The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Read online

  OPERATION: Antwerp witch recruitment, Part C: Harvest kalonji as incentive to potential KCW Winnifred Dutton

  DEDE: Recruit Dutton as KCW

  DTAP: Peerdsbos Forest (Antwerp), Belgium, 1562

  Note: A previous unsuccessful recruitment attempt had been made by Dr. Stokes circa Day 500. The encounter ended awkwardly. Dutton had demanded kalonji, which Stokes knew nothing about, so recruitment was abandoned until a new gambit could be established for obtaining some. The series of DEDEs conducted by Chira Yasin and Felix Dorn circa 1200 had the effect of sowing kalonji in known locations in the Peerdsbos Forest where conditions were right for it to thrive and remain available centuries in the future.

  Thanks to the earlier DEDEs by Dr. Stokes, Winnifred Dutton was already aware of us, and Overkleeft knew how to obtain clothes, make contact with Dutton, etc.

  MUON Erszebet Karpathy sent Dr. Overkleeft from ODEC #3 at 08:21 of Day 818.

  Having retrieved clothes stashed from Stokes’s previous efforts, Overkleeft went without incident to fortress at which DOer Felix Dorn had sowed seeds in 1202. Discovered that 360 years later, a small but hardy patch of kalonji had survived in one south-facing exposed courtyard. Esme uprooted one plant and took samples of leaves, removing viable roots and seed-buds so that Dutton could not simply establish her own patch of kalonji. Carried these to the home of Winnifred, wife of Thomas Dutton (Thomas Gresham’s Antwerp factor).

  It is now known, and was an open secret even then, that Winnifred had been married off to Dutton only to get her out of England, where she had been Thomas Gresham’s lover and had borne him a natural daughter, Anne (twelve years old at time of this DEDE).

  Consequently Dutton was living in a comfortable home with a disinterested “spouse,” in a foreign country, deprived of her lover, and except for the task of raising her daughter was very restless. She allowed the servants to bring Esme into the home at once and was delighted to receive the kalonji plant, the merits of which she immediately began to describe to both Esme and young Anne. Without further obstinacy, she pledged herself to being a KCW and made her residence available as a safe house. Furthermore she encouraged her daughter to do so as well, which Anne agreed to eagerly.

  Esme Overkleeft returned without incident at 18:45.

  Note: It is already marked in DODO archives, but for ease of reference, here is additional historical context (not told to Winnifred or Anne, of course): Anne Gresham/Dutton will go on to marry Nathaniel Bacon (half brother of Sir Francis), with whom she will live in Norwich, England. Her three daughters, all witches, are roughly contemporaneous with Gráinne in London. Accordingly, our next DEDE will be to reach out to them for recruitment.

  Diachronicle

  (CIRCA DECEMBER, YEAR 2)

  In which Tristan has a working vacation

  THE VILLAGE OF COLLINET STRADDLES a tributary of the river Dives, which empties into the English Channel a few miles downstream. The actual DTAP was a copse of trees both leafless and evergreen, some half-mile from the center of the village proper.

  DODO now had a small operational group called TAST: the Tactical Archaeological Strike Team. As the name implied, they combined the skill set of traditional archaeologists (digging holes and finding stuff) with those of covert intelligence operatives—they knew how to get in and out of potentially hostile locations without drawing attention, and how to find what they were looking for in a hurry. You might not think of Normandy as a hostile location. But because of France’s ancient and secret laws banning diachronic operations, it was hostile to us. Anyway, TAST, zeroing in on a powerful GLAAMR centered on this copse of trees, had been able to carry out a couple of midnight digs and verify that it had been the homesite of the lineage of presumed witches we’d seen mentioned in various church documents. It was classic witch real estate: close enough to the village to allow commerce and social contacts but sufficiently remote to afford separation and privacy.

  Erszebet was admirably on the mark: I materialized unobserved right at the copse, where the ground was mercifully dry, and after recovering from the usual disorientation, I followed the scent of woodsmoke to a hut some fifty very chilly strides away: the home of our potential KCW, Thyra of Collinet. I had landed, by design, in late afternoon in midwinter; in spite of the risk of hypothermia, I elected to arrive now because Thyra would likely be holed up in front of her fire.

