Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  Tom threw some more wood on the fire and it crackled like gunfire. “We need to get some sleep.”

  “Okay, I’ll take first watch.” He stood up and stretched, breathing deeply of the night air. “What are we going to find when we get where we’re going?”

  “Everything we ever dreamed of.” Tom wandered towards the tent. “And everything we ever feared.”

  Tom had been in the tent barely five minutes when an awful sound echoed between the steep walls of the gorge. All the hairs on the back of Veitch’s neck stood erect instantly and a queasy sensation burrowed deep in the pit of his stomach. Veitch hoped it was just an unusual effect of the wind rushing down from the mountains, but then Tom came scrambling out of the tent, his face unnaturally pale, and Veitch knew his first instincts were correct: it was the crying of a woman burdened by an unbearable grief.

  At first he wondered if it was Anna, who had followed them, but Tom caught at his sleeve as he made to investigate. “Don’t. You won’t find anyone.”

  “What do you mean?” Veitch felt strangely cold; his left hand was trembling.

  “You can always hear the Caoineag’s lament, but you will never see her.”

  Veitch peered into the dark. The wailing set his teeth on edge, dragged out a wave of despair from deep within him. He wanted to crawl into the tent and never come out again. “What is it?”

  “She is one of the sisters of the Washer at the Ford.” Tom’s voice was so low Veitch could barely hear it. “A grim spirit.”

  “Is this her place, up here in the mountains?”

  Tom shook his head. “She is here for us.”

  “For us?” Veitch dreaded what Tom was to say next.

  “Those who hear the sound of the Caoineag’s mourning are doomed to face death or great sorrow.” And with that he turned and dismally retreated to the tent.

  chapter sixteen

  on the night road

  he light from the fire glowed through the trees like a beacon in the darkness of the night. Another technology failure had left Shavi breathless as the sea of illumination that spread out across the Midlands winked out in an instant; even after all this time it still chilled him deeply to see it.

  He had just been coming down the final, gentle slopes of the Pennines after Ashbourne when it happened. He never travelled at night, particularly in the wild country, but he wanted to complete the last leg of that difficult part of the journey before he reached the more comforting built-up areas that lay towards the south. Now he wondered if he had made the wrong decision.

  More than anything, he was aware of time running away from him; Lughnasadh was only eleven days away, little enough time to put everything right. He still found it hard to believe their great victory in Edinburgh had turned to such a potentially huge failure. His mind kept flashing back to Ruth and the suffering she must be feeling. But more, he was aware of the looming presence of Balor, in the shadows beneath the trees, or the chill in the wind, or the deep dark of a cloudy night. There had been no sign of the Fomorii, but he knew they were out there, searching for him. He could palpably sense the god of death and evil close to their reality. He felt it like a queasiness in the pit of his stomach and in the many dreams that had increasingly afflicted his sleep. An overpowering atmosphere of dread was beginning to fall over everything he saw and heard.

  Although the night was warm and there were plenty of stars, a smattering of clouds kept obscuring the moon. That made the darkness almost impenetrable and he was sure he could hear something moving nearby. On several occasions he had been convinced someone was following; not too close, but tracking him from afar, sometimes off to one side, sometimes the other, always out of sight. He tried to pretend it was paranoia, but he had learned to trust his sharpened senses.

  His main comfort was that if it were some kind of stalking beast, it had had plenty of opportunity to attack him while he slept. Yet it kept its distance, almost as if it were sizing him up. A twig snapped, too loud in the still of the night. He looked round briefly, then hurried towards the fire.

  Almost forty people were seated around a blazing campfire next to a copse on the edge of a field. In the gloom beyond were parked a motley collection of vehicles: a black, single-decker bus of fifties vintage, a beat-up Luton van spray-painted in Day-Glo colours, other coaches, obsolete and heavily modified, minibuses stocked high with effects. The gathered crowd were obviously travellers, camouflaged by old army fatigues, leather and denim, hair long, spikey or shorn, piercings glinting everywhere, tattoos glowing darkly in the flickering light. They were all ages: children playing on the edge of the firelight, a few babes in arms, several pensioners, and a good selection of those in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. The hubbub of conversation that drowned out the cracking, spitting wood dried up the moment Shavi stepped into the circle of light.

