Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  “Tell me about Castle Krossington.”

  What Pezzini described so amazed Lawrence that at first he did not believe it. Only after pressing for details and tactfully testing those details later did he come to believe Pezzini was telling the truth. Castle Krossington was no vast palace such as the czars of Imperial Russia had enjoyed. It was actually a village where Wilson Krossington had bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse during the last years of the Public Era. His descendants still lived in the same house. The vaunted Krossington Institute was the former village primary school. The Science and Technology depot did indeed exist—although in the Krossington yard of Portsmouth, not Castle Krossington— and was just as full of stunning artefacts from the Public Era as legend held, including a complete jet airliner. That airliner really was as big and heavy as a ship, with a sheet metal skin as smooth as the body of a whale. The Fatted Masses had packed inside it as in a theatre, as proved by the seating plan. The Krossingtons had no need of any palace. Pezzini was not aware of any outsider having been invited to Castle Krossington. Displays of power happened in the capital of the Lands of Krossington, the town of Haslemere. That was where the Land Council met, society postured through fancy-dress balls, there were racing tracks for horses and cars, as well as casinos, nightclubs and bars. The Krossingtons inhabited a self-created world. It was not unusual to meet scions of landed clans who had never set foot outside the frontier and had not the slightest intention of doing so.

  Lawrence asked about the Krossington’s oil fields.

  “How do you know about them?” Pezzini asked. He was obviously taken aback.

  “The oil fields date back long before the Glorious Resolution. There are geology books describing the oil basins of the Island of Britain, although such books have to be tracked down. They show the best wells located in what is now Krossington territory, so… It’s a matter of logic. They’re important today because most Public Era oil came from wells far beneath the sea, or else from places no one would think of going nowadays.”

  “You are well-read. Not many glory officers know that. What do you want to know?”

  “Do they still produce a lot of oil?”

  “It depends on what you mean by ‘a lot’. By Public Era standards, they issue barely a trickle, by our standards forty thousand barrels per year generate substantial income at a yield of eight ounces of gold per barrel.”

  “That’s the weak joint in Krossington’s armour, their oil trade. Follow the oil to the gold, follow the gold to the treasury.”

  Pezzini chuckled and shook his head.

  “Tell me, Pezzini. What are your views on the Glorious Resolution? Do you think the sovereign class plotted the end of the Public Era to destroy the Fatted Masses and gain the world?”

  “No. That is an old myth spread by the National Party and the SUN Party before it. The collapse of the Public Era was caused by the foolishness of the people and those who exploited them. They faced problems that threatened the social contract between the rulers and the ruled, so the rulers did nothing to solve the problems. You must understand that there were no democracies in the Public Era. The societies that practised universal suffrage were oligarchical ochlocracies—”

  “They were what?”

  Pezzini explained that so-called democracy spread across the world because it yielded the most powerful nation states. Yet it was but a veneer. The ruling élites enforced a semi-military discipline in the great workplaces of the Public Era. There had to be compensations for the people, or they would not have tolerated being inhabitants of a country called Work. Sensible élites—most notably that of the old United States of America—observed that as workplaces got more productive, it actually made sense to give the workers more money. Indeed, it made sense to push workers into debt. The workers spent the loans on things that enhanced the wealth of the élite. There was something else, something much subtler. The people bought compensations like houses and motor cars that provided a sense of dignity in contrast to their actual status as indentured serfs. Houses and motor cars caused an immense scale of debt, death, over-crowding and pollution, yet few objected, so the system became self-reinforcing, endlessly expanding—and powerful, above all powerful, more powerful than any tyranny. The ‘democracies’ beat the fascists of Germany and Italy, the Japanese nationalists and later drove the communist Soviet Union to extinction.

  Alas, endless expansion cannot go on forever. It turned out the expansion could go on for about a hundred and twenty years before the Public Era was up against existential threats: debt, death, over-crowding and pollution across the whole planet. Solving those problems meant obstructing the social contract of suburban houses, motor cars, foreign holidays and easy credit. It simply could not be done. It turned out the mobs ruled the élites just as the élites ruled the mobs. Hence oligarchical ochlocracy. The Public Era collapsed under its own weight of mutual stupidity.

