The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne Read online

  She came to a decision. “We’ll stop here.”

  “Spend the night?” He stared round at the darkness twining through the weeds.

  “Easy to defend. We can keep the animals away.”

  “And the men behind us?” The boy hadn’t mentioned them since the top of the ridge and had never asked why she was being chased. But he had been watching her all this while.

  “They’ll halt on the hill. It’s night. No one moves through the forest at night.”

  She spoke with an airy confidence she didn’t quite feel. No one tracked outlaws so deep into the Wilds either.

  But she had to stop. It was dark, the boy was gray with fatigue, and she too needed to rest.

  They explored the ruin until they found a room where the roof beams had not yet fallen and the flagstone floor was covered with dry dead moss and quantities of leaves. It was a good place to sleep. Its only animal traces were small-scale—tight, twisting tunnels among the leaves, the discarded casings of insects, and dried seedpods that had been piled in corners to make winter homes for mice. In the shell of a neighboring room Scarlett discovered a ground pheasant’s nest, with a fat mother bird sitting on a clutch of pale blue eggs. It snapped its beak at her but was ignorant of humans and did not know enough to be afraid. She wrung its neck and pocketed the eggs, then went to locate some brushwood.

  When she returned to the roofed room, she found Albert Browne sitting cross-legged on the floor in the last of the dying light, examining a collection of bright red seedpods and yellow leaves. He was staring at them in rapt admiration.

  Scarlett stood and scowled at him. “Don’t tell me: you find them beautiful.”

  He gave her a beatific smile. “Aren’t they just?” He was arranging them in a line. “So delicate, so intricately textured…”

  She dumped the wood on the floor with a clatter. “Yes—well, don’t let me bother you. I’ll just make a fire…. Cook this dead bird…. Set up defenses…. Won’t take me more than an hour. You just holler if I get in your way.”

  “OK.”

  He went back to his study of the seedpods. Scarlett stared mutely at his bent head. A large piece of brushwood was near at hand. It was the work of a moment to connect the two with a single short, sharp blow. The boy did a backflip and ended up with his jumper over his face and his bottom in the air.

  He rearranged himself indignantly. “What did you hit me for?”

  “For your impudence and laziness! For leaving me to do all the work!”

  “But, Scarlett, you told me to do everything that you said! ‘No argument! No discussion!’ Those were the exact words you used! And just now you told me to leave you in peace while you did those jobs.” He rubbed sadly at the back of his head. “I don’t understand how I have offended you.”

  “Your main offense is an appalling ignorance of sarcasm.” Scarlett tossed the branch back onto the pile. “Let me be clearer: I make the fire, you pluck the bird. Then you roast it while I fix up the sulfur sticks. Is that plain enough?”

  “Certainly. Though you might have said that in the first place.” He picked up the pheasant. “Ooh, look at the pretty speckled feathers—all right, all right, you don’t have to hit me again.”

  After that, preparations proceeded in silence.

  * * *

  —

  Firelight ignited the color of the ancient bricks. The pheasant roasted on a skewer above a roaring blaze. Scarlett had built the fire in the innermost corner, to allow as little light as possible to escape. There was a risk it might be seen, but this could not be avoided. They had to eat. While the boy tended to the pheasant, she unpacked her acrid-smelling sulfur sticks and lit them near the door and window to ward off mud-rats and other smaller predators. This done, she stepped out into the farmhouse yard. It was overgrown, a place of bushes and brambles. The sun was gone; a dim red glow shone in the west above the hill.

  Some animal was howling in the woods; when it abruptly ceased, there was intense quiet. Scarlett’s senses strained against it, listening for footsteps….

  Nothing. Of course there was nothing. It was night. She spun on her heel and went back into the room.

  The boy was listlessly turning the skewer, his face passive and serene, his skin glimmering darkly in the firelight. He might have been made of fossilized wood or stone. He was doing nothing overtly annoying, but his collection of colored leaves and pods lay beside him on the ground. He had arranged it in size order. The sight of this—in fact his very presence—made Scarlett suddenly sick with anger.

