Medi-Evil 1

by Paul Finch

  Kingsley deflected one wild thrust, and cut the jailer across his neck, but Morgeth continued to attack like an enraged animal. His point found Kingsley’s chest, but though it punctured the leather and sheepskin, it lacked the force to penetrate the steel mesh. Kingsley smashed the blade down with his sword, and drove in with his dagger – it plunged to the hilt in Morgeth’s stomach – before twisting it and yanking it upwards, ripping meat and muscle alike. Boiling blood flowed out over his hand. The jailer’s eyes started from his burning-red face. Kingsley released the dagger and backed away. With a gargling gasp, Morgeth sank to his knees, before pitching forward onto the flagstones.

  Ratcliffe, a skilled swordsman but no match for the trained Urmston, realised the game was up. Already bearing bloody slashes across his hands, arms and face, he cut and thrust at his opponent, driving him two steps back, then turned and fled through the sacristy door. Urmston took a second to regain his breath, and followed, the panting Kingsley close at his heels. They hurried along a dark passage, which wound behind the back of the altar and fed them out into a snow-filled graveyard. Night was falling, but Ratcliffe’s trail was clearly visible: bright drops of blood interspersed with deep, sliding footprints. He was evidently trying to weave his way through the headstones towards the distant wrought-iron gate. This appeared to be his ploy, but Urmston and his servant pursued carefully; at any moment the madman could leap out and ambush them.

  However, Reginald Ratcliffe, Constable of the Tower, Custodian of Royal Prisoners, would not be leaping at anybody ever again.

  They rounded the next corner, and found him prostrate in the snow, his weapons discarded, a red stain spreading in his fluffy white hair. Over him crouched an ape-like shadow. Urmston and Kingsley slowed to a halt, at first unsure what this new horror was. The ape-thing rose to full height, shouldered its nobbled club – and came forward through the swirling flakes. Immediately they recognised the thick black beard and wicked little eyes of Jack Cutter, ruffian of The Black Prince.

  “Better late than never,” Urmston said.

  The footpad shrugged. “I got your message, but I had to take my father home before I could come.”

  “It was a timely intervention, all the same.”

  Cutter kicked at the prone body. “So this is the dreaded Flibbertigibbet, eh?”

  “One half of him,” Urmston replied.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does he?”

  “They never do.” Urmston wiped down his rapier with a piece of rag. “Think you can carry him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’d suggest you take him to the Tower, but the Marshalsea Prison is closer. Bind him, carry him there, and present him to the warden with this note.” Urmston handed over a letter. “It will fully explain the order of events.”

  The ruffian took it, but looked uncertain. “You sure there’s money in this for me?”

  “You’re not stupid, Cutter. You know as well as I do, there’s a five-hundred pound reward.”

  “And I won’t have to split it with you?”

  “We’re paid officers of the Crown. We don’t get rewards.”

  Kingsley had listened to this exchange with growing disbelief. Now he intervened. “My lord … this is intolerable! This cut-throat will be a rich man by midnight tonight!”

  Urmston watched Cutter grab up the lifeless shape of Ratcliffe, throw it over his brawny shoulder and work his way out through the gravestones. “At least his limbless father will benefit.”

  “But Cutter’s a villain!” Kingsley said. “He doesn’t deserve it!”

  Urmston smiled to himself. “I know.”

  Kingsley shook his head, perplexed. “My lord, why didn’t you just summon the Watch … have them assist us? At least we’d have saved the State Department five-hundred pounds!”

  Urmston shook his head. “No, this way is better. This way we get to see Lord Walsingham’s face when he has to hand over the purse.”

  THE GODS OF GREEN AND GREY

  It was a drowned landscape … a great plain of silt-dark water, stretching from horizon to horizon, stippled by a maze-work of muddy dykes and emerald swathes of reed-bed. At first glance, the mackerel sky arching over it seemed colossal and empty, though in reality it was filled, flocks of wild-fowl – geese, ducks and plover – skirting the salt-smelling estuaries or soaring high and wide, the wetland wilderness alive with their cries. At the surface, there was equal activity: otters chased each other across the slow waterways; glittering blue dragonflies hummed back and forth through the bogbean and white willow; herons waded the shorelines, bitterns boomed in the sedge and marsh-fern. Everywhere one listened, there was a frantic warbling and chattering.

