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WYRM XI
🕑 Added 2023-08-03 03:45:04 +0000 UTCLondinium
The city was burning. Stephen watched it from the Tower while in the queen’s apartments sir Godfrey ended Richard’s line. It was an ugly thing. A small and sad and somehow pitiful act, to cut short those little lives into which England had poured all her might and cruelty and malice and in whose blood flowed all the lakes of molten gold that were her wealth. Eight inches of cheap steel was all it took to kill a kingdom. They had drawn straws for it, and Stephen had won. He didn’t feel victorious. There was fire in the streets, and devils too. He watched one stalk along East Cheap, a dead man dangling from its jaws.
Lord Thomas’s armies, exhausted and strung out across the whole metropolis, had dissolved almost at once when the dragons came out of the sea. Those who had been quick or lucky enough now crowded the Tower, which at least for now was proof against the wyrms. It was not as Pale had said it would be. They will take only the nobility. Gather them together in one place and it will all be over in a night.
The sun was nearly set. Perhaps it really would be over before dawn broke, but somehow Stephen didn’t think so. More likely it was just beginning. From behind the queen’s door came a woman’s scream, raw and anguished. Stephen fought the urge to follow Godfrey into her apartments, to give himself over wholly to the hell they had unleashed on London. Forgive me for my arrogance, he prayed, gripping the window’s stone sill tighter and tighter until he could hardly feel his fingers. His breath was coming in tight gasps. The face of Moor who had looked at him with such infinite sadness on the gently swaying deck of the Hellfire many years before intruded again and again on his flurrying thoughts.
It will all be over in a night.
He removed his coif and patted the sweat from his brow with a favor he’d carried since asking for it at a tourney, years ago. He couldn’t remember the woman’s name, or even her face, but he remembered his deep longing to impress her in the lists. He remembered the taste of her hand as he bent from his saddle to kiss it. He wondered for the first time in years what his mother had looked like, and if she’d been kind, and if she still lived. His sword belt fought him for a moment before he could undo the buckles. Scabbard and dagger clattered to the stones. His mail shirt. His arming jacket. The splinted greaves he’d strapped on just that morning. He felt very light without it all. He smoothed his tunic and permitted himself to imagine that someone was still tending father Alphonse’s garden, that it grew wild and green every spring and fed the brothers and the people both.
He hauled himself up onto the windowsill, looking down the vertiginous drop to the hard stone yard below. The door to the queen’s chambers creaked open behind him. He heard sir Godfrey’s voice. “Stephen,” the other man said, so terribly gentle. Aching. Afraid. “Stephen, please.”
Stephen stepped into thin air. The wind roared in his ears. A timeless, weightless moment.
It ended.
Will fled Westminster with sir Ralph, Edmund Greene, lord Thomas, and perhaps a dozen others as the dragon tore the Painted Chamber down around it. The whole riverfront was alive with running men and wyrms. Clarks and pages jammed in doorways. Men at arms fighting over their panicking mounts. A tricorne blundered past across the winter garden, smashing through part of a fountain depicting the Madonna with the Christ-child at her breast. Men scattered from its path.
“Into the city,” lord Thomas snapped as they made for the stables, still guarded by a handful of white-faced soldiers. “We can’t let them catch us out in the open. We’ll marshal the men, regroup at the Tower, and put these brutes down.”
The north wall of the Painted Chamber came down with a series of echoing booms. From within the cloud of dust the dragon roared in fury. Men dragged themselves out of the wreckage, one glassy-eyed straggler leaving a snail’s trail of blood from the stump of his leg. The stablehands had fled. Will darted into the warm darkness of the stables, soothing Lightning as the mallard stamped and rolled his eyes, groaning in terror. The smell of blood was thick in the air. “Easy, boy,” said Will, leading the wyrm out into the night. He wanted to bolt. Every inch of his huge body trembled, straining at the reins.
