Haven Read online

  HAVEN

  First published 2018 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978 1 78618 109 1

  Copyright © Rebellion 2018

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  A HUNDRED YEARS ago, The Sisters came, a string of asteroid strikes that destroyed human civilisation and brought on a decades-long winter.

  Now, communities are starting to rebuild, and trying to piece together the knowledge that was lost. The old tools are broken, superstition is rife, and the land is hard and unforgiving.

  And some, inevitably, have dreams of conquest.

  The Aftermath tells the stories of a future on the edge of survival.

  PART ONE

  An English Settlement

  Chapter One

  FORKTONGUE DAVY HAD visions. From time to time his Da would pat him on the left shoulder, in a kindly manner, and say, “Senses working overtime, lad?” Smile at him. “Senses working overtime,” was a phrase his Dad had used before him, and his Granddad before that, going back into the horizoning haze of recorded time where history had been swallowed by the coming of the Sisters. Who knew what it meant? Different people on the Hill had different theories. Overtime, according to Aunt Eley, overtime was a special kind of work, a punishment. There had been a time when everybody worked, and then at the end of the workday everybody had gone home, except for the wicked who were compelled to work over the usual time. So the phrase just means: your fits are a punishment.

  “But why am I being punished?” Davy asked.

  “Why are any of us?” Eley replied.

  Aunt Eley was so old it looked as though her brown face had been erratically ploughed by a tiny ploughshare. She had married Uncle Sunil long before Davy was born, and the two of them worked Oak Tree Farm, a tiny smallholding a mile away. Their bodies were bent with age, but their farm was too small and poor for them to be able to hire any help.

  Da’s theory was different. “Lad,” he said, “it’s like this: your senses, you see—your senses are bound in time. Sight, hearing, all that. What happens in your young head is that occasionally your senses drift away from time, fly over it like a red kite.” It was true, Davy pondered, that he sometimes saw stuff ordinary people couldn’t see. So in a way the phrase made sense to him. Especially the working part of the phrase—when the visions came it didn’t feel like dreamily floating above things. It felt like struggle, inside him yet beyond his control. He saw strange people, who sometimes spoke to him. He saw a gigantic face floating through the sky. He peered into unsettlingly labyrinthine underground spaces. He saw himself painfully sprouting wings from his shoulders.

  Usually the visions would begin in eyeball-aching drizzles of sparking lights and a migraine that pincered his head from the back. More often than not these would lead straight to blackout, and he would come round lying on the floor, bruised or cold; sometimes with people gathered around him.

  “Senses working overtime my arse,” said his Ma. She was a practical human being. The backbone of the whole farm. Her genius was running things, fixing things, objective and to the point. She was the family’s boss. Stray too far from common sense and you invited her ridicule.

  It was something of a puzzle to Davy why she had married Da in the first place. Opposites attract, his sister Sue said, but that seemed to Davy merely a contradiction in terms.

  “Senses working nothing,” said Ma. “You have epilepsy, my boy. That’s all. It’s just a medical condition, like a sprained ankle or a bladder infection. You can read about it in the big medical book Mother Patel keeps in her house.”

  He couldn’t, because he couldn’t read. But he liked the sound of the word. Epi-lep-sy, the ps fumbled by his forked tongue. It was a word that resonated, somehow. Something happy. Some portion of lucky. Of see. Hap. Luck. See. Not much like the actual experience, of course. But a hopeful way of framing his life, nonetheless. Maybe he would be lucky! Maybe he would be something special.

  He wasn’t the only person who thought like that. One time Mother Patel told him, “You’re blessed, blessed.” And when he asked her how that worked, exactly, she said, “I tell you, three times these fits will save your life, young Davy. Three times!”

  That didn’t seem very likely.

  “You’ll be transfigured into an angel, boy! An angel!”

  That seemed even less likely.

  The fits tended to come on him when he was physically worn out, or very hungry. He quite often drifted between regular senses and senses-overtime as he was going off to sleep. But they could come at any time.

  Sometimes the fits made him thrash about like a fish, and one time he fitted so hard he put his shoulder—his left one—out of its socket. It went back in when his Ma leaned on it, and the going-in hurt like he was being stabbed; the joint ached for a week afterwards, and often gave him twinges.

  Once he had bitten a piece out of his tongue; hence his nickname. His tongue had lolled to the side and his left canine tooth had stamped a neat plug out of the tip. Before that accident he’d been a chatterer, a rapid speaker. Afterwards he’d had to learn to speak anew, and now he enunciated slowly and carefully.

  Physical exhaustion brought on the worst of the fits, which was awkward because working a farm inevitably entailed a good deal of physical exhaustion. His Da and his sisters did their best not to overload him with work. But one of the helps, young Sam Parkinson, had absconded—stealing one of their horses and a backpack full of food into the bargain—which was a shock. Everybody had liked the lad, and trusted him too. And then, much worse, young Byron had died. What happened with Byron was that an impacted tooth went bad. It wasn’t pretty. In less than a week one whole side of his head had swelled, his features stretching and bulging until they resembled a face drawn on a giant lumpy potato. Soon after that he’d stopped breathing.

