Be My Enemy (14 page)

E
verett woke stiff and sore on the hard cargo deck. For one moment he couldn't think where he was. For the second moment, he couldn't remember how he had got there. Memories raced back. Sen, her feet dangling over empty space, lobbing halva out into the darkness. Sen's cry in the night. Sen warm against him, like a kitten curled up in the corner of a sofa. Sen was gone, and he was very cold. Everett got to his feet. Every bone creaked. He had a headache. He never had a headache. He tried to knuckle bad sleep from his eyes and saw Mchynlyth, watching him with amusement over the top of his mug of tea. He poured a second mug and nodded for Everett to join him.

“How long have you been here?” The tea was very strong and very hot. Everett cupped his hands around the mug—Tottenham Trojans—and let the warmth seep into his joints.

“Long enough,” Mchynlyth said.

“She had a bad dream,” Everett said. “She needed someone to be with her. She didn't want to go back to her latty.”

“Oh, I dinnae doubt it for a moment. She's gets her own way a little too much, that polone, and because we're crew, not family, she thinks she's a lot more grown-up than she is. She thinks she don't need anyone to look after her, but she does. We all do. Sabi, Mr. Singh?” Mchynlyth slid a wrench across the workbench to Everett, huddled in his quilt and blankets. “When you've that down ye, you can give me a wee hand getting that big mill working so we can grind out some electricity. Make yourself useful.”

But Everett had been too thick with drowsiness to be anything other than useless. The day was bright, but he was dumb; the sky was clear, but his head was not; the cold was sharp, but he was dull. Then he had dropped the wrench for the third time. When he went down the tall white shaft of the wind turbine, Mchynlyth shouted down at him.

“And where do you think you're going wee lad? Send the wrench up on the line, you keep yer lally tappers firmly planted on terra firma. You're as much use to me today as willets on a boar.”

A new figure was descending from
Everness
's open charging hatch, riding the line down, coattails fluttering and the slipstream tugging at the feather in his hat: Miles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey.

“You can hunt up something decent for dinner,” Mchynlyth shouted. “I'm getting a wee bit weary of saag channa, nae offense.”

Sharkey touched ground lightly, snapped off his drop harness, whipped a shotgun out of the coattails, and threw it to Everett. “Ever handled one of these before?”

Everett caught the gun cleanly—damn sure he wouldn't let Sharkey make him look like a handless middle-class idiot. He broke it, like he'd seen Vinnie Jones do in that old gangster movie
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
, and hung it over the crook of his arm. Sharkey touched the brim of his hat.

“You're mighty spry around the kitchen, sir. ‘And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers,’ in the words of the Dear. But in my philosophy you ain't no real cook until you've cooked what you've killed yourself. Man cooking. Let's go hunting.”

The wind turbines stood along a ridgeline. The short turf of the ridge was pockmarked white with the chalky debris from rabbit holes. Sheep, wild and scraggy, fled from Sharkey's approach. The wind that the turbines had been designed to catch was finally blowing the fog from Everett's head. The day was gloriously clear, and he could see for miles and miles. The land fell off the long ridge into scrubby valleys. To the south were further parallel ridges; to the north was open, flat farmland—or what had once been farmland. The land carried the patterns of fields, but hedgerows had grown into tangles of thorn and beech and the open spaces were rank with winter-brown weeds and scrubby growth. Roofs and chimneystacks rose from overgrown gardens. Some roofs had collapsed altogether, leaving the timber joists exposed to the air like the broken ribs of a decaying animal. Everett saw light glint from the glass of distant windows. There was not a sound. No rumble of traffic from the highway Everett could see cutting through the chalk downs. No chug of tractors or SUVs. Not even the bellowing of cows in the overgrown fields. No sound but the whistle of wind in the turbine blades high over Everett's head and the croak of rooks.

“Rabbit,” Everett called. Twenty yards away, a lookout for a warren dug under the concrete footing of a wind turbine twitched its nose.

