STORIES FROM RORY No. 9

 

SUBTRAFUGE

Captain Roberts had been keeping his eye on the sub’s diesel fuel gauge....almost half full.  He had safely arrived at the coastal drop-off point for the three Royal Marines he had been ordered to deliver at a Bell’s Cove just after midnight. They took to their inflatable dinghy and quietly rowed ashore, watched by Roberts through his telescope from the sub’s conning tower.  The men easily located the rock-lined coastal cave indicated on their map and settled in to rest up for their morning assignments.

Their goal was to infiltrate the seaside village of Dundalk and, dressed in the local, inconspicuous clothing they wore leaving the sub, blend in with the local county fair festivities scheduled for the weekend.  After each taking the pills which would keep them alert during the dangerous mission, they clambered over the coastal rocks and joined the early morning preparations for the fair events.  They helped in raising the two circus tents, earning them free passes to the carnival rides which would open at noon.

They would not take advantage of those free rides, however!  As the fair grounds began to fill, they walked into Dundalk and sought out their target’s house.  The map accurately led them to the house with a large family crest prominently displayed on the double garage next to the stone steps leading up to the house.  The Murray crest was  further confirmation that they had reached the correct house.  Spacing themselves 10 meters apart, they slowly walked up the forty-five steps until they reached a beautifully manicured garden framing the impressive three storey Victorian mansion. None of them knew their target’s family members but they must be very wealthy.  The Aston-Marin parked outside the Murray garage confirmed that.  They must have done something very bad for them to deserve what was coming!

The mission now dictated that they find the entrance to the house’s cellar, enter it and place the explosives they had carried in their back packs at the precise foundation points noted on the reverse side of their map.  There was no sound coming from the floors above so they surmised the Murray family was away for the weekend, as had been noted in their mission briefing.  But what about that handsome roadster down at the garage?  As they descended the steps and left they glanced back at the DB4, its British Racing Green bonnet glistening in the sun, and hoped that debris from the exploding house would not rain down and damage this wonderful example of British engineering.  They had to trust that the Murray family had done something terribly wrong to deserve this!  Government-sponsored terrorism against its own citizens.  “The greater good,” was how the mission briefing on the sub had put it.  Let’s hope so.

Chuck Wallace

In the Cellar

We had enjoyed a party in the Bulrush pub cellar. I must have passed out, and I woke with a start and a splitting headache. For some minutes I couldn’t fathom where I was. Then one cell in my brain began to work; ah, now I remember. I am alone here and everyone else has vanished, well, gone home, I supposed.

I climbed the steps up to the bar and Malcolm the pub manager greeted me.

“Wow, you look like hell. You seemed like you had hollow legs and kept drinking everything you could swallow. It was as if you were taking your last drink, and you drank everyone else under the table.”

I put my hand over my eyes as the light was blinding.

“Have you anything to take this headache away mate?” I asked.

“Paracetamol do?” He put some capsules on the bar-top with a glass of water.

“Thanks, mate,” I said, and I couldn’t wait for the tablets to kick in. Then I ran to the gents to be sick. I washed my face and hands and after a while I felt a bit better.

I parked myself on one of the WCs to pull myself together.

Looking around the sparkling wash room, I noticed something I’d not noticed before. It was a painting someone had worked hard on, and it was great work and extremely unusual.

It was a yellow submarine, and the artist had painted part of the layout of inside the sub. The artist had painted a speedo and a fuel gauge, also a map with an x to mark the spot with a pint of beer next to the x.

It made me wonder what the artist was trying to say and I thought I would ask Malcolm when I emerged from the wash room.

I came out of the gents and asked Malcolm about the Muriel on the wash-room wall. He chuckled as he explained the meaning of the yellow submarine.

“Well, the yellow submarine was all the rage when this artist came here to drink. It was sung by the Beatles and one of their greatest hits. The lads all used to sing this song when they’d had a few. They also would wind each other up and make up stories to tell their wives why they got home late in a drunken state.

“The fuel gauge was to alert them when they’d had one too many. The speedo was to represent how fast they could run away from their wives’ rolling pins, or frying pans.

“The map with the X next to the pint of beer is asking them a question.”

“So what is the question, Malc?”

“Do you love the beer more than your wife?”

He laughed again and mentioned that most of the lads would say, “I’ll settle for the beer, I know what kind of headache to expect from a pint, but not sure what sort of pain in the head I’ll get from her indoors.”

My memory fully refreshed, now I remembered my poor wife sitting at home, wringing her hands, wondering where I am.

