by Simon Morden
Perhaps the geomancer could help after all. If the name suggested anything, it was a close connection with nature: they’d be someone who watched the way the seasons turned and how the land reacted. He was keenly hungry – he was certain they all were – but he wasn’t going to complain, because what would be the point?
When he was younger, he’d always tried to wheedle something from the kitchen, no matter what time of day it was. But food was always there, and his mother was the gatekeeper. Occasionally she would relent. Most times she would not. Here, there was no food, no morsel being kept back. Only finding or catching something would change that.
They started upriver again, heading for the notch between the two peaks ahead. There were no more houses, at least that they could see. It felt like they were walking through forests so ancient that no one had ever walked that way before, and though Grace must have passed that way only the day before, there was no sign of her passing.
All the woods he’d ever been to – with the Scouts, with the school, or on holiday with his parents – had had paths worn into them by the persistent feet of people, even if planned routes, marked and laid out with posts and signs, hadn’t been present. The closest he’d ever come to this was the one time he’d gone – his father had called it ‘going back home’, to a place alien to Dalip – to the Punjab. They’d gone as a party up to the high mountains, where the patchwork quilt of cultivation ended and the forest reigned. He’d stepped off the path, away from everyone, just for a moment. It hadn’t been quiet, or still, but it was a world apart from the roar and dust of the cities.
That had been just a flavour, a mere hint, of what he was experiencing now. Once upon a time, the whole world had looked like this. Trees grew, seeded, died, and more trees grew to take their place. Some of the saplings were eaten, but the eaters were in turn eaten. There was no one to cut and burn and clear the forest, until the coming of man.
That thought had him hurrying to catch up with Stanislav, who once again had taken the lead.
He drew up behind him, and the man waited for a few seconds to let him catch up the rest of the way. They’d have to stop soon, anyway, to gather firewood and try harder to scavenge food.
‘This place,’ said Dalip. He was not so much out of breath as simply tired. ‘This place, it’s untouched.’
‘This is true,’ said Stanislav. ‘But you mean more than that, yes?’
‘When people – when we – stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being farmers, we lost all this. Even where we didn’t cut the forests down, we lived in them, managed them. Here, that never happened. If we believe the wolfman—’
‘If.’
‘Even if he’s lying to us, he might be telling the truth in parts. He said his father was a, a traveller, like us. What if everyone here is one, or their children? That there’s no other people here at all, except those who find their way here by accident?’
‘I see. That would mean that there are no real natives, that there is no deep knowledge to pass down, and that people we meet vary only in their levels of ignorance depending on how many generations back they go.’ He lowered his chin, deep in thought. ‘It might be that this geomancer is the pinnacle of lore here, but there will be limits even to her knowledge. This is important.’
‘Also …’
‘Yes?’
Dalip’s gaze followed Stanislav’s, down to the ground. ‘People, you know, have babies. Even by the end of the Neolithic, most of Britain had been worked over once. By the Middle Ages, everywhere was lived in, and that’s with a tiny population, a couple of million.’
‘You are very knowledgeable.’
‘School, that’s all. But everything we know about where people live: along rivers, on the coast, especially where rivers flow out into the sea. We should have already found a town, a couple of villages, and farms everywhere. There’s nothing. Nothing at all.’ Dalip spread his hands wide. ‘There’s no one here. This is a, I don’t know what to call it, a blank slate, a new world.’
‘Yet,’ said Stanislav, ‘when we do find what we could call a village, it has been deserted for many, many years. The number of people should be increasing, not decreasing. There is no lack of space for them to spread out into.’
He rumbled deep in his chest, a noise that made Dalip look askance.
‘Have you seen this before?’
‘Yes,’ said Stanislav. ‘Twice before. Once when I was young, and again when I was not so young.’
‘And?’
‘The cause was the same. War.’
‘That’s not good.’
‘No.’ Stanislav looked over his shoulder, either to see who might be listening, or to check that the others were still there. Dalip looking behind him, too. There was Mary, and further back, possibly Luiza.
‘But you think this might have been twenty years ago.’
‘Yes. There is another question, of course. How did the wolfman find us so quickly, if this is an empty land?’
‘I … don’t know.’ Dalip didn’t, either. ‘Chance?’
‘Perhaps. Have we met anyone else? By chance?’
‘No. No, we haven’t.’
‘So he was waiting for us, yes?’
‘But we didn’t know we were coming,’ said Dalip. ‘How could he possibly do that?’
‘When I mean waiting, I mean watching. He did not know when we might appear, but if he knew where we would appear? Then it is very possible. Then we must consider why he would keep watch over a door which, until we passed through it, we did not know existed.’
‘Other people must have come through.’
‘Yes. What do you think happened to them?’
‘The same thing that happened to us.’ Dalip stopped walking, right there in the forest within earshot of the slow flow of the river. ‘They were told about the geomancer. They went to find her.’
