Ironhand (22 page)

He realized that it was only the other soldier’s arm gripping his over the top of the horse’s neck that was keeping him upright. He tried to brace his boots and set his legs, but it was like trying to stack jelly. He gritted his teeth, and then he heard his father’s voice saying:

“Good boy, good boy, you’re going to be fine.”

And even though the soldier was saying it to calm the horse, he was also gripping George’s arm as he did so, and George’s heart opened again, despite the cacophony of the world coming to an end all around him. He found the iron in his soul and made his shaking legs do their job. As he looked down and saw them braced and supporting him, he noticed the thing, the last bad thing before it happened.

His father’s boots were like his.

The only difference was that his father had broken a lace and had hurriedly mended it by knotting it at the toe end.

George knew what was going to happen even as his hand clenched on to his father’s sleeve and he started shouting—

“No! Dad! Listen, please, I didn’t—”

The soldier’s head jerked up and met his eyes across the horse’s neck. He was smiling.

“It’s okay—”

The wall came in as if another giant had just kicked it down. The horse kicked sideways, and they both flinched. George felt the hand that had been gripping his go limp, and suddenly it was his turn to support the whole weight of the man on the other side. Then the horse tumbled over as a gout of flame rolled over them.

George didn’t let go of the arm even though they were suddenly enveloped in a cloud of dust and smoke that was impossible to see through. He felt the horses’ hooves lashing about in panic and heard their screaming neighs, and with his free hand he found the hobbles and released them, and then the horses were gone. He pulled his father’s limp, heavy body onto his shoulders and staggered out of the burning debris into the open.

He shouted for help, but none came, so he staggered forward up the hill, the weight on his back heavier with each step. He heard himself sobbing, and then the wind whipped away the smoke, and the barrage stopped. He saw the hill ahead of him, and he dropped to one knee at the horror it revealed.

The two guns were destroyed. One was pointing crazily to the sky, the other was just not there. In its place was a crater with the gun team neatly splayed around the rim like petals on a flower. Bodies were blown into the barbed wire, some of which were not moving. Something was trying to crawl out of a shell hole. The impaled horse was gone, as were most of the birch trees.

George’s scream for help turned into a question, and he heard the word “Why?” convulse repeatedly out of his throat. All that time he clutched his father’s dead arm tighter and tighter as he felt the weight of the body buckle his legs and start to drive him into the ground.

And then something clattered at his feet; it was a stretcher. He looked up and saw the Officer and a bombardier looking at him with infinite sadness in their eyes and heard the Officer say:

“Put him down, Gunner.”

He shook his head and tried to straighten his legs despite the crushing downward force on his shoulders.

“Can’t carry him forever. Put him down.”

Again George shook his head and clenched on to the arm all the more tightly.

“It’s my dad.”

One of his hands twined fingers into the dead hand’s fingers, and he held on for all he was worth. But there was no answering flicker of life. Then the hand seemed to grow bigger in his, and his fingers slipped out of it. He heard the fast percussive
wah-wah
of a police car roaring past, the rumble of London’s traffic dialed back up as the sky dimmed, and his knees gave way. He fell off the bronze plinth and felt himself being caught in two bronze arms. He hung there, looking down at the Officer’s boots. The light dimmed down to black, and he let it close over his head like the sea.

T
he Gunner lay in the dark water, waiting for death. The human part of him was numb with the constrictive horror of drowning, the bodily outrage, the pounding claustrophobia of the pipe, the terrible impossibility of taking a last breath, and the choking wrongness of it all.

The statue part of him knew that turn o’day was upon him, and that his death as a spit was coming. He had spent his whole existence marking midnight and standing to, and as with any habit, the rhythm and timing of it was hardwired into his body clock.

He would cease to walk, cease to talk, he would just be an inanimate lump of metal. Somehow dawn would see him winnowed to the elements and reconstituted on his plinth, never to move again. He had often wondered if the spits who had died were dead inside, or merely unable to move or express themselves. He hoped they were dead. Otherwise it would be like being buried alive forever, with a tiny window to view the passing world but no way to communicate with it other than an unending scream that sounded only inside your head.

Death, he hoped, would be just nothing. A big blank, a full stop, a balance where the absence of life and hope was counterweighed by the absence of pain and despair. A final equation where nothing equaled nothing, and all calculation ceased.

He managed to squeeze his arms so that his hands could lie calmly across his chest. He closed his eyes and composed himself as he waited for oblivion.

The trouble was he didn’t feel composed inside, because, as the seconds ticked away, he couldn’t help thinking that the whole oblivion thing was an easy way out. George and Edie would still be in danger, no matter whether he was conscious of it or not, and that felt bad. He grimaced as he realized he was not going to go gentle into any good night; rather, he was going to go feeling like he’d betrayed them by checking out early.

His eyes snapped open in the blackness. Well, he thought. Forget this composing yourself lark. Go down fighting.

