Winter
David Whitmarsh
It was July the seventh, her fifteenth birthday. She had been six years old when the sky darkened and the world was covered by a grey blanket of fine ash. She remembered the vivid greens and blues of the old world just as she remembered the brightly coloured picture books of the child she had been. But now, Spring was coming. The signs were there: the shoots and buds, sparse and feeble after the enduring winter, were each day a little stronger. The sulphurous yellow of the sky was streaked with blue, letting through a hint of warmth. It had been months since the last serious snowfall and there had been no frost for weeks. This wasn’t the first time that the bitter cold had eased, but the news now was that Thrihnukagigur was quiet.
Some trees hung on waiting for the long overdue Spring, but many would never again show green. Each year brought a greater crop of those winter fungi that live on dead wood. A harvest of ink-caps from the usual site went into the decoy bag on her right hip; they would go into a soup before they dissolved into a slime.
A cluster of velvet shank caught her eye, orange bright against grey-brown bark. She had to climb a little to reach them, but soon they were in the collecting bag on her left hip. With the takings of the snares she would manage a meal for her and Mr. Carnegie. A meagre one, but some days she had returned with less, or with nothing.
She climbed to the margin of the wood at the crest of the escarpment. Below, beyond the scarred and sterile fields, the town filled the valley. A few desolate figures scurried along empty streets. Half the houses were empty, some crumbling, some burnt out. The grey of walls and roofs and streets and people broken only by the artificial light leaking from the windows of a pair of high-rise farms, bright against the grey twilight.
It was not enough, never enough. There was hunger in the town as much as in the countryside around. After the sky had darkened and the crops failed, the townspeople had formed a militia, set up barricades. They would not share their precious resources.
Her mother had brought the family to live here when Beth was a baby. Before the volcano, they would go foraging for the plenty that the green forest provided. When the eruption began and ash and sulphur spread the world over, her mother had understood what it meant. Beth remembered the arguments between her parents. Her father had been one of those in the village frightened by the barren fields, the dying sheep. Her mother knew what the land could provide even in the harshest winter. Her logic was implacable: with the town barricaded against them, their only choice would be the squalid, sprawling camps, where the hungry would be concentrated, where there would be the greatest need, the greatest suffering. Her father had left, alone, they had survived, and Beth had learned her lessons. They were often hungry, but they did not starve.
She didn’t know whether he was one of those who died in the camps, or if he was loaded onto one of the hastily contrived, ill-equipped starships to jump through years of time and space to an uncertain future. She had cried when he left, cried at his parting and at her parents’ bitter words.
But her mother had not cried, and Beth had never cried since.
The walk past the empty houses of the village always made her nervous. She hurried as she always did past the James’s house. Harry James had been in her class, back when the village school was still running. One day he hadn’t come in. His mother, a big woman even then, had seemed unconcerned. Later she had tried to entice Beth in. Harry was sick in bed and would love to play with her. Beth ran away. Later, the police had come and found the bones buried in the garden, the flesh in the freezer.
There were no police out here now. What little law there was didn’t venture from the towns, just as what was left of government and army was too busy keeping the turbines and the fusion plants and the power grid running to ever raise its head.
There had been a population a little under five billion, once. The orbital habitats and the buried cities of the Moon and Mars housed tens of millions. No-one really knew what the numbers were now. Off-world, they took as many as they could, but too few to make much difference. Escape to Armstrong, Tranquillity, or one of the great spinning orbital cities was only a dream now for any Earth dweller.
News came occasionally of the chaos in other parts of the world, where the collapse had been more complete. Around here, the worst they’d seen was when the countryside was ravaged by waves of desperate refugees, who lacked the skills to survive from the woods and wound up in the camps. They should think themselves lucky.
Mr. Carnegie lived in the old vicarage. A large Victorian house next to the former church. There was a well-concealed cellar in which he would hide when the scavengers came. The front door was left unlocked to save them the trouble of breaking it down, but there was nothing left for the likes of them to take. What interest would they have in a mouldering orchestra?
They spoke little while she prepared the day’s meal and fresh soup for the decoy bag. After they had eaten they went into his music room. The grand piano with its smashed lid lay tilted on two legs beneath the cracks in the high ceiling’s ornate plaster-work.
