Chapter 1...

Eternal night.

Sometimes he could not sleep.

Weeks turned into months, and months became years, spent in quiet contemplation, ceaseless footsteps, restless hours all used up in all night cafés. He would read two novels in an evening, just to fill the time, ‘til there were none left to read. Or consume four or five broadsheet newspapers, read from cover to cover.

Like now, sitting in a dingy café, book propped against the chipped enamel of a tea-pot, rain against the window, the smell of fried food and tannic acid and stale sweat. The cold night air and the noise of diesel engines from buses and taxis as the door opened and closed.

He turned a page.

He knew every all-night hole and lair and inn in the city and those that he did not know he knew he’d find sooner or later. The clock on the wall found him. Told him it was almost ten.

He closed his book. He stood and pulled on his coat, buttoned it against the weather, opened the café door and stepped out into the rain. From outside the café looked brighter and warmer than it had from within. The streets smelled of filth and oil and iron and decay. He buttoned his coat; watched as a cab pulled up on the opposite side of the road to unload a woman and child.

The woman was expensively dressed and the child wore a uniform and a wide-brimmed hat, bounced a large and colourful ball. He decided to walk home.

He stopped at the kerb and looked to his right, waited for an approaching bus to pass. On his left a truck was pulling out to overtake the still stationary cab. Instinctively he took a half step back.

The little girl.

He saw what would happen.

She bounced the ball higher into the air, grabbed at it, clenching hands punching it into the road and, with the quickness of a child, she slipped her mothers gaze and darted after the ball as it rolled toward the white lines in the middle of the road where she stopped and bent down to pick it up.

He was already running, flickering speed, his mind absently registering the fact that the bus driver sounded his horn a split second before the truck driver. The girl looked up in alarm as he raced toward her, picking her up by the hood of her coat, pirouetting like a matador between the bus and the truck, wind tugging at them both. Mother’s scream. Engines’ roar. Safety a tenth of a second away, safety a mere three turns of a truck wheel, little girl held dangling by her hood in his right hand, the scream of the bus brakes and the hiss of the truck. Dance, he told himself as a wheel trim on the truck kissed his hip, the wing mirror smashed against the back of his head knocking him into a half crouch. Even now he was almost safe, he staggered a brief step and then the spinning bus wheel caught his coat and dragged him under.

Knowing what was about to happen he let go his grip on the child and, for perhaps a thousandth of a second, he caught her eye and a smile flickered as he tried to slip out of his coat, but it was fastened tight against the rain and he was torn from his feet and dragged beneath the wheels and into the churning gears and sump of the bus.

The child stood stranded in the middle of the road as the vehicles parted and watched silently as he was crushed. She did not hear her mother’s scream or the screeching of the brakes or his screams, as he was shattered. She saw only the look in his eyes and remembered, for a moment, the suggestion of his smile.

Then the noise returned and the glistening street shone like fireworks exploding.

*

‘I could sleep,’ Jenny said, ‘I could sleep for a week.’ She was leaning against a desk reading through a form as she talked, ‘I heard my pager and dreamed that I’d answered the call. Can you believe that?’

The paramedic nodded, not listening, he too was exhausted by a busy evening that had seen him attend three road incidents, a heart attack and a stabbing. This was his third corpse of the night. ‘I’m going off-shift in ten minutes,’ he told her. ‘The body is in storage room two.’

Jenny glanced at the form one more time. RTA. Routine. Check the paperwork. She read the name; James Wyatt. Then she forgot it, running through the mental checklist. Visual the body and send it for a post-mortem. ‘Well, I’ll give him the once over.’ She followed the paramedic into the room, and he was saying, ‘We tried CPR for ten minutes but there was massive blood loss, internal damage. The whole left side of his body was crushed.

Jenny shut the door behind them, approached the slab, pulled back the green sheet. ‘Still got his clothes on. What’s left of them.’

The paramedic said, ‘Yeah. We’ll let the PM lot search through.’ He looked down at the corpse, ‘He’s a hero. Saved a little kid.’

Jenny drew a breath, surveying the mottled blue flesh, the torn flesh of his leg, pelvis, flank, ribcage; the damage-distorted face. ‘Some hero.’

‘Some reward,’ the paramedic said.

Jenny took hold of the right wrist, checking for a pulse was a reflex action. Nothing. As expected. ‘Time of death?’

‘We got there at ten oh nine, bundled him into the ambulance, did CPR on the run, until ten nineteen. Attempted to halt the blood loss as we went. As you do.’

Jenny nodded. ‘As you do.’ Then she said, ‘Time of death, ten nineteen. RTA. DOA. OK. I’ll get a porter, you get a cup of tea.’

‘What time do you get off shift, Jen?’

She shrugged, ‘Eight more hours, I think.’

Out of habit, the paramedic held the door open, first one opens the door, the other pushes the stretcher.

Jenny smiled, was about to say ‘thankyou’ but then the corpse moaned and the rules changed.

They came two hours after dawn; the men were in the fields cutting corn in the open sunshine.

Harvest.

The women milking; making breakfast, chatting.       

Wyat and Geela were on the near hill, playing chase, they were both ten or eleven years old and not quite at the stage where games become awkward and yearning. So they ran and they shrieked and they laughed in the autumn sunshine. Wyat was strong and quick but his friend was quicker, darting from his grasp with a squeal. ‘I’ll get you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill you.’

He paused, breathless, and Geela stopped a wary five yards from him, sensing a trick. He wiped away sweat with his sleeve, smiled at her. He looked away down the valley to the river’s head where the fishing boats nodded at their moorings, intending to throw her off guard by making her do the same.

But he saw the longboat sliding upstream toward the village, oars working, shields slung at the side. And the rules of their game changed.

Wikings he hissed and ran toward the fields.

*

Hopkins was washing his hands, thoroughly, methodically; front, back, between the fingers, under his fingernails, beneath a running tap. ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ he said. ‘These things happen.’ He turned to look at her, ‘I’ve made…’ he paused, ‘I’ve done things like that myself.’

‘Mistakes, you were going to say.’

‘Jenny, two paramedics, two of my best paramedics with about fifteen years flight time between them, and you, one of my best emergency medics, three of you thought he was dead.’

‘But he wasn’t. We could have lost him.’

‘The machines said he was dead, and they don’t lie. And you didn’t lose him.’ He smiled, ‘and remember, it’s only a mistake if the patient dies. Or if you don’t learn from it.’ He towelled his hands until they were dry. ‘You’re tired.’

She shook her head, ‘No excuse.’

He patted her shoulder, ‘You,’ he said, ‘You have to take it easy on yourself. You’re in this for the duration. If you get too intense you’ll burn out and that’s no good for me, or the patients.’

He smiled at her. 

John Hopkins was tired; he was fifty four years old and he looked every inch of it, but his smile was genuine and warm and he was her boss so she accepted his smile and tried to absorb his advice.

He picked up his watch from beside the sink; ‘You were off duty almost an hour ago. Go home, watch TV. Wind down.’

He reflected, ‘He’s a tough bastard though’ and he ran through the injuries methodically, ‘Multiple compound fractures lower and upper leg. Smashed foot.’ He said,’The femur split the artery and he should have died from that. Pelvic fracture. Six broken ribs. Not broken,’ he corrected, ‘sheared. Punctured lung, punctured bowel, punctured, torn liver. Compound fracture to the collarbone. Multiple vertebral fractures, so God only knows about the spine. I don’t think the cord is broken but we’ll have to scan to be sure.’ He turned to look at her, ‘He’s down to maybe two pints of blood. People don’t survive that kind of damage. If he wasn’t dead he should have been. He should be.’

Jenny nodded.

‘Anyway, we’ve straightened the bones, stabilised his vitals, filled his tanks. They’re going to screw and glue him later this morning. I’m asking Issy to do it.’

‘Good. He’s good.’

‘He’s cocky. But he’s quick too. He won’t be fazed by the size of the job. Max would maybe do a better job.’

‘Maybe.’

‘But he’d need a week.’

Hopkins shrugged off his green gown, pulled on a grey sports t-shirt. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, as he pulled on a pair of running shorts.

Jenny shrugged, ‘Still running I see.’

‘You should try it. Keeps me fit, keeps me sane and I sleep like a baby.’

At the word sleep she sighed. ‘I prefer red wine.’ She looked at her watch; it was almost nine. She left Hopkins as he tied the laces on his Adidas running shoes and walked out into the corridor. She walked through casualty, out through the revolving door and into the sunlight. Floating, she walked to the dorm, found her room, her bed, and lay down. Despite the fizzing adrenaline of a fourteen hour shift in accident and emergency and the unanswered questions and doubts about her own abilities brought on by the possibly cataclysmic error she had made, she was asleep before her head hit the crisp cotton, hospital-laundered pillow.

*

She woke to her beeper, picked up her phone, switched it on and rang the number. ‘Wha? I’m off duty. What is it?’

‘It’s me, Issy.’

‘Issy! Fuck right off.’ She looked at her watch. It was just after noon. ‘Aw shit, Iz. Is it important?’          

‘Come over here,’ he told her. ‘Get cleaned and joined me in theatre four. I’m giving you ten minutes then I’m putting this guy back into A&E with an RTS sticker. Addressed to you.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘No,’ Issy laughed. ‘Just come over.’

She said, ‘Issy, you shouldn’t use a mobile in theatre.’

‘Sister Cain is holding it for me. Aren’t you.’ The voice of Sara Cain, theatre sister, said Yes.

Jenny stood up. ‘OK, give me ten minutes. I’ll meet you in the prep room.’

 ‘I can’t screw him.’

‘I hope not. He’s not even you’re type.’

‘Really, I mean it. I can’t get the drill into his bone.’

Jenny frowned.

‘I’m using a tungsten tip. It’s barely making a scratch.’

‘Show me.’

Issy, peeled back the skin, clamped it, then opened the muscle with another clamp. The bone was white, glistening. He took a swab and wiped away a glob of fat and dried the area with a steady stream of air from a compressor. Then he picked up the drill, switched it on, waited until the whine reached a steady, high pitch, said, ‘Watch,’ and began to carefully drill a hole, ready to take a screw, ready to clamp the two fractured ends of the femur together.

The drill changed pitch as it met bone, grinding now rather than a whine. Smoke rose from the tip of the bit, the smell of heat. Jenny crowded in close beside him, watching carefully. After fifteen or more seconds he withdrew the bit, which smoked still. ‘Look,’ he said, and she looked down at the wound, carefully clamped. The bone glistened. Unmarked.

‘It’s like tooth enamel, but harder.’

Jenny looked at Issy. She looked at the theatre nurse, whose professionally blank expression gave nothing away. She looked at the vital signs as they read out on the monitor. Heart steady. BP a little low but fine, really. ECG and EEG reading showed the patient to have the vital signs of a heavy sleeper.  

She said, ‘We’d better use glue.’

Through the lemon glade, then clear into the fields of corn, he ran, he ran and he screamed WIKING! WIKING! until he had to pause, lean forward and vomit. And then the men were running toward the village, even before he reached them, some dropping their scythes, others carrying them as weapons.

The men of his village were not weak, they were not cowards and they were dangerous when roused, but they were a half-mile from their families and from their shields, and their spears were rusted or packed away or mislaid.

And the Wikings were there ahead of them.

*

When a bone is fractured, the site of the injury becomes engorged with a jelly like substance that surrounds the damaged tissue, protecting it and, eventually, calcifying and joining the two damaged pieces together. From the initial injury to a time when the bone is stabilised by this new bone can take some weeks or even months. In cases where the bone is lost or the separate pieces displaced too far apart healing does not occur and the fractured bone does not knit together.

Alternatively, if not stabilised, the bone can move during the healing process, resulting in a deformed limb or injury to tissue.

For this reason many serious fractures are screwed together using the medical equivalent of scaffolding; screwed into bone, protruding from flesh, linked with springs and steel clips. Steel plates are used to join bone where a gap is too wide, or the surface area of the fractured ends too small to knit strongly.

Issy was faced with a series of traumatic fractures and no way to stabilise the bone ends – yet he knew that movement could result in further tissue or arterial damage. Hopkins had sewn up the punctured bowel and cleaned the stomach cavity against peritonitis. He had shaved away the damaged part of the liver. The wound was five inches long and neatly stitched. Scans had shown that there was no tissue damage to the spine and the fractures there were non-threatening. The pelvis had been straightened manually and fixed temporarily with an inflatable cast.

