by Adam Roberts
“Amy,” said Davy.
“Indeed,” said the old woman, and gave Davy a significant look.
“And you two founded Wycombe? I thought it had been around for fifty years or something.”
“We didn’t found Wycombe. There was already a community of women here when we arrived. They were strong in moral authority and weak in political power—paying a tithe to local warlords, in goods and sexual services. They were trying to make something beautiful in an ugly world and it wasn’t easy. They were all about the justice, about the fairness. About community and helping others. It was a fine little world.” The old woman was sounding almost wistful. “But,” she said, altering her tone, “doomed. Absolutely doomed. There was no leadership. They sent collective prayers to the goddess, but they were within a year of being entirely wiped out. Probably less than that, probably six months. Soon enough some warlord was going to come driving through and carry them all away as chattel. Surprising, in fact, that it hadn’t already happened. But then we came, Amy and I. And I was able to persuade them that justice could be a martial as well as a social virtue. I was able to train them, and give them the skill to fight. It was partly a matter of teaching them the basics, and partly a matter of getting them to see that exercising those skills could be a matter of the craftsman’s pride. I did that. And Amy kitted us out. Amy and her crew. Plus we had geographical advantages, on account of the topography of Wycombe itself. So we defeated some of the raiders, and built up our defences, and then we had to start expanding.”
“You did?”
“I’m afraid so. Standing still isn’t an option, you see. But expanding modestly, really. It’s either that or be swallowed up by some other expanding territory. My strategy is to expand a sphere of influence rather than to march into neighbouring lands and install occupying garrisons. But it amounts to the same thing.”
“My mother’s name is Amy,” said Davy.
The old woman nodded at this, but went on with her narrative. “So as I was saying, my primary job, in terms of running this place, is having a workable medium-term strategy to ensure our defence, and therefore our survival. That means assessing the varying risks of the enemies that are ranged against us, on all sides, and having a plan to deal with them. There’s a nasty little tribe that’s seized most of Kent. They will probably become a problem in a few years, although for now there’s London’s wasteland between us. To the south is a patchwork of communes and small-time gangsters with little manors. To the west—well it used to be the various peoples of the Downs. But a few years back there was a big bust-up, and lots and lots of people got killed: farms burned, people gunned down in the countryside, guerrilla war and snipers. All in all a bad business, and a vacuum into which Guz marched a well-trained little army up from Portsmouth. So now we can say: to the west is Guz. And I have to give them credit, Guz is an unusual problem for me. For the moment they’re just holding off, as I said. My best guess is that they’re waiting to see if we beat John, or if John beats us. In the former eventuality they might then judge Wycombe weakened to the point where it makes it a reasonable roll of the dice to come across the Thames and take us over. If John wins, then maybe they’ll come anyway, and try and eject his army from the highlands. Either way it makes sense for them to hold back for now.”
“There were soldiers of Guz,” Davy put in, “at the ambush where Abigail and the others died. Where I got shot in the shoulder.”
“Indeed there were. An expeditionary force, you might say. Interested not in invasion but in snatching you.”
“Me.”
“They had identified you as an asset, although they didn’t know why you were an asset. But they knew we wanted you, and that was enough. It’s the same with John: he was happy to grab you, or kill you, and probably happier to do the latter, because he knew it would thwart me. He doesn’t know why it would thwart me, but in the final analysis that doesn’t matter to him. That’s male thinking too: if it pisses off my enemy it must be good.”
“I’m male.”
“So you are! And now you’re here.”
“And that’s good for you.”
“That’s very good for me. Good for Wycombe. I don’t mind telling you I was extremely relieved when they told me you were likely to live.”
“As was I,” said Davy.
“Come along,” said the old woman, hopping off the bed. “Situate your gluteus maximus in this little mobile chair. You need to come along with me.”
“People keep saying that to me,” said Davy, levering himself up off his bed. His shoulder twanged with pain, but he got to his feet. “Come along with me, they say. Where are we going this time?”
“I need to show you to somebody. He was very disbelieving when I said you were still alive. Told me, in point of fact, that he saw you killed.”
Davy had a flash of insight. “Daniel?” He lowered himself into the wheelchair and let out a sigh.
“Hobbling along on a hurty ankle, poor fellow.”
Miranda, who had been waiting by the doorway, stepped over to push him, and so he followed the old woman out of the room.
Immediately outside was a long, wide corridor, the walls of which were hung with a series of paintings much too large for them, and presumably salvaged from elsewhere. They were all very old, the surface of the paint overlaid with a network of irregular hexagon and spiderweb cracks. Beautiful women in blue silk gowns, with light shining from, presumably, an electrical light fixed in the backs of their necks just out of sight. Old men holding up clasped hands, either because they were praying at the sky or else because they’d just caught a fly in the space between their cupped palms. A barn filled with animals, including two cows that were, in Davy’s professional opinion, very unlifelike, all crowding round a wooden box in which a bizarrely-proportioned fat baby sprawled.
They turned a corner and rolled down towards an exit. “It was all to do with Rafbenson,” said Davy. “I know that much.”
