The Book of the Crowman (23 page)

Neither Skelton nor Pike could ride a horse. With all the remaining fuel required for war machinery, this meant the journey north was made in an open carriage. It was pulled by a nodding, plodding horse, a shire breed if Skelton recognised correctly, and driven by a Wardsman so young and shy he’d barely said a word to them. Occasionally, Skelton would turn and lift the canvas tarp covering their cargo and permit himself a small grin of anticipation. Soon, very soon, their mission would be complete.

Pike and he sat with a couple of thick rugs over their knees to keep off the cold. The pace was slow but the touch of air passing over them was constant, numbing their faces, making Skelton's forehead ache. From time to time, Skelton’s hand would move unconsciously beneath the folds of wool and touch Pike’s knee or thigh. Sometimes he sought out the giant man’s slab of a hand, squeezed his cold, callused fingers. Pike, never a garrulous man in the first place, had grown even quieter over the past months. His face was locked into a grim scowl for most of the hours in a day, except when Skelton used one of the secret keys which revealed some other expression – of tension or release perhaps. In his sleep, the same downturn of his dour mouth hid the flesh of his lips, lips Skelton longed to reveal, to touch with his fingertips. Pike was an unexpected companion but they’d worked together for so long and with such single-mindedness that Skelton could not imagine a time when they wouldn’t be together.

What went on in Pike’s mind remained a mystery. Since that first touch, which had awakened stirrings and possibilities in Skelton – even the butterfly caress of real emotion, if he was honest – Pike worked as hard and as seriously as he always had. When they were off duty he responded to Skelton, albeit with the same mechanical, dutiful manner he brought to any task. Sometimes Skelton wondered if Pike felt the same way as he did. Sometimes he wondered if the man had any feelings at all other than the drive to accomplish the objectives of the Ward. Hence it was that, from time to time, Skelton could not help but reassure himself that Pike was beside him, not just as a partner in Ward business but as a dearly held brother, a friend for life. But as the slow progress north unfolded over the cracked, long undriven motorway and Pike’s physical response remained neutral, Skelton grew hungry for interaction.

“He’ll be ours soon. A day. Two at the most, I’d have thought.”

Pike may have grunted under his breath but Skelton couldn’t be sure. He didn’t give up.

“All this effort, Pike. The men we’ve sacrificed to this cause. I can’t quite believe that we’ll hold the key to all of it in so short a time.” Pike didn’t make a sound. “Do you ever wonder what we’ll do when Gordon Black has been disposed of and the Crowman is laid to rest?”

Pike’s head turned slowly towards him. Such was the length of time Pike had spent unmoving Skelton expected to hear the grind of rust between his bones. Pike’s flat yet fathomless eyes looked into his. Skelton was always unsettled by what he thought he saw there. Either a vast, deep emptiness or a total reflection through which no entry could be gained.

Baritone and motorised, Pike’s words brought the conversation to a swift conclusion.

“We haven’t got him yet.”

His head swivelled to face the front again and whatever light had greyly flickered behind the disks of his eyes guttered and was snuffed. More and more these days Pike’s engine seemed to stall, leaving Skelton wondering if it would ever start up again. He was overwhelmed by a sudden uprising of grief. He pushed it away as best he could.

Pike’s five little words could mean so much. They could mean so little. Was he merely saying that they shouldn’t get ahead of themselves? Or, by saying their mission was not yet accomplished, was he implying that he too would be saddened by the arrival at their common goal. And was he also alluding to the possibility that the end of the mission would also be the end for them? Skelton couldn’t decipher it. He knew Pike no better now than he had when they were first assigned to work with each other. Though they had risen to the highest echelons of the Ward as a team, it wasn’t enough for Skelton. He wanted more. He wanted Pike to love him. He knew he would give up everything else if he could be assured of that one simple requirement. Neither vengeance nor duty would endure. Only love could do that.

The driver sat hunched in front of them, trying not to be noticed, it seemed to Skelton. They moved in the slow lane up the motorway. To their right passed occasional grey troop-carrying trucks. Only elite troops got a ride. The rest made the journey on foot. The convoy stretched onwards beyond view. From time to time a grey tank rumbled past, and behind them, in the slow lane, horses like the one pulling their carriage hauled an array of field guns and heavy mortars. Marching up the southbound carriageway went the bulk of the Ward’s infantry; more men than Skelton could begin to estimate.

