Once Was Willem

by M.R. Carey

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Historical Fantasy; Action & Adventure; Gothic

Synopsis

From the bestselling author M. R. Carey comes an utterly unique and enchantingly dark epic fantasy fable like no other.

This is the tale of Once Was Willem, who - eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England - rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham.

Pennick for all its beauty was ever a place with a dark reputation. The forests of the Chase were said to be home to nixies and boggarts, and there was a common belief, passed down through many generations, that the castle housed an unquiet ghost of terrible and malign power. These rumours I can attest were all true; indeed they fell short of the truth by a long way . . .

Release date: January 28, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 496

Sample

Well a day!

My fingers are black with ink and my head aches as if it is about to burst at the seams like an over-stuffed flour sack, but this treatise at last is ended. I lean back from my labour and I draw breath, as God Himself did on the seventh day. His work was great and mine is small, but all makings of the mind and heart are sacred and this that you hold – good or bad as you may account it – is no exception.

The words that follow are true. I set my hand to them. I would have set my seal too except I do not have one. You will find in these pages a full and circumstantial account of all the things that passed in Cosham village and in the fiefdom of Pennick in the year of our Lord 1152. A word of warning: these events were monstrous and terrible and I have not shrunk from any part of them. The horror, the foulness, the pain and the pity: all are here without varnish. I felt I owed it to the dead, and to those for whom the blessing of death will never come, to chronicle as plainly as I could their doings and their undoings.

Ah, you will say, Pennick! It is like enough for dread things to come out of that quarter. And it is true that the land I call my home, for all its beauty, was ever a place with a grim reputation. The forests of the Chase are said to be home to nixies and boggarts. On the road that leads under Great Chell, benighted wayfarers claim to have heard bears and wolves address each other in human speech. There is a common belief, passed down through many generations, that Pennick Castle houses an unquiet ghost of terrible and malign power. These rumours I can attest are not unfounded; indeed, as you will see, they fall short of the truth by a long way.

As for what came to be called the curse of Cosham, that was a later thing. It did not come until the summer of my twelfth year. Still, I can and do confirm the particulars of it. The villagers of Cosham failed in their duty to God and man, and a great evil fell on them thereafter. Perhaps those two things were not enchained one to another, but were entirely separate. It was a dark time. Unnatural things walked the land (you may trust me on this, for I was one of them). There was enough misfortune abroad for all to take their share.

You might think me a doubtful witness of things that passed when I was still a child, but I assure you again that my word is good. Since I died and then was dug up out of the ground to live again (which I will come to in its place) my mind has had a clarity it never knew erewhile. Every moment I have lived stands before me now, as soldiers stand when their captain bids them rise and rally, ready to answer whatever they are tasked withal.

Gird yourself, therefore. I speak of monsters and magic, battle and bloodletting, and the crimes of desperate men. I speak also of secret things, of that which lies beneath us and that which impends above. By the time you come to the end of this account you will know the truth of your own life and death, the path laid out for your immortal soul, your origin and your inevitable end.

You will not thank me.

Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, there was a time of great disorder and misrule. Old king Henry, the first of that name, had died. The throne stood empty, and half a dozen powers had declared an interest in it. Invading armies trudged hither and thither across the land, pillaging as they went.

In Cosham, north of Trent, where I dwelled at that time along with my mother and my father, we understood very little of the causes of these things, though we surely felt their effects. The laws broke down in those years. Christ and His saints, it was said, had all fallen asleep. Many battles were fought, many towns and villages burned; the peasants that fled from the towns and villages had nowhere now to dwell and no way of earning their keep. The greatest number of them starved, but there were some – and not a few – that turned thief or cut-throat. They had a simple choice, after all: if they could not earn an honest living, they must either surrender up their lives or set aside their honesty.

This was already a bad thing. With thieves abroad the bands of amity begin to fray, setting neighbour against neighbour. People were afraid now to stir from their houses lest they be set upon by footpads, and none dared to take the public roads after dark. But worse was to come. The thieves began to find each other and to league together. You can lock your door against a robber, but not against an army.