  Shavi scanned their faces, expecting the suspicion and anger that came when a tight-knit group was disrupted, but there was nothing. He looked for anyone who might be a leader or spokesman.

  A thickset man with long black hair and a bushy beard waved Shavi over with a lazy motion of an arm as thick as Shavi’s thigh. He wore a cut-off denim jacket over a bare chest and had a gold band straining around his tattooed bicep; a matching gold gypsy earring shone amidst the black curls. He was grinning broadly; one of his front teeth was chipped.

  “The last brave man of England!” His voice had the rich, deep resonance of a drum. “Come over here and tell us what it takes to walk alone in the countryside at night!”

  Shavi squatted down next to him, perfectly balanced with the tips of his fingers on the ground. “I did not intend to be out so late-“

  The man’s bellowed laugh cut Shavi short. “Now how many times have we heard that before?”

  The others laughed in response, but it wasn’t directed at Shavi. “Come on, pull up a pew.” The man slapped the dry ground next to him. “You don’t want to be going back out there in a hurry, do you?”

  Shavi accepted his hospitality with a smile. The easy conversation resumed immediately, as if he were an old friend who had just returned to the fold. A second later a cup of warm cider was pressed into his hands. He could smell hash on the wind and soon someone switched on an eighties beat-box. It pumped out music which seemed to switch without rhyme or reason from upbeat to ambient, jungle to folk. There was a strange, relaxed mood that was oddly timeless. He felt quite at home.

  Shavi’s host introduced himself as Breaker Gibson. He’d been with the convoy for six years. As a group, the travellers had followed the road for most of the nineties, their number ebbing and flowing as people tagged along at different sites or drifted away without explanation; an extended family that owed as much to a gaggle of mediaeval itinerants as it did to any concept of modern grouping. Their neverending journey was seasonal, taking in most of the festivals: Glastonbury and Reading, some of the counterculture get-togethers in Cornwall and Somerset, the summer solstice at Stonehenge, Beltane in Scotland. They had their own code of conduct, their own stories and traditions that were related and embellished around the campfire most nights, their own myths and belief systems: a society within a society.

  Breaker didn’t want to talk about his life before he joined the collective; Shavi got the sense it was an unhappy time that he was trying to leave far behind, and the constant motion of his new existence appeared to be working. But of his time with the group he was robustly happy to discuss, and had a plethora of stories to tell, most of which he wildly exaggerated like a storyteller of old, all of which seemed to involve some kind of run-in with the law. After an hour Shavi liked him immensely.

  For his part, Shavi was completely open about what had happened to him over the long weeks since he had hooked up with Church and the others, but he said nothing about the reasons for his mission south, nor his destination; it was too important to trust to someone he had only just met.

  Breaker peered into the night beyond the light of the campfire. “Ay
e, we’ve seen some rum things over the last few weeks. We stopped to pick up a guy hitch-hiking near Bromsgrove. Dressed all in green, he was. But each to his own-I’m not a fashion cop.” He chuckled throatily. “We got to the point where we’d promised to drop him off. Looked around-he wasn’t anywhere on the bus! And we hadn’t stopped anywhere he could have jumped off. Next thing, someone discovered all the pound coins had turned to chocolate! The kids had a feast that night, I tell you!” His chuckle turned to a deep laugh. “Could have been worse, I suppose.” A shadow suddenly crossed his face. “‘Course, we’ve seen some rotten things at night.” Now a tight smile; Shavi knew what he meant.

  “Still,” he said, raising his mug of cider, “it’s wonderful to be alive.”

