Pilgrims

By Peter Lucy

Plunged back into the enchanting yet perilous realm of Empire, Gwin finds herself at the forefront, battling not only for her survival but also for the lives of her companions. Cast into a treacherous world vastly different from her own, this novice commander faces the daunting task of moulding a disparate group of outcasts into a cohesive fighting force.

United in their cause, they confront a brutal adversary, unravel a deadly plot, and seek to amend a grave injustice. This gripping tale is a blend of courage, intrigue, and the unyielding pursuit of justice, as Gwin and her warband navigate the tumultuous and violent landscape of the Empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035826117

Peter Lucy

Peter Lucy is a writer and historian living in Somerset, UK. He has had a lifelong interest in historic arms and armour and enjoys live-action roleplay and costumed historic interpretation. He has a master’s degree in history from De Montfort University and a PhD from Cranfield University. He has served on operations as an army reservist and has worked extensively in the film industry.

Book preview

I

Three weeks of lockdown. The film industry in the UK had been in overdrive, productions queuing up, studios and new stages springing up everywhere—then the pandemic struck and lockdown and it stopped like it had hit a wall. How much longer could this possibly go on for—weeks, months even?

Gwin was bored and out-of-sorts; she was trying, unsuccessfully, to manage the transition from ultra-high pressure, super-stress film job to enforced and open-ended idleness and isolation. Covid was ruining everything. It looked like the first big live-action roleplay festival event of the year would have to be cancelled and some people were even saying that the second one might have to be cancelled too.

Gwin hoped not. She had attended for the first-time last year and the experience had been, quite literally, magical. She had been transported into a new thrilling and dangerous world and occupied a character wildly different from everyday Gwin.

Players called the break between the last event of the year and the first event of the next year, the Long Dark, six winter months that seemed to go on forever. They filled the time with preparations—commissioning new outfits for their characters, investing in armour and weapons, pouches and potion bottles.

There were also player events to fill the time, small-scale happenings organised by the players themselves. Some were quite elaborate and complicated, numbering a hundred or more attendees and might be sanctioned, playing into the narrative of the main 3,000-person game. Some were little more than a few friends meeting-up in-character for a drink. Gwin’s friend Beth had tried to get her to go to two player events because it was an ideal way for Gwin to develop a new character.

It hadn’t worked. Gwin couldn’t go, because she couldn’t build a new character. Her Empire character Thaddeus was dead, emphatically dead, but she couldn’t find closure. She opened up her player page on the website and built new characters—but every time she stopped and read what she had written and realised she had rewritten Thaddeus by another name. If this had been a story, Gwin thought, it probably would have said Thaddeus haunted her dreams.

Gwin remembered it was a story—something she was still coming to terms with—but Thaddeus didn’t haunt her dreams. At least not the ones she could remember. Except one, she had been standing behind a vast crowd that was moving away from her. She saw Thaddeus, just a flash of white-blonde hair, but she knew it was him. He too was walking away from her and she followed, because there was something she needed to say, but he was swallowed up by the crowd and she lost him.

She woke up suddenly to the alarm beeping, feeling an intense sadness, which haunted her all that day. She had rubbed her chest below her breastbone, where the blade of the poisoned dagger had been driven home and tried to tell herself that Thaddeus was just Gwin in costume and he didn’t exist. Except he wasn’t and he did.

It was the afternoon and dull outside; she was still in her pyjamas and she had played about as much Animal Crossing as she could manage. Even the peppermint chocs she had treated herself to on her masked-up, hand-sanitised, socially distanced trip to the supermarket were flavourless and disappointing. The AC Gwin was in her museum, the real Gwin decided to make the effort and put some clothes on, otherwise the day and night were going to blur into each other. She was already losing track of time. ‘If you’re listening, now would be a really good time for an adventure,’ she shouted at the ceiling. Again.

Gwin slid open the door of her wardrobe and reached in. As she did, she realised that there was no back to the cupboard and light was flooding in where the MDF back panels should have been. She snatched back her hand as if she had been bitten and stood staring at the piece of slightly wonky flatpack furniture. And that was the point—this wasn’t a vast Edwardian armoire with a carved lion on the front, it was chipboard and medium-density fibreboard and it didn’t even touch the wall, being up against the skirting. She slid the door open as far as she could on its plastic runners, pushed the jackets and dresses apart and saw trees.