“What’s that, my dear?”
“Rafbenson. Benson, some people call it. What’s there? Daniel thought there were whole flights of magic machines that could swoosh humans through the air from sea to sea in the blink of an eye.”
“That,” said the old woman, “sounds rather more like a fantasy than any kind of verisimilitude.” She had stopped at a big door and was poking a code into an ancient keypad—silver metal buttons standing proud of a tarnished metal rectangle. Davy watched her, fascinated. They didn’t have anything like this where he came from. The lock clucked open and she pushed the door open.
Miranda pushed Davy outside. The air was fresh, sweet in the nose and the mouth. The sheep were making their creaky calls.
“What is at Benson, Mrs Henry?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said the old woman.
“So this has all been a wild goose chase?”
“Goose,” said the old woman, flashing a rare smile at him. “Goose! Very good. That’s closer to the truth, my dear.” She was walking alongside the wheelchair now, and Miranda was making sure to push it at a slow enough pace.
“Goose,” said Davy. “Goose-geese. What?”
“There’s nothing at Benson. Nothing of value. Not any more. What—did you think I was going to leave all the valuable kit just sitting around those hangers, did you? We retrieved it all years ago. The issue wasn’t the kit. The issue was always how to deploy the kit. And for that we needed—”
“Amy,” said Davy.
“She has her areas of genius, and I have mine. She’s a remarkable woman, she truly is, your mother. I have loved her as I have no other human being in my life. And I have had a long and varied life.”
“So weird to think of her like that,” said Davy. “I mean, of her having a life before—well, before us.” They were rolling along a wide path, fringed with weeds, towards a blocky three story building made of red-orange bricks. Smoke was idling out of a chimney. The air was chilly, but not unbearably cold.
“I’m assuming she didn�
��t talk much about her life before she started her family?” the old woman asked.
“Not with me. But then she never much talked about anything with me. I was the son, and she reserved her most intense interactions for my sisters. Although, I don’t suppose they know any more about Ma’s earlier life than I do. Than I did.”
“I would assume she didn’t want to tempt them. If she spoke too enthusiastically about Wycombe, her daughters might leave her and make their way here. Plenty of daughters do.”
“I guess she didn’t want to lose them,” Davy agreed. “Or not yet, at any rate. But, see, that’s one part of it all that just doesn’t make sense. I mean, me. I mean: why me?”
“I believe I already made clear my opinion of why-questions,” said the old woman.
“Seriously, though. You wanted leverage against my mother, and I get that—I get why. No, I don’t, actually. But I get that you might want such leverage. So kidnap one of my sisters. She loves them more than me.”
“She doesn’t, though.”
“I think,” said Davy, turning his face away because his eyes were feeling hot and pricklish, “I understand the emotional dynamic of my own family better than a stranger.”
The fresh air stroked his cheek. Baa said the sheep. Hush said the air.
“I knew your mother long before you were born, my dear. She values your sisters more than she does you, perhaps. But she doesn’t love them more. I’ve been a mother and I can tell you: that’s not how love works.”
His eyeballs weren’t getting any less hot or wet or prickly. Davy stared into the distance. The meadows, with their sheep, looked smaller outside. The forest at the edge of the estate looked larger, the bare trees blacker and sharper-twigged.
“If we had grabbed one of your sisters,” Henry said in a dispassionate tone, “Amy would have reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter was at Wycombe. It would, almost, not even be a hardship to her. She would miss the girl of course, but she would also know that she was in a good place. Her son—now, see, that is a different matter.”
“Because I’m not allowed in?”
“Well that was my mistake,” said the old woman, with a wry look of self inculpation. “I miscalculated. I thought you were still a young boy. But in the end it didn’t matter. We can keep you out here.”
“Here isn’t Wycombe?”
“There’s a zone around Wycombe proper. We call it low Wycombe, though it’s actually, topographically, higher. And we allow men to settle here, if they want to, and are prepared to work. Most of the men are just visitors—mercenaries, some of them; traders other. They come because women visit them for sex, when the women feel like it.”
“Aye-aye?” Davy said.
“Women who give birth to kids raise them in Wycombe,” said Henry. “If they’re daughters they can stay. If they’re sons they have to move out at thirteen. Either way, Amy would not be happy with you being here.”
“Because?”
“Because she knows we would kill you, if necessary. And she knows that we could never do that with one of her daughters.”
It didn’t really strike home to Davy, the full weight of this statement. He understood it, but somehow it seemed abstract rather than real. He reflected, though, that it was surely a real thing. That he ought to feel alarmed.
“Ah,” he said.
“It’s nothing personal dear,” said the old woman. As if that made it better.
They had reached another building now, rolling up a ramp to the main door. “Is my Ma here?” Davy asked.
“No dear,” said Henry. “I’m afraid not.”
Inside the main building was a tall, chill hallway, paved with wooden tiles. The walls were crowded with many large, gold-framed paintings.
A woman sitting behind a desk nodded respectfully as Henry walked through.
At the rear of the entrance hall they opened another door and went through to another corridor, this one darker—still lit with electrical light bulbs, but walled and ceilinged in dark wood panels.
