by Paul Finch
The lethal spear-point rammed itself home, puncturing the gelatinous layer, ripping through the soft framework below, filling the glowing interior of the beast with a bilious green liquor. The great bell-like thing convulsed inwards, collapsing on itself, blowing out its innards through its lower apertures in a stew of vile humours and vitreous gobbets.
Radnar was cascaded with toxic materials. A foul taste assailed his tongue. Even in that drowned, frozen world, a stench of fishy gore filled his nostrils. But the next thing he knew, hands were on his collar, and Ljot was there, kicking strongly up towards the warmth and light of myriad torches.
Radnar looked back once and caught a final glimpse of the fjord-thing as it sank away into blackness, its inner-lights extinguished. The long ash shaft still protruded from its side, inky-green fluid spiralling around it.
15
Sigfurth ordered the two men dragged to the long-hall on sleds.
They lay on the crude vehicles, pallid as death. In the eight minutes it took the panting drengir to scramble back to Bjarkalstead, and prop the casualties in front of a small fire, frost had sprouted on their hair and beards; their flesh had turned blue.
Their clothes were stripped away, and a slow, steady massage followed, handfuls of soft snow applied to their extremities. At length, a semblance of life was restored and the two brothers were left to their own devices, naked but dry, slowly warming in front of the fire, which the thralls – Marta the most vocal – now felt it safe to load up with fuel and stoke to a conflagration.
The brothers watched the crackling flames, every part of them tingling as the burning pain receded and their heart-rates returned gradually to normal.
“You slew it,” Radnar finally said, his voice a whisper. “You slew it. Why?”
“To save you.”
“It couldn’t harm me. It couldn’t harm me, so it showed …”
“Couldn’t harm you!” If Ljot had had the strength, he’d have jeered. He ran feeble fingers across an aching forehead. “That thing’s venom has addled your brain. When I saw it, it was set to descend on you, to absorb you like blood into a sponge.”
Radnar beheld the flames, but felt only frustration. He wanted to recall those other colours, that wondrous array of vivid hues through which he’d seen so much. But no matter how hard he tried, their imagery would not come back. “I don’t … don’t think …”
“It doesn’t matter what you think.” Ljot sounded strangely bitter. “You were half-dead down there. You’d frozen into a trance. That was the only thing that prevented you from drowning. It’s a miracle you’re able to think anything.”
“But it couldn’t harm me.”
Ljot sniffed. “It harmed others. Including the woman I’d set my heart on.”
“You’d set your … ?” Radnar was surprised. “I’d no notion.”
“I wanted her, put it that way. I might have grown to love her.”
“Love, eh?” Radnar almost chuckled. “‘Love your enemies,’ Jesus said. I always found that hard. And now, I take it, you’ve given up on that part too?”
“Not by choice. That creature made war on us. As such, it made a mistake.”
“So speaks a brave but wise man,” came a voice from beyond the fire.
The brothers glanced up and saw their uncle on the far side, a shadowy form made vast by a bearskin cloak. He drew his hood back and regarded them with his normal saturnine expression.
“Congratulation on your victory, Ljot,” Sigfurth said. “You’re sure the fiend is dead?”
“It was no fiend …” Radnar began, “it merely sought to protect this …”
“I’m sure, uncle,” Ljot interrupted. “I skewered it to the heart.”
“This place is ours now?” Sigfurth asked. “And ours alone?”
Radnar slumped back onto his pallet, in no state to argue.
“Yes, this place is yours,” Ljot said. “Do with it what you will.”
FLIBBERTIGIBBET
1581 AD
The crowd were stunned when Father Campion offered a prayer for the health of the queen; “his queen”, as he called her. Even the Lord Mayor, a pompous, self-important little man, who often spoke long and loud at such occasions, was fleetingly lost for words.
Was this not Edmund Campion, the infamous Jesuit seditionist? Was he not a scheming subversive, who had abandoned his country for the wiles of Rome, and had only returned here to undermine the Church of England and its most high and noble governor, Queen Elizabeth?
