By Force Alone Page 7

  *

  The safe house is off King Lud’s Gate and the adjacent cemetery. Kay’s still uneasy. Night has fallen and the witching hour’s sure to soon be struck. The others wait for them, Tor and Geraint, and Elyan the White and Owain, the Bastard. The only piece of furniture they have is an old driftwood-crafted rickety round table. They fall on the package. With crude utensils they cut the merchandise, divvying up the pure Goblin Fruit, mixing and cutting in bowls.

  The Roman soldiers brought it over, originally. Some sort of hallucinatory substance they called kykeon and used in the mithraeums. A mithraeum was a temple to Mithras, some old Persian god who liked to slay bulls. Really it was just a sort of officers’ club, where the men got together in dark subterranean rooms to feast and booze. It was all proper religious and stuff. Then the Romans left, but some of the old boys remained behind one way or another and, well, it turned out lots of people liked the taste from a bite of what they started calling Goblin Fruit.

  In Londinium at present, everybody wants a little escape.

  Problem is, it’s hard to get and, subsequently, expensive. Which means the profit margin’s huge. There are mithraeums everywhere, lots of demand – and never enough supply. Even those rich fucks who live up-river in Todyngton and Tuiccanham on their country estates beyond the tideway. Especially them.

  So Arthur’s boys cut the fungus up with flour and dried rosemary. They make several batches of different strengths, then package them into individual wrappers. Elyan the White’s in charge of mixing, Owain and Geraint package and wrap, Kay does the counting and the numbers.

  ‘Well?’ Arthur says.

  ‘It’s good.’

  Arthur nods.

  ‘Then let’s take it out.’

  19

  Once more the boys split. At night Londinium is dark and quiet. But not all dark, and not all quiet. Torches splutter, casting murky lights. A dog barks. A cat hisses. A woman screams. A pot smashes. The sound of dice, the laughter of men, the smell of cooking porridge and mutton fat seared in a fire.

  Overhead the via lactea swirls in the sky, so many stars like diamonds. No moon, which makes the going hard. And Kay has a sense of two cats on a wall, watching. Something in their perfect stillness gives him pause.

  A bellman rings his bell in the arch of a closed shop. ‘Who goes there?’ he cries.

  ‘It is I, Arthur, king of Britannia!’ comes the reply, and the boys laugh, running fast down the narrow alleyways.

  The mithraeums line up on the road along the main one, that temple to the bull-slaying Persian god. Men stand outside. The darkness masks their faces.

  ‘Well? Have you got it?’

  ‘The best and freshest, guaranteed to give you dreams from out of this world!’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Cheap at the price and twice as good!’

  The punters part with cash, receive the Goblin Fruit, descend back to the underground lairs.

  ‘What if we get robbed?’ Kay says.

  ‘What is it with you, Kay? Stop being so afraid.’

  ‘I do not like the night.’

  ‘We own the night!’

  Kay only nods. They sell the Goblin Fruit and Arthur and the boys carry the profits back. A look of understanding passes between him and Arthur. Then he departs, Kay slips into the shadows and is gone.

  It’s true. He fears the night. But not because of spooky cats, or centaurs, Pans, Jack-in-the-Wads or mormos.

  Not because of the Guv’nor’s goons and what they might do if they catch him dealing Fruit, either.

  Not because of brigands or back alley cut-throats. Not because of rabid dogs or wild wolves or an escaped bear from the amphitheatre.

  None of that.

  Kay fears the night’s potential. He feels aflame with heat. His heart beats faster. He hugs the shadows and the shadows whisper back, caressing him.

  He makes his way to the Via Amare, not far from the amphitheatre and the nearby gladiatorial schools. In Rome in the Empire’s heyday they had been popular institutions. Here in Londinium they are not quite the same, for all that men and beasts still die in the arena, and there are always spectators to cheer on the sight of blood.

  Kay makes his way to a small door in a stone building with a sign above it that says The Gogmagog. Two men with nasty cudgels by their sides part silently to let him enter.

