The Penal Colony (8 page)

Martinson was one of the first convicts to
have arrived on Sert. During the war with Franks he had sided first
with Barratt, then Houlihan, then Tompkins, then gone over to Peto,
and so had never even been invited to join the Community or given
Franks a chance to kick him out. Barratt and Tompkins were dead
now, the first murdered by Peto and the second beaten to death by
his own men. Since the present state had been established Martinson
had shown no interest in telling others what to do, though he was
regularly employed by Peto as a bodyguard or to discharge missions,
such as the present one, which contained an element of danger. To
that end Martinson maintained in his hut an alarming array of
weapons: most fearsome, perhaps, was a captured Village crossbow,
one of several built for Franks by Randal Thaine.

This morning the crossbow had remained
behind. Obie’s brief was simply to try to establish that it was
indeed Houlihan who had taken Billy.

“See anything?” he asked Martinson.

“No. We’re going to have to go down.”

Obie agreed. “Jez,” he said, accepting the
binoculars from Martinson and handing them to Brookes, “you wait
here. If we aren’t come back by noon, go and tell Alex. Right?”

“Sure thing, Obie.”

They passed unchallenged among the upper
tombs; Obie even paused to talk to a former towner who had fallen
out with Peto and moved. At the helicopter pad, though, they were
stopped, disarmed, and questioned by three of Houlihan’s retinue,
and only then were they admitted to the tower.

The double oak doors at the main entrance
were set at the top of a low flight of reinforced concrete steps.
Painted bright green, the woodwork was now flaking, the bare
patches weathering to silvery grey. Inside the threshold was a
storm lobby, and beyond this lay the large ground-floor room which
had been the communications centre. Two doors led off to the
kitchen and mess; an iron staircase gave access to the upper
floors. Under the staircase, an open hatchway led down to the
cellar.

“Wait here,” said McGrath, one of the guards.
“I’ll get Himself.”

Obie had not been inside the lighthouse for
three months, not since the grazing agreement had been reached.
Nothing much seemed to have changed.

None of the windows, set deep in the
thickness of the walls, had more than half a pane of double glazing
left, and the steel shutters had gone. There was nothing to keep
out the ferocious northerly and westerly gales of winter: the
cellar, its drainage blocked, was almost permanently flooded with
black bilge. The smell, together with the universal stink of stale
fulmar oil, pervaded the whole building. Obie would have known
where he was with his eyes closed.

The lighthouse also smelled of burnt wood;
the white-painted interior walls had been scorched and blackened by
a series of both accidental and wanton fires. Houlihan’s personal
apartments, though, were said to be relatively habitable. He
occupied the two floors above this one.

“Yes?” said Feely, appearing on the
staircase.

“We want to talk to Houlihan,” Obie said.

“Well you can’t.”

Feely was one of the few lighthousers who
shaved, using a cutthroat razor which he honed on his belt. Like
Martinson, and Houlihan himself, he was a founder member, a child
killer who had almost been too old for Category Z. What remained of
his hair was grey. He had lost his dentures last year, so that he
could no longer eat raw meat and had become virtually dependent on
cooking. That meant he was dependent on Houlihan, since Franks
wouldn’t have him in the Village, Peto hated his guts, and wild men
seldom had the means or opportunity to cook their food. Feely had
been a professor or something on the mainland. He was clever. He
was also a homosexual by preference. Obie despised him.

“It’s important,” Obie said.

“If Peto wants to talk, he can come himself.
Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say to me.”

Obie glanced at Martinson, who gave a slight
shrug.

“It’s just,” Obie began, “it’s just that
Alex’s billy has disappeared.”

“‘Disappeared’?”

“Last night,” Martinson said. “He thinks
Archie might know something about it. He thought, seeing as how
Archie’s his friend, Archie wouldn’t mind if we had a quick look
round.”

“Are you accusing Mr Houlihan of stealing
Peto’s goat?”

“No, course not. It’s just that, like Obie
says, Billy’s disappeared. He might have wandered this way, like.
One of youse lot might have taken him in, not knowing who he was.
That’s all we’re saying, in’t it, Obie?”

