Haven

by Adam Roberts

  One of the deer put its head down, slowly, and then, suddenly, the two beasts darted off. Not so much running as bouncing on their sinew-springy legs, away through the trees and gone in a moment.

  Davy shut his eyes and tried to calm himself. It was a relief when the prickles of an incipient fit faded and fell away. Senses not working overtime, not right now. He couldn’t afford it. Lose consciousness here, and he would die of hypothermia.

  He had to get on.

  He picked up speed again and threaded his way through the trees. At one point he crossed an old road: now only a corridor where the trees gave way to a few yards of bush. Abandoned cars, each entirely consumed with the black-red smallpox of rust, sat in twos and threes. He passed over and back into the woodland. Trees all around, and a deadweight of absolute silence. Then, without any warning, he came out the other side of the wood. The trees opened to a downslope covered in shrubs and bushes, and there was the Thames.

  It was flowing.

  The near and far banks were both crusted with solid ice, it was true. It looked, incongruously enough, like the fat that gathered at the top of a stew the day after it is cooked—when you lift the lid on the leftovers gone cold. White with a slight tinge of grey, thick and somehow greasy-looking on the Thames’s farside. The thickness was harder to gauge on the nearside where the scrubby growth obscured the details. But there was no mistaking it: the middle of the river was black and open, and occasional floating pads of ice whirled downstream with alarming rapidity.

  Davy looked past the river at the rising hills beyond: home, blanketed in purple woods, with stretches of dishcloth-coloured mist threading in and out of the trees.

  Ravens flew, north to south, creaking out their warning song in their hard, dry little voices.

  He might have burst into tears. But he didn’t. He wasn’t a little child, after all. Thirteen was a man’s age. (Why had the woman Steph insisted he was twelve? What was that about?) He had to gather his thoughts; he needed a plan. Somehow he had to cross the river.

  He could go south—he wasn’t sure how far it was, quite a number of miles certainly, but if he stuck to the east bank of the Thames he would eventually get to Goring where there was a ferry. It was a long walk, and he had no supplies, and there was no way to live off the land at this time of year. Worse, he had nothing with which he could pay for a ferry crossing, and the Goring folk were unlikely to advance him any credit.

  There was something else: two rival sets of people were, it seemed, intent on taking him as their captive. He had no idea why, but it was a fact. The stranger in the leather jacket and the woman, Steph, was two. Then again there was whoever it was who’d shot Steph in the hand with a crossbow bolt. Maybe that guy was a third party and three tribes were out to get him. Davy pondered the odds of getting down to Goring on his own, pursued by three determined sets of people and decided they were slim. And Goring was the obvious move for a person who wanted to get back to his home on the Hill.

  What else could he do, though? To the north the river widened into a long broad lake, edged on both sides by frozen marshland. Pretty much all the land between here and Oxford was a morass. It was possible to pick a way through it, if you knew what you were doing, had some sense of the old causeways and paths, and if it were summer, when the river was less swollen. But alone, with the Thames in full spate, north was a hopeless option.

  What did that leave? Going back east was out of the question. And that only left one way. At least, Davy told himself, go down to the river and see what’s what. Maybe somebody has left a boat tied up? It was a foolish thing to hope for, of course, but Davy couldn’t think what else to do.

  Try to swim it? The mere thought of the cold of the river made him shudder. The reality would murder him.

  Take a look, anyhow. Take just a look. He picked his way down the slope towards the river. The closer he got the louder it was: a rushing sound overlaid with snaps and thwacks as ice broke away from the edge and floated away, or banged into other ice. The shrubs became smaller and then gave way to sedge: sharp blades of frost stiffened grass that broke under his feet like twigs with a series of crackling detonations. Though the marsh was frozen his feet began to sink into it.

  He was hard by the river. There were no boats. Davy thought again about swimming over. There was no guarantee he would survive the cold of it. He put a foot on the ice at the river’s edge and it wheezed audibly under the pressure. His other foot, and the ice groaned and wobbled. It was a hundred feet or so to the unevenly crenulated edge of the shelf of ice, and after that was only freezing fast-flowing black water. It was going to be lung-seizingly cold and the flow was such that he would be swept far downstream immediately. He would probably be pushed under the ice shelf.