Seriously? She ducked under the clothes rail and stepped through, to find herself in a dripping wet forest, with a frameless rectangle behind her through which she could see her bedroom behind a screen of hanging clothes and a scatter of shoes. The forest was soaked and storm-lashed, but this seemed to be the calm after. She took two paces forward and the rectangle of bedroom abruptly vanished and she was standing on wet leaf litter in her sheepskin slippers, wearing stripy pyjamas and a dressing gown.

‘You absolute bastard!’ she shouted at the sky.

Gwin was now on the horns of a dilemma, the question was whether to stay there and wait for the wardrobe portal to open again or move forward into the unknown wood, following whatever narrative imperative was supposed to be driving her on. She was tempted to sit and sulk until he opened the portal again, but in her heart, she knew she would never live with herself if she didn’t see where this was taking her. But pyjamas? She hated him for that.

‘It’s going to be dark soon. I’m going to try to get a fire going—unless you’ve got somewhere else you need to be?’

Gwin almost jumped out of her skin. The voice came from behind her; she turned and saw a bedraggled figure in a wet robe holding an armful of sticks.

‘Where am I?’

‘Therunin.’

‘Oh, perfect.’ The two stood staring at each other for a moment. ‘I’m Gwin. May I join you at your fire?’

‘For sure. I’m Guardi—Brother Lazarus.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘I’m sorry—have we met?’

‘No, but if you’re the Lazarus who used to have a helmet with magpie wings on, I knew a friend of yours.’

‘Yes, that was me, once. Who do we both know?’

‘Guardian Thaddeus.’

Lazarus smiled, ‘Yes indeed! Is he well?’

‘No, actually he’s dead.’

Lazarus stood for a moment, stunned. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Certain. I was there.’

‘You two were close?’

‘Very.’

‘Then I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘You too. You’re thinking about the company and going back, aren’t you?’

Lazarus looked at Gwin appraisingly. ‘Yes. How do you know?’

‘You can’t go back. They have to make their own way, that Lazarus is gone, you left him behind.’

‘Yes. You’re right, of course. I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a shock. Strange coincidence us meeting like this though.’

‘Nope, it’s absolutely not and I strongly suspect it’s going to get stranger.’

Lazarus looked up at the sliver of sky visible through the trees. Already the shadows beneath the forest canopy were thickening towards an impenetrable gloom. ‘It’s going to be dark soon—we had best get the fire lit, there’s an old charcoal burners’ camp, I’ve built a shelter of sorts.’

Lazarus had repaired a small lean-to, built under the roots of a huge fallen oak. In the hollow left by the fallen tree, they were sheltered from the wind and the light of their fire wouldn’t show. The lean-to was framed with branches and thatched with bracken.

Lazarus had piled more bracken inside, to make a bed. He started to break the wood he had collected and build a small fire. He pulled a piece of dried bracket fungus from his bag and teased out some fibres that he set as tinder. Gwin took a few of the drier sticks and, borrowing Lazarus’s knife, whittled them so that they were covered in curls of thin wood that would easily take a flame. She had absolutely no idea how she knew to do that, but Lazarus grunted with satisfaction and worked them into the fire he was building.

‘Wood’s quite dry,’ he said. ‘I only took dead branches off the trees—nothing off the ground.’

He took a piece of flint and struck it a few times with an iron striker until sparks started to glow in the fibrous tinder. He lifted the little bundle of sticks and kindling cradled in his hands and gently blew. The tiny fire caught, he put it back in the hearth and gradually added material as it gained in strength and heat. ‘We best keep it small,’ said Lazarus. ‘We’ve no idea who else is in these woods.’

It was a little fire, but it made all the difference and they sat on piled bracken and warmed their hands and their toes.

‘I don’t recognise your clothing,’ said Lazarus.

Gwin shook her head. ‘It’s not what I would have chosen—I wasn’t expecting to be camping tonight.’

Lazarus grinned at her, ‘You just mysteriously found yourself in the middle of a forest in Therunin?’

‘Actually—and stupid as it sounds—yes. Exactly that.’