Cosham village was part of the fiefdom of Pennick, which belonged to the baron Robert Carne. Pennick in those days stretched from Cauldon almost to Thorn’s Dyke. It was goodly land too, blessed by the Trent and Erren rivers with such bounty as you cannot imagine. Upwards and eastwards from the Erren rose the forests and hills of Pennick Chase, where the baron had leave from the king to hunt deer and draw timber from October to February. But in the time of which I speak this royal lease was not worth a fart in a cupped hand. The forests of the Chase had filled up with brigands, who slaughtered and cooked what meat they liked.

These rogues were all of one household, and they had a leader whose name was Maglan Horvath. Nobody seemed to know where this man had come from. Neither his given nor his family name rang like English coin. It was said that he had come into the realm as the captain of a Norman raiding party, but then had been stripped of his position and cut loose on account of some egregious misdeed.

At any event Horvath was a bold-faced villain and a scourge on the public weal. He made the woods of Pennick his home and his fastness, but from there he went where he liked. Some forty of his followers had raided the town of Burslem in search of food and treasure and left the place as bare as a plucked chicken. They had even emptied out the kitchen and pantry at the abbey and haled six basket-loads of fish from the father abbot’s trout pond, for these scofflaws saw all the world as their banquet and ate with an indiscriminate appetite.

Such offences could not go unchallenged. Robert Carne rode out from his hold at Pennick to clear the fiefdom of all that unruly company. At first they could not even find Horvath, the woods of the Chase being both deep and wide. Then they came across a dozen ragged men dressing a freshly slain deer – all brazen, full on the forest road. The brigands dropped their prey and ran headlong into the trees. Robert gave chase, hallooing his men through denser and denser thickets until finally they came into a clearing of wide extent.

It was an ambush. As soon as Robert and his followers broke from cover they were assailed with arrows and slingshot stones from all sides. The rogues they had been pursuing now turned in their tracks, took out knives and cudgels and engaged with them, while others harried them from behind.

The knives and cudgels were no great matter, but the bowmen in the trees were altogether more concerning. Robert saw at once that he and his cohort stood in great peril. He led a retreat, turning in his tracks and carving his way through the brigands who had hoped to pen him in. Still he lost full two-and-twenty of his tally and was himself bloodied. He limped back to Pennick Castle on the arm of his eldest son, Geoffrey, defeated and shamed.

This Pennick Castle was not the stone keep that stands now. It was a much simpler thing. The fortifying wall was really no more than a stout wooden fence with a single gate. A tall mound or motte stood within, that touched against the part of the fence furthest from the gate. Robert Carne and his family lived in a donjon built on top of the mound, while his soldiery and servants for the most part were accommodated in longhouses or smaller buildings of wood and roughcast stone in the bailey yard at the mound’s foot. More than a hundred souls resided there – though that number was now considerably reduced.

Robert felt the sting of this rout very keenly. He was meant to keep the law within his own fief, and he had been humbled by a common rabble. Perhaps he felt the loss of his men, too. I cannot tell. Nobles are wont to look at such things differently than most, and I would not presume to sound their consciences.

At any rate, Robert decided to raise a general levy, that the Normans call arrière-ban. Such a levy would bring under his flag all the men of the fief old enough to have beards on their faces – a formidable force, at least in numbers. True, they would not know how to fight and would surely take much harm, but Robert had good hope that the sight of such a host would be enough to persuade Maglan Horvath to quit the woods and find himself a quieter place to bide in.

Acting on this plan, Robert sent messengers that same day to all the settlements within his fief to bid their menfolk equip and ready themselves. He would ride through the farms and villages himself on the morrow morn and gather the muster, then forthwith back to the woods to bring Maglan Horvath to a reckoning.

Robert retired early to his chamber that night, tired out by his labours but greatly solaced by the quick and bold decision he had made. His lady, Isobel, went with him, but his son Geoffrey was taken by the day’s events in quite another way. He found he could not sleep at all, and so stayed up gaming and drinking, at first with his brothers Hal and Martin and then with some among the men-at-arms. He was still awake at the second change of the watch, when a great commotion was heard at the gate. Someone was hammering on it from the outside, and the blows were hard enough to make it shake and lean in on its hinges.

Geoffrey ordered those on watch to sound the tocsin and to man the standfasts on either side of the gate. Whoever was down there needed to be repulsed before they broke the gate open. The rest of the guard came stumbling from their beds, some with boots and some without, strapping on their swords as they came. The first to arrive hurried up onto the standfasts, while the rest lined up in front of the gate to be ready if it fell.

