The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 36

1194, Nottingham

The town of Nottingham glowed in the dark. Not the welcoming glow of lanterns and night-watch fires but from several buildings set aflame.

As the cart and its escort of guards slowly approached the entrance to the town, their ears picked up the faint ring and clatter of melee weapons and the roar of a defiant crowd.

Through an open and unmanned gatehouse they entered the walled town to see a thoroughfare cluttered and messy with broken slats of wood. A funeral pyre burned in the middle, stacked with a dozen corpses. The smell of cooking human flesh made Liam gag.

Cabot sitting beside him on the jockey seat turned. ‘All right, lad?’

‘Jay-zus! The smell,’ he grunted, wiping a string of dangling bile from his chin. ‘What’s happening?’

‘’Tis a rebellion, I think.’

Liam noticed some women and children in rags and on their knees around the fire, presumably grieving for those bodies burning in the flames. He spotted a cart laden with what at first he thought was a pile of bark-stripped firewood, pale knobbly branches of beach or willow. Then he realized he was looking at arms and legs — bodies, stacked on top of each other.

‘Starvation and disease has come to Nottingham,’ said Cabot, shaking his head. ‘Farmers no longer work their farms only to have all they yield taken in taxes. So food rots in fields and ’tis the towns that feel it first.’

‘Where is everyone?’

Cabot tipped his head towards the centre of the town where it seemed most of the night’s amber glow and the roar of voices, the ring of blades, seemed to be coming from.

‘I’ll wager they are turning on the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle.’

Cabot reached through the canvas into the cart, pulled out his sword and sheath and rested it across his lap as he goaded the horses forward along a muddy avenue between tumbledown shacks. ‘We may have to fight our way in.’

The noise and the amber glow increased with intensity as they rounded a bend in the muddy rutted track and finally the crenellated top of a stone wall came into view. Along its base a sea of humanity swarmed by the light of hundreds of flaming torches. Activity seemed to be focused around two large thick oak gates at the base of a guard tower. From the confusion and movement amid dancing shadows and flickering firelight, Liam guessed the people of Nottingham were doing their very best to attempt to build a bonfire against the gates. The soldiers on the wall were in turn firing crossbow bolts down into the crowd, and ducking back to avoid being pelted with stones and javelins and one or two arrows.

One of the guards John had assigned to escort them jogged forward to the cart. Edward — Eddie, he seemed to be called. The other men deferred to him although they all seemed to share the same rank.

‘Sire,’ he called up to Liam. ‘If those see us here … they will turn on us!’

He was right. It seemed none of the hundreds in front of them had yet noticed the cart and its escort tucked back in the shadows of the alleyway between a long thatched granary and a thresher’s mill.

‘We’ll have to fight our way in,’ said Liam.

‘Sire?’ Eddie stared up at him with astonishment. He looked like he’d seen a fair few battles in his time with, like Cabot, a face that had taken its share of damage. But that command seemed to unsettle him. ‘Sire … that would be suicide!’

Liam nodded uncertainly. It didn’t look too good. But then they did have Bob. He turned in his seat. ‘Uh … Bob?’ He realized his mouth was dry and his voice fluttered with nerves. He hated how every other man around him seemed to manage not to sound like a quaking child, and yet he sounded to his own ears like a boy still.

Bob’s bristly head emerged through the flap of canvas.

‘We need you to do your thing.’

‘Affirmative,’ his voice rumbled, and he disappeared back through the flap. A moment later the cart wobbled as Bob emerged from the back and dropped heavily to the ground. He strode to the front of the cart, his chain mail jangling and clinking. He stood beside the driver’s seat, his head almost on a level with Liam’s and surveyed the scene ahead. ‘You intend for us to enter the defensive structure ahead?’

Liam felt his stomach twitching and writhing with apprehension. He nodded. ‘What do you think, Bob? Can we do it?’

Bob gave it some thought and eventually nodded. ‘I estimate a high probability of success. Eighty — ’

‘I d-don’t want to hear a number! Please!’

Bob nodded obediently. He reached up with a big ape hand and patted Liam’s shoulder heavily. ‘Do not be afraid, Liam. I will clear a way.’

He looked at the soldiers. All of them had unslung their shields from their backs and unsheathed their swords, ready for action.

‘Have the guards form up behind me, either side of the cart.’ Bob glanced at Liam, his eyes lost beneath the firm ridge of his brow and the rim of his chain-mail coif. ‘And stay close to me.’

Liam looked at Cabot. ‘Got that?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, aye … I’ll stay right close.’

Liam gave Eddie the order to have his men form up in two rows of six either side of the cart and then nodded at Bob that they were ready.

Bob turned towards the crowd and strode forward, a longsword held aloft in one hand. The cart rolled along behind him, both horses skittish and nervous, snorting their unease, and the flanking guards moved with it, hunkered down behind their shields.

The first heads in the crowd turned towards them as they emerged from the shadows, voices raised, alerting others. Liam could almost see the idea spreading from one to another: an easier target than the sheriff’s castle, an easier target on which to vent their rage. A dozen soldiers to make a brutal example of, and a cart no doubt loaded with gold sovereigns or, better still, food destined for the sheriff’s table.

A roar of excitement and anger rolled across the crowd, the goal of setting fire to the castle’s gates forgotten for now.

Oh boy. Liam had no weapon to clasp. Right now he’d give anything to be holding one of those Nazi pulse rifles in his hands. Even unloaded, the weight of it would have felt better than twiddling his thumbs.

Just ahead of them Bob’s purposeful stride switched to a slow loping jog. Cabot barked at his horses and the cart picked up a little more speed, while Eddie and his men broke into a trot beside them.

The castle wall loomed before them. Above the roar of the crowd Liam could hear raised voices from the wall. Perhaps they’d recognized the round helmets and long shields of their guard as king’s men and were preparing to open the gates for them. The crowd, though, looked unwilling as yet to part, despite the imposing form of Bob’s seven-foot frame.

A cluster of a dozen men — by the look of them, not townsfolk carrying little more than pitchforks and stones, but more like the brigands who had jumped them in the woods — squared up to Bob’s approach. Liam caught sight of the rusted glint of a sword’s blade swinging round at Bob’s head. He deftly ducked the blow and shouldered into the man with the force of a charging bull, knocking him back into the crowd and a dozen people off their feet.

One of the men took the opportunity, with Bob adjusting his balance, to lunge a pike at his stomach. The tip of it bit deep into his mail, breaking some chains, piercing his skin and going some way inside. Bob responded with a roundhouse sweep of his longsword that cleaved into the side of the man, cutting him completely in two, the momentum continuing into the shoulder of the man standing beside him. Both men collapsed as Bob jerked the pike’s blade clear of the torn tissue and shattered bone and prepared to swing it again in the other direction, but the rest of the men quickly pulled back.

Meanwhile, halted by the exchange in front, the cart and the guards were fending off the closing press of people either side. Missiles of all kinds clattered down on them: stones, sticks, chunks of broken masonry.

Something punched Liam’s shoulder. He screamed out in pain and grasped where he’d been hit. There was blood. Beside his legs Eddie’s shield clattered and clanged from the missiles raining down on them.

‘Sire!’ Eddie called up, jabbing the tip of his sword to ward off the nearest of the rioters. ‘Sire! We must keep moving!’