The Book of the Crowman

by Joseph D'lacey

  Baritone and motorised, Pike’s words brought the conversation to a swift conclusion.

  “We haven’t got him yet.”

  His head swivelled to face the front again and whatever light had greyly flickered behind the disks of his eyes guttered and was snuffed. More and more these days Pike’s engine seemed to stall, leaving Skelton wondering if it would ever start up again. He was overwhelmed by a sudden uprising of grief. He pushed it away as best he could.

  Pike’s five little words could mean so much. They could mean so little. Was he merely saying that they shouldn’t get ahead of themselves? Or, by saying their mission was not yet accomplished, was he implying that he too would be saddened by the arrival at their common goal. And was he also alluding to the possibility that the end of the mission would also be the end for them? Skelton couldn’t decipher it. He knew Pike no better now than he had when they were first assigned to work with each other. Though they had risen to the highest echelons of the Ward as a team, it wasn’t enough for Skelton. He wanted more. He wanted Pike to love him. He knew he would give up everything else if he could be assured of that one simple requirement. Neither vengeance nor duty would endure. Only love could do that.

  The driver sat hunched in front of them, trying not to be noticed, it seemed to Skelton. They moved in the slow lane up the motorway. To their right passed occasional grey troop-carrying trucks. Only elite troops got a ride. The rest made the journey on foot. The convoy stretched onwards beyond view. From time to time a grey tank rumbled past, and behind them, in the slow lane, horses like the one pulling their carriage hauled an array of field guns and heavy mortars. Marching up the southbound carriageway went the bulk of the Ward’s infantry; more men than Skelton could begin to estimate.

  Non-Ward pedestrians, the country’s permanent refugees, had no option but to move to the hard shoulder and grass verges in order to continue their journeys in or out of London. Mostly they stood and watched the endless convoy pass. If these were the kind of people they were likely to do battle with, thought Skelton, they looked beaten already.

  In the hours they’d spent rolling along behind their steady Shire and silent driver, Skelton realised he was running out of patience with the endless resistance from the people of the country. They needed to understand that the Ward had everyone’s welfare at heart. They wanted a future and they were going about securing it as swiftly and cleanly as possible. If only the people would stand down, everything could move forward smoothly and without more pain and bloodshed. Though he had a taste for cruelty, Skelton was tiring of it.

  Perhaps my engine’s stalling just like Pike’s.

  That brought a humourless grin briefly to his lips.

  Maybe we’re all just tired…

  There was a thud. Something bounced off the side of their driver’s head – half a brick, Skelton noticed as it rolled off his coat and back down to the blasted tarmac. The silent Wardsman made an inhuman noise deep in his throat as he slumped over to his right. The carriage began to drift into the overtaking traffic to the sound of angry horns and the hiss of truck brakes.

  Skelton, sluggish with hours of pondering and boredom, struggled forwards to take the reins from their unconscious driver. He pulled the left rein and succeeded in bringing the horse and their carriage out of the way of the trucks. He hauled on the leather straps and after a few more paces the horse stopped.

  Pike reanimated the moment before the missile struck, having seen something come at them from the grass verge – a boy, barefooted and grimy, had thrown the fragment of brick and he had another ready to fly. Pike leapt down from the still-rolling carriage as soon as the driver fell over. He strode towards the boy, who threw his second projectile – a simple stone this time – straight at him.

  Thinking the boy was aiming high, Pike ducked but the boy had anticipated this and Pike took the blow on his forehead. It stopped him. He straightened up and put a hand to his brow. It came away bloody. Slower now, he advanced on the boy. A man, the boy’s father perhaps, moved into Pike’s path. Pike’s businesslike backhand knocked the man out. He rolled and lay facedown in the gravel. Pike reached the boy who lashed out at his shins and crotch with his bare feet. He grabbed the boy’s head, rotating it hard and fast between his palms. The boy dropped to the almost bald verge. His legs still kicked but without direction.

