by Adam Roberts
The image of Goring was growing larger in the middle of the screen.
“Are there people inside the flying machine?” Davy asked.
“Wee free folk? No,” said Henry. “No. This plane is four feet long.”
“So it’s a toy?”
“A special kind of toy.”
“You’re delivering a message to Goring,” said Daniel.
“I am,” said Henry.
“You could just have told me your message,” Daniel offered, “and I would have undertaken to pass it on, you know.”
“Well it’s the kind of message liable to get diluted if translated into words,” said Henry. “Much,” she added, arching one eyebrow, “as I admire and respect the power of words.”
The little moving pictures on the tattered old screen were hypnotic to watch. The toy flying machine was coming closer to Goring, swooping down perhaps, like a bird coming in to land. Everyone in the room was silent, staring at the images. The houses were larger, and it was possible to make out details on the sides of the moored boats. Birds flew out of trees and away as the image got bigger. There was the pontoon. The flying toy was close enough now that it was possible to make out a gate and a guardhouse on the Goring side of the bridge. The pontoon was now filling the screen, and Davy just about got a glimpse of figures running on the far side. Guards, he presumed.
The screen went spotty-white.
There was silence. “Is it broken?” Davy asked.
“That depends,” said Henry, “on what you mean by it.” As she spoke the screen flickered, and a new image came onto it. A wall, with a tiny little door in it, like a dollhouse door.
“Going,” said somebody else. “Going Goring, gone.” Another woman laughed, a sound like rubber being twisted.
Henry and Daniel were having a conversation. It was evident that, whether he had come as some kind of envoy from Guz, or whether he had been captured sneaking around in Wycombe territory, Daniel was going to be released. He was taking this message—the strange little bird’s-eye view of flight over the trees to the new bridge at Goring—back to his people.
“Your demonstration,” Daniel was saying, “has, of course, made it harder rather than easier for me to get your message back to my side.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a boat that will take you over,” said Henry. “Or maybe you could swim? One might assume the cast on your leg would make that impracticable, but I’m told you can be a surprisingly persistent swimmer when you want to be.”
“And there’s another side for me to get over to, is there?”
“Side,” said Henry. “Well. Largely. More or less.”
“Your sweet little old woman act,” Daniel said, “is something approaching a master-stroke, you know.”
Henry didn’t react to this. “The inconvenience to which you are now put when it comes to returning to Guz is very much the message I wish to send,” she said. “I don’t say I want a hard border on my western flank, mind you. I say such a border now exists, and I would encourage Guz to respect that fact.”
“Whilst you make minced-meat of John’s army?”
“I am disinclined to take instruction on that matter,” said the old woman, brightly, “from a group who possesses not one but a great many of these nuclear weapons, sitting in your big boats and submarines.” She pronounced this last word with a heavy emphasis on its second syllable.
“Submarines,” said Daniel.
Henry smiled. “I’ve only ever seen it written down. But, yes, yes. You and I know what we’re talking about. Most of my drones carry conventional ordnance. I’m obviously not going to tell you precisely how many I have. Some of my drones—and again, obviously, I’m not going to give you a detailed itinerary, but is more than one—have these … what shall we say? Bigger bombs. Bigger bangs.”
“The mighty atom,” said Daniel, and raised up his handcuffed wrists. Or perhaps he said, “the mighty Adam,” and was making some Biblical point. Davy couldn’t be sure.
“Father John,” said Henry, running an index finger over first one and then another eyebrow, “is arrogant and greedy, but he is not insane. Once he grasps the destruction he is calling down onto his own heartlands, he’ll pull back.”
“Or you’ll bigger-bang him,” said Daniel.
“The important thing is that he understands that I do not bluff.”
“Was it you,” Daniel said, in a voice of dawning realisation, “who sent that young girl up the river, on that crazy quest to Father John? Jesus, Henry. Was it?”
“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Daniel,” said Henry, gesturing to one of her people. “Don’t take it the wrong way if I say I hope we never meet again. Jojo tells me you killed one of our horses?”
“Horses cost less than bridges.”
“Well, yes, I was going to say: you’ll be pleased to hear we won’t be pressing you for the restitution of that debt. I’m sure you’ve heard how persistent Wycombe can be when it comes to recovering our own.”
“Madam,” said Daniel, bowing, “it is not despite but because I grasp how much of what you are trying to do depends upon maintaining a certain act, a certain attitude, that I offer you my genuine admiration and respect.”
All this time Davy’s eye was caught by the screen: the dollhouse wall, the teeny-tiny doorway. As Daniel was making this last speech Davy saw the door open, and a teeny-tiny figure come out of it and start walking towards the camera, swelling rapidly and prodigiously as she, or he, did so. Henry, noticing what Davy was doing, pointed a finger and the operator turned the screen off.
