The Book of Caradoc
by
James Leigh
Published by Wexyork Books on Smashwords
This book is also available in print at my website
Copyright © 2010 James Leigh
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
oooOooo
THE BOOK OF CARADOC
Foreword
What are heroes?
They can't all be just tough or graceful sufferers. Or aggressive thrill-seekers. Or hard men looking to rough each other up and punch holes through fate.
In the earliest ages we know of, people seem to have thought of them as almost a different species - half-men, half-gods - and I for one find such an idea attractive. These days, it seems to me, we expect too little of ourselves, too much of the gods. As a consequence, a wider gap than is either necessary or healthful has opened between us. We need heroes to fill it and inspire us.
That is why I set down this Life of Caradoc - to inspire us. Rough, not smooth, times are needed to make heroes, so it is hardly surprising that there were more of his kind around in the period following the Withering than now. Besides, since of all recent heroes he is agreed to be greatest, he ought surely to inspire us most.
But I have another reason. People today are eager to learn more about him, but until now there has not been enough to know with any certainty, with the result that fictions have flourished, smothering truth the way the fungus called Dead Men's Fingers embellishes the trunk of a great tree while robbing it of sap. I want people to understand Caradoc better by clearing away the lies and half-truths that hamper our understanding, even if the result is sometimes to make him seem less, rather than more, heroic.
Such, then, are my reasons for setting down my story in chronicle form, separating fact from generally admiring but sometimes malicious fiction. Of course there will be those who disapprove of my attempt since we do not yet know he is dead. Some may even fear that in penning his life, I risk bringing about his death, but as to that, readers will have to make up their own minds.
*****
I claim my account to be the fullest and most authentic possible since I am the first (and so far only) scholar to have had access to Ayling's journals which are as near a first-hand account of our Dux Bellorum's life as we shall ever have. These were brought back to Britain by Païen of Penmarch who handed them on to his cousin Wauchier, first President of the Wessex Bretons, who then sent them on to Ayling's original Commune. Old epics thought it proper to begin in the middle of events and then retrace what had happened up to that point before going on to narrate their end. Ayling, though, had no choice in the matter since he did not meet Caradoc until after the two Hardman Campaigns. His journals thus begin at that point and only glance back at the hero's earlier life as he learned of it later. As for a proper ending - there can be none since Païen reports that he left Caradoc alive while Ayling's journals simply break off. But a word of warning about Ayling. I myself do not question his honesty. We must remember though that everything he records comes filtered through two human and therefore fallible memories: his own and that of the Dux Bellorum.
My chronicle opens on that occasion when, on one of his regular forays out of Dulwich 6B, the young man who was not yet Caradoc was captured by a unit of the Oxford Authority militia somewhere between Dorchester and the Goring Gap and imprisoned in a frontier post that had once been a mansion beside the Thames. In those days, of course, most of North, Middle and South Britain was made up of small, usually independent Communes ranging in size from family farms to large estates, a few of them urban but most still rural, among which the first Authorities were just then coming into existence.
Our Dux Bellorum spent several months in a cellar jail under Oxford's frontier post, and it was there that he underwent the experience which turned an unremarkable tinker into the most famous man of modern times, for the cellar also housed a library abandoned after Oxford commandeered all the useful volumes. Having nothing else to do, he read stories by old poets like Homer and Virgil, and it was there that he adopted the name we now know him by. Needing an alias for Oxford's criminal records, he borrowed one from the book he happened to be reading. I too, then, will begin my story in that Thames-side prison, but before doing so I must first say something about Ayling and conditions in the South Britain of his day.
*****
Britain was more beautiful then than now, life itself simpler, if also starker. It has become less dangerous and more predictable, less alluring but also more boring, while we no longer recall all its terrors and discomforts. Memory gilds. Ayling was fifteen when he met Caradoc and so barely an independent member of the Bolton-on-the-Wharfe Commune - then as now a dull sort of place. In those days there were many more kinds of Commune than today, and Bolton even then had a sly, humourless reputation. Yet it respected learning and was prosperous. Fields by the River Wharfe grew grain for its bread and beer, cattle were pastured and pigs fattened on acorns and beech mast in the old ducal woods. The Wharfe itself teemed with trout and grayling, and the abbey stew-ponds held carp as well as eels and other fish. Walled gardens grew vegetables and fruits, and sheep were pastured high up the dales to keep the Commune in wool, meat and cheese. It was a worthy, self-sufficient place, not needing to trade for much, and life in it must generally have been untroubled, if also tedious. Ancient abbeys, after all, were not built to be knocked over easily, and Bolton's frugality, or stinginess, will have meant that there was little to tempt Metros.
Still, frugality is a boring virtue, and Ayling was glad to have his life changed for ever by meeting Caradoc. We should not, though, overlook the importance of his early training. There are still some who consider him a liar, apt to invent since there were, and are, few other survivors of that era or records to contradict him. I myself though have no doubt that he knew Caradoc better than anyone else and that he tells us honestly what he knows - not, of course, that honesty ever guarantees truth.
It seems that Bolton was sceptical as well as learned, concerned to find things out for itself, both from curiosity and a desire to examine at first hand developments elsewhere that might prove useful at home. Accordingly, every year it sent out young men to travel before they came of age, telling them to make notes of whatever they saw that might prove worth copying. In fact the worst part of Bolton's coming-of-age ritual seems still to be the public delivery of a lecture based on these notes!
