A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  Before it got full dark, I hung the pig upside down and cut its neck so that if the blood had not already settled it might run out during the night. Then I collected the horses and tied them to a tree each. And then I went to sleep too. I didn’t know if what I had done would work or if she would take an infection and die. As I lay in the darkness and listened to the unfamiliar sounds of the night starting up, I wondered if it had been the right thing to do. I decided I didn’t know if she was as dangerous a person as Brand. Then I thought some more and decided she was probably as dangerous, but that she had saved me and found Jip and that, all in all, I probably had done the right thing. And then I slept.

  I woke in the early morning, dew beading the trees and the grass. She was poking me with a stick. She needed to piss. Helping her up was a complicated effort. Holding her up while she squatted awkwardly keeping the wounded leg straight so as not to put pressure on the stitches was even more so. When I got her back on her bedroll, she looked white.

  Door may, she said, nodding at my bedroll. Then she went straight back to sleep.

  By the next time she woke, I had slices of hog sizzling over the fire and the three horses were untied and grazing again. I had also been through her packs. I could make no sense of the things she had clearly collected on her travels, some of which were useful—like tools—and others of which seemed just to have caught her fancy because they looked interesting, like a small bronze head, or a homemade doll, sewn together with buttons that nestled in an old box full of shiny necklaces.

  She was looking at me, her face unreadable. Then she gave me a nod, as if I’d done something right.

  Mare-see, she said. Mare-see.

  I brought her some of the boar. She rolled onto the unwounded side and ate propped up on one arm. She finished the slice and belched, deep as Dad did. She smiled, as if pleased with herself. She picked up the dictionary and flicked through it, found a word and showed it to me with a raised, questioning eyebrow.

  Name?

  Griz, I said. My name is Griz.

  I pointed at her.

  Mwah? she said, eyebrow still raised. She shrugged her shoulder as if names weren’t important to her, as if she was above having just any old name like everybody else had one. Then she made a face as if just picking one of her many names.

  John, she said.

  John? I said.

  Wee, she said, nodding. John Dark.

  Chapter 19

  A bond

  Even though we didn’t speak the same language, I liked John Dark. Even though that wasn’t her real name, only what it sounded like. And the name it sounded like wasn’t really her name either, I discovered. It was a joke, and as good a name for a French woman as any. Though I didn’t get the joke until it was explained to me long after our ways had parted.

  I remember that first day and night very clearly, but the days that followed blurred into one another. I was torn, wanting to be on my way to find Brand, but not being able to leave her until she could at least get up and piss for herself. There would have been no point sewing her up just to leave her in a pool of her own mess. Would have been a waste of good honey, not to mention the not-quite-so-good needlework. And of course I wanted to know her story, why was she here, where had she come from, what had she seen, what she knew. She looked like she’d seen a lot.

  She got my story out of me first. Using the dictionary and lot of eyebrow raising she asked, Where from? and I showed her on the map—not exactly, but roughly. I didn’t quite trust her enough for that exactly. Family? was easy. Four fingers answered that. So was Alone? That got one thumb. Why here? was harder: I laboriously pointed out the words for “a man steal my dog; I go find him, get dog”. She made me do it twice because she couldn’t believe it. I added “red beard” the second time, hoping she might know about Brand, but her eyes didn’t flicker a bit in recognition. Where? was easier to answer. I just showed her on the map. And since I had it open, I showed her where I thought we were. She made me get a map from her own bag and, though hers was better, being backed in material, it showed the same landscape. And we agreed we were just outside the big city in the middle of the country.