Issy needed to ensure that no further damage was inflicted on the man’s ribs, collarbone and leg. He needed to fix the bones in place so that they would join, heal and become strong. To no do so would risk life or crippling deformity.

He tried to drill bone in four separate places, and failed.

‘Clip him up,’ he told his assistant. There were seven injuries to the leg. Four compound fractures, that is, where sharp bone-ends punctured the flesh. He had aligned these correctly. The man had now been in surgery for eleven hours altogether.

Issy had used a superglue formula as a temporary measure to keep the bones in place while he considered his options. The clips would hold the wounds together but they were less permanent than stitches, the wounds could be reopened quickly.

The ribs he’d had to scaffold, using superglue to fasten the surgical steel to the bone. This was a fragile measure, but less dangerous than to risk allowing the splintered ribs to slide over each other and puncture the lung or heart.

He did what he could. He was expert at his job, bordering on brilliant at times, and he knew it. The patient had bones that wouldn’t drill and fractures that needed securing, his life depended on it. And Issy had improvised brilliantly.

He spoke to the anaesthetist, ‘I need him sleeping for a week, not moving at all.’

‘OK. I can arrange that,’ she replied, ‘though we’ll need someone to monitor him. He’s tough but it can be risky. If we dope him enough to keep him dead still.’

Risky to the heart, which was in danger of stopping if too much sedative was used, or if even a small residue built up over time, dangerous to the lungs, which could slowly, quietly fill with fluid and drown him.

*

Jenny was having breakfast. She’d left Issy before ten in the morning, had five hours of blackness-deep sleep and woke with a ravenous hunger. Dressing, she’d walked to the staff canteen for sweet milky tea and plate of waffles.           

She looked up, ‘How’d you manage?’ she asked him.

Issy sat down beside her with an empty cup, poured a cupful from her pot and tipped in a carton of UHT milk.

He shook his head, ‘Stabilised the fractures best I could, glued him where I had to.’

‘Spoke to Hopkins?’

He nodded, ‘Said he’s seen one like this before, about fifteen years ago. Said that some people have sort of crystalline bone structure that hinders drilling.’

‘Kind of a mutation,’ she observed. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’m a bonesetter and I’d never heard of it. But I couldn’t deny the fact of it.’

‘Have a cup of my tea,’ she said, as he drank off a cupful.

‘Thankyou,’ and he poured another, emptying the pot. She stood and walked over to the counter to buy another pot of tea.

‘What?’ She asked. He was smiling.

‘Nothing,’ he shrugged.

‘Tell me, you lying bastard. What do you want?’

He looked at his watch. ‘The guy is in IC. We can’t let him move. Not even an inch.’

An inch would be enough for the shard of a rib to penetrate his heart.

She nodded, eating a waffle, speaking with her mouth full. ‘We got good people in IC. They know their jobs.’

She looked at him looking at her, swallowed and then slowly shook her head. ‘No.’ she said. ‘No. I won’t. Hear me? I get off at ten tonight and I’m going home for four days. I’m not babysitting, Iz. I’m not.’ She almost laughed, or cried, ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘It’s an absolute waste of manpower and resources, paying me to sit in IC with a comatose patient.’

Issy smiled again, ‘Who said anything about being paid?’

*

His mother was not like other mothers; all the village mothers were tall, almost as tall as the men, and fair and sturdy. His mother was small and quick and dark. She came from the West Country, she’d told him, where witches lived still, and they practised the old religion, and where the cliffs were higher than the downs and where the men were brave and they fought battles sky clad.

‘What is sky clad?’ he asked.

She rubbed his hair, ‘You’ll find out one day,’ she said.

He was more like her than like his father, lighter of build and darker-haired than the other boys, with hazel eyes, not the usual blue.

But he was strong.

He tore through the village, past a burning home, past a girl of thirteen, a maid, screaming as she was being raped beneath a huge man with red hair and beard. He ducked under a swinging axe, ran between two Wikings as they hacked at a corpse laughing.

Screams.

The smell of burning. Laughter and more screams.

He found home, found mother and father.

‘Mother?’ He shouted.

She was still alive, breathing, eyes barely open. A hideous wound across her belly, his hand cupped her entrails, pushing them back inside, ‘Mother?’ Blood slipping between his fingers. Her blood. His blood.

He glanced at father. Face down. Dead. The back of his head crushed. His fair hair mopped with blood and brain. He looked back at mother.

A blow to the head sent him rolling across the grass, another blow broke his nose as he tried to stand. A spear skewered him as he fell, passing through his stomach and out through his back, pinning him to the ground.

*

Jenny was dreaming, of walking along paths she’d known as a child. But these paths wound on and on and she couldn’t find the place she was searching for.

She woke with a start; he was stirring, whispering something that she could not make out. She went to the cot and said ssh and held him gently at the shoulder and the right thigh to ensure he wouldn’t try to turn or roll over. He was dreaming, saying words she couldn’t understand.

Ssh, she told him.

His dream subsided though she could see REM beneath the eyelids, lips parting slightly and then closing as he mouthed a silent word. She looked at the monitors, bp, heartrate. Sure that he was sleeping soundly she checked her watched and then scratched some notes onto the clipboard. She checked the drip that guided food and rest into his arm. Satisfied, she sat back down in the comfy chair provided as a courtesy by the ward sister, slipped off her sandals and put her feet up on a linen box.

In the morning she was woken by the ward sister and a mug of coffee. ‘Thanks, Cait,’ she murmured, glancing up at the machine. Cait, IC ward sister of ten years experience caught her glance and said, ‘Ignore that thing. You should go home now. He’s going to be fine.’

‘You can’t say that,’ Jennie chided. She was aware too that she was on Cait’s territory and, even though they were friends of some time, only partially welcome.

Cait nodded at him, ‘Look at the colour of his skin. Pink as the day he was born. His breathing has been steady all night. His heart is as strong as a lion.’ She pulled up a steel framed chair and sat down beside Jenny with her own mug of coffee. ‘I heard that you all thought he was dead. Well, he’s not.’ She shook her head to emphasize, ‘So don’t worry about him. He’s out of this ward today if I have my way.’

Experienced ward sisters have more authority than junior A&E doctors and Jenny had to admit that, superficially at least, he looked fine. But she said, ‘We’re concerned about the fractures, they might creep, if he moves at all.’

Cait picked up the clipboard, ‘Look at this. It says here he has a compound fracture to the left ankle. Tibia.’

‘Yes.’

Cait touched his ankle, ‘Well, I see the wound. It’s healing fine. And there’s no movement of the bone.’

‘There must be some.’

With the professional callousness of twelve years experience Cait placed two fingers against the swelling around the wound and firmly pushed. The whole lower leg moved, but the fracture did not flex.

‘Are you sure it was broken?’ Cait asked, only half joking. She opened an envelope hanging from the foot of the bed and flicked through the X-rays. ‘Here it is,’ she said, answering her own question. ‘Well, there’s a fracture. On the X-ray, at any road.’

Still sitting, Jenny took the X-ray from her, studied it. Double checked the name on the X-ray and the name on the envelope against the name on the bed.

James Wyatt.

She stood up, put down her coffee cup and repeated Cait’s action with the fracture, careful not to touch the actual wound. No movement.

Cait said, ‘He was operated on, on Tuesday?’

Jenny nodded. Cait said, ‘That’s not a three day wound,’ pointing at the ankle, ‘Or that,’ pulling back the dressing to reveal the five inch incision that ran from his hip bone to below the rib cage. This all looks like it’s a week, ten days old. Two weeks even.’

‘What are you saying?’ Jenny asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Cait evaded, ‘Perhaps he’s a quick healer.’

‘You think I misdiagnosed?’

Cait shook her head, ‘That would be you, Hopkins, three theatre staff, Issy and various others. No.’ She conceded, ‘I don’t know what happened but I do know he’s healthy and, according to the injuries listed in this file, he’s healing exceptionally quickly.’

She found him three days later, amongst the ashes and the corpses and the smell of rot.

Still breathing.

She squatted down, put her hand to his forehead, pulled back an eyelid. Then she lifted his woollen shirt and looked at the spear. His flesh had begun to heal around it. She ran her fingertips up the shaft and then back down.

Reaching into a bag slung around her neck she pulled out a small knife and slit away the shirt. The spear was five foot long, plus what was through him. She stood upright and took hold of the spear shaft with both hands and, with a heave, pushed it further into the soft earth, breaking the scab and flesh that his body had sealed around it, he yelped in fresh pain.

Hush, she told him and, still pushing the spear into the ground, she suddenly leaned against it, snapping the shaft it in two, four inches above his torso. She threw away the broken wood of the shaft, bent over and very gently lifted him clear of the remainder of the spear. Fresh blood ran down her skirt.

He weighed nothing.

 

chapter 2...

‘The Russian girls are the most accomplished,’ Antonio said. ‘I sometimes chat with them when I’m breakfasting down by the harbour; they’re excellent company.’
Paul said, ‘You can’t generalise about the quality of a nation’s women by the ones who live with billionaires.’
‘They’re very intelligent, as well as beautiful, Antonio told him. ‘Most of them have doctorates; they can play musical instruments, speak many languages…’
They sat quietly for a while, each contemplating the merits of Russian women. Paul said, ‘I rode around the south of India once.’
‘Rode?’
Paul nodded.
‘On a motorbike, or a scooter?’
Paul frowned, and Antonio poured them both another glass of wine, and Paul took a long drink before saying, ‘Horseback, I think’.
‘You think?’
‘Indian women are very beautiful,’ Paul said. ‘They don’t have the accomplishments enjoyed by the concubines of Russian oligarchs, most of them being uneducated and dirt poor, but still, they’re extremely beautiful.’ He reached for the bottle, shook it and found it almost empty, ‘More wine?’
‘You’re not busy tonight?’ Antonio asked.
Paul reached across to his phone and tapped a finger on the screen, checking for messages, shook his head. ‘It’s September,’ he mused, ‘and trade is slowing.’
Antonio nodded agreement, ‘I haven’t seen a Ferrari or even a Hummer all evening.’
‘All the beautiful people are hibernating,’ Paul said, and picked up his phone. He said, ‘I used to change my ring-tone about every week. Then I got to changing it every couple of days. Then daily. Whatever ring-tone I had, I was dissatisfied with it. So then I started just having a single beep, a quiet beep.’ He dropped the phone into the pocket of his khaki shorts. ‘Now I have it on the shortest, softest vibrate setting.’ He smiled to himself; ‘No sound. Just nought point two of a second’s vibration. I had to download it off the Apple website. It just goes rr, once, and that’s it.’
Antonio signalled to the waiter and ordered another bottle. 
While they watched the waiter uncork it Paul said, ‘The most beautiful women in the world are Persian women.’
‘Persian women?’
‘Paul nodded, ‘Aryans.’
The waiter poured them each a glass of wine and left them alone. They both watched as a woman walked past. ‘Spanish women are attractive,’ Antonio observed, ‘but they’re often a little bit angry.’
‘Muscular,’ Paul said, ‘Maybe not muscular, but wiry?’
Antonio nodded. ‘English women are flabby.’
‘Mainly.’
‘But an attractive English woman, now she is very nice. They have a wisdom about things.’
‘Persians,’ Paul said, rubbing his eyes. ‘The rare ones, with green eyes and black hair, and some have those reddish lowlights in their hair, like henna but natural.’
‘And skin the colour of caramel,’ Antonio added.
Paul nodded.
‘Aah, possibly,’ Antonio said with a slow grin. Then he asked, ‘How long is it since you slept?’
‘About four days.’
Antonio shook his head in amusement, looked at Paul who sat with the wine glass in his hand, watching the traffic, watching the girls, ‘I don’t know how you manage it. All the wine you drink, the drugs you take, no sleep for days, weeks even.’ 
‘I’m immortal,’ Paul said, ‘I must be.’
‘You look pretty fucked-over for a god,’ Antonio replied, pouring another glass of wine. ‘How long is it since you had a hit?’
‘About a week,’ Paul said.
Antonio nodded, ‘I’m amazed how you can go so many days without it.’
‘We have a long-term relationship,’ Paul said. ‘She knows I’ll never leave her, so she doesn’t expect me to call every day.’
You should get some,’ he said, miming the action of depressing a syringe, ‘and maybe then you’ll sleep.’
‘I’ve been too busy delivering the stuff to take any myself.’
‘You look wired.’
Paul shrugged. ‘I do?’
‘Pre-occupied maybe. Something going off? Maybe an aggrieved husband or a jealous Russian?’
When Paul didn’t answer Antonio sighed, checked his watch and said, ‘Well, I have to go.’
He reached into his pocket but Paul raised his hand, ‘It’s on me.’
‘My turn next.’
‘Sure.’
Antonio patted Paul’s arm and said, ‘Whatever you got planned, Paulus,’ he said, ‘be careful.’
‘Sure.’
Paul watched Antonio rise and squeeze between the tables of the street café, giving him a wave as he turned a corner and vanished into the night. Then he returned to the half empty wine bottle, intending to finish it. After that he had a couple of collections to make.

