The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  The woman clucked her tongue. “Terrible, what Hitler’s done, making parents say good-bye to their little ones like this.” She shook her head. “But there’s no room.”

  “Room?” Marsh tensed. Heat flushed through his face. The entire situation was fucking ridiculous. “Sod the room. My girl is only four months old!” The woman’s mouth formed a little O as she stepped back.

  Liv laid her hand on Marsh’s arm. She gave him a reassuring squeeze. More quietly, she said, “You’re from WVS? Agnes is going to stay with my aunt in Williton.”

  “Yes.” The lady peered at Agnes’s tag, then consulted a list, deftly handling the yearling on her hip and the clipboard at the same time. “21417 . . . 21417 . . . Agnes Marsh?”

  Liv nodded.

  The woman checked something off on the clipboard. “Don’t you worry yourselves one jot. I’ll personally deliver little Agnes safe and sound to the waiting arms of your auntie. And what a doll she is, too.”

  Reluctantly, Marsh gave one last squeeze and kiss to the bundle in his arms. “I love you, Agnes,” he whispered. He held her close, filling his awareness with her scent, where he intended to hold it until his daughter came home again. Then he handed Agnes to his wife. He asked, “Isn’t there any chance at all you could let Liv go along, too?”

  “Raybould, we’ve been through this—”

  “I’d feel immeasurably better if I knew she were safe.”

  The WVS harridan clucked her tongue. “Oh, my dears, I’m so sorry.”

  Marsh pressed the issue while Liv said her own good-bye to Agnes. “You clearly need the help.” He nodded at the yearling on the woman’s hip. “How will you care for him and Agnes, not to mention their things?” He indicated the pram and the bulky anti-gas helmet.

  The woman laughed. “Oh, my. It’s more than just these two.” She pointed across the platform to where a group of children ranging from toddlers to perhaps ten years old received hugs and kisses from weeping parents. A train porter and three more ladies from the WVS watched uncomfortably over the good-byes.

  “But there’s enough of us to make do,” the WVS woman continued. She smiled, again revealing those graveyard teeth. “Haven’t lost one yet.”

  “I should bloody well hope not.” The Stukas had been known to strafe trains now and then. Every parent knew it.

  The WVS woman’s lips moved silently for a moment while she studied Marsh’s face, as though searching for some way to reassure him or deflect his irritation. Part of him felt badly. She probably received a great deal of abuse. The billeting officers had it worst, but anybody working in the evacuation program was bound to become the focus of strangers’ frustration. Before he could assume a softer tone and apologize, she shrugged slightly and held her free arm out to Liv and Agnes.

  “Come, dear, let’s introduce Agnes to the rest. And perhaps while we’re doing that, your husband can help the porter load little Agnes’s things on the train.”

  Marsh pushed the pram behind the trio to the group of young evacuees and distraught parents. With a bit of shoving and cursing, he and the porter managed to make room in the luggage car for the pram, helmet, and a suitcase of clothing and diapers for Agnes.

  The whistle blew. After a final kiss and hug, Liv handed their one and only daughter over to this group of strangers. The runny-nosed evacuees and their meager group of escorts boarded the train. The WVS lady took a window seat and held Agnes up for Marsh and Liv to see as the engine chuffed away down the tracks.

  He put his arm around Liv. She rested her head on his shoulder. They watched the tracks until the train whistle faded in the distance.

  31 August 1940

  Dover, England

  The first thing Will noticed was the sunlight. It moved like a living thing.

  He stood with Stephenson at the coast, not a dozen strides from where the earth plunged straight down along the famous chalk cliffs of Dover. A gust of wind eddied around Will’s legs, rippling the hem of his topcoat, snapping it like a flag. The wind smelled of brine and, impossibly, Mr. Malcolm’s shaving lotion.

  Will shivered. The stump of his missing finger throbbed with pain. He paced, fidgeting to ward off the chill. Something grabbed his attention, a sense of something odd glimpsed in the corner of his eye. He looked at the long shadow his body carved from the sunrise.

