The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) Read online

  Savagely he pushed the encroaching memories away and strove to think of other things. His books. There had been two characters like those of his dream in the second, he remembered, but their names escaped him, which was irritating. And the giants from the mountains—Rime Giants, creatures of the glaciers who marauded the lowlands in the depths of the bleakest winters...

  Moonlight on the lawn turned it into a flawless snowfield, and he winced. Winter. He felt he would never be free of it. So many doors in his mind had been frozen up and were closed to him. His imagination creaked with ice. My livelihood, he thought glumly, and he remembered Hugh’s words. So the fans were hungering for the last of the trilogy. Well, maybe if he could churn it out somehow, it would be enough.

  But Jenny was in there, in that world of mountains and giants and desperate swordsmen.

  He flinched away from the thought. Time heals, he reminded himself bitterly. But when will I have the guts to finally go home? He recalled Molesy’s ramblings. Remember where you have to go. Easy for you to say, you loopy old bastard.

  He thumped the arm of the chair. Come on, Riven. What happened to the soldier in there? Where did he go?

  There had been a Greenjacket officer who had been to Oxford with him, an impossibly good-natured gentleman who had once led his platoon in an attack whilst chanting the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon. And that had completed a circle somehow—the myth had met the reality and had in a strange way become the same.

  It’s why I began writing. To make my own myth. But the real world has a way of mocking things like that.

  The door opened and he jumped like a hare, half expecting to see a hulking monster stoop into the room with its eyes blazing. But it was only Nurse Cohen, her white uniform making a wraith of her in the moonlight.

  ‘Mr Riven, what are you doing up?’

  He shrugged. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  She laid a hand on his bare arm. Her fingers were warm against his skin. ‘You’re freezing! Come on, let me get you back into bed.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s all right. I’m fine.’

  She studied him for a long moment, standing in the shadow at the side of the window. ‘Bad dreams?’

  ‘Maybe. How do you know?’

  He thought she smiled slightly. ‘I look in on you now and again while you’re asleep. It’s my job. You cry in your sleep, Mr Riven.’

  Riven swore briefly and turned his face to the bright window again. ‘It’s not a fucking spectator sport, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Everyone’s sorry. I don’t want anybody’s sorrow. I just want some peace.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Everyone’s apologising,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I am sorry, really. I’m a cantankerous bastard at times.’ He paused. ‘And foul-mouthed, too.’ Jenny had always hated him swearing.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and sat on the windowsill so that the moonlight limned her in silver and made her face indecipherable. Riven caught himself wondering how old she was.

  ‘Will you ever write again?’ she asked unexpectedly.

  He did not reply, and she added: ‘I’ve read your books. They’re beautiful. All mountains and horses, and strong silent types.’

  He laughed despite himself.

  ‘Will you finish the story? Will you write the third?’

  He could not speak. The story finished me. My part in it is over. And Jenny’s. There will be other characters in it now. And he felt the damned tears crowding his eyes.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Listen, I didn’t mean to—oh, hell.’ She leaned over and suddenly hugged him close, so that his tears wet her neck. He clenched his teeth. Get a grip, man. He could feel the soft push of her breasts through the uniform.

  She withdrew, leaving him strangely desolate.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be missed on the wards. Will you be okay?’

  He nodded dumbly.

  She stared at him as if unsure, and then leaned forward again to kiss his scarred forehead.

  ‘Is this regular nursing procedure?’ he asked lightly.

  ‘There’s nursing and there’s nursing, Mr Riven.’ She stood up. ‘Remember, if you need me, just press your buzzer.’

  ‘Handier than whistling,’ he said with a thin smile.

  ‘Don’t let yourself get too cold. I’ll check on you a little later, and I want you asleep in bed. Good night.’

  His eyes followed her to the door. ‘Good night, lass,’ he whispered.

  ‘I MUST MOVE on soon, Jenny.’

  The fire crackled, turfs shifting slightly in a momentary flare, throwing larger shadows behind them.