  As they drank and chatted, two women came over. One was in her late twenties, with a pleasant, open manner and sharp, intelligent eyes. She had a short sandy bob and wore a thick, hand-knitted cardigan over a long hippie skirt. Her name was Meg. With her was a Gothy woman about ten years older with a hardened face and distinctly predatory eyes, but a smile that was welcoming enough. She said her name was Carolina. They both seemed eager to talk to Breaker, who obviously had some standing within their community.

  “Mikey doesn’t want to do the late watch,” Meg said, drawing out a list of names and quickly running her eyes down it.

  “The little git says we keep picking on him to do it,” Carolina interjected sharply.

  “But I’ve checked the rota and it’s been divided up fairly,” Meg added.

  Breaker sipped on his cider, suddenly serious. “I’ll have a quiet word with him. We can’t afford to have too much dissent in the ranks.” He turned to Shavi. “We had to instigate the watches a few weeks back after some bad shit happened.”

  Shavi could feel the eyes of the women sizing him up. “What was it?” he asked.

  “Woke up one morning, hell of a commotion. Penny over there-” he motioned to a thin, pale woman whose eyes bulged as if she had a thyroid problem “-she was in a right state, understandably. Her baby, Jack, he’d gone missing. Taken in the night. And in the cot where he’d been lying was a little figure made out of twigs tied up with strands of corn.” Breaker’s cheerful face sagged for a second. “Naturally we told the cops, went through all their rigmarole, getting the usual treatment that it was partly our fault for the way we lived. It was just going through the motions. Everyone knew what had really happened. Since then we’ve had the watches going through the night. No more trouble, so I suppose you can say it’s worked. But some of our … lesscommitted … friends don’t like having their sleep disturbed.” This was obviously a source of great irritation for him, but he maintained his composure.

  “So what’s your deal?” Carolina said to Shavi bluntly. “Why are you walking the land?”

  “A friend of mine is very ill. I need to find some way of helping her.”

  “Medicine?” Meg asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “So where are you going? Maybe we could give you a lift.” Carolina glanced at Breaker, who nodded in agreement.

  Shavi weighed up whether to tell them. “South,” he said. “To Windsor.”

  Breaker tugged at his beard thoughtfully. “We could do south.”

  “Yeah, haven’t been that way for a while.” Carolina winked at Shavi. “We tend to steer clear of some of the posher areas. The residents used to run us out with pitchforks in case we robbed them blind.”

  The two women were called over by a teenager who looked as if he hadn’t bathed for days; thick mud coated his face and arms like some Pictish warrior. Once they were out of earshot, Breaker said, “They just about run this place, those two. We couldn’t do without them, though I wouldn’t say it to their faces. Give ‘em bigger heads than they’ve got.” He looked Shavi in the eye. “So, are you with us?”

  “I would be honoured.”

  “Good. One more for the watch rota!”

  The camp was already alive when Shavi awoke from the best night’s sleep he’d had in days. In the light it was easier to get a better handle on the people roaming around, and to see the vehicles, which looked like they would have trouble travelling a mile, let alone thousands. He ate a breakfast of poached eggs on toast with Meg, who had an insatiable desire for information about what was happening in the country; she was bright and sparky and he warmed to her. Afterwards he had his first mug of tea since The Green Man; it made his morning complete.

  Once everyone had started preparing for departure, Breaker hailed him to invite him to sit up front in his sixties vintage bus, which had been painted white and vermilion like an ice cream van. The back was jammed with an enormous sound system and what appeared to be the cooking and camping equipment for the entire community.

  “Hell-bent or heaven-sent,” Breaker said with a grin as he clicked the ignition. He pulled in behind the black fifties bus and the convoy set out across the country.

  The open road rolled out clearly ahead of them, with no traffic to spoil the view of overhanging trees and overgrown hedges.

  “You have experienced the technology failures,” Shavi said with a teasing smile, his gaze fixed ahead.

  Breaker eyed him askance, then laughed at the game that was being played. “Oh yes, we’ve had our fair share of problems with that.” He winked. “Some of us were even kinda happy to see it. Bunch of Luddites, I ask you! Travelling around on the Devil’s Machines!”

