The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  Roundabout

  Belching out clouds of smoke, the jeep thumped over a pothole. The vehicle rattled so much Rick had a momentary fear it was about to disintegrate and he’d be left sitting in the dirt clutching a steering wheel. He decided if he ever needed to flee the city at night again, breaking curfew and going AWOL, he was going to hot-wire a car rather than sweet talk a sleepy quartermaster. That way he might have got a vehicle with wheels that were vaguely round. He jammed the accelerator pedal into the floor and cursed. The faster the litter-strewn hedges whipped past him, the slower the drive from the capital to Axeford seemed to take.

  There had been a burst of rain as he was sneaking out of the city gates. The shift in the weather had helped with the guards that had been stationed at every entrance since his time in his windowless office. Men and women strutted around, sporting brass badges of a sharpened portcullis that gleamed just a little too much. A dishevelled woman, with a face like an empty potato sack, had eventually waved him through. She’d been grumbling about everything under the sun, and the sun itself, as it was still too hot for her, but soon it would be too cold, and that played hell with her joints, but at least in winter her athlete’s foot didn’t—

  “Shit.” A pig streaked across the road, squealing. Rick swerved. Hit another pothole. Bounced off the roof. Bit his tongue and screeched to a halt. He sat stone still, listening to the pop and crack of a cooling engine, watching the shimmer of corn in the field opposite as the pig disappeared. And, after peeling his trembling fingers off the wheel, Rick clambered out of the jeep. Black tyre marks pointed at the vehicle like a pair of crooked fingers.

  “Daydreaming and tired,” he muttered. “You’re lucky to be here in one piece.” A chunk of stone broke off under a wheel and the vehicle shifted. “Very lucky.” Did they manufacture these concrete roads precrumbled? Gripping the contraband he had smuggled out of the city in his pocket, Rick headed for the shade of a tree’s branches.

  The midnight rain had left a freshness to the air he could smell as well as taste. The damp chill clinging to his skin brought a lightness that had been missing for weeks. It went some way to relieving the tiredness that clawed at Rick’s eyelids, the trembling feeling in his hands that wouldn’t quite do what he wanted them to. Whether that was fatigue, nerves or fear, he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure the body distinguished too much between these things. The dentist, Neumann, probably had a theory. Would have had. She was dead. Murdered.

  Acres of yellowing grass and bristle bush stretched away from him, surrounding the town of Axeford that was slowly waking up. A spit away from the tree he now stood under was the artificial surface of an old bodyball pitch, a rectangle of vivid green amongst the sandy coloured surroundings. Thistles were growing out of the gaps in the material, weeds forcing their way through the threadbare patches around the goal mouths.

  What would he do if the person he was supposed to meet didn’t turn up? Rick had a back-up plan but wasn’t sure how viable it was. So he waited and hoped and watched the area that had been so much a part of his childhood. The moons clung onto the morning sky as the sun rose. It chased off the shadows, burning away the welcoming coolness. A threat of what was to come. And, as he wondered how he had ended up in this situation, he heard the scuff of feet.

  He squinted into the sun. A lone figure was heading towards him with a limp that was almost a swagger. The regular dip and rise of one shoulder offset the odd-sized puffs of dust bursting from the ground. “Thank you for coming,” Rick said, when the figure reached him. He nodded to the man’s leg. “You’re walking better than before. Don’t need the crutch now?”

  “Barely use the thing these days.” Stann watched Rick warily, his body listing to one side. “I don’t know why I’m here after what you did, but your message said it was important. I guess I can listen, at least.” He shuffled towards a rusty metal circle on the ground, now strangled by weeds. An old A-frame stood next to it, the plastic swing seat long gone, the chains cannibalised by a local villager.

  Probably a good idea to move. A forest was unlikely to be bugged; cameras up in the branches weren’t practical. But the more space around them, the better. Rick’s fingers closed around the pen drive in his pocket. He had no idea how to ask his favour of Stann. Once, he wouldn’t have hesitated, he’d just have said it. Once.

