by Adam Roberts
Davy caught up with Daniel and grabbed his arm. “There’s somebody there.”
“I know,” said Daniel, without looking round. “He’s been following us for a while. He’s been following me for much longer.”
“Is he one of yours? From Guz?”
Daniel laughed a brief and humour-denuded laugh. “No. He’s more by way of being my Gollum.”
“Your Gollum?”
“You know that story? People still tell it, I think. He’s in one of his harmless phases. Far as I can tell. I mean, he cycles through—up and down, dangerous and harmless. But I don’t think we need to worry about him at the moment.”
“You don’t think we do?” Davy repeated. “That’s not a very reassuring thing to say.”
Daniel looked round at him. “It’s not far now.”
“You have a particular destination in mind, then.”
“Indeed I do.”
They picked their way through undergrowth and back down towards the edge of the water. The river at this point stretched away almost out of sight, to where the hill lifted its shoulder over the horizon. Another wilderness of sedge, yellow as cream, brittle and sharp-edged as upended icicles. The clouds were breaking up overhead, like ice on the pond of the sky, blue starting to show through. The mist thinned the distance into unreality.
They turned proper north and went on half a mile or so. At one point they crossed an old road, its surface somehow not overgrown or broken up by time: it ran straight into the river, like a boat launch track. They waded through. Then, on the far side, they came upon a ruined farmhouse and beyond that a large copse of trees.
Daniel went into the copse and Davy followed. An ancient, torn-up tarpaulin was snagged on the lower branches of one of the trees: blue old-world waterproof fabric stained brown with age and old leaves.
“Shit,” said Daniel.
“Shit?”
“Shit.”
“Are you using the word as an invitation?” Davy asked. “Or an expression of exasperation?”
“There was supposed to be a punt under that tarp.”
“What’s a punt?”
“It’s a kind of flat bottomed boat. You pole it along. I was going to use it to take us both over the water, and get you home.”
“Oh,” said Davy.
“The annoying thing,” Daniel said, poking the ruined tarpaulin with his foot, “is that they left the tarp. I mean, it’s a bit ragged, but it’s a perfectly good piece of tarp. Steal my boat, steal my pole, but leave the tarp? I mean, what were they thinking?”
“What,” agreed Davy. “Also, another what: what are we going to do?”
For about a minute Davy stood staring into space. Small waves were patting the edge of the land a few yards away, and making a soothing kind of sound. Davy listened. It sounded like a dog drinking from a bowl. The faintest of winter breezes made the bare twigs shiver.
“Plan B,” said Daniel, eventually. “I have a friend at Chalgrove. It’s further east than I’d have liked to go, but I should be able to borrow a boat from her. I mean, I say friend. Friend might overstate things a little. But I’m fairly confident she won’t actually kill me and sell you to Wycombe.”
“Fairly sure?”
“Yep,” said Daniel.
“Not,” Davy pressed, “wholly sure?”
“Nope.”
“Fairly is the best you can manage, sureness-wise?”
“I mean,” Daniel said, kicking the tarp again, “I did think about maybe locking it up. But how does one even lock up a punt?”
They headed off. The copse was too dense, and the undergrowth too brambly, for them to pass through, so they had to come back out and go round. Then they pushed across a field hip-deep in grass and up a slope into more scrubland. Davy caught one more glimpse of Daniel’s Gollum, whatever that name meant, hanging back at the copse they had just left, seemingly reluctant to come any further. They marched on and left him behind.
They passed a tractor, its body all rust, shreds of long perished rubber hanging from its wheel-hubs like meat on old bones. Somehow its front windshield was still intact, after all these years. It made Davy want to stop—that transparent rectangle would be a valuable thing to bring back to the Hill. Make a nice window, or an element in a greenhouse. But of course he was carrying no tools with which to extract it, and even if he had been there was no way to port it across country. He felt a twinge of desolation, a more-than-ordinary sadness, as he hurried on to catch up with Daniel. Such a waste!