They made a little island in the thick of Westminster’s unfolding chaos. Screams echoed from all around. The city was alive with fear. Barges jammed the Thames. On the far bank a pair of dragons feasted on a dead tricorne as its blood ran down the stone embankment and swirled away with the current. Smoke drifted in black towers over the water. Will led Lightning to where sir Ralph waited, blood masking half his face where chips of broken slate had cut his brow and cheek, hand on the hilt of his sword. Other squires and soldiers followed with the remaining mallards. One banded hen spooked and dragged her stablehand away by his arm, which was tangled in her tack, galloping off into the dark with the screaming boy dragging after her.
Lord Thomas put his foot in Justice’s stirrup. “Whatever this is,” he bit out, cold steel in his voice, “we’re going to put an end to it.” He drew his sword. “Are you with me, men?”
Behind him, another dragon loped out of the night from the direction of the sea, crashing through the garden wall as though it were woven grass instead of mortared stone. It bore down on them, jaws parted. The mallards panicked, bellowing, and broke. As Lightning nearly pulled his arm out of its socket, sending him sprawling on the flags, Will saw lord Thomas fall, knocked aside by Justice. The big hen honked in terror and wheeled about to flee. He watched in frozen horror as the stampeding wyrms crushed the duke beneath their feet. Skull smashed. Ribs stove in. A man transformed in seconds into smeared meat. A massive foot came down a bare few inches from Will’s head. Another. He rolled onto his stomach and seized hold of someone, a nobleman in a rich pelisse and heavily embroidered tunic, and dragged himself upright.
The dragon snatched Bolingbroke up in its jaws as the man tried to wrestle his sword from its scabbard. It shook him, then flung his body aside. It roared as it plucked another man out of the running crowd, and bloody sputum sprayed them. Men died beneath its tread. Its tail swept over their heads like a great scythe, the wind of it loud and sharp. Will wiped blood from his face, too tired to feel real fear. “Into the city!” sir Ralph shouted at the others as some broke and ran for the edge of the gardens and the woods and fields beyond. “They’ll tear us apart on open ground, you fools!”
The crush began to move them. Will’s feet left the ground more than once. An elbow grazed his wounded face and nearly sent him to the ground as he doubled up in agony, but sir Ralph had the back of his tunic and hauled him onward toward the gate that led to Temple Church and Whitefriars. He saw Edmund Greene, face streaked with tears. Men at arms climbing the garden wall and racing out across the field. There were dark things moving out there in the night. Cries rose up from the forest verge. The shrieks of hunting raptors. The dragon roared again. Will flinched. The weight of other bodies forced him back against the gate’s archway, his shoulder blades scraping over stone, his face against the rough-cut blocks. For a moment he couldn’t draw breath against the pressure of them.
Then they were out and racing down the street toward Temple Church with its soaring arches and slender towers, people all around them spilling from the tenements and houses in the shadow of the city walls. Will caught a glimpse of the first dragon stalking out of the ruins of the Painted Chamber to join the second, its ruined eye socket still leaking blood, but the press bore him on and soon the gate was lost in the rioting dark. There were fires in the city. He could see the glow of them over the walls and through the mouth of Ludgate. The crowd began to break up as they blundered through the Temple’s lichyard. Headstones and grave markers loomed out of the dark. The built-up earth spilled over wooden frames where the dead rose three-deep. A hunting cry, not far. Lithe forms leaping from worn statues.
Am I going to die?
He clipped his shin on the corner of a gravestone and limped onward, hopping to keep up with sir Ralph and Edmund Greene. Hotspur was a little way ahead of them, his red-gold hair shining in the dull firelight as he fought the human tide. A mallard galloped past, knocking men right and left and toppling headstones, raptors clinging to her sides and haunches, tearing at her throat. They broke from the crowd as it forced its way through Ludgate, where the gatehouse was abandoned and dead bodies lay strewn beneath the teeth of the great iron gate. They went along the wall until they came to a postern that had been left open and slipped through it into a narrow alleyway behind a tannery. The smell of rendering fat was thick as oil in the air. The stones rang with screams and distant roars.
“We’ll make for the docks under London Bridge,” sir Ralph panted, leaning against the alley wall. “Water’s where we’re safest now. Buy time, find the lay of things. Who’s behind this.”