“I've a hankering for something a little more toothsome,” Sharkey said. “This way.” He turned off the ridge and followed a sheep path down into a narrow valley. Within twenty paces, scrub elder and sycamore saplings had closed overhead. The branches were bare and stark against the clear January sky. Sharkey held up a hand. Everett stopped dead. Sharkey motioned for Everett to stay where he was. He had seen something through the tangled branches. Everett could see nothing. Sharkey raised his shotgun and walked forward. Something exploded out of the undergrowth in front of him. Everett saw a dark object flash into the air and whirl over his head. Then he heard Sharkey's gun fire twice and saw the thing tumble from the air in a shower of feathers. Sharkey grinned. Smoke still leaked from both gun barrels.

“Now that's fine manjarry,” Sharkey said. “Bring her back, Mr. Singh.”

Everett found the bird in a bracken brake where the dense valley vegetation gave way to the poor grazing of the water-starved ridge top. It was a cock pheasant, its breast shattered with lead shot, limp and dead but still warm, still oozing blood. Sharkey inspected the bird, looked pleased, and tucked it into a pocket of his great coat.

“My daddy had this theory…more a philosophy, a rule of living, really. When we were growing up, we never ate fur, fowl, or fish he hadn't killed; he either butchered it or hunted it. And when we got bigger, that we'd killed ourselves. I reckon each of us Lafayette Sharkeys was born with a fishing rod in his hand, and when we got old enough to handle a piece without blowing our own feet off, we'd hunt most days. Must have killed and cooked near every darn thing flies or crawls or swims. You see, my daddy believed that if you eat meat, which is a critter's life, then you must be prepared to take that life yourself. To buy a piece of meat from the store, that wasn't just a dishonor to the dumb beast whose life was given for you, it was an act of cowardice.”

“I used to cook with my dad,” Everett said.

“Every man should know how to feed himself, or a passel of coves.”

“I've cooked mussels.” Chop the shallot fine and sauté them in the butter, add garlic and a glass of wine and, while it's still steaming, throw in the mussels, alive alive-o. When all the shells are open, they're done.

Sharkey smiled.

“Then you understand the principle.”

“But I also think that if you do kill something, then you must eat it. It's just as big a dishonor to kill for the sake of killing.”

“There's plenty of critters kill for the sake of killing,” Sharkey said. He reloaded his shotgun.

The sun rose toward its full winter height and Sharkey and Everett worked down the valley into the flat lands beneath. Three times Sharkey stopped and lifted his hand when he sensed some movement, some presence, some thing in the scrub that Everett could not. He lifted his gun but did not fire again.

“Sharkey, back in your world, when we were trying to make the run to Germany, would you really have handed me over to the sharpies?”

“Yes, I would have, Mr. Singh. And I believe I owe you an explanation for my action. I am not a good man. Never have been, never will be, despite the word of the Dear on my lips and in my heart. I've done bad things, Mr. Singh. Shameful things, terrible things. Miles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey, weighmaster, soldier of fortune, adventurer, gentleman. I've been all those things, and in every one of them I was sinful and faithless. I was a damned soul, cursed to wander the Earth without hope or home. ‘Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.’”

“I heard a story that you killed your father because he slapped your mum at the Peachtree Ball.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Sen told me.”

“‘Deliver me from the hand of strange children, whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of falsehood.’ Do you not sabi by now that half of what that polone tells you is lies? The trick is learning which half. No, Mr. Singh, many sins may drive a man from his hearth and his home. I was a vagrant soul for many years, sufficient that you know that I can't go home again. Captain Sixsmyth found me on the streets of old Stamboul, a soldier of fortune, a freelance agent, a man with money on his head, and she gave me that home, and hope. That ship up there, that's the closest I'll ever get to heaven. And I am loyal to it, if nothing else, and I will let nothing threaten it, and I will do anything to keep it safe and free and flying. I owe it. I have my own amriya, as these people say. Nothing personal, Mr. Singh.”

