by Adam Roberts
Jojo had ridden right past him. She had, to give her credit, seen that this chance was the last chance, and she had taken that chance, despite the fact that she had lost two of the four fingers of her left hand moments before, and blood was spittering out from the wound, like a comet’s tail as she rode.
There was no time to stop, and certainly no time to dismount and haul the lad up onto the horse, and remount and ride away. Father John’s men had pushed back those fuckers from—Guz, she supposed, in their black combat fatigues—and they almost had the boy. So she didn’t stop, and didn’t dismount, and instead she reached down with her good right hand, and grabbed the handle now usefully protruding from the lad’s shoulderblade, and good fortune and her own reflexes and most of all her horse’s sheer weight and momentum meant that she was able to heave him up, scoop him almost, and she tried to ignore the way he was screaming, and put her own head down as gunfire sounded all around her, and urged the horse on with her heels.
She got him, just about, over the pommel, on his belly, and then she was able to concentrate on just riding as hard as she could. By the time he hit the saddle he was unconscious. Luckily for him.
Chapter Fourteen
DAVY DRIFTED IN and out of awareness, and each time he opened his eyes he was somewhere new. But each time he opened his eyes his pain was the same, and the perfectly linked-together line of physical agony took such precedence over his merely geographical whereabouts to render that latter spectral and unreal. The fundamental was: always pain.
He was being lifted down from a horse, and various hands were holding him, but the movement dragged the bolt’s shaft against raw bone, and he howled, a long lupine sound. Then, with no sense of transition, he was in the back of a van or minibus. He wasn’t screaming now, but his mouth was very dry and the pain was exactly the same, exactly as unbearable. There had once been windows in the rear door of this van, and the glass had long since disappeared, and Davy could see tree trunks swinging past and going behind. The angle made it look as though it was an endless line of columns tumbling down, one after the other, in time to the ponderous beats of his own heart. But each heartbeat was pushing pain, not blood, around his body. And with no sense of transition he was in a low-lit room and there was a smell of soap and bleach, and he was on his side. The pain was as bad and then it was much worse, a grinding drilling that opened his whole back and allowed all his innards to slop out and fall in fire and acid onto the table, and his soul fell out too, and he was floating around in an airy medium of pain. He would have writhed and struggled, but he discovered he was tied down with a series of buckled straps, and—the pain had prevented him from noticing this before—there was a wooden plug in his mouth, to prevent him biting his tongue, and perhaps to stifle his howls, and then with no sense of transition he was in a much lighter room, with ivory-white sky visible through an actual glass window, and electric lightbulbs on the wall. He was in a bed. His shoulder hurt, as before, but the thread of pain on which his experiences were strung was… Davy fished for the right word. Thinner? More silk and less wire? It was still there, but it was less. Breathing was still hard, and doubly hard because (he realised) he was lying on his front, with his face to the side. That meant that drawing breath involved lifting his whole torso as well as gritting his teeth against the pain. But the grinding of metal against bone—against his bone—had gone.
He was disembodied, but he had brought the pain with him. He flew, or floated, or fell in a strange horizontal trajectory. He saw the whole landscape below him: the dark green elongated wedge of the Chilterns, and to the north the parti-coloured spread of fields and innumerable small lakes and flows, flashing bright as the sun passed overhead, and retaining some wraith of illumination in the night, when the sun swung around the wall’s edge of the horizon.
Then it was dark. Davy was very thirsty. He tried to ask for water, not to yell or demand it, but just to beg in a small voice, pitiably enough, for a little water. His voice wasn’t working, though. What came out was a creaky, cicada burr. The thirst was so acute that it took Davy a little while to notice the pain again. But the pain was certainly there. More diffuse, now: the whole shoulder area cannibalised by a severe ache. Davy experimentally flexed a muscle in his back, and the pain started roaring, so he quit that pretty sharpish.
Eventually he fell asleep again, despite the pain, and despite the thirst. And in the morning there were two women, who fed him some water through a tube for which he was so grateful he actually wept, sobbed like a baby. He felt them peeling something off his shoulder and probing the wound, which was very far from a pleasant experience. There was a wash of something cold. The thing about this fluid, whatever it was, wasn’t that it was cold but that it stung like fuck, and he wriggled and complained and they told him to button it. Then they reapplied the bandage and patted him on the head.
“I’m still thirsty,” he said. “I’m thirsty again.” So they gave him some more water, and left him alone.
He was in a room. There was a big window, and it was glass, and it had bars in front of it. He was in a bed. The walls were white.
He lay still, observing from within (as it were) the way the pain in his shoulder burned like embers in a grate, and slowly diminished over time to a kind of distant moan. He tried reaching round with his right hand to explore the area, but even moving the muscles on the uninjured half of his back stoked up the ferocity of the pain, so he stopped trying, and lay still again. And lying still enabled the pain to settle, as agitated water restores itself to flatness.
There was a distant wheezing, rasping noise. It was faint, but once Davy heard it he couldn’t miss it: a remote squeezebox whingeing, or sobbing. It sounded like the whole house was a ship at sea, and its timbers were creaking. Or else it sounded like the cosmos had broken its heart and was sobbing over and over waah, waah, waaah. What was it?