When he left Bolton, Ayling tells us he travelled southwards to Gloucester but stayed in that Authority only a few months before moving on to the Buckland Commune on the south coast where he met Caradoc. I am aware, of course, of the rumour that he left Gloucester under a cloud, having put some girl in the family way but have come across no evidence to support the claim, which in any case I consider improbable.
Some believe he kept his journals solely to impress Bolton - and to keep its door ajar should he ever decide to return. Others concede that he knew the Dux Bellorum better than anyone else but was gullible - too overawed by him and too willing to act as his propagandist. Poor Ayling. I myself subscribe to neither view. As I have said, Bolton was both sceptical and inculcated scepticism. Still, the wariest of us is easily deceived when he wants to be - and which of us does not want to be from time to time? Indeed, he is often simple, but I find his simplicity reassuring. He is like a glass of spring water whose innocence quickly reveals all taint of moral sediment.
Since we cannot question him, however, we must make up our own minds. For my part, I will conclude only by remarking that if he has survived, he will now (like Caradoc himself) be in the prime of life, for both were young men when they met. His notes tell us he was with the Dux Bellorum at the Siege of Westerland on the island of Sylt, and the Bretons claim they were still together when they themselves sailed from Sonderborg. Where, then, did they go after leaving Sylt? I defer all such conjecture to the end of my narrative, for that is what it must be - conjecture. Besides, my aim being to inspire, I must not drag on, especially since I still have something to say about Caradoc himself before he was gaoled in the company of books.
*****
Even Ayling does not seem to have known Caradoc's original, or birth, name, and perhaps now we shall never know. Perhaps he had to re-invent himself. My own theory for what it is worth is that he suffered memory loss at or around the time of The Coombe massacre. I certainly cannot agree with those who claim that his past must have been discreditable, or that he deliberately hushed it up, even if that Oxford jail is unlikely to have been the first or only one he was ever in.
Such accounts of his early life as there are suggest that he was the child of ordinary parents, his father being a public entertainer of some sort. My impression is that the boy was withdrawn, the youth something of a tearaway - yet not so much a rebel as a dreamer, a youth unconscious of rules. After his parents were killed by Metros, he completed his growing-up in the Dulwich Commune which had been their home and where he himself first became a merchant, trading mainly with the Spitalfields Commune north of the Thames.
He can have been scarcely of age when he married a Friesian girl called Vibeke (pronounced Veeb-eh-keh), but I have been unable to discover any record of their contract since most Spitalfields records were lost when that settlement was incorporated into the Westminster Authority. All that can be said for certain is that Vibeke soon presented him with twin sons, Peter and Hannes, and that for a while the family was settled, perhaps even happy.
As the second great wave of Metro attacks began over South and Middle Britain, though, he gave up trading and took to the tinker's life, mending tools and carrying out any odd jobs for which he could get payment. Gradually his range expanded and he stayed away longer and more often from Dulwich 6B, and it seems to have been that which made Vibeke leave him, taking their children with her.
Even in his earliest days, then, he was a wanderer. While others worked their gardens, pens and coops or traded small manufactures out of basement workshops, he was out with his lurchers Topsy and Turvy, returning from forays into the country around with game and other commodities. From hints in Ayling's journals I infer that he was not above a little rustling and may even have tried his hand at the highwayman's trade. His main motive, though, seems to have been to find out for himself how other Communes managed their affairs, being convinced even then that the makeshift social arrangements of his day could not last, that new ones would have to be come by.
Increasingly, then, Dulwich 6B became just a base to which he returned with whatever he had gleaned on his wanderings, staying only for so long as was necessary to collect fresh goods. Increasingly, too, he wandered further afield, and it was on one such foray that he was caught and imprisoned for reasons unknown on the borders of the Oxford Authority.
The regime he was held under can hardly have been harsh, for he seems to have made no effort to escape. Indeed, once he got his feet under that library desk, he would probably not have escaped had his gaolers left the door open. He was not an educated man even by the standards of his day, yet he was curious, intelligent and imaginatively starved, and it seems to have been that Thames-side reading binge which prompted the change altering his life completely.
The Metro attack which burnt his prison down also forced him out, and it is at that point that I begin my chronicle. I myself once met him while I was still a professional diplomat - and almost did again, I think, during the Forest of Dean-Gloucester Authority treaty negotiations which I describe in Book X. It was my memory of that incident, by the way, that prompted me to set this chronicle down.
My aim, as I said at the beginning, being solely to transcribe the facts insofar as I have been able to determine them, I have used only Ayling's journals and my own researches, neither adding nor subtracting except occasionally in order to clarify (and where I do so, I say so). Bolton gave me access to the journals, but there is no guarantee it will do the same for anyone else, and in my opinion there are already too many gullible people about inclined to attribute to our hero achievements that owe more to fantasy than fact. I wish to put on record what I believe really happened and in the process scotch rumours that do neither him nor us any credit.
P.V.de M.C.
Speech House
Forest of Dean Commune
oooOooo
BOOK I
Caradoc watched from astride a willow uprooted by the current and wedged between islets in the river. The locks of the Thames had long since broken or decayed and the river reverted to its ancient course, winding among gravel banks formed and reformed in every flood. Throughout his stay in gaol, from a tiny window high up in the wall of his cell, he had been able to see a lighter beached by the drought on the opposite bank, its cargo steadily off-loaded over the course of several nights by Metros in spite of the outpost's guard mounted over it. Now even the lighter was gone.
