The Anger of God

PROLOGUE

    The man waiting in the corner of the derelict cemetery between Poor Jewry and Sybethe Lane jumped as an owl in the old yew tree above him hooted and spread ghostly wings to go soaring like a dark angel over the tumbled grass and briars. The watcher saw the bird plunge on its shrieking victim then rise effortlessly as a puff of smoke up against the starlit sky. The man shivered and cursed.
    He remembered stories from his childhood of the Shape-Shifters, those witches, crones of the darkness, who could change their appearance and haunt such deserted, lonely places. The night was warm yet the man felt cold. These were troubled times. During the day he laughed at the gossip, the stories about an anchor and rope which hung down from a cloud and lay fixed in an earthen mound near Tilbury. Or how the king of the pygmies, large-headed and fiery-faced, had been seen riding a goat through the forests north of the city. Whilst devils, small as dormice, laughed and leaped like fish in a net in the grass around the gallows at Tyburn. Such stories merely mirrored the times and echoed the words of the prophet: ‘Woe to the kingdom where the king is a child!’
    A prophecy now coming to fruition in England : golden Richard was only a youth and the affairs of state rested in the grasping hands of his uncle, the Regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who seemed unable to pour balm on the kingdom’s wounds. French galleys were raiding and sacking towns along the Channel coast. In the north the Scots spilled over the border in an orgy of burning and looting, whilst in the shires round London , the peasants, taxed to the hilt and tied to the soil, bitterly protested against the lords of the earth and plotted bloody rebellion.
    Gaunt, however, was as slippery as a fish: unable to raise taxes from a rebellious Commons, he had now performed the miracle of uniting the warring Guilds of London to obtain money from the wealthy burgesses and merchants. This had to be stopped. The watcher in the shadows just wished there was an easier way to do it. He bit his lip. Gaunt had to be destroyed, it was necessary. When the revolt came, a new order would be established in the kingdom and the Great Community, the name the peasant leaders had given themselves, would decide who would live and who would die, who would wield power and who would exercise trade. The prudent ones in the government of the city were already preparing to make such men their friends.
    ‘I am here.’
    The man jumped. Was he hearing things?
    ‘I am here,’ the voice repeated, low and throaty.
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘We are all around you. Don’t move. Don’t run. Just listen to what I have to say.’
    ‘What is your name?’ the man asked, trying to control the quick beating of his heart and the panic curdling his innards.
    ‘I am Ira Dei,’ the voice replied from the darkness of the cemetery. ‘I am the Anger of God. And God’s wrath will spill out against those who reap where they have not sown, who gather profits where they have no right, and who oppress the poor men of the soil as if they were worms and no more.’
    ‘What do you want?’
    ‘To make all things new. To take this kingdom into an age of innocence for:
    “When Adam delved and Eve span,
    Who was then the gentleman?” ‘

    The man nodded. He had heard this doggerel verse chanted like a constant hymn by the peasants who wished to march on London, reduce the city to red-hot ash, seize the King’s uncle, strike off his head and march in procession with that same head on a pike.
    ‘Are you for us?’ the voice asked.
    ‘Of course!’ the man spluttered.
    ‘And do the Regent’s plans move apace?’
    ‘The banquet is tomorrow night.’
    ‘Then you must act. Do what we want and we shall consider you our friend.’
    ‘I have a scheme,’ the man replied. ‘Listen...’
    ‘Silence!’ the voice rasped. ‘If you wish to be one of us then thwart Gaunt’s ambitions. How you do it need not concern us but we shall watch. Adieu.’
    The man strained his eyes against the darkness. He heard a twig snap, an owl hoot but, when he called out, his words rang hollow in the silence.

    A mile to the south, on the black, stinking waters of the Thames, another hooded, cowled figure moved his small skiff between the starlings of London Bridge . He tied the rope carefully through a rusting ring and began to climb up the wooden beams, on to the blood-soaked trellis towards the decapitated heads gazing