Ancient Images Part 16

"Or an oral examination."

"Right now all I can take is suggestion therapy."

Being married must feel something like this, Sandy thought, this swapping of amiable innuendos, this sleepy contentment that made it unnecessary to put them into practice. "I guess I may take my leg to bed," Roger said eventually, and when she had pulled the quilt over him: "Stay if you want to, just as you like."

She undressed and slipped under the quilt with him, ------------------------------------250 intending only to spend a peaceful hour. She told him about her travels, about meeting people from the film and her encounter with Enoch Hill, then she dozed and thought about Redfield. Once every fifty years was less than once a generation: a generation was supposed to be thirty-three years, the length of Christ's life. Suppose the fifty-year cycle was some kind of token ritual that kept the tradition of bloodshed alive? If so, who was performing the ritual? "There he is now," Roger muttered in his sleep, and for a moment she thought the man with the carton had returned and was outside the window; she even thought she smelled stale food, or food mixed with earth. She made herself waken, and the impression faded. Giles Spence's death might have been a coincidence, she told herself, but if it hadn't been, what could she do? p.r.i.c.kly dissatisfaction weighed on her, and she seemed unable to crawl out from beneath it, able only to escape from it into sleep.

She got up before dawn, and left Roger a note. The streets were deserted and silent except for a noise like wind through a dry field, which she identified as the sound of a truck brushing the curbsides. She caught a train home, where she bathed and changed her clothes, and went to work.

She had grown so impatient with feeling she was being followed that she almost closed the doors on a news producer, one of those she'd argued with outside Boswell's office. He stared at her for the first two floors as if to ascertain from her expression if she had meant to shut him out, and then he said sarcastically, "I see your camera-shy friends have found someone else to defend them."

"That restores my faith in humanity," she said as another floor murmured by. "Who?"

"Some landowner up north who says they can camp on his property while they work out where they're heading, a.s.suming they've enough brain cells left between them."

The lift had reached his floor. Sandy had to restrain ------------------------------------251 herself from grabbing his arm to stay him. "Do you happen to know what he's called?"

"His lordship? He's called the same as his land. Your friends had better hope it doesn't live up to its name." The doors closed behind him, trapping her with his answer. "The name is Redfield." ------------------------------------252 The lift soared up, blinking its numbers, and Sandy's thoughts sped faster. Enoch's Army mustn't go to Redfield. She had barely tasted the hostility that lay in wait there for strangers, but if anything was capable of releasing the violence that drowsed beneath the contentment of Redfield, it would be the convoy of scapegoats. Fifty years, her mind intoned like a refrain, and she wondered if the scale of the violence she foresaw could be what the land and its token bloodlettings had been waiting for. She strode out of the lift and down the corridor, into the editing room.

Lezli was running the image of a politician's face back and forth, making him rant in the voice of a cartoon mouse. "Lezli," Sandy said, "would you feel too much under pressure if I had to go away for another few days?"

"I'd miss you, but I quite like the pressure. Helps me grow."

"I'm pleased for you. Don't tell anyone I asked you this, but are we still following Enoch's Army?"

"No, we gave up on trying for an interview. We're taking film from the local networks. I believe one of the landed gentry is offering Enoch's lot a breathing s.p.a.ce."

"Do you happen to know when they'll get there?"

"I can find out. I'll say it's me who wants to know." She phoned down to a newsman and told Sandy, "Looks like it should be late tomorrow afternoon."

"So can you hold the fort here for the rest of the week? 8 "If you need me to I will. Tell me what I've been ------------------------------------253 helping you with when you can, all right? You can buy the drinks."

Sandy went up to the top floor and sat on a hard couch. Ten minutes later Emma Boswell's secretary sent her in. Boswell's nails were golden today, and flashed as Boswell flourished her hands on both sides of her face in a welcoming gesture. "Settling back in?"

"Certainly am, though I feel I hardly need to, the way Lezli has been coming on."

"I hear she's good, and I'm pleased you feel able to say so. Was that it?"

"No, I wanted to ask--was Sandy made herself relax so that she wouldn't sound too eager. "I wouldn't ask if Lezli weren't doing so well, but I wonder if I could take a few days of my holidays."

"You haven't settled into work as well as you were claiming, then."

"It isn't that. A friend of mine was in an accident and can't get about by himself. There's a journey up north that has to be made."

"Can't anyone else undertake it?"

"There's only me."

"You must be close," Boswell said, and sighed. "When are we talking about your leaving and returning?"

