Pagans, p.1
Pagans, page 1
Published by Moonflower Publishing Ltd.
www.MoonflowerBooks.co.uk
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Copyright © James Alistair Henry 2025
ISBN: 978-1916678019
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Interior design by Jasmine Aurora and Jack Smyth
Cover fonts: Norske, Syncro
Chapter heading font © Takuminokami
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Suffolk, UK
James Alistair Henry has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work. This is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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For Richard and Julia
– and my family, for being patient.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
SAXONS
Aedith Mercia: Detective Captain, London Police Force Homicide Division, Woden’s Cross Station. Daughter of senior politician Lod Mercia, sister of Edric, adoptive mother of Coram.
Earl-Elector Lod Mercia: Politician and clan chieftain from Mercian region (see glossary), father to Aedith and Edric, husband of Sweterun.
Coram Mercia: Adopted son of Aedith Mercia, student.
Edric Mercia: Brother of Aedith, son of Lod and Sweterun.
Sweterun Mercia: Wife of Lod, mother of Aedith.
Cheol Agapos: Sergeant in London Police Force, Woden’s Cross Station, reporting to Aedith Mercia.
Ava Naeku: Constable in London Police Force, Woden’s Cross Station.
Beocca Tancred: Major in London Police Force, Special Branch.
Odda Hengist: London Police Force Commander, Woden’s Cross Station.
Dæglaf Adamu: Lieutenant Colonel in London Police Force, Woden’s Cross Station.
‘Father’ Oswin: Teacher, Rowan Berry House.
Wigmund: Caretaker, Rowan Berry House.
Hildred Emor: Business owner.
Stithulf Hatt: Security guard.
Eawynn Wettin: Administrative assistant to Unification Summit.
Gif Denby: Tattoo artist.
Not-An-Uncle Dryer: Freelance consultant and fixer.
CELTS
Drustan of Dumnonia: Detective Inspector with Dumnonian Tribal Police Agency.
Deedra Kesair: Tribal leader, chieftain, media influencer.
Gorsedd Angwin: Tribal diplomat, ex-member of proscribed terrorist organisation.
Andraste Maol Nuadat: Independent business owner.
Fairgus Blaenu: Low-level criminal.
Conwenna Pennpras: Pharmaceutical therapist, independent consultant.
PICTS
Banba Godwin: Independent IT consultant, Woden’s Cross Station.
Extracted from Pan-African Collective Intelligence Services, Country Profiles, Factsheet: Britain
This developing nation just off the coast of the Islamic Caliphate of Southern Europe is populated by an uneasy alliance of three nation states divided by religion, culture and language: the Celts of the Tribal Lands of the West Country and Wales, the English Saxons of the East, and the Norse of the Democratic Republic of Scotland to the North, behind a heavily militarised border known as the Wall.
Of the three nations, the Norse are the most prosperous, with Eidenhaugr (Edinburgh) as the financial capital of the broader Nordic Economic Union, with Saxon England struggling to keep up, and the Tribal Lands in the West suffering from years of repression and plundering of their national resources by their neighbours.
Extracted from Lagos Economist: Yearly Global Index, current edition
As it has for the last two centuries, the Pan-African Unified States remains the world’s dominant superpower, with the Mughal Empire of India and the European Islamic Caliphate nipping at its heels.
Meanwhile the Nordic Economic Union (comprising the Democratic Republic of Scotland, Islenska, the Danelands, the Sápmi/Nynorsk/Suomi Protectorate and the Kingdom of Sverrland) prefers to focus on financial matters, while acting as a bulwark should the various squabbling nations that make up the Tsarist Conglomerate ever pull themselves together and try to expand Westward.
Further East, the Han remain ahead of their rival dynasties, but are quietly forging links with a number of weak North European countries in an attempt to establish footholds outside their traditional borders. Their desire for control over a number of coldwater ports has not gone unnoticed by the Pan-Africans.
Various superpowers have stakes in the vast natural resources of the plains, prairies and mineral wealth of the North Americas, but a series of treaties with the indigenous First Nation people there have kept a fragile balance with no one faction being allowed to take overall control.
ONE
Oladele had long dreamed of seeing one of the great English forests in the autumn. Tayo, her fiancé – no, husband, she had to get used to saying that – had been less convinced. Days before the honeymoon was booked, he was still showing her photos of sun-kissed beaches, palm trees, sailing holidays even, but she stayed firm and now here they were, half a world away, hiking under grey skies through primeval woodland. The summer had overstayed its welcome this year and though technically the season had moved on, hardly any of the leaves had begun to fall, let alone turn the brilliant reds and oranges they had been told to expect.
Tayo had begged Oladele to at least hire a local guide. Two of the guys from his office had taken a cheap flight to England for a stag week a few years ago, and the local they’d found had been amazing, apparently. He’d introduced them to the local brews, taken them on a druidic vision quest, even found them a replacement hire car when their 4x4 had broken an axle on a dirt track. But Oladele had refused.
