Haven

by Adam Roberts

  On day five he began to feel hot and uncomfortable. His two reluctant nurses scolded him for this, as if he had done it on purpose. The antique glass thermometer reported that he had a fever. The women stripped off his shirt, and made him bend forward and peeled away his wound’s dressing. Even Davy could smell it.

  “That’s bad,” said the angrier of the two women. “That could be the end of you.”

  “We have antibiotics,” said the other.

  “We’re surely not wasting those on a him!” said the first.

  “We may not need to,” said the second. “I’ve seen people recover from worse infections than this.”

  So they cleaned the wound, and it stung and sparked pain and Davy, leaning so far forward his chest was on his thighs, wept with the discomfort and the relentlessness of it all.

  “It comes,” said the kinder of the two women, “from re-using the same dressing. We should put a new dressing on each time.”

  “I swear if Mary mother of God came to us with a hole in her breast, we wouldn’t treat her with such lavishness!” exclaimed the first.

  “Henry was very clear.”

  “How long since he took that photograph? A week?”

  “Not so long,” said the second woman, lifting Davy a little from his posture so as to be able to wrap a bandage around the front of his chest, and again round the back, fixing it with a pin.

  “How long before we accept it’s not going to work? Before we agree we have to let him go. I mean—look at him!”

  “You’re not looking at him,” said the second, “with the right eyes.”

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  This entire exchange sank into Davy’s febrile mind, hot with feverish fidgetiness. He sat back in his big chair, leaning his good side into the cushions, and stared through the window, down the meadow and past its sheep to where the distance was fringed with winter trees. So many boughs, dividing into so very many branches, all subdividing and subdividing into finer and finer black lines against the white sky. Like the blood vessels in a retina, as if he was the eye looking at the eye that was looking at him. He replayed the conversation the two women had had over and over. It kept going through and through his humid brain. Not looking at him with the right eyes. Whose eyes? Not looking at him with the right eyes. Whose eyes?

  He had a fever, and he didn’t feel well. His eyeballs felt molten in their skull-sockets. He was shivering with the heat. Sweat came out of him like grease. He was thirsty. His nurses had left him a bottle of water, and he grasped it with his one good hand, but it shook like it was a live grenade about to explode, and he grew very afraid. He was crying. It wasn’t the bottle that was shaking. It was his hand that was shaking. His whole body trembled. His shoulder resonated with the tremors and made a song of pain out of the motion. Vibration was the source of all sound, he knew, and therefore of all music. The string that vibrated was his own taut nerve. Savage savage savage savage. He took a drink. Not looking at him with the right eyes. Whose eyes? His mouth was dry, and he tried to take another drink but realised that he had drunk the whole bottle.

  Not looking at him with the right eyes. Whose eyes?

  He managed to get to his feet, and though his shoulder hurt he was able to shuffle slowly, one foot over the other like a bear, to the little toilet room next to his one. He sat on the toilet because he wasn’t strong enough to stand, and pissed the way women do, and then he filled his water bottle at the tap and drank some more, and then, because sitting on the toilet wasn’t comfortable, in that it forced him to bend forward a little, which stretched the skin of his back painfully—because of that he somehow got back to his feet and shuffled back to his chair, and sat in it. His head was searing. He wept hot tears.

  He dozed, and when he woke he was a little better. He was still hot, and the room still had an unreal quality to it, as if the whole experience was a dream. But his heart was calmer, and he wasn’t sweating so much. He drank the rest of his bottle, and stared through the window for a while.

  He felt—strange. Trembly and overheated and a little sick.

  The door opened, and one of his two nurses came in. It was the crueller of the two, and she had a strangely triumphant expression on her face that made Davy wary. “You have a visitor,” she said.

  “I feel strange,” Davy told her. “Hot and floaty, sort of. I don’t feel all here.”

  “None of your nonsense, now. Didn’t you hear me? You have a visitor.”

  In through the door came Davy’s Ma. She walked right up to him, and bent over and gave him a hug, as he sat in the chair. He started crying. He couldn’t help it. “Ma,” he said. “You’re here.”

