Haven

by Adam Roberts

  A large spider’s-web stretched from bough to trunk, frozen solid: the centre a hexagonal badge of whitework from which radiated a spread of kinked and angled needles of white linked with sharp lined crossbars, like an arachnid diagram crocheted in white.

  Sometimes, before he had one of his fits, Davy could sense something tingling or gathering in the recesses of his brain. A sort of dissipated tingling of intensities, as though some mighty insight were gathering on the edge of comprehension—the key to the cosmos, perhaps, waiting to reveal itself. As he came out of the woodland and onto the clear brow of the hill, Davy felt something like that. The sun, low in the east, shone right in his face. Below him a great hump of shadow, cast by the heaped Chiltern highlands opposite, bulged over the flat lands and the flooded plains of the west. Towards the edge of this huge darkness was Didcot, a town long since under water. The tops of its blocky towers and old church steeples stood proud of the flood and shone bright in the sun.

  He scanned the whole scene. To the west the sky was butterfly-wing-blue, incongruously summery in the freezing air. Shielding his eyes to look east, the horizon over the brow of the opposite hills underpinned pale lemon and beige suffused in pink, and the sun a blob of red wine shining. The whole curve of the Thames was white as a blanched rib bone—completely frozen over. Davy had never seen anything like it in his life. He stared, amazed at the beauty of it all. His heart hammered with it. Could beauty alone bring on an epilepsy in him?

  Maybe it could.

  Maybe he could hold it back, though. Sometimes he was able to.

  The cows were grunting unhappily, and they were not feeding. One lowered its huge head, lifted it again. “Come on girls,” Davy called. “Fill your boots. Your hooves, I should say.” He kicked at various clumps of taller grass, ice scattering like sparks, but the cows just stood. Vacuous animals. They must be hungry, why wouldn’t they eat? “What do you want me to do, light a fire?”

  “I for one would applaud a fire, this cold morning,” said the stranger.

  Davy turned and saw him—a tall man, old, dressed all in leather with a scarf tied under his chin and over his head, and a hat on top. He was standing a few yards away, and yet Davy could see no footprints in the frosted grass leading to his position.

  “Good morning good sir,” Davy said, or rather squeaked, and his head buzzed and his balance tipped up, and for a moment he thought he could even see the great black feather wings unfurl from the stranger’s shoulder blades. He almost fell down, and had to put a foot out to prevent slipping over. Dizzy. But then the buzzing receded and the rainbow sparks shrunk in intensity and he looked again. It was just an old man, out early. A stranger.

  “Something strange about your speech, boy,” said the man.

  “I could say the same of you, sir,” Davy replied, emboldened by who knows what—his near-miss fit maybe. “I can’t say I can place your accent.”

  “You speak careful,” noted the stranger, “and there’s a hiss at the edge of your words. Not a trouble with your teeth, I think?”

  “My tongue, sir, has a notch in its end,” said Davy. Because the stranger was standing with the rising sun behind him it was hard to make out details. He was carrying a pack, though, and a tube poked from this. In itself, this meant little, for it was a rash stranger who walked the countryside unarmed. But Davy glanced at his cows nonetheless. If the stranger decided to take one, what could he do?

  “A notch, did you say? Was it cut out for thieving, maybe?”

  “No sir!”

  “I’m messing with you, youngster,” said the stranger, and he laughed a little laugh, phlegm audibly vibrating in his throat. “I heard all about your forked tongue. You’re Davy, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t see as how you can know me, sir, since I don’t know you,” Davy returned, a little more boldly.

  “I’ve been here a few days, chatting with your neighbours. You’re right, my lad: my accent betrays me. I’m from the North.”

  “Oxford?”

  Again the gurgly laugh. “Further north than that. Now, Davy.” The stranger stretched out his arm and pointed east. “What can you tell me about that place?”

  Davy, uncertain about what he was being asked, said, “Chilterns, you mean?”

  “I mean a particular part of it. I mean Benson.”

  Davy looked where the old fellow was pointing. “You mean Rafbenson?”