He kicked his heels in and started pushing himself farther into the pipe. As he did so, a savage smile played on his lips. He was smiling because he knew this was a doubly futile gesture: he was going to be dead any second, and no one would ever know he had tried. He was smiling because he was just doing it for himself. He was going to die living his last moment exactly as he was, and not a damn thing less.

It was a good plan. It was tough, it was valiant, and it was, in the finest tradition of all good plans, destined to fail.

He didn’t die fighting.

He didn’t die being who he was meant to be.

He didn’t die at all.

Somehow in the middle of kicking and pushing his way along the narrow pipe, shoving the bundle of heart stones ahead of him, he realized that he knew the day had turned, midnight had passed, and he was, unexpectedly and extraordinarily, not dead.

He didn’t know that this was because George had stood his watch and kept his place on his plinth alive; he just knew that not only was he not dead, but he was feeling stronger with every foot that he moved along the narrow pipe.

And the pipe was narrow. It was definitely getting smaller as the debris on the floor got thicker and the Gunner’s nose began to scrape along the roof.

But instead of his dying, the pipe came to an abrupt end. He was reaching ahead of himself to push his bundle onward when it met an obstruction and all progress ceased.

The fact that his vigor and strength were unaccountably returning had the contrary effect of making his predicament feel much worse. When he was winding down into what he thought was an inevitable death, his weakness had enabled him to ignore the claustrophobia. Now, having all his energy crammed into a blank pipe end buried under who knew how much city earth was unbearable. The pressure building up in his head and body made him want to scream and kick, but you can’t scream under water, and there wasn’t really room to kick. So instead he tried to ignore the fact that he had been worming his way forward only to jam himself into a coffin of his own making. He tried to think clearly. He had gotten into this pipe because there was a small but definite whisper of a current running through it. If there was a current, it meant the pipe was not a dead end. So he reached ahead of himself and ran his hands over the roof. He felt nothing but stone. He moved the bundle, and his hands felt the sidewalls. And there it was—a void. It wasn’t a dead end, but an angle. He squirmed until he could get his arm farther into the angle, and was amazed to find he could feel nothing but water, no sides at all.

He realized that the narrow duct he was in must be a side tributary to a bigger underground stream, and in this he was right. The underground water tank was an ancient spur of the Tyburn, diverted for the very purpose of providing an underground reservoir. The water he was feeling against his fingertips was the flow of the main channel of the stream itself.

He shoved the bundle of sea-glass ahead of him and wrenched himself around onto his side. He couldn’t quite get his body around the angle, but because he was gaining strength, and because when you get a second chance at life you grab it with both hands, he wrenched away the crumbling cornerstone and pulled himself into the wider stream.

He felt the pull of the water tugging gently at him. He could easily have gone with it and seen where it took him. But something pulled him the other way. He scrabbled for the bundle, took a firm grip on it, and pushed his way against the mild current. It was a contrary thing to do, but if anyone had been able to see his smile in the black tunnel, they would have seen it was not only contrary but obstinate and fierce and somehow exulting.

If he wasn’t going to die, he was certainly going to live, and live his way—and he was not going to do that by taking it easy and going with any damn flow.

E
die fell one floor and was saved by a combination of thick snow and a henhouse.

At least she imagined it was a henhouse, because it squawked alarmingly when she hit it and rolled off into the alleyway.

It was still clucking in outrage as Edie ignored the fact that she was winded and her shoulder felt dislocated, as she ran off into the snow. Somewhere in the distance a barrel organ was playing and a church bell was cheerily tolling the hour as Edie thudded through the snow, the arms of her straitjacket flapping wildly behind her as she tried to put as much distance as she could between her and the House of Pain.

The street was dimly lit by occasional oil lamps, and Edie ran from pool of light to pool of light, checking behind her as she did so. The houses hunched over the street with drooping eaves and second and third floors that overhung a narrow thoroughfare, as if ready to pounce.

She was very conscious that her footsteps were the only ones in the virgin snow. She wasn’t going to be hard to find. She ran out into a wider street, where the surface had been churned up by the passage of carts and cabs, hoping her footprints would be hidden in the general confusion.

She didn’t, however, want to run in the middle of any street for long, because she was too visible. She also had a strong sense that she was being watched; but when she whirled to look behind her, she saw no one in the road, and only blackness stippled with falling snow above her. The sense of being seen became an unbearable itch that needed to be scratched, so when she saw a chance, she leaped across the strip of virgin snow and into a narrow alley, leaving, she hoped, no clues as to where she’d left the general melee in the middle of the street.

She looked back and noted with satisfaction that she’d left no trace at all. She ran along the side of the alley, keeping in the shadows, then turned a sharp corner, only to come to an even sharper halt.

Straight across the street was a church, and beside it a small churchyard. The high wall surrounding it was topped with ornate multibarbed spikes that poked through the soft topping of snow like a thornbush. There was an arched stone gateway, also topped with spikes, above a black iron gate that stood ajar.

