by Adam Roberts
“Where have you been all day?” Agnieszka asked him.
“I needed to get this lamp,” said Hat. He held up the lamp. “May I put it close to the fire, to dry out the wick?”
“Where did you get that old thing? It’s filthy. Did O’Connor sell you that? I hope he didn’t charge you too much.”
“I found it in the river,” said Hat.
“Maybe you can rub it and get a genie out of it.” But she permitted him to place it near the fire, and even cleared away the scrum of her regulars to let him dry out his clothes. They didn’t get completely dry, of course, but as he sat there wrapped in a blanket, drinking a beer, he felt some small sense of satisfaction. “If you don’t mind, Agnieszka,” he said, “I’ll smoke a cigarette.”
“Be my guest.”
The whole room went quiet when he lit up the fag—the authentic aroma, the ancient scent of it. Men and women stood there drawing his second-hand smoke with their nostrils. The whole room seemed to relax. The mood lifted.
“There’s a genie, after all,” said Agnieszka. “You know, you’d dry your hat quicker if you took it off and put it by the fire with the rest of your clothes.”
“I prefer to wear it,” said Hat.
The next morning he was up early and down at his boat. The temporary seal had held, and the boat was still floating—much lower in the water than Hat would have liked, but still. He had his lamp and tinder in a bag. The Monsoon rain was light but steady, and there was a greenish-blueish quality to the daylight.
First order of business was to get the big, improvised plastic bladder out of the way. This took longer than he had anticipated. The whole structure had deflated by two thirds overnight, and was floppy inside the hold. But getting the last of the air out proved an onerous business. It would have been simplest just to rip the whole thing with a knife, but Hat had promised Plastic Bert that he would get the fabric back to him with as little damage as possible—it had been that, or else actually buy the whole lot outright, which was much more than Hat could afford, credit or otherwise. So he was reduced to massaging the whole dying slug, squeezing out air in a series of gushy puffs and oofs and farting sounds. Eventually he got the whole thing bundled up into a more or less portable roll, and pulled it onto the deck. It was filthy with river mud and crap, but that didn’t matter. Hat had become mired with the same substances as he wrestled with it. The least of his concerns.
With the plastic out of the way, Hat got his lamp out of its bag, lit it and hung it from the ceiling. The inside of the boat was a mess. Of course he had expected this, but it was still a shock to see how badly things had been shaken up.
He was standing in a foot-or-so of water. A great quantity of mud had come in through the breach when the boat was on the river-bed, and all sorts of objects were scattered everywhere.
The first order of business was to mend the breach. That meant carpentry, and it took Hat ten minutes to locate all the tools—they’d somehow ended up in the rear compartment. It also meant cannibalising some of the boat’s own wood. Hat had previously decided that the door to the rear compartment might as well go: he could get a new door when he was up and running again. So he unscrewed the portal from its hinges, broke it into component planks with a chisel and set to work sawing, fitting, and nailing. He got one layer in, behind the tarp, using a file to make the fit with the ragged edges as close as possible. Then he painted a great quantity of waterproof putty into the joins—a homemade concoction, this, rendered from bone glue, plastic fibres and tree resin, and very much a temporary solution to any given leak. He needed to leave this to set, and anyway it was lunchtime. His larder had remained closed the whole time, and although water had, obviously, got in there, the cured meats still seemed edible. He ate and drank and finished off his small store of soggy nuts, since he couldn’t realistically dry them out and if he didn’t eat them they would go bad.
Then it was back to the breach, and a second layer of wood carpented into the hole.
It took him almost all day, but he finished. The boat was still leaning forward, its stern a foot or so higher than its bow, because of the weight of the mud and the way the water naturally lay deeper at the front of the slope than the back. He could pump the front compartment clean tomorrow, and begin the tedious and doubtless drawn-out job of scooping the mud out then too. It was enough for today.
