By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘The fishing’s been bad the past fortnight, and the cost of caulking’s up and fish are down, and—’

  Now Arthur slips silent as an eel behind the stall and puts his cold iron blade to Wilfrid’s throat. The old man doesn’t dare to swallow.

  ‘Well?’

  The old man pays. The coins are old and some are bent and on their sides they bear the faces of all kinds of kings and emperors, the only common thing they have is that they’re all now safely in the earth and in the hands, so one presumes, of God.

  It’s meagre earnings. Yet the performance is repeated all along the edges of the market. Not at the heart. Those sellers who can well afford it have their own form of protection, to keep the riffraff such as Arthur and his boys away. But not the weak, the poor, the elderly – they need him. They need his help, his counsel, his force. He helps them, he is their protector.

  From there to breakfast in the ruins of the Roman wall. It stands, still, but it crumbles. Sir Hector has a line of trade in bricks, when Kay and Arthur were yet striplings they worked on Hector’s roaming gangs stripping the wall. There used to be more of it, then, and less of them. Now Arthur and his boys build a fire where the wall is black with soot already, and they cook fish for their breakfast, and share the stolen bread.

  Elyan the White counts the money. But money on its own is not enough. Swords. Power. Kay watches Arthur at his meal. He knows that Arthur hungers – for something more, something nebulous. He’s never been beyond the city. And yet this land – Kay knows that sometimes Arthur dreams of it. He dreams of northern snow and moorlands in the spring, and castles standing over green, green hills and seagulls crying over white-sailed ships approaching shore. He tells the boys his father is a king. They don’t believe him. His father is a king who rules all of the land and one day he’ll come back for him. An evil sorcerer has separated them. His father loves him. His real father loves him. Sir Hector is a boorish man, a fat old ogre with bad teeth that smell of rot. His pisser’s riddled with the clap. He thinks he’s lord, he speaks pig Latin and reads Greek pornography in the latrines. The whores he runs are little better. He takes a cut from everything he can: the whores, the brick trade, grain, protection, the cut-throat gangs, the rub-and-tug emporiums. Lord of Londinium, he styles himself, but he is nothing more than a jumped-up rent-boy who used to blow fat merchants for his supper.

  This is what Arthur thinks, and what he says to Kay: for all that Kay is Hector’s son.

  Kay chews on fish. He watches Arthur think his darkened thoughts.

  17

  That dream, Kay thinks. Those talking cats. They keep recurring.

  He finds the cats unsettling.

  Londinium in daytime’s bad enough. At night, under the moon, the witching hour starts. Things walk the streets that shouldn’t. Swaithes and tod-lowries and Robin Goodfellows.

  It’s best not to draw attention to oneself.

  Kay’s not like Arthur. Kay’s afraid. He’s scared of blood, of violence, of goblins and his father whom he also loves.

  Sometimes he thinks, uncharitably: Arthur’s too dumb to be afraid of anything.

  After breaking fast they scatter. The day is theirs. The city’s theirs, or so they think. Kay follows Arthur. As fast as rats they scuttle down to the forum.

  Here they come on sufferance. They steal inside. They have no power here, the forum’s under Sir Carados’ own protection. All in the city pay a tithe to Carados, he is the omnium ducibus dux, the boss of bosses.

  The White Hill Gang, the Wolves, the Frankish Mob, the Knights of Bors, they’re all subordinate to Sir Carados. He styles himself the Governor, for all that the city had not seen one since the Romans left. He makes his home in the old governor’s palace. To him the boys are like the summer flies that plague the banks of the Tamesis. One careless slap from him and they’d be nothing but a bloody splatter on the Roman wall.

  Kay loves the forum. He loves the cries of merchants from their stalls, the hustle and bustle of trade and negotiation, the shouted arguments and the whisper of exchange. He and Arthur steal among the throng, wary of the guardsmen, these burly ruffians of Sir Carados.

  Here there is gold from vanished Greece, hand-wrought anklets, bracelets, earrings – ‘For your girlfriend!’ says the seller with a lewd laugh, and makes Kay blush – and local silver worked into pendants and rings. Kay is enchanted by the jewellers’ section, the dazzle of precious metals and stones: of pearls from Persia and emeralds from Egypt, amber from Gedanum on the shores of the Mare Suebicum. Kay loves it, the artistry of it, the beauty that is not of anything but of itself.