  Inside, Kay finally relaxes. The air’s scented with sweat and oil and flowery perfume. The light is dim, the room’s illuminated by oil lamps. It’s hot inside, flames burst out of fresh logs in the large fireplace. He removes his apparel. Men move across the room, softly. Figures whisper in the shadows, recline on couches. Clay cups clink. Men nibble pastries.

  Men move across the room. Musicians play the flute and harp. Kay walks through rooms. Men brush past him. Small men and large men, fat men and thin. Gladiators from the nearby schools, naked but for a loincloth, muscled arms and torsos oiled and shining. Britons, Angles, Jutes, a panoply of free men. In one room a group of sailors from the continent, Gauls or Germanic, stand in a circle round a fierce little Iceni. A man who might be a druid watches them from the corner eagerly, stroking an immense erection. He notices Kay’s stare and smirks. It’s not an invitation.

  Kay moves on. The smell of oil and sweat and semen, cries of excitement, grunts of effort, in one room a fat merchant strokes a Libyan gladiator’s member with bejewelled fingers. They notice Kay and call out to him merrily to join them, but he declines, politely. A passing server offers him a goblet and he takes it, sips watered wine. In other rooms men sit already sated, making conversation. The Gogmagog’s a maze of rooms, it’s like a box of wonders. A buffet of delicacies sits on the tables. Kay finds the room at last, Reserved. He goes inside.

  ‘You came.’

  He grabs Kay roughly. Strong boorish hands, with gnarled fingers. The sort of hands used to the beating of a man half to death for not paying his debts or showing the proper respect. For expressing their master’s displeasure. The hands pull Kay’s face to the other’s face, to his rough roguish beard, to his hot, full lips. Kay’s breath is knocked out of him and the flame in his belly erupts as their lips meet, as he kisses the other man, as he wraps his own arms around him, as he lets his own fingers run over the man’s short-cropped hair, over the uneven scalp, and then there is no need for words.

  *

  ‘…I am undone,’ the other says.

  They lie there on the fur, on their backs, sated, emptied, at peace.

  Peace! How Kay craves peace. This is the closest he can come to it: here, now, he is fulfilled. He props himself up on an elbow and turns to look at the other.

  Bors the Younger looks back at him, smiling. He is not handsome in any conventional sense, Kay thinks, yet he is so arresting. The Knights of Bors are the worst of all the bands of knights who terrorise Londinium. Even the Guv’nor merely tolerates them, for they cannot be ruled. Boorish and violent and unpredictable, more ogres than men, and Bors the Elder is their paterfamilias, a half-giant, they say, who tore out his mother’s womb out of viciousness and committed his first murder in the very moment of his birth – they say.

  They say a lot of things.

  Kay strokes Bors the Younger’s hair.

  ‘I missed you.’

  ‘My father has a shipment of Goblin Fruit coming, a big one.’

  He’s not much for pleasantries, is Bors.

  Kay grows alert. ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘How big?’

  Bors moves his hands, stretching them wide.

  Kay says, ‘Why are you telling me?’

  Bors the Younger does not reply. The silence lies between them like a shameful confession.

  At last Kay nods. An understanding between them.

  Later, they rise. Too soon. Dress, and Kay marvels again at Bors’ rough hands, how gently and deftly they handle his weapons. They draw to each other for one last, stolen kiss. Then they are gone from there.


  *

  At home, Sir Hector’s sound asleep, his wenches by his side. The remains of a roasted pheasant on his table. Kay’s heard it was the Romans who brought the birds to Britain. His father’s fabulously fond of a pheasant. Kay helps himself to the remains, tears chunks of bread to soak up the oil, washes the lot down with more watered wine. His father snores, his wenches senseless by his side.

  Kay goes to his sleep. Arthur’s already there, curled by the dying fire, and Kay admires him, how small he seems in sleep, yet still so forceful, like a resting blade. He treads in softly, but Arthur stirs all the same.

  ‘You smell like a whore,’ he says, not unkindly.

  ‘And you would know how?’ Kay says, for Arthur is surprisingly prim.

  He tells his friend of Bors’ news. Arthur sits up, cross-legged on the stone. He mulls it over.

  ‘Can we trust him?’

