AS THE CROW FLIES BY SIMON BESTWICK

 
 
Let’s understand one another from the start, shall we? I am not a ‘role model’: no-one would even have understood the term when I was alive. I was an acid-tongued bitch, low-born (as those cuntish peers never ceased to remind me) and yes, power and status went to my head. Mea maxima culpa. Chop my head off for it. Oh, no, wait – Guy de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, already did that, at Blacklow Hill on 19th June 1312. Prick.
Yes, I’m still pissed off about it. Can you tell?
Confused? Don’t worry, darlings, all will come clear. Or should. I’ll do my best to fill you in (no, not in that sense, sorry) while I’m waiting. Though you will excuse me if I have to cut things short, won’t you? I’m a little pushed for time – which is not something I ever expected to say again, I can tell you. But needs must.
So, no, I am not a ‘role model’ or ‘queer martyr’: I’m nothing more nor less than Piers Gaveston, a brash young queen who did a lot better than he had any right to expect and paid the price. Not least because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut around my so-called betters; I wasn’t just buggering the King, I couldn’t even be discreet about it. But it’s not as though they hid their contempt of me. I was a sodomite and a pleb; I don’t know which they hated more. (I was hardly a peasant – my father was a Gascon knight – but I might as well have lived in a wattle and daub hovel, eaten raw water-voles and lost my virginity to a sheep as far as Warwick or his friend Thomas of fucking Lancaster were concerned.)
So, I gave as good as I got: I could be royally (no pun intended) vicious when I wanted to. I used to call Warwick ‘the Black Dog of Arden’ (I’m sure I could have come up with worse, but for some reason that nickname enraged him), Lancaster was ‘the fiddler’ (trust me, you don’t want to know), and the Earl of Lincoln ‘burst-belly.’ Such a charmer I was. Mais, je ne regrette rien. With the possible exception of calling the Earl of Pembroke ‘Joseph the Jew’. What can I say? ‘Twas a less enlightened time. And Pembroke, as it turned out, wasn’t such a bad sort. But I digress.
My royal lover – King Edward II of England, or as he was to me, Lovely Ned – wasn’t fit for any pedestal you might intend to prop him on either. He was, if the ugly truth be told, a terrible king. His father had bullied him all his life – he wasn’t enough of a man’s man for old Edward Longshanks – and had exiled me before he died. Now, as the boy saw it, he could do his own damned thing, and did. He summoned me home and created me Earl of Cornwall practically on the spot, and that was when the trouble really started with the peers. The angrier they got, the more he gave me. He acted like a spoiled adolescent half the time. And yes – it went to my head and I took advantage, got gifts and advancements not only for myself for my cronies too. In hindsight, it’s no wonder things didn’t end well.
Nonetheless… he was my love. No two ways about it. And you can say many things about me, but I loved deeply and I loved truly.
But I must, for the moment, break things off. After seven hundred years in the ground, company’s coming…
*
The crow arched down over the grounds of the school. While crows are intelligent birds, it could not have explained why it had been drawn there, nor why a particular patch of grass on the playing-field called to it, yet down it swooped and alighted. Puzzled as to its own choice, the crow, on the assumption some instinct for food had guided it, began to peck at the earth.
At which point something moved in – or, more accurately, through – the earth itself.
Dust: fine grains of powdered bone. The indigestible, the irreducible, the last corporeal traces of Piers Gaveston, Knight of the Realm and, inter alia, 1st Earl of Cornwall, Lord Governor of the Isle of Man and one-time quite successful Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, gathered up and motivated by his will, shot from the grassy earth in an animate stream into our crow’s open beak and compacted itself in its gizzard. The immortal part of Gaveston leapfrogged from its dust into the crow’s spinal column and scrambled, as up a ladder, into the corvid’s small but very capable brain, where it proceeded to (metaphorically, you understand) elbow the pilot out of the cockpit, shut the doors and grapple with the controls.
*
Oh good grief. Zounds, alack and really, fuck this for a lark. Look, will you please just quiet down there, Mr Crow? I’m very sorry to use you thus, but it’s a matter of sad necessity. All I require is transport, nothing more.
