side of my face.
Then I realised I was breathing deeply and the air smelt fresher. So at least the drill had worked.
I don’t know how long I lay there in the darkness, nursing a really bad headache, before I noticed that water was pooling around my boots. I did a little kick and heard it sloshing around. Ever since I’d started hobnobbing with the Goddess of the Thames and her daughters I’d started taking a keen interest in the hidden hydrography of London. So it didn’t take me long to work out that the nearest river to me was the Tyburn. But from the lack of smell I figured that this water was more likely to be coming from a ruptured water main.
In 1940 sixty-five people died when a bomb ruptured water and sewer pipes which flooded Balham Tube station. I really wasn’t in a hurry to recreate that particular historical precedent.
I told myself that my little void was unlikely to fill very quickly and in fact there was no reason for me to think that the water level would reach any higher than my ankles. I found myself just about as convincing as you can imagine and I was considering whether to indulge in a bit more panicked screaming when I heard a noise above me.
It was a vibration in the concrete, sharp percussive sounds of metal on stone. I opened my mouth to shout but a shower of earth fell from the darkness and I had to turn my head and spit frantically to avoid choking. Bright sunlight struck me like a blow on the side of my face, fingers dug into my shoulders. There was swearing and grunting and laughter and I was yanked into the light and dumped on my back. I flopped around like a fish and flailed my arms around just because I could.
‘Watch it, he’s fucking possessed,’ said a man’s voice.
I stopped moving and lay on my side just getting my breathing under control.
I was lying on grass, which was a bit of a surprise, I could feel it against my cheek and the green smell was tickling my nose. Birdsong, shockingly loud, came from above me and I could hear a crowd, which was to be expected, and the lowing of cattle – which wasn’t.
As my eyes adjusted to the bright light I saw that I was lying on a grassy bank. About three metres in front of my face was a haze of white dust kicked up by the feet of passers-by and a herd of a cattle. Pint-sized cattle, I realised, because their shoulders barely reached the chest of the teenaged boy who was driving them with expert flicks from a long-handled whip. The mini-cows were followed by a stream of strangely dressed people all carrying sacks over their shoulders or satchels under their arms. They mostly wore long tunics of russet, green or brown, with caps and hoods upon their heads, some bare-legged others in tights. I decided to stop looking at them and concentrated on sitting up instead.
Oxford Circus is fifteen kilometres from the nearest farm – had I been moved?
I tried to work some saliva into my mouth – somebody had to have something to drink. And soon.
A couple of metres away a trio of disreputable-looking white guys was staring at me. Two of them were bare-chested, wearing nothing but loose linen trousers that were rolled into their belts and barely reached their knees. Their shoulders were ropey with muscle and sheened with sweat. One had a couple of nasty red welts striped down his upper arm. They had dirty white linen caps upon their heads and both were sporting neatly trimmed beards.
The third man was better dressed. He wore an emerald tunic with fine embroidery around the neck and armholes over a brilliantly white linen undershirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The tunic was cinched with a leather belt, an elaborate buckle that supported a classic English arming sword with a cruciform hilt contrary to section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 which prohibits the carrying of blades in a public place. He had black hair cut into a pageboy, pale skin and dark blue eyes – he looked familiar to me. As if I knew his brother or something.
‘Has he been burnt?’ asked one of the half-naked men.
‘Only by the sun,’ said the man with the sword. ‘He’s a blackamoor.’
‘Is he a Christian?’
‘A better Christian than you I think,’ said the man with a sword. He gestured in a direction behind the men. ‘Is that not your master? Should you not be about your work?’
The silent member of the pair spat into the ground while his friend jerked his chin in my direction. ‘It was us who dug him up,’ he said.
‘And I’m sure he thanks you for it.’ The man’s hand slipped down to rest casually on the hilt of his sword. The silent one spat once more, clasped his comrade’s upper arm and pulled him away. As I watched them go I saw there was a line of similarly dressed men, perhaps thirty, working with shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction on a ditch by the side of the road. It looked like a chain gang right down to a large man in beige tights, a russet tunic with sweat stains around the arm holes and a sword at his belt. The only reason he wasn’t wearing sinister mirrored sunglasses was because they hadn’t been invented yet.
My young friend with the sword followed my gaze. ‘Thieves,’ he said.
‘What did they steal?’ I asked.
‘My birthright,’ he said. ‘And they are stealing it still.’
Some of the men were lowering hollowed-out tree trunks into the ditch which, once sealed together with pitch, would form a crude pipeline otherwise known as a conduit.
‘Water,’ I said wishing I had some.
‘Not so burnt by the sun as to be lacking your wits,’ said the man.
I recognised him then, or rather I saw the resemblance to his father and his brother Ash. With an effort I clambered to my feet and turned to look along the road in the other direction. It stretched out, straight and dusty, between big wide fields that had been planted with green stripes of crops. A continuous stream of people, carts, horses and livestock trudged towards a hazy orange horizon from which reared the oversized gothic spike of St Paul’s Cathedral. That was London, this was the Oxford Road and the young man with the sword was the original Tyburn from back when the stream tumbled down from the Hampstead Hills to quench the thirst of the crowds come to watch the executions. Now being diverted, by Royal Charter no less, to slake the forty thousand throats of London.
I hadn’t been moved. I’d been dug up eight hundred years too early.
‘You’re Tyburn,’ I said.
‘Sir Tyburn,’ he said, ‘And you are Peter of the Peckwater Estate, apprentice wizard.’
‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘This is an hallucination.’
‘And you know this for certain?’
‘I’ve heard Chaucer read out,’ I said. ‘I understood one word in five and there’s this thing called the great vowel shift – which means everyone pronounces everything differently anyway. Which means I’m still stuck in the hole.’ And if I start singing David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ someone would just have to shoot me in the head.
I looked down into the ditch from which Tyburn and his merry band had ‘rescued’ me. At the bottom there was a ragged hole a little bigger than a cat flap.
‘Since you are fixed for certain, and can do nothing for yourself, does it matter where you wait for rescue?’ asked Tyburn. ‘And I seem substantial to myself.’
‘You might be a ghost,’ I said, studying the ditch and wondering whether I should go in head or feet first. ‘Or a sort of echo in the memory of the city.’ I really had to come up with some better terminology for this stuff.
I jumped down into the ditch. The soil was soft, sticky yellow London clay. Head first would be quicker.
‘Or we could get a boat to Southwark,’ said Tyburn. ‘Hit the stews, get steamed – meet some hot girls from Flanders. Oh come on,’ he pleaded. ‘It’ll be kicking and I’ve …’ Tyburn trailed off.
‘You’ve what?’
‘I’ve been alone – here,’ he said. ‘For a long time I think.’
Possibly since you ‘died’ in the 1850s under a tide of shit, or so your father claims.
‘Now you’re saying things that I’ve just thought of,’ I said. ‘You see why I’m suspicious.’
This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs boson turn up and try to have a conversation with me.
‘Did you hear that?’ asked Tyburn.
I was going to ask what when I heard it – a long wail floating over the landscape from the direction of London. I shivered.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
The wail came again, wordless, angry, filled with rage and self-pity.
