Chapter 8: Ruth (8378)
The rooms where they kept the slaves in Merrick College felt like a run-down old folk’s home, or that’s what Helen thought at least. Or maybe one of the tatty hostels she had ran in Australia. The walls were nicotine stained, the furniture was all broken and the bedrooms were never cleaned.
When not in her own room, she spent most of her time in the small communal room in the company of Melissa and Tina. Melissa smoked if she could get her hands on some cigarettes while Tina had picked up some knitting that had been left by one of the former occupants. While the other two women kept themselves busy, Helen talked.
‘It’s been over two weeks we’ve been kept here. They’ve not given us anything to do. I didn’t mind it in the orange groves. At least we were out in the sun.’
They were in a basement area, the Slave Quarters, they were called. Helen didn’t even have a window to look out of.
The only other woman in the Quarters was an old lady called Holly. She had arrived the night before and had seemed to know her way around.
‘The Temple doesn’t have overseers and doesn’t employ slaves,’ Holly informed her. ‘This is just a holding area.’
‘Holding for what though?’
‘Until you are reassigned,’ said Holly with a shrug. She was white skinned with dark grey hair, a skinny old thing in a worn-out cardigan. ‘I was through here six months ago. We just await disposal. Church slaves, council slaves, we can wait for months. Just relax and enjoy the peace and quiet.’
‘Await disposal? What sort of talk is that? My God! How quickly humanity got used to slavery again, don’t you think? Just two years ago, people we thought of as friends and neighbours are now treating us like… I don’t know, gardening equipment. Tools. Beasts of burden.’
Holly just looked down at her hands. Any spirit of defiance had long since left her and she did not care for Helen’s tone.
‘They don’t all get reassigned,’ remarked Melissa. ‘Dat what I heard.’
‘I heard that too,’ agreed Helen, lowering her voice. ‘This is where people in Evermarch sent their slaves that they don’t want any more or have been too badly behaved. And then the church kills them! Is that true Holly?’
‘Of course, it is. You three don’t know what it was like here a year ago. The last time I was here, in these rooms, there were a lot of slaves. I was here a month and slaves came and went by the dozen. They could tell you where they had come from, but not where they were going. Last year Angster Stadium was used for executions, and they killed heretics, curfew-breakers, runaway slaves, Sunday-workers. All the time. I learned to keep my head down, just do my work and say nothing. The Stadium is closed now – God’s mercy – I think they either ran out of people to kill, or everyone has learned how to survive in this world like I have.’
Melissa handed a packet of cigarettes to Holly who took one and lit it. She smoked the cigarette in a fussy, old-womanish way, holding it like a pen.
‘Now if anyone is executed - they do it out of the way, somewhere in the College.’
Helen shuddered. ‘No Red Cross, no phone calls. Apart from the witch burnings and the constant threat of being beaten to death in your sleep we were better off on the farm. No TV, just a few old books and magazines. There are more vermin down here than there were on the farm. If I get to speak to someone, I’m going to have a word with them. It’s a disgrace this place. It’s…’
Helen stopped talking, a clanging sound out in the corridor heralded the opening of the door at the top of the stairs. There was no clock in the room. ‘It’s not dinner time already, is it?’
They heard voices outside, but none of them dared to move from where they were.
The door was gently opened, and a tall young guard stepped into the room. He was dressed in the attire of a Temple Guard, with body armour and a sword at his waste. He had no gun with him, but his looming presence made Helen start to physically tremble. Tina scuttled out of her chair and went to hide behind Melissa.
‘Hey hey!’ said the guard holding up his hands. ‘Don’t worry about me ladies... Oh, hello Mrs Banks.’
‘Hello Nathan,’ said Holly who stubbed out her cigarette then came to give the guard a hug. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘She’s good Mrs Banks. She’s very happy now that Randy is back from the war. That’s my younger brother, I don’t think you’ve met him.’
‘You’ve brough my papers?’
‘Yeah, yeah. For all four of you. They’ve finally decided what to do with everyone that came in from Goldengreens. It made a back log. That’s why you three have had to wait. Well, it’s time to go now. Get yourselves ready and I’ll be back in an hour to collect you.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Helen.
‘You are all going to farms. Holly goes to The Mains of Dunlechie, you three to The Shielings north of Glenmaisey.’
None of them owned anything other than the clothes that they wore, so it was not long before they were all bundled into the back of a large church car. The guard listened to pirate radio until they lost the signal outside Evermarch and then his own music after that. Holly was first to be dropped off and after that Helen sat in the front. The guard did not seem to mind, but he did tell Melissa not to smoke when she got her cigarettes out.
‘It’s pretty remote up here,’ he told them as they drove up into the hills. ‘The Shielings is thirteen miles from the nearest village. It gets snowed it every winter. It’s peaceful though, and you are away from all the nonsense.’
