Chapter Four

March Town

The next day was déjà vu. They followed the river, guarded by the intermittent trees patrolling its banks. As sunlight waned, the lines of trees thickened into dense forest, shrouding the waterflow on all sides. Agloff’s legs throbbed but he numbed his mind to it. He wandered in quiet amazement. Every step felt like the voyage into the great unknown that it was. It was like some strange city. Trees were buildings marking out roads and alleys in the gaps between them. Loose leaves gathered at their feet, as if they were wading through a crowd up one of Backwater’s roads.

But progress felt scant, like they hadn’t really moved all that much. Lake Principia seemed no closer in sight, yet Oxford was insistent they were near their crossing, and the road through March Town that granted safe passage out of the Colony, to the Underground. Oxford’s gushing anecdotes about Alice reached no end but it was cute, Agloff supposed. He could even begrudgingly stretch to say he envied Oxford.

By the time Oxford called it for the day, Agloff and Ariea were grateful to oblige. Agloff had already rearranged his bag across his shoulders several dozen times, as the pointed edges of his belongings cut into his shoulder blades. He slung them into a dense thicket with a satisfying thud and his legs gave way beneath him, collapsing into jelly where his bag lay to cushion his head.

At once, Oxford rummaged through his own and Agloff heard a distinctive click as he produced a switchblade.

‘Expecting anyone?’ Ariea said.

‘Food,’ Oxford replied with a wry smile. ‘Better to be safe than sorry, and better while it’s still light- just about.’

‘You want our help?’

‘Thanks, but, uh, you’d get in the way,’ He suppressed a snigger. Ariea scowled a little and moved closer to Agloff. ‘Do not go from this spot, yeah? I’ve done this a lot, no offence. I’ll be back.’

‘When?’ she snapped. It was obvious she wanted him gone as long as possible. The journey was getting to her as it had for Agloff. The respite from Oxford’s monologues was welcome. Agloff hoped all the hares and foxes had decided to make home particularly far away today.

‘Whenever I got something to bring back.’ He vanished into shrubbery.

Agloff and Ariea lay in silence for a moment, content in the peace nature’s frontier afforded them. The hustling and bustling of Backwater now felt so insignificant, so distant.

They lay face up towards the canopy, guarded from the heavens, then stretched out their bodies into the leaves. At that moment, Agloff felt high, caught in the scattered evening light, not wanting to move from this bliss, for fear he may never be able to reach it again.

The sky submitted to hues of violet, then pinkish-red, then black and the pair of them lay in joyous silence. There was no sign of Oxford, two hours since his departure, but this fact did not bother Agloff as much as he might have expected. Here, he felt surprisingly safe. It was weird. Nothing was said between he and Ariea and yet it felt as though nothing needed saying.

Agloff then rolled to the side. A patch of thicket swayed under a low hum, but it wasn’t the wind. The noise rocked back and forth, and the leaves seemed to follow it. His eyes traced the rhythm to a moonlit clearing and vague shapes swooping beyond. The floor of leaves tremored in the irregular beat. It was an exchange of grumbles, he heard. Louder.

He rolled back to Ariea and saw her swipe a tear from her eye. He realised then she hadn’t shared in his peace. But she kept her sobs well hidden.

‘Is that something?’ she said, pretending he didn’t see her as she was. She pushed a face full of wind-struck hair from her eyes. ‘Sounds like something. Might be Oxford.’

Agloff listened. There were two noises, not one. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He stood.

‘Well, don’t go and see, sit down for heaven’s sake, Agloff. Don’t be a hero.’

‘It’s not going to hurt me.’

‘Could be a bear.’

‘It’s not a bear.’

‘Well, imagine if it is. Can’t be too careful. I mean, we must protect you at all costs, saviour of the Colony and all that.’ Ariea snorted with a sort of polite laughter. Agloff frowned. The grumble grew louder. ‘Are you absolutely sure that is not a bear?’

‘I can’t be a hundred percent sure,’ Agloff said defensively. ‘Probably a couple of foxes. What if I go and hunt one of them and bring it back and we’re sat eating spit roast fox and Oxford’s just so cheesed off because he’s got too much pride?’

‘I’m not convinced you could catch a squirrel, to be honest,’ Ariea said, deadpan. ‘But prove me wrong. Go on then. But Agloff… if it’s not a fox, come back quick.’

He nodded, searched Oxford’s bag for a second blade, concealing it up the arm of his sleeve, and walked towards the moonlit clearing, the see-saw of noises. Each step, the grunts became sharper. Would he startle them? Scare them away into some burrow in the ground. He gripped the blade tightly, concentrating on every breath.

