The Modern World (22 page)

I came upon the baggage train along the Glean Road. It was decimated – nothing was moving down there.

I descended and let the road stream along under me. It was solid with dismembered bodies of men and women, severed heads and limbs. Between the shafts of overturned carts lay the white or chestnut flanks of the hitched horses. Ragged green vegetables and leather-fletched crossbow bolts spilt from the barrels. Dead Insects lay among them, each two metres long. The devastation stretched into the distance along the road. If a swarm has reached this far, what’s happening at Slake?

I skimmed over them – the horses and mules were no more than jumbles of bloody hide and entrails, a semi-digested green-shit stench. I could see no sign of the attack having come from any direction – the people lay in equal numbers on both verges as if they didn’t know which way to flee. Few were armed. Horses had bolted dragging their carts off the road; they lay on the grass further off, their black hooves raised and rigid.

It didn’t make any sense. Where were the live Insects? Once they were out of danger they would always stop and feed but few bodies showed any signs of damage beyond the wounds that had killed them. It was as if a great force had swept through and torn them apart instantaneously.

Here was one of the armoured wagons – steel plate riveted to its wooden sides – designed to be a temporary refuge in case of attack. The worst Insects could do was eat the wheels off and cause it to tumble to the ground. Its doors were firmly shut. As they had to be bolted from inside, somebody must be in there. I landed squarely beside it. On the ground the silence was terrifying. The pools of blood between the carts had dried to brown but the corpses still smelt salty, like fresh meat.

I looked all around, drew my ice axe and banged the haft on the door. I called through an air hole, ‘Anyone in here?’

‘Just me,’ said a young man’s voice.

‘This is Comet. What happened?’

‘Comet!’ The voice degenerated into sobs. ‘Everything’s gone.’

‘Open the door. The Insects have left.’

‘No!’ screamed the man. ‘I’m not coming out! Leave me! Leave me here!’

I peered through the air hole but could see only blackness. What would I do with one man crazy with terror in the middle of the Lowespass countryside? ‘OK,’ I said calmly, ‘I’ll fly to Slake and send lancers. They’ll get you out; you’ll be safe.’

‘Fly? Safe?’ The man started laughing with a horrible high-pitched tone.

I took off and flew as high as I could trying to catch a first glimpse of the town. Beneath me, both sides of the road were ‘trap fields’ where iron traps had been set. Yellow signposts warned travellers not to leave the highway. The pressure of an Insect’s foot on the trigger plate will spring a trap shut and bite the claw off. Now I started to see them, maimed but still alive, moving slowly or spasming on the ground.

I went over the valley head and the moorland pass dropped away – reddish spots were Insects roaming randomly on the slopes. I hastened on, frightened for my friends. This reminded me far too much of 1925.

Slake Cross town sat in the distance, the lake beyond it. A massive misty funnel of black spots was rising high and thin in the air above the lake. It was drifting slightly with the breeze but twisting with a slowness unlike any whirlwind I’d seen. And there was scarcely a wind anyway. I couldn’t tell what it was; I stared at it until my eyes hurt. The great spiral towered over the lake and specks cascaded from it like water drops or debris. They rose and fell like soot specks coming off a fire, but they must be huge if I could see them at this distance.

Below me another defence – a ‘field of holes’ – was full of struggling Insects. Pits had been dug close together over the whole valley floor. Each was two metres square and five deep, straight-sided, concrete-lined with sharp, tar-painted stakes fixed upright in the bottom. I looked directly down into them; some were half-full of Insects skewered on the stakes, in the base of others lone Insects raised their heads, convergent compound eyes glittering. They would try to dig their way out until they wore their claws to stubs.

Further still and I was over the zigzag trenches running parallel with the river. The trenches were square-based, cut in chevrons, so that trapped Insects could be more easily dispatched as they slowed down to scurry round the corners. The trenches trimmed across my field of
vision and Insects looking no bigger than ants scuttled up and down them, bristling.

I approached, with a feeling of trepidation like facing the cold wind that precedes a storm. The swirling flurry in the sky was more than five hundred metres tall. The whole sky was mottled with specks bumbling around each other, some over the town, some now between it and me. I concentrated on these, and as I came nearer the space between them seemed to increase. From looking at lots of motes plastered against a blank grey sky I was soon aware of them as individuals hanging in the air. I picked one and closed in on it.

The dot resolved into a dark crescent moving at my altitude with both points facing downwards. Closer still, I could see the crescent had three segments. It was bulky, not streamlined like a bird and I couldn’t understand what was keeping it up. Then it turned towards me and I saw its bulbous eyes. It was an Insect! An Insect flying!

I yelled, pulled my wings closed and fell below it just as it swept over my head. Its buzzing nearly deafened me even above the sudden roar of the air stream as I went into freefall. I forced open my wings, looked around, saw I hadn’t fallen more than twenty metres, and performed a slow roll so I could look down the length of my body and see it behind me.

A
flying
Insect?

I couldn’t believe it was real! It was heading away and starting to turn. I could see its ten bronze-brown abdomen plates, its tail curved and hooked under like a gigantic wasp. Its legs were bunched up under its body, the knee joints sticking out. Above its thorax was a continuous flickering – one, no
two
pairs of long translucent wings, beating so fast they blurred! They protruded from under its thorax’s first lamina, attached by a narrow joint that seemed flexible, like a hinge. What
were
these things?

Another one underneath me altered its path, rising up diagonally, but I jinked to one side and it missed. I looked forward, realising what the rising funnel above the reservoir was – a flight of Insects. Thousands upon thousands of winged Insects.

Their massed humming caused the sky to vibrate as if struck, resounding from all directions like the sound of flies on a corpse. It drowned out my own beats.

