The House of Storms (38 page)

Here, pinned out for the first time beyond the maps on which this battle had been planned, and warm and intricate and green, lay the way ahead, which now stretched all the way west across England. The black mandibles of Ralph’s headache scrambled again behind his eyes, huge and real as the earwig he’d once glimpsed magnified within the card tube of a kaleidoscope as a child. He’d known death as a close friend then, always hovering in the shadows, pooled in each day’s inky remains. That small, innocent insect—the way it dragged and wavered across the blaze of colours from his sickroom window—had become part of his deliriums, which were touching him again tonight with the trailing visions of that insect-apparelled woman. He reeled and gripped the rickety edge of the map table.

‘Sir? Are you all right?’

He coughed and swallowed and nodded, and looked down again at the map. The swirl of roads and contours and rivers. The twisting curl of the River Wye, the Avon and the wider Severn; a sweet and intensely English landscape which this war and foreign powers of ignorance and greed and bigotry had grabbed and would destroy. The rivers met, grew great, and there, at some indefinable point like the taint of a woman’s scent after she has left a bed, the water grew brackish and ebbed and flowed to the moods of the moon, and the land widened its arms to greet the salt ocean. Ralph let his gaze soothe itself on a landscape which he so often thought of, but which he had scarcely dared to envision as conquerable—and yes, he knew the correct word was
reclaim
—even though this was the way in which all the strategies led. But perhaps, after today’s victory, he really could allow himself to imagine that the job could be done efficiently, with such a great show of skill and force that the West would admit defeat and end this dreadful war. Yes, that would be a nice thought to think.

He allowed his fingers to touch the map’s new print. Bristol. The Severn Bridge. Those distant hills of Wales, which he had gazed at through the misted window of a car long ago on a morning journey towards what proved to be the happiest and saddest summer of his life. He remembered the prickle of the blankets and the churn of the engine and the driver’s grubby neck. Of all the many places across Europe he and his mother had travelled in search of a cure for him, England’s West had somehow seemed the most distant of all to him. It still did. And Invercombe. There it was, named on the map just any other place.

Ralph straightened up and nodded to silence the officer who was telling him about the need for more coal. To wary stares, he headed outside and wandered on through the gloom. There was scarcely room inside his own small tent for his trunk and bunk bed. That was the intention; this was his last place of retreat where others couldn’t come in. Carried on the wind, he could still hear the voices of his men. They’d gone beyond bawdiness, and were softly singing. In his weariness, their cadences sounded much the same as those that madwoman with her cloak of dead insects had sung. Was it a hymn? Perhaps some new patriotic song? Ralph thought how nice it would be, to be taken away in a cart tomorrow and left in a field somewhere, far away from this mud and chaos. Then he remembered the blood-stained corporal’s grin.

Hunching around, he lifted his trunk’s lid and pushed clothes and letters aside. Musty in here. Musty everywhere. But here was his old canvas bag. He unpicked the laces from rusty eyeholes. Inside lay a loose sprawl of notebooks and reckoning engine punchcards, the elastic which had once bound them into neat blocks snapped into brittle worms.
Ma-ri-on. Ma-ri-on.
Wild, waving figures still fluttered inside his skull. Why on earth had anyone ever mistaken that bizarre creature in the engine pit for Marion Price? And had she really said
lnvercombe
? But faintly, beyond all the echoing odours of military life, there rose a lingering smell of salt. Sand still glittered in the seams of an old notebook’s bindings between the words and sketches within which he’d once tried to capture and explain the world. His fingers trapped and rolled a few precious grains. Sealight washed over him. He thought of lost days. Lost love. A lost child. Despite everything, he smiled.

W
HAT
WAS
THE SONG?
How did it go? Klade loved the mingled voices, the tramp-drag of feet and the thunder-rumble of wheels before the silence which came over everything was broken by the voices of the big guns, but some fragment of the song always seemed to escape him. Soldiers’ voices joined afterwards in unison around the campfires when the ash drifted and trembled, with the battle lost or won, and their voices grew and were joined on the wind by the moans of the raveners in their cages and the wounded in their long tents and by followers like Klade himself. They were happy and sad. They were brave and they were afraid.

