The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (15 page)

Dana glanced at her feet. “I thought you said not to wear impractical things!”

“I didn’t mean
that
practical. I mean, who rides pillion on a bike wearing wellies? If the police see us, they’re bound to stop us!”

Dana hated it when people seemed to expect her to know something nobody had ever explained was inappropriate as if by some sort of instinct she didn’t have. “How am I supposed to know what the dress code is for riding motorbikes? I mean, we’re not even old enough to ride motorbikes anyway!”

“Oh, never mind. The police will probably all be hanging around near schools, waiting for them to get out and start chucking paint and eggs and vandalising everything on the last day of term.”

Dana threw her bag on the garage floor, sat on Eric’s sofa, and pulled her jeans out of her wellies and rolled them down over the rubber so only the foot was visible. “Is that any better?”

“I suppose so. At least it’s less obvious now.” Eric stuffed Dana’s rucksack into one of the bike’s panniers. “What did you bring?”

“Sleeping bag, lunch. Other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

“You know, underwear and things.”

“Oh, right.” Eric went red in the face. “I suppose we’d better go now. I’ve brought extra food, so we should have enough for this evening as well.”

He went back into the utility room to lock up before opening the garage door and wheeling the moped out. Dana waited for him to shut the garage door and get on before she climbed on behind him.

“The A14 goes due east, more or less,” said Eric. “Unless you’ve got any better suggestions, we could try that as a start.”

Dana could just about visualise the road, a green line snaking east. Nothing was triggering any memories yet. Perhaps something would remind her once they were closer. Perhaps there might even be another beacon, or something like that. “Okay.”

Much of the view ahead was impossible to see from her seat on the back of the bike. Dana tried turning her head to watch the scenery pass, but it made her neck ache. Soon, they were out of the suburbs and tearing along a straight road through the countryside.

Dana began to get stiff from sitting in the same position and hanging on to Eric. The vibrations from the bike’s engine and the asphalt under the tyres made her legs go numb. The biker helmet became suffocatingly hot, and the sides of it grew sweaty and pressed uncomfortably on her cheeks. Dust from the road penetrated her jacket and trousers and made her skin feel gritty and sticky. By half past eleven, hunger had turned into a sickly ache in Dana’s belly, and Eric pulled over into a layby. When Dana dismounted and pulled off her helmet, her hair was plastered to her head with sweat and felt disgusting.

Eric stripped off his jacket and helmet. “I’m starving. You got the map?”

“No. I thought you had it.” Dana didn’t need a map to tell they were in Cambridgeshire. The town of Cambridge itself lay not far to the south, and she could make out the greyish-brown clutter of the city amidst the patchwork of green woodland and fields of crops. Cambridge was where Jananin lived, or at least where she had lived before the Information Terrorism attack on London, and before she became a Spokesman for the Meritocracy. Dana wondered where amongst this city her house might be, what it would be like.

“Bugger. We’d better not have forgotten it.”

Traffic whipped past on the road behind. Beyond the low steel barrier at the edge of the layby, a field of sun-burnished grass going to seed waved very slightly in the still, dusty air, a golden sea tinged with violet. Dana spread her jacket on the shorter grass of the embankment to sit on while Eric rummaged through the panniers.

They sat on the bank with the map spread in front of them and the food they’d brought. Even though they’d agreed to save some for that night, Dana was so hungry right now it didn’t seem to matter any more, and she ate all the sandwiches Pauline had made for her to take, and the fruit and crisps and chocolate, and Eric didn’t seem to leave much either.

“Where to now?” Eric said.

Dana gazed at the meadow and the hazy air laden with exhaust fumes and pollen. So far, she hadn’t sensed anything. She was tired and aching from being on the bike, and it was starting to look as though this might lead nowhere, and now she couldn’t go back home until the excuse they’d made up finished on Monday morning. The plan wasn’t looking so good now.

“If we go north from here, we could go to the beach. My mum’ll never take me because it’s too far away, and I suppose it’s the weather for it.”