  “How are you, my boy?” said Ma.

  “I’m sorry Ma—I’m sorry I didn’t get back. I missed Christmas, I know. Oh Ma you must be so angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry,” Ma insisted. “Just relieved to see that you’re all right. It’s not your fault, my love.”

  That wasn’t the kind of thing Ma tended to say. But Davy clung to the hallucination, if that’s what it was. “Oh Ma, I’ve had such a time!”

  “I know my love.”

  Her presence was turning him again into a little, little boy, a tiny kid, a baby. He wanted her to gather him in her arms and hug him. “I tried to get back, but they grabbed me.”

  “He feels very hot,” Ma said.

  “He has had a temperature,” said the nurse. “But it’s going down.”

  “An infection?”

  “A small one. We’ve cleaned the wound, and it’s good now.”

  “Have you given him antibiotics?”

  “He’s mending well.”

  “Don’t shit me, Miranda,” said his Ma, in something closer to her usual tone. “I know you have them. Give him the medicine, god damn you.”

  Miranda scowled, but didn’t reply.

  “Ma,” Davy said. “I tried to get home. I’m sorry. Did I miss Christmas?”

  “Yes, my love,” said Ma, giving him another swift hug.

  “I knew I did. I knew I missed Christmas.” He began crying again, because none of this was real, and his Ma was an impossible distance away, and he would probably never see her again, and an hallucination was no substitute.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Ma said. “And I’m not angry. I’m not angry,” she clarified, looking at Miranda, “with you. Get well—Davy, Davy, just you concentrate on getting well, and these people will help you.”

  “I got shot in the back! I got a crossbow bolt in the back, Ma!”

  “I know. It must have hurt.”

  “It hurt like the world was ending,” he said. And, thirteen years of age boiled away by the fever and the emotion to a mere five or six, he started weeping yet again. Ma comforted him as best she could, although that kind of thing had always been Da’s business, really, not hers. Eventually she stood up and rubbed the small of her back.

  “I’ve got to go now, Davy,” she said. “But I’ll see you soon. When you’re well. All right?”

  “Are you going Ma?” said Davy. “Don’t go.”

  “I have to my sweet. But I’ll see you soon.”

  And she left the room.

  Davy sat in his chair, his head hot and his skin itchy with sweat, and he tried to make sense of what had happened. Miranda had gone out with Ma, but she came back with a cup of water and a new kind of pill: a parti-coloured lozenge of red and white, much smaller than the other one he had had to swallow. It went down easily, and Davy was helped back to the bed, and he lay on his front and dozed.

  When he woke the fever was worse, and the bed was wet. Miranda and the other nurse got him up, and fed him, and gave him another red-white pill, and he lay down and slept again.

  When he woke this time he felt a little better. Not so hot, not so shaky. He got himself to the toilet and pissed standing up, for the first time in who-knows-how-long. Then he got himself to the comfy chair and just sat, staring out of the window for a long time. The other nurse came
in, not-Miranda, and took his temperature, and gave him another of the miracle red-white lozenges.

  “Am I in Wycombe?” he asked her.

  “We don’t let men in there,” she replied. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “So am I on the Hill?”

  “What do you mean, Hill? We’re on a hill, I suppose.”

  “I mean, am I home? Or near Wycombe.”

  “Oh,” said not-Miranda. “The second one, my boy. You’re near Wycombe. You’re at a place called Hughenden. Henry didn’t say anything about not telling you, so I guess I can tell you. It’s a few miles from Wycombe.”

  “I had a fever,” he said.

  “But you’re getting better,” she replied, and turned to leave.

  “I had a sort of vision,” he said to her retreating back. “I thought I saw my mother. I thought I saw my Ma, and she came right into the room and she told me she would see me again.” But the woman had gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IN TWO DAYS Davy’s fever had entirely evaporated, and though his shoulder still ached, and sometimes twinged so badly he cried out, it was clearly starting to mend. His main problem now was that he was very bored. He got up from his bed and shuffled slowly to the door, but it was locked. He tried the window, but trying to lift it made flames of pain lick out of his wound, so he gave up on that endeavour. Sat down again.

