‘Next you’ll be trying to tell me that you rode with bloody Wellington himself.’
Bill smiled at that. ‘A bit before my time,’ he admitted, and was quickly sober again. ‘The favour of Moccus is not some deferred celestial reward if you say enough Hail Marys and eat fish on Fridays every week until you die. It is writ in the flesh and blood and muscle and bone of his worshippers, gifted from that of himself. He makes his followers strong.’ He was still stirring his food, not eating, and the deserter caught the unspoken word hiding in his tone.
‘But?’
‘Strength doesn’t count for much when a man is all scar.’ Bill grunted a dry little laugh and put his meal to one side.
‘Ah yes, the sword of righteousness and the shield of faith. Forgive me if those don’t sound much help against a trench mortar and Jerry coming at you with a bayonet. No offence, Hans,’ he added. The German lad picking lice out of his beard with the use of a candle and a mirror waved the insult away. ‘Are there songs? Does your Moccus offer virgins in heaven?’
There was more laughter at this. Only Potch, the cook, who had known Bill longer than any of them, didn’t join in. ‘Don’t provoke him,’ he warned the deserter.
Bill drew out his knife.
Everett jumped to his feet and stepped back. ‘Now hold on there a moment, chum…’
‘I told you,’ Potch murmured, watching with interest. Activity in the cellar had stopped; white eyes in the gloom turned their way, wary. It wouldn’t be the first fight – or death – this room had witnessed.
But it seemed that fighting to defend his faith was not what Bill had in mind. ‘There’s this,’ he said, pulling up his sleeve, and then drawing the blade across the underside of his forearm. The cut was shallow but bled in a quick, red flood. He winced a little, put the knife down, gripped the cut with his other hand and then wiped the blood away. Where it should have bled afresh, there was the shining pink line of a new scar.
Everett gaped while the other men, evidently familiar with such small miracles and uninterested in the conversation now that it seemed unlikely to become violent, went back to their business. He felt his lungs go into spasm and sat back down heavily as coughing wracked him. ‘Well,’ he wheezed, wiping blood from his lips with the back of one hand. ‘You’ve convinced me. I could do with a bit of whatever you’re selling. Consider me a convert. Where do I sign up?’
‘It’s not as simple as that. If this ever ends,’ Bill said, with an upward nod that meant not just the outside but the whole war, ‘and you’re alive to see what comes next, find a village called Swinley, on the Welsh Marches in Shropshire. That’s where you’ll find us: the Farrow. It’s where our god walks – you can make your case directly to him.’
3
SWINLEY
THE DESERTER WASN’T CONVINCED THAT THE WAR would end. With his past lost behind that wall of thunder, and along with it any clear recollection of a time of peace, it seemed entirely possible that no such state had existed, that slaughter and mud and mangled flesh had been the condition of mankind forever and would continue forever, war without end, amen. He wasn’t persuaded by the way other men claimed to recall such a time and told stories about it. The members of the Grey Brigade rarely offered insights about their pasts, presumably fearing betrayal to the authorities and a firing squad, and it was easy to dismiss those that did talk about their lives before as madmen. There were plenty of men in the trenches who were shell-shocked and suffering from all manner of absurd fantasies – what more absurd than a world of green grass, trees, and birdsong? Then the Loos offensive was launched, and in the botched attempts to cut the German wire an artillery barrage brought down the cellar roof, killing half of the Brigade along with Bill, and his particular absurdity died with him. Apparently his unnatural healing couldn’t do much in the face of several tons of stone and earth. The Allied offensive rolled over their position in a wave of steel and thunder, and while the surviving Wild Deserters tried to flee before it Everett let himself literally sink beneath it as it passed, reasoning that the world would have its way with him and there was little he could do about it.
When British arms pulled him out of the mud they found a man dressed in the rags of a British uniform but who, despite speaking English with an accent which sounded vaguely Midlands, claimed to have no memory of where he was from or what had happened to him. This in itself was not unusual, but the lack of any insignia, tags, or documents to give a clue as to his identity caused more suspicious voices to suggest that he was simply shamming and really a deserter. Nonsense, it was countered, who in their right mind would desert forward, into No Man’s Land? And so he was declared to be suffering from shell-shock and sent to an army hospital at Langres, where the surgeons confirmed that diagnosis and added tuberculosis to the list, and he was invalided out to an asylum for enlisted men called Scholes Farm on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Here, for the first time, he felt truly afraid.
He saw strong men reduced to stammering and twitching puppets, jerked by invisible strings that tied them inescapably to the horrors that they had experienced – weeping, vomiting, pissing themselves like infants. Still, for them there was some hope, however thin, that their minds might be healed. Worse were the ones who retained their clarity of mind within mutilated bodies –
