Thimblewinter (10 page)

The weeks after our arrival came to be known as the Sergeant’s reign, not to his face, but behind closed doors at the end of the long, hard days. Where people had been pleased, they, with time, grew resentful. It seemed that he was everywhere, demanding more and more from them; more training, more digging, more work on the defences. And, all the time, he and his men - all those extra mouths - eating their fill of the village’s food.

The offence they felt was partly because of all this extra work and partly because it had been easy to forget the threat of the people of the winged skull during the last few weeks of summer. Also, my people had become unused to strangers and used to their quiet lives, which were gradually being turned upside down.

Of those we had brought with us, the Sergeant and the two other soldiers led the work. The two brothers seemed to be steeled by the fight at the crossroads and were less useless afterwards, as Cal put it. Besides, they knew that winter was nearly upon them and they had little option but to stay till the spring and make the best of it.

There was little that was biddable about Rowena, she seemed to come and go as she pleased, but knowing her deadly nature now, she was left to shift for herself as she wished. I think the Sergeant knew that, though she would not take to being ordered, she would do her share of the fighting.

Though the villagers thought of Nes as one of the others, the outsiders, she spent most of her time with Rachel and me. My aunt had taken to her, when she had got past that first flash of jealousy and suspicion, and seemed to accept her being there. I think Cal had told her of the care Nes had taken of me, her only blood relative, and she showed her gratitude in this way.

Nes spent some of her time with Cal, who had set up a make-shift armoury in one of the village storehouses. I had seen that she had knowledge of weapons before, that somewhere in the mystery of her past she had been a warrior of some sort. I had mentioned this to Rachel on one of the late summer days as we hung out the washing on the line behind the house. All the gardens of the terrace were draped with the flapping strings of clothes, dull and worn with age.

“Like Welsh prayer flags,” Rachel said, laughing, though I didn’t understand the joke.

But she became serious when I talked of Nes and told her my thoughts.

“There’s hardly anyone that I’ve ever met who wanted to fight, be a warrior as you say. Most were at best reluctant, few could stomach fighting long.”

Even then I think I still harboured some idea that there was romance in it, that this was the stuff that legends were made of; these knights, as they seemed to me, come to save us by heroic deeds. But for me, after all, this was a quiet time, taken up by the everyday life of the village; school in the morning; work in the afternoon, whatever needed doing; and the long evenings gradually shortening, almost imperceptibly.

I wonder now, looking back, how I spent what I remember as a happy time - the long, dry and fine days, the evenings with Rachel, Cal and Nes, the Sunday meetings – when, over us all, the winged skull people cast such a shadow; like a thunderhead on the horizon, always there, constantly imminent.

When I could get out of the work I was supposed to be doing, or finish it early and shirk another task, I would seek out Nes, the Constable or Cal. Invariably they were taken up with what everyone called the preparations. And there was always much arguing going on.

The Sergeant’s writ  only ran because the Constable was always there by his side to back him, but the villagers, being little used to being commanded and much given to discussion, would always seek to question his orders. Early on, in the days after our arrival, he would often show his frustration by shouting and cursing at them. But later he grew accustomed to these questioning ways and became somewhat calmer.

From what I could see and understand of all this, I reckoned that he had found fault, initially, with the village wall. It was, after all, a palisade of old corrugated iron and reclaimed timber, thrown up on the earth spoil from the ditch the JCB had dug out. He had sniffed at it when he first inspected it, like a dog tracking a rabbit, all the way around the perimeter, silent and unreadable, followed by the Constable and Cal; trailed by Nes, who seemed to go where she wanted without challenge and followed in turn by me, being as invisible as I could.

“It’s not bad,” the Sergeant had said, when we’d finally completed the circuit and stood by the gateway and the bridge. The Constable visibly perked up, straightening his body and letting his face relax in a smile.

“But it’s also not good,” the Sergeant went on and we were all somewhat taken aback again.

“Because,” he said, “what you have basically got is a wall, a fence, not a fortification. The perimeter is also too big. But if we shorten it, you lose half the village.”

