunday, like enough. If yorn wants to get theres sooner, you's must have to pace it out yournsel."
Giuseppe mopped his brow with his cuff and studied the horse. Its chestnut coat was sheened with perspiration. Chub had been driving it at a gallop since they had left the coast.
It looked back at the Italian traveller with fathomless dark eyes, and Giuseppe knew that further argument was useless.
"Free the horse from the harness," Giuseppe instructed the carter simply.
Chub looked at his passenger for a moment with handshaded eyes, and then obeyed without comment. He led the horse away from the wagon to the roadside, where it began to graze in a half-hearted way.
Giuseppe climbed onto the driving board and reached over into his luggage. After a moment, he produced the little, potent book and a small felt bag of coins. He tossed the latter to Chub, who caught it smartly.
"What's this?" he asked.
"For the cart. Now I recommend you look the other way. Over there, for instance," Giuseppe said, indicating the misty distance beyond the corn, which Chub dutifully began to regard.
"And don't look back until I'm gone," Giuseppe added, turning the fragile, wriggling pages of the notebook.
Chub had had a funny feeling about the Italian since he first met him, so he obeyed the instruction unswervingly.
He looked out over the Downs, across the corn to the point where it met the sky. Bees hummed past. Behind him, he heard, although he did not want to hear, a muttering of Latin phrases, followed by a creak of wagon-wood. The air around him, around the Downs, seemed fulminous and heavy, suddenly, charged with an electrical murkiness, and there was a smell of syrup, or was it molasses?
Then there was the sudden rattling of a wagon in motion, a rattling and a squeaking, but no hoof-beats. His horse started, nostrils flaring, but he shushed it down with an experienced hand, his eyes never leaving that distant spot. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
The noise of the wagon receded and was gone.
Chub slowly turned around. He was alone with his horse in the middle of the golden ocean and the early morning.
"As if," he murmured to no one at all.
Lying on the nape of the Downs, on the London Road, Smardescliffe i
s, if you didn't know, pronounced "Smarly", and has been since before they started taking preparatory notes for the Domesday Book. On Masque Saturday, however, the only thing pronounced about it was the anti-Goetic fervour that throbbed in all Smardescliffian veins.
By the church gate, opposite the cross of St Cunegund (the patron saint of being patronising), on the village sward, the Mayor stood in conference with the Baker, the Butcher and the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop. The Mayor had leant his pitchfork against the gate for the time being, but the other three had fast holds on their own makeshift weapons, variously a rusty haulm shear, a pig stick and a cooking apple on the end of a piece of string. Frankly, the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop wasn't quite sure what he was going to do with the be-stringed apple in the event of a fight, but he wanted to show willing, and, besides, he felt that the confidence with which he hefted the thing suggested it was a devastating, exotic weapon, whose secrets he had learned from some far-travelled great-uncle, and which could bloodily rout any foe in seconds, in the hands of a trained expert, ie him.
The Butcher, a vast man, who looked like one of his bled carcasses dressed up in an apron, was rhubarbing on about deviltry, evil times and making a stand. Blood-letting was first nature to him, and he was secretly very pleased that this national emergency had come along and given him an excuse to bluster and threaten people with a piece of sharp iron.
The Baker hadn't even cut so much as a thatch spray with his shear, let alone another person, but he was quite buoyed up by the Butcher's bullish gusto. He stood, legs apart, shear over his shoulder, eyes hooded, imagining that he cut quite a heroic, dashing figure. He didn't, of course. He looked like a skinny Baker trying to look relaxed about struggling with a heavy piece of rusty metal. But no one told him. "Live and let be" is the Smardescliffe village motto.
The Mayor had thought about telling the Baker he looked like a prat, but he was staring with ill-disguised fascination at the Landlord's cooking apple. He had even blanked out the Butcher's unstinting and inflammatory monologue.
Eventually, as the Butcher paused to draw breath and wipe the drool from his lips, the Mayor spoke.
"I quite agree, Master Butcher," he said, having no idea what he was agreeing to. "In these dark times it is our duty as seniors of the parish of Smardescliffe to stand together and defend our lands, our country and the honour of our Queen against the vile perculations of Beelzebub, whose infamy has risen to plague this fair isle."
"And on such a day as this," put in the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop, swinging his apple dangerously, "when we should all be celebrating the coronation of our Gloriana. Why, it makes my blood fret and boil." He punctuated his comment by slapping the apple hard into his open palm. They all looked at him. They all wondered.
