Sword of Justice
by A M Kirkby
Text Copyright © 2011 A M Kirkby
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
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Short stories
A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
The Tin Heart
Sword of Sorcery
Novellas
Walsingham Way
Green Land
Doppelgänger
Novels
Etruscan Spring – forthcoming
Etruscan Blood - forthcoming
Children's books
Kasbah cat
Pagliaccio the opera cat
Sword of Justice
by A M Kirkby
I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams.
There were only two instructions. Don't touch the lettering on the blade, he said, and never leave the sword unattended.
Not even at night?
Not even at night.
The job was not an easy one. It would call on all the silversmith's craft. The rubies had to be reset; that was not hard, a matter of reworking the bezels, detailed but simple work. But then the snakeskin of the hilt had to be replaced, and matched in colour and texture with the covering of the scabbard; and it had to lie absolutely flat and smooth, not a bubble or a wrinkle anywhere in it, not a single roughness that eye could see or (more sensitive and exigent) finger feel. Then there was polishing, and repairing the nicks in the hiltguard, and replacing the old coat of arms in high relief, with its three baronial lions, by the lion and castle of the newly chartered city. All this to be done, and two weeks to do it, and Camlet's reputation was at stake.
And then in the middle of the work, he was called to a guild meeting in London, and being a freeman of both cities, had no choice but to go. The sword, though, remained a problem. If he took it with him, he ran the risk of footpads and thievery; but he could not leave it unattended. No wife, no apprentice, because for him the craft and the long days of meticulous delicate work had always been enough.
Then he thought of Lawrence, the clerk of the Close. And he knew what to do.
***
I've seen it before, of course, Lawrence said. Carried before the lords and judges. But I never thought to have it in my house.
They'd drawn the curtains, though the evening was still light, and lit the oil lamp that hung over the waxed wood table in the middle of the room. The heavy stink of oil made the room feel greasy; there were breadcrumbs on the table, Camlet noticed, not swept up from dinner. Glints of light reflected from the glass of the prints Lawrence had hung on the wall; Camlet knew them well; Ferry Lane, the Old Palace, the castle, the Guildhall, a view of the dim arcades of the cathedral from the west door. (This last, a sole mezzotint among the engravings, which drew the eye with its dark promise of secrets.) They'd sat here often and talked of the old days, before the Greyfriars were shooed out and the houses built on the fields outside the walls, before either of them were lads or even their fathers. Sometimes Janssen was here, and sometimes not; sometimes they talks, and sometimes a companionable silence reigned as they played cribbage or a hand of whist, and drank their kummel.
But tonight the sword lay between them on the dark wood table, bright in the lamplight, and the rest of the room seemed darker somehow, the shadows in the corners a palpable blackness.
What's the inscription on the blade? asked Lawrence, seeing the letters waver and glow.
I don't know. I didn't ask.
Fides et... That's faith, faith and...
But the letters seemed to be in flux, changing and blurring as he squinted to make them out, and he never got any further. It occurred to him later that there was a warning in that, a warning he might have taken; a warning to the curious. A warning not to inquire too closely into the nature of what he was guarding. Still, Camlet had asked him to look after it, and Camlet was all right, a decent fellow; he wouldn't have asked him to do anything dangerous. And it was only four days.
***
Lawrence raked the embers of the fire over the few coals that were still glowing. He was going to shovel the ash under the grate into the pail, but then he thought he could do that just as well tomorrow. Going to the window, he pulled back the curtains; in the dark street outside he caught a sight of a man hurrying past, tightly belted and his cap pulled down against the cold rain. The shutters creaked as he pushed them into place, dropped the retaining bar down with a snap of metal on metal that rang sharp through the house.
He looked at the sword; there was no trace now of the letters, and apart from the ornate decoration, it looked just like an ordinary sword. He wished he hadn't seen the letters; inscriptions were tricky things, even now in 1743, now that rune-writing had been prohibited and whatever you wrote was only words, not magic. He took the hilt in one hand, readying the other to support the blade as he lifted it; but as the hilt came off the table, he tripped on a rough patch in the carpet, and the blade nicked his finger.
Damn, he said, and sucked his finger. It's sharp.
Then he felt himself a fool. Whoever knew a sword that wasn't sharp? Even if it was, after all, only a ceremonial sword, and never used in anger, or even in the cold execution of justice. He should have taken better care.
Into the scabbard with you, he said, and an end to your mischief.
With the sword safely sheathed, he made his way up the narrow stairs to his bedroom.
***
It was a tall, narrow house, three floors and an attic with a steep staircase squeezed between the two small rooms on each floor. The front room on the first floor had been closed for years; he never used it now. Last time he'd been in there had been the day of his wife's funeral; she lay there, whiter than the lilies or the bridal dress she was wearing for the second and last time.