  He would not survive immersion.

  He decided against going any further in that direction.

  As he picked his way back onto the bank, and crunched his way carefully up through the frozen sedge, he felt once again as though he was going to cry. Once again he fought the urge back.

  There was no point in delaying. He was not going to die of thirst, with a river right next to him, but he was going to get pretty hungry over the next few days, and the sooner he set off the sooner he would reach home, and food, and shelter.

  The sooner he might reach home.

  He resolved: he would walk to Goring and see if he could work off a passage over the river. He had no illusions about his scrawny frame or physical incapacities, but there had to be some kind of work he could do. Or maybe somebody would take pity on him, and let him across without payment. Or maybe he could strike some kind of deal: the Higginses were not a wealthy or powerful family, but the Hill was a solid parish, dependable and reliable, and surely somebody would take his word as an IOU. Then—well, he wasn’t sure of the road west from Goring, but if worst came to worst he could walk north along the far bank of the river until he saw some bit of the uplands that looked familiar.

  As he crunched up to where the sedge ended and the scrubby bushes started, it began snowing. He looked up. A slow-motion tumbledown of miniature white flakes, so soft they landed right on his face and he barely felt them. Like albino flakes of soot. Ten million of them, all around, muffling even the roar of the river. To his right Davy could see them falling onto the black surface of the Thames where they survived for a second, whirling downstream before dissolving into nothingness.

  The fall thickened, until his surroundings became blurry. Davy started walking, picking his way through and sometimes around the bushes that grew on the eastern flank of the Thames. The snowfall increased in intensity. Visibility fell away, and his path began to meander. He knew he was stepping too close to the water when the bushes stopped and he found himself scrunching onto the sedge; but when he adjusted his path further away from the bank it was harder to know that he was drifting. A wind started up and suddenly the snow was boiling all around him, the flakes larger and harder and he began to fear that he would be unable to struggle on, and would get snowed in and freeze to death. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the snowstorm stopped, and he was standing hard by the forest, blinking in a wash of stingingly bright winter sunlight.

  “Thought I might lose you in that,” said somebody close at hand. It was a man’s voice.

  Davy was almost not surprised. He turned to see a man of medium-height, his bearded face uncovered beneath a beanie-hat, itself topped with a disc of snow like cake-icing. He had a large pack on his back and his clothes were old-looking and patched.

  “If you’ve come to kidnap me,” said Davy, surprising himself with how steady his voice held, “then you’ll have to join the end of the queue.”

  The man did something unexpected. He smiled. “Davy, isn’t it? My name is Daniel.”

  “Daniel,” said Davy.

  “I was told that you had a speech impediment,” said Daniel. “But I have to say: it’s really not so bad.”

  “You’re clearly a master of the compliment,” said Davy. H
e had been raised by an unusually fierce Ma to be respectful to his elders at all times, but—well, he’d been through a lot. He was shivering with the cold, and bitter and angry and sorrowful. So he added, “I’ve a compliment of my own. Fuck off, big nose.”

  At this Daniel actually laughed aloud. “It’s genuinely good to meet you, Davy. And I haven’t come to kidnap you. If you want me to fuck off, then off is precisely where I shall fuck. Before I do so, though, I might offer you one piece of advice.”

  Davy’s heart had sped up with the thrill of his own transgression. Now he flushed with embarrassment. Fuck off, big nose! Was that really the best he could do? “What advice?”

  “Don’t issue the off-fuck order. Rather, keep me the fuck with you.”

  “What?”

  Daniel nodded, as if agreeing that he hadn’t expressed himself very well. “You want to get across the river. That’s your home, isn’t it?” He tipped his chin at the westward hills.

  “Have you been there?”

