The Chalk Giants

Book 110: Gateway Essentials

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE the hazardous evolution of mankind continues. And in primeval response to the disaster, humanity's solutions to catastrophe carve the harsh new world in violent patterns of magic and myth, rite and religion. Brave images scar the ancient hills, the clash of swords and the ageless power of sexuality sign-post another, bloodsoaked path to civilisation.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 268

Sample

1

Always on a long trip it was like this. First he’d worry for a while and listen for big-end knock and differential whine and noise from the dynamo bearings, then boredom would set in and he’d start working out times and mileages in his head; and finally driving would become automatic and then it was like getting tunes in his brain only the tunes were sights and scenes sometimes from years back, things he didn’t want to remember but had never managed to forget. No rhyme or reason to them; like the faces you’re supposed to see in a glowing fire. Only he’d never managed to see the faces, not even when he was small.

The Champ rumbled steadily, clocking twenty, twenty-five. He was south of Salisbury now, clear of its bottleneck of old streets, the hooting and fumes and din. The city had been bad; there were broken windows, in one place he’d seen riot troops with guns and shields. Somewhere a building was burning; the smoke cloud rolled down thick and black and evil-smelling, obscuring the cathedral spire and the lines of hooting, panicking cars. It was car horns and shouting, and forcing your way yard after yard. A Vauxhall rammed him, on the new roundabout on the outskirts; the big towing hook on the Champ smashed through the stoneguard, left the car sputtering, wheezing water and steam. There had been armed troops; but he had still been lucky to get clear.

He gripped the wheel, trying not to think any more. Ahead, a bare five miles away, was the coast road that skirted Bournemouth. In old times he would have been at his destination inside the hour, but the traffic was slowing again to a halt. To either side stretched the glades of the New Forest. He swallowed. He’d caught himself wondering if the ponies would survive.

He told himself for the dozenth time how if he had a dash compass he would risk driving cross-country. He’d tried to get hold of one, a week before; but he’d been too late. Maybe they’d been banned. He stared round and licked his mouth. He had the vehicle for it, he had his maps; but he wasn’t going to make it, even now. He didn’t have the guts.

The fear was welling again, jamming his throat. He made himself be calm. He found a handkerchief, wiped his forehead, then the wheel rim. He sat listening to the throb of the Champ’s big engine. After a time he switched off again, to conserve fuel.

How and when the idea had come he couldn’t say. At first, like all such things, he had thrust it away; but it returned insidiously, time after time. It got into his brain at work, again like a tune that wouldn’t be dismissed, came between him and sleep as he lay night after night, hearing the clock tick and his mother’s restless coughing from across the landing. He told himself it was useless, useless, till he was sick of the sound and very taste of the word; but it didn’t help.

His first buying had been tentative, tins and packets picked up here and there, smuggled back to be transferred later to the garage where he kept the Champ. He spread them on the floor, working by the light of the one dim lamp, saying to himself, ‘You’re never going to do it. You haven’t the guts; and if you tried, you’d fail.’ Finally he sat himself in the cab with a pencil and scratch-pad. Some overall system was needed; that much at least was obvious.

He realized nearly at once how random and senseless his purchasing had been. Most of the foodstuffs, bought in a species of hysteria, were too bulky for his purpose, too liable to spoiling. He set himself mentally to explore the shelves of his local supermarket, ticking off unit after unit. He’d read somewhere rice kept more people alive than any other staple; so far it hadn’t figured in his lists at all. Flour was another obvious basic; to transport and store it he would need damp-proof containers, either of plastic or metal. Butter he supposed was a necessity; it could double as cooking oil. That at least was readily available in tins. Salt would be vital; it too would need an air-tight container. Most canned meats were unsuitable; too little bulk, too much slosh. Corned beef, though, was ideal; greatly daring, he risked buying in bulk. Soups tempted him; he settled finally for the dehydrated variety that comes in foil-lined packets. Later he added baked beans to his list of possibles, and remembered the peculiar merits of dehydrated potato. He never stopped asking himself, ‘What are you doing it for? What do you think you’re going to do?’ But the back of the Champ began to fill.