  ‘I’ve been away ten days.’

  The wind howled anew around the windows; they rattled as it rushed down from the mountains. Down from the heights of Sgurr Dearg, whose slopes had brought him here, bruised and bleeding. It was fitful, roaring and silent by turns.

  ‘Will anyone have missed you?’ she said quietly, eyes fixed on the fire. Her hair glinted in the flickering red light.

  He chuckled bitterly. ‘I doubt it, but I have things to do, I can’t stay here for ever.’ He turned his head to regard her lovely, dark profile. ‘Much though I’d like to.’

  Without looking at him, she moved her hand on to his and let it rest there.

  ‘Do you really want to go back, Michael?’

  ‘I have to. My leave will be over in two weeks.’

  ‘You could stay here. You’re good around the place, and I know Dad likes you.’

  He did not answer. A penumbra of dreams rose out of the fire and swayed tantalisingly in front of him. How often had he dreamed of something like this?

  ‘For another two weeks,’ he said.

  Jenny smiled, and cocked her head to listen to the wind. ‘Well, I suppose there’s time enough...’

  RIVEN SLEPT, BEREFT of dreams. Outside, the moon flickered through feathers of cloud, burning bright their edges. In the shadow of the trees, a figure waited patiently. A pair of wolves sat by its side. They were winter wolves, fully grown, and grey as ghosts in the moonlight.

  THREE

  RIVEN HAD NOT seen a white Christmas for as long as he could remember. December was cold and dull, with flurries of rain that whipped the willow limbs about and rippled the surface of the normally tranquil river. On the wards, tinsel and a few bravely decorated trees appeared.

  ‘They’ll have me dressing up as Santa Claus next,’ Doody said, grinning.

  When the daily purgatory of his morning walk was over, and Riven was tired enough to lie still in bed for a while, he sometimes drew a little—mostly horses and landscapes—and sometimes he thought. It was good to retreat to that other world, which stretched wide and green in the middle of the mountains; the place where all was ordered as he loved best. It was good to forget his shattered body for a while and walk the wide Dales with legs that did his bidding, or on the back of a willing horse with only the characters of his imagination for company.

  They were many and varied. Like a pilgrim, he shared the road with others who came and went in his mind, travelled with him for a while, and then took another way and disappeared again. There were farmers and shepherds, peddlers and rogues, beautiful ladies and hard-eyed soldiers. They sprang into his mind fully grown, clad in leather and linen, smelling of earth and sweat, or redolent with perfume and spice. Their colour put the dull days of December to shame.

  He rode up and down fertile Dales dominated by turf and stone fortresses, where companies of sashed warriors patrolled the ramparts. He stayed in inns where the beer was pungent as wine and the fiery barley spirit scorched his throat. He laughed at travellers’ tall tales of far-off lands beyond the mountains, but told none himself. For he had none left to tell. Instead he listened and watched, and marvelled. He spent days with an innkeeper called Gwion, who fussed over his guests as though they were children and whose bald pate glinted lik
e a mirror in the candlelit evenings. He drank himself roaring drunk with the red-bearded man of his dream and found him to be a fountain of homespun philosophy with an unquenchable good humour. His name was Ratagan. There were others also. A young man with blue eyes and a sardonic turn of the mouth regarded him unsmilingly and rubbed the ears of two tame wolves who were always at his side. He was Murtach; Murtach the shapeshifter. And the fine lady who was a demon on horseback and who dressed in black—well... and there the daydreams broke down, and he stared at the gentle rain that trickled down the window.

  He marvelled because they were characters from his books, but in his daydreams they took on lives of their own and had their own stories to tell. They became his companions, their faces eventually as familiar to him as those of Doody, or Nurse Cohen. They held the black memories at bay, and only when they had left him for the day did the despair come crowding round him again, knifing in at all the familiar weak spots.

  ‘You’re at it again, sir,’ Doody said to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wandering.’

  Riven rubbed his eyes. ‘Gives me something to do.’

