Darwinia (24 page)

A gentle sun blessed the day. Guilford had rigged a rope harness to keep himself sprawled on Evangeline’s broad back even when he lost consciousness, and there were times when he drifted into a nodding half sleep, head slumped against his chest. But the sunlight meant he could shed a layer of furs, and that was a relief, to feel air that was not lethally cold against his skin.

As snakes went, Evangeline had proved intelligent. She avoided insect middens even when Guilford’s attention lapsed. She never strayed far from fresh water. And she was respectful of Guilford — perhaps not surprising, given that he had killed and cooked one of her compatriots and set the other free.

He was careful to keep an eye on the horizon. He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.

He credited Evangeline with finding the arch of stone where the expedition’s boats had been cached. She had nosed her way patiently along the pebbled shore, hour by hour, until at last she stopped and moaned for his attention.

Guilford recognized the stones, the shoreline, the hilly meadows just beginning to show green.

It was the right place. But the tarpaulin was gone, and so were the boats.

Dazed, Guilford let himself down from the fur snake’s back and searched the beach for — well, anything: relics, evidence. He found a charred board, a rusted nail. Nothing else.

The breeze slapped small waves against the shore.

The sun was low. He would need wood for a fire, if he could muster the energy to build one.

He sighed. “End of the road, Evangeline. At least for now.”

“It will be, if you don’t get a decent meal into yourself.”

He turned.

Erasmus.

“Tom figured you’d show up here,” the snake herder said.

Erasmus fed him real food, lent him a bedroll, and promised to take him and Evangeline back to his makeshift ranch beyond the Rheinfelden, just a few days overland; then Guilford could hitch a ride downriver when Erasmus floated his winter stock to market.

“You talked to Tom Compton? He’s alive?”

“He stopped by the kraal on his way to Jayville. Told me to look out for you. He ran into bandits after he left you and Finch. Too many to fight. So he came north and left decoy fires and generally took ’em on a goose chase all the way to the Bodensee. Saved your bacon, Mr. Law, though I guess not Preston Finch.”

“No, not Finch,” Guilford said.

They paralleled the Rhine Gorge, following the land route Erasmus had established. The snake herder called a halt at a pool of water fed by an unnamed tributary, shallow and slow. Sunlight had heated the water to a tolerable temperature, though it was not what Guilford would call warm. Still, he was able to wash himself for the first time in weeks. The water might have been lye, for all the skin and dirt he shed. He came out shivering, naked as a grub. The season’s first billyflies bumped his torso and fled across the sunlit water. His hair dangled over his eyes; his beard draped his chest like a wet Army blanket.

Erasmus put up the tent and scratched out a pit for the fire while Guilford dried and dressed.

They shared canned beans, molasses-sweet and smoky. Erasmus cooked coffee in a tin pan. The coffee was thick as syrup, bitter as clay.

The snake herder had something on his mind.

“Tom told me about the city,” Erasmus said, “about what happened to you there.”

“You know him that well?”

“We know each other, put it that way. The connection is, we both been to the Other World.”

Guilford shot him a wary glance. Erasmus gave him back a neutral expression.

“Hell,” the snake herder said, “I would of sold Tom those twenty head if he’d asked. Yeah, we go back some. But Finch showed up all blood and thunder, pissed me off… not to speak ill of the dead.”

Erasmus found a pipe in his saddlebag, filled it and tamped it and lit it with a wooden match. He smoked tobacco, not river weed. The smell was exotic, rich with memory. It smelled like leather-bound books and deep upholstery. It smelled like civilization.

“Both of us died in the Great War,” Erasmus said. “In the Other World, I mean. Both of us talked to our own ghosts.”

Guilford shivered. He didn’t want to hear this. Anything but this: not more madness, not now.

