by F. G. Cottam
‘What?’
‘A hammer blow to the heart.’
‘Very funny, but I’m serious. I’d have suspected coronary trouble if he wasn’t in such good shape. I think he’s been wounded and I can’t help suspecting it was deliberate.’
‘We should ask him. Once we’re in on whatever it was your father discovered, we should just ask him outright. If it’s anything to do with what began at Cree, I’m pretty sure he’ll be prepared to tell us.’
There were two thin folders on Grayling’s desk. He was habitually neat and his office Spartan, so Adam could not help noticing a tube of Arnica cream on the desk. He was standing, staring out of the window when they came in. When he turned to them his expression was very serious and he was clearly deep in thought. It took him a moment to realize how wet the walk had left Jane and to offer to take her damp raincoat from her and hang it up to air and dry.
He gestured at the folders. ‘This material can’t leave this office. Nor can the contents be freely discussed. You will appreciate why when you’ve read what is written there. Your father discovered the original, Jane. He found it in the library of a medieval seminary in the French Alps and brought it to me twenty-five years ago.
‘Its claims are sensational, by any standards. But I can assure you that the source is utterly genuine. When you have read this, you will appreciate that history is very different from how you assumed it was. And you will have some notion of the nature and scale of the threat we face and some idea about its origin.’
They stood silently in front of him. Adam had never seen the professor look so stern or sound so ominous in tone. He glanced to his right and saw Jane bite her lower lip, staring at the floor. In this mood, Grayling could reduce you to the status of a naughty child. Except that children were never trusted with the sort of secrets they were about to be invited to share.
‘The man who wrote what you are about to read was a knight. He was a clever and literate man whose name was de Morey, and people were obliged to call him Sir Robert. But it goes a long way beyond titular status. What you need to know is precisely what, in medieval times, being a knight involved.’
‘He would have been schooled in combat.’
‘He would, Jane. That schooling would have started when he was seven years old, and from the outset, the weapons would have been edged and the lessons immensely skilled and almost unimaginably brutal. By the age of twenty he would have been a fighting machine, capable of wielding a broadsword through hours of battle astride a warhorse.’
‘Formidable, then,’ Adam said.
‘Terrifying,’ Grayling said, ‘and also relentless. De Morey adhered to the chivalric code. He was fluent in English and French, the language of the court, and Latin, in which this account was originally written. Apparently he danced and enjoyed poetry. For all I know, he was a dab hand at embroidery too. But he was a killing machine by training and inclination, unquestioningly obedient to his God and his king. Charged with a mission in the name of either, the only thing that would stop him would be death.’
‘And he was hard to kill.’ Adam was reminded that Grayling had been a soldier himself. Duty was something of which he had a professional understanding.
‘Oh, yes. As you’re shortly to discover, Robert de Morey was very hard indeed to kill. Sir Rupert, Jane’s father, thought that he was a mercenary, though I’ve found no evidence to support the claim. He was at the call of the Crown. But he was a ruthless warlord who fought decisively in a number of crucial engagements. He fought in France under the Black Prince, his king’s son and heir to the throne, at Crécy and Poitier. His name inspired terror. Sight of his coat of arms in the field would breed panic among the enemy. He was the nearest thing the Middle Ages had to a guided missile.’
‘And somebody pressed the big red button,’ Adam guessed.
‘King Edward the Third,’ Grayling said, ‘an amenable monarch by Plantagenet standards and a ruler who was rightly popular. But he was very hard pressed by the time he called upon de Morey to pursue this peculiar quest.
‘This is a contemporary account, and the Black Prince is a name given to Edward of Woodstock after his death. During his life, he was Earl of Chester and then Duke of Cornwall and finally, of course, he was Prince of Wales. But they were friends in youth and de Morey called him Woodstock. I must stress that every word you are about to read is authentic.’
It was the second time he had made that point and Adam knew that Grayling was not a man generally given to repeating himself. Now he gestured for Adam and Jane to sit in the easy chairs facing his desk and handed them a folder each. ‘I’ll make some coffee while you make a start,’ he said. He looked at his wristwatch. Then before he left for the kitchen along the corridor, he unplugged his office phone. Adam opened his folder and focused on the first page, half expecting to hear the jingle of the professor’s keys as he locked them in.
The events concerning myself and faithfully recounted here began when I answered a summons from the king received late one evening thirty years ago. I am an old man now, left stiff and ailing from the many wounds endured in battles fought during a long and sometimes turbulent lifetime.
I was young in body when the summons came, and strong. Though I confess my heart was heavy and my spirit listless with grief, having recently lost my wife and daughter to the Great Pestilence. My son was spared and that was a solace to me. I tried to take comfort in the certain knowledge that those I had lost were now with God. But I missed them. Their absence was a cleaving blow to me. I had nowhere near recovered when the call to duty came.
I was not to present myself at court, the king’s courier informed me. In this the command he conveyed was unusual. Unusual it was too, in the further particulars. I was to meet the king instead at the abbey at Bayham, about two days’ ride from my own estate. I was to tell no one of my business or destination. I was to travel armed. I was to take no escort. No one was permitted to accompany me, not even my squire. I was to saddle my horse and leave at once. A mission of the greatest import and urgency awaited me.
