The House of Storms (40 page)

‘And him?’

A gun, once again, was cocked, and Klade gazed into the hole in the world which it made.

‘Run!’ called the Beetle Lady. His back flayed by the hot expectancy of bullets, Klade scrambled up the slope. But none came.

Then he was out.

The Bonny Boy was away.

T
HE MONTH WHICH HAD FOLLOWED
the victory at Droitwich was one of steady advance. It really seemed, at least to Ralph’s officers, and sometimes even to Ralph himself in his brighter moods as they followed the quietly unwinding roads and occupied the undefended and often near-empty towns, that the West was in abject withdrawal. But then came Hereford. Even the weather, previously mild and dry and warm, had betrayed them as it broke into torrenting rain just as they were establishing their forward positions, and with it and the crackle of thunder had come the boom and whistle of Western shells.

Vital weeks had now been wasted in ugly stalemate, and many lives and precious ordnance and stores had been lost in the muddy roads and damaged tracks which snaked from the supposedly safe Midlands towards this new front line. Ralph had argued from the start that they lacked the necessary numbers to properly support their supply lines, but London had repeatedly assured him that the counties of Worcestershire and Salop were entirely tamed until the first sabotages had begun. Not regulars in proper uniforms with clear lines of command and appropriate ranks, but shabby groups subsisting on pillage and stolen weapons, many of them women and children. Ralph had to admire the skill with which the West had responded to their summer of defeat: retreat and retreat until the lines of your advancing enemy were overstretched, then use your own starving citizenry to attack from behind. Hereford itself no longer seemed like a prize worth the fighting, but a symbol of Eastern vanity and Western cunning shaped from rubble. And still its citizens refused to submit to his offers of sanctuary and free passage.

At least the weather was finally improving, and the last of the mist which had cloaked Ralph’s morning departure from Advance HQ was replaced by innocent autumn sunlight as the repatched rails bore him in fits and starts back towards London across the innocent-seeming countryside. Choppy seas of hills, and the old stone crowns of abandoned aether mills which mimicked the sarsens that had surely stood there before. Wary trackside guards, waiting for the next explosion or wrecking spell, made yet more edgy by the latest story of poisoned apples left ripening in orchards for them to pick. Ralph had no idea whether that was true or not, but it often seemed :hat things had got to the point where such distinctions scarcely mattered. The heavily armoured train finally picked up speed after it had passed the freshly fortified castle at Warwick. Pricked by guilt to be staring aimlessly out of the window, he returned to studying the papers and maps he’d spread across the seats of the carriage.

A neatly typed report attempted to make sense of the essentially unknowable situation of Western morale. On the one hand, there could be no denying that there was a general sense of pessimism. But capitulation was another matter, and there remained a feeling that London and the Great Guilds would still concede most of the West’s territorial, legislative and trading demands if they could just hold on, and a near-religious faith
A
as being placed in their much-vaunted new weapons. Essentially, Ralph thought, these people had lost too much to admit that it had all been pointless, which meant that the thrusts by his companion armies towards encircling Bristol and cutting off Bath and Gloucester and Swindon, which he’d previously thought of as exercises in planning and logistics, would have to take place. But first, he would have to capture Hereford.

He slanted the fluttering angles of light across a typewritten final addendum, which dealt with what it termed
the alarming fondness
which many lower ratings of his own side were now displaying towards Marion Price. Of course, the report meant the myth, not the real person who, as the report went on to confirm, was rarely reported on these days in the Western press in any case. Most likely, any real deeds by a single person would have got in the way of all the stories and songs and medallions, although there was some suggestion that she was no longer in accord with the main policy-makers within the Merchant Venturers. She might even have fallen ill from one of the many diseases which were said to be rife in the over-brimming Western hospitals, or possibly have been killed or captured in one of her famous forays to the front, although no verifiable trace had been found of her despite many disproved reports.