Waste was the worst thing. The unfairness of it. The wealth of the world poured away into the dirt.
They passed through more woodland: an older, more passable stretch of forest, mostly house-tall conifers. Then across a field dominated by gigantic ferns, like something out of the Jurassic period, each one electroplated by the frost. They passed a wide cove in the lake, all iced over and glistening the sun like a tearful eye.
“Looks like your Gollum has finally given up following us,” Davy remarked, in passing.
This made Daniel stop. He looked around. “You’re sure?”
“I think so. After we left that copse, where you’d left the punt so carelessly unlocked, he crossed over to it. But then I think he stopped there.”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, he is insane,” said Daniel, turning a slow three-sixty and surveying the whole landscape, “but he has a pretty healthy sense of self-preservation. That makes me wonder if he saw something.”
For a minute or so the two of them stood in silence. The wind was picking up. Away to the north Davy could see a misty scrabbling in the zone between the ground and the low-running black clouds. It looked like sleet, rather than snow, or maybe just heavy winter rainfall. It would presumably roll down here eventually.
“Maybe we should get under cover?” he suggested to Daniel. “Put the tent up?”
But Daniel was peering in a different direction—away to the east, with his hand to his brow like he was saluting. “Now that’s the kind of thing that makes a fellow say,” he said, “bollocksy bollocks and a second helping of big bollocks.”
“What?” But Davy could see them too: half a dozen riders, coming down the lower slopes of the Chiltern Hills on horseback.
“They might not have seen us?” Davy offered.
“They’ve seen us.”
“They can’t know who we are!”
“They know who we are. We have to go, Davy my friend, and neither dilly nor dally.” Daniel turned abruptly and set off jogging due west. Davy hurried after him. They got to the edge of the field and in amongst a stretch of bushes and junior trees, and then Daniel ducked down. He was breathing hard.
“If they saw us, they’re going to know we’re in here,” Davy pointed out.
“They will indeed. I’m trying to weigh up options. I’ve half a mind to plunge into the river.”
“I thought you said it was so cold it would kill us in moments!”
“It is, and it probably would. Which would mean you’d have to be insane to follow us, right? But there are two difficulties with that plan. One is that the river here is just too wide. If we were back beneath Benson it might be different. But that’s not where we are. Two is that they’re on horses, and horses can swim. So they’d probably just follow us in anyway.”
“You’re forgetting three,” Davy added. “Which is that it would kill us within moments.”
“There’s too many of them for us to have any luck with a defensive redoubt, or to try to stage an ambush. Oh Fuckton-on-Thames this is unlucky. I tell you one thing—whoever half-inched my punt has a lot to answer for.”
“We can’t just crouch here all day.”
“No, Davy my mucker, we can’t. I’m going to break a resolution I’ve held to for many years and try to get to Oxford. Upriver, I’m afraid. And we’re both going to get a lot hungrier than I initially thought we would. But I can’t see what our alternatives are. Stick close to the river’s edge, because the horses won’t like that terrai
n. Take as much cover in woodland as possible. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find a boat?”
“Or a magic flying machine?”
“Laughing in the face of terror, Davy. I approve. At any rate, we’ll have to go into the storm. That storm, there, on the horizon. It’ll be harder for them to track us though that. At least, I really hope it will. Though it’ll mean we get wet, I’m afraid. Wet and cold. I’m sorry about that. Come on.”
They kept low and managed an uncomfortable crouching half-run through the shrubs. Then they dropped down a slope nearer the water where they could stand up. They jogged alongside the wide expanse of slow-flowing water as it turned the corner from south-east to south, the river moving like an immense millstone under an equally impassive, similarly coloured sky. The raincloud was certainly coming closer. The wind was getting up. “We stand a better chance in that weather,” Daniel called over, “though it won’t be pleasant. But it will be better than the alternative.”
“We can’t run all the way to Oxford!” Davy called back. He had a stitch.
