by F. G. Cottam
My force now numbered six. It seemed expedient to go our separate ways. The carnage of the ambush could be neither concealed nor locally blamed, since the bodies of two of my men still lay at the scene as proof both of intrusion and hostile intent. The hunt for us was inevitable. We would be far more conspicuous prey travelling as a single company.
I told my men that they should try to return to the portal from which we had entered the shadow world. I would pursue my quest of vengeance alone. Their prospects of survival and escape were bleak, but none showed it in his face. I swore I would enrich any surviving man on my own return from the proceeds of my own treasure house. Plunder and reward had made me very wealthy and this was no idle boast. Alas, it was a promise that fate denied me honouring.
The attack upon my modest and reduced camp came an hour after I took farewell of my men. I had loosened the bonds securing my prisoner but with no common language between us had not established the terms necessary to release her from the confinement of the ropes binding her hands and feet. I was in the act of raising a cup of fresh water to her lips when she gave vent to a startled cry that warned me of assault.
They were three in number and had approached with not a sound, and their nimble footwork as they fought demonstrated how they were able to glide across the ground in near silence. They feathered the turf with their feet, and their mastery of weapons was prodigiously skilled. I was armed with my sword only.
It is difficult to fend off three without the play of a shield or the distraction of a dagger in your free hand. But these people had contrived the killing of my wife and daughter and they could not match the fury with which I subsequently fought. When I look back now, it is hard not to see myself then as a man possessed by my appetite for revenge. Certainly my anger lent my sword arm terrible strength.
I killed the tallest with an upward backhand stroke that entered his right side between the ribs and cleaved his heart in two. The second I ran through as his one surviving ally, to my astonishment, turned and tried to kill the woman as she knelt bound and helpless on the ground. In the last act of the encounter I pulled free my blade of his companion’s flesh and took off his head with a lunging sweep that drenched my poor prisoner in gore. That said, the stroke saved her life, for he had his sword point at her throat and would surely have slain her.
She remained composed. Her tranquillity in the face of blood and murder was almost as astonishing a detail to me as the fact of the attack attempted upon her person. And then the third detail occurred which, of that day’s turbulent events, has stayed most vivid in my memory. She spoke Latin to me and in the manner of a woman both modest and gentle. But the inference of her words was ruthless and cruel. She asked me if she was destined to be sold, or sacrificed. Or merely violated, she said.
I untied her, then. I unsheathed a dagger from the belt of the headless corpse at her feet and freed her from bondage. I told her I was not from Endrimor and from the subtle expression of her smile I saw that she had concluded this already. She had knowledge of the two opposing worlds.
‘More men will be sent,’ she said.
‘I will be ready.’ It was the simple truth.
‘They will know you are formidable when these three do not return. We have a day or two’s grace, I would say. Sit down and tell me why you have come to this awful kingdom. I can see from your face and know from your actions that you are noble. Tell me what business summoned you from earth.’
I told her nothing at first. There was a smell of the charnel house about that bloody pasture and so I insisted we leave the spot. We rode a dozen miles or so away from there with her before me astride my horse. Only when the faithful beast grew plodding and fatigued did we eventually stop. Then I asked her about herself. Firstly she told me her name, Eleanor Bloor. Then she told me about the circumstances of her travel at the time my men interrupted the progress of her caravan that morning.
She had been sold into marriage, a reluctant bride. Her hand in this union was the price of an accord between her father and a rival landowner who had long gained the upper hand in their bitter neighbourly feud. Though I said nothing, her account made me wonder what prize her father could have lost that he held to be of greater value than this most handsome and dignified daughter.
‘You have not explained why that man tried to kill you.’
‘They were assassins. Killing is what assassins do. I warned you of their presence when you pressed the drinking cup to my lips and so they failed. He tried to kill me because I warned you of them.’
‘Was not your rescue the point of their presence there?’
‘No one yet knows of my absence. Not my father, not the man to whom I am betrothed. Those men were there for you, not me. They were killers marked for the cross, men deprived of their tongues lest tortured if discovered. I do not know for certain, but I am sure that’s what they were.
‘They were seeking you. They came from the court of the Crimson King. They did not accord you the merit your strength at arms deserves. But if they cannot kill you with steel, they will resort to magick. Travelling north is no strategy for eluding them. They will pursue you to the very border of the Kingdom of Parasites, where awaits a worse death even than the one they would inflict upon you.’
‘I do not seek escape, Eleanor Bloor,’ I said. And then I told her truthfully of my mission and my strategy for its eventual accomplishment.
‘I can help you pass,’ she said. ‘It will take time for you to learn the language and the customs. You might disguise yourself by growing your hair and beard. You can be costumed in the trappings of the court. If you are clever and brave enough, it might be accomplished. Already I think that you have the courage for the task.’
‘Why would you help me?’
She was silent after I put this question to her for such a long moment that I did not think she was going to reply to it at all. ‘We can assist one another,’ she said eventually. ‘We can hold one another to a bargain of sorts. I wish for my father and my intended husband to think me dead.