“P-p-perhaps they’ve sickened,” wheezed sir Edmund. “Gone r-r-rabid.”
“Shut up,” hissed Hotspur. His hand was on his sword. “We’re being watched.”
A hip-high shadow regarded them from the mouth of the alley where it met Old Dean’s Lane, its eyes flashing silver in the moonlight. Another joined it, and another until the darkness seethed with glowing eyes and the glint of firelight on dagger teeth. Will fumbled for his knife and drew it, shaking. His limbs felt numb. His mouth was dry. The others had their swords. He’d left his own in Lightning’s tack. Greene never saw the hen that killed him. She came off the roof of the brewery on their left and in a trice the stout knight’s guts were on the ground, his blood spraying the alley wall from where she’d opened up his throat down nearly to his collarbone. He fell almost gracefully, pawing at the awful wound, blood spurting between his fingers. Sir Ralph lopped off the raptor’s head and kicked her thrashing corpse away. The pack at the mouth of the alley surged into screaming motion.
They backed down a connecting alley between another tannery and a chandler’s works, sir Ralph retreating slowly, choosing each step with care while keeping his sword leveled at the encroaching raptors as Hotspur eyed the eaves above and Will picked their way through piles of rotten wood and refuse. Rats fled squealing underfoot. The raptors’ eyes gleamed in the firelight every time he dared to glance over his shoulder. He could hear the claws of other hunters on the shingles above. Click, click, click.
“Belial’s stabled just off Ropery,” sir Henry said, speaking quietly. “She’ll carry three. We can make a break for Cripplegate and take Whitecross north. We’ll head for Faringdon; my cousin Robert is castellan of a hill fort just outside the town.”
“Long ride,” sir Ralph grunted. “Lots of open country.”
They came out onto Paternoster in the shadow of Saint Paul’s, the belfry’s shadow hanging huge across the street. Raptors watched them from the eaves. They spread out from the alley’s mouth. Trying to flank us, Will thought, despair washing over him. They’ll eat me. They’ll eat me alive. I don’t want to die.
“Stop your crying, you little cunt,” sir Ralph hissed. His dark eyes darted left and right, trying to account for their pursuers. “Get your knife up. Get it up. I swear I’ll rape your pretty mouth if you let them at my back.”
A pair of raptors darted in. Hotspur’s sword flashed. Sir Ralph cried out. Will stabbed wildly at fangs and speckled feathers. More leapt and feinted, dodged and scurried. Will’s dagger found flesh. Claws dug shallow furrows down his left forearm. A shriek of pain. The thud and crunch of butchery. Then they were running again, tearing past shattered shopfronts and burning tenements, past a belltower lying broken in the street beside a great landslide of tile and stone, fingers jutting like spring flowers from the wreckage. The cold was in Will’s blood. He held his injured arm across his stomach. Down Friday Street onto Old Fish where they plowed headlong back into the press, Will catching an instant’s glimpse of a dragon hunting on the grounds of Blackfriars. Someone screamed nearby. Sir Ralph swore loudly. The crowd bore them along. A woman sobbing as she staggered under the weight of the naked old man leaning on her shoulder. Children screaming for their parents. City guards with pale, broken faces, all livery and allegiances forgotten.
At Trinity they passed close to a block of tenements all burning in the velvet dark, the heat of it like a breaking wave scalding Will’s throat and cheek and bringing tears to his eyes. Smoke scudded over them in stinking clouds. Smell of cooking meat thick in the air. Raptors feasting in the little market square where Watling met Budge. A man’s head lying jawless in the street. A mallard trumpeting in terror as its barding burned.
I’m going to die.
The press thinned again as they reached the manors of the city’s merchants, pouring down Vinery past tidy gardens and hired men with nothing more than boiled leathers and hard truncheons. Eyes watching through closed shutters. Thundering footsteps, soft at first, then drawing nearer. Louder. Two doors behind them, a dragon crashed through a fine house and emerged through its facade trailing dust and with a little boy dangling dead from its jaws by a ruined red arm. It plunged into the crowd, biting at random, the whole street shaking with its awful tread.
