by Adam Roberts
On the morning in question it was a different Wycombe Warrior who roused Hat with a boot-kick alarm call. “Take the docket, Hat,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Take it and you’ll see.”
The fact that Hat could read and write was another reason people liked to hire him. Sometimes people even paid him to take dictation, such that he wrote out letters for them, and afterwards delivered the epistles to family up or downriver. Combination scribe and postman. That was rare, though.
Eva wasn’t about to jump onto Hat’s boat. So Hat had to pull himself up on deck, wrap his blanket like a toga around his naked body, and come over to the riverbank.
The docket, neatly hand-written, spoke of picking up three hundredweight of what it called ‘miscellaneous electrical parts and components’ from a trader in Pangbourne. “Fair do’s,” said Hat. “Then again, I have no immediate cause to go so far upriver.”
“This docket gives you cause,” said Eva. “What we’re paying you gives you cause.”
“A cargo would give me cause,” said Hat. “No point in hauling this boat empty-belly all the way to Pangbourne.”
“How long until you get a cargo?” Eva pressed. “Henry says this is kind of urgent.”
Hat nodded. Everybody knew that it was Amy, Henry’s second-in-command—or perhaps the de factor ruler of Wycombe, if Henry was just a fiction—was a tinkerer and builder of electrical things. Presumably she was the one impatient to get her hands on whatever the trader had pulled out of the factories and storerooms of Swindon, or Southampton, or wherever this stuff had been sourced.
“Couple of weeks, maybe,” said Hat, scratching his beard. “I heard rumours Old McCormack is waiting on some coal, pulled from an old store, out of the water somewhere in Surrey and dried out. If that comes overland maybe he’ll pay me to take it upriver.”
“Get dressed,” said Eva. “Come ashore and I’ll buy you breakfast and we’ll see if we can work something out.”
Hat knew when somebody was trying to butter him up, but he was not about to pass up a free breakfast. So he went down below and dressed, and pulled on boots, and followed Eva into Henley—a town that boasted no fewer than three taverns. He had pulled-pork and beer for breakfast, and also an egg, and Eva talked him into going up to Pangbourne straight away for one-half over the usual fee. He tried, weakly, to argue for double money, but Eva pointed out, not unreasonably, that so sumptuous a breakfast was probably worth a half fee anyway.
So, full-bellied, he went back to his craft, the docket tucked inside his shirt, and readied the boat.
It didn’t have a name (unless ‘Hat’s boat’ counted as a name) but he knew the barge like he knew his own body. In point of fact, since his own innards were something of a mystery to him, he knew it rather better than he knew his own body. At any rate, he knew something was wrong as soon as he pulled away.
He didn’t do anything straight off, though. He moved the boat upriver, a hundred metres at a time, in the same methodical way he always moved it. Round the bend of the river, to where the Thames bulged into a huge almond-shaped loch at Shiplake. Here the best way through was to stick to the right bank, past the meadows where the Chaudreys pastured their cows on the green slopes. There was a particular old oak that overgrew the water, a tree of which Hat was especially fond. He tied up his steel cord, walked back to the boat, winched himself up alongside, and then sat on the deck and smoked a cigarette out of the small store he’d been husbanding. It was corn-silks, not tobacco, bulked up with bagasse, but it was better than nothing. Chaudrey’s herdsboy was sitting on a stone halfway up the hill, watching him. They knew one another, and the boy knew Hat wasn’t about to try anything, but neither party had any desire to open a conversation with the other.
Eventually he finished the cigarette, and called aloud. “Might as well come out now. We’ve left Henley.”
He wondered if he was going to have to winkle the stowaway out by main force, but after a little while she came up from below. A young girl, couldn’t have been much more than fourteen or fifteen: a skinny, big-eyed, brown-skinned thing. “Hello,” she said.
“Don’t recall inviting you on board,” said Hat.
“I stowed away,” said the girl. “I’m sorry, but I have to get away. On the run. I have to get up the river. Will you take me? I don’t have anything to pay you with, but I will have one day, so I can give you a promise-note, yeah? I’m Amber by the way. What’s your name?”