How far? A short distance only. Our current location is Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, and our destination Gloucester Cathedral. In a straight line – yes, as the crow flies, ha-ha – that’s just under a hundred miles. You can do that in one day. After that, whither thou wilt, go thou mayest. You’ll have brought me where I’ve needed to go for so long.
Please, that’s not an unreasonable request, surely? Yes, I apologise for the manner in which I’ve come aboard, so to speak, but I’m rather new to this.
Thank you, Mr Crow. Mrs Crow is a lucky woman indeed. Or perhaps there’s another Mr Crow – I’m given to understand that such things occur in the animal kingdom, as in the human one. No? Well, no offence meant, nor taken I hope. No? Good. To Gloucester, then!
*
A schoolboy, gazing from his classroom window, spotted a crow on the playing field that was behaving somewhat erratically, leaping to and fro and flapping its wings, then falling on its side and beating one wing forlornly at the air. It occurred to him that he was witnessing the avian equivalent of a grand mal seizure (one of his classmates was a sufferer of epilepsy, which would have earned him an exorcism in Gaveston’s time) and, being that type of boy who derives enjoyment from separating flies from their wings, watched with some avidity in the hope of seeing the bird die.
He was much disappointed.
Instead the crow folded its wings to its body, then stood up once more, smoothing its ruffled breast feathers with its beak. Following one or two experimental flaps of its wings, by which it established that all relevant moving parts were in working order, it launched itself into the air, rose and circled above the school and then set off to the west-northwest, in the general direction of Gloucester.
Before leaving, however, the crow took the opportunity to lighten itself for the journey by unloaded a substantial quantity of ballast, which would have got the young sadist smack in the eye had the weather been warmer and the window open. Sadly, it is in chill November that we lay our scene, so the flying turd instead splattered quite loudly and spectacularly against the classroom window. On the plus side, it did cause the boy to start, attracting his teacher’s attention and leading to an almighty bollocking for failing to pay attention in class.
Which frankly served the little fucker right.
*
We weren’t exclusive, of course, Lovely Ned and I. Well, we couldn’t be, could we? He was married and so was I, since appearances had to be maintained, alliances formed and heirs produced. You could say I had to close my eyes and think of England.
And yes, there were other men for both of us. We were often separated by distance: I was exiled three times, once by Ned’s father, the old King, and twice by those fucking peers. When we were apart, we took what comfort we might where we would. Our exclusivity was one of of soul. Neither of us, truly, had any other love.
In retrospect I feel rather sorry for Isabella, his queen; no surprise she ended up playing hide-the-sausage with Baron Mortimer. We’d all have been happier had we lived in the present day, I suspect, and if Edward had been born a few notches down the social scale, without all the requirements of kingship being foisted on him. I can see us running an antique shop in the Cotswolds, while Isabella went off and found herself a nice straight boy. (They do exist, I’m told. At least when sober.) But ‘twas a different time.
When I came back to England that last time I was excommunicated outright, and had to hold Scarborough against a siege by the barons. I was no mean soldier, so I toughed it out at first, but in the end we couldn’t hold. The Earl of Pembroke guaranteed my safety if I surrendered, but that prick Warwick snatched me from Pembroke’s custody. The Black Dog of Arden hauled me up in front of a kangaroo court headed up by him and Lancaster, then had two Welshmen take me out to Blacklow Hill. One drove a sword through my heart and the other took my head off. There’s probably a joke about getting shafted and/or getting head in there somewhere.
Pembroke (who’d sworn to protect me, remember,) was so angry he switched allegiance to the King – like I said, he wasn’t such a bad sort in the end. As for Warwick, the Black Dog of Arden was dead within three years – poisoned, rumour hath it. Whoever could have done such a thing?
After I was gone, Edward went looking for a new favourite. Easy enough for him to close his eyes and imagine it was me, I suppose: his preference was always for the passive role. (Which I didn’t begrudge him, but the Lord knows there were times when I could have used a good reaming myself. Luckily, there was never a shortage of rough trade, especially in the port towns… but I digress once more.) You might say he needed someone to fill a hole in his life, ha-ha.