“That’s right.”

“I seem to remember Mr Houlihan giving his
word of honour on the goat question last April. I seem to remember
him and Peto making a covenant. He gave his word, which is to say,
his sacred bond. And now you two come here with a demand to search
his property.”

“It’s not like that, F—” Obie began, just
stopping himself in time. “It’s not like that, Harold.”

Feely crooked his finger at McGrath. “Show
these men the way back to Old Town.” Then, ignoring Obie, he
addressed his final remark to Martinson. “If you two pillocks come
round here again, you’ll be sorry.”

* * *

Martinson saw him first.

“Hullo,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Quick. Give us them glasses.”

After leaving the lighthouse, Obie and
Martinson had returned to the cliff to collect Brookes before
continuing with their mission. Since Houlihan, through Feely, had
denied the charge so strongly, Martinson had suggested that it
might be worth taking a look at the Village stock, just in case
Franks had, after all, been responsible for stealing the goat. They
had now followed the coastline as far south as Illislig Bay.

Martinson raised the binoculars to his eyes.
“That’s it, dummy,” he said. “Go on. Show us what you got.”

“What?” Brookes said. “What is it?”

“If I in’t mistaken, I’m looking at the new
meat. Buggeration, the way he’s looning about he must want to get
caught.”

Obie took the binoculars. “Where? I can’t see
nothing.”

“Inland, about a kilo from the crest. In line
with Pulpit Head.”

Among the low gorse and bracken scrub a
distant figure came suddenly into Obie’s view: a dark-haired man in
a blue shirt and dark trousers, clutching some black clothing in
one hand and something else – perhaps a stick – in the other. It
seemed he had just come down from the ridge and was making his way
towards Perdew Wood and the middle of the island. Even at this
range it was apparent, both from his general demeanour and from the
mere fact that he was crossing such a visible stretch of ground,
that he was completely ignorant of the basic rules of Sert. Either
he was a wild man gone off his rocker, or he was, as Martinson had
surmised, the new meat.

“How do you want to play it?” Obie said: for
it was Martinson’s privilege, having found the quarry, to
decide.

“It could just be a trap,” Martinson said.
“It could be wild men. They could’ve seen us coming. Still, he’s
clean-faced. It’s got to be him.” He smiled at Obie. “We’ll get him
in the wood. If someone else don’t get to him first.”

At least seven men from Old Town, and
probably a similar number from the lighthouse, had set out to look
for yesterday’s arrival. The Prison Service helicopter had touched
down at its usual hour, in the early afternoon, and Bruno had
reported a prisoner deposited for Franks’s people to find.

The landing place was well inside the Village
boundary, impossible to get at from outside, an expanse of
close-cropped turf where the pilot was guaranteed a clear view in
all directions. From the hedge, Bruno had watched the usual routine
of boxes and sacks of stores being left, and had seen the full
plastic canisters of mail unloaded and the empty ones taken
away.

During this process the pilot always kept the
rotors turning. Despite the cosy agreement with Franks, the crewmen
never wasted any time on the ground. As soon as they could they
would scramble into the hatch, the turbines screaming and a
widening gap already appearing between the undercarriage and the
turf, leaving, as often as not, one more unfortunate wretch to join
the population of Sert.

But new meat was new meat: the only source,
outside the Village, of factory-made clothing, boots, and news of
the world at large. Thanks to the system of initiation Franks had
adopted, the outsiders had at least a chance of exploiting this one
commodity.

The weekly or fortnightly hunt was becoming
something of a sporting occasion. Obie had even detected a certain
rivalry between the towners and the light. Because of Franks’s
terror of AIDS and HVC, if and when new meat was caught, the
growing custom among the more rampant stonks was to make sure it
failed the medical examination performed at bell-time by Sibley,
the Village vet.

Quite often the hunt drew a blank.
Occasionally the wild men got there first and only a corpse,
perhaps mutilated, would be found.