"Ideally I should go today, now, if possible, and I might be away for the rest of the week."

"Nothing in life is ideal." Boswell gazed at her for what seemed to Sandy an unnecessarily long time. "You'd better have a word with news. If they don't object to your going I don't suppose I can either, but I shouldn't like to find that you've caused any problems."

Problems were fine so long as they could be filmed for broadcasting, Sandy amended, but they weren't the kind she intended to cause. When she told the newsroom that she needed to leave on an errand of mercy, n.o.body objected. She said goodbye to Lezli and hurried away. ------------------------------------254 A placard for the Daily Daily Friend Friend stood against the railings of Hyde Park. stood against the railings of Hyde Park. ENOCH's ARMY OFFERED RESTING ENOCH's ARMY OFFERED RESTING PLACE, it said. Beyond it a tramp was gripping the railings and staring out at her side of the road. A trick of the sunlight as it flickered behind a rush of clouds made him seem impossibly thin, framed by altogether too few railings, and his face looked more like a lump of the park. She shivered as a shadow rushed at her, and ran into the Underground. it said. Beyond it a tramp was gripping the railings and staring out at her side of the road. A trick of the sunlight as it flickered behind a rush of clouds made him seem impossibly thin, framed by altogether too few railings, and his face looked more like a lump of the park. She shivered as a shadow rushed at her, and ran into the Underground.

Instead of going straight home she caught the train to Roger's. He'd managed to position himself at his desk, his plastered leg poking out to one side, and was leafing desultorily through a printout of a chapter. "You're back early," he said.

"Just to see how you are and give you this." She kissed him and eventually stood up. "I've got to go back up north."

"Only for the film, I hope."

"I expect I'll take the chance to bring it back, but I don't know what you'll think of my reason for going." She filled a gla.s.s with water from the kitchen tap and gulped it to ease her throat, which was suddenly dry. "Enoch Hill and his tribe are on their way to Redfield at Lord Redfield's invitation."

He crossed out a phrase and sprawled the pages facedown on his desk. "You don't think they'll be welcomed."

"Not in a way they would want to be."

"You're saying Lord Redfield is luring them into some kind of trap?"

"I don't know if he means to. The sort of violence I'm afraid he may provoke wouldn't do much for the Redfield image. Maybe he thinks he can control his town, but this is one situation where I'm sure he can't. Maybe he genuinely doesn't realize what he's doing, but he should, for heaven's sake. Ignorance isn't supposed to be an excuse, especially when you've as much power as he has." She swallowed some of her harshness and said, "The b.u.g.g.e.r of it is, I feel partly responsible. I took him to task about the way his ------------------------------------255 newspaper had kept after Enoch's Army, and he may even be trying to make amends."

Roger heaved himself round in his swivel chair, his leg b.u.mping in an arc. "But are you really saying this is happening because these fifty years are up?"

"Roger, I don't know," she said, wishing he hadn't asked, and glanced at her watch. "I should be on my way. Let me just make a call to find out where to head for."

The AA told her that the convoy was in the Fens, moving slowly north. With luck, though she was loath to consider how much of that she might need, she would be able to turn Enoch away from Redfield and then go on to Lincoln to retrieve the film. "I ought to thank you for helping when you didn't even know you were," she said to Roger. "I said I had to chauffeur you about, to get the time off work."

"Sounds like what the doctor ordered. Where's the car?"

"At my place. Wait, though, I didn't mean--was "But I do, Sandy. You could fit me in, couldn't you? Maybe you'd like to have some company on the road. Maybe I might even turn out to be some use."

"You already are, and a whole lot more than that," Sandy said, and held his hands and squeezed them harder than she meant to. When he didn't wince she smiled into his eyes. "I'll go home and get the car," she said impulsively. She needn't feel selfish for letting him come with her, not when his book was at such a low ebb. Whatever the reason, she had just realized that she would rather not be alone on the road. ------------------------------------256 They started out well. Roger loaded himself into the pa.s.senger seat and patted his outstretched leg as if it were a dog that he was pacifying. When Sandy found that the act of shifting gears rapped her knuckles on the plaster, he picked up his bundle of leg and swung it over a few inches. His crutches lay diagonally across the back seat with his coat draped over them to stop them rattling. "Here goes the last leg of the journey," Sandy said with a grin at his plaster.

"We hope."

