The House of Storms (45 page)

Friend or foe? East or West? But all the usual questions seemed irrelevant. After all, what was he, now? But still, he should stop, take stock. For the next step—crawl in this case—the next unconsidered move, is where your gravestone lies. But bizarre though the creature seemed, and weirdly wavering though the voice was, Ralph scrambled on. The odd thing, the oddest thing of all, really, was that he recognised that sound, that figure, that song.

Ah, listen, listen. Here
he
comes …’

The figure paused in its humming, and straddled the ditch to welcome him with her ragged, insect arms.

E
ACH MORNING AS SHE AWOKE,
Marion allowed herself the lingering luxury of not knowing where she was. The fact that she always knew it
was
a luxury, and that there were certainly things, important things, things which, done or not done, would lead to outcomes good or dreadful, all added to its loveliness. She thought firstly of water, cool, glittering expanses of it bubbling and racing towards her. It drowned her legs and swarmed over her senses in the salt cry of gulls. And then, in another rush, came the chuckle of waves. She was lifted through marvellous warmth amid brilliant gardens, up into a high room with a single slant window and a narrow yet coolly expansive bed. And it was early, yes, for the sun was just creeping over the lintel and across these whitewashed walls, and the air smelled faintly of bleach and was inordinately, purposefully, importantly and beautifully clean. Yes, there was so, so very much to be done.

Thinking of brasses in need of polish and ash-dusted grates, Marion opened her eyes. Even though she knew this wasn’t really Invercombe, this dim room wasn’t so very different to the place where she had once slept. Sighing, she climbed up from her bed and got dressed. Half past five, and freezing cold. She took the long central stairs and headed on past dark offices to receive Chief Matron’s report. It had been a quiet night. Few deaths or new arrivals. No emergencies had necessitated her awakening.

‘That’s all?’

The matron nodded in a way which didn’t seem to mean entirely yes.

‘Something else?’

‘It’s just I was wondering if you’d heard what people are saying?’

‘What is it now?’ Marion felt tired already. ‘I’m sorry, Matron. What I mean is—’

‘No. That’s quite all right. It’s just that word’s getting back from the front that Hereford’s fallen …’

She headed down the next set of stairs, then along the main wards. Considering that Cirencester College had been a school for the Joint Guilds of Engineers three years before, it had adapted extraordinarily well to its role as a military hospital. The dorms, each partitioned alcove of four beds easily visible to the nurses, had scarcely needed changing. The perpetual cold, the echoing footsteps and voices—even the sense of suppressed loss and loneliness—had all been here long before she’d requisitioned the place. There had been probably even the same secret drinking amongst the teachers as there was now amongst the nurses.

The wounded grew used to her presence but still, as she entered the dim wards, there were cries and groans.
Thump, thump, thump;
that dreadful chant they took from her name and beat out with bedpans. Individual patients quietened as she approached them, but still, ringing back and forth along the hospital, there were those damn three beats.
Ma-ri-on.
It wasn’t her—it wasn’t anything—but she was nevertheless its cause, and it was useless to shout and rage at the sisters and nurses. The only answer was for her not to make these inspections. Then, what would she be worth?

Ruined heads turned on pillows in the burns wards. Hands which weren’t hands reached for her supposedly healing touch. Who was she, she wondered, as she heard their gagging whispers; the tired and irritable woman who was trying hard not to notice the cooked-meat smell, or the ministering angel they imagined? And word of this supposed defeat at Hereford was everywhere. Depending upon who you listened to, the West was said to be retreating, regrouping, retrenching … More work, another sleepless night, was being yawningly anticipated by the staff, but few new casualties had yet arrived apart from the usual dribs and drabs from accidents, shell shock, syphilis and food poisoning. Coldly worried, she headed out along the corridors.