Unable to think of any better suggestion, Dana agreed. The idea of a beach heaving with tourists didn’t seem appealing, but she supposed the beach might not be a stereotypical one, as the ones in Devon where Duncan had promised to take her, where there were fossils and shells, weren’t. After they had finished their food and drunk some water, they put the bags and the map back into the panniers. Dana reluctantly pushed the sticky, constricting helmet back onto her head.

A few hours later, they reached the road GPS reckoned was closest to the sea. However, there was no track leading down to rocky cliffs riddled with faint prints and stains from long-dead sea creatures, nor any shore of shells to hunt through and get painfully stuck to the soles of one’s feet. There was not even a path through dunes leading to a sandy beach concealed beneath sun-reddened flesh hanging out of bikinis and hairy grizzled male bodies in garish swimming trunks. All that was there was a flat expanse of waterlogged muck with low hummocks of scrubby grass on it, stretching away as far as the eye could see, and no flat blue horizon of sea laced with white foam anywhere to be seen.

“Oh,” said Eric. His eyes looked red and wet, and he took off his biker glove to wipe his nose on the back of his hand. “I’m all right. It’s just the pollen.” He pointed to the field behind, full of bright yellow flowers that gave off a strong and not entirely pleasant smell.

“What is that?” Dana asked. With no wLAN in range, she couldn’t look it up.

“Oilseed rape. It’s probably the genetically modified sort they use to make biodiesel out of. You know Blake said she wanted the country to be self-sufficient by the end of next year, so we didn’t have to rely on imported oil from foreign countries? Some people don’t like it. It’s why they say the Meritocracy rapes the land.”

Dana ruffled her hair in an attempt to increase the air circulation around her sweaty scalp. If anything, the day had grown hotter, but a very slight breeze flowed from the marshland and the unseen sea that must lie beyond it to the north. Dana closed her eyes and inhaled, letting it cool her face. And as she stood there, she sensed a faint, living pulse — a
signal
.

She looked up to the sky. The shape of a hawk hung there, wings stretched wide, shouldering an updraught. “Look, a bird. I think it’s a bird of prey. It looks
big
.”

Eric stared up at it. “The biggest bird of prey in Britain is the Golden Eagle.”

“It doesn’t look golden,” said Dana. It looked mostly white from underneath, with a darker colour around the edges. “What colour’s a Golden Eagle supposed to be?”

“I think it’s sort of brown. Perhaps it’s an illegal immigrant eagle.”

Dana squinted up at it. “I think it’s watching us.”

Eric shrugged. “They only eat rats and mice and stuff.”

“Not big ones. They carry off whole sheep and stuff. And anyway, that’s not what I meant. Look, it’s circling round. I’m sure it’s watching us.”

Dana concentrated on the signal, but there wasn’t any two-way communication available to her. She could no more control it than she could control the GPS signal that she used to orient herself and navigate. “It’s probably circling on a thermal,” Eric suggested. “That’s what big birds like eagles and vultures do.”

“I mean, what if someone used a bird to spy on people? Like they made the wyvern?”

“Oh, I see — you mean a bird with a camera tied to it. Mint! I remember reading something — I don’t know if it really happened, or if it was something in a book or a film — but some spies put lots of expensive cameras and stuff on a cat, ’cause they wanted to use it for spying and that, but when they put it outside it went into the road and got run over!”

“Poor cat!” said Dana. “Perhaps it would be more sensible to use an eagle.”

The eagle was starting to drift away. It slipped out of the thermal and began beating its wings slowly. Dana followed it along the side of the road, back in the direction they’d come. This could be the signal, the clue that would guide her to the place the wyvern was made. She didn’t want to put the helmet back on and suffer its sticky claustrophobia pressing against her scalp and cheeks and she didn’t want to get back onto the bike and put up with it jarring against her stiff limbs one minute more. Eric wheeled the bike behind her. Each stride eased a little of the stiffness out of her legs.

The bird could fly far faster than she could walk, and it wasn’t long before it came away from the road’s route and Dana lost both its signal and sight of it against the glare of the afternoon sun.

“Didn’t look like a normal bird,” said Eric.

“Perhaps it was a falconry bird, and it escaped?” Belatedly, Dana remembered something she’d been told when she went to see a falconry display with Duncan the last time he’d been back from university. The birds had all had electronic tags on them that allowed them to be tracked on GPS. Perhaps that was all the signal she’d been picking up was.

