Haven

by Adam Roberts

  “Did you mammy never tell you to beware of grown men who go about befriending twelve-year-old boys.”

  “I’m thirteen,” said Davy.

  Abigail was silent for a little time. When she next spoke her voice sounded almost offended, as though Davy had gone out of his way to insult her. “I’d keep that fact to yourself if I were you, boy,” she said, and moved back to the fire.

  Davy chewed the jerky, and looked at the brimming orange light. He was sitting a little apart from the rest of them. All the women were gathered around the fire, their faces given freakish gargoyle animation by the play of shadows and the movement of the light. One of them was heating coffee in a long-handled saucepan: Davy could smell it. It reminded him of home, because his mother always loved coffee, and that little pang of nostalgia brought the tears welling back. He had to struggle to contain himself. How dearly he wanted to be home!

  From out of the distance came an elongated, shivery howl—a long, tubular, mournful noise. A wolf. Around the fire all the murmured conversation stopped, and every head turned in the direction of the noise.

  “Aylesbury way,” one of the women said.

  “Lots of wolves Aylesbury-Hitchen area,” agreed another. “They keep trying to sneak up the hill. Bloody nuisance they are.”

  “Make,” said Jojo brightly, “boffo rugs though.”

  “That’s your real heroism, isn’t it, Jojo,” said Abigail. “Not the killing of wolves, so much as the haberdashery.”

  The distant wolf howled again, a great wailing leash of a sound, drifting out into the night air. It rang Davy’s heart like a bell. One concept swelled inside him to possess him: home. He had to get out of this place. He simply had to go. Quietly he got to his feet and started walking—he didn’t know where, except that it was away from the fire. Nobody seemed to notice. Shadows pulsed around him, hollows in the turf stretched by firelight and then snapped back to their original form, embers of fiery light floating past. Up ahead was a deeper dark that Davy thought might be a forest. Maybe if he could slip in there, whilst the women were all distracted by the fire warmth and wolf-song, maybe he could hide from them. And in the morning he would walk west—hop from ice-floe to ice-floe across the river—mount the hills on the farside and run down the lane to his own house.

  The wolf’s howl unspooled for a third time in the distance, and a human figure loomed up before Davy. It was Jojo. He opened his mouth to say something, to explain perhaps how very acutely he needed to be home right now, but before he could say anything her fist leapt at him and back again like an adder’s strike. His forehead felt like he’d been hit by a slingshot stone—a burst of pressured pain right in the middle of his brow and an actual humming in his inner ear, and a follow-up thump across his back, and then he was staring at a mixture of white stars and red floating embers and the cold of the ground was starting to chill his shoulders and his bum and the backs of his legs. His skull curdled with pain. “Ow,” he said.

  “Where exactly were you sneaking off to, shit-weasel?”

  Davy’s vision was starting to rotate, and the sparks at the back of his head were building in number.

  The other women were standing over him now, but their voices swirled into an indistinct mess of human sound. Then something strange happened to Davy: something which hadn’t happened to him before. He teetered on the edge of a seizure, and stayed there, teetering. He felt the inside of his head swell outward until its lip touched the lip of the sky, but it didn’t dissolve into the cosmos and oblivion the way it usually did. The stars overhead were all snow, held in place because nobody had explained the law of gravity to them; and now and again they wriggled and dislodged and fell to the ground, and the rocks beneath the soil were creaking because they were being heated by the dawn and expanding, and it was this that generated the long, silver whistle of the wolves, and everything was held in an exact aeon-long tension with everything else.

  He saw the Sisters with hallucinatory distinctness, the pack of them loping through the outer sky, wolves in search of prey. He saw them stretching their legs and opening their great mouths, fringed with stalactite and stalagmite fangs, as they zoomed down upon the world. Then: snap, and darkness, and the end of things that was also the beginning of things.

  He expected to pass out, but instead the pain in his head focussed his thoughts back into the logic of consciousness. The stars shrank back into perceptual objects in the external world.

  He was cold, because he was lying on the cold ground. His head was humming with pain. Hands were on him, lifting him upright.

