Ancient Images (37 page)

    Roger shouted behind her. She twisted round and saw someone fling a glinting object at him. She thought it was a knife until the van jerked forward, and then she realized he'd been thrown a bunch of keys. He must have struggled across to the driver's seat when he had seen Enoch fall.

    Enoch's followers dodged out of the road, taking the police with them, as the van lurched out of the trees. Roger was crouched awkwardly over the wheel, his face squashed together by determination. He slowed when he came abreast of Sandy, and she slid the passenger door open. He was slewed around in the driver's seat, his plastered leg wedged against the accelerator; he had to swing his whole body whenever he needed to work the other pedals. He looked more incongruous than he had when she'd left him by the road; he looked like a grubby knight who'd found his way into a modern vehicle by mistake. The sight of him was so comic and heartening that she wanted to weep. She would have changed seats with him, except that would waste time. As soon as she climbed into the passenger seat he thrust his cast down on the accelerator.

    Enoch had halted in the middle of the road and was covering his throat with both red hands. As the van sped toward him he staggered aside. "Don't," Sandy cried, suddenly afraid that he would step into the field behind him. Roger must have thought she was talking to him, for he leaned so hard on the brake that she was nearly flung out of the vehicle as the door slid open. As she jumped down and ran to Enoch, Roger was already turning the van.

    The cords of Enoch's vest were beginning to turn red. His eyes looked in danger of glazing over, glistening with his struggle to stay in them. Though she had hoped before that he wouldn't recognize her, she was dismayed now that he seemed unable to do so. She grabbed him by the elbow and felt him trying not to collapse onto her. "I've got you," she said as firmly as she could. "We'll take you back. There's a healer traveling with you, isn't there?"

    He drew a breath so painful she thought he was choking. At last he managed to get out one word, in a shrunken laborious voice. "Hospital."

    His hands let go of his throat as if to allow him to speak, and she saw how much he needed a hospital, saw the raw shredded streaming flesh he was attempting to hold together. Faintness brought the landscape dancing at her, but she forced herself to support him as far as the van, which Roger had succeeded in turning. Roger clambered down and helped hoist Enoch into the back, where there was a lumpy double mattress for him to lie on. "Can you drive now?" Roger said to her. "It might be quicker."

    It would also help her overcome her faintness. She scrambled behind the wheel and started the vehicle as Roger slammed the rear doors from inside. In the mirror she saw his face as he propped himself at Enoch's head, murmuring to him, looking so encouraging that she knew he must be battling not to react to what he saw.

    She'd scarcely gathered speed toward the trees when she had to brake. Both the police and the owners of the van, a long-haired middle-aged couple, were blocking the road. "He's badly hurt. We need to get him to a hospital as fast as we can. Will you escort me?" she called down to the police, and threw down her keys to the long-haired couple. "It'll be quickest if you take my car. It's just past all your vehicles."

    What sounded like authority was half panic, the sound of her determination to drive straight on if anyone opposed her. The driver of the leading police car scrutinized her face, then turned quickly. "Follow us."

    As he swung the police car around, its siren howling, a muscular woman with a crewcut and the whitest teeth Sandy had ever seen jumped into the van and wriggled over the passenger seat into the back. "I'm Merl. I'll look after him," she said, and then with much less certainty: "Oh Jesus.
Was
it a dog?"

    "Whatever it was," Sandy said, to fend off the subject, "he didn't let it get away in one piece."

    "You should have seen what it was, you were there. If I'd been there I would have killed it myself." She tore a strip off the hem of her loose ankle-length dress and wrapped it around Enoch's neck, and her voice became maternal. "Rest now, rest and be strong. What is it? What are you trying to say?"

    Enoch sucked in a choked breath. "Don't let me die here," he said indistinctly.

