The Half-Made World (39 page)

—Two motorcars; carrying at most twenty men; at most two heavy motor guns. More will follow, but for now there are two.

—Fair odds.

—Many more will follow.

—An honest fight. A clean fight.

—If you like.

BOOK THREE

WESTWARD

CHAPTER 25

FLIGHT

Liv kept her eyes firmly closed. She thought yearningly of the tonic for her nerves, which was behind them now—
far
behind perhaps—she had simply no idea how far they had come. She was thrown from side to side. She held on to Cockle’s back as tight as a frightened child, hating him, fearing him, not understanding. The muscles in her back and shoulders and arms were in agony. Her gag smothered her, and she was light-headed. The horse’s hooves were a mad, meaningless din. From behind, there was the sound of roaring motors, shouting men. Cockle turned and laughed and there was another noise, right by her ear, the loudest thing she’d ever heard in her life, so loud that for a moment all sensation left her. She felt herself floating in darkness; lifted up helplessly from her body and its aches and terrors; set aimlessly adrift in a cool no-place among black waves. The sensation somewhat resembled falling asleep.

A small clear part of her mind said:
This is the beginning of a dissociative state, the onset of fugue, occasioned by shock and trauma. You are going mad, Liv. Again.

She disagreed. It was the world below that had proved itself mad—had proved itself to be, behind its rational façade, a world of broken forms, meaningless turbulence, terror and incoherence.

Another part of her analyzed her situation.
This is politics
.
This is history
.
Cockle is an Agent of the Gun. Therefore the men pursuing him are servants of the Line. Or perhaps vice versa. You are not important. Therefore, somehow, the General is. Plans are in motion. Oh, Liv, you have become involved in history.

She disagreed. There was no logic to her situation.

And yet another part of her was wordless, long gone, dreaming of history, adrift across the red plains of the West, its wars, its bitter myths, lost in images of blood and battle and destruction and madness. The lies of the
Child’s History
—progress, purpose, virtue—turned inside out, revealing horror. Four hundred years of the Great War. She dove deep, looking for meaning, past politics, past the bloody fall of the Republic, past the battle of
this
and the battle of
that
and four hundred years of cruelty visited on and occasionally by the Folk and back to the first colony at Founding, which now seemed like a mistake in itself, the frightened colony huddled behind its walls against the alien woods, mad and dark and shifting. . . .

Cockle pulled her to the ground. Her legs gave way and she sprawled in the dirt. She opened her eyes. It was night and cold and they were among pines. Needles pressed sharply into her palms. She did not know how much time had passed or where she had been.

She tore at her gag, released it, and coughed and retched until a thin trickle of fluid ran from her mouth.

The horse was a huge steaming shadow at the edge of the pines. A few feet away, the General sat stiffly against the trunk of a pine. Cockle stood above her, smiling. He held out a hand. “Are you all right, Doctor?”

She looked him in the eye. He kept smiling.

She swore to herself that she would not beg.

She begged.

“Please, Mr. Cockle, let me go. I know nothing, I have nothing, I cannot help you, I will only slow you down. I am a stranger here and—”

“Doctor—”

“And no one will pay for my release. Let me go, Mr. Cockle, I will tell your pursuers whatever—”

“Doctor—”

“Please, Mr. Cockle.”

“Call me Creedmoor. Cockle was a nice enough fellow, but he’s gone now. Stand up. No?”

He lowered his hand and shook his head sadly.

“If you were caught by what’s pursuing us,” he said, “you wouldn’t lie to them. Not that I doubt your good faith or your word as a doctor. But no one lies to them. Their methods of interrogation are more
methodical
than ours. And what would be left of you afterwards wouldn’t be you anymore, which I’d regret. So we are in this together now, Doctor.”

“In what, Mr. Co—Creedmoor. In
what
?”

He waved a hand vaguely in no particular direction. “Everything. The Great War. We’re coconspirators, Doctor. No doubt it’s obvious to you which side you find yourself on—I am far too handsome and charming to be a Linesman.”

He sat down with his back against a tree, facing her, and began to roll a cigarette. He looked up at her and smiled.

“I brought my vices with me. I apologize for taking you without warning. I imagine you miss your nerve tonic. Not to worry! We’re going to meet my very old friend Dandy Fanshawe in Greenbank, and he’ll have all the opium you need to
float
all the way back east with us if that’s what you’d prefer. One more reason to stick with me.”

“The tonic is a medication, Creedmoor—”

“As you please.” He lit his cigarette, took one long drag on it, then extinguished it between finger and thumb. “No light tonight,” he said. “No fire, either, sadly.”