“We can go birdwatching tomorrow,” Eric said. “We need to think about where we’re going to camp and what we’re going to do about dinner.”

The field on the other side to the marshland was lower down than the roads, and Dana could make out what looked like onions growing in the soil there. She climbed down off the road and found herself on the edge of a ditch with a bit of stagnant water in the bottom. “They build a moat round the field to stop people stealing the food and camping in it?”

Eric stumbled down beside her. “It’s a dyke. I mean, what the Dutch people built to channel the water out when they drained the fens.”

A little farther down the length of the dyke stood a small outcrop of a few trees and bushes. That place might be the most concealed. “Perhaps we could camp in there.”

“Okay.” Eric looked up the far side of the dyke, to the drooping onion leaves that were starting to turn yellow in the sun. “You know when you go to your grandma’s house, and she does roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for you, and you have roast onions with it?”

“I dunno really. I haven’t got a grandma.” Graeme’s mother was the only one still alive, and Dana had only seen her a few times. She lived in sheltered accommodation and got Meals on Wheels.

“I wonder how you make a roast onion.”

“In an oven, I expect,” Dana suggested. “It’s only really barbecues that you can cook on outdoors I think.” She could remember when Graeme had made a barbecue and insisted on trying to cook the food without Pauline’s help, and it had all been burnt.

“Perhaps we can make barbecued onions.”

“We haven’t got a barbecue either.”

“On a camping fire, then. That’s what you
do
, when you go camping.”

“We could always
buy
some food,” Dana suggested.

“Oh ya? Did you bring money?”

Dana hadn’t brought any money, and she didn’t have any better ideas, so she agreed to give it a go. They each gathered up some brush and dry grass. “We ought to make it somewhere we can put it out quickly if it goes out of control,” Dana suggested.

Eric agreed with her. “Let’s make it on the other side of the dyke. If it sets the grass on fire or something, you can take off your wellies and I can go and fill ’em with water out the dyke.”

Crossing the dyke turned out to be easier said than done. They decided it would be easier to throw the firewood across first, rather than trying to scramble across with their hands full, and in this way they ended up scattering most of it on the opposite bank.

Dana went first. She slithered down the bank and jumped across the water, landing on her hands and feet on the opposite side. She climbed up and began to gather up the firewood.

Eric jumped too early and slid down the bank into the water. It wasn’t very deep, but it soaked his feet and ankles pretty well and made him swear.

“That’s why I wore wellies!” Dana jeered at him.

When he got to the top and took off his trainers, his socks were all brown. He swore and made noises of disgust as he took them off, whereupon he wrung them out and started leaping about and flapping them in his hands, like a Morris dancer.

Dana chose a spot concealed from the road by the bushes and trees on the other side of the dyke. Conveniently, a pile of broken bricks and builder’s rubble lay nearby. She pulled up the grass and made a ring of bricks and stones to build the fire in. Eric hung his socks on a bush and set to work lighting the fire, while Dana pulled up some fat onions and also some turnips that she found in a field a bit farther down the road.

“We’ve not brought a pan,” she realised when she got back. “How are we going to cook them?”

“I dunno,” said Eric. “How do people normally cook things?”

“I think when people have onions they usually cook them in a frying pan in oil.”

Eric frowned. “There’s some oil in the moped.”

“I don’t think that’s the right sort of oil.” Dana thought back to how she’d seen people cook things: usually at Pauline and Graeme’s house, food would be either fried, boiled in water, steamed, or cooked under the grill. Occasionally, cakes and meat were cooked in the oven. Then she remembered a country fair Graeme had taken her to the last summer. The depressing apprehension of the approaching end of the summer holiday had been hanging over her at the time, but she’d forgotten about it because they’d had archery and owls and huntsmen, and shops selling ‘tat’ as Pauline called it, and people who brewed cider and mead and kept bees, and a man who carved things out of bits of wood. And there had been a whole pig cooked on a spit above an open fire, which was called a hog roast, and Graeme had bought some, in a bun with apple sauce on it. It had been juicy and crisp, and with more flavour than normal roast pork.