    "We won't let you die at all," Sandy cried, following the police car. Enoch's plea had made her fear of Redfield more immediate and more specific. All the victims of the land hadn't just spilled their blood within its boundaries, they had died there. The flashing light of the police car made shadows leap between the trees, and she was afraid that one or other of the thin vague shapes would spring into the van to finish Enoch off. When some of his folk stared resentfully at the police car and didn't clear the road immediately, she heard herself moaning between her clenched teeth.

    The trees parted ahead, beyond the curve that led into the open, and all at once the copse smelled to her as if the earth were heaving up beneath the undergrowth. She had to restrain herself from ramming her fist into the wheel to sound the horn; it wouldn't make the police drive any faster, it was more likely to pull them up. The last branches sailed by overhead, and their shadows reached beyond the copse for the van. Then the vehicle was out under the sky, and she had to swallow before she was able to ask, "How is he?"

    The woman was singing Enoch a song, too low for Sandy to hear the words. It might have been a lullaby or a soft dirge. When she didn't interrupt it to respond to Sandy's question, Roger peered at Enoch. "Alive," he said.

    At the most Sandy would have uttered a secret whisper of relief, but even that was premature. Half the convoy was still on Redfield land. As she raced after the police car she glanced constantly into the mirrors, seeing the trees close around the head of the convoy, the line of vehicles shriveling with distance as though Toonderfield were consuming it. Fumes rose through the trees and drifted across the fields as the vehicles turned, and Sandy willed the drivers to be quick, get out, don't be distracted by any movements in the shadows, stay together… Perhaps there was safety in numbers, for as Toonderfield sank below the horizon to bide its time she saw the convoy following the second police car. She gripped the wheel so hard she bruised her fingers, to carry herself past feeling so weak with relief that she wouldn't be able to drive.

    It took the police half an hour to conduct her to a hospital, and the cropped woman sang to Enoch all the way, wrapping more strips of her dress around his neck. Once he tried to say something about a dog, which Sandy thought was either a question or a denial. As Sandy parked the van in front of the Emergency wing, one of the policemen came running out ahead of a doctor and two orderlies with a stretcher. Enoch was loaded onto the stretcher, and Sandy heard him speak. Later she agreed with Roger that he'd muttered, "Can't be helped." She hoped that meant he was resigned to what came, for less than five minutes later he was dead.

    

    

    The police were ready to believe Arcturus, since he alone claimed to have seen what had happened to Enoch. Merl the healer said that Enoch had tried to tell her about a dog, and Sandy made herself keep quiet: this wasn't the place or the time to say what she knew. The police called in a warning about a savage stray dog and made to herd the convoy away, until Sandy managed to persuade the hospital to let Enoch's people pay their last respects.

    Not all of them wanted to see Enoch. A group led by Merl knelt in the car park and chanted as a large bright cloud that made Sandy think of an unfurling sail glided slowly from above the hospital toward the distant sea. Most of those who went in to view Enoch shed a tear for him, but they seemed stunned by his death. He lay in an anonymous side room whose function was unclear, a sheet over his face until one of the men uncovered it and snarled at an orderly who started to protest. Sandy stood outside the room in case she needed to mediate, but that was the only skirmish. The sight of Enoch's huge head in repose, his beard wiry on the white sheet, seemed to impress even the hospital staff who passed along the corridor. As Sandy watched his followers trudging silently in and out of the room, she thought that despite the starkness of the setting he looked exactly like an ancient chieftain lying in state.

    The last to visit were Arcturus and his mother. The boy held her hand and gazed at the dead face as if he were trying to understand. "Where's he gone?" he said.

    The woman didn't speak until she was out of the room and staring hard at Sandy. "Somewhere better than we're going, but we'll be there too someday."

    Sandy thought she was meant to feel guilty, a feeling easily invoked in her just now, until she realized the woman only expected her to respond. All she could think of to say was "Where
will
you go?"

    "We'll find an island," the woman said, with a fierceness that sounded bitter rather than convincing.

    "Maybe there's a country that'll like us," Arcturus said in a dazed voice.

    "Or one so big we won't be noticed, any road."