  Some years it was possible to recruit new farmhands from wanderers or passers-through, but the last few years had been hard and few people ventured onto paths. The worst of it had been a full-scale war that had broken out between two powerful families in an area twenty miles west of Davy’s home, a territory called The Parish. This had been a short but very bloody conflict that had drawn in all the local families, big and small, and had escalated rapidly for reasons nobody was quite sure about. Suddenly the area was gripped by major catastrophe—so much so that militia squads from distant parts of the country marched in formation to join the fighting. Who knew why? Shillingford Hill hadn’t been directly involved but that didn’t mean the families living there weren’t affected. A couple of lads from Mother Patel’s farm had hiked west to try their luck. They hadn’t been heard from again. And when the conflict ended—abruptly—stragglers fleeing the battlefield had caused all sorts of trouble on the Hill as they passed through, stealing chickens, breaking walls, that kind of thing. Then the Monsoon had come and everything had stopped.

  Eventually the rains cleared, and it was time for the hardest part of winter. Davy was busy taking the cows out for winter forage at dawn and bringing them in again by dusk. The land was frosty, but the beasts could get to the winter grass and there was a field of turnip
stubble sloping down the hill, protected from the easterlies by a hedge, that helped them fatten. It was cold work, though, for Davy. He dressed in as many layers as didn’t actually restrict his motion: two layers of gloves, hat and scarf, two sweaters with his hand-me-down big coat over the lot. But tending the cows was still a freezing job, no matter how much he stamped and stalked up and down, or tucked his hands under his armpits. When it snowed the cattle refused to root around to find the grass beneath, so they had to be wintered inside the farm, which made life considerably less uncomfortable for Davy. But there was next-to-no forage and the cows grew hungry and restless and unhappy. As soon as the snow thinned he was sent back out on the hillside with them, although it was as bitterly cold as before.

  After the war, all the families on the Hill arranged a temporary moot, and called it a parliament, and decided some kind of collective action was needful. In practical terms that meant a tax, something the smaller families grumbled about more than the larger families, since they could afford it less. Davy’s family, the Higginses, was not the poorest farm on the hill, but neither by any stretch was it rich. Still, it was agreed: pool wealth, send a party up to Abingdon to buy extra weapons—since the land between the hill and the town was almost entirely flooded, that meant a boat—and take a person from each farm to make a work-group to go round strengthening defences, shoring up or elevating walls, making gates stronger. This last point was debated fiercely, since it amounted to a poll tax on family labour, and (the argument went) the larger families could obviously spare more people than the smaller. But it was eventually decided. Ma, who always negotiated for her family, tried to get the parliament to accept a pig as their contribution to the tax, and held out for a long time on a pig and a goose. But she rode home in a foul mood having had to concede a whole cow.

  Slaughtering a cow was a whole day’s work; but killing a second could be folded into that same day at the cost of only a few added hours. So Ma decided—arguing with herself vocally, as if she were two different people—to reduce the herd from five to three.

  “It’s a good call,” Da said. “The weather’s so cold now the meat will keep, and the beasts aren’t going to get any fatter whilst this weather holds.”

  “Isn’t it nearly Christmas, anyway?” Sue suggested, to try and cheer Ma up. “You can give a flank to the church.”

  Nobody knew exactly when Christmas was. The local priest, Annie Hacault, claimed to keep a careful itinerary of days and weeks from one solstice celebration to the next, but nobody had ever seen her calculations, and the general suspicion was she picked a date at random at some point in midwinter.

  The Hillingdon church, a flint-wall structure over a thousand years old, was in impressively sturdy nick, compared with all the wrecks of much later-built properties that still littered the landscape. Christmas was the year’s big festival. Intimations of its coming would start when Pastor Annie visited the various farms on her donkey. She boasted about churches up Oxford way where the priest received a tithe from the community—or at least a twenthe—but the Hill was not wealthy enough to subsidise her like that. She kept geese and chickens on a smallholding on the hill’s east shoulder and nobody begrudged her food when she came visiting. She brought God with her, and a little God was always welcome. Farmers, forced into an existential passivity not comfortable for a human spirit, are necessarily a superstitious people.

  “Give a whole flank to the church?” grumbled Da. “A leg would be enough, surely?” But Sue’s was a canny idea: it would be a large statement of Higgins generosity, and since the whole Hill would eat, the family would gain greatly in status. And so it was agreed. Which is to say: Ma said so, and everybody fell into line.