‘The wolfman did not explain any of this. He had the opportunity to do so, and yet did not. He led us with his answers, so that we would choose to go in this direction, to choose to find the geomancer, choose to knock on her door and ask to see her.’ He pursed his lips. ‘I think we should reconsider.’
They stopped and waited for the others. Mary arrived first.
‘Is this where we’re stopping for the night?’ She looked up and around. ‘I suppose it doesn’t make much difference, right?’
She started to head off towards the river, to see if it could offer them anything, when Dalip called after her. ‘Don’t go far.’
‘Fuck off, all right?’ she said, and kept going.
Stanislav jerked his head in her direction, and Dalip got up to follow her.
She was lying down, looking over the river bank at the slack water beneath, trying to see if there were any fish there, when Dalip came up behind her.
‘We need to stay together,’ said Dalip.
‘Fuck off, Dalip. I’m fine.’
‘No,’ he said, and tried to explain, but the words got stuck. He sat down, back to a tree trunk. ‘Stanislav thinks we’re walking into a trap.’
Now he had her attention. She rolled over and leaned on one arm. ‘We’re what?’
He wanted to explain, and he tried, but Mary wasn’t at all convinced.
‘This geomancer is paying the wolfman to be her lookout, to send people up to her, whatever, church? What the fuck is she going to do to us when we get there? We can just walk out if she gets heavy on us.’
‘I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the wolfman’s on his own.’
‘He’s got a gang? So have we.’
‘He’s got wolves, Mary! I mean, look at us. We’re dressed in bright orange clothes, we have a cigarette lighter, a small blunt knife and a rusty axe between us. We’re not a gang. We’re just a bunch of people thrown together by the fact that we didn’t die.’ Then the final penn
y dropped. ‘He’s watching us now. We’ll never spot him, but he’s followed us this far, and he’ll follow us until we get where we’re supposed to go.’
She sat up and stared into the forest, checking random directions.
‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring myself. But it’s too much of a coincidence that he’s the first and only person we’ve met. We should’ve been more careful.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with what we did,’ she said, and was suddenly distracted by something happening behind Dalip.
Shouting. Rushing. A scream.
‘Get down.’
Dalip rolled to one side, pressing himself against the ground. After a moment, he started to raise himself, to see over the undergrowth. It was as if the forest itself was moving, brown and green shapes darting from cover to cover, and the few orange boilersuits he could see were running.
‘We’ve been so stupid. Naive, trusting … idiots.’
Mary crawled next to him. ‘Who are these people? Why are they doing this?’
‘I don’t know, and we need to find out. But not from them.’ He looked forward, then back at the river. ‘We’re going to have to go that way.’
‘We can’t just leave the others,’ she said, and straight away doubted her words. ‘Can we?’
‘We have literally nothing. If we can cross the river without being seen, it might mean we can get away. Go. I’ll be right behind you.’
There was another scream, and more shouting. Something that sounded like a laugh.
‘I can’t swim.’
‘Bank to bank, it’s not even the length of the local baths. Just do it.’
‘I really can’t swim.’
‘You can probably walk halfway across.’ He raised himself up again, and dropped down immediately. ‘They’re coming.’
They were several shapes he could barely make out, as tall as a man but blending with the background in a way he couldn’t quite believe. They were close and closing.
‘Come on!’
He sprang to his feet, grabbed Mary’s wrist and pulled her toward the river. She wasn’t even standing by the time he got her to the bank and he pushed her in.
There were noises right behind him. If she was to get away, he would have to stay. Even if she drowned because for some inexplicable reason she hadn’t learnt to swim, and he wasn’t there to hold her up.
He reached into his boilersuit and drew his kirpan, then turned to face them.
Perhaps they realised by the way his hand shook that he’d never used the blade in anger before. Perhaps it was because there were three of them, lean, toothy, skin tanned like leather, all used to casual violence and pain.
Could he keep them at bay for long enough for Mary to escape? They had knives in their hands: proper knives, almost swords, thick bladed and curve-edged. Never mind. It was his duty. It was his honour. It was the first time he’d had to act out his faith on his own accord, and it felt like something inside him had finally shifted into place.
Any fight would be quick and dirty, and it’d be him losing and losing badly. These men in brown and green were fighters, warriors. He was an engineering student with decent batting average and a fierce spin.
And still. He jabbed forward with his kirpan at the face of the man on the left, causing him to dodge back. The man on the right caught his arm, stepped close and punched him hard in the kidneys.
The pain was extraordinary. He felt his legs start to fold, and decided that he’d be better on his feet. He brought his arm back, elbow first. He made some sort of contact because the grip on his wrist loosened.
They’d had enough of his nonsense, clearly. The other two laid into him with no finesse. A fist to the gut, a blow to the side of his head, and he was reeling. He couldn’t see straight. He lashed out, hit something, and his hand felt like he’d struck solid wood.
Then he was down, and the blows didn’t stop falling. His back, his legs, his head. His turban saved him: that, and a clear command stopped the beating before he was crippled.
