Never, ever let the Ward catch up with you. Never let them find you.
That was what his mother had written. And his father’s words had been much the same:
You must never, NEVER let them catch you.
But all that was three years ago. So much had changed since then. He had scoured this land for the Crowman in every waking hour; even in his sleep he had pursued him. As he’d walked the fields and forests, as he’d passed through the ruined cities, he had given what help he could and he had waged an uncompromising war on wickedness.
He could see Jude weeping now and struggling weakly in Skelton’s pudgy grip. Here was his sister and protector for so many years. The war was almost won and the future the Crowman promised was perhaps only a few days away. Jude needed that future more than he did. Gordon’s lips moved silently:
Mum, Dad, I’ve done enough. I’ve got to give her a chance now.
Gordon approached the carriage, stopping fifty yards away.
“Send her out to me,” he said.
“You come to us,” said Skelton. “And then we’ll let her walk away.”
“No. She comes to me first.”
Skelton removed a cutthroat razor from his trench coat pocket. He unfolded it.
“Come to us, Gordon. Or watch your very long-suffering sister bleed.”
Gordon’s feet began to move before his mind caught up. He walked slowly towards them, watching the hedges for movement. Pike, huge and stone-faced, stood motionless, as though switched off, but Gordon watched him anyway, alert for any movement.
“You can’t win, Gordon,” said Skelton. “Your problem is you care. That means you have no real power. I control this situation precisely because I don’t care about your sister’s welfare. Paradoxical, isn’t it?”
Gordon’s footsteps slowed further as he neared the group. The driver of the carriage tried to look unconcerned but Gordon knew the man had been picked for a reason. It was only when Gordon was five yards from them that Pike’s dormant engine seemed to fire up, he seemed to expand and come to life. Skelton grinned and manhandled Jude to create a shield between himself and Gordon. The driver’s hand slid inside his jacket.
Gordon’s left hand moved towards his breast. He placed his palm over the Crowspar and allowed his eyes to close.
Once more. That’s all I ask. Of the land. Of the sky. Of the crows. Once more and then I’m done.
There was nothing. Only the weight of a dead crystal beneath the fabric of his shirt. He heard the voices of his mother and father, speaking the warnings of their letters:
Never let them find you.
Never let them catch you.
Sometimes children disappoint their parents.
“I have to,” he whispered, his eyes still shut.
“What did you say?” asked Skelton.
As if his decision had unlocked the Crowspar, it transformed him. He was the confluence of the earth and the sky. He was the animal in every human. He was the beginning and the end of everything, the Black Light manifest in flesh and blood.
A wind gathered around them, agitated at first then swiftly furious. Skelton looked up and around to discover the source of it. Gordon moved in that moment, rage and love surging through him, his black feathers giving him lift. He leapt at Skelton whose fat hand now moved towards Jude’s neck. Pike began to lunge forwards with more strength than grace and the driver withdrew a long knife from the sheath inside his jacket.
The distance between Gordon and Skelton’s razor hand was impossible but he covered every pace of it in the air, his arms outstretched ahead of him, his black coat flying around him. He saw true fear in Skelton’s remaining eye. Pike’s slow, clumsy dive missed him and Gordon brought his knife down on Skelton’s wrist as the razor touched his sister’s neck. Skelton screamed, the sound of a castrato, as Gordon’s blade opened his forearm to the bones. Skelton dropped the razor and let go of Jude. Gordon’s momentum sent the blubbery Wardsman careening back into the side of the carriage. The base of Skelton’s head collided with the running board, knocking him senseless.
“Run, Jude!” shouted Gordon.
He saw the look of bewilderment on her face. This should have been the moment when they could finally embrace, reunited after so long. Instead, without even a touch, Gordon was commanding separation.
“Don’t look back. I’ll find you.”
Pike lunged for Jude, but she slipped out of his grip. From where he now stood on the running board, Gordon slammed the sole of his boot into the side of Pike’s face, knocking him to the ground. From the corner of his eye, Gordon saw the driver’s knife flashing towards his neck. He ducked to his left and the knife slammed deep into the wood of the carriage, sticking. Gordon slashed backhanded at the driver; that single swipe opening the man’s neck wide. The driver fell from the carriage, blood forced from his wound under such pressure it covered Gordon and Skelton as a mist.
Pike struggled to his feet and Gordon leapt at him from the running board. The lumbering man sidestepped with surprising alacrity and Gordon’s knife slit nothing but air. Pike’s massive fist came around in a wide arc, pounding into Gordon’s wounded shoulder and sending him to the ground. He rolled and was up before Pike could grab him.
Now they faced each other.
From Pike’s sleeve slipped a steel cosh, small but heavy. He held his arms wide and advanced. Gordon was sure he could hear the man’s tendons creaking, his joints grinding like corroded gearwheels. Behind him, Skelton had rolled over, the back of his head sopping with blood. He staggered to his feet. To Gordon’s disgust, the froglike man was grinning, his one eye wide and bulging with delight.
“My, my, Gordon. Haven’t you grown? And what a fine specimen of a young man you’ve become.”