She was on the Great North Road before the lunchtime traffic began to bunch where trucks were parked. As she drove past signs for Elstree and Borehamwood, Roger gave an appreciative laugh as if he had seen a small joke in a film. Soon the car was on the motorway, and then among the traffic circles of Hatfield. She remembered Harry Manners, and realized that he was the only person she had interviewed about the film who hadn't been nervous during the interview--unless his heartiness had been meant to conceal that he was.

She followed the Roman road toward the pastures around the Ouse. Roger kept p.r.o.nouncing names of pa.s.sing villages and towns like a litany of Englishness: "Biggleswade, Potton, Duck's Cross ... Hail Weston, Diddington, Alconbury Weston ..." The land was growing older; lonely villages across the fields of gra.s.s looked as if they had absorbed time rather than let it change them. She could ------------------------------------257 never have imagined she would shiver at the sight of thatched roofs, and they were still hundreds of miles from Redfield.

"Pidley, Pode Hole, Dunsby, Dowsby, Horbling ...8 Roger seemed to be trying to distract himself while he shifted about in search of comfort. They were in the Fens now, fields of wheat interrupted by windmills, houses with Dutch gables, dikes, here and there an airstrip where dusty weeds danced, as if the land were expressing its victory over the concrete. The fields had had to be reclaimed from marshland, Sandy reminded herself: the land wasn't as old as Redfield, and so it surely couldn't be soaked in any similar tradition. All the same, the sight of miles of wheat flexing themselves as her car approached made her anxious to head off Enoch and his followers long before they were in sight of Redfield.

An hour further north along the winding road she saw them on the horizon to her left. Even at that distance the motley parade of vehicles looked more worn out than ever. At either end of the slow procession, police cars winked as if lapus lazuli were set into their roofs, catching the light of the bare sky in repeated lingering glares. To Sandy it looked unpleasantly ritualistic, as though the convoy were being ushered to the slaughter by a ceremonial guard.

Roger hoisted himself up in his seat, to see better or to relieve his discomfort. The minor road along which the convoy was being conducted disappeared over the horizon, and Sandy accelerated while Roger traced the roads on the map with his forefinger. "You're planning to head them off," he said.

"It seems the best idea."

"I believe I've a better one. I see where you should be able to join the road they're on in a few minutes, before they can see us."

"And then what?"

"Be honest with yourself, Sandy. Are-you really ex ------------------------------------258 pecting them to listen to you when they identify you with television? The way you told it to me, Enoch Hill is liable to feel you already tricked him once."

"But some of his people may listen. The woman I helped after I nearly ran her over," Sandy suggested, her voice sharp with hope. "I've got to try. If I don't stop them, who else will?"

Roger knocked on his plastered leg. "Behold the knight in armor."

"More like a knight who's fallen off his horse."

"Well, I guess that'll make me seem less threatening and give me more of a chance. You drop me once we get to their road and then you can go on to meet them, okay?"

She gave his arm an affectionate squeeze. "What are you thinking of? Using your leg as a roadblock?"

He hitched himself around in his seat, uncomfortably, to face her. "Don't you want us to do everything we can to stop what you're afraid of? If they won't listen to you they might listen to me. I recall enough of how I used to feel to sympathize with them. I dropped out for a while myself, until I got lazy and wanted to be comfortable."

She felt touched and yet angry with him. "Roger, how could I ask someone in your condition--was "You're not asking. I'm saying what I'll do. These guys aren't violent, I'll be in no danger. Look, there's the road they're on. Turn left here."

She had been turning the wrong way at the junction, she was so distracted by the argument her thoughts were having. Roger was determined to prove he was of use, but need that mean he wouldn't be? How could she abandon him in the middle of nowhere when he wasn't even able to run? If she did, wouldn't that force her to try harder to stop Enoch so that Roger wouldn't need to? Perhaps she was angry because Roger seemed not to realize the demands he was making on her. "This is it," he said suddenly, urgently. "Drop me now or they'll see what we're doing." ------------------------------------259 Her foot faltered on the accelerator, and then she braked. As soon as the car was stationary she dragged at the handbrake, which made a harsh toothed sound, and held on to his arm with both hands. "Roger, I truly don't think you should do this. You've been more help than you realize."

He opened the pa.s.senger door and leaned over to kiss her. "Then let's see what more I'm capable of," he said, and heaved himself out of the car, turning his wince into an expression of relief at being able to stretch. "Hand me my crutches, would you?" he said, his voice m.u.f.fled by the roof. "Better be quick."