  “I mean Rafbenson, very particularly.”

  “But why ask me, sir? I’ve never been.”

  The Thames skirted the Hill, turning in a broad arc as its course changed from running east to running south. At this point the flow was wide and fast, and crossing it was difficult even in a boat. There was a chain ferry at Goring to the south; but that cost money, and to travel seven miles down there and then seven miles back north only to stand on the far bank and look west at your own Hill would be a strange way to waste your time and your cash. The alternative was to take a boat north-west into the flooded land, and work your way across less rapid waters round north and east. But there was rarely a call to go east. As far as Davy was concerned the Chilterns might have been France. Or the Moon.

  He’d heard of Rafbenson, of course. It was supposed to be one of the old sites, where the mechanised armies of the world pre-Sisters had stored their machines. It was set in a declivity in the western flanks of the Chiltern hills, and by a quirk it was a location that got colder than anywhere else in the whole country—a microclimate of high land, said Ma. An ancient curse left over from the warriors of the vanished age according to Old Jeff.

  Jeff said he’d been there once, as a young man, and that the whole compound was deserted, yet pristine—protected by malign charms from the decay and overgrowth that had claimed the rest of the pre-Sisters world. Ma rebuked him for his crazy superstition, but Jeff had shaken his head, firm, and repeated that he knew what he knew. When Davy pressed him, Jeff had said, “They have caverns beneath, and in the caverns are… in those caverns can be found…” That was Jeff all over. No matter how many times Davy cried, “Are what, Jeff? What are in the caverns? What’s down there?” Jeff only looked shrewdly at him, and touched the side of his nose with one thumb-knuckle.

  “I’ve only heard stories,” said Davy to the stranger.

  “Stories of war machines. Yes?”

  Davy looked past the stranger, across the river valley: the forested uplands of the Chiltern Hills crusty with white frost. Where the sun was yet to penetrate, the mist patched out swathes of the landscape. It was too cold for birds to fly.

  “Caverns beneath an ageless building,” said Davy. He did not mean to say this. He did not want to talk to the strange man at all. But something drew the words from him.

  Something was awry with the whole encounter. Davy lifted his switch, and looked again at the cows. If they weren’t feeding, there was little point in keeping them up on the hill; and if this stranger—who hadn’t even given Davy his name—wasn’t planning on stealing one of the cows he was very likely planning something else nefarious. A shiver of fear went through Davy. Fear, or cold, or both together.

  “I’ll be taking my cows home now, sir.”

  “Go home,” agreed the stranger. “You’ll find your priest there—Annie, she’s called, I think? She’s doing her rounds, and announcing that Christmas has come at last.”

  Despite his increasing sense of unease, this made Davy’s heart leap a little. Christmas! Naturally it was exciting. And, suddenly he wanted to be back at home: warmth, family. Home.

  But now the stranger was pulling off his gloves, and tucking them one after the other into his greatcoat pockets. Underneath the gloves were more gloves: fingerless wool ones.

  “Davy,” he said. “I want to tell you something before you go. Before you go home.”

  “Home,” Davy repeated, staring at the stranger like a mouse incapable of fleeing a cat.

  “Yes. It’s about Benson, you see. It’s about what’s hidden at Benson. What’s there is ve
ry important, my lad. It’s very, very important—do you see?”

  “I see,” said Davy, although he didn’t. The tingling was starting again, low down at the back of his skull. The green-tinted white of the surrounding fields and the pale sky above began to spume outwards with rainbow hues. He angled up his cattle switch in one hand, and grasped the end of it with the other. He held tight. Like the handlebars of a bike. The world hummed.

  “Very important for the future of this land. Of this world. You see things, don’t you? Visions.” With his bare fingers, the stranger was unbuttoning his outer coat. Top button. Next one down. Third button. Fourth.

  “Visions,” murmured Davy.