  “I’ve been all over,” said Daniel. “So I probably have. But if you are asking, have I specifically been to your home? No, I don’t think so. Nor do I plan to. You want to get home, of course you do. I can help you. I know you went right down to the river to see if you could cross and decided, wisely I might add, not to try swimming it. Really, you’d be dead in seconds if you went in that water. So you thought: I’ll go south because there’s a ferry at Goring.”

  “Big-nosed and a mind-reader,” said Davy, his heart rate pumping up a second time. “What a rare fellow you are.” This speaking-to-shock business was exhilarating.

  “See,” said Daniel, shaking his head, “that wasn’t funny. It’s not the content, it’s the delivery. And knowing not to overegg it. Not that I hold it against you. Davy, my friend, there are people very keen to find you and take you away. They have their reasons, and those reasons don’t require that you be comfortable, or happy, or even alive—at least not for very long. You don’t want to fall back into the hands of those people, trust me.”

  Davy now felt embarrassed at what he had said. “I’m sorry, sir,” he tried. “I don’t mean to be rude. I don’t know what came over me.” He was shivering so hard with the cold that it added vibrato to his voice.

  “Ditch the ‘sir’,” Daniel advised. “Leave it alone, let it lie fallow and we’ll come back to it next season when it looks more fertile. For now what you have to do is: think. You reckon your only practical option is Goring. If that’s the way your reckoning is going, then the people who are after you will think that too. They will be heading there right now. And if they don’t apprehend you on the way—which, incidentally, they will if you just go stumbling down the rive gauche of the river the way you have been—why, then they’ll pick you up neatly in Goring town itself.”

  “Reeve goes?” Davy queried.

  “So he does. You need to find another way across,” said Daniel. “Is my point. You need not to go the way you’ve been planning on going, and more to the point you need to start thinking seriously about things, risk-analysis-wise.”

  “You shot Steph.”

  Briefly a look passed over Daniel’s haggard face as if he was rolling back through a long scroll on which were written the names of everyone he had ever shot, looking for and failing to find the entry for ‘Steph’. Then he said, “The woman back at Benson?”

  “Why does everybody keep shortening that name?”

  “That was me, yes. I did shoot her.”

  “Is she…?” Davy was going to say dead, but the word refused to come out.

  “Is she what?” Daniel returned, although he clearly understood what was being asked.

  A few, slow-zigzagging snowflakes were falling again, and the light had diminished to suggest that many more were on their way. Davy was shaking all over with the cold.

  “Is she…?” Davy tried again.

  “What you need to understand,” Daniel told him, “is that she’s not alone. She is very much not alone. And the others from her community are as single-minded as she.”

  “Who are they a-wuh-wuh…” He was shivering so hard he couldn’t properly articulate his words. “Who. Are they. Anyway?”

  “Davy my friend, they are alarming people. I’m happy to tell you more, but you need to make a decision. If truly you wish me to fuck off then that I shall take your words as an actual command. But if that’s what you want then say so right now, because whilst we stand around here jaw-jawing I’m freezing my metallic and simian testicles off.”

  “I’m also cold,” shuddered Davy. His teeth added a Morse-code underclack to his speech. “Is there sa-sa-somewhere war-warm we-we can get to?”

  “Warmer, certainly. I have a tent, and a stove. It’s not a large tent, and you’d have to be OK getting inside it with me, but considering the alternative is probably freezing to death, I might suggest it’s worth your while to trust me.”

  “All right,” said Davy.

  “You’re rescinding the off-fuck command? Excellent. Come on, my boy. I’ll pitch a tent, and we can get warm, rest assured. Although I’m just not pitching the tent out here where everybody can see us.”

  He pulled two sticks from his backpack—for a startling moment Davy thought they were rifles and that Daniel was going to shoot him, but they were skinny metal walking-sticks—and started walking. He was heading north, back along the direction Davy had just come, and the snow was starting to fall more thickly now. But the thought of being alone again filled Davy with a terror, so he trotted after him.

