The Way to Babylon

by Paul Kearney

  Also by Paul Kearney

  DIFFERENT KINGDOMS

  A Different Kingdom

  The Way to Babylon

  Riding the Unicorn (coming soon)

  THE MONARCHIES OF GOD

  Hawkwood's Voyage

  The Heretic Kings

  The Iron Wars

  The Second Empire

  Ships From The West

  THE MONARCHIES OF GOD

  OMNIBUS EDITIONS

  The Monarchies of God, Volume 1:

  Hawkwood and the Kings

  The Monarchies of God, Volume 2:

  Century of the Soldier

  THE MACHT

  The Ten Thousand

  Corvus

  Kings of Morning

  THE SEA BEGGARS

  The Mark of Ran

  This Forsaken Earth

  This edition published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  First published in the United Kingdom

  in 1992 by Gollancz

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-672-5

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-673-2

  Copyright © 1992, 2014 Paul Kearney

  Cover art by Pye Parr

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  For my father

  Acknowledgements to:

  John Wilkinson for a lot of hard work

  and encouragement, Martin and Suzie

  for many excellent dinners and my family

  for their unfailing support.

  ONE

  HE FOUND IT hard to believe, looking back; hard to believe in that older, sunnier time when his mind and his body were whole. Before the world came crashing down on him. In a single screaming instant, he had seen all he loved taken away from him. And now he was alone.

  Yes, someone up there really has a bastard sense of humour. Well, I hope you’re amused at my antics—at the smashed bones and the red pain and the months of putting the bits together. And the anxious friends. Christ; that’s the most hilarious part—the agonies they had, debating when to tell me she was dead. Crushed. Because of a rope I had stretched one too many times. It was always too expensive to replace. Now that must be funny.

  So die laughing.

  The sun was warm on his face. He opened his eyes and saw the familiar stretch of river and woods, separated from him by a wide lawn. The figures in dressing gowns seemed totally out of place. And the white-clad nurses. It was a world away from the heather and the eagles. And the mountains.

  You don’t get much more civilised than Berkshire.

  His fingers rubbed the armrest of his wheelchair absently. They were so bloody old here. Old men and old women who were on their way to a deck chair in Bournemouth but who needed an MOT first. So they wouldn’t keel over and spill their ice cream. A gentle retirement.

  That’s what I need. A quiet slide into oblivion with slippers and a golden labrador, and perhaps a walk on Sundays. He almost laughed, but the twitch in his jaw sent lights splashing through his skull. He cursed fervently and silently instead, touching with a ginger hand the metal rods implanted in his face like some hideously inept form of acupuncture. Man in the Iron Mask, that’s me.

  The pain sank, and there was only the sun on his face.

  I’m lucky, of course. Should be dead, by rights, after falling two hundred feet. She was. Very dead, by all accounts. Real-life ugly dead. It shouldn’t happen to people in that way. They ought to have time for a dying wish and the rest. A last kiss—

  Oh, hell; here we go again. You stupid bastard.

  He gouged his eyes until they were dry, until his head ached again.

  Well, I’d rather have the bloody headache anyway. Life’s a bitch.

  And a thousand years away a laughing, silver voice rejoined: ‘And then you marry one!’ .

  His right hand worked at the control knob, and with a jerk and a whine he was off down the patio, zigzagging to avoid chairbound patients.

  Hold on to your bedpans, you retired bankers!

  Then a white body right in front of him; a tray of bottles and pills that erupted into the air; a collision and a woman’s startled shout.

  Oh, shit. He sped away, deaf as well as dumb, with pills caught in the folds of his blanket and syrupy medicine down his neck.

  ‘Mr Riven, come back here! What do you think you are doing?’

  I must get this thing souped up. It’s still not as good as a pair of pins.

  The engine sank to a halt and he waited patiently as a burly nurse stalked towards him.

  Jesus. With legs like those, she could be an oil rig.

  ‘Mr Riven, I have told you before about speeding with your chair. Don’t you ever listen? There are other patients in this centre, Mr Riven, and most of them are old and frail. Don’t you care about the accident you could have been responsible for if you had hit one of them instead of me?’

  Talk to me about accidents then, you fat cow. Talk to me about responsibility.

  ‘I’ll push you out on to the lawn. There you can’t get up to any mischief. Be good and sit in the sun while it lasts. You ought to be grateful for the chance to get out of doors, Mr Riven. I understand you are an outdoor sort of person...’

  Oh, yeah. Running, jumping, climbing. The great outdoors just kills me.

  ‘There we are. You can sit here and enjoy the sun. Your lunch will be in an hour. I’ll come out and get you and you’ll have a nice big appetite with all this fresh air.’

  And off she goes, with seabirds trailing in her wake and a smell of land in the air. Ahar.

  Christ. Even retirement couldn’t be as boring as this.

  He twiddled the armrest knob again, but the engine could not cope with the bumpy grass. It lurched a few feet and stopped with an ominous crunching sound.

  Ouch. Must have forgotten the clutch again. Wonder if you can get four-wheel drive in these things. Or an estate. I could put the golden labrador in the back.