  He watches Arthur. His friend moves like a thief among the stalls. He cares not for the beauty of these things, not even for their value, but for what they represent. Wealth is power, and power is what Arthur craves. These trinkets mean nothing to him, these gaudy baubles, these decorations for the human frame. It makes no woman more desirable, no man more fetching. These are mere indications of their place in the world, and Arthur knows the place he wants to be.

  Kay admires his friend for his ruthless determination, his absolute conviction of who he is, of where he wants to go. Kay follows him willingly, for to be with Arthur is to be dazzled, to have one’s mind opened to infinite possibilities. It is but a dream that Arthur has, but what a dream! And Kay will follow him anywhere, even into the mouth of the underworld itself.

  Past the jewellers into the arms market: old helmets and shields, short stabbing swords and javelins. Arthur lovingly fingers the hilt of a sword. Kay examines a legionnaire’s old pair of sandals, the tough leather studded with metal spikes. Alongside the Roman junk are other weapons: Pictish axes and pikes, short nasty daggers, and next to these a range of bows and arrows all of different makes and ages – a cornucopia of arms, a profusion of weapons!

  The arms trade’s bustling in Londinium, that great cesspit of a town to which, even now, the dregs of the known world are sometimes drawn. This island is a wild country, a host of warring tribes who scrabble for scraps in the ruins of civilisation. It’s each man for himself, and a man with the right attitude – and the right arms – can make or lose a fortune.

  The boys scuttle past, wary of the guardsmen’s attention. The best arms in the city go to the Guv’nor and his gang, Carados still believes himself the heir of Rome, its rightful representative on this dark and fertile soil. The Romans came, they killed, they built, they ruled – they left.

  ‘Well fuck the Romans,’ Arthur says, ‘and fuck good Sir Carados in the ass.’

  ‘Hush!’ Kay says. ‘Not so loud. His men are here.’

  ‘I will piss into the empty sockets of his skull and watch him grin as I do it,’ Arthur says. But he speaks softly, now.

  Somehow that’s scarier to Kay. Arthur seldom raises his voice, and when he speaks there’s an authority beyond his years behind his words. Perhaps it’s being orphaned, or perhaps he truly does believe himself a king. Though what’s a king? They’re all, each one a king, these lords of Londinium, each with their turf, each with their share of the spoils. There’ll always be a need for swords and whores, there’ll always be a need for men to take what’s theirs. Or so they think, at any rate. They think themselves kings in their tiny domains.

  Yet Kay’s dreams take him elsewhere. In Sir Hector’s house there were several buckets of scrolls tossed in a corner, the debt plus vig repayment of some ancient loan. Handed over along with some blood and teeth by some travelling priest with an unfortunate predilection for games of dice and little boys, and a thirst for knowledge. In Hector’s manor no one read them, it was left to the boy Kay to learn his letters from a hired tutor, he and Arthur huddled on the floor beside the window. But to Kay the letters came more easily.

  He loved those scrolls, from vanished Rome they came, just common scrolls on grade four amphitheatre papyrus, the sort the scribes copied by the bucketload back on the Aventine. Just common scrolls, just scraps from vanished Rome, these typo’ed badly copied fragments of cann
ibalised classics.

  He had read them till they began to crumble, and any time he can he reads them still. There is, for instance, a fragment from Lucretius, in which the poet proposes that the universe is but an endless void, filled with an infinity of atoms. In all of Nature, the poet says, there is but bodies and the void.

  Kay wishes he could read more of Lucretius. They say the Guv’nor has a library still inside the fort, a treasure trove of codices and scrolls, for all that he’s illiterate. It’s just more things to own and thus more power, like jewellery or whores. Kay thinks of life, how passionate it is to be alive. Death scares him, and to walk by Arthur is to skirt always close to death. The poet, Lucretius, says that death is finite, the body and the spirit both summarily end. Yet in another fragment in his father’s house, an evangelion, written by some curious Jew from distant Palestine, Kay reads of a death and a resurrection in Jerusalem.