Abruptly recovering himself, the Mayor rolled up the death-sentence and laid it across the pommel of his saddle. “In which case,” he called out, “do you recant your papist beliefs? Might we take word back to the queen that at the moment of truth, you returned to the Anglican faith and sought her forgiveness?”
Campion, who’d had difficulty standing since they’d lifted him from his hurdle, made no answer. Instead, he turned painfully to the executioners. “Please … do what you must.”
The chief-executioner, a heavily-built man clad all over in leather, his head shrouded in the customary black hood with eye-slits, nodded, and turned to his red-garbed apprentices. The first one came forward with thongs and bound the priest’s hands behind his back; the second looped the noose over Father Campion’s head and tightened it into place. Throughout the process, the Mayor leaned forward from his horse, his eyes keen and hawk-like. Too often in the past, executioners and their staff had been bribed by families to end the ordeal swiftly – slipping a knife in here, twisting a neck there. Occasionally, during the reign of Mary, they had acted from pity alone, garrotting with a ligature before lighting the heaped faggots. None of this would be tolerated on a day like today – not with Edmund Campion the object of attention. Today’s spectacle had to be exemplary.
The chief-executioner stoked the brazier in which he heated his tools, while his first apprentice leaped down into the cart, took the reins and whipped the team away.
Father Campion was drawn up to the crossbeam of the gallows. There were gasps from the crowd as he swung there, silent but jerking in the frigid December air. He had been a tall man, well-made and handsome, with a head of golden hair and laughing eyes. As well as a learned father and fine scholar, he’d also been a caring man. Charismatic in his oratory but patient in the debate, his polite and gentlemanly attitude had won the admiration of many, even those he’d encountered who didn’t share his beliefs. Now though – now, he was indistinguishable from so many other doomed wretches who had come this way to Tyburn. His lean form, battered and bruised, and through the cruel auspices of the Little Ease, withered almost to bones, was clad only in a filthied, blood-stained shroud. His tortured limbs twitched; his bruised, crudely-shaven head turned first a shade of scarlet, then darkened to purple as the rope bit into his neck.
There was an awesome silence in the square. More and more gathered to watch, but still the only sound was the slow, steady creaking of the gibbet.
To one side, behind the line of halberdiers, an elegant gentleman stood watching the affair. He was tall and sleek of appearance, his features smooth, aquiline, and excepting his neat beard and moustache, closely shaved. He wore a goffered ruff at his neck, a blue satin doublet over his lace-edged shirt, and a purple velvet cape to ward off the chill. His padded trunk-hose were the height of fashion, yet were almost concealed beneath thigh-high riding-boots waxed to a gleaming finish. On his head, there was a tall beaver-hat complete with peacock feather, while at his left hip a rapier hung in a decorated scabbard. Others of his class were also present, watching from carriage or horseback, each decked in his or her finest, and clutching smelling-salts for fear they might swoon. Not so this gentleman at the front; for all his gorgeous apparel, he had a fearless, steely look, as if determined to see the business through, though by his hard indifference it was difficult to tell whether he was against the prisoner or for him.
He didn’t seem the sort to suffer fools lightly, yet he didn’t so much as stiffen when a
mumbling beggar in ashes and sackcloth came and stood beside him. In truth, of course, the gentleman had already recognised Secretary of State Francis Walsingham, who as ever was about his business – mixing now with the hoi polloi in search of Campion sympathisers.
“Good day, Master Urmston,” the beggar said. His voice was a refined purr. For all the grime on his face, up close the Secretary of State’s small, demonic eyes and sharply-pointed beard were unmistakable.
Urmston sniffed. “Is it a good day, my lord? I wish I could believe that.”
“Now now, Robert … don’t be disloyal.”
Urmston’s eyes were fixed on the hanging priest. “If loyalty is approving scenes like this, it’s scarcely a desirable state.”