  ‘I’ll give you something to do.’

  ‘Not making fucking decorations along with the other lot. I’d had enough of that by the time I was twelve.’

  Doody shook his head. ‘Getting worse, you are.’

  Riven scowled. ‘Santa Claus can’t bring me what I want for Christmas.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I know, sir—but this won’t bring her back either. Come on. Give the world a break.’

  After a moment, Riven laughed. ‘Why not? It’s given me a bodyful of them.’ He thumped Doody on the arm. ‘Sorry, mate. Next time you find me like this you have to kick me down the corridor.’

  ‘That’s more like it. But remember, I got done for striking an officer once before.’

  Christmas was for the more elderly and less mobile inmates of Beechfield. The Centre did quite a creditable job of making it traditional, and there was a service in the morning for those so inclined. Riven was not. However, he managed to paint two cards, for Doody and Nurse Cohen. Strangely, he could still paint well enough. It was writing, the less instinctive skill, which eluded him.

  His walking had progressed, if not by leaps and bounds then by several dozen steps. He had dispensed with the frame by now, and muddled along with a single crutch. He was twenty-eight years old, but with beard, stoop and crutch he looked forty. Every day the face that met itself in the mirror grew grimmer, and the new lines at the corners of the mouth deeper.

  The pins in his limbs would baffle airport metal detectors for the rest of his life, and the scars he bore would never fade completely, but his body was fighting for health and wholeness whether he wished for it or not. The headaches he had been subject to decreased in virulence and frequency, and the pains in his legs gave way to a feeling of weakness.

  For Christmas, Doody and Nurse Cohen together got him a hip flask full of malt. ‘Keep you warm in the winter nights, sir,’ Doody said with a wink. Riven’s watercolours seemed inadequate in exchange, though the pair expressed delight over them.

  Christmas Day, and Christmas lunch, and that boring Christmas afternoon with the Queen on television and patients happily dozing. Then a dark evening strolling into night, and it was over. One taboo time was behind him, and now crouched in waiting for next year. That night he lay quiet as a corpse in bed, and viciously beat back the siege of his memory; pushed it away until he had walled it off in a dark corner. In the morning the struggle showed in the tiredness, and the sombre set of his face.

  The holiday deadness that would last until the eve of the New Year then set in. Doody and Nurse Cohen took their well-earned holiday. Riven watched them drive away together: Doody was getting a lift to the station. That left him to the tender mercies of Nurse Bisbee. He was glad, in a way. They were the ones who were drawing him back into the mainstream; something he did not yet want.

  He had received Christmas cards from old friends, most of whom he had known at Oxford; and also from one or two of his colleagues in the army. He mulled over them for hours, not yet ready to believe that these people had any claim on him. The world outside was a lawn and a willow-fringed river; no more. If he began thinking about things beyond that, the wall began to crumble, revealing the darkness behind it.

  He actually discovered a patient reading one of his books, on a wet morning as he hobbled through the recreation room on an expedition to the toilet. He felt a moment of pride and pleasure, then a weird panic, as if his den was being infiltrated, or his disguise being whittled away. That world, which had once driven and uplifted him, being brought here by others. Even here. First Nurse Cohen, and then this. How could he forget, or begin to heal, since Jenny was in that world also, in every word he had ever written, as surely as if her picture smiled behind every sentence? He stole the book when the old man left it behind for a meal, and took it back to his room.

  Flame of Old. The first one. The one I began as a boy, and left again; until I met her. The glad one. The story which believed in happy endings.

  He opened it.

  THE LAND WAS hard, but good. In the Dales, there was fine soil, rich enough for barley in the more sheltered parts. Down there also there was kale, and the shimmering mouse-fair hayfields. But the hills clawed out of the valley like blind, blunt breakers of granite that foamed into serried patches of boulders, encrusted with moss, straddled with heather and humps of yellow grass. Thorn trees gnarled there, bent by the icy northern blast that men chose to call wind. They looked like leering cripples, hardy as the rock on which they perched.