Hat looked at her for a while. “People call me Hat,” he said.
“Can I hitch a ride, Mr Hat? Please? I’ll be no bother and I could help out with the cooking and washing and…” She seemed at a loss. “Stuff.”
“Don’t need help,” said Hat. “Who you running from?”
“Running?”
“You said you were on the run.”
Amber sat herself on the deck. “Don’t freak,” she advised him. “When I tell you, I mean.”
“All right,” said Hat.
“I’m from Wycombe. I don’t mean the camp followers part, the shanty part. I’m from actual Wycombe. Inside the cordon—inside the town itself.”
“I see,” said Hat, slowly.
“I’m on the run from them. I know people are scared of us, of them I mean, and that we go after anyone that crosses us and so on. I know people think we have wonder machines and so on. But you’ll be fine if you just take me upriver. I promise. And, later, I can pay you, when I have money. I promise I will. I mean,” she leapt to her feet again, “I could just set off on foot. But it’s a long way, and everyone knows it’s not safe for a young girl, out in the wilderness. Who knows what bad things might happen to me, or what bad people I might run into?”
“You might have run into one already,” Hat pointed out, “in me.”
“You’re saying you might be a murderous rapist or rapeous murderer?”
Hat nodded his head, slowly, to convey the magnitude of the risk Amber was taking.
“I don’t think so, though,” Amber said. “I think I trust you. You are trustworthy, aren’t you?”
“I’m,” Hat replied, gravely, “afraid so.”
“I knew it. And you’ll help me?”
“I run this boat upriver and downriver, you understand,” said Hat. “That’s my living. Downriver of Henley it’s all Wycombe territory, more or less. Give or take. If I piss them off, I’ll be in trouble.”
“Oh they won’t know,” said Amber. “Won’t ever know. I’ll hide. And anyway, we’re going upriver. That’s where I need to go. Or what else will you do? Kick me off the boat, here? Anything could happen to me—I could get murdered. Or raped and murdered. Or raped and not murdered—do you want that on your conscience?”
“I didn’t invite you on the boat,” Hat pointed out, mildly.
“But I’m here now, so you have to deal with it. Don’t you? You must have had stowaways before.”
“No,” said Hat. He rummaged his fingers in his beard and then dropped his hand. “Never.”
“So this is a first for you! It’s win-win, it really is.”
“Not saying I’m agreeing to take you anywhere,” Hat said. “But where would I be taking you, if I agreed to take you anywhere?”
“I need to get up to Oxford.”
“I don’t go so far up. And soon it’ll be the Monsoon, and I’ll be mooring-up for the duration. And after that winter. You’d best get off, go back to Wycombe, hope you’ve not been missed. You and I can talk again in the spring, maybe.”
“Oh I can’t go back,” said Amber, matter-of-factly. “That’s not going to happen. So it’s kick me off here or go on with me.”
“You got on at Henley,” Hat said. “If you get off here it’s a short walk along the river back to Henley. You’ll be fine.”
“No you don’t understand. I’m on a mercy mission.”
“Mercy?”
“Yes. And Wycombe doesn’t take kindly to what I have in mind. I have to get to Fath
er John.”
“Father John?”
“Yes, I know it sounds crazy, and I know he’s like a hundred years old and far, far away, over the hills and far away, but I have to reach him. I have important stuff to tell him.”
“No girl, no,” said Hat, in a low voice. “That’s a bad, bad idea. He’s a wicked fellow. Don’t do that. Don’t go to him.”
“I must.”
“I shan’t take you. I’m hardly the only boat on the river. You’ll have to find another.”
“So what will you do?” Amber stood up to look more defiant. “Will you throw me off?”
“No girl,” said Hat, in a yet lower voice. “I won’t lay hands on a woman, and surely not a girl.”
“Then you’ll just have to get used to me.” And she went down below again.
