Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  “We all know the Fog is innocent as charged. What was the charge?”

  “Kingpin crook plundering a private garden.”

  “That’s not even original.”

  “I’m on the run, Andrew. I’m in your hands. What I need is help to reach my family in the Central Enclave. They’ve got connections to get me pardoned. Can you help?”

  Kalchelik’s eyes lifted, he stared up at the wallpaper, thinking.

  “I have to be blunt and say our family business relies on the ultramarines. It would finish us if they knew I’d helped a fugitive,” Kalchelik said.

  This time it was Lawrence who let the silence hang.

  “What sort of help had you in mind?” Kalchelik asked.

  “A visa for the Central Enclave.”

  “Very difficult. You need to understand the lie of the land, Lawrence. This business has two hundred staff who could earn three or four times more with a job in the Central Enclave. Their misfortune is, they don’t have the… pedigree I suppose you’d call it. They’re not good-looking, they never got the education, they don’t have testimonies from their head teacher, district leader and the director of a factory to attest to their roots. The staff agencies only pick maybe a quarter of the folk that apply, which even then doesn’t guarantee getting a visa because the final decision happens in the City Hall of the Central Enclave, it’s not done out here. Do you see what I am saying?”

  “I meant a forgery.”

  “I don’t know any forgers, Lawrence, and besides, there’s more to forgery than meets the eye. You need to manufacture a whole persona to carry a forgery. You need to have knowledge of real people. It’s something only a big smuggling network could do—and speaking as a dedicated Party man, I am not going anywhere near kingpin smugglers to save my own mother. They’re social vermin. We’re going to exterminate all corrupt glory troops. It’s on the First Action List of the Party.”

  “Can you at least give me money to get up the turnpike to North Kensington basin? I know people there who can help.”

  “You won’t get into North Ken basin without a passport.”

  “What about a Brent Cross passport?”

  “They don’t just hand them out, Lawrence. You need a head teacher, a district leader, a factory director and at least one respected person who will attest that they have known you all your life. No! Don’t even think of asking me about forgeries, Lawrence. That’s a capital offense, quite apart from breaching my principles. Documentation is the basis of any decent society. It’s blasphemy to even think of forging a passport.”

  “What do you advise, Andrew?”

  “Get over to Limehouse or Woolwich and sign aboard a roving buccaneer. See the world—and never come back.” Lawrence’s shock must have been clear. “I’m sorry, I truly am, Lawrence. You’ve got to see reality. Anyone who gets eight years’ Fog will never be pardoned. Too many people staked their reputations sending you down. Do you really think the local sovereign, whoever it is—”

  “Krossington.”

  “He’s a barbarian. He won’t save you, however your family plead with him. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  Lawrence scoured around his mind for any further means of persuasion, without success; he was out of bargaining chips. He got to his feet.

  “I’m a danger to you. Take these clothes back. You can assume your secrets are safe with me.”

  In silence, Kalchelik marched out to find the servant who had taken the foul Value System clothes. Afterwards, he accompanied Lawrence down to the gates of the premises.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help. Your only hope is to get out of Britain. Don’t come back until the National Party have won.” He pressed a pouch of metal into Lawrence’s hand.

  “Maybe,” Lawrence said. Kalchelik observed the remoteness, the bleakness of Lawrence’s face.

  “What was your rank when you were fogged?”

  “Cost-centre lieutenant.” Kalchelik’s reaction was a long, sad sigh. After a pause, Lawrence held out his hand and Kalchelik shook it. “I wish you the best of luck.”

  *

  The pouch contained a mix of shiny steel balls, copper Norsemen and silver white ones. The steel shot was Public Era heirloom ball bearings salvaged from the millions of useless motor cars that had once littered the drains. It was ubiquitous money. The Norsemen and white ones were peculiar to the London basin, although they would be accepted more widely, if with some grumpiness. The question was, how could he make use of this wealth? The end of the afternoon allowed him some grace to linger on the great market space of Brent Cross. He reasoned that the pouch of coins was if anything a liability. It was useless for the turnpike without a passport. To spend any of it was to risk broadcasting he had money, which instantly targeted him either for assault or denouncement as a thief.

