Ross Lawhead (3 page)

“Steady,” he whispered. “Steady now.” As he inched forward, he tried to hide his fear, but then decided that it would be better for the one hunting him if he didn't hide it. He tried to keep his breath even.

The seconds dragged on until he heard, with a relief that nearly chilled him, a faint scuffle on the path behind him. He turned carefully, keeping his left shoulder most visible, and saw the creature standing off at a distance of about thirty feet. It had discarded its sunglasses and T-shirt and was crouching on the footpath, half naked and wreathed in shadows, leering at him.

“Lonely little light,” it said. “Dim light, faint light. All alone in a city of one hundred and fifty thousand. A fraction so infinitesimally small, it's hardly worth expressing. Statistically insignificant, equivalent to nothing.”

Daniel wanted to reply, to try to deflate its gloating pride, but he was depending on the creature's conceit to survive the fight—he had to play the role of unsuspecting prey. He set his jaw and narrowed his eyes, bracing himself for the attack.

The thing opened its lips in a sneer, revealing teeth sharpened into spikes. “It has been eighty-one days,” it said, “since I've had a decent meal.” It raised its hands to show that it gripped two spring-loaded knives in its hands. “Eleven and a half weeks; one thousand nine hundred and forty-four hours. I will savor you, I guarantee.”

It licked its lips and then broke into a low, frantic run. Daniel crouched, waiting for it to leap. It had to leap; they always leapt. If it didn't leap, he wasn't sure of his chances.

Daniel crouched even lower as the creature drew closer, and just when he thought it was too late, it pounced nearly twice its own height up into the air where it arced perfectly, on course to land right on top of him.

He waited until it reached its peak, perfectly silhouetted against the evening sky, and then with a smooth, lightening-fast motion, Daniel's right arm came up through his open jacket, grasping the hilt of a sword with a wide blade just a few feet long. It stuck in the air, unwavering, perfectly placed to pierce the creature's chest as it fell.

The thing had only a fraction of a second before it descended upon the blade. Its eyes widened in surprise while its mouth was still twisted in hate. As the sharp, thin metal penetrated its torso, the beast spasmed and dropped its knives. In a smooth movement Daniel brought his left hand up and struck the creature on the pelvis, using its own momentum to carry it up and over his head, flipping it over onto the pathway behind him.

It fell squarely on its back, and as it fell, Daniel moved his arm in such a way that his sword was pulled automatically out the thing's chest. He held it poised for another strike but one was not necessary. There was a gaping, steaming wound in the thing's chest that gurgled and spewed thick, black lifeblood. Its throat worked, desperately trying to breathe. Its eyes gazed distantly into the sky.

Daniel kicked it in the head with his foot and then crouched down, pressing his left hand on the side of its skull and putting his mouth near the creature's tattered ear.

“Listen to me carefully,” Daniel said in an even, clear voice. “If, when you reach the dark, smoky pit where you will surely burn in unending agony, you are able to send a message to your friends through whatever infernal back passages exist, tell your vile brethren this:

“Oxford
is not safe
.”

He stood and with his free hand grabbed his slain victim's leg, dragging the body into the tall grass, far enough so that it almost certainly wouldn't be discovered until the next day, if not much later. Once hidden he bent and slit its throat, just to be certain. He wiped his sword as much as he could on the weeds around him—he'd have to go into a toilet somewhere and clean it more thoroughly when he had the chance—and replaced it in its sheath underneath his shirt. Then he went back and kicked around the dirt and gravel on the footpath to mask the blood.

All that done, he walked briskly back the way he came, feeling himself still glowing with adrenaline and triumph. Not too far from where the killing took place, he found the thing's discarded T-shirt and sunglasses, which he casually kicked into the dark waters of the canal. Then he stepped out onto the busy pavement and the flickering yellow light of the street lamps, which were just coming on.

When the body was discovered, he thought, they would not be able to identify it, “it” having no identity. The weapon that made the wounds upon the body was odd enough to be unique, and unknown to anyone but himself, so no one could possibly connect him to it. The business looked fairly airtight.

Still, it was prudent to keep a low profile the next few days and perhaps steer clear from the night shelter, where enquiring minds usually dropped by at some point. His stride broke slightly as he recalled that he had talked to Scouse Phil about the thing, and he chided himself. But there was little he could do about that now.

A man coming towards him on the pavement fixed an odd stare at Daniel's forehead as they passed, and then quickened his step. Daniel slowed and put a hand up to his face, then held it out.

Blood. Not his, but the creature's.

He turned to the wall and rubbed every inch of his face with his palms, drying them in his hair, until he judged that he had probably removed as much of it as he could, or at least smeared it to a thin red film. Yet another reason to find a stall in a toilet soon.

Then he had to find a place to sleep that night.

Then he had to find Freya.

And above him, from the rooftops, dark eyes that had seen the city when it was just a wooden fortress and a church watched— cold and passionless.

3

She used the glove trick to get into the coffee shop. The practiced motion of pulling her hand out of her pocket to push the door open brought Freya's woollen out as well. She went through the door anyway—pass one—and then put her hand back in her pocket. Her face registered puzzlement for a moment and then she turned and saw her gloves. She went back outside—pass two—bent down and grabbed a glove without really looking, pushed back hurriedly through the door—pass three—looked down to her hand and realised she had only picked up one glove, went back outside— four—picked up the second glove, and came back inside—five.

Five passes were enough in a place like this with lots of people, but there were some places she tried very hard to avoid and some streets that she wouldn't even walk down. Being back in Oxford made her nervous. There were too many old doorways and arches. The bricked-up ones she came across—in her college's hallways, in the sides of buildings and churches—made her especially nervous and she gave them a wide berth. She was going through her medication faster than she'd like. She'd have to talk to her psychiatrist about that, but that would have to wait five weeks until the end of term. What would she do if she ran out before then?

