by Adam Roberts
Angie began to speculate openly that Maxim had forgotten about them, and maybe they wouldn’t have to leave after all. Henry knew that was foolish. Max might have had his hands full with a more pressing task, but he hadn’t forgotten. He wasn’t the sort to forget.
Gossip went round and round the Borough every day. The story now was: Den had killed his main rival Stan, and tried to pin the blame on another of his enemies with a crazy story. When it became obvious nobody believed his lie, he’d run.
When he was eventually caught it was because he’d tried to take too much stuff with him. Obviously he’d had to leave most of his wealth behind, but he should have filled his pockets and ridden his fastest horses and gone south. Instead he’d piled two cartloads with stuff and gone east, and soon got bogged in the flooded lands, and had to abandon the stuff anyway. Some said Father John’s people had caught up with them in the ruins of Milton Keynes; some that he got as far as Bedford. The details were never resolved.
What was inarguable was that one fine, clear autumn morning Max came trotting back into the Borough with Old Denny, handcuffed, his left leg broken, dragged behind a horse on a pallet, and Denny’s son and grandson, rope-tied together and linked to Max’s saddle pommel, running behind. The rest of the family—wife, daughters, son-in-law, daughter-in-law—were not brought back. Maybe they’d escaped altogether. Maybe they’d died or been killed already by John’s men. Nobody knew, and Max wasn’t about to go into all the details. Max looked, the whole Borough agreed, royally pissed off at the whole diversion.
Behind Max and his men was a large force of Father John’s troopers. They had the appearance, Henry thought, of annoyed men; presumably because now they’d have to give up the relatively easy business of searching wild country and go back to the big war in the north. There was one thing to do before they left, though: to go from farm and farm, and compound to compound, and summon everybody to the Common Pond down by the church. Not everybody came, but the crowd was big enough to satisfy Max. He made a speech and hanged the three of them: the old man, the young man and the boy. The boy needed to have one of Max’s men come and haul on his legs to kill him.
“Nobody touches these,” Max ordered. “They’re here until they rot. The crows eat these.”
The very next day a dozen men, all of them new to the area, members of Father John’s select and chosen people, rode up to the gates of Ted’s farm and told everyone to clear off.
Angie asked, “Can we stay in the Borough, once we’ve vacated this farm? Or do we have to leave the Borough as well?”
The leader of the men replied, “I don’t give a horseriding fuck. I don’t care where you go, so long as you fuck off out of this farm.”
The family had talked about it, obviously, before this moment arrived. Angie hadn’t wanted to believe it would ever come to this, but of course they had to make plans. For Angie those plans were: go stay with her folks, in the Borough. Ted’s oldest boy, Rob, wanted to leave the area entirely and start somewhere else completely new. Ted, still weak and in pain, said he had to go where his wife went. Something, Henry noted, dispassionately, had broken inside his spirit. The family bickered amongst itself, and nobody got around to asking Henry what she intended to do.
What she did was this: she went back to her tiny cottage on the Stately, amongst the weeds and the infertile soil. She stayed there three days, and on the fourth she packed a pack and walked away forever, heading south.
It had been clear to her for a long time that there was no future in the Borough so long as Father John was the overlord. And there was nothing she could do to unseat John, not sitting on her tiny eminence in the middle of that land. If that was what she wanted to do—and she did want to do it—then she would need a different vantage.
So she went to find one.
It was easier than she thought it was going to be. She knew enough to distinguish berries good to eat from berries she should avoid. She had a line in her pack with a hook that caught fish one time out of four. And when she came to settlements and farms she was often able to trade the fact that she could read and write for food and shelter. Sometimes this was a simple matter of writing letters, or reading them, or deciphering old instruction manuals whose pages were dissolving to dust at the edges. Sometimes it was more serious: a twentieth- or even a nineteenth-century medical book brought out, a child sick almost to death, anxious relatives urging her to read the cure out of the page. She did what she could.
