A Kinder City, page 9
Damon slaps his shoulder.
‘Left Rabbie behind did you?’
He grins at David. David feels a gust of comradeship. You do these things, you don’t know why, you do them for your mates.
‘Get ready.’
He rolls out from behind the wagon and crawls, head down, the heat tearing at him. Just two metres, one, and he forces his arm forward against the inferno and flicks the cinder jammed in the track to one side. Scalding pain bursts through his finger tips and he collapses prone. The pounding of the mill throbs through his face, his chest, his body. Axles creak beside him, the truck rumbles past and starts to tip. Someone seizes him by both ankles and drags him backwards.
Someone tilts a water-bottle against his lips. He gulps and swallows and chokes and the hurt in his hand jerks at him. The gauntlets and helmet have gone and he sits on a wooden floor against a plywood wall, his legs stretched out in front of him. A linen bandage, already grimy and secured with a metal pin, encases his hand and forearm in an untidy bundle. The furnace glowers some way away outside the window opposite him, far above it the roof of the mill. The throbbing murmurs, more distant now.
‘Don’t do that again, you had me worried.’
He recognises the voice. Luke, his face serious, squats next to him.
‘What? What are you doing here?’
‘Someone has to look after you. I saw where you went, straight downhill, so I followed. I signed up like you did. Besides I got my own business with Franklin.’
Luke’s face looks young again.
‘Damon’s pleased with you. You’re the only one ever burnt through a gauntlet on your first day. Soon as that hand’s healed you’re on the recharge team and I’m on clean-up.’
‘But you, it was you got me out of there wasn’t it? The others were at the wagon. Thank you. I owe you.’
Luke drops a hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t think about it. You’re off until the hand’s healed. I’m looking after you. And I’ve got a plan.’
David closes his eyes. Ideas swirl in his brain. He’s found things out about Franklin and his factories but why are Ferris and Adam so interested? And why don’t the people in the Old Town trust the City? And Sarah, with her hair forward over her face. You’re on the wrong side. He can’t think about Sarah.
And Juno. He’d like to see Juno again.
Luke comes back with a bowl of something in each hand.
‘Bean stew. I got them to take the sausages out. Do you good.’
‘I’d tell you to go and put them back if I wasn’t so hungry!’
No flavour, no spices, the beans just taste of beans and sugar. He wolfs them down, belches, puts his good hand on a chair-back and pulls himself to his feet. They’re in an office, abandoned by the look of it, with one rusty metal filing cabinet and a dirty window looking out over the factory floor. The furnace glows dull red away to the left and the yellow road-beast is on a level with them to the right. The yellow helmets of the workers bob as they fidget around the machines as if grooming them.
He flexes his fingers inside the bandage and the pain doesn’t grow worse.
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I’ve been looking around. This mill is huge, much bigger than any hall or barn I’ve ever been in, but there’s more to it, I know there is. See the far wall? You have to put your face against the glass, the air is so bad.’
David squints. The wall the other side of the factory floor stretches left to right, grey and rusting.
‘See?’
‘What? It’s a wall.’
‘Yeah. A wall. No doors, no windows, no way through. You see that anywhere else? That’s Franklin’s other mill beyond it, the one no-one ever goes in, he doesn’t want us to know about it. You put your hand against that wall, you feel the rumble of machinery and you can hear shouting. I’ve been over there.’
He pauses.
‘Another thing. I heard a horse neigh, loud, on the other side. I heard a crack, like a whip. I swear it.’
‘Let’s get out of here, tell people what we’ve seen. Tell Sarah.’
‘Alright. We’ll do that later. Franklin’s men take the people they kidnap down here, I’m sure of it, but they’re not in this hall. We’ve got to find them.’
He squats and moves closer.
‘People like to have fun in the Old Town. They don’t like worrying about things. I look after the Football Team. You know what everyone’s scared of, what they won’t talk about? Being out on the streets after dark. We took you in pretty sharpish, didn’t we? They blame your City for that.’
David sits himself on the chair and scratches at his cheek.
‘Franklin’s men. They patrol the streets. They catch you, you’re not seen again. That’s what the street people think. They don’t come near here anymore. No-one goes to the Pit.’
He looks down.
‘I’ve known people I don’t see any more – my mate Sam. We used to hang out together, play football. Now he ain’t around.’
He fiddles with a scrap of paper.
‘That chancer, O’Connor. People like him. He does deals, deals with the villages, people say he’s done a deal with Franklin. He’s the one tells us not to trust you lot. Franklin, he’s from the City, that’s what people think.’
‘I just want to help, to make things better. I hate Franklin.’
‘Maybe.’ Luke looks him in the eyes. ‘Sam. O’Connor’s his uncle, you know that? Sam was different. I used to work for O’Connor, Sam was my mate. I was very close to him.’
The Hall of Beasts
Luke pauses and looks back. David leans against the wall to gather his strength.
‘Just give me a minute.’
They’ve worked their way right round the edge of the factory. Luke has a torn cardboard file from the office with sheets of blank paper in it under his arm and no-one shows any interest in them. The wall vibrates to the rhythm of machinery. They find a crack where a rivet has rusted through but they can’t prise the metal sheets apart.