Was it him?
No, it came from outside him. It was something else. Too irregular to be a machine.
He couldn’t work it out.
Perhaps he dozed, and woke. Perhaps he did that several times over; it was hard to tell. He became aware that he was hungry. If he concentrated on his stomach the hunger got worse, and if he put his mind elsewhere—out through the glass window, for instance, at the hazy white clouds that were visible—then the hunger got less worse. Reduced in worseness. Diminished in worsosity.
Better. Slowly, slowly.
He supposed he was mending. Slowly, slowly. The two women came back, and gave him some more water, and when he said he was hungry they fed him little pellets of something, maybe bread, maybe chicken, flavourless except for a faint saltiness. These he swallowed as he lay flat, and they did little to take the edge off his hunger.
He told them he needed to relieve himself, and they didn’t understand. He said, “I need to relieve myself,” more slowly. But it wasn’t his forktongue pronunciation that was throwing them, it was the idiom. Relieve myself was the kind of thing his Dad would say. So he tried again, “make water. Drain the bladder. Have a piss.”
“It’s gonna hurt, my boy,” one of the women warned him. “We’ll have to roll you a little onto your side to get a pan in under you, and that won’t be comfortable. You sure you can’t hold it?”
“I could just piss into the bed,” he said.
“Well that would be smelly and nasty and, I think we’d have to say, unhygienic. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The pressure in his bladder was quite severe now. “I don’t think I can hold it.”
So one of the women trotted off to get a pan, and when she brought it back the two rolled him towards his right side. Not the whole way over onto his side, but just enough to be able to slip the pan in. And it was indeed, as they had promised, excruciating, agonising, excruiagonising, and he cried aloud in pain. “Oh god, oh god, oh god.”
“Do your business, boy,” said one of the women, “and we’ll put you back down and things will settle again.”
But there was a pro
blem. He was now lying on his right arm, and couldn’t move it; and there was no way he could do anything with his left arm. There was no chance of moving his right arm at all; it was locked, paralysed, helpless. His left arm could do it, if it were free. He tried to explain this to the two women, but the combination of his physical distress and the rising panic that he was going to lose control and wet himself, added to the slit in his tongue, meant that he was not able to communicate his anxiety to them. Eventually one of them intuited what the problem was, and fumbled at his pants to get his little willy out, and he gratefully rang the bell of the pan with a hard little stream of urine, and finally they lowered him back onto his front and left him to it.
As before, he lay for a time in sheer pain, and over the course of a distinct period the pain slowly settled until it became only an ache. It settled enough to permit him to sleep, and so he slept and when he woke up it was dark.
He grew so bored, lying there in the dark, that he began experimenting with moving portions of his body. Seeing how far he could move without waking the slumbering pain in his shoulder. He could flex his toes, and his feet and even bend his legs at the knees, lifting his shins off the mattress. But turning his head was a no-no, and though he could fiddle with his right-hand fingers and move his arm a little from the elbow, his whole left arm sprang agony upon him if he moved any part of his right shoulder.
He listened to the silence. The creaking noise had stopped.
Light again. He slept odd hours, like a baby. In the morning he was thirsty again, and they gave him some more water. The irregular creaking noise was back. “We have a painkiller here,” said one of the women tending him. Neither of them had told him their names. “It’s a pre-Sisters pill, and you have to swallow it. Do you think you can do that?”
“I’m hungry,” Davy complained.
“The pill won’t help with hunger. But I tell you what: if its active ingredient hasn’t dissipated over the years, it will take your pain away, as if by magic. And then we can get you sat up, and properly fed. You can eat, use the toilet, have a wash. What do you say?”
The pill was as large as the nail of a little finger, and Davy nearly choked on it—he couldn’t speak and beckoned for more water, a gesture which first only puzzled the two women. But then they gave him more water through the straw, and he managed to get the pill down into his stomach. They left him for a half hour or so. He tried to determine, as he lay there, whether the pain was diminishing because he was lying still, or because the pill was actually working. Maybe it was the latter.
When the women came back they coordinated in a series of manoeuvres of his body in which he was a junior partner. Rolling him fully onto his right side—his shoulder hurt, and quite acutely, but not nearly so badly as it had done—and then swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and sitting him up. His head swam with prickly dizziness and his sight retreated down a sort of corridor towards blackness, except that the glowing ache of his shoulder pulled him back to consciousness.
He was up. The women gave him more to drink and fed him a little soup and bread. Then they took a photograph of him. An actual photograph! It was only when the camera clicked and the box was taken away that Davy realised that there was somebody else in the room. A newcomer, a stranger, had been standing behind him as the image was taken.
“On the mend?” this person said.
Davy couldn’t see who it was, and didn’t feel like taking the risk-of-pain entailed by turning his head to find out. The voice sounded old. “Better than I was, I think,” he said.
“Good,” said the person. “I’ll come and see you again. There’s a lot we need to talk about.”
“Like why I’m even here in the first place?” Davy said, with some hostility in his voice. If he’d only had a bit more strength he would have allowed himself to get properly angry. Kidnapping him? Taking him away from his home? The person, whoever she was, sitting behind him didn’t say anything. “Or won’t you tell me that?” he asked.