His grandmother's body had lain in that room, too, surrounded by a calligraphy of blood. That was in the rune-days, when you spilt your own blood to write your dreams or desires or your fear of loss, and his grandmother went to her death surrounded by the spiderweb of her son's binding, the tangles of her grandson's scrawl. He remembered her lying on the high bed, stick thin arms and a nose as sharp as a paper crease, and kept the door firmly closed on his memories.
Holding the sword firmly against him, he turned for the next flight of the staircase. The lamp on the landing was burning low, slightly blue. He opened the door to his bedroom, the smallest, highest room in the house, and without lighting the lamp by his bed, pulled up the coverlet and pushed the sword into the dusty darkness under the bed.
Looking into the dim mirror, suddenly he seemed to see his wife again, standing behind him, one arm about to touch his shoulder gently; and then the light shimmered, and he realised he was dreaming on his feet. Too tired to read, too tired to put the lamp on the landing out, he stripped to his shirt, and slipped under the coverlet.
Yet despite his tiredness he couldn't sleep. His mind kept slipping back to the day of his wife's funeral, for some reason, opening up a pain he had thought long dead. He didn't like to think about that. It had been just after Janssen had appeared from the Low Countries, and they'd become friends... just after the war, and he didn't like to think about that, either.<
br />
A million killed on both sides, but they'd not seen the worst of it in England; in Holland whole towns had flamed and guttered like torches, and runes had been cast which sucked people dry as withered grass, or softened bones and sinew till they collapsed into themselves, just lard and skin and tripe, whole streets made a butchers' shambles. They'd executed the rune-writers, those they could find; some, people would tell you, had escaped, but he had a suspicion that parents found the figure of a fugitive rune-writer on the loose useful for frightening children into docility.
Yesterday he'd heard the woman next door telling her son "Cornelius'll get you". Cornelius Van Tuyll, who had scythed through thousands in that final siege, made into a bogeyman to scare little boys with. (But when he'd found the neatly laid turd in the middle of his garden path, Lawrence had rather hoped Cornelius did get the boy, and had felt ashamed of himself for wishing it.)
Half way through the night he thought he heard a noise in the house, something knocked over, or a foot on the stairs. He lay tense and still, hearing his own heartbeat racing, but there was not another sound, except a cat howling in the churchyard outside.
Then he seemed to hear a voice that spoke from behind him, and said hollowly, "Justice will be done". He tried to move his hands, to pull the cover over his head, but he was paralysed with sleep; another voice, close to his ear, whispered to him, "Justice only haunts the guilty." Neither of those voices spoke again, but the floorboards creaked, and the sash window rattled, and he felt a heavy presence in the room.
He'd thought sometimes before of what he might do if he found a burglar in the house, and he'd thought perhaps he would be brave and take the poker and a candle and go downstairs (the burglar was always downstairs, when he'd thought about it), or perhaps he would hide so that when the burglar came upstairs, he was safely behind the curtain or under the bed. Now, though, he lay rigid, breathing as shallowly as he could, thinking desperately 'I'm not here, you can't see me, I'm not here', as if it mattered.
Only the guilty. That was what it had said. And he got round to thinking of his wife. How little help he had been to her as she lay dying; how much help could you be to anybody, really, when they were faced with that awful certainty of an ending? Towards the end, she could hardly keep her food down; she'd never eaten much, like a little bird picking at things, but now she was vomiting every morning, and he couldn't bear it, and went away down the bramble-haunted alley at the back of the houses to the river, and stood there throwing stones into it and watching the ripples till he thought she'd be asleep again.
Strange, how the little robin she'd tamed and the blackbird that used to perch on the top of the kitchen door went away the day she died, and never came again.
He'd drifted away despite himself, and he must have slept, for if he wasn't sleeping how could he have woken with a start.
"Who's there?" he said, and thought as soon as he'd said it; that was stupid, they'll know I'm here...
Then he realised the room was already light with the melancholy grey of an overcast dawn. Struggling up from sleep, his eyes gritty and his neck aching, he threw off the blankets. The room was cold.
The sword was still under the bed where he'd put it. He frowned. He was getting slack, he thought, and remembered suddenly the ashes of yesterday's fire left in the grate downstairs. An inch or two of sword blade showed out of the scabbard, and he'd been sure he had pushed the blade securely home. It wouldn't do to get it scratched. Carefully, he slid the blade back before picking up sword and scabbard to take them downstairs. He'd put the percolator on; hot coffee was what he needed, the biting edge of a new day.
***
He'd thought he might go in to the archives the next day, to look at some deeds that a friend of his mentioned would be interesting in connection with his work on the history of Beckonthwaite; but of course with the sword to look after, that had to be postponed. He spent the day reading Malgoire's Treaty on Fortifications, with a dictionary on one side and a huge pot of gradually cooling coffee on the other, and the Sword of Justice lying across the table.
Once or twice he thought he saw someone in the hall, and wondered if he'd left the street door open; but when he checked, the house was empty, and the door securely bolted.
