“Green, stay abreast of me, Owen at our backs, and Ryder to cover the rear. Steady pace.” He looked deep into the darkness of the tunnel ahead and ignored his misgivings. “Advance.”
The small party moved off into the gloom of the ancient tunnel.
Aspects of the tunnel’s geography confused Bell. In the first instance, the end of the tunnel behind them must, common sense said, be close, for otherwise the tunnel would wind into the river. Bell had surveyed the area carefully for weaknesses during the siege; he was as sure as the nose on his face that no tunnel opened into the river. At least, not at the surface. Perhaps in Roman times it had been more shallow?
It also perplexed the major that a lengthy Roman tunnel had gone undiscovered. He was unclear how long ago the Romans had been in Britain, but they were in the Bible, so he guessed at somewhere around the first year AD. Since then, the Norse, the Saxons, and the Normans had left their mark on the city and raised many buildings. How had none of them ever found the tunnel?
This was answered when Ryder pointed out some markings on the wall the others had missed as they passed. It was a strange, godless series of scratches into the stone, angular and alien. Bell had seen similar before, though.
“That’s Norse. Seen suchlike up in Northumberland.”
That answered Bell’s question, at least a little. Perhaps the tunnel entrance opened into the home of a family of Royalists, who used it secretly. In principle, Bell did not mind this hypothetical family. A civil war is a strange thing, with odd enmities and unexpected sympathies. But they had Hensley, and that meant the major’s mercy was paper thin. If they had harmed one of the men under his command, they would be punished. If they had killed him, Bell would string them up himself.
He was steeling himself for such a judgment when the tunnel abruptly ended.
The chamber was more than a shrine, but less than a temple, and Bell could not understand the purpose of it beyond it being a place of pagan worship. The tunnel opened into what he gauged to be the southwestern point of a circular chamber five or six yards across. The brickwork was Roman, and also the simple stone altar, he guessed. Probably some of the bones too.
The sides of the chamber were stacked with human bones like an ossuary built by a madman. He’d heard the papists liked to make such things. The bones were old and untidy, ancient scraps of desiccated meat visible hanging from femurs and tibiae, humeri and radii. Scraps of cloth and even armor were visible here and there.
Other discarded items lay in an untidy pile by the entrance. Helmets Roman and Norse, Norman bernies, and swords from Plantagenet times. Armed men had come here, and they had died.
“Major,” said Green quietly, “mayhap we should go back? Wait for the captain?” His knuckles showed white on his sword’s hilt as he spoke.
“Not yet,” murmured Bell. It was difficult to speak much above a whisper in that chamber. “We still don’t know what befell Hensley.”
He saw Ryder glance at the skeletal remains and draw breath to say something before thinking better of it.
“I’d do it for any of you,” said Bell. “We never leave a man behind while I have a say in it.”
“He can’t have come this way, though,” said Owen. “There be no way out.”
This was also true, or seemed to be true. The tunnel through which they had gained entrance was also the only egress. Yet the drag marks in the soil indicated this direction right enough. Bell frowned; the floor being slabs of stone, the dry dust upon them was not enough to hold sufficient indication of Hensley’s fate, lost among the comings and goings of whoever else used the place.
“There’ll be a concealed door,” he said. “As the papists use to hide their plate and idols. Needs be we must find it.” He set the men to searching the chamber carefully by quarters. They set to the task diligently though poorly enthused.
It was Bell himself who made the discovery, having given himself the quarter farthest from the entrance, to lead by example. The slab-sided altar was a far better prospect than the piles of bones, and Bell approached it cautiously.
As he did so, he saw that he had been wrong about it being an altar at all. Its position upon a low dais and the shadows cast by the men’s lights had served to obscure the altar’s surface, until Bell grew close and realized that, in truth, it had no surface at all.
He’d seen Roman coffins before. During the siege, they’d turned up a couple on the Mount, a low rise to the west of Micklegate Bar. It seemed the rich Romans of York had been buried in great slab-sided sarcophagi that — viewed from the side, in poor light — might well be mistaken for an altar. Those coffins had lids, also of stone. This one had none, and the suspicion wiggled in Bell’s mind that perhaps it had never had one.
He climbed the two low steps formed by concentric ovals beneath the coffin and looked into it, holding his lantern high and away from him so that the light fell without shadow. The lack of ambiguity in what he saw made him wish he hadn’t been so assiduous with the light.
Hensley lay there. Quite dead, and curled in a ball like a frightened child. It was not the dreadful wounds in throat, torso, and limbs that appalled Bell to the merest fraction, as much as the expression on the corpse’s face. Bell had seen enough of violent death on the battlefield for it to retain little ability to shock or horrify. This was something else again.
Hensley’s eyes were open and rheumy already, the cloudy glassiness of death settled on them with unnatural rapidity. They were wide open, as was the mouth, settled in a scream that never reached expression. Bell had been hard after Hensley from the moment he fell, and the distance from the breach to the chamber could not be more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards, at most, of silent, stone-lined tunnel. A shout would have been heard easily enough, never mind a scream.
Hensley, then, had died rapidly, although not rapidly enough for Hensley. His very last quick second was struck upon his face, and would be until the worms took the flesh from him.
And yet, he could not have died with such alacrity, for there was blood aplenty, and dead men do not bleed.
They do not bleed, yet Hensley had bled a quart or more into the coffin, a tide of black that was creeping from beneath the cadaver as Bell watched.
They do not bleed, yet Hensley was bleeding.
An oath stronger than most escaped Bell’s lips and drew the attention of his men. “What is amiss, Major?” said Green as he reached Bell’s side. Then he looked into the coffin and had no words at all.
The blood covered the floor of the coffin, and then began to fill it. Pints. Gallons. More than any man might contain. It rose around Hensley and submerged him in its tide, a darker shade of red than blood had any right to be.
Green stepped away, and Bell wished he was able to do so too. But he could only stare as the coffin filled. The last he saw of Hensley’s face, he could have sworn the eye still above the rising meniscus rolled in its socket to regard Bell. The lips moved, the flood pouring smoothly into the open mouth, but Bell never understood what Hensley was trying to say, even if it had ever happened; Bell found many reasons to deny his memories afterward.
Then the blood swallowed Hensley altogether. It rose until it was at the very edge of the coffin’s lip, and there it halted, as if by a spigot closing.
Bell stood, transfixed as if the stone beneath his feet had bled through his boots and into the flesh of his legs from sole to thigh. He could do naught but stare into the reflection of his own face cast into the dark mirror before him. His face was shadowed by the lantern held high, and he sought the humanity he knew to be within his own visage as a counter to the thing he had witnessed. In a moment, however, his reflection was gone, and not even the light shone back.