Age of Legends Read online

  “Mr LeRoy told me about Wayland the Smith,” said Smith. “He told me that was who I was now. What clinched it was when he gave me a hammer to hold. This hammer.”

  “Just some old hammer that had been lying around the funfair,” Mr LeRoy said. “Nothing special.”

  “But it felt special in my hand,” Smith said. “All of a sudden I knew I could do anything with it. Make anything. Repair anything. Mr LeRoy picked up one of the empty bottles I’d left lying on the floor of the shelter. He dropped it. It smashed. ‘Put that back together,’ he said. And I did. I couldn’t believe it even as I was doing it, but I fused the broken pieces of glass back into a single bottle, label and all, completely intact, with just a few light taps of the hammer. I knew somehow where to hit and how hard, as though by instinct.”

  He chuckled wistfully.

  “And that was that. I was no longer who I had been. I was this new entity. From that day on, there was no more drinking. By then, though, there was also no possibility of going back to my old life. I’d had a partner, Lianne. A son, Jacob. I’d been drinking in order to forget about them, to avoid even thinking about them. Now, a year and a half on, too much time had passed and I was too different. I could never re-join them. They would assume, anyway, that I was dead. They would have mourned me and moved on. I couldn’t just waltz back into their lives and hope we could pick up where we had left off. Mr LeRoy was offering me a new home, a new family. What could I do but accept?”

  “You were always free to return to your true family, any time,” Mr LeRoy said.

  “And I tried. Often I would drift away from Summer Land with vague ideas about going to my old house and turning up on the front doorstep, but sooner or later I’d always drift back.”

  “You could still go back to Lianne and Jacob,” Ajia said. “Why are you looking at me like that? It’s not impossible. Bloody hell, if I had the chance to be with my mum again, I’d take it like a shot. And my dad, although that would be a bit harder to organise, on account of he’s dead.”

  “You haven’t spoken much about your former life, Ajia,” said Smith. “And of course, we’ve none of us enquired. It’s your business.” He looked at her pointedly.

  “Fair’s fair.” Ajia shrugged. “You’ve shown me yours. My turn to show you mine. And it’s not as if the mood in this car could get any more depressed. You guys want the full grisly tale? Brace yourselves.”

  She told them about the forced repatriation of her mother and grandparents, and about her father’s subsequent suicide.

  “I was parentless at sixteen, but just too old to be taken into care. Occasional checks from social workers were all I got, and their funding was being cut month by month. After a while they didn’t have the staff numbers to keep up the visits. I seemed to be getting along okay so they left me to it. I needed money so I ditched college and got a job bike couriering, but even then I couldn’t keep up the rent on our flat without digging into my dad’s savings. When the money ran out, I moved into a bedsit. Street art was about the only thing that kept me sane. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have taken the same option my dad did, and you, Smith. And then the cops shot me and beat me to death. But hey”––she faked a breezy, tra-la-la laugh––“what can you do? One minute you’re up, next you’re down. Life’s crazy like that.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN, the rain relented. As the sky lightened, Smith got to work ridding the Land Rover of its bullet holes and the bars he had forged over the windows until it looked like a normal, if still veteran, car again.

  With Mr LeRoy at the wheel once more, they drove northward, keeping to minor roads. There were too many cameras on motorways with numberplate recognition technology, and too many unmarked police patrols.

  They filled up with diesel at a small, out-of-the-way petrol station, where Mr LeRoy bought a selection of fairly unappetising snacks for breakfast. He paid cash. He told Ajia that since founding Summer Land he hadn’t used debit or credit cards or carried out any kind of electronic transaction, so as not to give the government financial spoor to track.

  “Luckily I had the presence of mind to grab the week’s takings as Perry and I sneaked out of my caravan,” he remarked as they pulled onto the road again. “A decent sum but it’s not going to last forever. I don’t suppose either of you is carrying any money?”

