“Thus cheated of his long-anticipated vengeance,” said Bass, “I would imagine that the King has the London gutters running blood, by now. Once I heard His Majesty swear that he meant to erect either a gibbet or a block at every place two streets intersected throughout the length and width of the city, when once it fell.”
The young officer shrugged. “Oh. there have been some executions. Your Grace—hangings, mostly, though with a few beheadings, guttings, maimings, burnings, public rackings, and similar torments. The Papal Legate and a few others were broken on a wheel and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had crowned the bastard, was sewn into a leathern sack with three black cats, then the sack was flogged and, when he ceased to scream, thrown into the Thames—but there has been little bloodshed, really. There are not that many people left alive within London City, Your Grace, what with the starvation and its attendant illnesses, lack of fuel last winter, and a terrible outbreak of siege fever, which last is even yet claiming victims.
“However,” the officer said, smiling, “I was entrusted a bit of decoration for Your Grace’s castle-gate arch. May my troopers bring it in?”
Despite a strong sense of foreboding. Bass acquiesced, and a brace of brawny, jackbooted troopers trundled in a small cask, sprung the topmost hoop, opened it, and lifted out—pale-white, slack-jawed and staring-eyed, dripping brine in ropy streams—by its hair the severed head of a man.
Smiling even more broadly. Sir Egbert introduced the “newcomer.” “Your Grace, please give me leave to present his late grace the foul traitor Sir Jonathan More, onetime Duke of Norfolk. His Majesty knew that Your Grace would feel unjustly slighted unless the main gate of Norwich Castle bore the head of this infamous rogue in its proper setting . . . upon a spike.”
Speaking through teeth tight-clenched, striving with every ounce of willpower to control his body’s need to instantly spew up the full contents of his churning stomach, Bass Foster said that which he knew he must. “Sir Egbert, my thanks for delivery of this . . . token of his majesty’s good offices. Please have it turned over to my castellan: he will know what disposition to make of it.
“Do you and your troopers bide the night with us. there will be food and drink for you all and bait for your mounts. Now, please go. for I soon must be on the march with my squadron and there is yet overmuch to be done before our departure.”
Immediately the chamber was left to him alone. Bass stumbled in haste to one of the casement windows that overlooked a tiny garden court, thrust out his head and shoulders, and retched until nothing more would come and he could only gag and shudder.
Assured by his Portuguese friend, mentor, and onetime prisoner Baron Melchoro that such gestures were expected and necessary, Bass gifted Sir Egbert, along with his dawn stirrup cup, a purse of silver to divide amongst his troopers and for himself a golden ring—a bit of the loot of Gijon port—in which was set a malachite.
Then the officer and his troopers and their train of mules with their grisly cargoes were off to their next appointed stop: the town of Norwich where the mayor would shortly be in receipt of the upper right quarter of the body of the late and unlamented Sir Jonathan More for “decoration” of the town gates, a warning to all who saw of the certain and horrible fate of traitors to the Crown of England and Wales.
While he stood stock-still for the fitting of a new pour-point into which the ultralightweight breast-and-back gifted him by Hal would shortly be sewn, Bass wondered if his mindset would ever truly adapt itself to this savage world and its barbaric, bloody mores.
“In my world.” he mused, “there are … were far more people than live in this one. Hal estimates that there are less than a half billion people in all of this world, at this time, and something under a hundred thousand in this kingdom and Scotland combined, while there were between three and four billion in mine and nearly twelve billion in his.
“One would think that with so few people alive, human life would have at least the value that it had in most parts of my world. Hah! No such thing. The lives of most men, women, and children, here, are considered of less value than that of a horse or a trained hawk or hunting dog. No one seems to give a thought to the fact that in a bad winter, humbler people starve to death that said horses and hawks be properly fed.
“Some of the things I’ve witnessed since we were borne here would literally curl the hair. And some of the stories I’ve heard . . . like the poor bastard of a slate-roofer who was winged with a crossbow bolt and fell off a roof to his death because he had allowed his shadow to fall across the path of some West Country baron, back during the reign of Richard IV.
“And the killings and outright murders would be bad enough. God knows, but the people of this world, ninety-nine percent of all that I’ve met, anyway, don’t seem to get half the kick out of seeing a poor wight put to death unless it’s done slowly, agonizingly, or at least preceded by such tortures that would’ve made the Marquis de Sade of my world cringe and gag.
“The country people and those of the smaller, unwalled towns are all scared shitless of armies and soldiers of either side, and for damned good and sufficient reasons, not the least of which is that if companies on campaign are issued any rations at all, they’re almost invariably of the worst quality that the commanders feel they can get away with, and if the soldiers expect to get anything better they must either buy it at vastly inflated prices or take it by force. And that latter is just what they usually do, taking time and opportunity for a little casual rape, here and there, and of course lifting any money or small valuables while they’re about the main business that brought them to that particular place.
“The Kingdom of England and Wales is reputed to be an enlightened and humane land, ruled by just, merciful monarchs and nobles, and yet even here the value of human life, the price of human suffering, is incredibly low. Hal attests—and who should better know than a man who has lived in this kingdom for going on two hundred years?—that before the Crusader invasions and the late Angela Tudor’s bloody mischief, things were slowly becoming less savage and sadistic in England. But even so, he can list nearly a hundred so-called crimes for which the almost invariable penalty is death, quite often a drawn-out, messy death at that.
“God knows, being who I am, what I am, and from where and when I am, my household and establishment is run—insofar as I am able to personally supervise it, which isn’t much anymore, I fear—along decent, humanistic lines, yet every day or night at Norwich I find that I have to block my ears, pretend that I’m not hearing the screams of someone being hurt; for, as squeamish as I am still, my staff and guards and senior servants are men of their age to the nines, their minds and actions set an governed in a hard, callous, mediaeval mold.
“If a trooper breaks his captain’s rules, he is flogged, while his sergeant will usually just knuckle-massage him into bloody unconsciousness. A kitchen scullion who displeases a cook is beaten, but informally so is a stablehand who runs afoul of a groom, or a common servant—male or female—whose work or lack of same offends a superior, for even the slightest or most petty of reasons. I have to be damned careful in complaining about anything, lest my complaint be the cause for a poor bastard of an underserv-ant to suffer wealed, bruised, bleeding flesh or broken bones, simply on account of His Grace being displeased in some more than likely trivial way.
“Worse, my own attempts to maintain humane behavior are misinterpreted to the farthest extreme. Because I cannot stomach driving a pikepoint or a blade into a helpless wounded man, I am considered widely to be a cold, hard man, taking private enjoyment in the thought of my enemies dying slowly of blood loss, shock, sepsis, or gangrene; and my signal failure on a few occasions to order a man taken to that particular room and put to what is euphemistically called ‘the severe question’ has been judged to my dislike of permitting torture when I’ve not the time to watch it.
“This worldwide barbarism must be infective, though, to some extent, because my wife, who was a left-liberal of the northeastern U.S. variety, egalitarian to a fault, warm and loving of all mankind, has succumbed to the brutality of this world, is becoming every bit as hot-temperedly cruel as any woman born here could be. Thus far it hasn’t affected me to any great lengths, and I’m just as glad that it hasn’t, for all that I might adapt a little more quickly and easily to the here and now if it had or did.”