The grunts loudened and Agloff backed against a tree. They were but a few feet away, shielded from view by dense wood. A sudden silence followed, then a faint whimper and Agloff halted, glancing down at his feet. The golds and ambers of the day had melted into grey in the darkness. He glanced up, composed himself. Cerberus flickered with red lights, as it rotated above the Colony.

Shuffling his knife in one hand, he peeled back branches with the other. He grimaced at each crunch of leaves as if it were some terrible pain. A dark shape hunched over the ground before him, muttering, mumbling.

It stood and morphed into the shape of a man. But it wasn’t Oxford. Agloff leaned back, clutching the edge of his blade in cold, shaking fingers.

Its head tipped to one side, mouth wide and panting. His eyes bred a violent hunger and blood licked his cheeks. But it wasn’t the giant’s own. He noticed a second shadow, unmoving at its feet. He waited.

The figure stepped forward into a moonlit shaft and Agloff saw a flowing grey robe clasped across his shoulders. A small insignia was emblazoned across his left breast; a mark Agloff knew.

Winter’s mark.

He wanted to run. But neither leg yielded to his command. He was sucked to the ground in the vacuum of silence that split them. Agloff tried to say something, anything that might delay the inevitable. But no words came. He half-choked in coughs and wordless murmurs. All but his mind were paralysed.

Then the man laughed. It was a manic grin. Delight even. Agloff backtracked into a tree, cut alight in an arrow of moonlight and the man of Winter seemed to recognise him.

‘You’re Agloff Ashborne,’ it said.

Its hand reached out, closed around Agloff’s wrist. The other motioned towards his face and the world fell darker still. Wide fingers pressed inwards against his temple and Agloff thought his head may split in two.

He screamed.

‘Birch!’ the giant’s voice called. The ringing in Agloff’s ears built to a climax, the hand tightened its grip. He saw nothing but black and his knife jerked from his hand.

Then, the pain lessened, the hand slackened, and Agloff’s cheeks felt nothing but the warmth where the fingertips had held on. They rolled down Agloff’s body, falling to the floor. He saw the pilgrim of Winter flayed against a bed of leaves, next to the second shape it had been hunched over when Agloff had found it.

Oxford Blue took two steps towards Agloff. He wiped his blade against the cuff of his sleeve, then collected the one Agloff had dropped, and dangled it before him. Oxford’s face bore none of the jest Agloff knew. His eyes were wide and features like stone, cold and sharp.

Agloff stooped his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘This is what I do Agloff: day in, day out. I leave the Underground. I trek across the Colony, hundreds of miles from one fort to another. Sometimes I’m a dignitary, sometimes I’m a messenger, sometimes I’m a killer. I know these forests, these lands. They’re where I sleep every night. I know how to hunt, how to kill, how to wound, how to hide, how to track, when to run and when to stand still. You don’t. You know jack shit about anything outside of Backwater.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

‘But Backwater’s gone now. Drake’s gone. I am your protector, with the intention of delivering you safely to the Underground. There is no rebellion here, there is no not obeying me. Discipline starts and ends with me. I am the highest authority and when I tell you to do something I do so because that it what I want you to do, and what I expect you to do it. Maybe you heard something, maybe you needed the toilet. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. You do what I tell you to do.’

The operative paused. Agloff could do nothing but nod limply. He felt like a scathed child. Pain still throbbed the sides of his head.

‘I’d say thanks for the boar, but it’s too big. Come on.’

Agloff looked down at the second body and saw it was indeed a boar, as still as the giant who tamed it. That must have been what he had heard, their wrestling match until the pilgrim prevailed.

‘There’s another one… I think,’ Agloff mumbled. His tone was that of a boy who had been sent to his headmaster.

Oxford turned back, tightened a rope across his shoulder on which a gutted fox hung. ‘You sure?’

‘Someone called out.’

‘Wasn’t Ariea?’

Agloff shook his head. ‘Said “Birch”, so maybe he had a partner.’

‘Pilgrims aren’t fond of travelling alone. They may well be tracking us. If they weren’t, you’ve just given them a good excuse to. We need to go.’

They made for the spot where Ariea was now anxiously stood, with the bags tucked around her feet. She shot forwards and wrapped her arms around Agloff’s shoulders. The pair of them said nothing and shared a look but its meaning escaped Agloff. His thoughts spiralled on Oxford’s words still burning in his ears. He thought his heart might burst from his ribcage.

‘We’re leaving,’ Oxford said, gesturing to Ariea to gather the bags.