It was her mother who had first brought Beth to Mr. Carnegie, too. Her previous teacher had started her on the violin, but after only a couple of lessons Mr. Carnegie had roared in frustration, “Too much! You are too big for this.”
She thought he was taunting her, but he wasn’t speaking of her physical size. He fetched out a half-size cello. “You may think it is like a violin turned around, but you will start again. There is much to unlearn.”
He sat her down, showed her how to cradle the instrument, to stretch her arm up to the fingerboard. The first time she drew the bow across the C string and felt the deep, growling vibration pass from wood to flesh and into her bones, she had been enthralled.
He was a hard teacher. Demanding, indomitable. She raged against her mother, Just surviving is hard enough. After her mother’s death, she turned her anger against Mr. Carnegie, saying the same thing. His reply had been calm and quiet: And for what do we survive?
Sometimes she stormed out in anger, promising never to return. But it was too hard, the music had permeated the core of her being, so that every movement was a melody, every thought a chord, every mood a key. Then, too, she felt sorry for him; but he would accept nothing from her except in payment for his teaching.
Some days the scavenging was too poor, the hunger too much. She lacked the will to play, he to instruct. Sometimes she had to stop and wait while fits of coughing wracked his emaciated frame. It seemed lately that even though the returns of her foraging had become more plentiful and she had a little more flesh on her bones, he had become thinner still, and weaker.
Today, he selected for her a piece from the twenty-second century. “Delaney,” he said, as the manuscript appeared on the display before her. Relief and joy warmed her as she started to play. A torrent of chromatic cascades and subtle counterpoints. Precise, formal, structured; as with Bach, the passion that lay hidden beneath the mathematically precise veneer struck deep in Beth. When she lowered the bow and raised her head at the end, he nodded.
“Good,” he said.
As always he had recorded her playing, and afterwards he played it back. Until a year ago, it was he that offered analysis and criticism, a relentless critique of every mistake, every weakness of technique. Since then, he had watched silently as she dissected her own performance.
“You have promise,” he said, “but without the chance to play with others, you can never reach your true potential.” As he often did, he sent the recording to his grandson who studied at the New Vienna Conservatory. A surprise that there was still such a thing as a Conservatory in this blighted world. Was there also in Vienna an Old Conservatory?
At the end of the day, she took the instrument to the safety of Mr. Carnegie’s cellar. He was too weak now to carry it himself. She went to leave, to head for her own home in the woods, but turned to him on the doorstep.
“Spring is coming,” she said. “Soon.”
He nodded slowly. “It will take more than one spring to heal this land.” His eyes swept the tired landscape behind her and returned to stare directly into her own. “When there is plenty again, then everyone you meet, you will think to yourself, ‘How did you survive? Who did you abandon, or betray, or kill? Did you taste human flesh?’”
He turned away. “Spring is coming, but I will not be here to see it.”
He closed the door.
She walked away, steeped in discord.
The previous evening’s mood settled into her as a slow melody in a minor key as she crept soundless between the near-naked trees. She went first to her grub farm, left undisturbed for three weeks, time enough for some small morsels to be burrowing through the rotting wood. A hedgehog curled itself into a tight ball as she lifted the bark cover. A hedgehog. How long since she had last caught one? How many were left out here?
She lifted it, rested the bristly ball on the palm of her left hand, and drew her knife from its sheath. For a long moment she knelt, ready to cut the life from the small creature. A mangy crow taunted her, out of reach in the upper branches of a moribund lime tree. Then she laid the spiny creature down again. Take it all, and there will be nothing the next day—one of her mother’s lessons. She picked through the friable fibres of crumbling wood for the larger pale grubs. A few she popped in her mouth and swallowed whole. The rest went into her bag, and the bark covered the hedgehog once more.
In a dark gully on a west facing slope a snare was gone, torn from the dead sapling where it had been secured. There was a dampness on the dark ground. She probed it with her fingers and lifted them to her nose, sniffed, tasted the dampness on her fingertip. The blood of some creature.
She crept onward with heightened senses, the melodies in her mind stilled to the silence of the wood.
A movement in the distance down the slope.
Footfalls, voices.
