by Adam Roberts
“But no navy.”
“No, indeed. Then there’s the north. I’ve been up north, and it’s hard country. But what we’re hearing now is that something is gathering up there, and probably for a large scale assault. You ever heard of Father John?”
“My father is called John.”
“Not him.”
“Well,” said Davy, reasonably, “I daresay a lot of fathers are called John. It’s quite a common name.”
“I hate to say I liked you better when you were freezing and weeping,” said Daniel. “But it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid the truth of that. Father John is real, though enough legends have accrued around him to suggest that he’s done a good job generating a cult of personality. He’s very dangerous, and from what my superiors at Guz can glean, he’s pulling together a very large army. You don’t do that unless you intend to use it.”
“Maybe he wants it for parades and such?”
“John’s focus has been to his north for a long time, but what we’re hearing is that he’s sorted all that out now. Which means his attention is liable to be redirected south. Which is bad news for everybody in this territory.”
“Guz, the navy. John, the army.”
“There’s also Wycombe. Plenty of people have underestimated those women to their cost. Picture the whole island. There’s us tucked away in the bottom left. Then, from the bottom right, through the middle and up to the top, in amongst the many smaller groups and militias, are three more considerable armed forces, all with their own ambitions and plans. Kent, Wycombe and John in the north.”
“Mother Patel has a big atlas-book at her house,” said Davy. “I used to go and look at it, to work out where the Hill was in relation to the rest of the country. I spent a lot of time exploring the land with my mind, wandering up and down rivers. But it turned out I was looking at a map of Italy.”
“Didn’t the fact that it said ITALY give it away?”
“Oh I can’t read,” said Davy, matter-of-factly. “Ma concentrated her energies on teaching my sisters, obviously.”
“Obviously?”
“Well, they’re older, and they’re not brain-sick like me. Julia and Sue. Ma said she didn’t see much point in teaching me after them. Too busy. Sue, my next-up sister, says she’ll try and learn me some proper reading when she gets a bit of time. I know some of the letters. But I figured England began with an I, and saw the I at the start of ITALY and then made the rest of the map fit what I thought it should look like.”
“Moving,” Daniel said, blinking, “right along, and before I degenerate into a gibbering loon: we come to the reason why you’re in such high demand, my boy.”
“At last!”
“England, you see. This is a difficult territory to fight over. It’s difficult even to travel across in the most basic sense. Before the Sisters there were roads and cars and rail lines, the whole country threaded together. But the roads and the rails are almost all gone, and the few cars we still maintain are pretty useless without roads to run on. Before the Sisters I could’ve travelled from Guz to, let’s say, here in a few hours. Now it’s weeks.”
“This doesn’t explain why I’m in such high demand at all,” complained Davy. “I’m starting to think you don’t know.”
“Be patient. I’m getting to that. We talked of the two oldest branches of the military-as-was: army and navy. But there was also an air force.”
“Up in the air. Flying soldiers? Men with wings?”
“Men inside machines with wings. A few of those machines still exist of course, but flying them is not like driving a car, and nobody really knows how to do it any more. Besides which, they use a lot of fuel. I mean, an insane amount of fuel. And it’s a slow, slow business distilling that much ethanol. That’s even assuming we can get these flying machines to work. Guz knows more about these old kinds of aircraft than anybody, because we have a ship called an aircraft carrier stuffed with them.”
“Wow,” said Davy.
“So here’s the thing. One point the old histories of war—I mean, pre-Sisters war—all agree on: to win the war you needed to control the skies. And that makes sense. You might have a great big, well-trained army on the ground, but it would be an easy matter for a war-plane to fly over and bomb your men to little, squelchy, red pieces.”
“Ugh.”
“Ugh is the whole of war in one handy syllable, my lad. And there are other advantages. If the roads were open, and the bridges still standing, and if I had a car and a full tank, I could drive you to Guz in a number of hours. But if I had a fuelled-up plane, I could fly you to Guz in minutes—and without any regard to whether or not there were roads, bridges or thick, thick jungle beneath me. Having access to the air would completely revolutionise travel.”
