The Fall of Chance (28 page)

Then, through one of the gaps in his defences, he spotted a small child. It was a boy of no more than three with the curls of a cherubim. Someone had seen fit to bring him to this circus and placed him in the front row. Wet dribble glistened as it ran from the thumb stuck in its mouth, right down its wrist. It was the only unmoving thing in this valley of hate, a single point of innocence among it all.

It gave Unt hope. He smiled at the infant when its whole expression changed. In an instant, the angelic mask melted away and took on the vicious aspect of the adults. It contorted into a snarl of primal rage, the fury intensified by being borne on so small a face.

Unt recoiled in terror and almost fell to the floor. The grim hand on his shoulder saved him but not out of kindness. It propelled him back onto the human gutter that had been made for him and drove him on at its slow, relentless speed.

The missiles fell thinner as the ammunition grew scarce but still, Unt grew weaker. The constant barrage had cracked open his defensive shell and let the resistance flow out of him. He slowed and stumbled and the world slowed with him.

And then he heard a voice, a high, sermonising voice bellowing out from above the crowd. It was a voice he recognised. It belonged to Lasper. And then Unt saw him, head and shoulders above the mob. He’d made a pulpit from a stack of crates and Lasper now used it to stir the crowd into greater fury.

Unt could no longer tell the words. The strikes to his head had affected his hearing. It was like trying to listen through water. In spite of that, the tone was unmistakable and so were the wild gestures that were cast in Unt’s direction. An accusing finger was levelled at him like a weapon and Lasper looked like he intended to kill him with it.

The hate was gathered thick as tar around Lasper. It was hard to move beyond it. As Unt faltered, the sermon became an artillery command. A new shower of missiles fell upon him in a dense mass. Scores of impacts hammered him to the floor. His feet and shins were driven into the mud.

This was the end, thought Unt. The baying pack would fall upon the beaten animal before them.

But the final moments never came. Instead of rushing in on him, the crowd fell back. The Rangers, at last, were driving them off. Too many objects had accidentally hit them and their patience had run its course.

Unt was aware of the lead Ranger shouting and of Lasper shouting back but he couldn’t lift his head to follow what was going on. After a lot of snarling back and forth, he stopped hearing his enemy’s voice. He must have been persuaded to leave, he thought, his parting shot at Unt delivered.

Unt took the respite to regain his breath and tried to raise himself but couldn’t. He felt a pair of hands under his armpits, hauling him up. He turned his head, expecting to see a reluctant or indifferent Ranger but what he saw was a frail old man.

As Unt regained his footing, the man stooped repeatedly and when he stood up, he plunged his hands into Unt’s pockets. Unt felt some weight added with every action. Uncomprehending, Unt put his hand in one pocket and came out holding a squashed and bruised apple.

The old man prised the apple out of his fingers and shoved it back in his pocket. He grabbed Unt’s chin and brought it to face his own. Before him was a pair of eyes, ringed with the redness of sunken sockets and framed with a wispy mane and beard of pure white. The eyes were a watery blue, whitened as though they’d been glazed with milk, but deep in their core there was an intensity of kindness like Unt had never seen.

The old man spoke. “Forget your shame and fill your pockets son, for God’s sake. Leave your pride there on the floor and accept these gifts from your enemies. Lord knows when you’ll get to feed again so fill up and bear on.”

At that point, a Ranger pushed the old man roughly away. “Hold back now!” he growled, speaking to the whole street. Order restored, the Rangers were returning to their charge.

They pushed on and Unt didn’t look up. He was focusing on the floor, driving on step by step. He shut out the noise, letting each yard of brown mud be his world.

A while after this retreat from his environment, he noticed he could see it clearer. He realised he’d forgotten to raise his defences again and that was when he noticed that the missiles had stopped. The noise, too, had abated and wound down to growls and utterances.

He dared to look up, which was difficult. Existing from moment to moment had been a seductive crutch but he sensed that now the time for crutches had passed. That meant the end was coming.

He looked around and saw he was in his old neighbourhood. The faces he saw were the ones he’d been seeing every day for his entire life. There was no fury here: that had belonged to the people who’d pushed themselves as far as they could up the street. Back here, the ire had mellowed like a river at its mouth. Unt looked in those faces and he still saw resentment but it was mixed with disbelief, curiosity and worst of all, disappointment. Somehow, his shame had become their shame and they would not meet his eye.

He saw his own house ahead. The windows were dark and empty. He wondered if Crystal was with Rob.

