All that done, he walked briskly back the way he came, feeling himself still glowing with adrenaline and triumph. Not too far from where the killing took place, he found the thing’s discarded T-shirt and sunglasses, which he casually kicked into the dark waters of the canal. Then he stepped out onto the busy pavement and the flickering yellow light of the street lamps, which were just coming on.
When the body was discovered, he thought, they would not be able to identify it, “it” having no identity. The weapon that made the wounds upon the body was odd enough to be unique, and unknown to anyone but himself, so no one could possibly connect him to it. The business looked fairly airtight.
Still, it was prudent to keep a low profile the next few days and perhaps steer clear from the night shelter, where enquiring minds usually dropped by at some point. His stride broke slightly as he recalled that he had talked to Scouse Phil about the thing, and he chided himself. But there was little he could do about that now.
A man coming towards him on the pavement fixed an odd stare at Daniel’s forehead as they passed, and then quickened his step. Daniel slowed and put a hand up to his face, then held it out.
Blood. Not his, but the creature’s.
He turned to the wall and rubbed every inch of his face with his palms, drying them in his hair, until he judged that he had probably removed as much of it as he could, or at least smeared it to a thin red film. Yet another reason to find a stall in a toilet soon.
Then he had to find a place to sleep that night.
Then he had to find Freya.
And above him, from the rooftops, dark eyes that had seen the city when it was just a wooden fortress and a church watched- cold and passionless.
3
She used the glove trick to get into the coffee shop. The practiced motion of pulling her hand out of her pocket to push the door open brought Freya’s woollen out as well. She went through the door anyway-pass one-and then put her hand back in her pocket. Her face registered puzzlement for a moment and then she turned and saw her gloves. She went back outside-pass two-bent down and grabbed a glove without really looking, pushed back hurriedly through the door-pass three-looked down to her hand and realised she had only picked up one glove, went back outside- four-picked up the second glove, and came back inside-five.
Five passes were enough in a place like this with lots of people, but there were some places she tried very hard to avoid and some streets that she wouldn’t even walk down. Being back in Oxford made her nervous. There were too many old doorways and arches. The bricked-up ones she came across-in her college’s hallways, in the sides of buildings and churches-made her especially nervous and she gave them a wide berth. She was going through her medication faster than she’d like. She’d have to talk to her psychiatrist about that, but that would have to wait five weeks until the end of term. What would she do if she ran out before then?
She ordered a latte and took a seat. It was overcast outside and she couldn’t see the sun-definitely a day to be cautious. Her watch said she had about forty minutes until the lecture. She had started chapter five of her Introduction to Moral Philosophy book three times. Her mind kept racing ahead to the lecture at ten a.m., and she hoped she could control herself this time. The medication would take the edge off at least. Maybe.
Leaving places was fairly safe, especially with a lot of other people milling around, so she didn’t have to test the doorway leaving the coffee shop like she had to when she entered it. From St. Aldate’s it was a short walk down Blue Boar Street to Merton Street and then into the exam schools. She circled around and entered via the main doors on High Street, which meant that she only had to deal with one set of doors to get into the building and then one more set to get into the room the lecture was in. For both of these, she pretended that she was waiting for someone to meet her; checking her phone and looking around allowed her to repeatedly duck in and out of the doorways. People would think she was lost, maybe, or a little ditzy, but they wouldn’t think that she was crazy at least.
The monitor in the entrance hall informed her that Textual Histories of Pre-Arthurian Britain was in the large lecture theater called “South Schools.” She followed the signs that led her up a wide stone staircase with a bannister made of rose marble. Then she took a right into a large wood-paneled, L-shaped room and found a seat, third row from the back. Scanning the room as students continued to file in, she didn’t find a single familiar face. Eventually the lecturer, a fortysomething woman dressed completely in black, came to the podium and cleared her throat, a cough that reverberated from the speakers and echoed off the walls.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m Dr. Fowler,” she said when the chatter had died down. “We’ve got a lot to cover this morning, so let’s get started.
“ ‘The Matter of Britain’ is the name that we give to the works that form up the early pseudo-histories of Britain, as told by the Anglo-Saxon settlers, orally, and recorded by monks in the ninth and tenth centuries. It should be noted as being separate from Celtic legends-in this context predominantly Welsh, Irish, or otherwise Gaelic legends, although there was quite a lot of crossover, as we shall see.”
The professor tapped a few keys on her laptop and the board behind her displayed an image of an ancient piece of paper with nearly indecipherable text printed on it. “This,” she continued, “is the first page of the Historia Brittonum written around 870 Common Era by the scribe Nennius. It is perhaps the oldest English account of the settling of the British Isles-and the originator, perhaps, of a lot of the confused and conflated myths traditionally associated with the settlement of Britain, myths that initially branched out of the Trojan tales of Greece, which were also very popular in Rome. It is thought that the work was created for wealthy Welsh families in the fifth century as a way to justify their claim to nobility and to cement their position as a ruling class-and obviously has little relation to objective fact. The tales centre around the legendary Brut, a son of-yes?”
Freya’s arm was in the air. Her heart was pounding partly with anxiety and partly with anger. “Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that those accounts are objectively true? Seeing as no other accounts disagree with them?”
Dr. Fowler shrugged. Interruptions were rare in this type of lecture, but she was professional enough to take it in her stride. “There may be certain grains of truth within the various accounts, but were you to read them closely-as I’m sure your tutor will insist you do-then the appallingly fabricated fantasies within them will show quite apparently.
“Now, this Brut,” Fowler continued, “was a hero of Troy-”
“I’m sorry,” Freya said amid a swell of groans from those around her. “We know that Britain must have been settled at some point. Why is it unreasonable to believe the tales which state that it was a group of exiled soldiers-veterans of the Trojan wars- and their families?”
“I thought I was scheduled to give this lecture,” the professor replied. The other students in the auditorium chuckled pointedly. “I’ll gladly change places with you-I did quite a lot of this during my doctoral thesis so it’s old hat to me.”
“But why not take the account at face value?”
“Because it’s completely unverifiable-fanciful even. Why-”
“Just because something cannot be proven true doesn’t mean it isn’t true-even if its claim to truth is unlikely. In fact, it’s more likely that an improbable truth would be recorded than a probable one.” This provoked more groans, and more than one request to “shut up.”