by Adam Roberts
“Things seem to have calmed down,” said Abigail.
“Our best guess,” said Steph, “is that Father John is quartering a pretty large force in Long Crendon. Hundreds of men according to some. Thousands according to others.”
“Long where?” asked Davy.
“It’s a few miles north of Thame.”
Abigail saluted the distance, the better to peer into it. “Can’t see any sign of that. Anyway, we need to get going.”
They rode slowly through the trees until they came to a road. It had been cleared: the rusting wrecks of cars and trucks pushed off to the side, parked, as it were, in amongst the trees. Accessing a road made progress rather more rapid, naturally, and the horses moved forward at a sprightly trot.
Abigail turned her head. “We’re going inside what we call the cordon—not into Wycombe itself, but the outer zones. At least inside the cordon we’ll be safe.”
“Safe,” repeated Davy, and as he did so May, riding ahead of them, screamed. It wasn’t a warning scream. It was more by way of being an agonized scream. There were several swishing noises, and Davy, looking around him with the abruptly adrenalised start-up of panic, saw one crossbow bolt hit the horse behind him—hit its neck and sink in deep—and caught a glimpse of another in flight—a blur of grey—before it jarred into the chest of that horse’s rider. Mahvesh. She exhaled hard, as if she’d been punched, which, in a more fatal sense than is usually implied by that word, of course she had been. She slumped to the side, and her horse, in pain and consequent agitation, sprang into motion, shouldering Abigail and Davy’s horse aside and galloping ahead.
Davy could see what was happening. The enemy was on them. They had chosen this cleared-away corridor of crumbly tarmac because it was perfect for such an ambush, and Abigail had blithely led her people into it. Abigail was already aiming her pistol to return fire. May was still howling in pain, up ahead, for whatever reason, and Mahvesh’s horse, and its sole, probably dead rider, was careering away into the distance.
It was obvious what was going on. Yet something in Davy wondered: what is going on? He opened his mouth and shouted:
“What’s happening?’—
—at exactly the moment Abigail discharged her weapon. The crashing, severing noise of the gun going off completely covered the sound of his voice. It also seemed to scare the horse they were riding, which arched its spine and leapt up, all four hooves off the ground so far as Davy could tell. It landed with such a hefty jolt that Davy was bounced up in turn, and when he landed back on the saddle he caught one of his testicles under his thigh.
This was not a pleasant sensation.
Now it was Davy’s turn to yell. He writhed to the left, to free up the crushed organ, and the horse, as if in response, rolled its whole body to the right. The combination of these two motions shucked Davy clean off the saddle. He fell, hard, to the ground.
He didn’t hit tarmac, but instead fell just to the side of the road onto a sedimented layer of old leaves and fir-needles. The horse was tall, but this softer landing ground meant he was not as badly hurt as he might have been. But his balls! Or, more specifically, his right ball. For a time he simply lay with his hand between his clamped thighs, trying to get his breath back. There was some kind of commotion going on around him, but he didn’t have the mental space to pay attention to it. His entire sensorium was consumed by the pain in his testicle.
It settled, eventually, or at least the pain and shock withdrew to a more tolerable level. Davy rolled over, and got up, by stages, sitting up, pulling his legs round and getting onto a knee, and finally stranding upright.
There seemed to be a great many people in motion. Davy turned to look up the road. A few yards ahead he saw the horse he had been riding only moments before, with its head on the ground, kneeling on its forelegs with its huge rear up in the air, as if the beast was abasing itself, or praying, or doing some kind of callisthenics. There was a pile of something on the ground in front of it. The horse wasn’t moving at all. Davy stumbled a few steps towards the beast, and started to walk round it. There was a great deal of black goo on its front, soaked into its hide, dripping into a puddle onto the road.
Something tsinged past Davy’s ear.
People were yelling.
His ball ached.
Something went snap, very loudly, quite close. Davy continued walking along the horse’s motionless flank, and brought the heap, whatever it was, into clearer view. It wasn’t a whatever it was. It was a recognisable thing. It was Abigail, lying foetal on her side, a bolt through her throat and much blood underneath her, a dropped cape of black-red slick painted onto the road and glistening like wet leather.