I have fought ground-bound Insects for so long I was bewildered; I couldn’t believe they were doing something different. Are these the same animals? Insects have always had tiny wings. Where have they suddenly got long wings from? And why now? One struck my foot a glancing blow – I dived hastily.

Below me, normal Insects swarmed over the whole valley bottom. They floated dead in the moat, scurried on the road, tore tents down and dragged them over the heather. Trebuchets stood abandoned. Warning beacons blazed on all the peel towers but I could see no other sign of life. A convoy of wagons by the town wall had been chained together to form a laager but every soldier inside the enclosure was dead. The Insects were raining down from above, bypassing our defences, overwhelming everything on the ground.

Arrows pulsed out of the towers’ overhanging belfries and irregularly from the covered walkways along the walls of Slake Cross. I thought of Lightning – surely he must be alive, directing the archers? I had to find out what was going on.

I passed over the town and towards the Insect flight. Like a single being, it threw off graceful wisps as myriads tumbled from the apex. Its base was russet with them ascending from their side of the lake.

Every sense was alive as I dodged past the Insects hurtling towards me. I flew low, dropping underneath the main concentrations. I would never see down through the flight if I went above it. I stared out towards the Wall and what I saw took my breath away. On the far side of the lake, against the panorama of the muddy valley bottom, thousands of Insects, no, tens of thousands, were crawling out from irregularly spaced breaches in the white Wall. They blanketed the ground, scuttling slowly and purposefully over the bare earth before the lake. Ranks and ranks of Insects were flowing out. Each had four transparent wings, so long that their wider rounded ends overlapped each one’s abdomen and dragged on the ground behind it like a bride’s train.

They stopped on the bank. I picked one and focused on it. Its elbowed antennae twirled, even more active than usual, and its head was raised, alertly tasting the air. It turned its head, separated its drooping wings with a mandible and a stretched back leg. It began to twist them up and down with beats. The wings beat faster into a blur and the Insect’s back began to arch. It was being tugged up. I could see its feet shifting position and rising until just the tips of its claws touched the ground, then they lifted off and with a tremendous birring the Insect slowly took off from standing, rose into the air and joined lines, skeins, then great clouds of them spiralling up above the Wall.

Hundreds of metres above, the multitudes were converging. Insects clung together in clusters; enormous aggregations of chitin plates
and thrumming wings. They were tussling to touch the tips of their abdomens together. They rolled as they fell, losing height rapidly and separating again. When their abdomens retracted I saw sticky strands of mucus stretched between them. They reminded me of ants in … in a mating flight!

With this chill realisation I flew a circuit around the rising funnel, risking being attacked, but the insects paid me no attention at all, totally intent on each other. Their numbers seemed to increase and ebb in waves. Individuals in the spiral rose and fell, dropped height and struggled up again, as if with fatigue.

I glided and watched spent Insects tumble out of the spiral, still trailing strands of slime. They righted themselves and descended, drifting south with the wind, around the town and over it. They fell into the town, onto the wreck of canvas outside the walls, onto the glacis between the walls and moat. The moat was completely full of thrashing, hopelessly tangled brown legs and abdomens.

Some landed in the reservoir, or in the river, where they didn’t resurface, and I saw the current turning them over and over as it swept them downstream.

Those that survived were suddenly free of their wings, running rapidly back towards the Wall. Whole wings were scattered all over the ground like glinting shards. The Insects trampled them heedlessly. I concentrated on one Insect alone on the river bank. It settled, took hold of its wings with its nearest pair of legs and pulled them off. They didn’t leave a wound or a scar, or any sign of the enormous muscles that must surely be driving them.

When the newly grounded Insects reached the lake they joined thousands of others all along the south shore, gathered so densely they were clambering over each other. Many were turning around, dipping their abdomens into the water. What appeared to be streams of froth drifted away from them. All around the lake margin the Insects’ tails were pushing out lines of white foam, which lazily tangled with other streams into an irregular lace, drifted towards the lake centre and became indistinct as it slowly sank in the depths.

I put some distance between myself and the chaos of the mating flight to gain a clearer picture of what was happening. Were these different Insects altogether?

The fresh perspective simply brought new questions. More Insects were swarming over the Wall and their saliva was melting the paper as if it was wax. They were working hard to pull out darker lumps from within the liquefying spit. I glided closer to see what was happening – then wished I hadn’t. The lumps were cadavers, the remains
of soldiers. Free of the spit that had formed the Wall and preserved them, some were so rotten that they began to fall apart. There were horse limbs and heads, whole sheep from Lowespass farms, the feral mastiffs of the forts, and some chunks of matter I couldn’t recognise, all covered with the white paste.

The Insects carried them directly to the lake. All along its shores they were wading into the water as deep as their middle leg joint and dropping their burdens. They lowered their heads and nudged the ancient carcasses further in; I could see them bobbing, leaving ripples.

The reservoir edges were filling up with a putrid mass of sodden rotting meat. Chunks washing at the surface and at the water’s edge were releasing a thick, dark brown and oily scum that started to resemble broth. They were turning the entire lake into a waterlogged charnel pit. The amount of matter being dumped was displacing the water and the dam’s spillway glistened as shallow pulses ran down over its cobbles.

‘Oh shit,’ I said, for want of a better word. I had never seen Insects do something so complicated. What if they were sentient after all?

The rank smell of rotting fat and skin rose on the breeze, making me retch. I folded an arm over my face and gained height above it, but I knew it would stick in my sinuses for days. I took a last look at the gruesome mess and skimmed away from the lake. More Insects were beginning to build a new Wall around it.

They were ranging freely over the whole countryside, scurrying on the road, feeding on dead men and horses – and carrying fresh pieces, still dripping, back to join the corruption they had made of the lake.