“Why did my Ma leave?” he asked the old woman. “Why did she leave you all, to have us?”
Henry was walking ahead of him now, since there wasn’t space in the corridor to walk alongside his chair. When she didn’t reply Davy assumed that she hadn’t heard. But just as he was about to repeat his question she said:
“For a great many people, the strength of Wycombe is its principles. Your mother is one of those people. Most of us are, in one way or another. There are plenty here who would be surprised to hear me say it, but I’m one myself.”
They’d reached a door at the far end of the corridor, but instead of opening it, Henry turned and faced Davy, in his chair.
“There is, I would imagine, a proof of it somewhere, like the proof about how you need at least four colours to colour a map, or that incompleteness theorem, whose name escapes me, and about whose details my memory is a little hazy.”
“A proof of what?”
“Of the impossibility of political rule in accordance with absolute adherence to moral principle. Politics is always pragmatism, I’m afraid. The two words are almost synonyms. And although it is possible to leaven pragmatism with morals, at least a little—I’d say, indeed, it’s impossible to rule if you set out to be purely pragmatic—nonetheless…” She frowned, and stared over Davy’s head for a while.
“Nonetheless…?” he prompted.
“I had to do what was necessary to keep Wycombe safe. Which meant: strong. Which meant: pugnacious. Do you know to what the word realpolitik refers?”
“I know what the word real means. But not the rest.”
“Ah well. Long story short, Amy grew disillusioned. She grew disillusioned with many things: with me, with Wycombe… she would say with what Wycombe had become. She even became disillusioned with technology, and that was the most puzzling thing of all because that was a passion that preceded all the others. When I first met your mother do you know what she was doing?”
“No.”
“She was fishing old tech out of the lake at Marlow. Good grief how she loved all that stuff! But she turned her back on it, went west, married some man and had children. A farm, of all things! Of course she had a crew under her, here at Wycombe I mean. And some of the brighter ones had even managed to learn something from her. So we carried on. But it’s never been quite the same. Never quite the same.”
She turned back and opened the door. “Davy,” said a voice from the room beyond. “Is that you? Good to see you, my lad.” It was Daniel, and he was in handcuffs.
Chapter Seventeen
BEYOND THE DOOR was a wide, low-ceilinged room lit by dim electrical light bulbs—a row of them, all tucked away behind the rim of some ledge-like ceiling coving. There were many tables and many people sitting at them. A dozen, or so. On some of the tables were boxes—microwave ovens, perhaps, like the one Mother Patel had owned for about a fortnight, and which heated things up by the magic of electricity—but Davy wasn’t sure.
When Henry came padding into this room all the people at all the desks stood up: no exceptions. Daniel, his hands tied before him, was already standing. Henry waved them all down, and they took their seats again.
“You all right, lad?” Daniel asked Davy. “I thought I saw you killed at the battle of Rout’s Green. I’m genuinely glad to see that I was wrong about that. Can you walk, though?”
“Oh yes,” said Davy. “Mine spine is fine. I mean, my spine. It’s fine. I’m just still… what’s the word?”
“Recuperating?”
“Exactly. Convalescing. What happened to you? Did they capture you?”
“Not exactly. Though, then again,” he glowered at the other people in the room, “not everybody would consider treating an envoy like this to be acceptable behaviour.”
“Not everybody,” said Henry, “would consider Guz to be entirely trustworthy. Are we ready?” This last was addressed to one of the women manning one of the microwaves. Two switches were flicked,
and the hum of a generator increased in pitch somewhere near at hand. Lights came on, and the front door of the box flickered with light.
It wasn’t a microwave at all.
“It’s a screen,” said Daniel. “Do you see?”
Davy looked more closely. The screen was spittered with whiteout blotches, and there was a shimmering white line down one side; but the rest of the rectangle showed an animated picture of broccoli and a strip of fabric. The image was in motion, as if a camera were moving slowly across the surface of this still life.
It took a moment for Davy to understand what he was seeing: a falcon’s-eye view of forest, with a river in the middle distance. And when he realised that, the image revealed all sorts of new details. There were houses on the far side of the river, little boxy structures in amongst the trees; and boats moored on the riverbank like rice-grains. And there was a bridge. Was that the pontoon the old woman had mentioned earlier?
“It’s Goring,” said Davy. “You fitted a movie-picture camera to a bird.”
“You’re a smart one,” said Henry. “And yes, this machine is a kind of bird, and it has a kind of movie camera in its snout. We brought home two dozen of these drones from Benson—decades ago, long, long years. The engines run on a kind of sealed battery, and Amy figured out how to renovate and recharge it. But the hardest part was in speaking its own machine language to it. Programming, the books call it, and it’s not like any human language. The pre-Sisters humans designed dozens and dozens of them—of the languages, I mean. A whole spread of different machine languages! Who knows why? To baffle their enemies, perhaps. They left us lots of books about them, the programming languages, but none of those books explain the reason for the sheer proliferation of them. Anyway, Amy solved it. She has a genius for such things.”