Reading Online Novel

Falconer and the Great Beast


One





This is the word of the Lord God: At that time a thought will enter your head and you will plan evil. You will say, ‘I will attack a land of open villages, I will fall upon a people living quiet and undisturbed...’





Ezekiel 38: 10-11





It filled the crossroads in the centre of Oxford with its bulk, and soon drew a milling crowd to wonder at its size. The skin was grey, thick and as creased as an old man who had spent his life toiling in the fields through scores of summers. A solemn man with the king’s arms emblazoned on the front of his tabard stood at its head, holding a chain that looped around its enormous neck. Peasants in the crowd stood with their mouths agape, pointing calloused fingers at the monster. The black-clad masters of the university were equally agog, but outwardly behaved sagely, being more discreet in their examination, sharing whispered comments and knowing looks. A small child, bold in his ignorance, scuttled from under the protection of his mother’s skirts, and slapped one of the tree-trunk legs that the beast had firmly planted on the ground. The woman shrieked, and made a grab for her errant child, pulling him away from the monster before it could breathe fire over her offspring, or rend him apart with needle-sharp teeth. But she need not have feared. The child’s slap was nothing more than a pin-prick to the hide of the great beast, and the boy was retrieved without him being burned, eaten or crushed under the beast’s great weight. The enormous ears, like vast wings, flapped back and forth, and the beast’s head swayed rhythmically from side to side as though it was listening to some piper’s tune in its head and unheard by anyone else.

Emboldened by the child’s actions and seeing him come to no harm, the crowd pressed ever closer, pointing and gesturing at this great beast that had just arrived in the town. The people in the front of the press seemed oblivious even to the long curved horns that protruded from the beast’s jaw, and the long proboscis that dangled down between those yellowy protuberances. Then suddenly the knot of students who stood at the head of the beast became too bold. One student, the worse for drink, it has to be said, made a grab at one curved horn. Another drew a short dagger, and began to prod the end of the questing proboscis. The earsplitting squeal that resulted seemed to throw the whole crowd back with its force. Later, some in the crowd likened it to the final trumpet of Judgement Day, and for that one foolish, dagger-wielding student it very nearly was.

The beast tossed its head, and the man who had held it under control with the long chain looped around its neck lost his grip. To the crowd’s astonishment, the formerly placid, earth-bound beast reared up and swung its head in pain. The youth who had stabbed at its tender trunk was struck by one of the graceful horns, the tip of which ripped through his leather jerkin, and tore the woollen shirt and pale flesh that lay beneath. The youth was thrown backwards into the retreating crowd, and landed in the dust, still and pale. The king’s man, who until then had had control of the beast, recovered himself and scurried fearlessly between its legs, snatching at the swinging chain. Once he had a grip of the chain, he pulled on it, and cried out in a guttural tone that the beast seemed to understand. As quick to be calmed as it had been roused, the beast once more stood still, but now its massive eyes betrayed a fearful look that it cast wildly on its erstwhile tormentors.

Two students grabbed their fallen comrade, and lifted him up between them. He groaned, and the crowd gave a communal sigh of relief at this sign of life. He was conveyed away between the two youths, groaning and dripping blood in the dust. With the victim out of sight, a semblance of good humour returned to the crowd. But they now treated the great beast with more respect, eyeing it from a safe distance, while showing no sign of dispersing. Presently a bent-backed but muscular old man elbowed his way through the crowd, and spoke briefly with the beast’s keeper. The king’s man nodded curtly, and the sturdy old man pushed back through the crowd, shouting and waving his arms for the people to get out of his way. The king’s man yanked the beast’s chain, gave another guttural command, and the beast and its keeper followed the lurching gait of Peter

Bullock, Constable to the City of Oxford, through the parting mob.

The arrival of the king’s elephant in Oxford should have been wonder enough for that summer’s day in the fifty-second year of the felicitous reign of King Henry III, but there was still more to marvel at that year in the university city. Peter Bullock had already been advised of another arrival expected in Oxford that day or soon after. And as dusk fell, and his watchmen locked the city gates, he paced the top of the new city walls, peering over the battlements. The meadow below the walls was dotted with bright flowers - the white constellations of daisies, red clusters of clover, and the yellow spikes of agrimony close to the wood’s edge, where the trampling of students’ feet had left the flowers undisturbed. But the sweetness of their presence left Bullock unmoved - his nose was more attuned to the stink of the ramshackle houses that lined St Giles outside North Gate, and Grandpont in the south. Oxford was bursting at its seams, and the poor and the whores now lived mainly outside the protection of its walls. They would have no protection from Gog and Magog.