“Thanks for the warning,” said Unt bitterly.
“Hey, it’s like I said, I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I prepared you with anything less than the truth.”
Unt swallowed a mouthful of food. “I wanted to be a farmer,” he said.
They sat in silence for a while as Unt devoured his last meal. He kept looking to the door but it remained unmoving.
“What you going to do, then?” asked Pearson after a while.
“I haven’t had much time to think about it,” said Unt. “It doesn’t seem two hours ago that I was sat in our office, looking forward to lunch.”
“Well, you’d better start thinking about it,” said Pearson, “because you won’t stay in good shape for long.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Head south,” Pearson spoke with certainty. “Most of the people passing through here are heading south so there must be something there. Besides, if you get lost, south’s an easy direction to find: if you look at the trees, moss always grows on the south side.”
Unt figured if you could tell one direction you could work out all others anyway but it wasn’t worth saying.
“Oh, and look for a stream,” said Pearson. “If you find one, follow it. Flowing water’s always going somewhere and what’s more, it never comes back.”
At that point, a door to the rear opened and a black-clad Ranger came forward. His hood was up, concealing his face and in his hand was a murderous-looking glaive. “It’s time,” he said.
Pearson extended one of his big, white hands. “Good luck, mate,” he said.
Unt took the offered hand then rose in the shadow of the Ranger. He didn’t say a thing as he was led away toward the exit. At the threshold, they were joined by a second Ranger. He took the opposite side of Unt to the first so that they bracketed him. A third Ranger stood to the side, ready to open the doors.
“Do it,” said the one who had first come for him.
The doorman opened it and the one who seemed in charge took them out into daylight.
The noise that met them hit Unt like a wall. The force of it almost pushed them backward. The crowd was pressed thick at the foot of the steps, the crush of bodies so dense that the ones at the front had to fight from being pushed forward.
Unt’s first feeling was that they were going to rush him, the Rangers were so few, but even in their feral madness, something staid them. It could have been the muscle-memory of acting like civilised people, or it could have been the glaive’s gleaming edge. “Back!” the lead Ranger bellowed and the mob succumbed.
“Make way!” said the Ranger, using a sweep of his weapon to sketch the path he wanted.
“Back!” Some in the crowd took up the order. There were heavy murmurings of dissent but a space was still cleared. Unt saw he was being directed down West Street, back toward his old neighbourhood. Was it a conscious effort to humble him before his old neighbours or was it just the easiest way out of town?
The mono-roar of the crowd gave way to a general rumble through which single insults were hurled like missiles. It was like a rain of bee stings: each strike did little damage on its own but it was the cumulative impacts that hurt.
Out of the square, the natural boundaries made by the street gave some shape to the disorder. By unspoken agreement, the crowd pushed back against its walls. This made a corridor through which Unt and his guards walked, although with so many people, the corridor was a narrow one.
Order was no salvation in the tight street. All the pent-up, crushed hopes and dreams of the onlookers were concentrated into a single pressure-cooker.
The chief Ranger laid a hand on his shoulder. “That won’t be necessary,” Unt told him but the hand remained.
They were maybe thirty yards down the street when the first object struck. Unt didn’t see it coming: the first he knew of it was a wet thud on the back of his neck. It was something neither hard nor soft: some piece of food, most likely. More followed, one after another, getting faster and thicker the way a heavy rain shower starts.
It was hitting him and he couldn’t see where it was coming from. The sight of a wheeling arm or the loop of some object was the only occasional warning. Most of it struck while he was still feeling the impact of the strike before it.
Some of the stuff was soft, some wet. It was the rotten food people had plucked from their bins especially for him. Some of it was just mud, filthy, stinking but harmless. But the worst were the stones. West Street was a busy thoroughfare and didn’t have proper rocks lying about but like anywhere, there were always small stones to be found and they were all finding their way to Unt.
He’d hoped to be dignified, to march out with his head held high, but as the stones rained in, he had to raise his arms to defend himself. The Rangers did nothing to stop the blows so long as nothing hit them. Unt was forced to see his way through the gaps in the crooks of his elbows.
The crowd was stationary; a viscous mass he had to wade through, but at the edges, against the buildings, he spotted the flicker of movement. Following his progress like shadows were the gambolling forms of children. Unt thought of what Pearson had said, how the children were the worst, and he saw that most of the stones were coming from them. Not happy with pelting him as he passed, they were pursuing him, harassing him like a hunting pack against a weakening prey.
And Unt was weakening. Each blow on its own did nothing - what Bull called an attention-getter - but taken together, hit after hit, it sapped him to the core. He was dying a death of a thousand cuts and over it all, like a leaden sky, was the hot noise that swamped him.
Then, through one of the gaps in his defences, he spotted a small child. It was a boy of no more than three with the curls of a cherubim. Someone had seen fit to bring him to this circus and placed him in the front row. Wet dribble glistened as it ran from the thumb stuck in its mouth, right down its wrist. It was the only unmoving thing in this valley of hate, a single point of innocence among it all.
