The Naked God

  He got the impression that it could have hauled the caravan right round the world without pausing.

  It kept on coming, and Luca twitched slightly, knowing his nerve was being tested. He refused to give ground as the huge beast lumbered inexorably towards him. At the last minute, the woman sitting on the driver’s bench clucked softly, and pulled back on her slender reins. The caravan halted, rocking slightly on its lightweight spoke-sprung wheels.

  Carmitha applied the brake, and hopped down. She studied the man edging cautiously round Olivier. The horse whinnied at him.

  “Greetings,” he said. Then gave a sudden start as he found himself staring into the twin barrels of her shotgun. Not for the first time, she regretted giving Louise Kavanagh her pump-action weapon.

  “My name is Carmitha. I am not one of you. I am not a possessor. Is that a problem?”

  “None!”

  “Good. Believe me, I will know if it becomes one. I do have some of your powers.” She concentrated, and the seat of Luca’s trousers became very hot indeed.

  He twisted about, frantically slapping at the fabric with his hands before it started smouldering. “Bloody hell.”

  Carmitha smiled artfully. His thoughts were equally agitated, pastel whorls of colour that hung just outside her physical sight. I can read them, she told herself happily. Along with the rest of the magic.

  The heat gone, Luca squared himself, recovering some dignity. “How did you …” His jaw moved silently. “Carmitha? Carmitha!”

  She shouldered the shotgun, and brushed some loose strands of hair from her face. “I see part of you remembers. Then, no man would ever forget an afternoon in my bed.”

  “Eh.” Luca blushed. The memories were certainly strong and colourful, with her vital flesh hot beneath his hands, the smell of her sweat, rapturous grunting. He felt the stirrings of an erection.

  “Down boy,” she murmured laconically. “What do you call yourself these days?”

  “Luca Comar.”

  “I see. At the town they said you were the one in charge up here. Nice irony, that. But then you’re all reverting.”

  “I am not reverting!” he said indignantly.

  “Of course not.”

  “How have you got our powers?”

  “I’ve no idea. It must be something to do with this place you’ve taken us to. After all, you don’t have any contact with the beyond any more, do you?”

  “No. Thank God.”

  “So it must be the way everybody’s thoughts impinge on reality here. Congratulations, you made us all equal in the end. Grant must be real pissed about that.”

  “If you say so,” he said disdainfully.

  Carmitha had a throaty chuckle at the umbrage on show. “Never mind. Just as long as you lot realize you can’t turn me into a host for one of your own anymore, we’ll get along okay.”

  “What do you mean, get along?”

  “It’s very simple. I hate what you’ve done to these people, don’t be under any illusion about that. But there’s nothing I can do about it; nor you, now. So I might as well try and live with it, especially as you’re reverting and re-establishing everything that’s gone before.”

  “We are not reverting,” he insisted. Yet there was the nagging worry about just how much of Grant Kavanagh’s personality he was employing these days. I must stop being so dependent on him, treat him as encyclopaedia, nothing more.

  “Okay, you’re not reverting, you’re mellowing out. Call it whatever you want to salvage your dignity. I don’t care. Now, I’ve spent the last few weeks hiding out in the woods, and I’m getting very sick of cold rabbit for breakfast. I also haven’t had a hot bath for a while either. As you’re probably aware. So I’m looking for a place to stay over for a while. I’ll pull my weight, cooking, cleaning, pruning; whatever you like. It’s what I always do.”

  Luca pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip. “You shouldn’t have been able to hide from us before. We’re aware of the whole world.”

  “My people still have the earthlore your kind—both of you—have forgotten. When you brought magic back into the world, you made the old enchantments strong again, no longer just words mumbled by crazed old women.”

  “Interesting. Are there any more of you?”

  “You know how many caravans are here for the midsummer collection. You tell me.”

  “I don’t suppose it matters. Even if all the Romanies survived, you don’t have the power to take us back to the universe we escaped from.”

  “That idea really frightens you, doesn’t it?”

