then his mother started to change. She said that something in the house was “weighing on her”. That there was something in the air itself that left her unable to think straight. She started to forget things. Little things at first, then it seemed as if she forgot almost everything, wandering through the house, vague and forgetful.
Owen read on until the light changed, almost as if a rain cloud had arrived overhead, the light dark but silvery, so that he could still see the letters on the page. He listened for the sound of the rain falling, but there was nothing, not even the sound of the wind. In fact, a stillness seemed to have fallen outside, so complete that you couldn’t hear the sound of birds or insects. Owen decided to investigate. He slipped on his jacket and heaved the old door open. He was careful to replace the branches that hid the door, even though he was aware of their loud rustling in the still air. He paused. There was a sense of expectancy. He began to climb towards the old swing, which was the highest point overlooking the river.
It took ten minutes to get up to the level of the swing tree. The air itself was dense and heavy, and Owen was breathing hard. He skirted the ridge until he got to the swing. It was a piece of ship’s cable which had been hung from the branch of an ancient oak protruding over a sheer drop of fifty metres to the river. The rope part of the cable had almost rotted away to expose the woven steel core. No one knew who had climbed the branch to put the cable there, but Owen knew what it felt like to swing on it. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. You knew that if you lost your momentum or your grip there was nothing to save you from the long drop to the stones of the river far below. Local children had used it as a test of nerve for years. For Owen, it wasn’t the bone-crunching impact of the stones that he feared, but the clammy touch of the water.
For some reason he couldn’t explain he felt that there was someone watching. Almost without thinking, he crouched down behind a heap of old stones and peered out over the river. As he did so he saw a part of the bank below him start to move. At least he thought it was part of the bank, but as he looked closer he saw that it was in fact a man. He was wearing some kind of uniform, which might have been blue to begin with but was now faded to a greyish colour. There were no insignia on the uniform except for heavy epaulettes on the shoulders. The man’s hair was close-cropped and steely grey. In one hand was a narrow, metallic tube, almost gun-shaped, and on his belt there were oddly shaped objects – thick glass bulbs with narrow, blunt, metal ends.
There was something else strange about him and it took Owen a little while to work it out. Then he realised what it was. Even though the man was obviously fully grown he was barely a metre and a half tall and just a little taller than Owen himself. The man was staring intently across the river. A small knot of hazel trees on the slope meant that Owen couldn’t see what he was looking at, but a dip in the ground led towards the man’s position and Owen crept along it.
As he got closer, he could see how tense the man was, how his left hand gripped the metal tube so that his knuckles were white. As Owen drew level with him, he could see that he was looking in the direction of Johnston’s farm and scrapyard. Owen knew that Johnston’s scrapyard had been getting bigger, but he hadn’t looked at it for a long time and now he saw that it seemed to have expanded to cover field after field. At the fringes of the scrapyard he could see small black figures moving busily to and fro. And as he watched, a figure in white emerged from the fields of scrap and stood facing in the direction of the river. Owen heard a sudden intake of breath from the man in front of him.
“The Harsh!” he exclaimed then went silent as the cloaked figure raised his right hand in the air. Owen heard a voice that did not seem to be human, a cry that swelled and seemed to be both angry and triumphant, and full of youthful arrogance and ancient fury, a cry that seemed to flow like a raging river until Owen covered his ears and pressed his face to the ground.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the cry stopped. Owen looked up. The man in front of him had not moved. If the cry had shaken him, he did not show it. He seemed to be waiting for something. The wind had stopped and every branch and leaf was still. The birds and insects made no sound. Even the noise of the river faded away into silence. The man waited and Owen waited with him. The silence seemed to stretch on and on. Owen’s muscles were taut and his hands were clenched into fists though he didn’t know why. And then it came, soundlessly and all-enveloping. A kind of dark flash, covering the sky in an instant, sweeping across the land and plunging everything momentarily into total blackness like the blackness before the world began. And then, just as suddenly, it was gone and the trees and grasses seemed to sigh, the very stones of the land seemed to sigh, as if something precious had gone for ever.
“It has begun,” the little man said softly to himself, his voice weary. And then there was another great cry, but this time filled with terrible triumph. Owen felt a chill run down his spine and he gasped. In a second, the man had turned and taken several swift steps towards him, brandishing the metal tube. But when Owen stood up, he stopped and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“So,” he said, as if to himself, “it is to be you. I suppose it had to be.”
Owen waited, suppressing the impulse to run. The man strode up to him and took him by the arm.
“We must hurry,” he said. “We have a lot to do.”
Owen didn’t resist. He felt completely bewildered. When the man released his arm he followed. They were going in the direction of the old Workhouse, the small man moving with great speed through the tangles of willow and hazel scrub along the river. After a few minutes, Owen realised that they were following faint paths through the undergrowth, paths that he had never noticed before, but that seemed to be well-travelled. Every so often, the man would disappear from sight, but he never got too far ahead. Owen would round a bend to find him waiting.
“What’s your name?” Owen said breathlessly as he hurried up to him for the third or fourth time.
“My name…” the man said, stroking his chin and leaning back against a tree as though the matter of his name was worth interrupting his headlong progress for, that it was something which merited sitting down and thinking about.
You either know your name or you don’t, Owen thought impatiently. “My name’s Owen,” he blurted out, hoping to hurry the man along.
“I know your name,” the man said in a tone which left Owen in no doubt that he was speaking the truth. “They call me the Sub-Commandant.”
A sudden cold breeze made the trees around them rustle. Owen shivered. The man straightened up quickly.
“Let’s go,” he said urgently and started out again. Owen followed, almost running.
After ten minutes they were close to the Workhouse. To Owen’s surprise the narrow paths had started to widen and there was fresh-cut foliage to either side of them. The grass had been stripped from the ground and he could see that the surface of the path underneath was cobbled. But that wasn’t all. As they approached the Workhouse, he could hear the sounds of people at work, hammers tapping, wood being sawn, the rumble of masonry. When he rounded the corner he stopped and blinked and rubbed his eyes in amazement. The side of the hill leading to the Workhouse was swarming with people, many of them wearing the same uniform as the Sub-Commandant. And instead of there being a smooth stone face, archways were beginning to appear in the rock. Archways and windows, more and more of them. Men were unblocking entrances and passing the stones from them from hand to hand down the cliff. Other men were using the cut stones to construct a wall at the bottom of the hill. In the oak wood on the other side of the Workhouse, teams of women were working with saws at the trees.
Owen