Something else, somewhere nearby, made a very loud snapping noise.
The whatever. It was not good. Whatever it was that was.
Davy bent forward, to get a closer look at Abigail. There was no mistaking her lifelessness. Her un-status. He got up again, and looked around him—in the trees on the other side of the road, using the rusted hulks for cover, were many people. Somewhere something, or things, went snap, snap, snap.
Davy thought to himself, You’re smart, Davy, you know you are. You really ought to be able to piece together what is happening here. But though he understood what all the discrete elements were, somehow they wouldn’t gel into a meaningful whole.
There were many figures in amongst the trees on the far side of the road. These figures were dressed variously, mostly in clothes of tan and leather.
Davy turned about.
About a yard from him, a chunk of the crumbly tarmac disengaged from the road and leapt diagonally into the air, separating as it moved into a dozen small pieces of shingle, all going in different directions. Grit from this disassembled tarmac rattled against Davy’s left leg as he turned.
He saw a running man in a bulky brown jacket duck his head, dive at the tarmac as if it were water, and lie motionless. Running at him.
Running at Davy.
It was—
Turned right around. Cars. There were lots of rusty hulks on the far side of the road, and fewer hulks pushed into the trees on this side of the road. In between the trees were lots of people, but dressed differently from the others—in tidy-looking black outfits, all alike. Something went snap, snap, snap, like the air itself was clacking its jaws.
Davy saw a figure, standing not far from him, hauling his rifle round to aim it. A bullet, or a piece of shrapnel, touched this person’s belly with a glancing blow, and the whole gut opened as if unzipped. A mess of viscera slopped out and unfurled towards the ground. It reminded Davy strongly of the way cows shit, the way a great quantity of manure will simply slop out of the beast’s rear-end and splash to the floor.
The person wasn’t standing any more.
“Davy!” yelled somebody, and it was a man’s voice, not a woman’s.
Shreds of mist were drifting over the road. But they were a strange sort of mist that smelt not of moisture and cool but of a musty, sulphurous hotness.
“Davy,” yelled somebody, quite near. “Cover, Davy! Come over to me.”
Davy saw another horse lying on the ground. This one was on its side, and its chest was not moving up and down the way a living, breathing horse’s chest would. It was very solidly static. Davy walked slowly over towards it, because there was a rider with a leg trapped under the horse. I can help lift the horse and free her, he thought. But then he thought, No, no, a horse would be much too heavy for me to lift. So then he thought, But perhaps I could drag her out. It was May, and she was still alive. He got to the horse and May’s face was in motion and in pain but she was still alive, and then there was a flash-bang and all the air was instantly hot and hard and it bundled him over. Abruptly he was—tzit!—down, face down. How had that happened? The texture of the old tarmac was like stale baked goods, or old rubber, and it smelt strange. It was scratching Davy’s face, and his head was filled with a strange song, maybe birdsong, very high pitched, and
—eeeeeeeeeeeee—
and he got in a spinaround way to his feet again. The spinaround was the whole road. It was obvious what was going on. He knew very well what was going on. Dizzy dizzy. You’d have to be moron not to see it. May wasn’t moving any more. She was still stuck under the horse, but there wasn’t as much to her head as there had been a little while before. The world spun around the sun and spun around its polar axis and how it was spinning around Davy’s head.
Davy said to himself, You are in the middle of a big fight, a proper war, and people are dying. But because there had been no build-up, no advanced-warning, no preliminary, because he’d suddenly found himself in the middle of it, and because his ball still ached, and because all these people were dead, and because he was only just thirteen years of age, he simply couldn’t make any meaning out of all these component events.
Flashes and flickers. A breeze from the left, and then a much stronger breeze, hard from the right, making his hair struggle and writhe. Somebody had hands on him. Somebody had grabbed him, and was turning him away from the dead body of May. The eee inside his ears was sliding up a tone, and then up a semitone, and then iii with a sort of background roaring moaning rush, the whole yelling, roaring, snap-snapping world loomed back into audibility, and the man who had his hand on Davy’s shoulder was shouting right in his face
“Davy! Davy!”