    Outside the hospital the police were making sure that everyone returned to the vehicles and prepared to drive on. The healer, who appeared to have taken over some of Enoch's leadership, was murmuring comfort to them as they left the building. "Where are we," Arcturus' mother began and was interrupted by an angry sob, "supposed to go now?"

    "As far north as we have to, we've decided."

    Not everyone seemed to agree. At least one couple were already arguing between themselves. If Enoch's death caused the convoy to split up, Sandy wondered whether that might be for the best. She watched the convoy meander away, following the beacon of one police car and trailed by the other, until it was out of sight on the road that led to Scotland. Some of the convoy would stay with the healer, she imagined, and there would be room enough for them in the harsh thinly populated highlands, but would they be able to survive there? Sending a wish after them, she went back into the hospital.

    Roger was in another wing, having his cast removed. He would be expecting her to drive back to London once he was free, but she couldn't when the closeness of Redfield reminded her that nothing had changed, that the year wasn't over. A surge of the nervous energy that had kept her driving hustled her to the nearest pay phone, her hands digging change out of her purse.

    The receptionist sounded efficiently warm as ever. "Staff o' Life?"

    "I need to speak to Lord Redfield. Not the press office, not his secretary. Lord Redfield himself."

    "I'm afraid he's accepting no calls."

    The swiftness of the answer told Sandy that it wasn't just a standard response. "Tell him Sandy Allan wants to speak to him. Tell him I saw what happened this morning at Toonderfield. I saw exactly what happened, and he needs to know."

    She felt uncomfortably like a blackmailer-indeed, one who was contradicting what she had told the police-but what else could she do? If she wasn't able to speak to him over the phone she would have to venture back to Redfield. All she wanted at this point was to arrange to meet him somewhere beyond the boundaries of his land, but the receptionist said, "I'm sorry, Lord Redfield is in conference."

    That was a stock response if Sandy had ever heard one. "What do you mean, in conference?"

    "He's left instructions that he's not to be disturbed."

    "He's going to have to be. He'll want to know how a man came to be killed on his land."

    "Miss Allan, I'm not authorized-was

    "Didn't you know that had happened this morning? He'll want to speak to me, I promise you. And no, I haven't got the number of his private line. If you'd seen what I saw earlier I think even you might be a bit disorganized."

    After a pause the receptionist said "Please hold on" discouragingly, and made way for the Staff o' Life jingle. There should be children singing it, Sandy thought, not the sterile tones of a synthesizer. She leaned her forehead against the inside of the sketchy booth, and felt exhaustion lowering itself onto her shoulders. She blinked her eyes hard and stretched them wide several times, and then she was jarred awake. The second repetition of the jingle had been cut short, leaving her mind to sing "mark it" where the jingle would have reached that phrase, and Lord Redfield broke the hollow silence. "Well, Miss Allan."

    Either she was hearing what she wanted to hear or he wasn't as calm as he was trying to sound: his voice was a little too precise and high. "I was at Toonderfield this morning," she said.

    "Many people were."

    "Yes, but one of them died, even though I got him to hospital. He died of being injured on your land."

    A sound like a shudder in the earpiece made her take the receiver away from her face, and she heard the last of that sigh in his voice. "I was afraid of something of the kind after what I saw myself."

    Rage, the more uncontrollable because she felt it was to some extent unreasonable, shook her voice. "You were there and yet you didn't do anything? I didn't see you."

    "I wasn't there. My grandfather was. Perhaps you saw him."

    "If he was, why didn't he-was she demanded, and then what he was implying caught up with her. The heat and noises of the hospital seemed to retreat, leaving her alone and cold and yet closer to him, united in understanding. At last she said, "How do you know?"

    "I heard him coming back and I followed him down. I take it the victim put up a fight."

    "He tried to."

    "He broke my grandfather's leg, if I can call that my grandfather. I must, of course, since I am to be allowed no illusions. It nearly hid from me in its lair but wasn't quite swift enough. I wonder if you have the least idea what I'm talking about, not that it matters."