When you need neither food nor drink, you don’t really need to stop travelling.
The horse they were riding, however, needed both, as well as a rest.
They stopped by a narrow stream, one that had long ago become naturally cleansed of the detritus men had once unthinkingly filled it with.
Winchester: that’s what this place used to be called.
‘This used to be called Winchester: that was briefly mentioned in the book,’ she said coolly to Sis’s back.
Lil felt Sis give a nod of appreciation for the information.
‘Your parents: who were they, Lil?’ Sis asked with all the casualness of someone who hadn’t heard anything unusual.
‘Hard to remember much about them; they loved me, I suppose. But they also saw me, I reckon, as another mouth to feed, another problem holding them back from ensuring their own safety.’
‘This Christ – the one mentioned in the book, who was also against the Devil – do you think, maybe, he sent you to help me?’
‘Help you? In what way?’
‘The way you can sense what a place used to be called.’
‘Hmn, not always; there can be lot of conflicting voices I hear. It’s only when I sense some thought bringing them all together than I can read it all clearly. With the boy–’
‘So that was you too?’
Sis glanced her way, more impressed than ever.
‘Not completely,’ Lil admitted. ‘I’m not sure how it worked – not even sure what did work! I just sensed that something gelled between what you were asking for and what he’d seen; something he hadn’t really even registered clearly himself.’
Lil shrugged off Sis’s questioning gaze, a gaze demanding explanations Lil felt incapable of giving.
‘The Lexington battle thing – it all just gelled with what I sensed coming through from all those who had read the book; thoughts about people who had previously been close suddenly brutally fighting each other.’
‘The good against the bad; inevitable.’
Lil paused thoughtfully before replying, ‘I don’t think it all comes down to anything so simple.’
‘The Devil on one side; this Christ on the other,’ Sis persisted. ‘It makes sense, then, why people suddenly start attacking each other.’
Lil’s attempt at a reply died on her lips: her mouth agape, she reached forward, aiming to draw Sis’s attention to the two men who had apparently sprouted from the undergrowth a few yards behind her.
‘Men, fifteen of them, right?’ Sis asked calmly without bothering to even briefly glance over her shoulder.
Lil was about to shake her head, to say no, there were two men; but then, one by one, more and more of the heavily camouflaged men began to appear from behind the hillocks and rocks.
‘I’ll take your word for it there are fifteen,’ she said resignedly.
*
Chapter 7
‘I don’t think they mean us any harm,’ Lil said, rising to her feet as the men began to confidently draw closer towards the two resting girls.
One took the reins of the grazing horse, grinning at his good fortune at acquiring such a remarkably healthy mount.
‘Its not safe out here for two girls,’ the nearest of the men declared loftily. He looked around, wary for any signs of other people, of an ambush. ‘Are you on your own?’
Sis had already coolly gained her feet.
‘Do you know where Naseby is?’ she asked him bluntly, ignoring his own question.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ he growled at her furiously, unaware that the grasses and leaves of his camouflage weren’t moving anywhere near as wildly in the wind as the rising, whirling strands of the girl’s hair. ‘It’s not safe here: you need to come with us!’
‘So you don’t know–’
‘Sis…’
Responding to Lil’s forbearing tone, Sis almost blithely turned towards her, the excitable hair strands left unchecked in their eager movement.
‘Are these good people?’ she asked sceptically.
Seeing the way that a group of the men were admiring the horse, Lil was tempted to give an honest answer, a honest ‘No’.
But did they deserve to die simply because they needed a healthy horse?
In all honesty again, no.
Instead, Lil decided that she would try to reason with the men.
‘Could we have our horse back please?’ she pleaded, stepping closer towards the horse, her hand raised as if expecting one of the men to place the reins in her hopefully outstretched palm.
‘It’s not safe for you to continue your journey,’ one of the other men said.
‘Around here, it’s more dangerous than you might suppose,’ another added, his tone as apparently concerned as the previous speaker.
‘For two young girls, it’s dangerous round here no matter what they do,’ said a third, more sceptically, more resignedly.
It was his comment that was met with dour growls of agreement from the majority of the surrounding men.
‘Are we safe with you?’ Lil persisted
The man who had first spoken grinned wanly.
‘Safer than with most people, I suppose,’ he said with a low, gruff chuckle.
‘Do most people pinch other people’s horses?’
‘If you’ve travelled anywhere, you must be aware they do,’ the man replied bluntly. He looked back admiringly towards the increasingly skittish horse. ‘It’s a fine horse; a shame for such a creature to be wasted only on travelling.’
‘And us?’ Sis asked sourly. ‘Is it a shame that two young girls are also wasted on travelling, do you think?’
Sis’s long hair flowed and curled in the wind like a mass of disturbed serpents. Had anyone noticed, Lil wondered worriedly, that the hair was longer than it had been only moments ago?
Worse still, Lil caught the strange glimmers of light heralding the formation of the armour Sis seemed capable of instantly cladding herself within.
‘Have you heard of Memesis?’ Lil asked, hoping to give the man warning that he should alter his tone, his attitude.
