Joost slid to the ground in a narrow defile, in the shadow of a fallen tree trunk. He aimed the rifle and squeezed off two shots. The gunfire stopped for a moment, then came back with renewed ferocity. Several bullets hit the tree trunk, but didn’t get through.
‘I think there’s only two of them,’ Joost announced. ‘You said you have a car?’
‘We left it in the woods on the other side of the road.’
He jerked his head back. ‘Two hundred metres that way, you find a tree with a red ribbon tied on it. Behind it there is a hole in the fence. Get your car: I meet you there. The camera’s in the bag. If anything happens to me, you send those pictures to the Green Knights, OK? They know what to do.’
‘What about the men with guns?’
‘I take care of them.’ Joost fished in the pockets of his flak jacket and pulled out a glass beer bottle filled with clear liquid, a cotton handkerchief and a cigarette lighter. He opened the bottle and poured some of the fluid over the handkerchief, then stuffed it in the bottle’s mouth. Ellie smelled petrol.
‘What sort of environmentalist are you?’
‘A pissed-off one.’
He flicked the lighter. Flames flared up from the rag in the bottle. He got to his feet, crouched like a quarterback and threw.
The bottle hit a tree trunk and shattered over a pile of brushwood. The dead forest lit up like a tinderbox: flames raced through the dry grass and pine needles, spreading in every direction.
‘There goes my carbon footprint,’ said Joost. He aimed the rifle through the flames.
Only afterwards did Ellie realise she’d heard the shots before he pulled the trigger. At the time, all she felt was a surge of confusion, a sense that the order of the world had broken down. A second later she saw why.
Joost reeled backwards. Blood bloomed from three holes punched in his chest. The gun fell to the ground, and Joost fell with it, sprawling into the undergrowth. He hadn’t thrown his firebomb far: already, the flames were licking back towards him.
Doug stared, hypnotised. Ellie pulled him away.
‘We’ll be next if we don’t get out of here.’
They ran up the hill to the fence. They found the tree, a plastic red ribbon hanging limp from the branch, and behind it a small segment of fence which came away when they tugged. They crawled through, sprinted across the road and into the forest on the far side. Ellie found herself scampering like a hunted animal, bounding through the woods on all fours as she tried to keep low. Smoke began to drift across the road.
She saw a flash of silver ahead and changed course. There was the car — undisturbed and unguarded. She almost wrenched the door off its hinges. Doug reversed on to the road, changed gears and floored the accelerator. The smell of burning rubber was lost among the smoke of a far greater inferno building behind them.
XLII
Our boat glides up the Thames. Around Woolwich bend we see London like a blot on the horizon. A white stone tower guards its approach, looming over the whole city. It dwarfs everything. Cranes and scaffolds around it show tributary defences still under construction.
‘The city’s well protected,’ I say.
Hugh, standing by the bow wrapped in a dark cloak, grunts. ‘The tower isn’t there to defend the city. It’s there to dominate it. Even the colour is foreign — the Normans brought white stone across the sea from Caen to build it.’ He grunts. ‘Literally, putting our land under theirs.’
We’ve travelled together for six weeks now, but the facts I know about Hugh would barely fill eight syllables of verse. He’s English. His family must have made some compromise with the Normans, or he wouldn’t be a knight, but every so often I glimpse the hatred he has for them. I don’t know if he counts me as a Norman. He has so many other reasons to hate me, it’s hard to tell.
It’s almost eight years since I was last in England. Back then, the country was in its springtime — ripe fields, safe roads, handsome towns and well-loved King Henry. Now, winter has fallen. Civil war has split the country open, and the wound is festering. King Henry died without a son: his nephew, Stephen, seized the crown, but Henry’s daughter, the Empress Maud, contests it. They’ve been trading blows, gaining and losing territory, these past four years.
As we travel upriver every town we pass has its gates barred and fires set in the watchtowers. Occasionally, we see strange mounds erupting from the flat landscape, the mottes where castles have been thrown up and thrown down again during the war. Some still show the scorch marks: blackened lumps, bruises on the body of the country. Severed heads, in various degrees of decomposition, shrivel on spikes along the riverfront.
London looks as if it’s preparing for a siege. So many ships crowd its wharves that we need three hours just to reach our mooring. The sheriff’s men ask us hard questions when we land — even the barrel of wine we give them doesn’t deter them. But they don’t find the false bottom in our hull, the mail shirts, shields, swords and spears that give the boat its ballast.
We find lodgings at an inn on West Chepe. Hugh takes a room on the first floor, across from the mouth of an alley, and pays the innkeeper handsomely to have it to ourselves. He draws two stools up by the window — hour after hour, we sit there and watch, listening to the drinking, gambling and fighting which drifts through the floorboards. London is a city of constant noise and motion — like Troyes at fairtime, but every day and magnified a hundredfold. The smiths and pewterers and carpenters and masons hammer their metal, wood and stone; the hawkers shout in the markets to be heard over the smiths; and the merchants shout to be heard above the rest.
Down the alley, according to the clerk in Troyes, is the house where Lazar’s debts are settled. I want to go and see it, but Hugh’s worried I’ll be recognised. Two of his men, Beric and Anselm, go and report that the building is locked and shuttered. They pass by twice a day to see if anyone arrives, while I stay confined to the inn, watching men pass beneath the grimy window, trying to make out the features beneath hats, scarves and collars. Even our meals get taken in the room.
Hours stretch into days. One afternoon I ask Hugh, ‘What did Malegant steal?’
I’ve been working up my courage for the last hour to say it. I expect him to tell me to shut up. He stays silent so long I think he’s decided to ignore me. At last he says, ‘There are things in this world we can’t understand.’
‘You mean you won’t tell me?’
He frowns. ‘I mean you won’t understand it.’
He stretches out his legs. ‘There are objects in this world which have powers we can manufacture. A bucket has the power to draw water. An axe cuts wood. But there are other things we can’t explain. The way a single seed contains an entire tree, or a woman’s belly produces a life.’
I pick a lump of eel out of the grail-dish on the table and feel it slither down my throat. I lick the salt juice off my fingers and remember the first time I met Ada. She was carrying a dish like this that night.
‘You’re speaking in riddles.’
‘Because I don’t understand it myself.’
‘Then why try so hard to get these objects back?’
‘Because I know what they can do, even if I can’t explain it. Their powers are terrifying.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘I have.’
‘Can you tell me what they look like?’
‘Commonplace. They could be any of the objects in this room. But they have powers …’
He’s beginning to irritate me. ‘What sort of powers?’
He waves his hand out the window. ‘Look at England. Ten years ago, this was the happiest country in Christendom. Now it’s a wasteland. That’s the sort of power Malegant stole.’