I delayed only to have my sword sharpened on a whetting stone before ordering my horse prepared and provisioning hastily in the kitchens with my own hands. I made fond farewell to Simon, my son, unsure of when I would likely see him again. I rode away from my castle thankful for the trustworthiness and piety of the household left me after the loss of lives cruelly ended by the recent pestilence.
My journey was unremarkable, though it was saddening to see how depleted lay the country in the aftermath of the plague. I could not count the number of hasty roadside graves I was obliged to pass on the route. The hooves of my horse echoed through empty villages and clopped through untilled fields. There are not the hands to plough. There are not the mouths to feed in order to require the cultivation of crops.
The whole of our land lies grievously wounded. Ashes and scorch marks still scar the land in great circles. They are a reminder that there was no remedy to the pestilence; not prayer, posies, garlands, potions, spells, flagellation, lotions or charms. Fire could not purge it. Only when it had satisfied its own appetite for death did the plague finally desist. We have truly lived through a terrible age and an awful catastrophe.
I arrived at my destination at about noontime of the second day. I recognized men of the king’s own bodyguard patrolling about, fully armed, and his personal company of archers was there also, armed with their longbows and with the arrows in their quivers freshly flighted, bright with new feathers in the spring sunlight. I was shown into the presence of the king with sombre deference, and to my great astonishment the archbishop was there too, summoned from Canterbury for our grave and secret conference.
The two greatest men in our kingdom shared a small and modest chamber at the abbey with a third. This man was of Germanic appearance and dress. He did not look to me like a man of gentle birth, but he showed little deference to either of his exalted fellows.
There was a guard at the door but the door itself was o
f such a stout nature, with such a perfect fit in its narrow arch, that standing outside it he would not have heard a word of our hushed exchange. The light in the chamber was dismal. There was but the one narrow north-facing window, and despite the strength of the sun in the clear sky outside, it was chill in there and candles had been lit of necessity to illuminate the scene.
We conversed in Latin. The commoner was an apothecary from Hanover. The king asked me if I was aware of a notion or theory he described by a word alien to all my past learning. He called this principle contagion. I confessed that the idea of contagion was entirely new to me.
‘Think of the heat of battle,’ the Hanoverian said quietly. ‘Think of its tumult and clamour and the way it can inspire fear and fury in equal measure, and the way those feelings are able to spread and find communication without the necessity for a single spoken word.’
And I had it, for I had seen it so often. I well remember the bloodlust at Poitier, the mutilations indulged by our infantry when the battle had lulled and victory was already ours. Bloodlust spread that afternoon through the minds of men with a swiftness that made them seem spellbound.
I have seen it too with fear. Sometimes men cannot govern the terror communicated between them when they are faced by the thunder of cavalry assault. There comes the point when their stand, resolute until that very moment, turns into shared and headlong flight.
‘I think I understand contagion,’ I said.
‘The Great Pestilence was a contagious disease,’ the Hanoverian said. ‘Men communicating physically with men ensured its spread. Travel and proximity enabled it to flourish.’
I nodded acquiescence. The notion was not quite such a novelty, after all. I had heard of the monastic communities which had isolated themselves against contact with a single stranger for the duration of the plague. And before it ever came upon us, we were all familiar with the doleful warning peal of the leper’s bell. What the Hanover apothecary had done was oblige me to consider not the fact of contagion but the speed of it. The speed of the contagion had been the shocking aspect to it.
‘How is the contagion achieved? Is it in our sweat? Does it taint our breath?’
‘That is not the point, Sir Robert,’ the archbishop said.
‘Then what is?’
‘The source,’ said the king.
I confess I had never seen him so solemn in aspect. It was as though the very sun had set in that noble face.
‘The pestilence was created deliberately,’ the apothecary said. ‘I myself discovered the proof of this. The devil that did the work was careless or merely vain enough to leave the evidence behind. Perhaps he thought it would kill anyone who discovered it. But it leaves some people unscathed, Sir Robert. It did not kill me.’
I thought of battlefields and my place on them and the fact that I had always been indifferent in my own self to the contagion of fear. Then I thought of my lovely wife Helena and my beloved daughter Catherine and the breathless swiftness with which they were snatched from life.
But I could not believe the apothecary’s claim. I have seen much deliberate cruelty in armed conflict. The evil he was suggesting had been deliberately conjured, though, was beyond my capacity to understand. I could not conceive of a man who would employ the necessary skill and education to accomplish such a violation of nature. It would require such coldness and calculation. It was a sin beyond comprehension, if only because it would condemn he who committed it to certain damnation.
The king smiled at me. He had read my mind. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You are a noble spirit, Robert. No man faithful to me is braver or more constant. It pains me to expose you to such a cynical and horrid truth. But it is the truth. I will have wine fetched, and bread and meat, and we will tell you the secret with which great men in our world are sometimes forced to struggle.’
Thus did I learn of the existence of the land we do not dare name. Thus did I lean of Endrimor, the mirror world, the realm of blighted magick and antipathy to all we hold dear.