As they stood there rubbing their eyes and girding up their spirits, Maglan Horvath attacked – but not through the gate. Instead a volley of arrows was launched at the men-at-arms from the very quarter from which they had just come. Six or seven went down before they even knew they were imperilled. They turned to find an armed host coming on them from behind, from within the keep. It was the self-same host they had met in the woods the day before, and the memory of that first encounter, still all fresh and sore, gravelled their spirits.

Horvath had not taken Robert Carne’s invasion of his woodland court well, even though he had come out best in the encounter. He feared a renewed assault – rightly, as things fell out – and had decided not to wait for it. But he was not so foolish as to attack a fortress at its best defended point. All the noise and banging at the gate was partly to bring the defenders together in the wrong place and partly to mask the sound of his real efforts.

Horvath had suborned a man, one Hugh Catspole, who had been cashiered out of Carne’s household for being drunk when he was needed sober. Catspole told Horvath of a failed assault on Pennick Castle shortly after it was built. The Danes were come to beard Bastard William in the north, and since Pennick lay full in their way they had tried their best to burn it down. They had not managed it, but there was a place at the rear of the stockade wall that had been first torched and then breached. When the time came to repair the ruined part, new posts were driven in all along that length. The posts were sturdy enough, but the holes in which they sat had not been dug deep enough. Robert Carne’s father, also named Robert, had decided to buttress the weakened stretch, but the buttresses were placed to counter an enemy pushing inwards.

Horvath had his men throw weighted ropes up onto the top of the fence and – once they caught and held – had used harnessed oxen to pull the posts out of true. At length the stockade had sagged outwards far enough at that one point to allow Horvath’s brigands to squeeze through the gap.

So now they were come upon the castle’s defenders from within their own walls, surprising them before they were yet ready for the fight.

The front ranks of the raiding party were composed only of longbowmen, who loosed their shafts as they advanced. At such a distance the arrows bedded themselves in the flesh of the startled men-at-arms so deeply that the fletches barely stood proud. Then the archers retreated quickly to either side and drew again, aiming now at the men up on the standfasts, what time their comrades with swords and axes ran upon the startled defenders on the ground.

After that all plans were moot and all was blood and chaos. The raiders seemed to have the advantage in number but Robert’s men-at-arms were more seasoned and better trained. They recovered quickly from their shock and went at the invading brigands with a will. Their intention was to carve a way through to the donjon, where they expected their lord to appear at the head of his own retinue.

But Robert did not appear – and something else stepped into their path. The something else stood on two legs like a man, but it was bigger than any man that ever walked. It was an ulfeðnar, a wolf-brother, though this one seemed much more bear than wolf. He had a bear’s pelt, long and shaggy and of so light a brown that it seemed in the dim and uncertain light to shine like gold. His arms were as thick as tree trunks, and at the end of each arm was a clutch of claws curved like reapers’ sickles. With those claws the beast-man proceeded to do the thing that reapers do.

Seeing this awful apparition, the men-at-arms were unmanned. Some few fought still with courage and discipline, engaging the ulfeðnar and forcing him back with their swords. But the greater part of the cohort fled across the bailey yard to the steps that led up the side of the mound to the donjon’s door. This was just as Horvath had hoped, and indeed was the main reason he had sent his bear-man into the fray. The steps being long and the mound steep, the men as they climbed were an easy target for Horvath’s archers, who had hung back all this time and waited for their moment. Only a few defenders reached the top of the mound and the donjon’s door.

They found the door barred against them. Robert Carne’s spirits had been sapped by the previous day’s failures, and he had no stomach to fight. He hoped to weather the raid within the donjon’s walls, and then emerge again once Horvath had taken such grain and cattle and vengeance as he desired.

Exposed on the mound’s flat top, the few men-at-arms that were left saw their friends below eviscerated by the beast-man, while they themselves were picked off one by one by Horvath’s long-bowmen. They would have fought bravely, but there was nobody to fight. They fell and died with their backs against their master’s barred and bolted portal.

Horvath had now the run of the whole castle, barring only the donjon itself. He called his beast-man to him. The ulfeðnar was all over bloody, but most of the blood was not his own. His appearance was so frightening that the fighters who engaged him had fought with only half their hearts and swung with less than half their strength. The few cuts he had received were shallow.