She crept up and away, finding the more open spaces where she could move without disturbing the branches, keeping low to the ground. She crouched in a hollow and listened. The sounds were moving away, to her right. North. She worked her way south along the slope, then a sharp odour caught her throat.
A scent mark. Dogs.
She took her knife again in her hand and held it reversed so she would not impale herself if she tripped. She crouched, listening. The breeze picked up, rustling the dry branches. If they came, it would be from downwind. She turned and ran into the wind, always bearing away to the left, to the south, away from the people she had heard passing by.
A lull in the breeze and she could pick out the sound of paws padding behind. Dogs pacing her. Others would be overtaking to either side, but she had no time to look as she searched the quickest path, skipping over roots and branches. They would be on her soon.
That tree. Now.
One foot on the root, she propelled herself upwards. Arms wrapped around a stout branch, her head banged into the trunk, scraping her cheek. She twisted upwards, wrapped her legs around the branch and hauled herself up. Not high enough. She stood and leaned forward to grasp a higher branch and swung herself up again. Only then did she allow the pain and dizziness of the blow to her head to rise. A long rasping note, a break in the rhythm.
They came slinking from the shadows. The biggest, perhaps the pack leader, stopped at the foot of the tree and glared up at her, drooling, deep black with dark brown markings around the neck and face, ribs showing through the short fur. Even in its current state of near starvation it must have weighed as much as her.
The rest of the pack sat or lay spread around the base of the tree in their various sizes and colours and coats. All were thin, some showed bald patches, oozing scabs. They waited in silence with their eyes fixed on her.
She settled to wait them out, making herself as comfortable as she could. She rested her back against the trunk and slowed her breathing, quieted her heart with a long, slow, repetitive melody. Leaves were budding on the branches around her.
The sun hid behind a deep overcast, a twilight gloom at midday. The sentry furthest from her, short, light brown fur, pricked up its ears and stood, gazing into the trees. Another, mangy long-haired grey and white, did the same.
The silence of the woods was shattered by a gunshot, and the first of the sentinels fell.
The pack melted into the trees.
Beth sat on the branch, mute, breath held. Even the music in her mind was still, save the heavy tympanum of her heartbeat.
The first to appear stepped through the naked brush with exaggerated caution, as if raising his feet high would obviate the racket he made with each footfall. His rifle was held to his shoulder and he swung it from one side to the other, so fast he would never have seen anything that might have been hidden. There was a comic look of intense concentration on his gaunt weasel features. On the sleeve of his tatty and stained dark blue coat he wore the red armband of the town militia.
He was followed by another, dark skinned, who walked up to the dead dog with his gun resting in the crook of his arm. He crouched down and prodded the bloody wound in the animal’s flank, then wiped his hand on his jacket.
“Oh, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson. Fucked up again,” he said, shaking his head. He stood and ran the fingers of his hand through his thick black hair.
Weasel-face, presumably Johnson, turned his head to glare at the other. “What?” he whined.
“Right in the gut, a bloody mess, that’s what. Half inedible. Why didn’t you shoot it in the fucking head?”
Johnson just growled and carried on his caricature of a huntsman.
Another voice followed them from the trees. “Light a fire, Johnson, they won’t show themselves now. Aziz, see what you can salvage from the carcass.”
The voice was followed by a figure in somewhat less dishevelled clothing. Short, older. The loose sagging jowls of a face that had lost much fat. He did not carry a rifle, but had a buttoned holster on his belt.
He sat himself on a log and chewed a piece of root while watching the other two work. Beth maintained her stillness, her silence. She was well practised at it, and in the gloom, in her clothing as dull as the bark of the tree and a screen of budding branches before her, she would not be easy to see. Besides, people seldom looked up without reason.
Johnson built his small fire at the far side of the small clearing. She could slip down, hang by her hands from the branch and drop to the ground. If she didn’t injure herself she’d have a head start. Through these woods she could outrun them, lose them. If she didn’t hurt herself, and if they were not too quick with their guns. She waited.
Aziz used a fierce looking blade to cut and skin a haunch from the dog, then to cut thin slices from it. Each slice he coiled loosely and impaled on a stick. Weasel-face Johnson wandered away a few metres. He leant his rifle against a tree and turned to piss in the leafless bushes.
