He swam towards it.
Chapter 14
The flames of the bonfire reeled in the wind with trees waving their orange branches beyond it like the feelers of giant insects. Nude human silhouettes leaped across the glare, whooping and yelping. Lawrence huddled amongst the reeds, groaning with the pain of cold, his eyes on the life-saving heat of the fire while his instincts chilled at the thought of the death he would suffer if those jumping savages should see him. He checked his tag was tucked inside his hat to prevent it gleaming. The faint warmth from the fire taunted him.
One savage—tall, with a fine vee-chest and chiselled shoulders—hurled an object into the fire. There came a strange sound, a thin wail. In his life Lawrence had seen terrible things, he was not easily shocked. On his mind’s eye lingered a bundle, with outsized head and stubby limbs. A baby. The same savage did it again. This time the wretch got a cat-like screech out to the black void before it too vanished into flames. A spasm in the wind dragged the fire flat, stretching it so that its light reached further upstream. Lawrence sensed something up that way, a tower or warehouse, something the marsh people could not have built. Then the wind shifted and he lost it.
But the festival continued. The savages formed a ring about the fire and began clapping and chanting, a repetitive, sub-human bawling. It was a noise like a barking dog, or a machine that stamped metal parts. It beat and beat on the mind, pummelling, confusing, disorientating. Lawrence waited, baffled, repelled, unable to move. One silhouette sprinted forward and jumped into the fire, landing in the gleaming logs. It was a young girl, struggling as the logs shifted and cascades of sparks belched up. She rammed her legs through to firm embers at the bottom of the fire and stood upright, entirely within the flames, with her arms above her head. Even from his viewpoint, Lawrence could see her pubic hair blaze off, the pale skin blacken, blisters erupt and burst. The flames billowed around her, hugged her, entwined her. She staggered. Like clothing, the skin of her legs slid off and hissed about her thighs. The rigid arms faltered, drooped, she collapsed, a swarm of sparks leaped into the night like a fleeing soul. In her ordeal, she had uttered not a sound. A space-trip on mushrooms? Religious enthrallment? With these bloody savages, it could even be stone cold sobriety…
Lawrence shrivelled down, worming his way lower into the mat of mud and crushed reeds. He reverse-crawled back down into water so cold it winded him, and began pulling himself along the reeds with the current. To remain near the bank was dangerous. Fifteen strokes out into mid-stream, he rolled on his back to look over his feet, startled to see savages mingling in the waving reeds. A crowd of the bastards had infested the shore line, jabbering some crap. They certainly could not see him, so what was the game? He started counting, knowing he had to be out of the water by five hundred, or he stayed in the water forever.
At around 220, he collided with something rising up vertically from the depths, probably the post of a pier. Ten more counts and his club-like numb hands hit the bank. It was slimy but firm mud. By a kind of writhing he got clear of the water. The overcast rendered the darkness total, only a faint orange glimmer from the savages’ fire hinted at some kind of net stretched across the channel above him.
A red spark twirled down from above and landed in the water with a rasp. Cigarette end. Civilisation. What kind of civilisation? Was this the outside world? Or an outpost of the Value System? Damn this bloody mud, it was so bloody cold. He opened his eyes and found the world under a wan blue light. The moon had come out, the Milky Way was brilliant like the sun through fabric. It alarmed him that he had fallen asleep and could easily have frozen to death—gone without having known.
What he saw above made him freeze with amazement, his eyes wandering of their own accord along the span of a bridge perhaps thirty yards long suspended from cables across the channel. This was no skinny single-file footbridge as found in the Value System, it was wide enough to take a troop of men marching four abreast or a wagon. The sight of it shocked Lawrence—the gall of The Captain to situate his filthy Value System within a few miles of a public drain was staggering. His suspicion grew this must be the Norwich to Nottingham drain, as that was the only route still open across the water-logged area south of The Wash, a sprawling tongue of marshes spreading as far as Cambridge fifty miles to the south. The suspension bridge was typical of the light structures that crossed the numerous tidal channels cutting inland. There would likely be a ford nearby, or possibly a rope-operated ferry, to allow crossing by heavy vehicles. He must have used this bridge when he served in the fens, as he had several times travelled the drain all the way to King’s Lynn.
Alternatively, he was fooling himself and this was actually a like structure built on the soil of Holland or Friesland. He rejected this thinking. His recollection of the voyage from Chatham on the Thames Estuary was firmly of a day before the wind and another day tacking back against it. Perhaps it was a shift of wind rather than of the barge’s course? Lawrence doubted that. Even if wind shifts quickly, the run of the sea does not.
This was the Norwich to Nottingham drain. If it was not, he was going to die believing it was.
Clear in his