  ...I can’t even bloody well whistle.

  He sat, scowling theatrically, until his head hurt again, then sighed and stared at his knees. Twisted, thin, even under the blanket. More metal than bone, now. We can rebuild him, make him better than he was before... Pull the other one; it’s got pins in.

  Well, another hour of this marvellous southern air and then I’ll be wheeled in by Nurse Bisbee of the Hairy Forearms—she-who-must-be-obeyed—to a gourmet meal of minced bangers and smash. Or if the cook is feeling adventurous, maybe a little steak and kidney with a delicate whiff of ketchup. And afterwards we’ll retire to the drawing room, sniff some liqueurs, pop our painkillers and wait for supper, after which we’ll toddle merrily off to bed. Ah, for the life of a country squire.

  Wait a moment: it’s old mad Molesy, come to say hello. Certifiably insane and he’s the only one who’ll talk to me. Hiya, Molesy. What planet are we on today, then?

  The old man had a face like a rumpled rug, red as an apple, but with two brilliant blue eyes; blue as a lochan under a clear sky. His jaws munched moistly for a moment, then he looked slantwise and whispered: ‘You haven’t gone, then. You’re still here?’

  No, you old twit. I’m a mirage.

  ‘I only asked, see, because I thought you’d be off any day now, what with you having been there and all.’ He lowered his voice
even further, looking about furtively. ‘You and me’s the only ones who know.’ His voice was whisky-roughened, with the lilt of the Highland Scot, and some accent behind it that could not be placed. ‘We’ve been there, and that’s where it is.’

  Some day, Molesy, I’m going to bop you one on your big red nose. You and your Celtic bloody twilight. You’re a whisky-sodden jock who’s lived too long on his own and got hill mist in his hair.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know you can’t tell anyone. I know you can’t talk. That’s why the rest never talk to you. They think your head’s gone along with your voice—like they think mine is gone.’ He chuckled, for a moment seeming startlingly shrewd and somehow younger.

  ‘Ach, well. We’ll keep our secret for a wee while yet, eh, Mr Riven? There’s time, and there’s time enough...’ He trailed off. ‘Ach, my old head wanders like drift these days. It was better on Skye, back in Minginish, with the wind and the salt smell. Better when I was at home, in my own place.’

  Aye. Maybe you do have a point at that. But I’ll never be going there again.

  ‘I’m off. I must be going. Bloody nurses...’ And away he went, weaving a precarious trail across the lawn to the ward buildings.

  There’s time, and there’s time enough.

  Using a mixture of motor power and his good hand, he managed to manoeuvre the chair back on to the patio, though his head felt as though it were about to explode by the time he got there. That’s it, you bastards; don’t offer me any help. It might aggravate your ulcers—

  Bloody hell, my skull hurts. I bet it’s still cracked.

  Patients were making their way towards the buildings in time for lunch. The autumn sun was warm and down where the river glittered there were willows. Their limbs dipped in the flow and the thin leaves floated in fleets on the water. He liked to sit where the bank shelved into gravel and the light spangled on the bottom. It was a southern place, very sleepy and slow. He looked back, and half wished he could go and sit there now. But the old man had put the northern mood into him again. The mood of stone and bracken and peat. That was the worst mood to be in, for in an instant he would be belaying on the top of Sgurr Dearg again, staring in horror at the severed rope.

  A stereo was playing in the recreation room. He listened to it for a moment, face twitching, then shoved the chair into life and whirred inside, whistling in his mind, watching other mountains.

  ‘MOUNTAINS. THEY WERE the world’s backbone. In the north they were the black, snow-eaten teeth of the Greshorns, high enough to lose themselves in perpetual cloud and to squat, vast and sullen, like a tribe of savage giants in conclave with the north wind. They loomed over the green lands below, a drop as long as a river separating them from where men worked the softer slopes and meadows.

  ‘To the west yet more peaks reared up to snatch at the skies—less brutal, these, more broken, with wide slopes of scree and heather-tangled rock. They curved down the land in great gentle swathes of dull stone, rolling for hundreds of miles to the south, to where the sea swept into the coast and battered it into shingle.

  ‘To the east another great barrier of high ground was pushed up in escarpments and cliffs, shattered and frowning under ice and snow at their highest points, leaning off into wastelands of stone and sand farther east, where the sunlight became harsher and the character of the land changed and shifted, becoming scrub, savannah and, eventually, arid desert.

  ‘Mountains. They bounded three parts of the world and left the last part to the grey, murderous sea. Within their gnarled horseshoe, the world was a green and pleasant place, wrinkled with silver rivers and scattered with forests that no man had ever cleared. The world was wide and fair, hung over with a haze of sunlight and shimmering with warmth. It was uncluttered, empty; wild as a wilderness and serene as a summer afternoon.’

  And it did not exist, save in the mind of a cripple who whistled in silence.

  THE MEALS OF clearly-defined meat and vegetables that sat on other plates had on his mutated into a single pile of neutral-coloured mush, which he siphoned carefully into his broken mouth. Around him, the dining room was full of talk. It was set aside for the more mobile patients. The rest ate in their beds, in their respective wards or rooms.

