Near King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Autumn, 1650.
The works go on while columns of insects sing above us. Fevers run through the prisoners’ bodies, and into the soldiers and numbers of the engineers. Any place other than the Great Level now seems far away to me, as unreachable as a mirage across the desert. It is many months since I wrote to my parents and my sisters. My father’s hand on my shoulder, my mother’s anxious admonitions, the laughter of Anna and Katrijn: they seldom break into my mind. The Great Level, though I know it to be a small part of the earth, might stand for the whole of it.
In October the camp is swelled with hundreds of prisoners from another war, waged by General Cromwell in Scotland. Covenanters, I am told they are called, taken at a battle by the town of Dunbar. These men are short and tangle-haired. They dress in all manner of ragged clothing and many speak a language that some of the Irish can understand in part, but none of the English soldiers. I try to make out one word from another, but, having no success, allow their talk to surround me as if it were a kind of music.
So this land gathers strangeness as well as change. With the new prisoners the works progress fast, but they bring difficulties with them. The two bodies of men, the Scots and the Irish, must be housed in separate quarters, for they are of differing persuasions, the Irish of the old Roman religion, most of the others its sworn enemy. Notwithstanding the remoteness of our situation, where a pastor is rarely seen, the prisoners talk of little else than their faith and the battles they fought to preserve it. I am told that when the Scots and the Irish mingle they come easily to blows over the nature of the sacrament or the power of priests. New huts are therefore hastily thrown up for the Scots. It is getting crowded inside the stockade, a circumstance that worries the apothecary who comes regularly to the camp. He brings bags of herbs and medicines that he sells to the soldiers and to us Dutch who know from long experience that the ague can be held off by such infusions as we can make from his wares.
Adriaan Renswyck finds a new way of bringing order to this place of strife. Each morning before the work parties are assembled, he orders the men to stand in a line outside their huts. Then he walks by each line and counts the men in it. He is seldom alone now, and comes accompanied not only by Wade and Townley but also by a sort of secretary he has picked out from amongst the Dutch. This man carries a large pocketbook, leather bound. At certain points in his inspection, the same each day, Renswyck stops and gestures for his book, into which he deftly writes his tallies, hoarding prisoners as if they are gold.
One morning I pass a number of the Irish prisoners who stand in the half-darkness, and see a grizzled old man cup his hand over his young neighbor’s upturned palm. Something glints before fingers close over it. Curiosity pricks me, and an undertow of fear. Perhaps this sleepy boy has a knife, or some other rough weapon.
“What do you have there?”
Tiredness makes me suspicious. Here are men whose hatreds slow my work and place at hazard my reputation.
“Nothing,” he says, and puts his hand behind his back.
On an impulse I call a soldier. He is on guard, but has turned away to stare towards the stockade, waiting perhaps, as I have so often waited, for the sun to glide up above the fen and bring the comfort of daylight to the camp. He comes with reluctance to my summons and waits by me as I talk to the boy.
“Give it to me.”
Slowly the boy holds out his hand and opens his fingers. Red rises in his cheeks, and, at the same time, in mine. From his flat palm I pick a thin, cheap medallion; tin, and imprinted with the face of the Madonna, picked out with the sharp tip of a nail.
“Take it, take it.”
I close the boy’s hand over the metal scrap, and wave the soldier away. Shame fills me that I felt fear of so little. My apprehension has overcome me. The day has started with feeling running too high, and ill will follows it. If a Scot should come across a man with such a charm in his hand he may try to pull it away, such is the Covenanters’ hatred of the old religion. The Latin prayers of the Irish also draw the anger of the Scots. When I hear a Scottish and an Irish prisoner in dispute, and the shouts and growls of those who quickly gather around and add their angry faces to the crowd, I turn my back and walk off.
The men’s resistance is complete. The guards hurry them to work each morning. They tie to one another those most likely to flee and patrol the length of the works all day. The ground itself seems to take the prisoners’ part. Near the middle section of the new river, where I expected an easy cut through peat, we encounter gravel, which slows us down. Then storms drive over the whole Level, one after another. Soil in the washes runs off into the cut just made, clogs the bed of the new river and destroys its gradient. Again the atmosphere darkens and I have the feeling of the watchers getting closer in the misty nights. Some days I take to sleeping under my coracle near the works. Van Hooghten teases me, saying I am become a fensman, or a savage, or a Scot, wrapped in my blanket under the sky. The solitariness of the night will do me no good, he adds, and the bad air after the rains will bring the ague.
Then, as the days shorten towards winter, an insurrection breaks out at the works north of the new sluice. One sunny afternoon I arrive to see a long line of prisoners sitting on the ground, their tools lying beside them and a soldier standing by. Adriaan Renswyck walks up and down, and as I approach slaps one of the men with his glove. The man flinches as the leather whips against his cheek, but he does not move. Renswyck turns to the soldier in rage.
“Make them get up.”
“There are too many, sir,” one of the soldiers says. “They cannot flee, to be sure, but they refuse to stand.”
