Black Feathers

by Joseph D'lacey

  “Can I come with you?” he asked.

  John Palmer couldn’t hide his surprise.

  “Hunting?”

  “Yes. I know about snares and I’m good at being quiet. I won’t get in your way.”

  It only took a moment or two for Brooke’s father to register that if Gordon was with him he wouldn’t be with his daughter.

  “It could be a long walk. Can you manage it?”

  “I feel fine. If I get tired, I’ll just turn back.”

  John Palmer shouldered his gear and moved off without saying goodbye to Brooke. He turned back once.

  “Are you coming or not?” he asked, and before Gordon had answered he was out of the clearing and moving out of sight.

  Gordon looked at Brooke, their first private moment in many days.

  “He’s not a bad man,” she said. “He’s just frightened.”

  “I know.”

  Brooke put her hand to Gordon’s cheek and smiled. He wished he could understand what she was thinking. The sound of John Palmer’s footsteps was almost gone. Gordon leaned forwards and kissed Brooke, just a peck really and a quick one, but on her lips. He turned away before he could see the reaction.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  John Palmer’s route took them along the edge of the wood but just inside its boundary. It was an old wood with many huge beech trees, their muscular trunks sheathed in leathery grey bark. Smaller trees and shrubs gave the camp good cover, but out here the trees were large and well spaced. John Palmer moved through them not like a hunter but like prey, eyes watching the open spaces all the time. Gordon walked behind him, silent as a panther, and often John Palmer would turn – pretending to check far behind them but really, Gordon knew, to see if he was still there. The more Gordon watched John Palmer, the more he wondered what could have scared him so much that he would bring his daughter out to the forest to live wild.

  Finally, John Palmer broke from the protection of the beech wood. There was an expanse of lumpy land in front of them, broken by patches of deep green, spiky marsh grass. To their left was the River Usk, which, like most of the rivers in the country, now constantly threatened to breach its own banks. Its waters swirled by, muddy and spiralling with currents. Fortunately, there had been no rain for a few days – at least, Gordon didn’t remember any – and the grass of the hummocked flood plain wasn’t too waterlogged.

  John Palmer got as close to the river as he could, descending the bank a little to maintain cover as they crossed the exposed field. They had to jump across runnels of water draining from the land, the muddy bank sucking at their boots. Gordon, so confident and fleet of foot through woods, began to tire, his strength caught and washed away with the passing eddies.

  When they reached the opposite side of the marshy land, Gordon’s lungs heaved for air and his muscles burned. He struggled up the bank behind John Palmer, but where the bank ended another rise began. His legs began to shake and when he reached the top he fell to his knees. John Palmer turned and Gordon saw great concern in the man’s eyes. This he had not expected. The man ran back to him and helped him into a sitting position.

  “You all right, Gordon?”

  “Fine. A bit weak, that’s all.”

  The man looked annoyed with himself.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you. You’re not well enough.”

  “I’m OK. I just need to rest for a minute.”

  “You’re trembling all over. Here, I brought a snack.”

  John Palmer handed him a dozen or so sloe berries and Gordon chewed them hungrily. They were bitter but what little sweetness they possessed cooled the burn and soothed the ache in his legs.

  “More?” asked John Palmer.

  Gordon nodded.

  When he’d eaten a second handful of berries, John Palmer handed him a strip of meat.

  “What’s this?”

  “Smoked rabbit.”

  Gordon bit into the wrinkled meat and chewed fast. It tasted good and it must have been obvious.

  “Not bad, is it?”

  “Tastes amazing.”

  “It lasts for ages too.”

  John Palmer sat down beside Gordon and joined him in chewing a string of rabbit meat. For a long time the only sound was the swollen rush of the passing river and the distant calling of rooks.

  “It doesn’t take much for people to become animals, Gordon. Just a bit of hunger and discomfort and fear. Then it all breaks down.”

  Gordon didn’t say anything but he agreed. He’d seen it all over the news every night as the country ran short, first of luxuries and then of necessities.

  “Seventy-two hours from anarchy, that’s what they say.”

  Gordon stopped chewing.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a social theory, I guess. If you cut off the food, the water, the power and the fuel, it will take seventy-two hours for people to turn into savages. Civilisation breaks down. Remember the floods in Cumbria last year?”

  Gordon didn’t remember any floods in particular. Hardly any areas had escaped the consequences of storm rainfall.

  “There were parts of the Lake District unreachable by any means. Areas where water and power were cut off for weeks. Lots of people didn’t manage to get to the supply drops. It wasn’t reported on the news but I heard every abandoned house was ransacked for food and water. They took the valuables too. When the tins and dry goods ran out, people ate their cats and dogs – raw if they didn’t have means of starting a fire.”

  Gordon was pale at the thought of it.

  “Is that true?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but that isn’t the point really. Far worse things have already happened in this country.” John Palmer stared out across the landscape beyond the small ridge where they sat. “Things no one will ever talk about.”

  Whatever had lifted John Palmer’s barriers now brought them down, hard. He stood and looked down at Gordon.

  “It’s very hard not to like you,” he said. “You certainly seem like a decent boy. But you’re not a Palmer, Gordon. You’re not… one of us. Don’t forget that.”