Not much was left of his prison either. From where he sat he could see Oxford militiamen raking through its shell, smoke and ash billowing about them, while others stood guard on the road. Metros had taken to travelling in larger bands lately, and it was not unknown for them to attack small outlying forts mainly in order to ambush the forces sent to relieve them, weapons being their most prized loot. Caradoc noticed that none of the guards strayed far from their carts and that their horses had not been let loose to graze the verges of the old Dorchester road.
Still, it was unlikely that they would have ventured far to look for him even had they had known he was in the prison, for he had not been an important inmate. Anyway, with luck he would soon be gone. He and his boat were just out of sight round the first bend downstream, and the water level was already dropping fast. Unwilling to risk the fast-running main channel, he had tried to negotiate a quieter one between islets near the bank and for his pains got stuck beneath the branches of a fallen tree. Returning to his craft now, he was soon free and rowing past Goring in fast water. He did not stop until he beached her on an island not far from Pangbourne.
Now he hauled the boat as far out of the water as he could and took stock. Even before his arrest he had been away a long time. Vibeke would be even more frightened and unhappy than usual. At least, though, he now had a prize to justify his absence - and what a prize. He stripped to wash the soot and mud from his body, then washed his clothes and draped them over low bushes to dry in the low afternoon sun, grateful that it was a warm spring day. His dogs would warn him of any approach. Already they had caught a rabbit apiece, both of which lay baking in embers beneath the fire, for the island was only a temporary flood-made one.
Having overwhelmed the frontier post in their attack, the Metros had presumably meant to ransack it. The storm struck first, though, ending a long dry spell, and then someone's torch got out of control. Caradoc had smelt smoke even before he heard footsteps outside his cell. No-one paid any attention to his shouts, but flames soon drove the invaders out. That he had survived at all was due to a stalemate in the contest between fire and water. The storm had blown in from the west and the river rose fast. The site of the outpost on the south-east edge of Oxford's territory had made it too important to pull down, but the river's changed course had long since put it at risk. Soon, then, as floodwater welled up between cellar flags and threatened to drown him from below, fire and smoke threatened to roast or suffocate him from above.
Luckily water in the form of another cloudburst won, dousing the flames just as weakened ground floor beams crashed into the cellar area. Unscathed, he had been able to clamber out in choking darkness. Topsy and Turvy, who had never left the district, found him under a thick, dry and warm holly bush on high ground and there stretched out on either side of him so that he was even able to sleep for a while, and at first light he woke to inspect the wonderful present fate had sent to replace the lighter that had been swept away. It was a big, undamaged clinker-built skiff with four sets of oars strapped to brackets inside its hull. Built, according to a plate screwed onto its transom (which he immediately unscrewed and threw into the river) by the Oxford Authority to patrol the tangle of waterways surrounding that city, she must have been moored carelessly or simply torn loose by the flood. What mattered was that she had fetched up on the bank in front of his gaol.
He had levered her back into the water, tied her securely this time, then gone to see what he could salvage from the frontier post now that he had a means to carry loot away. In fact the fire had driven the Metros out so soon that the storerooms were scarcely touched and most of their contents only superficially damaged, so he had been able to salvage ropes, axes, knives, cooking utensils, tubs of nails, tarpaulins, blankets, even clothes, stowing as much as he could into bow and stern compartments and under thwarts. Noting his dogs' restlessness, he left while there was still a cap of cloud over the Chilterns though and was soon glad of his caution when he became wedged in the passage between islets as a squealing of cart axles silenced the birds and a barred sun unmasked the Sinodun Hills.
He and the dogs having fed, he now laid damp brushwood on the fire to make smoke, and soon answering smoke arose on the Chilterns side of the river. By now his coat and breeches were dry, so he divided his salvaged goods into two piles. A few of the larger Authorities already issued coinage at that time, but away from Commune markets the usual trade mode was still hearth-barter whereby anyone with goods to exchange lit a signal fire to attract others. Both parties then met at the nearest of a recognized web of hearths to discuss terms. It goes without saying that everyone generally went armed since Metros could answer smoke signals as well.
A solitary figure whom Caradoc recognised soon appeared in the hearth clearing, a big, slow-talking farmer with a leather hood almost grafted onto his skull. Leaving his dogs in charge of the boat, Caradoc himself had swum ashore, his clothes in a bundle on his head. Now the two men smoked companionably, tobacco being as much a ritual as a medium of exchange
"Times are bad," Caradoc agreed, the conventions not calling for any great originality of thought.
"Hard as hard," the farmer repeated, sucking his upper lip over his teeth as he blew out smoke. "And getting worse."
"How so?"
"Metros. They are more aggressive this year - and there are more of them about. My Commune has lost two men and a woman stolen already. It's getting so people won't travel at all unless they have to. One or two of our outlying farms had to be abandoned when our Council announced it couldn't guarantee to protect them any more."
"Why don't you move on? They say there are fewer Metros westward."
"Funny you should say that. The wife's got relatives near Letchlade. Me, I'd go like a shot, but until conditions are safer, moving might be riskier than staying."
"How many convoys has your Commune made up this year?"