  Ajia was in a T-shirt and a pair of soft cotton tracksuit bottoms, nightwear which could just about pass for daywear but lacked pockets of any sort. Not that it would have mattered even if she had been in her daytime clothes. She didn’t own a wallet any more and didn’t have a penny to her name. Smith was just as cash-strapped.

  “Well,” Mr LeRoy said, “perhaps Smith’s friend in Nottingham will help us out.”

  “Wouldn’t bet on it,” Smith muttered.

  “I thought he was all for donating to good causes.”

  “As far as he’s concerned, there isn’t a better cause than himself.”

  Summer Land had confined its operations to the south of England, principally the Home Counties, where there was still relative prosperity and people had a few spare quid to spend on entertainment. As the Land Rover wound its way up into the Midlands, signs of neglect and deprivation were more and more in evidence. Out of the window Ajia saw fallow crop fields overgrown with poppies, thistles and tall grasses, and farm machinery sitting idle, succumbing to rust. Here and there, smoke from fires smudged the horizon. Verges were choked with litter and played host to the occasional broken-down vehicle, long since abandoned and stripped of salvageable parts. Manufacturing plants stood derelict, walls scrawled with slogans about Derek Drake and the Resurrection Party, as many pro as anti. A few wind turbines stood wreathed in ivy, unmaintained, their static blades like arms raised in supplication. Several of the towns the car passed through didn’t have a single shop that was open for business, and even at this early hour gangs of youths hung around at war memorials and other municipal monuments, drinking from cans, scuffling with one another and harassing passers-by. Other towns had barricades across the roads which led into them, guarded by people dressed in army-surplus gear and toting shotguns and pistols. Part survivalist, part concerned citizen, these municipal militias had rallied in defence of their homes against both a lawless society and what they perceived as a government hostile to their interests.

  To Ajia, groggy from lack of sleep and horrified by the events of the previous night, this part of the country looked as lousy as she felt. Like her, England was shellshocked and desolate, and she knew that the further north you went, the worse it got. Of course she had seen images of the nation’s ailing regions on the news and social media, but it was one thing to look at video on a screen, another to watch the sights themselves roll by in an endless sorry parade. Eventually her eyelids drooped and she drowsed off. It wasn’t so much exhaustion as a defence mechanism, her mind saying enough.

  She awoke to find that the Land Rover had halted. Mr LeRoy had pulled into a lay-by––one of the rare ones that wasn’t a dumping ground for defunct white goods and items of broken furniture––and was poring over a dog-eared road atlas.

  “We nearly there?” she asked, but Smith shushed her.

  “He’s concentrating,” he said.

  Mr LeRoy’s eyes were half-closed and his lips were pursed. He raised a hand over the open page of the atlas, palm down, and began moving it around and around in a figure of eight.

  “What’s he up to?” Ajia whispered.

  “Divining,” said Smith. “He’s using the atlas to help him locate my friend. He can sense he’s close by. The map––any map––allows him to refine his search.”

  Ajia had heard about certain people who could find underground water sources and mineral deposits using a map and a pendulum, a form of dowsing. Mr LeRoy, it seemed, could do something similar for eidolons.

  “Where are we anyway?” she said, looking outside. “Looks like the middle of nowh––”

  “I am,” said Mr LeRoy loudly and sternly, “quit
e busy here. If you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

  As quietly as she could, so as not to disturb him any further, Ajia opened the car door and got out. Smith looked questioningly at her. She crossed her legs and bobbed up and down, mime for I need a pee. He gave her a thumbs up, then tapped an imaginary wristwatch, mime for don’t be too long.

  She scaled the steep roadside bank in search of a secluded spot. Thick forest lay before her, with bushy undergrowth that came up to her thighs. She waded into the greenery, steering clear of the clumps of stinging nettles. Everything was still damp from the overnight rain and beginning to steam in the sunlight. A few dozen yards from the road, the sound of traffic was dimmed, just the occasional muted whoosh of a passing vehicle. Raucous birdsong and the rustle of leaves engulfed her. She found an oak with a massive, gnarly trunk, broader than she was tall, and squatted behind it.