The car wound its way up through quaint looking Scottish villages, past farms, over old stone bridges until, in the dark winter evening, it was on a single lane road that followed a river into an area of flat farmland surrounded by a ring of looming flat-topped hills visible only due to the starlight they blocked out.
As their journey ended Helen worked up the courage to address the guard directly.
‘You seem like a nice guy. Please, can you contact my husband Ray Lorric and tell him where I am?’
He gestured at the glove compartment. ‘Yeah, yeah. There is pen and paper in there, write his details down. Same for you two in the back if you have anyone you want to send word to.’
***
Ruth was from a family of rich landowners. The Sauchen’s owned several farms in the Glenkens and while no one had expected all that much from her (she was the youngest in a family of six) they had not expected her to marry as she had.
Her husband, Owen, was of the Free Church, and was a devote man of deep religious principle. He was also a good man (back then) and her father had liked him, even though it had meant his daughter joining a Church that was viewed with baffled suspicion by the people of the Glenkens. The wedding had gone well, and a photo of them together on the church steps still hung over the fireplace in the living room. Owen stood tall and handsome in his kilt and Argyll jacket, a confident smile on his broad face, his unruly blonde hair combed down behind his ears. Ruth was in a white dress vaguely in a Princess Dianna style that looked more dated as each year passed. In the photo she was not smiling, her freckled face is stern, her eyes looking directly down the camera lens.
The Sauchen’s decided that Ruth and Owen could have the remote Sheilings Farm and after they were married, they moved in and started their new life. It was a large holding up in the hills consisting of a house, several outbuildings, barns, and sheds. A small cottage about half a mile away was home to a shepherd and his family.
Despite how isolated it was, life on the farm had been good - to begin with. Owen was not from landed stock, his parents were from Ayrshire, his father had been a car mechanic, so it was a pleasant surprise for the Sauchen’s that he had taken to the running of the farm so well.
There was so much work to do on the Sheilings that in the summer that they would hire in men from the village to help with the dipping and shearing of the sheep. In the winter there was less to do, and it was then that Owen would turn inward, studying the Bible, and other dense texts recommend to the congregation of the Free Church, great tomes printed in small letters on thin paper, bound in thick blue hardback covers. Ruth never went near them, they looked strange and occult. By March he would have turned so inward, so buried in his own thoughts that days would go past with barely any communication between them and just as it was getting to the point where Ruth could no longer stand it, spring would come, and the rhythm of the farm would bring him back down to reality once more.
When their son was born, things inevitably got worse. David arrived in September so his crying through the following winter tormented Owen so much that he converted one of the outbuildings into a cottage and went to live in there.
That winter was the worst of their marriage. They had been cut off all through Christmas and New Year and the baby seemed to never stop crying. Ruth had called out the doctor, but he had told her it was just teething pain. One night, she had been so tired, so thoroughly worn out, that she had gone over to Owen’s cottage to ask him to take his son for a few hours so that she could get some sleep. He had refused, they had argued. He had then slammed the door on her and David, leaving her out in the snow in her dressing gown and slippers.
He came to the kitchen in the main house the next morning and delivered a lecture on not disturbing him during his devotions. Still tired and resentful she answered back. Suddenly he had started to beat her, the pain of the blows as they rained down on her made all the worse for being so unexpected, so out of character.
Later, it was not the pain of the kicks and punches that she remembered, but the intense feeling of all her happiness draining out of her. This was the man that she loved doing this to her, this was the father of her child. In less than five minutes her entire live had been turned upside down. Everything changed. The joy that she had felt in her marriage and new family was replaced with shame. Shame and a sense of being worthless, of having failed, a shame that had to be hidden away and never thought of or discussed. This was a sorrow that was never to leave her.
He had gone back to his cottage, leaving her whimpering on the kitchen floor. She had eventually picked herself up and gone to the bathroom to wash the blood out of her mouth and look at the bruises on her body, naked in the mirror.
The next day Naomi, Owen’s mother arrived, summoned by a message from Owen perhaps. Despite the bruises on her face and her swollen lip, Ruth let herself be persuaded to not tell her family about what had happened or to do anything else hasty or rash. Naomi assured her that Owen was very sorry for what he had done and would be doing months of penance to pay for his misdeeds. Her mother-in-law stayed for a week and Ruth always remembered that she didn’t help with her grandson at all or do any of the cooking throughout her entire stay. She was just there to make sure Ruth did not leave or make any phone calls.