  He saw his situation thus: he had to assume The Captain had the means to watch North Kensington basin and his family’s house in the Bloomsbury district of the Central Enclave. The man who owned the Value System had the means to bribe (or threaten) customs officials and servants. All Lawrence had in his armoury was time. If months passed without the reappearance of Big Stak, then The Captain would be forced to assume that either his missing value had perished in the fens, or else had fled to the oblivion of ‘seeing the world’. In either case, the threat had evaporated. So, Lawrence had to plan for months of furtive living before making any move. It was late November, the worst of winter was yet to arrive. He thought of the ragged tents and boxes the marginals lived in. What sort of health would he be in by April, even if he avoided freezing to death?

  As dusk came, there was an unspoken coagulation of the marginal groups. They gathered outside a pub on the edge of a workers’ district on the east side of the market place. At some signal Lawrence never saw, they drained away down a lane through the maze of passages and tiny squares to the clearing where they had accumulated that morning. From there, everyone filtered off into the wasteland. Lawrence by this time had found Bob once again and with much gesticulation and pretty much unintelligible plosives expressed no lie that he had spotted a long-lost friend. Bob grinned and shook his head.

  “You’re one of the big, sad losers of this world, Horace, but…” He wagged a finger at Lawrence. “You know how to work and that’s what counts. You come with me and I’ll see you’re all right.”

  About a score lived in the settlement with Bob. They sat around the fire, yarning, those who had had a day’s work satisfied to have full bellies and be stewing a good shit before kip—seemingly a good shit before bed was living high on the hog by marginal standards. Lawrence kept his ears alert. Today was Friday 26th November. It was Advent Sunday this weekend. The churches were opened to all, there would be food and a glass of wine for the poor. The citizens of the asylum would be less spiteful. Traders would hand out potatoes, turnips, onions and clean water to the needy.

  One of the men around the fire sat with a bow and a quiver of arrows slung about his chest. Lawrence took a close interest. After some apologetic soothing from Bob, the man allowed Lawrence to try the bow, test its pull, select an arrow and smack it bang in the centre of a birch bole some thirty feet off. The bow’s owner took a closer interest. He set up a challenge for Lawrence—see if you can hit ‘this’. The bowman placed a much-chipped rat carved from oak on a box and paced out twelve yards. Lawrence drew the bow, aimed... The wooden rat leaped and fell, the arrow in its flank.

  All the men cheered and clapped. The bowman introduced himself as Tuwile—not two willies, too-will-eh. The name came out of Kenya, that was a nation state somewhere in Africa back in the Public Era. The man’s skin was very black. He laughed at how white Lawrence’s skin was: I think I have a partner, I’ll call you White Horace. Lawrence discovered he was to be a top killer of rats, not the most impressive career move for a man who once aspired to be an account-captain first class, but hey, it put food on the table... Seriously, this was a major advance. Now he h
ad a job. The world was never going to stop hating rats after all. Tuwile also shot mad dogs and the odd cat. Cats were welcome in the asylum provided they stuck to eating rats and mice. If they acquired a taste for hens, pet rats or wild birds, they were welcome no longer—they were walking gloves plus a tasty stew.

  Tuwile asked whether Lawrence could make himself a bow and arrows. Lawrence nodded. He had learned this in survival training at Peterborough. He enjoyed the craftsmanship so much that he made a number of bows, the last of which was of superb performance. It was one of the things he had to leave behind as ‘too plebeian’ when he went up to Camberley College, where he had to at least try to act like a gentleman. Of course, Lawrence needed a story to account for his skills. With a mixture of gesticulation and childish capitalized scrawl in the dirt, he explained his father had been a hunter around Peterborough. After he died Lawrence was shunned because of his dumbness and had to wander to find a new living. He had been on the drains since the spring.