He packed each box and carton with consummate care, grudging every inch of unused space. He added his fishing rod with two spare top joints, a box of hooks and heavy lines. Camp accessories followed: a two-ring burner, plastic cups and plates, forks and kitchen knives, a hand lantern, containers of gas. The bottles were bulky, he had to cut back on the space allocated for bedrolls and blankets. He told himself, ‘You’re never going to turn the starter. You’re never going to drive down there and you’re never going to do what you think you’ll do because it’s mad.’ And still he didn’t stop.

A trip to a second-hand dealer yielded a dozen five-gallon fuel cans; they accounted almost wholly for the remainder of the space. Then he remembered he’d made no provision for the most vital necessity of all, a supply of drinking water. He had to start again, nearly from the beginning, revising his priorities, discarding this, cutting down on that. With the Champ empty he drove her down to the workshop, oiled and greased and checked her over. The sealed power unit he didn’t touch, but it was good for a hundred thousand miles. He made up an emergency kit: fuses, lamps and bulbs, rotor arm and distributor cap, spare coil and condensers, plugs, fanbelt, hoses, jubilee clips. An iron frame, spot-welded hastily under the chassis, received a second battery sealed in polythene; lastly he took the locked case from his bedroom drawer, slid it behind the driving seat. Topcoat, boots, toolkit and second spare wheel would have to travel with him in the front. He stowed them experimentally, walked round the big motor. There was room for nothing else; the Champ was full.

The traffic was moving again. Ahead on the main road were blue and amber flashers; somewhere an ambulance was yelling its strident double note. A saloon car lay on its side, there was a jack-knifed artic. Beyond, the road was a hooting jam of vehicles.

He’d discounted for the moment any means of heating. In emergency the burners would have to serve. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette in years; he’d packed five hundred, all the same, in sealed tins of fifty. Another fifty lay in the dash cubby for immediate use. He prized the lid off, lit up. The first drag made him cough; he inhaled again carefully, lay back in the seat. He couldn’t stop the shaking in his hands.

The pictures had started, as they always did. He rubbed his face, tiredly; but Form 3Q was still laughing, and Sledger Bates standing with the register under his arm, eyes bright blue beneath tufted ginger brows. ‘What for?’ he said. ‘What for? When I give lines, you don’t ask what for. For what you were doing before I came in …’

The seat edge hit the backs of his knees. He was holding the desk-top, stammering, vision swimming. ‘Sir, I …’

‘Another fifty, Potts!’

‘I … I …’

‘A hundred and fifty, Potts! Going up!’

‘Sir, I …’

‘And another fifty. Got the score, Chapman?’

‘Yessir!’

‘Sit down!’ The voice was thundering, defeating him.

‘Sir …’

‘Potts! Sit down!’

His legs gave way, traitorously. He held his head down, all of him shaking, the exercise book sparking and spangling six inches from his eyes.

‘Two hundred and fifty,’ said the Sledge. ‘Fifty for luck, the rest for cheek. Don’t rub that out.’ The chalk scraped the corner of the board; the register slammed on the desk. ‘You must be mad, Potts,’ said the Sledge. ‘You must be mad. Turn to a hundred and twenty-three.’

His hands were aching where they held the wheelrim. He flexed his fingers. The light was fading now, the tail-lamps of the stalled vehicles ahead winking like jewels. He closed his eyes and tried to work out how long he’d been in the car. Horns set up bedlam behind him. He jerked awake. The line had moved; he shoved the Champ into gear, drove forward. The hooting stopped.

He lit another cigarette. The taste was coming back. He remembered how when you drove past the castle and up out of the valley you drove back into sunlight. You got it on the last bend, full in the eyes; then the road snaked away between dry-stone walls and there was the pub and the yellow and red caravan outside and the hanging sign rich-lit against the deepening sky. Sometimes too the May mist lay across the curve of hills, long angled stripes of it moving fast down toward the village. Driving through it was like driving through clouds, and the sun on top made it look like fairyland.