Back beyond his house, was Bulton’s. His family were stood on their porch and Bull was with them. Bull himself looked petrified and pale. His mother’s hands were on his shoulders. Yvesse, his surrogate mother, stood there with her family and looked on, emotionless.

Before Unt knew it, they were past the gap between the houses and Bull’s family were out of sight. Moments later, they were beyond Unt’s house too. They stood on the precipice of the embankment.

No more crowd stood before them. The bank was too steep to stand on comfortably. The only people still watching did so from the porches of the houses that clung to the slope.

One house in particular caught Unt’s attention. It was one he hadn’t thought of in quite a while. It was Mélie’s old house, where her father still dwelt alone, only now Unt saw two shadows in its recesses.

The silhouettes had a feminine shape and they melted away as he looked. A second later, they might never have existed but Unt knew what he had seen.

Down the steep steps they went, right to the bottom and beyond the last house. Still the Rangers said nothing.

The path now cut straight through the cornfields on its way to the river. The crop was high and golden, approaching the time when it would be taken in for harvest. Unt was sorry he’d never get to see it.

As they walked along the path with its walls of gold, it gave the procession a look of false cheer. It was almost cruel to make him walk out this way. He was being mocked with the things he would never know again.

In time, they reached the river and crossed the white-painted bridge. The river was shallow at the moment and he could see fish moving along its bed. Downstream, his eyes went to the jetty where all this trouble had begun. Even from this distance, he saw that the fish traps had been left to fall into disrepair. Even that had counted for nothing.

Beyond the bridge, the path continued its straight course along an embankment that cut the floodplain in two. Beyond that was Cherry Wood. Unt had never been beyond its borders and its dark undergrowth of knotted roots matched his growing fear.

After a while, they emerged into daylight but it was a daylight that belonged on the other side of the world. The path stretched onward into the distant Moxie Hills but here the Rangers stopped.

Unt waited but the Rangers didn’t move or say anything.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?” said the lead Ranger.

“What do I do?”

“Go,” said the Ranger.

“Where?” asked Unt.

The Ranger shrugged. “I don’t care but you can’t stay here.” He turned as though to lead his men back into the wood but he stopped and spoke again to Unt.

“You know our boundaries,” he said, “So no matter what route you take, don’t come back. If you try, we’ll find you.”

“Please,” said Unt. “Where does this path go?”

The Ranger considered whether to answer. “Can’t say I know,” he said. “Nowhere, as far as we’ve been. Folks have passed through saying there’s another town some way down. No one’s come back, mind. Make of that what you will.”

With a gesture of his glaive, he led his men away.

17. Wandering

There was no town further down the road. There was nothing. Not as far as the road went, anyhow. Way beyond the town boundaries, the path remained well-trodden. For mile after mile, Unt walked with ease. Despite his bruises, his worries seemed to slip off as he strolled in the sunshine. He found a stream which he used to wash off the mud and rotten food juices and then he let the sun and breeze dry him.

He took the Ranger’s advice and followed the path into the hills. The track was a lazy climb of sweeping curves that rested against the slopes. Unt followed it deep into a flinty ravine and there it stopped.

The canyon ended in a blunt cliff face. High walls surrounded him. There was nowhere to go but back. Unt looked behind him and checked his tracks. The path was well-beaten down; he hadn’t imagined it.

He must have missed a split in the track, he thought. The path he’d come along had been true but it hadn’t been made by his own people. His former people. The yellow flint was unlike anything they used at home and even the Rangers didn’t come this far. If someone was mining the stone, he reasoned, there was probably a settlement nearby. The stone would be too heavy to carry long distances so there had to be something close to hand.

Unt sat on a rock and looked up at the tops of the cliffs. The ravine was darkening, becoming steeped in shade. Unt had no way to tell the time but it had been full-day when he started his descent and not much time had passed since.

It was getting dark because the sun had moved to an angle that no longer cut into this deep scar in the earth. If he left now, he’d probably have an hour or two more of daylight but he decided he’d done enough for one day.

He decided to make camp so he looked around until he found a moss-covered patch that was big enough to lie down on. Here and there, hidden flint poked through minutely but it wasn’t an uncomfortable bed.

He’d staid off eating until now, knowing that he had to make his stores last. Pearson’s last meal had kept the hunger at bay and only now was it creeping back on him.

He took an inventory and found six apples in various states of decay, three carrots, two turnips and most of the leaves of a cabbage. The crowning glory was a couple of stale buns that would have been like rocks were it not for the mud that had soaked through them.