Walsingham sighed. “This is not what the queen wanted.”
“Nevertheless, it’s what she has.”
“Campion was given every opportunity to recant his views. She beseeched him personally during an audience at the Earl of Leicester’s house. She begged him. In her own hand, she held out a royal pardon to cancel all charges if he would only recant. And even then he refused.”
“In which case, we’ve made him a martyr,” Urmston said. “God have mercy on our souls.”
The spy-master’s eyes narrowed. “I trust you’re not questioning the supremacy of our queen and our holy Church of England?”
Urmston wanted to shrug, to say that he didn’t care either way – but that would have been utter folly, as well as a blatant lie. “Of course not.”
“You’ve accounted for enough of these scoundrels yourself, Robert.”
Urmston didn’t wish to be reminded of this. “My lord, my duty is to England and her sovereign. Rebels, traitors and Spanish spies … I will gladly dispatch to the scaffold. But to inflict this on some poor monk whose only crime is religious belief … in your conscience, you don’t find that disgusting?”
Walsingham shook his head. “These men are traitors, Robert. There can’t be any other way to describe them. They were trained in French seminaries expressly for the purpose of coming here to England and undermining the faith.”
“And in response, we wreak a holocaust. I wonder which party history will deem the greater villain?”
“I had no idea you felt so strongly.”
Urmston nodded. “Why else do you think I’ve resigned from your service?”
“Ah … now that is really the reason I’ve sought you out.”
Walsingham was about to speak further, when movement at the gibbet distracted him. Campion’s body was being lowered to the platform. The priest had gone limp, though by the frantic palpitation of his chest, he still lived – which was greatly to the satisfaction of the Lord Mayor, who was now able to sit back in his saddle and preen himself.
The two apprentice executioners released the prisoner from the noose, hoisted him up between them, and stripped off his ragged shift, to reveal an emaciated body, streaked with blood and sweat. Naked, he was laid on a trestle beside the gibbet, and strapped into place at his throat and feet. The chief-executioner came forward. In one gloved hand he held a long, slender knife, in the other a vicious hook; both glowed hot from the coals. Without further ado, he set to work, slitting the prisoner’s abdomen from his ribs to his groin. Smoke rose, and a stench of burning flesh tainted the air. Incredibly, though the priest tensed and flopped wildly about in his bonds, he remained silent – even when the disembowelling commenced. At one point, he tried to raise his head, as if to see what was being done, though the vision of his own entrails, now yanked from his belly in loop after glistening loop, like coils of raw sausages, was perhaps too much, and he fainted dead away; either that, or, mercifully, he died. Either way, the chief-executioner continued with his grim task for several more seconds, depositing a great heap of steaming intestines on the floor around the trestle, more, it seemed, than any man’s belly cavity could contain, but at last laying his hook and knife aside, and reaching for the axe with which he might behead and then quarter the wretched creature.
“Your resignation, yes,” Walsingham said, taking up the conversation where they’d left off. “It’s been rejected.”
Urmston looked round in astonishment. “What?”
“You’re too valuable an asset to me. There’s no conceivable way I can release you from your obligations now.”
“Obligations!”
Walsingham smiled. “My dear Robert, you live the way you do … comfortably, because it pleases Her Majesty to retain you in her private household as Squire of the Royal Body. In return for this lofty honour, you are expected to attend upon her during her public appearances, to doff your cap and bow when she wanders idly past, and occasionally to take a turn around Greenwich Palace to ensure the men-at-arms are awake and the outer gates locked. It is scarcely demanding work.”
Urmston felt a tremor of rage pass through him, but also helplessness. He knew exactly what this implied, and more to the point, knew exactly how much, or rather how little he could do about it. “With all respect, my lord, this is unfair. You, better than anyone, know the full extent of my service to the Crown.”
Walsingham shook his head. “You can’t have things both ways, Robert. You resign from one office, then I’m afraid you resign from the other also.”