He checked his watch, switched off the Vespa engine and pulled it up onto its stand. Trotting up the stairs he walked in through the club doors and, nodding to the security, he pushed through a side door and into an ante room. Five minutes later he was back on the scooter and with another five thousand euros in his pocket. That made thirteen thousand altogether, wadded into his hip pocket snug and tight next to the passport he’d collected from his apartment. He turned the key, revved the sputtering two-stroke engine, kicked away the stand and pulled away. Instead of turning right, back toward town, he turned left toward the airport.

The Customs guys didn’t like the look of him, a lone male catching the red-eye, and he got strip-searched, and someone checked his passport and rummaged through his cash to see if there were any brand-new Euros that they could run a number trace on, but the notes were all old and battered and the last of the heroin was already cooking up in his veins. He’d dumped everything else in a sanitary towel bin in the ladies’ toilets before he’d entered departure the area.
When he took his seat in the cramped, almost empty aisle he was hitting a slump, and by the time the plane left the runway he was unconscious, splayed across three seats.

His dreamt of cities burning, and of women raped, men blinded and infants spitted and thrown onto bonfires. He dreamt of walls stormed. Of villages razed
Then he was climbing.
Then he was flying.  
He woke to an air steward shaking him by the shoulder.

 
England was cold, and a chill wind caught his breath as he walked down the mobile steps onto the runway and across to arrivals. He got strip-searched again by customs officers who were suspicious of a single male arriving on the red-eye.  He found a Starbucks franchise and bought coffee and muffins and chocolate-coated cookies.
A couple of hours later, walking along the hard-shoulder; thumb out, as the sun rose, he spotted a Subaru Forester indicate and pull into a lay-by a hundred yards further on.
He trotted forward.

*           *

‘Where are you headed?’ Ghent asked as Paul slammed shut the door and fastened his seatbelt.
‘Anywhere will do,’ Paul told him.
Ghent nodded, checked his rear-view mirror and pulled back onto the motorway; ‘Well how about some breakfast?’ he suggested, but Paul was already asleep, the remains of the heroin letting him slide into a reservoir of unconsciousness.  

Ghent woke him when they made the Little Chef and they walked through the fresh morning air and into the machine-whirring low-wattage coffee-smelling eating area where Ghent ordered two breakfasts and took a double pot of freshly ground java over to the table where Paul sat, and poured them both a large cupful. When the food came Paul ate quickly and hungrily and Ghent watched him with amusement as he tore through the bacon and scrambled eggs and toast, before demolishing a double sized chocolate muffin and two more mugs of coffee.
Paul sat back as Ghent ate his own breakfast at a more sedate pace, chewing each mouthful with patience and relish, cutting slices with his knife and fork, his eyes anticipating and the next mouthful as he swallowed. He paused to look at Paul, ‘You want some more breakfast?’
‘I’ll get some in a few minutes,’ Paul said with a smile. ‘Giving my stomach a rest.’
Ghent nodded, slicing into the yolk of an egg.
Paul watched the older man ate his breakfast. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome. I was passing, and you looked like you needed a lift. Anyway,’ he paused, smiling, ‘It’s not like I carried you or anything. All I had to do was stop and open the door.’
‘You bought breakfast too.’
Ghent nodded, pausing while he chewed and swallowed, ‘I’m sure I can afford it.’
Paul didn’t mention the euros in his pocket.
‘So you’re not heading anywhere in particular?’ Ghent asked.
Paul shook his head, ‘Nowhere special. Nothing planned.’
‘It must be nice to have that feeling of not having any plans.’
Paul said, ‘Sometimes I wake up and there are a few moments when I don’t know who I am, or where. And I look around ad everything is fresh and brand new.’
‘That must be disconcerting.’
‘No,’ Paul said, ‘I like it, really. It’s the best time of the day.’
‘So what do you do,’ Ghent asked, ‘In between temporary bouts of sleep-induced amnesia?’
‘I’m a climber,’ Paul said, ‘Though the last few years I’ve been mostly making a living from delivering drugs to wealthy customers in nightclubs in Ibiza. ’
Ghent raised an eyebrow.
‘But really, I climb,’ Paul said, ‘I’m a climber.’ And he stood and went over to the food counter to order another breakfast.
 
An hour later Ghent folded his newspaper and decided it was time to go. He found Paul flicking through magazines in a rack. ‘Do you have any plans?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Paul told him. ‘Nothing.’
‘I might have some work for you, if you want.’
Paul didn’t look that interested until Ghent said, ‘it involves a bit of climbing, which is why I can’t do it myself.’
‘Ok,’ Paul said.

Ghent turned the car onto a single-track that wound up the side of the valley and a few minutes later as they breasted the top Paul could see a smaller valley, a geological dimple indenting a ridge that separated two larger wolds.  
‘This is my house,’ Ghent told him.
As the road approached the house it bisected the perimeter woods that circled the valley and then ran along an avenue of sycamore trees. Ghent pulled the Forrester to a stop at the end of the avenue, turned off the engine and got out. Paul followed. Ghent pointed up at the trees; ‘These haven’t been trimmed in about forty years and they’re getting a bit dangerous’.
The branches were hanging low enough to almost scrape the roof of the car in places. The trees were mossy, ivy clad and heavy-looking. They blocked out a lot of light and the ground beneath felt damp and mossy.
‘I need them trimming right back.’
‘Thirty-four trees,’ Paul said.
‘Really? I hadn’t counted.’
‘A day for each tree,’ Paul calculated, ‘plus time to cut up the branches and clear up the mess.’ He turned to Ghent. ‘About six weeks work for one man.’
Ghent nodded.
‘And I’ll need to buy some tools, and some ropes.’
‘Sure.’
Ghent said, ‘I have a workshop full of tools, but the ropes and things you’ll need to get at an outdoor shop. There’s one in town.’
He looked round for Paul, who had already clambered up the low branches of the end tree and was now mid-way up, bouncing up and don on a branch to gauge it’s condition and strength. ‘Where can I sleep?’ Paul shouted down?
‘There’s a pub in the village, or you can have a room at my house.’
‘Which is closer to the trees?’
‘My house.’
‘I’ll stay at yours then, if it’s ok.’
Ghent nodded, already losing sight of him in the broad-leaf canopy. Only the noise gave away his position. Ghent went back to his car and waited.

 

*           *

‘Nice house,’ Paul said, climbing out of the car.
‘I like it,’ Ghent said. ‘It’s peaceful.’
He opened the door, ‘Watch for the dogs,’ and Paul nodded with a grin which faded as a huge dog trotted toward him. ‘This is Lucy,’ Ghent said, stroking the dog’s huge head, ‘And Boss should be around somewhere.’
‘Does she eat hitch-hikers?’ Paul asked.
‘Not usually.’
‘What breed is she? A mastiff?’
‘My own breed,’ Ghent said. ‘Somewhat lighter than a mastiff, taller and heavier than a pit-bull. Smarter than both.’
Paul stood still as Lucy padded up to sniff him.
‘Boss is the other one?’
‘Lucy’s son.’
‘And he’s bigger, I’m guessing.’
Ghent nodded with a smile, ‘Come on inside. I’ll show you your room and you can get the keys for the tool-shed, see what you can use. I’ve got an account at the a hardware store in town for anything else. The climbing stuff you’ll have to buy yourself. I’ll give you some money for that.’
‘Sure,’ Paul agreed and followed him into the living room.
‘But you don’t have to start today. Have a look around, explore the place. Your room is on the top floor, it’s the one with the pale blue door. The guest room,’ Ghent explained, and then looked at his watch, ‘I’ve been driving most of the night so I’m going to go and rest for a couple of hours. If you want a snack or a coffee or something the kitchen is at the back of the house, the dogs won’t bother you, so feel free to wander. We usually have lunch at about one.’
‘We?’
But Ghent had already turned and walked toward a door and a moment later he’d closed it behind him. Paul sighed, and then he sat down in one of the armchairs. After a minute or two he stood up again and left the room, wandering around the house looking tentatively into each room; in the kitchen he found what he assumed was Boss, who eyed him hungrily but didn’t move from the huge basket in which he lay. He left the kitchen and walked up the stairs to the next floor, counting six or seven rooms, and a couple of bathrooms, and on the third floor he found three doors at the top of the stairs and one of them had a pale blue door.
He pushed this open and entered to find a large room, unfurnished save for a large single bed, a bedside cabinet and a wardrobe. The windows faced south, had no curtains and were low in the wall, where the roof began to slope inwards toward the apex, so that the light crept in at knee level and shone upwards. He opened the wardrobe and it was empty save for a lidded glass jar that was filled with small origami shapes.
He opened the jar and poured a few onto the palm of his hand. Flowers. Tiny coloured paper flowers, hand folded. Carefully he poured them back into the jar and then used his fingertips, he withdrew one, a long-stemmed white crocus, the spread of petals no bigger than the nail of his little finger. He put the jar back in the wardrobe and then placed the paper flower on the table by the bed.
He sat down on the bed, kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks and t-shirt and lay down. He reached over for the crocus, studied it, spun it between his fingers. Then he closed his eyes and lay quietly, breathing slow and deep.
Then he was asleep, the final vestiges of tiredness and heroin sending him three or four hours into a dreamless depth in which he did not dream of flying or climbing or running through forests at twilight.  

He woke quickly, like he’d been switched on, and for a few moments he didn’t know who he was, or where, and he searched his short-term memory, flicking through the drinks in Ibiza town, the scooter, the airport the flight the airport the motorway the lift … aah, yes, he remembered.
He sat up.

Leaning forward he lifted the catch on the sash window and slid it open. He knelt on the floor looking through the window, and then inserted himself in the gap and slid through eel-like, until he was mostly outside, hanging by fingertips thirty feet above the ground, taking his full weight in his grip he hoisted his legs through until he was hanging fro the window ledge, then he braced himself against the wall, bare feet gripping softly, toes feeling for cracks until he found one, then another. Small, but enough to take maybe two tenths of his weight, he didn’t trust the window frame to hold his weight, nor the slates which, he guessed, were old and might be suffering from nail-sickness, but he had enough grip with one hand and both feet to allow him to move one arm which he did, letting it leak sideways and up until it found the concrete ridge-tiling that ran from the apex down the corner of the roof to the edge. He gripped this and tugged at it, worried it a little, to see if it was stable and it appeared to be so he eased his weight toward it, then his other hand darted up to grasp the wood beneath the slates and this too was strong enough to bear his weight. His left foot came up to the window ledge and he pushed through with his right leg and rolled forward onto the roof, ignoring slippery moss which stained his bare chest as he dragged himself onto the slates.
He stood, then jogged up the tiles to the apex and stood on the lead-flashing that crowned the roof. He walked cat-like along the apex until he came to the chimney stacks and climbed onto the highest, so that he was now level with some of the tree-tops behind the house. He surveyed the small valley, running south from the house with a walled garden to his right and outbuildings to the left, greenhouses and sheds, converted stables maybe. The gravel track snaking down and away to the right through the trees and, in the distance the avenue that the man Ghent wanted trimming down.
He wondered what else might need doing. The house was well-kept, but old. I could spend some time here, he thought; maybe spin it out for the winter if I do a good enough job. Suggest there’s other work to do. He looked at the brickwork that he stood on, hungry, he said to himself, it needs pointing or it’ll fall down in ten years.