  “This is where the old sand pit was, wasn’t it?” Stann pointed to a dirty square of weeds. “I remember your dad filling it with red builder’s sand from Skaldar’s yard.”

  “‘Sand’s sand’,” Rick quoted his father, grinning. “He bought the most he could with the amount he had. Skaldar was just happy to see the money.”

  “Our mums weren’t so pleased at having to wash it off us.”

  “Your mum. Mine made my dad do it.”

  “Your life does seem to be littered with strong-willed women.”

  “Not littered, Stann, and just women, not strong-willed women. Would you have described a man like that?”

  “OK then, unusually strong-willed. But yes, if a man was strong-willed, I would. It’s just an adjective, get over it.”

  Rick’s grin failed. He didn’t want to argue with Stann, not today. He kicked the rusting metal circle with his foot. “What did you do with that motorbike? The one we rigged up to the roundabout and you almost killed me with?”

  “Sold it when I got enlisted. Gave the money to Mum in case I didn’t come back. She didn’t want to take it, said no amount of money could ever make up for losing a child. ‘You can’t buy what children bring’, she said. Mum put the money under the clock on the mantelpiece, saying I could have it, as long as I picked it up from the house in full dress uniform.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin with the remaining digits of his left hand. “So, when I passed out, I came back. I was going to take her out with the money, take her to the city, buy her something new.” He stared up at the sky, blinking hard. “My old man had drunk it, pissed it away, and then beat her.” He rubbed his eyes. “Damn dust,” he said, “gets everywhere.”

  “Why did you never tell me? I could have helped.”

  “How? You had no more money than me back then and, even if you had, I wouldn’t have taken it. Or are you going to invent a time machine, take the credit for that, too, and go back and discover a cure for a violent drunk?” He wiped a thin trail of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “Dads prided himself on being a high-functioning alcoholic. He wasn’t. He was a drunk, a clever drunk, but still a drunk. They all are, just some know longer words than others.”

  “Like strong-willed?” Rick asked, attempting a smile.

  “What are you saying?” Stann rounded on Rick, fist raised. There was purple paint under his thumbnail.

  The heat haze was rising around them, distorting his jeep in the distance. The sweat prickling his brow matched the sheen on Stann’s face. Rick didn’t want to have to fight. Not now. Not like this. The days of them fighting and forgetting were long gone. And as he shifted his weight, a stick cracked in the woods. The eyes of both men followed the sound. A pig — pink, dirty and scrawny — was snuffling through a pile of twigs and leaves under a tree. The red brand on its hide was clearly visible.

  “Another pig?” Rick glanced back at the jeep and then at the one rooting in the dirt. “Isn’t that one of Hanzel’s? I thought they were all slaughtered?”

  Stann’s shoulders slumped as the fight left him. “Yup,” he replied. “Old Finn couldn’t bring himself to kill them all and he didn’t trust many people not to snitch. So he altered the brand on some and smuggled them into the Weeping Woods while I kept watch. I got a couple for my help. Never believed a man could tire of fried bacon, but I’m almost there.” He nodded to the pig. “One of them got away before we could rebrand him. Looks like he’s doing better than the rest. We burnt as many straw-filled blankets that day as we did real pigs, but it was still a gruesome, senseless waste. The blood was everywhere, coming out of the pigsty like water from a burst main. It was so bad t
he authorities didn’t want to get too close when they did the final check. These city folk make all these rules, safe behind their sterile plastic desks, but none of them have the balls to actually see the job done.”

  He laughed, a low bubbling sound Rick knew well. A cautious smile spread across Rick’s face. “I was trying to make a joke, Stann, about being strong-willed.”

  “Like you did about my mother’s moustache back in that castle in Mennai?” Stann’s voice trailed off. He flexed and extended the remains of his left hand. “Neither joke was funny but you’re almost right. My old man wouldn’t have said strong-willed, he’d have used something with more syllables. I had a word with ‘Dads’ as he liked to be called. ‘Too much father for just one woman’, I heard him say in the pub once.” Stann spat in the dust. “His friends loved that quote. And once we’d done talking, he was never a problem again.”