In the event, the voyage with the girl did not go the way Hat thought it would. Which is not to say he thought it would go any particular way, of course. Hat made his way upstream, and passed slowly over the remains of drowned Reading, taking the cable out in his coracle and affixing it to the various spire-tops and fixed points that poked over the waterline. There were groups living in the southern islands of this territory, and others who lived in the rising land further south; and they could get testy, and sometimes fought one another. But they generally didn’t bother Hat. Finally the river narrowed again, Hat cranked his way round the corner at Mapledurham, and got to Pangbourne. Here he found his contact and presented the docket, and loaded three large sacks and one crate of assorted electrical parts that hustled and maraca-shook like shingle. Then he set off downriver. It was before the Monsoon, and the river was fairly gentle, so he drifted some of the way.
Amber emerged when she realised they had changed direction. “This is the wrong way,” she said.
“For you,” he told her. “But the right way for me. And it’s my boat.”
“Go back!”
“No.”
“Please?”
“See,” said Hat, scratching his beard, as he tended to do when thoughtful, “when folk say that, does it mean they’re pleased to be asking, or I’m to be pleased to obey them? Because if the latter then the word don’t apply. Since,” he explained, to the girl’s puzzled face, “it don’t please me, see.”
“I can see I’m not dealing with a reasonable man,” said Amber. The boat was close enough to the shore for her to jump off, and jump she did, landing in the long grass on the bank where Purley once stood. She made a disrespectful gesture and set off back upstream towards Pangbourne. Hat did wonder if that would be the last he saw of her. He wondered that for a while, and then he settled himself by the tiller, and lit another cigarette, and watched the world drift past his prow, and stopped wondering altogether. Little good ever came of wondering.
Chapter Three
DAVY WOKE WITH a pain in his arm. He was lying awkwardly on it—his left arm, sore from the shoulder down to the wrist. Rolled to free it, and brought it out: it flopped weirdly, and he had to hold it by the wrist to move it. It wasn’t broken. It was just numb.
He was lying on a mattress in a bare grey room. The mattress was sheetless, spongy, stained. It smelt strongly of mould and damp. The walls were grey because they were bare concrete. There were a few scabs and patches of old plaster, but most of this had long since fallen away. The surface of the concrete was scuzzy and soft-looking, as if coated in spores. Light came in through a glassless window opposite him, and through gaps in the flat ceiling above him.
Very cold. The light was ice-bright.
Davy sat up, slowly, registering stiffnesses and aches in various joints. The problem with his left arm, he realised, was that the seam of his sweater, or jacket, or maybe both, had dug into his flesh and cut off the circulation. Sensation was pulsing back in, now: acid flushes of pain up and down the limb. He tried rubbing it. He stood upright and fell straight back down on his arse. The soles of his feet hurt. There was a bitter, dusty taste in his mouth and his head throbbed. He got, more carefully, upright again. Looked about him. He needed a drink of water. Indeed, now he came to think of it, he needed a drink of water very badly indeed.
There was a doorframe, and no door, and through it Davy staggered into a corridor. At the end of this was a doorframe with a door in it, but the lock had long since rotted out and the bottom was a ragged selection of wooden stalactites. Davy pushed this open with his foot, squinting against the light and stepped outside.
He was in a courtyard. Two-storey buildings on three sides, and a wire fence directly in front of him. Old leaves were wind-heaped against the flank of the right-hand building, each individual leaf engraved in filigree patterns of wire-work silver by the frost. The sky was white. The courtyard was filled with various pieces of junk: an indecipherable chunk of metal rusted bark-brown and bark-rough all over, a heap of ruined boots, a mess of old cardboard.
There was the stranger. It was the man Davy had met on the hill, still in his long leather coat and hat, sitting with his back to the wall of the building on Davy’s left.
He was grinning.
Davy shrieked a small shriek, turned to scurry back inside. But he still felt dizzy, and his arm was still buzzing, and his legs refused to move him in the direction he aimed at. He slammed into the side of the door frame, bounced back hopping on one foot and almost fell over. Then he tried again and bolted back inside. His head was ringing.