And then things blurred, meshed; he’d made his calculations, and they would work, he knew. He unfurled, standing up straight, closing his eyes, forgetting the present, his mind taking flight.
He stood atop the house, barefoot, arms outstretched like a bird. 
 

 

Chapter 3...

 ‘I know a wizard,’ the last man had told him. ‘A wise man. Cunning. He has gold, riches beyond belief. Let me live and I’ll take you there.’
‘Where does he live? Have you seen him?’
‘Will you let me live?’
A nod.
‘They say he lives in the forest, below a water fall.’
The woods. All of the northern land were forest. He’d cut the man’s throat and went searching himself.

10pm.
‘Welcome back, stranger,’ Fred Goundry said to her as she walked in through the sliding front doors of A&E.
‘Quiet?’
He nodded, ‘So far,’ checking his watch as though to say yet, and then turning back to his computer.
Jenny walked through the children’s section, said hello to Maeve Beecham, the ward sister, and pushed through the double doors to the staff section.  She dropped her coat over the back of a chair, pulled off her sweatshirt and slipped on a pale green t-shirt, her own, but conveniently coloured. Any blood-stains gathered would show up as black. She looked up as Maeve barged through the door, grinned, and asked her, ‘You ready to hit the ground running?’
‘Yes, why?’
But Maeve was already walking out the door, ‘We got a bleeder’ was all she said.

He’d taken passage across the northern seas, jumped ship before the captain could sell him as a slave, and after a search of eight months he’d found the village of the Black Swan clan, whose warriors had murdered his village.  The men had been away – it was the season for Viking - so he hid in the woods, living on fresh caught meat, berries and spring water, and waited. A month later they returned, with booty and slaves. In the three years since his village had died he had hardly grown, and even now he still looked an undersized boy of no more than ten or eleven years, but as he’d begun to approach puberty he’d developed a rapidly increasing strength, and a speed that was almost inhuman.

The two summers he’d spent with his mother’s aunt, she’d explained to him what she knew of what was happening. It was a thing, she said, a thing that had happened sometimes with warriors, reaching manhood slowly but living hugely extended life-spans; fast and strong and easily bearing wounds that would kill the strongest of men.
She’d come to visit her sister and finding the village destroyed and him the only one alive she’d tended to him, expecting him to die in a day or two. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d got stronger. So she knew.
And eventually she’d explained to him about the blood feud, and his obligations to it. Explained the rules.
But he needed no lessons in this.

10.49 pm.
‘Drink this.’
Things had quietened down. 
Jenny took the mug of tea and gulped it down, hands trembling.
‘Nothing we could do,’ Maeve said.
‘She shouldn’t have died.’
‘She didn’t fight too hard to stay alive.’
Jenny nodded. The girl had gone quickly; slashed wrists and a fifteen minute start on the paramedics meant they were playing catchy-up from the beginning.  They brought her back three, or was it four times? She slipped away five.
Jenny put down her cup. ‘I have to see the parents. They’re waiting to see her.’
Maeve nodded. ‘Want me there?’
‘Please,’ Jenny said.
Maeve patted her arm, ‘Welcome back,’ she said.
Jenny smiled; ‘You’re not the first person to say that to me tonight.’
Goundry came through the doors; ‘You busy?’ he asked, deliberately cheerful and loud, ‘I wouldn’t ask, only, we got a compound leg fracture and the other two are busy.’
The other two were Doctors Smithfield and Singh, both dealing with life-threatening injuries.
Jenny forced a smile, ‘Is that the best you can get me? A broken leg!’
‘I try my best,’ he said.
‘Can it wait about ten minutes? I have to speak to next-of-kin.’
Fred nodded, ‘Sure, ‘he’ll be on gas and air, nice and clean, waiting your arrival.’
Jenny nodded, and leaving her mug on the staff room table she left the room.

During the drunken three-day welcome-home celebrations of the Black Swan clan he’d murdered seven of the warriors, quietly following them as they walked to the trees to shit, or collapsed drunk at the back of the long-house, cutting their throats and dragging them deep into the woods, hanging them from boughs by their bowels. And when most of the men had died he’d went after the women.
And then the children.

Over the next fifty days hell descended on the clan of the Black Swan. Men, women, children, slaves, dogs, geese, and anything else that could be killed was killed.
The final warrior left alive had told him of the wizard, who lived below a waterfall, trying to buy his life with the gold this information could bring. But he didn’t believe in wizards.

‘You have got to be joking!’ Jenny said.
Cait shook her head.
‘I took a long weekend. That’s all.’
‘Not before time.’
She ignored this, ‘I’ve been away four days. And now you’re telling me he’s gone?’
A nod.
‘What, he just signed the forms, got out of bed and walked out?’
Cait stepped back, her chinned dipped and she took a short, deep breath as though to say Don’t Try It On, junior Doctor.
Jenny paused, ‘Sorry Cait, sorry.’
‘So you bloody should be. I didn’t make him go. He signed himself out.’
‘He was well?’
‘Well enough to walk out, unaided.’
Jenny shook her head slowly, ‘Unreal,’ she said, ‘Un-fucking-real. First he’s dead. Then he’s not. And then he signs himself out of hospital in ten days. It’s the most humiliating case of my career; I totally screwed up. I got everything wrong.’
Caitlin said, ‘In ten years time you’ll have a file full of humiliating mistakes Jen. Don’t sweat this one.’
Jenny shook her head, deep in thought. ‘If I got that so wrong, what the fuck am I doing in this job?’
Cait stayed silent, allowing Jenny space to fume.
Jenny turned to go, paused, said, ‘Sorry Caitlin,’ this has knocked me a bit sideways. I’ve just never come across anyone like this before.’
‘Some sort of superman, maybe,’ Cait suggested, then said, ‘Oh, and don’t call me Caitlin.’ She smiled, ‘you’re not my mammy.’
Jenny nodded, pursed her lips.
Cait said, ‘You know, I never really understood what the word nonplussed means, until this very moment. You, Doctor Friend, are the very definition of nonplussed.’
‘I am,’ Jenny agreed. ‘I wish I could have checked him over before he left.’
‘Why?’
‘Professional curiosity, I guess.’
‘That all?’
‘That’s all I have time for,’ she said ruefully.
‘He was quite handsome,’ Cait said.
‘Was he?’
‘Slightly wolfish. Sort of skinny but hard looking; dark hair, pale skin,’ Cait mused, deep in thought herself, and Jenny giggled. Cait look up at her, ‘and I’ve seen him naked,’ she said, cackling.
‘It’s true what they say about you nurses,’ Jenny said, laughing.
‘What’s true about us nurses?’ Cait said, feigning offence.
‘You’re all sex mad,’ Jenny said, smothering her laughter.
‘You doctors are all theory. We nurses are empiricists. We go with what works.’
‘Look at you, and the big words.’
‘Hey,’ Cait said, leaning in closer, ‘I might be able to help you out with some practical research,’ and put her hand into her pocket to take out a card.
‘What’s this?’ Jenny asked.
‘His business card.’ She handed it to Jenny.
                                    James Wyatt
                                    11 Mecklenburgh Sq.
                                    0207 405 0011
‘Where’s Mecklenburgh Square?’
‘Near Great Ormond Street Hospital,’ Cait said. ‘Further up, toward Kings Cross.’
‘Exclusive,’ Jenny said.
‘Go and see him,’ Cait told her.
‘Oh, I can’t.’
‘Yes you bloody can, girl.’
‘He signed himself out.’
‘You need to sign him out of your head.’
‘I’m going mad,’ Jenny told her.
‘You will, if you don’t go and see him.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Well, strictly speaking, you won’t, but it’ll annoy the hell out of you for the next decade if you don’t. You might even get a medical paper published. A case study.’
‘What would I say?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe try telling him the truth. That you can’t believe he’s not dead, and you really can’t believe he’s well enough to sign himself out. And you want to check him out, see what he’s made of, so that you can understand what happened. And write a paper for the Lancet about him.’
‘Can you?’
‘Can I what, understand? No. But I saw him, and he was fine and that’s good enough for me.’
Jenny said, ‘I need to think about this before I do anything.’  But she put the card into her pocket anyway.

He told the few women that he’d left them alive to breed, and that he’d come for them later, and their children, for sport. And he had. For three generations he pursued the descendents of those women, and killed them all.
Thief, the women shrieked at him, as he left them standing in the ruins of the village of the Black Swan.
Thief. 

Jenny glanced at the address on the card. Number 11.
The building was Regency, she guessed, or Georgian maybe, looking at the proportions of the windows. The door was dark green. She took hold of a well-worn brass knocker that hung on a plate in the middle of the door.
Knocked twice. Took a step back and waited. She hoped she looked serious enough that he’d take her seriously and listen to her for long enough to maybe arrange a more formal check-up of some sort. Maybe she should have worn her scrubs, she thought, smiling to herself at just how desperate that made her feel. Or at least kept on her hospital ID tag.
‘Doctor Friend.’
She looked up, taken by surprise by the voice, and looked into the open eyes of James Wyatt. He stood in the open doorway dressed in paint spattered jeans and an old white shirt.  ‘I surprised you?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘The door …’
‘It’s quiet,’ he agreed, smiling.
‘I’m surprised that you even know me.’
‘Of course I do,’ he told her. ‘I remember seeing you when I first came round, just for a second or two. After the accident. And then later, I was drugged, but I woke a couple of times. Once when you were asleep.’
He looked at his own hand, holding the door, pushed it open further and said, ‘I’m being rude, come in, come in,’ stepping aside to make an offer she couldn’t politely refuse.
She stepped across the threshold and into the hall. He was already walking toward the rear of the passage, ‘I’m decorating, but I’d stopped to make a pot of coffee. Want some?’
‘Sure, yeah. Thanks.’
She followed him along the passage, ‘You were painting?’ she asked as they passed doors on both sides of the hall. ‘This all yours?’ she murmured, his informality seeming to welcome questions. She followed him into the kitchen where a pot of coffee was boiling over a stove. He wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘Milk and sugar? Or would you prefer cream?’
‘Milk please. No sugar.‘
He poured out two mugs of coffee, added milk for her and took cream and two heaped spoonfuls of soft brown sugar for himself. Handing her the mug he asked, ‘Should we go and sit down somewhere?’
She nodded, and followed back along to a living room that looked out over a small green park. The furniture was covered in dustsheets but there was no sign of any paint or brushes. ‘Excuse the mess,’ he said and indicated for her to sit down, and when she did he sat down on an old chair opposite, legs curled beneath him. He put down his mug, rubbed his eyes.
Tired?’ she asked.
‘Hungover,’ he admitted.
‘You’ve been drinking?’
He chuckled softly to himself, ‘Drinking. Painting walls. Breathing in. Breathing out. All sorts of activities. Have you come to look in on my well-being, Doctor Friend?’
The very definition of non-plussed, Jenny thought to herself. She composed herself; ‘Just about, actually. I came to see you because I wasn’t sure you were well enough to discharge yourself.’
He nodded, took a sip from his mug, ‘I see.’ He seemed to consider what to say next. Then he said, ‘Well, I suppose you have prior claim on my health. Being the doctor who confirmed my death, and all.’
Her heart skipped a beat. She went to speak but he interrupted her, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to sue, if that’s why you came. Nor do I hold you responsible, at all.’
‘I didn’t come here to thwart a lawsuit, Mr Wyatt.’
‘Good. It’d have been an unwise move if I had been planning to sue.’ He gave her a wry smile, and then relaxed back into his chair said, ‘Sorry. I don’t mean to be short with you; I am a little bit tired.’
She smiled, ‘It’s alright, you’re allowed a hangover. You being dead, and all.’
He acknowledged this with a slight nod. ‘Anyway,’ he told her, ‘No harm done. Here we are, alive and well both of us.’ He looked her in the eye, ‘So what can I do for you, Doctor Friend?’
As he paused to wait for an answer, his attention wavered, he looked around the room, ‘And yes,’ he said, ‘This is all mine.’
Then he looked back at her, still waiting for a response.
‘Well ‘all this’ shouldn’t be yours,’ she replied coolly, ‘It should be the subject of a will. Someone else’s good fortune. You should be dead.’
There, she thought. I’ve said it. Now throw me out. Though it would be a shame to waste the coffee, which was excellent.
But instead, he shrugged, pulled his legs tighter beneath him; ‘Would you like a biscuit?’ he asked. ‘With your coffee?’
And his smile was so disarming she let out a breath, and nodded. ‘Yes please.’