‘Magic, I expect, then,’ said Lazarus.

‘Undoubtedly.’

Lazarus rummaged in his bag, he produced a water skin and a cloth-wrapped bundle of dried meat and a few twice-baked hardtack biscuits. ‘The snares are all empty, this is our dinner I’m ’fraid.’

‘I couldn’t, that’s your rations.’

‘Don’t be daft. We’ll share, then see what tomorrow brings us.’

They soaked some of the tough meat and three rock-hard biscuits, boiling them in a little pot hung over the fire of sticks and ate the pottage or whatever it was they had made, taking turns with Lazarus’s spoon.

‘Remember,’ murmured Gwin, staring into the flickering flames, ‘there is no spoon.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ said Lazarus. ‘I wasn’t expecting to entertain.’ He looked at her apologetically.

‘Sorry, no, you’re very kind to share. They were just random thoughts from a different world.’

The two were quiet and cautious as darkness enfolded them and they lay down to sleep back-to-back under Lazarus’s cloak and a pile of bracken, with Gwin nearest the little fire. It was a cold, miserable night. In a chilly, washed-out dawn, they coaxed the fire back into life and built it up a bit.

‘Lazarus,’ said Gwin, picking pieces of bracken out of her dressing gown, ‘where are you actually headed?’

Lazarus looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t rightly know. I just felt I had to walk away from everything and that’s what I did. I’ve no idea what comes next. Pretty stupid, eh?’

Gwin pondered for a bit, ‘No, this is heading somewhere. We’re heading somewhere.’

‘On that subject, where are you from? I’ve never seen clothes like your’n.’

‘Somewhere very far away, but I’ve spent some time in Holberg and the White City.’

‘Really? That’s where I’m from, that’s where our chapterhouse is.’

‘I know, I was there with Thaddeus.’

‘Ah, I see. Do you mind if I ask you what happened to him? He meant a lot to me.’

‘There was a conspiracy. He got involved. The Exarch had him killed.’

‘Because he was in a conspiracy?’

‘Because he was in love.’

‘With you?’

‘No, with a couple of Leaguers. The Exarch felt he couldn’t be trusted.’

‘And who killed him?’

‘The Leaguers.’

Lazarus looked at her blankly.

‘It’s a long story. When we’re warm and dry, I’ll tell you all of it. But you know the background, don’t you? The conspiracy, that’s why you left, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly Gwin jumped up, ‘LOOK, look! There must be a road—there’s someone coming!’ Gwin pointed. The top half of a figure was visible intermittently through the trees. He was toiling along, pulling a cart with a tall fabric cover. ‘Let’s go and talk to him.’

Before Lazarus could say anything, Gwin was dashing through the bracken towards the lonely figure. She reached the rough track and skidded to a halt.

‘YOU!’

‘Hello,’ said the armourer. ‘Glad to see you’re up.’

‘Wet, cold, insect-bitten and hungry. You could so easily have waited until morning!’

‘It seemed an opportunity for some bonding time.’

‘You really are impossible!’ Gwin was too wet and cold and tired to even try to articulate her frustration. She just wanted things to move along. ‘And—a wardrobe?’

‘Just as well you don’t have a picture of a sailing ship or we’d have had the ceiling down in the flat downstairs.’

‘No lamppost.’

‘No, but we both once worked with an SFX tech called Mr Tumnus though.’

‘Did we?’

‘It was a nickname, but yes.’

Lazarus had followed Gwin at a distance and regarded the armourer warily. ‘You two know each other then?’

‘Sadly, yes,’ said Gwin, who was hungry and grumpy.

The armourer threw back the canopy on his handcart and started to unload bundles of clothing and armour. ‘Lazarus—this is for you. I’m afraid the old magpie helmet Lazarus is gone, so here is a set of armour for a cataphract.’

‘Do we know each other?’

‘From a distance.’

Lazarus looked at the armour dubiously. ‘It’s not like any cataphract armour I’ve seen.’

‘No, here it’s more like Varushkan or Wintermark armour, but in Gwin’s world, that’s what cataphracts wore. You may find it more useful than Highborn plate armour. There’s clothing and a gambeson and I made you a new sword.’