  “And what happens if the technology fails completely?”

  “Well, that’s why God invented horses, matey! If it’s good enough for the old ancestors, it’s good enough for me and mine. I can see it now: a big, old, yellow caravan … ” He burst out laughing. “Bloody hell! Mr. Toad! Poot, poot!” He was laughing so much tears streamed down his cheeks and he rested his head on the steering wheel to calm himself. Shavi had a sudden pang of anxiety and considered grabbing the wheel, but Breaker pulled his head up a second later and righted the bus as it drifted towards the hedge.

  Shavi noticed an ornate Celtic cross hanging from the rearview mirror. “For safety on the road?”

  Breaker nodded. “Though not in the way you think. That symbol was around long before the Christians got hold of it.” He muttered something under his breath. “Bloody Christians stamping all over any other religion. Some of ‘em are the worst advert there is for Christianity. On paper it’s not a bad religion. Love thy neighbour, and all that. But once they start mangling the words, anything can happen. Having said that, we’ve got a few Christians here, but they’re not the kind where you can see the whites of their eyes, if you know what I mean. The rest of us are a mixed bag of Pagans and Wiccans, an Odinist, a few Buddhists, some I don’t even bloody well know what they’re called, and I don’t reckon they know themselves either!”

  “In these times faith has come into its own. It really can move mountains.”

  “What do you believe in, then?”

  Shavi rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Everything.”

  Breaker guffawed. “Good answer! I tell you, the people you have to watch are those bastards who don’t believe in anything. You can see them all around. Scientists who reckon they know how the universe works ‘cause they know how one molecule bumps into another. Bloody businessmen who think they can screw anyone over in this life to get what they want because there’s no afterlife so no comeuppance. Property developers flattening the land …” He chewed on his lip. “Making a fast buck, that’s too many people’s faith.” He raised a hopeful eyebrow in Shavi’s direction. “Looks like they could have a few problems in this new world.”

  “Oh, let us hope.”

  They laughed together.

  The convoy avoided the motorways and kept to the quiet backroads. It was a slow route that involved much doubling back, but Breaker explained it meant they could more easily avoid undue police attention. As they cruised down the A444 towards Nuneaton they passed another convoy coming in the opposite direction, but these were the army. Grim-faced soldie
rs peered out from behind dusty windscreens; they looked exhausted and threatened.

  “We live in a time of constant danger,” Shavi said.

  “Something big’s been happening, but we never get to hear about it. They go bringing in martial law, then they haven’t got the resources to police it because everybody’s off fighting somewhere. At least that’s what the rumours say.” He glanced at Shavi. “You hear anything?”

  “I have seen signs … a little, here and there. The authorities have no idea what they are doing. They are trying to fight with old thinking.”

  “They don’t stand a chance, do they?” He mused for a second. “We always wanted the Establishment to leave us alone. I wonder what the world’s gonna be like without them?”

  As they rounded a corner they were hit by a moment of pure irony: a police roadblock barred their way.

  They were held there for half an hour. Everyone was forced out of their vehicles on to the side of the road while they and all their possessions were searched. Nothing untoward was found; those who did carry drugs had found much better hiding places, after years of bitter experience. Even so, the indignities were ladled on: verbal abuse, women pushed around, homes turned upside down and left in chaos. All the travellers remained calm. They had obviously learned any opposition would result in a rapid escalation into a confrontation they could never win.

  Shavi expected the police to pounce on him in a second, but they seemed to have no idea who he was. Eventually, once the police had had their sport, the convoy was turned around for no good reason that anyone could see; other cars and lorries were waved right through.

  Breaker’s face was stony as he headed back north and looked for a side road. “Just like the bleeding miners’ strike. And they call this a free country.”

  They eventually made their way around the blocked area and pitched camp for the night in the deserted countryside to the east of Stratford-on-Avon. The area was thickly wooded enough for their vehicles not to be seen from any of the roads in the area.