He went to bed early, while there was still a little light in the sky, and lit three candles, spaced out so the room was clearly, evenly illumined. The sword went under the bed, as it had done last night; and though he knew it was foolish, irrational, and downright superstitious, he locked the door carefully, and looked in the wardrobe before he went to bed. Just before he lay his head on the pillow, he felt carefully under the bed, touching the sword as if for luck. Then he slept.
But in his sleep there came dreams of blood. Swords sliced through necks; blood fountained, or splattered against whited walls, or spread in insidious slowness from under a sprawled body. Blood rose like a flood and suddenly he was in a windowless room and it was rising around him, and just as it reached his mouth he was awake and in his bed and only one of the candles was still burning.
He hadn't meant to mention it to Janssen when they met up in the snug of the Gog and Magog that evening, as they'd done every Thursday evening for years. He hadn't meant to tell Janssen what he had in that long thin case,either. But it happened, none the less.
You don't seem to be getting enough sleep, Janssen said as he brought the second pint of beer back to the table. (It was flat. It often was. Nothing to be done about it.)
I have dreams, Lawrence said.
Don't we all. Janssen took a mouthful of his beer, and swished it round his mouth before gulping it down.
Bad ones.
Oh, said Janssen, who always claimed he'd put in two years of study on the Minor Trivium before getting thrown out, but who worked as a carpenter and never seemed to have a penny to his name. (Sometimes he said he'd had to leave the university to take over his father's business. Sometimes it was an affair with a good-looking landlady, and sometimes a darker story about heretics and the runes, but the payoff was always the same; immediate expulsion.) Dreams were half way through the fourth term. I know a bit about them.
So Lawrence, who hadn't meant to mention the dream, told Janssen about the fountains of blood and the sword and the sense of threat and the feeling of someone standing just behind his shoulder, who moved when he turned his head and could never quite be seen, except fleetingly in the very corner of the eye. And in fact he had that same uncomfortable feeling right now, though he knew no one else had come into the snug and he wasn't going to mention it to Janssen, either.
The innocent have nothing to fear, said Janssen. It's the guilty who need to fear a sword like that.
Thank the gods neither of us are guilty, said Lawrence, but Janssen didn't reply.
***
That night he dreamt his of his own childhood. He saw again his mother's drawer, the dainty white leather gloves embroidered with pink flowers; smelt the lavender and cedarwood, felt the glorious sinfulness of silk against his fingertips. A boy shouldn't know his mother's secrets. He relived the moment he found the money, stiff notes in a little clip, and peeled off the two he'd need for the sextant he'd seen in Rook's.
He'd never pursued that dream of becoming an astrologician; but he still had the sextant, upstairs in a cabinet, alongside the broken Chinese porcelain vase he'd picked up from a sailor on Quayside, and the carved alabaster saints he'd patiently pieced together from fragments on the site of St Margaret in Flames.
He couldn't remember whether his mother had ever found out. Did she know, all her life, that he was a thief? He wanted to turn and go without the money, but in the dream he saw his hand slipping into the drawer, between the silk and the leather, and he knew there was no recalling time past, no chance now to ask forgiveness and no chance to be given it.
When he took the sword from under the bed in the morning he saw it had fallen half way out of its scabbard;he must have had one beer too many, he thought, and he'd put it aw
ay clumsily. Good thing he hadn't sliced himself with it.
At lunchtime he managed to cut a finger while he was slicing the bread. When he pulled the drawer open to find a clean cloth, it came out of the dresser completely, scattering the knives across the floor, and he cut himself again picking them up. Everything metal seemed to be playing up today. Putting the drawer back he heard the knives rattle.
That night was worse. He dreamt of the night he'd found his wife asking Janssen for runes to take the pain away. He'd thrown Janssen out, snatched the square of flimsy paper from her hand, and thrown it in the fire; and then watched her retching emptily all night, till about dawn she stopped retching, and when he'd fetched the glass of water she wanted, he found her cold already.
Now her pale fingers were reaching for him, all bone as they'd been when the flesh had melted off her in that last month. Her hand on his wrist felt like an iron manacle, clamped on him; now she pulled him through corridors where dark liquid sucked at his legs, stumbling over hidden soft things that rolled and twisted under his feet. Then they came out to a rainswept square where the cobbles shone red in apocalyptic sunset, and he saw the bodies, hundreds of them, thousands of them, piled neatly or casually sprawled. Pale cold flesh like the dead eyes of fish, and everywhere the brown stains of drying blood. Tall empty houses looked down; he realised after a moment their windowsd had no glass in them. There was not one person left alive in this city but him, and when he turned, he realised she had gone, too.
He woke with a lurch, thought for a moment he was falling. Then it was daylight, and he was sitting upright in his bed, feeling the coldness of the morning air in his mouth and the heavy pulse of his heart. He breathed out, felt tiredness seeping into his muscles, as if he'd not slept.
He sat there for a few minutes, trying to shake off the dream. Flickering images played across his mind, then faded like the yellow and purple shapes seen for a moment after you rub your eyes; but what lasted was that sense of horror, and loss, and guilt.