He held out a wrist, but the only mark was on his filthy vambrace. Everyone who could fight to defend the settlement wore some kind of makeshift armor. Tim was too large to wear any that they had taken from Buckler’s Hard Maritime Museum, but he had fashioned himself the nearest equivalent from motorcycle leathers and football gear.
Rebecca relented and smiled at him.
“Well, I’m grateful to you. The gods must be at your side, my lad. I give thanks for your safe return.”
His big shoulders relaxed. She moved the burning candles to a safer distance from the bottom of the retort and its attached spiraled tubing. She had only six retorts left. Laboratory glass, however breakage-resistant, was irreplaceable, as were so many things these days. It was a wonder how much she had once owned, and how she had been reduced to the barest of bare necessities. Everything had to be treated with the greatest of care. A fruity whiff escaped from the clear liquid in the three gallon receiving bottle.
“Sure there’s none of that to drink, missus?” Tim asked hopefully.
“No, you great oaf,” Rebecca said, for perhaps the thousandth time. “It’s wood alcohol. It will blind or kill you. It’s for medicinal use only, to sanitize the utensils.”
“You could make the real stuff,” Tim said. “I miss a tipple, bad.”
“I know.” She sighed.
In her mind’s eye, she could still see the neat bottles from Oddbins on the drinks trolley in her tidy sitting room. The house had burned with a thousand of its neighbors in the first month. The coven had long ago drunk up the contents of the cellar of this pub, what hadn’t been stolen by other raiders in the first few days after the Change.
“I wish I could have a nice chardonnay or a good real ale in the evening myself. Hold on for a while yet, will you? We’re doing our best.”
Tim nodded toward Martin. “Will he be right?”
Donning a cotton cap over her graying chestnut curls and a pair of gloves with fancy cuffs better suited to plunging into a sink filled with Fairy Liquid foam, Rebecca mounted the box next to the table to look down at him. She wished that the steel legs could be reduced so her five foot two inch height did not put her at such a disadvantage while operating. She touched the pulse point in the right side of the man’s neck and counted. “Ninety beats per minute. A little elevated, but fine. He’ll do.”
“Sorry about the mess, mum,” Tim said. “He took the brunt of it.”
“You’re doing the work I can’t. I’m grateful, lad. Go on and get yourself cleaned up. Have you reported to Ben yet? Stuart is cooking the meal tonight.”
Tim wrinkled his nose.
“That’ll mean stew,” he said. “Stew Stu. That man can make a potato feed sixteen.”
“And aren’t you glad he can?” Rebecca said, with a wry smile. “Go along and let me concentrate.”
The big man fled, and Rebecca warded the door after him with two fingers, closing the circle she habitually drew at the beginning of her workday. Everything she did in her surgery, she considered sacred to the gods. When she took the Hippocratic Oath at medical school, she swore by the Greek god Asclepius, but in her mind she pictured the goddesses Brigid and Eir, her patrons.
Three years, three terrible years, since the day everything stopped working. Rebecca had been called to help, along with every other medic, EMT, nurse, surgeon, and herbalist in the Southampton area, to save those who had been in collisions or trapped by machinery. It was no good arguing that she was an obstetrician/gynecologist with little surgical experience but for Caesarian sections and episiotomies. Everyone had pulled together in true English fashion, and done their best for their fellow man and woman. It was only when it slowly became evident that nothing was going to begin to work that the accusations, riots, then actual horrors began. She hated to relive those days, and dismissed them from her mind to concentrate on the poor man on the table.
She always began with a short prayer. The room was always warded, day in and out, as a matter of habit. She blessed herself and her two assistants standing by. Nora and Stephen pushed forward draped utensil trays, one with neatly folded boiled rags and pots of homemade salve, and the other with a tray of sterilized needles threaded with nylon fishing line. In happier times, those rolling carts had been dessert trolleys in the pub’s dining room. With two fingers, she drew an invoking pentacle over the man’s heart.
