Blue-Eyed Stranger Read online

  “What am I supposed to do about it, then?”

  Martin took his watch out of his belt pouch. There was just about time to bolt down some lunch before they had to go on and wow the public with their martial prowess. He sighed again. “Go back to the stall where you got it and ask for a refund. You were wearing kit when you bought it, right?”

  Stigand nodded, his head still bent regretfully over the abomination of a brooch.

  “Well, if he told you that was a Viking brooch, he told you a load of bollocks. He was trying it on because we’re a new society and he thinks we don’t know the score. Tell him if you don’t get a refund, I’ll send Rolf down to have a word with him. We may be a new society, but he knows all our thegns from way back, and he needs reminding that he can’t slip shit like that past us. All right?”

  The newbie still looked surly and unconvinced. Martin wondered if this was one recruit who would not come back after his first show. Thought it would be like a live action World of Warcraft, did he? Thought he’d get to be oh so cool, because it was just a game and who gave a fuck, right? If that was the case, if the guy didn’t care about history enough to want to do it properly, Martin didn’t need him anyway.

  “Go on. Do it now, before you miss lunch. We’re on in three-quarters of an hour.”

  The rest of the muster of warriors fortunately turned up nothing to complain about. Like Rolf and Martin himself, these were all ex-members of that other society.

  While fully in agreement with its ethos of being the most accurate depiction of life in the Dark Ages that was to be found in the country, they’d split from that society for purely personal reasons. The usual stories: political infighting, cliques, personality clashes. The tendency of Martin’s old group leader to spend the night around the fire telling homophobic jokes and needling him for having no sense of humour when he didn’t laugh. Even the fact that Martin ended up as a perpetual chew toy between people who wanted to put him into photos of the society for PC reasons, and people who wanted him kept out of the photos because he wasn’t what the public wanted to see when they looked for Vikings.

  Bretwalda was meant to be Martin’s refuge, a society with the same high standards, but without the pissing contests. Maybe even a place where he could dare, one day, to openly bring a boyfriend without the certainty that he’d be the subject of every dirty joke around the campfire for years.

  He just hadn’t really expected it to come with this much grief. Now even Rolf was looking at him askance. “If he comes back as surly as he was when he went, I’m not sure I want him on the field in charge of a spear.”

  They had grown a great deal since Martin formed the society two months ago, with a round robin letter to his friends in that other society. There was a sense of hope over the whole encampment—the hope that this time they could all do their thing without petty little power plays getting in the way. But it still only amounted to a grand total of twenty warriors. With an audience like this, they couldn’t afford to lose even one. He really didn’t want Bretwalda’s first big show to be an embarrassment to everyone.

  “Put him on the field,” he said now. “All that adoration will give him the motivation to want to do it right in future.”

  “And if he puts someone’s eye out?”

  Martin shrugged, pretty sure that even Kayleigh was good enough to prevent that happening. Truth was, she had the makings of a good line commander. “Bit of gore? The crowd’ll love it.”

  Speak of the devil, he thought, coming in under the work shelter to saw at a loaf of bread with his handseax. Someone had loaned Kayleigh a padded gambeson which disguised her figure, and a helmet which disguised her hair. Her face was washed clean of makeup, and she had even given herself a five-o’clock shadow with some ash from the fire. He was impressed and ready to say so, but her expression was easily as sullen as Stigand’s.

  “She says—” Kayleigh gestured dismissively at Edith “—I have to help her with the cooking. Why do I have to help her with the cooking just cos I’m a girl? I don’t do cooking in real life, and I don’t mean to start now.”

  Privately, Martin thought she had a point. In that other society there had been no rule that the women had to cook, but still they had somehow ended up doing it anyway. He wasn’t sure if they preferred it, or if they just stepped in because no one else could be bothered. That was something at least he could improve on.

  “Everyone should get to do everything,” he said, and his teacherly side prompted him to add, “I’ll draw up a rota after the battle.”