Chapter Eighteen
DAVY’S NEW LIFE began. They took him by car (an actual moving vehicle, whose engine hummed and sputtered) along a repaired road, and he sat in the back peering through the window. Lots of soldiers coming and going, most of them women, a couple of armoured vehicles, and a great many horses. Then a turn down a bumpy track, past the weed-crammed shells of roofless old houses and to their final destination. It was a two-storey block building, behind a fence. Inside this compound Davy was helped from the car. He leaned on his guard’s arm as he was shown around. A large room with a bed it in, and an annex with a sink, a toilet and a bath which had presumably once been white but which was now the colour of the heel of your foot. In the main room there was a bookcase against one wall, and a window looking across a stretch of wasteground to trees. The window had bars on it.
It was a prison.
Davy sat on his bed and fought to get his breath back. “Lots of books,” he observed.
His guard was called Gabriela: a tall well-built woman with white-yellow hair and a little scar shaped like an uptick in her left cheek, by her mouth. “Something to pass the time.”
“I can’t read, though,” he said.
“Well, the time will pass,” she said, “whether you read or not.”
She laid out the routine: breakfast and supper in the room, lunch in a communal dining space followed by two hours in the central quad for exercise, or fresh air, “Or not if you don’t feel like it.”
He quickly got used to things. He had no timepiece, but soon got the sense—judging only by how empty his belly was when breakfast or supper were delivered—that the timetable run by the guards was very loose. Sometimes they woke him early with bread and milk, or bread and hot tea, but sometimes he woke and spent a long time staring at the ceiling, or padding around the room, or staring through the barred windows at the view, before food arrived. Food did at least always eventually arrive, and there was hot water for about half an hour in the morning. So things could have been a lot worse.
Lunch meant unlocking his door and escorting him through to a sparsely-kitted room where four guards and three prisoners sat at the same table and ate. This, and the two hours that followed it in the building’s twelve-metre by twelve-metre internal courtyard, were the highlight of Davy’s day. The two other prisoners were both female: an elderly woman who said very little, and a young woman who was only a few years older than h
e was.
The young woman was Amber: the girl he had, briefly, travelled with. When Abigail and May were still alive. She looked different.
“You escaped the ambush,” he told her. “I’m so pleased!”
She stared at him, not recognising him at all.
“I’m Davy. Don’t you remember? When Abigail and the others were bringing you back to Wycombe, I was there too.”
Nothing. She was, it seemed, in shock. Or perhaps she had never registered his presence there at all. Davy remembered that her sister had been killed, and that she was in some obscure way to blame for that, so he decided to give her space. Not to pester her.
After a week Henry came to see him. It was the last conversation he would have with the old woman. “Settling in?”
“How long will I be here?”
“You understand that we need to keep you around, for a little while,” said Henry, smiling a thin smile.
“I don’t, really,” said Davy. “I’m much fitter now. I have hardly any problem with my shoulder. I mean, I have some problem with my shoulder. But it’s much better.”
“You’re a clever lad,” said Henry. “Too clever to believe that we’re holding you for reasons to do with your health.”
“I just…” said Davy, looking gloomily at the floor. He stopped.
“You just?”
“I suppose I just wonder if I’m ever getting out of here.”
“Oh I’m sure you will,” said Henry, in a tone that implied that her sureness actually ran in quite another direction.
“Will my mother visit me? Is she staying here?”
“She’s gone back home. She has, after all, her pride. As I believe I said before—” The smile dropped from Henry’s face, and then came back up. “Nobody has known her longer than I have. Not even you, and you’ve known her all your life.”
“So you’re just holding me in reserve?”
“It might look to some,” said Henry, as she went to the door, “like petty statelets squabbling. It might look that way to some. But that’s not what’s going on.” She paused, by the door, and Gabriela waited on the far side, with her keys out. “Most power politics is jockeying for position. But where we are now will shape the way this entire country grows over the next hundred years. Longer! Father John doesn’t grasp that fact. I don’t think even Guz understand it. But I do. Goodbye my dear.”
And she left.
THE SECOND WEEK was the worst. A deep gloom settled, like a snowdrift, on all the roofs and gutters and crannies of Davy’s soul. He would never get out of this place. Eventually his Ma would die, of course, and then he would be of no further use to Wycombe, so perhaps they would let him go then. But they might equally well just cut his throat and leave him in a ditch. There was no point in anything.
At lunch, everyone seemed to be in a similar state of misery. The guards chatted amongst themselves; the other two prisoners simply stared at their food. The weather took another turn to the icy, and the little courtyard was very cold, its stone flags so frozen that Davy actually slipped and fell when he tried to walk around the perimeter. A bruised arse didn’t help lighten his mood.
One day the old woman was gone—released, they said. So now Davy and Amber were the only two prisoners. Just the two of them.
Days were interminable. Because he wasted much of the day in naps, night-time sleep was unreliable. He often found himself in the dark, staring into nothingness. His room had an electrical light bulb, inside a little wire cage, but there was no switch on his side of the door, and it was only illuminated for a short period in the evening.
