The Naked God — Flight

One of the stables was a burnt-out hulk, with long sootmarks lashing up over the stone above each empty window. The centre of its slate roof had collapsed inwards. Carmitha whistled silently. Louise hadn’t been lying. Several groups of field labourers were sheltering from the radiant sky in open doorways. They were munching on big sandwiches and baguettes, passing bottles round. Carmitha could feel every pair of eyes on her as Luca took her over to the remaining stable.

“You can put Olivier in here,” he said. “I think the stalls are big enough. And there’s oats in the sacks at the far end. The hose is working as well, if you want to wash him down first.” It was something of which he seemed quite proud.

Carmitha could well imagine Grant’s Kavanagh’s reaction if the hose hadn’t been working. “Thank you, I’ll do that.”

“Okay. Are you going to sleep in the caravan?”

“I think that’s for the best, don’t you?”

“Sure. When you’re ready, go into the kitchen and ask for Susannah. She’ll find something for you to do.” He started to walk away.

“Grant . . . I mean Luca.”

“Yeah.”

Carmitha held her hand out. Light sparked sharply off the diamond ring. “She gave it to me.”

Luca stared at it in shocked recognition, and took a couple of fast paces towards her. He grabbed her hand and brought it up in front of his face. “Where are they?” he demanded hotly. “Damnit, where did they go? Are they safe?”

“Louise told me about the last time she saw you,” Carmitha said coolly. She glanced pointedly at the burnt out stable.

Luca clenched his fists, his face contorted in anguish. Every thought in his head was suffused with shame. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . Oh, shit! Goddamn it. Where are they? I promise you, I swear, I am not going to hurt them. Just tell me.”

“I know. It was a crazy time. You’re ashamed and sorry, now. And you’d never harm a hair on their heads.”

“Yes.” He made an effort to regain control. “Look, we did terrible things. Brutal, inhuman things. To people, women, children. I know it was wrong. I knew the whole time I was doing it, and I still kept on doing them. But you don’t understand what was driving me. Driving all of us.” He shook an accusing finger, shouting. “You’ve never died. You’ve never been that insanely fucking desperate. Lucifer’s deal would have been the most blessed relief from that place we were imprisoned. I would have done that. I would have walked right through the gates of hell and begged to be let in if I’d just been given the chance. But we never were.” He crumpled, energy withering from his body. “Damnit. Please? I just want to know if they’re all right. Look, we’ve got some other non-possessed here, kids; and there’s more in the town. We look after them. We’re not total monsters.”

Carmitha looked round the courtyard, almost embarrassed. “Are you letting Grant know all this?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. I promise.”

“Okay. I don’t know exactly where they are. I left the pair of them at Bytham, they took the aeroambulance. I saw it fly away.”

“Aeroambulance?”

“Yes. It was Genevieve’s idea. They were trying to reach Norwich. They thought they’d be safe there.”

“Oh.” He held his horse tightly, almost as though he would fall without its support. His face brimmed with regret. “It would take me months to reach the city. That’s if there’s a ship that’ll take me. Damn!”

She put a tentative hand on his arm. “Sorry I’m not much more help. But that Louise is one tough girl. If anyone is going to avoid possession, it’ll be her.”

He stared at her incredulously, then gave a bitter laugh. “My Louise? Tough? She can’t even sugar her own grapefruit for breakfast. God, what a stupid bloody way to bring up children. Why did you do that? Why don’t you let them see the world for what it really is? Because they’re born to be ladies, our society protects them. I protect them, as every father should. I give them everything that’s right and decent in the world. Your society is shit , worthless, irrelevant; it doesn’t even qualify as a society; you’re playing out a medieval pageant, not living. Being pathetic and insignificant isn’t a way of defending yourself and everyone you love. People have to face up to what’s outside their own horizon. Nothing was outside, not until you demon freaks came and ruined the universe. We have lived here for centuries and made ourselves a good respectable home. And you scum ruined that. Ruined! You stole it from us, and now you’re trying to rebuild everything you say you hate. You’re not even bloody savages, you’re below that. No wonder hell didn’t want you.”

“Hey!” Carmitha shook him hard. “Hey, snap out of it.”

“Don’t touch me!” he screamed. His whole body was trembling violently. “Oh God.” He sank to his knees, hands pressed into his face. A wretched voice burbled out between clawed fingers. “I’m him, I’m him. There’s no difference any more. This isn’t what we wanted. Don’t you understand? This isn’t how life’s supposed to be here. This was meant to be paradise.”

“No such place.” She rubbed the top of his spine, trying to ease some of the badly knotted muscles. “You’ve just got to make the best of it. Like everybody else.”

His head bobbed weakly in what Carmitha supposed was acknowledgement. She decided this probably wasn’t the best time to tell him his dear precious Louise was pregnant.

Chapter 10

Mortonridge was bleeding away into the ocean, a prolonged and arduous death. It was as though all the pain, the torment, the misery from a conflict that could never be anything other than excruciatingly bitter had manifested itself as mud. Slimy, insidious, limitless, it rotted the resolve of both sides in the same way it ravaged their physical environment. The peninsula’s living skin of topsoil had torn along the spine of the central mountain range to slither relentlessly down-slope into the coastal shallows. All the rich black loam built up over millennia as the rainforests regenerated themselves upon the decayed trunks of timelost past generations was sluiced away within two days by the unnatural rain. Reduced to supersaturated sludge, the precious upper few metres containing abundant nitrates, bacteria, and aboriginal earthworm-analogues had become an unstoppable landslip. Hill-sized moraines of mire were pushed along valleys, bulldozed by the intolerable pressure exerted by cubic kilometres of more ooze behind.

The mud tides scoured every valley, incline, and hollow; exposing the denser substrata. A compacted mix of gravel and clay, as sterile as asteroid regolith. There were no seeds or spores or eggs hidden tenaciously in its clefts to sprout anew. And precious few nutrients to succour and support them even if there had been.

Ralph used the SD sensors to watch the thick black stain expanding out across the sea. The mouth of the Juliffe had produced a similar discoloration in Lalonde’s sea, he remembered. But that was just one small blemish. This was an ecological blight unmatched since the worst of Earth’s dystopic Twenty-first Century. Marine creatures were dying in the plague of unnatural dark waters, choking beneath the uncountable corpses of their mammalian cousins.

“She was right, you know,” he told Cathal at the end of the Liberation’s first week.

“Who?”

“Annette Ekelund. Remember when we met her at the Firebreak roadblock? She said we’d have to destroy the village in order to save it. And I stood there and told her that I’d do whatever I had to, whatever it took. Dear God.” He slumped back in the thickly cushioned chair behind his desk. If it hadn’t been for the staff in the Ops Room on the other side of the glass wall he would probably have put his head in his hands.

Cathal glanced into the sparkling light of the desktop AV pillar. The unhealthy smear around Mortonridge’s coast had grown almost as a counterbalance to the shrinking cloud. It was still raining over the peninsula, of course, but not constantly. The cloud had almost reverted to a natural weather formation, there were actual gaps