After Naomi left, Ruth and David spent the rest of that winter almost totally alone. In the summer too, there were problems. She had a baby to care for and was not able to help as much on the farm and the bulk of the work fell to Owen. He refused to hire in help and quarrelled with the shepherd so much that they stopped talking to each other. Ruth noticed at this time that Owen began to bully the dogs more frequently, kicking them if he could get at them or grabbing them by the tails and swinging them around his head before slamming them down onto the ground. When a dog was too old to work, he would take them into a byre and shoot them.
The years rolled by. Owen grew to be more and more zealous in his religion, erecting crosses on the surrounding hills and spending their savings on pilgrimages to the Holy Land in winter. His moods darkened, he became more morose and quicker to anger.
When David was old enough, he helped on the farm, but Ruth would always watch for Owen’s temper. In the same way that he bullied his dogs, he bullied his son, often lashing out at him for the smallest of errors. By then Owen was back in the main building, but he slept in a separate room downstairs while Ruth and David were upstairs. Sometimes David would wet the bed and Ruth would help him change the sheets in the night, whispering instructions to him in the dark so as not to wake Owen.
David left home at sixteen. Just as he was beginning to get useful, Owen would remark later. Ruth could tell, after twenty years, that Owen had grown to hate the farm and by extension, to hate her. When Owen’s father died, his mother moved into the cottage.
With Naomi’s influence he grew worse, more disparaging of his wife. Ruth did her best to avoid him, taking long walks into the hills or driving into the village and staying there as long as she could. They never worked together on the farm anymore, the farm and household tasks had been divided between them over the years and through unspoken agreement they did their best to arrange their days to avoid each other as much as possible.
When Ruth’s father died and left them money, it was used to convert a block of out-buildings into a guest house. They took in tourists and walkers in the summer. Ruth enjoyed meeting and talking to new people. Owen kept out of their way, while Naomi always found something to complain about to Ruth, constantly griping that the guests were always using too much soap or making too much noise at night. The winters were still hard, but by the time David left, Ruth and her husband had worked out a vague sort of life that more or less suited both of them. They had their own rooms, their own bathrooms, and their own schedules and only came together for the evening meal. Sometimes a religious fervour would overcome Owen and he would insist that Ruth and Naomi joined him in prayers, Bible readings and all-night vigils. This could go on for weeks at a time, sometimes for months. Ruth found him to be at his most insufferable during these manic periods. The rhythm of the farm had to be put on hold until it had all passed, the work piling up as each day went by.
And yet Ruth endured. Throughout it all she still had her family to fall back on. She often visited her brothers and their children. She regularly visited David over in Dumfries. Her son had never joined the Free Church, not that that was much of a surprise, and when he turned twenty, he had gotten engaged to a Sri Lankan woman called Ravima. Owen did not go to the wedding. They were expecting their first child when the reditus happened.
The reditus was Owen’s rapture. Everything he had been hoping and praying for had happened. This was it, the end of times. Now. Now, he believed, the unworthy would be punished. Now, all those that laughed at him would suffer. Now, all those smug faces in the village would burn in everlasting damnation.
When the rumbling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning had stopped, the ground had ceased moving and the air had settled, the news of what had happened started to come in. They heard it over the radio first. She remembered the absurdly calm voice of the announcer, talking from BBC Manchester (now incredibly just forty-five miles away), telling them that God had miraculously returned. That God had talked to many people, that the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, could now be consulted and considered as a guide for what had happened and for what was to come.
Ruth did not need to consult it as Owen read it aloud every night.
‘The Seventh Seal!’ Owen would cry. ‘The Seventh Seal has been opened! Do you know what that means?’ He would not wait for an answer. Holding a Bible, although he did not need to look at it to quote, he would then bellow, ‘And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour - And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets - And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne - And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand - And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.’
For the first few weeks afterwards, Ruth genuinely thought she had gone insane. Owen, always zealous, whipped himself up into a frenzy through lack of sleep and acts of piety that were increasingly dangerous and bizarre. No farm work was done. Some people, displaced by the Splintering, came to the house looking for food. Owen shot at them. Later he erected three crosses in the farmyard. He had wanted Ruth to nail him to one of them, but she refused and hid in one of the sheds until nightfall.
After a month of increasing insanity some of the Free Church congregation came to the farm and told him that there had been a call from God. An army was being formed to go north and root out heretics from the jumbled-up lands there.
Owen packed a bag and was gone the next day. He barely said goodbye, and despite Naomi’s tears he did not turn back once. Owen was nearly sixty now and Ruth wondered how much use he would be in the army, or whatever it was he had gone to join, but she was far from sad to see him leave.
Two weeks later, Sandy Till the shepherd, his wife and two daughters packed up their car and left too, heading down the valley to live with family in Glenmaisey they said.