The man looked at them both warily, still failing to spot the slight changes that had begun to take place to Sis’s hair, the strange glints of emerald, of the brightest blue, appearing at certain points upon her body.
‘Nemesis, you mean – or Astarte, as I’ve heard her called?’ he said dismissively, despite a nervous chuckle, a swapping of edgy glowers with his nearest friends. ‘Legends, that’s all; stories to scare children. It’s quite obviously impossible for a girl to create the mayhem described in these increasingly ridiculous tales!’
Lil anxiously glanced Sis’s way, expecting the worst; but then, thankfully, the whirling hair calmed, while the glittering of green and blues faded, the first slivers of the sheets of armour readying to slip into place abruptly retreating once more.
‘Who are these girls, Crafen?’
A group of women appeared out of the undergrowth, each as well camouflaged as the men already surrounding Sis and Lil. Naturally, Sis didn’t seem at all surprised by their arrival: neither she was perturbed by their presence, Lil realised, which explained Sis’s lowering of her defences.
The woman who had spoken seemed to be in charge of the new group, perhaps even of the whole team of men and women. She addressed the leader of the men as at least an equal.
‘Don’t they realise the danger they are in?’ she continued, quickly glancing about herself, taking in the details of the scene.
‘They don’t trust us,’ one of the men replied.
‘If they think you mean to steal their horse,’ the woman said, ‘no wonder they don’t trust you.’
The man she’d addressed as Crafen shrugged.
‘We’d pay for it, if it came to that,’ he said. ‘But if they decide to join us, why wouldn’t they let us make use of their horse anyway?’
Sis had politely remained quiet while the man and woman talked, Lil noticed with surprise, no doubt with the i
ntention of forming a swift opinion of this new arrival.
Now she could no longer hold back from asking her question once more.
‘Do you…’
‘Sis…’
Sis ignored Lil’s attempt to stop her.
…know where Naseby is?’
The woman briefly looked Sis up and down curiously, perhaps even irately, either shocked or impressed by Sis’s forthrightness.
‘Naseby?’ she repeated bemusedly.
Although the word obviously meant nothing to her, Lil sensed once again, as she had with the boy earlier, that it somehow brought into life a brief spark of recognition deep within her, as if she were struggling to recall some long forgotten memory.
Bending down before the woman, Lil made a few deft strokes of her finger within the dust, scrawling out the symbols representing the word that she had seen within the book.
Even as she wrote out the letters, an excited murmuring began to rise in the throats of the watching men and women.
As Lil finished writing out the word, the woman glanced up from watching her, her eyes sparking with awe.
‘Yes, yes,’ she exclaimed excitedly, pointing down at the word in the dust as she spoke, ‘this appears upon our temple!’
*
Chapter 8
It was another farm, but one much larger than the last one they had passed through, much larger than any farm Lil had come across before in fact.
It appeared to be incredibly well defended too, eschewing the single fort that farms normally relied on and placing their faith instead in a series of smaller structures that would obviously be dependent upon the supportive covering fire of arrows from any neighbouring fortress.
With such a large farm, of course, it would be almost impossible for anyone working in the outer fields to run for the safety of a large, single defensive construction positioned within its centre. This network of smaller structures was obviously their solution to a problem that had been the downfall of many farms, for any villagers caught by the marauders outside of the fort were invariably tortured, or at least left to starve in a no-man’s land until the mortified defenders foolishly capitulated.
The buildings here were remarkably sturdy, formed of both well-cut wood and a rather surprising amount of salvaged remains of various Golden Age structures, including battered metal sheets and crumbling bricks. The men, women and children out working in the fields seemed to be unusually well-fed too. There was even laughter, especially amongst the children.
As they walked along the rough pathway meandering between the fields – Crafen had suggested that it would be unwise to let the girls mount up, for it would be impossible to stop them charging off without bringing them down with arrows (and that would be a waste of such a wonderful beast!) – the column of camouflaged men and women drew little attention until the workers began to notice the remarkably healthy horse and the two new girls. Even so, even the most curious of the workers hardly stopped off from their tasks, with only the very youngest children falling alongside the returning warriors, taking delight in mimicking the arrogant strides of the men, or the energetic prancing of this most wonderful of horses.
Despite the elaborate array of linked, small forts, the very centre of the farm was graced with what could have been a mighty citadel, the largest building that Lil had ever seen. It seemed to possess absolutely no form of fortification, however, despite the way it rose to a great height through a series of levels, each one smaller than the last, such that it could be said to be a ziggurat, a stepped pyramid: and yet it was a deliberately lop-sided pyramid, with one side long and gently sloping, while the opposing side was precipitous in the steepness of its incline. Projecting over this precipitous drop was a slight continuation of the gentler slope, like a pathway leading out into nowhere, into the darkness.
It was mainly a dark-green colour, giving it the semblance of an oddly shaped hill – indeed, it might well have been built around a hill, a means to obtain its impressive height and size – but there were also a number of rectangular panels of orange and amber, running here and there along the sides of each level. Every wall was strewn with thick white arrows, with numbers and letters forming a bewildering variety of words, many of them repeated.
