With the rising tide and falling wind a thick fog had formed, obscuring the afternoon sun and leaving the marshes a grey, dismal place. It was dangerous, Peter knew, to carry on in these conditions. Better to halt and wait for the tide to drop and hope for the fog to go with it. The marshes were full of natural traps - deep mud in pools and steep sided tidal gullies ran across it waiting for an unwary fool to step into them, where they would be stuck in its thick, cloying embrace until the cold brown water of the incoming tide drowned them.
There was a small rise a little way inland of the estuary's muddy bank that he had seen just before the fog closed in, so he turned towards it and the other members of the patrol followed. They had left their horses at the edge of a small copse of trees about a mile back and had carried on by foot. Taking a horse onto the marshes was folly, even on a good day.
Peter de Vries could trace his family's history back some three hundred years, almost as far back as the time of the red death, the pan-global plague that had run rampant across Earth back in the late 22nd century. The earliest record of a de Vries in the Wessex County record was in the year 2241, some fifty years after the terrible reaping of 99 percent of all human life on Earth, but even that was likely to have been a guess made fifty years or more later by an elderly de Vries who told his story to a disciple of the Revenant Monks, who were amongst the first to begin documenting the names and histories of those rebuilding a life in the ruins of mankind.
He knew that the original de Vries had been Dutch, and that they had escaped the horrors of the continent, coming ashore at Weymouth before making their way north and west, eventually settling at Cirencester, where Deckard de Vries, a soldier, had been one of the first members of the Wessex King's Protection. All this was written down and known.
After that, he knew relatively little, other than at some point a later generation of peaceable de Vries had moved to Berkeley, and that since then the family had lived humble, quiet lives, not appearing to impact the communal memory at all until his father's time, when the de Vries had returned once again to a martial profession. His father had been yeoman sergeant before old Thom Hewlett, and Peter was decided that he would one day soon take up the mantle of top soldier in the Protectorate. As ambitions went, it was a start. A few years as yeoman sergeant, make a good impression, then straight to Cirencester and a place on the King's Protection. Everything he wanted depended on making that good impression.
He turned to look at his two companions and sighed. With the Godwit brothers, good impressions were hard to come by. Peter himself strove to look professional at all times, as befitting a yeoman captain. He wore black leathers and chainmail, and his cloak was made from strips of dull brown and green material of different shades that would blend in with the surroundings if he needed to conceal his presence from anyone - 'camouflage', Thom had called it. He was tall and muscular from hours spent training with a sword, and his bright hair and chiseled features could draw a sigh from all the fair ladies in town. And a number of the un-fair ones, if truth be told, but he didn't like to dwell on that. He also tried not to acknowledge his vanity, but, he reasoned, what twenty year old man didn't suffer from a excess of self belief in his own looks?
Perhaps those two, thought Peter. The Godwit brothers only drew sighs of derision from the ladies. Jep was short and fat, Wes was tall and skinny, and they were both devastatingly ugly.
"Jep, there's a worm poking out of your apple." Peter had stopped to wait for the brothers to catch up with him, and Jep, the first to reach him, had taken the fruit out of a pouch on his belt and had was about to bite into it.
"Oh, thanks, Cap. 'E nearly got away."
Peter winced with disgust as Jep pulled the wriggling maggot out of the apple and then popped it into his mouth, chewing happily before taking a bite from the half rotten apple itself.
"Good for protein, tha's what my old man used to say," observed Jep, patting his ample belly and laughing. Peter looked past Jep to see Wes appear through the fog, industriously wriggling a finger in his ear and then withdrawing it to inspect closely whatever it was he'd managed to dig out. Peter turned quickly so as to not see whatever Wes did with it next, and strode on towards the rise.
At least, thought Peter, what Jep and Wes lack in social skills they make up for in other ways. Jep was following his father in the family trade as a butcher, and would someday take over the shop on the market square. He was handy with a cleaver, and he carried an impressive specimen almost two foot long in a leather holster on his back. In contrast to its owner, who was a dirty, dishevelled heap of a man, covered in stains and dirt, the cleaver wore a dull polished sheen on its flanks and the edge was always razor sharp.
Wes had followed a different path in chosen profession - there was only room for one apprentice butcher in the town - and he laboured on the farms. Or, at least, he occasionally did. Peter knew Wes made his living by poaching, from both within the Protectorate and without. No-one had ever caught him with game, but the little butcher shop always had pheasants, geese and the occasional swan or deer, and those didn't just 'happen to drop at me feet,' as their father, John Godwit, would say when challenged. Besides, the townsfolk benefited from the variety and quality of the butcher's wares, and no-one would dare argue with John in his shop if they valued their fingers.