  “Terrifies, actually. But then you can see that if you have got our ability.”

  “Hummm. So, do I get to stay?”

  He deliberately let his gaze meander over her leather jerkin, remembering the full breasts and flat belly which lay beneath. “Oh, I think I can find room for you.”

  “Ha! Well don’t even think about that!”

  “Who, me? I’m not Grant anymore.” He walked back to his horse, and took the reins off the gate.

  Carmitha slid her shotgun into the leather holster beside the seat, and started to lead Olivier along the drive with Luca. The caravan wheels crunched loudly on the gravel. “Damn this humidity.” She wiped a hand across her brow, mussing her hair again. “We are going to have a winter, aren’t we?”

  “I expect so. I’ll certainly make sure we have it on Kesteven, anyway. The land needs a winter.”

  “Make sure! My God. What arrogance.”

  “I prefer to call it practicality. We know what we need, and we make it happen. That’s one of the joys of this new life. There’s no fate any more. We control destiny now.”

  “Right.” She looked round the grounds of the big stone manor house as they approached it. Surprised by how little had changed. But then the possessed tendency to establish glorious façades over everything they occupied was nullified here. When you already live in what was essentially a palace, you don’t need gaudy energistic trinkets to enhance your status. For some reason, the sight of the well maintained fields was comforting. The normality, I suppose. What we all crave.

  Luca led her into the courtyard at the side of the house. The solid stone walls of the manor and the stable wings magnified the clatter which the hooves and caravan wheels made on the cobblestones. It was hotter in the confines of the courtyard, too. Something Carmitha’s small energistic ability could do little about. She took off her jerkin, ignoring the way Luca openly looked at the way her thin dress stuck to her skin.

  One of the stables was a burnt-out hulk, with long sootmarks lashing up over the stone above each empty window. The centre of its slate roof had collapsed inwards. Carmitha whistled silently. Louise hadn’t been lying.

  Several groups of field labourers were sheltering from the radiant sky in open doorways. They were munching on big sandwiches and baguettes, passing bottles round. Carmitha could feel every pair of eyes on her as Luca took her over to the remaining stable.

  “You can put Olivier in here,” he said. “I think the stalls are big enough. And there’s oats in the sacks at the far end. The hose is working as well, if you want to wash him down first.” It was something of which he seemed quite proud.

  Carmitha could well imagine Grant’s Kavanagh’s reaction if the hose hadn’t been working. “Thank you, I’ll do that.”

  “Okay. Are you going to sleep in the caravan?”

  “I think that’s for the best, don’t you?”

  “Sure. When you’re ready, go into the kitchen and ask for Susannah. She’ll find something for you to do.” He started to walk away.

  “Grant … I mean Luca.”

  “Yeah.”

  Carmitha held her hand out. Light sparked sharply off the diamond ring.

  “She gave it to me.”

  Luca stared at it in shocked recognition, and took a couple of fast paces towards her. He grabbed her hand and brought it up in front of his face.

  “Where are they?” he demanded hotly. “Damnit
, where did they go? Are they safe?”

  “Louise told me about the last time she saw you,” Carmitha said coolly.

  She glanced pointedly at the burnt out stable.

  Luca clenched his fists, his face contorted in anguish. Every thought in his head was suffused with shame. “I didn’t … I wasn’t … Oh, shit! Goddamn it. Where are they? I promise you, I swear, I am not going to hurt them. Just tell me.”

  “I know. It was a crazy time. You’re ashamed and sorry, now. And you’d never harm a hair on their heads.”

  “Yes.” He made an effort to regain control. “Look, we did terrible things. Brutal, inhuman things. To people, women, children. I know it was wrong. I knew the whole time I was doing it, and I still kept on doing them. But you don’t understand what was driving me. Driving all of us.” He shook an accusing finger, shouting. “You’ve never died. You’ve never been that insanely fucking desperate. Lucifer’s deal would have been the most blessed relief from that place we were imprisoned. I would have done that. I would have walked right through the gates of hell and begged to be let in if I’d just been given the chance. But we never were.” He crumpled, energy withering from his body. “Damnit. Please? I just want to know if they’re all right. Look, we’ve got some other non-possessed here, kids; and there’s more in the town. We look after them. We’re not total monsters.”