“There’s a causeway about half a mile. If we can cross north over it our options increase—places to hide on the far side. Woodland, farmhouses. Might even be possible to steal a horse. But there’s nothing for us on this side.”
They jogged on, until Davy couldn’t jog any further and stopped. Daniel noticed and doubled back for him. “Come on, my lad. Trees, up ahead. We’ll stop in there.”
So Davy stumbled on, his flank singing with an almost musical note of pain, until they came into a thicket of oak and birch trees. Three egrets, tall as children, stood knee-deep in the water staring at them: bright white and solemn, like priests. The wind chuffed up the edges of the feathers on their backs. Davy leaned against a tree trunk and tried to get his breath back. Daniel went further into the wood and returned a moment later with a broken bough, twigs and dry leaves rattling where the separation of the larger branch had robbed them of the instinct to fall. They looked like they had been stamped out of bronze foil.
“What’s that for?”
“I was thinking cover,” said Daniel, looking dubiously at his own find. “But maybe—I don’t know, a weapon?”
“You have a crossbow.”
“I was thinking more for you.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?” Davy demanded. “Fan them?”
“Come on.”
They pushed through the trees and out the far side. Here at last was the causeway—an old railway bank, raised against the flood-prone flatlands. The rails had long since rusted, or else been removed by enterprising locals to be melted down and repurposed. But the hefty concrete sleepers remained.
As soon as Davy had clambered up the bank he felt ridiculously exposed. Maybe Daniel’s portable bush wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. There wasn’t any other cover up here, beyond weeds and binding creepers.
The extreme straightness of the causeway’s line, out across the cold water, looked uncanny, even unpleasant, after so much natural variety. But it meant they could pass over rather than through the water, moving directly north-north-west, instead of having to detour miles round the marshy bank. Daniel looked back, grimaced, and beckoned Davy on. Davy thought about looking behind him, but decided he’d rather not know how close the pursuers were.
“If we’re lucky their horses will be spooked by this strange spit.”
“And if we’re unlucky?”
“If we’re unlucky they’ll run us down like hounds chasing foxes. Come on.”
At first they made good progress. The line of falling sleet was getting appreciably closer, and the colder wind from its stormfront pushed at Davy’s face and body. But then fate gave them a hint as to whether luck or unluck was going to characterise their efforts: Daniel, stepping on a sleeper, dislodged a chunk of ancient concrete from its set, and did something horrible to his ankle—bent a knight’s-move shape out of his leg and foot. He went straight down, and sat there cursing inventively, clutching his lower leg.
Davy crouched beside him, but there was nothing he could do. Three times the older man gathered himself, somehow, into an upright position, but each time he could sustain no weight at all upon the injured joint. “I’m sorry my forktongue boy,” he said, through gritted teeth, “but I’m going to have to lean on you.”
“OK,” said Davy, uncertainly.
Daniel abandoned the birch bough, shouldered his pack and tried to use Davy as a crutch. It didn’t work, though. The lad was too short, and did not have the necessary strength to keep him up.
“We’re wasting time,” Daniel snarled, from the ground.
“Leave the backpack, maybe?”
“Not on your nelly.”
“My what?”
“Christ alive. Nelly, nelly, nelly. Come on, we have to go.”
Davy looked around. On either side the flat expanse of cold water stretched away; slushy ice moving queasily against the banks of the causeway. To his left chunks of larger ice bobbed and lolled as the flow carried them south. Up ahead the storm was much closer. Behind them, the riders had made it onto the old rail track, and were trotting towards them with an insolent leisureliness. It was horses they were riding, not donkeys; and nothing in the horses’ demeanour suggested they were in the least spooked about the track they now traversed. Davy could see the riders were all armed, some with rifles, some with crossbows.