With Owen gone, Ruth found that she could think again. She could barely believe that Dumfries was gone now and that the whole Earth had been all muddled up, but one day she walked up to the Windy Standard and saw with her own eyes that the mountains beyond had gone, to be replaced by sand dunes. She dared not go anywhere near the strange barrier that she learned later they were calling the Transition Zone that sat between the desolate Galloway hills and the rolling Saharan desert.
The first winter after the reditus was hard, they were virtually cut off from civilisation. The new city to the south, that had been formed from parts of Dumfries, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen they had called Evermarch. To the south of that was a large chunk of Guyana.
Ruth and Naomi survived on what stock they had and the beef from a slaughtered bullock. It snowed in November and Ruth did not see another human soul other than her mother-in-law until April the next year.
In the spring a car from the Evermarch Temple had come and told them that the farm was owned by the church now and that in order to help her meet their quotas, two slaves would be sent up.
These were surly women, displace people they called leftovers, a young woman from Canada and another from Thailand. Both had run off in the summer and Ruth had gotten into trouble for not reporting it.
The summer after the slaves had gone was the best Ruth had had in a long time. With Owen not around she had all the farmwork to do herself, but it was manageable. Friends and family were making contact again, and what members of the Sauchen clan that remained were on hand when she needed help.
As summer ended and autumn came, they spend their evenings cosy in front of the fire in the living room. Some evenings Naomi just kept to her own cottage and Ruth treasured those nights. She had books that she read and stacks of old newspapers from before the reditus. She enjoyed the books, as a means of escape, but she found the newspapers to be too much. The referred to a world that had totally gone and the memories were upsetting. She didn’t throw them away though.
She used to go down to Dumfries or Ayr for her shopping but now she got everything from the Glenmaisey shop fifteen miles away or they grew it themselves on the farm.
There had never got much of a TV reception up on the Farm and now there was none at all. She had started buying DVDs from the shop in Glenmaisey and watched them when Naomi was not around. Naomi only watched the religious films that Owen had left.
There were a few radio stations. She sometimes tuned into the pirate stations that broadcast out of Evermarch, but mostly she listened to the official Evermarch Radio, a border blaster that could be heard right up to the edge of every Zone line.
As they came up to their second winter it looked like Ruth and Naomi would have another quiet Christmas together, and if it snowed again then they might expect to be cut off for months. It was a surprise then, when the first church car they had seen since the summer rolled unannounced into the farmyard.
***
The Sheilings is isolated, situated at the end of a long, tall-sided valley. To get there from the nearest village you must first drive up through ten miles of desolate Galloway hills on a pot-holed road, then a further five miles on a dirt track. As you descend into the glen from the east side of the valley you see the roofs of Sheilings Farm rising out of its wind break of spruce trees. The farm consists of a large farmhouse, a wide cobbled yard that is surrounded by whitewashed out-buildings, three big byres and two tractor sheds. The farm keeps sheep on the hills and rugged Galloway beef cattle in the glen.
Three hundred yards from the farm was the much smaller cottage where the shepherd had once lived with his family. Its kitchen garden was overgrown with weeds now, two windows were boarded up. The sight of such a desolate and uninviting building spooked them all for a moment, but the car headlamps passed over it as they glided slowly by on the iced-up farm track and continued on its way to the main building.
As they rolled into the yard, the outside lights came on and Helen got her first sight of the farm. She’d never seen anything like it. Her and Ray had both been born and raised in Oxford. It wasn’t until after they separated that he had moved to Scotland, and it hadn’t been until after they had divorced that her and Gary had emigrated to Australia.
This place though. It wasn’t the quaint biscuit tin image of Scotland she remembered from before the reditus. It was a grubby, ramshackle, working farm, with piles of dirty snow in all the corners of the yard. A strong smell of chimney smoke and animal dung hung in the air.
‘Where dis?’ asked Melissa.
‘I think this is Scotland,’ replied Helen.
‘You’re in the Galloway hills,’ said the middle-aged lady that had come out to meet them. She was wearing a Barbour jacket over her nightie and green Wellington boots. ‘This is Sheilings Farm.’
‘Hello Mrs Sauchen?’ asked the guard as he stepped out of the car. ‘Three slaves from Evermarch for you. To help on the farm.’
‘We really don’t need them,’ said Ruth. ‘Not in winter.’
The guard handed over a folder. ‘Here are their papers. As a Temple farm you can claim for their upkeep for the first three months. Phone the number at the top of page six to arrange payment.’
‘Is there nowhere else that needs them?’
‘I’m sorry Mrs Sauchen. There are a great many more to be assigned. Every farm is getting some.’
‘Oh, I see,’ accepted Ruth. ‘Well, have they been fed?’
Further arrangements were made, papers were signed, and the guard got back in the car and left. The last thing he had said to the three slaves was ‘for your own sake, don’t cause any trouble.’
‘It always been like dis?’ asked Melissa as she watched the car drive off.