  Skelton watched the unfolding scene with detachment and even disbelief. Something snapped in the starving travellers who’d witnessed Pike’s response. Perhaps twenty of them – whether related to each other or merely fellow travellers, Skelton never found out – launched themselves down the verge at Pike and the nearest vehicles in the convoy. The strength in their fleshless bodies surprised Skelton but it surprised Pike more. Four of them took Pike down when they slammed into him. The rest swarmed onto the drivers of nearby carriages.

  Taken by surprise, and probably not well prepared for combat, some of the drivers were killed by the travellers who beat their heads and faces with stones held in their desperate fists. It was a full minute before a troop carrier stopped and spilled its men onto the motorway. The two behind it did the same. Quite suddenly a hundred or more elite, battle-ready Wardsmen brought the attack to an end by catching every single one of the skirmishers.

  Without a word spoken the Ward troops bound their assailants, knelt them on the hard shoulder and beheaded them with machetes. They let the bodies drop and returned to their vehicles as though they’d done nothing more than stop to relieve themselves. The engines of the trucks had not stopped. They rolled away and the convoy recommenced. Moments later, the first truck stopped again and four Wardsmen trotted back to take over the positions of the slain carriage drivers. Skelton and Pike’s driver, too injured to stand, was hauled to the grass verge and left there.

  When Pike climbed aboard again his face was half covered by a tacky red mask. There was blood on his hands and coat too. Skelton reached under the seat and brought out one of their travelling cases. From it he took a small first aid kit. As their carriage moved off with a new driver, he cleaned and dressed Pike’s wounded head and wiped the blood from his hands and uniform as best he could. Pike looked straight ahead throughout as though nothing had happened. His stoicism caused Skelton to flush with pride and arousal.

  41

  Denise waited for Gordon on a bridge over the M6 about ten miles south of Coventry.

  There were many others who waited with her, leaning on the railings to scan the vast column of fighters walking south to meet the Ward. The bridge provided a perfect vantage spot for people who’d been separated from friends and loved ones in the press of Green Men leaving Coventry.

  Of the small company of First Guard riders she’d travelled with since running from the skinheads in the wood by the canal, only peach-faced Jerome remained. Mounted on his pale, spotted horse, she felt his eyes drawn back to her again and again. She smiled to herself. His fellow First Guard had galloped south in readiness to split and organise the Green Men troops before battle. They’d left Jerome, or rather, Jerome had made it clear he should be the one to stay. This amused his more world-weary comrades who gave him a spare horse for Denise to use on the last leg of their journey.

  She’d already learned a lot about the Green Men forces; useful information. There were a few simple ranks among them. The Chieftain, First Guard – who acted as commanders and sub-commanders – and the nameless hordes of Green Men troops; a rabble made up of anyone old enough and willing to fight.

  It was clear to Denise that those in the higher ranks knew this was not a fight that would be won with finesse and incisive manoeuvres. All the Green Men had on their side were greater hordes – of a population that had been pushed to its limits in every possible way. If this fight was to be won at all, it would be through sacrifice and determination; a willingness to go all the way, for each militiaman and woman to lay down their lives taking one or more Wardsmen with him. It was a numbers game, nothing more.

  While the Ward were far b
etter organised and more accustomed to open combat, they had come to a wall in their ideology. They still had all the power. They still controlled most of the country and most of its cities. But they had separated themselves from the territory they planned to take. They had no roots or mythology to guide them and they sought only more power. Each Wardsman knew, whether he chose to voice it or not, that the Green Men cleaved to something more powerful than dominion; they were fighting for the land and for their lives.

  Denise saw all this and felt a thrilling sense of liberation in sharing neither ideology. To survive one had to be pragmatic. She’d always had her own ways of staying alive; if she could leave the fighting to others.

  Nevertheless, she knew the land a little better since travelling with Gordon. She could even stretch to saying she understood how worthwhile it would be to protect it. But she wanted to stay alive no matter who won, and that meant playing the game she’d played best all her life; the game of men.

