'THE RELIC HUNTERS' - A NEW STORY
An exclusive, never-before-published story, by me. Happy Hallowe'en
A couple of Hallowe’ens back I wrote a short medieval ghost story, which was published in 2021 as The Tale of the Tailor and The Three Dead Kings. This year I was going to write another one, but other stuff (the impending US release of Essex Dogs, the podcast, a new TV show, a new novel) has got in the way. However, I wanted to put something out for all my loyal Substack subscribers.
So I went through my archive of unpublished work, and found this. I wrote it about five years ago. It’s never been edited, but it’s in okay shape. It’s not exactly a ghost story, but it concerns the dead. And it’s extremely grotesque from start to finish, which seems to me to be good enough for Hallowe’en these days.
The plot is fairly loosely adapted from the first story in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s the tale of a bad guy who goes to a foreign city and dies. His death creates a problem for his hosts - some other bad guys. But he gets them off the hook by means of an audacious trick.
Boccaccio called his antihero Ser Cepparello - which sort of means Little Jimmy, but could also mean Little Log/Stump. I’ve played up the bawdiness of that entendre in my version, changing it to a more obvious English pun. In Boccaccio there’s another level of punning still, which involves mistranslation between Italian and French and means his name could sound like Little Rosary. But I didn’t care to work that in.
Okay. Enjoy the story. And trigger warning: it’s a story about scumbags and lowlife, there’s lots of swearing and a fair bit of sexual humour, and it’s definitely unsuitable for kids.
THE RELIC HUNTERS
by Dan Jones
© 2022
1
Little Dick ate sweetmeats with his mouth open. There was a queasy yellow to his face. He dropped crumbs. He scratched. He grunted at the servants. He pointed his mug at Simone and cocked his head: more wine.
A dew of sweat was gathering on his bald top lip.
Simone looked at Ludovico and sighed. Pisans.
They had spent the morning in the suburbs, minding their houseguest as he made his collections, ending up as usual in the stewhouse where Little Dick flicked the florins he collected for the organisation at preening boys in undershirts and girls with crooked teeth.
Simone poured the thin red liquid into Little Dick's proffered cup and wondered how long he would be staying. The summer was coming in and the streets had already started to stink. He and Ludovico had their own business to attend. Do the work. Get out to the cleaner air in the mountains before the August sickness came. At this rate they were going nowhere. Little Dick glared at them and drained another draught.
Across the city church bells began to ring.
2
That afternoon they went out to make more collections, trudging through the streets, kicking in doors and threatening whoever needed reminding of their obligations. For the most part people were at home. It was the feast-day of St Felix - an excuse for the city to shut down and a timely moment for its underlife to suck up a visit from Little Dick the Pisan.
They rounded a corner as the day’s heat was waning with the turn of the afternoon, and ran into a small parade of citizens droning psalms and waving homemade images of Felix.
Ludvocio and Simone stepped to the side of the road to make way. As they moved, Little Dick eyed the revelers and sneered: 'In Pisa we do this like we mean it. In Pisa you would see more men than this lining up to piss outside the church.'
He shook his head. 'Provençal finnochi'.
Simone watched his brother tense. Ludo worried about everything. He worried for the pair of them, and of course he worried about Little Dick.
He knew what Ludo was thinking. It was all very well helping with the organisation's collections, but harbouring their agents was a serious breach of city law. The more Little Dick walked the streets cursing the people for their pieties, extracting money with menaces, fucking lowlife and playing dice for money that wasn’t his, the more Ludovico foresaw disaster. Little Dick was supposed to be operating quietly, and they were supposed to be keeping him quiet. The way things were going, they were heading for discovery, recrimination, a mob with hooks and fire arriving to tear their house down and put nooses round their necks.
Then Little Dick would see what a Provençal parade looked like, thought Simone: when they were dragged to the gallows on the back of a cart.
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