The dry spell continued just long enough to begin to seem normal. Then the earth, done with resting, girded its loins. We heard a sucking noise, like boots emerging from a swamp as, almost simultaneously, the loch surged. Fin-shaped waves were spreading out from its heart, coiling like the limbs of a giant squid or a Catherine wheel to flood what was left of the bank. Some yelled and began walking backwards to escape the steady seep. Grown bold now, the guitar players lifted their instruments like clubs and looked out over the water, ready to act. But there was nothing to act against: just more sound, like groaning, the press of insistent, ground-covering waves. Children clasped whatever hand was prepared to take theirs and a helicopter reared into view like a black Pegasus, the pilot waving one arm from the cockpit. Back, he mouthed, circling once, move back, though only a handful could have seen before the harsh, warm gust that meant he had turned away for the last time. As the water groaned again and the copter disappeared, I wheeled and walked, limping with something very like sluggishness, a sensation of being trapped underwater. Perhaps I was afraid. A great belch of mud and gas behind me was all it took to spur my legs, of their own volition, to a canter, to choose without my having to rationalize that to run was my best chance. Where were the pheasants? I thought. They were here only yesterday, but now not one remained. On either side, tethered dogs strained on their leashes, part of the debris, the abandoned litter we would doubtless leave behind. It was then, as I lurched uphill and away from whatever it was that headed towards us, I saw it. Off to my right, glowing in the dark, dry grass.
A tiny, living fire. I slowed. Orange with coal-black flecks and magnesium-flare markings, those tiger-tints of amber, auburn, gold. Closer to, though I tried to still myself, the creature fluttered, showing its full colours. A copper lycaenidae, but which? Its antennae, glowing like incense sticks; that frill, like bead-work on his wings; those distinctive legs. It was a Duke of Burgundy for sure. Male, perfect, impossibly far from home. Despite the situation, I could not help but smile. An allegedly extinct butterfly was here, miles from what had once been his normal habitat, breathing after all. And searching for a mate. And where he had chosen to search, where his instinct had driven him to best survive, was north. As I watched, he folded himself in half and lifted weightlessly into the air, spiralling higher with every beat of his wings. Against all prudent judgement, I waited, wishing him luck, till he disappeared.
Others crushed against me, insistent, haring in what I knew for sure now was the wrong direction. Trusting everything to an insect, I let his fitter senses guide me and took the left fork. I accelerated North. North.
The Red Waste
Tom Bullough
Through the tireless rain that sucks beneath the narrow roof, Perran watches the smith lay down his bellows and, with his tongs, lift the crucible and fill the mould with liquid fire. The rainwater surges up the ravine. It spits and cries on the hot red charcoal. Perran waits for the mouth of the mould to fade back into the fire-stained darkness, then, when the smith offers his hammer, he smashes the clay and releases the dagger, which hisses briefly in the mud. He finds its handle with a leather-hard hand, feels its heat, its pattern of holes and triangles. He brings it close to his single eye – the blade short and slender, like the leaflet of an ash tree.
In the yard, the women are scattering embers, scalding the rain. They part as Perran passes, but they do not look in his direction.
The lord is hunched in the uncertain lamplight in the central hut. The water from the mouldering thatch dribbles over his riven forehead, his downturned eyes, his heavy, trembling jaw. Beyond the thick daub walls, Perran hears the wind-torn trees, the rush of the Little River deep in the blackness beneath them. He watches the lord’s daughter, Letty, stand small and erect as her attendant fastens the golden crescent of the lunula at the neck of her white woollen dress.
‘I would go myself,’ the lord says, distantly. ‘I would go there willingly, had I a son. But I have only a daughter. Who would protect us in my absence?’
■
There is light enough to see the narrow gateway, the palisade and the stony ramparts as the men swing the bridge across the ditch to the moorings on the tall, dark slope. With time-tried senses, Perran peers into the thrashing oaks and hazels. He inspects the faint far side of the ravine, the cliffs that frame the Rock of the Black Pool, then he turns and, to the bawls of women, dogs and oxen, follows Letty out onto the slippery boards.
At the corner of the track, where the ground falls away into the Big Valley, the girl finds a space in the trees and begins to climb the sheer, wooded hillside. She scrambles among the ferns and the moss-caked trunks, groping for ivy and brambles, the bearskin soles of her deerskin shoes slithering on the rotting soil. Clambering behind her, Perran keeps his eyes on her thin white arms, her straggling shawl, the dark plait twitching on her shoulders. In places, the path has vanished, taken by the perpetual rain. Letty hesitates at hollows, pits, the scrabbling roots of tumbled trees, but she does not stop, does not try to cut away into the shadows and the hiding places that surround them.
Perran lifts himself painfully onto the level Old Road.
‘Come on, Perran!’ says the girl, turning to the west.
‘Not … Not that way,’ Perran manages.
‘What do you mean?’ she says. She pauses, peers at him with close blue eyes. There are pink dog roses in her thick red hair. ‘What are you talking about? We never go the other way.’
‘I know,’ says Perran.