He walked up and down thinking, and we all kept as quiet as we could, as if waiting on the word of some angel, or demon even.

“I’m not an engineer, but what I think we have to do is…”

I didn’t follow it all, but got Cal and Nes to explain it to me later. He was going to base his defence on a series of strongpoints along the walls, at the corners of the palisade, and by the gateway. The defenders would fire from these places and cut down the attackers in the ditch, rather than wait for them to climb the walls. When they got over the walls, they’d face another run of these strongpoints; the chapel, the old Welfare Hall, the school and the former Co-op store, now one of the warehouses. These were all tall, strong buildings, standing on their own, so they couldn’t be overlooked or outflanked, as the Sergeant put it.

“What happens if they fall?” The Constable had asked.

“Then we lose,” the Sergeant replied.

After this, the Sergeant, with the two sailors, had supervised the work on the defences and the Constable was constantly there too, a worried presence in the background. Apart from building the strongpoints on the wall, built up like medieval towers at the corners and the gateway, work was also carried on apace on the four village buildings that would be our secondary forts. These were fortified and stocked with food and supplies.

The other two soldiers, May and Dai, were training the young and able-bodied villagers up as soldiers and so unwilling were most of them to play the warrior that they all but proved Aunt Rachel right. There was no spare shot for firing practise, but bows and slings and home-made javelins were plentiful enough to allow them some exercise. Close fighting too could be rehearsed, though this led to arguments and squabbles as they confused sham fighting with real combat. The soldiers had one attempt at drill, but no-one took to it, so they shrugged and gave it up as an impossible job.

Cal, with the aid of Nes, had become the village armourer and to him had fallen the most difficult of tasks. The Sergeant might seek to build up his fortress and train up his army, but Cal was the one who had to worry from the old and broken implements and tools the weapons that would equip it. There were the AK47s, of course and the soldiers’ guns, but for the majority of the reluctant foot-soldiers there were shotguns, if they were lucky, or bows of some sort. So Cal’s time was spent in feverishly making shot and powder, fletching arrows and even forging pikes and spears, because at close quarters these could be as deadly.

Then there were also the spikes to make, that the Sergeant wanted set in the ditch and in pits around about the perimeter as man-traps, and the caltrops, the wicked metal thorns that would lame horses or puncture tyres that he would also make use of. Cal could not do all this on his own, so he had his own gang of assistants; men and women who had worked with metal or at other processes of manufacture.

Then there were also the bombs. There was a hut that stood some way away from the old garage that Cal used as his workshop for the manufacture of these infernal devices and I was allowed only a few furtive glimpses at what took place there. One of the soldiers was usually there and one of the older men, Mr. Jenkins, who had worked at one of the local quarries.

In the usual pattern of things, I would approach and then be quickly shooed away, but I would glimpse the empty bottles that were lined up there, the half-full sacks of something I didn’t recognise and all the various implements of the task they had set themselves. They were like black magicians or alchemists practising their dark arts in seclusion.

Though all this was going on around me and the village was in so many ways a changed place, there was little that could be said to have changed in my life. I still spent time with Joshua and my other friends in those rare times when there was no work to be done. But inside I felt changed, as if the things I’d seen and the places I’d been had affected me.

Before, the outside world had been a dangerous place, but the dangers had been unknown to me and distant, like those that lurked in the deep, dark woods in some fairy story. But now I had seen some of the things that haunted those woods close up; I could conjure them out of the formless ghosts. Before, the world had seemed harsh and cold, but the village had been a secure, warm place, where I would come to no harm. Now I doubted that I could truly, ever, be safe here.

So I became quiet amongst people, keeping things close to myself, loath to join in the games and escapades that I’d so zealously thrown myself into before. Instead of my friends, I sought out Nes and even Rowena, though the latter did little more than tolerate my presence. I think I felt safe when I was with them, or at least safer.

I also took to visiting Mrs. Sharma in the evenings. She had reluctantly agreed to stop school, while the preparations were going on, as there were always tasks that needed to be done, even for the smallest of the children, but the resulting idle days seemed to lay heavy on her, as she was too old and infirm to pitch into the more physical work. She always seemed pleased to see me and we would talk about books and she would search out another tattered and mildewed copy of some novel I hadn’t read.