  He folded roughly chopped ham, raw onions, and cheese into his wedge of bread. It had been a hard day, he thought again as he washed down the sandwich with a leather mug full of apple juice, and watched as the warriors began to muster into a two-column marching formation behind Biscop Weyland’s cross. A hard day, and it was still only half over. But when they blew the harsh discordant notes of the great hunting horns and all the milling public turned to look at his small army with admiration, he still thought it was a good one.

  Let it be a good battle, with single combats between some of the seasoned warriors who know how to put on a good show, with some drama and some good death scenes and no actual injuries. Let us impress the organisers so we get asked back. Let us thrill the crowds and make more starry-eyed youngsters want to join up. And let us have fun, so all our newbies come out of the ring floating on their own glory, reassured that it may take extra effort to do it well, but we are fucking good, and it’s worth it.

  With less than a minute to go, the Stomping Griffins drew up outside the central arena and offloaded a dozen bags onto the hay bales that both defined the area and served as seats for the inner ring of audience. Here by the entrance stood a stand for the announcer, a tall scaffolding pole with loudspeakers attached to the top of it. The microphone itself was out in the centre of the ring, in the hand of a woman who was just winding up a display of falconry.

  They could vividly hear the bull-roarer vibration along the string of her lure as she twirled it in the air. “Ah, and there he comes. Over by the helter-skelter. Keep your eyes on that dot.”

  Billy did, and saw it unfold into a spectacular tawny-winged bird with psychopath eyes. It swooped straight at the rat on a string, looking leisurely until the final blinding rush, caught the meat in big yellow claws, and allowed itself to be drawn down to sit on the woman’s heavy glove, shrugging as if cynically unimpressed by the clapping of the crowd.

  “That concludes the falconry demonstration.”

  The announcer walked out to relieve the falconer of the microphone. Switching it off, he brought it back with him to go into a huddle with the Stomping Griffins’ musicians.

  “No one’s going to hear you if you’re not amplified out there. So where would you like me to hold the mic? Somewhere in the centre, around here?”

  “I think, if you stood by Christine,” Annette was saying, “at the other end from Nancy. If we put the pennywhistle at one extreme and the drum at the other, you could hold the mic closer to the quietest instrument. What are we starting with, boys?”

  Matt offered the announcer a distracted smile. “We’ll start with a dance called ‘Blue-Eyed Stranger.’ Then I’ll shout them out as we go along.”

  A glissade of bells sounded out as the side moved into a six-man formation. That was when Billy first noticed the horns and the chanting. Noise crashed at them from everywhere of course. Steam fairground organs played Mozart. A stall selling little statuettes of dragons curled around highly coloured glass gems was belting out “All Around My Hat” by Steeleye Span. Children were shrieking while their parents yelled. Billy had tried, as he always had to try, to tune it all out, so it had been easy to overlook the additional sound of approaching footsteps and the jangle of horses’ tack.

  But then a guy who looked like he ought to be sacking churches and setting innocent monks on fire took the mic right out of the announcer’s hand.

  “What the . . .?”

  Almost as one, the side turned in bewilderment. Billy found a small army of Vikings bearing down on him, preceded by a purple-clad priest with a nasty-looking mace at his belt. Unhesitatingly, the priest walked out into the arena, carrying a polished processional cross with a banner beneath it.

  The heavies went to follow. A guy in a helmet with odd, owl-like frames of metal around his eyes. One with an axe as tall as he was and a shield Billy associated with the Normans. A third, a startlingly and unexpectedly black Viking wearing a necklace of white shells and carnelian over his hauberk. All of them built like human tanks and ironclad in armour that hung far too heavy, and stank far too rankly, to be just for show.

  Those swords were convincing—not flash enough, not decorated enough, not spiky enough to have been made up by some modern dreamer. A part of Billy recognised and respected the fact that these guys looked like they meant business. Another part was too busy going, What the fuck? You don’t get to ignore me too. This is our spot! Our time. Get out of it!