■
In the sodden dawn, the Old Road comes to the Little River, which floods across shelves of rock, parts around alders that once stood on islands. The walls of the ravine have opened. Through the rain and the trees there are glimpses of green-grey pasture. Perran and Letty cross the rain-crushed footprints and hoof prints of a second track, which winds down the bank towards a ford, past muted flowers whose names Perran finds he can remember – sun spurge, oxeye daisy – past a clutch of roofless houses, their wall-posts blackened, their wattle tattered and exposed.
‘What … What happened here?’ asks Letty.
‘Burnt,’ says Perran.
‘But why?’
Perran listens through the torrential water, looks from the ruins of Ridge Court back up the slope towards Homestead Hill, and, certain now that he can hear the wincing of an axle, he pulls the girl into the shelter of the willows and forces her to lie down. Above the tall grass, he sees three armed men leading an ox-cart. Like him, they are dressed in tunics, cloaks and round woollen hats. On the cart lies the carcass of a second ox, its big head swinging from the back end, the blood still weaving from its neck.
‘I’m scared,’ says Letty, when they are gone. ‘We should have brought men with us, Perran. Why didn’t we bring any men?’
‘We are safer like this,’ says Perran.
‘Is it … Is it still a long way?’
‘To the Red Waste?’
‘Yes.’
‘We need our ears,’ says Perran. ‘We’ll talk on the hills.’
■
There’s nothing else beneath the moon
So pleasant as the month of June –
No meat, no beer,
Nor any revelry.
As Perran and Letty emerge from the trees into the hissing emptiness of Bedr’s Hill, Letty starts to sing in a faint, bird-like voice. They climb through the ravaged mud of the Hill Road, along the brow of the Short Valley: Perran still knows the names here. Early that morning, perhaps in the night, one of the upland armies passed this way with oxen, goats, and horses. Perran inspects the Old Pool, where the animals stopped to drink the brown hill water. He scans the rain-muffled ridges, the crumbling cliffs where strangled rowans are clinging to the shale. He does not interrupt the song.
I’ll wager you’ll find everyone
Out in the evening, in the sun,
From crones to babies
On their hands and knees.
On bleeding feet, he turns to face
the valley.
We’ll light our bonfires with the night
And as the beacons come alight
We’ll see the Red, White,
And the Black Hills, three.
Perran swipes at the flies, pushes his grey hair away from his eye. He follows the line of the track back down the hillside, past the swallows cavorting over Buck Lake, across the forest to the Little River valley, where the Rock of the Black Pool waits in the clasp of its ravine.
Far to the south, the Black Hills wear hoods of sheer, silver cloud.
‘Where are we, Perran?’ asks Letty.
‘We’re on Bedr’s Hill.’
‘Who’s Bedr?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why are we going to the Red Waste?’
‘Did your father not tell you?’
‘He just said that I have to take the lunula there.’
Perran says nothing.
‘What is the Red Waste?’
‘It’s the source of the Little River. It’s where it comes from.’
‘Why …’ Letty hesitates. She wraps her shawl around her, shivers. ‘Why don’t we just follow it there, then?’
‘There are people at Mawd, in the Great Fort. It is too dangerous to go that way.’
‘Aren’t there people on Bedr’s Hill?’
Perran turns back towards the rain-washed hilltops.
■
‘Have you been on Bedr’s Hill before?’ asks Letty.
They pass between the cliffs of Grey Stone and Fithel Stone, where a new crop of hills is revealed to the north. Perran knows that one is Fraith Hill, and that another is the Hill of the Blue Valley, but he cannot remember which is which. Their vague, swollen shapes seem similarly strange and remote.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you’re the only one who knows the way? Because you’re the oldest?’
‘Yes.’
They cross the causeway over the Birch Bog, slipping, losing their feet between the decomposing trunks. They pass fields where the distant scions of oats and wheat raise drooping heads among the broken birch trees, the rushes, and the hard, spiny shrubs that Perran has not seen this side of the century.
‘What happened?’ asks Letty.
‘It became like this,’ he says.
‘So that people couldn’t live here any more?’
‘So that people couldn’t live here any more.’
‘I can see someone,’ says Letty. She points, comes close to his panting side. ‘Look! There’s a man there, watching us!’
Perran peers through the slanting rain, the mist that slides around the ridges. On the White Hill, or the Bank Hill, or the Oak Hill, he makes out a tall, dark figure.
‘That’s a stone,’ he says. ‘It’s not a person.’
■
At Goidel, where the track from Mawd crosses their own, the houses are no more than circles in the shattered ground. Their stakes, their roofs, their posts have been taken for fires by decades of travellers, while the daub pits and the smelting pits are flooded with thin brown water. The army appears to have slept in the lee of the hillock. There are piles of ordure, beset with flies, leaching into the mud. There is the grey-black space of a recent fire – although what they found to burn up here, even to last these short summer nights, Perran is unable to imagine.
Letty kneels, drinks from a puddle. The flowers in her hair are gone. Her dress is stained brown and green, stretched so that it drags around her feet. Through the clinging wool, Perran can see the pricks of nipples on her flat girl’s chest, the pressure of her stomach, the trembling muscles of her legs.