“What are they up to, those regulars, then?” he called over his shoulder.
Aziz positioned his dog kebabs over the fire. “Powerline maintenance, isn’t it?” His rifle was on the ground next to him. But Jowls had taken his handgun from his belt, and was weighing it in his hand, inspecting it.
Johnson zipped up and turned around, facing Beth’s tree. She held her breath, willing his weasel face to turn away, to not look up. “That’s a way south, the patrol was heading north.” He picked up his gun and sauntered back to sit by the fire.
Jowls looked at Johnson, gun still in his hand. “They’re looking for some off-worlder. To lift them out.”
“Like the regular army have nothing better to do?” Aziz leaned forward to turn the roasting meat. “Baby-sitting those off-world fuckers. What are they doing for us?”
A light gust brought the smell of cooking dog-flesh to Beth’s nose, making her salivate, and stinging smoke to her eyes, making them water. She squeezed them shut a moment while it cleared.
Aziz muttered something under his breath, and Jowls stood. “Makes no difference what you and I think, Aziz. When the off-worlders want something, they get it. One interesting question is what they’re doing around here.”
Johnson nodded. “Arse-end of nowhere.”
Johnson and Aziz sat hunched by the fire as Jowls circled around them. He stopped by the tree where Beth was concealed, almost directly beneath her, facing towards the fire.
Aziz tilted his head to look askance at Jowls. “You said one interesting question. Is there another?”
Jowls cast his gaze around. “Yes. Indeed.” He spoke quietly, as if to no-one in particular. He disappeared from Beth’s view, behind her tree. She heard his feet disturb the desiccated litter of the woodland floor. The sound stopped, started again. He came back into view a little way to her left.
Aziz lifted one of the sticks from the fire and blew on the blackened sliver of flesh, then tentatively nibbled at it. “It’ll do,” he declared. Johnson grabbed another stick and tore into the meat. Jowls walked around behind them and Aziz offered him the third piece.
Jowls shook his head, a ghoulish grin spread across his face. “You have it,” he said. He sat and watched them work their way through their meal.
Mr Carnegie’s words came to mind: What did you do to survive? She thought again of dropping and running—Johnson and Aziz both had their rifles lying on the ground beside them—but Jowls was facing her way, his handgun in its holster, unbuttoned, and his right hand rested on the faded denim of his thigh close by.
When they had finished, Johnson carved off the other haunch from the dog’s carcass and tied it to his belt while the other two watched with arms crossed. Aziz made to head off towards Beth’s right, but Jowls whistled, and pointed, and Aziz changed direction, walked beneath the branch where Beth hunched silently against the trunk. Johnson followed. Jowls kicked out the fire, glanced around, then whistled again.
The sound of feet in the litter stopped.
“The other interesting question,” Jowls said, “is what that pack of dogs were waiting for. Either of you think of that?” He looked up into the tree, directly at Beth. “You can come down now, kid.”
He took the gun from its holster. “One way or another, you are coming down.”
She clambered down from one branch to the next, looking around as if to check her footing. Reluctantly, as late as she dared, she dropped to the ground. Johnson grabbed her arms from behind and pinned them painfully at her back.
Jowls took the knife from her belt and looked her up and down. “Well, well. A little girl.” His eyes gleaned, the ghoulish grin returned, exposing a gap where two teeth were missing.
Johnson’s right arm reached around to squeeze her small breast. “Not so little.”
Jowls scowled. “Later, Johnson. We’ve wasted enough time. Check her bags and pockets, Aziz.”
Aziz tugged both bags over her head, and Beth winced as a strap snagged on her ear. He tipped the heap of squirming, shiny white grubs from the collecting bag onto the ground. “This what you’ve been living on?” Then he opened the decoy bag and took out the vacuum flask, and a glass half-bottle containing an amber liquid.
“Bingo.” He popped off the cup-lid and opened the flask. “Fuck, that smells good. What is it?”
She didn’t answer. Johnson tightened his grip on her arm and twisted.
“Mushroom soup,” she cried.
“Give it to her first,” said Jowls. “There’s mushrooms and there’s mushrooms.”