  We established she came from France which was not a surprise by then, having read the cover on the grubby dictionary. What was a surprise was when I asked, Where boat you? and she shook her head and made it clear there was no boat. She pointed to the horses and rolled her eyes. How could she get them on a boat? Then she made walking movements with her fingers. I shook my head and pointed at the sea. She snorted and pointed at another area on the land and traced it across the narrow channel. Then she snapped her fingers and demanded the dictionary. She found the word for “tunnel” which was another word like “infection” that was spelled exactly the same. I didn’t believe her, because even if there had been a tunnel under the sea, I’m sure it would have filled with water after a hundred years or so. And that’s assuming the rising seawater hadn’t submerged the entrances and filled it that way. However, she was emphatic that she had ridden under the sea to get here, with an oil lamp that she showed me hanging off one of the baskets.

  I didn’t mind that she was lying. I hadn’t quite told her exactly where I was from either. I did like the swagger of her lie. Ferg once said to me that if I was going to lie I might as well make it a big one as a small one, and I think that’s what she was doing. She didn’t want me to find where her valuable boat was laid up.

  I asked why she had come here. Her face did flicker then. Her finger found “family” again. Then “daughters”. Then a word that I first read as “pest” until I realised I was reading the French word and that there was an e on the end and in English it meant “plague”.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  She shrugged, but her eyes were elsewhere for a long

  moment.

  I wanted to ask more questions, but I could see she was sad and tired and so I went off with Jip to refill the water bottles from a stream that came tumbling down the slope behind us. As I did so, I wondered about the plague she had spoken of. I decided it was probably just a normal disease that likely once would have been easily fixed with drugs we no longer had. After all, a plague is a disease that sweeps through huge populations, inflicting terrible damage. There just wasn’t enough population left to have a plague in. I think I was wrong and she was actually being very accurate about the symptoms, but that’s what I thought then.

  She spent most of the day sleeping, and when she wasn’t she always seemed to be looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was something that she could not quite make out. It was late that afternoon, or maybe the next one when she told me the other reason she was here. She thumbed her chest, then pointed to the dictionary: I. Look. Someone. Too.

  Someone? I pointed back and raised my eyebrows in imitation of her questioning expression.

  Kel Kun, she said. Kel Kun Demal.

  Whoever this Kel Kun was, he made her eyes go away again.

  I changed the dressings morning and night, and there was no smell of infection, though the wound line was crooked and red and was, for the first two days, worryingly hot. I kept using the last of my honey on it, and she dosed herself with the contents of her medical kit, and between the honey and the powders and leaves she ingested, the wound did seem to be healing.

  She had several habits that were odd to me, things she was emphatic about. Maybe everybody else’s habits are odd to strangers. One was the loo garoo sticks. These were long torches, made from wooden handles which had spools of material wound round the head, material that had been soaked in sticky pine pitch. She never lit them, but she insisted that we kept them laid close to the fire at night. When I tried to ask why, she just pointed out at the darkness, at the three horses hobbled close by and the blackness beyond.

  Poor lay loo, she said.

  I made a question with my face. She smiled.

  Lay loo, she repeated and then made a mock-serious I’m-trying-to-scare-you-but-not-really face.

&
nbsp; Lay loo? she said, waggling her eyebrows. Lay loo garoo.

  So the torches became the loo garoo sticks, and were—to me—a sort of quaint pointless ritual she liked. Until of course they weren’t.

  Several things became clear as we waited for her wound to heal. One was that Jip had got caught in a snare she had set for rabbits around her camp. I found a bunch of them, made from the thin wire in one of her bags. She pointed at them and then at Jip’s leg with a shrug of apology. Another was that she had seen the burning house I had left behind us and had ridden to see what it was, in much the same way that I had been drawn to the fire I had seen from the tower. Like me, she had been drawn to a possible sign of other people—but unlike me she had found it was so. She said she had thought the fire might have been Kel Kun Demal.

  One afternoon she pointed at the horses and asked, by miming, if I could ride one. We don’t ride the ponies on the island, just use them for carrying and walking beside them. But since I had ridden them as a small child, perched between the panniers carrying the peat, I nodded.

