Tuwile asked whether Lawrence could make himself a bow and arrows. Lawrence nodded. He had learned this in survival training at Peterborough. He enjoyed the craftsmanship so much that he made a number of bows, the last of which was of superb performance. It was one of the things he had to leave behind as ‘too plebeian’ when he went up to Camberley College, where he had to at least try to act like a gentleman. Of course, Lawrence needed a story to account for his skills. With a mixture of gesticulation and childish capitalized scrawl in the dirt, he explained his father had been a hunter around Peterborough. After he died Lawrence was shunned because of his dumbness and had to wander to find a new living. He had been on the drains since the spring.
It was a massive relief that neither Tuwile nor any of the others had even heard of Peterborough. Tuwile told White Horace that in the morning they would get hedge apple so that Lawrence could make a bow. Then they would go into Brent Cross and find some business. They would call themselves the Black and White Bowmen. It was the kind of gimmick that might bring fame. The crowds would gasp at their prowess… Tuwile’s eyes shone with great dreams.
*
Lawrence was too quick to copy Tuwile’s mastery of tip-toeing and sliding through the bushland. From time to time, Tuwile would turn and watch his new apprentice, his eyes curious. Lawrence maintained a bumpkin innocence, standing there with what he hoped was an expression of an eager young hound. Internally, he was watching Tuwile in turn. Although the man was slightly built and half a head shorter than Lawrence, he was sure-footed like a goat as he weaved through an ever denser turmoil of thickets and rotten trunks. The ground softened to deep, black mud. They teetered across branches and balanced on tree stumps or tufts of weeds. Lawrence’s trained eyes discerned they were following a path—previous feet had rounded off a stub of wood here, worn off bark there. It might be a path used only by one, certainly not more than a few. The ground hardened again and was more open, allowing them to see back to the tops of the chimneys of Brent Cross, still not such a great distance off. They were on the far side of a swamp, which made them far enough away to have reached a place visited by few, if any, others. Tuwile murmured:
“This is gangster land. Don’t make any noise.”
He told Lawrence to sit and wait while he went off to get the hedge apple (whatever that was, Lawrence had never heard of such a wood). Perhaps he did not yet trust White Horace. He returned later with a curved length from a tree of deeply ridged bark. He tossed Lawrence a green, horny-skinned fruit the size of a big man’s fist and used a knife to demonstrate how to eat it. Lawrence now recognised that ‘hedge apple’ was the osage tree. It was grown on sovereign lands for precisely the same purpose they were going to use it for. Tuwile murmured they were lucky still to get fruit this late in the year; he had found these in the crook of another tree, off the ground so they had not rotted, although it was surprising squirrels had not scoffed them. Only eat the seeds. You have to slice off the skin and put up with the stink—look, even if it’s no feast, it’ll give you a shit before kip.
The settlement was deserted on their return. All the rest were away hunting work. Tuwile allowed Lawrence complete discretion in how he cut and carved the osage to make his bow.
“Have you got family anywhere else besides this Peterberry place?”
Lawrence shook his head as he sharpened the knife Tuwile had lent him.
“That’s a tough deal. Me, I’ve got roots in Bermondsey Asylum. You know it?”
Lawrence stopped his sharpening and with a stick cut letters in the dirt: “Ever heard of Nightminster?”
“No. Is that someone you know?”
Lawrence wrote: “Met him on the drains once. He went his way.”
“I prefer this life I have. It’s a good life if you have a skill people always need. The others here, they’re mostly lazy. They haven’t the patience to learn how to make a bow and shoot straight. That takes hard work, you have to bring a power out of yourself. Most of them will die this winter. I’ve learned to spot the ones who don’t care any more. They’ve run out of will. They never did enough hard work in their lives, so they’ve no reserves of pride to fall back on. That’s what makes you different.”
He monologued on as Lawrence got to work with the first rough-cutting. Tuwile was descended from a family that scattered all over Europe during the Public Era. When the Great Snatch came—there was nothing glorious about it—all the different branches of the family were cut off forever. His grandparents had no idea what happened to them. When he was a boy, the family got expelled from its land as part of a routine discharge of surplus population to the drains. It was a place where the language was completely different from what they spoke here in London. They wandered for weeks. All he could remember was dust, thirst and getting weaker and weaker until his father dragged him on a piece of sacking. They came to this great amount of water, so great it spread to the horizon. His father explained they had to cross it to reach another land that was rich and wet and there was enough for everyone. The crossing was the most potent memory of Tuwile’s childhood. For days they waited on a kind of floating settlement just like this one here, except there was no fire at night, just the darkness, the stars and
