The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  “What is that?” Dana asked. With no wLAN in range, she couldn’t look it up.

  “Oilseed rape. It’s probably the genetically modified sort they use to make biodiesel out of. You know Blake said she wanted the country to be self-sufficient by the end of next year, so we didn’t have to rely on imported oil from foreign countries? Some people don’t like it. It’s why they say the Meritocracy rapes the land.”

  Dana ruffled her hair in an attempt to increase the air circulation around her sweaty scalp. If anything, the day had grown hotter, but a very slight breeze flowed from the marshland and the unseen sea that must lie beyond it to the north. Dana closed her eyes and inhaled, letting it cool her face. And as she stood there, she sensed a faint, living pulse — a signal.

  She looked up to the sky. The shape of a hawk hung there, wings stretched wide, shouldering an updraught. “Look, a bird. I think it’s a bird of prey. It looks big.”

  Eric stared up at it. “The biggest bird of prey in Britain is the Golden Eagle.”

  “It doesn’t look golden,” said Dana. It looked mostly white from underneath, with a darker colour around the edges. “What colour’s a Golden Eagle supposed to be?”

  “I think it’s sort of brown. Perhaps it’s an illegal immigrant eagle.”

  Dana squinted up at it. “I think it’s watching us.”

  Eric shrugged. “They only eat rats and mice and stuff.”

  “Not big ones. They carry off whole sheep and stuff. And anyway, that’s not what I meant. Look, it’s circling round. I’m sure it’s watching us.”

  Dana concentrated on the signal, but there wasn’t any two-way communication available to her. She could no more control it than she could control the GPS signal that she used to orient herself and navigate. “It’s probably circling on a thermal,” Eric suggested. “That’s what big birds like eagles and vultures do.”

  “I mean, what if someone used a bird to spy on people? Like they made the wyvern?”

  “Oh, I see — you mean a bird with a camera tied to it. Mint! I remember reading something — I don’t know if it really happened, or if it was something in a book or a film — but some spies put lots of expensive cameras and stuff on a cat, ’cause they wanted to use it for spying and that, but when they put it outside it went into the road and got run over!”

  “Poor cat!” said Dana. “Perhaps it would be more sensible to use an eagle.”

  The eagle was starting to drift away. It slipped out of the thermal and began beating its wings slowly. Dana followed it along the side of the road, back in the direction they’d come. This could be the signal, the clue that would guide her to the place the wyvern was made. She didn’t want to put the helmet back on and suffer its sticky claustrophobia pressing against her scalp and cheeks and she didn’t want to get back onto the bike and put up with it jarring against her stiff limbs one minute more. Eric wheeled the bike behind her. Each stride eased a little of the stiffness out of her legs.

  The bird could fly far faster than she could walk, and it wasn’t long before it came away from the road’s route and Dana lost both its signal and sight of it against the glare of the afternoon sun.

  “Didn’t look like a normal bird,” said Eric.

  “Perhaps it was a falconry bird, and it escaped?” Belatedly, Dana remembered something she’d been told when she went to see a falconry display with Duncan the last time he’d been back from university. The birds had all had electronic tags on them that allowed them to be tracked on GPS. Perhaps that was all the signal she’d been picking up was.

  “We can go birdwatching tomorrow,” Eric said. “We need to think about where we’re going to camp and what we’re going to do about dinner.”

  The field on the other side to the marshland was lower down than the roads, and Dana could make out what looked like onions growing in the soil there. She climbed down off the road and found herself on the edge of a ditch with a bit of stagnant water in the bottom. “They build a moat round the field to stop people stealing the food and camping in it?”

  Eric stumbled down beside her. “It’s a dyke. I mean, what the Dutch people built to channel the water out when they drained the fens.”

  A little farther down the length of the dyke stood a small outcrop of a few trees and bushes. That place might be the most concealed. “Perhaps we could camp in there.”

  “Okay.” Eric looked up the far side of the dyke, to the drooping onion leaves that were starting to turn yellow in the sun. “You know when you go to your grandma’s house, and she does roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for you, and you have roast onions with it?”