The lady ushered them indoors. ‘Nothing has changed here since the reditus if that’s what you mean. It really is this cold and windy up here. Let’s get you inside. My name is Ruth.’
As they entered the warm kitchen an even older and smaller nightie-clad lady quickly got up from the table and left, heading further into the building’s interior, closing the door behind her. Before the door was shut, Helen caught a glimpse of the most Scottish looking room she had ever seen. There were tartan sofas and chairs, stuffed animals, several stag heads, and skulls on the walls. She barely understood what she was looking at, it was like a nightmare set inside a taxidermy museum brought on by eating too much shortbread before bed.
‘That’s Naomi, my mother-in-law,’ explained Ruth as she crossed the room to the kettle.
Helen, Melissa and Tina sat together in a row on one of the benches that ran the length of the kitchen table, watching in amazement as Ruth made a pot of tea and laid down four cups, a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk. As the kettle boiled, she brought out a tin of biscuits.
Ruth talked as she pottered about. ‘Well, it seems senseless to send you here. There is not much to do in winter. You can feed the beasts each morning I suppose. I don’t know if I’ve got a coat big enough for… sorry what are your names?’
They gave their names. Tina saying, ‘Tina, Mistress.’
‘Maybe one of Owen’s old coats will fit you,’ said Ruth as she looked over Melissa. ‘There are always fences to be repaired. And if the sheep need to be brought in you can help with that. Do you have much farm experience?’
‘Sure, Miss,’ chimed in Melissa. ‘I harvest de sugar cane.’
‘I worked in an orange orchard,’ added Helen.
‘I never work on de farm,’ admitted Tina. ‘I’m just a girl. I’m only sixteen, Mistress.’
‘No sugar cane or oranges here. Can any of you drive a tractor?’
They all shrugged.
‘A car?’
‘I can drive a car, of course,’ said Helen.
‘Oh right, good.’ Ruth stood warming her legs at the stove. ‘Are you Australian?’
‘I’ve lived there.’
Ruth took a biscuit from the tin and dunked it in her tea.
‘I suppose there is not much to be done today. I’ll see what bedding we have, and we can air out rooms for you. I suppose I’d better feed you. Left over lasagne, ok?’
After they had eaten Ruth, using a torch, took them across the yard and together they got three of the out-building rooms ready.
‘We used to take in walkers,’ Ruth explained once everything was arranged. ‘But none since the reditus. Well, I’ll leave you to settle in. We usually eat breakfast at seven. I’ll ring the gong.’
Once she had left, they explored the rooms. There was a central room, which contained a fireplace, a stove, a sink, and some kitchen units. There was a table and enough seating for about ten people. Near the fireplace was a rather beaten-up sofa and a selection of mismatched armchairs. Helen felt she was in familiar territory here as it was just like the hostels she had ran back in Perth. At either side of the room was a corridor that led to three small bedrooms. One of them was locked, this was where Naomi stored the furniture from her house after she had moved onto the farm.
The fireplace looked usable, but there was no wood. It seemed like the most sensible thing to do was go to bed, but for a while they lingered in the common room, taking in the events of the day.
‘Rescued from one farm to be sent to another,’ said Helen.
‘What that she feed us?’ asked Tina.
‘Lasagne. It’s Italian.’
‘I aint never eaten anything like that before.’
‘You some dam fool backdam lady,’ said Melissa. ‘You never been to Georgetown? They got Italian restaurants there. They got all kinda food.’
‘I aint never been to Georgetown.’
Helen laughed. ‘You know that, Melissa. Remember when we first arrived at the Temple and we were just sat talking for days. I asked Tina where she was from and she says “I come up from Paradise, Miss” and I said “what, like an angel?”’
Tina smiled at the memory. ‘Not Paradise, like heaven. Paradise the plantation. Me aunt never let me leave. I only ever eat her cooking.’
‘I aint never known cold like this,’ grumbled Melissa. ‘It like this all the time?’
‘This is winter. It gets warmer in the spring,’ replied Helen.
‘I aint never seen snow before today.’
Perhaps Ruth had sensed that the new arrivals would be feeling the cold after coming up from the Delta as she brought them all a rubber hot water bottle each to warm their beds.
The next morning, they awoke to the sound of a truck arriving in the farmyard. They dressed and met in the common room.
‘It’s so cold!’ gasped Tina. ‘I sleep under all de blankets, not even my head out of de bed! Just my nose until it gets too cold. And I curl up in a ball, I never been so cold in all my days.’
Once they were all ready, they crossed the farmyard to the main building and entered the kitchen. There was an old man at the table, dressed in a green thermal jacket and a flat cap. There was a Border collie sat between his legs.
‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘This is your new house guests then, Ruth? Come in come in, don’t be shy. Shut the door you’re letting in the cold.’
As they quietly ate breakfast he talked to Ruth. ‘Those tatties should keep you going a while. I’ve ten bags to take to John, then I’m away home. Oh, did I tell ye? I saw army trucks on the main road yesterday. Going south. Do you think...?’
Ruth was down at a low cupboard, sorting out bags of potatoes. She stood up and turned round. ‘Owen? I’ve not heard anything at all.’
‘Aye well, they were quite a sight. Like a travelling circus. I’d better be on my way I suppose. Where is the beef?’
‘In the outside freezer, I’ll show you.’
As he got up to leave, the old man stepped back to look at the new arrivals.
‘Jeezo, what did they feed you on to make you so big?’ he asked Melissa.
‘Metemgee.’
‘Meta-what?’
‘It’s basically a vegetable broth in coconut milk,’ put in Helen. ‘It’s nice.’
‘Oh aye. Not many coconuts around here I suppose, but you’ll get fed well enough. Froakall got five slaves I heard, and Achstone got six. Where are you all coming from?’
‘Goldengreens,’ said Helen, then adding, ‘that’s in what used to be Guyana, part of South America. Not me though, I’m displaced.’
‘Makes about as much sense as anything else does these days…’ the man muttered as he left with Ruth.
On her return Ruth said, ‘that was Luke, one of my brothers. Don’t pay any heed to the old bugger, he talks a load of nonsense.’
‘He had no beard,’ remarked Helen. ‘And no tassels on his coat.’
‘Oh aye. Well, the Committee don’t come up into the glens much. The people around here don’t hold with that sort of nonsense.’
Over the next few days, they discovered that the work they were to carry out on the farm that winter was very light. Every morning, as the dawn light came over the hills, they took a tractor and trailer down to the silage pit. As the only slave that could drive, Helen had been shown the basic workings of the tractor and was soon confident enough to take it drive it short distances.
At the pit they uncovered a section of the silage and used pitchforks to fork it up into the trailer. This took about half an hour, the warm fermented hay pungent in their nostrils and steaming in the winter air.
Next, they drove the tractor down to the fields where the ‘beasts’ were kept. These were beef cattle, last year’s bullocks grown fat and strong after missing their trip to the slaughterhouse after the reditus. Now they were slaughtered one at a time to feed Ruth and her brothers, or the meat sold to buy farm supplies and other food not grown on the farm.
Melissa and Tina crowded into the cab of the tractor to keep warm against the heater, jumping out when they had arrived to get into the trailer and fork the silage out onto the ground or feeding bins for the hungry cattle.
It was cold work, and they were always shivering when they had brought back the tractor to the byre. Here they were always greeted by Jed the Peg, barking happily, jumping up at them. He was a three-legged collie who had turned up at the farm not long after Owen had left and was now kept with the other dogs. He didn’t work, but he was friendly and well liked, to the extent that even Naomi tolerated his presence and drain on the food supply. He lived in the disused tractor shed under a broken-down old hay-baler.
‘Dis dog can really move!’ Melissa would exclaim as Jed came racing across the yard to greet them, hoping along at speed on his one back leg.
From start to finish though, the whole exercise only took three hours so after a long lunch they would be given other outdoor chores to do that required the light of day. Mending fences, feeding neeps to the sheep, feeding the dogs, the chickens and the two plump porkers that lived in the pigsty behind Naomi’s cottage.
The days were short and as it grew dark in the afternoon they came in for their dinner, which was always tasty and filling, much better than the slop they had been fed at Develde. Ruth had more time on her hands now that the slaves were here, so she was doing farmhouse make and mend tasks as well as cooking up large meals for everyone.
Then they went back to their quarters for the rest of the night, a glorious fourteen hours all to themselves. On the second night they were so cold Helen decided to go back to the farmhouse and complain to Ruth. Naomi spotted her as she came across the yard and dressed in a pink dressing gown, silhouette in the light from the doorway of her cottage called, ‘where are you going?’
‘We need wood for the fire,’ Helen replied.
Naomi pointed at a shed. ‘There’s an axe in there. Go into the forest and chop yourself some wood!’
Helen nodded and went over to the door. Opening it she let her eyes adjust to the darkness until she could just make out an axe buried in a chopping stump, surrounded by piles of logs.
She ignored the logs and took the axe.
‘You plan to murder dem?’ asked Melissa when she saw Helen come in with the axe.
‘Don’t be daft, here, take it out the back and fetch some wood.’
Melissa did so and soon they had a huge blaze going in the small common room and were as snug and warm as they could have wished for.
After five or so days they had settled into this gentle routine. Ruth did not ask much of them.
‘This isn’t so bad,’ said Helen one evening as she warmed her feet by the fire with a cup of tea in her hand.
