The Book of the Crowman (32 page)

Denise watched Jerome dress.

Gone were the drab greens and browns of his filthy First Guard uniform. Now he stepped into stiff grey flannel trousers, a keen crease along the front and a thin charcoal stripe extending from hip to ankle. He pulled on a grey cotton shirt and tucked it in, snapping a pair of leather braces over his shoulders. The Ward trench coat was broad at the shoulders and reached almost to his knees. A single star on the epaulettes marked him as a low-ranking officer but he wore the uniform as though he were already a general. Tactically, perhaps he was.

If Jerome suspected her of being complicit in Gordon’s escape, he never mentioned it. Perhaps she was too valuable a prize to risk losing over the ensuing argument. Besides, Jerome had delivered Gordon, as agreed, and got everything he wanted in return. Like Gordon, he wasn’t much more than a boy and Denise knew many ways to keep a boy happy.

“Come back to bed,” Denise said.

He turned to her, clearly tempted.

“There’s not enough time. I have to assist in the transport of prisoners.”

“You’re losing interest in me.”

“This is my first duty as a Wardsman. I need to get it right.”

“Last night you said you loved me.”

This much was true.

As the mortar fire had popped and thudded in the distance, raining destruction and chaos on Green Men in Yelvertoft, Jerome had flung himself on Denise, his passion at once sincere and inexperienced. She’d had no trouble pretending her feelings matched his and when he’d said, “I love you”, she’d mirrored him effortlessly in reply. Now, his cheeks flushing deep red, he approached the bed and knelt, careful not to rumple his uniform.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Denise. You’re everything to me. But I have orders to follow and they will always come first.”

She was shocked by his candour, by his unspoken denial of words spoken in darkness and lust. Power was more important to him than anything else. It only stung for a moment. Inwardly, she shrugged. She didn’t care whether Jerome loved her or not as long as he took care of her. If what she suspected was correct,
her
might soon become an
us
. What was not possible was that Jerome was the progenitor. But she would always encourage him to think he was. Another month or two and she would give him the happy news.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said.

And to herself: you’re just another man who thinks he controls everything around him.

“Can you live with that?” he asked.

The implication of commitment in the question was better than any declaration of love from Jerome, even if it had been true. She took his face in her hands, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, a soft and lingering contact. When they parted, she looked him in the eye and smiled.

“Go to work,” she said. “Make me proud.”

Face still flaming and unable to hide his grin, Jerome left the vicarage.

Skelton and Pike addressed their officers in the windowless and burned-out village hall. At least, Skelton addressed them. Pike merely scowled, the muscles at the angle of his jaw bunching and rippling as he ground his teeth together. Skelton had not seen him do this before. It took him a while to realise that Pike was trying to contain his impatience. He was eager to be at the boy, keen to finish the job.

Skelton permitted himself a thin smile as he imagined what Pike would do. They had talked about it a lot over the years. Especially late at night when one or other of them had woken and could not return to sleep. Discussion of Gordon Black’s punishment had been a way of both relaxing and staying positive. Indeed, in the darkest hours of the night, when Pike’s mind was on the boy’s destruction, these were the moments when he was most… Skelton reached for the word… accessible. When he thought about it, despite the hardships and seemingly unending disappointments along the way, the pursuit had brought Skelton a good deal of joy. Whether the same had been true for Pike, he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure the man was capable of such an emotion. Seeing Pike now, his jaws twitching, his giant hands knotting in his lap, Skelton felt a rush of lascivious impropriety.

Governing himself, he turned his eyes to the crowd of grey-coated officers, their most recent and most useful recruit, Jerome Proctor, among them.

“Gentlemen, congratulations are in order. The mortar attack on Yelvertoft has all but decided this conflict. Close to half of the enemy have fled into the surrounding countryside but, as we have captured most of their officers, they won’t be able to organise any meaningful response. A significant number of their remaining troops are also our prisoners now. The rest, we can assume, have regrouped but it will make no difference. Today, we are going to cut the head off these Green Men!”

A cheer went up from the assembled officers. Skelton waited for silence before he continued.

“You’ll all be more than familiar with the local geography by now. Less than half a mile northeast of us is a good sized bump on the land. It’s known as Cracks Hill. Appropriate really, as that is the place where we will crack the resolve of the Green Men once and for all. What I want you to do is range the prisoners in view of this hill and place our troops around them. Leave only a token force in the village. I want as many of us as possible to witness the end of this war. It’s been a long hunt but it’s finally over. Gordon Black has given us the Crowman. Everything you’ve fought for and every sacrifice you’ve made has been justified, my friends. The prophecies of doom will never be fulfilled. In capturing the boy, we have secured the future. We, the Ward, will be the architects of that future.”

