Vinnie De Soth and the Ravens of London
As some of you will know, I'm currently writing a Vinnie de Soth novel (70,735 words so far, making it too long for my usual publisher even now). Still no name yet; that's unusual for me. And no chapters, which is even less usual. But part of the structure is a series of cutaway scenes, many of them in the recent or distant past, establishing backstory or introducing character elements that are relevant to the main plot.
One such element is Vinnie's association with the yeoman Warders - beefeaters - at the Tower of London. Vinnie is already known to them at the time he visits there in the main narrative. This is the flashback that establishes why. It's a more or less standalone story that I've transplanted with very little tweaking from the actual book. Of course, it may get radically changed or even cut on the second draft of the novel, so this might be your only chance to read this.
Oh, and apologies for those who have posted material that I haven't read yet. When I'm this deep in my "writing head" (or orifice of your choice) I try to avoid getting my "reader head" on. I will be getting to all of your work soon. In fact I'm using reading your stuff as an incentive to keep me at the grindstone.
HH
***
 The unfinished tower block rose up on the south bank of the Thames like a skeletal steel finger. Vinnie de Soth was atop it, surrounded by sceptical, unamused, armed men, and they were all looking at him.
"Right," he sighed. "Let's try again. You know how sometimes you read in the papers about some Japanese World War II soldier who's been hiding in the jungle in the Philippines ever since 1945 and doesn't know the war's over? "
"It's not some stray Jap hiding out in London!" scorned Sergeant Major Kepper. The stern-looking veteran was fifty-one years old but he was in a lot better shape than the jobbing occultist less than half his age. "We're trying to catch a wild bird of prey that's attacking the Tower ravens."
Vinnie clung onto his satchel and tried not to get too close to the edge of the tower. The concrete floors had been laid, and the structural steel rose up for three more floors, but the walls were all just plastic sheeting or simply open to the elements.
The four soldiers didn't wear the familiar traditional, somewhat silly livery of the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London. For operations they wore standard military fatigues and camouflage mesh. At least two of them looked ready to beat Vinnie to a pulp.
"Bear with me. Let's try again," persisted the jobbing occultist. The worst they could do was shoot him. It looked as if they might. "Okay, you've all seen kung fu movies? In real life there's this ascetic hermit cult called the Yamabushi. That translates as 'man who hides up in the mountains'. Let's just say the Japanese have some pretty weird people with pretty weird and extreme survival abilities. And in the last World War they deployed them."
Kepper was about to interrupt again but the Ravenmaster intervened. "Let him say his piece, Fred. We called him because we weren't getting anywhere any other way."
"Yeah, you must tell me who recommended me for this job," Vinnie told them. "So I can thank whoever it was." The yeoman warders weren't exactly pointing their semi-automatic weapons at him but they looked as if they wanted to.
Or they might just throw me off the building, Vinnie considered. The jobbing occultist and four off-duty warders of the Tower of London were perched high enough, with spectacular views over HMS Belfast, London Plaza, and the whole cityscape. It was a long way down.
"It was the ravens recommended you," the Ravenmaster confessed. "They seemed to think you could help."
"Oh well, if it was the ravens," Vinnie sighed. "I'd hate to disappoint a bunch of birds. Don't shoot me!"
The Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London and Members of the Sovereign's Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary took their jobs deadly seriously. Each beefeater had to have at least twenty-two years senior military service, an exemplary record, be tough as nails, and preferably have some decorations for combat. There is massive competition. It was essentially a whole squad formed from the services' hardest retired sergeant majors.
"The undress uniform's bad enough. The dress uniform's bloody uncomfortable," Sergeant Major Stan Neville, Yeoman Ravenmaster, had confessed when Vinnie had mentioned the lack of medieval costumery, "but it's really good disguise. Nobody expects a sixty-year old veteran in medieval poncery to be able to drop a thug in four seconds flat." He'd smiled wickedly.