The Champ barked, breasting the slope in second; he swung into the pub yard with a clash and jingle and sat and listened to the engine tick as it cooled. And the paddock was there and the grazing donkeys, nothing changed; the great dimming sweep of hills and the castle brooding miles off in the dusk and house lights and headlights showing in sparks and twinklings and Poole on the horizon and the air moving huge and clean and old. He listened to the silence, then his own feet on the gravel as he walked toward the door; and Ray was inside and the rest, John with his clipped posh voice and the artist with the beard who drank from a pewter pot with a lid to it, and the frightening fierce-eyed girl who played the guitar and sang the song about working, all the bloody work and no pay, he wouldn’t have minded her. And the fossil fish in its glass case on the wall, the pots hanging over the bar and the yard-glass in its chain slings and the lit signs for Devenish draught and keg and the cigars and cigarettes and the placards advertising English Country Wines.

Something in his chest gave a hot jump, for she was there too. She wore a shirt checked in amber and sage green and a short canvas-coloured skirt and sandals that left her feet bare, just a sexy little strap between the toes. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin brown-gold in the lamplight and her hands like butterflies, as deft and slight. She was perfect, head to feet. He wondered sometimes how anything could be that perfect, somehow it seemed nearly wrong. He swallowed and wondered what to say, but there was no need because Ray called from the bar as he always did, ‘Same place,’ and grinned and jerked his head at the ceiling. So he hefted his stuff upstairs and unpacked, he knew the furniture in the room now and the bed with its immaculate, tight-stretched sheets. The window stood ajar on its big old-fashioned stay and beyond was the castle, the great shell of ruin blue in the dusk. He would unpack quickly and put the camera and light-meter in the one drawer that locked and go and eat his meal because afterwards he could sit in the bar. And once she talked to him a whole ten minutes, asked what he did for a living and whether he’d had a good trip and how long it had taken getting down. After that he had a good time, although she didn’t speak to him again; instead he heard how John’s boss planted the wrong strain of wheat and the wind had flattened it, and how the caravan had taken first prize in a carnival and how the coastguards log a boat all round the shores of Britain. Driving back, it seemed the hours flew; it was as if she was with him, he’d brought her back like a wonderful catch from a wonderful shifting sea. He smiled, in the dark; and the Champ took a roundabout gently so as not to wake Martine, asleep a hundred miles away.

He got the Champ from Chalky for a straight ton, God knew where he had picked it up; but when he got tired of her and said she was using too much bloody juice and went for an old Magnette Stan took her over and cleaned her up and had new side-screens made and a hood at Trade and got himself a garage again. After that she was good for him because he could sit inside her and dream, though when he got her down to Purbeck the first time Ray Seddon took the pleasure out, right out, saying he thought the bloody coal had come.

They all laughed, the people he knew, and he had to laugh with them, but afterwards it wasn’t too bad because she came out to see. She was wearing a white shirt and the canvassy skirt and her hair had been cut, though he preferred it that shade longer. The Champ was standing on the skyline, angled on the rough car park behind the pub; the sun was glinting on her dark green paint, she looked big and tough and smart. Martine had her arms folded and a cardigan over her shoulders. She said in her brittle little voice, ‘What are all those knobs?’ and he said, ‘Four-wheel drive,’ and then his voice stuck in his throat because the chance was there, anybody else in the world would have said, ‘Nip in, I’ll give you a run,’ but he couldn’t speak. So time stopped for a bit; then she was walking back saying, ‘I have to get on now,’ so he went round to the back of the car and fiddled with the jerrican lock as if it didn’t matter, and the afternoon was still and warm and he felt like death. After which Northerton was hard to take; his mother’s house and the doctor coming and the workshop and the fish-and-chip place on the corner and the birds on the telly and in the Sunday papers, all reminding him of her. Winter was coming on; and Chalky was hard to take, the Sunday walks down past the garden fields and the new Grammar School to Drawback where they ran the dogs. The grey sky and the rough brown fields, the silence and leafless trees, all were hard to take, though what he had inside him locked away he couldn’t speak of, least of all to Chalky. Though he owed the castle to him and the valley and Martine; to a week’s holiday, years back now, Chalky between women, with time on his hands for once. What had haunted Stan had left him unimpressed. The beer was good, he had pronounced; the castle all right, if you liked that sort of thing; and Martine all right, though she didn’t look like a very good fuck. Stan pondered, frowning; while Chalky swore and cursed and the greyhound put up hares it never caught, and cut itself on hedgerow wire. And sometimes it was good to get back in the Champ and drive down past the gasworks to his place and shut the curtains and put the Box on and get his mother’s tea.

