Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  With his thirst and hunger abated, there was now a ritual he anticipated with relish after laying his hands on a pair of rusty pliers. With these, he twisted at the pin of his Value System tag until it broke and he was free, the hated thing was there in the palm of his hand. The wild meal of winter chanterelle and shaggy parasol had by now induced a certain urge; it was with utmost pleasure he smothered the tag with the result of that urge before burying the lot.

  His boots and clothes now being dry, he decided to get moving while the light lasted.

  Chapter 15

  Drizzle frosted the window. Lawrence swore. After all the effort to dry out, this. Although the Value System overalls were waterproof, for a while at least, his woollen hat was not. A rummage around the bothy yielded a whetstone wrapped in oil cloth—just the job. With the whetstone he gave his knife a much-needed sharpen, while the oil cloth made a fair sou’wester wrapped around his head and draped over his collar, even if it did smell of mouse piss and stale oil. There were also some ancient woollen socks. Despite their filthiness, he filled them with fungi and slung them around his neck tied together with twine. Lastly, he needed some way of carrying water. Despite a thorough hunt both inside and around the bothy, the only container he could find was the bulky old kettle.

  All the while, his mind was pondering. He was averse to doing the obvious. To take a direct south-west bearing to Peterborough was the shortest although not the easiest route. The problem was that he could easily miss Peterborough completely and perish in the wastelands beyond. What he needed was a target he could not miss. He recalled that a public drain ran due north of Peterborough for twenty miles to connect with the Norwich-Nottingham drain at a big crossroads. Long ago as a trooper going up to Nottingham on furlough with some pals, the lot of them had got drunk in an inn at those crossroads. By trekking due west to that drain, he cut by half the distance across sodden wilderness. Plus, The Captain was less likely to look for him that way. Of course, the route might have a bloody great inland lake on it. It was a chance he decided to risk—once he reached the public drain, it was a simple walk to Peterborough; that was the pay-off.

  He weaved in and out of woodland, staying on open grass where the going was easier and he left less of a trail. For direction, he used the more exposed trees, which had been permanently bent by the prevailing south-westerly wind. That was all he had to go on unless the sun came out. This vagueness of direction dogged him constantly with a feeling of wasting time going the wrong way, against which he had to respect the risk of the weather suddenly turning arctic—the longer it took him to reach Peterborough, the greater that risk. On top of which, he was getting weaker all the time, for mushrooms and worms really do not provide the thousands of calories needed by a man trekking across-country in cold weather. Dreams of feasting taunted his thoughts—even nostalgic fancies of Sunday breakfast in the Value System. Breaking into his first sock of mushrooms did not help much.

  In these early hours the ground remained good with plenty of cover from patches of woodland and bushes. The curtain of mist thinned and visibility increased out to about a quarter of a mile. He kept to higher ground as much as possible to avoid boggy areas where his boots would leave marks, stepping on roots or between tussocks, listening, eyes roaming all about for any signs left by people. There were deer in the area, he saw their tracks and droppings and now and again caught glimpses of them amongst bushes. The risk of ground traps left by the marsh people was something he just had to accept. It seemed to him a pit deep enough to trap deer would inevitably flood. The thought of a shallow pit with stakes nagged, kept him uneasy, and would have slowed him had he not focused his concentration on maintaining the pace. It reassured him that he had seen no evidence of people here: no paths, no faeces, no signs of fire, no remains from feasting. During his service in these fens as a trooper, the marsh people had simply not been a factor to reckon with, it was the seasonal bandits from the high country east of King’s Lynn that were the mortal enemy, those and the terrain.

  A strong smell of dead animal stopped him, his natural wariness causing him to follow the smell up the wind to the scene of a kill on the margin of some bushes. It had been a deer. It had not been killed by humans—a human hunt would have either taken the prize home or cooked it on the spot. The hide was badly torn and the bones scattered about, including half of the rib cage. This was a kill by wild predation. After inspecting the immediate area, he found several paw prints in mud. They were as wide as his hand and lacked claw marks, which meant they had not been left by any kind of dog or wolf, in addition to which, they were too broad to be a dog’s. Possibly a big cat? He had repeatedly heard tales of these marshes being inhabited by big cats descended from animals that had escaped or been released from zoos during the Glorious Resolution. They were incredibly shy creatures though. He had never seen or heard one in three years’ service. It was feral dogs that filled the nights and provoked the curses of shepherds around Peterborough.