“Why have they done this? Tell me; you were here.”
Renswyck throws up an arm so that his cloak flares out behind.
“Do something. Take a man out of the line and beat him in sight of the others.”
The atmosphere is thickening and needs patience to thin it out. Renswyck is already beyond sense. The soldier silently refuses to obey him. These men have no love for the Dutch. Most long either for real soldiering in the vortex of war, or for their homes. This half-life of keeping order is neither. It is, one told me, a humiliation, and unhealthy at that.
“Upon what grounds do they stop work?” I ask. I make my voice quiet and level.
The soldier turns to me and I add, “What is your name?”
“Ralph Cooper, sir.”
“I am Jan Brunt, the engineer here. Tell me what the prisoners say, Mr. Cooper.”
“That things are coming up from the ground, Mr. Brunt, strange and wondrous things.”
“Where?”
“Just along the embankment, sir.”
“Very well, Mr. Cooper, let us go and see for ourselves, and speak to the men there.”
Renswyck turns to me and says in Dutch, “Speak to them? You need to restore order. Make an example of one man and the others will pick up their spades soon enough.”
I feel sudden rage. What is Renswyck doing outside the camps, which are under his authority?
“Mijnheer Renswyck, might I ask why you have come here? This stretch of the works is looked after by Aelbert Mortens, who answers to me.”
Aelbert Mortens is a taciturn man apt to spend the evening with a bottle of brandy in one hand and a bible in the other. He says little and keeps his opinions close, though I should like to hear them, for he has worked in Guiana in the New World, and in many other possessions of the Dutch West India Company. Van Hooghten thinks him steady, despite his moroseness; another man who has seen better times and now seeks to recover his position.
“Mortens—” Renswyck jerks his head away again. “He’s over there, shaking. I happened upon him and have assumed command.”
I walk across to Aelbert Mortens, who sits on the bank of the new cut. He is about forty years old, bullheaded and solid. A ragged velvet coat hangs from his shoulders. His face has fallen into deep lines. I tap him on the shoulder.
“Aelbert; it is I, Jan Brunt. What is passing here?”
Mortens turns to me. Terror streams from his eyes.
“We have disturbed the dead. Their spirits walk abroad as a judgment upon us.”
“Do you see them, Aelbert, these spirits?”
Then I understand what Renswyck sees; that Mortens is deaf to human speech and speaks not to me but to himself.
“Aelbert, do you hear me?”
He says nothing, only continues to look wildly about him. It is not within my power to bring him out. I turn away, and leave him to sit on the bank alone. I must talk to the prisoners and coax them back to the digging; force them if needs be. The work must go on, advance by the calendar we have laid down.
As I walk away from Mortens, my eye catches the raw edge of the new cut. Twenty feet below the surface the peat and silt stop and another formation begins. I know immediately what I see. I cannot be mistaken; it is as if a drawing I have long studied has come into being. I am looking at the layers of a road sliced through by the new cut, clean as a cake. It is of ancient construction, but as fresh as if just laid down. I stand and stare, forgetting all about the prisoners and their fears, then jump down to examine it close up. The flint at the top is familiar in this place, and used by the fensmen in their knives and axes. But I marvel at it, for though an extreme hard stone it is yet compacted with the finest gravel in the way set forth in every book I know upon the science of engineering. This top surface lies on sand and gravel mixed together to the depth of a foot, and the whole rests on a bed of branches and twigs, tangled to a dense blackness. It is a firm road, yet built beautifully to float upon the marsh.
I remember from my books of study that this is a road such as the Romans built. Scrambling up out of the cut I look around me and see the prisoners, who sit on the ground, tied one to another with rope. Beyond them, and beyond the excavations of the works, the meres stretch out on all sides, like silver coins thrown into the mist. This land looks as if it has always been like this, uncharted and unchanged. Yet here is a road, and surely, down this road Roman legions marched. In this desolate place, where had they come from; where did they go?
And before any soldiers walked here, engineers came, men such as myself, strangers to the place. They must have measured this ground, as I have done, observed its times of flood and shrink, and calculated where to float their road across. Perhaps they lodged hereabouts, or at a fort hastily constructed, for the people of this place could have had no good intentions towards their conquerors. At this thought I feel something of the spirit of these my ancestors enter into me. By my shoulder I sense a man such as I might have been, though more likely born in Spain or some other southern place. I see him rise up out of the fen and come towards me across the expanse, an arm raised as if in greeting, one engineer to another. He is young and dark-complexioned; full of his knowledge as I am full of mine. His gestures to me are at once eager and supplicating, as if he wishes me to tell his story, to rescue him from that place where the dead of his religion journey in the end.
The road is well done, and would be still serviceable were it lying now upon the surface of the land as it was when built. I feel a joy to see its beauty now brought by chance into the light. Yet had we not cut through it, it would have lain undisturbed in its sleep of centuries, down below the vegetable world, no conjecture to be made of it. My fancy brings forth ghosts; yet they are everywhere, if only we could see them. Perhaps this is the very thickness in the air of this place, filled with the souls of those who lived here, or passed this way.