The curse, Ghent called it. The desire to tell someone. To unburden. It plagued them all, the ones who were left. But even assuming they were believed, it rarely worked. For Wyatt it had worked twice, in thirteen hundred years. Ghent said he’d told his story to outsiders four times.
Four times in twenty seven thousand years. Four times in ten million days. Two ice ages.
He check his watch, 6am, winced as he bent to fasten his running shoes. Doctor Friend had asked him, ‘on a scale of one to ten, what number would your pain currently be? Your residual pain?’
Eleven.
‘One being a state of ecstasy, and ten having a root canal without anaesthetic,’ she’d explained.
Eleven.
‘I can’t imagine that,’ he lied. Then said, ‘Seven, maybe, or eight?’
‘That bad?’
Worse.
But he’d agreed to let her come back at a more convenient time for both of them, and check him over; a week hence. It would be almost four weeks since the accident by then, and his scars were already fading. Even the pain, though fierce, had diminished to about, ten, he thought.
Grimacing, he tied his laces, straightened, stepped out, locked the door, and shoved his keys into his waist bag along with his phone and credit card and, out of long, ingrained habit, a short, extremely sharp knife that slid into a built in sheath behind the bag.
The sun shone brightly as he jogged down Doughty Street, and turned right toward Queens Square. At Great Ormonde Street Hospital he passed a young woman climbing out of a car, her skin pallid and oily, eyes dark, blonde hair thin and lifeless. Walking dead, he thought. Unlike me, he smiled to himself, the running dead.
He ran across Queens Square and took a left, heading down toward the river.
The pain was intense but he ignored it.

Doctor Friend was a terrier, he judged, and the best way to deal with a terrier wasn’t to pull away, because that only made their jaws lock even tighter. Best thing to do was push at them, and they’d eventually either gag or get bored. So he’d be forthcoming and honest; yes, he was an amazingly quick healer. No, he didn’t know why or how. It didn’t run in the family as far as he knew, but his parents were dead and he had no siblings. He rarely had accidents. And he’d allow her to check his scars, his blood pressure and whatever else she asked. And he’d ask, anything else? Until she got bored.
And he wouldn’t tell her his story.

Finally, he found Ghent, and tried to murder him, because murder was all he knew now.  He’d come across the high-roofed long-house in a clearing below the waterfall, and slid in through an open shutter like a thief, and he’d crept up on Ghent, mud-covered, dressed in rags and soft-leather boots,  starving-skinny but endlessly alive and quick and murderous. Knife in hand he’d found Ghent at his table, eating a thick stew from a plate.
He smiled. Even now, a thousand years later, he could smell that stew. Ghent hadn’t turned round as he snuck up, knife in hand, but he’d paused, chuckled and asked, ‘Well now, my young murderer. Would you prefer to eat some broth now, or after you’ve cut my throat?’
And he’d turned and smiled at Wyatt, and said, What’s your name, child-troll?’
‘I’m no troll,’ Wyatt replied.
Ghent put down his spoon, ‘You’re right of course. Trolls don’t exist.’
‘Don’t they?’’
‘Nor do wizards.’
He pulled out a chair and said, ‘Sit down for a while. Eat stew. Kill me later.’ But Wyatt had dashed at him anyway, reckless, knife pointed straight at Ghent’s throat and Ghent had simply reached out and took the knife from his hand and threw him back across the hall. Wyatt had leaped up and dashed at him again, snarling; no one was faster that Wyatt; no one was more ferocious; no one more murderous.
But Ghent had smiled at him as he threw Wyatt across the room. And as Wyatt stood up and brushed he dust from his torn shirt Ghent had asked again, ‘Do you want to eat some broth?’ 
Wyatt looked at Ghent’s twinkling eyes, saw something he recognised in there and shrugged.
Sighed. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘I’m sure you are. How long is it since you sat down to eat a meal?’
He frowned, calculating; ‘Seventy two years. Maybe seventy three maybe.’
He looked no more than about twelve years old.
‘Well, sit down and eat with me.’
And later, when Ghent showed him a loft where he could sleep, Wyatt had asked, ‘You’re like me?’
Ghent nodded.
‘I thought I was the only one.’
He lay back on a hay-filled mattress, Ghent was climbing back down the ladder. Wyatt asked, ‘What are we?’
Ghent paused, asked, ‘What are you?’ returning the question
‘I’m a thief,’ Wyatt said.
‘I’m a librarian,’ Ghent said with a smile, and disappeared below.
A what? Wyatt thought. A what?

Chapter 4...

The sky hung lead-grey and the wind whipped the blade-sharp scree of snow and ice across the bitter landscape. The man trudged on, sweating beneath his furs, and the oiled runners of the sled he dragged glided smoothly across the frozen grass and the rock hard earth. He paused to pull off a mitten, allowing it to hang from the leather strap that attached it to his sleeve, and he rubbed his face, feeling that the beard he’d grown over the winter had softened as it lengthened and the skin beneath was raw and grimed. He pulled off his hood for a few minutes, daring the freezing wind to enjoy the coolness. He was exhausted and, despite the bitter cold, he was beginning to overheat, he knew the signs. The wind was picking up again as the day drew to a close, but he thanked his good fortune that it was coming from the north, behind him, and pushed him south. The alternative, to walk into the freezing gale, would have been grim, bordering on impossible. He needed shelter.

The day was short this far north, and the pale glow of the low sun was already dropping toward the horizon; soon it would be dark and the temperature would drop dramatically. He needed to set up camp soon. He searched the skyline for his destination, a shallow cave below a ledge of stunted trees somewhere nearby. If he didn’t make the shelter of that cave by nightfall he might die. If he did perish, then his dog, three parts wolf and running somewhere nearby, would feast on him. He grinned to himself, knowing that if the tables were turned he would do the same.  

The wind whistled and howled, and his head turned, or was that his dog howling, he thought? He listened again, eyes fixed and blank, seeing only the sounds that carried to him across the screaming winds. Sifting them, separating, identifying. Yes. The dog. He knew it. He heard it again. He pulled on his mittens, leaving the hood down for the moment, all the  better to hear, took up the slack of the harness and began trudging toward the source of the sounds, dragging the sled.

There it was. The cave. A dark sickle gap below a ledge. Sanctuary. But the trees were gone now, in the three or four years since he’d last been there, and he would never have spotted it. The dog was standing foursquare at it’s entrance howling for him. He pulled the sled up the slight incline to the entrance to the hollow, manoeuvred it so that it blocked up most of the entrance and then unfastened the harness and went inside, bending low, to inspect the cave. There were no signs of recent habitation, but the cave was shallower than it had been the last time, filling slowly with debris and soil. Still, it was enough. He stepped back out into the storm and unfurled two large bison skins from his sled, using two short cedar staffs to prop them tightly against the remainder of the gap so as to form a weather screen at the mouth of the cave.

He ought to get out his cooking gear, he thought, wriggling inside. He ought to light a fire, he ought to eat, and get warm. He ought to strip his clothes in the heat of the fire and use melted snow boiled over the fire to wash himself. The wind howled and screamed outside, rattling against the temporary skins, attempting to slide round the gaps that protected him from its fury. Instead, he sat against the inside wall of the cave, legs splayed, body feeling heavy and weary, and he allowed his eyes to close. He’d been awake for four days, walking day and night across the unforgiving tundra to get to this sanctuary, dragging the sled, his eyes peeled, his skin raw and burned from the cold, muscles burning, joints aching, his energy waning as his weariness grew. He pulled off his hooded outer coat, unfastened the shirt beneath a little. Even with his great gifts of strength and endurance he did not think he would have survived another night outside, but now he was safe. He slept. And the dog, three parts wolf as it was, squirmed between the skins and into the cave and wrapped itself around him, and slept too.

*          *

‘Hello Sue,’ he said.
She was still slender, and the years had been kind enough, he guessed, and she was holding a glass of red wine, standing near the bar with a man of about thirty who, from the likeness, he took to be her son.
She frowned and said, ‘Do I know you?’
‘We met a long time ago,’ he said, putting down his empty glass.
She smiled, ‘I’m sorry, I have no memory…’ and her smiled faded as she recognised him. ‘You,’ she said, her face going pale. ‘You can’t...’ and words failed her.
‘Mum,’ the younger man standing beside her said, and she whirled round, ‘What?’ and he tapped his wrist-watch. ‘Taxi’s due.’
‘Alright,’ she hissed, and turned back, but James had gone. She turned back to her son and the fear that she was hallucinating was dispelled when he asked, ‘Who was that man?’
She shook her head, her legs feeling shaky. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure.’

He stood at the desk as the librarian finished a telephone call. When she turned to him he smiled, said, ‘I have an appointment, to look at some letters,’ and he handed her the slip.
She glanced at the details on the slip, nodded, ‘I have the forms here,’ she told him, ‘can I ask for some identification please?’ He took out his passport.  She checked his details against those on the booking form, nodded, said, ‘Just a minute, Mr Wyatt,’ handed back his passport and called over a young assistant. ‘Sue, will you get this box please, it’ll be somewhere in the four hundreds; on the rolling shelves.’
The library assistant took the details and exited through a side door. The librarian told him ‘If you just wait a few minutes, one of the archivists will find them and Sue will bring them up for you.’
Wyatt imagined the archivists as mole-like creatures in white coats who never saw daylight, and the thought made him smile, of them tending books and documents like gardeners in a nursery; he walked over to a desk, sat down and waited. The library assistant returned ten minute later with a box file, brought it to his table and opened the box, took out the bundle of letters and laid them out in a row. Each letter in a hand-folded envelope; each bundle tied with faded silk ribbon.
‘Thankyou, Sue,’ he said.
‘These are old,’ she commented.
‘Very,’ he said, looking up at her.
‘Friends of yours?’ she joked.
He nodded, watched as she set them out on the glass plate laid out on the table top.
‘Thankyou,’ he said again.
The librarian frowned across at them. Sue glanced over, then back at him, brushed her hair back from her face, ‘I’d better leave you to it,’ she said.
‘Right.’
‘Oh, and will you sign the sheet please?’ Inside the box was a vellum sheet, divided into two columns; one column for dates, the other for signatures. The earliest dates were almost two hundred years old.
He signed.
She glanced at the signatures; written in various faded inks and styles. ‘You all have the same name,’ she noted. ‘Family?’
‘Tradition,’ he said.
She left him sitting at the table. She hadn’t said the next thing on her mind, the thing she was thinking, that despite the different pens and different, faded inks, and the different styles of writing, the signatures were almost exactly the same.
But from the way he’d smiled at her she thought, maybe I’ll ask him later.

He unfastened the silk ribbon on the first bundle of letters. Gently took the first letter from the top of the pile and opened it. Carefully he unfolded the thick, handmade paper. He drew a slow breath, smelling something faint in the paper; scent? Emotion? A memory?

To my Dearest James the letter began. Hello my love. My soul. My bittersweet.
‘Hello,’ he replied, his voice hoarse, his heart soaring, and he whispered her name, Jane.