  She had no intention of laying down her life in battle, though there were now many women in the ranks of the Green Men. Perhaps a quarter of the fighters passing under the motorway bridge – fifty or more with every passing second – were female. Women who had nothing left in their stomachs but fury. Perhaps, Denise thought, they were fighting for the chance to bring children into a world that could actually sustain them, or keep alive the children they hadn’t already lost to the ignorance that had brought the world to its knees and spawned the Ward.

  Whatever the case, Denise wasn’t moved to join them. She was a realist and a survivor. The combination meant taking certain liberties with trust from time to time and playing men like slot machines. It was the ones who paid out she was interested in.

  Jerome, high on his horse, had been such a one. As had some of his fellow First Guards. Gordon had been another. She found herself genuinely excited to see him again as she waited up here with her current guardian. She appreciated Jerome’s puppy-like eagerness to please her, combined with a protective instinct that was half brotherly, half fatherly and a little too much like shackles to be of any real interest to her. He would be the man who kept her safe until after the battle had played out, when a clear victor would step forward from the field and claim her loyalty.

  In her hand she held a black top hat which she’d traded for a favour. She’d decorated it with crow and jackdaw feathers. It would finish Gordon’s outfit perfectly. Plenty of the fighters had taken to wearing feathers in their hats but there would be no other Green Man to rival Gordon’s battle-dress. He would be powerful and unmistakeable. She stroked the hat and placed it on the backpack at her feet.

  Jerome’s horse fretted and stamped at the concrete of the bridge. He leaned down and tried to quiet the animal. Whether it was Jerome's nerves or the endless stream of agitated fighters spooking his mount, Denise couldn’t tell.

  “Will you know him?” asked Jerome.

  “Of course I’ll know him.” She let her eyes meet Jerome’s. “We’re… intimate.”

  He coloured and looked away. So readable. So playable.

  “Can you be sure he’ll come with you?”

  Denise didn’t answer straight away.

  She didn’t want to make a silly mistake and miss him. Her gaze fell back to the flow of rough and ready troops. They walked fifteen to twenty abreast. Many of them wore black feathers in various arrangements but none of them looked the way Gordon did, resplendent in his shimmering black coat.

  There was still no sign of him.

  “He’ll come,” Denise said, speaking into the wind. “He’s very dependable.”

  She glanced up.

  The boy in the saddle responded perfectly, knowing he was being compared to another. His rage ascended in rose coloured flashes to mottle his never-shaven cheeks. Though Gordon also reacted to her, though he was similarly innocent, he was no marionette; he’d sooner slice through his own strings than be her dancer. But even innocent, boyish Jerome wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here with her now.

  Denise rested her chin on her hands on the railings and let the advance of the Green Men’s army hypnotise her.

  42

  Once clear of Coventry’s smaller roads, the column loosened and Gordon was able to trot between the ranks. Their pace was little better than a fast shuffle; none of them had learned to march in unison. Without his pack he made swift progress out to the motorway and once there he jogged along within the barrier of the central reservation making good time.

  His pace had an edge of panic and desperation to it. Gordon recognised this but couldn’t control it. Somewhere amid these crowds was the one individual who could make the Green Men victorious but Gordon couldn’t stop to search every line of fighters and even if he did, he had no idea what the Crowman really looked like. All he’d ever had to go on were sketches, poems and hearsay. Even so, Gordon had a sense that he would know him if he saw him.

  He had to keep believing that the moment of revelation was coming. He had to trust Grimwold’s words and the silent language spoken by every tree and bird and rock he’d passed since his journey began. And he had to get ahead of these troops fast. If the head of the column met the Ward before they had a figurehead to follow into battle, Gordon didn’t believe they had a chance. It would be like feeding meat into a grinder.

  The motorway bent lazily to the left and crested a rise. On the other side was a long shallow decline and, almost a mile away at its lowest point, he saw the exit for Rugby. At the top of the slip road a bridge spanned the M6 and even from this distance he could see people ranged along the edge of it. With the hill on his side, he picked up the pace.