“Basically,” Erasmus said, “I’m just a small-potatoes third-generation Heinie out of Wisconsin. My father worked in a bottling company most of his life and I would of done the same if I hadn’t shied off to Jeffersonville. But there’s this Other World where the Kaiser got into a tangle with the Brits and the French and the Russians. A lot of Americans got drafted and shipped off to fight, 1917, 1918, a lot of ’em killed, too.” He hawked and spat a brown wad into the fire. “In that Other World I’m a ghost, and in this one I’m still flesh and blood. You with me so far?”

Guilford was silent.

“But the two worlds aren’t strictly separate anymore. That’s what the Conversion of Europe was all about, not to mention that so-called city you wintered in. The two Worlds are tangled up because there’s something wants to destroy ’em both. Maybe not destroy, more like
eat
— well, it’s complicated.

“Some of us died in the Other World and went on living in this one, and that makes us special. We have a job ahead of us, Guilford Law, and it’s not an easy job. I don’t mean to sound as if I know all the details. I don’t. But it’s a long and nasty job and it falls on us.”

Guilford said nothing, thought nothing.

“The two worlds get a little closer all the time. Tom didn’t know that when he walked into the city — though he may have had an inkling — but he knew it for sure by the time he left. He knows it now. And I think you do, too.”

“People believe a lot of things,” Guilford said.

“And people refuse to believe a lot of things.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. You’re one of us, Guilford Law. You don’t want to admit it. You have a wife and daughter and you’d just as soon not be recruited into Armageddon, and I can hardly blame you for that. But it’s for their sake, too — your children, your grandchildren.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Guilford managed.

“That’s too bad, because the ghosts believe in you. And some of those ghosts would like to see you dead. Good ghosts and bad ghosts, there’s both kinds.”

I won’t entertain this fantasy
, Guilford thought. Maybe he’d seen a few things in his dreams. In the well at the center of the ruined city. But that proved nothing.

(How could Erasmus have known about the picket? Sullivan’s cryptic last words:
You died fighting the Boche…
No, set that aside; think about it later. Yield nothing. Go home to Caroline.)

“The city,” he heard himself whisper…

“The city is one of
theirs
. They didn’t want it found. And they’re going to great lengths to keep it hidden. Go there in six months, a year, you won’t find it. They’re stitching up that valley like a sack of flour. They can do that. Pinch off a piece of the world from human knowledge. Oh, maybe you or I could find it, but not an ordinary man.”

“I’m an ordinary man, Erasmus.”

“Wishing won’t make it so, my mother used to say. Anyhow.” The snake herder groaned and stood. “Get some sleep, Guilford Law. We still have a distance to travel.”

Erasmus didn’t raise the issue again, and Guilford refused to consider it. He had other problems, more pressing.

His physical health improved at the snake farm. By the time the stock boats arrived from Jeffersonville he was able to walk a distance without limping. He thanked Erasmus for his help and offered to ship him
Argosy
on a regular basis.

“Good idea. That book of Finch’s was a slow read. Maybe
National Geographic
, too?”

“Sure thing.”

“
Science and Invention
?”

“Erasmus, you saved my life at the Bodensee. Anything you want.”

“Well — I won’t get greedy. And I doubt I saved your life. Whether you live or die is out of my hands.”

Erasmus had loaded his stock into two flat-bottomed river boats piloted by a Jeffersonville broker. It was Guilford’s ride back to the coast. He offered the snake herder his hand.

Guilford said, “About Evangeline—”

“Don’t worry about Evangeline. She can go wild if she likes. Once people name an animal it’s too late for common sense to prevail.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll meet again,” Erasmus said. “Think about what I said, Guilford.”

“I will.”

But not now.

The riverboat captain told him there had been trouble with England. A battle at sea, he said, and strictly limited news over the wireless, “though I hear we’re walkin’ all over ’em.”

The snakeboats made good time as the Rhine broadened into the lowlands. The days were warmer now, the Rhinish marshes emerald-green under a bright spring sky.