  She was just finishing up when she sensed something was amiss. All at once, the birds had stopped singing.

  She tugged up her tracksuit bottoms and stood. As a city girl born and bred, she didn’t know if sudden hushes like this were common in the countryside, but somehow it didn’t feel normal. The forest seemed to be offended by a presence in its midst, cringing from it as if in revulsion. Not her presence, she thought. Someone else’s.

  Could the Paladins have caught up with them already? Were they about to spring an ambush?

  She tensed, ready to flee. She could be back at the Land Rover in under a second.

  She scanned around. Maybe she was just imagining things. After all she’d been through, not least the slaughter at Summer Land, nobody could blame her for getting spooked.

  Amid the tree shadows, dead ahead of her, something glowed.

  A pair of eyes.

  Blood-red eyes at waist height, staring at her.

  She discerned a shape around the eyes, a patch of ragged darkness. The silhouette of some sort of dog. Large, shaggy and with fur as black as night.

  Then teeth. A sickle grin of white fangs, and an accompanying growl which was so deep it was almost subsonic.

  The dog padded out from the shadows, making for Ajia. She twisted to her left, only to find an even more alarming-looking apparition stalking towards her through the undergrowth. It was a scrawny, human-like thing, going on all fours, haunches in the air, with two large tusks sticking up from its lower jaw. Scraps of animal fur were attached to its body, glued in place with blood, and the skin left exposed was criss-crossed with scars, much as if the creature had been torn apart and stitched back together again. Its eyes were glassy and full of horrible glee.

  Ajia was almost too terrified to tear her gaze from this monstrosity, but she did, swinging to her right, the only direction that still offered an escape route.

  Except, it didn’t any more.

  A tall, muscular man stood there with his long arms dangling by his sides. He was naked and exceptionally hairy, and he had a tail which twitched and coiled behind him like an irritated cat’s. His brow was Neanderthal-large, a jutting ledge from beneath which a pair of small, gimlet eyes peered.

  He grinned. He knew, as Ajia did, that she was surrounded. She had the oak at her back, to the south, and the hairy man, the scrawny beast and the black dog were closing in on her from east, west and north respectively. She wished she had the paring knife with her, but she had left it back at the Land Rover. She’d had no idea she might need it.

  Still, her three opponents weren’t necessarily quicker than her.

  She dug her feet into the soft, loamy ground and darted into the gap between the hairy man and the black dog.

  The dog pounced to the side, intercepting. Ajia skidded to a halt so as not to collide with it. She swivelled through a quarter turn and sprinted again. Again the dog jumped into her path, checking her.

  The black dog had reflexes to match her speed. Its glowing eyes, bright with triumph, said it knew this and knew Ajia knew too. Whichever way she ran, the dog could obstruct her. Right now it was toying with her, but its bared fangs were a promise that in the near future, at a moment of its choosing, it would rend her to pieces.

  Then the bony thing with the animal fur stuck to it began to sing. The melody was simple but sinister, with the repetitive cadences of a nursery rhyme:

  Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones

  Steals naughty children from their homes,

  Takes them to his dirty den,

  And they are never seen again.

  Its voice was guttural, and the words themselves were slurred, those two tusks creating a speech impediment.

  “Are you a naughty girl?” it asked Ajia, drool leaking from the corner of its mouth. “Would you like to come back to my dirty den? We can play together. I know games. You won’t like them but I do. One is called ‘Which Body Part Shall I Eat First?’”

  Ajia recoiled, retreating until her back was against the oak once more. The hairy man now loomed large over her, his tail more agitated than ever. She noticed––How could I have missed that?––a compact digital camera strapped to his shoulder, the lens peeking out through the thick tufts of his pelt. He was recording this? Either that or someone was monitoring proceedings remotely. Somehow the second possibility seemed the likelier. The hairy man didn’t look intelligent enough to know what a camera was, let alone how to operate one.