Urmston’s hand tightened on his sword-hilt. He shook his head with impotent fury. “So be it … I still tender my resignation.”
“I see. Of course, if you really are intent on leaving the State Department, I must instruct my officers to investigate your reasons … as thoroughly as they can.”
“So now it’s a crime in England just to hold an opinion?”
“Of course. That’s another of Henry VIII’s great legacies to us.”
Urmston shook his head. “And this is the land I love?”
“But let’s not dwell on the negatives, Robert.” Walsingham rubbed his hands against the chill. “Instead, let’s discuss how we may use your undoubted skills to our mutual benefit.” He lumbered away. “Come with me if you would. There’s nothing else to see here.”
Urmston glanced again towards the scaffold. Father Campion’s head, now more like a waxen effigy than a fragment of humanity, had been mounted on a spear, a grimace of agony still etched into its dirt-smeared face. For the approval of the crowd, one of the apprentice executioners was hefting into the air a great square of torso, with an arm and shoulder still affixed to it. It was like something from a butcher’s yard, the pallid flesh contrasting sharply with the rich, red innards. Blood dripped steadily from the grisly trophy. At the sight of that, Urmston could only agree; there was nothing else to see.
He and Walsingham passed into a small tavern, which had clearly been commandeered for the day. The Secretary of State warmed himself by the crackling hearth, shared a jug of mulled wine with Urmston, then washed his face and hands in a bowl of rose-scented water, and threw a heavy ermine cloak over his ragged garments. In the tavern court-yard, a royal carriage was awaiting their pleasure. Walsingham despatched a groom to deliver Urmston’s horse back to his home address on Drury Lane, before ushering his unwilling guest into the vehicle.
“Ride with me, if you would, Robert,” he said. “At least as far as King’s Street.”
Crimson taffeta drapes were closed over the windows, to block out the cold, and with a shout from the driver, the carriage jolted into motion. In the dim, reddish light, Urmston stared blankly at Walsingham. The scheming nobleman stared back with a cat-like smile.
“What do you know of the Southwark Stews, Robert?” he asked.
Urmston shrugged. “Pain, poverty, pestilence …”
“There have been six murders there in as many months.”
Urmston feigned surprise. “Only six? Things must be improving south of the river.”
“Six murders by the same hand,” Walsingham added. “And a gruesome, fiendish hand it is.” Fleetingly, his poise faltered – he frowned, his brow creasing as if something genuinely troubled him, a thing Urmston for one had nev
er seen before.
“I don’t understand, my lord.”
“Neither does anyone else.” Walsingham shook his head. “There’s no apparent sense to these murders. The victims are unrelated, they had offended no-one … they certainly possessed nothing worth stealing.”
“In which case, forgive me for asking, but how do we know they’re connected?”
“Because of the mutilations.”
“Mutilations?”
Walsingham nodded. “Ritualistic mutilations, in fact.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well … it’s a vile business. The victims have all, so far, been women of low repute … whores or serving-wenches. But each was subjected to a shocking assault. Brutally beaten, and despatched with knife-blows to the throat. Following death …” he paused to swallow his distaste, “ … at least it is to be hoped it was following death, they were gutted like fishes, their inner organs strewn around the murder-scene or removed altogether.”
Urmston pondered. “Clearly the actions of some lunatic.”
“Every known lunatic in the district has already been incarcerated. Yet the atrocities continue.”
“And the parish bailiffs … what role do they play in this?”
“A rather ineffectual one, it would seem … at least, in the opinion of the Privy Council.”
Urmston started. This did surprise him. “The Privy Council? Since when are they interested in a non-political crime?”
“Since a district of the city which is already a powder-keg of discontent fell under a progressive succession of monthly murder-fines.”
“Ahhh.” Urmston rubbed his chin. This was a more familiar story.
“Everything which can be done seems to have been done,” Walsingham added. “The Watch has been doubled … in fact trebled, all streets and houses have been searched, strangers questioned … still nothing arises.”