  He watched the sheep meandering over the grass, heads down. He listened to their bleats.

  A click, and the door opened. In came Miranda, and she was pushing a wheelchair in front of her. “All change for you, Davy my lad,” she said.

  “You sound jolly, Miranda,” Davy returned. “For a change.”

  “My stint here is almost done, lad,” she replied, without losing any of her good humour. “And I can’t tell you how pleased I am with that. Here.”

  It was another of the red-white pills. Davy took it placidly, and then looked at the wheelchair. “For me?”

  It was only then that he noticed there was a second person in the room. She must have slipped in behind Miranda. Not the other nurse, but a small-statured and very old woman. Indeed, she was the oldest person Davy’s young eyes had ever seen. Her face was so brown and wrinkled it seemed to be sculpted out of nothing but wrinkles, with the flesh in between creases reduced to fibres, and the whole shaped into cheeks, a chin, a thin mouth, and a wide brow. Her eyes were bright, though: blue and clear with that strange magic that keeps eyes young whilst the rest of the body shrivels. Her hair, white as old hay, was tied back in a bun, and she was wearing a plain blue dress, cut close to her slender frame. She was standing a few yards from Miranda, and though her head barely came up to the nurse’s chest there was no doubt who deferred to whom.

  “Hello, Davy,” this stranger said. “I came to see you once earlier, but you were quite feverish and I don’t think you registered my presence. Plus, I was here for your photograph, of course.”

  “Who are you?” Davy asked.

  “I’m Henry, my dear. I run this place.”

  “This hospital?”

  “No my dear. This land.”

  “I’ve heard of you,” said Davy. “I thought you were a man.”

  “Now why would you think such a thing?” asked Henry, in a level voice.

  A dog was barking, a long way away. It stopped barking.

  “I don’t know,” said Davy.

  “I’m afraid you’ve got yourself caught up in some major events, my boy. And I know you were shot—in the shoulder. That can’t have been comfortable.”

  “Un,” Davy confirmed, “comfortable.”

  “I saw you when they brought you in. The quarrel was sticking out quite neatly, from the exact centre of your shoulderblade.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s the technical term for the bolt fired by a crossbow.”

  “Why not just call it a bolt?”

  “I try to steer clear of why? questions, my dear,” said Henry. “They rarely lead human beings any place good. Though it was almost a shame they had to take the quarrel out, I thought. They could, perhaps, have inserted a second one in your other shoulderblade, and then fixed wings to the stumps. Big eagle-wings, with feathers made of tooled steel. Think how magnificent you would have looked!”

  Davy wasn’t sure if the old woman was joking when she said this. “That doesn’t sound…” he started, and then trailed off.

  “But with your metal wings, my dear, you could fly! You could soar.”

  “You’re pulling my leg?”

  “I am pulling your leg.” The old woman trotted to the side of Davy’s bed and pulled herself up, to sit on the edge of the mattress, like a child. “I hope they’ve been looking after you? Miranda and Camilla?”

  “After,” said Davy, “is what they have been looking.”

  “We didn’t expect you to be brought in quite so close to death. Knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door. In point of fact you were doing more than that. You were ringing heaven’s door bell, hammering on the door, kicking its cat-flap with big booted feet, and yelling to be let in.” When Davy stared at her in incomprehension she said, “My lad, we expected you simply to arrive, by horse. We have a little apartment ready for you, in a different place. In the event, we had to bring you here first.”

  “Why did you have to bring me here?”

  “Because you were so badly injured, of course.”

  “Not to this hospital,” said Davy. “To this land.”

  “Ah,” said the old woman, nodding and smiling. “I see what you mean. Well, Davy, I’ll tell you. Do you have any sense of what it entails, running a place like this?”

  “The land, not the hospital? I honestly don’t.”