  And there the Rorim was. Ralarth Rorim, fortress of the southern Dales. It encircled a low hill that some said was made by man and others said had always been there. The ramparts overlooked a wide valley spangled with the bright circles of a deep stream, and in the valley were the crofts and huts of the Dales peoples. Fields were marked out in straight lines, and animals grazed in dotted herds. Ribbons of blue smoke rose up into the clear air from houses and inns, smithies and byres. The bustle of a market could be heard when the wind permitted. It nestled like a patchwork in the slopes below the Rorim itself, and there folk bought and sold, bargained and argued, their voices a mere murmur on the breeze.

  Beyond the Dale of Ralarth the hills rolled in a sombre sea to a blur of mountains on the horizon. They were flecked with stone, drowned in heather and coarse upland grass; a tableau for kites and buzzards to wheel over, for wolves to roam, for deer to tread warily. To the south, a stain of forest darkened the slopes of the hills like a silent sea in the valleys and crested the stone-ridden heights with pine and fir, spruce and beech, occasional oak and a riot of ferns and brambles. Scarall Wood was its name; a home for wild things. And to the south of the wood, the land dipped sharply in grey cliffs, tumbling down past waterfalls to the rocky brim of the sea itself, that beat unceasingly against the ramparts of the earth in its ancient battle.

  The troop of horsemen came riding out of the north, with the wind at their backs and the sun of a waning day to their left. There were ten of them mounted on tall, dark horses whose necks were pale with foam. They were dressed in metal-studded leather, belted with blue sashes. Swords rattled at their thighs and empty provision bags bounced from their saddles.

  They halted within sight of Ralarth Rorim and stood in their stirrups to watch the great dip of the Dale cup the gathering twilight in its folds. A few fires twinkled like gems in a mine, and they could catch the distant lowing of cattle being driven in for the evening.

  ‘Home,’ the big red-beard, Ratagan, said with satisfaction. ‘I told you we could make it before nightfall if we pushed on.’

  The dark, slight man with the sharp face who had reined in beside him nodded. ‘Though the horses have paid for it. But it will be good to be under a roof this night.’

  ‘And within walls,’ Ratagan added. He scanned the surrounding hills. ‘I had no mind to be staving off th
e hunting packs yet again. I’ve had enough of the wolf-folk to last me a long while.’

  ‘Then will you be steering clear of Murtach when we get back?’ the dark man asked with a grin that was like the flash of a knife in the twilight.

  Ratagan laughed, his voice a boom of sound in his beard. ‘Those curs of his! They’re afraid of their own shadow. I think their dam must have been a strayed lamb. But they look the part, I’ll admit.’

  ‘Murtach says appearances can be everything,’ the dark man said.

  ‘Aye, and he would know—shapeshifter that he is. Ah, the beers he will ply me with tonight for the stories I have gathered!’

  ‘You are the one to tell them.’ The dark man smiled. ‘But come, we must be on. The wind grows cold, and we have a mile or two yet to do before dark.’

  They spurred their weary mounts, and the little column set off once more on the descending slopes to where the lights of the Dale were burning in the deepening darkness.

  AYE. BUT FOR some, the darkness comes too quickly for us to go any farther.

  He closed the book and then his eyes, still seeing the evening hills of another world. Then he got up slowly, retrieved his stick and, making the laborious way to the recreation room, left his work where it was.

  As Christmas was for the less lively of Beechfield’s inmates, so New Year was primarily for those who, as Doody put it, had less than five pinkies in the grave. Many patients went home for the holiday season, but a fair percentage remained, as did the staff who looked after them.

  ‘Well, sir,’ Doody said when he returned on New Year’s Eve, ‘I intend to party it anyway, whatever that old cow Bisbee says. Orange juice, my fucking foot! Anne and me are trying to get some booze in for the old boys who are up to it. You’d be surprised how many of them perk up at the mention of the hard stuff.’