None of it was very appetising. His instinct was to leave the worst and go for the best but the cautionary part of him said that things would only get more decayed the longer he left them. It was better to eat the older stuff now, while they were still vaguely edible than later on when they had turned to rancid sludge.

Still, when he looked at the worst apple, shrivelled like an old woman’s skin, bruised and peppered with dots of white mould, he decided he wasn’t that hungry yet. The pantry could stay intact for another day.

He didn’t have a chance to test his fire-making skills. There was no wood in the ravine. The white carcasses of dead shrubs were the closest thing to fuel and they’d burn up in seconds. He decided it didn’t matter: the night was warm and clear and there was nothing to cook. He was better off sparing himself the effort.

So it was that he laid himself out for his first night in exile. Actually, it wasn’t so bad, he told himself as he gazed up at the stars. In town, where the street lamps flared in the night, the stars were few and scattered but here, in true darkness, they were thick in swarms. It was like they fled from humanity and returned in droves when it was absent.

Unt was surprised at the liberation he felt. His exile was less than a day old and already the trial and eviction were distant things. His whole abandoned life was quickly becoming some abstract concept.

All the hurt and anger evaporated up to meet the stars. It was like he’d been swimming in toxic waters and hadn’t even noticed. Humanity was the disease and cutting it out was the cure.

With the passing of anger, desire went with it. He found he wasn’t missing the things he’d lost. His job had been a false idol, something he knew he would never have truly loved. Crystal was another kind of trophy. She was miserable and eventually she’d have made him miserable too. All that had connected them was his lust for her. He wasn’t heartbroken to have lost her.

The house was a different matter. That had been Unt’s home and his connection to the parents he couldn’t remember. If he could have picked it up and put it down here he’d have been happy and would never have a second thought of seeing that lot again.

*              *              *              *

On the second day, he woke with the first of the morning sun and went in search of the mystery settlement. First, he tracked back for a bit and near a stream, on the other side, he saw a path. He reasoned the men who quarried the ravine must cross here so he leapt across to follow their path instead.

It led him back along terrain much like where he’d spent the night. Narrow cuttings ran twisted between bare rock. These ravines, however, branched frequently and it wasn’t long before he lost all sense of direction. When he came across a dead-end, he tried to backtrack but discovered he couldn’t find the path again.

Unt was angry with himself for making such an error. It was a sorry start to his survivalist career. He should have paid attention to where he was going. He should have laid markers. He tried to rule out each channel, one by one, but when they too split, he only found himself getting more confused.

Get to high ground, he told himself. Get above it and see where you need to go. Plot a route. The problem was that there was no easy climb out of the maze he’d got himself into. Panic started to set in as his search for a way out grew more desperate. He had to stop, calm himself down and engage his brain. Keep going clockwise, he told himself. Eventually you’ll find a way out.

That was the tactic he decided on and he stuck to it. Finally, it paid dividends. He emerged from a ravine into unfamiliar territory. A wide rolling hill led down toward a green forest that stretched away as far as the eye could see. There was no town.

He looked back at the granite maze behind him. Left and right, that too went to the limits of his vision. He didn’t fancy going around it and he sure as hell wasn’t going back into it. The forest looked lush and inviting from up here but beneath the canopy it would be every bit as much a maze.

He was caught between a rock and a soft place. The soft place had the better potential. Unt started walking downhill.

*              *              *              *

In the afternoon, it became clear that Pearson’s advice was useless. Moss, it turned out, grew on all sides of a tree when the tree was one of many beneath a dense blanket of leaves. Unt didn’t mind though, he didn’t need to get anywhere in a hurry. South was only a vague target and he decided the sensible thing to do was to skirt the edge of the forest.

He’d hoped he might find some food to exchange for the filth in his pockets but none of the trees at the forest’s edge seemed the type to bear fruit.

Before the day was out, he resorted to eating two apples. He started by picking the two worst ones but when he put one in his mouth, he recoiled and threw it away. He ate the second one and then, thinking better, he retrieved the discarded one and shovelled it down. The flesh had turned to the point of liquid and it trickled down his throat like foul syrup.

The taste stayed but the night was more comfortable than the last. The day had brought the first scares of being alone but he was over that now. These things would happen but he’d learn.

*              *              *              *

On the third day, everything changed. High grey clouds drifted over the summer scene, the rain came and everywhere seemed suddenly bleak and barren. The heavens hadn’t opened, it was just a light drizzle but it was sustained and it seeped deeper and deeper into his fibres.