‘Hello, little darkie. You must think you’ve very clever to have worked it all out. Better you hadn’t shouted it out so all the world could hear, though.’
Dalip forced one eye open. Everything hurt so much, it didn’t matter which bit of him was damaged.
‘Hello, wolfman,’ he said. His lip had split open. He may have lost a tooth, he couldn’t tell.
The wolfman crouched down and plucked the kirpan from Dalip’s fist. He waggled it like a finger. ‘You weren’t going to do much with this.’
‘I had to try.’
‘Of course you did. Now where’s your little darkie friend?’
Dalip spat out blood on the ground.
‘Cat got your tongue? She can’t have gone far. Go,’ he said to the other men, ‘bring her back.’
Dalip couldn’t breathe through his nose, so he lay there, curled up, mouth open, panting. The wolfman was missing something.
‘Where,’ he managed, ‘where are your wolves?’
‘My wolves?’ He rubbed the end of his nose, and gave a sly smile. ‘Is that what you’re worried about?’
The wolfman dropped the kirpan and held his hands out in front of him, curling his fingers around imagined chains. He clenched his jaw, and his eyelid twitched.
His hands did hold chains. Those chains looped around the necks of wolves. The wolves sniffed at Dalip, smelling his blood and his defeat.
‘These wolves, you mean? They’re right here.’
11
Mary stayed very still, even though the water was cold and the current pulled at her boilersuit. The voices were right above her, above where she crouched amongst the roots and the weeds, with only a thin overhang of soil hiding her. Her chin was in the river, and she was prepared, no matter how much she’d hate it, to take a deep breath and submerge completely. Anything, just so long as she wasn’t discovered.
She could hear the men beating Dalip, the steady grunts of effort as their fists rose and fell. She could hear the wolfman’s taunts. Then she heard him call for her to be found.
She was almost numb with cold by the time they moved off, and she sat, balanced on her haunches, for a good while longer. It could have been a trap, another one, with someone sitting on the bank above her, waiting for her to emerge, and with her in no state to either fight or run.
She listened. The sounds she recognised – traffic, music, doors, shouting – were absent. The sounds she was now hearing – trees, birds, the slow churn of the river – were alien to her, but she’d rather hear those than anything else. She was alone. Truly alone now.
She still wanted to cross the river, and put broad water between her and her pursuers. It looked, at least from down at water level, a long way. Especially for a non-swimmer. No one was going to help her, no one was going to offer her a reward for just trying. She steadied herself and moved her waterlogged legs out towards the middle.
Her feet lost the bottom quickly. Her head ducked under, she splashed her way to the surface, gasping, and for a moment couldn’t remember which side of the river she’d just left. One bank was a lot closer than the other, so that was decided for her quickly. The current was carrying her, and the one thing in her favour was the trapped air in her closely woven boilersuit.
She floundered, arms and legs moving in contradictory motion, her boots dragging her down, her sleeves holding her up. The current slackened, her foot struck something soft and she grunted, pulling it back fast. But it was only the river bed’s soft mud, and she was able to stand a few metres from shore, sodden, freezing, dirty, scared.
She looked behind her, to where she’d come from. She could see no one, though she knew the wolfman and his gang were able to blend in to the forest in a way that was almost spooky. They could be watching her now, just like they probably had been, all the
way from the sea to here. Watching her wade to the far bank and crawl out, lying on her belly like a worm, in the brown leaves and broken twigs and earthy decay.
Where was she going to go? What was she going to do? How was she supposed to do anything?
Something was sticking in her ribs. She rolled over, reached inside, and pulled out the axe. Dalip had been right. It was very rusty. She wasn’t going to throw it away, though. It was all she had.
She wasn’t going to be able to rescue the others, even if she could find them. She didn’t owe them anything, really, even though the thought suddenly struck her as, if not wrong, certainly unworthy. She didn’t know where such an idea came from. Perhaps she could find someone to help her rescue them, or better still, who would do all the rescuing for her.
No. There would have to be a rescue at some point – she assumed that was a given – and she had to be involved in some way. She wouldn’t be alone, though. The Red Queen needed soldiers.
The problem was, there was no one here. The woods were empty. She’d have to start walking until she found someone. Not upriver though. Away from it. If she’d started the day with the sun on her right and ended with it on her left, she’d have to travel towards where it rose and watch it circle around.
She was also fucking freezing, and if she didn’t make a move soon, she’d never go anywhere at all.
She emptied her boots, wrung her socks out, and straight away put them back on, hurriedly brushing off the leaf litter and the tiny bugs that had crawled out of it to investigate her toes. Her fingers were stiff and shivery, and tying wet laces was hard. When she put one foot in front of the other, she was so uncomfortable, it was all she could do not to sit down and weep.
What drove her on was the certainty that the others would swap places with her in an instant. She was free. They were not.
She walked. The forest looked the same in every direction. She couldn’t see the distant mountains; she could barely see the sky. The sun was behind her, but she couldn’t tell how far it was from setting. She could be walking straight back the way she’d come, just on the other bank of the river.