"Just the one so far. There's talk of petitioning Oxford to send more patrols if they want our trade, but I'm not holding my breath."
Caradoc rarely used roads himself, preferring old railway embankments and new footpaths. Still, he supposed a man with a family and possessions to move had less choice.
"You could go by boat. The Thames would take you direct to Letchlade. Oxford levies a transit tax, but you could dodge their patrols if you travelled by night - which would be safer anyway. You wouldn't even need to get close to the city, still less pass through it, because there'll be plenty of water in the channels now after last night's rain. You could turn into the Hinksey Stream a mile or two short of the border, then into the Seacourt and re-join the main river at King's Weir."
"Done it yourself, have you?"
"No, but I know those who have. Security won't be tight because water levels have been too low for commercial traffic for a while."
The farmer wore patched dungarees and cleated boots. His skin was a tanned a ruddy chestnut, his eyes a clear, steady blue, the back of his neck was hatched geometrically like an old gunstock butt. He sat on a log ledged with fungi and covered with bird droppings.
Where would I get a boat from?"
"I've got one."
"Thought you might. Are you willing to trade?"
"Yes."
"Tell me."
"She's twenty-five feet long, clinker-built, shallow draught, broad in the beam, nearly new, with an easily-stepped and lowered mast and a lug-sail and four sets of oars. Easily big enough for a family and all its gear. There's a tarpaulin arrangement you can rig over the lowered mast for sleeping on board so you wouldn't need to risk camping ashore."
"What would you want for her?"
"Your horse and mule with all their tack."
Caradoc had coveted the animals ever since first seeing them a year before. The mare was well-made and strong, the mule older but also strong. Both sets of harness were double-stitched and included saddle-bags and panniers.
"Stuff like mine costs a fortune."
"So do boats like mine, and I've other goods to trade as well. They say the Oxford Road hasn't been made up in years and there are pot-holes you could lose a wagon in. You wouldn't be able to load much of a household onto just two animals, and you won't get much by selling them if others in your Commune are thinking of moving on as well."
The farmer seemed not to be listening. He was whittling at a new pipe bowl with a knife big enough to be a weapon. According to the conventions of the hearth, he ought to have declared it as such, but the letter of the convention applied only to strangers.
"Trade with me and you'll be able to sell her on again at Letchlade where animals are cheap and boats dear. You would probably make a good profit. I shan't be in the area long, mind, and I don't know when I will be back."
The other stood up. He still hesitated, though, not putting his knife away, and Caradoc suddenly realized why. Since he could hardly bring the boat to the neutral hearth, the farmer would have to leave it and its conventions. The two had done business before, but there was always a risk.
"I'll take a look. No harm in that."
Caradoc led the way to the river, hoping the other could swim. Many men, even in riverside Communes, could not, but in fact he did, well and powerfully, leaving his clothes on the bank and jumping in naked except for his leather cap. He stood motionless and unselfconscious when he got out, admiring the skiff. Finally he smiled.
"I'll take her." He did not examine her in detail just yet. "Like you say, I can always sell her on."
Now he became attentive, inspecting minutely every plank and cleat, prodding with the knife he had kept in his cap to test the soundness of timbers. He noted the dimensions of the now empty bow and stern compartments and affected not to notice the piles of goods Topsy and Turvy were guarding away to one side of the clearing. The two men spent some time haggling over those as well as the skiff itself before finally shaking hands and loading up to row back to the bank. There the farmer went off by himself. Soon he was back with his animals, and each helped the other load up. The farmer's Commune backed onto a canal at Reading, he said, so there would be no problem getting his stuff ashore when he arrived home.
It was an exceptional trade for both men. As well as the horse and mule with their tack, Caradoc got a rifle with five hundred paper cartridges, various smoked foods, a quantity of seed and two Weimaraner pups together with cartridge-making and bullet-casting equipment for the rifle. In exchange, the other got the boat with all its fittings, spare cordage, paint, tools, a barrel of nails and some other hardware. Caradoc noted but did not comment on the Westminster Arsenal stamp burnt into the top of the box holding bullet-making equipment. Remembering, though, that the Oxford Authority would certainly hang the other if it saw and identified its skiff, he repeated his earlier warning.
"Arrange to reach Hinksey by nightfall so that you pass the city at night," he advised. "Don't take chances."
He watched him pull away, easily and at home on the still fast-moving river. When he was out of sight, he checked over his own gear. The rest of his Oxford loot was already in his panniers along with the stuff he had just acquired, no now he loaded the mule with them, balancing the pups in a closed basket on top of everything else. Then he tied the mule's bridle to the mare's saddle and mounted up. Crossing the River Kennett, he rode on for some distance before camping near Sunningdale.
He was off before dawn again next morning and entered the Westminster Authority through a region that had once been built up but was now mainly scrub and woodland capable of hiding an army of Metros. Half-grown trees thrust through ruptured, tilted shelves made of ancient concrete slabs like shattered sheet-ice. Looming over them were lunar hills of machinery and metal graveyards that had long since rusted a deep red. Pools and lakes had formed around them and were also blood-red. Buildings stripped of their glass and cladding still subsided regularly in those days, the silence of every day broken by protracted rumblings that filled the air with dust like smoke billowing over the mangled terrain.