“Hail, guardians of the watchtowers, lord of death and rebirth and lady of life and love, be here now! Bless thy servant Martin here. Breathe with his breath, course with his blood, be strong in his bones. Let all darkness be cast forth from him and health return to him. So mote it be.”
Her apprentices echoed behind her, “So mote it be.”
She cleaned the wounds and prepared to stitch them. Surgical sutures were long gone. Dissolving stitches were a thing of the past. For internal injuries, when she stood a chance of saving the patient, she used biodegradable materials such as her dwindling supply of silk, counting on the patient’s own healthy immune system to dispose of it once the trauma had resolved. For surface injuries, she used everything from fishing line to embroidery thread. She could no longer be fussy, nor could her patients. The knot of refugees living there in the New Forest couldn’t spare anything. Not food. Not drink. And certainly not lives.
The Beech Grove Coven had met in the New Forest, probably since time immemorial, but certainly since Gerald Gardner had revived the Old Religion in the 1950s. Rebecca’s parents had been among his devotees. Not so strange, if one thought about it. Carvings in churches had always featured images of the Green Man, with a face made of oak leaves.
The fact was, she reminded herself, that if one scratched even the most fervent British Christian, one touched a pagan core who leaped over bonfires under the full moon.
The coven in its heyday was large by any standard, up to forty souls who attended the solstices and equinoxes, if not the esbats in between. She had been Beech Grove’s high priestess since old Mary Valentine had retired. Rebecca’s husband had been its high priest far longer, after Mary’s husband had died. Rebecca herself had been without a regular high priest for three years. Noel had traveled to London on the morning of the Change. After three years, she had admitted he wasn’t ever coming home again. She had known the truth far longer. Ben Glass had substituted for him willingly, but it was time she acknowledged his place at her side and in her heart.
When the disaster had struck, Rebecca and all her fellow medical professionals had attended the scenes of accidents and fires, doing their best to save the victims, using whatever supplies they could find. No one had survived any of the hundreds of planes that had crashed on their way to or from British airports. Momentum had caused numerous train wrecks and boat catastrophes. Everyone, no matter of what origin, pulled together at that time and become splendidly, cooperatively English.
Within weeks, though, when the Change did not change back, Rebecca fled Southampton with her three children, trying not to look as desperate as she felt. She begged a ride across Hamble Water on a rowboat that had taken the place of the Hythe Ferry, paying with her gold wristwatch. Hidden in her holdall under magazines and a spare jumper were all the medical implements she could carry. A hysterical woman had ripped her Coach purse from her shoulder as soon as she came ashore and run off with it. Rebecca had let her go. Nothing in it was of any value any longer, not her mobile phone, not her electronic car key fob, or really her Lancôme cosmetics, and especially not the thirty pounds in notes or her credit cards. Only the skill in her hands and the knowledge in her head were of any value any longer. Her ordeal had not yet ended. Desperate men surrounded her, reaching for the holdall. The children cowered around her. The men were beaten back by the sudden appearance of a rearing horse and a riding crop in their faces. Rebecca had looked up to see a dark-haired man on a dappled horse. It was Ben Glass.
“I would never let anything happen to you,
my lady,” he had said. Rebecca felt her heart turn inside her with relief and dread. He had realized, as she had not, that her husband was gone, almost certainly for good. She could not, would not, believe it. Not then. But Ben was always at her side from then on.
He helped her up on pillion behind him on Dinnie the gelding, baggage and all. Together, they retreated to the New Forest, along with her three children and most of the coven, not a day before the real atrocities began. Rebecca knew very well that almost all the visitors to the forest never penetrated beyond a hundred yards or so from the car parks, leaving the rest of the wilderness to the rangers, wardens, and such enthusiasts as her family. Thank all gods, she had thought, that reluctance to brave the woods still held true. Occupation of the enclosure was in defiance of the rules and the regulations of the Royal Forestry Commission that employed Ben, but those who had made the rules never anticipated what would follow the death of civilization.
As well as she knew the ins and outs of the great forest founded by William the Conqueror in 1079, Ben knew it better. He had been a forester for eleven years. He kept the group moving from place to place, always hiding the traces of their passage from those who would follow and kill. What he did to prevent the enemy from pursuing them, she didn’t ask and really didn’t want to know.
