The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (16 page)

“Here, you make holes on either side of the fire, and put sticks in them like cave men did in pictures.” She went back to the pile of rubble, where she recalled having seen an old copper pipe. She retrieved it and stuck the turnips and onions on it like a kebab. By the time she’d finished, Eric had the sticks in to support it and the fire going.

They sat and watched the food cooking. It started to go black on the outside, so Dana cut off a piece to see if it was done. The outside tasted burnt, but the inside was still raw and the overall taste was horrible. Eric suggested that they might need turning to make sure they cooked evenly, and he burnt his hand on the hot metal and knocked the spit over so all the food fell down in the ash and dust.

Dana cut up the burnt bits of turnip and onion. At first both of them sat and ate solemnly, and Dana pretended to like it since they had done it themselves from scratch, and she felt an element of pride in their effort.

“Mm,” said Eric, “this is a good method of cooking turnips.” Then he tried to swallow and retched, and Dana spat out her mouthful of burnt onion, whereupon they both admitted it was foul, and laughed and took great zeal in throwing it in the dyke.

“I don’t know,” said Dana, exasperated. She thought back to the food Ivor had made on Roareim with a newfound respect. “Maybe it only works on meat. Perhaps we could build a trap and catch a rabbit.”

Eric hung his trainers by their laces on the spit over the fire. “I’ve not noticed any rabbits. And I don’t know how to build a trap.”

Dana sighed. She knew roughly what a trap should look like, but she was too hot and hungry to think about what to make one from or search for the materials.

“Gypsies, in the olden days, used to catch hedgehogs and roll them up in clay and cook them. The spikes are supposed to come off in the clay. Hedgehogs don’t run very fast.”

Dana shifted her legs in the uncomfortable position she was crouching. “But then the hedgehogs would still be alive when they were cooked! That’s horrible. And I bet they taste awful, anyway.”

“Perhaps there’s one squashed on the road somewhere.”

“Ugh!” Dana stood up. She really was very hungry, and the thought of succulent hog roasts, and of Ivor’s rabbits — she was sure her memory had exaggerated them, as she didn’t recall finding them particularly good at the time — was making her mouth water. For the last few minutes, she had been unconsciously aware of an unpleasant rubbery smell, and at this point she noticed it and turned back to the fire, where Eric had left his wet trainers too close to the edge of the burning material. “Your shoes are on fire!”

Eric shouted an expletive and kicked over the spit. He beat the trainers with a stick, although they were not really on fire, merely smouldering and stinking. Dana started to laugh. “You wouldn’t laugh, if it happened to you!” Eric objected. It suddenly didn’t matter so much that they had come here and not found anything, and that Dana was aching and hungry and the food they had tried to make was inedible.

“Do you like Chinese food?” she asked Eric.

“Ya, course I like Chinese food, but we haven’t got any, unless you stuffed a wok in the back of my bike without me noticing.” Eric shovelled dusty earth over his trainers and stamped on them to extinguish them.

“I’ve just remembered something.” It might be a bad idea to bring this up. She hadn’t tried it since Ivor has asked her to do it for him, and even then she’d known it was wrong, and the security on the machines might have been changed since to make it harder to hack into. Dana had a top-up payment card that would only allow her to pay for items legal for people under eighteen to buy up to the value of the money on it, that she or Pauline or Graeme had paid into it. At the moment the card had nothing on it, but she could probably make the machine that read the card think there was money on it. “I think I do have, on a payment card. We could go into a town near here and find a Chinese.”

“Cool, and thanks.” He exhumed his shoes and tried to shake the dust off them. “However crap it is, it’s got to be better than anything we can do.”

By now, the day was cooling off and the sun was getting low and ruddy. Clouds of midges were emerging from the marsh and the dyke. Eric cringed and complained when he put his trainers back on.

They rode back towards Spalding, where Dana had found a Chinese restaurant on the Internet via a wLAN she’d sensed coming from someone’s house. When they arrived, the man who took the order stared at them, and at the brown water oozing from Eric’s shoes, and told them he wouldn’t serve them unless they paid in advance. Dana offered him her payment card and, despite her concerns, found she could still interfere with the card reader’s signal and make it think she’d paid.