On the way home I made up all sorts of excuses for being out all night. I gave a sigh of relief as I got through the door. Angela smiled and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m so sorry love I should have rung to let you know I’d be late, and honestly, I never expected to be out all night,” I said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh don’t worry, Brian, Malcolm phoned me to let me know it was about to be an all-nighter, and so I had the girls over, and we had our own celebration. It was great, and we also got very tipsy.”

I guess that’s why I married Angela; she’s such a good sport.

I gave Malcolm a ring and thanked him for phoning our home.

Josephine Smith

TRADITION

The wind was cold. The tent did little to keep out the chill. It was new. The wind was old, and knew many more tricks. It came from miles and miles away, from lands that were still covered in snow, where the ground never thawed, not even in summer. Here, near the sea, in the country of the Pruzzen, there was mud again, just enough, not too much. That was why the Duke had ordered the campaign to begin afresh, the one he had reluctantly abandoned in the autumn rains. Gerd thought it was folly, but he was too young, his family too new and too poor, to have any influence in the councils, and now that the Duke’s brother had become leader of the German Order the Great Man could whistle up God on his side.

Which bit of God, Gerd wondered, was supposed to be fighting on their side? It couldn’t be the soft-eyed Son, who still had the wounds to show from His last encounter with soldiery; and it was unlikely to be the Bird, the Dove, who traditionally brought peace. It must be the Old Man, with the big beard, the one who liked smiting, and wasn’t always too careful who He smote. The one who claimed vengeance as His Own, and then deputed people to be His agents.

Like now. In a nice clean tent – well, it had been clean when they started – with a pennant on the top, and big black crosses round the sides, just the thing to scare the natives, when the Knights, or rather their servants, set up camp and these giant mushrooms looked as though they’d popped out of the ground overnight.

Gerd didn’t believe the natives were scared. He thought they were just being cautious, keeping out of sight, doing things that the Knights couldn’t see, wouldn’t see until it was too late. Stakes, for instance, concealed with brushwood, to spike the horses when they landed, after their over-confident riders urged them on to jump these negligible obstacles.

Gerd knew he wasn’t especially clever. He just kept his eyes open. He’d kept them open last time he was up here, as a page, rapidly promoted to squire, as the casualties rose, and squires had to be made knights. He hadn’t asked to come, not then, not now. His family had urged him, pushed him, forced him. They wanted better territory and more of it. One way to get that, of course, was to go to the Duke’s court and fawn on him – but to do that, you had to have money to start with, for the fine clothes and the rich presents, and (so they said) for the expensive perfumes that disposed the Duke especially well towards pretty young men. Gerd’s father had neither the money nor the manners for that road to acquiring land, nor, to his credit, did he wish his eldest son to become a courtier of that kind. A boor, thought Gerd, but an honest boor.

Gerd’s eyes were always open. Others might shut them in terror, or wilful ignorance, or prayer – he had watched them do that often enough, both here and at home – but he kept looking, and when he had the time, and thought it appropriate, he judged. But he waited with judgement, till he had enough knowledge, and even after he had made his judgement he still collected knowledge, because he knew that out of ignorance he might have judged wrong.

If his eyes were open now, though, it was because sleep fled him. He rose, and left the tent, with its other sleepers muttering, snorting, sprawling, twitching, and went to stalk his quarry. If sleep would not come of its own accord – and, in the circumstances, why should it? – then it had to be tracked down. So the hunter moved quietly through the flickering darkness.

The camp was never quiet, not completely.

Horses stirred, whinnied softly to one another – who could tell what they were saying? Ah, what a gift it would be, to know that! How language could link!

Men moved to and fro, errands, duties, perhaps even messages. Preparations for the morrow: checking the horses’ tack – many a rider had been lost by an unsound girth or a bent buckle; readying food; and bandages, to staunch wounds and bind up broken limbs. Swords and spears were sharpened, shafts tested for soundness. Archers kept their bows warm and dry beside them, some even caressed the flights of their arrows and murmured to them to fly straight, charms in old languages they took care that the priests should not hear.

The priests made their magic in their own tent, where the candles burnt all night before the altar, and incense wafted out through the flap to fight with all the other smells of the camp and lose. They sang, those priests, it was not a simple muttering in the tongue of holiness and charters and histories, but a quiet song that bemused and made spellbound with its repetitions.