Ben never pushed the reality in her face, and she did not want him to stop doing what he was doing. He was a natural leader, and she was grateful for his take-charge ways. She didn’t mind sewing up the wounds or bandaging the bruises as long as she didn’t have to watch them being inflicted.
Rebecca hated herself for being so squeamishly suburban. A few of the other adults felt the same way. On the other hand, the nine children, her three among them, all aged ten to eighteen, had become scouts in his small army, then fighters, helping to defend their small group from raiders and worse. Her youngest, James, had become a deadly archer who could make his own arrows with pheasant feathers. All she was called upon to do was heal, soothe, and organize—three skills she was glad to employ toward their survival.
Their numbers had dropped horribly and irrevocably during the starvation times that followed. The first winter was the worst. It nearly broke the coven into bits numerous times. Only hope and faith and a firm attitude on her part and a good deal of raiding from now tragically empty suburban homes on Ben’s part kept them alive through the cold season and the hungry spring that followed. All of them had to dismiss their scruples on what constituted housebreaking or looting. Mary Valentine, the eldest and last of the OAPs who survived, preached the litany of “make do and mend.” She also told them about the victory gardens of her youth. With the help of her son, Frank, a keen gardener who was not a Wiccan but indulged his mother in her faith, Beech Grove started miniature farms all over the New Forest that next spring. Wherever there was an open bit of ground, shielded by bracken, gorse, or bramble, the thirty-odd members of Beech Grove planted whatever seeds and tubers they could find. Though a number of the plants were uprooted by hungry animals and the desperate survivors outside the coven, enough food grew to keep them alive, if thin as wraiths. It surprised them all how many natural foodstuffs were to be found in the Forest. They supplemented the small crops with hazelnuts, beechnuts, herbs, tree fruit, and acorns, plus whatever fish, deer and, with immense regret, a few of the remaining New Forest ponies they could hunt for protein. They lived on swedes, turnips, potatoes, and other root vegetables, too boring during most times, but desperately welcomed now. If Rebecca could avoid ever being reminded of acorn bread, she would be grateful beyond words to the Goddess.
Frank and Ellie Valentine had come to her in April with an almost priceless treasure. Undiscovered in the back of the abandoned garden center just off the A326 was a bag of seed barley. Rebecca could have cried for joy. With a liberated scratch-plow pulled by Dinnie, they sowed a field and guarded it night and day until the seed sprouted. The group created a rota to hoe and weed. They used the old means of driving pests away, including scarecrows. Unfortunately, the hungry deer and ponies saw it as an open buffet lunch. Their scrawny carcasses added to the larder of the coven.
The first harvest was small, but the dusty-golden grain heads nodding heavily on their stalks raised everyone’s spirits. At summer solstice, the Valentines proudly served barley bread, baked with sodium bitartrate gleaned from the skins of their wine grapes as a leavening. The loaves were broken up and shared with the gods, then devoured. The rest of the barley had gone to soups and morning porridge, with a precious tenth set aside for the next crop, but bread was a sign of normalcy returning.
At all the festivals and esbats, Rebecca, with Ben acting as her high priest, gave thanks for the gifts of food and survival. Come the fall, they made a thin, sour wine from the wild grapevines that twined everywhere up the sturdy, shaggy trunks of the oaks, and shared it at the rituals. Every other crumb or drop was hoarded against the winter, which they spent in a longhouse constructed from wooden fences ripped from the back gardens of every housing estate within half a day’s trot and insulated with blocks of polystyrene. The longhouse was not a pretty sight, made as it was to blend with the undergrowth, but Ben warned them against using any of the surviving houses or inns until this third year, when they moved into the old red-brick pub, still with its FULLER’S ALE sign on the crumbling facade. They all slept in the great room, warmed by a log fire burning in the huge hearth they now used for cooking. Rebecca still missed her three-bar fire and her comfortable sitting room and the cryptic crossword in the newspaper of an evening and knew the others did, too, but she was impressed that everyone had adapted so well to living in primitive conditions. On the other hand, not one of them was more than three generations from an outdoor toilet in the back garden, nor five from cooking over a wood or peat fire.