The traffic was halted again; and lights were flashing, amber and blue. There were cars drawn up and lorries; it looked like a road-block and he couldn’t think any more what he meant to do.

All the tech lights were on, so the side of the building looked like a shining yellow cliff. The canteen was cold and nearly empty, stinking of lunchtime’s bacon rolls. They’d pulled two tables together, though the fat woman had yelled through the serving hatch not to, and Tasker was there from the Boot and Shoe, the only leather bloke they got on with, and Quatermain and Briant and Tony Sidgwick and half a dozen more. Mist was closing in and the odd bangs were starting already and they were all making a row, and it was Guy Fawkes Night.

He sat with the rest, feeling a hot breeze blow on the back of his neck from the table at the far end where the art school girls were sitting. The tall blonde was there, Annette Clitheroe, thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-six, and the little Irish one they reckoned did turns with the Pakis, and the other one, Helena, the one they nearly had the jumper off in the corridor that night and she didn’t have a stitch on underneath. Tony Sidgwick kept cheeking them, saying to come down on the tech table and they’d show them how, then he started on Annette Clitheroe, her people had this big furnishing shop in town centre. She was wearing her hair up round one of those felt former things and Tony kept shouting what was it on her head; and she said finally, ‘That’s my business,’ and Sidgwick said, ‘That’s a bloody funny place to put it,’ and they all started shrieking, Stan included, because he couldn’t help himself. Then Sidgwick lit a jumping jack under the table, they didn’t see him do it till it was fizzing and went off; and Stan Potts’s brain worked with lightning speed so that he grabbed it and threw it over his head and ducked. The fat woman was yelling over the counter about the Principal, and Sidgwick was choking himself he was laughing that much.

Her heels on the concrete floor were very distinct and sharp. She walked the length of the canteen, carrying the plate, and set it down in front of him. He had to look up, though he couldn’t stop the laughing; and her eyes were snapping and glinting behind her glasses, there were red spots of anger on her cheeks. In the centre of the spoiled cakes, embedded in a meringue, were the remains of the cracker; and there were little white splashes of cream on her sweater, and one on her jaw.

She said, ‘My cousin lost his eye through one of these, you big fat bloody thug. You must be mad …’

He’d passed the road-block but he’d had to lie, he’d said he was going to Dorchester. The traffic was lighter now, the cars spaced out and moving at forty, sometimes forty-five. But nearly nothing was coming up from the west.

His mind was empty; so to fill it, and keep away the things he didn’t want to see, he set himself to remember the road ahead. Wimborne, and the left turn by the Dorset Farmers, the little bridge, the long straight in the trees with the notice saying Welcome to Poole although you never really touched it; and the new roundabout at the bottom with the filling station, he could remember it being built. Then there was the other roundabout by the Bakers’ Arms and the research place, Admiralty they said it was, with the miles of high steel fence. Then the turn into Wareham, the siding where the oil tankers stood; and beyond, over the bridge … but his heart was thumping again, hammering, it seemed, painfully against his ribs, and he checked the thought half-formed.