  As if to confirm her suspicion, the hairy man let out a throaty chortle––“Hurrgh hurrgh hurrgh”––which was as moronic a laugh as Ajia had ever heard. He spread his arms wide, waggling long, spatulate fingers in the air. He wanted to seize her, and no doubt not to give her a friendly hug.

  There was one option still open to her: going upward. She spun round and began clambering up the oak at full speed. A couple of large knobbly burrs near the base of the trunk provided footholds from which she sprang to grab one of the lower boughs.

  The black dog, seeing this, hurled itself after her. Its claws missed her by a hair’s breadth, raking the rough bark instead and digging furrows. It growled in frustrated fury and tried leaping to catch her, only to keep slithering back down to the ground. Ajia hauled herself from the bough to an equally thick branch above, and then to another less thick branch above that one.

  She paused there, straddling the branch. Should she shout for help? The Land Rover wasn’t far away. Smith and Mr LeRoy could be there in moments, and Smith could fashion cages out of the trees to corral the three creatures.

  That was assuming the creatures didn’t kill him first, and Mr LeRoy.

  She didn’t want them to die rescuing her. But she didn’t much fancy dying herself. Again. What should she do?

  She heard scuffling sounds below. The hairy man was swinging his way up the oak towards her, as agilely as any monkey.

  Ajia immediately started climbing again, fast as she could. The hairy man followed, only slightly slower than she was. He seemed quite at home in trees, even using his tail, prehensile-fashion, as an additional limb.

  Soon Ajia was near the top of the oak, higher than she wanted to go, vertiginously high. She had to halt. The branches here were barely able to support her. And still the hairy man kept coming.

  The moment his looning face was within reach, she lashed out at it with her foot. He avoided the kick and swung round the trunk. He continued clambering upwards on the opposite side of the tree until he was level with her, then began approaching her laterally, shinning from branch to branch. He kept up that low chortling of his throughout, while down on the ground the black dog barked and the bony, scarred abomination––Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones? Was that its name?––crooned that sordid song.

  Ajia backed away along the branch she was on, as far as she dared. The tree limb bent beneath her with a worrying groan. It bowed all the more when the hairy man joined her on it, adding his weight to hers. Either he was too stupid to realise the branch was in danger of breaking or he didn’t care. The blank deadness of his gaze was matched by the blank deadness of the camera lens on his shoulder. Ajia wond
ered if whoever was watching the feed from the camera was getting off on her distress, or was just some dispassionate observer who didn’t give a damn.

  The hairy man edged closer along the branch. He looped his tail around a parallel branch for extra support, sliding it along as he went. If this branch should snap, he had given himself a safety rope. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he acted; or maybe he just had an ingrained, animalistic instinct for self-preservation.

  Now he was almost within touching distance. The branch, meanwhile, was making deep splintering creaks at its junction with the trunk. Ajia reckoned it could part company from the rest of the oak at any second.

  Then the hairy man stiffened. He frowned, looking utterly flummoxed. His gaze went to his flank, from which a slender wooden rod several inches long now protruded. An arrow, with feather flights at the end. It was embedded in the hairy man at an acute angle, clearly having been fired from below.

  A second arrow joined it, thudding into the hairy man’s belly. He let out a yawp of pain and shock. His dull eyes grew duller, his tail relaxed its grip on the parallel branch, and he keeled sideways, plummeting through the oak’s leafy crown and striking several other branches on his way down to the forest floor. He hit the ground with an almighty thump.

  Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones gave a cry of dismay. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “Who did that?”

  Then, snarling, the black dog shot off through the undergrowth. Ajia, from her precarious vantage point, watched the animal streak between the trees, an ebony blur. It was homing in on some target she couldn’t see.

  Then the dog was rolling over and over, legs flailing. It managed to regain its feet but it was whimpering now and trembling terribly. There was an arrow shaft in its hindquarters, the end splintered.

  The black dog limped on, as determined as before to reach its quarry, but it was barely able to walk. Its head sagged. Its tongue lolled.