Awakening (48 page)

‘They’re the enemy, not us,’ she said, pointing towards the soldiers.

They watched as the soldiers fired clinical sniper shots at a target across the valley, each as calculated as the cut of a surgeon’s knife. By their side a spotter, using binoculars, whispered instructions.

An infinitesimal change in the sights. Another round of shots.

The shots were a blasphemy that cut through the tree-ruined landscape that was the dark forest of Kielder.

They landed deep inside the forest’s dry and dark sterility.

‘Poor trees,’ she whispered, touching them as she passed.

She instructed him, ‘Touch them, Arthur, they’re all alone. Imagine ten thousand of us, our feet in concrete and our arms cut off, standing upright so close that even in a gale the wind sweeping across the moors doesn’t reach those inside and you can’t move and turn and see who’s behind. Imagine! That’s Kielder.’

He saw that she was weeping.

‘Our Mother Earth feels their pain and I do too. Sometimes I can’t bear being all alone and ask, “Why me?”’

They reached the black, black waters of the reservoir.

‘Submerged beneath the surface are the huts of the men conscripted to dig this wound into the Earth’s surface,’ she said. ‘Come on, Arthur, let me show you.’

She pulled him unresisting beneath the surface of the waters to feel its cold sterility.

‘People looking at the cold surface above us,’ she said, ‘don’t know we’re here underneath. Do we exist? I don’t think so. Ready to leave? Too soon, Arthur; I want you to get so cold you feel Earth’s pain.’

She let go his hand and he touched neither the surface nor the bottom, drifting, turning round and round, hands out, flesh watery white, no longer alive to the world above. He felt the Earth’s cold in every joint and muscle right through to his head.

‘Judith,’ he wanted to say so he wasn’t alone down there, ‘Judith . . .’

It took two years for the waters of the moors around to fill that great scar
, she whispered, her voice deep and blurry with the water.

She carried him out, water streaming off him, from his ears and his mouth and his clothes.

When he looked back the water of the reservoir was gone and there was just the original wound, grey-black, a massive gouge in the Earth’s flank.

‘See you in two years,’ she said, flying away and leaving him to sit and wait and watch the filling-in, his tears ten thousand little streams, and he shivering throughout.

Want to go back to the fire
, he wished to say, but he was too cold to say anything.

One night, three nights, two whole years?

He didn’t know how long he had been up there when he realized they were finally coming off the moor back into the human world, back past Chattlehope, past the hanging waters of Catcleugh.

When they returned the fire was waiting and ablaze.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ asked the women.

‘We did.’

‘He came then, to fix the fire?’

‘He took a shine to Katherine,’ said Margaret, and they laughed at some secret about all that.

Judith said, ‘One more night, then you must go.’

‘I was just beginning to enjoy myself,’ said Margaret, the flames flickering all over her wrinkled face and hands.

Judith shook her head.

‘Got to go,’ she said, ‘because Byrness is under sentence of death. The reservoir’s dam is going to burst. Tomorrow morning . . .’

They packed the car at dawn, locked up the cottage, said their goodbyes to the place and the time and Katherine began weeping. She suddenly understood. Her baby was no more. Her little girl gone. The teenager matured. They were saying goodbye to the place; Judith was saying goodbye to them.

‘But Judith . . .’

Judith held Katherine like a woman now, not a child.

Held her like Jack did.

Held her with love.

Katherine wept but Judith did not.

‘It was going to be sometime, Mum. Well, it’s now. I . . . thank you . . . say thanks . . .’

‘I will, I will, I will,’ said Katherine.

‘Tell him I love him.’

‘I will.’

‘Mum?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Am I ugly?’

Katherine held her tighter still. No question could have made her feel more loved, nor more needed. ‘You are the most beautiful creature on the Earth,’ she said softly, ‘and you make me proud.’

‘You’ll make me cry and Shield Maidens don’t cry. Let me go.’

‘Your sister did,’ Katherine said, ‘and you’ll learn how to, I expect.’

‘Let me go!’

They parted, laughing.

‘I’m not coming,’ Judith called out to Arthur and Margaret. ‘Mum, goodbye. Now go!
Go!
There’s no more time. I’m going to tell the man to leave as well and the dogs with him. Too dangerous.’

‘Focking dangerous,’ murmured Arthur, inaudible but to himself. ‘
Judith, we should tell . . .
’

‘It’s in the wyrd of things that you go and they stay, except maybe the man and his dogs . . .’

She turned from them and was gone to tell the man and do whatever it was she was going to do down the coming seasons of her life.

‘To north or south, uphill or down?’ asked Katherine when Judith was gone.

‘Down and away,’ said Arthur. ‘The sooner we put Catcleugh behind us the better. If we went up that way you’d have to go through Kielder and, trust me, you wouldn’t want that. The place looks like a sentence of death.’

Katherine eased the car onto the road, turned downhill, and did not look back.

Behind her Judith was already long gone, the man well warned, and Morten happy at her side as she strode back up into the trees.

In their dark shade the Reivers were waiting for her with their dogs.

‘Come,’ she commanded them, ‘your wait is over and you have your queen at last!’

She raced away, Morten followed, and the Reivers galloped behind her to right and left, right across that dreadful, bullied, ruined landscape.

‘Look!’ she said pointing.

Even a Summer sunrise didn’t improve it.

‘Look what men have done to the Earth!’

The sun arced across the sky towards dusk.