  It was a massive relief that neither Tuwile nor any of the others had even heard of Peterborough. Tuwile told White Horace that in the morning they would get hedge apple so that Lawrence could make a bow. Then they would go into Brent Cross and find some business. They would call themselves the Black and White Bowmen. It was the kind of gimmick that might bring fame. The crowds would gasp at their prowess… Tuwile’s eyes shone with great dreams.

  *

  Lawrence was too quick to copy Tuwile’s mastery of tip-toeing and sliding through the bushland. From time to time, Tuwile would turn and watch his new apprentice, his eyes curious. Lawrence maintained a bumpkin innocence, standing there with what he hoped was an expression of an eager young hound. Internally, he was watching Tuwile in turn. Although the man was slightly built and half a head shorter than Lawrence, he was sure-footed like a goat as he weaved through an ever denser turmoil of thickets and rotten trunks. The ground softened to deep, black mud. They teetered across branches and balanced on tree stumps or tufts of weeds. Lawrence’s trained eyes discerned they were following a path—previous feet had rounded off a stub of wood here, worn off bark there. It might be a path used only by one, certainly not more than a few. The ground hardened again and was more open, allowing them to see back to the tops of the chimneys of Brent Cross, still not such a great distance off. They were on the far side of a swamp, which made them far enough away to have reached a place visited by few, if any, others. Tuwile murmured:

  “This is gangster land. Don’t make any noise.”

  He told Lawrence to sit and wait while he went off to get the hedge apple (whatever that was, Lawrence had never heard of such a wood). Perhaps he did not yet trust White Horace. He returned later with a curved length from a tree of deeply ridged bark. He tossed Lawrence a green, horny-skinned fruit the size of a big man’s fist and used a knife to demonstrate how to eat it. Lawrence now recognised that ‘hedge apple’ was the osage tree. It was grown on sovereign lands for precisely the same purpose they were going to use it for. Tuwile murmured they were lucky still to get fruit this late in the year; he had found these in the crook of another tree, off the ground so they had not rotted, although it was surprising squirrels had not scoffed them. Only eat the seeds. You have to slice off the skin and put up with the stink—look, even if it’s no feast, it’ll give you a shit before kip.

  The settlement was deserted on their return. All the rest were away hunting work. Tuwile allowed Lawrence complete discretion in how he cut and carved the osage to make his bow.

  “Have you got family anywhere else besides this Peterberry place?”

  Lawrence shook his head as he sharpened the knife Tuwile had lent him.

  “That’s a tough deal. Me, I’ve got roots in Bermondsey Asylum. You know it?”

  Lawrence stopped his sharpening and with a stick cut letters in the dirt: “Ever heard of Nightminster?”

  “No. Is that someone you know?”

  Lawrence wrote: “Met him on the drains once. He went his way.”

  “I prefer this life I have. It’s a good life if you have a skill people always need. The others here, they’re mostly lazy. They haven’t the patience to learn how to make a bow and shoot straight. That takes hard work, you have to bring a power out of yourself. Most of them will die this winter. I’ve learned to spot the ones who don’t care any more. They’ve run out of will. They never did enough hard work in their lives, so they’ve no reserves of pride to fall back on. That’s what makes you different.”

  He monologued on as Lawrence got to work with the first rough-cutting. Tuwile was descended from a family that scattered all over Europe during the Public Era. When the Great Snatch came—there was nothing glorious about it—all the different branches of the family were cut off forever. His grandparents had no idea what happened to them. When he was a boy, the family got expelled from its land as part of a routine discharge of surplus population to the drains. It was a place where the language was completely different from what they spoke here in London. They wandered for weeks. All he could remember was dust, thirst and getting weaker and weaker until his father dragged him on a piece of sacking. They came to this great amount of water, so great it spread to the horizon. His father explained they had to cross it to reach another land that was rich and wet and there was enough for everyone. The crossing was the most potent memory of Tuwile’s childhood. For days they waited on a kind of floating settlement just like this one here, except there was no fire at night, just the darkness, the stars and the constant attack of the waves slowly beating their home to bits. He recalled many other children on the raft. They lay about amongst the adults, too dulled by hunger and thirst to play or even talk. Fear grew in them. That was when he learned for the first time that everybody dies one day; their day could be very soon. This terror still haunted him. He still had nightmares about a terror out in the darkness of his mind.