It gave Unt hope. He smiled at the infant when its whole expression changed. In an instant, the angelic mask melted away and took on the vicious aspect of the adults. It contorted into a snarl of primal rage, the fury intensified by being borne on so small a face.
Unt recoiled in terror and almost fell to the floor. The grim hand on his shoulder saved him but not out of kindness. It propelled him back onto the human gutter that had been made for him and drove him on at its slow, relentless speed.
The missiles fell thinner as the ammunition grew scarce but still, Unt grew weaker. The constant barrage had cracked open his defensive shell and let the resistance flow out of him. He slowed and stumbled and the world slowed with him.
And then he heard a voice, a high, sermonising voice bellowing out from above the crowd. It was a voice he recognised. It belonged to Lasper. And then Unt saw him, head and shoulders above the mob. He’d made a pulpit from a stack of crates and Lasper now used it to stir the crowd into greater fury.
Unt could no longer tell the words. The strikes to his head had affected his hearing. It was like trying to listen through water. In spite of that, the tone was unmistakable and so were the wild gestures that were cast in Unt’s direction. An accusing finger was levelled at him like a weapon and Lasper looked like he intended to kill him with it.
The hate was gathered thick as tar around Lasper. It was hard to move beyond it. As Unt faltered, the sermon became an artillery command. A new shower of missiles fell upon him in a dense mass. Scores of impacts hammered him to the floor. His feet and shins were driven into the mud.
This was the end, thought Unt. The baying pack would fall upon the beaten animal before them.
But the final moments never came. Instead of rushing in on him, the crowd fell back. The Rangers, at last, were driving them off. Too many objects had accidentally hit them and their patience had run its course.
Unt was aware of the lead Ranger shouting and of Lasper shouting back but he couldn’t lift his head to follow what was going on. A
fter a lot of snarling back and forth, he stopped hearing his enemy’s voice. He must have been persuaded to leave, he thought, his parting shot at Unt delivered.
Unt took the respite to regain his breath and tried to raise himself but couldn’t. He felt a pair of hands under his armpits, hauling him up. He turned his head, expecting to see a reluctant or indifferent Ranger but what he saw was a frail old man.
As Unt regained his footing, the man stooped repeatedly and when he stood up, he plunged his hands into Unt’s pockets. Unt felt some weight added with every action. Uncomprehending, Unt put his hand in one pocket and came out holding a squashed and bruised apple.
The old man prised the apple out of his fingers and shoved it back in his pocket. He grabbed Unt’s chin and brought it to face his own. Before him was a pair of eyes, ringed with the redness of sunken sockets and framed with a wispy mane and beard of pure white. The eyes were a watery blue, whitened as though they’d been glazed with milk, but deep in their core there was an intensity of kindness like Unt had never seen.
The old man spoke. “Forget your shame and fill your pockets son, for God’s sake. Leave your pride there on the floor and accept these gifts from your enemies. Lord knows when you’ll get to feed again so fill up and bear on.”
At that point, a Ranger pushed the old man roughly away. “Hold back now!” he growled, speaking to the whole street. Order restored, the Rangers were returning to their charge.
They pushed on and Unt didn’t look up. He was focusing on the floor, driving on step by step. He shut out the noise, letting each yard of brown mud be his world.
A while after this retreat from his environment, he noticed he could see it clearer. He realised he’d forgotten to raise his defences again and that was when he noticed that the missiles had stopped. The noise, too, had abated and wound down to growls and utterances.
He dared to look up, which was difficult. Existing from moment to moment had been a seductive crutch but he sensed that now the time for crutches had passed. That meant the end was coming.
He looked around and saw he was in his old neighbourhood. The faces he saw were the ones he’d been seeing every day for his entire life. There was no fury here: that had belonged to the people who’d pushed themselves as far as they could up the street. Back here, the ire had mellowed like a river at its mouth. Unt looked in those faces and he still saw resentment but it was mixed with disbelief, curiosity and worst of all, disappointment. Somehow, his shame had become their shame and they would not meet his eye.
He saw his own house ahead. The windows were dark and empty. He wondered if Crystal was with Rob.
Back beyond his house, was Bulton’s. His family were stood on their porch and Bull was with them. Bull himself looked petrified and pale. His mother’s hands were on his shoulders. Yvesse, his surrogate mother, stood there with her family and looked on, emotionless.
Before Unt knew it, they were past the gap between the houses and Bull’s family were out of sight. Moments later, they were beyond Unt’s house too. They stood on the precipice of the embankment.
No more crowd stood before them. The bank was too steep to stand on comfortably. The only people still watching did so from the porches of the houses that clung to the slope.
One house in particular caught Unt’s attention. It was one he hadn’t thought of in quite a while. It was Mélie’s old house, where her father still dwelt alone, only now Unt saw two shadows in its recesses.
The silhouettes had a feminine shape and they melted away as he looked. A second later, they might never have existed but Unt knew what he had seen.
Down the steep steps they went, right to the bottom and beyond the last house. Still the Rangers said nothing.
The path now cut straight through the cornfields on its way to the river. The crop was high and golden, approaching the time when it would be taken in for harvest. Unt was sorry he’d never get to see it.
