The Guardians Page 5

  But traveling by day meant more chance of being seen as well as seeing. The moon, which had gone behind cloud, sailed out into a sea of stars and taking the sign for encouragement he walked on.

  4

  A Rider in the Sun

  GRASS GREW IN THE CRUMBLING street and the front gardens of the houses were choked with bushes. In one place a quite large sapling grew out through an empty window frame. Where the road ended there was open country, dotted with trees and undergrowth. A noise somewhere ahead, sepulchral hooting, startled him. He realized it must be an owl, but he had never heard one before except in holovision thrillers. He had seen them, of course, in the zoo, but silent, sitting hunched and blinking.

  Rob fought an impulse to turn back, and plodded northward. There was a fair light from the moon but the ground was uneven. He put his foot in a hole and almost fell. The coldness and hunger were worse and the thought of a warm bed, even one likely to be surrounded by tormentors at any moment, was an attractive one. He decided he could at least do something about the hunger, and opened up the paper bag. There was bread and cheese. In the moonlight he could see that the cheese had mildew on it and the bread was stale and hard, a week old at least. He might have known the man with the rabbits would not have given him food he could eat himself. Still he was hungry enough to eat anything. He crunched the bread with his teeth and bit alternately at the hunk of cheese. It was sour but it filled his stomach. He felt thirsty now, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  He went on, his back to the glow of light which was the Conurb, into a night lit only by the half-moon and a scatter of stars. He could not have imagined such loneliness. The urge to give up, to turn back toward the comfort and warmth of his fellow men, was almost overpowering. Once he did stop and look around. The glow stretched in a band across the southern horizon, made up of millions of lumoglobes, neon signs, electrocar headlights, display illuminations. It would diminish as the night wore on, but it would never completely die. There was always light in the Conurbs. Resolutely he turned again and walked away from it.

  The ground was rising and dimly in the distance he could see the slopes of the hills. When he had been traveling for two or three hours the moon went behind a cloud. But the sky was mostly clear. He saw the stars, sharp and bright against deep black. The glow of the Conurb had become a faraway smudge. He had never seen such a sky before because of the other lights all around. It was breath-taking to see how many stars there were, to look at the diamond dust of the Milky Way. Breath-taking, and frightening. He shivered and resumed his march. The moon came out, a small comfort.

  There were sounds, mostly unidentifiable, more or less alarming. A howling which could have been one of the wild dogs which were supposed to run in packs in nomansland, fortunately a long way off. Squeaks and rustlings and clickings. Once, almost under his feet, a hoarse grunting which made him jump away. Later he was to learn that it was nothing more terrible than a hedgehog, but at the time it was horrifying.

  Rob wondered, as he had done a score of times already, how far he was from the Barrier; and in that instant saw it. Moonlight gleamed on metal farther up the slope. He advanced cautiously and investigated. Nothing like a hundred feet high, or even fifty. About twelve. It was constructed of diamond wire mesh, supported by heavy metal posts a dozen or so feet apart. That was as much as could be made out. The obviously sensible course, now he had found it, was to wait until daylight and examine it then.

  He found a hollow in the ground, somewhat protected from the wind, and lay down and tried to sleep. It was not easy. He felt the cold more keenly, having stopped walking, and the bread and cheese lay heavily on his stomach. In the end he had to get up and walk about, slapping his arms to restore circulation. He alternated lying and exercising while the hours of night crawled past. Eventually, worn out, he fell asleep and shivered through dreams for an hour. When he awoke from one in which the Master of Discipline was accusing him of having a nonaligned eye and several limbs out of place, to the accompaniment of jeers and howls from the prefects, there was a different, wider and paler light all around. Dawn was breaking.

  • • •

  Rob slapped himself into something like life—he was tired and cold, hungry again, and aching from sleeping on ground, which made the hard mattresses of the boarding school seem like plastifoam. He went to the fence and looked at it. It ran as far as he could see in either direction, straight to the east, curving inward and out of sight to the west. The mesh was in a pattern of half-inch diamonds, the metal supports several inches thick and sunk in concrete blocks. The bottom of the fence disappeared into the ground. Electrified? He did not feel like touching it to try.

  He looked through the mesh. It seemed no different there—open grassland and trees in the distance. The ground rising to a near horizon. Farther off, featureless hills. He decided he might as well walk on, to the west since it looked less depressing than the long line of fence to the east.

  He came to a part where there were more trees on this side, some growing quite close to the fence. If there were one right up against it which he could climb . . . Or if, for that matter, he had one of the long flexipoles used by jumpers in the Games, and the skill to vault with it, he could get over very easily. But there wasn’t, and he hadn’t. He checked, glimpsing something, a small flash of movement, on a branch of a tree ahead of him. A small brown shape. Something else known only from the zoo: a squirrel.

  It stayed on the branch for several seconds, sitting up with its paws to its face, nibbling something or washing itself. Then it whisked back toward the trunk and down to the ground. Rob lost sight of it when it disappeared into grass. Not long after, though, he saw it again, this time racing up and over the fence! That solved one problem. He put a finger, tentative still, against the mesh. It was cold, harmless metal.