“So, all this—me being kidnapped, Wycombe, the man in the leather coat—this is about machines that can fly in the air?”
“Bingo, my boy. Bin-go.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I have bosses, in Guz. They have their contacts all around the country, some of whom stay in touch via radio. They also send people out. People like me. We’ve been scouting, recruiting, checking on things, a little bit of firefighting here and there, and piecing together a bigger picture. But over the last year we’ve been hearing rumours, and from several different sources. Rumours of something big. Something to do with aircraft.”
“Are they true, these rumours?”
“Well that’s the million dolorous-dollars question, isn’t it? The way Guz figures it, I suppose: it’s not something that can be ignored. It’s not outside the bounds of possibility that Father John has some aircraft. Maybe he’s got crew who have studied them, read the handbooks, put time and resources into maintaining them. Maybe he can even spare the fuel to fly them, train pilots and so on. But it’s going to be few, and it’s going to be limited. Make a sort of statement at a big battle maybe. Try and intimidate the more easily scared members of your enemy’s army. But hardly an air force. Because the old aircraft were not fundamentally different to the old planes and trains. Same sorts of engines, just put to a different use. Same fuel needed. And nobody’s putting pipes into the ground to suck any more of that stuff out, so it’s little copper stills and ethanol and drip-drip-drip. It’s never enough. It’s a cul-de-sac. You don’t know what cul-de-sac means.”
“Testicle?” Davy guessed.
“Close enough. But then these rumours started. Rumours of different tech. Just before the Sisters struck there had been breakthroughs in energy generation and new kinds of motors were developed. Still experimental, not yet put into mass production. But a motor that didn’t need constant refuelling. A special kind of flying engine. You must have electricity, on your hill?”
“Mother Patel had an electricity generator. She ran it on pigshit,” said Davy, eager to show off. “And it lit two lights inside her house when it got dark.”
“Evidently your Mama Patel is quite the village tech-geek.”
“But the lights were these wallets of glass, with little stamens inside, like the insides of flowers.”
“Bulbs,” said Daniel.
“No, not like tubers or seeds. Like the insides of a flowering plant, you know? These little twisted-around strands that got hot and bright when the electricity went into them.”
“Filaments. I know about the technology. The whole thing is called a bulb.”
“No,” said Davy, confidently. “Anyway they were made all of glass, these lights, hundred-year-old glass. And then one broke. And then the other one broke. No way to get any more. One time a tinker came to her door, she told us, and promised he could get her a working one from Oxford, but he wanted a whole pig in payment. A whole pig! And some other stuff. She told him to go fish in the river for whole pigs, called him a cheeky mah-der-chod. That’s what’s she called him.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea. So, anyway, he went off. And after all, lamps and candles are just as good at s
hining out light, and not nearly so easy to break.”
“So what did your Mama Patel do with her electrical generator after that?”
“She ran a tub with it that shook water around and made washing easier. But then the motor on that broke and she sold the generator to a man from Moreton. He came up with a horse and cart and took it away.”
“The point is: you know the basics.”
“Electricity,” agreed Davy, in a knowledgeable voice.
“Once upon a time, electricity was everything. In the old world, I mean. Whole palaces were built in stone with no other purpose than making it. The towers you can see, looking towards Didcot? Poking out of the flood? They’re all that remains of a huge castle that did nothing except make electricity. And the old world could store it too, in batteries. Now we can make batteries, but they’re big boxes that dribble out only a small charge and don’t hold it for very long. Pre-Sisters, people carried devices powered by batteries smaller than your fingernail that lasted days, or weeks. So anyway, the rumours—the rumours are that a new kind of charge-device, or motor, or something, had been developed, back then. Who knows? Davy my boy I’m going to show you something.”
