Okay, I’m unreliable, lazy and generally quite crap.
But I’ve been enjoying the actual GMing side of things, and the PCs seem to have been enjoying themselves as well.
Because I can only now remember the vague order in which things happen, rather than the exact sessions of play, all times of events are estimates, and apologies for any cockups.
Week 3: October 9th, 1004 AD - The Man on the Hill
The PCs spotted a hill from the highest tower of the abbey. They decided to go there.
During the day, Godwin and Matthias attempt to make ‘Greek Fire’, or naptha, using Byzantine books found in the library. Matthias fails miserably. Godwin succeeds spectacularly, for a given value of ‘succeeds’. Fortunately, he is working at a solid oaken table and is wearing a heavy woollen habit, so the blast only sears his face and hands and hurls him across the room. His iron-hard constitution saves him from severe injury, although he spends the next few weeks with rags, soaked in bear fat, wrapped around his face and hands.
God only knows why, but the PCs
again decided that travelling at night was a sensible thing to do in Dark Ages England. Luckily, they reached the hill without incident. It’s a reasonable sized hill, lightly wooded and surrounded by the graves of God knows how many long-dead Roman legionaries (20th Legion, sent here to defend against the Picts, to be precise). Ulfegar surreptitiously takes some grave dirt and slips it into one of his many pouches.
The group wait for a while. Shortly before midnight, they hear a horse’s hooves. The party do a People’s Front of Judaea and hide in bushes, up trees and behind tombstones. Expecting at any moment for a horde of pagan scum to appear, Brother Cuthred performs a quick ritual of consecration and sets up a discreet altar on the hilltop (a cross of twigs and a flat rock).
A horseman rides into the clearing at the foot of the hill and ties up his horse. They recognise the man as being Aefred. He unstraps the axe and shield from his back, removes his sword belt, slips out of his chainmail and… keeps going with the undressing. The naked noble sits at the top of the hill and starts reciting a poem:
“I sit here on this woded hille, in the blake of moon…”
Independently of one another, and just before the final two lines of the poem, Tancred and Aelfstan rush Aefred. Tancred slashes the noble’s shoulder with his shortsword while Aelfstan delivers a powerful kick to the chin that knocks him unconscious. The rest of the party emerge from hiding and think, “We’ve just stabbed and beaten a noble unconscious. Oh shit.”
After a few moments of confusion and recrimination, Aefred moans and awakens. Cuthred, being a good, compassionate, Christian, helps him sit upright. On the woded hille. In the blake of moon.
“I beseech you to show me all that is wondrous and beyond my sight!”
Aefred is beaten heavily in vain attempts to put him back to sleep, and is eventually just slung over the saddle of his horse. (Note, with a bleeding shoulder. This becomes important later…)
Then everyone gets a weird headache, as if the air pressure has suddenly shot up.
There’s a weird buzzing sound.
Cuthred’s back is torn open by something that buzzes low over the clearing. Something spindly with many limbs and bee-like wings.
They get a good look at the creature (which may well be eldritch, or perhaps even squamous) as it swoops down and tears open the shoulders of Aelfstan the guard with its three-clawed pincers.
In the confusion as the party tries to flee, Matthias goes into catatonic shock. The horse bolts, ditching Aefred the Younger into the dirt. The cultist is chanting in an unknown tongue.
Matthias is dragged up into the air by the beast, only to be rescued by Aelfstan. At least, that’s the plan. What actually happens is that Aelfstan swings his axe up, the beast darts back, and the blade slices across Matthias’s belly, the shock smashing him back to sanity and out the other side into unconsciousness.
Apparently concerned for its safety now it is under attack by an axeman and the sword-wielding Tancred, the daemon flees into the night, leaving roughly half the party still at the scene, the remainder having fled into the night.
As apothecary Brothers Godwin and Alfred struggle to save Matthias’s life (he is a few strips of muscle and fat from being disembowelled), Aelfstan continues trying to render Aefred the Younger unconscious. After a severe kicking about the head and body, the noble stops moving. The awful truth dawns, that Aelfstan and Tancred have murdered the son of the local lord. In an effort to conceal this, they strip the corpse and Aelfstan destroys its head with a few good axe strokes. His clothes, armour and weapons are buried in several locations, while the body receives its own shallow grave a few dozen feet outside the clearing surrounding the hill.
Brother Godwin takes Aefred’s signet ring, while Ulfegar takes the scrap of paper on which Aefred had written his ‘poem’.
The following morning, the party reaches Rikby, carrying the still unconscious Matthias. Ulfegar the heretic, having fled during the daemon’s attack, meets them at the bridge across the river dividing Danish and Saxon lands.
Immediately handing the cleric over to Father Harald, the Danish priest, the PCs meet Odric, the farmer who told Brother Reduald about the lights in the sky close to Easter. Odric can add little to what he already told Reduald, except that it was he who found the body of Godfrid, the farmer from Salden. He had been walking on the north bank of the river, a month ago, when he spotted the remains amongst rocks on the south bank. He tells them that Godfrid had been hacked apart with a sword.
Brother Cuthred decides that, for some reason, he does not trust Odric, and puts him in the “Satan Worshipper” category of NPC. Rather than take immediate action, the party decides to leave Odric for later.
Over the week or so that the party remain in Rikby, Matthias recovers partially from his injuries, but now has a deep fear of insects and develops the delusion that insects cannot enter holy ground. He remains within Rikby Church until the party returns to Salden.
Brother Godwin also has another dream about the naked woman with no navel. He is walking in a beautiful garden, although grey-skinned things that look like shrivelled female corpses are creeping through the trees, just at the edge of his field of vision.