It was during these visits to Mrs. Sharma that I tried to salve my conscience and rid myself of the terrible guilt that I felt. For I had lost the book that Richards had given to me, somewhere during that flight along the sand dunes I had mislaid it. And it had only been later at The Services that the fact had occurred to me, but I had been too numbed to really face the truth of it. So at Mrs. Sharma’s, in her house or at the school room and library next door, I would search for another copy of that book, “Moby Dick”, but I would never find it. I still think about it and wonder what I lost that night, what things the book could have told me.

Mrs. Sharma seemed to have been much affected by our journey. She seemed a smaller, older figure, somewhat shrunken and without that vital spark that had carried us through all those lessons in the school room. I think she was mourning her lost family and now felt bereft and without hope of seeing them again.

With the burden of years that now lays on me, it is hard to see clearly back to that time. We were preparing for more than winter then. We were facing more than our usual struggle to survive the deep cold. My grandmother had told me once, when I was a very small child, of the great winter of the Vikings that they called Thimble Winter. The three great winters without intervening seasons that would come before the battle at the end of the world. So this was what we were anticipating, our very own Thimble Winter. And with it, before it was through, would come the end of our world. For, whatever ultimately happened, things would never be the same for us again.

A few weeks after the Sergeant’s reign began, Aunt Rachel woke me up from sleep on the old sofa in the living room. Still drowsy from the fire, I shrugged on my clothes and took the billycan of soup that she gave me, heading out in the direction of the gateway towers, where Cal was standing guard. It seemed a cruel thing to me at the time, to get me up at that hour, but Rachel was looking after Mary Anne, the neighbour’s baby, as the woman was poorly. To me the child seemed a noisy, needful thing, but Rachel was captivated by it and wouldn’t leave the creature to run this errand.

I could feel the winter’s breath on the breeze as I walked down the main road and there was the first hint of frost in the air. There was light by the gateway, a fire kept alight in a brazier there, but the streets were mostly dark as people tried to save wood and candles. Some houses, it was true, had solar panels or wind turbines, but mostly people were saving what power they could. Cal had rigged up a series of wall-lights to a generator, to light the village streets, but, as fuel was in such short supply, they were only to be used in an emergency.

The ladder-way to the tower was ice-cold to the touch and it felt like my hands were sticking to the metal, but I managed the climb without disaster to the food or to myself. Up in the tower itself, a nest-like place of corrugated iron, sandbags and scaffold, Cal was rubbing his eyes as he gazed out over the valley, trying to make out shapes in the dark.

I was a good deal taken aback, to see that the Sergeant was with him.

“Are you sure she is still out there?” He asked.

Cal nodded his assent and the Sergeant kept staring out at the darkness, as Cal ate his soup. He had offered some to the Sergeant, but the man had declined.

I knew they were talking about Rowena.

The Sergeant had set about charting the territory of our village. There were those in the place that knew the hills around as hunters or foragers, or even as shepherds and traders, so he was forming a pattern, really, mapping the land around from the knowledge learned in a series of otherwise aimless journeys.

Since we had arrived back at the village, the Sergeant had insisted that the Constable send out scouts. The parties often went out on horseback, as there was little enough fuel to spare, but because there was some sickness amongst the beasts, some malady that struck down the ponies, they were lately often out on foot.

The Sergeant was trying to frame a picture of what was happening around us. The prisoners that we’d released had given him parts of this picture, but he needed to learn more. According to those amongst them who were lucid enough to speak, and not too ill or ailing in the mind to make sense, the progress of the winged skull people was marked by burning villages, trails of dead bodies and herds of slaves. It was not news to us, but just confirmed what we had heard before. The Constable, though, was disquieted by it.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he had said, “they are an army of scavengers, but the more they burn, the more people they take, the less there will be for them next year.”

The Sergeant had shrugged and replied:

“It doesn’t matter, does it? They could be a completely chaotic band, or they could be working to some bigger plan. There may be other villages like yours, other places they can conquer and control and set up their own little state. They are already well on their way to controlling the valley road and god knows what’s happened further north.”