  Carmitha looked round the courtyard, almost embarrassed. “Are you letting Grant know all this?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. I promise.”

  “Okay. I don’t know exactly where they are. I left the pair of them at Bytham, they took the aeroambulance. I saw it fly away.”

  “Aeroambulance?”

  “Yes. It was Genevieve’s idea. They were trying to reach Norwich. They thought they’d be safe there.”

  “Oh.” He held his horse tightly, almost as though he would fall without its support. His face brimmed with regret. “It would take me months to reach the city. That’s if there’s a ship that’ll take me. Damn!”

  She put a tentative hand on his arm. “Sorry I’m not much more help. But that Louise is one tough girl. If anyone is going to avoid possession, it’ll be her.”

  He stared at her incredulously, then gave a bitter laugh. “My Louise? Tough? She can’t even sugar her own grapefruit for breakfast. God, what a stupid bloody way to bring up children. Why did you do that? Why don’t you let them see the world for what it really is? Because they’re born to be ladies, our society protects them. I protect them, as every father should. I give them everything that’s right and decent in the world. Your society is shit, worthless, irrelevant; it doesn’t even qualify as a society; you’re playing out a medieval pageant, not living. Being pathetic and insignificant isn’t a way of defending yourself and everyone you love. People have to face up to what’s outside their own horizon.

  Nothing was outside, not until you demon freaks came and ruined the universe. We have lived here for centuries and made ourselves a good respectable home. And you scum ruined that. Ruined! You stole it from us, and now you’re trying to rebuild everything you say you hate. You’re not even bloody savages, you’re below that. No wonder hell didn’t want you.”

  “Hey!” Carmitha shook him hard. “Hey, snap out of it.”

  “Don’t touch me!” he screamed. His whole body was trembling violently.

  “Oh God.” He sank to his knees, hands pressed into his face. A wretched voice burbled out between clawed fingers. “I’m him, I’m him. There’s no difference any more. This isn’t what we wanted. Don’t you understand? This isn’t how life’s supposed to be here. This was meant to be paradise.”

  “No such place.” She rubbed the top of his spine, trying to ease some of the badly knotted muscles. “You’ve just got to make the best of it. Like everybody else.”

  His head bobbed weakly in what Carmitha supposed was acknowledgement. She decided this probably wasn’t the best time to tell him his dear precious Louise was pregnant.

  Chapter 10

  Mortonridge was bleeding away into the ocean, a prolonged and arduous death. It was as though all the pain, the torment, the misery from a conflict that could never be anything other than excruciatingly bitter had manifested itself as mud. Slimy, insidious, limitless, it rotted the resolve of both sides in the same way it ravaged their physical environment. The peninsula’s living skin of topsoil had torn along the spine of the central mountain range to slither relentlessly down-slope into the coastal shallows. All the rich black loam built up over millennia as the rainforests regenerated themselves upon the decayed trunks of timelost past generations was sluiced away within two days by the unnatural rain. Reduced to supersaturated sludge, the precious upper few metres containing abundant nitrates, bacteria, and aboriginal earthworm-analogues had become an unstoppable landslip. Hill-sized moraines of mire were pushed along valleys, bulldozed by the intolerable pressure exerted by cubic kilometres of more ooze behind.

  The mud tides scoured every valley, incline, and hollow; exposing the denser substrata. A compacted mix of gravel and clay, as sterile as asteroid regolith. There were no seeds or spores or eggs hidden tenaciously in its clefts to sprout anew. And precious few nutrients to succour and support them even if there had been.

  Ralph used the SD sensors to watch the thick black stain expanding out across the sea. The mouth of the Juliffe had produced a similar discoloration in Lalonde’s sea, he remembered. But that was just one small blemish. This was an ecological blight unmatched since the worst of Earth’s dystopic Twenty-first Century. Marine creatures were dying in the plague of unnatural dark waters, choking beneath the uncountable corpses of their mammalian cousins.