Far below, winding away down the narrow, darkening forest roads, heading south, the others went, contained in a car, fleeing red rear lights in the landscape, heading home to Woolstone, their task done. Judith watched them go and then looked another way. The Shield Maiden’s childhood was over but she was not alone.

‘You look ill,’ the Reivers said.

‘I am ageing,’ she said, ‘and I have much to do. What season is it?’

‘Up here it’s always Winter, down south it may be Summer. How would we know? We’ve never been.’

The Earth shuddered to hear their racing feet and the dread beat of their hearts. It was Herself she heard.

Behind them in the dark that night, the great wall of the Catcleugh Reservoir cracked and the first trickle of water began.

A man had already closed his cottage door, put the key under the mat out of habit, whistled up Morten’s son, and began climbing away from Byrness, up the steepest track he knew. The village sat in its sterile darkness, a few lights on, waiting and waiting, nothing to do, fires guttering and the wind ill-tempered off the reservoir.

Silent, a white snake writhing through the dark, the River Rede began to race and grow as the trickle down the face of the dam wall upstream turned into an angry waterfall.

There was a thundering rumble and bang! as earth and concrete broke and the lichen-covered capstones along its parapet moved one from another, the narrow gaps between them widening and widening as the water they’d contained, eager now for freedom, roared out its right to liberty and began its killing spree.

The humans’ grip on their world was weakening.

40

H
OLY
C
HARADE

‘T
his isn’t what it seems, Jack,’ said Feld quietly as the Fyrd led them away. ‘Do exactly what they say.’

It was as well he spoke, because Jack was all for resisting and having a fight right there in the outer tunnels of Bochum.

‘We’ll see,’ he muttered, signalling to the others to say nothing, make no protest and for the moment go along with what they were told to do.

‘It’s just processing,’ explained Feld. ‘It’s what they do when they can’t think what else to do.’

They were hurried off the main concourse away from the crowds down a well-lit corridor which looked to Jack like a very large sewage pipe cleaned up, painted grey and floored.

They were taken to an empty room and told they would be locked in there until late afternoon when their processing would begin.

Jack was worried, Feld less so.

‘It’s about control,’ he said. ‘We’ve arrived at a time of festival or celebration and this is their way of keeping people they can’t easily identify under control. There are probably a lot of others like us, getting equally frustrated and angry.’

He was right, they were kept locked up until the late afternoon, when the door opened and they were led, firmly but not roughly, into a large space in which a whole mass of people had already been herded, most with portersacs and staves. They were standing about and many complained loudly.

‘It’s a holding room before they do the paperwork,’ said Feld, ‘and we’re going to have to make some fast decisions. The first is not to look too much like a single group. That way we may be able to split up without anyone realizing we’re working together. They don’t like groups, they’re threatening.’

Jack nodded, looked around, and appraised things.

He had assumed when they were stopped that they had been targeted for some specific reason and no one else had. In fact the Fyrd who had stopped them had left them at once and gone back out the way they had come without talking to anyone or passing on information about them.

At the far end of the room was a harassed-looking seated official in grey garb that matched another, but which was not Fyrd uniform. Bureaucrats.

More people were suddenly brought in, as they had been, and were placed behind them. They were in a queue and it was moving forward, those at the front being asked questions and filling in forms. There were several doors behind the officials, a grille through which Jack could see more, and a double door to the left side through which most of those who had been questioned were filing, irritated and voluble. Some people, forming a smaller group, had been put over to the right-hand side.

‘I need to know who these groups are and why they’re being treated differently,’ said Jack, bringing his own group together, ‘and fast. Once we’re through one or other of those it’s going to be harder to get back and go through the other if it’s preferable. Meaning we’ll have lost control. Also if we split up we may find it hard to get back together again . . .’

The queue moved forward, more came in from behind, some of whom began pushing.

‘Okay, listen. Let these new people come past us; look confused, but stay loosely together until Feld and I have worked out what’s going on. Stay with Stort, he’s tallest and we can find you quickly in this crowd. Just try not to move forward . . .’

He and Feld filtered out of the queue to right and left, drifting forward towards the front and side.

It was noisy and chaotic and the Fyrd inside the area had given up trying to do anything other than keep the crowd moving.

Jack pretended he was looking for someone he had lost, peering about ahead of him, nodding indifferently to the Fyrd who tried to push him back in the queue and saying, ‘Just looking for my brother . . . he’s . . . yes . . . yeh . . .’

He did not exactly resist the Fyrd, but he did keep moving forward. Finally the Fyrd left him to it. He glanced across the room to Feld, who was doing much the same. Feld headed towards the people going through the double doors and was able to get a look at the papers they had filled in.

Jack reached the much smaller group on the right side. He saw at once that their dress was better than average, they looked in no way fearful or helpless, and they wanted answers. It was obvious too that some spoke neither English nor German and appeared to be representatives of the places they had come from, like officials or even ambassadors.

He returned at once to the others, just as Feld did.

‘A few of them are Bochumers,’ said Feld, ‘who’ve got caught up in the Fyrd’s net. That’s why they’re so angry. But most are travellers coming here to celebrate the Emperor’s return to normal life. The Fyrd don’t want them any nearer the centre. The crowd down there is getting too big.’

‘What are the papers they’ve been given?’

‘Coupons for meals and accommodation,’ said Feld. ‘Look. I’ve got one, someone dropped it, Mirror help them.’

Jack looked at it.

It was printed, not handwritten, and had a name at the bottom:
By Order of N. Blut, Commander of the Emperor’s Office.