  “You’ve seen the great head flying through the air, high as the clouds. Yes? You’ve seen visions of the sealed room under Benson. You’ve seen a lot. Well, my young friend, I want it—I want what’s in that room.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Harp and carp, Davy my boy, and you just come, come with me.”

  The stranger flung open his coat and the tails flapped and snapped and, without any kind of jolt or sense of transition, they blossomed into mighty black-feathered wings, two filled arches of darkness flanking his form, and the sky streamed with colour, and voices babbled up like floodwater all around him. The last thing Davy saw before consciousness jumped out of his head and fled away was the stranger taking the first step towards him.

  Chapter Two

  THEY CALLED HIM Hat because he always wore a hat. Sometimes they called him Hat the Boat, because he had a boat. They didn’t call him anything else, because, frankly, they didn’t often have occasion to talk to him, or about him. He kept himself to himself, and rarely walked the land, and he was happy with that, and doubtless they were happy about that too, or would have been happy if it ever crossed their minds.

  Hat’s was a flat bottom barge. Hat carried whatever people paid him to carry, down the Thames as far as Marlow, and up the Thames to Goring and sometimes a little beyond, to where the river widened into the great lake and marshland stretched below Oxford. He didn’t venture any further north or east than those two termini for a good reason: his mode of passage was not a motor, but a hand-winch. The way it worked was as follows: Hat tied a hundred-metre metal cable to a tree or other bankside firmness, and then manually cranked the boat up along it. It was a painstaking but reliable mode of proceeding, slow enough when moving against the current, but steady. He had little competition. Few boats wanted to waste what fuel they had going upstream, fighting the strong downflow push of the Thames, especially after the Monsoon. Sails were no good, oars were hopeless—although some strong lads made a bit of money delivering letters and such upstream by canoe, the sheer physical effort of it wore out the strongest, nearly killed the weaker ones. Even beasts of burden could make no headway, hauling boats. But Hat could: he tied the boat by steel to a strong tree and then, taking as long as it took, winched the whole thing upriver, one hundred metres at a time. “You could walk it quicker,” people said, which was true (and which was why he rarely acted as postman). But as he would have told them, if he was a telling-people-things kind of person, you can’t carry twelve hundredweight of potatoes, or coal, or spare parts, by foot.

  He was known, and he was reliable.

  He had a code-lock on the winch, and without the winch the barge was useless. Once, years ago, a group of leery lads had tried to steal his boat—had in fact stolen it, technically. They’d waited until he hopped onto the bank and then come at him with guns out. “We’re having your boat,” they said. It was autumn, and the boat was full of cobbed corn from Wooburn. Hat had just stood there, on the bank, and the lads had jumped onto the boat laughing at how easy it was. But then they realised they couldn’t operate the winch without the code, and without the winch the boat was a dead weight. So they hopped onto the bank again and said, “What’s the code, hatty-man?” He said, “I won’t tell you.” They threatened him with their guns, and one of them slapped him a few times, but he just shrugged. In the end they’d filled bags with cobs, making barely a dent in the cargo.

  “You know who’s trading this corn?” he asked them. “You know whose corn it is you’re stealing?”

  “Does it belong to the Master of fuck-should-I-care, old man?” one of the lads replied.

  Hat had waited until their laughter died down to explain, “This is Wycombe’s corn, you know. They own the farms that grow it, round about Wooburn way. They won’t be happy you’re stealing from them.”

  “Bunch of fucking women?” another of the lads yelled. But the news had discombobulated them, Hat could see. Nobody crossed Wycombe. Not if they could avoid it. People who crossed Wycombe rarely prospered, and were often punished out of all proportion to their transgression. But then again, Hat could see the lads thinking (because they were young), Fuck it. It’s only a few cobs. So they filled their bags and ran off. As a malicious parting shot one of the boys disconnected the cable from the tree to which it was hitched, and held a gun on Hat as his boat began to drift downstream. But then this guy ran off as well, so Hat was able to jog down the bank, jump in the river at a point beyond the boat and swim out to it. He dropped anchor, and splashed through to the land to reconnect the cable. And then he simply resumed his painstaking passage upstream.