It was a warm, pale, windless day on which only cooking fires had been lit, and there were few people about in the areas between Communes - most of which were small, no more than a few houses linked by rough walls with metal shards set along their tops. Fear of Metros kept most to a network of interconnected paths outside their Communes, but Caradoc kept to the open spaces, relying on his lurchers to give him warning of possible ambush.
When he arrived in Dulwich late that afternoon, Tom was waiting, hero-worshipful as ever and eager to help but seeming nervous as well, even frightened. Without asking what was wrong, Caradoc packed him off back to his lodge and saw to his animals' needs first. He stabled the horse and mule in an empty outbuilding, fetched nets of hay from the barn and settled the pups in a high-sided wooden box beside the horses to get them all used to each other's scents and sounds.
Entering the Commune kitchen which was also its common room, he found Hubbard waiting, his face set as though in mourning. The Secretary had turned patriarchal with age. His hair had grown down to his shoulders, his beard to his chest. To be fair, he suffered from some skin condition that made it difficult to shave, but he had adapted his personality to his enforced image anyway.
There were five families of varying sizes in Dulwich 6B, each occupying its own sets of rooms but feeding and managing their common affairs communally. Outside Westminster it was not a typical arrangement, but as I have said, communes were of all kinds in those days, and life in Dulwich 6B was at least little disrupted by disputes, since its members gave each other little excuse or opportunity to quarrel. That was why the post of Secretary required a doggedly placid rather than a forceful personality - which was what it got in Hubbard. The two men sat at opposite end of the table, the occasion being of a kind all communes dreaded. The kitchen was like an interior by some ancient Dutch Master: a fire beside a cooking range struck highlights from rows of utensils hanging from a frame suspended above. A bowl of fruit glowed in the afternoon light from the room's one window. The human figures were immobile, as though posed: two women who had been preparing vegetables were half-turned to the table, knives in hand; a third had stopped as she entered from the garden, a trug-full of vegetables over one bandaged forearm. Even the grubby child playing in the hearth was motionless, one wooden brick held in its pudgy fist.
"She left, oh, a couple of weeks ago," Hubbard repeated. "We tried to make her stay, but she wouldn't, and we could hardly keep her by force."
Caradoc could imagine the scene. Vibeke was a pale, almost ash blonde, with sky-blue eyes and a beauty so singular that in spite of her twisted nose, the result, she told him, of a childhood accident involving a horse and cart, complete strangers sometimes came up to her to stare. The same injury had damaged her jaw and teeth, resulting in a wry twist to one side of her mouth when she smiled. It was her smile that Caradoc would remember longer than anything else about her. Shy and halting in speech, she was immovable when she made up her mind, and he could imagine her beating back every argument the commune put up with a gentle shake of her head. Assuming there had been much argument.
"News of relatives?"
"We found it hard to believe too, but she had certainly been trying to trace someone. She walked up to Westminster every week, leaving the boys with Tom. Then, one evening a month ago, she upped and said she would be taking ship to Cuxhaven from Felixstowe in a convoy leaving in four days' time. She took Hannes and Peter but hardly any stuff. No other man was involved. As to that I would swear."
"How did she pay for their passage?"
The rest of the room became quieter still. Hubbard slumped further in his seat.
"She asked us to buy the boys' room. If we refused, she said she would sell to the first outsider for whatever she could get. You wouldn't have wanted that any more than we did. It took all the currency we had and could raise, and I still don't know whether the deal was better for her or for us. If you insist, of course, you can have it back for what we paid."
The silence stretched out. Family holdings in Dulwich 6B were owned equally by partners and passed on only to first-born children. It was a family planning device as much as a means of property transfer and way of making sure that no one family came to dominate the others through sheer fecundity. Technically, then, if an estranged partner needed to dispose of his or her shares, he or she could sell only to the other partner, some outsider approved by the rest of the Commune or the Commune itself. Vibeke's deal had been irregular since he had not been present or involved. That was why they were nervous. Even at that date, Caradoc's solitariness made him unpredictable. Already there had been flashes of his one day to be famous temper.
In fact, though, he did not much care. All he and Vibeke had shared for some time past, their children apart, were possessions, and those, like the Commune itself, did not interest him. He was suspicious about her claimed search for, he supposed, relatives, but even that made no difference. She had gone and he would have to look for her. That was all there was to it.
He glanced around the kitchen as though already saying goodbye. The main Commune building, originally a terrace of three houses on five floors, was strongly built and fully glazed, even though most of the windows were shuttered most of the year for safety as well as insulation's sake. The wood that fed its fires was at least two years old, its cellars were crammed with stores and preserves, and every inch of its fertile garden yielded something useful. Its hen-houses produced manure as well as eggs and meat, while methane from the slurry its pigs produced powered their generator. Rusting metal sheets atop high and solid walls, ostensibly wind-breaks, had been left ugly and rusty on purpose to mislead outsiders as to the prosperity inside. To judge by the smell from the stove, supper that evening was to be a stew of beans and bacon.
"We'll discuss it later," was all he said.
Because his parents had been founding members of Dulwich 6B, his suite was the most coveted in the Commune, its four rooms, all on the first floor, grouped around the main chimney for warmth. Inspecting it now, he found the boys' room already stripped, the living room cluttered with their belongings. He sat on his bed and knew what he would do if he could not bring them back.
