by Adam Roberts
Even as the charge was exiting the gun, Daniel was ducking down; or not ducking, so much as falling forward, unable to bear any weight on his bad ankle. But it was a strategic tumble. He bent both knees, hit the sodden ground, and slid on his belly away to the left.
A second rider, further back, fired her rifle too, and a moment later something flickered through, glinting in the scrabbled light. It might have been a crossbow bolt.
Daniel was no longer on the causeway.
Abigail swung herself into an athletic dismount, put her jammed rifle into its saddle holster and pulled out a crossbow of her own. She stepped over a sleeper, knelt down and aimed the weapon into the water. She was only a few feet from Davy, and it occurred to him that she was presenting him with a target. He could tackle her, push her, fight. But of course he didn’t do that. Of course he did nothing.
She was trying to see through the scratched-up rainy view, to pick out Daniel’s form in the frothing water. Or, maybe, to check that he had gone under and wasn’t coming back up. One of the other women shouted something from her horse. Davy couldn’t make out what, but he heard Abigail’s reply. “He’s gone.”
The hammering din of the rain, everywhere, all around, all encompassing. Water streaming into his eyes.
It felt as though some entity inside Davy’s gut reached up and clutched hard at his heart.
Abigail stood up, wiping her face clear of water, scanning the scene.
Then there was another shot. Not from the causeway this time. Abigail’s horse snorted a great puff of steam from its nostrils and made a noise somewhere between a cough and a groan, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the storm. A fat black fly had landed on its big horse face, just behind its left eye. But this fly didn’t rest there. Nor did it fly away. Instead, freakishly, the fly dissolved and spread. It began generating matter out of its deliquescing body, and this became a trickle and then a constant flow, spurting down the beast’s broad cheek and dripping off it to fall, with the rain, to the ground. The horse coughed again, and then knelt on its two forelegs, with a clunk and a shudder of its harness. Then the beast rolled onto its side and put its head on one of the crumbling railway sleepers as a pillow, and lay still.
Abigail watched this, her mouth an O. Then she turned and lifted her crossbow and aimed—shifted her aim and tried again—and aimed a third time. Didn’t pull the trigger. She could see nothing to shoot, and there was no point in wasting a crossbow bolt.
Davy stared at the dead horse. Rain pounded it and fizzed a kind of halo over the curve of its body. It was so bulky. So much weight and heft, and yet it was dead. It had possessed life in its enormous frame, and now it possessed none at all. The sheer weight of the corpse made it seem, somehow, more dead than it otherwise would.
But his eye was distracted by Abigail in motion. It took him a moment to understand what she was doing. She was dancing—leaping in a pure frenzy of frustration. And she was screaming at the frantic water, yelling through the endless rain, “Daniel you’ll pay for that—I’ll make you pay for that—I’ll personally make you pay for that!”
Soon enough she got it out of her system. The rage dance ceased. The rain continued falling, and the women gathered to strip the body of the horse of its trappings, and redistribute them to the other mounts. Finally they came for Davy, with a hood for his head and a set of old metal handcuffs for his wrists, and then he was hauled up, sightless, onto a horse behind one of the women, and away they went.
INTERVAL
The Borough
HENRY WAS SHORT for Henrietta. She had heard the joke about her name many times, and from all sorts of people—had, indeed, heard it reinvented from scratch by a whole new generation who thought they were being clever and unique. When she was a girl it would be:
“Hey, I’m looking for my sister.”
“Henrietta?”
“He did? That’s terrible!”
And when she was an old woman it would be:
“Say, what’s the deal with that old woman up on Stately, with the goats?”
“Henrietta?”
“Did he?”
“Hungry times, I guess.”
When she was a child she would smile along with the joke, not because she found it amusing, but because people liked jokes, and there was no harm in indulging them. But the older she got the less patience she had with people and their foolishnesses. As if this was an epoch for jokes!