It was only as he stood there at the end of that long day’s work, looking forward to appraising the sheer mess that he would have to deal with that he noticed for the first time something that shouldn’t have been there. A shoulder.
It was unmistakeably a naked shoulder, rising about the flat murky layer of water like a dolphin’s back.
The first thing that occurred to Hat was: I had been working in this space all day, inches from a dead body, and I never even noticed. He was cold and wet, but the shiver that trembled through his body had nothing to do with either of those facts.
He went over and touched the shoulder. It turned under his pressure, and the body went onto its back. The front was covered in mud and grime, but a number of things were easy enough to see as the face came up through the water. It was a young person. It was female. It was naked. It was dead.
Chapter Seven
DANIELS’S TENT WAS a small tent, and that meant he and Davy were forced into a physical proximity awkward for two males who hardly knew one another. On the upside this arrangement had the advantage of sharing body heat. Davy had not had the chance to get dry after being snowed on for so long, but his thin blanket did help, and though he didn’t feel exactly warm at least he didn’t feel too debilitatingly cold. Besides, he was utterly exhausted, and so Davy finally fell asleep.
When he woke he was alone in the little tent. He knew straight away where he was, and what was happening, and the knowledge filled him with despair. He was separated from his home. The night before he had thrown his lot in with a stranger. He had been desperate, but it was foolish to trust strangers.
He lay under the flimsy blanket trying to work out what he was going to do. But, lacking the prompt of the sheer exhaustion that had overwhelmed him the previous night, it wasn’t very comfortable. His coat was still damp, and that had transferred to his inner clothes.
He dragged himself out of the tent.
Daniel had started a small fire in the very corner of the dilapidated room. Scraps of old wallpaper isolated schematic red-blue flowers against an otherwise rough-surfaced façade of concrete scabbed with patches of plaster. Daniel had cleared detritus from a patch of floor, and managed to coax fire from a heap of twigs, though they spat and hissed as they expelled what had once been frost, and the flames were very pale in the morning light. But it was heat, and Davy huddled as close as he could.
“First things first,” Daniel announced. “Shoes and socks off. Let’s dry what we can. No point in getting trench foot.”
He had salvaged a strange little structure made of plastic-covered wire from somewhere, a kind of frame a foot high. Davy peeled his damp socks off and draped them over this, as near the fire as possible. Then there was a quantity of tricky manoeuvring of his feet so as to soak up at least some of the warmth. It was far from being a fierce fire, but it was certainly better than nothing.
Daniel made some more tea and shared a little bread. The little was not as much as Davy could have eaten.
“Sleep all right?”
“I slept,” said Davy. Close up, and in full light, he could see how exhausted-looking the older man was.
“You were pretty blotto,” Daniel agreed. “Last night you were so exhausted you almost zombie-walked into the river. That would have been the end of you.”
“Where are we, anyway?”
“There was a town here, pre-Sisters. Big expensive houses on the banks of the river—they’re all under water now, of course. Some of the properties further from the river’s edge are still standing, more or less, and that’s where we are. I don’t propose staying here very long, though. I don’t p
ropose staying anywhere very long.”
“They’ll be coming after me,” said Davy.
“The new reality of your life has finally sunk in, I see.”
“Why?”
“They consider you a valuable asset. So do we, evidently, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Davy took a deep breath. “Who are they? And who are you? And what on earth is going on?”
“Let’s take those in order, shall we? They first. They are a powerful group, or tribe, who work out of Wycombe. It’s a female collective. But of course you know of them. You live hard by their back garden. They don’t trust men, is their premise. Can’t say I blame them, as far as that goes. We don’t have much of a record, do we? Men, I mean.”
“I know about them,” said Davy. “I mean, everybody knows them. They keep themselves to themselves, and Wycombe’s a long way east of here.”