“Quick, quick,” sir Henry snarled. He led them down a little side street toward the river’s edge. Will caught sight of London Bridge glowing doubled in the surface of the Thames. It wasn’t yet aflame. Its buildings stood quiet, its towers softly lit with lanternlight. Hotspur stopped dead. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered, staring at a long and unkempt warehouse with a sagging roof. “It’s the next lane over.”
The paving stones jumped beneath their feet. The dragon’s roar was deafening, a scrape of steel on flint. Will’s pulse leapt. He gripped his dagger tight, knowing it meant nothing against that great weight of bone and muscle. He thought of de la Pole screaming as he died, Launcelot himself one moment, bloody meat and shitted hose the next. The dragon’s shadow crossed the far end of the street. It came stalking into view and Will saw that it was the same beast, one-eyed, feathers matted with its own blood and the blood of the men it had crushed and torn and gorged on. It snorted, the wind of its exhalation enough to stir hair and clothing.
There was a crash. A deep, wild shriek. Thundering steps and then Belial came bursting through the warehouse wall, masonry cascading off her back. The shrike let out a deafening scream and launched herself at the dragon. She was a third its size, perhaps a little less, but heavy enough to send it staggering as she raked its flank with her long, curving claws. The dragon flailed its little foreclaws, shaking itself vigorously, but Belial clung on, trying to work herself into position to bite at the back of the larger wyrm’s neck.
“No!” sir Henry bellowed. “No, girl!”
The dragon’s jaws closed on the shrike’s right haunch. Belial screamed as her thigh bone snapped like matchwood. The dragon swung its massive head, dragging her off of its flank, though her claws left bloody furrows across its ribs. She crashed into a glassblower’s shop. The storefront came down with a rumble of falling bricks. The dragon followed, pinned her skull beneath its foot, and tore her throat out, a meaty skein of flesh and muscle stretching taut between the thrashing shrike and its huge jaws. Blood flooded the street. Strings of gristle snapped.
“Leave her, Henry!” sir Ralph shouted, hauling on the other man’s shoulder, but Hotspur shook him off with an animal wail of rage and pain and raced toward the dragon as it feasted on his mount. Will thought of Lady looking up at him at Radcot, of the fear and confusion in her big, soft eye. Sir Ralph pulled him away. They listened to sir Henry screaming like a rabbit as they ran, high and shrill and stupid. The sound became a groan. A gurgle. The splintering crunch of breaking bones.
The dragon’s steps shook the ground beneath their feet. It was coming. Will forced himself not to look back. His lungs burned. His legs felt like they were full of molten iron. They were at the river’s edge now and he could see the piers beneath the bridge, the titans Lizzie had told him about, the ones used to load and unload ships and to drag barges upriver, lifting their heads high above the rooftops and trumpeting in fear and confusion. There were masts there. People.
We can still make it.
In the dark they nearly ran into a barricade manned by a dozen men at arms. Lord Thomas’s men. Spears jutting over crates and barrels. Wooden rubbish. A fat soldier in a bloody leather jerkin pulled Will over the makeshift wall. “There’s a lad,” he said. Will looked back at the dragon standing perhaps twenty yards behind him, considering the barricade and its defenders. He climbed faster, ignoring the splinters in his hands, the tears in his hose. Sir Ralph came up after him. The soldiers thumped their backs. “His lordship?” asked the fat one.
“Dead,” sir Ralph said grimly. “City’s lost. Fall back to the Tower.”
“There’s women in the streets, sir,” said the man, brow furrowing. “Children. We’ll hold here. Get them headed to you.”
Sir Ralph grabbed the man by the front of his jerkin and pulled him close, swatting his spear aside. “What in Christ’s whoring name am I meant to do with your women and orphans? You want to be trapped in that bloody tomb with an army of useless mouths? Let them fend for themselves.”