  There was a bamboo grove in the vicinity. He tore out a stalk about the thickness of a broom handle and around ten feet long, sliced off all its branches and whittled the tip to a point. It was the best weapon he could make with the time and tools he had, and in any case, he found it hard to work up much concern about big cats relative to the really frightening beasts on two legs.

  He estimated it was early afternoon when he sensed the wind picking up and the mist starting to shift and thin rapidly, the sun broke out above, within a matter of minutes a new landscape opening out in the sunshine. He faced grassy islands amid bog pools as far as the eye could see. Spitting curses to drive back his fears, he bound on the mud shoes and started out across the spongy ground, muddy water oozing up over his laces. He used the higher ridges to avoid the black bogs. Slowly, methodically, he zig-zagged from island to island. This was fine, until he crossed a larger island and found his way blocked by a channel of open water several hundred yards wide. He stood arms akimbo, furious and fearful, scowling to left and right. There was no way around it that he could see.

  What to do? His legs were leaden tired. The thought of back-tracking to find a way around was unendurable. He decided to sit down and wait, hoping that the channel would empty at low tide. It did not occur to him to hide—this was dead season in desolation, after all. He sat down on the grassy bank of the channel and dozed, occasionally jolting awake when he started to tip sideways.

  *

  Grunts and yelps broke into his sleep. Dogs? He leaped to his feet, still groggy, swiping the sleep from his eyes. A canoe with three men in it surged towards him from the channel. In the first seconds of confused emergence from sleep, he yelled and waved to them assuming they must be duck hunters out of Peterborough. Then the sleep cleared and he saw their faces. On each forehead was a scarlet strip.

  Marsh people.

  A white-hot spear of terror skewered clean through him, he staggered a pace backwards. The canoe came on at the pace of a running man, fans of spray scooped aside by the bows. In moments they would be ashore. He had no chance of outrunning them in his heavy boots. In this moment, his back pressed against death, the warrior’s rage was like a great wave shoving him forward. He snarled at them. In his first, mindless action, he grabbed one of the stones from his pocket and hurled it at them. The three marsh warriors ceased their huge strokes and stared up, six eyes following the trajectory of the stone until it landed with a feeble splash to the left of them and they laughed and paddled on, more easily now, knowing they had their prey banged to rights.

  Lawrence now pressed a stone into the pocket of the sling and worked up the action, whirling the sling around faster and faster until it was a blur. The marsh warriors watched, a kind of patient perplexity on their faces. Lawrence released. The stone hissed the gap in a blink and struck the middle warrior’s forehead with a crunch like thin ice, kicking his head back and spraying blood over the warrior behind. As their dead comrade slumped, the two others erupted into screams. The leading warri
or jumped up, eyes popping with rage. Like a deer he leaped out over the water and as he was soaring across the gap to the shore, Lawrence’s second shot hit him in the stomach. He collapsed in the shallows, hissing and rolling about in agony.

  The abrupt treatment of his comrades left the third warrior gawping up, fear-frozen in the stern of the canoe. He was younger and smaller than the other two, barely more than a boy. Lawrence charged into the shallows and finished him off with his beauty, slashing at the jugular, hot blood spraying over his hands and sleeves. The last warrior, struggling to recover from the hit in the guts, lunged to grab Lawrence in the groin and got his throat opened to the elements for his pains. Lawrence collapsed, shock leaving him utterly exhausted.

  The wind carried the canoe along the bank, watched by an apathetic Lawrence. Finally, he struggled to his feet and followed, eyeing up the distance, agonising over whether to swim out and retrieve it. What forced him was the fall of evening. That canoe had been won at great risk and he could not let it drift off into the dusk. This cornered him into the lunatic action of stripping naked and swimming out to retrieve it. Minutes later, he had the canoe ashore, his feet aching again from the brief swim. The air felt warm compared to the water, so balmy was it. That was the east of England for you—west winds brought wafts of the Caribbean, east winds ice fangs of the Arctic. Dressed again, he dragged the three very dead marsh warriors up and out of sight into bushes. He loaded his mud shoes, the last sock of mushrooms and the kettle of water, still half full. He left the bamboo spear behind, as it was too awkward to carry with the kettle. Under the grey screen of dusk, he paddled out into the channel.