“Of course not, Mr. Sharkey.”
And you would do it again
, Everett thought.
Without hesitation, or even a thought that you had done anything wrong. I'm safe now because we are all in danger together, but when the moment arrives when it is me or the ship, you will sell me. And it won't be personal. It'll be an act of old Deep South honor.

“Shh.” Sharkey raised his hand. They had come out from the valley onto an old, abandoned country road, so overgrown it was a tunnel beneath overarching tree branches. No hunting here: Sharkey turned off through a collapsed farm gate into a field. “Hare.”

“Where?” Everett whispered.

“There.”

Everett sighted along the line of Sharkey's pointing finger. A hare it was, upright and suspicious, at the very far edge of the field, where it ran up against the overgrown verge of the lost highway.

“You'll never hit it from here with a shotgun,” Everett said.

“‘His going forth is prepared as the morning.’” Sharkey tucked away his shotgun. From a pocket in his coat that Everett had never seen before, he drew an elegant, silver-handled revolver. From another secret place he took out a long metal tube that he screwed onto the barrel of the revolver. From the poacher pocket where he had stashed the pheasant, he took his cigar box. With a twist he converted it into what looked like a wooden rifle stock. One click and it locked to the handle. The revolver had become a bijou rifle.

“Eisenbach of München in Old High Deutschland. Finest damn gunsmith in the world—or any world, for that matter.” Sharkey took a firing position, aimed, slowly let out his breath. The shot rang out. The hare dropped cold, dead.
Rifle bullets travel faster than sound
, Everett thought. It was dead before it could even hear the killing shot. Everett fetched the hare. From alive to dead in a moment. He had seen that moment, that little jerk, that tiny spurt of life stuff as Sharkey's precision shot went clean through the hare's head. It would not even have known. Death was not knowing. It was nothing. No thing. The hare was still warm in his hands. Its fur was very soft. Everett felt blood wet his fingers. Sharkey's father had been right. It was a moral thing, to only eat what you are prepared to kill.

“Never cooked hare before,” Everett called. The absence of any machine sound was eerie. His voice sounded loud and wrong, as if every plant and cloud and living thing took offense at it. Sharkey beckoned Everett over. With two deft strokes from his knife he opened and gutted the hare.

“Hang him for a day or two and he'll be bona.” Sharkey walked on, scanning the hedge line, toward the chimneys of an abandoned farmhouse that rose from a tangle of overgrown garden shrubs. “Might be some layin’ fowl around here. Chicken is a national passion among us Dixie boys.”

The sound was low and soft and carried far and clear across this haunted England: the swoosh of blades cutting through air. Everett looked behind him. Up on the hill, the wind-turbine was turning. Everett thought he saw a figure, no more than a speck, riding up from the rotor hub toward the open power hatch in
Everness
's belly. He waved, though he knew Mchynlyth could not possibly see him. The airship hung over the ridge like a cloud.

“You coming, Mr. Singh?”

The house had been a country retreat. A dead Audi stood on the weed-choked gravel. Moss grew in the car's grooves and sills. Storm winds had tugged at the house's loose tiles, found weaknesses, and, over successive winters, stripped most of the roof. The attic had been converted into some kind of workspace. Peeling walls, peeling paper, and sagging plasterboard had collapsed down on top of desks and office chairs. The windows were all broken; rain-soaked, sun-bleached curtains wafted in the wind. Everett smelled rotting carpet and mold. Gardens and lawns were overgrown jungles. There was something blue and bloated and luminous and very, very dead in the leaf-clogged swimming pool.

Sharkey shook his head. “Don't look like much chicken around—”

The things came hard. They came fast. They burst around the corner of the house. Everett saw them, three dark, low bodies, at the same time that he heard Sharkey shout a warning. He acted without thinking. The shotgun clacked together, the safety slid off; he leveled and pulled the trigger. The recoil almost knocked him off his feet, but the blast blew the lead creature across the yard. The other two came on. Everett fumbled with the shotgun. At his side Sharkey pulled out the other shotgun. Two flat cracks sent clouds of birds up from the surrounding trees.