"And you guard the traditions as well," Vinnie had replied. "All the traditions. Secrets. Stuff you won't tell me. You're the Ravenmaster, responsible for the welfare of the Tower's guardian birds."
"Get a haircut and twenty years of loyal service in a decent regiment and then we'll talk," promised the Ravenmaster.
The warders certainly took the deaths of Tower ravens seriously enough.
"I look after the ravens," Stan Neville had said when he'd consulted Vinnie. "Feed them. Protect them. Arrange for any surplus birds to be kept safe in sanctuaries to restock in case of disaster." He'd pointed to a rifle in the corner of his office. "Shoot bloody diseased pigeons, especially those sent by Al Quaeda - that last bit's classified, by the way."
"And," the jobbing occultist had prompted.
"And of course I see to the oracles and do what I can to maintain the old arcane defences that the ravens thatch."
Then he'd shown Vinnie the sad minced remains of two of the birds.
Vinnie had done his research. There were six official Tower ravens. Although they were usually kept confined these days to protect them from bird flu they had to be released sometimes. There have been official ravens at the Tower since King Charles II , but they've been there much longer than that. Since before William the Conqueror put his White Tower there, legend says, right back to when Bran the Blessed's giant head was buried on the spot.
Popular superstition holds that when the ravens leave the Tower then Britain will fall; or maybe the monarchy. Some noted that the two ravens that survived the London blitz flew off in 1945, the year that the British empire ended. Now great care is taken to preserve the Tower's birds.
Vinnie took his job seriously too. There atop the unfinished office block across the river from Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of London he began to empty out the small stones from his satchel and place them around the floor. He also made another attempt at explaining. "John Le Carré. You've read his spy books, or you know about them? You know what a sleeper agent is?"
"We know what a sleeper is," Kepper agreed. "You're saying that somebody's behind the attacks on our birds? Somebody deployed to harm them when the time comes? Using, what, a trained raptor?"
Vinnie wandered the top floor, positioning the common pebbles he'd brought seemingly randomly. "I'm saying that in March 1940 the buildings on this site were bombed by the Germans. There was nothing but rubble and ruin here. The site was vacant until 1951, so anything could have been planted here all through the war. There could even have been a capsule dropped in the bombing raids." Vinnie pointed to the half-constructed steel frame of the new skyscraper. "This tower is replacing the post-war block. Its foundations go much deeper, right through the bombing rubble debris. Anything beneath would have been disturbed, awoken at last, ready to carry out its mission."
Kepper snorted sceptically, but Stan Neville had had to clean up the shredded remains of two of the six ravens that traditionally 'protected' the Tower and the nation. "Hold on, Fred." He turned to Vinnie. "So what are you claiming, lad? That some ascetic Japanese bloke got himself buried in the blitz and has somehow survived seventy-odd years to attack our birds? That makes no sense."
"A deliberate attack on the ravens does," the Yeoman Castellan said. Like all the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London he'd first served twenty-two years with distinction in a military unit and retired with distinction. Unlike the others he'd been additionally trained about the ancient arcane defences woven into London's great fortress. "Everyone knows the old superstition that while the ravens are in the Tower the nation's safe but if they go then the monarchy will fall. There's plenty of aggressor states out there, and terrorist groups who'd be happy for a bit of a propaganda win. And that's not counting the ones who happen to know it's true."
"That's why I thought the Thaumaturgist Royal might have helped you out," admitted Vinnie. "This is just the sort of..."
"Thaumaturgist Royal!" snorted the Castellan. "Don't get me started on that little..." The beefeater had a soldier's vocabulary too.
"So no help from Sir Giles Dendene then," Vinnie concluded. "Gotcha. What I'm saying is, I did some checking into the history of this site and it looks like the most likely event to trigger the attacks just now is the construction work. This is also a great place to stage an attack on the Tower ravens from."
"Good lines of sight," Stan agreed. "Excellent view of the Tower."