Ralph sat back, remembering that evening after the victory in Droitwich, and the small madness which must have seized him to ever put credence on that ragged lad’s report. The train rocked on, and tiredness crept over him in a painless grey wave. The papers fell loose from his fingers. The clouds, the hills, the sheep, the fields, the whole onrush of the journey, crept by him, then suddenly, as his eyes jerked open and his senses jarred with all the things he’d planned and failed to do, the train was huffing into London’s Great Aldgate Station. He got up and snatched his falling papers just as his ADC poked his head around the door and the train gave a final jolt. Then he was climbing out into sunlight and pigeons and steam, his throat raw and his face stiff and his left arm numb with pins and needles, and there were the kids and there was Helen, and everything was much too blurred and quick.

‘You really must learn to unwind,’ Helen said to him through the bathroom door as they prepared for bed that night. ‘It’s not as if we don’t have our own difficulties and privations. But we just laugh and get on with it…’

Moving within the strange, soft weight of his dressing gown in the tiled expanse of their bathroom, Ralph opened his shaving kit and stropped up the razor with its soap-encrusted diamond stud, lathered his face, and drew the new blade across the roughness of his cheeks. Then he washed his face, and enjoyed the warm oblivion of the water, although the huge white towel he dried himself with came away streaked with pink. He sighed, and the gaunt-looking man in the mirror sighed back at him. He’d never been much good at this.

‘People are still talking about Droitwich. You should take more credit.’ Helen’s voice slowed as she neared the open crack of the bathroom door. ‘Everyone says I’m married to a military genius. But I suppose that’s all shop to you, isn’t it? Even here in London, it’s so hard to think about anything but the war…’

Her voice trailed off, although Ralph, as he stood at the mirror watching two thin rivers of blood make their way down his neck, could tell that she hadn’t moved away.

He cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’ He dabbed himself, clicked off the lights and crossed the long space of the room. The sheets felt coolly enormous as he climbed into bed. The air was hissingly quiet.

‘Darling, I can’t wait for this to end.’

‘Neither can I.’

‘And I’ve so, so missed you.’

She leaned over him on her elbow. It was never truly dark here in this city. Despite the room’s velvet curtains, the endless electric wash of London filtered in, glowing silver on her cheek and shoulder and the fine, sharp cut of her fashionably short bob of hair. He could hear the rustle of flesh against silk as she breathed. Beyond that, the sound of traffic.

‘My hero.’ Her fingers touched his jaw not far from where it had scabbed, played with a top pyjama button, moved down. ‘And the children are so, so proud, although I know they’re not always good at showing it.’

‘I know it’s difficult for them. I should spend more time …’ Ralph swallowed. Bat-wings of night flickered before him. There was this new kind of creature the West had long been rumoured to be developing. He’d doubted their true existence, but reports he’d read today on the train before sleep had ambushed him suggested they’d been encountered by a reconnoitring party near Slough. Like bats—moths—nocturnes were suicidally drawn to heat. Their acid wings filled engine vents and cooling systems to cause irreparable breakdowns. They were also drawn to human faces.

Helen’s eyes were shining a little too brightly. Moving slightly up the pillow so that he could only see the pale edges of her cheek, she slid the strap of her night-gown from her shoulder and offered her breast to him. He drew himself to her, filled with sudden need.

There was blood on his pillow in the morning—a surprising amount of the stuff considering it was only a cut from shaving, as if in evidence of some crime—although Helen, who had primped and primed her already obvious beauty, was simply amused. Perhaps, Ralph thought as he pulled on his uniform in preparation for the morning ahead, women have a different attitude towards the stuff. After all, they have to shed it every month. He paused in mid-trouser leg, struck by a regret, a memory. Women bled, but Marion never had—not in the near-three summer months in which they’d been lovers. All their talk of science, love, nature, and he’d thought himself obsessed with her body, yet he’d never known or noticed that she was pregnant. Not until he was in the heart and heat of this damnable war, when it was all too late.

Outside, traffic was muffled in fog and the city’s great structures seemed, in their dimness and size, to drift with him as he followed the ribboning pavements. He had to think hard about the route he was taking, then backtrack and dodge a ferocious tram. He was breathless and nearly late by the time he reached the base of the greyly robed triumphal arch of the Halls of the Great Guilds, and regretting he hadn’t called for the car and saved his energies.