  It hadn’t moved.

  The edges of his shadow rippled, oozed into tendrils of light that choked off the darkness. Will’s new shadow grew via the same process in reverse. Repulsion flooded through him while the darkness spread out from his shoes, slithering across the grass before settling into a natural shape.

  He shivered again and looked at the sea. The sun hung low in the southeast, round and red like a bullet hole in the sky. The light shone through the English Channel. The Channel was filled with Eidolons. Something unnatural happened to the light inside that non-euclidean fog.

  Will glanced at Stephenson. The old man either hadn’t noticed the strange light, or somehow managed to not care. His attention was entirely on the Channel, which he studied with binoculars. Weather spotters had reported the disturbance moving closer to shore every day.

  Wind hummed through the barricades, pulled a per sis tent thrum from the coils of razor wire. Barricades like these lined the coast from Ramsgate to Plymouth. But this fence wasn’t intended for keeping the Germans out. If invasion happened, no fleet would land here; the cliffs were far too high. No. This barricade had been built to keep people in. To prevent them from hurling themselves into the sea.

  Three months had passed since the tragedy at Dunkirk. Two months since Milkweed’s warlocks had first invoked the Eidolons to warp the weather in the Channel. And a fortnight had passed since the local police lost count of the suicides along the coast.

  A uniformed constable waved at Will from up by the road. He didn’t approach. The locals kept as far from the shoreline as they could. Will waved back.

  “Sir,” he said. Stephenson let the binoculars hang on a leather strap around his neck. The interplay of sunlight and shadow trickled through the grass when he turned to look at Will. Will said, “Our bobby is hailing us.”

  “Don’t forget,” said Stephenson from the corner of his mouth as they ambled up the gentle slope to the road. “Should anybody ask, we’re from the War Office. Got it?”

  “War Office. Check.” Will hadn’t the slightest idea how to portray himself that way. What did folks from the War Office talk about? Not bloody demons and supermen, that much was certain.

  The bobby, a ruddy man with a pug nose, nodded to them as they approached his car. “You see, sirs? Just like I told you. Something strange going on out there.”

  “Hmmm,” said Stephenson.

  “Do you think it’s the Jerries doing this?”

  “Hmmm,” said Will. It seemed the safest thing to say. Better than the truth: No, son, we’re the ones doing this.

  “Just got a call over the blower,” said the officer.

  Waves of tension radiated from the poor fellow. Will couldn’t help but feel an awed respect for the policeman’s resolve. Doing his job day after day, trying to protect people while enduring constant exposure to that wrongness off the coast . . . He was a good man. Will wished he could have offered him some perspective, some sense of hope.

  The bobby continued, “Sounds like something you should see, if you can spare the time.”

  Stephenson asked, “What is it?”

  The bobby hesitated. “It’s . . . well, hard to say. Not rightly sure. Better to see for yourselves.”

  Will rode up front while Stephenson rode in back. They drove to a small village east of the Dover port. The sun shed a little of its unnatural taint as it climbed higher, no longer shining through the Eidolons.

  They stopped at a primary school. Something cold and hard congealed in the pit of Will’s stomach. A frightened teacher ushered them inside. The bobby introduced Stephenson and Will as being
“from the government.”

  It was a small school, a handful of rooms. Will guessed that it normally accommodated no more than fifty or sixty children. But it was emptier than that owing to the evacuations. The remaining children either had drawn high numbers in the lottery, or their parents had refused to split up the family.

  The teacher led them to a playground in back. Four children, three boys and a girl, sat on a swing set. They rocked in the breeze. They didn’t blink and they didn’t shift, except for their silent constantly moving lips.

  “How long have they been like this?” the bobby asked.

  “I rang the bell,” she said. “They didn’t come in, so I went out to collect them.”

  Stephenson and Will shared a look. Will shrugged. Dreading what he’d find, he went over to get a closer look at the children.

  The first thing he realized was that they all faced southeast, toward the coast.