  She took a long, slow breath to calm herself. In the previous twenty-four hours, she had killed four men, committed a bank robbery, walked many miles across difficult country, been squashed by a bear, and acquired the unwanted company of an idiot. By any standards it had been a long day. But worst of all, she had been unable to meditate that morning. She knew that all her anger, her pent-up agitation, was rising from that omission. She needed to relieve the pressure—and do it soon. Right after the meal would be nice. She went to her pack and unclipped her plastic tube. Tipping out the mat, she spread it carefully on the ground at a distance from the fire, patting and smoothing out its rucks and curls.

  The boy was watching her. “Why are you doing this? What is that thing?”

  “I am setting out my prayer mat. I wish to pray.”

  He nodded. “Praying? I have heard of that. So you do it on that old rag?”

  Scarlett paused. “I use this fragile, sacred cloth, yes. And by the way, once I’m sitting on it, there are rules. You don’t bother me, prod me, talk to me, or flick soil at my ears. You leave me alone and wait for me to finish.”

  Albert Browne considered the matter. “So it’s like a toilet, then? Old Michael at Stonemoor used to express himself in similar terms.”

  Scarlett clutched preemptively at her cuss-box, then took another deep, slow breath. “I won’t strike you…. Self-evidently you are a simpleton and have a head filled with clay. No, Albert, it is not like a toilet. Quite the reverse! This mat, when it’s unrolled, is holy ground.”

  “Yet you plant your backside on it,” the boy observed. “That is a sorry act, and surely disrespectful to the sacred cloth.”

  Scarlett gave a bleak half smile. “It is not really so strange. When I sit upon it, I am in a state of grace.”

  “So if I sat on it, would I be in a state of grace too?”

  “No. You would be in a state of some discomfort, for I would beat you with a stick. Listen to me closely. Never let me catch you touching this cloth with your dirty fingers, let alone your ragged arse, or it’ll be the worse for you. It is my mat, and mine alone. Do you understand?”

  “I do, Scarlett, I do.” The boy nodded vigorously, rocking back and forth on the moss with his skinny arms wrapped tight around his bony legs, but Scarlett McCain noted that he could not take his eyes off the mat and that it continued to exert a powerful fascination. Not even a leg of roast pheasant could fully distract him, and his bright eyes still glittered in the firelight as, after the meal, she finally sat cross-legged on the mat to begin her meditations.

  The prayer mat was made of coarse cloth, roughly woven out of yellow and red threads. As a physical object it had no value; indeed, its material worth was negative, for it was grimy and malodorous. But for Scarlett it was the symbol of her daily retreat from the world and more particularly from herself. It represented her ability to escape. Now she sat straight-backed, her hands folded; half closing her eyes, she let the light of the fire swim and dance behind her lashes as her mind untethered itself and took off in a series of vaulting leaps.

  She thought of the four outlaws by the lake that morning. Well, their deaths had not been her fault. They had attacked her, and self-defense was the right of all. They should have guessed the person she was, used common sense, and let her be. Who would miss them? Not even their
mothers. They were worthless and incompetent, and by killing them she was doing the world a favor. Yes, she could safely scratch them from her mind.

  She thought next of the Cheltenham bank job. It had been carried out efficiently and well, and without causing any gratuitous harm—aside from the bank guard, of course, and she’d made sure he wasn’t dead. The haul was good enough to settle her debt with the Brothers of the Hand, then let her live like a queen, if only for a month or two. Not only that, it was another successful strike at the Faith Houses and the Surviving Towns, which anyone with a conscience would celebrate. In sum, it was an act to make a girl proud, rather than ashamed. So no need for guilt there, either.

  By now Scarlett enjoyed a feeling of warm satisfaction. True, the militiamen were doggedly tracking her, but she could evade them the following day. She knew there were rivers in the lowlands ahead—somewhere near, even the ancient Thames had its source—and it would be an easy matter to swim these to throw the dogs off their scent. A good sleep, an early start—soon the Cheltenham men would be left behind. What was she worried about? She had everything under control!