It was cold up on the open scaffolding of the highest unfinished floor of the new block. Construction had been halted because of economic recession so now only the bare frame of the skyscraper loomed over London. The concrete pylons and plastic sheeting formed wind tunnels that channelled air like the icy breaths of a giant.
"So there's a World War II kung-fu Oriental killing our birds," Sergeant Major Jackson summarised, speaking for the first time. He glared at Vinnie. "We're not actually paying him for this, are we?"
"He came very highly recommended," the Ravenmaster noted. "War hero, they said."
"Which war?" demanded Jackson.
"It doesn't matter," Vinnie glossed over the need to describe the Occult Worlds Wars or his part in the most recent of them as the arcanosphere of the planet had adjusted to the digital age. "Point is that it's not just a hawk or something that's randomly targeting your ravens. It's a deliberate attack that was actually planned way back when something like this would have really hurt you, something that never got triggered. Now it's been set off and it's doing its duty, just like those guerrilla soldiers in the jungle. But it's not a man, either."
"Then what?" demanded Kepper. "Thought you said it was one of these mountain hermits."
"The way of Yamabushi isn't just taken by humans following the ShugendÅ doctrine. The Tengu favour it too." Vinnie paused and waited for the inevitable backlash of scepticism.
"And what's a tengu?" asked the Castellan, blankly.
"Great, you haven't even heard of the mythical monster enough to know how dumb I'm sounding."
Vinnie moved the last of his stones half an inch to the left, then turned it round slightly until it was laid to his satisfaction.
He went back to his bag and handed over a paperback edition of Konjaku Monogatarishū, the great collection of over a thousand tales from the Heian period, AD 794-1185. "In there are stories about fallen priests who transform into demons of pride. These tengu are described as ferocious, martial creatures, with red faces and long noses and more the the point long cruel claws. They're warriors, killers. In their evil they hate priests and monarchs and seek their downfall. They carry off boys and leave them wandering mad. They possess women to seduce men to their destruction. But the main thing is that their natural form is that of a half-man half-kite - the raptor, that is, not the thing you fly on a windy way."
The growing breeze buffeted the men waiting up on the open steel of the unfinished tower. The pages of the book fluttered in the wind.
"If I was sending something to destroy mystic ravens that upheld the monarchy I'd pick a tengu," Vinnie admitted. "Anyway, I asked around and that's what I came up with. People who know this stuff seem to think there's a tengu active in the Thames Valley."
Vinnie waited to be shot.
"So there's one of these tengu buggers what thinks the war's not over going after our birds," said Jackson. He primed his weapon. "Right. Let's frag it."
"Bullshit!" Kepper spat. He grabbed the paperback Konjaku Monogatarishū and tossed it over the edge of the building. "This is all a huge waste of time, lads. This little prick's a huge waste of time."
"Tengu are powerful, dangerous shapeshifters," persisted the jobbing occultist. "Fortunately they're quite gullible and very cowardly. Although they're skilled combatants with blade and claw, able to fly, able to become invisible, they shy away from battle with real warriors. That's a problem, because we'll never find this tengu while he cowers away from facing soldiers."
The winds buffeted the tower again, bulging the transparent plastic sheets like sails, whipping the concrete dust into tiny spirals. The sun sank over the Thames Valley and the stars begin to show.
"A coward?" asked Kepper. "Why are we even listening to this nutter?"
"Because the ravens said to," said Stan Neville. The Ravenmaster took that quite seriously. "And because I saw what was left of my birds. I've never seen an attack like that from any raptor alive."
"There's strange things out there," the Castellan admitted. "You can't work at the Tower without knowing that. But... a Japanese birdman?"
"A cowardly, stupid, incompetent Japanese birdman," Vinnie went on. "They were feared once. Even at the time when this one was deployed they were held with respect. But look at this." He rummaged in his satchel and pulled out a cute plastic doll. It depicted an ugly, big-nosed red-skinned monster dressed in black cap and red pom-pom sash, holding a feathered fan. The toy was squat and ridiculous, a monster made soft and cuddly.