Then again, if her long life had taught her anything it was that jokes contained a pip of truth inside them, and that this truth was always uncomfortable. Take Punch and Judy, popular with travelling puppet-men. Itinerants entertaining villages for a heel of bread and a cup of beer—what was funny about Punch and Judy if not our fear of being beaten, or our deeper fear at how much we would enjoy beating others? And what did that say about us?
One time, Father John’s people hanged a man for stealing sheep. They threw the rope over a tree bough, and as they fitted the condemned man’s head into the noose he said, “This is a strange necktie, my friends, it floats up instead of hanging down.” And everybody laughed! The whole crowd gathered to see it laughed. Then the hangman said, no need to worry there, my friend, when we tighten this knot your tongue will come out and hang all the way down to your balls, and the crowd had laughed even harder. Henry had been there, an old woman by this time, and she had seen it with her own eyes. Why were they laughing? And the most remarkable thing was: the condemned man had laughed harder at the hangman’s joke than anybody else! What was he laughing at, except his own death? And why else was he laughing, except that the alternative was to weep and howl and despair?
So, the people who made fun of young Henry’s name died, and Henry survived, and Henry was not devoured by death. Lady Death in her black silk dress.
On the contrary, it was Henry who did the devouring.
That’s how it turned out in the end, anyway.
Somehow, as all the people she knew and loved fell away, Henry stayed alive, such that she eventually became very old. Too old to know precisely how old she was.
She was long-lived enough, in fact, to have a kind of personal connection with the catastrophe that had redefined the whole world. Her grandmother had witnessed it, or so she claimed, when she had been a young girl. She had seen the Sisters with her own eyes, she said. They’d been living in Milton Keynes, and her great grandmother had worked with ‘computers’, those magic boxes that had powered so much of pre-disaster life. Gran had been at school, the day it happened. Or so she said.
Henry’s mother used to warn her, “Don’t take everything granny says literally. These sorts of stories get built up over time. A pinch of salt,” she used to say, “is needful for the listening. I think she probably heard the story from her mum, and has appropriated it as her own.” And Henry could believe it.
Still, granny was as vivid as a poet: she was only six years old, she said, and at a primary school, and they’d all been out in the schoolyard playing at breaktime when there was a great shining dazzle in the sky. It illuminated the whole west of the sky so violently that the horizon was swallowed in light, and the trees outside the school were silhouetted so blackly that for three days afterwards they appeared on your inside-eyelids every time you closed your eyes! All the kids in the playground had stared, and then a couple of the younger ones had started crying. Granny said she hadn’t cried herself, not at first. The brightness faded, and everyone was blinking—all the teachers had come outside to stare up at the sky.
After that, Granny said, there was another set of blue-white flickers, from way over the horizon. Everybody started crying then, even some of the teachers, Granny said. Then, after the light, came the noise—a great tidal wave of rumbling and grinding, loud enough to hurt your ears. And a great wind. And then: panic.
Great-Grandmother used to have family in Nottingham, and in the first weeks of the chaos she had taken her family up there; but the city back then was a mess, riots and fires and destruction,
and granny’s two brothers had died. After a period—Granny was hazy about the length of this period, and the specifics—they’d ended up in Bicester, but then there was some kind of explosion and fire in Banbury that took down most of the town, and a bunch of refugees came south to Bicester, and life in the town grew uncomfortable. So Granny moved out, and somehow got hold of some land to the east, here in the Borough. By the time Great-Granny died, long before Henry’s own birth, they owned a smallholding.
Granny had married and bore many children, including (she claimed) six sons. When Henry asked her mother, “So I have six uncles?” Mammy would shake her head sadly. The details never got unpacked or laid out, because they were too painful, or perhaps because they were too muddled in Granny’s head. She was a very old woman by the time Henry was old enough to pay her any attention, and would ramble, and repeat herself. Maybe her uncles had gone off to fight for some warlord or other and had got killed. Maybe they just got sick and died. Happened a lot.