  Decimus optio Livius stood at the prow of the rush-raft, and surveyed it all uncomfortably. He was a young man, Livius, but a lean and ambitious one. He had keen plans to rise through the ranks, and to do that, he knew he had a key role to play in this great ‘taming of Britain’, as his commanding officers had called it. That meant more than just taming the people; it meant taming the land as well … though to manage that here would surely take more legionaries than the eight he currently had. He turned to view them; for comfort, the four on this first raft had removed their helmets and stripped down to their scarlet under-tunics, but were still poling strongly, talking idly and enjoying the unaccustomed relaxation. This was much the case with those four on the second raft, though their cargo of timber and cattle-hides was heavier, and they had to work that little bit harder.

  Livius wasn’t concerned by that. Work was good; work kept his men alert and in the trim. He gazed ahead again, and a moment later was joined by Marcus Ursus, the engineer from Londinium.

  “You told me,” Livius said, “that this place was like Elysium.”

  Ursus, an older, squatter man, with a head of white hair and lined, sun-bronzed skin, could only smile. “A garden of a thousand delights but also a thousand perils.”

  “And as if that isn’t enough, I hear our guide will be an Iceni?”

  Ursus nodded. “That is true.”

  It was seventy-two years since Boudicca’s revolt, but Livius still found this unsettling. “Are you sure you trust him?”

  The old engineer shrugged. “It’s a case of needs-must. Nobody knows these northern fens like the Iceni.”

  “That isn’t very reassuring.”

  Ursus took a sip from his cup of watered wine. “Reassurance isn’t part of my remit. I’m here to draw maps and build causeways. You’re the one who provides the muscle.”

  The soldier considered. A fantastically coloured butterfly fluttered past. Beyond it, the labyrinthine broads gleamed and rippled in the June sun. Livius took off his helmet and mopped a sheen of sweat from his brow. He’d served in warmer climes than this, but there was something lush and exotic about Britain in the summer-time. Profusions of flowers seemed to break out overnight, the undergrowth grew dense and impenetrable, the air swam moist and heady with pollen. Of course, these marshes were alien territory even by those standards.

  “What do you know of this region?” the soldier asked.

  “Largely uninhabited, from what I’m told.”

  “Largely?”

  “Well … no-one knows for certain. We’ve never been this far into it. The natives aren’t overly fond of it either. They can’t farm anything out here; the footing’s too treacherous for organised hunting. And then there are the sea-frets.”

  Livius glanced around. “Sea-frets?”

  The engineer sipped his drink. “Yes. A warm fog that blows up from nowhere. I’ve seen it once or twice, myself. It’s quite shocking actually. You literally can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

  “I’m liking this less and less.”

  Ursus smiled. “I shouldn’t worry too much. The main danger out here is getting lost. You definitely need guides … these marshes are totally trackless.”

  “How much land do they cover?”

  “Hundred upon hundreds of squ
are miles,” Ursus said. “From Camulodunum to Venta Icenorum and beyond. From Verulamium to the sea itself. The whole of the east country, at a guess.”

  “Incredible,” the soldier replied. “And most inconvenient.”

  Ursus gave a sly chuckle. “Which is why Emperor Hadrian, in his divine wisdom, requires them to be drained, I should imagine.”

  Livius shook his head wearily, envisaging toilsome years of slogging through the morass, digging ditches, driving in piles … mired in a misty backwater at the edge of the known world. “Quite a post I’ve landed myself.”

  “Anything’s preferable to the barrack-blocks at Glevum, surely?”

  Livius snorted. “You’re joking, I trust? The Twentieth Legion is merriment all the way compared to what I’m seeing here.”