Everywhere she went she met people who made the same mistake about her. People who believed her life was over because she was old, when in fact her greatest years were all before her. Who believed she was a harmless biddy when she was quite the reverse.
Nobody considered her a threat, because she was an old woman. That meant they let her into their compounds and houses, because they figured she couldn’t do them any harm. That meant they chatted to her, and revealed confidences, and offered friendly advice.
“Don’t go down Thames way,” they said. “Monsters have fenced themselves in there, cannibals. There’s a war in the north,” they said. “Monkeys have taken over Henley on Thames.”
“Monkeys?” she asked, to check she’d heard correctly.
“Yes, yes, monkeys. There was a large private estate full of monkeys and after the Sisters the apes all got out and prospered.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Yes, yes. Maybe it’s just a story.”
She skirted Aylesbury and came over the hill at Tring, and down into the flooded Colne valley, and that is where she first met Amy. At that time Amy was young and full of rage, and she and Henry clicked immediately over a shared distrust of men. Amy had energy and ideas, and Henry had strategic vision, and they worked together so naturally it was as if they’d been together for years.
What Amy was doing, in those early years, was salvaging the sort of pre-Sisters kit nobody else was interested in. “Everyone wants the big kit. The cars that still work. The tractors. Vats to distil ethanol. You can see why. But the real genius of the old world was the small stuff. Tiny things. And here, the whole of the Thames Valley was world-famous for its tiny technology. And that’s what I retrieve.”
It meant, often, going underwater into the Colne lake—right down, and into old buildings, with a helmet over her head and pulling stuff out of drawers and broken cupboards and old shop-buildings and even out of delivery vans and cars, all in the murk and dark and wet.
“There’s a plane down there,” she said, “an old-school plane long as a dinosaur, and full of the most amazing and baffling electronics.”
“Full of dead bodies, too?” Henry asked.
Amy shrugged. “Sure. Or the coral bits that are left after fish ate all the soft stuff. You know—bones.”
“I know bones,” Henry confirmed.
Amy had rigged up a homemade aqualung, because she was super-clever with her hands that way. She was also, Henry realised the first night they bunked together, twitchy, unhappy, scared, damaged. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her, she said, and Henry said she understood, and would never pry. And so they fell in together, and Henry persuaded her that there was no future on the lake—mostly frozen in the winter, and in the summer a place of malaria and constant bugs and bad smells. Toxins from the old world still leaked into the water from below, and the Thames flushed all the shit of middle England right through the heart of that place.
Of all the people Henry had met in her life, young Amy was the one who struck her as possessing the greatest potential. She was ingenious and inventive, found ways to work around problems. Quick witted and neurotic and a little paranoid—these last states of mind, once handicaps, positive survival traits in the modern world. For the first time in a long time Henry started to think it might be possible to accomplish something that she knew she wouldn’t have been able to accomplish alone.
“We should go upland,” Henry said. “There’s a commune of women at Wycombe that would take us i
n. Nice people, but directionless. Within six months we could be running the joint.”
“Sounds like a lot of work,” said Amy.
“Sounds like a lot of power. The good thing about power is that you can use it to keep yourself safe, and also, if you want, to punish those who want to hurt you.”
“I just want a place where I can tinker and build my machines,” said Amy. “I just want a—” and as the word occurred to her she began crying, such that her tears and the word came out at the same time, “—sanctuary. I just want a sanctuary.” Amy sobbed, and hugged Henry close to her. “I just want a place where I can feel safe.”
“You want a shelter,” said Henry.
“Yes. That’s the word.”
“Then let’s make one,” said Henry. “Together.”
They spent their last night by the lake together, and Amy confessed that sometimes she cut herself with a penknife she carried in her pocket, and that sometimes she wished to die.
“The thing about that wish,” Henry said, “is that it is the one single wish guaranteed to come true for every human, no exceptions. You just need to be patient.”
“Patience,” said Amy, as one might say cockroach or faeces.