"What is that?" demanded Kepper.
"This is how they think of tengu today. Like we think of fairies, really. Not dangerous. Not fearsome. Things to play with. Things to make fun of." Vinnie squeaked the doll and handed it to the soldier. "I couldn't get one of the really rude ones, the ones where the nose is actually a big penis."
"It's what?"
"I brought this stuff along because that tengu's been sleeping since 1940," Vinnie explained. "And the world's moved on. Japan now is about video games and motor cars and international banking and manga comics. If anyone remembers the tengu at all its to mine for entertainment. Can you imagine how an ascetic warrior who sacrificed everything to become a kite-demon might feel if he found that he'd given up all he was to be remembered for this? How would a creature that spawned the phrase 'proud as a tengu' react? If he wasn't such a coward, that is?"
Kepper slapped Vinnie across the face, knocking the young occultist back towards the skyscraper's edge.
"I am not a coward," Kepper said in Japanese.
"You're not Kepper either," Vinnie replied. "What did you do with him? When did you replace him? When we were searching the building?"
The Ravenmaster cocked his machine pistol at his comrade. "Fred, you'd better stand down," he warned.
Kepper tore the weapon from Stan and kicked him away. In short order he disarmed the Castellan and Jackson too.
"Told you tengu were easy to fool," Vinnie said. "Question their honour, sting their pride, and see what happens?"
"But that's Fred," said Jackson, clutching his chest. Three seasoned, experienced soldiers had been disarmed and downed in half a minute.
The tengu tore away his disguise and rose, blood-red and terrible, his feathered wings twitching behind him like a cloak.
 "Bloody hell!" said the Ravenmaster, reaching for his sidearm.
The tengu twisted a black fan and gale force winds tumbled the soldiers again. He shouted something in Japanese that none of them could understand.
Vinnie struggled to his feet, clutching a pillar for support. A pace behind him was a drop of thirty stories. "Hey!" he shouted over the winds, "pick on somebody your own size!"
The tengu whipped round, and now it was a samurai sword in the monster's hands. A cruel red face shifted into a leering smile.
"I don't mean me!" Vinnie clarified urgently. "I mean, you might notice that I didn't bring a nihontÅ with me? All I brought were a few stones." He pointed to the pebbles he'd laid out across the floor. The wind hadn't scattered them.
The tengu leaped across at Vinnie. The young man swung away round the concrete strut until he was leaning precariously out over the sheer drop.
"Of course, I did borrow those stones from the fabric of the White Tower," Vinnie admitted. "Castellan?"
Across the room, the Yeoman Castellan of the Tower of London crawled to the nearest stone and said, "Permission is granted."
An angry young woman hurled the tengu away from Vinnie and sent the bird-man skittering over the concrete floor. She became transparent again then winked out.
"Anne Boleyn?" Vinnie speculated. "She was beheaded on Tower Green in 1536 and has been haunting the place ever since. But it could have been Catherine Howard, or Lady Jane Grey. "
The tengu sprung to his feet like an athlete and crouched for attack.
The archbishop appeared from nowhere and struck him down.
"Thomas a Becket!" Vinnie guessed. "He first appeared when they were building the inner curtain wall in Henry III's time. Henry was so upset - his granddad had murdered the Archbishop - that he made the Becket chapel to keep the ghost quiet. "
The tengu screeched like a bird in a grinder.
Sir Walter Raleigh stabbed him with a sword.
"Ooh, I bet that hurts," winced Vinnie sympathetically. "Not much mortal stuff can hurt a tengu, but I bet Tower phantoms can. What, you didn't think if you attacked the principal stronghold of Britain it would go undefended?"
The tengu rose again, furious. Its winds rocked the whole building, overturning wheelbarrows of sand, sending buckets of rivets rattling across the floor, shredding the canvas and plastic sheeting.