—and it was Daniel, Davy recognised his creased old face, and smiled, and then Davy said, with a resonant internal sense of comprehension (but in a croaky sort of voice), “Ambush.”
“What?”
“It’s an ambush.”
And Daniel said, “I know, lad, come on.”
And out of the mush of weirdness and disorientation and the fact that his testicle still ached, something more distinct came swiftly into focus. Something much more adrenalised. Something more like
“Shit!”
panic and
“Come on, Davy…”
Daniel, doing an awkward crouch-down lopsided-limping run, was pulling on Davy to drag him along, and Davy’s heart suddenly upped its rate, and the fact of being-in-danger clattered home to his thinking mind. He was suddenly very scared, and he ran.
Daniel hauled him behind an old van, once white, now a pattern of pale blotches over wine-brown rusted metal, as if camouflaged for life in the snowy tundra. Davy was panting now, and everything had become much more vivid. He could see with jittery precision all the little details of the scene, and here was Daniel dressed in black with a big cast on his hurt foot, and a gun in his hand, and all around were people keen to kill him, to kill him, Davy, who was so courteous and pleasant to everybody, who had always been a good boy, and yet here they were, and Davy was afraid and when a triplet of detonations slammed into the far side of the van, shaking it and making it chime like a muffled bell, he let out a shriek of alarm.
“Daniel,” he gasped.
“Good to see you again,” said Daniel, peering round the side of the van. “We need to get you out of here, my boy. Are you ready to run? Stick with me. I’ll be doing a bit of a Quasimodo lope, but I can move pretty fast if I have to.”
“What’s happening?”
“John is happening,” Daniel said, grimacing. He seemed to have hurt his shoulder. “Trying either to grab you or kill you—or grab you prior to killing you.”
“Why?” Davy asked. “I don’t understand why!”
“I don’t know suppose he knows why either,” said Daniel, checking his gun. “Except that he knows, now, that Wycombe wants you so very badly, and he’s made the decision that it’s in his interests to thwart them.”
“Oh dear God.”
“It’s bold,” said Daniel. “It surely is. It’s surely going to piss off Wycombe that John’s actually put men up on their hill, and a pissed-off Wycombe is not a thing you want aimed at you. I guess he’s actually making his move. Interesting times, as the Chinaman said. Was that a Chinaman? I’m not sure.”
Davy’s heart was now going so fast it was palpably uncomfortable in his chest. He was fidgety. All his instincts were screaming inside him to run. “What do we do?”
“I’m going to fire this,” said Daniel, looking at the stub-barrelled shotgun he was holding in his right hand “and then we’re going to make a run for the trees—over there.” With his left hand he gestured. “Keep running, and don’t stop, even if I—Jesus!”
This last came out as a shout, because a wide chested figure in a yellow leather coat was coming straight at them—was almost upon them. The pistol in this figure’s raised right hand was aimed directly at Daniel’s face. He pulled the trigger as he ran, and Davy heard the click of the mechanism very distinctly.
The pistol did not discharge.
Daniel hoisted his shotgun and fired one barrel. It didn’t go off. Clic-tac. He pulled second trigger and that barrel too failed to fire. Davy saw Daniel’s expression curdle in anger, and heard him say, “Oh for f—” before the running man crashed into him, and the two of them sprawled—“irk!”—backwards onto the road—“sake!” bellowed Daniel. The two men rolled over and over, struggling in an ungainly way that made it impossible to see who was doing what to whom.
Davy’s panic was in no way diminishing. I have to get away. To his right the soldiers of Father John’s army were coming closer, and seemed very numerous. He looked across the road at the black-clad soldiers of Guz. Would they shoot him, if he ran straight at them? What could he shout to let them know that he wasn’t attacking them? Would they even care? He rubbed his face with his hands, made a little whimpering noise, and took a step away from the van. “If I shout I’m not attacking,” he said aloud, to nobody, “then what are the odds they’ll hear attack and shoot me down? Oh god, oh god.”