  Dusk was coming. It was time to stop these—distractions—and see about some food. They could not live on air and water. Lawrence stirred into action.

  “That was all very interesting, Pezzini. Personally, I think a sneaky boot kicked away the last prop, although I don’t think the boot meant to wipe out civilization, that’s why guilt shut its mouth ever after. I would love to get Grandad Wilson Krossington up against a wall and twist his arm until he spilled the truth. However, he’s long gone with all the rest, so it shall not be.”

  On his hands and knees, Lawrence explored across the island. Rotten logs would be his best bet. He came upon a flourishing colony of oyster mushrooms and gathered them in the pockets of his overalls. On a bit, he found a patch of blewit, or he hoped they were blewit, the light was not good. They smelled like blewit. Crawling down the far side towards some reeds he came upon Alexanders in abundance. Then there were dandelions, along with some worms he captured whilst digging out the tap roots. He took the harvest back to Pezzini and split it in half.

  “Eat the worms, Pezzini. Food is life.”

  Pezzini shut his eyes and ate the worms, his face such a grimace of disgust that Lawrence had to turn away stifling laughter.

  It would be an exaggeration to say he now felt full, but he no longer had that aching emptiness in his belly. While there was still a little light, he explored the ruined shell of the house, on the look-out for any useful detritus. The place had been stripped long, long ago, probably before the estuary had formed. No wiring, pipes or other metal remained. Nothing wooden had survived, not even as rotten fragments He found a cracked porcelain sink, almost sunk from sight, a broken mug and a tasteless porcelain dog still pining for its owner.

  Then as he was leaving, he noticed some odd marks on the bricks under a gap that had been a window. He stooped to look closer. When he straightened up, his face was paler and his eyes focused far away. It was better to say nothing to Pezzini about it. In the rotting brickwork, someone had scored with a knife: “Red Rob Gamma629 and Spinner Gamma153 late April 97 God be with all who find this and good luck”.

  In crawling back down to their den, he froze. It was late dusk and fiendishly difficult to distinguish real movement from a bush swayed by a gust. He heard definite human noises; someone spat and someone else uttered a grunt. Lawrence sank lower, his head pounding and his eyes fixed, searching. A cleft in the branches gave him a good view of the nearby channel. A line of perhaps half a dozen thin figures walked across the mud, going upstream. They were not ultras as they were too slender and were not wearing helmets. That meant marsh people. They broke into a run. He could hear the splattering of their sandals on the wet clay. To his vast relief, the noise receded and faded under the whoosh of the breeze in the branches. He waited a few minutes before crawling on.

  In the shadows under the thicker bushes above the beach, he could not find Pezzini. In the end, he called softly and a voice answered not a couple of metres off.

  “You Okay Pezzini?”

  “No. I am so cold. So tired.”

 
Lawrence felt Pezzini’s feet. They were colder than stones. He rubbed them furiously, telling Pezzini to wring out his socks as dry as he could and put his boots on.

  Lawrence took Pezzini’s tube of water and worked away at the leather lace that sealed the end of it. Eventually he coaxed it loose enough to feel some water trickle out and pressed the end to his mouth and sucked. It was the first fresh water he had taken in a day. It tasted bitter from the leather. He wondered vaguely if it would poison them, as he sucked down about half the tube and then pressed it into Pezzini’s face.

  “Drink. Give me the tube afterwards. I need it to make a sling.”

  While Pezzini drank down the tube, Lawrence swept his hands about looking for stones. All he could find were little bits of gravel and small pebbles; useless as ammunition for a sling-shot.

  He gripped Pezzini by the collar and urged him to his feet.

  “We’re going onto the mud now. Hold my hand and do not let go. If you hear or see anything, stop and crouch. Leave any action to me.”

  “Suppose the ultras are watching with night vision?”

  “Can we do anything about it?”

  “No.”

  “Then forget about it.”