  “I was,” he gasped, still a little dazzled, “I was going off to have a wee.”

  “What the fuck is this retard saying?” Jojo complained. “I swear I can’t understand a blind word.”

  “I was going,” Davy tried again, tucking his tongue down to make his articulation clearer. “Over there to have a wee.”

  “May,” said Abigail. “Take him over there so he can relieve himself. Jojo, stop hitting him. Henry will be most annoyed if we break him.”

  A tall woman put her hand on Davy’s shoulder and lead him a little way from the fire. “Don’t try to run off,” she advised. Davy fumbled his little spigot out of his trousers and dribbled a little onto the grass. Then the two of them returned to the fire.

  “My head hurts,” he announced to the group.

  “Good,” said Jojo.

  Several of the women unrolled blankets and stretched out. Davy didn’t feel sleepy. The wolf appeared to have stopped its distant song.

  Chapter Eleven

  IN THE MORNING the women watered their horses and let them graze on the grass the fire had unlocked from frost. Then they packed up and mounted. The events of the night, which Davy might have expected to make the women more wary of him, in fact seemed to have made them more relaxed. They didn’t bother cuffing him, and the woman he was riding with—her name was May—permitted him to hold her round the waist. That made the ride much less uncomfortable. Indeed, and rather awkwardly, the fact that he was pressing his body intimately into the back of a full-grown woman had the effect—frankly—of arousing Davy. The motion of the horse, and the up-down rubbing that it provoked, made matters worse. Or better. It was more than just that he had a hard-on, although he had to do some shuffly rearrangement to ensure that fact wasn’t made obvious to May. It was a whole-body suffusion of low-level excitement.

  “We’ll be in Wycombe before supper,” Abigail said.

  The hills were directly ahead, and the fields before them boiled with a chilly mist. Broken roofs rose from the white blur like aslant gravestones. The dark flakes that flew across the sky were high-up birds.

  After an hour or so of riding the troop came down into a shallow valley. The mist was starting to thin. They stopped outside a row of old houses, now shells. Dismounted.

  “Where’s this?” Davy asked.

  “Where?” replied Abigail. “Chinner, or thereabouts.”

  “You know what Henry says,” put in one of the other women, whose name Davy did not know, “‘I wouldn’t loiter in the northlands for all the tea in Chinner.’”

  “Henry certainly likes a joke,” said Jojo.

  “The worser the better.”

  “Is there tea here?” Davy asked. When the women laughed at him, he blushed, but added, with a little spark of spirit. “What? I’d like a cup of tea. Wouldn’t you?”

  Abigail went into one of the houses, and in amongst the rubble and broken wooden boards she revealed, like a prestidigitator, a metal box deliberately hidden under the junk. This opened to disclose a radio which, after a few tweety cranks of the handle, came to life. It was one of the kind that required Abigail to put on big headphones, and to speak into a little hand-held rectangular grill. Probably two hundred years old. Amazing that it still worked, really.

  Abigail said little, and listened a lot, and after she had packed the radio away and hidden it again she announced a change in plan. “Detour.”

  J
ojo groaned, but the others seemed unconcerned. Everyone got back on their horses and rode north-east, parallel to the bulk of the hills on their right. The land was littered with ponds and small lakes, all half-iced, and the going was slow. They crossed a road so clogged with rusting cars and trucks it was like a hedge of red-brown metal—the horses had to go single file between a lorry and a bus—and then trotted up a slope. Then they turned and rode north, with the hills shrinking down behind them.

  In a debatable land, half scrub and half forest, they came across a pre-Sisters house. The tiles of its roof lay all around like discarded dragon scales, but somebody had gone to the bother of thatching the top, and inside was a fire and two more Wycombe women, and with them was the reason for Abigail’s detour—a girl. She was sat on the floor with her back to the wall, and a very sour expression on her face. What Davy thought was a necklace was, he saw when he looked more closely, actually a rope, and, sitting beside her, he could see that it went down her back to where her hands were tied.