He rummaged in the front pocket of his bag and brought out a coin, tainted almost to coal-black by age and use. Davy had often seen old coinage from the pre-Sisters world tainted as black, and had even been amazed when Mary had polished one up to reveal a bright, bright silver artefact beneath all the grime. Daniel held this one up for Davy to see, and what he saw were numbers and incomprehensible sigils shining, a faint red, on its surface. The numbers changed, and Davy realised that the thing wasn’t a coin at all but some kind of old-world device. The blackness was not any kind of taint but was rather the colour of the substance out of which it had been originally made. “What is that?”
“We’re not entirely sure,” Daniel conceded. “More than a clock, at any rate, although a clock is partly what it is. That’s not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that it is still working. It must be one hundred and ten years old at the very least. What kind of battery could last so long?”
“Open it and find out,” Davy suggested.
Daniel tucked the magic coin away, as if he feared Davy was about to bash it with a rock. “That’s been done. The devices are sealed in, so we have to break them to open them, and then they don’t work any more, and we’re none the wiser. Anyway. The reason I’m showing you that is because it stands as evidence, howsoever small, that there may be something in these rumours.”
“It’s so small!”
“Small things can have big implications. This small thing is why I’ve been sent so very far from my home and comfy bed, for one thing. And I will take any wager you care to offer that it, or something like it, is why so many people are after you, and willing to risk killing and dying, and enduring this foul weather too.”
“It is a strange fate,” said Davy, “that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.”
Daniel looked at him oddly for a moment, and then said, “The rumours are about various places, but there’s a particularly persistent one to do with Benson.”
“Where the strange man took me.”
“The strange man was called Steven Harding, and he was a nasty piece of work.”
“You knew him?”
“For my sins.”
“He was a priest?”
“What? No. Jesus, Davy, are you doing this on purpose? Knock-off the dum-dum act and try to pay attention.”
“It’s not an act,” said Davy, in a small voice.
“I mean that he and I had crossed paths a few times in the past. He was a ruthless man, and a traveller and a warrior when he had to be, and a torturer even when he didn’t. You were very unlucky to fall into his clutches, and lucky to have been freed from them.”
“Why did he take me?”
“Near as I can figure it, he was hired by Wycombe. The women paid him to snatch you and bring you over to them. But he’d got wind of enough of the stories about Benson, and he was greedy enough, to think he might cut out the middle… eh, the middle-woman. Go directly to the site. But the folk at Wycombe are not fools, and they had him shadowed. Well, either that or else they had someone at the Benson compound. Maybe they keep somebody, or somebodies, there all year. It would make sense to guard it, if the rumours about it are true.”
“And what are the rumours about it?”
“In the old days Benson belonged to the British military. They flew flying machines from there, and serviced other flying machines. The rumours are that they developed new kinds of flying machines there too. I don’t know how they started, these rumours, and I certainly don’t know if they’re true or not. But like everyone else, Guz has to take them seriously. Because if they are true then the whole balance of power shifts, and whoever can open the storehouses at that place can start making serious plans to roll through the whole kingdom like floodwater and set up their empire on whatever terms they choose.”
“Storehouses?”
“You saw the compound. You were at the compound. It’s all old buildings, all more or less tumbledown as all the regular buildings from the old-days are. If nobody tends them, houses fall down. But according to rumour there are also underground storage spaces, and that’s where the new tech was developed and stored. According to rumour. The story is that the power for that part of the facility was not wired in from the electricity generating facilities like everyone else’s. That it was the tech itself.” Daniel shrugged. “Who knows? Where we are at the moment is: it doesn’t matter if it’s true. It doesn’t even matter whether we believe it or not. The crucial thing is: we know other people believe it, and are acting on that belief, and this is destabilising the delicate socio-political balance of the whole area.” He chuckled, as if he had said something funny. “So we have to act.”