This jumble of thoughts rushes through me in an instant. I had thought the meres untouched, but this cannot be so. Nature has swallowed what man made, dragged it beneath the water and the mud. So our eyes deceive us. We think we see all, or can discover it, and yet we see so little. Time has covered over what men made here before, and all the habits of their life.
As if in a dream, I see inwardly the whole skin of the earth peeled away. It is a picture only, yet for a second everything is discovered and placed before me, both the works of man and the hidden works of nature that only seldom burst forth as volcanoes and hot springs. For if a Roman road may hide here unsuspected, my own work might at some future time drown also, and lie forgotten.
I walk back past the slumped figure of Aelbert Mortens, to where Adriaan Renswyck still stands with his sardonic look. Only a minute or two has passed, but my ill humor has turned to wonder.
“Have you seen the road we cut through, Adriaan?” I ask.
“You have been dreaming, Mijnheer Brunt,” Renswyck says. “What road? You are seeing things.”
“Indeed I am, Adriaan; great things.”
There is no profit in talk with Renswyck, so I turn to Ralph Cooper.
“Come, Mr. Cooper,” I say. “Pick up your pike; let’s go.”
Ralph Cooper leads me along the roughly thrown-up embankment of the new cut. Below on the mere, the reed heads are brown and the hawthorns heavy with scarlet berries. After a few minutes the ground is firm beneath my boots again and I am come back into the world of our day. In half an hour we reach the northernmost extent of the works. An angry murmur of voices rises up from beyond the new embankment. Spades, entrenching tools and hessian sacks lie across the ground, and piles of muddy soil stand at intervals. Another ragged group of prisoners sits on the grass. Two soldiers stand guard.
“What passes here?” I ask.
The prisoners reply all at once.
“The work of the devil.”
“These are witches buried here.”
“Or this is the work of witches.”
“Or sinners with no Christian burial.”
One man makes the sign of the cross on his breast, rocking forward as he does so. Another says the same words over and over. The rest just sit, and raise their eyes to me in accusation.
A tall soldier, who himself appears discomposed, points to a patch of turned-up ground a little way off. Walking over I see new-broken shards of pottery. Dusty ashes veil the grass. Beside them a rough-hewn pot as high as my knee lies quite out of the ground. It is full of gray fragments that make a kind of gravel. All around, the tops of many more jars have been uncovered. Rightly they must be called urns, for there is no doubt that this is a place of burial.
“Go back to Mr. Renswyck,” I say to Ralph Cooper, “and tell him that work is finished here for the day.”
Then I tell the captain in charge, “Escort the prisoners back to the camp, but leave me half a dozen of your men. I wish them to excavate these things and remove them from sight. We will work tomorrow in the usual way.”
When the prisoners have been marched off beyond the embankment I kneel down to look at the excavated urn. My heart is full within my chest, for I see easily that within the ashes that have spilled out onto the mud are human bones. Man, woman or child; perhaps a whole family is mingled here, the ashes of one person poured on top of another.
I cannot resist plunging in my hands and drawing out a handful of grit and other stuff. When I open my fingers the heaviest particles fall to the ground, coating it in patches. The lightest rise into the air, a million motes in the shafts of autumn sunlight. The dust moves and turns gracefully. I watch it fall, then come up again, pushed by the resisting ground. Minutes pass as it comes up slowly and then sinks again until finally there is just a slight haze left. The sun shines through it, filling the air. The sight is as beautiful as God’s grace, or the light that will open to the heavens when all souls rise at the Last Judgment.
I part my fingers and see that a few lumps cling to my skin. One of these I pick out and rub on my breeches as I might do to a pebble from a beach. The dust comes off and I see that it is a tooth, ivory white, perfectly formed, brown in the hole where the root once grew. Wonder turns to horror and I dash the other teeth off my hands. When they fall onto the grass the story of the sowing of the teeth comes into my mind, so that I fancy for a moment that a legion of Romans, fully armed, might spring up to fight. My ears fill with sea sounds and I forget where I am.
When I come to myself I order the soldiers to dig out all the urns. They do not move; they have seen my horror. It comes across me that we are in a sacred place and that the spirits of the dead, now disturbed, may remain here with malevolent intent. This I know to be a superstition, and tell myself so, yet fear fills me.
I grab one soldier’s pike from him and lower it towards the others, advancing on the group without a thought in my head.
“Take up the urns. Carry them beyond the new embankment and bury them again. Cover them well. They are pagan remains, merely. No Christians lie here. Put them from your minds. Now get to work.”
Slowly the soldiers bend to pick up the spades abandoned by the prisoners.
“Do this and you may return to the camp afterwards. I give that as an order.”
I leave and walk slowly down the new embankment in search of Van Hooghten, who is riding this way from Ely. I will tell him how the Roman road has come to light and show it to him before it is washed away, as it will be. The discovery of the urns I will keep to myself; I do not want Van Hooghten to share my fear, or see it.