The ulfeðnar’s name was Kel, and he had come into England with the Danes when Swein Astridsson pressed his claim against William of Normandy. He was (as his two-footed stance and slope-shouldered shape bore witness) a bear-man rather than a wolf-man, but there was no name for such a thing. We will have much to do with him later in our story, and with his sister Anna, who was stranger still than him.

For now it is enough to say that Kel allied with Maglan Horvath not out of any great liking or loyalty towards the man but out of a sense of what was needful and good. He was of the woods and hills, and Pennick’s woods and hills in particular he had loved from the first moment he came into them. He had heard strange silences there, and he had observed how even when the wind was high the trees sometimes stood still as if it had not touched them. He approved of Horvath only because Horvath’s coming into the margins of the woods had deterred anyone else from passing through into their deepest heart. Then too, Horvath had flattered Kel with gifts and with respect, treating him as an equal when most men treated him as a monster.

Now Horvath did so again, offering Kel first pick from the spoils of the dead and asking his advice on how the donjon might be taken. He hoped that Kel might know a trick or two from his days as a Danish reaver.

“Look,” Kel said, pointing. “Yonder is the castle’s well. The sweetest water for ten leagues, or so I’ve heard.”

“And what of that?” asked Horvath.

“Why, it’s out here,” Kel said, “in the open yard, where Carne and his men can’t get at it. They won’t last out any kind of a siege without good water to drink, be their storehouses never so full.”

“Aye,” Horvath said, “but there might be a second well inside the donjon walls, might there not?”

“Aye, but there isn’t.”

“You know this for a truth?”

Kel shrugged his massive shoulders. “When Bastard William built these fortresses he built them quickly – to hold the north against my old master, Swein, and Greybeard Harald, and any Saxons hereabouts who were emboldened by them. The case was somewhat urgent, and more times than not they decided that digging one well was labour enough.

“But this time the decision was made for them. That mound the donjon stands on, full forty ells high, is not piled and packed earth but rock as firm as granite, with a great cavern underneath it. My life as gage, master, there’s no well in that donjon. You may wait them out. Three days will see an end of the matter.”

Horvath considered this plan, and though it seemed sound enough he decided against it. “I like not to sit here so long,” he said. “Anyone might come on us while we wait. It’s best to settle this suddenly.”

“Well then,” Kel said, “if suddenness is your aim, do you take up one of those great posts where we came in through the stockade wall. They’re set shallow, as you found, so it won’t take long to dig one out. Carry it up to the top of the mound and use it as a ram to break open the gates of the donjon. They’ll give way, late or soon, if you keep at it. You’ll lose a fair few men doing it, though, for there’ll be archers at those embrasures firing down on you the while. If you had a mage in your company, you could raise a great wind and blow their arrows off their course, but you’ve none so you’ll have to abide the insult.”

The arrows did not trouble Horvath a whit, since he had no intention of coming himself within their reach. As for the loss of a few men, well, he knew his followers to be for the most part the vilest of rogues. Come feast or famine, rogues are never in short supply.

He gave order, and the thing was done. It took the best part of three hours’ hammering, but the defenders’ arrows ran out after the first hour and after that it went easier. At the last moment, when the gates were already hanging off their hinges and must surely fall at the next blow or the one after that, Robert Carne offered surrender. He was prepared, he said, to give order that his men-at-arms should lay down their swords and spare further bloodshed. In exchange for this promise he asked for assurances that the men would be allowed safe passage out of the castle, and that whatever befell his own person, his wife and sons would be allowed to go forth without hurt.

Horvath gave his word freely – and kept it partially. He had no need or desire to slaughter the men-at-arms. He offered any that wished to stay a place in his company, and there were more than a few that took that offer. But to Robert and his family he showed no mercy. The baron, his three sons and the Lady Isobel were put to the sword. The bloodletting was swift and merciless, and the bodies afterwards were cast onto the midden behind the donjon wall to stink in the open air.