  *

  He paddled half a mile northwards—the opposite direction of his plan—before going ashore and pulling the canoe a good fifty yards from the bank to hide it in a copse, going back to brush up the slight trail left through the grass. Any pursuing marsh people would now have to work hard to locate the canoe even if they found the bodies. He was thinking that with the evening now coming down, they would not be able to commence any serious search until the morning. Furthermore, he doubted they would pursue any trail far from the channel. This was based on a growing feeling the marsh people were averse to treks across featureless marsh, probably because travel by canoe was faster and navigation easier. That would explain why he had seen not a trace of their presence since leaving the Norwich to Nottingham drain.

  In thinking that, as he was about to leave the canoe, he suffered another bolt of shock to see a canoe out on the channel sliding by going southwards. The view through the trees was too limited to follow its progress. He did note the canoe bore two warriors, and that they paddled at a steady, economical tempo. This area could be seething with the bastards! The only solution was to get away just as fast as he could, find the drain and achieve Peterborough before dawn.

  The first half mile was a torture of suspense, scared by every creak or scamper of some little animal. Once, a startled pigeon gave him such a fright he sank down to all fours sobbing in hopeless despair, and it took all of his will, and the thought of real warriors coming after him, to get back to his feet and walk on. He maintained a heading of what he hoped was a little south of west. Under the clouds, his only navigational cue was the wind-bowed trees as before, and with darkness even that guide became problematic. He kept going at the risk of wasting time in the wrong direction, for it had become too cold to stop. Indeed, the fall in temperature now worried him more than the marsh people.

  His next step dropped into thin air. He toppled into waist-deep mud and it took desperate groping at grass and reeds to writhe himself out, now soaked from the waist down again and filthy. In fright, he had thrown away the kettle, which meant the end of his water. For some time, he sat in the darkness, cold and getting colder, growing pessimistic. It was pointless to continue. But then, it was pointless to sit wet from the waist down. In the end, he continued on his hands and knees, too dulled by conflicting fears to grasp what he had been reduced to. And then, Fate smiled—the clouds slid away on the breeze! Now he had the moon to see by and the North Star to steer by. He kept near woodland as much as possible where the ground was firm, until the trees petered out and he was back to probing out over dark bogs, sinking, having to back-track and try again. The drag of the mud-shoes wearied his legs. The tediousness of this terrain weighed on him.

  He gradually became aware of a background rushing sound, like a waterfall. After some minutes, he saw glimmerings ahead—moving lights. The noise was engines, not falling water. This told him he must be approaching the drain that was his goal. It did not solve the mystery of why trucks would be moving at night in winter. Only the direst emergency could prompt such an operation. As he got closer, he could distinguish the tiny red tail lights the drivers followed to stay on the drain. The lead vehicle probably had an infra-red lamp, with the driver using a viewer to see ahead. He counted twenty vehicles. In the darkness, there was no way of knowing what type they were. They left a potent reek of diesel fumes blown past him by the prevailing breeze.

  After edging his way across some soft ground with the mud shoes, he climbed a firm embankment and at last stood on the hard gravel drain, a well-constructed artefact of the Public Era. He knew it ran clean and dry all the way to Peterborough. An astonishing victory! He jumped about, cheering and punching the air, oblivious to possibility there might anyone near enough to hear him. He had beaten that disgraceful Captain and his Value System. The euphoria soon crumbled to a sober low. There were still an awfully large number of ways by which he could fail. Normally at this time of the year, Peterborough was not guarded in any way as there was nothing to guard against. However, the night convoy evidenced trouble of some sort.

  He set off south, into the darkness.

  *

  Even at a distance, Peterborough garrison displayed itself to the night by the glow of floodlights. This night was unlike any of the hundreds of nights Lawrence had spent in Peterborough, for he had never known any glory garrison anywhere to waste gold shining into the night. It was like some tale from the Public Era.