Still, Granny Taylor had lived through the worst times and come out the other side. That was something. And if some of her children had not, then at any rate Henry’s mother, Georgina, had not only survived but prospered. Everybody was raising livestock. The new climate made arable farming tricky. The year was punctuated by a lengthy monsoon, weeks and weeks—months, some years—of crop-rotting rain. Winters tended to dip into shocking cold, and the summers were short. And yet somehow Mammy had got into a rhythm of growing wheat and corn, such that she had a surplus harvested and stored-away come the rains, and that made her rich.
She had married, and Henry’s Dadda had built a barn, and the two of them had had four children, of which brood Henry was the youngest daughter. But Dadda had died when Henry was a baby. He got stones in his bladder, Mammy said, and they grew so agonising and stopped his pissing and his legs swelled and the whole thing became impossible. So he had arranged for a doctor to come up from Oxford, because Oxford people knew about these things. The doctor was paid to cut the stones out, but the operation didn’t go well. Dadda had bled a lot, and kept seeping blood, Mammy said, and his operation cut had never healed properly, and soon enough it went black and bad and he’d got so hot he yelled he was being roasted on a fire, and then he had died.
“You were sad,” Henry said.
She must have been—who knows? Five years old, six maybe, when she first heard this tale. She had noticed that the other kids had fathers and asked why she didn’t, and Mammy had laid the whole story out. It meant little to her.
“I was sad,” Mammy confirmed. “Everyone was sad for years and years.”
Still, Mammy’s oldest child was twelve when Dadda died, and old enough to help; and over the following years all four kids were recruited into the running of the farm. It was a fine art, timing the crops, Mammy used to say, and some years it didn’t work out. Some years the Monsoon came early, or the rain stopped altogether and parched the wheat. But other years they were able to grow and harvest a barnful of grain, and people came from all over—came from as far as Aylesbury and Winslow to buy their grain. People love bread. That’s how people are.
They also kept pigs, of course, for the scraps, and a couple of goats and some chickens. In lean years they’d eat most of these, and in fat years they’d buy more. After Dadda’s death Mammy took another man, Jim, but he was a wastrel and got drunk and she kicked him out. He came back from time to time, yelling, and the two of them would fight. One time he hit her so hard she dropped down—dead, Henry thought, running to her and crying and hugging her, but she was all right. She got back up after five minutes, groggy and complaining, but still alive. The side of her forehead went a queer shape for a week or two, but then settled back to normal. Two weeks after that Jim came back to live with them, and never mentioned it. And Mammy asked him to leave, and he didn’t. So she yelled at him to leave, and he threatened her with his fists until she stopped yelling, and then he got drunk on the last of their beer. The next morning he wasn’t breathing, and Mammy got Ted—Henry’s older brother—to help her dig a grave.
“The booze takes some men that way,” Mammy said. “They tope too much, and the next thing their lungs stop. It’s sad but it’s sometimes what happens, and we’d best be quiet about it.”
Some years later Ted told his sister, “We didn’t bury him, you know, Henry. The pigs ate him. The pigs ate him up.”
“Good,” was what Henry said to that.
After that was Uncle Sunil, and he was a much nicer person. A little lazy, when it came to helping out, but good-natured and a born storyteller—fantastical stories with no basis in reality, about things like flying cows and strange monsters and treasure hidden in caves. And life was not bad for a while. They got on well with their neighbours, and all went to church in Bicester most Easters and Christmases, and when bandits came rattling through young Ted joined the posse to scare them away. Later they ended up paying their tithe for protection—to Father John’s predecessor, a Scotsman with the unusual name of Wod. Soon enough, though, and with what looked in retrospect like inevitability, Father John took over the whole landscape north of Oxford and they ended up paying their tithe to his men instead. John’s ascendancy at least reduced the incursions by bandits, though it did little to stop individual thieves.
Mammy Taylor put up a big wire fence all round the farm, with some old rusty barbed wire along the top. This wasn’t much of a deterrent to pilferers and trespassers but it was better than nothing. Over the years she supervised the bolstering of this boundary with wooden posts, and pieces of salvaged infrastructure from the old world, and that was much better. But having walls alone was not enough: the key was having people to guard the walls. And although Mammy took on extra workers at harvest there wasn’t enough to do in the farm most of the year to enable her to build up the community enough to protect it properly. So things were always a little precarious: some years good, and some bad.