Whatever Wes did, he had learnt how to handle a bow and arrow, and was the Protectorate's best marksman. He even made his own bows and fletched his own arrows, not trusting the Yeomanry's armoury to do a good enough job.
Peter himself carried a longsword in a scabbard across his back and a smaller falchion at his waist for use on horseback. Between the three of them, he thought they made a fairly formidable unit, and if it wasn't for the Godwit's unfortunate personal traits, Peter might consider them his brothers in arms. However, you don't bring your brothers in arms round to your home knowing they will fart and belch with impunity and letch over your sister without shame. No, they were more like acquaintances in arms than brothers, and Peter felt no real allegiance to them outside their yeomanry duties.
Perhaps it's only a matter of experience, he thought. After four years service in the Yeomanry, Peter had gained considerable skills as a swordsman. At least, in the training yard. He was reckoned by some to be the best swordsman in the Protectorate. But all the practice in the world doesn't make up for actual combat experience, and there had been precious little of that. Peter ached for glory, but the Protectorate wasn't likely to offer it - in those four years he had only twice had to draw his sword in anger. Once, to subdue a highwayman who had killed a man on the Old Gloucester Road (the damn weasel had dropped his knife and pissed himself as soon as Peter jumped down from his horse and drawn his sword), and the second time a poacher had tried to rake him with a trap while being questioned. On that occasion Peter had really thought he was about to kill a man, but just as he was about to thrust his sword through the poacher's chest, an arrow thudded into the poacher, instantly killing him. It had been Wes, from fifty feet away on horseback.
Peter stopped at the top of the rise and sat down, wrapping his cloak around him to keep out the damp and cold. Jep and Wes did likewise, each pulling a similar cloak over their heads and hunching down next to him. Jep and Wes talked inanely about girls in the town they each hoped to bed, leaving Peter to his thoughts.
If only things were a little more like Deckard's time, thought Peter. Back then, there had been real threat to every town, village or hamlet that tried to make a living in the wake of the plague's reaping. Any group of dwellings were likely to attract unwanted attention sooner or later by those who took what they needed rather than make it or grow it themselves. The effect of the plague had been more than just the taking of human life. Those left behind were woefully unprepared or skilled for living in an age that, for good reason, was called the 'New Medieval.' Before the plague, life had revolved around technology. After, it had revolved around survival. For almost one hundred years, a free-for-all grab of what remained took place across the country, until the development of Protectorates and Free Towns under the new Kingdoms, which offered some defence against roving bands of raiders, scavenger gangs and plague-wraiths. The Kingdoms had emerged to provide governance and oversight of the people within their realms, and protected the surprisingly few resources left available.
All this and more Peter had learned from Sable when he had been an impressionable youngster and all he wanted was to be a soldier. Sable had spent hours telling him about the history of the plague, how it had changed Earth beyond all recognition within the space of ten years. About how the collapse of infrastructure that provided power, communication, food, clean water, sanitation and stable government had exacerbated the impact of the plague which had itself come seemingly from nowhere, and which thrived in the appalling conditions created in the collapse of society. Sable too him that several wars took place either just before or during the plague, and there was even a suspicion the plague had been released deliberately, or by accident, from some secret laboratory in the confusion. Sable thought it had been meant as a deterrent, the way a thing called a 'nuclear bomb' had once been used to provide what Sable chillingly called 'mutual assured destruction.'
It was a source of fascination to Peter, hearing about the world before the red plague. A lot was still known - many records had survived through the ages - but much of what had been was gone or unfathomable and, more importantly, the skills and resources necessary to recreate them were now gone also. Over three hundred years on, and mankind was still struggling to re-learn how to work metal, farm efficiently and collectively, and rebuild a stable form of government and trade. Add in the effect of rising sea levels over the last three hundred years, and life had truly regressed to medieval times.
With one or two exceptions.
By the time the plague finished its work, and the destruction caused by the madness of the swarms of plague-wraiths had passed, there were a few technologies which survived into the new world left behind. Those pieces of technology which did come through were not large things however. Even the most technologically advanced gadget, tool, machine, power production plant - almost anything on a scale bigger than a few centimetres in size - required a power supply, regular maintenance, supply chains for spare parts from all around the globe, raw materials that required processing on an industrial scale, and many devices had finite lifetimes deliberately built in. There was plenty of stuff left over from before - but none of it worked or had any practical use other than as a object to marvel over, or to use as barter. The everyday items of the 22nd century were no more than trinkets, unknowable works of art or a form of inanimate currency in the 26th.
Not only that, but the few items that did survive fully functioning into the desolation immediately after the plague had often been strange, and usually dangerous.
