Riding the Unicorn (Different Kingdoms)

  Also by Paul Kearney

  DIFFERENT KINGDOMS

  A Different Kingdom

  The Way to Babylon

  Riding the Unicorn

  THE MONARCHIES OF GOD

  Hawkwood's Voyage

  The Heretic Kings

  The Iron Wars

  The Second Empire

  Ships From The West

  THE MONARCHIES OF GOD

  OMNIBUS EDITIONS

  The Monarchies of God, Volume 1:

  Hawkwood and the Kings

  The Monarchies of God, Volume 2:

  Century of the Soldier

  THE MACHT

  The Ten Thousand

  Corvus

  Kings of Morning

  THE SEA BEGGARS

  The Mark of Ran

  This Forsaken Earth

  This edition published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  First published in the United Kingdom

  in 1994 by Gollancz

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-857-6

  Copyright © 1994, 2014 Paul Kearney

  Cover art by Pye Parr

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

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

  For Marie

  Acknowledgements:

  To John Wilkinson, as always,

  John McLaughlin and Richard Evans,

  still fighting my corner,

  and Superintendent

  Eugene Kearney, RUC.

  ‘Schizophrenia, like the Unicorn, is described in various ways by various people. And its elimination, like the capture of the Unicorn, appears to require some special conditions, not all of which have yet been specified. Finally, whether or not these conditions exist, belief in their existence has had significant consequences.’

  Schizophrenia: Behavioural Aspects, Salzinger, 1972

  PROLOGUE

  HE SEES THEM in his dreams...

  A COLUMN THAT extends for miles. It comes down from the mountains, a snake of people marching south with the rime and bite of the high passes written on their wind-burnt faces. Warriors in furs with iron swords, leading tall horses. Women crammed in the few wagons that have survived, or stumbling along beside their mates. Children hollow-eyed and silent, tramping with their elders or carried on bent backs. An entire people is on the move, their faces set towards the green world of the south whilst behind them the huge snow-covered peaks and ridges pierce the sky as far as the edge of sight—mountains they once deemed impassable. Tens of thousands march south, bruising the grass and scattering the wild things as they go. Thousands more lie frozen and still on the road behind them. They march like an army intent on conquest.

  AT NIGHT HE hears the stamp of their feet, the thunder of a hundred thousand hooves. In his sleep they move ever farther south, and he can smell the close-packed smell of the Host at their campfires. They are never stilled. They eat away at his reason.

  ONE

  THE EARLY SHIFT—the one he hated most. A dark, just-birthing morning, and the whole wing was filled with the sluice and clatter of buckets, brushes, the catwalks crawling with the pail-emptying queues, the smell already inching out of their covered containers. All the excrement of the night was being poured away by men still half-asleep. They shuffled in blue-clad lines, yawning, grinding the slumber from their eyes or staring stupidly into space. Unlit cigarettes dangled from the lips of a few. They were pasty, grey-yellow in the light of the overheads.

  ‘Come on, Greggs, we haven’t all fucking day.’

  ‘I dropped me fag in the bucket—me morning fag!’

  A ripple of laughter. ‘Shouldn’t have been sticking your nose into it, then! What were you looking for, your breakfast?’

  ‘Screw you!’ Said without conviction.

  ‘Move along and shut your mouth.’

  They shuffled past endlessly. Most did not look at Willoby as he stood, a black, silver-flecked statue, but some raised eyes filled with blank hatred, flicking away just before his own locked with them. A few, a very few, smiled or winked at him.

  Mawson the Mass-Murderer paused beside Willoby with his mop and pail. He was a tiny, wizened broomstick of a man, his bald head as pale and pitted as a golf ball.

  ‘Morning, Mr Willoby—another fine day in our salubrious establishment.’

  Willoby only grunted in reply. Mawson made his flesh creep. Despite his nickname, he was only in for one murder: that of a pretty young man on a London to Edinburgh train. But he had been in so long and behaved so well that he had become a trusty of sorts. Christ knew the Governor made some odd decisions in that line.

  ‘A nice film lined up for tonight we have, and ping-pong for those as likes it. I’m thinking we—’

  ‘Fuck off back to work, Mawson,’ Willoby said mildly, and the man shuffled away, mopping as he went, face expressionless.

  Some screws cultivated Mawson, for he knew all that went on in the wing—in the whole prison. But he was a queer, a right fucking nut-case in Willoby’s opinion. When he got out, whenever that might be, he would be chatting up pretty boys in trains again.

  Christ, the smell. The piss smell in the morning, the unwashed smell, the old food smell. It had sunk into the very bricks and boards of this place. It had clotted in the mortar. High time they pulled the shithole down, built something new. Something different, for God’s sake.

  He snatched a glance at his watch. Eight hours to go. Purgatory passing. Looking up, he saw the blackened skylights high above. Still dark. Still night. Somewhere beyond the glass the stars wheeled; Canopus the Dog was rising and Venus was a last gleam on the lightening horizon, but not a man in here would see them until the steel gate of Her Majesty’s pleasure had banged shut on his back. Years hence it would be, for some of them.