  As we’d come to expect, Thyra—a handsome woman of some forty years, brown hair gently greying—was not surprised by the arrival of a naked stranger, although I cannot say she was particularly pleased by it either. She grudgingly allowed me to enter her hut and warm myself by the fire. She muttered to herself.

  “Pardon? Please repeat,” I said politely in Latin—the educated traveler’s language of the time.

  Thyra appraised me a moment, then turned back to the fire. “I said”—now in slightly stiff Latin—“I sensed a glamour in recent days. But I did not expect somebody Sent. I cannot imagine why anyone wants to visit such a remote location.”

  “Would this language be easier?” I asked in Anglo-Saxon; she gave me a confused look. “Let it be Latin, then,” I hastily amended. “Are you fluent?”

  “Too fluent for the priest’s liking,” she said with a reluctant little chuckle. “If you speak slowly I can probably understand.”

  I was able to convey to Thyra our proposal: namely that young men, apparent warriors, would come and stay with her from time to time, with no other purpose than to become familiar with the local language and customs. They would be disciplined and well-behaved. After a few weeks she would Home them.

  “Pah,” she said, turning her attention back into the fire. “I do not like young men. Why not Send young women?”

  “The men could be your house-help while they are here,” I said, looking around. “Chop firewood and bring it in. Fetch water. Fix that leak,” I added, pointing. “Is that roof-beam rotting? Do you think it’s safe to wait until spring? What kind of snow-load do you get here?”

  With a dismissive wave of her hand, she grunted. “I have magic for all of that.”

  “Magic can be tiring,” I said. “If the young men were here, you could rest all the time. Order them around.”

  Thyra made an exaggerated expression of hmm-maybe-I-should-think-about-this-after-all, and after a moment nodded her head. “You say they are warriors?”

  I nodded.

  “I have no weapons for them, only some small knives and an axe for the chopping of wood.”

  “They are not here to act as warriors,” I clarified. “They are here only to learn the language.”

  “What if we require them to act as warriors?”

  That brought me up short. “Why?” I asked. “Are you at war?”

  She shook her head. “No, but there has been some concern in the village about maybe raids from boat-thugs who have been using the Dives estuary to get to the interior from the seacoast. If these young men could protect the village, this would make them more attractive guests.”

  “I can’t promise protection,” I said, “since there is no guarantee they’ll be here if such an attack happens. But you must surely agree that having a strong young man around is better than not.”

  Thyra shrugged. “It’s not bad,” she said. “Not as good as a strong young woman, though.”

  Over the course of the next few minutes, I could see her warming to the idea, and eventually, without actually having said yes, it was clear she was amenable.

  “How might you vouch for these visitors?” I asked. “Their presence will be noticed in the village.”

  Thyra shrugged and gave a dismissive wave of her hand (a sort of early medieval variant of Erszebet’s body language, now I think of it) and said, “That is easy. Much trade across the Channel, there is nothing strange about cousins, friends of friends, and that sort, showing up from Britain and Ireland. I shall say my guests are such people, from such places.”

  A few minutes more conversation, and she was willing to
actually speak the words, “Yes, I will take them” (which put my fledgling Inner Bureaucrat at ease). She even invited me to share her meal of rabbit stew with root vegetables, and to stay the night before she Homed me the following morning.

  Back at DODO HQ, I delivered my good news. Tristan and I sat at the same computer (be still my heart, I suppose) to pore over the feudal, judicial, and church chronicles of the area, seeking references to raids circa 1045. We found nothing, except one possible indirect reference to villagers who perished during altercations with bandits. It did not match Thyra’s description, nor was it chronicled officially anywhere—it was an ancillary comment in testimony given during a property dispute.

  “Well, that’s good, anyhow,” said Tristan. “Probably means I won’t encounter anything while I’m there.”