‘We shall travel north together. I will not go further than the forest that guards the Parasitic Kingdom. I will not venture to where the Miasmic Sea laps at the edge of the land with the lure of enchantment. But while we travel, you will be my escort and guardian and I will be your teacher.’ She laughed then, a liquid sound, the sweet splash of a pebble in a brook. ‘And nobody shall know of our arrangement.’
‘Why would you help me? Is to do so not treasonous?’
‘I am one of those who would like to pass to earth,’ she said, ‘and not for the purpose of assassination.’ She looked wistful. ‘We cannot choose our worlds. But we can choose in ourselves those virtues to which we are loyal.’
‘Where did you learn to speak and comprehend Latin?’
‘It was my father’s secret indulgence when I was the child for whom he still cared. It is a crime to learn earthly tongues on Endrimor. Though of course, most of the court is fluent in your principle languages.’
‘Who taught you?’
‘Someone killed since for the crime of the teaching. You may have passed him on your journey. He hangs from one of the crosses. A parchment above his nailed feet declares the nature of his offence.’
‘I could not have read it. I lack the knowledge.’
‘Knowledge I will give to you.’ She stood. We had been seated on the ground. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let me bathe and dress your wounds.’
‘They are merely flesh wounds,’ I said.
‘No, they are not. I felt you wince behind me in the saddle as we rode. Let me help heal them.’
‘Can you accomplish magick?’
She paused. ‘It would do you more harm eventually than good. It would not be worth the price you would be obliged, when your time finally comes, to pay for its assistance.’
I had only said what I had in jest but could see she was entirely serious. She looked around at the fertile land about us. ‘I shall make you poultices from herbs,’ she s
aid. ‘The pain will lessen once they are applied and the healing will begin. Have you lost much blood?’
‘Other encounters have cost me more.’
‘Men,’ she said. And she laughed again. ‘In some ways you are all the same.’
Jane Dobb stopped reading. She was forced to, because she had come to the end of the new pages Grayling had provided them with. ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this to us again,’ she said. ‘Talk about dragging it out.’
‘I want to know you are taking from it what you should,’ Grayling said. ‘I need to know that you appreciate the implications and importance of this material. It is a primary source.’
‘De Morey speaks with an authentic voice,’ Adam said. ‘You just don’t get that contrast between brutality and grace in the modern character. He’s hacked six people to death so far but he’s so lonely and traumatized by his own grief, he’s on the point of becoming besotted with a woman he’s taking totally at face value.’
‘God, you sound exactly like Martin would,’ Jane said. ‘Eleanor Bloor was obviously principled and intelligent and totally deprived of the independence she craved by the feudal circumstances in which she was trapped.’
‘Her surname is intriguing,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll give you that.’
Grayling said, ‘De Morey was raised according to the chivalric code. It did not give him a great deal of choice in the way he behaved towards a woman of noble birth such as Eleanor was.’
‘That’s a fair point,’ Jane admitted.
Adam nodded his head vigorously.
Grayling raised an eyebrow. ‘Having said which, he does seem to have fallen rather hard for her.’
All three of them were silent. Then Adam said, ‘Are you both familiar with the term ring-rust?’
‘It sounds vaguely obscene,’ Jane said.
Grayling said, ‘It sounds self-explanatory to me. What’s your point?’
‘King Edward could not conceivably have committed a large force to this mission of retribution. He couldn’t spare the soldiers. The plague would have depleted the army as much as any other sector of society and besides, England had a war with France to prosecute. So he sends a champion, probably the best he’s got excluding his own son.’
‘I wondered that. I wondered if he ever thought about sending the Black Prince,’ Jane said.
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘He needed Woodstock’s generalship for the war with France. He was not available.’
‘Good,’ Grayling said. ‘You show signs of having a brain after all. Go on.’
‘The warriors of Endrimor are physically bigger than their opponents from earth. They are very skilled with the weapons of the period. And yet they’re bested by de Morey. That’s where my ring-rust theory comes in. You can spar as many rounds as you like in the gym, but you’re doing it in eighteen-ounce pillowcases compared to the six- or eight-ounce gloves laced on to your fists for a fight. Impact, timing, urgency, spiteful intent – everything is different. There’s no substitute for the real thing and de Morey and his company were battle-hardened.
‘My point really is about the effect on Endrimor their apparent invincibility must have had, so soon after the Black Death and earth coming so close to complete breakdown. The shock of de Morey’s victories against them must have been seismic. They must have shaken even the court in Salabra.’
‘In the scheme of things they are very small victories.’
‘Not symbolically, they’re not, Professor.’
‘You are assuming efficient lines of communication.’
‘In a place so authoritarian that criminals were publicly crucified on a mass scale? I’m assuming some kind of network of spies and informers. They would have found out and put two and two together.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Grayling. ‘De Morey’s progress would have shocked them.’
‘Can we read the rest of it?’