After that first chance trip he went back to Purbeck time and again; though the journey from the Midlands was a long one, five hours and more on a bad day. It left little from a weekend; just one night, and the following morning. The nights he spent in the bar; he would rise early on the Sunday, drive down to the castle or out on to the heath. The castle drew him, the vast shell of ruin topping its hill, the village straggling and crouching at the foot of the mound. Foursquare it stood in a great pass, flanked to either side by bulging heights of chalk. Once he climbed the nearer of the hills, sat an hour or more staring down at the ruined walls and baileys, the gatehouse with its leaning towers of stone. A chalk stream ran beside the mound. Tall trees arched over it, bushes clothed its banks; and here in autumn the glowworms came, like cold green stars in the grass. He longed to take them back to her, jewel her fingers with them and her dark, rich hair.

Other times he drove across the hills themselves, over the range road that was so often closed. There were hidden bays there, and empty, forgotten villages; and once he saw a horseman ride the forbidden cliffs, a mile or more distant, outlined against the pearly haze of sea. He discovered Kimmeridge with its blackened beach, the great house that overlooked the bay; Worth, its gnomish cottages hidden in sea mist, and Dancing Ledge with its lovely rock-carved pool. He was learning, too, the people who used the pub; John, as much a mystery to his friends, who knew, it seemed, every country you cared to mention and yet drove a tractor for a living; Martin Jones the hippie, with his floral shirts and wispy shoulder-length hair; Maggie who played guitar for the tourists sometimes in the Barn Bar, who lived in a white bungalow down the road with a birdbath on the lawn and a stone rabbit with broken-off ears, and Richard Joyce who painted for a living and who must have Private Means. He knew them, though he couldn’t talk to them; and for their part it seemed they looked askance at the fat man in the corner, with his pained half-smile and always-furtive eyes.

These folk formed, as it were, an inner circle of acquaintanceship. But there were many others; Andy who worked with John, Andy with his tanned good-looking farmer’s face who went with Penny who helped out sometimes in the bar; Ted and Arthur and the locals and Vicky who was tall and blonde and wore an Army uniform, they said she was a nurse; she knew Richard, he’d seen her with him a couple of times. And the tourists, the leggy warm brown summer girls who sat in the hayloft in the Barn with their men and laughed and drank cider and lager and sometimes wine. He liked the Barn Bar best, with its high cool walls hung with implements and harness and the thatched roof over the counter and the door standing open to the dusk and the moths circling in the pools of yellow light. He saw the place in dreams; and always Martine was there, Martine with her great dark eyes. Sometimes too he saw her in the hills, in the hidden villages and by the great rock pool. Then he would wake and realize that once more he was home, that he had been alone, that he would always be alone; he would stare into the mirror, at the balding head, the faded, heavy-lidded eyes, and know he would never go to that golden place again, that Northerton was where he belonged and where he must stay. But the simplest truths are the hardest to accept; so he would pack his things, just one more time, and hear his mother’s complaints, and the images would swirl hour on hour till he saw the hills again, the sea-mist striping their flanks. He would drive into the remembered yard; and always he would know as he pushed through the hotel door that this time she was gone, gone for ever. Yet always she was there.

In the intervals between his trips he studied. He read the geology of the region; and its history, prehistory and architecture. Every fact that touched upon the place touched, it seemed, on her, made him feel fractionally less alone. So, increasingly, she towered in his consciousness; her face glowed above the hills, her slender hands cupped bays and sea. He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolled their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies. He became at times transfigured; then he would remember, and Northerton would claim him and the garage, the oil changes and grease-ups and job cards and MOTs; Chalky and the dogs, the telly and the dreary Sunday nights. His mind, circling, would balk once more at the inevitable yet wholly unacceptable fact: that he was fat, and bald, and forty, and that life was ended.

This inner pain was such that greater issues tended to pass him by; so that it was with some surprise that he entered the Barn Bar one summer night to find the place unusually quiet, a handful of regulars and visitors clustered round a tranny that stood on the counter-top. The words he heard seemed no less and no more than the many uttered before; but the silence that followed them was intense.