  The man turned and walked down the ridge into the area of untidy brush and shrub that stretched to the base of the hills. Beyond, the land rose into heath and heather, more forest and higher peaks beyond. Gordon stood too. He was unsteady, but the food had returned much of his strength to him. When he felt able, he followed John Palmer.

  34

  When Gordon caught up with John Palmer, he was staring at a strange catch. Rabbits should have been in the carefully laid wire slipknots. Instead, they found three rooks.

  Cautiously, John Palmer approached the snares and Gordon advanced with him. The wires glinted through the grass, one end anchored to a peg in the ground, the other tight around a black, bony foot. The rooks didn’t move.

  “Maybe they’re in shock,” said John Palmer, more to himself than to Gordon.

  While he puzzled over their catch, Gordon enjoyed a physical proximity to the birds that he’d never known before. Rooks were generally shy and wary of humans. This close, Gordon could see their intelligent eyes and the powdery grey of their long, curved beaks. Feathers extended down from their broad breasts like fluffy plus fours, from the bottoms of which poked comically skinny legs and long feet. The rooks seemed to watch him carefully. Only when he bent down close did they try to hop away from him, tripping over their short tethers.

  “I’ve never eaten vermin,” said John Palmer.

  Gordon was swift to reply.

  “Rooks aren’t vermin.”

  “Course they are. Farmers shoot them on sight.”

  Gordon let the matter pass. Some things weren’t worth arguing about.

  “We’ve got enough food for a few days,” continued John Palmer. “Maybe we should just let them go.”

  “No. They’re here for a reason. We should take them back.”

  John Palmer regarded him with some surprise.

  “You
going to kill them, are you?” he challenged.

  Without speaking, Gordon stepped forwards, knelt and put his hands over the first rook. It barely struggled. In his left hand, he smoothed its wing feathers and feet into a tight grip. He took the rook’s head between his thumb and index finger.

  “Wait,” said John Palmer.

  Gordon looked up. The man’s face was full of confusion.

  “We could still release them. They’ve done nothing to us.” The words sounded feeble.

  “That’s not the point, really, is it?” said Gordon.

  He stretched the rook’s neck and twisted its head in his hand. There was a quiet grinding and a faint snap as the bird’s lightweight bones separated beneath his fingers. The feathers were warm in his hand as the rook’s nerves twitched and its wings spasmed in his grasp. Soon it was still. Its head hung limp. Gordon placed it in the ground and moved to the next snare.

  John Palmer didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day.

  After their rest and food, Megan keeps pace more easily. At the top of the slope – not endless, as it soon turns out – she sees a huge expanse of countryside spreading into the distance like a broad canvas, more colours and textures of green than she can count laid over it. She stops to take it all in. This is another world.

  This new land stretches to the horizon under a vast sky. She knows from school that the world is a sphere but she imagined it smaller than all this. She experiences a moment of dizziness, utterly overwhelmed by the possibility of the size of the Earth and suddenly realising her own tininess in relation to it. The dizziness turns to fear. She flings out her hands to either side but there is nothing to hold on to, and so she sits down, anchoring herself to the land.

  In the distance a huge flock of rooks takes off from a stand of poplars. There must be hundreds of them, wings seeming to flap in slow motion as they rise. Moments later the sound of their calls reaches her. She is comforted.

  Mr Keeper has noticed the halt in their walk, and he looks back towards Megan with a smile.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  She can only nod, tears spilling from her eyelashes.

  They walk along the crest of the gentle ridge for quite a while, and Megan absorbs the landscape at leisure, feeling less fear and more awe the farther they progress. They are moving uphill but it’s a barely noticeable gradient. Then they run out of ridge and a path appears: exposed dirt, worn down between two banks of grass. The track winds upwards more steeply and the going requires effort again.

  This time Megan is steady, not forcing herself to tramp harder but only putting one foot in front of the other. After a while, this rhythm causes her to disappear from the world and she becomes a detached awareness. Megan is the tide of her lungs and the beat of her soles on the exposed dirt. Megan is the sensation of heaviness and the pull of pack straps. Megan is a winding pathway, only a few steps of which are visible up ahead. Megan is gone.

  For a long time, a time she neither cares nor is able to measure, they rise upwards. She does not stumble. Nor does she look up to see how far ahead is her guide. The gradient levels out and the path lengthens in front of her. She can see without having to look up that Mr Keeper is not too far ahead. She glances to either side and in doing so, she returns to herself. They have crested a new ridge. This one is much higher. To either side the land falls away gradually, but if she were to try to walk straight down, the walk would become a scramble and then a fall.

  To her left is the same vast bowl of land stretching out to a horizon now even more distant. Mr Keeper has stopped walking. He is looking to the other side of the new ridge. As she draws level with him, Megan lets her eyes be drawn into yet another new landscape.

  Her hand flies to her mouth, too late to stifle the small cry that has escaped.

  She looks at Mr Keeper and sees in an instant that this is no surprise to him.

  Written in his features she recognises an expression she has never seen there before. Nor could she ever have predicted such a man as he would have cause to display it. Something akin to shame. He says nothing and turns his face out across this new landscape, scrutinising it.