Lazarus took the sword and drew the scabbard off the blade. He whistled appreciatively, ‘Pattern welded?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a proper sword.’

‘Yes.’

Gwin was impatient. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any food in that cart?’

‘There’s a ham, a fresh loaf, some butter and cheese and there’s wine in the skin.’

‘No mustard?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

Gwin sighed theatrically, then took Lazarus’s knife, rummaged amongst clothing and armour, found the food and started constructing some huge ham and cheese sandwiches.

The armourer held out a bundle of clothes to Lazarus. ‘Time to get dressed and get that armour on, soldier.’

Lazarus shook his head, ‘No, I’m a pilgrim now.’

‘No, Lazarus, you’re not. We both know you’re exactly what you always were—a warrior. Now get dressed and I’ll sort out Gwin.’

‘Oh no!’ said Gwin and waved the knife at the bulging sandwiches, ‘Eat these first.’ She turned to the armourer. ‘I made you one, goodness knows why, I’m so cross!’ She took a big pull of wine and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then passed the skin to Lazarus.

Lazarus took a pull of wine, stoppered the skin and put it back on the cart, then shrugged off his pilgrim robe, so he was standing in his undertunic and five-buckle fighting boots.

‘Kept the boots then?’ said the armourer.

‘I’m not really the sandal type.’

Gwin eyed Lazarus as she ate her sandwich. He was quite muscly—all that sword fighting and so on. Lazarus pulled on some tight-legged black wool hose and tied the drawstring, then a plain black tunic. There was a black war skirt, heavy cloth in quilted sections, to protect his legs and a short, light gambeson or quilted coat of wool fabric between two layers of linen. Then came a cuirass of steel scales rivetted to a black sleeveless leather jerkin.

Lazarus regarded it with distaste. ‘I don’t really hold with scale. All the weight of mail, but you can push a blade up between the scales.’

‘Try it,’ said the armourer. ‘It’s better protection than people think. You can always get rid of it—but you’ll find it flexible, more comfortable than plate.’

Lazarus pulled the cuirass over his head. Gwin passed him his sandwich and did his buckles up while he ate. The armourer pulled out some armour that covered the arm from shoulder to wrist, made of mail and slim overlapping plates of steel.

‘I had fun with those,’ said the armourer. ‘They’re really manicae like the ones Roman gladiators and legionaries wore.’

Gwin wrinkled her nose, ‘Arms like Bender the robot.’

‘Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.’

‘It was a pile of bracken. And I got bitten.’

Gwin buckled on the manicae, Lazarus juggling his sandwich from hand to hand as she dealt with each arm in turn. There were steel tassets to protect Lazarus’s thighs and greaves, of combined plate and mail, for his lower legs. Lazarus finished his sandwich in time for the armourer to slip the baldric of the new sword scabbard over his head.

‘No belt?’ asked Lazarus.

‘No sword belt,’ said the armourer. ‘You’ll find this less restricting. There’s a thin belt to hold your pouches and purse, though.’

Gwin slipped Lazarus’s pouch and purse onto the new belt and then passed it around his waist under the cuirass and buckled it.

‘Nearly there,’ said the armourer and pulled out a large oval shield in a weatherproof protective cover of thin leather. ‘This is quarter-inch limewood boards, covered with linen and edged with rawhide. Light and strong—lighter than your old shield. It has an iron boss and you can sling it on your back with the guige. And this is your new helmet. No wings, but you do get a plume.’

Lazarus held up the helmet. It was a simple domed shape, made up of iron sections rivetted inside a frame. On the top was a fitting holding a long black plume. Lazarus teased it out with his fingers.

‘Dyed unicorn tail,’ explained the armourer. ‘Horsehair is just unobtainable here.’

Fixed to the front of the helmet was an iron piece like a half mask, with angled eye holes. All the way around the lower edge of the helmet hung a curtain of chainmail, which even extended to hang under the mask-like eye guard. Lazarus rolled up the mail, placed the helmet on his head and let the mail fall. It completely obscured his face and spread out across his shoulders, he reached underneath and fastened the chin strap.

Gwin stared at him. ‘I wish you could see what you look like. It’s seriously intimidating.’

‘It’s not what I’m used to,’ said Lazarus dubiously, from behind the mail aventail of the helmet.