But – what the fuck were you thinking of, Ned? – he ended up with a prize cunt called Hugh Le Despenser, and that was when it all really went tits-up. Despenser was a nasty, crooked, greedy little prick, and I say that as someone who hadn’t been averse to exploiting my connections to the hilt. The peers hated Despenser even more than they had me, and it broke out into civil war. The barons lost that one, and it was Thomas ‘the fiddler’ of Lancaster’s turn to face a kangaroo court and a trip to the block. What goes around, etc.
But that was the beginning of the end: Ned became an absolute monarch, wrapped around Despenser’s little fucking finger. While he’d never been a marvellous King, now he was an actual tyrant. Sad, but… he was still the love of my life. And now the love of my death.
There was another civil war. Despenser got his just deserts at last – hung drawn and quartered, and serve the fucker right. Isabella and her boyfriend Mortimer deposed Edward and – if you believe the stories – had him buggered to death with a red-hot poker. Passed for a perfect murder back then, as there was no blood or outward mark of violence (other than some singeing to the royal ringpiece, presumably.)
You didn’t need Sigmund fucking Freud to spot the symbolism there.
*
So this is Gloucester, is it? Things have changed a little, but then it’s been a while…
All right, Mr Crow, just hold thy horses a while longer. We’re nearly there. Need only to find the Cathedral. You wouldn’t think that would be hard to spot from the air.…
*
It took three years to bury me – God alone knows what state my mortal remains were in by the time they put them in the ground. I can’t clarify the picture, unfortunately: I was pretty disorientated the first four or five years of it. My death had been a bit of a traumatic event, after all.
I’d died excommunicate, so Edward had to get Papal absolution for me in order to arrange a proper burial. He’d founded a Dominican priory at Kings Langley in 1308, and interred me there with all ceremony. Good luck finding the tomb now, of course. The Priory’s long gone, with the only surviving building converted into a school; I ended up under the playing field, being woken up on Thursday afternoons by screaming teenagers trampling over my resting place playing hockey. Sic transit gloria mundi. And such was my ending.
Until now, obviously, where I find myself airborne over Gloucester.
I have no idea if my experience of the afterlife is typical. Basically I regained an increasingly less scrambled sense of awareness in my coffin, and pieced together events in the outside world from eavesdropping on the friars. Since then, there’s been a lot of traffic through the area. Now and again, with a lot of effort, I can get out of here, over short distances, and briefly connect with the neural systems of animals or occasionally humans. Which is why I’m not addressing you in Norman French; I’ve done my best to remain au courant.
If there’s a Heaven or a Hell, I’ve encountered no evidence of either. I’m aware and conscious in the ground, but that’s it. It does get rather boring. Which, given how much I loathe tedium, might mean it’s Hell after all.
I did my best to divert myself, retreating into fond memories and pleasurable fantasies. Maybe that’s how most people spend their eternities. I whiled away a century or three in such a fashion. But I grew restless and discontent; I wasn’t with him.
I couldn’t wander far, but I was able to poke out above ground and listen in, and pick up enough about the state of the world from those passing by. Hearing about Edward’s death was not a pleasant moment. Or his interment. I suppose I’d hoped that in death at least we might be together without interference or interruption, but no. Gloucester Cathedral: a hundred miles. Might as well have been in China.
But… where there’s a will, there’s a way. I was determined to find my way there: I reached that resolution a century ago, and ever since then I’ve been storing up my energies for the task – for the job of hijacking some transport (apologies again, Mr Crow) and breaking free of the pull of my grave (it’s rather like gravity for a space-rocket). Till now, at last, here I am.
Descend, Mr Crow, and let the reunion commence...
*
Ah.
Patient yourself awhile, Monsieur Le Corbeau. Yes, I know I said our ways would part at Gloucester, and that we’re there, but I must be closer to the tomb. Then I can jump ship, as ‘twere, and my dust seep into his casket avec his bones. And so we shall be reunited, and make love again in whatever fashion spirits may.