Martin Jones broke it. He sat hugging his knees, head back against the wall of the place, fair hair brushing the stone. ‘Well,’ he said in his quiet, carefully modulated voice, ‘it’s all happening. This is what we’ve been waiting for.’

Ray stood frowning behind the bar, one hand laid, it seemed protectively, on the shoulder of Martine. ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘Come on, Martin, we’ve heard it all before.’

The hippie shook his head. He said, ‘Not quite like this.’ He glanced round lazily. He said, ‘I’m looking forward to it. So’s Vicky. It’s what she joined up for.’

The blonde woman turned to stare at Joyce, but did not speak.

Jones always seemed exceptionally well informed. ‘This will be a primary retaliation zone,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to be sure of Winfrith. I expect we’ll be shipped out before too long. They’ve cleared one of the caravan parks at Sandbanks as an embarkation area. They’re keeping quiet about it, of course. That won’t be a sight of good, unfortunately. Far too flat.’

Somebody said, ‘Tell us where would be any good.’

‘Quite a lot of places,’ said Martin. ‘One thing’s certain; I shan’t be waiting it out in Poole.’ He yawned. ‘I’d tend to look for somewhere between the hills and the sea,’ he said. ‘You’d get good blast protection from the Purbecks; and I can’t see anybody lobbing anything into the Channel. They’re much too accurate these days.’

Maggie said, ‘There’d still be fall-out.’

Martin said, ‘I shouldn’t think there’d be much to worry about there. You only get fall-out with ground detonations. If we get anything it will be air blasts; they’re far more destructive anyway.’

Maggie said bitterly, ‘Maybe they’ll want some good dirty blasts while they’re at it.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Jones politely, ‘but I think strategically unlikely.’ He brushed the light hair back from his eyes. ‘After all, they – and don’t forget “they” could be the Americans – will want to occupy the territory afterwards. Otherwise the whole thing’s pointless.’

Richard said, ‘It’s nice to know there’s some point in air blasts. It makes it all seem more worth while.’

He turned. As if in emphasis, a rumbling had sounded from outside. The noise intensified; then past the open door ground yellow headlights, dark green armour. The vanguard, it seemed, of a considerable column, moving up towards Worth and the sea. They watched the first vehicles pass; then Ray shrugged. He said, ‘That’s it then.’ He picked a cloth up expressionlessly, hung it over the pumps. A shocked pause; and somebody laughed. They said, ‘It’s not Time yet.’

‘No,’ said Martin. ‘Not yet. But soon …’

Stan Potts had not spoken. His mind was working furiously; for he knew just such a spot as the other had described. He remembered the lane that wound down from the range road, the lane they only opened once a year, in summer when the Gunnery School closed down. The dead village behind its ten-strand fence, ruined, bullet-pocked gables of barns; and the great shuttered farmhouse by the sea, close under the brooding cliffs. The hippie had spoken, as usual, with calm conviction; and the unthinkable had come to seem, for a space at least, a practical reality. He glanced at Ray, under his lids; at Joyce the painter, and at Martin Jones. Lastly, he saw Martine; and something caught his breath, made his heart begin to pound. Though the notion that later came was not yet fully formed.

The tail-lights ahead brightened. He braked automatically, stared round. For a moment he was disorientated. He brought his mind back from distance, saw with something like a shock the railway siding to his left, the bulky line of tankers. Ahead was the bend that took the road into Wareham; and on the bend they had set up their block. The Army this time; he saw the lorries drawn up, figures moving purposefully behind the red-and-white striped pole. Handlamps bobbed, he caught the gleam of a steel helmet. A car was turned back peremptorily, another waved to one side. So he wasn’t going to make it, after all; but he had known that from the start.

Where he sat at the tail of the queue he was a quarter-mile or more from the checkpoint. The vehicles in front of him moved forward, stopped again. He saw a car directed into the side road that runs inland, across the heath to Wool. Another followed it; and something seemed to snap inside his . . .