‘We can explore the country ourselves,’ she said. ‘I don’t want some local in fancy dress who shows us all the tourist sites then goes back to his mobile home and wifi at the end of the day. Let’s get out there, have an adventure. This isn’t Lagos. This is wild!’
So they had hired a lodge deep in the woods, with a porter who cooked an evening meal for them and kept the fridge stocked with local food, every item replaced at the end of the day whether they ate it or not – although thankfully the first day’s boiled leeks never made a reappearance.
‘I can’t believe we’re only ten miles from London,’ marvelled Oladele as they strode though yet another woodland glade. Tayo mumbled something in reply, but seemed more focused on casting nervous looks around the trees. Oladele sighed. She knew he was worrying about wolves. She had tried to convince him there were no wolves left in England, but Tayo had said weren’t there plans to reintroduce them? Or maybe that was bears.
‘Also, I should have brought a thicker fleece,’ he said.
Oladele rolled her eyes – uncomfortably aware she had been doing this a lot during their honeymoon – but pushed on womanfully through brambles (she’d brought some thick gloves with her for this exact purpose) and into the next glade (or was it a dell?), a wide saucer-like depression in the forest floor with a single mighty oak at its centre.
Someone had got there before them. A man, a white man with a drooping moustache – and he was white, positively anaemic – was leaning back against the tree’s wide trunk. He wore only a tattered pair of trousers, his chest covered in tattoos, mainly black but with an interwoven design in maroon. His arms were outstretched, his head on one side, feet together. It was a curious pose. Like many locals, the man had a metal band around his neck, made from carefully twisted wire. The British didn’t have much, but they were great craftspeople.
‘I think it’s a religious thing,’ said Tayo, shading his eyes with a cautious hand. ‘We shouldn’t disturb him.’
But Oladele was already striding forward with her mobile phone held out. She would ask him first if she could take his photo, of course; it was important to be respectful of other cultures. If he said no, she would put the phone away, but maybe they could talk a little. She could do with some ancient wisdom at this point, and this local looked like he might know a thing or two.
‘Hello?’ she tried, but the man didn’t look up. As she drew closer, she realised the glints of silver at his wrists and ankles weren’t jewellery, as she’d first thought, but nails, driven into the tree through flesh and bone. His throat had been slit. What Oladele had taken to be a snaking red tattoo were rivulets of dried blood.
Oladele lowered her phone just as Tayo caught up with her and came to an abrupt halt. ‘Oh,’ he eventually said, after a long silence. ‘Will they give us some money back on the trip, do you think?’
Oladele started searching for a spot where her mobile could conceivably connect with the local police department, trying to ignore her growing suspicion that this marriage wasn’t going to last.
TWO
The black sedan jerked to a halt as the ambulance sped past, sirens wailing. It was gone in a second, a green and white blur, the familiar sign of the green apple lost in the London traffic, allowing the car to be on its way once again, the electric motor starting back up with a minimal whine.
Aedith hated the sedan, but her father had insisted, so in a petty act of defiance she had
Normally, Aedith would have put the blues and twos on and slid through in the wake of the now-departed ambulance, under the guise of escorting it, but the town car was unaccountably siren-free. It did have bullet-proof windows, but that only meant you couldn’t wind them down and yell at pedestrians. Or shoot them.
She stopped at a traffic light. As if on cue, a man slammed a hand against the car’s side window. The hand was grimy; the owner’s mismatched clothing more so. A tattooed face peered in at Aedith with drunken indignation. An abstract Wayland the Smith design, made up of interlinking circuit-board patterns, reached up the man’s face to his hairline; Wayland having been the patron spirit of choice at most IT departments a decade or so ago, although he was out of fashion these days. Probably the man had lost his job some years ago, when the Mughal Empire had swept in and bought up most of the native telecommunications industry, such as it was.
For his part, the man seemed taken aback to see not, as he must have expected, a foreign dignitary or some social-media celebrity, but a Saxon woman in her mid-thirties, blonde hair in twin braids, wearing silver rings on both arms and an expensive contemporary take on a classic shift dress. He recovered quickly and began mouthing obscenities; at least until Aedith pulled Lungpiercer out from the glove compartment and tapped the barrel against the glass, making him back up swiftly into a crowd of his contemporaries.
The light turned green. Aedith steered the sedan round a moustachioed Celtic elder in traditional robes leading his ox across the street, pointed the car’s nose towards the West End, and floored the accelerator. The sooner she got there, the sooner she could leave. Aedith hated parties.
The Meadow was a stone’s throw from London Bridge, a short walk from the King’s Palace and widely regarded as the capital’s finest hotel. For Aedith, it had been the site of family get-togethers ever since she was a child. Consequently, she hated it. Replacing Lungpiercer in the glove compartment before handing the sedan over to a valet went against every instinct she had. She soothed her grumbling spirit beast (her therapist had suggested it was a falcon, but Aedith was pretty sure he was trying to flatter her, to get in with her father, and had fired him shortly afterwards) with the notion that she was about to enter combat in the social rather than physical realm, requiring different tools entirely, but it was still huffing to itself as she showed her ID at the entrance, took a deep breath and walked into the party.
