‘Right!’
Five thousand men cheered and stamped their feet in unison; the ponies shied and pulled away. Tyburn didn’t try and stop them. I looked back at Beverley, who blew me a kiss before running out to the flank with a javelin ready in his hand.
The Romans liked to outsource their cavalry, but every legion had a small contingent of its own. Small wiry men in mail on horses the size of Shetland ponies – their saddles looked ridiculous, with absurdly high cantles and no stirrups. But the points of their spears glittered in the sunlight.
As the chariot picked up speed down the road they formed up around us as an escort.
Up ahead Chorley had limped onto the bridge across the Fleet and looked back to find us bearing down in all our righteous fury. I saw him shout something and gesture and a brace of Norsemen barred the way.
‘Take this,’ said Fleet, and handed me a spear. I handed it back.
‘I’m not using that,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got something a bit less lethal?’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.
The Norsemen formed a line and braced their shields.
‘Time to earn your triple pay, boys!’ yelled Tyburn as the chariot went down the slope towards the bridge, picking up speed as it went.
The Roman cavalry surged ahead. There was a flurry of movement and then they wheeled away to the left and right. Straight ahead men at the centre of the shield wall were staggering backwards, or sitting down coughing up blood, with spears through important parts of their anatomy.
I could hear the screaming even over the mad thundering of our horses, but the line looked unbroken and we were going to hit it any second.
‘Hold on!’ yelled Tyburn.
Whooping, he vaulted over the edge of the chariot and ran along the pole until he was standing upright on the yoke between the heads of his horses, one javelin poised to throw, another in his left hand ready to go.
With another high-pitched yell he threw both spears, one after another. Two Norsemen directly ahead fell away and the rest looked at Tyburn’s face and scattered. The shield wall broke and the chariot ploughed through.
As we did, Tyburn dropped down on the yoke and scooped something off the ground as the chariot passed over it. Then he popped back up and ran lightly along the pole to join me in the chariot. He passed me a round Norse shield.
‘That better?’ he asked.
I took the shield – it was heavier than the riot shield I’d trained with, made with wood bound with a metal rim and a centre grip within the boss. It was well balanced, nicely made, but probably not supposed to be wielded as a primary weapon.
We thundered across the bridge and the horses only slowed a little as they climbed out of the valley of the Fleet into Ludgate Hill, or at least what would be Ludgate Hill when there was a gate for it to be named after.
A shanty town with a bridge attached Tyburn had called early Londinium. But, even worse, it was spread out so thin that it was practically the countryside. Only the fort to the north had any stonework. Everything wattle and daub and thatch – half of them being the traditional British roundhouse.
The roads, though, were wide and well maintained, and fanned out from the point where the bridge met the high ground like a net cast to catch an island. And ahead on Watling Street I saw Chorley halfway to the bridge already.
‘We’ll have him in no time,’ said Tyburn, just as something huge and dog-shaped leapt out of nowhere and killed the chariot’s left-hand horse.
The chariot pitched forward like an unexpected pole-vaulter and I think Tyburn threw me clear, because I have a definite memory of tumbling along the muddy verge, stopping and looking back in time to see a wheel scything into the thatch of a nearby roundhouse. The remaining horse was screaming and Tyburn was yelling as he wrestled with the Black Dog of Newgate Prison. I grabbed my shield that was, miraculously, nearby and legged it after Chorley.
If this turns out to be cyclical, I thought, I’m going to have serious words with whoever’s in charge.
It was less than a kilometre from Ludgate Hill to the north end of London Bridge.
I was younger and fitter than Chorley, but he had a head start and the occasional friend who tried to kill me. I wasn’t sure what death in the realm of memory would entail – probably nothing permanent. It wasn’t going to be this very short gentleman with a leather jacket and a switchblade that killed me. It was going to be the sudden transfer of energy from potential into kinetic.
But I wasn’t so sure about the matter that I didn’t hit Leather Jacket very hard in the face with my shield and then stamp on his knife wrist, just to be on the safe side. Ditto for the posh guy on a horse, who obviously hadn’t done any cavalry training or he wouldn’t have pulled up beside me and tried to use a riding crop. I like to think the horse was quite relieved to be rid of him. He went into the Walbrook – the muddy creek, that is, not the conspicuously absent goddess.
I had a good view of the bridge by then. A classic bit of Roman military engineering, a wooden roadbed laid over a series of pontoons. It would rise and fall with the tides.
There was nobody on it apart from Martin Chorley.
When I saw this I stopped running and walked the rest of the way. Obviously today was my day.
Chorley glowered at me as he watched me approach.
‘Where is Punch?’ Chorley asked me when I reached him.
‘He’s behind you,’ I said, and when he turned to look I punched him in the face.
His head snapped to the side and he staggered and gave me a look of hurt outrage. A look I’ve seen so many times on the street, or in an interview room or the magistrates’ court. The one on the face of every bully that ever got what was coming to them and counted it unfair, an outrage – You can’t do this to me. I know my rights.
‘You let him go?’ he said.
I said that I had.
‘Why?’ Chorley seemed sincerely perplexed.
‘He thought I was the lesser of two evils,’ said Punch suddenly beside us.
Not the moon-faced Italian puppet but the youngest son of an Atrebates sub-chief – black haired, square faced, dressed in the blood-stained remains of his fashionable Roman tunic, ripped across the front to show the horrid gaping wound in his belly. He was a sad sight, but his eyes were full of a screaming and dangerous mirth.
‘More fool him,’ he shrieked, and seized Chorley by the throat and lifted him off his feet.
I jumped forward but Punch casually backhanded me so hard I landed on my back more than a metre away.
‘We had a deal,’ I shouted.
‘I don’t bargain,’ screamed Punch as I got to my feet.
‘Father,’ said a woman.
Still holding Chorley aloft, Punch turned to look at his daughter as she walked across the bridge towards us. She seemed taller, thinner and darker, and wore a sheath of white linen from armpit to ankle. From her shoulders trailed a shawl of implausibly gauzy material that streamed a couple of metres behind her in a non-existent wind.
Light blazed from the circlet around her head.
Isis of the Walbrook, I thought, you kept that quiet, girl, didn’t you?
Punch turned to his daughter, his face stricken, mouth drawn down in pain.
‘Never like that,’ he said. ‘You promised.’
The light faded, the gauzy shawl slipped from Walbrook’s shoulders and went fluttering over the dark gleaming river. She became shorter, stockier and lighter until she was the women I’d met in the pub a month ago, complete with orange capri pants and purple scorpion T-shirt.
‘Come on, Dad,’ she said. ‘Put the little man down.’
‘Don’t want to,’ said Punch petulantly. ‘Why should I?’
‘Because my boy there is going to deal with him,’ she said, glancing at me. ‘And I owe him. And I pays my debts.’