Gordon risked a glance back to the fields. Jude was well out of range and still running, albeit weakly. He knew she’d make it to the Green Men now. The fleeting moment spent looking back had been a mistake and Pike, seeing him unguarded, struck. His cosh came diagonally downwards. Gordon didn’t have time to counter or even to block it. All he could do was shrink from the blow and pray it missed. By some miracle the only thing that touched Gordon was the sudden, cold wind left by Pike’s massive hand.
The attack left Pike wide open but when Gordon slashed at Pike’s exposed shoulder, he missed his target. It was the simplest of disabling moves, one he’d executed successfully a hundred times. Both he and Pike stared at each other, neither understanding. Gordon raised his knife to cut again and stopped, staring at his hand. The cosh had snapped the worn blade of his father’s lock knife; all he held now was its handle.
It was then that the rustling came from the hedgerows nearby, the sound of thirty Wardsmen with crossbows stepping clear and levelling their weapons at him. Gordon’s hands dropped to his sides. The broken knife fell from his bloodied fingers.
The Black Light had gone out.
62
Denise watched Jerome dress.
Gone were the drab greens and browns of his filthy First Guard uniform. Now he stepped into stiff grey flannel trousers, a keen crease along the front and a thin charcoal stripe extending from hip to ankle. He pulled on a grey cotton shirt and tucked it in, snapping a pair of leather braces over his shoulders. The Ward trench coat was broad at the shoulders and reached almost to his knees. A single star on the epaulettes marked him as a low-ranking officer but he wore the uniform as though he were already a general. Tactically, perhaps he was.
If Jerome suspected her of being complicit in Gordon’s escape, he never mentioned it. Perhaps she was too valuable a prize to risk losing over the ensuing argument. Besides, Jerome had delivered Gordon, as agreed, and got everything he wanted in return. Like Gordon, he wasn’t much more than a boy and Denise knew many ways to keep a boy happy.
“Come back to bed,” Denise said.
He turned to her, clearly tempted.
“There’s not enough time. I have to assist in the transport of prisoners.”
; “You’re losing interest in me.”
“This is my first duty as a Wardsman. I need to get it right.”
“Last night you said you loved me.”
This much was true.
As the mortar fire had popped and thudded in the distance, raining destruction and chaos on Green Men in Yelvertoft, Jerome had flung himself on Denise, his passion at once sincere and inexperienced. She’d had no trouble pretending her feelings matched his and when he’d said, “I love you”, she’d mirrored him effortlessly in reply. Now, his cheeks flushing deep red, he approached the bed and knelt, careful not to rumple his uniform.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Denise. You’re everything to me. But I have orders to follow and they will always come first.”
She was shocked by his candour, by his unspoken denial of words spoken in darkness and lust. Power was more important to him than anything else. It only stung for a moment. Inwardly, she shrugged. She didn’t care whether Jerome loved her or not as long as he took care of her. If what she suspected was correct, her might soon become an us. What was not possible was that Jerome was the progenitor. But she would always encourage him to think he was. Another month or two and she would give him the happy news.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said.
And to herself: you’re just another man who thinks he controls everything around him.
“Can you live with that?” he asked.
The implication of commitment in the question was better than any declaration of love from Jerome, even if it had been true. She took his face in her hands, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, a soft and lingering contact. When they parted, she looked him in the eye and smiled.
“Go to work,” she said. “Make me proud.”
Face still flaming and unable to hide his grin, Jerome left the vicarage.
Skelton and Pike addressed their officers in the windowless and burned-out village hall. At least, Skelton addressed them. Pike merely scowled, the muscles at the angle of his jaw bunching and rippling as he ground his teeth together. Skelton had not seen him do this before. It took him a while to realise that Pike was trying to contain his impatience. He was eager to be at the boy, keen to finish the job.
Skelton permitted himself a thin smile as he imagined what Pike would do. They had talked about it a lot over the years. Especially late at night when one or other of them had woken and could not return to sleep. Discussion of Gordon Black’s punishment had been a way of both relaxing and staying positive. Indeed, in the darkest hours of the night, when Pike’s mind was on the boy’s destruction, these were the moments when he was most… Skelton reached for the word… accessible. When he thought about it, despite the hardships and seemingly unending disappointments along the way, the pursuit had brought Skelton a good deal of joy. Whether the same had been true for Pike, he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure the man was capable of such an emotion. Seeing Pike now, his jaws twitching, his giant hands knotting in his lap, Skelton felt a rush of lascivious impropriety.
Governing himself, he turned his eyes to the crowd of grey-coated officers, their most recent and most useful recruit, Jerome Proctor, among them.
“Gentlemen, congratulations are in order. The mortar attack on Yelvertoft has all but decided this conflict. Close to half of the enemy have fled into the surrounding countryside but, as we have captured most of their officers, they won’t be able to organise any meaningful response. A significant number of their remaining troops are also our prisoners now. The rest, we can assume, have regrouped but it will make no difference. Today, we are going to cut the head off these Green Men!”
A cheer went up from the assembled officers. Skelton waited for silence before he continued.
