Elysium. Part Two (7 page)

Chapter Seventeen
.

South-easterly wind.

Eleven knots.

Semilion called on Selina and Priya early the morning following their night in the Smuggler’s.

Priya answered the door, her face grilled with red lines from a night of paralytic sleep. Her hair, for the first time, seemed dull and unkempt, and she looked at him with bag-laden eyes. He would never have believe this was the same woman who had mesmerised him the evening before. She wore the same linen dress, he presumed she had returned home and collapsed in bed, roused only by the sound of his knocking.

‘Please tell me you’ve come with paracetamol?’

‘For a hangover?’ He laughed. ‘Not a chance.’

‘
Then can we speak somewhere close to a toilet,’ she groaned, ‘I’m more than likely going to expel the contents of your pub without warning.’

He had come to assign them jobs in the village. They knew the day would arrive, and part of them welcomed it. But not today. Nothing was welcome today other than sleep.

‘Everyone pitches in,’ he said once they were convened in the living room. ‘Selina, ‘I need you to help Hannah and Morag in the mill. George gives a hand when he’s free but, well, he’s needed more and more elsewhere. Hannah and Morag are getting on a bit and could use an extra pair of hands... But don’t tell them I said that. I'd never hear the end of it.’

‘Ok.’ She smirked, sensing Hann
ah and Morag belittled Semilion’s authority.

‘Priya, I’d like you to lend your services in the crèche looking after our under-fives.’

At this Priya blanched and disappeared into the kitchen. ’I don’t have to start today, do I?’ She called, her head in the sink.

‘No, don’t worry, you can both begin tomorrow.’

She nodded and he showed himself out. Selina heard Priya drag herself upstairs and then the creak of the bed as she collapsed into it. She heard a moan of ‘Kids!’ And then all was quiet.

Opening the living room window, Selina closed her eyes and fell back asleep on the sofa.

*

She woke with a gasp at a quarter past midnight, a drowning man sinking in the shadows of the room. Her heart raced, and then the sound of the front door clicking roused her fully awake. It took her a moment to notice it was the door she had heard, and another to realise Priya must be going somewhere. She took a moment to check there really was no ghost in the shadows of the room, and then leaned towards the window, her forehead squeaking on the cold glass.

The moon was low on the purple sea, and it sent scattered shadows through the streets. A dark-coloured cat sat on a fence beside the house before dancing along to the slate wall that lined the road. It pawed at the moss that hung from it, and then ducked behind a hedge.

She flattened her face against the glass and tried to peer to the foot of the house. Her breath steamed the window and obstructed her vision. She withdrew her face, and watched as the mark shrank, Priya appearing as it did so. She held her breath, and looked back out into the steep garden. She saw Priya, almost a shadow within shadow, wrapped in a duvet. She stepped slowly down the garden steps, crossed into the next garden, and into her own house.

Selina remained at the window and waited for her to reappear, wondering what had been so urgent to collect from her house in the middle of the night. After uncounted minutes had slowly passed, Priya emerged without the duvet, though instead of returning the way she had come, she hopped from a wall on to the dark high street and began walking towards the Smuggler’s Rest.

*

Semilion reclined in the battered chair of the council chamber, the radio headphones roasting his ears. Beside him the radio hummed gently, its filaments glowing brightly; they flickered tentatively as he negotiated the channels. He had been waiting for fifteen minutes. The shipping forecast was late.

It was an unusual, but not unheard of, occurrence. Several times Dr. John Camberwell had been delayed, or experienced difficulty with his equipment, though if ever there was a significant problem there would be a singular pulse that proclaimed a twenty-four hour postponement of the forecast. There was no such pulse, and after the broadcast of the previous month he was growing increasingly worried.