The main problem – and I really should have considered this before – is getting inside the bloody Cathedral. Finding a way in will be the difficult part. Very well: flap thy wings, Monsieur Crow, and alight above the main door. When it opens –
Et voila! Quick, quick, before it swings closed behind yon fatted American tourist…
*
With a metallic clatter of its wings, the crow came swooping and soaring down the Cathedral’s centre aisle, startling hell out of the congregation gathered for a special service held by the Bishop of Gloucester.
The Reverend Ludwig Zimyana, a young priest of the Anglican Communion from Zimbabwe, turned at the sound of its entry and found the bird hurtling towards his face, ducking only just in time. The crow hurtled on, banked and turned, cawing so ferociously, as assorted representatives of the Church of England and the Gloucester Tourist Board converged on it, that Ludwig (his late beloved father had had a great fondness for European classical music, Beethoven in particular) was briefly led to wonder whether this was an attempt on Satan’s part to invade the house of God.
However, he was fairly certain that Satan would have taken a slightly more terrifying form (although the crow, in truth, was intimidating enough) and that he would have shat upon the Bishop’s head rather than that of the local councillor whom the Reverend was fairly sure he’d heard mutter a disparaging remark about his race when his back was turned. (The good father reproached himself inwardly for his lack of Christian charity as he struggled in vain to repress his laughter at the sight.)
Despite all efforts to catch or shoo it, it conducted a peripatetic tour of the Cathedral, flitting from tomb to tomb before finally alighting on the only one belonging to a former King of England, where it perched, eyeing all who dared come near with a defiant glower, then opened its beak and loudly cawed.
Then it coughed, or at least made some sound that prefaced an expulsion from its open bill: a dull-coloured dust cascaded forth, or so it seemed, whereon the crow, after teetering for a moment and looking as though it might fall, took flight and hurtled towards the main doors, which Ludwig had had the presence of mind to run to and opened. With a last caw, the crow departed, soaring out of the door into the approaching desk, home (presumably) to Mrs Crow with a tale to tell, and at any rate out of this story.
Ludwig Zimyana closed the Cathedral door and, by way of penance for his uncharitable thoughts, made of a gift of his handkerchief to the shat-upon councillor. Before he went home, he inspected the tomb of King Edward II, where the crow had perched, curious about the powdery detritus the bird had seemed to cough up, but found no trace of it. By the time he’d returned home to his boyfriend, he’d dismissed it as a figment of his imagination.
*
The dust, of course, had been the corporeal remnants of Piers Gaveston, ejected from the crow’s gizzard after having been repossessed by Gaveston’s consciousness. Said consciousness arrested the dust’s descent and dispersal, whirling in a tiny but intense dust storm that went unnoticed due to a rather irate crow regaining full possession of its physical faculties in the middle of the Cathedral.
The storm battered without avail against the tomb, and Gaveston might well have been about to rail at cruel sardonic fate for baulking him here at the last. But then the swirling dust detected the tiniest of cracks in the wall of the tomb, imperfectly mended, and so gained access. And the dust of Piers Gaveston, at last, poured into the tomb of his beloved Edward, and they were reunited, after being parted so long.
*
Except, unfortunately, they weren’t.
*
Ned? Oh lovely Ned? ‘Tis I, my love.
What? Jesus Christ! Who the bloody hell are you?
What? Edward, it’s me. Piers.
Piers who? Oh, wait. You’re that Gaveston, aren’t you?
Who the hell are you? You most certainly aren’t my Edward.
No, I’m not your bloody Edward. Well spotted.
Then where is he? And what are you doing in his tomb?
I’ve no idea where he is, or where he ended up. What I’m doing in his tomb is taking his place, obviously.
Why isn’t he here?
Because he wasn’t bloody dead, you pillock. You’re not very quick on the uptake, are you?
You’re decidedly lacking in respect to your betters, my lad. I like that in a man.
Can’t say I’m particularly bothered what you like, fella.
Obviously not. Oh. I see.
….
….
….
….
Are you crying?
Of course I’m not.
….
I can’t. I don’t have any tear ducts.
Oh yes. Course not.