  The prison tang caught in his throat for a second and the sweat popped out along the rim of his cap as he fought the panic, the screaming pressure of the walls and the creeping queues.

  Oh, Jesus, not here.

  But it passed, and he was Willoby the big bad screw again. Willoby the hard bastard with the flint eyes.

  My luck won’t last for ever, he thought as the last of the trembling died away. One day it’ll hit me as I stand here, and they’ll laugh their fucking heads off as I go down.

  The thought steeled him. His face stiffened further. Passing prisoners avoided the fish-cold stare, affording him a grim kind of pleasure. He was lucky in being a big man, with a prize-fighter’s nose and shoulders broad as a door. The years were thickening his middle, but by Christ he could still hospitalize any bastard that tried it on with him. Oh, yes.

  They were filtering back to their cells now, preparing for breakfast. He jangled the chain of keys in his pocket gently. When this shift finished, he would not go straight home. He would drive out of the city, up to the moors, and he would sit with the windows open and listen to the wind and the silence.

  Except that he would not. He knew he would go homewards, and pick up Maria from school, and crack jokes she never understood on the way. And he would doze in front of the telly until Jo came back from work and cooked his dinner.

  Just there, hovering still—the panic and the blackness at the edge of vision. The need for violence, shouting and running. He closed his
eyes momentarily, hoping to see something else when they were open again, some other world, perhaps. Mawson slopped water on the shining boots from his mop and went ashen, but Willoby did not even see him.

  Close—so close.

  But no cigar. Not this time. He had sweated through it again, and the inmates had not even noticed.

  ‘You all right, Will?’ another black-uniformed figure asked, striding up.

  ‘In the pink, Howard. These bloody early shifts, though—I hate them. It’s a God-awful hour to be awake.’

  ‘The dog watch, I know.’ Both Howard and Willoby had been in the army before this, and they knew the limb-leaden weariness of the last hours before dawn, when the body was at its lowest ebb.

  ‘Still, finishing at three isn’t so bad. I get a lot done around the house after an early, and the wife likes the dinner cooked for her for a change.’

  Willoby looked at him quickly. Howard was a purple-faced, corpulent man, the kind who would accumulate weight with every year he made it past thirty until the first heart attack at forty. He liked his grub. So did Willoby, but that did not mean cooking it himself.

  ‘Things to do.’ And Willoby walked away with his hands behind his back. He was blind to the line of prisoners; the last of the slopping-out line. Breakfast smells wafted from the mess hall below overlaid with a rancid veneer, like greasy fingerprints on a glass. His own stomach was knotted and closed. He was not a breakfast person. A tot of whisky, though—that would be welcome now, by Christ. A little pick-me-up. And he glanced around as though the thought had been audible. But the kitchen clatters and the talk and the feet on the metal catwalks were enough to drown out a storm.

  What is wrong with me?

  The notion popped into his head, as startling and un-welcome as a whore at a wedding. It sat there with the early morning racket playing around it.

  ‘Give us a fag, Bromley!’

  ‘Fuck off—smoke your own!’

  ‘You tight bastard!’

  ‘That’s enough there, Sykes.’

  Nothing wrong that a stiff drink and a bit of quiet wouldn’t cure. The wind-rushing stillness of the moors, with only the buzzards for company.

  ‘Move along there. We don’t want our breakfasts to get cold, do we lads?’

  ‘It’s always bloody cold anyway.’

  ‘Yesterday’s bloody leftovers, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Oh, Christ, that fucking noise! Couldn’t they shut their mouths just for one morning—just once?

  The sweat was trickling down his face and his back felt like sun-heated sand under the heavy tunic and shirt. Too warm—too warm in here. Too many people, all of them fucking scum, criminals, wasters. Wouldn’t they love it if hard man Willoby cracked up in front of their eyes? They’d fucking cheer.

  Here it comes again.

  Mustn’t, mustn’t. Must not. All that money spent keeping them here, just so John Willoby could walk up and down this brick and iron hell in a stifling coat, with a black hat squeezing down on the bones of his skull.

  He groaned aloud, the sound lost in the morning cacophony. The world blurred, and he had to grip the metal handrail that bordered the catwalk with both hands.

  Sweet Christ, what’s wrong with me?

  It was the voices again, the voices in his head, except that they were louder this time, more insistent. He could never understand the words. They were speaking foreign gobbledygook.

  No one else heard them. They were his alone. He had carried them for months now, as some men carried a hidden cancer. Ghosts, spirits, demons—they haunted him like a conversation heard through a thin wall.

  Like maggots squirming through his brain.

  He lurched into motion. He had to get off the wing, back to the staff quarters. He had to get away to where he would not be seen.

  A prisoner in his path was shouldered aside and left sprawling, shouting obscenities. Willoby was almost running.

