Which put Guz in something of a position, because it was a luxury it could afford.
Adam got up and lifted one of the skylights, leaned on the frame and looked out on a vista of rooftops and houses. The hail squall had passed over, hung like a curtain to the west, lit by a sliver of moon veiled by broken cloud. Some of the rooftops had windmills, and below them there was light in the windows. Most, though, were dark. Guz might have been the largest population centre in the West – maybe in the entire country – but there were still not enough people to fill it. Movement down in the street made him crane his neck; a patrol of constables, making their rounds.
He ducked his head back into the flat and looked around, wondering if he would ever be here long enough to redecorate.
“SO,” SAID MR Ross. “Do they represent any threat to us?”
“God, no,” said Adam. “They’re barely coping.”
Mr Ross had a cast in one eye, and an arm lost above the elbow to some long-ago accident. He habitually tucked the empty sleeve of his jacket into his pocket. He made a note on the pad in front of him and sat back and looked at Adam across the table. “The decision hasn’t been announced officially yet, but we’re going to be trading with them.”
“They haven’t got anything to trade,” Adam said. “A few scabby sheep, and they can’t even spare those.”
“As you will be aware,” Mr Ross told him, “threat is not always to be measured in terms of force of arms or numerical superiority. We have to be careful who we take in.”
Adam nodded at the notepad. He had been sitting in this airless little room for hours now, going over his trip to Wales, going over it again, answering questions, going over it again. Debriefing was always the same. Nitpicking and dispiriting.
“If you go back a few pages, you’ll find a line somewhere to the effect that they’re on the verge of starvation,” he said. “They’re not going to come in here and start a takeover.”
Mr Ross sighed. “You know,” he said, “these debriefings don’t only serve for you to report what you have seen and done in the field. They allow us to make an assessment of how you’re performing.”
Adam blinked slowly at him.
“Your superiors – myself among them, let’s not forget – have noticed a certain tendency for you to over-identify with the communities you visit.”
“I’m supposed to tell you what I think.”
“You’re supposed to tell me what you see and make a dispassionate assessment.”
Adam blinked at him again.
“A degree of empathy is valuable,” Mr Ross went on. “It helps you do your job more effectively. Your job is to make contact with groups outside Guz and report back on what you find.”
“Thank you for that.”
Mr Ross inclined his head in assent, as if the sarcasm had bounced straight off him. Which it had not. “A distance is also valuable,” he said. “Your job is to gather intelligence. What happens to that intelligence, at a policy level, is out of your hands.” He closed the notebook and laid his pen on top of it.
“To be more concise, you can shout and scream and stamp your feet all you want, but we are not, for the moment, letting the Welsh in here. Understood?”
“They didn’t even know what happened,” Adam told him. “About The Sisters. They’ve been living up there all this time thinking there was a nuclear war. They thought the world had come to an end and they were the only people left.”
“Hm. Well, absent a miracle it almost did and they almost were.” Mr Ross took his briefcase from under the table, opened it one-handed, and put his notebook and pen inside. “The Committee will be setting up a working group to determine the best way forward in terms of trading with the Brecon Beacons,” he said. “They will be needing a briefing paper from you.”
“I just...”
“No, this was your debriefing, which does not leave the Bureau. As you very well know.”
“I’m going out on deployment,” Adam said. “Tomorrow. Again.”
“You’d best get the briefing paper done before you go, then,” said Mr Ross, standing and picking up his briefcase. “Good to see you again. Good luck on your deployment.”
“I CAN’T GIVE them this,” Chrissie said. “Come on.”
“It’ll have to wait till I get back, then,” he said.
They were in her office, a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and a sheet of paper on the desk between them.
“You said yourself they need help; the working group won’t do anything until you give them a steer, and those people up there are going to starve.”
He poured more whisky into his glass, sat back, and put his feet up on the desk. Outside, night and rain brushed the windows. On the sheet of paper, he had written, Send boats across the Bristol Channel. Bring them all here. “They wanted a briefing paper,” he said.
Chrissie picked up her glass and slumped back in her chair, cradling it in her hands. “Just between us, please tell me you didn’t say they could come here.”
He drank some whisky.
She sighed. “You don’t do that. How many more times do I have to tell you?”
He drank some more whisky.
“We’re not a bloody guest house, Adam. We can’t take in every raggedy Bob and tattered Brenda.”
“They’re good farmers,” he said. “They’ve had to be, to scratch any kind of a life for themselves up there. Bring them over here, put them on some of the old farms inland, they’d work like demons.”
“That’s not how it works,” she said. “You know that.”
“It’s how it used to.”
“Yes, and remember how much trouble it caused?”
Some years before he was born, Guz had contacted a small community living on the marshy fringes of Wiltshire. Like the people of the Beacons, they had been starving, barely getting by. A decision had been made to take them in, welcome them with open arms, and for a few months all had been well. Then their leader, a young man who styled himself Father John, had begun quietly spreading sedition, turning people against Guz’s military authorities, recruiting followers. There had been a brief season of assassinations, then an attempted coup, which the Commodore of the time had put down with an iron fist. When it was over, more than a hundred people were dead and Father John was nowhere to be found.