The metal shafts of the crutches were as cold as the wind that was creeping out of the fields and through the open door. She wanted to refuse, but she thrust the crutches at him and wedged the rests beneath his armpits. As he stepped back, she heard the muddy verge smack its lips. He ducked in order to grin at her. "Don't wait around or you'll ruin my chances. Look at me now, how could these guys not take pity on me? Never mind worrying about me, you take care of yourself."

"You make sure you do," she said fiercely, the wind flattening her voice.

As she started the car he waved, wobbling so much he had to clap the hand to His prop. He was having a good time, she thought as he grinned, so why should she worry about him? In the mirror she saw him standing like a bemused sculpture, the tips of his crutches sunk in the verge, his plaster heel touching the gra.s.s. He tossed his head to flip back an unruly curl, and the field at his back quivered toward him. It was the motion of the car that swept him away, not the landscape that was carrying him off, but she twinged her neck for a last sight of him, lonely and immobilized and too unaware of how he looked.

She resisted the temptation to lift her foot from the accelerator. Now he was out of sight, at least a mile back, but there was no sign of Enoch's folk. She could have talked ------------------------------------260 to Roger at more length, she might have been able to persuade him to stay in the car. Her hands clenched on the wheel, her head ached with indecision, and then, above a dip in the road ahead, she saw a roadside oak grow momentarily blue with the light on the roof of the foremost police car.

She braked and veered the car across the road, backed almost into the ditch, swung the car onto the yielding verge on the nearside of the convoy. As the blue lamp glared beneath the oak, she climbed out of the car and leaned against the door. The police car rose from the dip, and then Enoch did, as if the police were drawing him along behind the vehicle, a captured warrior. The driver stared hard at Sandy, and she did her best to look like a casual spectator, though her throat felt blocked by her pulse. "Stay there until all this is past," he called out to her, and drove on as soon as she nodded, hardly hearing him, bracing herself to meet Enoch's scrutiny.

He frowned at her over the police car, then he stared straight ahead. He hadn't recognized her. Perhaps he was too exhausted, if he had led the procession on foot ever since she had last seen him. Dust from the roads had dulled the glint of his wiry hair and beard, had turned the ropes of which his vest and trousers were woven the color of dry earth. The veins of his weathered arms were more prominent than ever. The veins made her want to shout a warning to him or stand in his way, except that the police would intervene.

An ancient station wagon fumed by, the amiable moon- faces that were painted on its sides sinking into layers of dried mud. A hea.r.s.e sprayed with rainbows pa.s.sed, and then she saw the van embellished with clouds and sunbursts. The order of the vehicles had changed. The woman she'd helped was driving the van, and her son was beside her. "There's that lady," he shouted.

His mother craned across the wheel to peer through the sunlit grime of the windscreen, her thin pink face unpromisingly blank. Her son looked delighted, and slid back the ------------------------------------261 door as the van reached Sandy, who jumped onto the running board. "h.e.l.lo," she said. "Can I ride with you a little way?"

"I told you not to open that door when we're moving, Arcturus," the woman muttered as he made room for Sandy on the seat, "and you know what Enoch said."

The boy gave Sandy a glum look. "About me?" Sandy suggested, sliding the door shut.

"He won't answer you," the woman cautioned him.

"But you needn't be afraid to. Couldn't Enoch be wrong?"

"You would say that."

"Not necessarily. I'm on your side, remember. I helped you when you fell."

"Enoch says you did that so your crew could film us. Maybe you made me fall so you could help me, he says. I don't think you made me fall, but I don't like being used by anyone."

Pots and pans were jangling in the van's brightly painted interior, where a stove and two sleeping bags took up most of the floor s.p.a.ce, and the noise wasn't helping Sandy's nerves. "There you are, you're agreeing he was wrong," she said, and heard herself sounding even more suspect. "I'm not saying he's wrong in his beliefs. It's partly because of things he said to me and things you said that I'm here now."

The woman looked both incredulous and uninterested. "Don't say you want to join us."

"No, I want to warn you about where you're heading. I've just come back from there. I'm sure Enoch wouldn't lead you there if he knew what it was like."

The woman gave Sandy an ominous smile. "Well, now you can tell him," she said, and the door beside Sandy slammed open.

She had been so intent on her task that she hadn't noticed Enoch waiting for the van. His bristling face was ------------------------------------262 almost level with hers, his smell of sweat and rope was overwhelming. "I didn't realize it was you. I didn't expect we'd see you again," he said, so grimly that she thought he was about to heave her out of the van.

"I only came back because of what you told me. You said that land can grow hungry because people have forgotten what it wants."

"I did?"