“Not such a long way, really. And their days of keeping themselves to themselves are at an end, I fear. They’ve been bounced out of that by, well, events. The bigger picture. But the thing to bear in mind about them is that they’re a Power. The story is that the name Wycombe is short for ‘Women, come’. I don’t know if that’s where the name actually comes from. I daresay it’s an ancient name and originally had nothing to do with women. But that’s what it means now. Wycombe has become more than a refuge. It’s become a force in the land. They have numbers, and they have good land and some useful infrastructure and tech. They’ve got a real steep hill—I’ve seen it, it’s practically a cliff-face—which makes defence that much easier. And most of all they have a unity ethos. An ideology. Something that motivates them, that makes individuals prepared to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. That’s rare in this dog-eat-dog world. Most local warlords have to enforce loyalty by terror and punishment, which is a fragile sort of discipline. But Wycombe is different.”
“What’s a ‘thos’?”
“Not ‘thos’, ‘ethos’. An ethos. It’s a, you know...”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“Well it’s sort of a shared, a shared set of beliefs and values.”
“But why do they want me? These women?”
“Well that’s an interesting question. We’re not sure. I say ‘we’ and I mean my bosses, and if I’m honest I’m not privy to their strategy meetings. But they say ‘come’ and I come, and say ‘go’ and I go, and right now they reckon Wycombe are up to something. They’re not exactly sure, although we have a pretty good sense. A pretty good sense of the larger motives. If my supervisors were better at keeping me in the loop I could tell you more. At any rate, we know they consider you a valuable asset, worth taking a risk to obtain.”
“You’re not explaining very well. When you say ‘bosses’ what do you mean?”
“I’m from a town west of here, called Guz. A port. That’s us, that’s ‘we’.”
“Port means it’s on the coast, yeah?”
“That’s it. South coast, couple of weeks’ travel west of here. A few summer weeks’ travel, rather more winter weeks’ travel.”
“So you’re even further from home than I am.”
Daniel’s beard spread and his teeth flashed in the midst of all the hair. “You’re not wrong there, my boy.”
“So what’s your ethos? You people from Guz, I mean?”
“Our ethos is—it’s complicated, actually. I’d like to say: civilization. I’d like to say: bringing order and decency and humanity and all that back to this benighted kingdom. Davy, trust me when I say I believe it. I really do. It’s just that if we break down civilization into order and decency and humanity, the first of those three terms rather overwhelms the other two. In practice, I mean. Turns out we can’t do anything without establishing order, and that establishing order can be a bit… violent, really. Still. That doesn’t make doing nothing an option.”
“Doesn’t explain why you’re so far from home.”
“Oh I go all over, believe me. Davy, listen. It’s over a century since the Sisters. Then the long autumn. For decades people clung on to existence, the barest minimum of survival. I mean, most people didn’t even manage that, but it was week-by-week precarious for even the most fortunate. I’m not pretending that it’s milk and honey now, but things are better. We’ve settled, adjusted to living in this new world. Various communities are managing it, though of course there are plenty of desperate people, plenty of starving folk and refugees. But there are centres, now, where life is more stable. Guz is one such. The Parish and the Hill—your neck of the woods, I mean, over the river. It’s small-beer, but it’s doing OK. I mean, no offence, you know? But it’s stable. Otherwise there’s Southampton down south, and Oxford up north, although people tend to overplay the strength of that town. Wycombe is a citadel. Each of them puts out their own money, tokens—a lot of it is pre-Sisters coinage filed and restamped, but still.”
“We don’t have a lot of use for money on my hill,” said Davy. “We baa.”
Daniel put his head to one side. “Like sheep?”
“I’m forgetting the word. You know what I mean—we swap things for things, we keep a mental tally of who owes what. You know the word.”
“I know the word,” Daniel agreed. “But you on all fours bleating strikes me as a better system still. And you do know what money is—barter’s less effective at a trading point like Goring, or Henley, and so there are tokens. But you’re distracting me from my main point. Us: Southampton, which is a failing state actually. Oxford. Wycombe. All right, what happens next? What do you think? You think that people will happily co-exist, rub along, concentrate on their crops and their livestock, do a little trading on the side?”