One year a group of lads were tearing up the countryside—originally from Cambridge way, the rumour was—and they abducted Henry’s older sister Jenny. She was gone for three weeks, and bad things happened to her. Eventually she came home, because Wod’s men had hanged all the Cambridge boys and let her go. But she was never the same: didn’t want to talk about it, couldn’t get back into the rhythm of farm life. Soon after that she told Mammy she was going, and not reasoning, not begging, not tears could persuade her otherwise. She took some supplies and went south.
Henry never saw her again. She got on with life. She brewed the beer, because that was one of her chores. Beer was safer to drink than water. She tidied and cleaned. She fed the goats and the chickens. She grew up from childhood into adulthood.
Wild pigs got established in the woodland east of the farm, and Ted used to go out hunting them with a group of his friends. It made a pleasant change to eat the gamey pork of these beasts, and when the hunters came home successful it was an excuse for festivity: a big fire and as much meat as anyone could eat, songs and stories. One year, though, Ted shot a big boar with his crossbow without killing it, and the creature ran him down, and trampled his face. The pig’s trotter put out one of Ted’s eyes, and scarred up his face pretty badly, and his good temper deserted him after that. One glimpse in a mirror, and he would grow sullen and angry. He married, eventually, and Henry hoped that his wife would restore him to the easy-going brother he had been before, but it didn’t work out that way. Then Uncle Sunil died of asthma. And then there were several hard years, when somebody from somewhere—who knew the details?—tried to topple Wod and seize his kingdom. It was open war in the summer, and winters of sniping and guerrilla raids, and life grew pinched and untrusting. But they lived through it, and whatever was going on in the larger world resolved itself, and the fat years returned.
When she was of age Henry married a boy called Dick from Fringford, and they had two children. She left home to live with him in a house near his family and swapped-out farming for armoury work. Dick’s father made bullets in a b
ig shed in their garden: difficult, pernickerty work that left him exhausted at the day’s end. Dick helped him.
“It’s the danger,” he told Henry. “It’s a constant worry. The whole place could explode—any time.”
Sourcing the raw materials was also tricky, and expensive. But it was lucrative work, because everybody wanted ammo, and Wod’s people favoured Dick senior since his rounds had a lower failure rate than many others. So Dick lived pretty well, and for a time Henry had so much leisure time she grew bored.
“Just care for the kids,” Dick said, but that hardly occupied her whole day.
When she travelled home for a visit Mammy scolded her preciousness, “Nothing to do all day? You should relish it!”
Henry’s kids were Owl and Crow—Oliver and Charles, really, but Owl and Crow to everyone. Bright, curious kids full of laughter. And they grew strong and tall, and Henry, who knew how to read, taught them their letters. Then at the age of eleven Owl fell out of a tree and broke his thigh, and though a doctor reset it something wasn’t right about the fracture, and the leg swelled big as a sack of gloop and went black and in a week Owl was dead. Crow died the following winter of a fever that came out of nowhere and from which he seemed to get better. But even though he seemed to get better he still died. Dick never got over this double blow. He withdrew into himself, and he and Henry stopped having sex, and eventually she left him, just walked away and returned to her Mammy. She later heard that Dick had been press-ganged into Wod’s army, when Father John made his play for power, and that he had died at the Battle of Little Tew. She also heard that Dick senior went on making bullets for Father John, just as he had done for Wod before him. For what else would he do?
The early years of Father John’s rule were not easy, because John at that time was young and ruthless and wanted to stamp his authority on the land. Many people got hanged. Some of these danglers were thieves and troublemakers, who deserved it; and some were cranky people who did nothing worse than call John names or mumble in the tavern. Three years of bad harvests made things worse, because everybody was hungry and restless and that only made John and his lieutenants more paranoid and so more ruthless. But then the weather improved and there were half a dozen years of plenty and life settled down into more bearable rhythms.