  Coming downstream was in a sense harder, especially the in period after the Monsoon when the flow was most rapid. The problem here was slowing down; and using the anchor as a break tended to wear it out and risk snapping the chain, neither of which would be cheap eventualities to repair. So what Hat tended to do was winch downstream in reverse, tying the tether to a tree and then unwinding it as slowly as he could. Sometimes Hat passed down in double-cable-length portions—he’d fix the boat at the stern, tie the forward cable to some downstream marker, get on board and let loose: then that scary-exhilarating acceleration as the stream whisked him away, and the cable swinging taut about as he passed its fix, swinging the whole boat around, and then the final hundred metres before the jolting stop. Then do the whole thing again. He liked this less, because it was less controlled and it kept jarring the boat and tethers in ways that clearly weren’t good for their long-term health. But it was at least faster.

  If he had a base it was probably Henley, although he slept on the boat and went ashore as rarely as he could get away with. But Henley was a good place to moor if he didn’t have a specific cargo to deliver. People would sometimes pay him just to take them across the water—if, say, they had some reason not to want to get themselves, or what they were carrying, wet. It was easy enough: paddle over the far bank in his coracle, taking the cable with him, paddle back and winch the whole boat over. Though it wasn’t complicated it was laborious and exhausting, and he charged quite a lot for it, which meant he didn’t do it often. Otherwise he just waited for contact, or news of possible jobs. When somebody came to him with a cargo, and an offer of pay, then off he went.

  Being alone didn’t bother him.

  Quite a few of his jobs came from Wycombe. They valued reliability and rewarded competence, did Wycombe. The only problem was that they weren’t very patient. When they wanted something done they wanted it done straight away. Hat wasn’t exactly a hop-to-it sort of fellow. Slow and steady, his motto.

  One brisk autumn morning a woman woke him by kicking the side of his boat. Hat put his head abovedeck. He was naked, with a blanket wrapped around him, but of course he was wearing his hat, so he looked decent putting his head above. “Hello Hat,” she said. Hat recognised her. He’d had dealings with her before. She was called Eva, and she didn’t take any shit.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I’ve got a docket from Henry,” she said.

  Henry was the bigwig who ran Wycombe. Hat had never met him; and nor, so far as he knew, had anybody else. Kept himself to himself, did Henry, which was (Hat had to concede) quite a clever play for a dictator. Lurk in the shadows. Become more than a mere man. Still, it struck Hat as puzzling that a community
otherwise entirely made up of women was happy with a man ruling them. Wycombe was women-only. Hat wasn’t stupid: he had considered the possibility that Henry was a mere fiction, a fake dictator that this women’s commune projected out onto the world. Maybe the reasoning was that other groups would be more likely to leave them alone if they thought them governed by the all-powerful and pitiless boss-feller. That didn’t seem very likely, though. Hat had plenty of dealings with women from Wycombe and the one thing you had to concede to them is that they were no retiring blossoms. On one memorable occasion Hat had watched as one of the warriors from Wycombe had intervened in a Henley riverside brawl—two drunk men swinging at one another with meaty fists, and a lot of shouting. He reckoned it had been the shouting that annoyed her—Denise was her name. Anyhow, she walked right up to the two of them, flashed a truncheon from her backpack, played the coconuts like a sideshow at a fair—clock, clock—and the two brawling men were lying the ground moaning. That wasn’t even the most of it. Then she’d crouched down, hauled the two bodies towards one another such that their heads bonked together, and then pushed a cord through their ears: an actual needle, punched through the cartilaginous flap of one ear and then straight through the same portion of the other guys ear. How they’d howled! Denise had tied the cord into a quick knot and walked away. It had been quite something to watch those two angry drunk hulks get to their feet with a great deal of ow-ow-owing, and fumbling at the cord together to get it untied. At least they weren’t fighting any more: shuffling away together to find someone with scissors who would cut them free, and wincing and complaining that the other wasn’t in step and that it was tugging on their ear most tenderly.