Vibeke had been the daughter of Friesian merchants recently arrived in Spitalfields when she was orphaned. Grief and homesickness had been complicated in her by some other sadness he had never fathomed, and he always knew that she married him more for security than love. He had not minded, though, sure at first that she would come to love him in time. He wondered where she and the children were now. Had she told Hubbard the truth? Had Hubbard told him the truth? It was possible that she was still be in the country, but he thought it unlikely. She would know he must follow her, for she was not the sort to play coy games and knew he would need evidence before he believed that a private agency had found long-lost relatives for her on the far side of the German Sea. What small amounts of information from abroad in those days passed mainly from council to council, and although private agencies were always ready to profit from private grief, many were only a cover for the slave-trafficking that Authorities like Westminster turned a blind eye to it since it was a useful means of purging communities of their more disturbed misfits. As for the victims themselves, very likely they knew what awaited them but no longer cared, unhappiness anaesthetizing their fear. He got up and went downstairs again to load the goods he had brought back from Pangbourne into his basement storage bay, locking it after him when he was finished.
The Commune ate in silence. Of its five families, two worked the gardens and stock units while the others ran their own businesses: one inside, two outside. Caradoc knew they spoke disparagingly of him while he was away, but his returns were always eagerly awaited, especially by the women, for most of the refinements in their dull lives were his contribution. They included perfumes and other luxuries, from tortoiseshell-backed hairbrushes to the Commune's crystal radio set that could pick up transmissions from two British Authorities, one Breton and even a Flemish one. The steam engine that powered its tool shop had been his contribution.
Apart from the families, there were also two individual members. Amelia was an Italian widow who had once owned one of the houses before exchanging all but two of its rooms for a corrody of life-long residence and support by the others. In theory she had no duties, but in practice she was the best of the commune's cooks and was deferred to by all, even Secretary Hubbard. At the opposite end of the social scale was Tom, orphan of strangers who had leased a room years before but died soon after arriving in one of the bouts of malarial fever that regularly swept the country then. It had happened while Caradoc was away on the first of his trips, and the lad's future had been settled by the time he returned, it being agreed that he might stay on without rights in return for his labour until he was of age. He had no room of his own, of course, and slept in the kitchen, but Vibeke had fed and looked after him, and in return he had invested all his affection in her, Hannes and Peter.
After supper, Caradoc produced a sharp sheep's milk cheese and a demijohn of mangold wine. He always returned from his trips with some treat or other, which was why, as usual, the faces around the table showed anticipation as well as nervousness. When hearth deals were struck in those days, it was the custom to give luck-gifts, partly to show goodwill, partly as a kind of loose change. Caradoc had given the farmer at Pangbourne a box of his second-best tobacco. In return he had received cheese and wine, both in jars, both wax-sealed, the former in oil, the latter old-gold in colour and aged ten years.
"If I can't find my family and persuade them to come back, I shall leave here," he finished.
They stared at him as though he were mad. The Commune was prosperous and comfortable, and it was unheard of for anyone to forego the security of one. Soon, though, other feelings vied for expression. Hubbard and the other men looked warily hopeful, like animals clever enough to spot a trap but unable to resist seeing if they could outwit it. Desertion being the same as divorce in Westminster for legal purposes in those days, several of the women looked disappointed, for they had had time to dream. Caradoc was still young and virile, and re-marriage within the Commune was usual. Besides, he was founding family. At least one of the married women would have left her husband for him had he asked her to. Even wrinkled old Amelia looked put out.
"I shall leave my holding - rooms, equipment, everything - in Tom's care. If I return before he comes of age, they will revert to me. If not, he will inherit them, while if I die earlier, he will inherit anyway. I will have all that set down and leave a copy in the Whitehall Registry."
The boy looked desolated. "Where will you go?" he asked. His voice, barely broken, sounded tragic.
"To Felixstowe first. If I find no trace of them there, I shall move on somewhere else, I don't know where."
"You were always itchy-arsed," complained Amelia, who had a soft spot for him. "Why don't you admit you are itchy-arsed?"
"I'm itchy-arsed," he agreed. "For a long time now I've wanted to see how other communes manage their affairs. We still live mostly in ways we fell into after the Withering, and now fear stops us changing. Our lives are ruled by fear, so much so that even if circumstances changed again, I doubt whether we would be brave enough to change with them. If all Metros vanished overnight, we would invent some new terror to take their place rather than face up to the problem of deciding what we wanted in their place."
It was the longest speech anyone had ever heard him make, and for the most part it only puzzled them.
"You will leave everything behind?" Hubbard asked.
Apart from the Commune's household goods, Caradoc owned most of its equipment such as the generator and crystal radio set.
"Tom will continue to make everything communally available as now. Only if I die or don't come back, you will have to negotiate with him. I will put all that in writing too. Jennie can have Vibeke's clothes."
"You talk as though you knew you will not come back."
Tears welled up in Jennie's eyes. She was a pale girl, the younger sister of one of the commune wives, and had been devoted to Vibeke. Caradoc knew she would have gone with her if asked. He also knew, though, that Vibeke would never inflict her own unhappiness on another human being.
"Vibeke never plays games or changes her mind," he answered. "You know that. I will leave at dawn tomorrow, but I do not expect to find her if she does not want to be found."
"There is a remaining, not inconsiderable problem." Hubbard even sounded like a pompous patriarch of late. "You say you will register Tom as your heir in Westminster. He is not even registered as a resident here yet."