Starvation, of course, was not their only enemy. As a doctor, she oversaw the construction of reasonably hygienic pit toilets to prevent the group from suffering cholera, but they passed influenza and colds around to one another like a favorite book. Everyone broke a bone or so, or gashed themselves doing chores. Or were injured by raiders or worse, like this poor lad here. Rebecca made sure the bleeding had stopped, then cleaned out the wound with saline from a squeeze bottle that had once held malt vinegar.
At the first thrust of the needle, Martin woke up. His dark brown eyes opened, staring at her in terror.
“Aaagh!” he cried. It was clear he didn’t recognize her. The assistants leaped to hold him down. They had had a great deal of practice. Rebecca murmured to him, trying to keep from hurting him, or vice versa.
“It’s Dr. Saltford, Martin. I’m sewing up the wound on your forehead. Now, hold still, there’s a good lad. Brigid is with you.”
The young man squeezed his eyes shut and held on to the edge of the steel prep table with both hands. Rebecca murmured to him soothingly throughout the rest of the operation. He’d have a scar worthy of Harry Potter, but if that was the worst that ever happened to him, he’d do fine.
She laid dressings over the wound and tied them in place with strips of sterilized cotton cloth. The bandages were printed with a cheerful pattern of flowers and butterflies. They had come from a hoard of quilting fabrics taken from a house on the edge of Dibden. The men scoffed when she insisted they bring it all back to the longhouse, but they’d ended up wearing a good deal of it over their many injuries since then.
And some of them had been sewn into shrouds made from that same wildly colorful cloth. Even with modern medical techniques, she couldn’t have saved some of the wounded, not with what humans’ inhumanity to others had become. She had had to learn to give mercy as well as healing. As one who took her Hippocratic oath seriously, it had been hard to learn to let patients die. She had no choice now.
Wearily, she washed herself and helped clean the operating room.
Ben was waiting for her in the garden at a rough table and bench hewed from whole logs. She studied him fondly. With the b
road-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the sun and the shaggy cloak he wore, he could have been a seventeenth century highwayman or Odin with both eyes intact. He wore a beard now, which he kept trimmed neatly to a point. It suited him. He studied her, too, then reached for the straw-lined basket in the center of the table and poured steaming liquid into a cup. She drank the tea gratefully.
“Will he live?” Ben asked. “Martin’s my second-best man after Tim.”
“I think so,” Rebecca said. She finished the tea and held out a hand against a refill. Ben put the pot back into its protective basket. He stood up and helped her to her feet.
“Come and see the crops,” he said. “I have a surprise for you.”
Though she was tired from her surgery and the morning antenatal class with the two girls who had fallen pregnant over the last few months, curiosity stirred her enough to put on her Wellington boots and follow him. His hunting hounds, an assortment of sight hounds of all varieties, trotted obediently at their heels.
How strangely silent the Forest had become. In the old days, the susurrus of distant traffic had been a constant undertone. Now the song of larks and cuckoos rang out clear in the bright sky. They passed the longhouse, now used as storage for food. It was constantly patrolled by their young scouts and by a troupe of cats who traded their rat-assassin skills for fish and the remains from the evening meals. Close by was the grove of beeches that had given the coven its name, surrounding the stump of an ancient tree that acted as their altar. The woods were full of bluebells from April to mid-May. Their perfume was her favorite scent on Earth.
Ben held her hand firm in his, helping her over the uneven ground. Rockford Common stood almost chest-deep in grass and gorse after three years without cattle grazing. The sheer height of the greenery concealed their cultivation from easy observation. They waded across the small, brown forest stream with stickleback fry hovering in the clear water. Up the hill and over it, past an enormous blackberry bramble that was their landmark, Ben parted the grasses to let her see. She gasped with wonder. The barley was easily double or triple the previous year’s crop.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 56