‘B-But? We were staying the night?’

‘Ran into a pilgrim. They don’t travel alone, and they saw Agloff.’

Ariea shot a furious look of ‘I told you so’ at Agloff and again his gaze shifted to his feet. She stubbed her fist on his arm. ‘Idiot,’ she mouthed.

‘I know a place to hide out at March Town,’ Oxford continued. ‘So, shut up and do what I tell you.’

If Agloff had been scared to provoke Oxford before, he damn well was terrified now. The miles passed by in total silence. Ariea seemed incredulous. Every now and then she would shoot Agloff one of her discerning, judgemental looks. He just beat it away, pretending to stare at a tree or whatnot.

But the trees were starting to thin. They passed through a narrow canyon, guarded by lines of tortured rock, and into less charted land.

The canyon bloomed into a wide basin. These, Oxford told them, were the rocky flats. Agloff couldn’t imagine a place so big and so empty, even as he had stood at Backwater Peak. But there was a magic in its infinity. The stars danced over them in unfamiliar clarity and Agloff was briefly distracted from everything. Cerberus was baked in the glow of a band of stars behind it brighter than Agloff had ever seen. He walked in view of the heavens, and, in this place, he thought he could reach up and touch them.

But soon enough, the flats took their toll.

The uneven land cut into the soles of his shoes. Stones and ridges lurked in the darkness to trip him in places. Great fissures in the rock waited in others- cracks and valleys as big as rivers. It didn’t rain out here, Oxford said. He said they’d be lucky to last the daytime in the heat. The temperate greens of the inner Colony were traded for layers of grey on grey on grey. And, but for a distant row of mountains to the south, the land was open to the full beating of the sun during the day, and the biting winds at night. But the winds were preferable, Agloff was sure.

They turned from the crack they were following, and onto a road that headed southwest towards March Town. This was the road to the Underground. The tiredness in his joints pulled Agloff’s aching shoulders ever closer to his knees. Soon, the sky paled into dawn, and he wondered if his skin would start peeling from his bones.

The roads out here cracked like clay, upended by grasses puncturing through its surface. It dropped off into a ditch on either side. Dozens of cars had apparently been driven to the side of the road and stopped, as if in the panic of some great disaster. Their rusting fossils nestled in long, bleached grass, ghosts from a world that died long ago.

‘The hell happened to this place?’ Ariea said coldly, running her finger across the bronzed frames of one of the cars.

Oxford raised a hand to guard his eyes against the sun. ‘Same thing as happened everywhere. Planet got screwed.’

‘But the cars,’ Ariea said. She poked her head through one’s window.

‘The last call went out from the colony ships, last ticket off-world. Trucks of soldiers, went town-by-town, knocking on doors to collect people. Like… conscription to the new world.’

‘People just stopped and went with them?’

Oxford nodded calmly. ‘Didn’t matter what you were doing. Or what you could take with you. You saw the trucks, you went.’ He brushed an arm against a car roof. ‘Even if you were already going somewhere, you got out and went to go somewhere else.’

‘How do you know that? Were you here?’

‘Folks were refugees from the Partizan, so we lived through it on Mars. Post 474. Our truck was already full by the time we saw it… Left behind.’ Oxford seemed to let his words hang in dead, still air.

‘Were refugees?’ Ariea asked, cautiously.

‘There was a fire in HabCom Two. I was at school.’ Oxford said bluntly, as if the whole matter was of trivial importance.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t be.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Had enough people say that. Not your fault and not like anyone can change it.’

As they approached March, buildings gradually stacked up on either side. Their husks were a microcosm of the world that came before, but the undergrowth had long since overcome them. Mother nature was a slow disease, reclaiming the land from men and women who had long since returned the earth. They passed into the centre of March Town. A main street ran about a mile westward. On either side, shops sat half-destroyed, awaiting their next customers with ‘sale’ signs blazed across their windows, like a tainted memory. The buildings cut up the wind into an unearthly whisper, and Agloff felt a quiet unease, like he was walking over someone else’s grave.

‘Does anyone come here anymore?’ said Agloff.

‘Scrappers. Scourgers. No one you’d want any business with,’ Oxford said, straightening his ponytail. Agloff scanned the scene with curious eyes. It was sad but peaceful here.

‘You couldn’t survive out here for more than a couple of days unprepared,’ Oxford squatted to grind a finger against the dust. ‘Bone dry. Dried up decades ago.’

Suddenly, their heads turned at a growl on the wind, bedded in its haunting whistles. Oxford followed the noise with slow, deliberate steps. Agloff and Ariea at his tail. It was a strange kind of noise. They shifted down an alley that cut adjacent to the main road.