  “She was right, you know,” he told Cathal at the end of the Liberation’s first week.

  “Who?”

  “Annette Ekelund. Remember when we met her at the Firebreak roadblock? She said we’d have to destroy the village in order to save it. And I stood there and told her that I’d do whatever I had to, whatever it took. Dear God.” He slumped back in the thickly cushioned chair behind his desk. If it hadn’t been for the staff in the Ops Room on the other side of the glass wall he would probably have put his head in his hands.

  Cathal glanced into the sparkling light of the desktop AV pillar. The unhealthy smear around Mortonridge’s coast had grown almost as a counterbalance to the shrinking cloud. It was still raining over the peninsula, of course, but not constantly. The cloud had almost reverted to a natural weather formation, there were actual gaps amid the thick dark swirls now. “Chief, they did it to themselves. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself over this. No one who’s been de-possessed in zero-tau is blaming you for anything. They’re gonna give you a fucking medal once this is over.”

  Medals, ennoblement, promotions; they’d all been mentioned. Ralph hadn’t paid a lot of attention. Such things were the trappings of state, government trinkets of no practical value whatsoever. Saving people was what really counted; everything else was just an acknowledgement, a method of reinforcing memory. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted that.

  Mortonridge would never recover, would never grow back to what it was.

  Maybe that was the best memorial, a decimated land was something that could never be overlooked and ignored by future generations. A truth that remained unsusceptible to the historical revisionists. The Liberation, he had decided some while ago, wasn’t a victory over Ekelund, at best he’d scored a few points off her. She’d be back for the next match.

  Acacia rapped lightly on the open door, and walked in, followed by Janne Palmer. Ralph waved at them to sit, and datavised a codelock at the door.

  The sensenviron bubble room closed about them. Princess Kirsten and Admiral Farquar were waiting around the oval table for the daily progress review. Mortonridge itself formed a three dimensional relief map on the tabletop, small blinking symbols sketching in the state of the campaign.

  The number of purple triangles, indicating clusters of possessed, had increased dramatically ov
er the last ten days as the cloud attenuated allowing the SD sensors to scan the ground. Invading forces were green hexagons, an unbroken line mimicking the coastline, sixty-five kilometres inland.

  Admiral Farquar leant forwards, studying the situation with a despondent expression. “Less than ten kilometres a day,” he said sombrely. “I’d hoped we would be a little further along by now.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d tried walking through that devilsome mud,” Acacia said. “The serjeants are making excellent progress.”

  “It wasn’t a criticism,” the admiral said hastily. “Given the circumstances, they’ve performed marvelously. I simply wish we could have one piece of luck on our side, everything about these conditions seems to swing in Ekelund’s favour.”

  “It’s starting to swing back,” Cathal said. “The rain and the mud have triggered just about every booby trap they left in wait for us. And we’ve got their locations locked down now. They can’t escape.”

  “I can see the actual campaign is advancing well on the ground,” Princess Kirsten said. “I have no complaint about the way you’re handling that. However, I do have a problem with the number of casualties we’re incurring, on both sides.”

  The relevant figures stood in gold columns at the top of the table. Ralph had done his best to ignore them. Not that he could forget. “The suicide rate among the possessed is increasing at an alarming rate,” he conceded.

  “Today saw it reaching eight per cent; and there’s very little we can do about it. They’re doing it quite deliberately. It’s an inhibiting tactic.

  After all, what have they got to lose? The whole purpose of the campaign is to free the bodies they’ve captured; if they can deny us that opportunity then they will weaken our resolve, both on the ground and in the political arena.”

  “If that’s their reasoning, then they’re badly mistaken,” Princess Kirsten said. “One of the main reasons for the Kingdom’s strength is because my family can take tough decisions when the need arises. This Liberation continues until the serjeants meet up on Mortonridge’s central mountain. However, I would like some options on how to reduce casualties.”