‘I’ll fetch the pages for you now, Jane.’ He frowned. ‘By the way, has anyone seen Martin Prior? He seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet.’
NINE
I took my leave of Eleanor Bloor after three months and I confess with a sorrowful sense of loss. We resided for most of that time in a modest hut at the heart of a forest close to the Kingdom of Parasites. I felt we were safest in the great northern wood of all places while I practiced the craft that would allow me to pass undetected into Salabra and the court of the capering despot the land we do not dare name endures as its king.
We ate what we could catch and the bounty was plentiful. We caught game with traps such as the keeper on my father’s estates taught me to make for amusement when I was a boy. I fashioned a bow from a branch of a tree similar to yew in its properties and Eleanor Bloor proved to be a most excellent shot, once I had made and flighted arrows and schooled her in the weapon’s use.
Elsewhere, she did the teaching as she made me conversant and then fluent in the language I aspired to learn from her. It somewhat resembled Greek in its grammar and was not arduous to master fully. English possesses many words because the English are so passionate about speech. They are countless, growing all the time, filched from other tongues or merely invented. This language, by contrast, contained a paucity of them.
The great bird I had heard in the night when I travelled with my lamented company I learned was called a Vorp. They are carnivores and kill and mutilate for sport. They are avian monsters, in truth, as I earlier speculated.
A skilled and bold rider might kill one with a lance, blessed with great good fortune on the open plain. But they are predator, not prey. They did not frequent the forest, where the vast span of their stinking wings means they cannot practically put down to kill. So we were spared their rapacious sound in the nights.
We saw no men in the forest, either. The legend of the parasites deters them, Eleanor told me. Men of Endrimor will not willingly pass so close to the border with the Parasitic Kingdom and the dark fate awaiting them should they be taken there.
She assured me the legend was true, and once or twice at twilight I felt the velvet chill of one watched from seclusion and knew I was not abroad in the forest alone. But we did not stray out after darkness fell, and the fire was kept brightly stoked and fierce till morning with burning embers. I slept with my sword laid beside me, always vigilant to attack.
I wondered often at the truth of why they had not followed me. The legend of parasites seemed insufficient reason, however loathsome those creatures if they existed at all.
I felt that some or all the men of my company to whom I had been obliged to bid farewell, would have been captured since and put to the torture. They knew of only the one gateway leading home. Even if any of them should have reached it, it would surely have been guarded in even greater strength than before. They had not known of the nature of my mission but would have been pressed into surrendering the name of the man who led them.
‘They might think you dead,’ Eleanor said when I pondered this question aloud. ‘You left behind the corpse of the man wounded in taking me. You left two dead at the scene of the taking.’
‘Commoners,’ I said, ‘leaders neither in aspect nor dress. They would not have been mistaken for someone born gentle.’
‘They might still think you dead,’ she insisted. ‘You were sorely injured in the affray with the assassins. They might think you died subsequently of your wounds.’
‘But I did not, thanks to you,’ I said.
Her modesty caused her to bow her head and blush at this compliment but I had only said what both of us knew to be true. Thanks to her ministrations I felt stronger than before the infliction of my injuries.
‘They will wait for you,’ she said. ‘They are watchful and implacable and they are patient.’
‘They are patient, madam? They do not seem so in the field.’
‘They have the luxury of time, Robert. Their mortal span is above that which a man can expect to enjoy on earth. Where you are concerned, time is on their side.’
> I nodded. The time had come and both of us knew it. My hair and beard had grown to make me unrecognizable to all but a few of my intimates. I carried a sword weal across my cheekbone that had not been there before. Few alive on earth but my son and perhaps my king would have known me at once, without shrewd study.
And I spoke the language I had come to learn fluently. I could think and sometimes even dreamed in it. The time had come and it was a moment thick with melancholy because it signified our parting.
She could travel no distance beyond the forest outskirts with me. Capture with me on the route to Salabra was too great and foolhardy a risk. It would lead to her crucifixion. I was confident I could pass but there was no guarantee of it. She was safer alone. In open ground, her expertise with the bow would deter any hostile approach. She had become a most accurate shot and I did not doubt had the fortitude to kill a man if necessary. Moreover, Endrimor was not England, hazardous with outlaws and banditry. The crucifixions deterred such petty acts of crime; Eleanor had told me so herself.
I escorted her to the edge of the forest and there took my leave of her. She had given me much to be grateful for. She had healed me and taught me and blessed me with her companionship. I would spend one more night in our modest accommodation and then in the morning take the route south myself.
I would be on foot, having gifted Eleanor my horse. I had buried my helm and shield and my armour too. I had kept only my sword to remind me of my true nature and status in the world from which I came. It was enough. I had not forgotten my purpose and would accomplish it now or die attempting to do so.
‘This isn’t ringing true,’ Jane said. ‘Where are you up to?’
‘He’s sleeping with his sword in their shelter in the forest,’ Adam said.
‘God, you’re a slow reader.’