  Ursus chuckled again, then threw the dregs of his wine into the water. “You wait ’til the sea-frets come, my friend. Then you’ll have reason to complain.”

  *

  It was early evening when they arrived at the engineering base-camp but still light enough for Livius and his men to see how Marcus Ursus intended to build his network of footways through the bogs. Two rocky islets perhaps twenty-five Roman paces apart – each pace two natural steps – had already been linked together; the causeway connecting them was made from lengths of timber, squared and trimmed into smooth boards, then laid over sealed and inflated cattle-hides.

  “Ingenious,” said Livius. “A floating bridge.”

  “It’s the only way,” Ursus replied. “I think of them as anchored rafts rather than bridges.”

  “How much weight can they bear?”

  “A man on horseback could pass over them with minimum difficulty, so long as buoyancy is retained. But if it came to moving artillery or heavy wagons … then we might have a problem.”

  Several tents had already been erected on Terra Venus … the closer of the two islands, and large quantities of materials and tools were laid out on sheets of canvas. A small group of men waited there as Livius and his party came ashore. They were civilians, like Ursus, but unlike him they were Britons. To some extent they had been Romanised – almost as one, they had cut their thick red hair square at the shoulder and carried hammers and chisels at their belts rather than weapons – but they still sported heavy moustaches, wore basic rough-woven clothes, and bore tribal tattoos on their brawny arms.

  “Relax,” said Ursus, sensing the optio tense beside him. “They’re Trinovantes … they’ve long been loyal to us. In any case, these men are farmers … in need of land. They stand to gain if we start to drain the wetlands. They’ve already been a great help to me.”

  “And what of our infamous Iceni scout?” Livius wondered.

  “He’s there,” said Ursus, pointing out a solitary figure walking over the causeway from the second islet. “His name’s Jusci. I wouldn’t antagonise him, Livius. From this point on, we’re entirely in his hands.”

  Livius watched the figure approach. True, Boudicca was a name now barely spoken, but the conflagration which she and her Iceni had touched off had snuffed out fifty-thousand Roman lives. Livius would never forget some of the stories he’d been told: how Londinium and Camulodunum had been sacked and burned, and the occupants butchered where they lay or dragged out and crucified on trees; how at the instigation of the druids, Roman women had been singled out for particular cruelty, being raped, then having their breasts cut off before being impaled on spears thrust upwards through their vaginas. Such tales brought shudders even now. Livius’s eyes narrowed as the Iceni scout, Jusci, came towards them.

  Compared to the Trinovant farmers, he was short and stocky, but he was still clad in the barbarous fashion of his ancestors – naked from the waist up, wearing leather breeks and boots of fur cross-strapped almost to the thigh. His chest and shoulders were covered with fantastic blue patterns. His hair was greasy and blood-red and fell past his shoulders in thick, rope-like braids. Apart from the obligatory British moustache, he was clean-shaven, but the eyes under his heavy brow were small and cold, like chips of jade, and they regarded the Romans with an eerie mixture of amusement and contempt.

  Ursus introduced the two men. Jusci nodded. Livius said nothing. Behind him, the officer could sense the unease spreading through his ranks. One or two of them were hoary old veterans … they had actually served with men who remembered Boudicca’s outrages. None of them would sleep comfortably knowing they were reliant on a creature like this.

  “Suetonius should have killed their entire tribe,” said Livius later on, as his men and the farmers began to unload their equipment and provisions.

  “He killed enough of them,” Ursus quietly replied. “Besides, if he had done, who would guide us from this point on?”

  From the outset, the optio had not been pleased by the prospect of working with a civilian – a civic engineer at that – who doubtless was more used to chartering his workers’ rights and negotiating pay settlements than getting on with the job at hand. And now the older man’s apparent indifference to the atrocities of the past and his willingness to treat this conquered people as something like equals was starting to aggravate things.

  “What exactly is the plan?” the soldier curtly asked.

