The monarchy had all sorts of hereditary and appointed offices, many of which were really cabinet members—the Lord High Treasurer, for instance, or the Lord High Chancellor. Clare, Bohun, Mortimer, Callum, and Carew all had their places. They didn’t serve in the royal household, however—though if the king was awake at two in the morning, certain companions might show up. As King of England, I had remarkably little authority over my own household, and whenever I tried to change these kinds of details, I only ended up hurting the feelings of the people whose job it was to be awake. I felt guilty about waking the castle, but not enough to return to bed.
At least I’d managed to dress myself without Jeeves, my manservant, but even as I thought that, Jeeves hustled down the hall towards me, straightening his soft hat. “Sire.” He bowed deeply. “What do you require?”
“I require you to go back to sleep,” I said. “How am I to trust your assessment of my attire if I know you’re operating on half a night’s sleep?”
“My lord—”
“Go, Jeeves. I’m fine. Just off to do a little paperwork.”
“Yes, sire.” Jeeves bowed and backed away. I hoped he would actually sleep, but more likely he’d lie down fully dressed to await events.
The square keep of Canterbury Castle stood six stories high, with towers on the corners adding the last level to the battlement. The exterior was all stone, but the interior was constructed in wood, which made the whole structure far more comfortable than it would have been had the castle been built all in stone. The corridors and stairs were built inside the eleven-foot-thick walls, allowing passage from room to room. The toilets (sometimes called garderobes) were in the walls too, accessible usually by an offset hallway in an attempt keep the smell contained and discourage it from wafting into the corridors.
Great wooden beams supported each ceiling and floor above. The bottom floor contained the kitchen and storage areas. Next up was the great hall, which took up almost the whole of the level, but also included my receiving room/office for smaller gatherings, in which I met my advisers throughout the day. Above that were the apartments of lords such as Callum and Ieuan. Then came a whole floor devoted to my needs, though Ieuan and Bronwen, with their small daughter, Catrin, had a room there too. And above that were more apartments and quarters.
The stone stairways were in circular towers on opposite corners of each floor. They spiraled down to the right, so if an invader was moving up towards me, he’d have to fight me left-handed. Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem today, and I met no opposition as I went down the steps to my office. When I reached the next level down, however, I glanced into the corridor to see three men of the garrison in heated conversation halfway along it. It was dark in the stairwell, so they didn’t notice me right away, but when the conversation continued, and after a moment included the words, ‘wake Lord Ieuan,’ I revealed myself and came forward. “Is there a problem?”
The eyes of the guard closest to me bugged out. “S-s-sire!” All three men stiffened to attention, bowed, and stiffened again as if unable to decide which form of obeisance was most appropriate when caught unawares at two in the morning in a corridor with the King of England.
These men belonged to Canterbury’s garrison, and I didn’t recognize any of them. Still, I canted my head, waiting for an answer. After a few seconds’ pause, one of the other guards, a young man of perhaps twenty, spoke up. “I noticed an unusual light coming from the toilet just now. We were wondering if we should wake someone to inspect it.”
“What’s your name?”
“George, sire.”
“Unusual how?” I said, though I hadn’t ever seen a medieval toilet with any light coming from it at all unless someone had left a candle burning in a sconce. I thought back to the Spiderman nightlight that had been plugged in above the sink in my bathroom back in Oregon. Even after I’d repainted my bedroom and bath orange at the age of thirteen to reflect the loyalties of my new teenage self, I’d left the nightlight in the socket.
“Well—” The soldier glanced at each of his companions, neither of whom gave him any help. “There’s a … a … glow coming up the shaft.”
“Show me,” I said.
George turned smartly on his heel and paced away down the corridor towards the far end. He took me first to the guard room that marked the corner of the keep, and then through it to the toilet.
Medieval latrines varied in quality and cleanliness. My sister, Anna, had a thing about them, and designing a better toilet had been a quest of hers. The best simple latrines consisted of a small room with one or two wooden toilet seats, which wouldn’t have been out of place in any American home, placed over a chute of varying sizes that emptied outside the curtain wall.
The most hygienic and best-smelling ones dropped the waste into a moat or a channel filled with water, which then had a mechanism to move the waste away from the castle. The monastery associated with Canterbury’s cathedral, like other monasteries I’d visited in Wales and England, had an elaborate underground water system with channels and pipes that moved fresh water into the complex and waste water out of it. The monks had built these systems without access to modern concepts of cleanliness or disease. It wasn’t rocket science—just forward thinking and a basic knowledge of hydraulics.
The toilets in this castle, however, were less advanced because the keep wasn’t built into the curtain wall. While the guarderobe looked the same as anywhere—a narrow cubby hole built into the wall of the keep—the toilet shafts consisted of a chute leading to a cesspit below.
“My apologies, sire, but you have to look right inside,” George said, wincing at having to ask.
I peered past the seat to where he was pointing and then, holding in a breath, looked closer. A faint white glow lit the interior of the chute about eighteen inches below the level of the toilet seat. A flashlight would have been better, but I swung around to one of the other soldiers who’d come with us and snapped my fingers at him. “Get me a candle.”