“Of course,” Davy suggested, “what you’ve just said might be what all the others believe—if you see what I mean. Not that this magic machinery really exists, but that others believe it does. Maybe nobody actually believes this stuff exists, but everybody believes everybody else believes it.”
“When I suggested earlier that you were a dum-dum, I may have spoken too soon. That’s very astute. You should join the strategic team at Guz.”
“I have to get home,” Davy blurted, immediately. Then, after a breath, “I mean, it’s very kind of you to offer, sir, I’m sure. But I need to get back to my Ma. And my Da, obviously.”
“Calm down lad. I didn’t mean straight away. But maybe think about it, longer term. Unless you’re really happy working a smallholding for the rest of your natural life?”
“It’s home.”
“Of course it is,” said Daniel, with a sigh, as if the very concept was becoming a remoteness to him. “Of course it is.”
“And—what I don’t understand, still, what I still don’t understand,” Davy said, pushing his knuckles into his gut to try and relieve the hunger pangs a little, “is why me?”
“Why you indeed. That’s the real puzzler. Here we enter into the land of Speculation. What’s clear, or clear-ish, is that Wycombe thinks you can open the vaults under Benson. Who knows why they think that, but they evidently do. I figure that Steven Hardman believed he might be able simply to take you to Benson and then—well, you tell me. What did he ask you to do?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember anything?”
“I had a seizure, on the Hill,” Davy said, looking through one of the glass-free windows, beyond the turbulent winter river at the distant uplands. “Next thing I knew I was waking up there.”
“Who knows what he planned? It didn’t work, at any rate. The question is: would it have worked, if he hadn’t been, eh, interrupted by an emissary from Wycombe? Which is related to the question of what it is about you that makes people think they can use you to unlock these vaults. I don’t suppose you’ve any inkling?”
“How should I know?�
��
“How?” Daniel seemed surprised by this answer. “You are you, aren’t you?”
“But I’m nobody! Sir, believe me. I’m the runt of my family’s litter. I herd the cows and do my chores and that’s it. I’m an epileptic scrap of a boy.”
“Or a visionary,” said Daniel, rousing himself. “At any rate, we don’t want to dally. I’m sorry breakfast wasn’t more filling. Put your socks on, and we’ll head north.”
“North? Where—Oxford?”
“Not so far as that.”
“It’ll take weeks to work round Oxford and come back down!”
“Trust me, my lad. North is our best option. Put your socks back on.”
‘Trust me’ was the sort of thing bad people said. Trust, Davy knew, was a quality to be earned, not something a sensible individual gave away free. But when he eased his now dry, warm socks back over his chilled naked feet the sensation was so exquisite—such an intensity of local, physical pleasure—that it quite drove suspicion from his mind.
“Boots on,” said Daniel, getting to his feet. “Let’s yomp.”
Chapter Eight
HAT PULLED THE body out of the water and wrapped it, for want of a better shroud, in some of Bert Rand’s plastic. Then he sat down in his boat and had a bit of a think. He wasn’t a heartless person, but it did cross his mind to push the corpse over the side and get on with reclaiming his boat. But he didn’t think he’d feel clean, in himself, doing that. And anyway, he wanted to know what the girl had been doing on his boat in the first place. And what the person, or the people, who killed her had been doing on his boat. Presumably they had blown up his boat to hide the body. Or perhaps to punish him. Or maybe to do both at once.
Hat pulled away the plastic to take one last look at her face, and wiped the unresisting, uncaring features with a rag to scrape away as much mud as possible. It wasn’t, it seemed, the same girl as the one who had stowed away, those many weeks earlier. He looked for a long time, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t her. Though it looked a little like her. But this individual had a longer nose; and her skin was a little darker, when you’d expect death to send the body’s colour in the other direction. And Amber—the stowaway girl—had not had a mole on the side of her brow. Hat was pretty much certain of that. “Mole? Beauty spot,” he said aloud, “I mean to say.” As if the corpse cared!