"Something like it, anyway," Sandy insisted, desperate to stop the progress of the vehicles and Enoch's inexorable march before they came in sight of Roger, never mind Redfield. "The point is, the place you've been invited to is like that. They used to make human sacrifices to the land, and the bloodshed hasn't stopped. It's happened every fifty years, up to fifty years ago."

She sounded grotesque to herself. She was suddenly unconvinced, but did that matter? Surely it was the kind of thing Enoch believed. The woman driving the van was visibly troubled. "You mean you think we've been invited so that--was "She doesn't think that at all," Enoch rumbled. "She's acting, can't you tell? She thinks she's in one of her films, some horror film she made."

"I don't make make films," Sandy said, and saw that she was undermining her credibility even further. "I'm not suggesting you've been invited so you can be harmed. I've met the man who invited you, and I think he may not even realize what will happen, but doesn't that confirm what you were saying about how we've lost touch with the land?" films," Sandy said, and saw that she was undermining her credibility even further. "I'm not suggesting you've been invited so you can be harmed. I've met the man who invited you, and I think he may not even realize what will happen, but doesn't that confirm what you were saying about how we've lost touch with the land?"

Enoch growled in his throat. "Stop the van," he said.

As soon as the woman braked he leaned toward Sandy, his shoulders almost filling the doorway. "I don't believe you want to help us. I think you're still looking for something to film."

"I never have been. I wasn't when I met you," Sandy protested, hating her voice for trembling. "I'm telling you ------------------------------------263 I've been to Redfield, and they don't like strangers. I only just got away safely myself."

"Sounds like you're not popular anywhere. You're beginning to know what it feels like, are you? 8 He took hold of her wrist with a gentleness that felt like a threat of crushing her bones. "Get down. We've no more time to waste."

She appealed to the woman. "Please listen to me, for your own sake and Arcturus's."

The great hot rough hand tightened on her wrist. "I know what she wants," Enoch said. "To keep us on the road so they can film us. To cause us more trouble that their audience want to watch in their homes while they eat their dinner."

"You're right, that must be why they sent her," the woman cried. "This is my home, you b.i.t.c.h. You f.u.c.k off out of it right now."

Did the hysterical edge to her voice mean that Sandy had reached her? Sandy could only hope. She climbed down onto the verge and waited for Enoch to let go of her. She wouldn't plead or cry out because he was squeezing her wrist; he wouldn't dare to injure her, the police were too near. "Leave us alone," he growled, and released her. "Don't try to speak to any of my folk. I won't let you spoil this chance for us."

The procession was moving again. She peered beyond the repet.i.tive glare of the police car, but couldn't see Roger. Enoch watched her as she began to hurry to her car, half a mile back. She rubbed her bruised wrist when she was sure he couldn't see what she was doing, and ran past the vehicles, slipping on the verge. She would never get to Roger ahead of the convoy if she went on foot. She had to stop him, for wouldn't Enoch know that Roger was connected with her as soon as he began to warn them as she had?

But the police who were following the convoy refused to let her drive past. When she tried to overtake, the driver ------------------------------------264 gestured her back, looking ready to arrest her if she continued trying. The convoy wouldn't pick up Roger, she a.s.sured herself. Surely he would appear too suspicious, stuck in the middle of nowhere with no indication of how he had got there. Then her heart sank, for she could see the junction where she had joined this road. She must already have pa.s.sed the spot where she had abandoned Roger, and there had been no sign of him.

She followed the convoy for miles, hoping to see him put down at the roadside again, until the police car stopped in front of her. The driver tramped back to her, his face red, his lips thin. "If you don't leave off following," he said, "I'll declare you and your car unfit for the road." ------------------------------------265 So she had to go to Redfield after all. If necessary, she would have to block the road where it descended into the copse. She felt spiky with anger and frustration, but all the same, she had to be grateful to the police: at least Roger ought to be in no danger while they were near. Surely he was in no danger anyway; surely if he was suspected he would have been dropped by now. He must have realized that he needed to avoid sounding like her. She turned the car and drove south, feeling more watched than ever, even when the police were well over the horizon. At least she would be able to tell Roger when they next met that she had Giles Spence's film.

She found a phone box in a village so small it could barely have freckled the map, and called Norman Ross's son. "I'm in your part of the country earlier than I expected. I'm sorry it's such short notice, but I wondered ...8 "I a.s.sure you, the sooner you relieve us of this legacy the happier I'll be. When had you in mind?"

"Would today be inconvenient?"