He ran to the nearest sconce on the wall, which held three candles behind a clay shield to block drafts, took out one candle, and brought it to me. Leaning with it into the toilet chute, trying to breathe only through my nose and hoping the flame wouldn’t ignite the methane gases that had built up in the chute from the waste below, I tried to figure out where the light was coming from. Now that I’d brought the candle closer, the glow had diminished in comparison, but it was still there, emanating from a block of clay that had been smushed into the crevices between the stones that made up the toilet shaft.
The light would have been brighter if a layer of the clay hadn’t been inexpertly smeared over it. By the same token, if the clay had been laid on a bit thicker, hiding the light inside the brick, and the toilet had been less engulfed in darkness, nobody would have seen it at all.
Which would have been a disaster beyond imagining.
My heart beating out of my ears, I straightened up, bringing the light with me, and looked at the soldier who’d brought me the candle. “Wake Lord Callum and send him here. Right now.”
“Yes, sire!”
Before the soldier took a step, however, I caught his arm. “And when you’ve done that, wake Lord Bevyn, Lord Carew, and everyone else on the floors above us.”
The man nodded and ran off.
I pointed at George. “Lord Ieuan’s chamber is opposite mine. He will rouse the men of the garrison. Wake him, and then go to my wife and son. It will be your job to get them out of the castle. Tell her ‘Cilmeri’, and she’ll come with you.”
Without cell phones, I’d worried that in times of danger I would almost always have to send a messenger to Lili instead of going myself. ‘Cilmeri’ was the emergency code word Lili and I had chosen.
“Get everyone up: William de Bohun, Arthur’s nanny, Jeeves—all of whom should be sleeping in rooms adjacent to my chamber. Take all of them out of the castle by the wicket gate to St. Mildred’s Church. You know it?”
It was a litt
le church a stone’s throw from the castle. It was the first place that came to mind that was a safe distance away but was also where I could find them easily. The Archbishop’s palace was too far away, and I didn’t want to send them there anyway.
George nodded vigorously, though his brow furrowed. “Cilmeri?”
“She’ll know when you say it that your message came from me.” Cilmeri was the place where my father would have died in an ambush had Anna and I not arrived in my aunt’s minivan to save him. “Everyone must be as quiet as possible. I don’t want anyone outside the castle to know that the alarm has been raised until it’s impossible to hide. Get them out!”
Wide-eyed but obedient, George disappeared. I looked at the last soldier, an older man with white in his beard and calm gray eyes. My urgency was clear, but he gazed at me steadily, awaiting orders.
“We need the whole castle cleared, down to the last man, woman, and child,” I said. “Go first to Sir Thomas in his quarters above the gatehouse. He will wake everyone else. Send the women and children to St. Mildred’s chapel, same as George. Quietly.”
“What about the men?”
“Once they’ve cleared everyone out, they need to get out too. Don’t wait for me or further orders. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
I didn’t think we could avoid a panic, but since I was the only one who knew what the glow in the toilet might be about, I hoped to contain everyone’s fear as long as I could. I didn’t want whoever had put the bomb in the toilet to panic and set it off prematurely. Particularly when I was standing on top of it. Whether or not that was a danger depended on whether the bomb had a timer or could be detonated remotely.
The soldier left, replaced within a few seconds by Callum. “What is it?”
Never in my life had I been more relieved to see anyone than I was to see him in that moment. Callum was the soldier, not me, and I was out of my depth in this.
I directed Callum’s attention to the light shining up from the shaft below the toilet seat. Wordlessly, Callum took the candle from me and, as I had, leaned close so he could look into the chute to see what was causing the glow. “It’s PE-4, what you call C-4.” He kept the tone of his voice completely even. When I’d given the orders to the guards, I’d had to grit my teeth to stop them from chattering so badly I couldn’t speak. Still bent over, Callum turned his head to look up at me. “I can dismantle this right now, but are there more explosives somewhere else? In other toilets perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we have the time to go toilet to toilet, not if whoever planted this here discovers that we’ve found it. It could be set off remotely, right?”
“I think it’s a timer with a digital clock,” Callum said. “This one looks like it came right out of a terrorist’s manual. You can find out how to make one in two minutes on the internet.”
“Last I checked, we have no internet,” I said.
“We do not. Nor C-4.” He glanced at me. “Given the amount of C-4 here, telling you to stand back is perhaps a waste of air, but I’d like you to stand back.”
I obeyed, moving outside the guarderobe itself into the little corridor that led to the main gallery running through the walls of the keep.
“It’s the timer that caused the glow.” Callum’s voice echoed out of the little room. “You can buy ones that don’t light up, but it seems whoever did this didn’t think about that until he put the bomb together. C-4 is quite stable and explodes only when combined with a detonator. It’s the detonator that is set off by an electrical charge, which then sets off the C-4.”
“My God,” I said. It was such a simple arrangement to cause the incredible destruction we were facing if we couldn’t stop it. I peered around the corner again, so I could see him. “Can you make this one safe for now?”