Greeted in the chilly mosaics by staff officers even younger than those who served with him at the front, Ralph was led up ascensions of stairs. Tea ladies steamed past. From the balcony of a large auditorium, he looked down on a vast map of England. The land was green and flat as a weed-scummed pond. The cities were numbered dots. Across this placid surface, pushed by long poles wielded by beautiful acolytes, sailed the flagged armies and fleets of the East and West. Their movements were dictated by the ribbons of paper which streamed from a far wall. Beyond, through enormous doors, lay the sea-on-shingle rush of the reckoning engines where all the messages of war surged and were resolved.

The meeting room was predictably enormous, although it would have been bested in almost every aspect by the halls of the specific guilds which lay around it along Wagstaffe Mall. The guilds, for all that they had worked together here on the difficult business of running the nation for several Ages, were always more willing to outshine each other than they were to co-operate. Ralph, as he raked back his chair and sat down at the furthest end of the table and golden doors which would have admitted a medium-sized ocean liner boomed shut behind him, thought he detected a shoddiness to the stonework of the pillars, a murkiness amid the great paintings. None of them were quite of the best. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. Perhaps, he thought, clearing a sandy dryness in his throat, I’m getting the hang of being back in London, to notice such things.

The men, their faces and decorations hovering reflected in the table, received his words with nods and blinks and a faint shifting of fingers. What Ralph wanted was to push on. The weather had admittedly been poor recently, but mobility shouldn’t be a problem for divisions experienced in fighting through the often pretty awful weather of your typical English summer. The transport infrastructure was in place since the taking of the railhead at Droitwich, when it had briefly seemed that they might have captured Marion Price. They were
ready.
They were
fresh.
They were
chomping at the bit.
Although he also knew that these phrases were intrinsically laughable, Ralph used them not because he believed, but because he knew they were the sort of thing that High Command liked to hear. Then he paused, his head ringing. Had he really mentioned Marion Price? Foolish if he had. He fought his way to the end of his presentation, and then through the few questions which the greatgrandmasters of High Command seemed to think were worth asking. He collected himself, his plans, his papers. He left the hall, and was surprised, when he finally emerged outside, to find that the fog had cleared and that he was standing in warm sunlight.

He, Helen and the children went to Great Westminster Park that afternoon. The blue sky, monumental against the city’s stonework, darkened through amber leaves in the giddy wing-Seats of Hallam Tower as they walked the elegant streets of Hyde. This, Ralph told himself, was exactly what he was fighting for. His men as well—or for the privilege of living in the Easterlies, from where they could rise before dawn to deliver at the tradesmen’s doors to the rear.

Tall railings surrounded the green mountain of the park. There had been several explosions and atrocities in the difficult years before the war, and visitors were being searched before entering by a couple of squaddies from the Essex Regiment. Ralph expected a salute as they clacked through the turnstiles, then remembered he’d changed into civvies. The steep paths wound upwards through incredible frondage, and Flora and Augustus scampered ahead. Despite the crowds, the gardens were so big that he and Helen soon found themselves walking alone. There were views across the Embankment and towards the grey toil of World’s End as tugs came and went on the wide, oily river and chimneys flew their long flags. Ralph couldn’t help thinking about the arcs of throw these positions would give to artillery. Capture Great Westminster Park in a surprise assault from the Thames. These endless turns and grottoes would be ideal for the killing sweep of machine-gun fire.

Helen still looked, Ralph decided, stealing glances as they pretended to inspect some particularly extraordinary flower, almost entirely like the tall, coolly beautiful blonde to whom he had once been so impossibly drawn. The fact that it had suited both their guilds—and that they made, as everyone agreed, such a handsome couple—had seemed like mere bonuses. Back then, she’d even been prepared to share his passion for the natural world, although now she only smiled with barely concealed boredom when he pointed out the peculiarity or wondrousness of a particular plant.