"I will register and formally adopt him at the same time. Thank you for reminding me, Secretary. Is that all right with you, Tom?"
The boy only reddened.
Caradoc left them working out the balance of advantage and disadvantage while he went down to the cellar with his saddle and rifle. He cut a holster from a belly of tanned hide and stitched it on the machine there, adding a flap and straps for fastening it to the saddle. Afterwards he sponged his work, oiled it and went back to his room where he cleaned and packed everything he intended to take with him. He also penned two copies of the deed he had outlined to Hubbard and the others. He had a neat hand - as I myself can testify since Tom showed me his copy years later.
It was then late, so sleep came quickly, but for once it was disturbed. In a dream he swam lazily in a warm backwater off some big, brawling river from which, insensibly, he was plucked out into a main current of icily tyrannical strength, hunching its shoulders to force its way over and between rick-sized boulders. Tumbled and thrown about, he surfaced once to spot, in a glade on the far bank, the figures of his wife and sons. They seemed to be picnicking on a cloth set out on grass shaded by poplars. It was a scene out of Watteau, and he shouted to them, but they did not hear him. Then he was pulled under by the current again, and when he next surfaced, glade and picnickers had gone. There was just the dusty plain with a line of poplars beside a long, straight road which was empty except for a dust-cloud masking the passage of some vehicle.
Driven from his bed, he tidied up his rooms and locked them. Downstairs, he gave his new pups the run of the yard while he mucked out the stable and refilled the troughs with water and mangers with fodder. Tom joined him, begging to be taken along.
"No, Tom I may be away some time, and you must protect my interests ..."
"They would not dare steal from you."
"... which include a horse, a mule and these two pups as well as Topsy and Turvy." He showed the new animals to the boy and the boy to the animals. "Don't forget to exercise them - only don't let the others even suspect their existence until I get back."
"You will be back then?"
"From Felixstowe, yes. There is a brace of manky rabbits hanging up in the stable for the dogs. Boil them up now while nobody else is around. Then chop the meat small and mix it with crumbled biscuit, sliced vegetables and a little seed oil. Feed and exercise the pups twice daily - and don't let them out of your sight. Make sure they have plenty of water at all times." He gave the boy his keys. "Take care of everything for me."
After breakfasting alone on bread and cold bacon in the kitchen, he left before the rest of the Commune awoke.
oooOooo
BOOK II
He walked north towards the Thames and Westminster. The weather had turned colder and rafts of clouds scudded down-river, threatening rain. He travelled that way seldom, and little of the disorder around ever seemed to change. Between the outlying communes of the old authority and Whitehall all roads had been cleared, but on this one a further corridor fifty yards wide had been razed on both sides to reduce the risk of ambush, and beyond these could still be seen the high buildings whose remains people fear to this day, even though they were already so decrepit and patched as to look fantastical. It will never be known how many died in them. Bones still littered the ground at the time I describe, mostly of the old, ill and unlucky, the younger and fitter having left to join the first Metro gangs. Even today, with land scarce again in places like Westminster, no-one builds on such sites for fear of what may lurk in their stones, weeds and contaminated soil.
Caradoc crossed the river by one of the old cable-ferries and warmed himself over a bowl of mutton broth with barley from a stall set up to catch the river traffic. Afterwards he joined the crowd that collected every morning to accompany the officials into Whitehall, most of them petitioners like himself. He spotted the one he wanted almost immediately. The man walked straight ahead, staring at the ground in front of him as though afraid of what he might see if he looked up. He was big and bearded, with a high forehead and crinkly ginger hair. His only uniform was the Authority badge on his sheepskin coat. Caradoc followed him into his office when they reached the building.
The man did not look surprised or protest when Caradoc showed him his copy of Vibeke's picture drawn by the Westminster portraitist and watched him compare it with the original in his files. Thus much was routine. He probably compared Caradoc with his file portrait as well - which may be why no early likeness of the Dux Bellorum has ever been found, for Caradoc would probably have taken the opportunity to steal it.
The official listened with attention. "They left for Cuxhaven on the last Felixstowe convoy but one," he confirmed. "One woman, two children and their baggage, two items apiece. Fares paid in advance."
"She left home to find relatives abroad following information received from you."
The official shook his head. "Not me, chum. She often called in to ask if anyone had put in a request-to-find on her, but nobody ever had, so eventually she stopped coming."
"From an agency then."
The man shrugged. "We take no responsibility for them. If it were up to me, I would close them all down."
Perhaps. Caradoc looked out over the Whitehall rooftops to where low clouds were beginning to weep a curtain of fine, warm rain. Lines from a poem he had known even before the Oxford gaol ran through his head:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
"Agencies are dangerous," he agreed, "which is why she would have told you about any she was considering doing business with - to get your opinion of them."
They were smoking his roll-ups, made from a good quality tobacco imported from Aquitaine. Caradoc rarely smoked alone, keeping the stuff only for social purposes. He saw the man's eyes follow the box back to his pocket.
"I've half an ounce of this to exchange for information."