He took Erasmus’ advice and arrived in Jeffersonville anonymously. The town had grown since Guilford last saw it, more fishermen’s shacks and three new permanent structures on the firm ground by the docks. More boats were anchored in the bay, but nothing military; the Navy had a base fifty miles south. Nothing commercial was sailing for London — nothing legal, anyway.

He looked for Tom Compton, but the frontiersman’s cabin was vacant.

At the Jeffersonville Western Union office he arranged for a bank transfer from his personal account in Boston, hoping Caroline hadn’t closed it out on the assumption he had died. The money arrived without a problem, but he couldn’t get a message through to London. “From what I hear,” the telegraph operator told him, “there’s nobody there to receive it.”

He heard about the shelling from a drunken American sailor at the waterfront dive where he was supposed to meet the man who would take him across the Channel.

Guilford wore a blue pea coat and a woollen watch cap pulled low across his brow. The tavern was crowded and dank with pipe smoke. He took a stool at the end of the bar but couldn’t help overhearing the talk that flowed around him. He paid no particular attention until a fat sailor at the next table said something about London. He heard “fire” and “fucking wasteland.”

He walked to the table where the seaman sat with another man, a lanky Negro. “Excuse me,” Guilford said. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but you mentioned London? I’m anxious for news — my wife and daughter are there.”

“I’ve left a few bastards there myself,” the sailor said. His smile faded when he saw Guilford’s expression. “No offense… I only know what I heard.”

“You were there?”

“Not since the shooting started. I met a stoker claims he was up the Thames with a gunboat. But he talks when he drinks, and what he says ain’t all the Christian truth.”

“This man is in Jeffersonville?”

“Shipped out yesterday.”

“What did he tell you about London?”

“That it was shelled. That it burned to the ground. But talk is cheap. You know how people are. Christ, look at you, shaking like that. Have a fuckin’ drink on me.”

“Thanks,” Guilford said. “I’m not thirsty.”

He hired a channel pilot named Hans Kohn, who operated a scabbed but seaworthy fishing trawler and was willing to take Guilford as far as Dover, for a price.

The ship left Jeffersonville after dark, on a gentle swell under a moonless sky. Twice Kohn changed course to avoid Navy patrols, faint silhouettes on the violet horizon. There was no question of navigating the Thames, Kohn told him. “That’s locked up tight. There’s an overland route from Dover, a dirt-track road. Best I can do.”

Guilford went ashore at a crude wooden landing along the Kentish coast. Kohn put back to sea. Guilford sat on the creaking dock for a time, listening to the cry of shore birds as the eastern sky turned a milky vermilion. The air smelled of salt and decay.

English soil at last. The end of a journey, or at least the beginning of the end. He felt the weight of the miles behind him, as deep as this ocean he had crossed. He thought about his wife and little girl.

The overland route from Dover to London consisted of a trail hacked out of the English wilderness, muddy and in places barely wide enough to accommodate a single horse and rider.

Dover was a small but thriving port town cut into the chalky coastal soil, surrounded by windswept hills and endless blue-green miles of star sorrel and a leaf-crowned reed the locals called shag. The town had not been much affected by the war; food was still relatively plentiful, and Guilford was able to buy a saddle-trained mare, not too elderly, that would carry him overland to London. He wasn’t a natural rider but found the horse an immensely more comfortable mount than Evangeline had been.

For a time he was alone on the London road, but as he crossed the highland meadows he began to encounter refugees.

At first it was only a few ragged travelers, some mounted, some hauling mud-crusted carts stacked with blankets and china and tattered wooden tea chests. He spoke to these people briefly. None had encouraging news, and most of them shied at the sound of his accent. Shortly after dusk he came across a crowd of forty families camped on a hillside, their fires glittering like the lights of a mobile city.

His paramount thought was of Caroline and Lily. He questioned the refugees politely but could discover no one who had known or seen them. Discouraged and lonely, Guilford reigned his horse and accepted an invitation to join a circle around one of the campfires. He shared his food freely, explained his situation, and asked what exactly had happened to London.

Answers were short and brutal.