“When it isn’t connected, the detonator is more dangerous than the C-4,” Callum said. “But that isn’t to say—”
He broke off as feet pounded toward us, coming along the corridor. So much for quiet. The older soldier had returned. I stepped out of the doorway into the passage and grabbed his arm. “My family—”
“George woke them. They’re out, and the top floors are cleared.” He looked around the corner to see Callum on his knees, his arm reaching into the toilet chute. “His lordship’s wife went with them. What do you want me to do now?”
Before I could answer, Ieuan arrived, skidding to a halt behind the soldier. “I have done as you ordered. Bevyn is awake and has the evacuation well in hand. Many of your guard are reluctant to leave before you, but they are following orders anyway, particularly once told that you’d sent Lili and Arthur to St. Mildred’s. Why are we doing this?”
“Explosives,” I said. C-4 would mean nothing to him, but he’d seen the effect of gunpowder. Only Callum and I knew that C-4 would result in a much greater explosion than any gunpowder producible in the Middle Ages.
Then Justin appeared at Ieuan’s right shoulder, having brought a half-dozen of my men with him. Any more and I’d have a small army. They ranged down the corridor behind him, ready for whatever threat came at them, though the one we were facing couldn’t be stopped by any of them. Another man I didn’t recognize, slender and stooped, who couldn’t have been more than a few inches over five feet, stood a pace behind Justin, wringing his hands.
“The soldier you sent to me spoke of a glow in the toilet,” Justin said. “I don’t know what this is about, but your urgency infected him to the point that I sent a few men to find out if other toilets in the keep have a glow inside them too. And I found Tom, here, thinking that I would bring him to you to see if he could help. He is one of the men who cleans the latrines.”
This was why I kept Justin around. His initiative had always impressed me. “When was the last time you cleaned this latrine, Tom?” I said.
“Yesterday morning, sire.” Tom’s voice shook. “Just after midnight, it was.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, trying to calm him. “How many latrines are there in the keep?”
“Er—”
I gazed at him, waiting for an answer.
“He can’t count, sire,” Justin said. “I believe there are ten, two on each level but the first.”
“I just wants to do my job, my lord,” Tom said.
“Are you saying you like cleaning the latrines?”
Tom ducked his head. “Nobody bothers me. I just do my work, sire, and don’t have to talk.”
I’d never considered the possible benefits of being a latrine cleaner before, but I could see how a certain personality might prefer it to many other jobs. “But the smell—”
“Oh, you get used to it, sire. I find I can’t smell anything anymore. Or taste anything neither.” Then Tom looked past me, his eyes widening.
I turned to see Callum, still on one knee in the guarderobe. He’d carefully removed the detonator and laid out the pieces of the bomb on the stone floor: the block of C-4, a slim silver detonator with wires running to a nine-volt battery, and a kitchen timer, purchasable at any store back in Avalon.
While we watched, he detached the timer from the battery and detonator, and then he stared down to where it lay in the palm of his hand. The faint white glow that had lit the toilet chute now shone into his face. His look of concern had me taking a few steps toward him. “Callum?”
He looked up, hesitated for a second, and then handed the timer to me.
It read 14:53. As I watched, the readout went to 14:52, and then 14:51.
“We can’t assume this bomb is the only one. We have to move,” I said. “Now.”
Chapter Eleven
We moved. We only had to go down another flight of steps, cross the great hall, and exit by the main stairs to get out of the keep, but Justin took us down another flight to the kitchen. “I feel like you’re a target, my lord,” he said to me by way of explanation. “I don’t know who’s waiting for us out there. By now, we’ve evacuated a hundred people from the castle. More.
If the danger is as great as you say, and the men who did this are watching, they’ll know the alarm has been raised.”
“There was no help for that after a certain point,” I said.
“We don’t have to think too hard about who set the explosives,” Callum said as we ran across the deserted kitchen and exited through the back door, which had been left open.
“No, we don’t,” I said. “How many hours in advance could that timer have been set?”
“Up to twenty-four hours, I’d guess,” he said. “I’d have to look at the timer once it stops counting down, but it’s a clock too and appears to have the capacity for keeping military time.”
A flight of steps led up to the bailey, and we took them. Carew was waiting for me at the top. He was another who hadn’t been willing to leave the castle without me.
The rain had stopped, which was too bad. Pouring rain could have gone a long way to damping things down after an explosion, and it would have made the people more likely to move faster in order to get under cover.
I halted on the top step, taking in my surroundings with a swift glance. The evacuation of the keep may have occurred with dispatch, but the bailey was in chaos. Every horse had been released from the stable and now many milled about, undirected, as the men who’d released them went back for other animals or people. Too many people had too many possessions they didn’t want to leave behind. Canterbury Castle obviously hadn’t done a fire drill in far too long.
I spied Bevyn and Huw near the town gate. Bevyn’s mouth was open, shouting at the people to get them moving, though I couldn’t hear his words and few seemed to be heeding them. Huw had his arm around a woman with a baby in her arms. More soldiers were trying to herd the people in question—craftspeople, servants, and hangers-on to my court—all in varying stages of undress, towards either gate. One man went so far as to throw a woman, who’d been screaming incoherently at him, over his shoulder and run with her to the exit.
Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) Page 9