Gerd stood there in the darkness, at the back of the priests’ tent, wondering what they were singing, and what it had to do with the fury that would be unleashed when the dawn came. His younger brother, Erwin, with the twisted leg, was destined for the priesthood, or perhaps for the law – a chancellery official. Already he wrote a good round hand, and discoursed as easily in Latin as in his native tongue. Gerd’s father had had the wit to turn a disadvantage to an advantage. The younger would secure with the pen what the elder won with the sword.

But nothing was won yet, and the future was as dark and light-speckled as what lay around him.

He turned away from the quiet hum – like a bee-hive by night, he thought – towards the darker dark, where trees and bushes were even blacker silhouettes against the dark grey sky where no moon shone and a marching army of clouds obscured the stars.

Sentries were posted – but they were sparse and lax, because the wisdom was that the natives had fled, primitively thinking to oppose them in a pitched battle the next day. Gerd was far more cautious than that – but it meant that his mood, which was growing calmer with steady walking, as he crept up on his prey, sleep, did not need to be disturbed by challenge and answer.

He wondered, indeed, whether he had fallen asleep while walking, and missed a few score paces, for he found himself in a place that he had never seen before, though he had walked round the camp three times in the daylight, to understand the ground over which, if the worst came to the worst, the Duke’s army might have to retreat.

In front of him he saw an arbour of rowan-trees, with some of their winter berries still hanging shrivelled from the branches. They sheltered a kind of mound, a low hut roofed with branches and dried grass and moss and turves to make it waterproof. Perhaps, thought Gerd, its framework has been made from living rowan trees, bent over as saplings and rooted again. He noticed, though the wind blew still as keenly, that the trees around were motionless. A steady glow crept out of the round hole which served as the hut’s entrance, and Gerd could hear a low singing, just one voice, more mysterious and more melodious than the noise the priests made.

He stopped to listen. The sound drew him. Sleep beckoned. What he had hunted was there, waiting for him, tame, and welcoming. He lowered his head, and bent his knees, and shuffled into the cramped space.

Inside, it did not seem cramped at all. The embers in the stone-edged fire-pit glowed enough to show a face on the far side, its high, shiny cheek-bones, its glinting eyes. The rest of it was in shadow. Specks of light came back from points on indistinct objects around. Were they bones? Were they shiny metal, glass beads, stones, crystals, drops of water, tears of amber with something inside them? Gerd could not say. It did not seem important. There was a scent enfolding him, stroking his eyelids until they had to close.

But as his outer eyes closed, his inner ones opened. And his ears. He was not sure which language was being spoken, only that he understood it. During his first time in the land of the Pruzzen as a page he had had to do with the natives, buying food from farms, listening to conversations, trying to comprehend from gestures and laughter and frowns and shaken heads just what was being said. Then, before the Duke had determined on conquest and the Church on conversion, it had been possible to be friendly. The people then had thought that the strangers, with their angular tongue, might be more generous, more merciful, than the native nobility who spoke their own language and mostly used it to order them around and make demands. Time had proved them wrong.

Questions were asked, and Gerd gave answers, without knowing what words he used, but he knew what was being offered to him, and what he said in reply.

What he wanted to know about was the future. Not just his. Not just whether he would die in the battle to come, or survive and perhaps be rewarded. Those things he would find out for himself in due course. Knowing would change nothing. He wanted to know what would happen to his family. Not those he knew now. He could imagine their fates. His father would continue to be discontented and grumbling, constantly dissatisfied with his offspring, driving them on to further efforts, as he had been driven by his own father, as had been the case all the way back to the moment when one particularly brave, bold, lucky, foolish man had distinguished himself in battle and caught the eye of his lord for long enough to be given a title and some land. That was where it had all started. Gerd wanted to know – not where it would all finish, but where it would all go. Even if he perished before the next sunset, or Erwin became a priest without issue, Gerd knew that his father had already married a good little breeder to replace Erwin’s mother, who had died of the next child – a girl – what did you expect? And before the apoplexy took him – too much food, too much drink, too much anger – he would have done his best to sire a few more.

In his way, Gerd was pleased to think that there was something outside himself and beyond himself that would continue – and that was before he considered his uncles and cousins… And so he made his request… and found that the world around him had changed…

There were steps under his feet, going down, he heard the echo, a vast hall, and a gentle splash of water. Lights above – not torches – he looked back down towards the water – that, at least, he thought he understood, though not what he saw floating in it.

The vision swam before his eyes – the eyes of his descendant, far, far in the future – but it was Gerd’s eyes, looking out through them, that could not encompass what he saw.