  “A lot of it is mundane bobbins. Sorting out the facilities. Making sure there’s food, and shelter, disposing of sewage, looking after the sick, OK-ing work rotas and duty-lists. Work is prayer for us; people do as much or as little of it as they feel they need to get in touch with themselves and with what is beyond themselves—the community, the larger principle. The goddess, some people call that. Not all of us. Wycombe is not doctrinaire. But most people who come here are keen to pitch in, to make everything work. And I end up working very hard. I do delegate, of course. Although it’s harder to do that at a time like now.”

  “What time like now?”

  “Why, we’re at war, my dear. A proper war. It may be the first this country has seen for a long time: actual armies and generals and pitched battles, advance and retreat, all that.”

  “War with Father John?”

  “Yes. And with Guz waiting to see who comes out on top. They’re sly, Guz. They’ve brought up quite impressive concentrations of troops and materiel, all camped out west of the Thames—your neck of the woods.”

  “Soldiers in my home?”

  “Not literally inside your house, I think. They’re mostly down by Goring. They’ve even put up a pontoon, so that when they think the time is right they can march straight across.”

  “Invasion.”

  “Well, if you’d ever spent time with one of the Guz higher-ups, you’d know that they don’t like to talk in those terms. They’d say something about the loss of life, and the grave social disorder, and all the negative consequences of war. They’d talk about the necessity of restoring order. I would agree with them about that, actually. I’m just not all that keen on Guz’s version of it. They make a desert and call it peace. Do you know who said that?”

  “Did you say desert, or dessert?”

  The old woman peered at him for a little while through her gloriously wrinkled old face. Then she moved on. “Initially I hired a proxy to grab you: a man. That was delegating. I shouldn’t have hired him. Delegation is always a thicket. He’d done good work for us before, but this time he got wind of something, and he did a little poking around on his own account, and then decided to grab you for his own purposes. We hired him because many people on our council like to think we can keep our hands clean, or at least dis
tance ourselves from the dirty-work. We can’t, though. We shouldn’t have hired him. We should have gone over ourselves and snatched you.”

  “Or maybe not come at all? Maybe just leave me be?”

  She didn’t reply to this. “So,” she went on, shortly. “Running this land means attending to a lot of petty day-to-day business. But it also means thinking strategically. It means thinking ahead, and knowing when to act—to act militarily, I mean, to defend ourselves. I don’t have nearly so many troops at my disposal as does Father John, I’m afraid. But we do have some advantages, happily. We’re fighting over defensive territory that we have well prepared, for one. And we have much better kit.”

  “Kit?”

  “Not just weapons. Tech generally. Tech is our superpower. We’re known for it, of course. We salvage old pre-Sisters machines and components and bits and pieces, and we study them. We run generators. We distil ethanol on a large scale. We have electricity. We have impressive libraries. There are limitations to what we can do, of course, and a lot of the stuff we salvage is junk, or so degraded and decayed we can’t do anything with it. But we have managed a lot, and that gives us the edge.”

  “I suppose that’s one of the reasons John wants to take you over,” said Davy.

  “You’re not as dim as you appear, my boy.”

  “Thank you?” Davy suggested.

  “I’ve never met him, you know. But I feel I can read his mind. He thinks like a man. He thinks, I will capture the Chilterns, seize all the clever tech in Wycombe, persuade our technicians to run it and maintain it, and then use it.”

  “Use it?”

  “To conquer the rest of the country of course. Conquest and power: that’s how a man thinks. I don’t think the country would enjoy such an eventuality. I grew up under Father John’s authority and it was not a very kind environment.”

  “You grew up there?”

  “Eons ago, of course. Wycombe has been my home for many decades. It was me, and my friend Amy. Together we built this place up. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but it turned out I had a genius for running things. Organising, but also inspiring. Knowing when to encourage and when to punish. Thinking strategically, like I said. And Amy had a different genius: a genius for machines and tech. She was really never happier than when tinkering with all that old jetsam.”