  Another thing that happened, as soon as the Monsoon stopped falling, was that Denny White threw his wife out. Half a year pregnant, she was, but he chucked her out the door regardless. At least he waited until the rains stopped, people said. You have at least to give him that. But he was a sour, jealous man, was Denny, and prone to irrational rages and conspiracizing. In this case he got it into his head that the child Gal White was carrying was not his, and so he threw her out. She went first of all to the Singleton’s compound, but Bella Singleton, despite her considerable matriarchal authority, decided that taking young Galadriel in would be too much like putting temptation in the way of her husband, Tubb. So Bella fed the lass and listened to her weepy story and then, firmly, sent her on her way. After that Gal made her way to Annie’s house, but the priest was practical-minded about the limits of Godly charity, and the paucity of her own means of subsistence. And so Gal ended up at the gate of the Higgins’s farm, looking pale and ill. Ma took pity on her. Given the young woman’s reputation, some on the Hill considered this foolishness, but people who thought Ma was making trouble for herself didn’t know Ma. She was a woman with command over her husband close enough to trust him with a young girl in the house. Of course, there was also old Jeff to consider, but if he tried anything then old Mary, his wife, would surely cut his cock off with a pair of scissors. The only other man in the house was Forktongue Davy the epileptic, thirteen years or thereabouts, and presumably beneath even Gal’s notice. So Gal joined the farm, and did housework in return for food and shelter. Davy got into the habit of watching her, sly and secret, as she moved from room to room, or settled with a look of exhaustion into a chair, or went onto all fours, her baby-bump swaying in a counterweight motion, to scrub the floor. If she noticed him watching her she made no sign of it. And Davy had no illusions about his own allure. Still, the old proverb about hope springing eternal is more appropriate to the sexual daydreaming of teenage boys than to any other aspect of human life whatsoever.

  Ma decided they would butcher the two cows as soon as Annie did her rounds with the announcement that Christmas was coming. That meant that for several weeks life went on as normal. Da grumbled that Christmas in January was one thing, but that it would be a spring Christmas if Annie didn’t get her act together soon and make the announcement, but Davy didn’t mind the delay. Anticipation, it occurred to him, was a sweeter pleasure than consummation. Christmas would come eventually. He took the cows out, and thwacked them with a stick, and tried to keep warm; he watched as Gal got rounder-bellied, and dreamed hopeless dreams of her amplitude and beauty. His sisters, and Julia in particular, smirked at him. He didn’t like that.

  The Thames immediately after the Monsoon was wide and fast, but as the season settled into its full chill ice formed in the bends of its course, chunks of it breaking from the edge and sailing downstream.

  One night Davy woke in the dark, scared awake by a strange dream—not bad, exactly, but disorienting. There was a tall man in his room, and he opened his arms, only they weren’t arms they were wings, great black wings, wings so long they scraped both walls with their scratchy feather-ends. I’m still dreaming, Davy thought. But, as if impelled by a force outside conscious control, he slipped from the bed and walked across to the man. He couldn’t make out the entity’s face. An angel, or an apparition from some other realm. Davy walked, or sleepwalked, past this being and out onto the upstairs landing. The moon was shining right through the big window. Davy’s breath was spectral in the moonlight. Sue was sobbing in her room and, without thinking what he was doing, Davy’s steps took him to her door. He eased it open and looked inside. Julia was already there, comforting Sue. The sisters were hugging one another. But Julia didn’t look like Julia. Her waist was too round. And Sue wasn’t sobbing, she was making a different sort of gasping noise and, without fully registering what was happening Davy retraced his steps to his room. It was empty now, and he got back into bed and fell asleep again.

  In the morning he sat quietly at the breakfast table whilst the others chattered on. He thought back to his night-time visitation.

  It had been a strange sort of vision.

  It was two days after this that the temperature really plunged. There was an antique thermometer hung in the downstairs hallway, but it only went dow
n to minus ten and this cold snap sunk the temperature well below that. Davy got up in the morning to windows thick crusted on the inside with ice, and doors sticky in their frames, glued by the frost. Da got a fire going and everybody jostled in front of it as they chewed bare bread and drank water so cold it scalded the mouth. Gal stayed in bed and cuddled her own pregnant belly, but everybody else got up because there was work to do. Da and Ma, Julia and Sue, Biddy Dexter, who was a distant cousin, Old Jeff and older Mary. They went about their various tasks, and Davy wrapped himself up as much as he could and went out to the cows.

  The five beasts were standing close together in the yard, leaning body against body, motionless as stone. Great cauliflower bursts of breath, white as the ice coating the ground, emerged intermittently from their nostrils. The nearest cow watched Davy warily, the creature’s brown globular eye rotating in the surrounding string of white-pink lining. None of them wanted to move, and for a while Davy thrashed at their behinds with a stick to no effect.

  He saw that the water trough was iced over, and only when he tried to break the surface crust did he realise that it was iced through entirely—a block of ice, big as a coffin. That might explain the beasts’ reluctance. It meant coming back in the house and getting Da to warm a pan in which water had been left overnight—not to boiling point, but enough to melt the rustling chunks of ice out of it, like butter on a hot griddle. He heaved this out to the cows and one by one by they each took a turn drinking. Davy had to go back in twice to refill the pan.

  That loosened them up, and they responded now to Davy’s thwacking. He took the beasts out of the compound and led them up the path, through the trees and up to the open land at the summit of the hill. Puddles were saucers and half-moons of pure silver locked hard into the ground. Each breath was a giant feather of surrender that sprouted in front of his face and dissolved into the air. The frost on the twigs was so thick it looked as though the trees were coated in rabbit fur. Every now and then one of the cows would harrumph, and a great gout of steam would boil into the clean air from its snout. But they were hungry, and now that they had drunk it didn’t take much from Davy’s switch to get them moving.