In the days after the last forecast, he had sent Baron and George south, telling them to return the moment they saw anything out of the ordinary. They had returned an eternal week later, saying they had continued until they could see the MoD on the horizon, spraying the land with a billowing purple dust before setting it aflame. A few days later Robin and Jeremy returned from scouting Exmoor in search of whatever ‘storm-front’ Camberwell had been reporting. They described a slight increase of Blackeye activity over the moorland, but nothing out of the ordinary.

‘There were the lights, though,’ Robin said as they had been getting ready to leave.

Jeremy shrugged as though he hadn’t thought it worthy of mentioning.

‘What lights?’ Semilion asked.

‘On the border. The skyline was lit every quarter-mile or so, right across the horizon as far as you could see. Never seen that before, always been a dead lump of concrete as long as I can remember.’

‘But there were no people? No soldiers?’

‘No,’ Robin replied. ‘There never is, is there? What’s this all about, Mr. Tupper?’

Semilion had simply said he intended to begin a new routine of patrols, just to be safe. Robin and Jeremy scratched their chins and thought little more of it as they left.

The static in his ears was ghostly; a nuclear wind howling, racing toward him. After a time though, with his lamp flickering gently, the steady hiss almost sent him to sleep. An echo of music or a reminder of speech from some drifting signal would wrench him back alert, disappointed it was not Dr. Camberwell.

He had waited for over an hour with no sign of the shipping forecast. He hoped Guliven had reached him and extracted more information, and yet had received no word as yet.

He was, a month later, desperately confused about the former report. The code for storm-front was only supposed to be used after a series of other codes, and yet those had been missing. Either the ‘storm-front’ had risen so swiftly that there had been no chance to apply the prefix codes, or it meant something else altogether. He supposed the latter as the two scouting missions had unearthed nothing, nothing but lights and Blackeye’s on the moors. He ran his hand over his eyes and sighed. What did it all mean? He eased the headphones off and lit his sixth cigarette of the sitting. He couldn’t abandon the radio, not with the enigmas of the previous report ringing in his mind.

He should have called a meeting with the community council already. He had to hold a council. He must. And yet...

As he stared at the dusty cement between the floor-tiles, he was wrenched back to his childhood, and the conflict that had arisen between his grandfather and the inhabitants of Lundy.

The union of the communities had been spoken of for years, since he could ever remember, and had always been regarded as a lofty vision that could never actually happen. The reasons from both communities were numerous and constant, though gradually the few who wanted a single colony negotiated and compromised until there were few excuses left to deny them.

A deal was struck on Semilion’s tenth birthday. He recalled how his father had missed the celebrations. He recalled the flotilla of boats arriving on a mild and moonless night. Hands running through his hair as strangers passed him on the beach.

The governor of Lundy, a broad and bearded mariner by the name of Red Sawbone, remained behind with his elderly mother and his two young boys. A grand house had been refurbished for him overlooking an expanse of Woolacombe Beach, a gesture grudgingly carried out by Semilion’s grandfather, Carrick, who bore a life-long animosity for Red after a trivial confrontation in Red’s youth. Red had long ago attempted to appease Carrick, though Carrick hoarded grudges like treasure.

Eighteen families migrated from Lundy, and were given homes in the Woolacombe district, and for several months little changed other than the newfound glee of conversing with strangers. Friendships formed fluidly as each community shared their knowledge regarding various tasks, and gatherings became enriched with Lundian tales and songs.

Nine months passed by, and Carrick grew increasingly frustrated on hearing villagers exchanging their thoughts on how difficult it must have been for Red to break up his community so soon after the death of his wife, Harriet, and how lonely he must have grown after the death of his mother. How hard must it be for him to raise two boys alone, with only the few remaining Lundians to offer any support.

These thoughts burned in Carrick, and his already dark view of Lundians grew darker still. He began to blame them for frivolous occurrences. A blight of carrot-fly, a meagre harvest, a lame calf; all these things would have been rectified had it been left in the hands of a Mortehoe farmer, Carrick seethed. His aggravation, left unchecked, turned to unbridled rage when he discovered a Lundian boy had pushed a cow over in the night and broken its hind leg. The beast had to be killed, and Carrick immediately threw the boy responsible, Joseph Borderly, in the Woolacombe cells.