  Then one morning they saw land, a low green line on the horizon. The next morning it was close enough they could smell its earth. The tide carried them into an empty, flat place veined by winding creeks of roiling brown water. It was deliverance from death when they at last got ashore and the men broke the raft up and went off to hunt. Later, his mother told him they waited for other rafts that had left with them, but they never saw any of them again. Perhaps they got spread far and wide in the days on the water. Life got better in this new land. After many weeks, they stopped in a settlement outside Bermondsey. Years passed, eventually his father got a steady job in a factory, they could move in to a room in a terraced house and finally have a proper roof over their heads at night. His strongest memories were that it was noisy and he had to fight all the time with the other kids, who could not understand anything he said. He was glad of that, looking back. It made him into a tough man by the time he was fourteen and started work running messages about the factory his father worked in. He found the life stagnant and degrading. One day, he took to the road to make a living by his own wits. Here he was, now twenty-one years old and his own man.

  His attention swung to Lawrence’s progress with the bow.

  “You’re a proper craftsman,” he said, inspecting the mastery of symmetry and grace in the tapering of the legs of the bow. By now, mid-afternoon, Lawrence had crafted what would be a competent bow once it was tillered and eased in. Tuwile issued sinew for the bow string from his private supply. Lawrence shaved a bit more off the legs to bring the draw down to what felt like about forty pounds—he was not going to hunt wild boar after all. After that, he relaxed, admiring the bow, filled with the satisfaction of having created a beautiful tool from the free provision of Nature.

  Tuwile reached out and pinched Lawrence’s left ear, tugging at the pierced lobe. Then he sat down and stabbed his knife into the ground, crackling with suspicion.

  “You’d better tell me exactly what you are, White Horace. I can see from the way you mutter when you’re working that you’re no dumber than I am. So you answer one question: are you Fog o
n the run?”

  “Yes,” Lawrence said.

  “Why did you run?”

  “I got eight years with nothing to go back to.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got stuffed by some merchants who didn’t like my face.”

  “You were a glory trooper?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t speak like any glory trooper I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m from the far north.”

  “If I turned you over to the ultras, what would I get?”

  “I should think it would be quite a lot.”

  “Do you think I’ll do that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d be killed for the gold they gave you. Gold is dangerous to a man who doesn’t need it. We both understand that, so let’s not bother kidding each other around.”

  Tuwile took his time to appraise Lawrence, thinking.

  “Let me explain something to you my father once told me. He said he heard it from a man he worked with, who had a brother in the glories. He said the folk on the other rafts—the ones who disappeared on the great water back when I was a boy—were probably wiped out. There’s glories that cruise about that water looking for rafts and when they find them, they kill them with a gun that makes a roar like a torrent of falling bricks. What do you think of that?”

  “I’ve heard rumours about that kind of thing. I think—” Lawrence found his chest paralysed by a flood of memories. He panted, tensing to regain control of himself. “It must happen at least sometimes or there wouldn’t be the rumours.”

  “Have you ever done anything like that?”

  “Of course not! It would be an abomination to massacre people like that.”

  “Why are you trembling?”

  “Because I’m hungry. A hedge apple doesn’t take a man my size very far, especially if he’s got a bow to make.”

  “I’ll tell you this—I do not trust you. I’ve learned the hard way a man who tricks you once is tricking you ten times, you just haven’t found the other nine times yet. So I know you are tricking me nine times, White Horace or whatever your name is.”