She ordered a latte and took a seat. It was overcast outside and she couldn't see the sun—definitely a day to be cautious. Her watch said she had about forty minutes until the lecture. She had started chapter five of her
Introduction to Moral Philosophy
book three times. Her mind kept racing ahead to the lecture at ten a.m., and she hoped she could control herself this time. The medication would take the edge off at least. Maybe.

Leaving places was fairly safe, especially with a lot of other people milling around, so she didn't have to test the doorway leaving the coffee shop like she had to when she entered it. From St. Aldate's it was a short walk down Blue Boar Street to Merton Street and then into the exam schools. She circled around and entered via the main doors on High Street, which meant that she only had to deal with one set of doors to get into the building and then one more set to get into the room the lecture was in. For both of these, she pretended that she was waiting for someone to meet her; checking her phone and looking around allowed her to repeatedly duck in and out of the doorways. People would think she was lost, maybe, or a little ditzy, but they wouldn't think that she was crazy at least.

The monitor in the entrance hall informed her that Textual Histories of Pre-Arthurian Britain was in the large lecture theater called “South Schools.” She followed the signs that led her up a wide stone staircase with a bannister made of rose marble. Then she took a right into a large wood-paneled, L-shaped room and found a seat, third row from the back. Scanning the room as students continued to file in, she didn't find a single familiar face. Eventually the lecturer, a fortysomething woman dressed completely in black, came to the podium and cleared her throat, a cough that reverberated from the speakers and echoed off the walls.

“Good morning, everyone. I'm Dr. Fowler,” she said when the chatter had died down. “We've got a lot to cover this morning, so let's get started.

“ ‘The Matter of Britain' is the name that we give to the works that form up the early pseudo-histories of Britain, as told by the Anglo-Saxon settlers, orally, and recorded by monks in the ninth and tenth centuries. It should be noted as being separate from Celtic legends—in this context predominantly Welsh, Irish, or otherwise Gaelic legends, although there was quite a lot of crossover, as we shall see.”

The professor tapped a few keys on her laptop and the board behind her displayed an image of an ancient piece of paper with nearly indecipherable text printed on it. “This,” she continued, “is the first page of the
Historia Brittonum
written around 870 Common Era by the scribe Nennius. It is perhaps the oldest English account of the settling of the British Isles—and the originator, perhaps, of a lot of the confused and conflated myths traditionally associated with the settlement of Britain, myths that initially branched out of the Trojan tales of Greece, which were also very popular in Rome. It is thought that the work was created for wealthy Welsh families in the fifth century as a way to justify their claim to nobility and to cement their position as a ruling class—and obviously has little relation to objective fact. The tales centre around the legendary Brut, a son of—yes?”

Freya's arm was in the air. Her heart was pounding partly with anxiety and partly with anger. “Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that those accounts are objectively true? Seeing as no other accounts disagree with them?”

Dr. Fowler shrugged. Interruptions were rare in this type of lecture, but she was professional enough to take it in her stride. “There may be certain grains of truth within the various accounts, but were you to read them closely—as I'm sure your tutor will insist you do—then the appallingly fabricated fantasies within them will show quite apparently.

“Now, this Brut,” Fowler continued, “was a hero of Troy—”

“I'm sorry,” Freya said amid a swell of groans from those around her. “We know that Britain must have been settled at
some
point. Why is it unreasonable to believe the tales which state that it was a group of exiled soldiers—veterans of the Trojan wars— and their families?”

“I thought
I
was scheduled to give this lecture,” the professor replied. The other students in the auditorium chuckled pointedly. “I'll gladly change places with you—I did quite a lot of this during my doctoral thesis so it's old hat to me.”

“But why not take the account at face value?”

“Because it's completely unverifiable—fanciful even. Why—”

“Just because something cannot be
proven
true doesn't mean it
isn't
true—even if its claim to truth is unlikely. In fact, it's more likely that an improbable truth would be recorded than a probable one.” This provoked more groans, and more than one request to “shut up.”

“But,
reasonably
, it is unlikely that an account of settlement could have survived two and a half thousand years to be recorded by an obscure Welsh monk.”

“If there
were
an accurate relation of settlement,” Freya said, her voice rising, “how else would you expect it to be recorded? Besides, the fact that there are many other surviving, corroborating, independent reports—”

“Not independent—
derivative
.”

“You say that they're derivative of a lost source because they're similar, but why can't they be similar because they're all true?”

The professor sighed and took a moment to collect herself. She shouldn't have allowed herself to be drawn in; she was falling behind schedule. Was this some sort of gag? “It makes no sense to spar with me about veracity when I have an entire section dedicated to authorial ‘tricks' or ‘stunts' of authenticity. You've obviously read some of the material, but if you
understood
half of what you
know
, then you would realise how outlandish your claims are.

“Why,” the professor continued plaintively, “on the same grounds, you could argue the case that Britain was populated by giants as was also popularly believed and recorded.”

“I
do
argue the case on the same grounds,” Freya said. This brought shouts of derision from the other students, and a couple of them slipped out of the hall to fetch the porter. “The history of giants in Britain is too independently supported to argue credibly against. Accounts of giant occupation are recorded in nearly all of the Brut legends, as well as Irish tales and sagas, such as the Fenian Cycle's
Acallam na Senórach
, and Scandinavian histories like the Vatnsdal Saga—let alone those recorded in the Bible and other Middle Eastern histories as well as Slavic traditions.”