The Naked God - Faith

amicable enough. He wasn’t expecting trouble; traders had visited Cricklade before, but never in a convoy this size. A group of ten estate workers were on close call, just in case.

The traders’ leader climbed down out of the lead lorry and introduced himself as Lionel. He was a short man with flowing blond hair tied back with a leather lace, wearing worn blue denim jeans and a round-neck sweater: working clothes which were almost an extension of his forthright attitude. After a couple of minutes’ conversation, sizing each other up, Luca invited him indoors.

Lionel settled appreciatively into the study’s leather armchair, sipping at the Norfolk Tears Luca offered him. If he was concerned about the restrained, moody atmosphere grumbling around the manor, it never showed. “Our main commodity this trip is fish,” he said. “Mostly smoked, but we have some on ice as well. Apart from that, we’re carrying vegetable and fruit seeds, fertilised chicken eggs, some fancy perfumes, a few power tools. We’re trying to build a reputation for reliability, so if there’s something you want which we haven’t got, we’ll try to get hold of it for our next visit.”

“What are you looking for?” Luca asked as he sat down behind the broad desk.

“Flour, meat, some new tractor bearings, a power socket to recharge the lorries.” He raised his glass. “A decent drink.” They grinned, and touched their glasses. Lionel’s gaze lingered on Luca’s hand for a moment. The contrast between their skin was subtle, but noticeable. Luca’s was darker, thicker, a true guide to Grant’s age; Lionel maintained an altogether more youthful sheen.

“What sort of exchange rate were you thinking of for the fish?” Luca asked.

“For flour, five to one, direct weight.”

“Don’t bugger about wasting my time.”

“I’m not. Fish is meat, valuable protein. There’s also carriage; Cricklade’s a long way inland.”

“That’s why we have sheep and cattle; we’re exporting meat. But I can pay your carriage costs in electricity, we have our own heat shaft.”

“Our power cells are seventy per cent charged.”

The haggling went on for a good forty minutes. When Susannah came in she found them on their third round of Norfolk Tears. She sat on the side of Luca’s chair, his arm around her waist. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“I hope you like fish,” Luca told her. “We’ve just bought three tons of it.”

“Oh bloody hell.” She plucked the glass of Tears from his hand, and sipped thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s room in the freezer room. I’ll have to have a word with Cook.”

“Lionel has some interesting news, as well.”

“Oh?” She gave the trader a pleasant, enquiring look.

Lionel smiled, covering a mild curiosity. Like Luca, Susannah was letting her host body’s age show. The first middle-aged people he’d seen since Norfolk came to this realm. “We got our fish from a ship in Holbeach, the Cranborne. They were docked there a week ago, trading their cargo for an engine repair. Should still be there.”

“Yes?” she asked.

“The Cranborne is a merchant multitramp,” Luca said. “She just sails between islands picking up cargo and passengers, whatever pays; she can fish, dredge, harvest mintweed, icebreak, you name it.”

“Her current crew have rigged her with nets,” Lionel said. “There’s not much charter work going at the moment, so trawling has become their livelihood. They’re also talking about trading between islands. Once things have settled down, they’ll have a better idea of who produces what and the kind of goods they can carry to exchange.”

“I’m happy for them,” Susannah said. “Why tell me?”

“It’s a way of getting to Norwich,” Luca said. “A start, anyway.”

Susannah looked hard into his face, now falling back into Grant’s familiar features. The relapse had been accelerating ever since he returned from his trip to Knossington with the news that the aeroambulance didn’t work, its electronics simply couldn’t operate in this realm. “A voyage that far would be expensive,” she said quietly.

“Cricklade could afford it.”

“Yes,” she said carefully. “It could. But it’s not ours any more. If we take that much food or Tears or horses the others will claim we stole it. We wouldn’t be able to come back, not to Kesteven.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. They’re our children, and this is our home.”

“One means nothing without the other.”

“I don’t know,” she said, deeply troubled. “What’s to make the Cranborne crew stick to the agreement once we cast off?”

“What’s to stop us stealing their whole ship?” Luca replied wearily. “We have a civilization again, darling. It’s not the best, I know that. But it’s here, and it works. At least we can see treachery and dishonesty coming a long way off.”

“All right. So do you want to go? It’s not as if we haven’t got enough troubles,” she said guiltily, flicking a glance at the diplomatically quiet Lionel.

“I don’t know. I want to fight this; going means Grant has won.”

“It’s not a battle, it’s a matter of the heart.”

“Whose heart?” he whispered painfully.

“Excuse me,” Lionel said. “Have you considered that the people possessing your daughters might not be exactly welcoming? What were you planning on doing anyway? It’s not as if you can exorcise them and go walking off into a sunset. They’ll be as alien to you as you are to them.”

“They’re not alien to me,” Luca said. He sprang up from the chair, his whole body twitchy. “Damn it, I cannot stop worrying about them.”

“We’re all succumbing to our hosts,” Lionel said. “The easiest course is to acknowledge that, at least you’ll have some peace then. Are you prepared to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Luca ground out. “I just don’t.”

Carmitha ran her fingers along the woman’s arm, probing the structure of bone and muscle and tendon. Her eyes were closed as she performed the examination, her mind concentrated on the swirl of foggy radiance that was the flesh. It wasn’t just tactile feeling she relied on, cells formed distinct bands of shade, as if she was viewing a very out-of-focus medical text of the human body. Fingertips moved on half an inch, she pushed each one in carefully, as if she were stroking piano keys. Searching an entire body this way took over an hour, and even then it was hardly a hundred per cent effective. Only the surface was inspected. There were a great many cancers which could affect the organs, glands, and marrow; subtle monsters that would go unnoticed until it was far, far too late.

Something moved sideways under her forefinger. She played with it, testing its motion. A hard node, as if a small stone was embedded below the skin. Her mind’s vision perceived it as a white blur, sprouting a fringe of wispy tendrils that swam out into the surrounding tissue. “Another one,” she said.

The woman’s gasp was almost a sob. Carmitha had learned the hard way not to hide anything from her patients. Invariably, they knew of the spike of alarm in her own thoughts.

“I’m going to die,” the woman whimpered. “All of us are dying, rotting away. It’s our punishment for escaping the beyond.”

“Nonsense, these bodies are geneered, which makes them highly resistant to cancer. Once you stop aggravating it with energistic power it should sink into remission.” Her stock verbal placebo, repeated so many times in the days since Butterworth’s collapse that she’d begun to believe it herself.

Carmitha continued the examination, moving past the elbow. It was just a formality now. The woman’s thighs had been the worst; lumps like a cluster of walnuts where she’d driven away flab to give herself an adolescent glamour-queen’s rump. Fear had broken the instinct and desire for sublime youthful splendour. The unnatural punishment of her cells would end. Maybe the tumours really would go into remission.

Luca came knocking on the side of the caravan just as Carmitha was finishing. She told him to stay outside, and waited until the woman had put her clothes back on.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, and hugged her. “You just have to be you now, and be strong.”