  He thinks that city must be grand indeed, this Jerusalem of white towers high on its hill. As grand as Rome or Athens. So different to Londinium, this beggar town where beggar knights and kingpins dwell. Kay longs for something more, a knowledge of the world. Lastly in his father’s store of scrolls there is a map based on Ptolemy the Greek’s Geography. For hours Kay had sat and studied it, for days and through the years. It shows him continents and seas. It is the world made comprehensible, it is the world as it is known. There is Rome and there is distant Qin where they make the silk, there’s India where spices come from, there’s Germania, Hispania and Palestina. There’s savage, ancient Egypt where the pharaohs ruled before Greeks or Romans ever dreamed of civilisation. The world is vast and interlinked in trade and roads, by ships and seas – it must be wonderful, Kay thinks, stuck on this dismal, rainy island.

  He’d never even gone beyond the walls. Londinium is all he knows.

  But he can dream.

  ‘Run, fool!’ Arthur hisses, and Kay startles. A merchant raises the cry and the guardsmen turn, but Arthur, laughing, is as fleet as wind or faun and Kay must hurry after. Together the boys run, upending a table laden with fruit, leap over a sheep, push an old woman out of the way and burst out of the forum. They run along the Via Publica and down a side street, not far from the main mithraeum. There in the alleyway they collapse against a stout stone wall, panting and laughing, and Arthur shows Kay his treasure: an exquisitely crafted flint dagger, of the sort men made in days gone by, before they learned the art of metallurgy. It must have been ancient, centuries old. Arthur turns it over and over in his hands. His long fingers stroke each careful notch the ancient stonemason had made. The blade’s still sharp as ever before it was.

  ‘But what good is it?’ Kay says, practical. Such techne, as the Greeks had called it, is surely obsolete.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Arthur says. It is a word he never uses lightly. For arms or women, only, and what does Arthur know of women yet?

  Kay shakes his head, for his friend never ceases to surprise him. Arthur is not given to much sentiment.

  ‘If they’d caught us they’d have beaten us to death,’ he says.

  ‘And yet they didn’t,’ Arthur says, and smiles. He’s so happy at that moment, with his toy. So pure. There is a purity to Arthur that can be sometimes terrifying.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We need to hook up with our Trinovantes connection.’

  Kay looks down at his own, nail-bitten fingers.

  ‘If my father finds out we’re dealing outside the family…’ he says.

  ‘What Sir Hector doesn’t know should not concern him,’ Arthur says.

  ‘We swore an oath! He is my father.’

  ‘And like a father to me, too,’ Arthur says – not too convincingly, Kay thinks. ‘But we are men, are we not, you and I? We have a right to make our own way in the world. Besides’ – he punches Kay on the shoulder – ‘it’s only Goblin Fruit. What’s the harm?’

  ‘The harm is that—’ Kay starts to say, but doesn’t finish.

  Something comes barrelling down the dark alleyway towards them. It makes the most awful and terrible sound.

  A horrid, giant, shrieking beast shambles down the alleyway. Kay cannot bear to look at it directly. It has too many eyes, too many mouths, too many teeth. Its shriek is like a pickaxe in the mind. Its crazed babble invades the psychic sphere, it conjures images of nightmares in Kay’s mind. It shambles down the alleyway and passes them. Eyes on a stalk look down on the boys. A slender, flexible appendage like a tentacle strokes their faces like a blind man seeing.

  Then it is gone.

  It vanishes so swiftly, like a dissipating dream. Leaving behind it the sense of vast incomprehension, and something else – a disappointment in the boys, a sense that they were not the things it seeks.

  A questing beast.

  ‘Well that was weird—’

  Behind the questing beast there comes a knight – bedraggled and ill-kempt. A vagabond with sword and hammered breastplate, unshaved and with eyes wild.

  ‘The beast!’ he says. ‘The beast, where did it go!’

  ‘It went that way—’

  He rushes past them, cooing.

  Silence settles once again.

  The boys exchange glances.

  ‘What was that thing?’

  Arthur just shrugs. ‘An aberration.’