A great shaggy bear struck him down.
"Ooh, that one's been seen ever since there was a royal menagerie at the Tower!" Vinnie enthused. "Scared the hell out of a sentry in 1815. They say he died two months later. "
The Ravenmaster crawled across and pumped six shots into the tengu just in case it helped.
A spry old lady in white appeared over the struggling bird-monster. The spirit seemed to wilt before her.
"Oh, my favourite!" called Vinnie. "I didn't think she'd show up. After all, Henry VIII rather spitefully executed her because her son had criticised him then run off to France. But Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the last Plantagenet, seventy years old, refused to put her head on the block because that was for traitors. The executioner had to chase her round hacking at her to kill her! What a way to go! What a lady!" Vinnie's face became serious. "What made you think you stood any chance against her?"
It was difficult to see now through the miasma of white translucent figures milling around the tengu, but it was clear that he was being literally torn apart by their attacks.
"The ravens protect the Tower, but the Tower protects the ravens," Vinnie called. "You attack the ravens, you attack the yeoman warders, you attack it all. And it's been defending itself for a very long time." He stepped around one of the White Tower stones. "I just extended its reach a bit for a little while, that's all."
The tengu stretched out its wings to flee. They were torn from it.
The winds ceased. Everything was still. Then the gloom was filled with the sounds of wings flapping.
"Take cover," warned Fred Neville. "Get down now!"
In the darkness there were the sound of ravens; a murder of crows.
The tengu screeched again. His last words would not have been comprehensible even had anyone spoken his tongue.
Then he was destroyed.
Aferwards Vinnie carefully gathered up the stones and returned them to the Castellan. He didn't want to annoy the Tower. The Ravenmaster and Jackson went to discover their comrade's body and were pleased to find him alive and confined; tengu prefer prisoners whom they can torture to insanity.
"There were other ghosts, of course," Vinnie noted as they descended from the wind-battered building. "The little Princes in the Tower, for example. Guy Fawkes. Henry VI. Those soldiers carrying a stretcher. The bubbly thing that the keeper of the crown jewels threw a chair at. And that veiled faceless lady; best she didn't show up, I reckon. Brrr . Or maybe they did. I reckon we only saw the barest fraction of what happened there. For the best."
"And you do this for a living, do you?" the Ravenmaster asked the jobbing occultist.
"Well, mostly it's online tarot readings and feng shui advice," Vinnie admitted. "But sometimes I get a rough one."
"And I thought I had a mad job," said Her Majesty's Yeoman Ravenmaster.
***
The Inevitable Footnotes:
The actual Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster of the Tower of London since 1983 has been Derek Coyle, formerly of the Green Howards regiment. Apologies for replacing him with this fictional impostor for the purposes of the present narrative.
Yeoman Warders are all retired non-commissioned officers from Commonwealth armed forces except the Royal Navy (whose troops take an oath of loyalty to the Admiralty, not the Crown). Candidates must have 22 years of exemplary service and hold the Long Service and Good Conduct medal. Apart from ceremonial functions and traditional duties like the nightly Ceremony of the Keys, warders also have practical security functions which they address with proper military ruthlessness.
"Brân" is Welsh for "Raven". Brân the Blessed, giant and king of Britain in Welsh mythology, features prominently in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, Branwen ferch Llŷr. In this account, after his death his severed head continues to speak and advise his friends for seven years. When it finally falls silent his followers enact his instructions and bury the head at Gwynfryn, the "white hill", reputedly the later location of the Tower of London. Bran promised to continue his guardianship of the realm and his head was interred facing France to ward off invasion. Subsequent Arthurian myth describes how King Arthur dug up and destroyed the head, believing that men now needed to stand for themselves without supernatural intervention; a Saxon invasion followed quickly after.