Aziz poured a cupful of the gently steaming liquid and held it out. Johnson released his grip on one arm, and when she made no move to take it pinched the other one fiercely. She waited as long as she could bear it, then took the cup and drank the contents straight down, handed it back and shrugged.
The three men took turns and drained the flask completely while Aziz examined the bottle. “What is it?” Johnson asked.
“Label’s torn off, but it’s sealed.” said Aziz.
“Give it here,” said Jowls, and cracked the seal, sniffing. “Gentlemen, I do believe we have here a half-bottle of whisky. We’ll have a little celebration when we make camp tonight.”
As he bound her wrists in front of her, Johnson gave Beth a smile. “Not so little,” he said.
Then Johnson’s blackened, broken teeth filled Beth’s vision as he squatted in front of her, his leering face red and moist with sweat, whisky and bad breath oozing from him. He slit the cords at her ankles then laid his knife down out of reach and grasped her feet, pulled hard, dragging her down flat on her back.
The back of her head cracked against a root and she cried out as a wave of dizziness ran through her—then noises penetrated the darkness. A low call, rustling movement. Sharp pain lanced into the back of Beth’s head as the dizziness passed and she moaned.
Jowls hissed, “Shut her up!” and Johnson’s hand clamped hard over her mouth.
Jowls and Aziz stood facing two figures silhouetted against the evening sky. One human, one mechanical. The human moved with a swift confidence, a firearm hanging ready from the shoulder. The robot bristled with sensors and armaments, towering half a metre above all of them. Army. Regulars. Aziz picked up his rifle and looked at Jowls, who shook his head firmly.
The soldier spoke. A woman. “We’re looking for Carnegie. Old guy, lives around here somewhere.” Jowls and Aziz both shook their heads. She nodded towards where Johnson had Beth pinned down. “What about your captive there? What’s the story?”
“Runaway,” Johnson shouted, “we’re taking her back.”
The soldier stepped towards him, and Aziz half-raised his rifle. “I wouldn’t,” she said without breaking her stride. The machine crouched with forearms raised, aimed towards Aziz.
She stopped two paces from Beth and Johnson. “I’d like to ask her,” she said.
“She don’t know anything,” Johnson stammered, sweat dripping from his face, crimson even in the fading light. How much had he drunk? How long it would take?
The barrel of the soldier’s gun rose a finger’s width towards Johnson. “I’d like to hear her say that.”
“This is an outrage,” yelled Jowls. “This is a militia matter, you have no jurisdiction.”
The soldier crouched next to Beth. Her face was round, weathered. Well-fed. She wore a half-smile, but that abruptly faded as her right hand rose to the earpiece of her headset.
She stood, turned to her mechanical companion. “They’ve found him,” she called. She glanced back at Beth, frowning, hesitating, then shook her head and trotted away.
As the soldier and her companion slipped into the dusk Beth just felt tired, without hope. And for what do we survive? The regulars, they were looking for someone to take off-world. They were looking for Carnegie. I won’t be here to see it. His words the previous evening when she’d spoken of the Spring.
Johnson released his grip on Beth and dropped back onto his haunches, shaking his head, raising both hands to his temples. Jowls just stood staring after the soldier warily, then behind him Aziz fell to his knees, leaned forward onto all fours and vomited, loudly, copiously. Johnson jerked in surprise, lost his balance and fell, sprawling—and Beth rolled over onto her belly, fumbling with bound hands for Johnson’s knife, then pushed herself to her feet and ran into the darkening wood, stumbling and tripping and straining to keep her balance. Jowls roared and a shot followed her, wild. She ran down towards a stream. A second shot hit something, a tree, a branch, way up and to her left. She ran to the right and tripped and tumbled, the knife fell from her hands.
Footsteps, slow and uncertain. Jowls, it must be. The other two were sick, but it hadn’t got to him yet. She needed the knife, needed to cut the cord that bound her wrists, forced herself to turn and crawled through the leaf litter, straining to see in the darkened hollow, pausing with held breath after each movement, syncopating consonance and dissonance.
A rustling to her left. She froze. Waited, breath held tight. A minute of silence, two, and she continued her search.
Her hand felt the sharp steel edge, she stretched to find and grip the handle.