  “Is that why he disappeared?” A thought chilled Rick, despite the rising heat. “What did you do to him? You didn’t—”

  “Kill him?” Stann laughed. “No. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my illustrious military career behind bars.” He stared down at the gun-shaped shadow his left-hand cast on the ground. “Dads was very strict with himself. He’d be up at six every morning, no matter what, and in the pub at six every evening. So, at five to six every morning, I’d find him, wake him and break one of his toes. And at five to six every evening, I’d drag him out of whatever corner he’d scuttled into and do the same to one of his fingers. I had ten days’ leave, so I figured one of each a day was a good routine. I broke his nose, too, just for good measure. He never touched my mum again, nor drank, as far as I’m aware. He left town, shouting stupid threats that the sins of the son visited on the father would come back to haunt the son. That life was too short to forgive.” Stann pointed at his prosthesis with his ruined hand and made a soft shooting noise. “I guess he was right.”

  Stann limped over to a tree stump near the old swing. Its insides were caving in and filled with bits of rubbish. Lowering himself down, he shaded his eyes against the glare. “You’re not here to chat, are you? What do you want, Franklin?”

  21

  Donarth

  Rick explained what had happened, what he had seen and who had been standing next to the corpses. Stann’s eyes narrowed when Rick glossed over the finer details of the last few weeks, including those including Beth. He’d never told Stann why he and Beth had split up. Stann, as always, had been too discreet to ask. At one point Rick swore he could smell her perfume. He glanced furtively over his shoulder only to see the pig snout-deep in mud.

  “And what do you want me to do?” Stann asked when Rick had finished. He used both hands to shift his left leg into a more comfortable position. “I can’t go storming in to help those folk, even if I wanted to.”

  Rick pulled the pen drive from his pocket. “Take this. Hide it. I’ll be back soon, I promise. I just need someone to look after it while I find out what’s going on and make it stop.”

  Stann took the pen drive, dangling it between thumb and forefinger. “This is it? This is what you’re going to save the nation with?”

  “I’ve made another backup but I’m not sure how reliable it is.”

  “Where is it?”

  Rick pointed at the flashing lights of the drones and sun-fans circling them like crows. “Who watches the watchers, right? You gave me the idea.”

  Stann craned his neck around, following Rick’s finger. “The drones?”

  Rick grinned at him. “The sun-fans. I did it while I was working on their new dragonfly lenses. I buried it in code so deep they’ll never know even to look.”

  “Clever. If it works.” The pen drive glinted as he bounced it up and down in his palm. “But why not give this to Thryn?”

  “She’s my wife. I can’t risk her or Rose. I’m not sure I should go home now. Too dangerous. I thought about Lenka, my neighbour, but I don’t want to drag her into this, either.”

  “But you can risk me?”

  “Over my wife and child, yes. You’d do the same. You’re ex-army. You know how it goes.”

  “Your child,” Stann said slowly. “Did you forget that my child, little Donarth, turned nine last week?” He sat up straight, losing the hunch that had warped his back since his dismissal. “Not so little anymore, he’s going to be a fearsome unit before long. Rose was at his birthday celebration, Thryn and Lenka, too. You were right in Castle Brecan — the only thing you did get right — little Rose does seem enamoured of my Don. He was sore upset you didn’t come. ‘Where’s Uncle Rick’, he kept asking?”

  “Stann, I’m sorry. I—”

  “Another excuse?” Stann pulled a battered packet of cigarettes from his pocket.

  “No, it’s just—”

  “Another excuse.”

  “Stann, please. You were best man at my wedding. You named your son after my dad. Can’t we be civil?”

  “I did, didn’t I? Donarth, Donarth Taille. Simple. None of this pretentious middle name crap.”

  “Will you help?”

  Stann held up his hand. “Your family and mine go back to the time of Greenfields, what my old man used to call Screamfields. I’m surprised the blood lines have stayed separate for so long, but as far as I know the families have never intermarried.” He lit a cigarette and clamped it between his teeth. The end flared red, Stann’s gaunt cheeks hollowing as he took a long drag. “And as far as I’m concerned, they never will. I’m going to make sure of that if our two kids end up courting each other.”