The restaurant had a buffet system where you could take a plate and have as many helpings as you liked. Dana had mussels in black bean sauce, egg-fried rice, sweet & sour pork, and seaweed and crab claws with a skewer of spicy chicken. They sat at a table by a pond with Koi carp in it, where Eric kept pretending to drop bits of rice in the pond for the fish to eat, because he said they looked hungry. For dessert, Dana chose some deep-fried fruits drizzled with sticky syrup, and afterwards they had a pot of jasmine-scented green tea to share, served in thimble-like ceramic cups with no handle, which was deliciously refreshing after the heavy meal and very sweet dessert. A lady came around the tables and handed out fortune cookies, and Eric’s said
Your trouble will soon pass
, and Dana’s said
Wisdom comes from experience
.

By the time they left the restaurant, dusk had fallen. Back at the site they’d picked to camp in, they had to use the torch to assemble the tent, with much difficulty. At last Dana lay awake in her sleeping bag, staring at the tent’s canvas ceiling barely visible from the moonlight behind it, and listened to the sounds of insects and rustling of unidentified animals, and the occasional whisper of a car’s tyres on the nearby road. A faint oniony smell permeated the air, and it was starting to make her nose feel clogged. From the regular sound of his breathing, she could tell Eric was already asleep. She ran through the memories the wyvern had given her several times, but nothing she’d seen today triggered any connection. She had been hoping something else might have been implanted in her, something subconscious or otherwise hidden, that she would recognise when she saw something that would trigger it. Now it was looking obvious that wouldn’t happen and she had been wrong. The only thing she had seen was the bird, and that might be nothing to do with this. She had two more days to look for information, but she had no idea where to start.

-6-

Y
OU
can’t remember becoming aware of being here again, back in what seems to be a dream you think you’ve had before. The familiar drone of a fan is barely perceptible. You can sense only a leaden feeling throughout your body, and your eyesight is filled with grey unfocused masses.

Gamma? What’s the matter?

My own consciousness is sticky, wrapped around yours like Velcro. It’s a while before I can pull together enough that I think is myself to answer.
The medicine must have worn off. You’re not supposed to be here
.

Small details become briefly comprehensible: the barred window, and the striped light it throws on the wall opposite. The mattress under my back.

Something’s wrong! Try to think!

I’m not supposed to listen to you. That’s what they say. You’re a symptom; you’re part of what’s making me ill
.

You remember them, men and women wearing white coats, asking probing questions, trying to trap us, nurses in blue uniforms, cold faces, hard hands.
Don’t listen to them. You’re only ill because they give you bad medicine that hurts you
.

I can think of no reply to this.

They’re always telling you that what’s in your head is fake, and that what’s here is real. What if they’re wrong, and it’s the other way round? What if this is fake, and we can get out of it and make something else real?

I lie there and I listen to the fan and stare at the stripes cast by the bars on the wall, and my mind is empty. You fear I am ignoring you, that I won’t hear. I can’t be bothered with the answer.
It doesn’t matter what’s real and what isn’t. If I take their medicine, it goes away. I don’t have to be me any more. I can just be nothing
.

But I can help you get to the place that’s safe
.

The Emerald Forge?
The name kindles some ember trapped deep within me, of a fire I thought had long gone out.

The Emerald Forge
.

I sit up on the bed with the straps. The motion sets the room heaving and a sick ache starts up in my stomach and pain shoots through my head and neck.

They give me this stuff, this medicine, to make me better?

Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to the Emerald Forge
, you think.

I wait for the room to stop swimming before sliding my feet off the bed and easing my weight onto the floor. Every step I take sends electric charges of pain lancing up my neck and into my head and eyes.

We tell the door to unlock. The bathroom door stands ahead.

Not in there. To the Emerald Forge. Down the stairs.

I hold on to the banister as I descend. The stairs are covered with sticky lino with metal grips on the edges that hurt my toes. My legs are weak. I can’t remember when I last walked. I think they’ve been giving me drugs for a long time. I don’t remember you being here much.