Non-Ward pedestrians, the country’s permanent refugees, had no option but to move to the hard shoulder and grass verges in order to continue their journeys in or out of London. Mostly they stood and watched the endless convoy pass. If these were the kind of people they were likely to do battle with, thought Skelton, they looked beaten already.

In the hours they’d spent rolling along behind their steady Shire and silent driver, Skelton realised he was running out of patience with the endless resistance from the people of the country. They needed to understand that the Ward had everyone’s welfare at heart. They wanted a future and they were going about securing it as swiftly and cleanly as possible. If only the people would stand down, everything could move forward smoothly and without more pain and bloodshed. Though he had a taste for cruelty, Skelton was tiring of it.

Perhaps my engine’s stalling just like Pike’s.

That brought a humourless grin briefly to his lips.

Maybe we’re all just tired…

There was a thud. Something bounced off the side of their driver’s head – half a brick, Skelton noticed as it rolled off his coat and back down to the blasted tarmac. The silent Wardsman made an inhuman noise deep in his throat as he slumped over to his right. The carriage began to drift into the overtaking traffic to the sound of angry horns and the hiss of truck brakes.

Skelton, sluggish with hours of pondering and boredom, struggled forwards to take the reins from their unconscious driver. He pulled the left rein and succeeded in bringing the horse and their carriage out of the way of the trucks. He hauled on the leather straps and after a few more paces the horse stopped.

Pike reanimated the moment before the missile struck, having seen something come at them from the grass verge – a boy, barefooted and grimy, had thrown the fragment of brick and he had another ready to fly. Pike leapt down from the still-rolling carriage as soon as the driver fell over. He strode towards the boy, who threw his second projectile – a simple stone this time – straight at him.

Thinking the boy was aiming high, Pike ducked but the boy had anticipated this and Pike took the blow on his forehead. It stopped him. He straightened up and put a hand to his brow. It came away bloody. Slower now, he advanced on the boy. A man, the boy’s father perhaps, moved into Pike’s path. Pike’s businesslike backhand knocked the man out. He rolled and lay facedown in the gravel. Pike reached the boy who lashed out at his shins and crotch with his bare feet. He grabbed the boy’s head, rotating it hard and fast between his palms. The boy dropped to the almost bald verge. His legs still kicked but without direction.

Skelton watched the unfolding scene with detachment and even disbelief. Something snapped in the starving travellers who’d witnessed Pike’s response. Perhaps twenty of them – whether related to each other or merely fellow travellers, Skelton never found out – launched themselves down the verge at Pike and the nearest vehicles in the convoy. The strength in their fleshless bodies surprised Skelton but it surprised Pike more. Four of them took Pike down when they slammed into him. The rest swarmed onto the drivers of nearby carriages.

Taken by surprise, and probably not well prepared for combat, some of the drivers were killed by the travellers who beat their heads and faces with stones held in their desperate fists. It was a full minute before a troop carrier stopped and spilled its men onto the motorway. The two behind it did the same. Quite suddenly a hundred or more elite, battle-ready Wardsmen brought the attack to an end by catching every single one of the skirmishers.

Without a word spoken the Ward troops bound their assailants, knelt them on the hard shoulder and beheaded them with machetes. They let the bodies drop and returned to their vehicles as though they’d done nothing more than stop to relieve themselves. The engines of the trucks had not stopped. They rolled away and the convoy recommenced. Moments later, the first truck stopped again and four Wardsmen trotted back to take over the positions of the slain carriage drivers. Skelton and Pike’s driver, too injured to stand, was hauled to the grass verge and left there.

When Pike climbed aboard again his face was half covered by a tacky red mask. There was blood on his hands and coat too. Skelton reached under the seat and brought out one of their travelling cases. From it he took a small first aid kit. As their carriage moved off with a new driver, he cleaned and dressed Pike’s wounded head and wiped the blood from his hands and uniform as best he could. Pike looked straight ahead throughout as though nothing had happened. His stoicism caused Skelton to flush with pride and arousal.

Denise waited for Gordon on a bridge over the M6 about ten miles south of Coventry.

There were many others who waited with her, leaning on the railings to scan the vast column of fighters walking south to meet the Ward. The bridge provided a perfect vantage spot for people who’d been separated from friends and loved ones in the press of Green Men leaving Coventry.