With an echoing splash, the dragon stepped into the river. It was gone in a matter of moments, only the boiling surface where its tail thrashed the water betraying its passage as it headed back upstream toward Blackfriars and the Fleet. The soldiers said nothing. The fat one didn’t flinch from sir Ralph’s scornful stare. Will thought of Lizzie. He wondered if she was already dead. It was too dark to see if she was circling somewhere over the city.
Sir Ralph seized his good arm and pulled him on along the waterfront. “Bloody fools,” he growled, but Will thought he looked more frightened than angry. His face was pale beneath the crust of drying blood. They passed the mouth of a dark alleyway. “The city’s lost. It’s lost. They’re dead.”
Raptors poured out of the alley in a shrieking tide. Sir Ralph whirled to meet them, his swing cutting one nearly in two as it flew at him claws-first in a killing leap, but three more bore him to the ground. Will slipped and fell on the slick stones and rose again, clawing his way up one of the wooden stanchions that ran like teeth along the water’s edge. He looked back, his breath coming fast and ragged. A pair of reddish cocks had the knight’s sword arm. A white hen perched in his lap as he fought, kicking and screaming. It opened up his belly with a swipe of its dewclaw and plunged its snout into the gaping wound, rooting within like a pig for truffles. The scream the knight let loose was the worst thing that Will had ever heard.
Another raptor stalked out of the dark into the firelight, head bobbing, eyes alight with curiosity. Shadows seethed on the warehouse walls as the pack boiled over sir Ralph. The knight screamed again, high and piteous as a rabbit in a snare. Three of the pack were ripping at his right leg with claws and teeth. Flesh hung in tatters. A joint bent the wrong way. One had a long strip of flesh and slippery fascia in its jaws still attached to the knight’s calf, and blood poured in gouts onto the paving stones. Sinew and gristle crunched and tore. The newcomer hopped up onto sir Ralph’s thigh and plunged its head between the knight’s convulsing legs in a gruesome parody of a lover’s kneeling kiss.
For the first time in that interminable nightmare of a day, it occurred to Will that they weren’t being hunted. This wasn’t for food. It wasn’t for survival, or to defend territory marked with sprays of urine. They were being executed. Killed. He turned his back on sir Ralph, though it tore the heart from his breast to do it, and he ran. Excited shrieks and chirps followed after him. The tap-tap-tap of claws on stone. He sobbed as he limped along the waterfront, pushing himself to run faster, to ignore the blood soaking his sleeve, to push down his memories of Pole and of sir Ralph and of his lordship turning to him in the Painted Chamber, looking at him as though he might be something human.
We’ll have to find you something.
Something had found Will first. He ran toward the masts and furled sails of the ships at anchor. Skiffs and merchantmen, shallow drafts that could sail the Thames without fear of ripping out their bellies. Will had never been out on the water. Perhaps he never would. He dropped his dagger. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a knight. He wasn’t even a man. Not really.
I shouldn’t be here, he thought wildly, looking back at the raptors hopping and darting after him. For now they seemed content to dog his steps, but they were drawing closer. I should never have been a squire. Why did he make me his squire? Why did he leave me? Please, God. Mother. Help me.
A burning ostri came pelting down one of the narrow streets that joined Billingsgate to East Cheap. Its feathers were aflame, and its barding, and it screamed as it sprinted toward the river. It knocked Will spinning. One of the posts at the water’s edge caught him a vicious blow to the temple that nearly knocked him senseless. The raptors shrieked in delight. They like that she’s burning, Will thought, half-senseless. The Bridge was close now. The footsteps of shifting titans shook the ground beneath him. They like this.
The ostri vaulted up over the posts, her flame-wreathed form reflected for a moment in the surface of the Thames, and then the river exploded. The dragon burst out of the current, cascades of mud and water pouring from its back and from its massive skull, its feathers shedding moisture like a duck’s, and caught the ostri in its jaws. It bore her down shrieking into the rush with a tremendous splash as Will dragged himself back to his feet, legs shaking, injured arm gone numb. The raptors were screeching and flaring their plumage, arraying themselves to face the new arrival. The dragon heaved itself up onto the waterfront, its massive talons crushing stone and tearing posts out of the earth. It struggled up the bank, crunching the ostri as it went, and a way down the waterfront the titans began to trumpet. Will saw someone race the length of a stone pier and leap into the water, raptors close behind him. They dove in after, one by one, like ospreys plunging into a calm sea.