Years before, in the time before the bodyguards and amulets, Marion would now have set straight out towards Hereford herself. Or at the very least, she’d have spent the day here in triage, helping deal with the carts and carriages as they arrived. Now, she was conscious that the systems she’d imposed on this and most other Western hospitals worked better without her presence. Fingers grew flustered when she was near. Kidney bowls were dropped. Soldiers tried to unstick themselves from blood-soaked stretchers so they could touch her.
Ma-ri-on, Ma-ri-on.
It was the last thing anyone would have wanted. And she’d never possessed sufficient vanity to imagine that things wouldn’t happen without her watching over them. Still, she couldn’t sit here idly, so she entered the main office and announced that she was going to Bristol, and would someone please find out the times of the trains?

There was chaos at the station, with relatives of soldiers crowding for non-existent news, to which Marion, by her very presence, made her own contribution as she fought her way past the pleading hands and faces into the carriage which had been set aside for her. There were, she thought, as the train pulled off, some advantages to being Marion Price. At least she had a compartment to herself, and sweet freedom to study the morning newspapers, interrupted only by the stammering requests from the guards that she sign something for their daughters, wives, mothers …

Hereford was certainly in the papers, but it was only all the usual rubbish about
Brave Western resistance
and
The turning of the tide,
and the front pages were dominated by the sinking of a French ship, which supposedly signalled a loosening of their blockade. Marion slid the papers aside. She tried to remember the heady feeling of those early advances, the times when London had seemed within reach, and she’d probably wanted to see the East cowed and defeated as much as the next Westerner, although her reasons had probably been entirely selfish. And then, with all the setbacks, it had still always seemed as if some new weapon or alliance or incarnation of peace or victory lay around the corner. Now, war had raged for three years, and even Hereford was supposedly falling. Marion’s eyes travelled back from the flashing countryside to a short column of reportage.
Forces apparently led by General Meynell…
War was like a fever—a nightmare gripped by its own internal logic where flashes of lost memories entwined.

She’d never sought to follow Ralph’s progress, but, just like his mother, he’d always been there, and every newspaper she’d ever picked up over the years had seemed to include his or her name somewhere in a long list of Guild Occasions. Often as not, it was so small that no one else would have noticed it, but she invariably did. But her old anger, the sense of betrayal which she had nursed through Alfies and the loss of her child and then on through her years along the river and with Noll, was gone, or had at least remanifested itself in all the energies she’d poured into her battles against stupidity, inefficiency and prejudice. More of which she would be prosecuting here in Bristol today.

She’d grown used to this city over the years, but every arrival was still tinged with the memory of taking that clattery train from Luttrell with Ralph, and the swarm and noise of a summer-hot Templemeads Station—the glorious escape of being someone called Eliza Turner. Today, though, as her train slowed and the tracks gathered in silver skeins under thickening grey skies, she could only be Marion Price, and she thought of the nearness of the Eastern army, and the route that they would take down the Wye Valley from Hereford, cutting off what was left of the West’s lifeblood. From here, and barring miracles in which she no longer believed, all that lay ahead for the West was defeat.

Marion spent her day warring amid the guildhalls of Bristol. She’d long known Greatmaster Cheney as a man rather than a poster, and one who had aged far beyond the point where he was capable of bearing the pressure of the day-to-day decisions about the conduct of the war; all he could offer her now was sympathy and a shaky cup of tea. Even one of the brothers Pike, although this was something she was one of the few to know, had suffered a nervous breakdown. Those who survived and prospered in the command hierarchy were, she was coming to think, those who were blessed with the thinnest grip on reality. But how could it be otherwise, with reality as it was now?

The greatmasters she confronted were as evasive as the newspapers about Hereford. Perhaps, indeed, what was in the papers was all that they knew. But for Marion everything was becoming clear. Not that she argued for capitulation, but it was vital that several hospitals around Ross and Monmouth were evacuated now in an orderly fashion. The alternative would be a log-jam of patients dying on jolting wagons amid the retreating soldiers and civilians, and the final collapse of the medical infrastructure which she had worked so hard to build. She was listened to with quiet sympathy in a series of impossibly grand rooms, and offered coffee, with cream, and fine moist sugar—the kind you couldn’t get anywhere these days, which she was too tired and hungry to refuse. Outside, great flakes of snow touched the windows with silent fingers. An early fall, the first of the year, and the signal that winter was here, and that this terrible war would continue through it unabated. These very halls had been the places where she had won her most significant victories as she had fought to overcome the ridiculous over-specialisation of the medical guilds, but now she felt powerless, lost…

‘Thing is, Mistress Price, if we start emptying the hospitals behind Hereford, which, by the way, is still being held as bravely as ever, it would be interpreted as defeat. Bad for our lads, to know that Marion Price is shutting up shop behind them just when they need her most. Although we do understand and admire your grasp of practicalities. Would you care for another biscuit?’