It was not that Horvath loved killing for its own sake. It was rather the opposite. He preferred when he could to get his way through indirection and to maintain his place through judicious threat. But he knew in this case that if he gave the baron leave to pass he would only have to deal with him all over again a few months down the road when he had resupplied. The same argument went for the sons, who were bound to make every kind of nuisance of themselves when they were come of age. The lady’s death he did not directly order, but he did not forbid it and was not surprised when he learned that it had come to pass. Taking all things into account he thought it was probably for the best.

Now we come to the nub of it, and the seed of all that passed later. Horvath had no reason to linger in the castle, his purpose there being won, but he did not leave. Even in that short tarrying he had found there were many easements to be had in Pennick’s walls whose absence he had long missed. The barrack room and sundry other outbuildings provided space for all his men to sleep under a roof, which with winter coming on was no small thing. He himself could now remove to the donjon, which offered even greater comfort. There were besides two dozen pigs and more than a hundred chickens, fifty sacks of flour fresh from the mill along with eighty sacks of wheat not yet ground. There was also the stockade wall, for all that it was in need of repair: a wall like that would fend off a great many vexations.

Horvath had only come to Pennick Castle to remove a thorn from his side, but now that he was here it seemed to him that only an idiot would leave again.

And what was a man who lived in a castle? Why, he was a lord. True, the king had not sworn and sealed him such, but the king was far away and had other matters on his mind. Things being as they were, it was like to be a long time before anyone came from London to see what was tiding up north of the Trent river.

Horvath made up his mind to it, and was well content. He had been a soldier, then a robber. Now he would be a baron, and let any man who said he was none come armed for a sharp answer.

I have run ahead of myself and must now turn and go back.

I have told you that Robert Carne, after his first clash with Horvath in Pennick woods, had decided to raise a levy. I have said too that he dispatched a messenger to tell his tenants in the villages round about what he required of them. The messenger set out in the late afternoon of that day, when the men of the baron’s household were binding their wounds up in the castle and Horvath’s brigands were moving all unseen towards them.

I remember his coming into Cosham village, which was the first stop along his way. He was a sallow-faced, ill-humoured man, wearing a tabard of green and yellow – Robert’s colours – over a tunic and breeches of coarse grey wool. His name was Joseph Payne, and he was himself a man of Cosham but preferred to forget that fact now he was somewhat risen in the world. He stood in our main street and rang his bell until the people of the village – myself the least among them – paused from their labours and gathered to hear him.

Payne told them that his master was calling on them under arrière-ban. All men between the ages of fifteen and fifty were to present themselves at the door of the kirk the morrow morn and wait on Lord Carne’s arriving there with his company. Thereupon they would swear allegiance and be impressed, or else stand proscribed traitors and be sent from the land. Oyez, all oyez, for such was the lord’s declaring.

There was a great clamour raised, with many begging to know what this levy was for, but Payne had a long way to go before dark. He did not linger to explain himself. With a final adjuration to the men of Cosham to be no strangers to their duty, he took himself away to the next village.

My mother wept that night, and my father did his best to smile past his sickened heart and comfort her. The great wars that had already been fought in the north, going back past the memory of any wight living, had grazed Cosham in passing as an arrow’s head might graze a leaf on its way to the stag’s heart that is its target. The very flimsiness of the leaf makes it bend out of an arrow’s path, and so it had been with Cosham up to now. It was too small and weak for anyone to covet it, too far from a main road to be useful as a base, too poor and bald to merit an army’s sacking it. A few had perished here and there, but mostly by the accidents of lawlessness I have already mentioned.

Now it seemed a war of sorts had come to Cosham, and those who lived there found they had but little stomach for it. My father, Jon Turling, was a farmer born of farmers. He had never hefted any weapon more formidable than a mattock, and his only enemies were the crows that ate his seedlings. He could not imagine himself making mêlée. In truth, when he tried to imagine a battlefield, he only saw one of his own fields with angry men standing in its neat furrows. No matter what enemy this levy was raised against, he saw but little chance that he would prove a brave or competent soldier. More likely he would die and his farm would go to his sister Mary’s husband, leaving his wife and son to walk the roads.

But the bloody battle that haunted Jon’s sleep that night never came to pass. When the sun raised its head over the horizon he climbed all unwilling from his bed, kissed my mother goodbye and went to join the men and boys gathered in a sullen group at the kirk’s door, waiting to add themselves to Lord Carne’s column when it passed through the village.

Matthew Theakston, as the foremost man in the village, took . . .