He watched her dressing; the sun shone through the skylight and through the gauze of her slip, outlining her slender waist and hips. She glanced over at him as she pulled on her mini-skirt, he smiled and lay back, his head sinking into her pillow. ‘You’d better go before my landlady catches you up here,’ she told him.
He stretched like a cat, murmured, ‘You’re over twenty one.’
‘I’m seventeen,’ she told him. Then she said, ‘And you must be, what nearly thirty?’
‘Over thirty.’
‘God, really?’ she giggled. ‘I must be attracted to the older man. Anyway, come on, up!’ and she pulled back the sheets. With a wry, reluctant smile he sat up, naked, at the edge of her single bed. She looked him over. ‘Not bad,’ she said, ‘Not bad for over thirty.’ Then she pointed at a jagged scar on his torso, ‘What’s that from?’
‘Spear,’ he told her.
She raised an eyebrow.
‘I was ten,’ he told her. ‘Or eleven, maybe. I can’t remember.’
‘You must have went to primary school with the Kray Twins,’ she laughed, ‘Cos, honestly, there’s not many eleven year olds round here throwing spears at each other.’
As he dressed she laughed again, ‘Do you work on that enigmatic thing, James?’ she asked him, ‘Or does it come naturally to you?’
He reached for his shirt, ‘Sue, you really the most no-bullshit seventeen year-old library assistant I’ve ever slept with.’
‘Huh,’ she said, unimpressed. ‘You’d better put your pants on before you try getting sarky with me, old man.’  Then she said, ‘Come on, you can buy me breakfast before I go to work.’
She pulled a cardigan over her work blouse and watched him dress.

‘This is a song that some of you might know.’ Wyatt smiled as the band launched into a raucous version of Rock n Roll; he took a pull on his lager and thought of Sue; he hadn’t thought of her for a long time. How long was it? Decades? Long enough for her to have a grown up son.
Not as long as some, he thought.

The beer garden was filling up. Sue had gone. His ice-cold beer was a little over half empty, and he was enjoying a fresh sunny afternoon for the first time in weeks. If he thought about the pain too much it became overpowering, but he was fixing quickly, he knew, and the itching was a sign of healing, it got worse as the pain ebbed. He knew the process well, had been as badly injured at least twice before, but that didn’t make enduring the healing, and the pain, any easier. But the beer and the sunshine made up for it a little. And the music, Wyatt loved music, and at this moment it intensified the feeling of being reborn. The rhythm, the melody, the sheer volume. Being human, he thought. He could live with the pain, which would diminish. Being human made it alright.

The guitarist finished his solo as Wyatt emptied his glass; he clapped with the rest of the audience, stood up, a little stiffly, and went to the bar for another; ‘Get the band a drink,’ he said to the waitress, speaking up a little so that she could hear him across the bar. ‘And one for yourself.’
She smiled, shouted, ‘Thanks,’ poured him his drink. ‘You planning on watching the full set?’ she asked.
‘I’m planning on getting a little bit drunk,’ he told her.
‘You alright?’ he asked, ‘You look a little pale.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said loudly, and as the band finished their song on a crescendo. Getting better all the time, he thought to himself.
The waitress smiled at him and then went to serve someone else, and he went back to his table. He watched her walk away. Her eyes glitter, he thought, as she glanced over at him again, from behind the bar. He knew it was probably because she was wearing contact lenses, but he liked to think they shone like diamonds. She smiled over at him again, the light catching the diamonds in her eyes.

*           *

Carrion birds.
They wheeled across the sky, lingering in the air, close to a wooded hillock some two or three thousand paces away. ‘Heeeyyy, girl,’ he said gently, tugging on the reins. He stepped down from the cart, chewing on a piece of dried bread as he stretched his legs, and took a good, long look around, drinking in the sights, sounds, the smells.
He remained there for a period of time, quietly and carefully observing the world that stood about him. He looked up at the hills on either side of the valley; he looked back along the well-trod route. He looked forward again to where the carrion birds flew. When some time had passed and still nothing untoward had revealed itself to him he swallowed the last of the bread, spat on the ground, and got back onto the cart. He flicked the reins.

An hour later he was approaching the wood from the west and north; he would have avoided it altogether but the land narrowed here and the hills crowded and he had no choice unless he backtracked and spent a half dozen days following a separate route.
Not that days meant anything to him. 
And he was curious.
This close he smelled smoke; not the flesh stench death-smoke of a pyre; simple campfire smoke; he heard the cries of the birds above him.
Crows.
No big birds yet, which meant that the carrion was fresh. But the smell of smoke had confirmed his initial thoughts, that it was people, not animals.
He whistled, long and soft and low; presently, Dhul appeared from the long grass, bounding smoothly toward him, taking a converging path to meet him. The mare turned her head at Dhul’s approach but made no sound.
As the dog closed he held out a hand, clicked his fingers and circled his hand; Dhul understood and took up a smooth orbit some twenty paces beyond the wagon. 
Behind the trees he found the camp-fire, the tethered horses, and the bodies.
Seated on the cart, he clicked his fingers and waved Dhul back closer; the mastiff sniffed the ground, glance flitting constantly between its master and the surrounding area.

The knoll stood at the edge of an old route, and the grass was worn, blackened by old camp-fires.
The bodies lay in the open.

He counted eight of them; the sun was half risen and all of the men had died, so far as he could tell by the colour of their flesh, sometime after sunup. He was wary, though he could sense no danger here. It had been a dawn raid and the danger had long passed, he was sure, but he remained cautious. He looked across at the horses, the saddles piled nearby, the food cooked black in the pans that lay by the fire. And the weapons; some still sheathed, others in situ, still held by their owners. A sword gripped in a hand severed at the wrist. There was nothing to indicate what might have been taken.
No women.
But this was a warrior band, he could se; the men muscled, tattooed, armed and armoured; their ponies, swift and tireless, fretted at their tethers.
Dhul closed on him as he walked away from the cart, picking his way slowly with his staff; beneath his cloak was a long knife, sharp enough to shave and strong enough to split bone, but he preferred his appearance, and guile, to protect him.
And Dhul.

The men lay where they had fallen; four in a close group, two near the fire with arrows in them, one lying further out. The last near the trees; a boy.

He looked for horse tracks, for surely this was a mounted assault, but he was unsure. He looked closer at the killing wounds; one man had an arrow through his forehead; he was the first to die, he thought, for only before the first kill could a man take time to aim for the head; the second man had an arrow through his chest; he was second. A quicker, easier shot. Then the warrior, for a single warrior it must have been, he realised, had put down his bow to attend to the four who lay grouped.
They had been assailed with an axe; their split skulls attested to that. Two had limbs removed. One of these had the remains of a shield attached to the stump of his left arm. The axe blow that had smashed the shield had severed the arm too.
Then his head had been removed. After the battle, probably. An execution of the wounded. Like the boy, whose spine had been split, from the nape of his neck to his pelvis.
The others were of similar hue.

One man had done this, he thought. A mighty warrior; someone whose skill matched his fearlessness, or his desperation; or he else had nothing to lose. And he had stolen nothing.
So.
This was an end to something.

The crows watched from above, waiting to return to their feast; one had settled on the hooped roof-ribs of his cart. Quietly he stepped away from the battle scene; the carnage was not his concern, but a mighty warrior was a rarity; he had met only three in his long, long life; only three who could slaughter eight in a single contest. A mighty warrior. Or a lucky one. It made no difference, he reflected, the mighty warriors he had known had not lasted long, lucky or no. A stray blow, a glancing arrow, a slip.
But they were always worth meeting.

He checked the leather yoke-straps that held the horse. Two of the three mighty warriors he had met had been dull men, excited only by the stench and noise of battle. He adjusted the blanket, patted the horse’s head. Took a pinch of sweet-tasting seeds from his pocket and fed it a treat. The third had been a woman.
He paused to consider her memory.
He stepped up, back onto the cart.  He would take nothing from this battle. There was nothing he wanted anyway, but to be found with the spoils of battle, by any of a dead man’s friends, could lead to much trouble. He looked to Dhul, who returned to his orbit; then he flicked the reins.  He was glad to leave the carnage behind.

He was travelling; leaving his home on the high steppes and heading west to the forests of the north; there, to make a new home for a while. He’d lived there before.
He’d lived most places before.

Shortly after midday he caught first sight of the rider; a mote, shimmering on the horizon; he had not expected to catch up with the warrior so soon, if ever, and he doubted that it was he; perchance it was another traveller. But by mid-afternoon the rider was only a thousand paces hence. He was not well, it appeared. The pony drifted to right and left. It walked with no purpose. The warrior was wounded, the man guessed, and he was losing his senses. The man flicked the reins twice, the pony walked at a quicker pace and the mastiff, noting the change, trotted closer.
By early evening he had drawn parallel with the rider, but rode his cart some fifty paces to the right, so as to not provoke an assault for, wounded or not, this man had recently dispatched eight others with an axe and a bow.
The warrior turned his head, and he waved across at him in a friendly manner; he shouted a greeting too, listening intently for the warrior’s language, which tongue he would then adopt and speak in.
‘Hello father,’ the warrior shouted
A northman. Good. Fortuitous.
He was ever lucky.
‘Greetings friend,’ he returned, in the north language; ‘You are a way from home.’
‘I had business,’ the speaker had a slow way with words.
‘You are riding home? May I accompany you a while?’
Horseman converged with horse and cart. This was the time of danger; the close. He slowed the cart, allowed the warrior to choose the pace.
The warrior asked, ‘You too are a northman?’
He shook his head, ‘I am a traveller, but I have been in the north many times.’
The warrior eyed the circling dog, looked long at the man, searched the cart for danger, as a warrior and a man in a strange land should. ‘You are a wizard?’ he asked shrewdly, ‘A spell-dealer?’
The man smiled, ‘No, though I have picked up some wisdom in my travels, I have no magic.’
‘You know dwarves,’ the man said, ‘Steelsmiths. I can see from the quality of the blade you conceal in your sleeve.’
‘A man must protect himself,’ he replied. Then he said, ‘But I am no match for you, a mighty warrior, if I am not mistaken.’
The warrior said, ‘Aye. This morning I killed seven men. And a boy.’
He said, ‘Well, that is your business. But may we ride together?’
The warrior nodded. The wind drew across the endless grass, the horse jittered, and he flinched.
‘You are hurt, my friend?’
The warrior turned, showed him the wound to his left arm where the flesh was parted from elbow to shoulder, and the bone glistened within the folds of pink flesh. The edges were blackening. ‘Aye, I’m cut,’ he said, ‘and I think I might die.’
The man nodded agreement, ‘If your wound is not tended, you will surely die.’
The warrior assented, said, ‘It saddens me, but I cannot escape the infection, unless I am stronger than I know.’ He looked down at the wound, observed, ‘I know nothing of healing.’
The man said, ‘I do. Perhaps I can help.’ Then he said, ‘There is a river bed in the direction we are going, it is sheltered from the wind, there is fresh water and dry sand on which to sleep and we could reach it before nightfall. If you would allow me, I would dress your wound when we get there.’
The warrior nodded. His eyes were half-closed.
The man was thinking of which herbs he could employ in saving the warriors arm; and his life. He was deciding what threads to use to sew up his wound; how much poppy resin to feed him; whether to feed or starve the fever that would surely commence by nightfall. He looked at the warrior, calculating if he would see another dawn. He wanted to talk to this mighty warrior. He wanted to hear the story he would tell. Why would a northman ride a hundred days to kill seven men? And a boy.

The sun was on the hills by the time he drove the cart slowly down the slope and onto the wide sandy bank of the river curve; the warrior sat on his horse, above, watching. The dog trotted down beside. When he had reached the shade of the river he unhooked the horse and tethered it by some coarse grass to feed. He peeled off the blanket from the horse’s salty flanks, unfolded it and shook it out. Then he laid it out on a rock. He went back to his cart and took out his cooking utensils, set them out, lit a small fire. Still, the warrior sat above the river bank, lit golden by the setting sun, and watched. When the fire had grown strong he dragged a couple of dried out branches from below the bank and, using a small axe, chopped them into smaller pieces, enough to last the night and into the morning.
Then he set a pan above the fire to warm.