  The second thing he realized was that they weren’t, in fact, silent. They were babbling. In synch.

  He knelt in the sand to better hear them. It was baby talk, nonsense. But Will’s trained ears heard something inhuman buried in the quiet prepubescent mumbling.

  These children were trying to speak Enochian.

  He stood. “We have a problem.”

  Stephenson joined him, leaving the constable and the teacher to their speculations about German bombers and chemical warfare.

  “I know why the fog is moving inland,” said Will.

  “What is it? What are they doing?”

  “They’re singing to the Eidolons.”

  Stephenson mulled this over. He scratched his chin. “Can we use this?”

  The question knocked Will so off-kilter, it took a moment to regain his mental footing. “Sir?”

  “If they can speak to the Eidolons like you and the others do, perhaps they can participate in the defense.”

  Will shook his head, appalled. “Not without many years of training. These kids might have picked up bits and pieces, but they’ll never be warlocks.” He frowned. “They’ll never be completely normal, either.”

  “Hmm. Pity. We could have used the help.”

  Will suddenly understood the purpose of this trip. Stephenson wanted a firsthand look at the supernatural blockade not out of concern for the effect it had on the surrounding countryside, but out of a businesslike need to evaluate its staying power.

  Stephenson wanted to know how long they had until the warlocks faltered, until unnatural weather no longer kept the Germans at bay. Only survival mattered. Nothing else.

  And in that moment, Will knew with a sick certainty that things would only grow worse. Stephenson knew damn well what it cost to make the Channel impassable, and to keep it so. But the old man didn’t care. If he could be so callous toward the string of unintentional human tragedies arising along the coast, he could also turn a blind eye toward the very intentional tragedies the warlocks would no doubt commit in order to pay the Eidolons’ blood prices.

  Will had naively assumed limits had been placed on what the warlocks would be allowed to do. A bud get of sorts, one they didn’t dare overspend. But now he understood that the old man didn’t care about the prices. If anything, he sanctioned them.

  The ride back to London was long, Stephenson’s questions exhausting. Will tried to sleep when he returned to his flat, but he couldn’t banish the memory of those mumbling children. He didn’t want to sleep with that image stuck in his head.

  He wished he could have slept. Keeping the Channel blocked meant Milkweed’s warlocks were on a tight rotation. And that meant another round of blood prices soon. And all of this had been the case before they’d realized the Eidolons were moving inland. Meaning they’d have to redouble their efforts. Somehow.

  Will returned to Milkweed before dawn and spent the day working on the one aspect of the job that didn’t fill him with dread. It did, however, leave him feeling lost at sea. After months of intensive study at the feet of some rather formidable fellows, he still couldn’t translate the Eidolons’ name for Marsh. Couldn’t even take a stab at it. Neither could the others.

  Will hurled his lexicon across the room. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” The binding splintered when it hit the wall, erupting into a blizzard of fluttering pages.

  It was a copy, of course; none of the warlocks he’d recruited for Milkweed would let go of their invaluable originals. But their greed for new crumbs of Enochian had made them amenable to pooling their knowledge into a single master document. This master lexicon represented the culmination of centuries of Enochian scholarship by generations of Britain’s warlocks. Nothing like it had ever been compiled before.

  “Buy you a pint to settle your nerves?”

  Marsh leaned in the doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he had a look of concern on his face.

  A pint? Well. Perhaps . . .

  But Marsh merely meant it in jest. Of course.

  “Ha. Cheeky sod. I’m knackered. I’d kill for a solid night’s sleep, to be perfectly honest.”

  “You look like you could sleep for days,” said Marsh.

  “It’s all these damnable air raid alerts. Getting so that a fellow can’t get a night’s rest any longer. You’d think the Luftwaffe had declared a war on sleep. You’re looking a bit ragged yourself.”

  “We sent Agnes away yesterday.”

  “Oh, dear. It won’t be forever.”

  “Wondering what von Westarp’s brood will do next, that’s what keeps me awake at night.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, Pip.”