Examples of forgotten Japanese soldiers include 2nd Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who hid as a guerrilla on the island of Lubang until 1972, Captain Fumio Nakahira who hid out on Mindoro to 1980, Sergeant ShÅichi Yokoi in Guam up to 1972, and Private Nakamura Teruo in Norotai, Indonesia until 1974.
ShugendÅ is literally "the path of testing and training", an ancient Japanese religion wherein enlightenment with natural forces (kami) comes through understanding Man and Nature through ascetic mountain-dwelling
Konjaku Monogatarishū, 'The Anthology of Tales from the Past', contains legends and stories from India, China and Japan. Modern versions print the surviving 28 or the original 31 volumes. The narratives in this work have formed the basis for much subsequent Japanese myth in the same way as Geoffrey of Monmouth's accounts did for Britain.
Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey: These three royal women all ended their days in the tower. Queen Anne, Henry VIII's second wife, was executed in 1536 on charges of high treason, adultery, and incest. Queen Catherine, his fifth wife, was executed in 1542 for treason and adultery. Lady Jane Grey, "the nine days queen", was executed at the age of seventeen in 1554 after a plot by her family to place her on the throne fell through.
Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury until his murder in 1170, is venerated as a martyr in the Catholic church and the Anglican communion. He was assassinated by followers of King Henry II, with whom he quarrelled, supposedly after Henry had asked, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Becket did not die in the Tower, but his ghost was reported during the thirteenth century building programme as Vinnie describes.
Writer, courtier, soldier, and world explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) likewise did not die in the Tower, although he was imprisoned there. His execution was at the Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster - the modern-day Houses of Parliament. Sir Walter's portrait still hangs in the Bloody Tower and he has been seen there looking exactly as he does in his painting.
The Tower has housed at least two bears. The King of Norway gave Henry III a polar bear which fished in the Thames on a long chain. In 1811 the Hudson Bay Company presented King George III with a grizzly bear called Old Martin.
After the bloody and shocking execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (1473 - 1541), popular tradition held that a verse was discovered on her cell wall:
'For traitors on the block should die; I am no traitor, no, not I!
My faithfulness stands fast and so, Towards the block I shall not go!
Nor make one step, as you shall see; Christ in Thy Mercy, save Thou me!'
Pope Leo XIII later beatified her as a martyr.
Edward and Richard, sons of King Edward IV, were declared illegitimate by parliament so that their uncle the Duke of Gloucester could take the throne as Richard III. The twelve and ten year-old boys were sent to the Tower "for their safety" but disappeared there in June 1483. Two skeletons discovered under a staircase in the White Tower in 1674 were given a royal burial in Westminster Abbey. Apparitions of trembling terrified boys in white nightgowns have long been reported.
Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was one of the Gunpowder Plotters who sought to blow up Parliament and foment a return to English Catholicism. He was tortured in the Tower until he gave away the names of his fellow conspirators, and with them was led from the Tower to execution at Old Palace Yard, outside the very Houses of Parliament he had failed to blow up. He avoided being hung, drawn, and quartered alive like this three accomplices by leaping from the scaffold and breaking his neck. His corpse was still hung, drawn, and quartered however. For years after his death his screams were heard in the Council Chamber of the Tower where he had been prepared for his execution.
Tradition claims that on 21st May each year Henry VI paces the Wakefield Tower to commemorate the moment of his murder on that date in 1471 by the Duke of Gloucester, the future king Richard III.
During world war II a guard on duty at the Tower's main gate reported seeing men in old uniforms carrying a stretcher containing a headless body. The figures faded away just before they reached the soldier.
In October 1817 Edmund Swifte, Keeper of the Crown Jewels, and his family in Martin Tower (the Jewel House) were terrified by a tall, strange liquid column that drifted through their room. Swifte's wife claimed it tried to grab her. Swifte threw a chair at it but the furniture passed through without impact.
An apparition of a veiled lady with no face has been occasionally reported but her identity remains unknown.
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2011 reserved by Ian Watson. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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