by Adam Roberts
“Everybody seems to know my name,” Davy said. And then, because he was so desperately thirsty, and he didn’t know where he was, and none of it really mattered, he took a swig from the dead stranger’s bottle. The water was so cold it scalded his throat, but it took the bad taste away and it felt good to drink. After he had finished he gasped, and gasped, and then, fearful that the woman would steal it from him, he took a chunk out of the cheese.
“I can imagine you’re hungry,” she said, transferring the pistol from her left to her right hand. “He’s had you here for days.”
“Days?” Davy repeated, dismayed. “Why?”
“He was supposed to bring you to us,” the woman said. “But I suppose he got—what? Greedy? Yes, let’s say greedy. So he brought you straight here instead.”
“Here?”
“You’re in Benson, my lad.”
“Rafbenson?”
“You can certainly call it that.”
Davy looked around him. “How did I get here?” he said.
“He carried you, I suppose. Or maybe dragged you.”
Davy remembered the iced-over river. Maybe he wasn’t as catastrophically exiled from home as he thought. If he hurried due west, maybe the Thames would still be all ice and he could just walk straight back to the Hill. A spark of hope in the kindling of his heart. He took another bite of cheese. His hunger was deep enough that these first few bites only made him more ravenous.
“I’m Steph, by the way,” said the newcomer.
“Pleased to meet you miss,” Davy mumbled with a mouth full of cheese.
“Well, come along then. There’s no point in loitering here. We really need to get going.”
Davy looked up at her. “I do have to get home,” he said. “It’s Christmas soon, and my family will be—have I really been away for days? They will be anxious. Have I really been here for days?” The thought of what his Ma would say when he finally stumbled home shivered fear through him. Oh, she would be so cross.
“Put that thought out of your head, my fellow,” said Steph. She aimed the gun at him. “We’re going quite the other way. How old are you anyway?”
He stared at the gun pointed at him. He knew what it was, and understood the threat it represented, and yet he couldn’t quite grasp what was going on. “I’ve got to get home,” he said again. “My Ma will be furious. I mean she will be so worried. I’m,” he added, “thirteen.”
“Small for your age.”
“I have to get home,” said Davy again.
“I say you’re twelve. OK? If anybody asks.”
“But I’m thirteen,” said Davy.
“Twelve,” said Steph firmly. “Now: to your feet.”
“But why?”
“Because you need to be upright to walk, you plughead. And you and I are going for a little walk.”
“Why am I twelve?”
“You just are. All right?”
“I don’t understand,” said Davy. But he got to his feet. The insides of his mouth were gummy with a layer of cheese, so he took another swig from the water bottle.
“We need to go through there,” Steph said, pointing at the building to Davy’s right. “In through that door.”
Davy went over to the door. “I have to get home. My Ma will be really worried.”
“Through you go.”
On the other side of the doorway was an old classroom: desks pushed against wall, chairs stacked in the corner. A large whiteboard filled one wall, speckled and cracked with age. “Keep going.”
He went through into another room, and then into a kind of hallway. Black leaves were strewn all over the floor, dry as burnt paper. There was a double door; one panel still in place, the other broken diagonally at top and bottom, leaving just a ragged triangle attached to its hinges.
The two of them stepped outside. The prospect was of flat land overgrown with shrubs, bindweed carpeting the ground; and in the middle distance the edge of a forest.
Steph was still training the gun on him. “Stop there for a mo,” she said. “Stand by the wall. Stand there, facing the wall, and put your hands behind your back.”
“I have to get home,” Davy said again. But he did as she told him.
“Sure. For Christmas, you said. And maybe you will get home for Christmas. Just not this year, OK? And probably not the next either. Look, I’m ready to believe you’ll be a good boy, but I don’t want to take any chances. So I’ll going to cuff you, OK? It’ll only be until we get to Wycombe, and these are regular sized cuffs and your wrists are nice and skinny so it won’t hurt.”
“I don’t understand, why do you want me?” Davy asked, tearfully.
