The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) (7 page)

Only a dream, for Christ’s sake.

But the Giant was straight out of his books, one of his pet monsters. And the other two men... He knew them from somewhere.

‘Fucking potty,’ he murmured.

The dream had left him with a bad taste in his mouth, as though something somewhere were not quite right. There was a jangling feeling of unease in him that was allied to but separate from the miasma of grief he was continually fighting. Absently, he wondered if the weather was fine up at the bothy. On a night like this, the sea would be shining like a lamp and the waves would be a gentle sussuration of water on shingle.

Ach, shit.

He swung his legs off the bed and groped for his dressing gown and crutches. Sleep was a long way off now. The cold floor chilled his toes, like the clutch of winter’s ice. He shook his head. Dreaming of giants. What next?

His crutches clumped on the linoleum as he laboured over to the window and manoeuvred himself into a chair. Outside, the gardens were a maze of silver and grey, the trees standing in ponds of shadow and the river glittering coldly in the light of the moon. He stared at the deep shadows a little anxiously, but there were no dogs there tonight. Or bloody wolves either, come to that. He smiled. Imagination is one thing, but paranoia quite another.

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...’

R
IVEN 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

R
IVEN 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 like 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.