There’s another electronically locked door that leads out into a foyer. Thin light from a window reveals seats and magazines and a big money tree in an urn. It looks civilised, not like the unreal side of this world that is more familiar. You wonder if whoever comes here to wait, to sit on these seats and read these magazines, knows what goes on behind the other door, in the deeper parts of the building.

The opposite door leads outside. It looks like early morning, when the sun is yet to rise.

You tell me the thought that will unlock the door and at last we are out, breathing clean air carrying the chill of early autumn, in the prison-like courtyard you remember seeing from the upstairs window. There’s a large metal gate painted black directly opposite the building’s exit, but the walls are all made of concrete and topped with barbed wire strung along poles angled inwards.

I look to the eastern horizon where the sky is bright, and stabbing pains shoot through my eyes and jaw. I turn away and blunder into the wall, but the pain is still getting worse. My guts have clenched into a burning knot of agony. I put my hands against the wall, but my legs still won’t support me, and I’m bending double and sinking to the ground. My mouth is full of slaver and my head spins. My guts lurch and panic grips me. I breathe in and out hard and fast, trying to hold back the urge to vomit. Again I swallow, force it down, but an alarming gargle rises up my throat even though there’s no breath there to power my voice. And then it comes again and I can’t stop it, and it burns my mouth and it stinks, and this awful greasy acidic slime is all up against the back of my nose and coating my tongue and lips, and running onto the concrete floor.

I cough and I force bitter saliva from the sides of my tongue and spit, trying to wash the taste away.

You hear the sound of a motor, the rattle of the front gate moving.

Someone’s coming
.
Quickly! Move!

You urge limbs to move, to coordinate and stand in the way you know, but the muscles of this body are not yours, and I am hunched snivelling and shivering over a pool of sick.

You have to move now. If we stay here they are going to catch us
.

There is a car engine making a noise somewhere near the gate. We are going to get caught, again, and the thought of their hands on me, restraining, forcing, is repulsive. Are we just going to stay here and let it happen, again, because Epsilon keeps vigil while Gamma falls apart?

The engine sound is growing louder. You strain to move, and suddenly something in me gives.
I can’t do this. You are better than me
.

Your legs straighten and you’re up on your feet, your field of vision swinging with giddy nausea. It’s unfamiliar, somehow, as though you did it years ago and it’s not as easy as you remember. This body is alien to you, but you know enough to make it work. You make it to the green plastic industrial bins against the wall in four unsteady strides before you fall down, out of sight.

Your vision is swimming and you can’t seem to get your eyes to focus. You can just make out the tyres of the vehicle as they pass by from under the bins. Your sides spasm into another retch, and you feel a hot line track down from the corner of your mouth, but when you try to raise your hand to your face to wipe it off, you can’t seem to find the right place to put it. The pain, the cold, and the leaden predawn sky are so much more intense now. Something isn’t adding up. How did you get here? You know you came from somewhere, but you can’t remember where. You’ve seen this place before, but it’s not yours. When you try to remember your own name, the only word that comes to mind is
Epsilon
.

Gamma?

You can still sense me, but I don’t reply.

Gamma, whatever just happened, you have to undo it
.

Still no reply. Fragmented memories of another life, somewhere else, start to return: a man with grizzled sideburns and green spectacles, a woman with dyed-red hair, and a silent boy with dark wavy hair. You can’t remember their names, but you used to know them.
I can’t. You have to do this. Not me
.

My reply takes a long time to come.
I’m no good at it. You have it. You keep this. I don’t want to be this any more. I don’t want to be me; I’d rather not be anyone
.

You feel me withering inside us. What happens if you become me? You’re sleeping now, in the world you know. There are people there who care about you. In the morning, will they find you in bed, unresponsive and in a coma, or something worse? If you have to become someone else, will you cease to be?
Because you’re the only one who can make what you want into a reality. Because if you won’t be responsible for yourself, no-one else can be expected to. Because you’re the only person who can be you
.