By the second week he had grown bored with being depressed. He went through all the books in his book case. A couple were so old and spotted with brown decay that he wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of them even if he’d been able to read. With a couple more the pages simply crumpled to flakes when he opened the covers. Most of the rest were in reasonable condition: a few had a kind of waxy layer over the pages, and others were printed on sturdy old paper. The majority had nothing by way of illustration at all. One had old line-drawings on a dozen pages. Two of the books were illustrated with old black and white photographs, one of pre-Sisters humans doing peculiar-looking things with big machines—making some kind of food, it seemed, but on a huge scale—and one of lots of kinds of seabirds and coastal landscapes. He spent several days going over these pictures in detail.
One lunchtime he took a book with him to the table. As everybody was eating he asked Amber if she could read.
She looked surprised. But instead of ignoring him she looked him up and down. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. Can’t you?”
“No,” he said.
They ate in silence for a while, as Davy summoned the courage to add, “Will you teach me?”
Amber stared at him and turned away. She said nothing more to him for the rest of the meal. He assumed he had offended her in some way. But after the meal, when two of the guards and the three prisoners stood arms-folded and stamping their feet in the little courtyard she turned to him and said, “I’d be a rubbish teacher, though.”
“You know how to do it and I don’t,” Davy pointed out.
She looked at the guards, leaned in closer and hissed, “This is a prison, you know.”
Davy was a little startled that she thought he didn’t understand where he was. Without really thinking, he replied, “A place where I get to spend time with someone as beautiful as you can hardly be described as a prison.”
She drew her head back. Then, after a long pause, she opened her eyes really wide.
“I’m sorry,” said Davy. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“There can’t be anything between…” she said and stopped. “I don’t want to break your heart, kid, but I don’t feel... Look: I’m seventeen—seventeen—and… Look, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It just popped into my head. It was a stupid thing to say.”
“I’m just not interested in that kind of…” she said.
“It’s OK—I won’t. Look, I won’t say anything like that again.”
“It’s not that it’s not flattering it’s just...”
“I understand. Really.”
“It really, really could never work out between you and…” said Amber.
“You can stop saying that kind of thing now,” said Davy.
She stared at him with her bug eyes for a while, and then slowly lowered her eyelids back to their regular position. “How old are you?”
“I’m thirteen. Like I said.”
“You’re thirteen, and you can’t read?”
“Can’t read and in prison.” He tried for perky. “It’s hardly a surprise you don’t want to go out with me!”
Perky didn’t come off.
She looked at him closely, as if trying to determine if he was joking or not. Eventually she said, “I’m in prison too.”
“True.”
“I know why you’re here. You’re Amy’s son. You’re our insurance policy.”
“You make me sound like a piece of paper.”
“There are many paper men,” said Amber, haughtily. “They outnumber the real men a hundred to one.” It had the sound of an apothegm.
“We did meet before,” Davy offered. “Do you remember? Abigail was bringing me up into the Chilterns?”
Amber shook her head. Then she said, “Abigail is dead,” and she began to sob.
Davy stared at the table in an embarrassed sort of way, until Amy got her sobbing under control.
“It’s understandable,” he said. “You being sad, I mean. Locked up in here.”
“It’s OK,” she said, without meeting his eye. “I’m not sad because I’m locked up in here. I’m sad for a different reason.”
Her sister, Davy warned himself, in an inner-monologue so distinct it was as if one part of his brain was shouting at another part, she’s sad because of her dead sister.
Don’t, whatever you do, mention her dead sister. “So why are you in here?”
“I was trying,” she said, her voice back under control, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms, “to warn some people that they could have been killed in their thousands and their land consumed by a dust storm of poisonous evil.”
“You were trying to kill thousands of people and obliterate their land in a dust storm of poisonous evil?”
“Not me. I was trying to warn them that other people were… but, then, actually, yes. You’re right. Not other people. I was. Because Wycombe was and I’m a part of that. Do you know how things are run here?”
“Henry, you mean.”
“She wishes! No, there’s a council. All adult woman serve a turn on it, and last year it so happened my lot came along, so I served, and we were discussing this poison weapon that kills men and women and children and animals indiscriminately, and leaves the soil polluted for generations, and we were actually talking about using it against Father John. Anyway, I said it was not moral, and that if Wycombe didn’t stand for doing the right thing then there wasn’t even any point in Wycombe, yeah? Anyway. Anyway, I tried to… tried to get word to John. So Henry has bunged me in here as a punishment. She may exile me, I don’t know. I don’t care if she does, actually. There is no shame in going to prison for a good cause. Do you know who said that?”
“I do not.”
“Neither do I. I learned it in ethics class at school. I don’t remember her name, except that everyone called her Granny, so she must have been old. And it’s true, don’t you think?”
Davy nodded, and tried to look wise. He was acutely conscious of the age gap between them: he a skinny, under-height kid with a nick in the end of his tongue, she this beautiful and assured young woman. There was no chance, of course. He knew there was no chance. Not in a million years. Even though he was technically a man now, she looked at him and saw just the kid. He had to play it cool, that was the main thing. So he decided to tell her that Daniel, from Guz, had explained to him what ethics was, and maybe he’d tell her about Daniel. That might impress her.