As they walked along the path with its walls of gold, it gave the procession a look of false cheer. It was almost cruel to make him walk out this way. He was being mocked with the things he would never know again.
In time, they reached the river and crossed the white-painted bridge. The river was shallow at the moment and he could see fish moving along its bed. Downstream, his eyes went to the jetty where all this trouble had begun. Even from this distance, he saw that the fish traps had been left to fall into disrepair. Even that had counted for nothing.
Beyond the bridge, the path continued its straight course along an embankment that cut the floodplain in two. Beyond that was Cherry Wood. Unt had never been beyond its borders and its dark undergrowth of knotted roots matched his growing fear.
After a while, they emerged into daylight but it was a daylight that belonged on the other side of the world. The path stretched onward into the distant Moxie Hills but here the Rangers stopped.
Unt waited but the Rangers didn’t move or say anything.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?” said the lead Ranger.
“What do I do?”
“Go,” said the Ranger.
“Where?” asked Unt.
The Ranger shrugged. “I don’t care but you can’t stay here.” He turned as though to lead his men back into the wood but he stopped and spoke again to Unt.
“You know our boundaries,” he said, “So no matter what route you take, don’t come back. If you try, we’ll find you.”
“Please,” said Unt. “Where does this path go?”
The Ranger considered whether to answer. “Can’t say I know,” he said. “Nowhere, as far as we’ve been. Folks have passed through saying there’s another town some way down. No one’s come back, mind. Make of that what you will.”
With a gesture of his glaive, he led his men away.
17. Wandering
There was no town further down the road. There was nothing. Not as far as the road went, anyhow. Way beyond the town boundaries, the path remained well-trodden. For mile after mile, Unt walked with ease. Despite his bruises, his worries seemed to slip off as he strolled in the sunshine. He found a stream which he used to wash off the mud and rotten food juices and then he let the sun and breeze dry him.
He took the Ranger’s advice and followed the path into the hills. The track was a lazy climb of sweeping curves that rested against the slopes. Unt followed it deep into a flinty ravine and there it stopped.
The canyon ended in a blunt cliff face. High walls surrounded him. There was nowhere to go but back. Unt looked behind him and checked his tracks. The path was well-beaten down; he hadn’t imagined it.
He must have missed a split in the track, he thought. The path he’d come along had been true but it hadn’t been made by his own people. His former people. The yellow flint was unlike anything they used at home and even the Rangers didn’t come this far. If someone was mining the stone, he reasoned, there was probably a settlement nearby. The stone would be too heavy to carry long distances so there had to be something close to hand.
Unt sat on a rock and looked up at the tops of the cliffs. The ravine was darkening, becoming steeped in shade. Unt had no way to tell the time but it had been full-day when he started his descent and not much time had passed since.
It was getting dark because the sun had moved to an angle that no longer cut into this deep scar in the earth. If he left now, he’d probably have an hour or two more of daylight but he decided he’d done enough for one day.
He decided to make camp so he looked around until he found a moss-covered patch that was big enough to lie down on. Here and there, hidden flint poked through minutely but it wasn’t an uncomfortable bed.
He’d staid off eating until now, knowing that he had to make his stores last. Pearson’s last meal had kept the hunger at bay and only now was it creeping back on him.
He took an inventory and found six apples in various states of decay, three carrots, two turnips and most of the leaves of a cabbage. The crowning glory was a couple of
stale buns that would have been like rocks were it not for the mud that had soaked through them.
None of it was very appetising. His instinct was to leave the worst and go for the best but the cautionary part of him said that things would only get more decayed the longer he left them. It was better to eat the older stuff now, while they were still vaguely edible than later on when they had turned to rancid sludge.
Still, when he looked at the worst apple, shrivelled like an old woman’s skin, bruised and peppered with dots of white mould, he decided he wasn’t that hungry yet. The pantry could stay intact for another day.
He didn’t have a chance to test his fire-making skills. There was no wood in the ravine. The white carcasses of dead shrubs were the closest thing to fuel and they’d burn up in seconds. He decided it didn’t matter: the night was warm and clear and there was nothing to cook. He was better off sparing himself the effort.
So it was that he laid himself out for his first night in exile. Actually, it wasn’t so bad, he told himself as he gazed up at the stars. In town, where the street lamps flared in the night, the stars were few and scattered but here, in true darkness, they were thick in swarms. It was like they fled from humanity and returned in droves when it was absent.
Unt was surprised at the liberation he felt. His exile was less than a day old and already the trial and eviction were distant things. His whole abandoned life was quickly becoming some abstract concept.
All the hurt and anger evaporated up to meet the stars. It was like he’d been swimming in toxic waters and hadn’t even noticed. Humanity was the disease and cutting it out was the cure.
With the passing of anger, desire went with it. He found he wasn’t missing the things he’d lost. His job had been a false idol, something he knew he would never have truly loved. Crystal was another kind of trophy. She was miserable and eventually she’d have made him miserable too. All that had connected them was his lust for her. He wasn’t heartbroken to have lost her.
The Fall of Chance Page 27