  Lawrence pulled him down the beach and out onto the bed of mud. The wind was the only direction they would have once out on the estuary bed, unless the overcast cleared to reveal the moon. Lawrence took a route to the south of the island and then generally towards the centre of the estuary, keeping the wind on his left cheek. The wind was probably not especially reliable because of the obstructions of islands, but it was all he had. Pezzini moved sluggishly, plodding and clumsy, his boots thumping the clay. Lawrence told him to shut up or he could go alone. Pezzini’s grace improved. They advanced into total darkness, eyes stretched wide, edgy from the faint orange echoes of light that were only in the mind and the unnerving suspicion of voices just barely audible under the rush of the wind across the islands and the reeds.

  The mud got stickier, until balls of it clung to their soles. Veering left, with the wind now on his cheek, he led Pezzini towards what he hoped would be drier surface. They splashed into water. Wavelets slapped about them. He swore. Further left, it got deeper. He tugged Pezzini about and tried the other way. This time the clay hardened and they scraped the clods off their boots. The going felt good here, he took them into the wind—roughly south-west—and for a while they strode along. Without warning, they hit stalky things that crackled. Both men jumped in shock. They had hit a bank of reeds, which meant shore. After a brief think, Lawrence pulled his comrade along the margin of the reeds, sweeping his free hand along them to stay in contact. To push through them would have made too much noise. Anyway, he saw no advantage in getting up onto land just yet. This was probably an island.

  For an interminable time, they blundered into the night, into the wind, across soft clay, having to seek a route around water when they came to it. Lawrence lost track of time entirely and grew uneasy, knowing they had at most five hours before the tide was back in across all this mud. The wind got colder, numbing his cheeks. Ahead of them, the sound of breakers grew louder. It was obvious they were approaching a big reach of water. Maybe it was the returning tide. Maybe it was a locked-in pool. He put the wind on his left cheek. After some minutes they heard breakers again. The rising tide could have trapped them on a shoal. The only way out was back, downwind. Bad luck if they heard breakers this way.

  The sound of breakers grew again. Not believing it, Lawrence kept going until the muddy clay sloped down and he could vaguely see a kind of shifting grain flowing away from them. Whitecaps, driven by the wind at their backs. Had he been religious, at this point Lawrence would have prayed. He stood gazing into the black void of noise, wondering what on earth to do, while Pezzini waited at his side as trusting as a dog. Time passed. Maybe he dithered five minutes, maybe fifteen. The tide was rising all right. It reached their boots. They had to retreat back up the shelf.

  “Keep close,” he said. “We’re going to have to move fast.”

  Alone, he would have run. To run in the company of Pezzini would have been like a three-legged race. They hurried along the water line, following it around into the wind and on farther until the wind was on his right cheek. Finally, when the wind was blowing down his neck, the idea finally paid off. Stretching away to the right was a kind of fuzzy white bar where the waves were breaking over shallows. Lawrence did not waste time on whether the shallows led to land or the middle of the flooded estuary, he ploughed straight in. The water reached up to his knees, then deeper still, slowing him to a fighting wade. Jesus was it freezing cold. He ground his teeth when the cold seeped around his groin. Fuck and damn this place, it was getting deeper, the current was dragging him off sideways, waves broke over his shoulders. Then he lost the battle. The tide swept him off his feet, breaking his grip on Pezzini’s hand and pulling him away into the darkness.

  He lay in the current, amazed at his own calm in this disaster, if anything uplifted to think that at least The Captain would not get a cadaver to sneer over. Pezzini splashed about nearby, wheezing and coughing. Lawrence rolled over and was swimming over to help him when the splashing abruptly stopped. It was as if Pezzini had got dragged under. That was a real hazard. His boots could have snagged a submerged tree. Lawrence trod water, listening, hearing just the gurgling of eddies and a soft rush of breakers from farther away. It would have been madness to call out.

  He knew in his heart Pezzini was done for, just as he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

  Which way to the shore? Being in the current, he had no idea which direction would take him across to a bank. He spun around a full rotation, looking all about for a clue. There was a clue all right, just not one that extracted from him any gasp of gratitude at his deliverance. What he saw was fire, bright orange heeling in the wind. Fire meant habitation. Out here, habitation meant marsh people.

  He swam towards it.