  He still had to find a way of getting over it. He was no squirrel. The small-gauge and the smooth poles offered no kind of toehold. There was nothing for it but to carry on walking. At least it helped him forget how cold it was. The sky behind him was pale blue, beginning to flush gold with the invisible sun. But it was cold enough. There were places where the grass crackled with frost.

  He found the answer at last in a minor landslip. The hill had crumbled slightly, above and below the fence, and rain had washed the loose soil down. It did not amount to much but the steel mesh instead of running down into the ground showed a gap underneath. It was no more than an inch or so, but it gave him the idea. He squatted down and set to work enlarging it. The ground was friable but it was not easy. His fingertips burned with cold. He kept at it. Bit by bit he dug earth away until there was a gap he thought he could wriggle through. But he had been too optimistic and had to go back to digging.

  The second time he made it. He scratched himself on the sharp base of the mesh and had a moment’s panic when he stuck half way, but he managed at last. He stood up shakily. He was in the County.

  • • •

  The slope still shortened his horizon to the north, but the brow was no more than fifty yards away. It should offer a vantage point. Rob climbed it, and climbed into the warmth and brightness of the rising sun. A bird was singing far up in the sky; he looked for it but could not find it. All was blueness and emptiness.

  He stood at the top of the rise and looked around. There were hills on either side, the sun’s orb just clear of one to the east. He was dazzled by sunlight and had difficulty taking in the landscape before him. It went down in a gentle fall and was not wild but patterned with fields and hedges. To the left a cart track led in the distance to a lane. To the right . . . He dropped to the ground. A man was staring toward him.

  He thought he must have been seen: the man was no more than thirty yards away and he must have been outlined against the sky. But the man did not move as seconds passed. Rob’s eyes, growing accustomed to the bright sunlight, took in details. A face that was not a face. Where legs should have emerged from old-fashioned black trousers there were st
icks. A scarecrow, in fact. He had read of them in an old book.

  It stood in the center of a ploughed field. He went across and looked at it. Turnip face with eyes and mouth roughly cut, a worn black suit stuffed with straw. The trousers were badly holed, the jacket torn under the sleeve but otherwise in fair condition. Rob fingered the cloth and then undid the front buttons and pulled it off. Straw fell around his feet. He shook dust and insects from it. When he put it on it felt cold and damp but he reckoned it would soon warm up. It would make a difference the coming night if he were still sleeping out. It was too big, of course. He turned the sleeves back inside which improved things, though it bagged around his chest. The scarecrow looked sadly naked—solid to the waist but above just a turnip head supported on a stick. Rob looked closely at the head. A bit mildewed but it might be edible. He decided he was not quite hungry enough for that.

  He went roughly northwest. There were different crops in the fields. In one big field there were rows of small green-leaved plants with tiny purple flowers. Would they bear some kind of fruit in due course? They would have to be very small. He pulled at one and it came up with white oval things hanging from its roots. Potatoes, he recognized. He could not cook them, but filled the pockets of his jacket in case he found a means later.

  His feet were tired and aching from the unaccustomed walking but he pressed on, leaving the fence as far behind him as possible. He rested from time to time, and once while doing so heard a new sound. It grew louder and clarified into something which he had at least heard on holovision historical epics—the thudding of horses’ hooves.

  Rob took cover behind a nearby hedge. It had a view of the lane and soon the horsemen appeared, riding to the west. There were half a dozen, in red tunics with gold buttons and gleaming leather straps and belts. They rode with careless arrogance; he heard them calling to one another and laughing. A couple of big dogs, one yellow, one white with black spots, lolloped alongside, their mouths open, red tongues hanging from between white teeth. And the horsemen had swords: the scabbards rattled against their high brown leather boots.

  They did not look his way. The cavalcade rode on, disappearing behind high hedges, the sound of their passing gradually fading on the morning air. The king’s musketeers must have looked something like that, riding through the summer fields near Paris on their way to a brush with the cardinal’s men. It was more storybook than real; fascinating but scarcely believable.

  Not long afterward he saw the first house inside the County. It had outlying buildings, a small pond, and poultry pecked the ground nearby. A farmhouse. There would be food there, but he dared not approach. Smoke rose from a chimney and as he watched a figure came from one of the outbuildings, crossed the yard, and disappeared inside the house. Going to breakfast, perhaps. Rob felt in his pocket and brought out one of the tiny potatoes. Friction had rubbed it clean of earth. He bit into it. It tasted unpleasant insofar as it tasted of anything, but he managed to chew it and get it down. It quenched his thirst a little, too. He ate three or four more.

  The day wore on. During one of his rests he took off the jacket and rolled it up as a pillow for his head. He fell asleep and woke with the sun burning his face. It was high in the sky, almost at the zenith. He chewed more potatoes and went limping on his way. His feet were hurting him. A mile or so farther on he stopped at the edge of a field and took off his socks. His feet were blistered and some of the blisters had burst, exposing raw flesh.

