Саймон Морден - Down Station

She poked her head inside the rectangle of wood. There was nothing remarkable to see, just a chaotic mix of rotting debris and new life. But outside, she found an axe embedded in one of the logs: an actual hand axe, haft as long as her forearm, brown blade the size of her fist.

She worked it free. The head wobbled slightly on the handle, and it was badly rusted. It was, however, an axe. She made a few experimental swipes with it, then let it hang by her side as she slowly turned.

There was another house even further away.

It looked to her like the whole village had just packed up and gone, leaving things behind that shouldn’t really have been left. Perhaps Stanislav was right after all. She walked halfway over to the third ruin, growing increasingly uneasy for no reason at all. Everything around her was green and brown, with even the man-made structures being eaten by nature.

Perhaps that was what had happened. The plants themselves had risen up at the order imposed on the land and dragged the people down, into the ground, burying them with roots and vines. Flowers grew on their graves and rot consumed their houses. All that remained were ghosts.

She stopped. She could feel her legs start to tremble. Concrete was what she knew, concrete and glass and tarmac and noise. Not this. Not the forest.

She turned around, and hurried back to where she’d found the axe. She was breathing fast and shallow, and leaned against a tree to recover. Orange in the distance meant that she was safe, back in sight of the others.

A crash, a shout, and she raised the axe instinctively.

Dalip stumbled back from the house, which he’d accidentally partially demolished. Then he heard her, or sensed her, because he spun around, hands up, ready to defend himself. For a moment, they didn’t recognise each other, seeing only a threat. His gaze went from the axe, to her, and his shoulders sagged with relief. She looked up at her hand, and lowered it.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You, you… What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘Just looking. Just… looking, that’s all.’ He held his hands up again, but this time palms out. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

‘Well, you did.’ She wasn’t angry, but startled and scared instead. ‘I, I found this. And there’s another house further on. There used to be people here, loads of them, and now there aren’t.’

Dalip didn’t seem to want to get close to the axe, not when she was still waving it in front of her.

‘Everyone’s going to keep looking for a bit longer. I came over here because I hadn’t seen you for a while.’

‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said automatically. ‘I’m fine.’

He didn’t believe her, but at least he pretended he did. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you alone.’ He pointed towards the river and slightly upstream. ‘I’ll be over there. Call if you find anything.’

He left her, moving off between the trees, every so often slowing and examining the ground by his feet. She leant back against the tree again, the back of her head resting against the bark. She started to realise that freedom for her meant freedom for everyone and everything. She was at their mercy, and they were at hers.

It wasn’t that no one could tell her what to do anymore. It was that she couldn’t tell anyone what to do anymore; that all she could rely on now was either trust and friendship, or fear and coercion.

She weighed the axe in her hand, and wondered what to do.

Whatever the reason for the village’s abandonment, they found so very little of use. No crops growing wild in the undergrowth, no feral chickens scratching their way through the dirt. They did find what Stanislav thought might be an old orchard, but the fruits were barely swellings behind the hairy remains of the blossom.

Dalip realised that the presence of a farm meant that they couldn’t just rely on foraging for food, or if they did, that their existence would that of a nomad, chasing calories around, always in that delicate balance of food burned against food earned. Plenty and famine were precarious states to sit between.

Perhaps the geomancer could help after all. If the name suggested anything, it was a close connection with nature: they’d be someone who watched the way the seasons turned and how the land reacted. He was keenly hungry◦– he was certain they all were◦– but he wasn’t going to complain, because what would be the point?

When he was younger, he’d always tried to wheedle something from the kitchen, no matter what time of day it was. But food was always there, and his mother was the gatekeeper. Occasionally she would relent. Most times she would not. Here, there was no food, no morsel being kept back. Only finding or catching something would change that.

They started upriver again, heading for the notch between the two peaks ahead. There were no more houses, at least that they could see. It felt like they were walking through forests so ancient that no one had ever walked that way before, and though Grace must have passed that way only the day before, there was no sign of her passing.

All the woods he’d ever been to◦– with the Scouts, with the school, or on holiday with his parents◦– had had paths worn into them by the persistent feet of people, even if planned routes, marked and laid out with posts and signs, hadn’t been present. The closest he’d ever come to this was the one time he’d gone◦– his father had called it ‘going back home’, to a place alien to Dalip◦– to the Punjab. They’d gone as a party up to the high mountains, where the patchwork quilt of cultivation ended and the forest reigned. He’d stepped off the path, away from everyone, just for a moment. It hadn’t been quiet, or still, but it was a world apart from the roar and dust of the cities.

That had been just a flavour, a mere hint, of what he was experiencing now. Once upon a time, the whole world had looked like this. Trees grew, seeded, died, and more trees grew to take their place. Some of the saplings were eaten, but the eaters were in turn eaten. There was no one to cut and burn and clear the forest, until the coming of man.

That thought had him hurrying to catch up with Stanislav, who once again had taken the lead.

He drew up behind him, and the man waited for a few seconds to let him catch up the rest of the way. They’d have to stop soon, anyway, to gather firewood and try harder to scavenge food.

‘This place,’ said Dalip. He was not so much out of breath as simply tired. ‘This place, it’s untouched.’

‘This is true,’ said Stanislav. ‘But you mean more than that, yes?’

‘When people◦– when we◦– stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being farmers, we lost all this. Even where we didn’t cut the forests down, we lived in them, managed them. Here, that never happened. If we believe the wolfman—’

‘If.’

‘Even if he’s lying to us, he might be telling the truth in parts. He said his father was a, a traveller, like us. What if everyone here is one, or their children? That there’s no other people here at all, except those who find their way here by accident?’

‘I see. That would mean that there are no real natives, that there is no deep knowledge to pass down, and that people we meet vary only in their levels of ignorance depending on how many generations back they go.’ He lowered his chin, deep in thought. ‘It might be that this geomancer is the pinnacle of lore here, but there will be limits even to her knowledge. This is important.’

‘Also…’

‘Yes?’

Dalip’s gaze followed Stanislav’s, down to the ground. ‘People, you know, have babies. Even by the end of the Neolithic, most of Britain had been worked over once. By the Middle Ages, everywhere was lived in, and that’s with a tiny population, a couple of million.’