  And Kay thinks of the Greek, Plutarch, and a story he’d read in one of the scrolls in his father’s manor, of a maze and the creature that was forever trapped there. And he thinks, this world is beset by fantastical beasts on all sides, and man is but a tiny thing beside them. He’d longed to see the giant elephantus, or that creature it was said Julius Caesar brought to Europe, a tall and terrifying creature with a neck so long it reached the tallest trees, and which the Romans called a cameleopard. He’d seen their images once in a bestiary.

  ‘Perhaps it was a unicorn?’ he says now, dubiously. For was it not Julius Caesar who said he had seen their like deep in the forests of Germania?

  ‘Where then was its horn?’ Arthur says and, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand, stands up. ‘Come on, Kay. We have business to attend to.’

  It’s easy to dismiss the strangeness, for such things are not unknown. And anyway it harmed them not.

  And so they go.

  18

  ‘Who’s the runt? Your bum boy?’ their Trinovantes contact says, and Arthur laughs. Kay blushes.

  The Trinovantes man is burly, dark, with greasy hair and cold clear eyes. He wears a coat of dead bear’s fur. His boots are studded. His sword is steel.

  ‘My associate, Sir Kay.’

  ‘A sir, is he?’ the man says, and laughs. He has good teeth, Kay notices. ‘Such lords and ladies in Londinium you are, boy.’

  ‘Don’t call me boy,’ Arthur tells him. There’s cold iron in his voice to match the alloyed metal in the other man’s weapon. There is this thing about Arthur, for all his youth men do respect him. The other nods.

  ‘You have the cash?’

  ‘You have the merchandise?’

  The man scowls. ‘We are nothing if we are not professionals,’ he says, with slight reproach. Opens his coat. Removes a bag and hands it over.

  Arthur tosses the bag to Kay. Kay looks inside. The smell is unmistakable.

  It’s Goblin Fruit.

  Nevertheless he sticks a finger in. Puts it to his mouth but doesn’t swallow. A putrid thing. Some sort of rye infected with a fungus. It’s nasty stuff.

  He nods. ‘It’s pure,’ he says.

  ‘You ever try it?’ the Trinovanti says.

  ‘I never use the merchandise—’ from Arthur.

  ‘And you, Sir Kay?’

  The man leers at him knowingly. The pit of Kay’s stomach feels warm.

  ‘Once or twice,’ he says – as though there’s nothing to it.

  Where the Trinovantes get the merch he doesn’t know. They rule directly to the east of Londinium and as far as the sea, and have dealings with Saxons. They say back in the day they’d sen
t emissaries to Rome itself, then rose against it in rebellion with Boudicca. They’re tough bastards, Arthur always says, admiringly.

  ‘It’s nasty stuff,’ the Trinovanti says. ‘Well – my money?’

  ‘Kay?’

  Kay puts away the bag of Goblin Fruit, removes the payment in its stead – a smaller bag, of rubies and garnets, a lady’s diamond ring set in gold, several gold denarii and silver Tyrian shekels from who knows where. The flotsam and jetsam of empire. He hands the bag to Arthur. Arthur hands it over to the Trinovanti.

  ‘Pleasure doing business with you, boys – men, I mean,’ the Trinovanti says. ‘Begging your pardon.’

  He gives a mock bow.

  ‘Next time we need double,’ Arthur says.

  ‘This shit’s hard to come by,’ the Trinovanti complains. ‘I’ll see what I can do, but it’s not like it just grows on trees. I’ll see you, Arthur.’

  ‘And you, Ywain.’

  He vanishes towards the Cripplegate. As they walk back, Arthur is elated. This area’s dark and dodgy, Kay just watches for attack. They pass the place where Lady Boudicca, the Iceni, is resting.

  ‘Now there was a queen,’ Arthur says, in admiration. Kay thinks of the city reduced to ruin, the bones of Boudicca’s enemies strewn across the ground. This new Londinium of theirs is built on bones and graves. And how long shall it remain? Without its Roman masters the city’s but a shade of what it was. There is no rule of law, nothing but the gangs, like king rats they scrabble in the ruins for domination.

  Soon, he thinks, it will wither and die, its populace will vanish, and nothing will remain but a thick layer of black ash, gathering over the dark age of centuries.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Arthur says, not unkindly. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Kay says.

  Arthur says, ‘You think too much.’