He took another step away from the van. Paralysing indecision. He turned to face down the road, strewn now with the bodies of human beings and horses. He turned to face up the road. Was that the direction to Wycombe? But why would he want to go there?
Which direction was home?
Daniel and his assailant were still grappling with one another. They had rolled completely off the road and were wrestling in amongst the old leaves and rubbish.
Somebody tapped Davy hard on the left shoulder. It was a very firm smack indeed, and, to be truthful, it was far from comfortable. It made him cough and take a step forward, to avoid falling over. Who would be so rude? But the sensation was one of pressure, not of penetration or pain—not, that is, in the first instance.
It was, however, a sense of pressure that did not go away. On the contrary, it intensified, and began to expand, like something boiling hot, or very icily cold, being poured over the whole shoulder area. Underneath the expansion was a prickling that, when he focussed on it, felt very much like pain. Felt very much like a sharp, unpleasant pain.
Davy reached round with his right hand, elbow at his waist, the back of his hand sliding awkwardly up his spine. His fingers fumbled on something straight and stiff and thin, like a pen, that projected straight out from the shoulder blade.
It was, Davy realised, quite hard to breathe. He was finding it harder to pull a breath in than he usually did. The pain in his shoulder was increasing, growing from ache to stab to something worse.
Davy took another couple of steps forward. He dropped his hand to his side. This, he thought to himself, is notgood. Oh no. Not good.
Figures to his left, flitting between the trees. Those were Father John’s men, and they were legion. They were going to kill him.
Somebody was shouting, and it was several somebodies who were shouting. God, his shoulder hurt! It raged in pain. Someone had sheathed a blade in his shoulder and by Christ it hurt. A paralallip rhythm. A paralallip. Rhythm of paralallip. Davy thought perhaps it was his own heart, galloping towards shutdown in panic and pain, but the sound wasn’t inside his body. It was an actual percussive pattern, being beaten onto the ground, and resonating in the soles of his own feet.
Paralallip. Paralallip.
He tried looking over his left shoulder to see with his own eyes the crossbow shaft that had struck his shoulder blade. But it was not in his field of view. The shaft was too short, or perhaps it was too deeply buried in his body. He couldn’t see it, as he tried to look over his own shoulder. It hurt to move his neck. Breathing in grated pain out of his left side and sent scattering sparks of agony all through him. Breathing out was sore, but not so agonising, like a release of pressure. Shallow breaths.
Shallow breaths.
Paralallip. Paralallip.
Out of the corner of his eye Davy saw the horse, at full gallop, and with no possibility of slowing or stopping before it ran him down. There was nothing he could do. The pain had paralysed his feet. He tried to snatch another breath, but the pain was so ghastly that he sobbed and stopped and sighed the little air out of his lungs again.
He recognised the rider on the big horse. The rider on the big horse was Jojo, the woman who called him shit-pants and fuckwit and who hated men and hated him in particular. And now she was going to run him down with her steed.
Davy grimaced. Oh, how his feet were fixed to that spot! He couldn’t run, or even turn. Death was riding him down, like in a fairy story. Father John’s troops were coming out from the trees now, running at him, at the horse Jojo was riding, yelling, or making the sorts of gargoyle faces that people do when they are shouting, but Davy couldn’t hear, he was deafened by his own pain, or else he could hear only the crescendo of Jojo’s horse’s paralallip paralallip.
It was a white horse.
The horse reached him and didn’t trample him with its hooves. Instead the pain in Davy’s shoulder suddenly intensified into something far worse, something simply beyond the capacity of flesh to endure, and what small air was in his lungs was jammed right out of them, expelled as if by a rocket, and he was down, to be trampled underhoof after all, except that he wasn’t down, he was somehow up, swinging into the sky—he actually saw the trees shrink down and Father John’s men go below his line of sight, as if he were a bird flying—but then he couldn’t really see anything, because the pain was so very overwhelming it flooded through his whole body and brain and a cascade of sharp-edged sparks flowed through his skull, and he was gone again, gone, gone again.