  He saw Denise long before she saw him and, as he’d hoped, she was accompanied by a First Guard. There appeared to be only one but that was far better than her travelling alone. He left the centre of the motorway and moved across to the hard shoulder, slipping lightly between the bodies of the marchers. Many of them already looked weary enough to drop but the combined energy and momentum of the vast column, and perhaps the thought that finally they might be able to make a difference; all this seemed to hold them up and keep them moving. When someone flagged or collapsed, those around them lifted them up. In three years of travelling Gordon had never seen so much cooperation and cohesion between people. He could only wonder why it took the promise of war to make it happen.

  When Denise began to jump up and down, waving and calling out to him, Gordon was already running up the slip road.

  Megan is halfway up the coppice side of the valley when she begins to hear faint pops and sharper cracks issuing from the opening of the cave and echoing into the night. She turns and looks back.

  There’s an orange glow behind the hawthorns, making warped black silhouettes of their gnarled bodies. The light from within the cave is enough to reveal thick, black smoke rising from the cave mouth. She hopes she has done enough to destroy everything inside.

  As she watches, her eyes are drawn to a bright flash high above the cave. It comes from inside the windmill. Moments later she hears a thump, the sound following the light across the valley. Something inside the mill has exploded and from within there is a brightening glimmer. Megan’s hand goes to her mouth as she remembers the hole in the roof of the cave where highly-combustible flour was sifting down. The flames would have leapt up the constantly falling grain dust and into the body of the mill where, no doubt, there are tons of tinder dry sacks of–

  Another flash, much brighter this time and the bang that follows it is much louder. The air from the valley pushes her back a step. She notices now, by the light of the fire taking hold of the mill, that there are figures outside it, their hands raised in dismay at the destruction. Three figures. It looks like three men.

  Megan turns away and sprints up the final stretch of the hill, wasting no more time on backward glances.

  43

  The two horses trotted south along the deserted A5. One carried Jerome, the other, Denise. Gordon ran comfortably along
side them on the grass verge. For the moment no one spoke. Gordon didn’t mind. He was glad they were making progress. Now that the daylight was waning, he cursed himself for all the time he’d spent trying to catch up on sleep in the high-rise flat.

  Their reunion had been mixed and he replayed it often in the silence:

  Seeing Denise running to him from the top of the slip road had made his heart beat faster. Her smile, her eyes, her hair, the way she moved; he was very glad to see all that again. And he ached for her too. Even before they embraced, he was uncomfortably hard. Her hug closed tighter around him when she felt it. He was glad his coat was there to hide his condition from the disapproving young First Guard who looked down on them. Even as he held Denise close and his physical need for her prevented him from swallowing properly, he knew it was wrong between them, just as he always had.

  And yet, he couldn’t pull himself away.

  “It’s so good to see you, Gordon,” she said, pulling back so that she could kiss him. “I thought you might not come back.”

  “I was always going to come back.”

  The words sounded trite, almost rehearsed, but he knew they were true. All this was inevitable; it was his calling.

  “And the little girl?”

  Gordon shook his head. Denise released him and her hands went to her mouth. He took hold of her shoulders.

  “Listen… I...” He struggled to find a way to say it. “They didn’t… It wasn’t a bad end for her, Denise. I did everything I could.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  Gordon felt the First Guard looking at him but he didn’t look up. Not yet.

  He shrugged.

  “They’re gone.”

  Now he raised his eyes to the First Guard, dressed in his green and brown uniform with a thick leather belt and brass buckle clasped around his waist. The buckle had a simple motif engraved into it – an oak tree. Gordon nodded to himself. It was a good symbol. The horseman was no more than a boy really. Gordon could see from his eyes that he had fought and that he had killed but his innocence seemed not yet to have been entirely rubbed away. There was an ambitiousness to his cheekbones, or was it arrogance? Either way, Gordon decided in that very moment that he didn’t trust this boy, with his soft, tanned skin and clamped lips, his resentful jealous eyes.