  “I dunno really. I haven’t got a grandma.” Graeme’s mother was the only one still alive, and Dana had only seen her a few times. She lived in sheltered accommodation and got Meals on Wheels.

  “I wonder how you make a roast onion.”

  “In an oven, I expect,” Dana suggested. “It’s only really barbecues that you can cook on outdoors I think.” She could remember when Graeme had made a barbecue and insisted on trying to cook the food without Pauline’s help, and it had all been burnt.

  “Perhaps we can make barbecued onions.”

  “We haven’t got a barbecue either.”

  “On a camping fire, then. That’s what you do, when you go camping.”

  “We could always buy some food,” Dana suggested.

  “Oh ya? Did you bring money?”

  Dana hadn’t brought any money, and she didn’t have any better ideas, so she agreed to give it a go. They each gathered up some brush and dry grass. “We ought to make it somewhere we can put it out quickly if it goes out of control,” Dana suggested.

  Eric agreed with her. “Let’s make it on the other side of the dyke. If it sets the grass on fire or something, you can take off your wellies and I can go and fill ’em with water out the dyke.”

  Crossing the dyke turned out to be easier said than done. They decided it would be easier to throw the firewood across first, rather than trying to scramble across with their hands full, and in this way they ended up scattering most of it on the opposite bank.

  Dana went first. She slithered down the bank and jumped across the water, landing on her hands and feet on the opposite side. She climbed up and began to gather up the firewood.

  Eric jumped too early and slid down the bank into the water. It wasn’t very deep, but it soaked his feet and ankles pretty well and made him swear.

  “That’s why I wore wellies!” Dana jeered at him.

  When he got to the top and took off his trainers, his socks were all brown. He swore and made noises of disgust as he took them off, whereupon he wrung them out and started leaping about and flapping them in his hands, like a Morris dancer.

  Dana chose a spot concealed from the road by the bushes and trees on the other side of the dyke. Conveniently, a pile of broken bricks and builder’s rubble lay nearby. She pulled up the grass and made a ring of bricks and stones to build the fire in. Eric hung his socks on a bush and set to work lighting the fire, while Dana pulled up some fat onions and also some turnips that she found in a field a bit farther down the road.

  “We’ve not brought a pan,” she realised when she got back. “How are we going to cook them?”

  “I dunno,” said Eric. “How do people normally cook things?”

  “I think when people have onions they usually cook them in a frying pan in oil.”

  Eric frowned. “There’s some oil in the moped.”

  “I don’t think that’s the right sort of oil.” Dana thought back to how she’d seen people cook things: usually at Pauline and Graeme’s house, food would be either fried, boiled in water, steamed, or cooked under the grill. Occasionally, cakes and meat were cooked in the oven. Then she remembered a country fair Graeme had taken her to the last summer. The depressing apprehension of the approaching end of the summer holiday had been hanging over her at the time, but she’d forgotten about it because they’d had archery and owls and huntsmen, and shops se
lling ‘tat’ as Pauline called it, and people who brewed cider and mead and kept bees, and a man who carved things out of bits of wood. And there had been a whole pig cooked on a spit above an open fire, which was called a hog roast, and Graeme had bought some, in a bun with apple sauce on it. It had been juicy and crisp, and with more flavour than normal roast pork.

  “Here, you make holes on either side of the fire, and put sticks in them like cave men did in pictures.” She went back to the pile of rubble, where she recalled having seen an old copper pipe. She retrieved it and stuck the turnips and onions on it like a kebab. By the time she’d finished, Eric had the sticks in to support it and the fire going.

  They sat and watched the food cooking. It started to go black on the outside, so Dana cut off a piece to see if it was done. The outside tasted burnt, but the inside was still raw and the overall taste was horrible. Eric suggested that they might need turning to make sure they cooked evenly, and he burnt his hand on the hot metal and knocked the spit over so all the food fell down in the ash and dust.