After a while he realised he was alone.
The distant waah waah background noise. It went away at night, and returned during the day. What was it?
The two women helped him to shuffle to a toilet, where he sat, and the pain in his shoulder started to grow again. Afterwards he washed his hands and face, and shuffled back to the bed, to lie down on his front again. By this point the pain was quite severe, a pulsing, scraping sort of agony that started at the point of his wound, but disseminated itself all over his back, pinched at his heart, and made breathing very difficult. Davy was crying: little desperate tears, shallow sobs.
“Can I have another?” he asked.
“Another what?”
“What you just gave me?”
“The painkiller tablet?”
“Tablet. That. Tabt.”
“My dear boy,” said the woman. “Those are gold! Rarer than gold. I’m afraid we couldn’t waste another on—excuse me saying this, but—a man.”
“It hurts! It hurts!”
“I’m sure it does.” Was there a note of sadistic satisfaction in her voice? What had Davy ever done to her?
The other woman was a little more kindly. “Just lie still, my love,” she said, “and the pain will settle down again. We have willow strips you can suck on, or chew. Chewing works best. I’ll fetch you one in a bit.”
The pain kept building, and then it plateaued, and then slowly it reduced in intensity. Finally it settled down properly, became background noise again. Eventually he drifted off to sleep.
A noise from somewhere—somebody dropping something with a clang—woke Davy. His heart was pummelling his ribs, and he was sweating. Anxious. He had a very clear visual image of Abigail’s body, dead and bloody on the ground—Abigail who was once alive and was now dead. Davy was, he realised, weeping. His agitation was making him move his body, and that in turn was disturbing his wound and making it more sore, but that only made his anxiety and desire to run away stronger. He had to get away, or what happened to Abigail would happen to him. It was intolerable. The sobs were crushing his own throat. Tears gumming his eyes. He groped with his good hand, and the pain of his wound flared. His hand found the bars of the bedstead and he grasped and tried to pull himself off the bed—to get up, run away, find a place to hide from the fighting. Tensing his muscles appeared to rip something in the wound—flesh tearing open, bone snapped or shifting, something agonising, agonising. He screamed.
One of the women came through eventually. “What’s your noise?”
“The fighting,” he sobbed. “The fighting.”
“We’re miles away from the fighting here,” she said, briskly. “You can’t hear anything where we are. Stop making a fuss.”
“Why do you hate me?”
“Me hate you? I’m not the one who shot you in the back! Nursing you back to health and this is the thanks I get? I’m going to petition Henry for a different duty, I honestly am.”
She went out, and Davy lay on the bed sobbing. Eventually the panic drained out of him, and his heart-rate settled again, and the pain in his back settled into a less ghastly configuration. He worried that he had done something to his wound, but after a while, exhausted with his own terror and worry, he fell asleep again.
He dreamed of his family: his two sisters, his Da, his Ma. He knew it was them, but because they were standing behind him he couldn’t see them. In the dream his back was fine, and there was no pain. He was standing up, inside a wide, clean, bright room, and he could simply have turned around and greeted his family. He could have gone over to them and hugged them, and then all of them could have walked out and strolled down the valley and up the hill on the far side—in the compressed topography of the dream he was a short walk from home. But he did not turn around. “Why don’t you?” somebody asked, and Davy saw that it was May, the woman he had first ridden behind on that big horse, when the Wycombe crew had first grabbed him and brought him here. He looked over at May, and saw she was naked, and an intense
sensation of embarrassment at her nudity mingled with an equally intense sense of arousal. May smiled at him. “Why don’t you just turn around?”
“I don’t know why I don’t,” said in-dream-Davy, but the main thought in his dream-head was, Can she see how turned-on I am? Can she see my hard-on? Because that would be just too humiliating and embarrassing. Dream-May smiled again, and came over to him, and reached out with a hand to touch the side of his face. “You don’t need to feel awkward on my account,” she said. “I’m dead, remember?” And Davy remembered that this was indeed the case, and that fact made him feel a plunge of sorrow.
Davy awoke in the dark room.
Chapter Fifteen
FOUR MORE DAYS and Davy’s wound had healed sufficiently to enable him to sit up, leaning his good shoulder into a mass of piled-up pillows, and so drink soup, and eat munches of cold roast parsnips, suck the little inch-long strips of willow bark that did (as he had been promised) take the edge off the pain, and look about him. On the fifth day they got him out of bed altogether and settled him into a large padded chair. From here he could survey where he was.
He was in a room inside a much larger building: a well-maintained relic of the pre-Sisters world. There was a radiator on the wall that got hot twice a day. There were two electrical light bulbs in the ceiling, and they came on in the evening, and poured out light in a ridiculous, prodigal profusion of brightness.
Through the barred windows the view was of a long sloping meadow, the grass kept short by a herd of some two dozen sheep. It had been their bleating that he had heard, from his bed. The mornings saw the whole stretch frosted over, but within an hour or two of the sun rising the frost melted. The coldest of winter was behind them, perhaps.