Unt had gone under the trees for shelter. He’d thought the canopy that had blocked out the sun would block out the rain but that wasn’t the case. The rain was so fine it seemed to penetrate everything. As well as that, the leaves and branches collected the water and stored it till it was too heavy to bear. Then it fell in great splashes that drenched in one shot.

Meanwhile, the undergrowth had become damp. It soaked through the stitching in his shoes and his trousers drew the water like the roots of a plant, sucking it up so he felt it at his knees.

Unt found the driest patch he could and hoped to see out the weather but it lasted all day. Slowly but surely, it soaked through his clothes until he was sat shivering. He told himself the best way to stay warm was to keep active so he started to walk again.

The more he drudged on, the more miserable he became. After a while, he found his path blocked by a stream. He’d passed others already but they were little, dried-up things. This stream was swollen by the rain coming off the hills and it was more like a small river.

It was too much to jump so he had little choice but to follow it. The question was in which direction should he go? The stream was flowing into the woods, which wasn’t the way he wanted to go but it seemed to make more sense to go with the flow than to fight it.

The forest darkened the deeper he went. The bank was muddy and slippery. Bits of ground looked stable but when he put his weight on them, they collapsed away, exposing the spider-web of roots that had been holding them in place.

Somewhere, the rain ended but the way the canopy delayed its effects, it was some time before Unt noticed. It made no difference to the ground he walked on. It was saturated and with nothing to dry or drain it, the water just sat there, waiting for Unt to step in it.

Somewhere along the line, the stream petered out. It didn’t dry up, it just sort of mingled with the earth. The distinction between the two blurred and then disappeared entirely. Before he knew it, the bank Unt had been walking along had dropped down and melted away so that it was part of the stream bed. With every step he took, his feet were sinking further. Finally, one foot sank past his ankle and then he was stuck.

Looking up, he saw that he was in a sort of hollow. As his banked path had vanished, raised bits of ground had closed in from the side and become new banks. Unnoticed, they’d crept closer and higher so that now he was swallowed in a hole of mud.

He looked around this place that he’d found himself in, searching for a spot of firm ground to aim for. His mind wanted to call it a grove, if that was the right word. There was no-one around to contradict him so that’s what he settled on.

The trees nearby, such as they were, were squat, black, gnarled things. Instead of a single trunk, they had many small ones that looked like they’d fought each other to haul themselves out of the mud. They were like dead things and their roots poked through the earth walls like skeletal remains.

Unt looked wearily behind him. If he went back along that path, it was a long way that he’d have to retrace his steps. A gap in the far bank offered a sloped exit that was tempting. He’d have to cross the middle of the hollow but it was a much quicker way out.

Heck, he thought, it was worth a try. If he got toward the middle and found the mud was getting too deep he could always retreat back here.

Instinctively, he hand reached in his pocket for his dice. “No,” he said, “You’re a free man now. Just do what you want.” He decided to go for it but it was still harder to put his dice down than to pull his foot out of the mud.

With a tug of force, he worked his foot free but the transferred weight pushed his other foot down. Still, he managed to point himself in the right direction and strived forward.

The going was surprisingly easy. It was still hard work but as he reached the middle, he was sinking less than half-way up his shin.

“Keep going,” he breathed and pushed on.

The sloping gap loomed large and inviting. Its clay face looked slick but he could see roots sticking out like ladder rungs that would give him something to grip. One large root groped its way down the right-hand edge of the gap and he aimed for that point.

Less than two yards from his goal, the mud got suddenly softer. He sank right down to his knee and swore. His leg was only inches deeper than it had been getting already - less than a foot - but those extra inches multiplied the suction he had to fight.

He couldn’t budge it. With all his strength, he couldn’t move. His trapped leg was stuck solid and his free one had nothing firm to push against.

The closeness of the bank taunted him. A couple more steps and he’d be there but two steps was still more than he could manage.

What was he going to do? Nothing would improve by his doing nothing and there was zero chance of a rescuer stumbling across him. His only hope was himself.

First things first, he’d make what gains he could. He had one foot that was almost free. He’d get it as far as he could. At least then the problem would be halved.

With a surge of effort, he pulled the leg free and swung it forward as far as he could. It sunk down as far as the other. The bottom of his thigh rested on mud. He was almost doing the splits but here at least, the mud did something for him and took the strain.