  Thus Scarlett’s meditations proceeded. She ended as she always did, thinking of the Seven Kingdoms. She imagined looking down on them from a great height—at the wastes, forests, and mountains, at the tiny towns and villages nestling in between. It always did her good to remember how insignificant her misdeeds were when set against the catastrophes of the past, the misfortunes of humanity, the landscape’s colossal emptiness, the vast indifference of the surrounding skies…

  Scarlett’s mind looped back into the present. She felt calm and composed. The mat had done its job. It was like a great weight had fallen from her and left her shiny and renewed.

  She opened an eye. The fire burned low in the corner of the room. The boy was standing at the window, looking out into the dark.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “A long, low whistle.”

  She was already on her feet, rolling up the prayer mat. Her calm was gone; still, she was cool and decisive. “The kind of whistle you might use to call an obedient dog?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How near?”

  “That’s hard to say. I thought it was fairly close, but it happened five minutes ago, and I’ve heard nothing since.”

  “Five minutes?” Scarlett gritted her teeth. “You didn’t think to call me?”

  “Well, you were in a state of grace. You told me not to bother you.”

  “Shiva spare me. Where’s my tube? Where’s my bag?”

  “Here by the window. I’ve already packed them. I thought we might change rooms.”

  “We’ll need to do more than that.” Scarlett was beside him, moving at speed, stowing the mat, shouldering the pack, squinting around the side of the window into the black night. She could see nothing but thought she heard faint noises, the softest of rustlings, the lightest of footsteps. They might have come from any single direction—or from all around.

  The pursuers hadn’t stopped. They’d kept on going after nightfall. Scarlett chewed her bottom lip. It didn’t make sense: that simply wasn’t what normal militia trackers did.

  “We can’t be trapped in here,” she said. “We’re going to have to make a dash for it. So—we burst out the door, make a break for the bindweed on the left. They’ll shoot; we run the gauntlet. Ten to one they won’t hit both of us. If we’re unlucky and we run straight into them, we’ll have to fight hand to hand, force our way into the forest beyond. OK? It’s easy.”

  She looked at him. Easy for her. No doubt about it, the boy was going to die.

  Albert Browne nodded. “Yes. Or we might nip out up there.” He pointed to a side wall. In the dwindling firelight, Scarlett saw that an area of bricks near the top had collapsed, creating a gap that led to the neighboring room. “They won’t see us if we go that way.”

  A noise sounded out in the knotweed, a low, husky, repeated trill that might have been birdsong but wasn’t. Scarlett moved from the window. “That’s probably the first sensible thing you’ve said in your life, Albert,” she said. “Come on.”

  The boy’s attempts to scale the bricks were haphazard, and twice Scarlett had to put out a hand to support him when he slipped. But he reached the opening, inched sideways into it like a crab, and was gone. Scarlett removed her rucksack, bundled it into the gap, and followed him. She was through.

  On the other side of the wall was a roofless, starlit space, surrounded by broken stonework. It was choked with ferns and weeds and phosphorescent night flowers that shone eerily in the dark. By their glow, Scarlett saw the boy moving hesitantly across it, stumbling on the uneven ground, making little noises with each step. She groaned inwardly. He was so hopeless; a one-legged man would have proceeded with more finesse.

  Dropping soundlessly down, she flitted to his side and took ungentle hold of his ear.

  “Stop making such a racket,” she whispered. “They’ll hear you.”

  The boy shook his head, pointed. “It’s OK. They think we’re still by the fire.”

  The wall ahead had tumbled low; through a gap in the stones, they could see onto the overgrown yard at the front of the farmhouse. Firelight glinted from the open doorway of the room they’d just vacated. The roof showed black against the stars.

  Out in the knotweed forest, darkness hung like shrouds. And within this darkness, shadows moved: figures in bowler hats converging on the yard.