David puts his nose to it. He smells the factory odour of grease and soot and oil and over it something else, a whiff of horses and polished leather that takes him straight to the stables and Juno, back to a different life. He shakes his head but the smell’s still there.
Luke squats down, elbows on knees:
‘No way through.’
‘Yup.’
‘You can’t see over the wall outside and besides there are guards. That’s his other mill. What’s he so keen to keep quiet?’
‘Maybe we could give up?’
Luke sits back and stares upwards at the gantries above them.
‘I’m not giving up. Sam’s here somewhere, I know it. Besides, you need looking after. How do you think they get on the roof?’
David spots the metal ladders, three-quarters of the way round, close to where the chimney slants across the end wall and out at the corner of the roof. They’re painted red and bolted to the side of the building, with metal safety-hoops round them. He stares upwards, trying to count the rungs, and gives up.
‘After you.’
Luke steps back. He sounds like he’s enjoying himself.
‘You go first – you slip, you’ll land on me. There’s a platform half-way.’
David reaches up, grips the ladder and snatches his hand back as the pain jolts down his arm.
‘Let’s leave it. I’ll be OK tomorrow.’
‘We’ll be on shift. You wait here, I’ll go by myself.’
For answer, David hauls himself onto the ladder with his left arm and wraps his right behind it. He raises his foot and climbs up one rung and then another. He hesitates and raises his foot again and clambers upwards and halts again and looks out. The road-beast at the end of the rails with the lesser beasts behind it is directly opposite him, like a line of elephants following each other across a desert.
He looks down, his head whirls and he reels back against a hoop. Miniature workers, like white ants, scurrying about their business. City Square would look like that to a crow’s eye, except the ants would be grey.
‘Hold on!’ yells Luke and shoves him back towards the rungs. He sucks air into his lungs and hauls himself onward. When they get to the platform he sits and rests, away from the edge. The air is hotter and heavier with fumes. He coughs again and gasps air into his lungs. Luke places a hand on the ladder.
‘You could hang on here.’
‘Not far, now. I’ll come with you.’
He puts his good hand on the ladder and pulls himself to his feet, waits a moment for his head to clear, and raises his foot to the first rung. Higher up they transfer to another ladder, without hoops. He clings on, the pain in his hand forgotten, his eyes focused on the oblong of wall between the rungs in front of him. He steps sideways onto a small platform built in at the angle between the roof gantry and the wall, grips the knob of a metal door and shoves hard.
Chill air rushes past him and he breathes deep. He opens his eyes. To his left the chimney of the first mill trails its wake of vapour across the shifting cloud-banks. A second chimney emerges from the mill in front of him and a third beyond it, twice the girth of the other two. All three cluster together, like the devil’s organ pipes.
Luke squeezes past him and onto a red-painted gantry which runs across to a metal door set in the roof opposite. He crosses and tugs the door open. David follows, holding on with one hand and stares past him, down, past red-painted gantries, into another vast metal hall.
Two-thirds of the floor of the mill, stretching away to their right, is green, the abundant green of well-watered grasslands. Hedges run across, with a coppice of fair-sized trees in the centre. Below the platform on which they are standing are pastures and paddocks and, at the near end, feeding troughs, with the sanded surface of a riding school to one side. A hooped ladder leads downwards.
Brown, black, grey and dappled shapes move about or stand in groups. Full-grown horses, and foals among them. Franklin breeds horses. He hears a shout. Tiny figures in white overalls bend and carry bundles or push barrows near the sheds. Some of them have rakes or shovels. The horses start moving, converging on them. One of them neighs and others take it up. They line up by the stables. Feeding time.
Bright light beams down from giant sunray lamps bolted to the girders just below them. The light sparkles on water in a pool at the corner of the meadow. The air is warm and clean, sweet-scented with grass and hay. He breathes in again and touches Luke’s arm.
‘Hey, I could like it here. It’s a world made for horses.’
‘Look over there: Greenjackets.’
A squad in the green uniforms of Franklin’s security enter the nearest paddock. Horses, saddled and bridled, are led in and assigned one to each of them. A command rings out and they mount, heaving themselves up with difficulty. One of them slides back down. David’s sure he hears laughter. A figure in white comes over and makes a stirrup with linked hands and the dunce is finally in the saddle. Embarrassing for the horse. The troop sets off at a walk, following the track worn in the grass round the edge of the field. The riders sway from side to side. Some of them can hardly keep a straight back in the saddle. Your legs are going to ache tonight.
‘Franklin’s teaching his men to ride. He can’t be all bad.’
Luke doesn’t say anything. He points to the left.
The final section of the mill floor, the other side of the platform, is bare, dirty yellow and covered in gravel. In the corner stands a larger shed, the height of a three-storey house, with double-doors tall enough to take a hay-wagon. A metal pipe snakes out of it and twists against the wall to climb up and out through the roof. David frowns. He doesn’t understand. Some way along from the shed, another pipe, much larger, emerges from the floor with nothing near it. Heat shimmers from it. It rises vertically to where the first pipe ducts through the roof. The third chimney.