The Hanover apothecary, whose name was Helmut Brandt and who was much more than a mere apothecary despite his unprepossessing dress and churlish manner, showed me on a map the seven gateways of entry. And the archbishop himself told me about the sorcery employed to enable Endrimor’s agents to come to do their calamitous dabbling with the destiny of earthly kingdoms.
Hieronymus Slee was either alchemist or physician, depending, Brandt said, on the tavern rumour to which you lent most weight. It was not a matter of great concern. What he certainly was, was the devil who had inflicted the Great Pestilence upon the world. He had created and nurtured the infection on Endrimor and delivered it to Russia, from where it had spread. Brandt’s part in his subsequent pursuit was a matter that remained unexplained to me. French and Germanic agents too had hunted Slee but he had eluded them and returned to the mirror-world. The detail of the chase was unimportant. Significant only was the fact of his escape.
‘Do they seek our extermination? Is it their ambition to expunge us from the earth?’
The Archbishop answered me. ‘They seek to replace us, to usurp us and rob us of our rightful destiny. That is what we think. They seek to reach a tipping point where our spirit is defeated and we descend into chaos; faithless, barbaric and without hope.’
I think my masters chose wisely, when they chose me for the pursuit of Slee to his homeland. I say that not out of consideration for my own martial skills. Nor do I say it because my gateway was close enough to England, a short sea voyage to the desolate coast of Norway.
I say it because the quest offered me an opportunity to exact personal vengeance, absolved of the sin that doing so would usually inflict upon a man’s soul. The Archbishop was quite clear on that. A man guilty of Slee’s calamitous offence would find no favour with God. There could be no forgiveness.
Endrimor had declared war upon the world and all its peoples. He had put himself beyond salvation. I would find him and kill him in a state of grace. He would meet his death deservedly.
I duly met the men chosen to accompany me on the quest. All of them were familiar to me, veterans of the war against the French, a ferocious company in truth, twelve common soldiers of uncommon skill and spirit. They were gathered in a tent to the rear of the abbey and I was struck again by the grave secrecy surrounding our endeavour.
There were two men missing from the company whom I would have welcomed at my side and I requested them. They were John Ball of Ormskirk and Daniel Rimmer of York, and I confessed to the king that I would be glad of two such steadfast fighters among our party if they could be summoned to meet me in the port of Hull for the voyage.
The king looked at the ground. When he spoke his voice was hushed and his tone marked by humility. ‘We sent for both,’ he said. ‘But both are dead, victims of the pestilence. It has taken its toll on our beloved kingdom, Robert. Of the twenty men we summoned only these twelve remained alive to answer the call. We have assembled the best company these grievous times allow.’
‘Majesty, you have honoured me with a party of great strength and enterprise,’ I said. I knelt before him and he offered me his hand and I kissed the ring that bears his seal of office. Then I rose and addressed the men. All of them knew me. They would follow me. I had their respect and through our various campaigns together had long justified their faith.
I spent the night in vigil in the lady chapel of the abbey church alone. I spoke to my wife and daughter and prayed to the Almighty for the safe-keeping of my son. I knelt before the altar till dawn and then buckled on my armour and sortied fiercely for better than an hour among the company.
The swordsmanship of common men so often lacks the quality of finesse, but these are the best in the land, skilled and cunning and veteran fighters. The matches were spirited, their mood ebullient, no quarter given so that at the finish all were bruised and some bloody and my own shield cracked and put beyond practical use.
A stream runs through the abbey grounds and the water was
clear and cold. We bathed in it to ease the heat and abrasions of combat while our discarded arms glittered in sunlight on the deep green grass and the patrolling men of the king’s bodyguard smiled and signalled their appreciation at the spectacle put on for them by our practice. After a hearty breakfast we mounted for the ride to Hull and the start of our strange and clandestine mission of retribution.
We rode hard north-east to Hull through the empty land. Four days it took us to reach our destination. During that time I learned that each of my cut-throats was a devout believer and that each of them had sworn before the archbishop with his right hand resting on the Holy Book that he would never disclose the particulars of our incursion into the mirror world.
A mounted escort awaited us at Hull. We were obliged to tarry on the outskirts of the port while we waited for darkness to descend. Then we clattered forth unseen with the smell of the sea growing stronger in the scouring easterly wind. There was under this wind a strong swell. The waves wore white edgings like fine lace filigrees in the starlight. I was glad the night was clear. The crew was made up of Hanover sailors and they knew the waters through which we would voyage from their constant trade with the Norse Men. But horses are nervous of storms and the swell alone would make them uneasy and skittish in their hold.
We cast off. My spirits were as buoyant as was our sturdy craft. It came to me again how black had been my humour over recent months since the pestilent deaths of my wife and daughter. And it occurred to me once more that Slee’s scheme had come very close to achieving the victory over hope that it had been intended to.
As the lights of Hull dwindled at our stern I thought of the final thing the king had said to me when we supped with the alchemist and the archbishop in the gloomy confinement of that cell at the abbey. I had asked should I not bring Slee back to face a court of retribution and the torture which his foul actions had so certainly deserved. But the king would have none of it. He said that to achieve my confrontation with Slee I would need to inveigle my way into the inner court of their king.