“I’ll tell you a joke,” said Henry. “An old woman was walking by a lakeside one afternoon, and the sun was setting. It was such a beautiful sight, the orange-white-yellow flame-light from the sky shining on the oily surface of the water, that she sat on a fallen log to watch it. But there was somebody already on the log: a lady who would have been beautiful if she’d had any flesh on her white, white face, or if she had been able to tuck her brilliant white teeth behind any lips. A lady dressed all in black with a black fur hood over her head, and in her left hand a great scythe. She had not been there on the log when the old woman had sat down, and the old woman had not heard her approach, and yet there she was. And as the sun sank, the old woman asked, ‘Who are you?’ And the fine lady replied, ‘I am Death.’ And the old woman nodded, and said, ‘Oh I see,’ and then she leaned a little closer-in and said,” and Henry acted the motion, leaning in to Amy, speaking more slowly, more distinctly and with more volume, “‘I said, WHO ARE YOU?’”
“I don’t get it,” said Amy. Then she thought about it, and she said, “Oh I do get it. It’s funny.” She didn’t laugh, because she never laughed. But saying so was praise enough.
“All humour is about death and pain and embarrassment,” said Henry. “The trick is making sure it’s somebody else’s death and pain and embarrassment that you’re laughing about.”
In the morning they set off together, heading for the eminences of the Chilterns.
PART TWO
Learning to Read
Chapter Ten
FOR HALF A day Davy lived inside a bag. It might have been longer than half a day. Maybe not so long. It was hard to tell time. At one point he flopped out of consciousness altogether—the exhaustion, and hardship, not to mention the fear, provoking a seizure. But most of the time he was aware and conscious. It’s just that the thing he was most conscious of was the canvas bag they had fitted over his head. The scratch of its weave. The smell of it. The way it amplified the sound of his breathing.
His hands were cuffed behind his back. At the beginning he’d been slumped over the saddle on his belly, like a sack, but this posture had not only been intensely uncomfortable, he had actually found it difficult to breathe. When the riders got off the causeway, and out of the rain, they stopped for a breather, and one of the women checked on him. “I don’t like his colour,” she said, and the others all gathered round. He was lifted down and propped against a moss-wet log. Finally he could catch his breath.
They gave him water, and a little flatbread to eat, this latter damp and flavourless. He looked around him, but with an anxious panicky crudeness of observation that registered very little except the wind-rumpled stretch of water in front of him and the general rain-sog of everything. The rain had stopped. The sun was low in the sky.
Then they put the hood back, hoisted him onto the saddle again, but in a proper upright position this time. They rode on. Sitting was easier on his lungs, and less painful; although the fact that he wasn’t able to grasp the rider in front to steady himself meant that he kept swaying backwards, and feeling the dagger-panic that he was about to topple off. He was wet, and scared, and exhausted, and he was like that for a long time.
The next thing he knew his hands were cuffed in his lap, which meant he could tuck his fingers into the trouser-top of the rider in front of him. His back and shoulders felt sore. He flexed and stretched, and there was a palpable pain back there. Since he didn’t recall being taken off the horse, having his hands untied, and retied in the front he reasoned that he had had a fit and fallen off the horse, and that the women had repositioned him when he was unconscious.
Senses working overtime.
They rode for an incalculable time. Finally they stopped, lifted Davy down and took off his hood. It was night. At least it wasn’t raining any more. The sky was clear and cold, and the stars mingled with the prickles of light buzzing on the pricky surface of his own retinas. To his left and right profoundly purple-black columns blocked out tree-shapes against the starry sky. He was in some kind of open space, and the moon was shining. In the pale light it was hard to get a clear sense of the dimensions of where he was. Some of the women were setting up a fire. The horses were all standing in a pack, snorting and puffing, and one woman was going from hefty snout to hefty snout with a leather bucket. Did the horses miss their dead companion? Were they even aware that there had been another? Davy rubbed his eyes, and waited for them to adjust to the milky thin moonlight.