Klade knew that verse perfectly, and it always filled him with a delicious sadness which made him forget about his own lost aches and hungers. But the other verses always escaped him. He knew that they grew sadder still, and he felt and shared that sadness, but he still didn’t understand quite why it was the saddest thing of all that the Bonny Boy was young and that he was growing, when surely that was a happy thing. But the song was about war—this war; wars in general—and Klade knew that such songs were often sad of their nature, when they weren’t about Marion Price, or angry or bawdy or just plain mad.

The First Western Army was a huge beast. It sprawled along miles of hedge and roadside in the quiet dark of pre-dawn near a place in Worcestershire called Droitwich. It breathed and clanged and stank. Klade entertained no illusions about the significance to the First Western Army of followers such as himself; they were the ticks on the beast’s back, and would be squashed with the same grim relish with which he dealt with the creatures in his own clothes and hair. And the beast was especially agitated at this point in the weary cycle of moving and waiting as it ploughed across the English countryside. Clambering towards it, slow and fast, invisible as smoke yet huge as a city, was another, Eastern, army. It seemed ordained that the two great beasts were to meet here, amid these patches of stone and field and the bright, precious tracks of the rails which linked Portsmouth with Preston, although Klade couldn’t imagine that that was a particular journey many trains took these days.

Klade stirred, feeling dew on his face. It was still dark, but he could just make out the shufflings of the other followers who had clustered around this spot. A gun somewhere went
bang,
but it was an overture to nothing, and Klade was still filled with weariness. A battle was coming, and he would have loved to sleep. He would have loved, as well, to remember how the Bonny Boy really grew… He remembered the shudder which, years ago now, had passed down the pylons over the hot cornfields as he stood by the fence at Einfell on the day he had lost Fay to the Shadow Ones. He remembered the pictures he’d seen soon afterwards in newspapers of that London building toppling aflame. He remembered, too, how the very texture of the paper had cheapened in what was called
the current emergency
, as, like the creased pages of his disintegrating maps, the landscape of England began separating. But he knew he was a Westerner, because that was where Einfell lay, and Silus had warned him that it would be unwise to say anything else.

First hint of grey was seeping now into the sky. What came with it was the memory of the hazy spring day at Einfell when the trucks had come. Klade, now that supplies had grown scarce and hunger gnawed at his head and belly, had leapt along the rutted road, expecting some bounteous delivery of
Cherry Cheer
or
Blackcurrant Dream,
and he’d been disappointed to see that the men who stepped out of them were carrying guns, and dressed as soldiers, although they looked, as far as Klade could then judge the ways and feelings of Outsiders, as edgy and afraid as the tradesmen like Abner Brown who no longer came.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, approaching them, I’m not really what you …’

But already they were turning to Silus, their guns raised, and the soldier whose uniform was stuck with the most bits of brightness was shouting in a loud voice. The song grew agitated, and the woods rang with the lost voices of the Shadow Ones, and the Ironmasters howled at their forge, and the birds cluttered up in a dense cloud from Mr Crow. Even Silus, Klade could feel and tell, was filled with a dense, buzzy agitation.

‘That’s quite impossible!’ The words coming loose and slow around his bright grey lips. ‘I can’t allow …’

But the soldier shook his head, for it seemed that all the Chosen were to step into the warm and metal-smelling back of one of the vans.

‘What about that one?’ another soldier asked, sniffing the barrel of his gun towards Klade. ‘What the hell’s he supposed to be?’

Silus came to stand by Klade. ‘He’s nothing. He just happens to be here. He can be left alone …’

‘See your wrist, son.’

Hesitating, Klade felt himself grabbed.

‘Nah. He’s coming as well.’

‘But—’

But it seemed there were to be buts today. Nudged towards the van by the point of a gun, Klade saw that its greens and browns had been crudely painted over a sign. Perhaps it had once been Abner’s, and that made him feel almost happy. Then Ida was pulled, dragged, almost carried, from the Big House. And Mr Crow lost some of this feathers. Apart from their hands, the Ironmasters had to leave behind their tools. Blossom came last, gently shedding petals and weeping.