While the officers cheered, hugged and clapped each other on the shoulders, Skelton watched the twitching in Pike’s jaw spread to the rest of his body. He laid a soft, white hand on Pike’s shoulder and the man’s face snapped towards him in shock.

“Soon, Mordaunt, my man. Very, very soon.”

Skelton’s fat fingers kneaded the tissue below his partner’s uniform. Pike’s bones resisted like an iron chassis, his muscles and tendons taut like rope and steel cable. Skelton ached with joy at the impatience of the machine beneath his fingertips. Soon that machine would go to work, but first… well.

Skelton had his own reason for impatience.

Whether wounded, bloodied or merely carrying a weighty sack of defeat around their shoulders, the tens of thousands of Green Men taken prisoner were marched at gunpoint and spear tip into the fields around Cracks Hill. Their boots and weapons had been taken. Those who could walk carried the maimed or dying between them. The fields in this part of the village, once verdant and fertile, were barren now; the hedgerows skeletal and black. The grey, dusty earth had been churned and stirred by the feet of warring troops, by the tracks of tanks and trucks and by the impact of explosive shells. It was a sea of cold, dead dirt where nothing grew, nourished only by the blood of the fallen.

Through these fields at the base of the hill ran a broad but decaying country road. The fences and dead hedges to either side had crumbled to sticks and dust. The road hugged the southern base of the hill like a cuff, extending northwest and southeast away from the obstacle it delineated. Captured Green Men stood all along this road, to its north on the lower slopes of Cracks Hill and to its south in the fields. Their numbers extended almost half a mile to the east and west of the hill’s southern face, and around this mass of defeated humanity stood even deeper ranks of Wardsmen. Many of the Ward troops could approach no closer than the northern borders of the village, so crowded and choked were the fields that gave onto the hill.

The hill itself would have been inconsequential if not for the flatness of the land all around. Its southern face was barren and grey. Evidence of a colony of rabbits remained in the form of dozens of eroded warren entrances but the tiny tunnels had long been abandoned. When the wind blew, as it blew today, it tore the lifeless dust away in sheets flung high and far. When it rained, the loose earth washed down into the fields and onto the road, creating dune-like pseudopodia which extended in every direction. The hill was slowly being devoured by the elements.

Once home to a small forest of mature oaks, now only one remained. It was as lifeless and black as the hedgerows all around, more like a gnarled charcoal monolith than a tree. The leaves and outermost branches had been gone for years; dried out, fallen and blown to dust along with the earth of the hill. What remained were the strongest, thickest limbs and the powerful, squat trunk. But the tree was dead, like everything else around it. Long dead. It looked as though it had been tortured and beaten into its present shape. The trunk leaned out far to one side and then bent back on itself, crippled and twisted like a tubercular spine. Mutated, like arms with too many elbows, the last few branches reached tentatively skyward, as though anticipating more punishment. The tree cowered, in spite of its ugly bulk. Wind had bent and snapped it. Hail and rain had lashed it. Lightning had scorched it. Yet, still it stood, solitary and stubborn even in death, its roots clawing into the south face of Cracks Hill like crooked black fingers buried deep in decaying flesh.

It was to this hill that the Ward led a tall young man. It was to this tree that they brought him.

He was dressed in black finery, elegant as a funeral groom. Black feathers decorated his flowing black coat. They danced in his long black hair at the touch of the wind and quivered in his hat band. Though his wrists were tied and the attending Wardsmen both dragged and goaded him, he walked with grace and dignity, his long legs striding with great confidence, his black-booted feet utterly certain of the ground.

Jerome warned Denise not to leave the cottage for any reason. If he hadn’t bothered to return with that caution, if he hadn’t said a word about it, she probably would have spent the whole day in bed.

As it was, her curiosity was irreversibly piqued.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s going to be… dangerous out there today. I wouldn’t want you to be hurt.”

“What’s going on, then?”

“Nothing you need to worry about. Just stay here until I get back tonight.”

“Jerome, you’d better tell me what’s happening. I’m not staying cooped up in here all day without any idea of what’s happening out there.”

Jerome, short of time anyway, sighed.

“Look, Denise, they’re going to execute the Crowman this afternoon. They’re making an example of him. All the POWs are being forced to attend and it could get ugly. I don’t want you anywhere near. Understand?”

Denise frowned and shook her head.

“I don’t believe it. How did they find him?”

“They did what they’ve been doing all along. Following Gordon Black. He led them right to him.”