Melissa grunted, she was too engrossed in a Horse and Hound magazine to pay any attention.
‘It’s de cold,’ said Tina in her tiny timid voice. ‘I don’t tink I could eva get used to de cold.’
‘It gets warmer in the spring, or at least it should, who knows these days, but even in Scotland the summers could be very nice.’
‘And de beasts are out in de cold,’ commented Tina. ‘And Jed won’t come in to de warm. He like it under his engin’.’
Melissa laughed. ‘He a workin’ dog, Tina. He know his place is not here with the people.’
‘He a clever fellow, I swear. He look at me like he knows. And he herd up the chickens when it’s time for them to go in their coop. No one tell him, he just do it for fun.’
‘Collies are very intelligent dogs,’ agreed Helen. ‘We had one once. It used to…’
There was a knock at the door and Helen got up and opened it. Ruth came in with a bin bag full of clothes.
‘Some more stuff that might fit you,’ she explained. ‘Oh, and Tim is coming over tomorrow to look at your plumbing, so you can have a proper bath in here.’
Melissa looked up from her place by the lamp at the back of the room. ‘Miss Ruth. You have all deez magazines, but no horse?’
‘Oh, well. I used to, before I was married,’ replied Ruth. ‘Horses used to be a big thing around here. I used to go on big rides. Not on hunts, but that sort of thing. When my last horse died of old age, I didn’t get another one. I’m a bit old for it now anyway.’
As she spoke, Ruth used the big steel poker on the fire, moving the wood to catch the flames. ‘You can help yourself to logs in the woodshed. Just don’t let Naomi see you.’
Once the fire was to her satisfaction she straightened up, leaned the poke by the fireplace and dusted off her hands. She then headed for the door, but before leaving she turned and said, ‘keep your door locked tonight. Don’t worry too much, but there are stories going around that the Fire Foxes have crossed the Zone line again.’
Tina looked alarmed. ‘What’s a fire fox?’
‘They are heretics on the other side of the Zone line up beyond the Windy Standard. They’ve not done anything yet, but they’ve been spotted. Last year they burned down three farms, the nearest was Hamilton’s about ten miles away. They burn the animals as well, it was just like when we had foot and mouth, big pyres of beasts burnt with petrol. Awful business. The fencibles will see them off don’t worry, but keep your door locked anyway.’
Tina slept with Helen that night and Melissa slept with the poker.
***
On Christmas Day, Ray Lorric came to the farm, driving up the snow clogged track in an old Honda Civic. By now the slaves were eating their meals separately in their own quarters. This was all very inconvenient for everyone, but Naomi had insisted. It was God’s will, she had announced, that slavery was back, and slaves should be treated as slaves, not as house guests.
Ruth had met him at the door, he had phoned ahead and although she had not really approved, she had let him come. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to see her, it’s just that I’m scared it will end up like last time,’ she had told him over the phone. ‘The lady ran away to be with her family, and when the Committee caught her, they stoned her to death.’
Helen came to the door of the bothy as Ray took a suitcase from the back of his car. She had known he was coming; they had talked on the phone several times over the last few days.
‘Merry Christmas. These are some of your old things,’ he said as he did his best to wheel the case across the cobbled yard.
‘You kept my clothes?’
‘Not all of them. I’m not a weirdo, I just never had the need to clear out your closet,’ he wheezed as he carried the case over the threshold.
‘But you moved house, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, but the Centre did it, not me. It all just arrived in boxes.’
Helen took the case at the doorway and Lorric went back to get two more. Melissa and Tina hovered around, both greatly interested to see the man that had once been married to Helen.
After they were settled, Helen boiled the kettle and stoked the fire. He was fatter she thought, and still wearing that ridiculous tatty old hat if you could believe it. With the bushy white beard, he looked like Captain Birdseye or a human sized garden gnome.
‘Not a bad set up here,’ he said gesturing at the well-furnished bothy common room. ‘Cosy. And a room each? Must be better than that jungle.’
‘You think you’ve helped me?’
‘Haven’t I?’
Helen sighed. ‘I’m still a slave, Ray. I have to stay here, or they’ll kill me.’
‘Honestly Helen, you are just as well here as anywhere. It’s not like Evermarch is a bed of roses right now. They army is back and now God knows what’s going to happen.’
‘God knows? You talked to God?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
Helen was now sorting through her clothes on the table. ‘I can’t believe you kept this,’ she said holding up a cardigan that was worn through on both elbows.
‘I never opened that cupboard…’ muttered Lorric.
‘You and God are best buds, right? Pull a few strings and get me freed. Tina and Melissa too if you can.’
‘I just work in a call centre Helen, uch!’ he grunted.