From a distance, not one of these words made any sense to Lil: and yet as she drew closer, she began to recognise the same formulations of the letters she’d sensed lying within the book: Reading, Northampton, Winchester, and Cambridge.
*
The vast majority of the words decorating the sides of the structure remained unrecognisable and illegible to Lil, for she hadn’t sensed any similar groupings of letters within the book. Even when she began to realise that some of the words had been positioned incorrectly, such that they ran up or down rather than from left to right, or had even been placed upside down, the only words she found herself familiar with where the place names she had come across in the book’s tattered pages.
Now amongst these recognisable words she found Bedford, Woburn, Marlborough and Worcester, all repeated a surprising number of times, as indeed were the earlier spotted Winchester and Cambridge. The words doubtlessly remained completely meaningless to the people who had placed them here, for it appeared to be the positions of the arrows that interested them most, these being used to produce an elaborate patterning, the words similarly used as nothing but a form of graphic decoration.
The closer they drew towards the looming structure, the more Lil saw that the paintwork was fading and badly scraped, the side panels buckled, battered, and rarely neatly abutting their neighbours. Where the paint had entirely flaked away, the dull glint of metal shone through wherever the sun struck it directly, a sure sign that these panels were salvaged materials from the earlier Golden Age: though Lil had never come across such an abundance of reclaimed metal that it could be utilised as nothing but the ornamentation of what appeared to be an impractical and possibly useless structure.
A temple, isn’t that what these people had called it?
At the base of the gentle slope, Lil could now see a series of gaily coloured and garlanded wooden posts, but none of the people appeared to be heading this way, even when the narrow track they had been following began to widen considerably. Rather, they were steadily beginning to disperse, no doubt heading off towards their own homes.
The woman who had given the impression that she was in charge of at least this small band signalled towards Sis, Lil and two of the female warriors that she wanted them all to follow her as she struck off towards the nearest side of the pyramid, the one that steadily rose through its levels at a more reasonable and regular inclination. The bulk of the column of camouflaged warriors continued on its way, worryingly leading the horse away with them; yet as Sis seemed unfazed by this, Lil decided that she too needn’t remain anxious about it.
The arrows and letters were far larger and more imposing than Lil had first supposed when seeing them from a distance, the buckled metal sheets towering over her as they all drew closer to the almost perpendicular lower wall of the temple. The paintwork was also even more scratched and flaking than she had first surmised, the arrow no longer entirely complete, the letters of the place names worn almost to nothing in many cases.
Lil failed to see what purpose these massive, painted sheets of metal could have served in the Golden Age. They could have been the dislodged pages of a book constructed for the use of an immensely strong giant.
The woman was leading them all closer to a ‘page’ that, disappointingly, was amongst the least impressive, its size hardly comparable to the very largest adorning the wall here. It also featured one slightly bent arrow, and only four names, all of them badly despoiled, two of them just another Winchester and a Cambridge.
Lying in between them, however, was the word Buckingham: as in the duke who controlled the king, the duke who was the Devil himself!
And yet the fourth word, although battered to a state of almost complete illegibility, was more interesting
still.
There was an incomplete but obviously capitalised N, followed by an ‘a’, an ‘s’, and then a paint-scraped small gap preceding a ‘b’, ‘ a’, and ‘y’.
Nasebay.
*
Chapter 9
‘It’s slightly different,’ Lil pointed out, but only a little doubtfully.
‘Spellings of place names always change over hundreds of years: people see a name, look at the area – such, as in this case, which is probably a coastal area – and bit by bit “by” becomes “bay”.’
Sis grinned exultantly: this was the place she had been looking for.
The place where she would meet the Devil.
Fight him.
And defeat him.
‘But which way?’ Lil asked as she forlornly took in all the symbols adorning the temple’s side. ‘All these arrows: but we don’t know which way they originally pointed.’
‘The change in the name helps us: we know we need to head towards not just the coast, but also a bay.’
Sis looked hopefully towards the patiently waiting women, presuming that her conversation with Lil would not only have been overheard but – together with her added emphasis on the word bay – it might also have sparked recognition amongst the warriors of any similarity to a nearby area of coastline.
‘The sea’s only a half day’s walk from here,’ the woman said, ‘but this is a well populated area; you’d need an escort to be safe.’
Sis shrugged nonchalantly.
‘Just return our horse and point us in the right direc–’
‘Thank you,’ Lil interrupted, glowering at Sis in her exasperation: she didn’t want either these people or anyone else they met on their journey harmed if it were possible to avoid it. ‘We’d be glad of an escort.’
The woman rewarded her with a satisfied nod.
‘Your horse will be the cost of your escort,’ she insisted sternly.
*
Naturally, Lil wondered if she’d done the right thing when she’d prevented Sis taking the horse and leaving, by force if necessary.
They had lost their horse, and lost time too, the woman – who had at last introduced herself as Frenda – assuring them that they could all leave as soon as she and her best warriors had refreshed themselves in readiness for not only a possibly arduous journey but also any potential ‘obstacles to their passage’ they might have to overcome; but all this seemed to be taking far longer than Lil had expected.