Only the lunula has prospered by the daylight.
‘Why is the water brown on Bedr’s Hill?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ says Perran. ‘It didn’t used to be.’
‘How old were you when you were here?’
‘I was a boy. Younger than you.’
‘Were there lots of people here then?’
‘A hundred. Two hundred. I can’t remember.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They came into the valley when it got too cold. But the valley was ours, there wasn’t space for us all, so we had to fight them. That was when your grandfather took us to the Rock of the Black Pool.’
In the clouds, there is the tumbling music of some hidden bird.
‘I want to go back,’ says Letty. ‘I don’t like it here.’
Perran feels the pain in his feet, his legs and his chest. He has water in his empty eye. ‘It isn’t much further now,’ he says.
■
They hear the dogs before they see beyond the trees: a rising wail, which blends with the roaring of the rain. Perran leads Letty down the last of the narrow path, the brambles tearing their legs, clutching at the girl’s dress so that the loose weave starts to unravel, and together they stand at the edge of the forest. They look through the leaves at the broad, closed gate of the village, the roofs that jut above its tall, jagged wall. They smell the damp smoke seeping from the thatch. They see sheep with sagging fleeces, the tormented crops where a few dark figures are working with oxen. They see a gang of swine near a stand of birch trees, where the Little River turns between alders and hazels, and disappears.
‘This is a new time, Letty,’ says Perran, quietly. ‘I remember when it was sufficient to cast our embers into the rain, to light our fires on the longest day. Then, the rain would listen. Then, it would leave us with fine, dry days when we could bring in the hay, or cut the oats and carry them home without a vanguard, without even watching the trees. In the evenings, we would swim in the river and the dust and sweat would peel from our skin. We would sing and the songs were still true. Now, there are powers beyond ourselves. It is they alone who can intercede on our behalf, and we can do no more than implore them to hear us …’
He feels for the girl’s small, cold hand.
‘We … can go,’ he tells her. ‘Nobody will stop us now.’
Letty moves hesitantly as they cross the Red Waste. Around them, the swine are working their destruction, dragging up roots with curling tusks. In the village, there are shouts from the watchman, but Perran does not look in his direction. He brings the girl to the quick, clean current of the stream, then takes a path into the birch grove where, among the bone-white trunks, they find a pool fresh-risen on rounded stones – surrounded by flowers, their heads turned hopefully towards the clouds.
With her free hand, Letty holds the hem of her ruined dress. Through the skein of the wool, her skin is pale and shining. Her eyes are on the rain-speckled water, close and blue within the tangle of her hair.
Perran passes the dagger hard across her throat. He feels the bronze part her soft skin, cut through the tendon at the root of her jaw, slice between the rings of her windpipe, which hold him, drag him forward as she contorts, claws at his hand with sudden strength, issues sounds that are lost in the torrent of blood.
The blood falls with the rain into the pool. It erupts, dissolves in a darkening cloud.
He holds her until her hair hangs loose across her crimson chest, then, with ragged breaths, he tugs out the dagger and throws it away. Three times he tries to work the claw of his fingers, but at last he manages to release the clasp of the lunula, which he holds at the limit of his arm, casts into the water and sees turn momentarily bright.
He lifts his face and waits for the coming of the sun.
The Weatherman
Holly Howitt
When I got the job here, the first thing I did was to tell Marly. We’d been waiting for years for an opportunity like this, both of us, but she was pregnant by then so that ruled her out. The law that Green pregnant women were exempt from any physical labour until after the birth (or at the birth, for that matter) had just come in, and we weren’t foolish enough to disobey, because we were a regular, law-abiding Green couple. I’d applied and applied and a
pplied for a job until I thought that it was impossible, knowing I was our only hope, determined to try but certain – perhaps even then hoping – that I’d fail. And then I got a message and that was that.
The first day wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. We can’t afford to live that close to the greenside; in fact, I’m nearer the sandtowns, although of course we are Green people, but it was a good walk to work, and by the time I got there I was sweating pleasantly. But even without my own moisture I could feel the humidity in the air, almost touch it. Where we live the water has started almost to disperse out of the sky; dust splatters our windows, and it rarely rains. Rain is so precious as to be concentrated over special areas only. It’s amazing how quickly you miss it.
The weather station was vast, and as I got closer it seemed only to get bigger and bigger and bigger, half buried into the ground and yet tall, too, like a submerged, crash-landed alien craft. I pressed my hand to the pad at the door and they’d already programmed it for my arrival; it let me into a huge room full of steel-coated, towering and beeping silver machines that looked alien too, and mezzanine upon mezzanine, going up and up and up, and people wearing white coats which were spotless. The whole place was, actually, and I heard laughter and chatter among the footfall on the mezzanines looking over a huge, empty floor with something like a large tube coming through it and right up through the roof.
I was given my own white coat straight away by a woman at the door who smiled at me and bit her lip when I said thank you. I noticed that she too was wearing the ubiquitous white coat. She brushed some invisible muck off the lapel, pouting, then watched me button up my own.
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