‘I was a slave,’ the warrior told him. ‘My father bought me from a trader when I was small. He said he was looking to buy a dog, but saw me and thought I’d suffice.’
He stroked Dhul, ‘Don’t you feed your dog?’ he asked.
The man said, ‘He’s not my dog.’ Then he said, ‘He eats after we do.’
He nodded, continued his story; men faced with death often want to tell their story; ‘I was separated from my mother, though I can’t remember her; I was brought up by the Rus. I became Rus myself.’
‘And now you’re here,’ the man said.
‘We lived in a village by the inland sea.’
The man bathed his wound gently, using a rag that he had boiled and torn into strips and warm water that he had boiled in a separate pan and let cool. ‘Does that hurt?’
‘Yes.’
‘The wound will need to be stitched together.’
The warrior nodded.
The man said, ‘I will need to clean it first or it will fester and you will die. If I clean it, and sew it together, you may live, and your arm may be saved.’
The warrior nodded.
He continued to bathe the wound; then he mixed herbs into water in a third pan, let these stand for a while; he sieved the water and then bathed the wound in this too.
He said, ‘I will give you something to chew that will cease the pain. It is bitter to the taste, but you will sleep, and feel no pain.’
‘Thank you.’
He took a pellet of opium from a pouch, ‘Chew this,’ he said.
‘It is bitter,’ the warrior noted as he chewed.
‘As I said. Now lie back.’
The warrior lay back and the man said, ‘I will stretch out your arm, away from your body, so that can stitch up the wound.’
‘Why do you not feed the dog?’ the warrior asked him.
‘The dog will eat when I am finished.’
‘My name is Petr,’ the warrior told him. ‘I am a Rus.’ The drug was taking hold and he was beginning to relax; his arm was soft to the touch and limp.
‘My name is Ghent,’ the man told him.

From a bag he took out a rolled up strip of leather, and from this he slid a fine bone needle. He took a bobbin of fine waxed wool and unspooled an arm’s length, bit it off with his teeth; from a jar he took a pinch of royal jelly, smeared the length of it. Then he threaded the needle.

The following dawn Ghent walked from the riverbank to a nearby wood and plucked eggs from low-hanging nests as a bird that watched him. He picked up two small fallen branches and carried them back too.
On his return to the river he stoked the fire and then took a skillet from his cart. The skillet had a tripod and this he laid across the fire; he fanned the flames and let the skillet heat. He went to draw water.

‘Here,’ he told Petr, ‘Let me look.’
Petr lay and watched Ghent’s face as he inspected the wound; he frowned a little, in concentration; then he went back to the cart and took out some herbs. These he mixed with hot water in a small pan, an iron cup, that sat by the edge of the fire.
He added a little stream water to cool the mix and asked, ‘Can you drink this?’
Petr nodded and took the mug in his good hand.
‘How do you feel?’ Ghent asked him as he drank.
Petr paused from drinking, ‘Sickly,’ he replied.
Ghent felt his forehead; ‘Hot?’
Petr nodded.
‘Not too bad though.’
‘More that I feel sick.’
Ghent examined him with patient fingers. He pushed his fingertips into the flesh of Petr’s stomach, his waist, his shoulders and neck. He felt around the wound, which was livid-edged and pussing between the stitches. ‘I need to use maggots. To draw the poison and eat the rotten flesh from around your wound.’
‘I’ve seen that done before.’ Petr told him. ‘On a man who had been slashed in the leg with a knife.’ He closed hi eyes, ‘He died though.’
You won’t die, if I can save your arm,’ Ghent said, and went to fetch his maggots.

Chapter 5...

‘Morning Ghent,’ she said, walking in through the kitchen door, bringing with her the smell of damp grass and pollen, and a wide smile on her face, wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before.
Ghent was finishing off a phone call, sitting at a half finished plate of scrambled eggs on toast, an almost empty pot of coffee and a slice of caramel shortbread, as yet uneaten. Good morning Astel, he mouthed, then spoke again into the phone, ‘Alright then, I’ll maybe see you in a week or two. Let me know for certain nearer the time.’
He hung up to see her pouring the last of his coffee into a spare cup. He smiled, stood and went to the over to boil water for another pot of coffee. ‘Want some toast?’ he asked.
‘Yes please.’
Ghent cut two thick slices from a load and pushed them beneath the grill. ‘Have you spoken to our guest yet?’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘He arrived a couple of days ago, just flown in from Ibiza; I picked him up hitching to god-knows-where; I’ve got him trimming the oaks down on the avenue near the front gate.’
She reached over and picked up the caramel shortbread from his plate and took a bite, washed it down with the last of the coffee, ‘I think I saw him standing on the roof yesterday morning.’
It was Ghent’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
‘Probably doing yoga,’ she suggested, ‘if he’s from Ibiza. Or greeting the sun, or some new-age business,’ and she glanced down at her fingernails, ‘Communing with the goddess of the woods or something.’
‘You didn’t see him when you came up the avenue this morning then?’
She shook her head, ‘I took the short cut though the trees and over the brook. It’s the quickest way from the village.’
‘How’d you get across the brook?’ he asked her, ‘It’s in flood.’
‘I flew,’ she said, tartly, taking another bite of his shortbread.
‘You have a good night?’ he asked.
She wrinkled her nose, ‘On a scale of one to ten, maybe a six.’ Then a memory made her smile, ‘Or six and a half, even.’
He frowned, it never ceased to puzzle him that men found Astel physically irresistible. And they always did. He looked at her; denim skirt, faded t-shirt and grubby Adidas; slender legs, pronounced hips-bones, narrow waist. She looked, how old, he thought - seventeen? Twenty seven? he could never decide. She could look thirteen; he was so used to her he couldn’t tell. But plain, he’d always thought. She definitely looked plain. And yet she had something; men found her as irresistible as she appeared to find his shortbread.
‘Be careful you don’t get too well known down there,’ was all he said. ‘Try visiting different places.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Frequently.’ And she winked at him, which made him smile. ‘Anyway, they think I’m one of the Gypsies from the bottom paddock, down in the valley.’
‘The gypsies haven’t even arrived there yet, it’s too early in the year.’
She shrugged, and Ghent saw how her copper brown hair and sallow skin could persuade someone she was Romany. ‘I think they have,’ she told him.
He frowned, ‘They’re early this year.’
‘There were a couple of travellers in the Grey Horse the week before last.’
‘Ah,’ Ghent said, ‘So I suppose.’
The kettle was boiling now and he spooned three heaped spoonfuls of fresh coffee in the pot. Then he picked up a long-tined fork to reach beneath the grill and flip over the two slices of toast. Then he poured Astel a coffee, gave it to her and watched her as she added cream and two large spoonfuls of brown sugar.
‘Mmm,’ her smile widened with pleasure, ‘Much nicer when it’s fresh.’
Ghent coated the toast with copious amounts of butter and marmalade, the way she liked it, put it on the table next to her and then sat down.
They breakfasted together in companionable silence. After a while Astel finished her toast, then made some more and ate that too. She burped, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, then stood and went to stack her plates by the sink; ‘Maybe I’ll take the woodcutter some food,’ she said, going to a cupboard to look for something.
‘He’s working a ten hour day,’ Ghent said, ‘I think he might need it.’
‘Ten hour day? Has he been eating enough?’
Ghent smiled, ‘You’re always trying to feed people.’ Then he said, ‘But no, he hasn’t been eating much. He’s an addict, I think, and he’s struggling with that.’
‘Maybe he’s working through cold turkey,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Is that possible?’
‘Maybe,’ Ghent said; ‘I suppose hard manual labour produces endorphins or dopamine or somesuch, which might fend off the withdrawal symptoms. Or perhaps it exhausts him so much that he doesn’t feel it so badly.’
Astel said, ‘I never understood that drug addict business,’ and she shook her head, ‘I mean, what’s all that about?’
‘I don’t think Paul has a choice in the matter.’
She frowned, changed the subject. ‘So why do you think he was standing barefoot on the chimney stack at six yesterday morning?’
Ghent chuckled, ‘Maybe he just likes climbing things.’
She went back to the sink and ran the tap to wash the dishes. ‘I’ll make him up a healthy lunch,’ she decided, ‘Fruit, cheese, some meat; I’ll bake some fresh bread; squeeze fresh apples. Maybe a couple of bottles of beer.’
Ghent said, ‘He might not want food.’
‘I’ll talk to him’ she said. ‘Persuade him to eat.’
‘There’s no rush,’ Ghent said, ‘He’ll be there until it gets dark. Go and take a shower, I’ll wash up the breakfast dishes.’
‘Ok,’ she said, wiping dry her hands and sashaying from the room.
Ghent watched her go, perplexed as always.

 

‘Who was that?’
Jenny put down her phone and rolled back beneath the warmth and darkness of the quilt, wrapping her arms around Steven’s neck and kissing him again, ‘A patient of mine,’ she said. ‘I’ve been running some tests on him and he wants to meet up with me to discuss the results.’
Steven raised an eyebrow, ‘Doesn’t that break some sort of hypocritical oath, dating a patient?’
‘Hippocratic,’ she corrected ‘and no, it doesn’t. Because he doesn’t want to date me. He didn’t really want me running tests on him either. It’s me, forcing the issue, wanting to meet him, really. I’m writing a paper on him. It’s going to make me famous.’
‘Really?’ Steven asked, before adding, ‘Is he dying?’ as he began to kiss her throat.
‘No,’ she murmured.
‘Is he moving abroad, or catching a midday flight to Rome, or driving down to get a place on the Dover ferry?’
‘Dover ferry?’ she giggled a little, ‘No.’
Steve rolled her onto her stomach and she sighed as he began kissing her back and shoulders. ‘Then you can stay with me for a while longer, can’t you?’
‘Mmm. Yes,’ she whispered, surrendering, but even as his fingers tracked her spine, as his lips grazed the nape of her neck, she was thinking of when she’d met James to do the preliminary tests.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she’d told him.
‘No problem,’ he said, smiling and pulling out a chair for her to sit down.
‘Thanks,’ she looked around, ‘I’ve never been here before.’ 
‘It’s full of media and literary types,’ he said, ‘so they never notice anyone else.’
‘I thought most people wanted to be noticed. Isn’t fame is the modern equivalent of royal blood.’
He picked up the menu, ‘I like the food here, but I’m not too desperate for royal status, or notoriety.’
‘And yet here I am,’ she said, picking up her own menu, ‘wanting to write a paper on you.’
‘And yet here you are,’ he said, ‘wanting to write a paper on me.’
 
She began by giving him a questionnaire to fill in while they waited for their food, and sat quietly as he filled it in. ‘Have you always lived in London, James?’
‘You can read upside down?’
‘Can’t everyone?’
He nodded, ‘Sure they can,’ and smiled, still looking down as he wrote. ‘But the answer is no. I was born in Kent. I’ve spent time abroad, on and off. But I always seem to end up back in London.’
‘Family ties?’
‘I have no siblings and both parents died young.’
‘Illness?’
He paused, ‘No. Accident.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He shrugged, ‘Long time ago.’
The food arrived and they ate quietly; he continued to write.
‘Any other relatives?’ she asked.
‘Not that I know of.’
She nodded, ‘I just wondered if your miraculous healing abilities ran in the family.’
‘You mean, if my good health was genetic?’
She nodded again, took a mouthful of chicken from her fork, chewed, swallowed. ‘If it was that simple,’ she said, thinking, if I was that lucky, ‘we could probably identify the genes involved and then just patent your good fortune.’
‘Patent me, in fact.’
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘Yes.’
He grinned to himself, shook his head. ‘Imagine that. Instant me, in a bottle.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s probably not genetic,’ he said, deflating her hopes with a gentle smile, ‘I don’t have a huge family of long-lived, injury-free quick healing cousins and grandparents.’
‘Ok,’ and she wrinkled her nose, ‘maybe you’re just a mutant,’ she said with a cheeky grin.
‘Maybe. Or maybe I just heal quicker than most people.’
‘No one heals as quick as you James,’ she told him, becoming serious. ‘No one.’
 ‘Some people do,’ he said.
‘I’ve done three years in casualty, and believe me; no one heals as quick as you.’
‘I do,’ he said.

‘Are you a vegetarian,’ she asked, a few moments later, looking at his half-finished plate which, unlike her own, contained no meat.
He shook his head, folded the questionnaire and handed it back to her, ‘I don’t think my eating noodles is the answer,’ and then he asked, ‘have you brought all your medical kit?’
‘Just some,’ she said, hoisting her bag for him to see. ‘Most of the tests are quite involved and we’ll need to do them back at the hospital but I’d like to do some of the basic stuff, if you don’t mind, to set the parameters.’
‘Well, when we’ve eaten, we can walk back to mine.’
‘Walk?’ she said, ‘In these heels?’
He grinned, turning back to his food.
She watched him eating for a while, looked at him not as a doctor should but just as a woman, sharing a meal with a strange man. A date.
How old are you?, she thought, late thirties? She’d have to check the forms. There were flecks of grey in his black hair and his face was lean and a little lined, like a distance runner, she thought. There was something feline about him, she thought, then changed her mind, no, animal-like maybe, definitely, but not feline. Canine, perhaps. Wolf-like. Something purely physical and extremely self-contained. A wolf in human form.
I’m glad I have a lover, and she thought of Steven, or I’d be tempted to spend the afternoon with you, James. And that would be most unprofessional.