Martinson did not normally deign to
participate. Kept supplied with island-mades by Peto, he had little
need of factory clothes, and very few new arrivals wore boots large
enough for Martinson’s feet. As for the outside world, Martinson
was interested in that not at all. Like anyone, though, Martinson
presumably saw the value of catching the meat as far as rank was
concerned. It would do him no harm with Peto and the others to
bring back the spoils.

Perdew Wood occupied part of Sert’s central
plain. The wood was merely a continuation and intensification of
the scrub on its northern and western sides. In few places did it
attain the status of real woodland; few of its rowans, thorns, and
oaks could be classified as more than stunted versions of mainland
trees. However, the wood provided the largest single area of cover
on the island. For that reason it was almost invariably the choice
of new arrivals, especially when they were not too bright; and,
inevitably, the wood attracted the largest numbers of hunters.

As it was so late in the day it seemed likely
that most of the hunters had by now given up or gone elsewhere.
This, at least, was the hope Brookes had expressed on entering the
wood; certainly there was no sign of any competition.

Among all the men at Old Town – and at the
lighthouse too, for that matter – Martinson had developed the most
formidable outdoor skills. He had adapted completely to his new
life; it was unimaginable that he could ever go back to the way he
must have been before. On those few occasions when he had
accompanied Martinson on food-gathering expeditions, Obie had been
able to observe at first hand Martinson’s awesome tracking
ability.

He found the trail without difficulty,
separating it from those made earlier by the passage of other legs
through the undergrowth. After striking for the middle of the wood,
the trail turned more to the north, passing through a glade of
gnarled oaks and rowans scarcely more than head-high. The
undergrowth here contained clumps of bluebells as well as brambles
and bear’s-garlic and male fern. Martinson squatted to examine the
colour and texture of some damaged leaves. Then, from the soil near
by, he plucked a tiny brown toadstool. It had been trodden on: the
cap was bruised, and colourless juice had seeped from the stem.

He arose, grinning malevolently, and
presented the toadstool to Obie.

“Ten minutes?” Obie guessed.

“Five.” Martinson raised a forefinger and
touched his lips. “Listen.”

Almost on cue came the sound of a dead branch
snapping underfoot, like a dull pistol-shot echoing through the
trees.

It was followed by more sounds of clumsy
progress, no more than two hundred metres ahead.

The search for his knife had taken Routledge
as far down as the rill. It had not been there, so he had again
turned back on himself and eventually, after a meticulous
examination of every centimetre of ground, had found it not fifty
paces from the ridge. The knife had fallen and been caught by the
bracken in such a way that, the point uppermost, it had scarcely
been visible to someone coming down the hill.

He estimated he had wasted at least two hours
on the search. The sky had clouded over completely by the time he
had returned to the ridge and set out, down across the bracken and
gorse to this area of more imposing scrub, even woodland,
wind-shaped and flattened when seen from above, greenly gloomy and
claustrophobic once inside. The undergrowth, deprived of light, was
relatively sparse and easy to get through.

He had dug up a few bulbs and roots and had
cautiously tasted them. The first he had spat out instantly: it had
tasted vile, like concentrate of garlic. Even the leaves of this
plant, resembling those of lily-of-the-valley, generated a
revolting musk. He had got some sap on his fingers and now could
not rid himself of the smell. None of the other roots had been
edible.

He had never been really hungry before. His
stomach hurt; he felt dizzy. For the first time in his life he
began to know what hunger meant.

He crouched and turned over a flat rock,
looking for he knew not what. A woodlouse scuttled away from the
light; three more were clinging on blindly. A small, pale brown
slug. Two blue-black beetles. In Africa the natives ate termites,
or their larvae, or something, by pushing a twig into the nest. The
twig, with its cargo of grubs, was carefully extracted and then
pulled between the lips. In France they ate snails. What was a
slug, if not a snail without its shell?

Routledge put the rock back.

The decision to forage inland was already
looking like a mistake. There was nothing in these woods for him.
He should have trusted his instinct and stuck with the coast. There
had to be easier ways of finding food than this. Real food:
rabbits, seabirds, shellfish.