“You’re special, my boy,” she said. “And there’s a lot at stake. A lot. Put your hands together, behind your back.”
He did so. He was still holding the water bottle—holding it, now, behind him—and she took it from him. He turned his head to look at her.
She chuckled. Then she made a sharp shh! noise, and slapped the hand holding the cuffs hard against the wall. It was as if she meant to punch the building really hard, and it made Davy wince to see it. It must have hurt her knuckles to bang the wall so forcefully. The hand that had banged the wall was holding something too: a screwdriver, maybe. Or was it a pen? It looked more like a pen than a screwdriver.
She had dropped the handcuffs. She had thrown down the water bottle.
“Fuck,” she said, in a strangulated version of her normal voice.
Davy, without really thinking, bent down and picked up the cuffs. He offered these to her, but her right hand was still against the wall and she was trying to reach round for something with her left. She was reaching round, he saw, to retrieve her pistol from its holster.
She wasn’t holding the pen in her left hand. Of course she wasn’t. The object stuck straight out from the palm of her hand. And it wasn’t a pen. It was a crossbow bolt.
It all came together in Davy’s head. He understood what had happened.
“You stay there,” Steph said, in a fierce voice. “You just stay right there, Davy boy.” She had pulled the gun from its holster with her free hand.
Davy ran.
He sprinted straight for the forested horizon. The ground had long ago been grass, but was now completely overgrown with bindweed which had been rendered slipperier by a thin layer of snow. Davy got six strides away from the buildings before his right foot vanished somewhere behind him, as if yanked back by a rope. He tried to stop his fall with his left foot but the angle was such that it also slipped backwards. He lurched forward, a comedy tumble, ducked his head and, without intending to, rolled a somersault as neatly as a gymnast. The next thing he knew he was back on his feet, skidding to a halt. Panting.
Behind him there was the hammer-blow clamour of a gunshot. It battered his ears and he flinched so hard he almost doubled up. But Steph wasn’t shooting at him. She was shooting past him, towards a copse of overgrown bushes near the corner of the main building. Shooting at whoever had pinned her hand with that crossbow bolt.
Davy took a deep breath and set off running again. He had got halfway to the treeline when a second shot banged the air hard and sent rumbling echoes rolling round the flanks of the Chilterns.
Chapter Four
HAT THE BOAT brought his cargo of electronica down to Henley where a message left at his usual tavern told him to ship it further downstream to Marlow. That was as far east as he usually went, since beyond that point the river spread into treacherous shallows, reefed with underwater obstacles, with ruins and roofs and other hidden prominences, and was besides prey to odd currents. Plus the people down that way were all barbarians. Eventually you got to London, which was a desert, threaded with desperate stalkers hoping and mostly failing to scavenge useful tech. Still, Marlow wasn’t a problem. He went that far, and there were six agents of Wycombe waiting for him in the town. They took the parts, and paid him, and then they asked him about his stowaway.
It occurred to Hat that he could
, perhaps, lie. But, scratching his chin, he wasn’t sure he saw any point in that. “Girl called Amber?” he asked. “I gave her a lift to Pangbourne.”
“And why would you do that?” asked one of the women, in a tired-sounding voice.
Hat considered this question for quite a length of time. “She asked me,” he said, finally.
“She’s very young to be roaming about on her own,” said another of the women. “Bad things might very well happen to her.”
Hat nodded slowly.
The first woman sighed. “Look, Hat,” she said. “If you see her again, do your best to get her to come back. If needs be, lock her on your boat and come find us. You’ll be rewarded.”
Hat looked placidly at her, which was his way of saying not-on-your-nelly-my-girl without having to open his mouth. But she took it for compliance, of course, and the six of them went off: four armed, on horseback, two driving the cart with all the stuff in it. Hat took his pay down below and stowed it.
Then he had a little lunch.
Over the fortnight that followed he made his way slowly back up to Henley, picked up Old McCormack’s cargo of coal and took it up to Goring. It was unloaded by a small group of armed men who called themselves Guz. Hat had no idea what that name meant. But gangs came and went, tribes spring up and fell away, and some of them managed to stick around. Best policy was: not to judge.