"They say London has already fallen," said the Baker, shifting the shear to his other shoulder with a wince. "Demons prowl the very streets, eating people. Bedevilment is abroad. The Queen, I hear, is besieged in her Palace, with only the Royal huscarls around her, blading off the Hadesborn scum."
"Would I were there, by the side of the noble huscarls, for the honour of Her Majesty," the Butcher said, twisting his pig-stick significantly in the clenched meat of his fist. There was something unpleasantly rectal about the gesture, and the other three looked away.
"Our duty is here, defending our own parish against the foes of England," the Mayor reminded them all, examining the privet of the church hedge.
"Of course," said the Butcher.
"If we cannot look after our own, then we have no business taking our war to London," said the Mayor.
"Of course," the Butcher nodded.
"The Queen expects as much. If each town looks after its own sanctity, then Her Majesty may rest easy. She will have an intact kingdom to rule once the danger is passed."
"Of course," said the Baker, assuming the Butcher had forgotten.
"You can wager that the damn folk over in Nether Pluxley aren't doing as much. Like as not, they're all hiding under their beds," said the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop. The apple smacked into his hand again. The Butcher looked down at his pig-stick and wondered a bit more. Pluxley, incidentally, is pronounced Plexcliffe.
"That's Nether Pluxley for you," said the Baker, quite getting into this macho posturing bit. "Shirkers."
"Shirkers," they all sneered in agreement.
"Well," said the Mayor, "we have militia stationed at every entrance to the village, and everyone is braced for any attack. We all know the signs to look out for. The moment the demons appear, they will be destroyed."
"Bled dry," affirmed the Butcher gruffly.
"Sheared," added the Baker enthusiastically. The apple slapped around into the Landlord's palm again.
"Indeed," said the Mayor.
"Reminds me of the Armada watch," ventured the Butcher. "Alert night and day, signal fires waiting to be kindled. Hungry for marching Spaniards to drive off."
They all nodded. The Butcher was forty-six, and the threatened Armada was four hundred years previous, but no one wanted to point this out to the Butcher. There was a dried sheen of something on the pig-stick, which quite curtailed comment.
"I almost might wish the Spaniards had invaded," added the Butcher in the silence.
The Mayor looked at him.
"I relish a good fight," the Butcher told him.
The Mayor nodded in agreement, and wondered how easy it would be to oust the Butcher from the Parish Council. Then he wondered how hard he'd have to jab his pitchfork in order to penetrate the Butcher's blood-scabbed apron. After that, he wondered how much he'd have to pay the Baker and the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop to corroborate a story of the Butcher suddenly going berserk through demonic possession. Not much, he concluded.
Then, a sudden shout was heard in the lane, and they all looked around. The Verger was sprinting down the bank from the high road, the hem of his robe gathered up in his hands, his hairy white calves scissoring frantically.
"D!" yelled the Verger as he approached across the Sward, sweat dripping from his nose.
"D!" he added as he fell against the gate, panting.
"D what?" asked the Mayor, reaching for his pitchfork.
Regaining his composure, the Verger turned to look at them. His face was blanched white with terror. The Mayor took a step back. The Butcher curled his lips into a snarl. The Baker almost dropped his shear. The Landlord of the Cat and Stoop slapped his apple.
"DEMON!" completed the Verger, and fainted. As he hit the ground, he extended a telling finger helpfully towards the north road into the village.
"Slap him," suggested the Butcher, "repeatedly."
But the Baker caught his arm and turned his attention to the road. The cart thundering down the track had no horse, but the gentle slope could not explain its accelerated progress.
"By Our Lady," said the Mayor, gawping.
The Butcher, the Baker, the Mayor and the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop took up their weapons and blocked its path.
"Stand ready now," hissed the Butcher through fused-together teeth.
"I'm ready for anything," said the Baker, who wasn't.
The Landlord of the Cat and Stoop spun his apple in slow, hypnotic arcs.
Giuseppe Giuseppo halted his careering wagon before the four armed men. It skidded up five feet from them. The harness, which had been mysteriously suspended in mid-air in front of the cart, flopped to the earth. The air was heavy with a syrupy aroma. The Mayor, the Landlord, the Baker and the Butcher all distinctly heard the snort of horse-breath. The Baker sensed that his bladder control was about to knock off for the weekend. He held out his shear, crossed his legs, and hoped that he retained some vestige of macho posing. He didn't, but, no one noticed.