  Movement took the edge from the cold, but Davy was horribly uncomfortable. His feet were nothing and his fingers were going, but his face felt as though acid were eating into it, and breathing hurt him way down his throat and into his chest cavity. It was growing swiftly darker too. It was partly the snowstorm; and also the sun was starting to set. If this Daniel man kept up this pace there was a good chance Davy would fall behind and lose track of him in the murk. Away to his left, the river hissed and cracked its knuckles. Some snaps were large enough to sound like detonations—very large pieces of ice breaking away. It occurred to Davy that this was only making the body of water he had to cross wider.

  Then he walked into a large bush. It loomed up suddenly and the next thing he knew its branches were scratching his face. He danced back, yelping, and then looked around. The snow coming down was grey against the darker sky. The bushes and shrubs were wraiths disappearing into darkness. Daniel was nowhere to be seen.

  Panic seeped up Davy’s spine. What was he going to do now? He called out, “Hello? Hello!” Thought he saw movement away to his left and set off in that direction at a pace. The hill-line across the water was black now against a deep-blueing sky; the land to the east was already nighttime. Fear made his head tingle, and the high dark purple began to shimmer with other colours—cyan, mauve, an infrared glow. Sparks in everything. The very atoms out of which the universe is built sparking. His breathing was hard, fast, reaching that point where the tipping would lurch him into somewhere else. The river was humming a gigantic om as it flowed down the trench of the world.

  It was only when he slipped that he realised he was actually out on the ice. Down onto his front, face banging on the cold floor: an effective smack in the chops. The colours shrunk back into their shells, his head focussed back down onto the simplicity of pain. What was he doing? Running wildly at the Thames—if he went into the water he’d die and his body would never be found.

  And his new sobriety had taken shape, and it was a man grabbing him by the sleeve and pulling him upright. “Good job you’re wearing a light-coloured coat,” Daniel said, “or I wouldn’t have seen you dancing away like a giddy goat. What got into you?”

  “I thought I’d lost you,” Davy gasped. “I thought I was lagging behind. I figured I saw you and came over here.”

  “If I were a superstitious man,” said Daniel, “I’d say a river siren was beckoning you. Attractive was she, this person you saw? Nice hair? Plump? Go
od tits?”

  Davy had a flash of Gal, on all fours, cleaning the floor, her round belly swinging gently with the counter-motion of her scrubbing. This in turn provoked a spike of something that felt very like shame, or perhaps embarrassment. That in turn pushed him into rudeness. “Better looking than you, at any rate.”

  “That’s the spirit. Let’s get off this ice.”

  Daniel lead Davy back to the frozen-marsh margins of the river, and as the world went out around them like a guttering candle they marched a few hundred yards further north. This time Daniel made sure to keep a grip on Davy’s sleeve. “I’m only half joking, you know,” he said.

  “About the river spirit?”

  “I’ve heard things about you, Davy.”

  “Things? Why is everyone so interested in me? I’m honestly a nuh-nuh-nuh… Honestly I’m a nobody.”

  Crunch crunch crunch went their footsteps. “There’s a lot of old, old superstition about epilepsy,” Daniel said shortly. “Now I’m generally a science-and-rationality kind of guy. That’s the governing philosophy of my town, you could say. Nonetheless, there are people pretty convinced that what we’re dealing with, where your abnormal brain chemistry is concerned, is something more than just the old falling sickness. Something more, what’s the word? Visionary.”

  “Senses working overtime,” said Davy.

  “Say what?”

  “It’s what my Da calls it. When I have one of my turns.” He was shivering, and miserable, and exhausted and he would quite literally have given his left hand to be home, and warm, and in bed.

  “Maybe that’s part of the pathology. Tuning you into—something. We all know the deeper history, don’t we? Humankind exploited nature for thousands of years. Then came the Sisters, and after that nature has been getting her own back. You can’t travel around the countryside for as long as I have and not get a sense of that. The hostility. The stubbornness. It teeters on the edge of being personal, you know? And maybe there’s a part of your mind, sensitized by the epilepsy, that tunes in, like a radio, to that? Or maybe,” Daniel added, in a different tone, “that’s just bollocks. Let’s get my tent out before the last shreds of light disappear completely.”