  Kay shrugs. He stretches on his bedding. The day was long and he is tired. Sometimes he dreams of being elsewhere, a farm boy on a village somewhere, tilling and hoeing on the fertile farmlands of the beaver lea brook, perhaps. And was it not said by the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, that men should turn their swords into ploughshares? He is sure he had heard it somewhere, though were he to mention it, no doubt Arthur would laugh and call him fool.

  And so he doesn’t.

  He falls asleep as Arthur broods.

  The alley cats are squabbling in the alleyway beyond the wall. They hiss and fight.

  Goodnight, you knights of New Troy, you lords of Londinium.

  Goodnight.

  20

  Time passes, as time is wont to do. A year it is. The seasons change as the gangs of Londinium scrabble for scraps in the ruins of a fallen metropolis. Children are born. Leaves fall. People die.

  Outside the steps of the Temple of Apollo stands now the wizard, Merlin. He thinks of time. The Greek, Parmenides, said that time was an illusion, and what exists is now, all at once, one and continuous. Yet Aristotle argued that time is a function of movement, that it was a measurement of change, and continuous. The followers of Mithras, that bull-slaying god, saw time as a wheel of a fixed duration of some twelve thousand years in which a battle raged between the forces of two gods, one good, one evil. It was the sort of idea soldiers were fond of, Merlin reflects, the sort that drew them to the mithraeums. The sort his dear old master, Uther, would have liked.

  Time, Merlin thinks. There’s never enough time.

  He finds he misses Uther. In the years since his master’s death he’s had scant feeding. The fae are drawn to power but human power is so fleeting. Oh, but to have lived in Imperial Rome! Oh, to have fed in the presence of Caesars! He thinks of pharaohs and the monuments they built, the power they commanded. He thinks of emperors in distant Qin, of the great kings and queens of India, of the Persian Shahs. If only he had time.

  He wonders, is it possible to travel back through time? There are stories elsewhere, filtering from the wider world onto the shores of Britain. Merlin collects knowledge like a magpie lusts for coins. There had been a man in Judea, so they say, whose name was Honi, who could raise the rain or calm the sky, and it was said further that he had travelled through time. But in that story Honi only travelled sideways, had slept and when he woke after a night seventy years had gone. And besides it was said that he had raised the ire of some rebels, and they had stoned him to death.

  Merlin fidgets. The temple’s a bit of a mess, he thinks: cracks in the walls, and overgrown with vines. In time it might be torn down and some western abbey be built there. Perhaps. Were you to ask Merlin his thoughts of time he would not answer truthfully, for time to such as him is a sort of coalescence of strands, which undulate and pulse in and out of probability and existence. Was it not the Greek, Plato, who spoke of the nature of reality as being viewed as shadows, dancing on cave’s wall? This is what people see, the shadows, while Merlins and their kind see the things that cast the shadows… Or so he likes to think, at any rate.

  A young man stands on the steps and has been standing there for quite a while. Now Merlin goes and stands beside him, comradely, and looks up at the artwork.

  ‘Wonderful architecture,’ he observes.

  The young man turns. He sees only a Merlin, which is to say, an equally young man, of pleasant countenance, surely no threat and, besides, the day is young and the sun pleasingly high in the sky.

  ‘They built to last,’ he says, and smiles in a friendly fashion.

  ‘Yet nothing lasts forever,’ Merlin says.

  The boy, Sir Kay, frowns but accedes the point.

  ‘What brings you here, then, stranger?’ he says.

  ‘An old story,’ Merlin says. He runs his fingers over the cracks in the walls. Peers at them closely. ‘Of a man who attempted to fly.’

  ‘Ah,’ Kay says. ‘Bladud, the leper king.’

  ‘Yes. You know the story?’

  ‘I often think of it,’ Kay says. ‘They say he invented a set of marvellous wings and strapped them to his body. He climbed to the top of this temple and soared into the air. For a short while, at least. Then… well.’ He raises his thumb, then points it down. A gesture adopted from the Romans in their gladiatorial blood sports.

  ‘Splat,’ he says.

  ‘Quite,’ Merlin says. He ponders. ‘Was his contraption ever found?’ he asks.

  ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘Such a device…’ Merlin says. ‘Would be most useful.’

  ‘Surely, sir, it’s but a myth.’

