Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

I considered bolting for the road, but then what?

This wasn’t a unicorn I was dealing with. Martin Chorley wasn’t going to be stopped by any landscape feature short of a three metre concrete wall, and even then it would only slow him down for two, three seconds tops. Better, I decided, to rely on stealth – at least until I had a better idea of where he was.

‘Peter,’ said a voice far too close by. ‘This really is an exercise in futility.’

It sounded like Martin Chorley, only richer and with the timbre of confidence that posh people put on to convince themselves they know what they’re talking about. There was money in that voice, and breeding, and behind it all the mace, the whip and the bowler hat. I also didn’t think it was entirely natural.

‘I’ve done a deal with Lesley,’ said the voice. ‘I promised that no permanent harm will come to you.’ It seemed very close now – metres, spitting distance.

He had to know that I got a message out, and that it was only a matter of time before Nightingale descended on him in all his glory. Likewise he had to know that it was goodbye Faceless Man, hello plain old Martin Chorley, nominal and prime suspect.

‘Look Peter,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t have all day, so why don’t we get this over with?’

How not to be seen, lesson number one: Don’t stand up.

It started to rain, a persistent invisible drizzle that worked its way through the canopy and started soaking the back of my jacket and trousers. What with being overcast, it was beginning to get dark and I wondered who that would favour – me or him.

‘We both know the only reason you’re still alive,’ said Martin Chorley, a couple of centimetres from the back of my head, ‘is because I have a soft spot for Lesley May.’

God, it was hard not to move. But I knew that Nightingale could throw sounds about the place. And if Chorley had really been behind me I doubted he would have been so chatty.

‘What I don’t understand, Peter,’ said Martin Chorley – but now his voice seemed to be coming from a spot three or four metres to my right – ‘is your loyalty to these institutions. The police, the Folly – you swore an oath to the crown for god’s sake – institutions with hardly the best track record with regards to you people.’

Because the alternative is you, I wanted to shout back. But the second lesson on how not to be seen is: Don’t answer back.

He knows he’s short of time, so he’s trying to provoke me, I thought. Next, escalation – threaten somebody else.

‘I’ve got your Muslim partner,’ he said. And this time I spotted the voice wow-wowing back and forth through the trees. I thought I might even be able to sense, just a little, the formae he was using to do it. ‘You have a reputation for gallantry – are you perpared to do the gallant thing now?’

Now, he might have Guleed, although I doubted it. But even if he did, I knew he wasn’t going to just swap me for her. He was trying to provoke a response so he could zero in on me.

And if he did have Guleed?

I thought it better to establish the facts before I started worrying about that.

I decided to give him a response.

Lux is really the most ridiculously versatile of the formae and it has been the subject of experimentation by literally thousands of practitioners since the Folly was a bunch of likeminded weirdos and charlatans meeting in a London coffee house. As a result, a young person with an inquiring mind can find the most extraordinary things written in the margins of his textbooks. Now, I have the advantage over my nineteenth century peers of knowing what infrared is and how it relates to imparting heat energy to a small cloud of gas so that it expands with a humorous farting sound – oh, how they must have laughed. Thus I can make my farting sound louder and funnier – to the point where it can shake the branches on a small bush.

Ipsa scientia potestas est .

I call them noisemakers because I haven’t thought of a decent Latin tag yet.

So I flipped one as far to my right as I could, where it made a sound like a deflating bellows and made a bush shake.

Let’s see what you make of that, I thought.

A tree five metres to my right exploded. I was looking right at it when the trunk shattered at head height and blew out in a cloud of pale brown dust and splinters. Even as I clamped my arms over my head and tried to burrow my way into the leaf mould, chunks of wood were thudding down around me. I yelled into the ground as a heavy bit bounced off my back.

Another tree exploded, closer; I knew it was a tree because I heard the top half of the trunk crash through the surrounding branches before smashing into the hillside with a sound that went vibrating up through my chest. A third explosion followed the crash so quickly that the sound became one long physical blow. A fourth and fifth followed, but further away to the right – below the pain threshold.

I risked lifting my head a fraction. The air was full of yellow and brown dust and the sick smell of broken wood. Flames were visible through the murk, licking up the shattered stump of a tree. Less than ten centimetres from my face a rough splinter the size and pointiness of a fencepost had been driven into ground.

I couldn’t stay where I was. Martin Chorley might not know I was here, but one more near miss by whatever he was exploding trees with and I was going to look like an involuntary hedgehog. I drew my legs up and braced to scramble towards the road.

Another couple of explosions – much further to my right.

Sometimes courage is easy, and sometimes you have to scream at your own body to act in its own bloody best interest, and sometimes it refuses the call altogether. And the pisser is that you never know which one it’s going to be until you try.

This time my body was in full agreement with flight mode and off we went.

We got maybe five metres before a weight landed on my back, wrapped something solid around my chest and hoisted me into the air. I would have screamed like a little girl but whoever had a grip on me had their hand clamped over my mouth. There was the scent of saffron, the sharp bite of clean sunlight over a windswept hillside and the sight of far horizons.

You lying little toerag, I thought, you can fly.

The soaring effect was ruined by the leafy twigs that smacked me around my head and shoulders and then we stopped in a green space and I was dumped onto a branch next to the tree trunk which, while being alarmingly thin at this altitude, I grabbed hold of gratefully. Caroline’s hand squeezed my mouth for emphasis before letting go.

I looked around – Caroline sat casually, legs swinging, on a branch on the opposite side of the trunk and Guleed was on a branch a metre below. We were near the top of the tree and the branches below us had been bent back and up to create a sort of natural hide. Suspiciously, none of them had broken in the process and I couldn’t see any string or wire holding them in place.

I looked at Caroline, who gave me a bland look in return.

Then I flinched at a nearby explosion, then another and another and then two more moving away.

We sat in terrified silence for another half an hour, but heard nothing more.

The likelihood was that Martin Chorley had cut his losses and scarpered, but none of us felt like betting our lives on it. Besides, he could have left booby traps and/ or weird hybrid things behind.

So we waited quietly in the gathering dark for someone to come along and rescue us.

We waited largely in silence and stillness, except for a furious unvoiced argument about whose turn it was next to play Angry Birds on Caroline’s phone, which only really ended when the phone in question buzzed and we got a text saying – You may alight whenever you feel ready.