‘Your turn,’ said the armourer, turning to Gwin. Lazarus fiddled with the chinstrap and took his helmet off.

Gwin was getting cold, she hugged herself and stamped her feet.

‘As you weren’t dressing as someone else, I was tempted to go down the full fantasy armour route—you know, steel heels and a couple of jelly moulds—’

‘I hope you didn’t or you’re going to need the services of a really good proctologist.’

The armourer smiled. ‘No, I reckon we had it pretty much sorted before, I just swapped out the butted mail for proper rivetted links and a real gambeson. The rest is what you wore at Anvil last year.’

Gwin pushed past him and grabbed a linen undertunic, threw off the dressing gown and pyjama top and slipped the undertunic over her head. Unlike Lazarus’s simple rectangular undershirt, it was shaped to her body and had ties at the side, which the armourer adjusted. ‘Should be comfortable, it’s a Lengberg shift.’

‘Holberg here, I suppose,’ said Gwin. She already felt less silly and out-of-place and she was curious, because she had never dressed in the female clothes of this world.

‘It probably feels quite different without the binder or tape or whatever, but you can always take some local advice. It’s a bit outside my area of expertise.’

‘If there are problems, I’ll trouble you for a sports bra.’

Lazarus passed her a black tunic and some hose, which had sewn on feet. She looked at them askance.

The armourer noticed her expression. ‘It’ll make your turn shoes last longer and socks aren’t really a thing here. You can cut them off and use foot cloths if you prefer.’

She was past worrying and dropped the pyjama bottoms and stood on top of her slippers to pull on the hose, tightening up the waist tie. Already she was feeling much better and the sandwich and a good swallow of wine were working their magic too. The new outfit was actually rather warm and comfortable, the thin wool tights—because that’s really what they were—slid easily into her soft medieval turn shoes, which she had discovered were called that because they were cut and stitched and then turned inside-out to be worn with the stitching on the inside.

Gwin pulled on the black tunic, as Lazarus shook out the gambeson and held it ready for her. She felt like she was climbing into it, rather than wearing it it was so new and stiff. She did up the ties and the armourer slipped her new hauberk over her head. The weight of the chain-mail hitting her shoulders felt like someone was trying to hammer her into the ground. ‘I need my belt.’

While Gwin pulled a plain linen surcoat over her hauberk, the armourer slipped her sword scabbard onto a belt and passed it to her and she buckled it on, quite tight. There were also two pouches on the belt, the big shell-shaped one and the little coin purse. She would look later to see if it still had bread in it. She pulled her hauberk up inside the belt like Beth had shown her back in her reality, so some of the weight of the steel links was taken on her hips. There was the familiar bundle of her fitted greaves and vambraces—leg and arm armour. The armourer unwrapped them.

‘I had to polish these all over again. You didn’t oil them,’ he chided.

‘I’m sorry. I’m not good at that sort of thing.’

Lazarus was examining the armour and shook his head.

‘You’ll have to grip her,’ said the armourer. ‘If her new sword gets rusty, I’ll be very displeased.’

Gwin pulled her sword from its sheath. Like Lazarus’s sword, the blade had been etched to reveal the patterns where the red-hot metal had been twisted and hammered over and over so that the blade was woven from strands of differing natures of iron and steel, some strong and flexible, some hard and sharp. ‘It’s beautiful!’

‘May I?’ asked Lazarus and took the sword from her. He swung it, feeling its heft. ‘It’s superbly balanced—awfully light, though.’

‘Gwin liked Thaddeus’s sword, but she’s never going to have his upper body strength, so I kept the weight right down. You can get away with it because it’s principally for stabbing, not cuts.’

Lazarus flipped the sword round and handed it back to Gwin, hilt first, rested over his left forearm. Gwin took it and did the spinning thing she had discovered she could do at Anvil, then made cuts to the left and right, then spun the sword backwards into its scabbard.

‘Thaddeus taught you to do that, didn’t he?’ said Lazarus, that was his trick.

Gwin nodded, but wondered, because she had never seen Thaddeus do that move. The armourer passed her a covered shield, like Lazarus’s, but smaller. ‘When you’re walking, put the guige—the shoulder strap—over your shoulder and let it hang