  ‘Would you like some more, Mr Riven?’

  He rolled his eyes at the young nurse with an are-you-kidding? look. She laughed. ‘I get the hint. At least you can’t go on at us like Mr Simpson does.’ She turned away.

  God, I could murder a pint.

  It was months since he had had a drink. The drugs that were continually in his system did not permit it. The idea of getting drunk both attracted and repelled him; though it was, he had to admit wryly, a useless exercise now for him to get legless. Sometimes he wanted to drink to make himself unconscious; a darkness without dreams, without the sight of that frayed rope end swaying in front of him. And sometimes he wondered if it would bring it all back, make it even more vivid.

  He sucked the remainder of the liquid meal into his mouth without tasting it. Across from him, a middle-aged man was eating his own meal precisely and deliberately. He looked as though an earthquake would not have hurried him. Riven felt trapped—by the drugs, the chair, the liquid food, the age of the people around him. He looked about and finally saw Doody, the orderly, at the other end of the room. He waved his arm.

  Doody was a black from London, ex-Army like Riven himself, and ex-RAMC. He had a streak of recklessness in him several miles wide.

  ‘Wotcha, sir. What’s up?’ Riven raised his eyebrows helplessly, and then put one finger to his head with the thumb as the trigger.

  ‘Fucking hell—like that, is it, then? We can’t have that. Hold on a mo’ and I’ll have you out of this.’ He went up to the charge nurse, and came back a few moments later. ‘Come on. Let’s leave these old farts to stuff their faces, and get a bit of air.’

  He wheeled Riven outside again, into an afternoon of blue and gold with the river and the traffic in the background. Suddenly the air seemed easier to breathe. Sitting down the whole time made Riven feel as though his lungs were being cramped. Once upon a time he had run a lot, run for miles, until his lungs had seemed bottomless. But all that stamina he had left behind him at the foot of the mountain.

  ‘Here, have a go on this, sir.’ Doody handed him a notebook and pencil. ‘Left it behind this morning, didn’t you? Mind you, I don’t blame you for not wanting to use it sometimes.’

  Sometimes it’s easier not to, Riven wrote quickly.

  Sometimes—he paused. Sometimes I really don’t give a shit. Doody looked at him with unaccustomed gravity.

  ‘You don’t, do you? A lot of people say it, but you’re the only bloke who really knows what it means, I reckon.’

  The pencil was silent. Doody leant forward. ‘Any day now, sir, and those fucking rods will be out of your face. You’ll be able to eat and talk and puke in my lap if you want to.’ He straightened a second and made a show of looking over his shoulder. ‘And what is much more important, I’ll be able to pour some beer down your neck.’ He smiled, his face becoming even more ugly for a second, then he and Riven exchanged a rapping handshake.

  You fucking marvel. You keep me sane.

  And sanity is a wry thing; a shivering gangway between light and dark.

  He remembered the rocks flashing past him, the momentary feeling that he was being granted a sight of something not often seen by those who could speak of it afterwards.

  Death.

  I’m here, Death had said with a grin. I always have been, waiting in the wings of every story. The uninvited guest.

  And that had not mattered.

  Riven smiled slightly, unconsciously. I was happy to meet him and shake his hand. He was taking me where I wanted to go.

  The grief bubbled up again, relentless as ever. It was irritating to be continually caught unawares like this. Undignified. It never happened in the best stories—in his own stories. Grief becomes boring to hear about, after a while.

 
He shook his head as far as he was able, freeing it from the hill mist and the smell of the heather. There was a face in his head: a dark girl with heavy brows and a determined set to her jaw. She was very young. Who was she? One of his characters, perhaps. A maiden from the land of dreams and stories.

  It’s a bugger having a tireless imagination sometimes.

  He whirred the chair round. Doody was talking to one of the other nurses. Her face was suspiciously similar to that of the girl in Riven’s head.

  So much for a tireless imagination. Doody looked over and waved.

  ‘You’ve an appointment with the head bone-carver, sir, it seems. I’ll take you in a minute.’

  Riven gave his version of a nod. The nurses’s smile went unreplied.

  An appointment to keep. Ach well. And no doubt promises to meet, too. Bring on the bone-carver.

  He did not see Molesy watching him from the shadow of the veranda, his face briefly that of a young man with calculating eyes.

  ‘WELL, MICHAEL, YOU appear to be making progress... one last jab... that’s it.’ All he could see was the bright light above him. He could feel the deft hands working at his face, the slight grate of metal on bone. Like being at the dentist. Strange, to feel the jaw slackening. To feel the possibility of movement there after so long.

  ‘Lovely. There’s going to be hardly any scarring. If your limbs heal as well, you’ll be laughing—’ The surgeon checked, grimaced. ‘I’m going to let you move it in a moment. Just take it very gently to begin with. Nothing sudden. There...’

  It works. Holy shit, it works.

  ‘I can talk,’ he said thickly; the first time he had heard his voice in months. He had to fight back the tears. She had been the last person to hear it.