  The next day, we ran out of honey and she decided the wound was knitting well enough for her to start walking and trying the horse. She was grey-haired but she was tough, and now that the pain had subsided and the infection—if it had been infection—had gone, she was energetic again.

  By a mixture of mime and dictionary-pointing, she made it clear that she wanted me to go with her into the city, where she had seen a big nest of bees. She pointed to my jar. She wanted to repay me by replacing the honey that had healed her. I was in a strange state of mind—in a hurry to get to Brand, overjoyed to have Jip back, but also not wanting to go our separate ways, and since the city lay more or less in the right direction I nodded. She spent the day reorganising the packs, and then she put one horse-load’s worth on a tree, close in by the car stacks where she indicated she would find it when she returned, and then made me get up on the second bag-free horse and ride around a bit.

  Jip barked to see me riding, and the horse snorted in something between ridicule and frustration, as if it could sense how suddenly nervy I was, but she said something to it and her words seemed to work like a spell and calm it right down. There was light left in the sky, but after a couple of wide circles to get used to the feeling of being carried across the landscape on such a high and swaying seat, we returned to the camp and spent a last night feasting on boar and berries.

  She didn’t look so cheerful the next day as we saddled up and set off down the hill. Her face was set and sour as the horse lurched over the rough ground, and once again I saw her teeth set against any sound of pain that might try and escape. It was a misty morning, and she rode with her hood up. Jip criss-crossed the slope ahead of us, surprising some early rabbits, but his heart was more in chasing than killing and anyway we had all eaten well the night before, him included.

  By the time we descended to the old M road, the sun had driven away most of the mist and as the day warmed, so did she. She dropped back to ride beside me, watching me with a disapproving eye. By the time we had gone five klicks or so, she decided that the various instructions she had communicated in mime to me—things like sit up, squeeze with your knees, relax your hand, don’t pull the reins and so on—had turned me into a slightly less disappointing rider than I had been at the start of the day and she grunted in approval.

  Bravo, Griz, she said.

  I don’t know which made me more surprised and unexpectedly happy. Her approval or the fact that she’d used my name for the first time.

  She rode ahead, leading the pack horse. My horse was happy to follow as they wove in as straight a line as they could through the saplings and larger trees that were invading the old M road. It’s a strange thing, riding another animal. I hadn’t really thought about it when I had been given rides on the peat ponies, but now I felt it strongly. It wasn’t so much the sensation of moving along without doing much—that was familiar enough from being driven by the wind on the sea—it was the fact that the motion which carried me was obviously the particular movement of another living thing. It was a controlled lurch, always—or so it seemed to me—on the point of tripping or at least losing its own special cadence. But as the day progressed, I stopped fighting it, and then by forgetting to worry about it I relaxed and slowly began to feel a part of the horse, rather than apart from it. Which probably doesn’t make sense unless you rode horses and felt what I was feeling. But you probably drove around in cars instead. Did that feel as exhilarating, or were you always worried the engine might run away with you, the same way I had worried about the horse stumbling?

  As we headed onwards, the city slowly started to rise around us, as if it were a growing thing crowding in on either side. Once again, the scale of who you were, the sheer number of you, began to wash over me. There were hulks of long, low buildings that must have been factories, and then mazes of regularly divided vegetation that must have been more overgrown streets of identical box houses and then in the distance, converging with us, another raised roadway striding across the intervening wasteland of shrubs, trees and tumbledown buildings on stubby legs of concrete.

  What did your cities sound like when these roads were full of cars? Was it a whine or a rumble or a growl? Or a roar? Did all the different kinds of car and lorry sound different? Could you tell what was coming without looking? And seeing all the roads there were, how did you stop bumping into one another if you were travelling at the speeds I’ve read about?

  I couldn’t keep my wits about me or stay alert to danger, and I was just riding one horse. If I had been able to, maybe I wouldn’t have ridden right into it.

  But then not all danger looks bad on the outside. We were just going to get some honey.

  Not everything sweet is good for you.