War had become commonplace, localised and extremely high-tech by the time of the plague. Disputes over natural resources and fundamental ideals flourished in the wake of energy and water shortages, exacerbated by the effects of climate change. It also became polarised. Most wars just before the fall had been fought between one highly developed nation and another who's standard of living were probably no better than Peter's times. It was hard to infiltrate and know your enemy. In order to know your enemy, you first needed intelligence to discover his dispositions, and gain intelligence to form a plan to deal with them decisively. High tech methods were usually unsuccessful given the ease with which artificial devices could be detected. It was no use flying drones over your enemy - they would shoot them down. No use trying to employ electronic listening devices or cameras either - they were easy to detect and neutralise. Even something the size of a fly could be detected and destroyed before it had the chance to do any real damage. Someone realised that in order to eavesdrop on, and then attack your enemy, you needed to hide your weapons in plain sight. Target key members of the opposing force, and you weaken it from within by paralysing its command structure.
And in order to do that, Chimeras had been made.
Chimeras were made to look like everyday animals - dogs, cats, birds, snakes, sheep - anything that would be a common sight in the place you put them, because, in essence, they were. A chimera could wander in and out of towns and cities; fly above troops and defensive positions; record images and listen to conversations without engendering suspicion from their targets. And if necessary, they could attack, suddenly and unexpectedly. Chimeras were very successful, and they were made in their thousands.
Peter didn't know how one was made. But he did know that the only way know for certain if an animal was a chimera was to open its skull and find the tech embedded in its brain. And the only way to work out if the cute puppy bouncing around your feet was genuine or not, was to wait for it to do something unusual.
Like rip your throat out without warning.
Every country with the means to produce them did so, right up until the end, and there were many that survived for unnaturally long years afterward, escaping into the wild as containment failed.
Whether it was a fault in the programming, or a last ditch offensive action by a state in its final throws of aggression, many chimeras, in Europe and perhaps across the globe, switched to an aggressive, offensive posture once roaming free. Some turned straight away, others turned after many years. They were more of a menace than the roving plague-wraiths that caused such grief in the years after the plague itself. It was chimeras that had been the greatest threat for a hundred years after the plague, until they had all died out or been destroyed.
Peter sat looking out into the fog, running through these histories. Part of him wished he had spoken to Sable about it more while he had still been alive, and another part wished he didn't know anything at all. At times he felt so frustrated by the monotony of his life, always being prepared to leap into action but never actually having to do so. Life must have been so much more interesting back then.
Sable's death was by far the most interesting thing to happen to the Protectorate in his memory. Everyone knew Sable and his oddity of a son for one reason or another. Most had been treated by him for one illness or another. Wherever he came from, his skills in medicine and healing had been far ahead of anyone else the community had ever known.
And the strange circumstances of his death...
Thom was right to sweep the Protectorate clear of any unwanted visitors, thought Peter. It's what he would have done.
The fog was beginning to clear a little. A slight breeze had set in from the north and it was taking the fog out with the tide. While they had been sat on the rise, the marshes had covered with a foot of water, but it was now already receding, the water making trickling sounds as it ran into gullies and freshets.
Wes suddenly exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "Boat!"
"Where?" asked Peter, and looked in the direction Wes was indicating. He got a glimpse of a shape just fifty feet away from where they were sat before the fog closed in again and hid it from view.
"It must've floated down on the tide," breathed Jep. Another momentary clearing of the fog revealed a small flat-bottomed skiff stranded on the marsh.
Peter cautiously started towards it, drawing his longsword as he did so, Jep likewise retrieving his cleaver and following him towards the boat. They moved slightly upstream at first so that Wes, crouched on the rise, could keep a clear shot should anyone emerge from the vessel and attack them.
The fog closed in again, but Peter and Jep were close enough now to be sure of their direction, and they stealthily approached, moving apart as they did so - Peter towards where he thought the stern ought to be, and Jep the bows. The boat appeared again as an indistinct shape some twenty feet away, and sudden movement made Peter's heart race. It wasn't the movement of a man however. With a powerful thrust of its wings, a large bird took off from inside the boat, launching upwards and instantly lost to sight.
Heart racing, Peter crept forward again. They reached the boat and looked inside. It was empty. Wes came over when they called and together they made a search of the boat, which took just a few moments. The mast and sail had been taken down and placed inboard, and the oars neatly stowed away. An anchor and line were also inside, so the boat had probably been drawn up somewhere, its owner expecting to be back by the next tide.
"Well," said Peter, "we'll not get anything useful from this. Let's have it taken back to the armoury - I'm sure Thom will want to inspect it. I'll bet a months beer allowance that the assassin used this boat to enter the Protectorate." Neither Wes or Jep took him up on his wager.
Peter walked around the skiff one more time, noting for the first time a word scratched into to the wood beneath a fold of sail: Guillemot.