Winter Page 6

They knew what he meant.

  The night breeze, which blew from the north-east, the direction they were going, carried an acrid, sickly sweet scent that turned the stomach. The good, heady scent of burning wood or leaves was one thing, but this was paint, chemicals and the filthy, cloying stench of burning oil and, though none of them said so openly, charred flesh.

  They had seen a fire or two earlier to west and east, but only now they were on the high embankment of the A39 main road with a view over the hedges and woodland all about, could they see that its source lay to the north. That portion of the sky was livid with the light of a great fire whose origin they could not actually ascertain.

  ‘Looks like a whole town is burning,’ said Katherine uneasily.

  Barklice and Stort conferred, debating which town it was likely to be. Even though neither had ever visited that part of the coast of the southwest peninsula they knew its geography and the location and names of the major settlements.

  ‘We think it’s Newquay, a coastal town,’ announced Barklice finally. ‘We’ll follow the A39 towards it for a few miles, but only as far as the A30, which will take us out of the South-West and on towards Brum.

  Terce moved onto the hard shoulder of the road itself and observed, ‘When we crossed this road two weeks ago there was human traffic to be seen. Now there is none.’

  Barklice pulled out his chronometer.

  ‘You’re right. Were it three in the morning that might not be remarkable but it’s only nine at night. Listen! Silence! There is not even the distant roar of traffic.’

  ‘Are we surprised?’ said Festoon, who was recovering fast. ‘Given the rapid succession of storms, and ’quakes and puzzling time shifts in recent weeks and months, all of increasing severity, it would be astonishing if the lives of human beings had not been disrupted. We know of the violence on Pendower Beach. But we knew already from reports we were receiving in Brum before we left that the human transport systems of rail and road have been badly affected. Now they seem to have ground to a halt.’

  Niklas Blut concurred.

  ‘Our intelligence suggests that these events have caused humans to desert their settlements and make a general flight northward to the hills of the Peaks and the Pennines,’ he said. ‘That might explain why the South-West is deserted. But so much so?’

  They had fallen silent, considering this mystery, when they heard coming from their left and west, the direction of Truro, the rumbling growl of vehicles.

  They retreated to the cover of the embankment and waited. The sound grew louder, the growl more ugly, but they saw no tell-tale lights such as human vehicles normally have. So what appeared did so quite suddenly, out of the darkness. It was both shocking and frightening.

  A great vehicle, with big wheels and a high chassis, the flat, steep glass of its great windshield reflecting the lurid sky ahead, loomed out of the dark on their left side. With a rush of air and clattering of sound it drove on by along the road showing only a single red fog light at its rear.

  They had no sooner risen from their hiding places to go out onto the road and watch after it than they had to dive for cover again when a second vehicle, identical to the first, passed them by as well.

  A torch shone briefly in the rear interior of the second vehicle and they caught sight of two humans in khaki, one with a weapon in his arms.

  ‘They’re military vehicles,’ said Katherine, ‘heading the way we want to go.’

  ‘They seem in a hurry,’ said Barklice ominously. ‘But, decision made, we follow on. If more vehicles come up behind us, or we see anything ahead, we’ll find cover along the verge. If worse happens and real danger looms, the fields beyond will be our refuge. But at least the going will be easier here and every step we take will bring us nearer home.

  ‘We’ll find out what’s afoot with these fires ahead and maybe where those vehicles were going and what they were doing, for certainly they seemed intent on something serious.’

  After a few more minutes of rest they moved off once more, now content to walk on the hard shoulder of the road.

  More vehicles came by and, later, returned, and they soon got used to taking cover.

  Further observation confirmed that the returning vehicles had been emptied of their loads for they bounced and rattled back along the road very noisily. It amused Blut to observe the different vehicles come and go in more detail and he worked out that there were nine in all.

  The darkness across the land on either side of them was punctured here and there by much smaller fires than the vast one far ahead. The silence was broken only by the familiar cries of night creatures, except once, when Katherine herself stopped and cried out.

  ‘I’m a fool!’ she declared, as they spied another of the red-orange fires far off to their right and saw the glimmer of a rocket in the low clouds above. ‘I’ve been in the Hyddenworld too long and had forgotten what date it is.’

  They all stopped and turned to her.

  ‘November 5th,’ she said, ‘Guy Fawkes Night, one of the few secular festivals humans have celebrated continuously for hundreds of years. Usually for good reasons but sometimes for purposes of riot . . .’

  They looked at each other blankly but for Blut, who had made a point of studying human culture, especially that of Englalond, from where Slaeke Sinistral had originally come.

  ‘It is a celebration of sorts,’ he explained to the other hydden, ‘commemorating the arraignment of a terrorist named Fawkes, caught red-handed trying to blow something up.’

  ‘Blow what up?’ asked Sinistral.

  Blut smiled bleakly in the dark.

  ‘I think, my Lord, as former Emperor, and therefore upholder of the Imperial might and all its institutions, you might prefer not to know . . .’

  ‘Try me,’ said Sinistral.

  ‘An institution that harboured free speech,’ said Blut.

  They moved on, bantering as they went, easier in themselves now they felt they were heading home, distant though it might be.