  I entered notes about Thyra’s dialect into the relevant linguistic databases, and sat with DORCCAD personnel, giving them sketches of the area for entry into their systems.

  There was some chatter about timing, conducted over ODIN—and occasionally in person, since we tried to dine with the Odas every couple of weeks. To make a long logistical issue short, it was determined that Tristan would go back to stay with Thyra four different times, for a fortnight each time (rather than going back twice for a month each—Frank Oda determined this to be stabler with Chronotron calculations, and Erszebet agreed with him).

  Tristan already knew Anglo-Saxon, and I’d been prepping him on Latin almost since we met (how can anyone with Western language interests not know Latin, FFS?). So he needed very little prep. Erszebet Sent him. Thyra had secured clothes in anticipation of his coming (he was Sent in spring).

  Thyra had also already communicated to curious villagers, priests, etc. that Tristan (her supposed kinsman) would be sojourning with her for a fortnight so they might exchange news, and that he was of mixed Danish/Anglo-Saxon descent originating from a remote part of England (Tintagel—or as they called it then, Dintagel), journeying to Normandy to seek his fortune on the tourney field. This would explain why his accent was unfamiliar and why he tended to use Britannic, Cornish, and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Since no one in the settlement had been to that part of England, they accepted the cover story.

  I KNOW THAT in the bowels of ODIN, there is an official DEDE report of Tristan’s time there, for I wrote it myself; I know also that there is an “incident report” that the well-intentioned but insufferably officious Macy Stoll required him to write as well. But I have just come into an extra measure of whale oil, and there is ink enough, and I cannot sleep from my growing anxiety, so it pleases me to recall Tristan’s telling me of his time there, and one element in particular.

  When he arrived, he was made welcome by the settlement at large, and all manner of gifts and entertainment pressed upon him. Once a level of trust was established, he asked to learn their combat styles, and the men of the settlement were pleased to show off and practice with him. It was generally limited to stick-fighting arts, as the locals were rural villagers. These sessions also allowed him to work on language immersion more fluidly, imitating not only the vocabulary but the cadence and pitch of able-bodied young males. He was not in danger of “talking like a girl,” which would have been the case if he’d mostly stayed under Thyra’s roof.

  He was Homed after two weeks (yes, it was dreadfully good to see him, and yes, I did try to catch a peek of him before he disappeared into the decontamination shower). After about ten days of downtime, he went back; another two weeks, another ten days; a third fortnight, a third rest period. During the rest periods, he was fully debriefed (usually by me) and all lessons learned were inserted into DORC’s linguistic database, so that future “Varangian Guard” candidates could bone up on their Norman prior to visiting Thyra, and learn the language that much more quickly.

  Then came the fourth and final repetition. This is the part I most like to remember him describing.

  One morning, shortly before dawn, Tristan and Thyra were awakened by suspicious noises. Tristan arose, went outside, and saw a longboat moving up the tributary toward the village center, with six men in it. He grabbed a peeled tree branch, at least an inch thick and about his own height, which he had been intending to use to build Thyra a drying rack. He ran to the village, entered the church through its narthex, and rang the bell urgently to alert the villagers. And then he stayed in the church, realizing the strangers must be coming there to steal the only thing of value in the area: a reliquary of a wrought silver cross, about a handspan across. Embedded in a decorative gold rosette in the center was a flake of white enamel, alleged by local clerics to be a fragment of a molar formerly belonging to St. Septimus of Pontchardon, an early missionary who had been martyred by the Gauls. Obviously this was of value to the would-be thieves for the metal, not the relic. They were startled by the bell as they approached the church entrance, more so because they found themselves unexpectedly face-to-face with a large man brandishing a stick.

  Three of the men, armed with an axe, a steel-tipped lance, and a seax (knife)—held Tristan at bay in the narthex while the other three ran up the aisle of the church to nab the reliquary, which lived on the altar. While there, they snatched up a few other odds and ends that had caught their eye—the candelabrum, the communion cup, etc. These booty-carriers emerged from the church first, only to find some villagers—alerted by Tristan’s ringing of the bell—waiting for them with shovels, rakes, pitchforks, and knives.