He starved the boy and made an example of anyone who protested about his treatment. Semilion remembered his own father breaking the jaw of a man who complained to his neighbour about the boy’s incarceration. The blow had been dealt to silence the opinions of others, though all it served to do was divide the communities even further. Several families returned to Lundy, and although Carrick hated them, he deemed it should be he who decided who had the right to leave. He ordered that the remaining Lundians stay, dealing harshly with anyone who showed signs of defiance.

There were many who needed to be dealt with, and in an act of desperation – an act deemed essential when devoid the sagacity of hindsight - Carrick executed the Borderly boy, brutally and publicly. If he had thought the act would conclude the surge of resistance from the Lundians he couldn’t have been more misguided.

Word had returned to Red of the oppression at the hands of Carrick, and without deliberating on the news he took to the water and sailed to Mortehoe. A stern and formidable man in unexceptional times, this extraordinary news of a Lundian boy’s execution set a violent rage inside him. On his route to The Smugglers’ Rest he felled any who opposed him, regardless of their age or sex.

Semilion remembered the knife at his throat as his grandfather tried to reason with Red. He remembered being thrown to the floor and his tooth cracking. He remembered the moment he knew he would fear Red for the rest of his life.

Carrick died that day at the hand of Red, and Semilion’s father had been beaten so violently that he never walked straight again. For a time, even after Carrick’s last breath had left him, Red stood over him, shouting at him in frustrated triumph, calling him an Irish prick and asking him why. Why had he done it? Why couldn’t he let their feud go? Why had he let it come to this? He was crying. With fury or pity Semilion would never know, and after running his bloody fingers through his lank hair, he turned to Semilion’s father.

‘I own this sty now,’ he said between breaths, ‘and I own every one of you pigs.’ Red thrust a length of wood in his father’s ribs. ‘But if I ever have to come back here,’ he growled, ‘if I ever have to step foot in this cancerous warren and attend your incompetence I will finish you... But before you die I will ruin your son.’ He swung the length of wood in Semilion’s direction and it hung before his eyes. ‘Do you understand?’

His father’s bloody, toothless mouth opened momentarily, but nothing came. Instead he closed them and offered an almost imperceptible nod.

‘I’m a man of my word.’ Red said, before stepping over Semilion’s father and leaving.

Since that day his fear of Red Sawbone, of the memory of Red Sawbone, had increased. In the look of dread in his father’s eyes if the name were uttered, with every mention of his grandfather’s memory, every time he walked by the room in which his father had been beaten and with every dreadful nightmare did he prophecies the return of Red Sawbone.

He slowly replaced the headphones, noting that in the intervening cigarette one of the ear-pieces had broken. Now the static invaded only his left ear, making him feel off centre and slightly nauseous. He had to resolve this problem alone, and as quickly as possible. He couldn’t risk anyone knowing, he couldn’t risk word spreading. As infrequent as contact with Lundy was, his fear of the governor kept what little he knew close to his chest.

*

‘Reighn! Wake up.’ Dawn hissed urgently.

‘Nnn? What is it?’

‘It’s William… He’s sick.’

Reighn sat up and put a hand to his head. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He won’t keep anything down. Not my milk… not even water!’

He could tell that she feared the worst. Her sunken eyes, pallid skin and tight grip told him that, but her words alone were thick with fright.

‘Go and wake Amber…’ he said,’ ‘She’ll know what to do.’

‘
I know what to do!’ She spat. Then she wept and held on to him. Her sobs were as desolate as corpses. ‘I’m sorry...’

He
held her tightly as she wept and looked down at the small collection of blankets swathed around little William. In the middle of the pile was a white face, sucking at the air in silence like a fish out of water.