  ‘They say the Qin have flying techne,’ Merlin says. ‘And centuries ago there was a Greek by name of Daedalus who made wings with bird feathers and wax.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, it sounds flimsy,’ Kay says politely.

  Merlin examines this young man. He looks at him closely. ‘I see blood in your future, Kay,’ he says.

  ‘Excuse me? How do you know my – what did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Merlin pats him on the shoulder.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he says.

  He waits. Kay stares at him, then shakes his head and leaves. Merlin watches him go, a slight figure, disappearing down the avenue back towards the city walls.

  ‘Meow,’ Merlin says softly.

  *

  Kay had not dawdled long at the temple. He had gone there hoping for a prophecy, for Apollo is the god of oracles and omens. But he had not expected this eel-silvery youth with the unsettling dead fish eyes, and he is uneasy, for all that today is a good day.

  Today he is going to be made.

  He reunites with his father outside the old governor’s palace. Sir Hector is resplendent in furs and the sword that he wears is magnificent. He hugs Kay, and Kay feels a wave of affection, even love for his father.

  ‘Are you ready, boy?’

  ‘I am ready, father.’

  Arthur is there. He too hugs Kay.

  They enter the palace.

  Really it is a ruined old place and a bit of a dump. Stone statues of imperial eagles lie broken on the ground, dirty puddles collect on the uneven ground, and the once grand mosaic floor is ruined. Yet the Guv’nor’s men line up the reception, big burly men with the stillness of stone-cold killers, and Kay is reminded that true power resides here, still. This is the home of the paterfamilias.

  There are some new additions since the last time he’d been to this courtyard. A wooden cross hammered into the ground and, strangely, a large rock with a sword stuck into it.

  As a child Kay had accompanied his father here when his father delivered the one-tenth tax. The low always kick up to the top, and each month the family heads would come to the omnium ducibus dux, the boss of bosses, to deliver his share of the profits. How awed Kay had been, then, by the glamour of the place. The burning torches and the burly men and the comely wenches and the open display of wealth, the looted statues and the tapestries and the gold rings on the women’s fingers.

  Too many broken wine amphorae on the
ground now and nobody to sweep them. The smell of piss from drunks who didn’t stagger outside but went wherever. Years of neglect and plain indifference. Dead flowers in Greek vases.

  It must have been so grand once, Kay now thinks. When the true governor ruled Britannia from this palace, the traders came and went, centurions kept order, musicians played. How grand it must have been! No longer but an isolated, dreary island with a thousand trifling tribes squabbling with each other, but a part of some vast tapestry that was the Empire, that was the known, civilised world. He wishes he could have seen it as it must have been.

  Yet there is only now. There is only this. And he is being made.

  He’s being knighted.

  ‘Is this the boy?’

  The Guv’nor sits on a throne of stone. He is a corpulent old man, bare-chested, extensively scarred, with a few good teeth remaining, the left ear missing, and he’s chewing on a chicken leg. His personal cook squats by an open fire, turning coals.

  ‘My son, Kay.’

  ‘He’s got less meat on him than this chicken!’

  The Guv’nor’s goons laugh.

  ‘Good one,’ Sir Hector says.

  Kay steals a glance. He watches Arthur, watching the gathered dignitaries. He knows – he thinks he knows – what Arthur thinks. How he hates them all and how he longs to be like them. To be a made man. To be a knight.

  It’s the highest honour they can give you, it means you belong. Arthur could never be one of them, he could never be made. To be a knight is to have family. It’s to be known. They’re all here today, to see Kay knighted. The Frankish Mob and the Wolves and the Knights of Bors. He tries not to look at where Bors the Younger is standing. To Kay, all this just means his dues. He was always going to be knighted. But for Arthur it means something deeper, it means no one can fuck with you and you can fuck with anybody, long as they’re not also a knight.

  But this is Kay’s day today.

  ‘Well, come closer,’ the Guv’nor says.

  Kay does, obediently.

  ‘Kneel.’

  He kneels.

  Sir Carados, the Guv’nor, shuffles forward. His smell is rather overpowering. Like ripened cheese and something that’s been dead too long down in a ditch. Plus cooked chicken.