Will staggered onward, no longer sure where he was running. There were people at the docks, and shouting down from the bridge above. An arrow plunked into the river perhaps ten strides from where he limped along, but who had loosed it, and at what, he couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. The world was opening up along seams he’d never known existed. The sun was coming up in the East, out over Southwark and Saint Mary’s to where the earth gave way to sea, and he thought it might drool from the sky like a burst yolk once it was risen. That it would all just end, and suck him out of being with it as it swirled down the drain.
He passed a man shaking a fallen boy and shouting at him in a strangled, panicked voice to get up, to shift his arse, or else he’d catch a hiding. A little further on panicked titans tore free of their chains and crashed through warehouses and dry docks. Their huge bodies broke stone and brick like ships’ keels punching through tall breakers. Waves of rubble rode up their breastbones and fanned out into sagging wakes around them. One lumbered out onto a pier, which collapsed beneath its weight and sent it plunging into the icy current. It trumpeted in agony as the pilings pierced its side and belly. A man fell from high up another titan’s neck, at where it met the skull. It was a long fall, and silent. Will stared up at a massive keelbone, thinking of Red Peter crushed beneath an avalanche of flesh. He looked back at where the dragon raged along the river’s edge, raptors fleeing onto rooftops and down alleys. There were soldiers there, poking at the great wyrm with their spears. Making it angrier.
The sun had yellowed the horizon by the time Will gained the bridge’s shadow. The fallen titan still hadn’t died, but its trumpeting had stopped, replaced by the resonant wheeze of its vast lungs at work. There was fighting on the bridge. A man fell. Another. On the far side of the river the diving raptors had fished out their kill, a boy perhaps Will’s age, and were tearing him apart from the groin upward. Will looked away, but there was nothing good to take his attention from the sounds of eating. He was very cold, and his legs were getting stiff. He passed the dying titan lying still in the wreckage of the pier, and the empty piers beyond — the old stone ones and the newer, made of wood. It made him sad in a deeper way than he’d ever felt before to see it dying there.
“I’m sorry,” he husked.
The titan stared back at him with an eye dark and soft as a cow’s. She sucked in a whistling breath, her great ribs rising, and then breathed out in a bellows rush, and did not breathe in again. Will began to cry. He wanted to hold her head in his lap and stroke her strangely delicate muzzle, to whisper that it was alright. Except that it wasn’t alright, and would never be so again. He wanted Lady, and to be back at Framlingham, and for none of the last year to have happened. He wanted his mother, and to listen to father de Brole’s nasal, warbling midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and to see Hugh the armorer again and let the big man clap him on the shoulder with a heavy, callused hand. He wanted to have had a home he loved, and which loved him.
Past the titan’s corpse a little skiff was tied up at the last stone pier, bobbing on the lee tide, thumping gently against the padded wooden batts. Martin Pale stood on its foredeck, winding a rope around an iron cleat, the winter wind catching at his lank white hair and trailing sleeves. He looked up at Will’s approach. His pale raptor sang out from the rigging.
“How strange,” said the lord chancellor in his tar and gravel voice. “I met you in the Painted Chamber, did I not?”
“You did,” croaked Will.
Pale was silent, his dark eyes searching. The sounds of the river and the dying city washed over them in waves. Screams and the hollow thump of the hull against the batts. Fire chewing wood and the water lapping at the pilings. “Come,” he said at last, holding out a long white hand to bridge the gap between the pier and the deck of his small ship. “Fate has brought us together, it seems, and only a fool ignores her when she knocks.”
Will trudged the last few lonely yards and took Pale’s proffered hand, stepping over the gap which shrank and grew with the river’s rise and fall. “My name is Will.”
Pale smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling warmly. “Call me Martin, then.”
Comments
Jerna Van Vooren
Every time I see Londinium, I think of Asterix in Britain without fucking fail