‘That them all?’

Soon it was, apart from the Shadow Ones, and they were in a wild fury. Some of the soldiers were sent towards the woods, although the song was so piercing he was sure that even the soldiers standing in the yard heard it as well. The others came back with their guns lowered, shaking their heads.

‘No use to anyone, sir—barely nothing but rags of ghosts. Give you the bloody creeps even worse than this lot…’

The rest of the Chosen were stuffed into the van and two soldiers, after some dispute, squatted with them, tenderly nursing the metal aches of their guns. Klade sat close. He breathed their fear-smell, and wanted to ask them about the war. He’d followed it himself as closely as he could through the odd newspaper he’d discovered clinging around Einfell’s firethorn fences. He’d rejoiced in the victories at Bicester and Swindon, and then again when the forces of Yorkshire met with them at Grantham. Even Klade, with his admittedly limited military knowledge, could see on what remained of his precious maps that the East stood no chance now that London and Preston were split apart. Western cannons were nearly within reach of the so-called capital. It would all be done and dusted by Christmas, and Klade had been looking forward to normality and Sweetness’ return. But that had been the Christmas before the one before last.

‘Westerner, are you?’ the soldier in the van had asked, looking Klade up and down.

Klade said yes enthusiastically, but the solider spat between his legs. The van, crammed with sickness and song, took them to a puddled yard where they were unloaded and told to stop all the damn howling and gibbering and just form a line. There came an odd jingling, and Klade thought for a moment that the soldiers had brought with them the contents of the old displays in the Meeting Place, but these chains were new and bright, and there was some difficulty as Outsiders in brown coats tried to fit them around the limbs of the Chosen, many of whom were too oddly shaped.

Unlike the ones he’d once played with in the Meeting House, these shackles now fitted Klade easily enough, although Silus, who was bleeding from a mis-hit steel rivet, was slurring again about how he should be let free. Still shouting and spitting and bleeding, he was taken away. Soon, only Klade and Ida were left in the yard. Although she was beautiful to him, Klade knew that there was something about the fissured arrangements of her face and the way she talked without using her mouth which made Outsiders more afraid of her than they were of most of the Chosen. And they’d dragged her here without her usual hooded cloak.

He’s with me,
was all she said as she offered the black boughs of her wrists to be shackled, and although there were many other moments when they might have been separated, Klade and Ida’s togetherness came to be accepted over the shifterms which followed as they were moved from place to place in the backs of cars and carriages and trains and wagons and vans.

We should have known this would happen—these chains … She’d raise her thinning, trembling hands, although in fact the chains had long come off. This is the way our kind have always been treated. They’ll be branding us next with a cross and a C… Klade had seen such implements in the old displays, and knew what she meant, but that never happened either, and he told Ida through the long journeys and the cramped nights and the endless hours in factories that things weren’t so very bad, and would probably soon get better, just as soon as Christmas came and the West won the war and they got back to Einfell.

With dismay, he followed news of the Battle of Royston, which even the
Bristol Morning Post
termed A Significant Setback, and then the Second Siege of Oxford, and the long forwards and backwards skirmishing of that crucial front between Leeds and York. Maps were precious now—something which, if any of his minders had happened to see him with such a thing, would have been instantly snatched away from him for the
nosy little changeling freak
that he was. But Klade still retained an image of the way this country looked. He knew that the Western forces which had met with those of Yorkshire at Grantham were now separate, and that London was much too far away to be reached by their avenging guns.

The war, their journeys, settled into an uneasy rhythm. Never quite stopping, never quite starting. Never quite total defeat, nor entire victory. Always busy, always waiting. The jibes. The cold slops. The absence of Sweetness, which he knew from bruising experience his minders grew angry at the mere mention of. They often had to half-carry Ida, in her weary soundless sighs and the grind of her bones and the bleeding of her breaking flesh, through the doors of whatever office or factory she was being taken to. More and more, since she moaned and resisted him the least, this became Klade’s job.
Upsadaisy … There we go…
Then concrete floors. Offered cups of water in old tins. This was the Western War Effort, for Ida and Klade.