  “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

  “Didn’t say that, did I?” Stann pinched the filter off the cigarette and flicked it in the direction of Finn Hanzel’s pig. “Thought a clever fucker like you would have got that.”

  “Then—”

  “Rick.” Stann held up a purple-nailed finger. “Hear me out.”

  A tractor rumbled along the road, beeping its horn in frustration at Rick’s shoddy parking. The men waited. One standing. One seated. And as the tractor disappeared around a bend, Stann spoke. “Your dad stopped mine from beating me on more than one occasion. My old man told him to back off, keep his snout out of shit that didn’t concern him. Yours didn’t. Told him some things just shouldn’t happen. On one of those days, Dads took me to the pub as part of ‘my education’. Two-thirds of a bottle of bathtub brandy into the evening he told me there was no character flaw that couldn’t be compensated for by violence. That people used it as medicine. He said it was a way for people to ignore their own failures, that a fear of failure comes down to a fear of dying. I’m all for honesty,” Stann said and hawked and spat phlegm into the dust, “but not when it’s dripping with self-pity.”

  Rick checked his watch. He had been here too long already. He had to get back to the capital. Leave it too long and his chances of getting back in would be worse and worse. His old friend seemed in no hurry.

  “Now.” Stann picked at a stain on his trousers. “I’m not a genius like you but I think Dads was all too well aware of his own mortality. He was obsessed with asking people their age. He made too many jokes once he hit forty that he was over halfway. I think it was driving him to poison himself with booze and tobacco. Maybe him being scared of dying was why he beat me and mum. Maybe that night in the pub was the closest he could get to an apology?

  “If Dads had been born to a family with the right bank account or surname, he could have gone far. He was brilliant but flawed. Scared of death and failure. So afraid he’d never be a decent father, he never tried. It’s left-handed logic, if you ask me. But I reckon envy was only fuelling the rot.”

  The last cloud fled as the sun got into its stride. A trail of smoke drifted up from the cigarette squeezed between Stann fingernails. “Dads,” he said, “was jealous of your old man. He was green on Donarth Franklin.” Stann leered at Rick, his teeth glistening yellow in the sunlight. “That’s one of the reasons I gave my son that name, so it would piss Dads off if he e
ver found out what his grandson was called. And I’ll tell you this one last thing. Might as well. Never told no one this before. Never going to see you again, neither.”

  Rick saw where this was going now and he was powerless to stop it: the misplaced feelings and resentment that had bulldozed through the generations, pushing aside opportunity and leaving the ravages of bitterness behind them.

  “I was jealous, too.”

  “Of what?” Rick said, voice rising. Patches of sweat were starting to appear on his shirt, tickling down his ribs from his armpits. “Of my wife and my promotion and who only knows what else? We’ve been through this already.”

  “You can add a hand and a leg to that list, if you want,” Stann snapped back. “But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Major?”

  He did. Rick had always known. He saw that now.

  “I’m jealous of the dad you had, have been since long before that useless non-apology I got in the pub. You have no idea how often I begged mum to let me come live at yours when I was little. I’d crawl under her blankets with her and ask if I could be your real brother. But she always told me it would be better in the morning. That Dads would be better. It never was. He never was, ‘cept for the days your old man had been round to have a word.” He knuckled the moisture out of his eyes and stared at the dampness on his hand as if surprised to see it there. “Your old man was more of a father to me than mine, Rick, the last Franklin worthy of the surname. Naming my son after him was the least I could do for him. That’s the main reason my kid got that name: Donarth.” He slipped the pen drive into his pocket. “And that’s why I’ll keep your secret. That’s why I’ll help and do the noble thing. ‘A Taille never turns tail nor tells tale,’” Stann quoted the family motto as he ground the cigarette butt on the trunk. He spat on the end to make sure it was out and flicked it towards the pig. “Goodbye, Major.” Stann jerked his thumb towards the road.