Edie normally stayed well clear of churchyards, but there were two reasons that she started across the street, heading for the gate. First, there was a mash of footprints and wheel tracks leading into it, so her footprints would be lost among them. And secondly, she heard the chilling noise of dogs baying, coming closer. Her plan was to get through those metal gates, close them, and wait behind their safety for her pursuers to pass. She knew without a doubt that the barking came from the mastiffs from the House of Pain.

As she approached the gate she looked up and saw that it was decorated with stone skulls. There were two on each side, buried to their eye sockets in snow, impaled on savage barbs. There were three in the center of the arch, resting on bones. The central skull wore a laurel wreath like an ancient Roman, which made it look even more ominous, like the Emperor of Death.

It was too late for her to stop now, because the baying was closing in, and there was nowhere else to hide. She ducked through the gate and pushed it shut. The latch clunked, but there was, she noted, no way to lock it. She griped the obsidian blade and listened, ready to fight.

The dogs were suddenly silent. Edie hoped this was because they had taken a wrong turn and run on. She crouched in the shadows of the wall and looked at the graveyard behind her. It was a cramped space, hemmed in by the blind-eyed backs of houses on two sides, and by the square tower and side of the church on the other. It was a mad jumble of snowcapped gravestones, as if the bodies beneath were stacked four or five deep. The spaces between the stones were far too small to leave room for the full length of a coffin between them.

There were no lights in the houses, but there was a dim flicker from within the church. She saw a narrow door in the base of the tower. Without thinking, she slipped through the closely stacked ranks of gravestones.

She heard a voice and froze.

“What a busy night.”

“A busy night indeed, Majesty.”

The voices had a hollow, doomy quality to them. They sounded dry and were accompanied by a bony clacking.

“One goes out, one goes in.”

“No rest for the wicked, Majesty.”

“No rest for the good either. Not with the resurrection men abroad in the night.”

Edie realized with a chilling certainty that she was hearing skulls talking to each other on the other side of the arch. The three central ones on the outside face of the stonework were, of course, invisible to her, but the two skulls on top of the wall were outlined against the night sky. And she knew what resurrection men were. She’d always listened in school, even when making it look as if she weren’t. Resurrection men dug up dead bodies and sold them to surgeons to cut up.

She looked down and realized that the muddy footsteps and wheel tracks in the snow were just the kind to have been made by people digging and wheeling something away in a barrow. That explained why there was such a churn of markings leading into a graveyard at night.

One of the end skulls swiveled on its impaling barb and looked at Edie.

“She’s listening, Majesty.”

“Impossible. Unless . . .”

“Exactly.”

“Ask her.”

“Are you a glint, girl?” said the skull that Edie could see.

She nodded.

“She says yes, Majesty.”

“I didn’t hear her.”

“She nodded. She’s hiding.”

“Tell her there is much hidden in the boneyard of Ghastly Grim, but that none of it is alive. Tell her to go.”

“You must go,” said the skull.

“Please stop talking!” Edie said urgently, ears straining for the sound of hounds or footsteps beyond the prattling chatter of the skulls.

“What does she say?”

“She’s arguing, Majesty.”

“She can’t argue with me.”

“You can’t argue with the Majesty.”

“I’m not arguing. I’m asking.”

This was the noisiest deserted churchyard Edie had ever been in. She backed up to the narrow door and tried it. It was locked.

“She’s trying to get in the church.”

“Will you please be quiet,” Edie hissed again, stepping around a newly opened grave. She hunkered down behind a gravestone. She noted the name carved across it. It read: Aemilia Bowles. “Please stop talking.”

“No. We always have the last word.”

She was really regretting her decision to seek refuge in this “quiet” graveyard.

“Okay,” she said urgently. “Have it. Just be quiet.”

“She says have it, Majesty.”

“Tell her we don’t need her permission to have it. We have it by right, for we are Death!”

Edie boiled over. “You’re not Death,” she said. “You’re a bunch of chattering stone skulls that can’t keep their mouths shut.”

“She says . . .”

“SHUT UP. You are not Death—”

There was silence. Then another voice said quietly.

“No. But I am.”

It was the Walker. Edie could see the two dogs silently pawing the other side of the gate.

Only now did she remember to look down at her hand holding the heart stone. She had been gripping it so tightly that she hadn’t seen the warning light blazing from it.

Something large leaped to the top of the wall and crouched there, and where the dogs were panting, this thing was breathing in short, choppy shrieks of hunger. In excitement, it clapped its stubby wings together over the hunched mass of its torturously enclosed body.

It was the Icarus.

All the energy seemed to drain from Edie as she slid down behind a grave marker, realizing that now the Walker had her and would have George, and the Gunner was probably dead, and it was all over. And even though she knew she was done for, she used the last piece of her energy to scrabble away the snow and mud at the foot of the gravestone she was hiding behind and stuff her heart stone deep into the earth.

And then she stood up and kicked the earth in on top of it and stamped it down, hoping her legs were hidden as she did so.

And she saw the Walker come through the gate, knife in one hand, the other covering one of his eyes.

And she dropped her head and closed hers.