“You’ll all be more than familiar with the local geography by now. Less than half a mile northeast of us is a good sized bump on the land. It’s known as Cracks Hill. Appropriate really, as that is the place where we will crack the resolve of the Green Men once and for all. What I want you to do is range the prisoners in view of this hill and place our troops around them. Leave only a token force in the village. I want as many of us as possible to witness the end of this war. It’s been a long hunt but it’s finally over. Gordon Black has given us the Crowman. Everything you’ve fought for and every sacrifice you’ve made has been justified, my friends. The prophecies of doom will never be fulfilled. In capturing the boy, we have secured the future. We, the Ward, will be the architects of that future.”
While the officers cheered, hugged and clapped each other on the shoulders, Skelton watched the twitching in Pike’s jaw spread to the rest of his body. He laid a soft, white hand on Pike’s shoulder and the man’s face snapped towards him in shock.
“Soon, Mordaunt, my man. Very, very soon.”
Skelton’s fat fingers kneaded the tissue below his partner’s uniform. Pike’s bones resisted like an iron chassis, his muscles and tendons taut like rope and steel cable. Skelton ached with joy at the impatience of the machine beneath his fingertips. Soon that machine would go to work, but first… well.
Skelton had his own reason for impatience.
63
Whether wounded, bloodied or merely carrying a weighty sack of defeat around their shoulders, the tens of thousands of Green Men taken prisoner were marched at gunpoint and spear tip into the fields around Cracks Hill. Their boots and weapons had been taken. Those who could walk carried the maimed or dying between them. The fields in this part of the village, once verdant and fertile, were barren now; the hedgerows skeletal and black. The grey, dusty earth had been churned and stirred by the feet of warring troops, by the tracks of tanks and trucks and by the impact of explosive shells. It was a sea of cold, dead dirt where nothing grew, nourished only by the blood of the fallen.
Through these fields at the base of the hill ran a broad but decaying country road. The fences and dead hedges to either side had crumbled to sticks and dust. The road hugged the southern base of the hill like a cuff, extending northwest and southeast away from the obstacle it delineated. Captured Green Men stood all along this road, to its north on the lower slopes of Cracks Hill and to its south in the fields. Their numbers extended almost half a mile to the east and west of the hill’s southern face, and around this mass of defeated humanity stood even deeper ranks of Wardsmen. Many of the Ward troops could approach no closer than the northern borders of the village, so crowded and choked were the fields that gave onto the hill.
The hill itself would have been inconsequential if not for the flatness of the land all around. Its southern face was barren and grey. Evidence of a colony of rabbits remained in the form of dozens of eroded warren entrances but the tiny tunnels had long been abandoned. When the wind blew, as it blew today, it tore the lifeless dust away in sheets flung high and far. When it rained, the loose earth washed down into the fields and onto the road, creating dune-like pseudopodia which extended in every direction. The hill was slowly being devoured by the elements.
Once home to a small forest of mature oaks, now only one remained. It was as lifeless and black as the hedgerows all around, more like a gnarled charcoal monolith than a tree. The leaves and outermost branches had been gone for years; dried out, fallen and blown to dust along with the earth of the hill. What remained were the strongest, thickest limbs and the powerful, squat trunk. But the tree was dead, like everything else around it. Long dead. It looked as though it had been tortured and beaten into its present shape. The trunk leaned out far to one side and then bent back on itself, crippled and twisted like a tubercular spine. Mutated, like arms with too many elbows, the last few branches reached tentatively skyward, as though anticipating more punishment. The tree cowered, in spite of its ugly bulk. Wind had bent and snapped it. Hail and rain had lashed it. Lightning had scorched it. Yet, still it stood, solitary and stubborn even in death, its roots clawing into the south face of Cracks Hill like crooked black fingers buried deep in decaying flesh.
> It was to this hill that the Ward led a tall young man. It was to this tree that they brought him.
He was dressed in black finery, elegant as a funeral groom. Black feathers decorated his flowing black coat. They danced in his long black hair at the touch of the wind and quivered in his hat band. Though his wrists were tied and the attending Wardsmen both dragged and goaded him, he walked with grace and dignity, his long legs striding with great confidence, his black-booted feet utterly certain of the ground.
Jerome warned Denise not to leave the cottage for any reason. If he hadn’t bothered to return with that caution, if he hadn’t said a word about it, she probably would have spent the whole day in bed.
As it was, her curiosity was irreversibly piqued.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because it’s going to be… dangerous out there today. I wouldn’t want you to be hurt.”
“What’s going on, then?”
“Nothing you need to worry about. Just stay here until I get back tonight.”
“Jerome, you’d better tell me what’s happening. I’m not staying cooped up in here all day without any idea of what’s happening out there.”
Jerome, short of time anyway, sighed.
“Look, Denise, they’re going to execute the Crowman this afternoon. They’re making an example of him. All the POWs are being forced to attend and it could get ugly. I don’t want you anywhere near. Understand?”
Denise frowned and shook her head.
“I don’t believe it. How did they find him?”
The Book of the Crowman Page 34
