Chapter 30 #4
Looking after the babies, milking the goats and keeping the fire going in the house so that everyone would be warm kept me busy enough till the light began to fail and of course anytime I wasn’t working I was sitting by Cat reading First Aid and Safety for Dummies trying to figure out what to do with the huge bruise across her misshapen chest. I wondered if the lopsidedness meant that she had ribs puncturing her lungs, which might explain the funny noise of her breathing but then I decided the fact she was not bleeding out of her mouth any more meant that her lungs were still intact.
That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of organs inside that might well be bruised or bleeding her away into death.
I just tried not to think of that because there was nothing I could do about them.
I wasn’t a hospital in the crowded clever past, I was just me in the empty now.
I tried to keep positive. I tried to stay away from the hole in the middle of myself that threatened to suck me in every time I forgot about it.
I tried to keep moving, like Cat would. By the time it began to get dark I realised that Storm and Freya would not be coming back.
And I also thought that Bear Shirt’s party would be so far over the horizon by now that they would not have noticed our signal fire at all.
In fact, it had just been a waste of tyres, but it had kept me going through the afternoon.
I realised I was hungry and hadn’t eaten anything at all, so I was heading back to the kitchen and Cat when I heard the horse whinny.
Since the fire was no longer roaring and spitting, the faint sound carried across the emptiness all around me.
It was a distant noise, but it was unmistakably a horse.
My heart bumped in excitement as I ran down the shallow slope from the bunkers and clambered to the top of the tank, trying to see the girls coming back in the direction from which the noise was coming.
Premature relief was flooding my system, which was almost as mind-stalling as fear and I tried to steady my brain as I balanced on the top plates of the turret, scanning the rain-sodden terrain spread out in front of me.
It took me a while to admit I had no sight of them; nothing was moving except the birds that flicked from tree to tree or soared high overhead in the failing light of early evening.
Even though I felt gutted with disappointment and na?ve for believing in a sudden happy ending that was clearly more hope than reality, I wasn’t a fool. There was a horse out there.
Whose horse it was remained an open question, and one of the possible answers had the potential to be the very opposite of relief.
So, I went and got my bow, and then I fetched the Russian’s gun from the high box where Cat had hidden it from the girls.
I had to put it together with its magazine full of bullets and carried it as I jogged towards the motorway in the direction of the horse noises.
If it was Freya and Storm returning with second thoughts and two pairs of hands that I could really do with, it would be one happy thing, even though at that stage I hadn’t thought it all through, because of course what they had done had sent Cat up on to the unstable roof of the Tower, and so they were to blame for her injuries.
At that point I just needed help so I could focus on Cat and not the demands of the babies.
If it was the Russians, I would at least be prepared in case they were as dangerous and hostile as the girls made us believe they were.
The horse seemed not to be moving from the noise it was making and indeed the whinnying got shriller as I crossed the M-way and got closer to it.
And now I could hear it better, coming from somewhere in the trees on the way to the quarry, I could sense the growing urgency of the whinnying, as if the horse was in trouble.
Every step I took away from Cat cost me as I crept forwards, stalked by the fear that she had woken up and was in pain and didn’t know where I was.
Nevertheless, the rising desperation of the unseen horse pulled me onwards.
I found myself knowing where I was going once I entered the Miserable Wood.
There was a sort of inevitability to it, on this day when the girls had gone.
I came to the edge of the dripping green space made by the fallen, overgrown legs of the pylon.
The horse was the mare, Red, and she was tethered to one of the struts, almost exactly as we had found her when we first came upon the horses and the dead Russian’s camp all those long lifetimes ago, before we saved the girls from the quarry.
It was disorienting, like the past was looping back into the present. I don’t know why they left her there.
Maybe they didn’t. Not both of them. It wasn’t something I could see Freya deciding to do, leaving me a horse.
I think Storm did it by herself. Maybe it was her parting gift to me, her way of apologising in a way that was more believable than the “sorry” that had seemed so stark and insincere in the short note they’d left.
Freya and Storm weren’t there to ask, nor were the two faster horses, so I’ll likely never know the truth of it.
But what I did know at the time was two other things: Firstly, that in its own way it was as inexplicable and miraculous as Devil coming back from Stitch Country with the other goats in tow.
And the second thing was the bigger one, and of course I’ve told this backwards, because it was also a surprise but a very much more dangerous one.
It was the three wolves. Cat and I had seen wolves, moving across a very distant snow-covered hillside, long before we came to live under the Tower.
And we’d heard them a couple of times, in the dark, maybe five winters ago.
But despite the fact I’d never seen one up close anywhere except an old picture book, I had no doubt about what the trio of animals looking at me were.
Bigger than a fox, smaller than a horse.
Grey-brown fur bristling up into a mane around shoulders hunched up behind yellow eyes that were simultaneously both dead and terrifying, and in front of all that muscle that moved under the fur as they crouched and slunk with their chests low to the ground, the main bad things and the focus of my attention – big and shockingly white teeth bared in a black-lipped snarl.
This was the worst of all days, the one when the sorrows did not come singly, like the writing in the library said, but in battalions – the girls ran away, the babies were abandoned, Cat failed to fly and might be dying and now there were wolves.
Right at that moment it was clear they were not sure whether to eat me or the horse.
I looked smaller, so probably less of a meal, and I could see they’d had one go at Red who was bleeding from a bite mark high up on her back leg.
It was only then when the wolves moved a bit, as though they were connected and making a silent decision to focus on me that I noticed one had a three-legged limp, with a front leg held high up to its chest. I’d been kicked by Red a few times.
I guess my bones were thicker than a wolf.
Good girl, I thought as my immediate life narrowed down into mathematics.
One of me, three of them. No way I could outrun them.
If they attacked, I might hit one with an arrow, but I didn’t think I could be sure of doing more than injuring it and making it angry.
I definitely didn’t have time to fire more than one arrow accurately.
I had my knife, but that was where the maths got hazy and futile.
I tried to keep my mind clear and see an alternative to running or fighting.
I looked quickly to right and left to see if I might make it to the edge of the fallen pylon and jump up on the struts, pulling myself clear of danger.
That seemed unlikely, but perhaps possible if nothing else happened and the wolves were slower than they looked as if they were going to be.
I was angry again, more than I was scared.
But it was me I was angry at, not the wolves, they were just doing what wolves had always done, looking for something to eat and working together to get it.
I’d been too fast, not slow and smooth. I’d been so keen to see Freya and Storm coming back that I’d run out of the Bunker fuelled by hope rather than sense; impatient.
I’d left Cat alone in the makeshift hospital bed I’d cobbled together, and worse than that – if anything could be worse than that – I’d left the babies alone with no one to look after them.
I’d had no business coming down here in the first place.
If people were coming, I should have let them come to me.
I suppose I was angry because I knew at some level I’d run away from the problem hoping to find a solution rather than staying with it.