  He realized he could not go on indefinitely like this, but did not know what else to do. Field had succeeded field, with little change. There were animals in some which he knew were cows. One obtained milk from cows, but how? And anyway the sight of them made him nervous. In other fields there were men and machines. He could not tell precisely what the machines were doing because he had given them as wide a berth as possible. They were silent, presumably powered by fuel cells. He had also kept clear of houses, not that there were many. The emptiness of this land, which had been surprising and troubling, was becoming monotonous, mind wearying. Rob looked at his swollen feet. He wondered if it would be better to lie up in the shade. But would he be any better able to go on later in the day?

  And what was he hoping to achieve? He had come here spurred by hatred of the school, and by the discovery that his mother had been born and lived her early life in the County. He had had this idea of farmlands as places that produced food, but it was not turning out like that. All he had found—all it seemed he would find—were a few small raw potatoes.

  He might as well, he thought miserably, give himself up. He would have to do that eventually, or starve.

  Someone called in the distance and he looked up quickly. There was a man on horseback in the gap at the end of the field. The call had been to Rob from him. There was a way through to another field on the left, and a wood not far off. If he could only reach it . . . The horseman had started to come forward. He decided he had no time to put on socks and shoes. He grabbed them and ran.

  The field into which he emerged was long but narrow—it was only twenty yards or so to a high hedge separating it from the next field which in turn was bordered by the wood. There was no gap, but Rob saw a place where it looked thin enough for him to squeeze through. He made it with thorns tearing at him and thought he was safe: the horseman would have to find a longer way around and by the time he did Rob would be in the wood. He could surely dodge a man on horseback there. His feet were hurting horribly but he disregarded that. Thirty yards to the wood, perhaps less. He heard another call and glanced over his shoulder. Horse and rider were in midair, clearing the hedge in a jump.

  He tried to squeeze extra strength out of his legs. Twenty yards, ten, and hooves thudding in his wake. He would not reach the sanctuary. He wondered if the horseman would ride him down, or slash him with his sword. Then his left foot turned under him and he crashed to the ground. The impact dazed and winded him. He lay gasping and heard the sound of hooves slacken and cease. The horse was snorting quite close and above him.

  Rob looked up. The sun was behind the rider’s right shoulder and he could not see him properly for the glare. There was an impression of fairness, of a blue shirt open at the neck. He looked for the sword but could not see one.

  The horse moved, jigging, and the rider checked it. The light fell at a different angle and now Rob could see him clearly. He was not a man but a fair-haired boy, not much older than himself.

  5

  The Cave

  IN A QUICK EASY MOVEMENT the rider vaulted from the saddle. Holding the reins with one hand he extended the other to Rob.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Let me help you up.”

  He spoke in a kind of drawl, very confident and assured. Rob got to his feet, wincing. The boy let go of the reins and put both hands reassuringly to Rob’s arms.

  “You’re barefooted,” he said with surprise. “Your feet are bleeding. Here, you’d better sit down and we’ll have a look at them.”

  Rob was still clutching one shoe—the other, and his socks, he had dropped in the last part of his flight. He did as he was told and the fair-haired boy squatted beside him. His hair was almost gold in color, thick and gleaming on top but cropped close at the back and sides. It fell forward as he lifted Rob’s feet and examined them.

  “Not too good. Hang on, I’ve got some water.” He went to the horse and removed a flat, leather-covered flask from the saddle. He poured water into one hand and gently bathed the feet. “They really need dressing.”

  “Is there any water left? I’m a bit thirsty,” Rob said.

  “Help yourself.”

  Rob drank and handed the flask back.

  “You’re not a countryman, are you?” the boy said.

  “Countryman,” he discovered later, was a term used both for farm workers and servants of the gentry.

  “I’m from the Conurb.”

  The fair boy stared at him. “How did you get here?”

  “Across the fence. Well, under
it really.”

  There was no point in trying to conceal things. He could not get away. The pain in his feet, which he had disregarded while running, was much worse. He wondered whether the boy would make him walk to the nearest police station. And then? He supposed they would take him back to the school but did not much care. He was more angry with himself for having failed, and failed so soon.

  There had been a pause. The boy broke it. “I’m Mike Gifford. What’s your name?”

  Rob told him.

  “I’ve never met anyone from the Conurb. What’s it like there?”

  Rob gave a gesture of helplessness. “It’s a bit difficult to say, just like that.”

  “I suppose it would be. What made you come here, anyway?”

  He made an attempt to answer that, explaining roughly what had happened since his father’s death and what he had learned about his mother. He spoke of his experiences at the school.

  “Tough,” Mike said. “They give you a rough time at the start at my place, but not as bad as that.” He stared at Rob. “The question is: what now?”

  He had been decent so far. It might be worth appealing to him.

  “You could just forget about finding me.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You’re crippled. You won’t be able to walk for days on those feet.”

  “I can lie up somewhere.”

  Mike shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  The tone was casual but decisive. It had been too much to hope, Rob thought. He remained silent. After a moment or two, Mike said, “How would you live? Do you know how to trap a rabbit, for instance—skin and cook it?”

  “No.”