And if I issue orders for the hospitals to be moved anyway?’

‘This is war, Mistress Price. Even being who you are, that would be treason.’

There was to be a big dance in Bristol tonight. If not quite in her honour—for Marion got the impression that there were still big dances here most nights—it was certainly expected that she show her face, and there were no trains to take her back to Cirencester. She felt trapped, but at least she could see Noll, and there was the dim chance that she might achieve more here than by flustering the medics back at the hospital.

Marion was saluted and stared at by the guards as she entered the halls of the doctors’ guilds beneath their stone scrolls of occult dogma in a square just off the Horsefair. She descended the stairs into white-tiled catacombs where the smell always reminded her of butchers’ shops. Not that she of all people could afford to be squeamish, but, unlike Noll in his stained white coat, his off-white smile, his pale face, she preferred to work among the living.

‘Heard you were here today, stirring up the old ants’ nest.’ He gave her a formaldehyde hug. ‘You’re looking…’ He peeled off his rubber gloves. ‘Tired, I have to say.’

‘Have you heard about Hereford?’

He leaned against a marble slab and lit a cigarette and shrugged. ‘More cadavers.’

‘You’re not that cynical.’

‘It’s what I have to be.’

‘We’re losing the war.’ He blew smoke and shrugged again. ‘But there’s no point in fighting battles we can’t win. We should have sued for peace this summer. Enough people have died—’

‘You’ve said that before, Marion. Look—’ He smiled, gestured. ‘I’ve things to show you.’

Blued hands and feet lolled with the easy repose of the dead. As Noll showed Marion the progress he was making in refining his guild’s knowledge of the workings of the human heart, she remembered how he’d suffered and complained about all the restrictions when they’d worked together in Bewdley. Now, in this coldly important place, she was in the presence of a calmer, better Noll who could act as he pleased. He’d had a good war. So, he’d undoubtedly tell her, had Marion Price. But she’d only ever done what any other reasonable person would have done in her situation. Healing, as she’d always seen it, was essentially a matter of common sense. If you had clean sheets, mopped floors, sufficient bandages and blankets and all the regular habits of hygiene, much of the rest took care of itself. She’d never intended to give speeches, or to harangue the grandmasters when they came in their long, exquisite cars to inspect the dead and the dying. Still, no one had forced her to give those first interviews to the papers, nor to pose for the photographs, and then that first portrait, or to write those homilies on Aspects of Care which were now in their eighth reprint.

Noll had always remained in the shadows. Even this place, for all its scientific rigour, was palely secret, subterranean—a retreat. He showed her jars filled with the glowingly viscous varieties of parasite he was extracting from the cadavers and preserving, monitoring how they grew and adapted generation on generation, the weaker falling by the wayside and the stronger passing on their heritage.

‘War’s a changed environment,’ he explained, replacing a jar within which something large and white and many-horned rocked as if it were still swimming. ‘So you’re bound to get the emergence of new varieties.’

‘You’ll be telling me next that war’s a good thing.’

‘I think it’s probably an inevitable and necessary state; a catastrophe we humans strive to create now that we mostly avoid the natural ones.’ He laughed. He sounded genuinely happy. ‘Think of the advances just in these few short years which the guilds would probably never have otherwise made …’

Noll took her to his apartment, which was neatly stylish, in the wintry and abstract modern way. He undressed, still talking about the ways his thoughts and ideas were taking him. Perhaps he was expecting her to do the same, but she smiled as he laid a hand on her shoulder and suppressed a shudder as she shook her head.