  Dana cut up the burnt bits of turnip and onion. At first both of them sat and ate solemnly, and Dana pretended to like it since they had done it themselves from scratch, and she felt an element of pride in their effort.

  “Mm,” said Eric, “this is a good method of cooking turnips.” Then he tried to swallow and retched, and Dana spat out her mouthful of burnt onion, whereupon they both admitted it was foul, and laughed and took great zeal in throwing it in the dyke.

  “I don’t know,” said Dana, exasperated. She thought back to the food Ivor had made on Roareim with a newfound respect. “Maybe it only works on meat. Perhaps we could build a trap and catch a rabbit.”

  Eric hung his trainers by their laces on the spit over the fire. “I’ve not noticed any rabbits. And I don’t know how to build a trap.”

  Dana sighed. She knew roughly what a trap should look like, but she was too hot and hungry to think about what to make one from or search for the materials.

  “Gypsies, in the olden days, used to catch hedgehogs and roll them up in clay and cook them. The spikes are supposed to come off in the clay. Hedgehogs don’t run very fast.”

  Dana shifted her legs in the uncomfortable position she was crouching. “But then the hedgehogs would still be alive when they were cooked! That’s horrible. And I bet they taste awful, anyway.”

  “Perhaps there’s one squashed on the road somewhere.”

  “Ugh!” Dana stood up. She really was very hungry, and the thought of succulent hog roasts, and of Ivor’s rabbits — she was sure her memory had exaggerated them, as she didn’t recall finding them particularly good at the time — was making her mouth water. For the last few minutes, she had been unconsciously aware of an unpleasant rubbery smell, and at this point she noticed it and turned back to the fire, where Eric had left his wet trainers too close to the edge of the burning material. “Your shoes are on fire!”

  Eric shouted an expletive and kicked over the spit. He beat the trainers with a stick, although they were not really on fire, merely smouldering and stinking. Dana started to laugh. “You wouldn’t laugh, if it happened to you!” Eric objected. It suddenly didn’t matter so much that they had come here and not found anything, and that Dana was aching and hungry and the food they had tried to make was inedible.

  “Do you like Chinese food?” she asked Eric.

  “Ya, course I like Chinese food, but we haven’t got any, unless you stuffed a wok in the back of my bike without me noticing.” Eric shovelled dusty earth over his trainers and stamped on them to extinguish them.

  “I’ve just remembered something.” It might be a bad idea to bring this up. She hadn’t tried it since Ivor has asked her to do it for him, and even then she’d known it was wrong, and the security on the machines might have been changed since to make it harder to hack into. Dana had a top-up payment card that would only allow her to pay for items legal for people under eighteen to buy up to the value of the money on it, that she or Pauline or Graeme had paid into it. At the moment the card had nothing on it, but she could probably make the machine that read the card think there was money on it. “I think I do have, on a payment card. We could go into a town near here and find a Chinese.”

  “Cool, and thanks.” He exhumed his shoes and tried to shake the dust off them. “However crap it is, it’s got to be better than anything we can do.”

  By now, the day was cooling off and the sun was getting low and ruddy. Clouds of midges were emerging from the marsh and the dyke. Eric cringed and complained when he put his trainers back on.

  They rode back towards Spalding, where Dana had found a Chinese restaurant on the Internet via a wLAN she’d sensed coming from someone’s house. When they arrived, the man who took the order stared at them, and at the brown water oozing from Eric’s shoes, and told them he wouldn’t serve them unless they paid in advance. Dana offered him her payment card and, despite her concerns, found she could still interfere with the card reader’s signal and make it think she’d paid.