“There is also,” she said, “a policy of not depopulating an area. The land needs to be worked, communities need to establish themselves and grow. Nothing’s going to get done if we just abandon the countryside and come and live here.”
“Even if it means leaving people to die?”
“We’re not going to leave them to die. We’re going to trade with them. Food, medical supplies, logistical support, animal husbandry.”
“They’ve got nothing to trade with,” he said. “How many more times? You’re not telling me we’ve become a charity now, are you?”
She shook her head. “No, we have not. But we’ll trade on account. Eventually they’ll have something we can make use of. In the meantime, we’ll send them some Marines.”
He sighed. “You want a stronghold. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Well, I certainly don’t; I’ve got more than enough work to be getting on with here. What’s going on in the Committee’s mind, I couldn’t tell you.”
He drained his glass. “They’ve managed to survive for almost a hundred years in some of the hardest country I’ve ever seen. They’re not going to take kindly to being turned into a colony.”
“It won’t be a colony,” she said. “We’ll be helping them out. From what you say, they need it.”
“We could always move them to Northamptonshire,” he said.
“No, Adam. No.” She sat up and held the bottle out to him. “Go home. Take this with you and go home.”
“There are times,” he said, “when I wonder what the point of this job is.” But he took the bottle anyway.
Chapter Three
THERE WAS AN apocalyptic light in the sky whe
n Max finally turned the wagon onto the home stretch. The horses were tired – he was tired – but they all sensed the familiarity of the landscape that spoke of home.
He sat up in the seat and looked to the West. He thought the sunsets were getting a little less spectacular, these past few years, which was a hopeful sign. In his grandfather’s day, the sun had barely fought its way through the driving clouds. Turning, he glanced back at the wagon, checking automatically that the tarps were still tightly lashed down.
When he turned back, three figures were standing in the middle of the road.
He sighed, let the horses walk on a few more steps before reining them in. Then he sat where he was and looked at the three figures. They were all dressed in combats, scarves wrapped around the lower parts of their faces, hoods pulled up. They were all holding crossbows. Not three miles from home.
“Lads,” said Max amiably.
“What are you hauling?” asked the tallest of the three. His voice sounded high and confident; he couldn’t be more than fifteen, which made him a problem because kids that age thought they could do anything and not get hurt.
“Oh, this and that,” Max said. He watched one of the figures move around and take April’s bridle. The horse whinnied and shied a little, but the figure stroked his forehead and hushed him in a whisper, and that was a problem too because the three of them were no longer all in one group and Max couldn’t watch them all at once. “You lads from round here?”
The tall one and the third one looked at each other. The one stroking April’s head looked up at Max.
“This is stupid, you know,” Max told them amiably. “I’ve got some sickle blades, a little water purification plant, some odds and ends of tools. What are you going to do with all that?”
“Get down,” the tall one said. “Nobody needs to get hurt.”
“I agree,” said Max, sitting where he was. “Don’t scare the horses now,” he said to the second one. “They’re tired, but they’re easily spooked.”
“Get down,” the tall one said again.
Max looked at them, one after the other, and he sighed. “All right,” he said. He shuffled along to the end of the seat and started to climb down.
“Keep your hands where we can see them,” the tall one cautioned.
“All right,” Max said again, and he held his hands over his head as he felt with his toe for the step.
“Mind you don’t slip,” said the third one, and they all laughed, and in one motion Max stepped down onto the road, pulled the shotgun from its clips behind the footboard, lifted it, and fired.
The blast caught the tall boy on the right side, shredding his combats, but he didn’t go down. Max had time to see the crossbow drop from nerveless fingers and blood start to well through his ruined clothing, then he was pumping the shotgun and half-turning for the second one. He had a better aim this time, centre of mass, almost point-blank. The boy folded convulsively as if punched in the stomach, staggered, sat heavily in the road, and toppled over.
Max was already moving, back along the side of the wagon, keeping low so the loadbed was between him and the third hijacker, hoping the kid would see sense and leg it. He pumped the shotgun and the breech jammed; another poorly-handloaded shell. Violence never goes quite the way you plan it. He cursed shoddy workmanship under his breath and tried to clear the slide, and there was a sudden thump and searing pain in his side. He looked down and saw the point of a crossbow bolt protruding from his jumper, and then it really started to hurt. He looked over his shoulder and saw the tall hijacker on his knees in the road, hopelessly trying to reload his crossbow left-handed.
“You little twat,” Max muttered. A scrape of heels on the road announced the third hijacker coming around the corner of the wagon. Max hit him in the face with the barrel of the shotgun, then stepped forward, reversed the weapon, and hit him again with the butt. The hijacker stumbled back. Max took the barrel of the gun in both hands, and swung it with all his strength at the side of his attacker’s neck. The man dropped bonelessly and lay still.