When the view cleared, everything was closer, much, much closer. He was enclosed – by what? No brick, no stone, no wood. Everything seemed to be made of metal, plates riveted together, when he could see where they joined. Smooth metal pipes ran everywhere, like the lead that was used in fountains, but shinier, harder… Men sat in chairs, chairs, too, made from metal. He paid no attention to the clothes they wore. Clothes always changed. No wonder in that. They stared at discs, with pointers that moved. Someone had told him once about such things – he had thought it a traveller’s tale – they could tell the time – time passed, whether it was told or not – others pointed the way for ships –

In his head, Gerd asked a question. He knew he had been granted his wish, but he hoped he could ask for something more. He thought about the best way to put it. Where am I? would not help. The answer would only be the name of a place, which he might or might not recognise. What is around me? There was a hesitation before the answer came, but when it did, he understood. Armour – Panzer. A vast suit of armour, with space in it for many men. Gerd began to imagine how such a vast creature might be made to move and stride over the landscape, dealing death and destruction wherever it went, and the men who worked it sat in safety…

He ventured another question: What am I doing? The answer almost had a chuckle in it – Hunting. He chanced a third question: Hunting what? The answer was not what he had expected: Ships – and the cargo and people they carry. There was a muffled roar, and a mighty blow struck the gigantic suit of armour in which he found himself. It lurched and slewed to the right, and began to tilt downwards. The quality of light in it changed, growing suddenly darker. The men were shouting and running to and fro. Only he – his descendant – stood still, and calm, amid the panic and chaos, though perhaps it was not that, but just a speedy response to danger.

His descendant’s eyes glanced down, and Gerd could see water rising round his feet. One of the dials with a pointer on flew off the wall, and a jet of water spurted out from the broken pipe to which it had been attached. Gerd’s descendant put his hand into a pocket and pulled out a tiny coloured tube, as long as the end-joint of his little finger, looked at it for an instant, then put it away, and joined his men – for surely he was their commander, his bearing, his sense of tradition, all bore that out – and with that, the vision ended.

Gerd came back to himself, drawing in deep breaths, as though he had been on the point of drowning, as though he had been under the water, which, he knew, he had been.

He shook his head, to clear it. He was back in the small hut, the embers had dulled, the scent had grown less, the eyes on the other side of the dying fire still looked at him, and a voice spoke in his head: You cannot change the future. Too many other people, too many other events will conspire to make it what it will be. Only your own next action is still in your hands.

Suddenly, the glow died. Choking smoke billowed up and drove him, staggering, from the hut. When he turned round again, still catching his breath, even the mound seemed to have sunk back into the earth. A sentry, who had just noticed him, called a challenge, and Gerd responded, and found himself walking back towards the camp.

The tent was as he had left it. His fellow-sleepers still lay in their unguarded attitudes, puffed, gurgled, burbled and threshed about them, offering him no help or guidance in his decision.

His imagination presented him with realities and possibilities. In a very short while, armoured men would ride down the Pruzzen, slaughtering all they could. Then, under the auspices of the Church, with its blessing, connivance, and direct involvement, the process of annexation and colonisation would begin: kill the men, rape the women, baptise and enslave the children, turning them into serfs, tied to land owned by people who refused to speak their language.

Some of the knights would die, that was sure, or be unhorsed and dragged off for ransom or torture. Were he not there at the end of the battle, they would assume that had been his fate, and, eventually, inform his father accordingly. (Somewhere there was a cleric who delighted in keeping lists, but always had too many to keep and too little time to do it, so was always behindhand with them.)

If Gerd wanted to hunt – and he did – he would sooner hunt animals than people or ships, and not in armour, either, so as to give the animals a fair chance to hunt him. There were woods here. When the battle was over, there would be plenty of game in them again, certainly enough to nourish a man with a good bow and good arrows and a good set of spears. The sword he would keep for other eventualities.

He strode to the weapons tent. The guard was nodding, but started at the intrusion. Gerd shushed him back to a drowsing sleep and took a handful of spears, the ones without knightly pennons, a stout longbow and a quiver of arrows.

The sky in the east had a silver edge to it by the time he reached the horse-lines.

“Scouting,” he whispered to the guard, as he unhitched a light palfrey and led it away to the clump of trees where he had already left his weapons, tied securely together, and a bundle of clothes in a blanket. It was spring, after all, and the wind had dropped at last, and before the autumn he should have found a place to make himself a shelter –

Perhaps he would tie together some rowan-trees…

Every tradition has to start somewhere.

Mike Rogers