  Chapter 20

  Kel Kun Demal

  It started off as a great day. Sun was high but not too hot, the birds were making a lot of noise and enough rabbits were running to keep Jip happy as we wove our way closer to the centre of the city.

  Birdsong like this was still a new thing to me. On the islands, there were occasional shrieks and caws and the lonely piping of single birds flying across the moor, but the birdlife was too thinly stretched to make anything at all like the constant noise that you get on the mainland. To begin with, I found the songs of the different birds was like a tumble of conflicting sounds, none of them particularly loud on their own, but relentless in the way they pecked at your attention from all sides—a coo here, a tweet there and a warble from somewhere else. And because they were all different noises, I kept twisting around, trying to spot where they were coming from, to see what bird made which noise. And then after a bit the fact the noise was always there seemed to blur those distinctive bits together into a wash of sound, like the sea. It became background and not something I spent any more time trying to unpick into the individual parts it was made of. By the time I met John Dark, the ever-present din of the birdlife all around me had become—like the sea too—a comforting noise. I had also got used to the fact it sounded different at dawn to the way it did as the light left the sky at the end of the day. And although I hadn’t got very far with identifying the various species, I had worked out which birds were pigeons and which were magpies from the small book I’d found in the museum shop.

  There was one different-looking bird that had sandy feathers mottled with darker brown ones that flew across our path as we rode down a sloping ramp that took us off the raised M road. I think it was a song thrush. It made a happy piping sound as it flew high above us, and when I looked over at the woman I saw that for a moment she’d lost her stern mask and let the younger face she kept hidden behind it have a moment in the sun as she too watched the bird jink and climb over our heads into the clear blue sky, looking as if it was singing and flying just for the joy of it.

  Then her mask came back down and she nudged her horse forward towards a gap in the overgrown ruins ahead of us. She knew where she was going, and my horse just fo
llowed her lead. A brick-built building had given up trying to keep standing tall at some time in the recent past and had slumped across the narrow alley, filling the space with an untidy jumble of bricks and glass. John Dark sucked her teeth in disapproval and turned her horse to the side, finding a narrower alley to go down. I don’t think she wanted to risk the horses cutting themselves or stumbling on the new rubble. One thing I had noticed by then was the way you could easily tell what ruin was new and what had fallen down a long time ago by the way the vegetation overgrew it. New rubble shifted under your feet, but as soon as moss and grass and the roots of plants had taken hold, it quickly became stable as the plants and the dirt bound it together.

  We emerged from the alley and pushed our way through an area of scrubby bushes that were all about as high as the horses’ shoulders. This had been an open area in the middle of the city, and once there had been light poles to illuminate it. They were corroded into sharp stubs, or had tilted and fallen, pulled down by the weight of the creepers that had overgrown them, but they were regularly spaced, which made it easy to spot them once you had seen the pattern. There were also trees that had grown randomly among them, and after I had ducked beneath one as we passed, imitating John Dark just ahead of me, I straightened up to see the three men standing in front of me.

  They had their backs to us, and the one in the middle had his hand raised in greeting so that I instinctively looked beyond him trying to see who might be waving back at them. But there was no one there, not even them really: they were just statues facing a great tangle of wreckage where one end of a huge stadium had collapsed a long time ago, making a hill of massive concrete slabs and twisted metal pipes, all now well bound together by the encroaching plant life. The statues were men and all wore short trousers and had their arms around each other, like brothers. One of them was bald and had a football held against his hip. When I guided my horse around the front of them, I could see they all had expressions that weren’t quite smiles, but more like they were expecting something. Whatever it was, it had either come and gone, or perhaps just had never arrived. All they had to look at was a ruin now. Not that they seemed upset about it. Brambles had grown around the block of stone they stood on, but I could still see one word carved in it. It said “BEST”. So I expect these were the best players in the team. I was looking into their faces, wondering what they had looked like in real life, when John Dark whistled at me.