“Why am I here, Creedmoor?”

“Why are any of us here? They don’t tell me everything, Doctor. One of the things you think before you take up the Cause is that when you do, you’ll be in on all the great secrets of the world; not so.”

He pointed at the General, who was staring at his feet and quietly muttering nonsense.

“There’s a secret in that old fool’s head. He saw something, or did something, or went somewhere. There is a weapon. I can say no more. But anyway, the secret is buried under the rubble the enemy made of his mind.”

He patted the gun at his side. “My usual methods of questioning are in effec tive here. So I thought, Dr. A’s a clever woman. I read your notes. Didn’t understand a damn word of ’em, but they looked clever enough to a simple man like me. So I want you to heal him, Doctor. That’s not so bad, is it?”

“I don’t know how to heal him, Creedmoor.”

“Try.”

“I don’t know how.”

“I have faith in you.”

The General suddenly shuddered.

“Cold night,” Creedmoor said. He walked over to his bag and extracted one of the House’s rough woolen blankets. He wrapped it around the General’s shoulders.

“Sorry, Doctor. I brought only the one blanket. Unchivalrous of me; but I’m sure you agree the patient comes first.”

He removed a rope from the bag, too, and tethered the General’s ankle to the tree.

“In case he wanders off. Of course, there’s no need to do the same for you. I wouldn’t insult you by suggesting anything of the kind. Do be mindful, though, that I sleep lightly.”

He lay down on his back with his hands behind his head.

“We’re sleeping, Creedmoor? What about . . .”

He looked up. “The Line, Doctor. Say it out loud if you like, no awful consequences will follow; or at least nothing that wouldn’t have happened anyway.”

“The Line, Creedmoor. Are they not—?”

“We will be meeting friends of mine in Greenbank, at the Grand Howell Hotel. I can’t vouch for most of them, but Dandy Fanshawe’s a good fellow in his way. But we cannot ride down into Greenbank like this, three to a horse, you in your funeral clothes. A little way over the edge of a scarp to the south, over which I suggest you do not wander in the night, there are some farms. We shall resupply in the morning. Sleep while you can, Doctor.”

He lay back and started snoring.

Liv had rarely seen anyone sleep so quickly or deeply. Had he no conscience?

But the Gun by his side, close to hand, that did not sleep.

Nor did Liv. She sat hunched against a tree with her arms around her knees. She listened for sounds of pursuit. It grew colder.

As it happened, she
did
have her nerve tonic with her, or at least a tiny three-quarter-empty vial of the substance, which she kept around her neck at all times in case of emergencies, for her patients or, if necessary, for herself.

She had no water with which to take it, so she let a slow greasy droplet of it bead on her fingertip, and she licked it quickly up. Under the sickly-sweet of the palliative, her finger tasted of sweat and earth and pine needles. Her tongue tingled and went numb. A numbness rushed up through her head. She’d never taken it unmixed with water before. A peaceful greenness washed over the world. She slept.

“Wake up.”

Creedmoor shook her.

“Wake up.”

It was still night. They were still in the pines.

“Do you hear that?”

“I hear nothing, Creedmoor.”

“No. No, you wouldn’t. But they’re close.” He stared off at something invisible in the distance.

“They’re close. Move.”

They staggered on through the night. She did not know where they were going or why.

In the morning, they went down into a village: a nameless scattering of houses and farms at the foot of a brown stony hill.

“We’ve lost them for now, Doctor. But there must be no alarms. Remember, Doctor, if we are caught, I will die and the Line will take you and so eventually so will you, and their machines will drill the poor old General’s head for secrets. I very much want to live and be free. Do you?”

She nodded.

He smiled. “Excellent! Then I can trust you to make no sign of distress when we go into town. If there is any disturbance, if there is any violence, if I’m forced to bring bad luck to these folk, it will be on your head, Doctor.”

He looked her up and down. “Perhaps we can say we’re husband and wife, Liv. May I call you Liv? The General is your elderly grandfather from the less-blond side of the family. The rest will come to me. Come on.”

Before they went down, she took a drop of the tonic.

Creedmoor purchased a horse from one of the farms in the valley, and a saddle, and a pack and blanket, and a dented kettle and a bent pan and tin plate; and the farmer’s wife was not far from Liv’s size, and so Creedmoor haggled for sensible country clothes for her—red flannels and breeches—while Liv herself sat silent in the corner, the unmixed tonic numbing her mind and flattening her vision so that the farmer and his wife and the horse and the kettle seemed all infinitely distant and toylike.