The woman who had married him when all he had to offer were a few potato fields in the middle of barren nowhere. The mother of his child. His Miranda.
“You’re here,” he said.
She smiled, serene and coquettish. “You look terrible,” she said, her voice sultry and smooth, warm and comforting like fresh butter on hot bread.
He wheezed his way through a laugh. “I don’t feel too good, love.”
“The same sickness that took me. It was my fault.”
“No.”
“Yes. The same sickness that was in my veins.”
“We were careful to keep Billy safe. But somebody had to take care of you.”
“Don …”
“It’s not your fault. We can’t choose the cards we’re dealt.”
She stepped light and dainty through the grass and folded against him, resting her head in the hollowed crook of his shoulder, like she had when they had been young and brave and indestructible. His skin puckered into gooseflesh at her touch, yet her body seemed made of air, light as fluffy down.
Can she really be here? She’s been dead months.
He didn’t believe in an afterlife, never had. Yet that didn’t matter a bit, looking at her now. She had come back to him.
“You did well,” she said, sniffing and breathing deep as the ocean air swept over them.
He sighed as he swayed on his feet. The darkness in his peripheral vision was growing thicker, narrowing his view of the world as though he was looking at it through a telescope. “I failed. I failed you all.”
“You didn’t fail anybody. We owe you everything. You never gave up. Lesser men would have crumpled into the ground or turned to drink or run out of their family. But you stood. You’re a good man.” She wrapped her arms around his chest. Though he felt no pressure there, he groaned and sank into her.
“I tried,” he muttered.
“You did more than that. You made sure Billy had a chance.”
“She’s lost, Miranda. I lost our daughter.” He was almost weeping now.
“Sshh.” She pressed a long manicured finger to his lips. “She’s here, in this place. Back home there was no place for anyone with a heart. She would have had to become a killer to survive. But here … she belongs here. She has important things to do.”
“What important things, Miranda?” He brushed her hair behind her ear, nuzzling the soft curls of her hair, breathing in her scent. Lemons, she smelled of lemons. “I’ve seen some funny things lying in that bed. I know she’s important. But what is she meant for? Where is she heading?”
“I don’t know. But getting here was worth the price.”
He nodded. He knew it was true. There was no arguing.
“She’ll be safe?” he asked.
“There’s no telling. We gave her the best chance she could have had.” She raised her head and whispered softly in his ear. “We have to let her go.”
He shivered, his eyelids drooping. The darkness was thickening still, and the pain was fading. He should have felt relieved, but instead he was only afraid. With his body the way it was, the pain going away could only mean that he was slipping away. He didn’t know how he was still standing; each moment he swayed more and more, and the wind threatened to blow him hard to the ground. “I’m cold, Miranda.”
Her sweet voice in his ear: “I know. Not long now.”
“Will you stay?”
“Until the end.”
“And then?”
She pulled away from his chest and looked into his eyes, radiant with the sun at her back. “Look at those eyes.” She grinned. “Big bear eyes.” She took his hand and took a step closer to the cliff edge, and he followed. She peered over the lip, turning her face into the wind and looking down the pristine coastline in all its chalky beauty, cast in hues of fading heliotrope as the sun’s last light faded.
She let go of his head and turned to face him, her dress afloat in the wind, composed and perfect as a wax doll. “Come on home.”
He nodded, and closed his eyes. He knew what he had to do.
But he needed a moment. It would take all the strength he had left to do it right. Then something had changed—there was an absence in front of him.
She’s gone.
Miranda wasn’t by his side any more. There was only the grass, the chalky precipice, and the rolling surf far below. He almost wept, but shook himself.
Stay focused. You’re at the end. One last step. You can do it.
He crept forward until his toes were upon the cragged lip, and he took in the waves and the infinite sky one last time. He was looking at the world through a telescope now, a long dark tunnel that stretched on forever. The pain faded to a dull ache deep in his bones. He was tired, done. He had done what needed doing. Now he could rest.
He closed his eyes and held his arms out to the side.
Miranda’s voice uttered from the wind, “Come home.”
Don leaned forward, and then he was falling. All the while his stomach fluttered and the rocks rushed up toward him, he was smiling.
CHAPTER 24
Sarah walked the cobbled streets of New Canterbury for a long while that night. Everyone else was too shut up tight in their homes to notice her making her way around the cobwebbed, dilapidated ruins at the edge of the city, away from the pools of precious light afforded by their power reserves. Her white dress glowed in the night, spotless and pure under the full moon. The dress plimsolls she was wearing were ungainly on the uneven cobbles, but with the rifle in her hands, she felt sure.
Nothing stirred but the trickling Stour, a blanket of twinkling reflected stars on black waters nearby. She breathed deep and walked sure, feeling Robert by her side. It was a silly thing, to think that being married could change anything; it was just a ring and a few words after all. She didn’t believe in God.
