Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

Carefully, reverentially, he eased the lid slowly open … half expecting the sky above to crack open and reveal a God ready to smite him with a bolt of lightning for daring to consider himself worthy enough look upon his very words.

Inside the small box he saw a threadbare canvas bag, a drawstring at the top pulling it tight and closed. The canvas bag rested on a shallow bed of coins, stamped with the face of King Henry II, Richard and John’s father. Liam guessed that was some of the money Locke’s bandits had managed to rob from tax collectors and merchants foolish enough to travel the forest tracks of Nottingham during the last two years.

Carefully, he lifted out the canvas bag and loosened the drawstring to look down inside.

He could see the handle of a wooden scroll spindle and the frayed edges of yellowing parchment wrapped tightly round it. He felt an almost overpowering urge to pull it out of the bag and unroll the parchment, but the cart was rolling and bucking as the wheels rode up and down ruts in the track. A bump and it could tear in his hands.

He stared at the frayed edges curled round the spindle. Somewhere on those pages of parchment the word Pandora was written. A message, a warning that — if Maddy was right — someone wanted them, specifically them, to know about.

He felt that shudder down his spine again, as if simply by holding this roll of parchment, looking at it, he was waking something up from a deep slumber, disturbing it … foolishly prodding it.

He pulled the drawstring tight again and gently laid the canvas bag back on its bed of coins and closed the lid.

He shuffled forward and tapped Bob on the shoulder. He turned his head and Liam found himself looking at the frayed and bloody pink edges of what remained of the top rim of Bob’s right ear. A line of dark dried blood ran down the side of his neck and disappeared beneath the folds of the dark cape.

‘Bob … that’s really it, isn’t it? We’ve got …’

He looked down again at the box. We’ve got, quite possibly, the most important piece of rolled-up paper that has ever existed.

He was wondering whether to voice that out loud, or whether saying it was somehow pushing their luck, inviting some sort of lightning bolt.

‘Caution!’ said Bob suddenly.

Liam looked up from the box. The dusty track had just brought them over the brow of a hill. There below them like a child’s play set, shimmering amid the midday warmth, was the walled town of Nottingham, busy with activity. A welcome sight for Liam. Or at least it would have been, had it not been for the spreading dark line of figures casually crossing and flattening the patchwork of furrowed fields outside the walls.

Thousands of them.

He saw the flickering glint of chain-mail armour among them: a forest of multicoloured pennants fluttering above columns of men, trudging off the road leading up from the south and fanning out into the fields. He could see swarms of dark figures pulling equipment from baggage trains of carts, tents already being erected on beds of trampled crops, and long beams of wood being worked upon by teams of carpenters with the percussive rattle-tap of dozens of hand axes and hammers.

‘It appears King Richard has arrived,’ said Bob.

Down the sloping track leading to the town’s main entrance, Liam could see a river of traffic emerging. King Richard’s soldiers seemed to be permitting those who wanted no part in the siege to leave. Mostly merchants, visiting tradesmen driving out empty carts: people with no special allegiance to the place and no wish to die for a cause.

‘Letting people out. But no one in,’ Liam commented.

‘Affirmative.’

He looked down at the milling chaos outside the opened gates to Nottingham. Perhaps, if they could get down there, in among all that confusion, they could find a way to sneak in.

‘Bob. Let’s see how close we can get before someone stops us.’

‘Affirmative.’

‘And you better pull your hood up … your ear’s going to attract attention.’

Bob did as he was told, working the hood up over his shaggy head. Then with his one good hand, he grabbed the reins and kicked the horse’s rump. It staggered wearily forward and the cart’s wheels once more creaked as they descended towards the scene below.

A couple of minutes later and they were passing the first of the merchants streaming out, many of them irritably shouting at them that they were heading the wrong way and should either turn round or get off the track; otherwise, they met with no interference. Until a picket of soldiers thirty yards ahead of them, wearing olive-green sashes over leather jerkins, began waving them down to stop.

Liam cursed. ‘What’re we gonna do?’ he hissed from the back.

Bob shrugged casually. ‘I am evaluating.’

‘Well, we don’t have time to evaluate … dammit!’ Liam gritted his teeth. They were a hundred yards from the main entrance and all of that distance was a confusion of people. Surely, if they could just lose themselves in that?

The soldiers ahead of them were now stepping on to the track and into their way.

And what if they decide to search the cart? What if one of them decides this little box looks rather nice?

‘Bob, I think we’re going to have to make a go for it.’

‘Clarify “go for it”.’

‘Don’t stop. Just go. Go very fast!’

Bob nodded. ‘Agreed.’

He whipped the reins across the horse’s shoulders, and for good measure swung a hard kick once more at its rear. The horse bellowed a complaint but all the same broke into a begrudging canter.

The soldiers ahead of them called out warnings for them to stop but, at the very last moment, stepped aside to avoid being run over.

As they swept by them, angry voices rippled orders and another party of soldiers further up, overseeing the merchants’ exodus, readied themselves to stop the cart. Liam could see these ones were better equipped for the job, armed as they were with pikes. Just one of those braced firmly against the ground would be enough to run their horse’s chest through and bring it down in an untidy heap.

What they needed was a stampede. A distraction. Chaos. What they needed was …

He reached for the box, yanked the lid open and carefully tucked the drawstring canvas bag into the folds of his cloak. What was left inside, a small mound of gold coins, he scooped up into his hands.

‘Bob!’ he bellowed over his shoulder. ‘Shout “free money”! Shout something like “free money”! Really, really loud!’

Bob craned his hooded neck to look at Liam and saw him holding the handfuls of coins. He seemed to understand what Liam was up to. ‘MONEY!’ his voice boomed above the pounding hooves and the laboured creak of their spinning cartwheels. ‘HAVE FREE MONEY!’

Liam tossed a handful of the glinting coins over the left side of the cart and into the tall grass beside the track. The result was almost instantaneous — like tossing a handful of breadcrumbs into a courtyard full of pigeons. Merchants’ wives walking beside their husbands’ carts, the foot traffic, tradesmen’s helpers old and young, children, all swarmed off the dusty track and began scrabbling in the tall grass.

Bob steered their horse, cutting in between two carts and putting them on the right side of the traffic emerging through the arch of the gatehouse as Liam tossed another handful into the crowd around them.

‘FREE MONEY FOR EVERYONE!’ bellowed Bob again.

Hands snatched and grabbed for the coins tumbling through the air. They were now level with the pikemen — the soldiers on the left of the surging river of people, them on the right, separated by a roiling sea of grasping hands fighting each other to get within reach of the last shower of coins.