“Come on,” said Daniel. He had retrieved the broken bough and was trying to fit his shoulder in amongst the dry leaves and smaller branches, to be able to use the broken end of the branch itself as the base of an impromptu crutch. He had his pack over his other shoulder and managed a few stumpy strides, before he went down again. He struggled up once more, and Davy tried to help him, and the cliff-wall of sleety rain curtained the whole land before them, mauve and black and flecked with shadowed blue-white. It was suddenly much colder, and Davy’s hair was alive and struggling as if it wanted to leave his scalp. The stormfront was almost upon them.
Where the rain struck the surface of the water it sent up a mighty hissing sound like something cooking in a vast frying pan. But their pursuers had finally caught up.
“The end of the line,” shouted one of the riders, drawing her horse up. She balanced a rifle across her forearm.
Daniel struggled upright yet again. “Abigail,” he yelled, over the sound of the sleet ss-ing into the water behind him. “What a delightful surprise.”
The other riders brought their horses up behind the first woman. All had rifles and crossbows and all of these were aimed at Daniel.
“You shot Steph through the hand with a crossbow bolt.”
“Yes. Sorry about that. That was the friendliest option available to me at the time. She all right?”
“You know you half-choked her when you tied her to that rail, yeah? I mean, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, sorry about that too. But I knew you’d come get her. And look at it this way: you got a free length of rope out of the deal. That’s not to be sniffed at.”
“Nobody’s laughing, Daniel. You’re deep in the shit.”
“Did you call me deep and a shit? Because, you know, half of that is actually a compliment.”
“You heard what I said.”
“It’s just,” he shouted, “it’s pretty hard to hear you, over the noise of this storm.”
Davy looked behind him. The first few bulletheaded drops of freezing rain were arriving, banging the ground like a drum, pulling tall nipple-shaped splashes out of the surrounding water.
Then the storm was on them. There was a sound like a gigantic sigh, uttered by the whole of the air around them, and suddenly everybody was wet. Thick threads of water were everywhere, spinal plummets of freezing drenching rain. The horses didn’t like it, shook and jerked their heads. All at once the storm swallowed them. Everything was rain: cold drops hard as shot pummelled him from above. Everything went murky and indistinct, and the level of noise magnified. Davy was soaked in a moment, and
shivering with cold in another.
“End of the line, Daniel,” called Abigail, again.
“Don’t,” he said, the expression on his face visibly slackening, “don’t hurt the boy. All right? He’s a good kid.”
Davy looked at him and felt a queasy sensation in his gut.
“That’s out of your hands now, Daniel,” said Abigail, shaking her head. She lifted the rifle a fraction and put her free hand down to her horse’s neck, to calm it before the gun’s startling discharge. The intensity of the hard rain was increasing. She may have said something else. Davy couldn’t be sure. His ears were filled with the percussion of the whole sky, and it was hard to make out anything through the rainfall.
Davy’s panic swelled. “Wait,” he called, but his voice sounded thin and reedy. He put a hand to his face to wipe the water away. It felt like total immersion, and the water was as cold as if it had fallen all the way from outer space. On either side of him the Thames, insofar as it could be seen at all through the torn-up, blurry air, was fizzingly spiky and white and lively.
Abigail was saying something else, but though Davy could see her mouth moving, and could hear a sort of human-sounding wah-wah in amongst the crashing and flushing of the rainfall, he couldn’t make out any words. Daniel was staring up at her.
She lifted her rifle a fraction more, aiming it with one hand, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing. Either the round was a dud already, or else the sudden rain had seeped in and soddened it. And Daniel was suddenly in motion. He lurched forward, his mouth wide open, possibly yelling—it was impossible to hear over the noise of the storm. But it was surely a yell, for he had put his bad foot forward, and surely that hurt like hell. His motion brought him close enough to swing the bough at the snout of Abigail’s horse, and the beast didn’t like that—flinched back, danced several hoofsteps in reverse, pressed its rump into the face of the horse behind. Abigail was shouting something, and one of the riders behind got a shot off—even in amongst the huge sound of the storm Davy heard the detonation clearly and saw the briefly shining tassel of discharging gunpowder leaving the end of the barrel.