  He wasn’t the only one enraged. Sometimes, when the side danced on a public road, some tosser of a driver who thought he didn’t have time to wait out a single dance would attempt to drive his car straight through the set, expecting dancers and musicians to move aside for him. It never happened that way. The side closed in. The dancers would be deliberately obstructive. The musicians would stand, unmoving, until the car’s bumper touched their knees—and if it got that far, the driver would find himself surrounded by angry protective men with sticks. So there was no way—no way—the side was going to meekly let a bunch of weirdos in dress-up push past them.

  To a person, Billy and his side closed around the gap into the arena, orphaning the “priest” who now stood in the centre of the ring. Matt turned on the organiser. “It does say the Stomping Griffins are on now, doesn’t it?”

  The poor man took off his flatcap and smoothed down his bald patch contemplatively. “It does . . .”

  “Right, so—”

  “But it also says, ‘Combat display by Bretwalda.’ Sorry, we’ve double booked for some reason. Maybe you can—”

  “Well, we were obviously here first.” Matt signalled to the musicians. Nancy had placed her enormous drum on the ground, a gorgeous red-painted thing with the team’s black griffin on the side, its goat-skin drumheads tensioned with snow-white ropes. Now she picked it up and shrugged on the harness.

  She hit it. Boom! And again. Boom! The melodeon struck up with a bagpipe-like drone just as one of the Vikings on horseback was trying to shoulder his way through the close-packed black of the dancers. Maybe the drumbeat spooked it. Maybe it was the way the Boy gave an automatic leap in answer to the music. Perhaps it didn’t like this big, dark, faceless flapping thing jumping at its nose. All Billy knew was that the horse kicked out, its hoof punching a hole in the drum. Wood splintered and the horse bucked and danced to try to shake this terrifying red thing off its leg.

  Bravely but very unwisely, Nancy tried to pull her ruined drum away. Billy saw the disaster coming but not fast enough to stop it. He was still running forward when the full weight of the horse drove up against the eighty-year-old’s shoulder, picked her off the ground and threw her. She went sailing in a way that might have been comical in a woman a quarter of her age, slammed the edge of her back into the straw bales, and rolled over them to lie still on the inner edge of the arena.

  “You fucker!” Billy had a stick in his hand. He didn’t think twice about running up to the horseman and belting him across the armoured thigh for being a sick fucker who rode down old ladies. “What do you think you’re doing, you fucking wanker?!”

  The rest of the side were with him in a kind of synergy that only ever happened in the dancing when they were really on form. Pudgy Matt and the Boy—who was only five years younger than Nancy himself—the normally straitlaced Pete, terminally sceptical Colin, and suave Andy just as fired up by his side. Margery had seized a spare stick and was wading in too, while Annette and Christine were on either side of Nancy’s fallen form, carefully proffering hankies and support.

  The horseman didn’t even have the decency to reply, instead leaning down over his mount’s neck and whispering to it. But the rest of the army poured out from all around the animal and closed ranks in front of it.

  “Fucking watch what you’re doing with the fucking horse!” Spectacles-helm guy got up in Billy’s face and pushed him in the chest. A hell of a lot of weight there. The shove knocked Billy off his feet, but dancing had made him agile enough to twist in the air and come down foursquare and balanced.

  “Did you see what he did? Did you see him knock down an old lady?”

  “She fucking asked for it.”

  Even the hard-nosed spectacles-Viking himself seemed to realise he had stepped over a line with that. His eyes went wide, and he backpedalled a little, raising his hands. But it was far too late.

  “You utter . . .!” Graham danced on a Wednesday night, and did karate on a Friday. A tall athletic man, with whom Billy was in competition for the unspoken acknowledgement of being the side’s best dancer, he wore a short-trimmed red beard and would have looked quite at home in armour, if the roles were reversed. Billy’s untutored slice to the leg had bounced off the horseman’s chain mail and been disregarded, but when Graham hit spectacles-guy in the sternum with the heel of his open hand, the guy reeled back five paces and went down.