  When midnight came they agreed it was time to stop and rest. Which they might well have done, moving off the road to find a safe campsite in the fields and woods nearby, had they not once more been interrupted by the familiar roar of a military vehicle. It came from their left, and this time its front lights were on, for the good reason that it was on a winding, broken slip road which led up to the highway itself. It was moving fast, arrived at a gate, jolted over a cattle grid and accelerated up to the road they were on, joining it two hundred yards ahead of them.

  It carried straight on in the direction they were going, again with just a red fog light to its rear, and it was soon out of sight.

  ‘Interesting,’ observed Festoon.

  ‘If no more humans show up, that slip road might be a good place to rest awhile,’ said Barklice. ‘Easier than clambering down the embankment.’

  They waited a little longer and saw no more lights, nor heard any sound. The air was acrid with smoke and the flickering glow of a second burning city showed up on the horizon far ahead.

  They went off the road, quickly settled among vegetation adjacent to a concrete drainage conduit and brewed up.

  Katherine was restless, the night lightening a little as the clouds thinned and revealed a few stars. She decided to explore the road from which the truck had come. Terce got up to go with her.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ said Barklice.

  ‘I must,’ said Katherine, making it clear enough what it was she needed to do.

  ‘Me too,’ said Terce, who had the same idea.

  ‘We won’t go far,’ said Katherine, ‘and we won’t stray from this slip road. If you whistle we’ll signal with my torch that we’ve heard and start straight back.’

  Once through the gate and beyond the wire fence, curiosity got the better of them both and they went further than they needed to.

  ‘It looks like an old airfield,’ said Katherine, eyeing the expanse of concrete that stretched away to their right.

 
‘There’s a building ahead,’ said Terce, whose night vision was exceptional. The dark, looming shape of a structure showed against the night sky a hundred yards ahead.

  ‘And the smell of burning . . . I thought it was from the distant fire but it’s getting stronger here. Come on . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘Come on, Terce. Let’s find out what the military were up to.’

  They headed straight towards the structure silhouetted against the sky, past some tyres, a pile of unused fencing and empty wooden boxes with rope handles at either end, which set off a warning bell in Katherine’s mind. It was unfortunately one too faint to act upon.

  Two posts rose up to their right with a noticeboard on top whose writing they could not quite read. The structure ahead became clear and they saw it was not a building at all, but huge containers, their rear ends open, roughly dumped into a circle.

  Beyond these there really were buildings, their windows barred. Not derelict but left secure, perhaps for storage use.

  The smell of fire came from something smouldering between the buildings and the containers. Katherine flashed her torch momentarily.

  The containers were filled with wooden boxes like those they had seen earlier. Their nailed tops had been levered off, the contents strewn. They peered more closely. There were boxes of bullets, hand-grenades, sticks of dynamite . . . and Katherine understood her earlier doubts. They were looking at unexploded munitions.

  Terce, not understanding what they saw, advanced towards the smouldering fire. It flared, caught by the breeze, sparked and sputtered strangely and its light caught the frozen panic in Katherine’s face.

  She grasped Terce’s arm.

  ‘Come back,’ she whispered, as if just the sound of her voice could set everything off. They had walked straight into a crude attempt by the military, or a militia group, to destroy dangerous ordnance.

  ‘We get out of here now,’ she said so urgently that he did not argue.

  The fire began to roar as they retreated, lighting up the boards on the posts they had just walked past. She peered upward and flashed her torch for confirmation.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, echoing an expression Arthur Foale used to use at moments of danger, ‘oh dear God.’

  The board was yellow. It had a skull and crossbones on it beneath which were the words: DANGER. Ministry of Defence Restricted Area. UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE, Authorized Access Only.

  ‘Run!’ screamed Katherine. ‘Run for your life!’

  Jack was still weak but no longer nauseous.

  The brew Slew gave him had settled his stomach. The endless motion of the deck and rails of the cutter, the ghastly see-saw of the night horizon no longer upset him. The once-revolting odour of cooked food in the galley seemed no longer so; he vomited no more and he had even managed a mouthful or two of stew.

  He was able at last to breathe the good sea air with pleasure and gaze in wonder at the few lights across the sea, some winking, some yellow, a few near, most far. The shore might be almost dark but the lights of buoys and automatic lightships were still working.

  Jack had never been at sea at night, either as human or hydden. Never seen the shore of Englalond as a nocturnal invader might see it, or an embattled, storm-tossed sailor seeking a safe haven in the centuries gone by might have done.

  The landmass itself was a two dimensional black-grey wall, the night sky lighter now the stars and a clouded moon were up. As the black coast slipped by, its anonymous shapes and features shifted into new ones almost imperceptibly. Jack found comfort and reassurance in Riff’s barked orders from the wheel as the crew luffed and reefed and kept the ropes tight and the canvas full.

  Sometimes on the passing shore, occasionally on top of higher ground, they saw bright fires and the shoot of rockets heavenward.

  These troubled the sailors until Jack explained that he thought it was November 5th, which humans commemorate.

  ‘Why?’ Slew had asked.