  Chapter 14

  The flames of the bonfire reeled in the wind with trees waving their orange branches beyond it like the feelers of giant insects. Nude human silhouettes leaped across the glare, whooping and yelping. Lawrence huddled amongst the reeds, groaning with the pain of cold, his eyes on the life-saving heat of the fire while his instincts chilled at the thought of the death he would suffer if those jumping savages should see him. He checked his tag was tucked inside his hat to prevent it gleaming. The faint warmth from the fire taunted him.

  One savage—tall, with a fine vee-chest and chiselled shoulders—hurled an object into the fire. There came a strange sound, a thin wail. In his life Lawrence had seen terrible things, he was not easily shocked. On his mind’s eye lingered a bundle, with outsized head and stubby limbs. A baby. The same savage did it again. This time the wretch got a cat-like screech out to the black void before it too vanished into flames. A spasm in the wind dragged the fire flat, stretching it so that its light reached further upstream. Lawrence sensed something up that way, a tower or warehouse, something the marsh people could not have built. Then the wind shifted and he lost it.

  But the festival continued. The savages formed a ring about the fire and began clapping and chanting, a repetitive, sub-human bawling. It was a noise like a barking dog, or a machine that stamped metal parts. It beat and beat on the mind, pummelling, confusing, disorientating. Lawrence waited, baffled, repelled, unable to move. One silhouette sprinted forward and jumped into the fire, landing in the gleaming logs. It was a young girl, struggling as the logs shifted and cascades of sparks belched up. She rammed her legs through to firm embers at the bottom of the fire and stood upright, entirely within the flames, with her arms above her head. Even from his viewpoint, Lawrence could see her pubic hair blaze off, the pale skin blacken, blisters erupt and burst. The flames billowed around her, hugged her, entwined her. She staggered. Like clothing, the skin of her legs slid off and hissed about her thighs. The rigid arms faltered, drooped, she collapsed, a
swarm of sparks leaped into the night like a fleeing soul. In her ordeal, she had uttered not a sound. A space-trip on mushrooms? Religious enthrallment? With these bloody savages, it could even be stone cold sobriety…

  Lawrence shrivelled down, worming his way lower into the mat of mud and crushed reeds. He reverse-crawled back down into water so cold it winded him, and began pulling himself along the reeds with the current. To remain near the bank was dangerous. Fifteen strokes out into mid-stream, he rolled on his back to look over his feet, startled to see savages mingling in the waving reeds. A crowd of the bastards had infested the shore line, jabbering some crap. They certainly could not see him, so what was the game? He started counting, knowing he had to be out of the water by five hundred, or he stayed in the water forever.

  At around 220, he collided with something rising up vertically from the depths, probably the post of a pier. Ten more counts and his club-like numb hands hit the bank. It was slimy but firm mud. By a kind of writhing he got clear of the water. The overcast rendered the darkness total, only a faint orange glimmer from the savages’ fire hinted at some kind of net stretched across the channel above him.

  A red spark twirled down from above and landed in the water with a rasp. Cigarette end. Civilisation. What kind of civilisation? Was this the outside world? Or an outpost of the Value System? Damn this bloody mud, it was so bloody cold. He opened his eyes and found the world under a wan blue light. The moon had come out, the Milky Way was brilliant like the sun through fabric. It alarmed him that he had fallen asleep and could easily have frozen to death—gone without having known.

  What he saw above made him freeze with amazement, his eyes wandering of their own accord along the span of a bridge perhaps thirty yards long suspended from cables across the channel. This was no skinny single-file footbridge as found in the Value System, it was wide enough to take a troop of men marching four abreast or a wagon. The sight of it shocked Lawrence—the gall of The Captain to situate his filthy Value System within a few miles of a public drain was staggering. His suspicion grew this must be the Norwich to Nottingham drain, as that was the only route still open across the water-logged area south of The Wash, a sprawling tongue of marshes spreading as far as Cambridge fifty miles to the south. The suspension bridge was typical of the light structures that crossed the numerous tidal channels cutting inland. There would likely be a ford nearby, or possibly a rope-operated ferry, to allow crossing by heavy vehicles. He must have used this bridge when he served in the fens, as he had several times travelled the drain all the way to King’s Lynn.