“Why not, though?” Davy asked, ingenuously.
“Why not indeed,” said Daniel, and stared at the fire in silence for a while. “So, yes. War. That’s mostly how the land is parcelled up. Local warlords here, local warlords there.”
“Guz too?”
Daniel peered at him. “You’re shrewder than you appear, my boy.”
“Hadn’t you heard, I’m a visionary? They call it epilepsy but it’s actually telepathic powers. See the future, read minds.”
“Read my mind right now,” said Daniel, “and learn a new range of swearwords, all of them deployed with reference to you.”
“You got anything else to eat?”
“I have, but we need to ration it. So here we are, you and me. And all around us things are arranging and rearranging. Two kinds of warlords, at root. The impatient warlords strike too soon, are defeated and killed and ploughed into the general mulch of history, to be forgotten. So that just leaves the patient warlords. Those are the ones we’re dealing with now. The ones Guz like to think they’re playing seven dimensional chess with.”
“I don’t understand that reference at all.”
Daniel nodded. Then he turned Davy’s socks on their broken-down little frame. “Patient warlords,” he said, “wait until they have overwhelming force, so they can be sure of victory. They pick their battles carefully, and slowly augment their territory. The patient warlord doesn’t think of the glory he can accrue, but rather the empire he can bequeath his children. Power. That’s what you find when you dig down, past the immediate appetites for food and shelter and warmth, down past them to the need for sex and children and meaning and religion and love, right down, keep on going. That’s the granite bedrock of humankind. Power.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Daniel,” said Davy, “but you’re kind of pompous sometimes, you know?”
Daniel gave him a hard stare. “Anyway,” he said. “Guz is strong, compared to lots of other places. We used to be a naval shipyard, back before the Sisters. Boats are still our forte.”
“That is a lot of boats,” agreed Davy.
Daniel gave him another hard stare. “You know your history, do you lad? You know how the military of this country of ours used to be disposed?”
“Not only don’t I know that,” said Davy,
looking serious, “I don’t even know what disposed means.”
“There were three branches. There was an army, a navy and an air force. The army is soldiers, boots on the ground, guns and massed charges, snipers and bayonets, but also tanks and cannons and men on horseback covering the ground real quick. The navy is boats and ships and also this clever kind of boat that goes underneath the sea. Submarines they were called; ‘sub’ which means ‘under’ and ‘marine’ which means ‘the sea’.”
“Under the sea? Isn’t that the seabed, that’s under the sea? Do they burrow through the seabed, these submarines?”
“Beginning to see why these groups want you dead.”
“I’m only being logical. If they go completely under the sea they ought to be tunnelling through the seabed. If they just go through the water they should be called sub-the-waves. Or… something.”
“Navy,” said Davy, firmly. “Army for land battles, navy for sea battles and also for delivering army soldiers to different coastlines for different land battles. Guz is the closest thing anybody in this country has to a navy, nowadays. I mean, in that proper, old sense. Then there’s the army. And in amongst the various small-time bandit chiefs and petty warlords, there are a few larger scale, more dangerous armies being mustered. One operates out the south-east, down Kent way. The man in charge suffered a setback, but he’s recovered from that.”
“Was it you who set him back?”
“Hah! I wish. Anyway, most of Kent is his now, and that’s a pretty tidy base from which to operate. Kent is—I don’t know if you know your geography. It’s like a peninsula, which is a word you don’t know the meaning of, I’m guessing?”
“You’re good at guessing!” said Davy brightly.
“Peninsula is a prong of land that sticks out into the sea. Kent is like that. I mean it’s a big chunk of territory, but it’s basically that shape. So King Frank is surrounded on three sides by water, like a moat around a castle. He’s been pushing solidly west for a while now. He’s one worry, because he has an army.”