  A procession of skeletal towers, cages rising high up into the air, make an angled line across the land. From each tall framework, three pairs of arms stretch out to either side. These arms grip black ropes which connect every tower. Where the ropes are broken they hang earthwards like whips. A few of the towers are damaged too or buckled, leaning to the left or right. Megan thinks of giants: blind, drunken giants using ropes to guide themselves across the land.

  Following the motionless march of the giants is a huge slate-grey path with lines painted onto it. Dozens of people could walk abreast along it. In many places the path is broken or cracked, black chasms like hungry mouths wait for travellers to fall in. Along the path are things she has only seen in her visions – enclosed carts without their horses or oxen to pull them. Cars. That was what the boy had called them.

  The path and the giants have one destination: a village. But a village so large it would hold more people than Megan knows how to count. The outlying areas of the village are made up of dwellings around mazes of smaller tracks. Hundreds and hundreds of dwellings in each area. Hundreds of tracks leading back to the main path like streams feeding a river. The tracks lead to buildings many times the height of those nearest to Megan. Hundreds of dwellings rising high into the air, thousands of square wind-eyes, like black lifeless sockets.

  There is more, much more, but all of it is silent and dead. She’s never seen an absence of life like this in the day world. It makes her cold inside.

  “I’ve seen this,” she says. “I’ve seen it in the night country. But it was alive then.”

  “Yes. It was alive. A long time ago.”

  “Is this where the boy comes from?”

  “Not here, no. But somewhere like this. Somewhere not too far away. That’s why his presence is so strong hereabouts.”

  Hereabouts.

  To Mr Keeper, even this distance from home must still seem nearby. Megan wonders how far he has travelled. Even standing beside him, she doesn’t feel safe so close to this dead place.

  “Is anyone still there?” she asks.

  Mr Keeper shakes his head.

  “No. There’s no life there. None at all.”

  “Does anyone ever… go there?”

  “No. Never.”

  “What happened to it?”

  There’s no answer. She looks across at Mr Keeper and sees that expression of regret again. She’s never seen his face so troubled, so much age hinted at in the many lines and cracks of his face. He looks at her now, knowing his emotions are visible for once but not seeming to mind. He smiles and puts a hand on her shoulder.

  “I could tell you, but you’ll find out for yourself soon enough. You’ll see it. I will tell you this, though,” he says and turns to the path again, walking away. “It was something we did.”

  “Us?”

  “People.”

  Megan’s imagination overloads. People did all this? Built it and destroyed it?

  She hurries after him.

  “But why?”

  Mr Keeper stops and turns back to her. He looks so sad and so tired that Megan is suddenly very afraid for him. His eyes take on that other-world stare and she thinks she’ll lose him to one of his absences, but then his eyes sharpen and his pupils contract. His look cuts right through her.

  “Because we forgot where we came from.”

  A moment passes, and when she recovers from the feeling of everything being her fault – it can’t be me, can it? – Mr Keeper is far ahead on the path along the ridgeway. She can only wonder where she’s been this time. She rushes to catch up before remembering what he has told her. She lets her steps fall back into a comfortable rhythm, allows her eyes to wander left and right – mostly they are drawn to the dead place on the land where people once lived in immeasurable numbers – allows herself to breathe deeply and without strain. G
radually the distance between her and Mr Keeper begins to close.

  Brooke plucked and gutted the rooks with less distaste than Gordon expected. She discarded the feet and the heads but used as much of the birds as she could to make a kind of stew with herbs gathered nearby.

  When the food was ready, John Palmer ate with reluctance and complained the meat was tainted and bitter. He didn’t finish his meal. Brooke ate slowly and thoughtfully and finished her portion without serving herself any more. To Gordon the stew tasted better than anything his mother had ever made. He took a second helping and ate with gusto while the other two looked on. Each mouthful seemed to charge him. All the weakness he’d felt that morning evaporated, to be replaced with a sense of vitality and clarity. It was how he imagined people felt after too much coffee. When John and Brooke Palmer continued to decline more food from the pot, Gordon finished it and said a silent prayer:

  Thank you for your strength and sacrifice.

  35

  They walk for the rest of the day, stopping sometimes to look across the land. The ridge path seems endless. At some point in the afternoon Mr Keeper finds another path, barely noticeable, which leads off the ridge in a zigzag.

  Going downhill is hard work on her knees and Megan takes it slowly, resting often. She has never walked this far before and certainly the load on her back is heavy. When the gradient levels out she almost cries with relief. The path disappears but Mr Keeper seems to know where he’s going. The land becomes dense with broad areas of bramble, rambling wild roses, now autumnal and flowerless, and hedgerows that have become impenetrable walls of thorn. They pass through it all, Mr Keeper finding gaps where she sees only barriers, and enter a woodland of birch, the bark of every tree curling and peeling like dead white skin. The breeze causes the bark to rustle and Megan is reminded of the book and the sound its pages make as she turns them.

  The broadly-spaced birch trees give way to oak and pine and then sycamore and beech. They reach an open tract of marsh grass. She sees willow trees and knows they must be close to water.