Hat got a drink in his usual tavern and, chatting with people, heard that these ‘Guz’ soldiers had secured a good swathe of the land west. Not the whole of the Downs west of the river by any stretch, but a fair holding. They wanted the coal to fuel restored steam engines, or something, for some big project. Nobody seemed to know, and Hat didn’t really care. The Monsoon was due in a week or so, and he had to figure where to wait it out. Since he now had quite a bit of money he was looking at somewhere he could enjoy some good food, and maybe even a proper cigarette. He could do worse than Goring. The ferry there meant that a lot of traffic east-west came through it, so it had plenty of options in terms of lodgings and food. Henley was probably a better option, because all those travellers brought Goring as much trouble as they did wealth. But he didn’t happen to be in Henley. He happened to be in his usual tavern, in Goring. He bought himself his usual beer.
It was warm inside, with the fire, and one pint became two, and the morning became the afternoon. Hat began to feel proper cosy.
“You got a daughter, Hat?” asked Agnieszka, the landlady.
“I do not.”
“I didn’t think she was old enough to be your daughter. To be honest, I wondered: maybe granddaughter.”
Hat thought about this, and rummaged in his beard with his fingers for a while. “Who’s this?”
“Girl was asking after you. Said you were called Boat, and that you owned a Hat, but we knew who she meant.”
Hat nodded. He sucked his upper lip down into the space behind his lower teeth for a while. Then he took another swig of beer. Then he said, “What did she want, Agnieszka?”
“Wanted to know if we knew you. Wanted to know where you were likely to be. ‘On the river,’ I said. ‘Where on the river?’ she insisted. ‘Between here and Marlow,’ I said. ‘That’s a lot of river,’ she said. ‘We could go on all day like this,’ I said, ‘or you could take my hint.’ ‘And what hint is that?’ she said, getting all bristly and cross, the way the young do when their impatience isn’t catered for immediate-like. ‘The hint that I don’t fucking know, my dearie,’ I said, and she went off.”
Hat nodded and thought about this for a while. Then he asked, “She didn’t say why she wanted me?”
“She didn’t say why she wanted you,” Agnieszka confirmed.
One of the tavern’s features, of which Agnieszka was particularly proud, were its windows: two big ones, either side of the main door. The glass in these had been salvaged from various places: eight panes, four on each side, and all made of a kind of toughened glass with a graph-paper matrix embedded into it. This let in a lot of light during the daytime, and was clear enough for Hat, looking out, to see the first transparent beans and specks of rainfall start to cluster on the outside. There was a pittery noise. Then, incongruously, a huge rolling whomp of thunder. This died away and the rain skittered on the window and roof for a while, and slowly died away.
“Odd,” said Agnieszka, “that one trump of thunder, and then no others.”
“Didn’t sound very far away,” Hat agreed.
There was a renewed pattering outside, and it got louder. Then the door smacked open and a breathless youngster was yelling, “Is Hat the Boat in here? They said he was in here.”
“I’m here,” said Hat getting to his feet.
“It’s Hat the Boat’s boat,” the lad said, and ran off. Hat went after him, and most of the people in the tavern followed as well. The rain was stronger now. The cobbles gleamed wetly like a thousand frogs’ backs, and the unpaved areas were turning to mud slidey as snailslime. Hurrying down to the river, Hat turned the corner and saw his boat with its arse in the air, and its prow underwater.
He stood watching as the water around the rear half of the boat churned and bubbled and made a series of gurgling noises, and then, with a sort of sigh, the back end of the boat slid under the water. A great bubble, like a Kraken’s fart, broke the surface, and finally the water settled.
It was gone.
The crowd had swelled to several dozen people. For a long time nobody said anything. Eventually a local called Charlie Charnock came over, slapped Hat on the shoulder and said, “Sorry mate.” A murmur went round the crowd.