  The restaurant had a buffet system where you could take a plate and have as many helpings as you liked. Dana had mussels in black bean sauce, egg-fried rice, sweet & sour pork, and seaweed and crab claws with a skewer of spicy chicken. They sat at a table by a pond with Koi carp in it, where Eric kept pretending to drop bits of rice in the pond for the fish to eat, because he said they looked hungry. For dessert, Dana chose some deep-fried fruits drizzled with sticky syrup, and afterwards they had a pot of jasmine-scented green tea to share, served in thimble-like ceramic cups with no handle, which was deliciously refreshing after the heavy meal and very sweet dessert. A lady came around the tables and handed out fortune cookies, and Eric’s said Your trouble will soon pass, and Dana’s said Wisdom comes from experience.

  By the time they left the restaurant, dusk had fallen. Back at the site they’d picked to camp in, they had to use the torch to assemble the tent, with much difficulty. At last Dana lay awake in her sleeping bag, staring at the tent’s canvas ceiling barely visible from the moonlight behind it, and listened to the sounds of insects and rustling of unidentified animals, and the occasional whisper of a car’s tyres on the nearby road. A faint oniony smell permeated the air, and it was starting to make her nose feel clogged. From the regular sound of his breathing, she could tell Eric was already asleep. She ran through the memories the wyvern had given her several times, but nothing she’d seen today triggered any connection. She had been hoping something else might have been implanted in her, something subconscious or otherwise hidden, that she would recognise when she saw something that would trigger it. Now it was looking obvious that wouldn’t happen and she had been wrong. The only thing she had seen was the bird, and that might be nothing to do with this. She had two more days to look for information, but she had no idea where to start.

  -6-

  YOU can’t remember becoming aware of being here again, back in what seems to be a dream you think you’ve had before. The familiar drone of a fan is barely perceptible. You can sense only a leaden feeling throughout your body, and your eyesight is filled with grey unfocused masses.

  Gamma? What’s the matter?

  My own consciousness is sticky, wrapped around yours like Velcro. It’s a while before I can pull together enough that I think is myself to answer. The medicine must have worn off. You’re not supposed to be here.

  Small details become briefly comprehensible: the barred window, and the striped light it throws on the wall opposite. The mattress under my back.

  Something’s wrong! Try to think!

  I’m not supposed to listen to you. That’s what they say. You’re a symptom; you’re part of what’s making me ill.

  You remember them, men and women wearing white coats, asking probing questions, trying to trap us, nurses in blue uniforms, cold faces, hard hands. Don’t listen to them. You’re only ill because they give you bad medicine that hurts you.

  I can think of no reply to this.

 
They’re always telling you that what’s in your head is fake, and that what’s here is real. What if they’re wrong, and it’s the other way round? What if this is fake, and we can get out of it and make something else real?

  I lie there and I listen to the fan and stare at the stripes cast by the bars on the wall, and my mind is empty. You fear I am ignoring you, that I won’t hear. I can’t be bothered with the answer. It doesn’t matter what’s real and what isn’t. If I take their medicine, it goes away. I don’t have to be me any more. I can just be nothing.

  But I can help you get to the place that’s safe.

  The Emerald Forge? The name kindles some ember trapped deep within me, of a fire I thought had long gone out.

  The Emerald Forge.

  I sit up on the bed with the straps. The motion sets the room heaving and a sick ache starts up in my stomach and pain shoots through my head and neck.

  They give me this stuff, this medicine, to make me better?

  Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to the Emerald Forge, you think.

  I wait for the room to stop swimming before sliding my feet off the bed and easing my weight onto the floor. Every step I take sends electric charges of pain lancing up my neck and into my head and eyes.

  We tell the door to unlock. The bathroom door stands ahead.

  Not in there. To the Emerald Forge. Down the stairs.

  I hold on to the banister as I descend. The stairs are covered with sticky lino with metal grips on the edges that hurt my toes. My legs are weak. I can’t remember when I last walked. I think they’ve been giving me drugs for a long time. I don’t remember you being here much.

  There’s another electronically locked door that leads out into a foyer. Thin light from a window reveals seats and magazines and a big money tree in an urn. It looks civilised, not like the unreal side of this world that is more familiar. You wonder if whoever comes here to wait, to sit on these seats and read these magazines, knows what goes on behind the other door, in the deeper parts of the building.