  “If we ever encounter them again.”

  After those spectacular few days in May, their enemies had disappeared into the Reich. Since then, the listening posts of the Ystation network had turned up nothing pertaining to von Westarp’s project. They’d all but vanished. It was nerve-racking.

  “We will. And we’ll have some surprises for them next time round, eh?”

  “So I hope. Clever chap, that Lorimer,” said Marsh.

  “He says the same of you, you know.”

  Lorimer’s team of engineers had spent the summer poring over Gretel’s battery. They had a few ideas.

  Will didn’t understand any of it, but he didn’t much care. He was doing his own bit for the war. He’d long ago abandoned any worry that he wasn’t doing his share.

  Marsh stopped leaning in the doorframe and entered. He picked up a few of the pages that had scattered across the floor. “Can you slip away right now, or are you on board to relieve the next shift?”

  “I’m not back on negotiations for another few days. In the meantime, I’m working on, ah, other things.”

  “Lucky you, then. I’m sure that’s a relief.”

  Will held his tongue for a moment, searching for a diplomatic reply. “Of sorts, I suppose. There are worse things than negotiations.” He experienced a momentary bout of lightheadedness when he stood. Dizziness plagued him these days, as though he were perpetually stepping off a carousel. And, oh, what a carnival life has become.

  He had to catch his balance on the edge of the desk when he tried to gather up a few of the pages.

  “Are you quite sure you’re well?” Marsh asked.

  “Stood too quickly,” Will lied.

  Marsh helped him gather up the loose papers. They worked in silence for a few moments, broken only by the rumblings of Enochian from the next room and a few measures of music. Something orchestral. Phantoms had become commonplace in the Old Admiralty building. At present things were relatively sedate, but for the illusory slant to the floor and the ghostly music. Often it was worse, such as those two days in August when the corridors had been filled with a peculiar mélange of wet sheepdog and overripe bananas. The week before that, a ghostly Siamese had stalked the corridors, occasionally pausing to cough up a phantom hairball.

  And there wasn’t a clock in the entire wing that ran properly, which was something of a nuisance.

  But luckily for Milkweed, many of
the Admiralty’s offices and much of its personnel had been relocated to safer locales. This was the case with many government entities, even the BBC.

  Marsh glanced at the writing on a few pages. “This is the master lexicon.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Did it offend you?”

  Will took the jumbled pile of papers that Marsh offered him and sighed. “Frustrated, perhaps.” He shook off the maudlin sentiment. In what he hoped was a lighter tone, he asked, “No matter. Did you have a question for me, Pip?”

  The music became a percussive thrumming that rattled the floorboards like a giant heartbeat. Marsh said, “Can we talk about it somewhere else?”

  “Yes, please, by all means, let’s.” Will glanced at his wristwatch out of habit, even though it was a useless gesture. “I think I’m done for the day.” He set the jumble of papers on the desk and snatched his coat and bowler from the hooks behind the door.

  “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “Brilliant. Cheers.”

  On their way out, Marsh paused outside the room where a triad of warlocks chanted at a shimmering column of smoke. The air in this room coated Will’s tongue with the taste of mothballs. Two more warlocks sat in the corner, ready to join in immediately if the strain overcame one of the negotiators. Milkweed had already lost one warlock to heart attack. The hoary legends of master warlocks’ immunity to death had proved untrue.

  Will could identify the negotiators based on their scars: Hargreaves, White, and Grafton. One side of Hargreaves’s face had the rough pink texture of extensive burn scarring; White had long ago lost much of his nose; pockmarks covered every inch of Grafton’s skin above the collar, including his bald scalp. Shapley, a journeyman warlock like Will with scarred hands to match, sat in the corner next to Webber, who stared at the pair in the corridor with one blue and one milky eye.

  Marsh shivered. Farther down the corridor, and out of earshot of the others, he asked, “Will, how long can they keep it up?”

  “Those chaps? They’re the experts.”