A Country Life

CHAPTER 5 - PETER

With the rising tide and falling wind a thick fog had formed, obscuring the afternoon sun and leaving the marshes a grey, dismal place. It was dangerous, Peter knew, to carry on in these conditions. Better to halt and wait for the tide to drop and hope for the fog to go with it. The marshes were full of natural traps - deep mud in pools and steep sided tidal gullies ran across it waiting for an unwary fool to step into them, where they would be stuck in its thick, cloying embrace until the cold brown water of the incoming tide drowned them. 

There was a small rise a little way inland of the estuary's muddy bank that he had seen just before the fog closed in, so he turned towards it and the other members of the patrol followed. They had left their horses at the edge of a small copse of trees about a mile back and had carried on by foot. Taking a horse onto the marshes was folly, even on a good day. 

Peter de Vries could trace his family's history back some three hundred years, almost as far back as the time of the red death, the pan-global plague that had run rampant across Earth back in the late 22nd century. The earliest record of a de Vries in the Wessex County record was in the year 2241, some fifty years after the terrible reaping of 99 percent of all human life on Earth, but even that was likely to have been a guess made fifty years or more later by an elderly de Vries who told his story to a disciple of the Revenant Monks, who were amongst the first to begin documenting the names and histories of those rebuilding a life in the ruins of mankind. 

He knew that the original de Vries had been Dutch, and that they had escaped the horrors of the continent, coming ashore at Weymouth before making their way north and west, eventually settling at Cirencester, where Deckard de Vries, a soldier, had been one of the first members of the Wessex King's Protection. All this was written down and known. 

After that, he knew relatively little, other than at some point a later generation of peaceable de Vries had moved to Berkeley, and that since then the family had lived humble, quiet lives, not appearing to impact the communal memory at all until his father's time, when the de Vries had returned once again to a martial profession. His father had been yeoman sergeant before old Thom Hewlett, and Peter was decided that he would one day soon take up the mantle of top soldier in the Protectorate. As ambitions went, it was a start. A few years as yeoman sergeant, make a good impression, then straight to Cirencester and a place on the King's Protection. Everything he wanted depended on making that good impression. 

He turned to look at his two companions and sighed. With the Godwit brothers, good impressions were hard to come by. Peter himself strove to look professional at all times, as befitting a yeoman captain. He wore black leathers and chainmail, and his cloak was made from strips of dull brown and green material of different shades that would blend in with the surroundings if he needed to conceal his presence from anyone - 'camouflage', Thom had called it. He was tall and muscular from hours spent training with a sword, and his bright hair and chiseled features could draw a sigh from all the fair ladies in town. And a number of the un-fair ones, if truth be told, but he didn't like to dwell on that. He also tried not to acknowledge his vanity, but, he reasoned, what twenty year old man didn't suffer from a excess of self belief in his own looks?

Perhaps those two, thought Peter. The Godwit brothers only drew sighs of derision from the ladies. Jep was short and fat, Wes was tall and skinny, and they were both devastatingly ugly.  

"Jep, there's a worm poking out of your apple." Peter had stopped to wait for the brothers to catch up with him, and Jep, the first to reach him, had taken the fruit out of a pouch on his belt and had was about to bite into it.  

"Oh, thanks, Cap. 'E nearly got away." 

Peter winced with disgust as Jep pulled the wriggling maggot out of the apple and then popped it into his mouth, chewing happily before taking a bite from the half rotten apple itself.