 

‘Did you do these?’ Paul asked.
He was holding a clear glass jar, inside which were hundreds of tiny origami shapes, animals, hearts, flowers, made in different colours, filling the jar to the lid.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘They’re lovely.’
‘I made them for you,’ she said. ‘To put on your window. This room is so bare. Austere.’
‘Thankyou,’ he told her. ‘I’ll put them here, by my bed.’
‘You could let a few spill out, if you like. Some of them are made with scented paper, like this,’ and she took the jar from him, lifted the lid with a soft pop, and scattered a few of the shapes onto the dresser, and then onto the window frame.
‘That’s lovely,’ he said, genuinely touched by her thoughtfulness. ‘They must have taken hours and hours to make. How many are there?’
‘One thousand,’ she said.
‘One thousand? Really?’
She nodded, ‘One thousand paper hearts, and paper foxes, and paper swans and other things.’
He thought of their first conversation, down by the trees; ‘You really are a bit crazy,’ he said, ‘but in a lovely way. Thankyou.’
‘Crazy?’ she pondered, ‘I’m not the one greeting the dawn from the rooftops every morning,’ and she turned to go.
He said, ‘Normally, with a girl like you, and you’ve made me flowers, and brought me food and things, and you’re in my room, normally I’d make a move, you know?’
She nodded, ‘I know.’
He said, ‘But not you.’
‘No. Not me.’
‘Strange,’ he observed, surprised at himself. ‘And I bet that doesn’t happen often, does it, with you?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Only with you,’ and left the room.

 

James sat passively as she wrapped the blood pressure sleeve around his upper arm. She pumped it up, read the results, jotted them down. ‘I’ll do that again later,’ she said. ‘Some people, their blood pressure goes up when they first get it measured, and it gives a distorted result.’
He nodded.
‘How much do you weigh?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you got any scales?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll do it later.’ She wrote down his heart rate. ‘Any history of illnesses?’
‘No.’
‘Any major injuries, apart from the ones I know about already?’
He shrugged. No.
‘Well, you’re blood pressure is excellent, your heart rate is about fifty beats a minute, your body fat is about six per cent. And your scars are healing incredibly fast; they’re not even pink. You’re extremely fit.’
She didn’t tell him what she was really thinking, that the speed and quality of his healing was off the scale, beyond the top one per cent.
That it was super-human.
Instead she took out a small optical device, held his jaw steady with one hand, leaned close and peered into his eyes, ‘When’s the last time you had them tested?’
‘Never.’
‘They’re green,’ she said, writing this down, explaining, ‘green and hazel are the least common colours.’
‘The genetic thing again?’
She nodded, ‘Your vision ok? No blurring, double-vision, short-sightedness…’
‘It’s fine,’ he interrupted, ‘Perfect, I think.’
‘Of course it is,’ she said archly, with a smile. Then she asked, ‘Can I look at your feet?’
‘Feet?’ he half frowned, half smiled, ‘Yeah, sure, but do you mind me asking why?’
She said, ‘A friend of mine did a thesis, a study of the geographical differences in the proportions, shape and bone-structure of feet.’ She paused as he took off his shoes and socks, took out a pair of callipers from her bag.
‘I haven’t washed,’ he said, lifting his left foot.
‘You’ll do,’ she said as she took his bare foot in her hand, and explained, ‘Basically, people in different regions have differently structured feet. Different proportions and shapes. ’
‘There’s a racial element to feet?’
‘More a case of localised natural selection.’ She took measurements, length, width, the height of the arch of his foot. Wrote them down.
‘That sort of genetic difference happens a lot?’
‘It does,’ she said, ‘For example, people who live in mountainous areas have bigger shin bones, to allow more muscle attachment.’
‘For walking up hills, right? More power.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘now switch feet,’ and he raised his right foot; like his left, it felt cool and dry, toenails perfect, skin smooth, ‘but bone structure can be affected by activity too,’ she said, ‘the most obvious examples being the chest and shoulder bones of Olympic rowers. They’re often hugely distorted, to accommodate the muscles and the cardio-vascular system needed to provide the energy to win races. That sort of thing develops over years of training.’ She looked up, let go of his foot, ‘But feet tend to stay the same, unless you’re running marathons from an early age. And the basic structure will conform to geographic type. Unless you’re mixed race, like say a Eurasian, or from an area of ongoing or historical racial mingling, like Spain, or the United States or somewhere.’ She wrote detailed notes, and then put away the callipers, took some photographs with a small digital camera, after which she asked, ‘Will you strip to your pants and lie down?’
He did so.
She measured his leg length, hip and spine alignment, inspected his scars, jotting notes. Asked him to roll over. Asked him about pain. Discomfort. Tightness.
‘They itch,’ was all he gave away.
‘Do you mind if I photograph them too?’
‘Go ahead.’
She did so, and as she recorded them asked, ‘You have an in and out scar on your abdomen. What caused that?’
‘When I was about ten or eleven, I got impaled.’
‘Ouch,’ she said. Then, ‘But you recovered quick, didn’t you.’
He nodded.
She asked, ‘Any long-term negative effects?’
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’
Something jarred her memory, a question, or a piece of information, but she couldn’t pin it down so she wrote more notes, then took out a tape measure; ‘Stand up against the door jamb and I’ll get an idea of your height. Then I’m almost done for the moment.’
‘Ok,’ he said.
She measured him. ‘’We’ll arrange to meet at the hospital and I’ll run the blood tests, the genetic tests and stuff,’ she said. ‘The cat scans. All the biggies.’
‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’
‘No. I’m just casting nets, to see what I might catch.’
‘Hence the feet.’
‘Yeah. Real long-shot,’ she said,’ But it’ll help me build up a picture. If I come across others like you they may display some similar characteristics.’
‘Will you come across others like me?’
She paused, ‘I’d like to.’
‘And what characteristics do you think we might share?’
‘I really don’t know, yet,’ she said, watching him dress, ‘Green eyes, maybe,’ and she began packing away her equipment.

‘So what are your first impressions, doctor Friend?’ he asked, as he fastened the cuff of his shirt.
She flicked through her notes and then said, ‘You’re fit, healthy and, if I had to make an educated guess, though I could be way off, your racial group is very early British.’
‘Celtic?’
‘No earlier. Like the people who’s bones they found at Cheddar Gorge. Early Indo-European. An unusual racial group, genetically similar to the Basques.’
‘Then I’m Spanish?’ he asked.
‘No. But you do have very high arches.’

 

‘See this?’ Paul was in the tool-shed, part of the outbuildings at the rear and side of Ghent’s house, and he was packing away his tools; saws and hand axe that he’d sharpened, ropes he’d coiled, pitons laid in rows.
‘What?’ Astel asked.
He pointed to the back corner of the toolshed, ‘Under that canvas, there’s a motorbike.’
Astel went to look, ‘Urgh, it’s old,’ she said, ‘and dirty,’ stepping back and clapping her hands to shake off the dust.
‘It’s an Ariel side-valve. Pre-war. An antique.’
‘How do you know?’
He rolled his climbing gear into a canvas, ‘I know a lot about motorbikes, especially old ones. I’ve always liked them.’
‘And you like this one?’
He nodded, ‘I might ask Ghent if I can do it up.’
‘You should. I’m sure he won’t mind.’
‘He won’t?’
She shook her head, ‘He’s not a biker.’
‘Good.’
He packed away the tools, and walked over to the bike. She asked, ‘Why do you pack away your tools every night. You clean everything, and then pack it all away.’
He wiped his hands on a towel, ‘I’m a bit obsessive about tools, and gadgets and things,’ he said, rolling back the canvas to reveal the motorbike in all it’s faded glory. ‘It’s a boy thing, I think.’
She nodded, ‘I think it probably is,’ then she said, ‘I’ve made you some supper, it’s on the kitchen table.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, still peering at the motorbike in the near dark. Sighing, she picked up a torch, switched it on and took it over to him. He pointed it at the machine, scrutinised it; ‘I think this has been restored once already, and then packed away. But whoever did it, it was a long time ago.’
She watched him running his fingertips over the paintwork, stroke the cooling fins with the back of his hand, sniff the air. ‘Yeah, it’s been restored, maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago, and then packed away.’
He stood up, dragged the canvas back over the frame; ‘Whoever packed it away coated it in grease to protect it. That’ll need cleaning off.’
‘Will it still work?’ she asked.
‘It will,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to check the tyres and the gaskets but I should be able to fire it up. I’ll start tomorrow. Better ask Ghent first though.’
She shrugged, ‘He won’t mind, I told you.’
‘Still, it’s his bike, and he might want it kept the way it is. Under wraps.’
‘Who says it’s his bike?’ she muttered.

 

‘Are you ready Matthias?’
The shadowy figure at the rear of the workshop paused, twisting the valve of a gas cylinder with a gnarled hand, turning the flame from blue-white to red, then raising the welding visor. He grinned toward the sunlit doorway. ‘Give me a moment Alistair,’ he said, turning back to rub soot from the steel plate he was welding, with the back of a gloved hand.’
‘Always just a moment,’ Alistair complained, and Matthias could hear the smile. ‘Tell you what; I’ll go ahead and grab our table before the tourists arrive,’ Alistair said, ‘Or you’ll keep me waiting here for hours,’ and he chuckled to himself, ‘but don’t be too long, or I’ll finish the first bottle for myself.’
‘Ok friend,’ Mathias said, ‘I won’t be long,’ and, giving a wave, he pulled down his visor before twisting the valve, glancing down at the cylinder to read the gauge, Alistair and the bottle of wine already forgotten.
An hour later, at their favourite table, on the terrace above the bay, they watched the sun setting behind the olive-groved hills. Alistair asked, ‘Have you heard from Astel lately?’
Matthias frowned.
‘I don’t mean to intrude.’
‘Oh, I know, my friend. There’s no offence taken. I was just trying to remember when she left. It must be, a year or more, yes, a year last May since she left.’
‘But she writes to you?’ Alistair said, and watched as Matthias empted the bottle into his glass, and waved to the waiter to order another bottle.
‘Sure. She writes every month.’ He took a large draft of wine, then sat back in the chair, smiling to himself, staring into the darkening sky. ‘She writes to me. And I to her.’
He pointed, ‘Look at that,’ as the blues and pinks and whipped-cream whites of the sky merged into the dark blues beneath the rippling clouds. Stars twinkling at the very edges of the daylight.
‘Beautiful isn’t it,’ Alistair said.
Matthias nodded, but was still thinking of Astel. ‘We must make a strange couple,’ he said.
Alistair nodded, working out who he meant, then, looking back at him, ‘You and Astel? Sugar and spice.’
‘I like that,’ Matthias said, ‘Astel and I. Sugar and spice.’
Alistair grinned, a little relieved; Matthias was prone to dark humours and you couldn’t always predict how he’d respond to humour, or unguarded observations.
‘The rough and the smooth, that’s Astel and me,’ Matthias continued. ‘Cat and dog. Tree bark and soft heartwood.’
‘You’re feeling poetic tonight,’ Alistair commented.
‘Ha!’ Matthias laughed, looking up as the waiter brought them another bottle, and they watched as he topped up both their glasses. 
They sat quietly for a while and then Matthias asked, ‘How is your good wife today, Alistair?’
He grimaced, ‘The same as ever. Heart like a twisted root, mouth like a badly played violin, and the pleasant humour of a bath full of broken glass.’
‘I’m not the only one in poetic mood,’ Matthias observed.
Alistair frowned. ‘And some days she’s worse.’
Matthias stood, patted is friend’s shoulder in commiseration, ‘And that’s why I never married, my friend,’ he said, then paused, ‘But I’ll not have you pretend your wife doesn’t love you.’
‘She loves me all right,’ Alistair conceded, ‘Like a terrier loves a bone.’
Matthias laughed again and then limped off toward the toilet to take a well-earned piss.