  Ursus beckoned him over to a small table, where measuring-tools were laid out alongside a crude map. It depicted a vast area of emptiness. Only in its bottom left-hand corner had any sketches been made, and these were little more to Livius than rough outlines of islands, various calculations scribbled higgledy-piggledly around them.

  “This is the area I’ve covered so far,” the engineer explained. “It’s so small as to be insignificant. Now that you are with me, I hope to make better progress. I intend to place our main centre of operations on a good-sized hummock of land which we’ve called Terra Mars. I haven’t mapped it yet, but it’s half a day from here and it’s as far into the fens as we, or any other Roman has ever been.” He paused to think. “I wouldn’t have got that far without the assistance of Jusci.”

  “When were you last there?” Livius asked, determined that as little credit as possible would be given to the Iceni.

  “Five days ago,” Ursus said. “It was a probing mission, nothing more. Jusci was the one who suggested it actually. Terra Mars is large and quite central to the lower reaches of the fens, so for our purposes it would make an ideal jumping-off point. I left my apprentice, Castor, to make preparations. He’s a good man, and he has two hardworking slaves with him. I think you’ll find you and your men can start building the camp as soon as we arrive.”

  Livius nodded. The sooner the better, as far as he was concerned. He felt hemmed in by the encircling stretches of fen, now glimmering green and gold in the setting sun. Work would take his mind off the feeling of vulnerability already niggling at him.

  *

  That night, they placed scented torches around the island to ward off mosquitoes and other biting insects, then settled down around two peat fires, the Britons in one group, the Romans in another. Livius and Ursus sat some distance away from the rest, sharing a wineskin and a mutton joint. Not directly beside the fire, they found it necessary to throw cloaks over their shoulders. This was one of the big differences between Britain and the Mediterranean lands where most Roman citizens had been born. Summer days up here might be flowery and sun-soaked, but when darkness fell, the chill mists rose, and suddenly it was easy to remember that you were far, far to the north.

  “Tell me,” Ursus said. “Why were you sent on this assignment? Did you make a mess of something?”

  Livius took a sip of wine, then half-smiled. “Believe it or not, I volunteered.”

  “Volunteered?”

  The soldier nodded. “Many in the Twentieth enjoy being garrisoned at Glevum. But I don’t. In fact, Britain itself is a mite too settled for me. The army’s my life, and I intend to get on in it. Of course, I’m no aristocrat. To make a favourable impression I need to see action.”

  The engineer ate a piece of mutton. “I’m not s
ure there’s much action we can offer you out here.”

  “I quite agree. But it was a job nobody seemed to want. I thought why not put myself forward? It would bring my name to the attention of the prefect.”

  Ursus chuckled. “Well, I wish every soldier in Rome’s armies was as eager to build.” It was a common gripe among engineers that, though soldiers provided the most organised and disciplined and therefore ideal labour with which to construct bridges and fortifications, it was a task the common legionary utterly despised. “So … you haven’t seen any fighting at all?”

  Livius stiffened slightly, as if this was a sore point with him. “Not so far. Last year, three cohorts of the Twentieth were despatched with Severus to Palestine, to help quell the Jewish revolt. A month later, two more went north for roster duties on the Emperor’s new wall. In both cases I was overlooked because of my inexperience. I don’t understand how a soldier is to gain that experience if he is not at some stage put into the front line.”

  Ursus eyed him carefully. From the outset, the young officer had seemed uptight. The engineer had put this down to his extreme youth, but now he saw something else as well. An insecurity, perhaps; a burgeoning need of the soldier to prove that he could do his demanding job, because perhaps deep down, he had the secret worry that he couldn’t. This wasn’t exactly cheering, but eventually Ursus laid it to one side. Thus far the young man had seemed efficient, and at least part of his problem was the common naivety of that peculiar creature … the military idealist.

  “My father was an army man, you know,” the engineer finally said. “A centurion in the Fourteenth. Fought against the druids on the Devil’s Isle, and against Boudicca herself at Mancetter. Given the choice with hindsight, I’m not sure he’d have rushed to be involved in those battles.”