  He hit the bars and wire of the catwalk door with a crash, and for a second a scream was gagging in his throat, his eyes wide and white, the voices crawling across his mind; incomprehensible, alien, impossible. He scrabbled frantically at the bars, then remembered his keys. The voices were shouting now, shrieking—and underlying the unknown words was the growing thunder of hoofbeats. Galloping horses, a squadron of them coming up behind him. He heard a high, aching whine, like that of a child, but never thought of it as coming from his own, tightening throat.

  His keys, his keys. He jabbed a shaking hand into his pocket, dropped them to the length of their chain, got them again, stabbed them clattering against the lock.

  ‘Open, open, Christ God. Open you bastard...’

  The hoofbeats were right at his back. They were an earth-trembling roar.

  The key turned, the door opened and he fell through it, crawled forward and kicked it shut behind him with a clang. Shutting them out.

  Safe now. Safe here.

  His cap was off, lying beside him. His chest was easing. He felt as soaked and racked as a sprinter. The voices were a final, whispering echo that died into soothing silence. Nothing. Nothing there but the prison noises.

  Oh, my God, what is wrong with me?

  ‘WHAT HAVE YOU done to him?’ the Prince asked curiously. ‘What was it you put into his mind to make him act so?’

  ‘What was it I asked you to think of, sire?’

  ‘Why, the—the manhunt, the pursuit of the traitor Carberran. Is that, then, what he was seeing?’

  ‘Partly. The link is tenuous yet. This is a shadowed land we walk in, my Prince. Best we tread slowly, and as softly as a cat’s footfall.’

  ‘Indeed. It is a hideous land also. This man, though, he interests me. We will stay with him. He may suit our purpose.’

  FOR THE FIRST time in fourteen years Willoby did not complete his shift, and the occasion was like a mark of shame, following him as surely as the puzzled looks of his colleagues. He had walked these corridors hungover, bronchitic and exhausted, but hitherto had always lasted out his eight or twelve hours, even if it meant Howard covering for him whilst he groaned over a toilet rim. Not this time. His ailment was different, and no longer possible to ignore.

  The prison receded. It was a cold winter’s morning, the keen air spearing in through the open car windows and watering his eyes, clearing the fug from his brain. He had a few miles of open countryside to motor through before plunging into the sprawl of the city where he had his home.

  And he had time, time to play with. The thought made him pause with his lighter halfway to his mouth, the cigarette drooping and forgotten.

  Why, then, was he hurrying?

  To get back to Jo? She was still at work. Maria was at school. There was no one else.

  The novelty of the situation fascinated him. He slowed down, lit the cigarette, dragged deeply.

  Open moorland, the end heights of the western Pennines. It was all around him, a bleak, sombre bowl of vast emptiness, populated only by sheep and stone walls. He stopped the car, opened the door and laboured out.

  Cold, bloody cold. The wind caressed his thinning hair, sped the glow of his cigarette into a tiny, bright hell.

  This is better. This is better for the head, for everything.

  The morning’s events slid to the back of his mind. There was something about this country that soothed him. The city scab was a distant blur on the horizon. Here the fells swelled from streams and rivers to green slopes, then up to tops purple-grey with heather and rock, desolate.

  This feeds my soul, he thought, and tossed away the cigarette, drew in a big lungful of the sharp air.

  Someone on a horse behind him.

  He turned, feeling the hoofbeats through his soles. They drew near, then faded again. The chink of harness had been audible, and the animal’s breathing.

  Except that there was nothing there.

  Strangely, he was not alarmed. Nothing threatened him here. The noise was not burrowing into his head in the same way it had in the prison.

/>   Ghosts? Poltergeists? Hallucinations?

  Madness?

  And the calm broke. A car flew past, the passenger’s face a white blur. Willoby felt the first hard spots of rain.

  Am I going mad?

  No answer in the rain or the flanks of the fells. He smiled, an expression that, unknown to him, chilled prisoners and fellow warders alike.

  Big Will, a basket case.

  Visions of himself strait-jacketed and drooling, banging his head against a padded wall.

  The smile faded.

  I need a drink. Several.

  And then drive Maria home from school? She’d love that, her dad smelling like a brewery. Fucking teenagers. You give them the best days of your life but nothing is ever enough.

  ‘My daughter hates me,’ he said aloud. The smile again. Several drinks. Several and several. Maybe Jo would be in the mood tonight.

  Quite suddenly, he ached to hold his wife, be held by her. And he laughed, running his big fingers over his face. I must be mad, he thought. When had he last screwed his wife? No—

  When did we last make love?

  What was in his head, messing up his thoughts like this? These stupid questions.

  A vision of Jo as a fresh-faced girl, dark, cropped hair and that upturned nose. The light in the brown eyes, long ago. She was blonde now, for she had hated the grey hairs. Blonde and tired, and she wore too much make-up.

  He shook his head, a big mountain of a man running to seed, standing baffled by the roadside with the rain pelting down on him unheeded.

  Get a grip, Willoby.

  Just for an instant, he caught a glimpse of some internal desolation, his mind’s skeleton parading across a wide expanse of pallid years. The rain dripped into his eyes and he knuckled them dry.