But if I did, I probably would be.
….
Sorry.
Not your fault.
….
So, er… how did you come to end up here?
Rough trade, wasn’t I? Got me up to Berkeley Castle where they were keeping him to satisfy his – you know, his carnal needs.
I thought he was supposed to have been horribly ill-treated there.
He was, but then there was a change of plan. Mortimer wanted him dead, but that Queen of his turned soft at the last. Decided to fake his death and pack him off to the Continent as a monk.
That was nice of her.
Not if you were me. They needed a body, so… two birds, one stone. Your Edward got a shag, and then after he was gone…
Did they…? I mean, you know – the story about the red-hot poker….?
Yes. The fucking bastards bloody well did. It was not fun.
Well no, I imagine it wouldn’t be. Are you Welsh, by the way?
Yes, I’m Welsh. Are we going to have problems about that now?
Of course not. This is the twenty-first century. I’ve learned a few things over the years.
Glad to hear it.
But you’re a bit of a way from Berkeley.
Well, they couldn’t just have anybody, could they? They needed somebody who wouldn’t be missed but who they could pass off as Edward. They told me I was to be his companion – you know, he’d be living a fairly pampered life like a bird in a gilded cage, and I’d be one of the creature comforts. Well provided for, a pension. Instead I got royally shafted, in every sense.
Oh dear. I am sorry.
Such is life.
So it would seem. Sorry, I didn’t even ask your name.
Ianto.
Piers.
*
There were always stories that Ned’s death was faked. That he ended up in Holland or Italy or the Holy Roman Empire as a monk or something – and I’d always wanted to believe them, but never could. I know this wicked world; a poker up the arse is, as a general rule, always far more likely than a last-minute change of heart. I’d always assumed the stories were somebody’s wishful thinking.
And it’s nice, yes, to know my Edward didn’t die the horrible, squalid death history ascribes to him; that I can hope he lived a long and happy life, and died a quiet peaceful death. But it also means that in death, as in life, we’re apart.
It took me a hundred years to find the strength to get to Gloucester. Never mind Holland or Central Europe. And where would I even begin to look? Where’s the tomb, the grave?
Perhaps this, at last, is Hell.
*
Or… perhaps not.
*
So, Ianto?
Yes?
It looks as though I may be here for some time.
This is my tomb, you know.
Technically it’s Edward’s.
Bugger Edward.
I did. Repeatedly.
So did I.
Oh. Yes. So you did.
He kept calling me bloody ‘Piers’ throughout.
Did he?
Course he did. He loved you.
I loved him.
All right, you can stay. I mean, it’s a pretty nice tomb, really. Lot nicer than I’d have otherwise. And I suppose that is partly thanks to you.
Much appreciated. Although of course I’d be happy to… pay my way in kind.
Is that even possible? I mean, now that we’re spirits or whatever the hell we are now?
Well, there’s one way to find out.
True. One way to pass the time, I suppose. But what about your beloved Edward?
I told you, we were never exclusive in that sense. Any port in a storm.
Cheeky.
You know, Ianto…
What?
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Don’t push it.

 
 

ABOUT SIMON BESTWICK 

Described as ‘among the most important writers of contemporary British horror’ by Ramsey Campbell, Simon Bestwick is the author of the novels Tide Of Souls, The Faceless, the serial novel Black Mountain, and the story collections A Hazy Shade Of Winter, Pictures of the Dark, Let’s Drink To The Dead and The Condemned. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static and a host of anthologies including End of the Line and Game Over, and has been reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year. Having spent most of his life in Manchester, he now lives on the Wirral with a long-suffering girlfriend. This is taking some getting used to, but he’s starting to enjoy it. When not writing, he goes for walks, watches movies, listens to music and does all he can to avoid having to get a proper job again. All contributions towards this worthy cause will be gratefully received.

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SINGING BACK THE DARK BY SIMON BESTWICK 

Simon Bestwick’s SINGING BACK THE DARK showcases a quintet of macabre musicality in: The Psalm, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, And All The Souls In Hell Shall Sing, Moon Going Down and Effigies of Glass.

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