  Abigail’s crew greeted the two new women, and everybody had coffee and stood in front of the fire. Everyone except Davy. He went over to the wall.

  “I’m Davy,” Davy said to the girl. He figured she was a few years older than him. She turned her head very slowly, looked at him with scorn, and then turned back to stare straight ahead. Davy assumed she was going to give him the silent treatment, but instead she said, “My name is Amber. Do you want to do me a favour, Davy? Untie me. And then wrestle those women to the ground to give me time to escape.”

  “All of them?” said Davy.

  Amber turned her head, again very slowly, and looked at Davy. “There’s something not quite right with your speaking.”

  “I have a bit missing from the end of my tongue. Look.” He lolled his tongue out, and Amber looked at the end with guileless curiosity.

  “How did that happen?”

  “I bit it.”

  “Must have hurt.”

  “I was unconscious. I was having a kind of fit. I get these sorts of fit. Epilepsy, it is called.”

  “You’re Davy,” Amber said, as if the full significance of his name had only just occurred to her. “Oh good gracious! And bad gracious too. Well what a surprise to meet you here, Davy.”

  “They had me tied up, yesterday,” said Davy. Amber was pretty, and he wanted to ingratiate himself. “I guess they kidnapped you, like they kidnapped me.”

  “Kidnapping isn’t how I’d describe it,” said Amber, glowering at the women. “I’m one of theirs, you see.”

  “You’re from Wycombe?”

  “Born and bred. Although it’s always seemed to me that that expression is the wrong way about. After all, a person is bred before they’re born. Aren’t they? I mean your breeding is what leads up to you being born. Isn’t it?”

  “So you left Wycombe? Didn’t you like it?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s the best place on earth.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  Amber drew a great breath into her lungs, thereby pushing out (Davy found himself incapable of not staring) her chest, and let it all go in one long sighing whoosh. “Oh dearie me, Davy, my lad. Where to start?”

  “Don’t feel obliged to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” said Davy, who was a little rankled by the manner of cool superiority she appeared to be taking with him—as if she were a suave and assured adult and he just a little kid.

  “I should tell you,” she said. “I should tell the whole world. You know who Father John is, yeah?”

  “He’s in charge of an area to the north. Oxford isn’t it? Or maybe further north? I’m a little hazy on the geography.”

  “He doesn’t know what’s coming, the poor man. I mean, people say he’s a tyrant and everything, but just because he’s a foreigner we shouldn’t hate him. Just because he’s a man we shouldn’t hate him. When you become a man I shan’t hate you.”

  Davy’s heart did a strange little twerk at that, foolish though it was. Not hate, his solar plexus said, is the start of something positive; something that might grow into—maybe, love? “When you say when I become a man …” he started. But Amber was on a roll.

  “And anyway, even if he is a tyrant, then his people are just regular people. You know? Just people trying to get along. I figured they deserved to be warned. To be warned away, you know? Have it explained to them that they need to back off. Why, do you think it’ll be John who gets killed if his troops try and storm the Chilterns? No, he’ll be safe and sound far away. It’ll be ordinary women who get murdered. And men, too! And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? People talk about war as if it’s different to murder, but it’s not different, morally. I mean come on. If you kill someone it’s murder and if you kill lots of people in war it’s mass murder. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I guess.”

  “I tried to make them see that,” she nodded at the women by the fire. “All of them. I mean, if Father John is a tyrant, what is Henry? I ask you.”

  “I can’t answer you.”

  “A tyrant,” she hissed. “Henry is as much a tyrant as John, except that we all swaddle ourselves in our moral superiority. Oh we’re better than John. Oh we deserve to live and his people deserve to die. But how is that moral?”

  “It,” Davy said, in a tentative voice, as if unsure whether this was the right answer, “isn’t?”

  “Of course it isn’t. I figured if John’s people knew how stupid any attack would be then they’d leave us alone. It didn’t quite work out that way. They weren’t interested in what I had to say. They were interested in having a hostage. But, good golly and gracious, I don’t need to tell you how little traction a hostage would give them, when it came to confronting Wycombe.”