And then all was silence, save for the song of a solitary bird in a nearby tree. Max bent down painfully, picked up the crossbow where it had fallen, and turned and limped back to the tall hijacker, who had slumped over on his side, his face pressed into an expanding pool of his own blood.
“You had a chance to stop that,” Max told him.
The hijacker lay where he was, panting, unable to speak. All Max could see of him were his eyes, scrunched up in pain. He stood there watching, and presently the boy stopped panting. Max stayed beside him a few moments longer, then he sighed and sank to his knees in the middle of the road. After a few moments, he bent over and rested his forehead on the ancient cracked tarmac.
DUSK WAS ROLLING up out of the Vale. In the main house, Rose went from room to room, lighting lamps. Upstairs, she could hear laughter and a stampede of footsteps as the younger kids did their best to avoid getting ready for bed.
In the living room, Nell looked up from patching a pair of jeans and said, “He’s overdue.”
Rose went over to the other side of the room and unhooked one of the oil lamps. “He’s been overdue before,” she said, lighting the lamp. “And he still turns up.” She adjusted the flame and hung it up again, moved on to the next. “You shouldn’t sew in this light; you’ll ruin your eyes.”
Nell pulled a face. “I’ll be all right.”
“I keep telling you.”
Nell laid her work aside. “He’s never been this late before, Ma.”
Poking the taper into the glass chimney of another lamp, Rose paused for a moment. The flame caught, its strengthening light flickering on her face. She remembered her father bringing these lamps home with him from Oxford, must have been thirty years ago now. They’d once had three, but one had got broken when the girls were little and instead of replacing the glass, Max, with his usual lack of sentimentality, had gone out and got a new one, and then looked crestfallen when she wasn’t delighted with it. Max didn’t put a lot of stock in mementoes. A thing was a thing; either it was useful for something or it wasn’t.
Rose lifted the lamp onto its hook and turned to look around the living room, its comfortable worn furniture, the fire burning in the grate. For a moment, she imagined that it was her mother sitting there in the armchair by the fire, not her daughter. She walked over to the window. The compound was filling up with shadows, the outbuildings sinking back into darkness. Above the wall, the rushing clouds were losing their sunset colours. There had been a time, even when she was young, when everyone locked their doors and pulled down the shutters and huddled inside come sundown. Even now, only the brave or unwise travelled after dark, and Max, bless him, was neither. He could, of course, just have been a bit late leaving Blandings. There might have been a problem with the wagon, or a tree fallen across the road. Any number of things. If he’d decided to stay an extra night to drink with Betty Coghlan, she thought she’d kill him herself, or at least make him wish she had.
Patrick was walking across the compound towards the house, shotgun slung over his shoulder, lantern hanging from his hand. He saw her standing at the window and raised his other hand. She waved back, and he walked out of view around the corner. Doing his rounds.
“He’ll be back soon,” she said, half to herself.
THE TAYLOR COMPOUND sat atop a low rise like a ragged, blocky crown. Its wall – a ring of old shipping containers dragged here from a nearby railway siding back in the days when there was still petrol for tractors and filled, down the years, with earth and rubbish – enclosed the main house and several outhouses, storage silos and sheds. Back when Rose’s mother was a girl, there had been enough space in the yard to accommodate all the livestock in an emergency, but those days were long gone. Scattered in the fields surrounding the compound were byres and pens and sties, patrolled day and night by armed guards. Beyond the livestock were fields and woods and wild overgrown country, and beyond that, lost in uncertain distances, was
the Vale of the White Horse, an almost primeval wilderness.
Over the years, the people of the smallholdings of the Parish had done their best to maintain the old roads, but it had become necessary to cut new paths and tracks. It was down one of these, winding and narrow, that a cart drawn by two horses came in the early morning. The cart moved slowly, the horses plodding along and pausing often before starting off again. They seemed in no great hurry, but they knew their way. The track wound between trees and bushes and along the edges of fields, and finally came to the gate of the Taylor compound, and here the horses stopped.
There was silence for a short time, then a commotion on top of the wall, and slowly the gate slid aside and a number of figures carrying weapons and lanterns came running out.
One of the figures vaulted up onto the wagon’s loadbed and looked down at what lay there. He held his lantern up by his head, revealing strong features, curly hair, the quick shine of an earring.
One of the figures in the loadbed stirred and opened its eyes. “Hallo, son,” Max said dreamily. Then he closed his eyes again.
HARRY ARRIVED AT first light the next morning, in a wagon with his two eldest sons. He pulled the horses to a halt at the gate and called out, “Taylors!”
Patrick, looking down on him from the wall, called back, “We don’t want any trouble, Harry.”
“Patrick!” Rose shouted up from the compound. “Don’t you dare speak to Mr Lyall like that. Let him in.”
Patrick glanced down at her, and for a moment it seemed as though he might disobey, but he nodded to the men down in the yard, and they began turning the big crank handle that winched the gate aside. When the gap was wide enough, Harry urged the horses through.
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