Of the small company of First Guard riders she’d travelled with since running from the skinheads in the wood by the canal, only peach-faced Jerome remained. Mounted on his pale, spotted horse, she felt his eyes drawn back to her again and again. She smiled to herself. His fellow First Guard had galloped south in readiness to split and organise the Green Men troops before battle. They’d left Jerome, or rather, Jerome had made it clear he should be the one to stay. This amused his more world-weary comrades who gave him a spare horse for Denise to use on the last leg of their journey.

She’d already learned a lot about the Green Men forces; useful information. There were a few simple ranks among them. The Chieftain, First Guard – who acted as commanders and sub-commanders – and the nameless hordes of Green Men troops; a rabble made up of anyone old enough and willing to fight.

It was clear to Denise that those in the higher ranks knew this was not a fight that would be won with finesse and incisive manoeuvres. All the Green Men had on their side were greater hordes – of a population that had been pushed to its limits in every possible way. If this fight was to be won at all, it would be through sacrifice and determination; a willingness to go all the way, for each militiaman and woman to lay down their lives taking one or more Wardsmen with him. It was a numbers game, nothing more.

While the Ward were far better organised and more accustomed to open combat, they had come to a wall in their ideology. They still had all the power. They still controlled most of the country and most of its cities. But they had separated themselves from the territory they planned to take. They had no roots or mythology to guide them and they sought only more power. Each Wardsman knew, whether he chose to voice it or not, that the Green Men cleaved to something more powerful than dominion; they were fighting for the land and for their lives.

Denise saw all this and felt a thrilling sense of liberation in sharing neither ideology. To survive one had to be pragmatic. She’d always had her own ways of staying alive; if she could leave the fighting to others.

Nevertheless, she knew the land a little better since travelling with Gordon. She could even stretch to saying she understood how worthwhile it would be to protect it. But she wanted to stay alive no matter who won, and that meant playing the game she’d played best all her life; the game of men.

She had no intention of laying down her life in battle, though there were now many women in the ranks of the Green Men. Perhaps a quarter of the fighters passing under the motorway bridge – fifty or more with every passing second – were female. Women who had nothing left in their stomachs but fury. Perhaps, Denise thought, they were fighting for the chance to bring children into a world that could actually sustain them, or keep alive the children they hadn’t already lost to the ignorance that had brought the world to its knees and spawned the Ward.

Whatever the case, Denise wasn’t moved to join them. She was a realist and a survivor. The combination meant taking certain liberties with trust from time to time and playing men like slot machines. It was the ones who paid out she was interested in.

Jerome, high on his horse, had been such a one. As had some of his fellow First Guards. Gordon had been another. She found herself genuinely excited to see him again as she waited up here with her current guardian. She appreciated Jerome’s puppy-like eagerness to please her, combined with a protective instinct that was half brotherly, half fatherly and a little too much like shackles to be of any real interest to her. He would be the man who kept her safe until after the battle had played out, when a clear victor would step forward from the field and claim her loyalty.

In her hand she held a black top hat which she’d traded for a favour. She’d decorated it with crow and jackdaw feathers. It would finish Gordon’s outfit perfectly. Plenty of the fighters had taken to wearing feathers in their hats but there would be no other Green Man to rival Gordon’s battle-dress. He would be powerful and unmistakeable. She stroked the hat and placed it on the backpack at her feet.

Jerome’s horse fretted and stamped at the concrete of the bridge. He leaned down and tried to quiet the animal. Whether it was Jerome's nerves or the endless stream of agitated fighters spooking his mount, Denise couldn’t tell.

“Will you know him?” asked Jerome.

“Of course I’ll know him.” She let her eyes meet Jerome’s. “We’re… intimate.”

He coloured and looked away. So readable. So
playable
.

“Can you be sure he’ll come with you?”

Denise didn’t answer straight away.

She didn’t want to make a silly mistake and miss him. Her gaze fell back to the flow of rough and ready troops. They walked fifteen to twenty abreast. Many of them wore black feathers in various arrangements but none of them looked the way Gordon did, resplendent in his shimmering black coat.

There was still no sign of him.

“He’ll come,” Denise said, speaking into the wind. “He’s very dependable.”

She glanced up.

The boy in the saddle responded perfectly, knowing he was being compared to another. His rage ascended in rose coloured flashes to mottle his never-shaven cheeks. Though Gordon also reacted to her, though he was similarly innocent, he was no marionette; he’d sooner slice through his own strings than be her dancer. But even innocent, boyish Jerome wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here with her now.

Denise rested her chin on her hands on the railings and let the advance of the Green Men’s army hypnotise her.