  Abigail came over to them. “All right you two, we’re going to make a move. Steph says John has parties out all over the landscape, looking for—well, looking for you, traitor-girl.”

  “Don’t be horrid, Abigail,” said Amber, poutily. “I’ve had a shocking rough time.” She appeared much less like a grown-up, saying this.

  “Brought it on yourself,” said Abigail. “If we get you back and nobody gets killed it’ll be a miracle, frankly. Then we can see what Henry wants to do with you.”

  “I had the best of intentions,” sulked Amber, staring pointedly at the floor.

  “You’ve no idea what you’ve started, girl,” Abigail said, severely. “One almighty fuck-up. It may yet cost lives. It has already cost—” But looking down at her, Abigail seemed to change her mind on this last utterance. “Anyway, we can talk about all that when we get home. Jesus, girl, I only wish you’d take on board how serious this shit is.”

  “There’s no call for that kind of language,” said Amber, without lifting her gaze.

  “Hark,” said Abigail, putting a hand to her ear, “what is that I hear, ululating from afar? Is it the call for sweary language? I do believe it fucking is! None other than the fucking shit-shouting call for sweary language! Ah, how beautiful it sounds. The call has fucking well gone out.” She dropped her hand. “We are going to try and creep away, nice and quiet, but if the shit,” she looked pointedly at Amber, “hits the fan then we may have to gallop and scatter. Davy, you ride with me.”

  “OK,” said Davy.

  “Steph needs her hands free, so Amber you’ll be riding with one of mine. She’s called Jojo and, Davy here can tell you, the amount of fucking-around she will tolerate is exactly zero. Give her any grief and she’ll knock you down and drag you along behind tied to the steed’s tail. You understand?”

  “And we’re supposed to be the good guys,” muttered Amber.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “All righty-tighty. Now, Davy: if all goes to plan we’ll be in Wycombe before nightfall. Trust me, that’s the eventuality you want. We have electricity, hot showers, warm beds and good food. The alternative is that you fall into the hands of Father John, and he not only has none of those things, h
e will take personal delight in making you suffer. That’s just how he is. Come on.”

  Davy got to his feet and Abigail pulled Amber upright. It was only at this point that Davy realised Steph was the woman he had met at Rafbenson. He felt foolish for being so belated in his understanding.

  “Hiya, Davy,” Steph said, waving at him with her thickly bandaged hand. “Good to see you again. How’s your Guz friend Daniel, by the way? Dead, I hope?”

  “There’s a reasonable chance he is,” said Abigail, doing up her coat. “He went into the freezing water near Didcot and none of us saw him come out. I did mean to shoot him.”

  “I would have thanked you,” said Steph.

  “Yeah. Sorry. The moment somehow got away from me. He killed my horse.”

  “Well isn’t that exactly the kind of shit move you’d expect from Guz?”

  “Guz aren’t our most pressing concern right now,” said Abigail. “All right everyone. We all know what we’re doing?”

  Jojo raked the fire down, and they all went outside to where the horses were standing in a huddle. It was still very cold. Overhead the sky had filled with a layer of thin cloud, grey-white and crinkled like the roof of a dog’s mouth. Breath puffed: cold steam.

  They all mounted up and started away.

  For a quarter of an hour things went without incident. The hills were in front of them now, slowly inflating on the horizon as they approached. But then—Davy was never sure what exactly provoked the panic, whether they were spotted, or somebody stumbled onto something—there was yelling, and spurring of horses. Abigail’s mount leapt like a steeplechaser and went straight into a lolloping gallop. It was all Davy could do to cling on. They cleared a bush, and ran straight over a patch of open ground. Jojo’s horse was close behind.

  There was a snap-snap sound, and then another double-snap, much closer. Davy felt something being pushed into his hands, clasped as they were into Abigail’s tummy. It was a leather strip—the reins. “Hold them,” Abigail called, as she rotated herself in the saddle, stretched out her right arm to its full extension, reached over Davy’s shoulder and reached her arm backwards. She was holding a firearm.