Laurie King - The God of the Hive

“Do you see?” he asked.

I looked at the trail ahead, circling past a rocky outcrop. “See-oh. The branch?”

One branch of a low-growing tree was tied back against the next tree with a piece of strong twine. Careful not to touch, I stepped around Goodman, searching the ground until I saw the fine, dirt-coloured twine: a trip-wire.

It was a booby-trap, not deadly but powerful enough to swat a person backwards down the path, breaking a nose or arm in the process. I looked up from where I was squatting to ask, “Do you have many of these?”

“It is a private estate. This helps keep away visitors.”

“So I should imagine.”

Satisfied that his warning had got through to me, he walked on.

After a time, Goodman slowed, and began to peer at the undergrowth. I decided this was as good a time as any to have our conversation, so I started by expressing my immense gratitude that he had not only saved our lives, but given us shelter as well. He grunted, then pulled out the little axe and laid it to the base of a young sapling, twelve feet tall with an odd bifurcation halfway up, as if something had bitten off its growing tip and driven it to generate twin alternatives.

I raised my voice. “I ought to take my companions away as soon as I can.”

“His leg should rest.”

“Well, at least let me move the others into the main room with me, so you can sleep at night.”

“The shed is comfortable,” he said.

I studied what I could see of his face, wondering at the thoughts underneath all that hair. The precipitate arrival of three demanding strangers into his quiet retreat seemed to trouble him not in the least-apart from a few mild comments, he had been remarkably incurious about our situation, our history, or our plans. One might almost imagine that the dreamy, fairy-tale quality of his surroundings had permeated his mental processes, as well, leaving him incapable of questioning even the most unlikely events.

That approach did not much help me, however. Even if we were welcome to stay here until Javitz could walk, my own mind was by no means dreamy, and worries pressed in on me: What was Brothers up to? Where were Holmes and Damian? What about Mycroft in London? Where could I find safe hiding for Javitz and Estelle near here?

Wherever here was.

“Where are we, exactly?” I asked.

The sapling fell. Goodman chopped off the twin tops, then exchanged the hand-axe for the thick knife he wore, stripping away the branches as he answered.

Exactly , it would seem, was not a term that applied to this location, although it was well short of the Forest of Arden setting I had begun to suspect. We were, as I’d thought, in the Lake District, approximately midway between two villages I’d never heard of. But if one drew a line between Grasmere (the bustling centre of the Wordsworth industry) and Ravenglass (on the Irish Sea), we should be halfway along that. Or perhaps a bit closer to the east. And south, he thought.

“Where do you shop?” I asked him. “When you’re not buying sausages from a neighbour?”

He named a village, adding, “I give the shopkeeper a list of requirements, then pick them up when next I go. I gave him one this morning.”

“What, on a Sunday?”

“He was at home, of course, preparing for church. I told him I’d be back tomorrow.”

I looked at him uneasily. “I wish you’d consulted with me first. It’s not a good idea to have it be known that you are sheltering three strangers. Someone’s sure to have found the wreck by now, even out here.”

He finished reducing the branches to stubs, slid the knife into its scabbard, and sighed. “Very well. Tell me your story.”

“It started when Estelle’s father came to our door in Sussex,” I began. We walked, he listened, with little response apart from a noise of pain when I told him that Estelle’s mother was dead.

“She doesn’t know,” I said.

He gave me a look over his shoulder.

“I haven’t had a great deal of free time in the past thirty-six hours,” I protested. “In any event, I can’t decide if I should tell her, or wait for her father to do so. I rather think it should be him.”

“Yes,” he said. I waited for any further response, but there was none, so I went on. I told him our problem, or enough of it to make him understand the danger: serious enemies with unknown but potentially considerable resources; scattered companions whose situation was unknown; a mad religious fanatic and his acolytes; the remaining threat against us. “We thought Brothers was dead, but by the time I got back to the hotel, it was pretty clear that he had escaped,” I told Goodman. “And, he somehow managed to alert a subordinate in Thurso that we were coming.”

“And that subordinate took a shot at your aeroplane.”

“I do not know who else it might have been.”

“It could not have been an accident?”

“I’d like to think so, but it beggars the imagination to picture a stray bullet cleanly puncturing the centre of an aeroplane two hundred feet overhead. Nor can I accept that the northern reaches of Scotland is so rife with madmen that we could find a religious fanatic and a man who takes pot-shots at passing targets within twenty miles of each other.”

He nodded, conceding my point.

“I have to assume that Brothers is somehow related to the sharpshooter. And if he has two assistants-one on Orkney, one in Thurso-he could have more.”

“Which requires that you keep your heads down for a time.”

“Until I meet up with my companions and we pool information, I cannot know who, or why. Or, I will admit, even if.”

Goodman walked, head-down with the stick across his shoulders, leading me in a wide circle through the untouched woodland as I told my tale-although since I was forced to leave out many of the details so as not to enmesh him in danger, I found it was a story I would mistrust myself, were I to hear it.

At the end, I described the rapid disintegration of the aeroplane mid-flight, and said, “Captain Javitz brought it down in the clearest patch he could see, although it proved not quite clear enough. And you know the rest.”

Back now where we had started, Goodman sat down on a fallen tree, studying the rambling structure on the far side of the clearing: tree in front, shed behind, a glimpse of orchard at the back. After a minute, I sat beside him. Even with a clear head, the meadow resembled the dwelling-place of some mythic creature. Could there possibly be a deed somewhere with Robert Goodman’s name on it? I thought it more likely that the aeroplane had delivered us to another world, one in which official land deeds and telegraph lines did not exist.

“The whole story sounds terribly alarmist and melodramatic, I know. But short of giving you all the details, and the names”- which would absolutely guarantee that you did not believe me , I mentally added-“it’s the bald truth.”

“Good. So you won’t be leaving momentarily?”

“Not if you don’t mind having us, for two or three more days.” If nothing else, I owed it to Javitz to let his leg heal before moving him.

“Good,” he repeated, adding, “‘Dull would he be of a soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty.’” I stared, then followed the line of his gaze: A hundred feet away stood a magnificent stag, its antlers each showing six or seven points. The creature’s liquid eyes studied us with as much interest as we studied him. Majesty was the word.

Which was, again, that of Wordsworth. “‘Westminster Bridge’?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were mad. “No, red deer.”

And so saying, the little blond man set out across his meadow, causing the stag to leap away and me to grin at my companion’s retreating back. The stripped sapling rested across his shoulder like a rifle barrel. Or the first support for a child’s swing.