  Billy heard the whisper-snick sounds of swords being drawn—long blade-shapes of steel sliding against the metal-lined mouths of scabbards. He could see they were blunt, the points carefully rounded, the edges a good millimetre thick and smoothed off so as not to break the skin. But they were still heavy steel bars a good two feet long. They might not cut but, like the side’s sticks, he was pretty sure they could break bones.

  Some of his righteous anger faltered. There were rules to this—the other side backed down in front of the threat. If they had any decency, they backed down and did not force actual blows. But this lot weren’t conceding anything. Even the ragged edges of the army, thin guys and short androgyns with nothing more menacing to their name than long tunics and itchy trousers, were massing in support of their leaders. Behind the swords, the jackals of this army were aiming spears at the side.

  In the long, tense moment that followed, the black Viking caught Billy’s eye. He could see his own thoughts reflected on the man’s handsome face. This is all getting a little out of hand.

  “Guys,” Billy said, tentatively. “Do we really want to go there?” Right was on their side, overwhelmingly, but he didn’t want to end up with a conviction for affray. He didn’t want the Griffins to get a reputation as a bunch of bully boys it wasn’t safe to ask to your event. He didn’t want this to get to a point where someone would have to get the police involved.

  And that was, of course, when the police arrived. Two constables in high-vis vests, striding along behind the organiser, whom Billy hadn’t even noticed leaving.

  The woman PC pushed herself between Graham and Norman-shield-guy. A little thing, half their height, she had dyed-auburn hair growing out black, tied back fiercely from a face that said it wasn’t at all impressed. “All right, lads, calm down. Back off a pace, both of you.”

  Thank God for the voice of authority, Billy thought, and did as she asked, turning round to check on Nancy. The sight of her sitting unaided on a straw bale, cradling a paper cup of tea in both hands and smiling, brought him further down from his desire to smite the evildoers. It brought further into his mind the thought of what this whole incident must look like to outsiders—the sort of outsiders who were thronging the ring two deep and standing on the seats to get a better view.

  Oh shit.

  “’Scuse me. Just step aside there please . . .” The organiser shepherded a man with a fishing rod through the awkwardly milling combatants and sent him into the arena to tell the “priest” to come back in. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, in a change to our published programme, the fly fishing demonstration has been brought forward from three o’clock. That’s the fly fishing demonstration now, and we’ll keep you posted on what’s coming next when we have it sorted out.”

  “I think you’d all better come with me.” The WPC’s partner, a Sikh with the black-and-white chequered band and badge of the police tied around his sharply folded turban, had Graham and spectacles-helm-guy by the elbows, propelling them firmly and inexorably away from the ring.

  Billy peeled out of the mass of dancers to offer Nancy his arm. She smiled at him, but didn’t take it, rising under her own steam and straightening up with the pride and stubborn resilience of the Blitz generation. She still looked like a vengeful goddess, more so with her hat knocked off and her long white hair come loose from its bun. Like the Morrigan, or the Crone—an aspect of womanhood long past putting up with the foolishness of others.

  “Don’t fuss,” she said, walking stiffly in a black clot of Griffins behind the Viking army’s spear-fodder. Annette came at the very rear, carrying the corpse of the beautiful drum.

  The police guided them to a secluded spot: a strip of bare grass between the back of the crepe van and the wire fence. Martin had time to think as they walked, time to get a good look at the woman who’d been thrown by Jasper, and realise that when the weirdos in black yelled about her being an old lady, they were speaking nothing but the truth.

  It was hard to tell what any of them were under that thick layer of pitch-black face paint—and he had to admit the black faces had set him against them from the start. But now he looked closer, it was possible to see the woman really was someone’s granny. He was appalled to think she could have broken a hip, broken her back, and all because no one had the sense to talk about who went on first.