  Militias weren’t stupid. The Cheltenham men knew who she was. They wouldn’t risk tackling her one on one. They’d try to overwhelm her, five or six at once…. Scarlett bent close to the boy. “We may have a chance here,” she breathed. “They’ll rush that room together. When they do, we shin over the wall and make for the forest.”

  “They’ll all go in together? Think that’s what’ll happen?”

  “Yeah. It’s a guarantee.”

  A flash of red light amidst the knotweed. The fizzing of a fuse. A figure danced forward, lobbed a cylinder through the doorway of the cottage, darted back again.

  The room exploded. Gouts of yellow-white flame plumed out of the door and window, spiking upward between the roof beams. Timbers cracked, stones fell. In the room alongside, Scarlett and Albert Browne were thrown sideways by the force of the blast.

  Echoes of the eruption rebounded off the hills above and out into the Wilds. A beam toppled from the wall beside them and crashed among the ferns.

  Scarlett picked herself up, blew hair out of her eyes.

  “Course,” she said, “I might be wrong.”

  There was blood on the side of her face, where she’d hit it against a stone in falling. Other than that, she was in one piece. She still had the rucksack, too, with the prayer mat and the cash. Everything essential was accounted for. Scarlett crawled through the ferns and debris to where a shape uttered feeble groans.

  “Keep it down,” she hissed. “If you’re dying, do it quietly. Are you all right?”

  Albert Browne sat up. His hair was covered in brick dust. “I’m one big bruise. Also, I think I landed on a thistle.”

  “In short, you’re fine. Stop moaning and follow me. I want to see what they’re doing.”

  With infinite caution, they returned to their vantage point overlooking the yard. The wall was intact, but the neighboring room, where their campfire had been, was a pile of jumbled stone. Small tongues of flame flickered amid the rubble, and a stream of luminescent smoke flowed up toward the stars. By its light, they could see the outlines of six figures congregated a short way from the farmhouse. All wore tweed jackets and bowler hats. One man held two dogs on chains; others had revolvers in their hands. There was an air of tension; the men watched the smoke in silence without drawing near.
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br />   Scarlett ducked back behind the wall, scowling into the darkness. OK, so they thought she was dead. They were waiting to make sure. Perhaps that was fair enough, but it didn’t explain why they were being so damn fearful. As far as they knew, she was crushed beneath a heap of stones. Something was off. Something didn’t quite make sense.

  The boy tugged at her arm; his voice sounded close beside her. “That explosion, Scarlett—what made it?”

  “A stick of gelignite.” She shook her head sourly. “It’s crazy. Why choose to blow up the banknotes?”

  “Banknotes?” Even at a whisper, she could hear the interest in his voice.

  “Doesn’t matter.” But it did matter. She’d never experienced a pursuit like this before, not even after the Norwich heist, when powerboats of men carrying harpoon guns hunted her skiff up and down the Anglian floodlands. Not even after the robbery at Frome, when their trackers trapped her on the edge of the drowned quarry—five men, armed with knives and axes, eager to cast her corpse into the black water. Tight corners: Scarlett was used to them. This felt different. The remorseless chase across the Wilds…the gelignite…it wasn’t what normal trackers did.

  No point dwelling on it. The main thing was to get away.

  Motioning the boy to silence, she looked over the wall again. The pursuers seemed to be gaining in confidence. They drew closer to the pile of steaming rubble. The dogs sniffed here and there. Someone laughed. An abrupt order was given. A man with a stick began to prod amongst the stones.

  They were searching for her body, or perhaps the cash. Either way, it was time to go. Scarlett retreated noiselessly through the ruins with Albert at her back. In seconds, they had scaled a tumbled wall, flitted across an open space, and vanished into the darkness of the forest.

  It was not easy going in the pitch black, but they went on blindly, feeling a path amidst the knotweed, until exhaustion overcame Albert at last. Scarlett heard him slump to the ground. She crouched alongside, trying to think. They had traveled a fair distance from the cottage. If the militia came after them again, there was little she could do. Clearly Albert was going no farther. Her own limbs were as heavy as marble; the rough earth felt like a goose-down bed….