The other wrote an address on a piece of paper. It was not really a matter of bribery, such arrangements being usual then. Nor was Caradoc surprised that the man remembered Vibeke at all. In fact he expected him to, for apart from her memorably odd beauty, he would have known what the outcome of a visit to such an agency might be and so made notes for possible reference. In those days many people still clung to the memory of lost loved ones, the commonest cause of family break-up being the unappeasable determination of one partner to find someone long since lost but still missed so greatly as to spoil all other happiness. Women were the worst for never letting go. Caradoc studied the paper before slipping it in his pocket.
Afterwards, in another office, he formally adopted the boy Tom, registered him as a member of the Dulwich 6B Commune, produced two copies of the property and rights transfer he had prepared and got an official signature and stamp on everything before laying another parcel of tobacco on the table.
Later he continued north through Whitehall and Trafalgar Square to the Tottenham Court Road. Rain was falling rather than drifting now, but the streets were packed with stalls and traders who had already moved back into the ground floors of buildings vacated for the winter - a season mostly endured in heated suburban hostels from which they wheeled their stalls daily into the city centre. He went through a smashed doorway opposite an emporium that had once been a barracks, then a warehouse, and climbed to the second floor up stairs made almost impassable by rubbish and worse. The door he was looking for was padlocked through staples and no-one answered his knock. He was not surprised. The area was favoured by drug dealers who mostly worked at night to avoid the tax collectors and so would not be around for some hours yet.
Determined never to be made a prisoner again, whatever its compensations, Caradoc had sewn a tiny hacksaw blade into the hem of his coat in Dulwich 6B and now retrieved it to cut through the staples securing the padlock, letting himself into a room that smelt so strongly of dope that his head swam. A solitary window was boarded up, with just a few drilled holes to let in light and air, so he could not see much at first. When he could, though, he saw sacking bales and barrels containing spirits distilled from every kind of grain and vegetable imaginable.
Beyond the store room was an office, a board on its door identifying 'ALB - Argus Location Bureau'. Inside were a filing cabinet, desk and camp bed. Following a thorough search, he had found nothing relating to his wife or children but could not help noticing that every record he came across , and there were boxes of them, included details of physique, skills and other attributes of obvious interest to a business trafficking in people but not to an agency dedicated to tracing them. In a drawer, too, were cards written on, erased and overwritten many times, listing needs for people with particular skills and experience. Pencilled in alongside some were prices.
Caradoc now seems to have been seized by one of his famous bouts of temper. Ayling says he emptied everything he could onto the floor, slit open every bale, stove in every barrel, then put a match to the lot and left. So there started (if we believe Ayling) that second great Fire of London which demolished a whole city quarter northward from the Strand to Holborn. I never heard that Caradoc himself ever claimed credit or blame for it, but certainly the coincidence of dates is interesting.
He walked on east past the Angel towards Bethnal Green and Stratford, hitching a ride on a carrier's cart and sleeping that night under a bridge near Squirrel's Heath. Next morning, he found faster and more comfortable transport inside a Colchester-bound coach with room inside for just one more passenger, his companions being a group of religious ladies who could not decide whether he was more a threat or a protection against threats until he calmed their fears by joining them in prayer, after which they shared with him their breakfast of apples, bread and honey. He slept for most of the journey to Felixstowe, having an invaluable capacity for cat-napping even when being jounced about, waking only for comfort stops. Being an express, the coach took little more than a day over the trip.
This, in fact, was the first of the Dux Bellorum's visits to the great eastern port that was to feature often in his career. There had been no reports of Metros on the road, and the fact that the city's suburbs were unwalled at that time suggests that its inhabitants considered themselves safe from land attack. The main reason for their wealth and strength, though, was their recent accession to the North Sea Federation, the first of the transnational Authorities. Already there were foreign enclaves down by the docks, each with its own warehousing, residential and social facilities, making it South Britain's most colourful as well as important outlet to foreign parts at that time. On his own first visit and walkabout, Ayling says, he met Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, even a brace of Portuguese matelots strolling arm in arm.
The morning being bright and brisk, Caradoc's spirits lifted as he set out the stock of small, high-value goods he had brought with him, mainly tobacco, knives and jewellery, content to be jostled by the pitch's regular occupants who, though, stopped short of physical harassment in view of his size. By midday he had made enough local currency for his needs, so he packed up and went looking for information. In the offices of the ferry company next to the coaling station on the far side of the harbour, he found its Friesian manager who was just then on his way to a lunch of eels, rye bread and beer in a waterfront bar filled with Danes and a strong, bright-blue pipe tobacco smoke smelling (Ayling records his picturesque description) like mermaids' bottoms. Caradoc joined the man and showed him his portrait of Vibeke.
The manager looked at the blank side of it as well before returning it, all without taking his face out of his quart beer pot.
"No use asking me, chum," he boomed. "Pre-paid passengers report straight to the ferry. I don't see or hear them. Pretty lass. Yours?"
"Where is the ferry now?"
"At sea. Due back next Wednesday. You say your lass went missing on the last-but-one run to Cuxhaven?"
"Yes."
"Then the ferry-master won't be able to help either." The manager wiped his mouth. "He ran into pirates just outside Cuxhaven that trip. There are a lot of them between Sylt and Borkum. In fact it's the main business on some of the islands. They pretend to be fishing when Cuxhaven warships stop and search them, but afterwards they just hide up in the lee of headlands again and dash out to snap up any craft not too big or fast for them to overtake. There are hundreds of islands thereabouts, and the ferry can't give them all a wide berth."