  These first intruders were lightly armed but their hands were full of loot, and they were obliged to drop the valuables in order to defend themselves. The more heavily armed men, who had been menacing Tristan, came out to join the fray. The last of these was the one with the lance. He backed toward the exit of the building while keeping the weapon leveled at Tristan . . . then pivoted toward the open door to make a fast departure.

  However, the lance got hung up in the tiny doorway, in a manner reminiscent of an early-twentieth-century slapstick film comedy, or so it always seems when Tristan is acting it out for new recruits. Seeing an opening, Tristan advanced and delivered a “pool cue” style shot to the head of the lance-man, catching him by his ear with the butt of his staff. The man sagged toward the floor and dropped his weapon. Tristan grabbed the lance, but he himself was the next person to fall victim to the cramped dimensions of the doorway, as he tripped over its high threshold on the way out and sprawled across the pavement outside (it is a hoot to see him re-enact this moment). The lance was lost (it was still dark, the sun not having risen yet), but in groping for it Tristan found himself grasping a boat oar that had apparently been carried up to the site by one of the intruders, perhaps to use as a weapon.

  The melee was moving in the general direction of the riverbank. This was a long stone’s throw from the church; the intruders struggled to fight their way through the mob of a dozen or so villagers who were haphazardly beating at them with farm implements, as though not sure if the point was to prevent them from getting back into the church or to prevent them from escaping.

  Tristan collected himself from his unintentional vaudeville routine, and caught up with the intruders as they were attempting to board the boat to make their getaway. By now, they had dropped all their booty, but nobody could see that in the dark yet. A villager grabbed the gunwale of the boat with both hands in a bid to prevent them from getting away (presumably with the reliquary). The axe-wielding intruder raised his weapon high, clearly with an eye toward cutting the villager’s fingers off.

  Tristan lunged toward them, swung his oar in a wide arc, and caught the axe-man in the gut, knocking the wind out of him and sending him sprawling back into the boat. At the same moment, the villager holding the gunwale did a belly-flop into the river. (I am trembling with suppressed mirth even now as I write this, recalling the many times I’ve seen it all acted out at office parties when Tristan’s had a few.)

  The intruders got away in their longboat. Five of the villagers sustained very superficial wounds (Thyra healed them
in an hour), and Tristan strained ligaments in his shoulder when he slammed the oar into the axe-man. It was nothing serious, but as I said, Macy Stoll ordered him to write an incident report about it. (And this was before DODO’s bureaucracy had bloated up out of control. I wonder what would happen if he did that now . . . Well, I’ll never know. Get used to it, Stokes.)

  Once the sun rose, all of the artifacts were recovered, cleaned, and restored to the church, and the village had a shared breakfast, during which the children imitated the more absurd physical moments of the brief raid. What could have been a tragedy was transformed into a playful morning.

  But if I told you the consequences of this minor skirmish, reader, you would absolutely not believe me.

  Post by Macy Stoll to LTC Tristan Lyons

  on private ODIN channel

  DAY 872 (MID-DECEMBER, YEAR 2)

  LTC Lyons, as a rule I don’t keep tabs on all of the After Action Reports on the various DEDEs, since Diachronic Operations is your department and not mine. Medical benefits, however, ARE my department. In that vein, I note that you consulted an external physician upon the conclusion of your most recent visit to the 1045 Normandy DTAP. In order for this expense to be approved, I’ll need details on the nature of the injury, whether it was sustained on the job, and why DODO medical staff were unable to deal with the problem in-house.

  Reply from LTC Lyons:

  NVM I will just eat the expense.

  From Macy Stoll:

  Your selflessness sets a brave example, but it’s not just about the money. By tracking these incidents and expenditures, we are able to optimize the planning and budgeting process, unlocking the ability to hire additional medical staff to meet the needs of our growing organization. Also, for legal reasons we need thorough documentation of all on-the-job injuries.

  From LTC Lyons: