“Where are you from?” Theresa asked him one day, sitting by the bed while he ate a bacon sandwich one-handed.
“I’m just passing through,” he said.
She looked at him for a long time. She said, “Do you remember what happened?”
“Some people stopped me and told me to get off my horse. That’s all.”
“Would you recognise them again?”
He thought about it, shook his head.
“We used to get on all right round here,” she said after a few moments. “The people round here are good people.”
“Not convinced,” he said. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know the full story. A chap from a farm a few miles from here came home one day with a crossbow bolt in his gut and three dead boys in his wagon. One of the boys was the son of another farmer. Nobody really knows what happened because Max – that’s the wounded chap – Max has been at death’s door ever since.”
Adam thought of the antibiotics he’d been carrying, wondered where they were now.
“Things were quiet for a few days,” she went on. “Then all of a sudden everyone was shooting at each other.”
He’d ridden into a war. He put the half-eaten remains of his sandwich down on the plate resting on his knees. “This has nothing to do with me,” he said. “I’ll be leaving as soon as I’m able.”
“That could be a little while,” she told him.
“How long have I been here?”
“A week.”
He was overdue returning to Blandings. “And no one’s been through looking for me?”
Theresa shook her head. “Not that I know of. Not that they’d have got very far; the Lyalls and the Taylors have more or less cut us off from the outside world.”
Someone from Guz would be arriving at Blandings soon, if they hadn’t already. A detachment of Marines, probably, with a senior officer from the Bureau, tasked to debrief him about Thanet. Betty would tell them where he’d gone, and then things here could only get worse.
“I need to get word to someone,” he said.
“Were you not listening? There are almost seven hundred armed people wandering around the countryside, shooting at anything that moves. The few of us who haven’t taken sides have barricaded ourselves in our compounds until they either come to their senses or wipe each other out. Have you finished this?”
He looked at his sandwich, not feeling remotely hungry any longer. “Yes. Sorry.”
Theresa took the plate and stood up. “You need to get your strength back.”
“I know. Sorry.”
After Theresa had gone, he settled cautiously back against the pillows and stared at the wall beyond the end of the bed. Getting out of here was going to be no problem. Being physically able to before someone turned up looking for him was going to be more difficult.
THE NEXT DAY, there was no word of heavily-armed strangers marauding through the area calling his name. Or the next. Paul, a tall, rangy, taciturn man in early middle age, periodically visited some of the other farms to talk with other families, returned with no news.
Paul and Theresa’s farm was one of the smallest in the area; just fifteen people living in a little compound, jumpy and heavily-armed at all times in case either the Taylors or the Lyalls suddenly took offence at their non-aligned status.
“I keep wondering if this was there all the time, under the surface,” Theresa told him as she joined him on a walk around the compound one day – as much to make sure he didn’t overdo the exercise as for the conversation. “The Taylors and the Lyalls have been friends for years, but it makes you think.”
Adam, for whom the family and interpersonal politics of the Taylors and the Lyalls were irrelevant beyond the fact that they were keeping him stuck here, grunted and kept loping along. “You said people died.”
“Max is still alive, as far as I know. At least, nobody’s heard otherwise.”
He paused and tried to catch his breath. His broken ribs still hurt and his face was still a grotesque landscape of swelling and bruising and cuts, but he was feeling stronger every day. His arm... well, he could use it, but he had a sense that the break wasn’t knitting as well as it might. That was going to be a problem.
“How many people did you say? Seven hundred?”
“At least. Could easily be more; we don’t exactly keep an accurate headcount.”
Now he thought about it, that was actually quite a lot of people for such a relatively small area. That many people would have been lost in Thanet’s drenched landscape, or the hundreds of square miles controlled by Guz. He looked around the compound, the high wooden wall that had kept out wild animals and wilder people for decades, the house and its outbuildings and extensions.
“I really have to get out of here,” he told her.
“You’re not nearly well enough yet.”
“I can walk.”
She gave him a long-suffering look.
“I’ve done this before,” he said.
“With three broken ribs, a broken arm and borderline concussion?”
Well, there had been that time in Cornwall... He scowled.
“I’d have got our doctor over to look at you, but someone shot her. That’s what this place is like now. I can’t force you to stay. I’m not going to tie you to the bed and lock the door. But for Christ’s sake be sensible.”
He took to walking round the farmyard every day, doing circuits of the wall. At first he got curious looks from the farmhands, but soon nobody paid him very much attention beyond nodding hello. Everyone had other things to worry about. No one dared go outside to tend to the fields; they’d brought as many of their sheep and pigs inside the compound as they could, but a lot of their livestock was now wandering the countryside, fair game for anyone who felt like some chops.
At night, he lay awake staring at the ceiling, still unable to turn on his side because his ribs and arm hurt too much. Sometimes he heard gunfire in the distance. When he did sleep, he dreamed of Margate and Frank Pendennis’s patient expression as he asked about Gussie. He dreamed about the cave covered in seashells, the place where he put bad people until they stopped being bad. The smell in there had been like a punch in the face.
“Sounds a rum old place,” Paul said, when he described Thanet to him.
“Thing is, it works,” Adam said. “Frank’s getting things done. There aren’t enough people there to do everything at once, but he’s fixing up the town, running farms, going out into neighbouring towns and stripping them for supplies.”
“We get things done,” Paul pointed out. “With about a quarter of the effort and none of the unpleasantness.” He glanced at the window. “Used to, anyway.”
Adam shook his head. “You and Frank, you’re doing two different things. You’re farming, you’ve put down roots. Frank’s thinking about conquest.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because that’s what he does; it’s the way he is. His family’s been pushing out into the countryside for years, absorbing farms and little communities. And the Wealders have been doing the same.”
“Sounds to me,” Paul said, “as if everyone in Kent is fucking mad.”
“You’ve kept yourselves to yourselves ever since the start of the Long Autumn,” Adam said. “Bunch of little farms hidden away in the countryside, making do, surviving. That’s not enough for Frank. He wants more. He wants civilisation, and he wants to be the one running it.”
“Civilisation got us in this fucking mess in the first place.”
Thinking that, like the people he had met in Wales, the farmers of the Parish believed there had been a nuclear war, Adam said, “No. It was a comet. A broken-up comet.”
Paul looked at him. “Oh, I know that. Know it’s what people say, anyway. No, I didn’t mean that. We were too reliant on civilisation. I’ve read about it. Motor cars, aeroplanes, electricity, television. Can you imagine television?”
Adam could – and had, on occasion – but he couldn’t see what
purpose it had served, apart from transmitting news across great distances, and anyway it had been among the first things to go when The Sisters came and it had never come back.
“We were soft. They were soft. Didn’t know what to do when civilisation went away.”
“This is not the way Frank is thinking,” Adam said. Or Guz, for that matter. Or, now he thought about it, Betty Coghlan.
“Frank or the Wealders come here, we’ll give them some trouble,” Paul said.
Adam opened his mouth, about to give his little speech about Frank rolling over the Parish as if it wasn’t there, but he thought better of it. “You’ve got to sort out your own trouble first,” he said.
Paul nodded. “Aye,” he said. “You know the history of this area?”
Adam shook his head.
“Story is that years and years ago, before the Romans came here, the whole country was covered in forest, pretty much, from the south coast all the way up to Scotland. Dangerous place, full of wild animals and scary things. It was safer to travel on the high ground, where the tree cover was thin.”
“The Ridge Way.”
Paul nodded. “You do know about it.”
“I heard some stories.”
Paul laughed. “That’s all we’ve got left, stories. Anyway, folk round here call it the oldest road in the world. Traders used it to transport goods down into Dorset and up into East Anglia.” He got up and went over to a bookcase and took down a large old book with a tattered cover, handed it to Adam. “That’s all the civilisation we need.”
The book was full of colour photographs of a neat, tidy, tamed landscape quite unlike the one beyond the wall around the Abbots’ compound. It seemed impossible that the country had once been like this. In most of the photographs the sun was shining and the sky was blue, full of fluffy white benign clouds. He turned a page and saw a photograph of a series of stones arranged in the middle of a clearing.
“What’s this?”
“Wayland’s Smithy,” Paul said, glancing at the book. “It’s really an old tomb, but the story is that Wayland the Smith lives there. Sort of a god of mischief and horseshoes. The Saxons named it – a lot of people have been down this way and settled, down the years.”
“I saw a signpost for it, not far from here.”
Paul nodded. “It’s a few miles along the ridge. You’re in Oxfordshire by then, or near as makes no difference these days. Anyway, that makes my point, really. That tomb was thousands of years old before the Saxons ever came here and put a name to it. People have made a life for themselves here for a very long time and for a lot of that time they didn’t need cars and television.”
Adam smiled. “Your god of mischief and horseshoes sounds as if he would have liked television and cars.”
Chapter Nineteen
ROSE’S FATHER HAD died when she was sixteen. He’d cut his hand while working in the yard and he’d washed and cleaned the cut and bound it up and for a few days everything had seemed fine. Then he came down with a bit of a temperature and after a day or so he seemed to fight that off. Then it came back and he couldn’t keep any food down, and a few days later he was gone.
She remembered her father as a big, strong man. Max wasn’t nearly as strong as he was; he got through life on common sense and charm rather than physical presence. But he refused to die. He was unconscious – had been, more or less, since he’d come back – and his temperature was frightening and his breathing was laboured, but he hung on. Rose didn’t know how much longer she would be able to stand it.
She and Nell sat shifts by his bed. At least, that was the plan; in reality Rose stayed with him most of the time, even when Nell was there.
“You need to get some sleep, Ma,” she said one evening.
Rose shook her head. “No.”
Nell came round the bed and held her hand, and together they sat looking at Max, who was snoring almost loudly enough to mask the wet rattling noise his chest was making.
The door opened and Patrick looked into the room. “Ma?”
“Bugger off,” Nell snapped. “Don’t you dare come in here.”
Rose reached out and put her hand on her daughter’s arm. “What is it, Patrick?”
“The little ones are playing up. They won’t go to bed.”
“Well, why don’t you sort it out, big man?” said Nell.
Rose squeezed her arm. “Nell. You go and take care of them, lovey. I’ll stay with your father.”
Nell glared at Patrick for a few moments, then got up and left the bedroom, brushing past him.
He caught up with her on the stairs and took her arm, propelled her complaining down to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.
“What’s wrong with you, you stupid fucker?” she hissed, punching him in the chest. “Haven’t you done enough damage?”
“Look,” he said quietly. He turned and opened a cupboard and took out a black metal flask.
“If this is one of your stupid games, Patrick...”
“It’s the antibiotics Faye sent for,” he said. “For dad.”
She looked at the flask. The name Taylor was written on the side in bright orange paint. “When did they get here?”
“Just now,” he said. “One of Betty Coghlan’s hands brought them.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “I can always tell. Where did you get them?”
“Someone just brought them,” he protested, but she could see there was something he wasn’t saying. “I don’t know what to do with them; Ma could just throw them away if I give them to her.”
Nell looked at him, and for a moment, under the shell of bravado that he had put around himself, she saw a frightened little boy. Looking around the kitchen, she saw a rifle leaning against the wall by the door. Not like any rifle she’d seen before. “What’s that?”
He didn’t take his eyes off her. “What’s what?”
She pointed. “That thing. Where did that come from?”
He looked over his shoulder, trying hard to be nonchalant. “Betty’s bloke brought it for us.”
She walked over to the door and stood looking at the gun. “What have you done, Patrick?”
“I’ve got the antibiotics dad needs,” he said, suddenly angry. “Do you want them or not?”
For a moment – just for a moment – she almost said no. Almost told him to take them away and throw them down one of the composting toilets in the yard, let his conscience suffer for whatever he’d done. Except his conscience wouldn’t be the only thing to suffer. “Silly sod,” she said, taking the flask from him. “I’ll give them to dad.” She uncapped the flask, looked at the vials inside, the syringes in their packages. More valuable than anything in the world. “When she goes to bed.”
“Do you know how?”
“It’ll be in Ma’s medical books. I’ll look it up.” She sighed. “Where did you get them, Patrick?”
“Betty’s bloke,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet her eye.
“Fine,” she said. She closed the flask, hefted it in her hand. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’re going to stop being a twat now.”
“About what?” He straightened up, and the frightened child was gone again.
“I know Harry Lyall was here, trying to make peace. And I know you threw him out.”
He snorted. “You sound like old John.”
She punched him in the shoulder again. “If you had half the sense you were born with, you’d listen to Mr Race.”
“I’m not the one that started this, Nell. I didn’t kill Faye. The Lyalls are killing our people out in the woods because dad killed Rob. You want me to just stand by and do nothing about that?”
“You deserve to get yourself killed,” she told him. “I’d shoot you myself if you weren’t my brother. Fuck, I’d do it anyway if I thought it would do any good.”
He leaned forward and said quietly, “Dad’s hurt, Ma’s... you’ve seen what Ma’s like, John’s just weak. Someone’s got to stand up for this family.”
She turned away from him and started to walk across the kitchen to the door. “I’m just hoping that there’s going to be a family left to stand up for.”
THE TWENTY OR so farms and homesteads in the Parish were scattered in a rough square about four miles on a side. The Lyall farm was in one corner, the Taylors in another, and around them was a complex web of family and allegiance going back, in some cases, all the way to the early days of the Long Autumn. Most of the farms mucked in together and helped each other out when necessary, but in general those closest to either compound had the strongest ties, with eight or ten stuck in the middle. No one had ever done a proper headcount, but Harry reckoned there must be around a thousand people in the Parish.
“Oh, Harry,” said Catherine Wright. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
Harry almost found himself saying, ‘we didn’t start it,’ and then remembered that they had. Or seemed to have.
“I don’t know, Cat,” he said instead. “That’s the truth.”
“We had Patrick Taylor here this morning,” she said. “Same sodding reason you’re here.”
He looked at her. He’d known Cat Wright his whole life, they’d played together as kids, their families visiting each other, and now he felt like a stranger. He’d felt that way with the other families he’d visited today.
“I don’t want anything to do with this, Harry,” she said. “This thing between you and the Taylors is between you and the Taylors; it’s got nothing to do with us.”
Of all the farms in what Harry was starting to think of as the no-man’s-land between himself and the Taylors, the Wright farm was the largest, almost a hundred people living around what had once been a ranch-style executive home but was now a scatter of buildings and smaller holdings.
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