  For hours he walked. The hump of light floated ahead on the dark horizon. Pounding of engines from behind forced him to take cover down the embankment as another convoy rolled past. Might this frenetic mobilisation be something to do with him? He had no idea how far The Captain’s influence extended. Was he walking to his own coffin? He lay on the embankment, anguishing over what to do. Reverse and head north towards Nottingham or Lincoln? He knew nothing about those places. The one edge he had at Peterborough was that the city was familiar and there might still be old friends there. So, he continued towards the hump of light despite the sense of walking into a trap.

  In the last few miles he came to landmarks he remembered from his life in Peterborough, notably crossroads where lesser drains ran off into the marsh, then a large circular junction with a wide, major drain that had once marked the outskirts of the Public Era suburbs. Baying hounds added a nostalgic accompaniment—he had forgotten that the area around the town held a population of feral dogs much loathed by the locals for predation upon sheep and goats and, legend had it, occasional children.

  He left the drain and skirted towards the overgrown suburban ruins around the surviving core of Peterborough. Most of the ruins were overgrown places of cats, foxes and rodent life, amongst which existed a few hamlets inhabited by clans of simple, illiterate people who sold meat and fish to the glory garrison, or else hunted in the surrounding fens. They did not like visitors. It was avoiding these humans Lawrence had in mind, whilst taking little notice of the baying dogs getting closer, until a dog bolted past, turned and snarled at him. Damn the brutes! He must be offending their territory or some such insult. More of them padded around him, panting and swishing through the grass. They still did not concern him much; he kept to his course along the edge of strip fields, knowing this track would lead him to what appeared to be a canal but was in fact a river that turned the land to the north into
a sodden wilderness by flowing into it. This river traversed the core of Peterborough, which made it an easy route into the centre of the city.

  “Fuck off, you,” he snapped at one of the dogs, batting it across the head after it had taken a bite at his right hand, fortunately protected by a thick leather Value System working glove. This was the first time he had really looked closely at any of them. The light from the city centre reflecting off the low overcast yielded a pale illumination like a full moon in which the dog’s eyes burned with lust, its ribs corrugated its flank in a striped pattern of shadows. It was half-starved. This observation had barely registered when the dog leaped at Lawrence’s face at just the moment he aimed a great kick at its throat, which actually struck it in the belly and flipped it on his back. He was a slow digging his knife out with clumsy, numbed fingers in the thick gloves. Another dog jumped up and bit his shoulder, crushing like a man-trap but unable to pierce the heavy canvas overalls. He was struggling to beat it off when he felt paws scrabbling on his shoulder blades and his head was getting yanked back—the damned brute had bitten the end of the oil cloth he had wrapped around his head as a makeshift sou’wester. He hacked this new attacker with the heel of a boot, catching it somewhere painful enough to force it back with a yelp. Now he had the knife in hand he rammed it deep under the rib cage of the character trying to chew his shoulder off. It uttered a high-pitched scream and fell writhing and yowling. Damn, human voices from a patch of lanterns a hundred yards or so away. He was terrified a local would take a pot-shot at the fight with a rifle; this terrified him far more than some desperate brood of hounds. They had jumped back to a more cautious distance after the fate of their comrade, now reduced to a final, gasping death-pant. Lawrence backed away in long, quick paces, being careful to keep his movements deliberate and measured to avoid any hint of panic. The pack followed, dancing about whining and nervous, increasingly agitated by the approach of more humans from the hamlet, angry and swearing ones with lanterns hung out on poles, sweeping about and getting nearer. One of them fired what must have been a musket, or else a blunderbuss, as a terrific flash followed by a cascade of sparks and a boom erupted from the bushes, the pack of dogs bolted leaving two more of their number thrashing about yowling, caught by the fan of shot. Lawrence turned and sprinted, hoping like hell the lanterns had dazzled the shooter since they could not have failed to hear his pounding boots and branches splintering. On reaching the towing track along the side of the river, he stopped and crouched to get his breath back and check for pursuit. There were dogs baying again, although none nearby. The locals had not bothered to chase him. With a sigh and some muttered curses, he moved on, massaging his shoulder and trembling with aftershock, trying to sooth himself down. When he passed into the gloom beneath a massive concrete bridge, he knew he was at the edge of the old city centre.