I knew that there had once been towns further north, but travellers who had passed through the village had only talked of ruined places where the dead from the epidemics lay unburied, just scattered bones now.

Of the prisoners, all but three had remained with us, being too old, infirm or scared to stray far. Three had struck out for the coast, reckoning that the village held little security for them. But one of them, a youngish man, somewhat bruised and bloodied, had told Rowena something before he left and since then her ways had changed.

She had always been a mystery to us, in that short time we had known her, talking little and hardly a functioning part of the group. She took turns at work, it was true, but on her own terms, doing enough to justify her presence, but no more. But whatever the prisoner had told her changed all that.

From then on she kept herself apart, going out on long scouts as if searching for something, slipping back into the village every so often, usually exhausted, filthy and sometimes wounded. She had done nothing to court popularity with the villagers and they grumbled about her and begrudged her share of the food and other supplies. But the Sergeant tolerated her and more. He was often seen huddled with her on her return, around the fire she had built outside the old caravan that she had occupied at the back of Cal’s garage.

I asked Nes about this, on one of the days that she was more forthcoming than usual, almost talkative.

“It’s because she covers so much ground,” she answered, “she’s been further than any of the scouts and she knows more than any of them about the winged skull people.”

I asked her why.

“Because her sister and niece are with them or so she thinks. She’s searching for them and the village is her base, where she can rest up and recover.”

And now, on this night, the Sergeant was waiting for her and he seemed more anxious than I had seen him before. Cal had finished his soup now and took up position again at the parapet.

“There’s someone on the road,” he said.

He had seen a flicker of light out there in the night and it seemed to me that I caught a sound, or perhaps more likely a difference in the sounds that had been before, signifying that the night had changed somehow beyond the gate.

“You know I’m going out there,” the Sergeant said to Cal and there seemed to pass between them some sort of assent. The Sergeant slipped through the gates a few minutes later, while Cal roused the guard, or what there was of it. The gates were fully opened and Cal sat in the seat of the Land Rover, kept ready behind the gate towers for happenings like this.

I stared into the darkness, forgotten and overlooked by the others, or I would have been sent home. We saw a flicker of light again out on the road and I thought I heard horses’ hooves. Minutes passed, stretched out and elastic, as I stared into the blackness. There was a sudden confusion of noise, then came shots and somebody pointed out the muzzle flashes. I heard a whistle and by then Cal had started the Land Rover and was driving out into the darkness, his lights off, navigating by memory, two men in the back of the vehicle armed with shotguns.

More seemingly unending minutes passed and then the Land Rover's headlights snapped on and I caught glimpses of horses, heard their whinnying and then the flat boom of shotguns going off, so different from the shots that I had heard before. Then it was over, the Land Rover was on its way back, then over the bridge and through the gateway, the over-eager guards nearly smashing the gates into the back of the vehicle as they rushed to close them.

On the bed of the vehicle were the two village men, sitting behind the cab, and in the front of the vehicle I could see the Sergeant holding Rowena as if she was a sleeping child. As I watched him dismount and lay her on the ground by the brazier, I saw that, though she was covered with a blanket, beneath it she was bloody and injured.

After a few moments, they put Rowena back in the Land Rover and drove to my house. The Sergeant carried the woman in and laid her tenderly on the couch. I could see then how frail and small she really was, when that fierce mask had dropped.

Rachel had hot water and torn-up sheets and saw to her wounds. She was scratched and bruised, with a gash to one side, which bled freely, and a cut to her head from a weapon, which Rachel thought had concussed her.

She lay on the couch for two days, bringing her scent of the woods and of unwashed body into house and also that sickly smell you get in a sick-room; limp like a rag-doll, she was, helpless as a baby.

The Sergeant spent a lot of time in our house watching her. I could see that this irritated Rachel, she did not like the man, could barely tolerate him, but she held her tongue. On the second day when Rowena awoke, he wasn’t there, but I was. The woman looked up at me, her eyes saucers of surprise and said:

“They’re coming.”