  ‘Because on that night, in 1605, Guy Fawkes failed in his attempt to kill some important people,’ he replied. ‘Maybe this year it’s being used as an excuse for something more violent.’

  Slew slipped away, puzzled still. The hydden were not in the habit of drawing attention to themselves with fireworks.

  Jack looked far to the west, the direction from which they had come, trying to work out where Katherine and the others might now be.

  ‘Maybe about there!’ he said aloud, pointing at what looked like yet another bonfire. Even as he did so there was a frightening flash, infinitely larger than any ordinary fire or rocket . . . and moments later the crashing, thumping, start of a series of explosions on an enormous scale.

  As these continued a new and different sickness overtook him, one far more dreadful than before. With it came a horror that ran to his heart’s core and churned it into feelings of absolute dread and fear.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ he heard himself say, ‘I should never have left her side.’

  He stepped back blindly from the rail without thinking, straight into the void above the galley and berths below. He felt himself falling, and heard the thump, thump, thump of his own head as it bumped downward on the wooden steps.

  In the final moments, as darkness descended, Jack was overtaken by the conviction that what he had seen was nothing less than an explosion that had killed all his friends on the landward route, Katherine included.

  9

  RACK AND RUIN

  Katherine’s cry of ‘Run!’, when she saw the fire by the explosives, was intended for Terce, but it was fortunately so loud that it was heard by the others in their camp near the road.

  The flames were bright enough for her to see that Barklice and Stort were trying to work out what was going on.

  ‘Get back down!’ she yelled as she and Terce desperately tried to escape and dive down into the protection of the deep conduit by their camp.

  Barklice knew Katherine well enough to know that she meant what she said. Seeing the fire and guessing the nature of the danger they were in, he grabbed the seat of Stort’s trews, pulled him backwards and shouted at the others to stay down and take cover.

  They followed his lead, abandoning their food, their fire and their ’sacs and tumbled pell-mell into the open conduit in a tangle of arms and legs.

  For a moment more there was silence, broken only by the drumming steps of the other two on the concrete road, their shadows a confusion of shapes on the embankment beyond where the others lay.

  Then the light of the fire turned to a blinding white and the dark night was rent asunder by a succession of percussive, incandescent, murderous explosions, which shook the ground and deafened them.

  Moments after that the dry, husky vegetation around them snapped off and two figures, like rag dolls caught in a hot, hurricane wind, shot over their heads and thumped sickeningly onto the steep side of the embankment beyond.

  The air shimmered with heat, the vegetation caught fire, the explosions continued.

  Festoon was the first to move, understanding at once that the flying figures were their friends. He might have tried to go to them but that the force of another explosion, as loud and bright as any before, slammed him back down again.

  There was a crackle of sound, as of gunfire, and ordnance great and small shot about above their heads for several minutes before silence fell again and the white light turned a shade more orange.

  Again Festoon rose, seeming to be less affected than the others and to understand the danger that Katherine and Terce were in, even supposing they could have survived the full brunt of the blast which carried them bodily onto the embankment.

  Seeing the danger, Festoon ordered them to stay where they were while he and Barklice climbed up through smouldering vegetation towards where Katherine and Terce lay deathly still.

  The crackling began again and bullets whizzed through the air and rockets shot across the airfield as showers of burning debris and shrapnel fell all around. Another series
of explosions began and the two would-be rescuers buried themselves face-down in the vegetation.

  ‘Let’s get them to safety, Mister Barklice,’ said Festoon coolly when the next lull came. He bravely rose to his knees, crawled up the slope far enough to reach the outstretched leg of Terce and grasped it. There was no time for niceties. He heaved at the leg, got Terce down the slope and helped Barklice roll him into the conduit.

  They went up again and brought Katherine back to safety the same way. Neither she nor Terce was conscious but there was no sign of obvious injury to him, and nothing but a deep cut on Katherine’s hand.

  It was as well they got the two into cover when they did for now the explosions became as violent as the initial ones, and soon after flaming debris came sailing through the air which set the embankment alight where the two had fallen. For a short while the heat was intense and those with their backs nearest to the flames, who were sheltering the others, found their clothes smouldering.

  Then, as suddenly as the explosions began, they were over, but for the fires and the drift of smoke, which had them coughing and spluttering for a while, leaving only the glimmering light and occasional flaring-up of a multitude of small fires, near and far.

  Miraculously, as it seemed, Katherine came round, groaning in shock and discomfort, her right hand going at once to her left shoulder. This was evidently more painful than the injured hand. She stared at them uncomprehendingly when they spoke to her, eventually shaking her head. The explosions had temporarily deafened her.

  Terce remained unconscious and seemed more seriously hurt. Stort examined them both and, having declared that Katherine had no broken bones or serious lacerations apart from the one on her hand, he shook his head grimly over Terce.

  ‘He breathes, just about, but even in his state of unconsciousness he seems in pain. I think some ribs are broken. His back is pitted with a dozen small puncture wounds, but they do not appear to be deep or very serious. I think he must have sought to protect Katherine with his bulk, and small pieces of grit and suchlike have been driven through his skin by the force of the explosions coming from behind him.