‘What idiot did your hair?’ said Deedra Kesair. ‘You should have them killed.’
Deedra wore an elegant black dress; Lombardian, possibly – the signifiers of high fashion weren’t far up Aedith’s list of priorities. Her auburn hair was pinned up high, the torc around her neck so finely wrought it was more of a ghost-like suggestion of identity than an object in its own right. The entire left side of her face was covered in swirling black tattoos, stretching down the neck and as far as one could see, which was quite far (elegant didn’t mean practical), around one of her breasts.
‘You’ve put on weight!’ said Aedith, embracing her with every evidence of delight. ‘It suits you. I like you fatter.’
Deedra pushed her away and smiled. The crooked canines Aedith remembered from school were long gone, straightened by Moorish dentistry, but somehow this made her look more, rather than less, feral.
‘Be honest,’ she said. ‘If you had to arrest three people in this room, who would you pick?’
‘That reminds me,’ said Aedith. ‘Smile as if I’m going to take your picture. Obviously, I’m not, because your freaky Indij tats would give my phone malware, but I need the cover.’
Aedith pulled the phone out of the concealed pocket of her dress and pointed it towards, if not actually at, Deedra, who gleefully pulled a variety of celebrity faces while Aedith scanned every attendee she could without making it too obvious.
‘Your father’s in the corner with some Scotch,’ said Deedra, making a ‘just seen someone I know’ face, and quite probably she had. ‘Drink and delegates.’
Aedith’s phone was going to town, harvesting faces, flashing up names and job titles faster than she had any chance of processing them. Didn’t matter, just good policy to lock down as many identities to a particular time and place as you could, when the opportunity arose. Obviously, the only people who let their phones announce their identities to all and sundry were those who had no intention of committing a crime or were powerful enough to get away with it if they did, but you never knew when the data might come in handy.
The Meadow’s thing was fusing Nordic chic with an earthier English interpretation of the afterlife: pale stone floors with elaborately carved wooden pillars, as much greenery interwoven with fairy lights as could be hung from one ceiling, and constant harp music. The hotel’s rooms were more of the same, with authentic grave urns daringly placed in every north-east alcove. Young Aedith had been convinced the urns were filled with burned dead people. Edric had tipped one out once, ignoring his sister’s screams, to see what was really inside: an empty cigarette wrapper, the crumpled receipt for room service (jollof rice and chicken), and a dead moth.
Aedith had never told Edric, but she credited his action that evening for two significant shifts in her belief system: religion was almost certainly bullshit, and trying to piece together someone’s life from scraps they’d left behind was all she ever wanted to do from that point on. She didn’t join the police for another twelve years, but mentally she was down the recruiting station there and then.
‘ELECTOR EARL LOD (MERCIA)’ noted Aedith’s phone above the bearded head of a barrel-chested man in his fifties, crammed into a black suit, handing an empty tumbler to a passing waiter and bearing down on Aedith before she could pretend she hadn’t been cataloguing the attendees of a social gathering instigated primarily for his benefit.
‘It’s been reasonable, darling,’ said Deedra, blowing an air kiss and practically skipping to the other side of the room.
‘You can’t just mingle with school friends,’ rumbled Lod, kissing Aedith’s cheek with his always-surprising delicacy. ‘Or it’s not proper mingling. You need to meet new people.’
The suit aside, Lod could have been any one of the Mercia family’s patriarchs from the past couple of thousand years. Aedith had seen the carvings: glowering eyes under a heavy brow, tangled beard and flowing hair, tattoos climbing up the neck, fingers covered with silver rings. The women were traditionally embroidered into tapestries instead, although Aedith had made her feelings very clear on that score. When Lod’s time came, however, Aedith would make sure that whichever artisanal woodworker was honoured with the commission put in a mobile phone and a data tablet loaded up with spreadsheets: two weapons that Lod had used to keep the Mercians at, or near, the top of the Saxon pecking order long after spears and axes had faded from fashion.
‘I meet new people all the time, Dad. They’re usually standing over a corpse, denying everything, but it still counts.’
Lod grinned. Half his teeth were silver, from the same source as the rings. When he died, if he ever died, they’d have to be pulled out and melted back into the family hoard. ‘How’s the boy?’
‘If he ever comes out of his room, I’ll let you know.’
‘Pffff,’ said Lod with a sly glance. ‘Teenagers.’
Aedith opened her mouth, closed it again. ‘Fine. Parade me round to show people your daughter has a real job. I know how much that means to you.’
‘Nonsense, I just want to make some introductions. Try not to arrest anyone with more than three bodyguards, it might get messy.’
‘I’m not—’ Aedith tried, but Lod was already steering her towards a robed Pan-African woman in her fifties sipping a cocktail, an equally distinguished man standing next to her with one arm around her waist.