Helen stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘You dare take that tone with me? Look at you, you look pretty well fed. With the tassels on your coat, you look like a novelty Elvis Presley gnome. Back at Goldengreens we were always worried where our next meal was coming from, it doesn’t look like you missed many dinners.’
Lorric looked down at his belly. ‘None of this is my fault,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t have to lobby for you. I didn’t have to bring you your things.’
Helen was about to say more, but she could see Tina was getting upset.
‘Well then,’ she said more softly. ‘What’s to be done? Can you free us or not?’
‘I can’t,’ he replied, holding out his hands. ‘I’ve looked into it. According to the rules you have to serve a minimum of six years then you can ask to be freed. Or you can ask to stay a slave, but that involves having your ear nailed to a door, then you are a slave for ever.’
‘Why on Earth would I want to do that?’
‘Hey, stop get angry at me all the time, I’m just telling you what the church told me.’
They talked, they argued, Helen got angry, calmed down, then got angry again. Tina went to her room and eventually so did Melissa.
Eventually there was nothing left to be said and they got down to preparing Christmas dinner with the food that Ruth had provided them. It was a pleasant meal, and after a few glasses of wine, Helen softened, and even shed a tear.
‘This is the happiest I’ve been since it all happened,’ she said and put her hand on top of Lorric’s. ‘Last Christmas I was in a concentration camp.’
‘Was pretty bad here, maybe not as bad as a concentration camp,’ admitted Lorric. ‘But everyone just hid indoors. The muta cancelled Christmas last year. People died. I didn’t do anything, just ate alone as usual.’
‘I wonder if anywhere in the world didn’t go to complete shit,’ wondered Helen.
‘Do they let you watch the news up here?’ asked Lorric.
‘We get no reception; all our news comes from the village.’
‘It’s unbelievable. Everywhere seems much worse. Sorry.’ Lorric sighed and refilled his glass. ‘I’d better make this my last one, I’ve got to drive back tonight. Nah, Helen. You are better off here. There are stories going around that Archbishop Sinclair will be made a Biblical Judge soon and then there will be another purge.’
‘I don’t know what any of that means. I’ve been a slave my whole time in this Zone.’
‘He’s already a total bastard. If God gives him more power nothing can stop him from doing whatever he likes. Strake is already a fascist state, it was only Thorman’s apathy and indecision that stopped Evermarch going the same way.’
When Ray was leaving, she looked long and hard at him, as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car, preparing to go. Something prompted him to repeat again, ‘you are honestly better off.’
‘It’s just all bollocks Ray!’ she hissed at him. ‘You try being a slave. And then try telling yourself you are better off.’
Helen cut herself short when she saw Naomi looking at her from the farmhouse door. As always, a forbidding silhouette of an old lady in a dressing gown and bunny slippers.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said finally, and drove off.
Boxing Day was a Sunday and as no one could work on a Sunday the beasts had been fed double the day before.
Helen decided to go a walk on her day off and climbed up through the trees on the slopes of the Windy Standard. Beyond the forest there was a trail, of sorts, and it was here that she had thought to turn back, but the snow was not deep, and the path was still visible, so she kept on going. This was where the summer pastures for the sheep were, the last shallow dip of the valley until the mountain flattened out at the top. This was where all the windmills had been built. In the distance she could see them standing against the clear blue sky.
They sat motionless and unmaintained now, having gone still the day the reditus struck and cut them off from whatever it was they needed to work. Some of them, at the back, were right on the Zone line, she could see their twisted shapes through the zonal haze.
She had been told that beyond the Zone line there was desert, perhaps the Sahara and that no one lived there except for heretics and the Fire Foxes. They were collections of Leftover people, people who had refused to stop worship the wrong God or Gods, and all manner of other crazies, people driven mad by the upheaval of the reditus or who had looked at Wormwood for too long.
Helen sat on a rock and drank from her flask of tea. After a while a glimmer of light caught her eye and as she focused on it, she could see it was the sunlight reflecting off a car windscreen. She heard the faint sound of a roaring engine in the far distance, strangely distorted from traveling through the turbulent air of the Transition Zone. She drained her cup and screwed it back onto the top of the flask and hid behind the rock. The sound of the engines increased, it was coming from the direction of the windmills and echoing down the valley. Whatever it was, it was hidden by the slope of the mountainside. Squinting against the sun, looking out from behind her rock she watched as a distant vehicle, a Land Rover or something, came over the horizon and stopped on the downward slope. It was about a mile away, but she could just make out the doors opening and two figures stepping out.
She hid behind her rock, then after a minute she peaked out. They were still there. Light glinted off something. She had a thought that they were using binoculars to look down into the valley. She hid again, her heart pounding, and did not move again until she heard the sound of the engine starting and the vehicle returning back up the mountain slope.
