The prince was sitting across from her, his eyes blank as if they were clouded with cataracts. His jaw was slack. A faint bit of drool pooled before staining his shirt. She rose, leaving the inert prince there. His only movement was a fluttering protrusion that was slowly growing somewhere within his torso, just barely visible through his clothes.
Taking only the flask filled with water that had been provided for him and furtively hidden, she went westward in the direction they had been traveling all day. The army sent after them was hidden in the folds of the sand dunes, but she knew that their small fire would reveal the prince’s location and he would be reunited with his father, not a single hair out of place.
The Great Ma’ah awaited her and the parasites she carried. She was positive she could find her way to his slumbering presence from the prince’s directions. The thief set off in the soft sand under a full moon and a clear, cloudless sky.
Without Within
Jonathan L. Howard
It was unconscionable, and — he felt — a personal attack on his reputation and thereby his honor. Yet he held his temper, and instead communicated his great rancor to Stephen Hensley with a glowering stare of unmistakable threat.
“This is a simple matter, Master Hensley,” said Major John Bell with dangerous deliberation. “I surveyed the breach myself. The length of fallen wall provides its own materials and pattern; there is naught of brain necessary but that it be put back as it was.”
This was not quite honest; the mine had shattered many of the blocks of stone that had formed the base of the city wall at St Mary’s, and replacements would have to be found, likely by commandeering them from elsewhere within York. That was a trivial matter, however, and if some worthy woke up one morning to find their doorstep gone, then they were still getting off very lightly indeed.
The breach in the wall had been a matter of contention to the Parliamentarian forces even before the city had surrendered to them. The walls were far too well constructed for artillery to bring them down. Instead, the engineers under Bell’s command had excavated a tunnel leading under the wall at St Mary’s with the intention to breach there and simultaneously at a similar mine at Walmgate Bar, allowing an overwhelming force to swarm in and take the city. It had been slow, dangerous work, with the possibility of detection or collapse at every yard of the way. Yet Bell’s men had managed it, and he had been proud of them for it. Aye, even of Hensley, who now stood sniveling before Bell’s desk.
In olden times, the wall would have been collapsed by setting a fire in the tunnel to burn away the heavy timber supports the engineers had brought in to prop up the foundations they had themselves dug away. These days, gunpowder did the trick more effectively, and allowed better timing of the exact moment the breach would open, allowing the attackers to be in position and ready to take full advantage.
That had not occurred on this occasion, however. The St Mary’s mine was completed comfortably in advance of the one at Walmgate — largely the effect of the ground being stonier there, Bell conceded. Sergeant Major General Crawford of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester expressed impatience, and one of his subordinates took this to mean they should press ahead with what was available to them. On the 16th day of June, the year of our Lord 1644, this fool took it upon himself to fire the charge.
Crawford had only six hundred men available to take advantage of the collapsed wall, the merest fraction of what was required. They entered the city, but Royalist defenders sallied from the nearby abbey postern gate and flanked the attackers from behind. Half the six hundred were killed or injured. Crawford claimed he had just discovered that the defenders had detected the Walmgate tunnel, and had successfully flooded it; he feared they also knew of the St Mary’s tunnel. That didn’t seem likely to Bell; the Royalists seemed to have been surprised by the breach, which argued against Crawford being right. It did not, however, preclude the possibility that he had acted in good faith. The Earl had taken him at his word, Cromwell less so.
After all their efforts, Major Bell was privately furious that the mine had been tossed away in such a manner. As it was, York eventually surrendered after most of the defenders marched out to join Prince Rupert in engaging the Parliamentarians. All they got for their trouble was slaughter at Marston Moor, before Rupert remembered pressing matters in the south and abandoned York to its fate. Sir Thomas Glemham was left as governor, looked at the sorry state of the forces left to him, and opened negotiations.
A month to the day after the disaster at St Mary’s, the Parliamentarians marched into the city at Walmgate, St Mary’s Gate, and Micklegate.
And here was Major John Bell, a month after that, trying to patch up the hole in the wall in whose creation he had been instrumental. It was a strange life, and not always an enjoyable one.
“The men don’t like the hole,” said Hensley. He had a shapeless cloth cap in his hands that he kept wringing incessantly. It was unseemly for a man of Hensley’s seniority, chief foreman and master of works.
“They helped make it,” said Bell. “Why would they show so much animosity to it now?”
Hensley stared at him.
Bell kept his anger in check. “Why are they so afeared of it, I mean? ‘’Tis just a hole in a wall.”
“Not that hole, Major,” said Hensley. “The one beneath it.”
The major’s eyebrows lowered. “They helped make that one too.”
Hensley shook his head, a desperately unhappy man caught between two intractable forces. “Not even that hole. The one beneath it.”
“What do you mean, a hole beneath a hole beneath a hole? You’re talking a child’s drivel, Master Hensley.”
“There is a tunnel not of our making below. The powder explosion damaged the bricks lining it. When we started the repairs and were clearing out the rubble, it collapsed altogether.”
Bell’s anger abated somewhat, and his thunderous brow admitted some curiosity. “Another tunnel? A counter tunnel?” Perhaps Crawford had been right after all; perhaps the defenders had been mining toward his tunnel with the intention of flooding or collapsing it.
“I... ” Hensley looked even unhappier. “I do not think it so. I believe it is an old place.”
Bell looked closely at Hensley; the man was sweating. It was a warm August day, sure enough, but Bell was sure that Hensley had not been showing any distress at the heat when he came into Bell’s temporary office of works in the ancient abbey’s hospitium.
“God’s teeth, man,” he demanded, “are you frighted, too?”
They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps ascending the wooden stairs outside the door, frantic and clumsy. No sooner had the unexpected visitor reached the head of the stairs than they were thumping open-handedly upon the door.
Major Bell started to call “Come in!”, but the door swung open before the first word was out of his mouth. Lindle, one of the foremen under Hensley, stood there. Normally a phlegmatic, somewhat dull man, he was wild-eyed and panting.
“The tunnel collapsed! It took Archer!”
“Took?” Bell climbed to his feet, plucking his jerkin from the back of his chair as he did so. “What mean you by that? It fell upon him?”