Almost directly beneath the platform, a section is fenced off. More figures in green uniforms are drawn up in rows. Opposite them, a line of black horses. A single figure stands in front of them. He gestures towards the horses and makes a sharp movement with his right arm as if flicking a whip.
Luke puts a hand on the ladder.
‘We’ve got to get lower down, hear what’s going on. I’ll go. You stay here.’
He eases himself over the edge of the platform onto the ladder. David licks his lips and watches as he clambers down. After a minute, he crawls across and lowers himself onto the first rung and follows, his bad hand wrapped round behind the rungs. He moves down, rung to rung, feeling with his feet, not looking. He smells the rich raw scent of horses again, gusting up to him. He wonders who does the grooming. Luke steadies him as he steps onto the half-way platform.
‘Keep your head down. They don’t look up much.’
Closer, they see that the Greenjackets’ uniforms are made of serge not leather. They wear peaked caps and carry whips, coiled at their belts. The squad are all male, and all carry themselves in the way of men who invite fights after the pub and don’t lose.
A black mare with a white blaze along her nose whinnies and stamps her hooves. Someone shouts. A guard comes forward, a whip in his hand. Two others grip onto traces, one each side of the horse’s bridle and drag down so she can’t move. The guard flicks the whip up and cracks it with a sound like a pistol-shot. He lashes it down across the horse’s face, just under the eyes. The mare neighs shrill and trembles and tries to rear up, teeth bared. The guards heave on the traces and she falls back. He brings the whip down again and she screams louder than David knew a horse could scream. He whips her again and again, across the nose, the mouth, the eyes and the cheeks, until she doesn’t try to rear up, and lowers her head, twisting her neck from side to side. Red streaks criss-cross the white blaze.
One of the guards seizes the bridle at one side and says something. The other laughs. The guards jerk the horse forward and lead her, head down, towards the end shed.
The hairs on the back of David’s neck bristle. Luke grips his arm and grunts:
‘They break them in by beating them, that’s how Franklin treats his horses. Look at the others.’
The beasts cower back, packed together into the corner of the paddock. Other guards stride towards them, whips ready. David holds onto the ladder with his good hand and peers down.
‘What does Franklin want with horses? He has a hall-full of road-monsters next door.’
‘Who knows? You use horses to travel between villages, where there are no roads.’
‘We’ve got to get back. Tell everyone.’
‘There’s more.’
Luke leans out over the left-hand side of the platform. David stares past him. In the bare area alongside the huge shed stands a row of machines, like a miniature version of the other mill. Figures in white overalls bend over them and spotlights shine on their work. No furnace, no track, no grinding and grating of metal, and no monstrous machine, just the shed with its pipework. He cranes out as far as he dares. The figures are working with metal, fiddling with steel poles and rods and cylinders.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
Luke ignores him.
‘I have to find Sam.’
‘They’ll see us if we stay here.’
A clangour, like the sound of hammer-blows on sheet iron, bursts out from the three-storey shed followed by a bellow that’s half a whinny, half a roar. The guards look round, someone shouts an order and the whole squad moves forward, their whips gripped in their hands. The double doors swing open, pushed from inside, and light, brighter than day, floods out. The noise ceases and the guards tense themselves, the light glinting on their whips. The beasts in the paddock fall silent, and cram themselves tighter into their corner.
David arches over the edge of the platform and stares directly into the shed. The light half-blinds him. He makes out the mouth of a tunnel reaching down away from him, brilliantly lit. Something dark moves within it, lumbering upward, towards him. A chill runs along his veins. A great horse, a stallion, black as Juno, but giant, half as big again, heaves itself forward. A shiver runs through it. It stamps and shakes its mane and neighs, louder and louder, and the neigh turns into a bellow that echoes off the metal walls around it.
The guards run forward and seize on the chains that hang down from its bridle. It shakes its head again, swinging the guard nearest David off his feet. Another seizes the chain with him and they lurch sideways, their heels scoring a curve in the ground.
Luke whispers: ‘Look!’
A framework of yellow metal struts surrounds the flanks and hindquarters and rear legs of the beast. The rods and hinges reach down, along its legs, to gleaming steel hooves. Cylinders are bolted to them and pipes run to some device, like trombone tubes clustered together, hanging close under the belly. David hears a hiss, like many geese, as it moves. Luke clutches at his arm.
Other guards crowd forward, some holding out padded shields in front of them, some with helmets and visors. They swarm round the chains and drag on the beast. It shakes its head and glares upwards and stares straight at David and Luke, its eyes wide and terror-struck, and bellows again. It stamps and rears up and kicks out with steel-shod hooves. Someone shouts an order and a guard in a helmet and padded suit ducks under the hooves and thrusts up with a rod like a lance. Electricity crackles, the bellow turns shrill and the beast plunges down on all four hooves and tosses its head.
The guard throws himself sideways and rolls out of danger. His fellows haul the creature round and drag it back into the shed. The metal rods slide into the cylinders as it moves. The light dims as it is forced into the tunnel-mouth and snaps out and the doors clamp shut, like a trap.
