Then one morning they saw land, a low green line on the horizon. The next morning it was close enough they could smell its earth. The tide carried them into an empty, flat place veined by winding creeks of roiling brown water. It was deliverance from death when they at last got ashore and the men broke the raft up and went off to hunt. Later, his mother told him they waited for other rafts that had left with them, but they never saw any of them again. Perhaps they got spread far and wide in the days on the water. Life got better in this new land. After many weeks, they stopped in a settlement outside Bermondsey. Years passed, eventually his father got a steady job in a factory, they could move in to a room in a terraced house and finally have a proper roof over their heads at night. His strongest memories were that it was noisy and he had to fight all the time with the other kids, who could not understand anything he said. He was glad of that, looking back. It made him into a tough man by the time he was fourteen and started work running messages about the factory his father worked in. He found the life stagnant and degrading. One day, he took to the road to make a living by his own wits. Here he was, now twenty-one years old and his own man.
His attention swung to Lawrence’s progress with the bow.
“You’re a proper craftsman,” he said, inspecting the mastery of symmetry and grace in the tapering of the legs of the bow. By now, mid-afternoon, Lawrence had crafted what would be a competent bow once it was tillered and eased in. Tuwile issued sinew for the bow string from his private supply. Lawrence shaved a bit more off the legs to bring the draw down to what felt like about forty pounds—he was not going to hunt wild boar after all. After that, he relaxed, admiring the bow, filled with the satisfaction of having created a beautiful tool from the free provision of Nature.
Tuwile reached out and pinched Lawrence’s left ear, tugging at the pierced lobe. Then he sat down and stabbed his knife into the ground, crackling with suspicion.
“You’d better tell me exactly what you are, White Horace. I can see from the way you mutter when you’re working that you’re no dumber than I am. So you answer one question: are you Fog on the run?”
“Yes,” Lawrence said.
“Why did you run?”
“I got eight years with nothing to go back to.”
“What did you do?”
“I got stuffed by some merchants who didn’t like my face.”
“You were a glory trooper?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t speak like any glory trooper I’ve ever met.”
“I’m from the far north.”
“If I turned you over to the ultras, what would I get?”
“I should think it would be quite a lot.”
“Do you think I’ll do that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d be killed for the gold they gave you. Gold is dangerous to a man who doesn’t need it. We both understand that, so let’s not bother kidding each other around.”
Tuwile took his time to appraise Lawrence, thinking.
“Let me explain something to you my father once told me. He said he heard it from a man he worked with, who had a brother in the glories. He said the folk on the other rafts—the ones who disappeared on the great water back when I was a boy—were probably wiped out. There’s glories that cruise about that water looking for rafts and when they find them, they kill them with a gun that makes a roar like a torrent of falling bricks. What do you think of that?”
“I’ve heard rumours about that kind of thing. I think—” Lawrence found his chest paralysed by a flood of memories. He panted, tensing to regain control of himself. “It must happen at least sometimes or there wouldn’t be the rumours.”
“Have you ever done anything like that?”
“Of course not! It would be an abomination to massacre people like that.”
“Why are you trembling?”
“Because I’m hungry. A hedge apple doesn’t take a man my size very far, especially if he’s got a bow to make.”
“I’ll tell you this—I do not trust you. I’ve learned the hard way a man who tricks you once is tricking you ten times, you just haven’t found the other nine times yet. So I know you are tricking me nine times, White Horace or whatever your name is.”
Lawrence did not need to be told what to do next. He slung the bow over his chest and turned his back, walking off with a steady, calm gait, his back stretched taut in anticipation of an arrow through a lung. He knew he was finished here in Brent Cross. Not even the marginals would accept him. That was not really what caused him to drift on in a blind daze. It would be an abomination to massacre people like that. Is it not strange how one’s own voice can be the bitterest critic? The words had torn the guts up his throat as he said them. He was still trembling, in mind as much as in body. The crack of doubt was now a gap through which he could see the guilt on his bloody soul. No amount of dodging, writhing denial could obscure a simple truth; in the big wide world beyond the officer cadre of the glory trusts, right-thinking people would be horrified to learn of the preventions done in the name of their safety.
How