He stumbled back into the corridor, slipped and fell. It was blind panic, a stupid thing, and it stymied his coordination, but it meant that he stayed down. The floor was slippy, and as he thrashed his legs trying to get up, he made a low moan that rose, quickly, to a yell. The stranger was going to get him! The man would be on him in a moment!
Nothing happened. Struggling to contain his terror, Davy slipped onto his back and looked through the open door. Nobody was coming after him. He could see the stranger’s boots resting in the thin snow. Motionless.
Cautiously, Davy pulled himself upright, and leaned against the doorjamb, looking out into the courtyard. The stranger wasn’t moving. His eyes, twinkly in the white daylight, did not blink.
Davy took a step closer. The white patches on his coat were frost, not scuffing. His beard was stiff with ice.
Relief passed through him, and in its wake a sense of foolishness. Then his thirst reasserted itself. He went down on his haunches and tried to scrape up a little snow, but though it was perfectly white on its surface it came up in his hand gravelly and brown.
The stranger would have a water bottle. Perhaps he would have food and Davy was, he realised, very hungry. When had he last eaten? How long had he been in this place?
Where was this place?
It took a deliberate concentration of courage to search the stranger’s corpse. Davy stood up, and then thought better of it. He crouched down again, settling his thighs on his calves, and then shuffled forward, like a duck. He wasn’t sure why, but it felt less alarming to approach the dead body this way. When he was close enough he reached out and unbuttoned the greatcoat. The buttonholes were large but the cloth was so rigid with the cold that it took an effort to force the buttons through. He opened the coat, the cloth creaked and bent like cardboard. Underneath was a second coat, thinner and not quite so frozen, and Davy got this open. Underneath that he found a number of small sacks attached to the fellow’s belt, and one of these was a leather water bottle. It was held on the belt by a snap-button loop that Davy eventually released. The contents were slushy with a squashable quantity of half-water, half-ice. Another pouch held some old bread, a gnarly cube of cheese, some chestnuts and an apple so withered and wrinkled it looked a hundred years old.
There were other things hanging from the belt, but this was enough for Davy to be going on with. He retreated from the terrifying deadness of the stranger, sat himself on the step by the broken door. The water bottle was leather with a metal screw-lid sewn into its mouth, and as he lifted it to his mouth Davy had a sudden horrible thought. What if the stranger had d
ied of some unspeakable plague? What if he were about to contract that same hideous sickness by sharing the man’s water? Perhaps gritty snow from the ground was a better bet.
Try the apple, maybe. It might be plump with sweet juices. He gobbled the whole thing quickly down, core, seeds and all, but the flesh was as dry as old bread and the bad-taste thirstiness remained in his mouth.
He was being foolish. There was nothing wrong with the water. He lifted the water bottle again, and palpated the squishy leather sack, feeling the ice-slush crumble beneath the pressure of his fingers.
“If you had the maths,” said a voice, “you could calculate how long he has been dead—from the temperature of that water bottle, I mean. It was close to his flesh and would have been body temperature at his death. Now it’s slush. Soon it will freeze solid.”
Davy fell backwards in startlement. Freezing water splashed from the water bottle onto his chin and neck and the unexpected unpleasantness of the sensation made him yell.
Whoever had spoken was now laughing.
“Who are you?” Davy wailed. “Who? Who?”
A hand grasped his sleeve, and pulling him upright. Standing in front of him was a person in a bulky blue coat and chunky leather trousers. The person’s features were completely hidden by the balaclava, but when she spoke again Davy could tell it was a woman.
“You’re easily startled. Drink, why don’t you. You must be thirsty.”
“I don’t know,” said Davy, his heart running in his chest like a dog chasing a rabbit. “I don’t know. Maybe he had the plague?”
“It wasn’t the plague that killed him,” said the woman. She stepped back, and Davy could see that in her left hand she was holding a pistol.
She saw him looking at the weapon and winked.
“That?” he asked.
“You should thank me,” she said. “He meant you no good at all. It’s Davy, yes?”