He was sitting on a hump of moss, and immediately to his right was an old tumbled-down trunk and bough, like a giant’s discarded slingshot. Davy’s senses were preternaturally aware. Even in so dim a light, he could make out a large spiderweb between trunk and bough, each line drily taut as if tensed for the terrifying inevitability of dew.
The moon looked like a still pond, very far away.
“Hungry?” One of the women was leaning over him.
“Did I fall off?”
“Did you fall off? Don’t you remember?”
“I am subject to epileptic fits during which I lose consciousness.”
The woman’s face was a mask in the moonlight. She said nothing for several seconds. Then she said, “Gabbledy-gabbledy say what now?” She stood up. “Abigail?” she called. “I can’t make head nor tail of this shit-rabbit.”
“He has a speech impediment,” Abigail called back from the fire. They had just got the wood burning, and an orange gleam was peeking through the heaped sticks. Abigail was squatting down, trying to get at the warmth.
“Is he, like, a retard though?” the first woman called back.
“What would Henry want with a retard?” Abigail returned.
“Search me. What would Henry want with any fucking adolescent boy at all?”
“Maybe he’s a savant. I don’t know,” said Abigail. “If you’re looking for insight into Henry’s mind, my Jo, then you’re asking the wrong person.” She turned back to the fire. The first woman bent down to Davy again.
“Maybe you’ve an inkling, though, babble-boy. What does Henry want with you anyway?”
“Henry,” said Davy. “I thought you were taking me to Wycombe?”
“What? Speak slower!”
Davy concentrated, and tried again. “I thought you were taking me to Wycombe.”
“Well aren’t you just Professor of Bears-Shit-in-the-Woods-ology. Damn right we’re taking you to Wycombe. That doesn’t fucking answer my question.”
“I thought Wycombe was a woman-only community?”
“Abigail?” the woman called, over her shoulder. “Do you want to see if this little shit-pants wants a drink of water? If I have to keep talking to him much longer I’m going punch his nose so hard it’ll relocate to the roof of his mouth.”
Abigail got to her fe
et and came over, and the other woman took her place by the fire. It was burning quite heartily now. “Don’t mind Jojo. Her bark is worse than her bite.”
“I’m guessing her bite is still pretty bad, though,” said Davy.
“Hah. Come on, lad. I’m going to uncuff your hands, and you’re going to have a little drink, maybe a bit of food, get warm by the fire.”
“Thank you,” said Davy.
The cuffs snapped off, and Davy rubbed his wrists. “I don’t even know why you’ve taken me,” he complained, as Abigail handed him a water bottle. “I don’t understand what’s going on at all.”
“No more do I, boyo,” Abigail returned. “Henry wants you, that’s all. It was supposed to be softly-softly—she hired that feller Hardman. He was supposed to grab you and bring you to Wycombe. Since you live in what amounts to Guz territory, we didn’t want a big military ride-in-and-snaffle-you hoohah. Hardman was paid to slip in and bring you out. But he got ideas of his own. Bastard.”
“He’s dead,” said Davy, the memory returning to him of Hardman’s ice-furred corpse.
“He won’t be mourned.”
“That’s sad.”
“That he’s dead? I don’t think so.”
“Sad that nobody will miss him, I mean.”
“Yeah. Well. The world is full of sadness,” agreed Abigail. “But pity is a precious resource, in limited supply, and you’d be profligate to waste any on a bastard like Hardman. Here, have some jerky. We’ll stop here a few hours and ride on at first light. You could sleep, you know.”
Davy chewed on the leathery strip of flesh. He was, he realised, very hungry. “Did you kill Daniel?”
At this Abigail laughed a series of low, gurgling laughs, like a series of hiccoughs strung together. “I surely tried. If there’s any justice, he’s frozen to death in that water. But it wouldn’t be the first time Daniel has evaded justice.”
“He was my friend,” said Davy, feeling tears swelling inside him.