“What did you do, girl? Was it the whisky?” She pulled herself to her knees and found Jowls standing in a pool of fading light. His handgun was raised and aimed at her head.
She mustered her voice. “Maybe it was the dog made them sick.”
He stepped closer. “Don’t mess with me, girl. I am really not in the mood.” His lips pulled back, his teeth gleamed dimly. He took a step closer, loomed over her. Beth sprang up, knife clenched in her bound hands, then the gun barrel struck the side of her head and pain flared, darkening all else.
When the nausea ebbed Jowls was standing over her, a dark patch spreading on his shirt. His arm jerked, the gun in her face. Beth squeezed her eyes shut and a shot shattered the air, then dead weight fall across her legs. She looked, to find Jowls’s one remaining eye staring blindly into hers. The other eye… Beth looked away.
“You okay, honey?” The soldier was kneeling beside her.
Beth shook her head and winced with the movement. She didn’t hear the machine’s approach, it was just there standing over her. There were lights, and sounds, and needles. She slipped into unconsciousness as silent and gentle mechanical arms lifted her from the ground.
“So, I am curious.” It was the soldier, sat by her bedside. “When the shooting brought us back, there were the two of them puking their guts up. How did you manage that?”
“Ink-caps.” Beth said, squinting through the mental fog. “I had soup with ink-caps in, they took it.”
“Poisonous?”
“Not by themselves. But if you drink alcohol…”
“Smart.” She stood and crossed the room to the door. “I’ll get Carnegie, you’ll want to say your good-byes.”
“He doesn’t owe me anything.” Beth rolled onto her side to face the wall. “Just tell him to go.”
“He’s not going anywhere, kid.”
“I heard. You were looking for him, they’re taking him off-world.”
“I don’t think so, honey. They’ve no place for him. Too old. Too sick, though they’ve arranged a care package. When he’s ready for it there’ll be no pain.”
“Too sick?” Beth turned back, propped herself half-upright, but the soldier was already gone, and then the fog rose again and unconsciousness took her.
She dreamed of baying dogs, of men with broken teeth and gaping empty eyes, of giants whose roars rattled the windows in their frames, but it was whispered voices that woke her. Firm hands rolled her onto one side.
“It’s okay, honey. They’re here.” The soldier’s face swam into view, then a man and a woman: tall, clean-cut, well-fed yet slender, in the traditional white coveralls of medics. One stood by her feet and the other moved to the head of the bed. Before Beth could ask what was happening, they lifted her by hips and shoulders, sliding her from the bed onto a gurney.
Mr. Carnegie stood by the door, his face pale and drawn. The gurney moved, its motors whining quietly.
“What’s happening?” she said. “Where are you taking me?”
The Gurney stopped by the doorway, Mr. Carnegie leaned over her, a frown on his face. “To New Vienna. The orbital habitat. They will treat your injuries, and then you’ll have a place at the Conservatory. They have seen the recordings I made of your playing. You will be safe up there, and you will learn. I can teach you no more.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not going! You won’t manage without me.”
“Foolish child.” His voice carried the same tone of exasperation as when she erred in her technique. “I will not survive long with or without you. But what was the point of all these years I spent cajoling and pushing you if you refuse this? For what did you survive?”
He receded into the shadows of the hallway, and the gurney followed.
The shuttle lay in the dead meadow at the centre of a circle of scorched earth, ringed by soldiers. Their eyes, human and electronic, swept the countryside around. Beth’s soldier walked with her gurney as far as the bottom of the loading ramp. “Good luck, kid,” she said. “Have a good life up there.”
There were no windows in the shuttle cabin, just a space for them to secure the gurney and half a dozen seats. As the loading ramp rose up, Beth caught a last glimpse of the vicarage. A pale figure watched back from an upstairs window.
Beth lay in silence as one of the medics busied himself hooking up monitors, inserting a cannula to the back of her hand with a friendly smile, saying “This might sting a little.”
The other reappeared in the cabin from a door at the front. She crouched beside the gurney. “Pilot says it’ll be about half an hour before we take off. You hungry? Can I get you something to eat while we wait?”
The first tear fell down Beth’s cheek like a storm cloud’s first heavy raindrop.
By the time the storm passed, the Earth lay far below.
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