‘Oh, Cerberus above me,’ Oxford whispered as he rounded into an empty car park. Agloff realised the growls weren’t the wind at all. The wind was merely its messenger. Instinctively, he reached out a hand, but Oxford ordered caution. Agloff had seen it in picture books before, the fauna of Old Earth’s untamed and tempestuous backwaters. They had called it a lion.

Agloff imagined them lean and muscular, but this one was slight; the contours of his ribs were revealed for all to see through its sandy coat. It dragged a wide paw through its mane from where it lay as yellowed eyes scanned each of them. Content they were harmless, its head sank across its paws and moaned to the wind once more, lacking the energy to do anything else.

‘Well,’ said Oxford, straining to hide his delight, ‘ain’t he bloody magnificent.’ His split into a smile from ear-to-ear, wider than Agloff thought possible. The feeling spread from Oxford like a contagion, and Agloff couldn’t help himself from grinning.

He imagined he might have been scared of it, but he could only manage pity instead. His eyes traced its slender body. On its hind leg, a knife wound had punctured the skin. The fur around it was matted by blood and Oxford made to inspect it.

‘What happened to it?’ Ariea spluttered.

Gingerly, Oxford spread two fingers across the wound and the lion murmured in discomfort. But too weak to do anything about it, it ruffled its mane and plopped its head back across its paws.

‘It’s a knife wound,’ said Oxford eventually. ‘Not very deep, mind.’

Ariea raised an eyebrow. ‘How did anyone even manage to get this close to it? It’s a lion for God’s sake.’

Oxford nodded. ‘Yeah but look at it. Bastard is so damn thin. There’s nothing to feed on round here.’

‘How’d it get out here then? It’s too hot.’

Oxford shrugged. ‘I’ve seen wild lions before but out in the grasslands to the north. Maybe scourgers caught it. Or a gang to sell on. I know the Regent of Whitecastle would pay good coin for beasts like this.’

Agloff sighed. Even at twice the size of him, his overriding feeling was to scoop the lion off the ground and nestle it in blankets. To tell it that everything would be okay. But he remembered then what Drake had told him: the world beyond the walls is rarely so kind. ‘Can we help it?’ he asked Oxford.

‘What is there we can do?’ Oxford paused. ‘Nothing. We can’t take it with us,’ he said, laughing dryly.

Ariea knelt closer and reached a hand to its thigh. She smoothed the fur under her palm and whispered to the animal. They were empty words. But the lion looked contented somewhat.

‘Would it not be kinder to kill it?’ Ariea said, swallowing.

‘Do you want to?’ Oxford held out his blade to her.

Ariea reached out but couldn’t take it. She sank shamefully. Agloff knew he was the same, capable of mercy in thought only, if not in action. He wondered if she saw her father in that mewling creature. ‘Best not to leave a fresh wound for them to track us with. There’s nothing we can do,’ Oxford said.

They left the lion where it lay and headed in-town, led onto a high street off the main road and up a small row of shops. Agloff wanted to stay a little longer. He wanted to keep the lion company. To study its nuance, the detail and design in its finest of features. To nurture it to health like it might have become an unlikely companion. But no, and he wondered if he might see such an awesome beast ever again.

‘Where are we going?’ Ariea asked Oxford grimly. Her shoulders slackened and her bags straps fell down to her elbows. Half of her looked broken; the other half looked empty.

‘I know a couple guys. We can hold out with them till shit blows over.’ Oxford raked his eyes up and down the street for something in particular. With a yelp of recognition, he tightened his straps and guided them down the way. Sandwiched between a pharmacy and a bakery, was a narrow inn called The Felled Giant.

It was a miserable looking place, blacker than coal and three stories high. Agloff could conjure an image of the kind of customer that frequented as dead a dive as this. He had seen a dozen such pubs squeezed on to street corners at Backwater.

Ariea huffed. ‘Doesn’t this place look amazing. We’re not actually staying here, are we? I swear to god if there are rats living in the walls!’

Oxford ignored her, rang his fist against the door with heavy beats and a pair of footsteps came scurrying.

It was then something occurred to Agloff. A delightful fact. And his heart skipped a beat as the chill of adrenaline coursed through him. The pilgrim in the forest. He had recognised Agloff. He had known his face. And it was a face Agloff shared with precisely one other in the entire universe.

A forbidden smile, a giddy excitement, touched his lips.

If Winter knew Agloff’s face, then it had seen his brother’s, and recently.