“What happened?” somebody asked.
“It was an explosion,” said somebody else. “A boom-boom explosion! Knocked a hole in the hull we think. That’s what Gerry reckoned, anyway. He heard explosions when the Guz soldiers were testing some fuses, out Aldworth way.”
“An explosion?”
“Were you carrying fucking dynamite, Hat?”
Hat scratched his chin through the hairs of his beard and shook his head slowly. “Coal,” he said. “But we unloaded it yesterday.”
“Coal dust can blow,” said somebody. “I’ve heard that. Blow up, it can. Anybody else heard that? Coal dust can float in, like, a confined space, and then ignite. Like a bomb. I’ve definitely heard that.”
“Flour dust too,” said somebody else.
“In this weather, though?” asked Charnock. “Come on—how damp is this air? That can’t be it.”
“Then what? What could it be?”
There was nothing else to see, and people began drifting away, earnestly discussing possible causes of the catastrophe. Hat stood staring at the now-placid surface of the water. From time to time he acknowledged the people who came up to offer commiserations before they went back to work, or back to the tavern. It occurred to him that nobody from Guz had come down to see what was going on. Soon enough it started drizzling again, and the river was covered in a tinselly sheet of silver and mauve prickles.
Hat was alone. “Bugger,” he said.
Chapter Five
DAVY RAN INTO the woods, and only when he was properly in amongst the trees did he stop to get his breath. The sun was white-yellow, near the southern horizon. He couldn’t be sure if it was morning or evening, but he knew which way was north, and that meant he could work out which way was west. Through the trees, then, and a few miles to—he hoped—the river. If it was still frozen he ought to be able to cross it, and then he’d be on home turf.
Merely thinking the word home made his heart gabble faster in his chest. A magic charm of a word. He wanted to be home more than anything in the world.
One last look back, out through the trees at the edge of the forest. The roofs of the various structures comprising Rafbenson were just visible, past the scrub, but Davy couldn’t see Steph, or her assailant. Beyond, the north-east flanks of the Chilterns, heavily wooded and glinting frost in the sunlight, made an impressive backdrop. There had been no further gunshots after the t
wo that had dinned his ears and terrified him as he ran, which either meant that the assailant had silenced Steph, or that Steph’s second shot had hit its mark.
Either way it would do Davy no good to hang around here.
He turned and started through the trees. Bare black trunks, glittery branches and here and there a shaggy-dark fir tree. The ground was a thin layer of old snow over a layer of compressed leaves. His feet moved with barely a swish. It was savagely, sadistically cold. Every breath was a wraith. Shivers and twitches kept going through him. He had lost all sensation in his feet and gloved fingers.
Inside the woods it was hard to see exactly where the sun was, and so hard to ensure that he was still going west. A life on the heavily forested Shillingford Hill had taught Davy how easy it was to go astray when travelling through woodland. But better to keep moving, and to put distance between himself and the crazy folk behind him—people who wanted him a prisoner or a corpse, of maybe first the one and then the other.
It was eerie in the silent wood, and grew eerier. Light dimmed, seemed to thicken, as he jogged on through the trees. His absent feet were an amputee’s phantom appendages. It was only the right-left-right-left sense of impact, the jar as each hit the ground, that told him he had feet at all. Davy’s gasping breathing ground a lopsided rhythm into his inner ear. Everything else was quiet with the perfect silence of a winter forest.
Was he being followed? He had a nasty sense he was. He stopped and looked back. There was no-one behind him. No-one he could see at any rate. He leaned forward and rested his hands on his thighs, until his breath slowed and settled.
When he turned to start again he found himself face-to-flank with two blue-brown deer. Roe-deer. They were standing, only yards in front of him. Their eyes were globes of polished coal, and every hair in their coats stood out in Davy’s mind as sharp as if they were specifically pricking into his skin. He could feel the vivid particularity of that visual texture. The suddenness, and the vividness, made the pitch of Davy’s thinking tilt, and colours began to flit and gather out of the bare surroundings.