But everything had changed. She felt more a woman than she had ever done before. People had always been kind, what with her divvying out the city’s literature and schooling the children. But she had always been the nice girl, the gawky one bumbling around in her warehouse. Never before had she felt maternal power in her bosom like this. She was the mother of the city, now. She knew it, and she saw it in others’ eyes.
And her husband could never leave her. A part of Robert had nested inside her and gave her new strength, and a part of her now rested in him. She could almost feel his hands on her now, hear his voice uttering the minutiae of her surroundings, calling out things to notice and be wary of, muttering plans for mounting their defence come morning.
Which is exactly what she would do. At first light she would rally the city’s guard—her guard. Pride was a thing to be cautious of, but she had been afraid to even touch a gun only days ago, and now she had taken a troop of those just like her, and made them a force worth reckoning.
Sarah smiled as she patrolled the city streets, a white wraith in the night.
Sometime after midnight, Allison and Heather appeared together on the roadside. By their stillness and the fixed hold of their gazes, she knew they had been watching her for some time. “What are you two doing here?” she said.
“Come inside, Sarah,” Heather said, her hands clasped at her sides.
“Shouldn’t you be in the clinic?”
“There is no more I can do for those people.”
“Fine. Get some sleep, then. I’ll need you come sunrise for militia duty. We’re going to practice, and practice, and keep going until we tear those targets apart.” She moved forward over the cobbles, stepping carefully, making her way past the both of them. “Nobody’s getting past us,” she muttered. “We’ll kill them all.”
She felt their eyes on her, and a well of anger rose up in her chest. She hated that feeling, the visceral sense that they were worried about her, as though she were unhinged or crazy.
And? How do you think you look? said a voice deep in her head. Your books go up in flames and you turn into Xena the Warrior Princess?
She almost la
ughed at herself, but caught the giggle in time. She couldn’t afford to play silly games now.
“You haven’t eaten,” Allie said. “Your feet must be all blisters by now, in those shoes. Just come inside, you stupid mare. Let us fuss over you.”
A swell of affection almost knocked Sarah off her course. Again, she almost succumbed to laughter. But she twisted her face into an expression she knew could melt ice, and glared at the two of them. “I’m not sure what you think is going on,” she said, “but we don’t have time to put our feet up. Look around, there’s nobody else left. We’re in charge. Us.”
“That’s why you need rest. People are looking to you, Sarah, and they need to be able to rely on you. There’s no sense in you patrolling out here by yourself. Come on in with us, eat a hot meal and get some rest, and …”
“Take off that dress,” Heather said.
Sarah looked down at herself, a white figurine amidst crumbling ruins of a bygone world. “I’m still wearing it,” she said. And it was so. She had been wandering around for hours, and the veil still trailed from the back of her head.
“Come on inside,” Allie said.
Together, Allie and Heather took Sarah’s arms and guided her inside, crooning over her and muttering soothing words.
Sarah wanted to tell them to quit being so ridiculous, but she found that her mouth was glued together and her feet felt like they were made of lead. Maybe they were right. She was getting weak. “Fine, I’ll eat.”
“And you’ll sleep.”
“Fine.” She stepped under the hall’s roof and shivered as she was embraced by the warmth of the hearth fire in the far corner. She hadn’t noticed how cold she was. Her stomach growled like a snarling dog. She sighed, sagging onto a bench and looked at her hands, feeling the tightness of the dress squeeze the air from her lungs. She propped the rifle beside her, and suddenly it seemed ten times heavier.
“What can I bring you?” Heather said.
“A change of clothes,” she said. “And a blanket.”
“You can’t sleep here. We’ll get you to bed.”
“I’m not going home. I don’t want to set foot in that place until Robert gets back.” She glared at them until Allie nodded.
“A blanket,” she whispered, patting Sarah’s hand as she pushed a bowl of broth in front of her.
Sarah ate while Allie stripped off her white garments as though she were a child. She was lucky to have them, but she couldn’t bring herself to thank them. Not yet, not now. A pall of determined vigour possessed her despite her exhaustion, pushing her on to the last.
She couldn’t relax, couldn’t show weakness. Not now. Because somewhere out there, Robert was fighting for them. And elsewhere, people were fixing to raze her city to the ground.
Sarah ate and slept, and dreamt of a honeymoon that never was.
CHAPTER 25
It was a crisp dewy morning, and Norman was in hell. Pain had festered in his chest since mounting up in New Canterbury. Even then he had known this trip might be the end of him, and he had come anyway.
This morning, cold woke him. He knew the Echoes were close. The farther north they rode, the stronger they seemed.
Before he could climb from his sleeping bag, the cold pulsed and thrummed in his chest, and he braced himself helplessly. This time he didn’t slip; he was hurled from his body into a blackness so uniform it seemed rich and velvety, like treacle.
He had time for one thought to bullet through his head.
Dear god, what now?
Then a terror to belittle all others shot from a mere pinprick to all-consuming enormity at impossible speed, and suddenly Norman hovered above millions of screaming, enslaved things, filthy and deformed.
So I’ve cracked after all. Well, at least now I’m sure.
