Mallory wasn't convinced. From the very first sight of it, he'd instinctively felt there was an intelligence there. 'It's definitely searching the area,' he noted. He turned to Hipgrave. 'You expected to see it.'
'They like to follow certain routes-'
'Ley lines,' Miller interjected, repeating the information he had learned at the pagan camp.
Hipgrave eyed him suspiciously, but didn't ask how he had come by this knowledge.
The trail was surprisingly easy to follow. Even the persistent rain had not washed away the regular footprints, and every now and then they were presented with items that pointed the way: a fountain pen engraved with the initials E. G., a freshly broken shoelace, a page torn from an out-of- date Church diary, the writing illegible after the rain. Hipgrave was enthused by their progress, but Mallory felt oddly uneasy.
The route followed little logic, sometimes doubling back on itself. The suggestion was that the cleric was wandering, perhaps in a daze, and it would have left them completely lost in the uniformity of the Plain if they had not studied basic orienteering, as well as navigation by the sun and stars. The twisting track meant the miles passed slowly, but they also progressed with caution when they came to any area where they might be ambushed. Gardener grumbled that even in a daze the cleric was probably outpacing them.
'Where is this stupid bastard going?' Mallory muttered bitterly.
'You'd better hope something hasn't eaten him and is walking around in his boots,' Gardener noted.
Daniels wrung out the sopping peak of his hood, sending a shower of water splashing on to the pommel of his saddle. 'Well, isn't that a surprise — Gardener looking on the black side,' he said.
'I'm not looking on the black side. I'm considering a possibility. These days, anything's a possibility.' In the thin silvery light, Gardener's face appeared as grey as the heavy clouds that now lowered overhead.
Daniels snorted. 'I know you well enough by now, Gardener. You think life's miserable — that's why you opt for that Old Testament morality. All the reward's in the next place. This one's just blood, piss and mud, am I right?'
'You should get down the pub more, Gardener,' Mallory said distractedly. His attention was fixed on the trail ahead.
'Bloody amateur psychologists,' Gardener said sourly.
'You know I'm right,' Daniels continued. 'All that fundamentalist Christianity you go for — it was right for a thousand years ago. Not now.'
'Look around you,' Gardener replied. 'It is a thousand years ago.'
'You really think the Fall was just the start of the apocalypse, Gardener?' Miller stared ahead gloomily.
'It's all there in Revelation. The great dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world- he was thrown down to the earth and his angels with him. We've had war, we've had starvation, and there's talk of some plague doing the rounds. Death makes four — the pale horseman.'
'What do you think, Daniels?' Miller asked.
Daniels appeared bored by the conversation. 'I think fine wine, good food and Italian furniture are the answer to all our earthly worries.' He added, irritably, 'Were you always like this, Gardener? Miserable, I mean.'
Gardener grew introspective. 'You don't choose who you are,' he said after a while. 'Life makes you the way you end up. You think you're going down one road, then something comes up… something you can't control… and you end up going down another. And then you get sent off on another journey, and then another, and then when you finally stop and look back, you're miles away from where you were.'
His bleak tone put Daniels off pursuing the conversation, but Miller appeared oblivious to it. 'What are you saying, Gardener?' he asked.
Gardener acted as if he were talking about something worthless. 'We all need ways of making sense of this life. That's mine.' As he considered this line, a shiver crossed his face. It appeared to prompt him, for he picked up the conversation again. 'I married Jean when I was twenty. We'd already known each other for seven years. Met her on the Dodgems at Gateshead.' A faint smile slipped out of the greyness. 'She wasn't what you'd call pretty, but she'd got a mouth on her like a sailor. I liked that. She gave as good as she got. We had a few barneys in our life because of that mouth, I tell you, but there was never a dull moment.'
He adjusted his hood so that his eerily glassy eyes retreated into shadow. 'We always wanted kids… tried for years… until we found out I wasn't able. Jean took it well. We could have adopted, I suppose, but Jean said, 'We've still got each other'. We'd had the best times before. That's how we'd carry on into our retirement. Then Jean started feeling tired all the time… got ulcers in her mouth. I carried on doing the bins, came back after every shift, she'd mention it in passing. It wasn't important — she'd get over it.' He shook his head. 'All that time… wasted.'
'What was it?' Miller asked quietly.
'Leukaemia. Acute myeloid. Little chance of a cure, the doc said. We gave it a go. All that chemotherapy… her hair falling out… moods swinging like a bloody pendulum. I tell you, that foul mouth worked overtime.' There was such affection in his voice that Miller winced. 'She died. Here I am. I'm just passing time till I'm going to be with her again. No point looking for anyone else. Jean was the only one, for life. Without her, there's nothing here for me.'
Nobody knew what to say. Daniels attempted a half-hearted apology, but it appeared pathetic against the weight of feeling that hung around Gardener. Yet Gardener himself seemed untouched by it. It was as if all his emotion had been considered and was now held in abeyance for some future time.
It was Gardener who eventually spoke first. He carefully surveyed the trail ahead, and then said, 'What are you looking for, Mallory? You've been watching the way we're going as if you're expecting the King of Shit to come round the corner.'
'When things are easy I start to worry.'
'And you're calling me a pessimist.' Gardener peered into the misty middle-distance. 'Though you'd have expected most of the footprints to have been washed away by now.'
'It's all the things he dropped,' Mallory said. 'They're like signposts so we don't lose our way.'
'Or perhaps you're just being paranoid,' Daniels said. 'What could possibly be the point? Who even knows we're looking for him?'
'Do you think we should mention this to Hipgrave?' Miller asked. As usual, the captain was trotting ahead, out of hearing range.
'Do you think he'd even listen?' Mallory replied.
As twilight approached rapidly, they considered making an early camp, but Hipgrave insisted that they press on. 'We must be getting close to him now. How would we feel if he died of exposure tonight because we delayed? He might be just over the next rise.'
Mallory made treasonous utterings, but the others accepted Hipgrave's view and continued against their better judgment as the light began to fade and the landscape slowly turned greyer. Soon after, they crested a ridge and saw a large hill looming up ahead of them.
'We've reached the edge of the Plain.' Gardener pointed out a church steeple rising up due north.
Hipgrave rode back to them with the sodden map that had until then been of little use in the secretive heart of the army land. 'That's Westbury Hill,' he said. 'On top, there's Bratton Camp, an Iron-Age hill-fort. If we need to, we can make camp there.'
'Look!' Miller said suddenly. They followed his pointing finger to a dark figure moving across the hilltop.
'That could be him,' Hipgrave said. 'Nobody else in their right mind would be roaming around a place like that now.'
'I love these leaps of logic,' Mallory said, to no one in particular.
Hipgrave spurred his horse towards the hill, with the others following close behind. It felt good finally to ride at speed, making them believe they were too fast for danger, once more untouchable.
Through the thin late-afternoon light, Westbury Hill loomed with seemingly unnatural steepness in the flat landscape, so heavily wooded around the lower reaches that they had to dismount and tether their horses. At Hipgrave's urging, they forged on, the breath burning in their lungs from the exertion of the climb. Finally, they reached the flat, treeless summit where the wind blew fiercely. In the twilight, they could just make out a figure picking its way over the banks and ditches of the hill-fort about half a mile away.
'I don't like it up here,' Miller said. 'There's a bad feeling.'
As they moved uneasily across the open space, crows flapped all around, their eerie calls sounding like human cries for help.