She tried to hide her shock but judging by Jerome’s quizzical expression didn’t completely succeeded

“You alright, Denise?”

“Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. Felt a bit dizzy for a moment, I guess.”

“All the more reason why you should stay here. I’ll see you tonight.”

Jerome was so rushed and tense he hadn’t even kissed her before walking out the door again. As soon as he’d gone, she was out of bed and dressing as fast as she could. In the bedroom wardrobe there were still clothes – left by the previous vicar and his wife, she assumed. She found a crocheted grey shawl of the softest wool and pulled it around herself, cowling her head, before setting off.

Now, having sweet-talked a couple of Wardsmen, she stood in the ranks of spectators, north of the road and at the base of the hill, directly below the twisted black oak. Beside her stood a filthy blind cripple, dressed entirely in ropes of rag. The smell from him was worse than the odour of the unwashed. He stank of decay, as though he were rotting alive. He swayed from foot to foot and nodded to himself like a madman, pointing up the hill with crooked, nail-less fingers.

Unlike the captive Green Men, he was undaunted and uncowed by the situation. The Wardsman appeared not to be bothered with him; he seemed too crazy and too physically broken to be of any use to either side. She would have given him a wider berth had it not been for the press of the throng all around them. There was nowhere else to stand.

Dempsey had managed to evade capture with his small band of sub-commanders and fighters. Other collections of battle-ready survivors had made good their escape too, having met and agreed on a plan in a field near the canal bridge outside Yelvertoft.

The simple reality was that they had neither the numbers, the equipment, nor the supplies necessary to face the Ward in open combat a second time. They might never be able to muster such a force again. There just weren’t enough people left with the strength to fight.

No. Their war would become a guerrilla affair once again and, as before, they would take to the still-living parts of the land and hide there, in the hills and the forests, living wild. All the towns where they’d had influence would now be taken over by the Ward. Even Coventry would fall.

They’re welcome to it, thought Dempsey.

What good was a city now to anyone? Nothing would grow there. No clean water flowed there. There was no game to hunt and nowhere to keep animals. That the Green Men had held the city had been good for morale. Such a triumph had been a source of pride. But now, for the sake of survival, they needed to go deep into the land and stay there. It was the one place the Ward had no understanding of and no interest in, a place where their agents couldn’t survive for long.

Dempsey had brought his fighters on a circuitous route to a group of abandoned farm outbuildings to the east of the Ward’s position. He would have kept his men moving if he hadn’t had his binoculars. He used them regularly to make sure they weren’t being followed and they’d shown him the massing of humanity around the base of a single, bald hill west of their temporary hideout.

He spent much of the morning glancing at the activity, shocked by the numbers of Green Men that had been captured. It had been a brutal and utterly demoralising defeat from which they could only run and hide. It shamed him and he saw the same disgrace in the eyes of every one of his cobbled-together troop. He feared the Ward were rounding up the captives for a mass execution.

That was until he saw a small group of Wardsmen leading one man up the hill and into the shadow of an old, dead tree.

He managed not to say “
Oh, dear God”
out loud.

His fighters did not need to know about this. But Dempsey needed to know so that he would have something to tell them, some outcome that they could take away from this, even if it was merely a story about how evil the Ward had become. It was better that they hear it as a story and not see it for themselves.

When he began to weep that afternoon, his binoculars held to his streaming eyes, they asked him what was wrong. He didn’t reply. He watched and cried until nightfall when, under the generous cloak of its darkness, he led them on into the countryside, away from the cities forever and into the waiting arms of the land.

Skelton struggled to walk up the hill, even though they traversed it to make it easier for him. He held his bandaged forearm close to his body. When their party reached the top, he was perspiring in spite of the heartless wind and cold, and his chest was hammering dangerously. A sharp pain under his breastbone caused his sweat to chill.

Don’t let me die here! Not now!

The pains became an ache and ebbed away. Skelton heaved several sighs. Once his pulse had settled he cast his eye over the assembled throng.

There were faces, of Green Men and Ward, watching from every southerly direction, ranged as far back as the outskirts of the village. He was impressed – he’d never seen such a vast mass of people and he knew, as he looked at them, that news of what they were about to do would extend from every mouth assembled here to the ears of every person they ever met and so on, possibly forever.

Only now did the Ward’s achievement really begin to hit home. They were saving history and making history all in the space of an afternoon. All the work, all the logistics of the chase, the nights spent awake, the treks back and forth across the country, the loss of life, the loss of his eye and of the mobility of Pike’s leg, all of this now had meaning, all of this would now be paid back to them in the public destruction of one man.