Then he screamed. Screamed, the way children do when confronted with an experience so alien and beyond their control that their only recourse is blind terror.
Something had thrust its way into his mind, deep into the gooey bits where he, the thinking, feeling Norman, lived.
“It’s people,” said a high, sweet little voice. A tiny figure now floated beside him, a young girl with fire-red hair, the same girl who had stood over him in his dream.
“You again!” he said. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. I didn’t bring you here.”
“Then what the hell is this?”
Talking to your own delusion. Great. Keep digging that hole, Norm.
But he couldn’t shake the iron certainty that this was real. The horrors under them were too far beyond reckoning, but something told him the girl was a living, breathing person somewhere out there. He sensed power.
“I’m on a mission,” the girl said simply.
“Aren’t we all?”
She ignored him.
“You speak strangely,” he said.
“I came across the sea. Enger Land is a strange place, like Wonderland gone topsy-turvy.”
Wonderland gone topsy-turvy. I like that. Craziness gone crazy.
“Look, they hurt so much,” she breathed.
Norman yelled as something yanked him closer to the writhing shadows, as though his face were being pressed up against stinking mud.
God, it’s her.
She turned him over like a leaf in the wind. Maybe they were both here because of some higher power, but between them there was no contest. The ease with which she threw him around was frightening.
“You’re special,” he said.
Where had that come from?
“Lots of people say that.” Her voice was tiny, and tired—too tired to come from that sweet, young mouth. “I just want to go home.”
They hung there together and Norman shook his head. “When will all this end?”
Sick amusement trickled down those invading fingers stuck in his head, her amusement. “I gave up asking,” she said.
“So I suppose we’re on some kind of journey together? Some Abra Kadabra quest?”
“Maybe.”
He nodded. What else could he do?
“One question,” he said.
She looked at him, so alone and small it made his heart lurch in his chest.
“Did you bring me here?”
She blinked slowly, and those prying fingers yanked free from his head.
“See you soon,” she said.
Then the screaming people were gone, and Norman span. In the blur he caught flashes of great silvery strands, titanic legs the breadth of entire galaxies, converging on eight blinking eyes—
The spider, the Great Weaver!
—and then he was shivering, encrusted in an icy skin. By the time the spinning stopped he was back in the stables, and Robert was calling his name.
It was time to mount up.
*
They had been moving for over a week, and by now Norman cursed himself every other moment. Constant, jolting impacts of the horse’s hooves sent blinding pain coursing his body. As mile after mile passed by, they skirted the smouldering wreckage of towns and villages. More than a few members of the expedition erupted in frantic searches for their kin in the rubble.
In a way, Norman felt like a hypnotist, drawing his mesmerised flock towards a meat grinder. Because that was the truth of it: a lot of them were about to die, and it might be for nothing.
But he would do it, because that was what needed to be done. After all he had been through, he still spurned his Great Destiny. But he had learned that much, at least: some things just needed to be done.
The cities had all fallen behind them now and they were heading into the unknown. Nobody had ventured this far north for years. The Northlands had been respectfully left to their own devices as the South had scrabbled to form its alliances and rebuild something of what it had lost. Of what really went on here, they had little knowledge.
Apparently, not all had crumbled. If this coalition from Scotland really was real, it was possible another society like theirs was bent on re-creating
the Old World, their two orders separated by a strip of no-man’s land in between.
But it could also be that nobody waited out here but thieves, trading posts, rival gangs and any lone farmsteads strong enough to hold their own. The farther north they travelled, the more it seemed the latter was the case. Norman’s hopes for finding the stranded emissaries dwindled fast.
But he couldn’t let on. He was a leader now, and that meant holding the course for the sake of everyone else.
This is what Alexander had to deal with all those years … All those years I was whining at his side.
He wished he had paid a little more attention to how Alexander had dealt with it. He had always known he would have to lead, eventually.
They had passed bodies by the roadside for as long as they had travelled north. Most were thin, beaten and desiccated. Some were whipped into bloody horrors.
Every so often they would pass a farmstead or a town or campsite, raided of food and women and children, along with anyone strong enough to walk. The rest had been either shot or driven off. A few had been burned on pyres of straw and kindling—burned at the stake like medieval witches.
Norman’s stomach turned at the sight of that calibre of barbarism. To think their countrymen had become that. He did his best to steer the group clear of those pyres, but still they all saw plenty. And there was no skirting the endless carpet of bodies that lay in the army’s wake. Even the thieves and highwaymen who had ruled this land had fallen victim to the relentless tide of anger and retribution; their bodies peppered the same ground as those they would have called their prey.
The North belonged to the sigil of the pigeon, now.
After travelling along a motorway for some miles they crested a hill and saw yet more wilderness ahead, stretching away towards a jagged collection of mountains. The land was growing rougher, sparser, and a low-lying fog was becoming ever present. Also there was simply a sense of something different, a prescient thrumming deep in his bowels. He knew they all felt it, but couldn’t describe it.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 34