3.6.23.12.028: Ovaltine may not be drunk at any time other than before bed.
The going was harder and the road less distinct as we trudged on. It didn’t look as though vehicular traffic had moved down this way since the Perpetulite spalled. Much of our time was spent wending our way through thick rhododendron to avoid the occasional yateveo, and trying to keep to the track as best we could. At times the heavy canopy made the forest so dark that it was almost impossible to see. At one point I lost the path of the old road entirely, and only picked it up again once the forest had thinned out and been replaced by open grassy moorland.
I walked with a sense of heightened nervousness, but relaxed as soon as I heard Courtland and Tommo talk about mundanities. Tommo asked him if grass looked yellow to him, and Courtland responded by saying that all green looked yellow, since it was the only component of green a Yellow could see. After about half a mile of open ground and a slight incline, we came across the lumpy remnants of a village, the only aboveground feature a stone meetinghouse that was almost consumed by two yew trees. I checked the time and sketched a plan of the village in my notebook. On one side of the crossroads was another deeply rusted land crawler swathed in brambles and coarsened by a heavy overcoat of lichen, its tracks now choked with a profusion of primroses, celandines and meadowsweet. Although similar to the Farmall crawler we had seen earlier, in that they shared the commonality of tracked locomotion, this was considerably larger and more heavily built—the outer shell was fully four inches thick in places. It was also badly damaged. The vehicle looked as though someone had attempted to turn it inside out; the steel was jagged and split like a shattered pot. “Can we take a break?” asked Courtland. “Five minutes, then.” I walked across to examine an old mailbox, almost consumed by a mature beech that had grown around it. The small door had split with the force. I opened it easily, and amid the abandoned birds’ nests and dry leaf mold I found the remnants of things that had been posted but never collected. A glass pendant, a few coins and a wireless telephone in remarkably good condition.
“Whoah!” said Tommo, pointing in the direction we had just come. “I just saw someone!”
“Claptrap,” replied Courtland, with slightly less confidence in his voice than he might have liked. “There’s no one out here but us.”
“They were just next to that tree over there, peeking over the wall.” He pointed at a dilapidated section of wall about thirty yards away, back in the direction from which we had come.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Clear as day. Do you think it might be . . . Riffraff?”
We all looked at one another. Even Courtland appeared ill at ease, despite his usually brash exterior.
“Only one way to find out,” I murmured and sprinted up the road toward the wall and looked over. In the field beyond I saw a couple of alpacas, which stared at me with a bored expression and went back to their grazing. There was no one visible, but the gorse-pecked hill offered an abundance of good hiding places. There might have been a hundred Riffraff for all I knew, and my stomach turned uneasily. I stood there for several minutes listening and staring, and after hearing and seeing nothing, returned to the crossroads.
“Nothing but a couple of alpacas,” I reported. “Couldn’t it have been them? I mean, no one has reported Riffraff in this area for, what? Twenty years?”
“Thirty,” said Tommo, “but then most people who have come this far never came back. And they eat the brains of—”
“Just button it, Tommo, you’re not helping,” said Courtland.
“I second that,” I said. “Shut up, Tommo.”
“What do we do?” asked Courtland, once we had been standing there doing nothing for a few moments.
“The Rules state that if we encounter even a hint of Riffraff, we abort.”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, trying to be positive.
“You and your stupid ideas,” Courtland said to Tommo. “And speaking personally, I’m too valuable to the community to be lost on some dumb expedition.”
“You agreed to it readily enough last night,” replied Tommo defiantly.
“Then why don’t you just go home?” I suggested. “No one’s stopping you.”
But Courtland, arrogant as he was, was no idiot. If he sneaked home early and I returned later on, everyone would know he had chickened out. He wanted the village to know that he was not just the next Yellow prefect, but a selfless resident, willing to risk his life for the good of the village.
“Let’s all just calm down,” I murmured. “Tommo, are you positive it was someone?”
He took a deep breath and looked at both of us in turn, then shrugged. “It could have been alpacas,” he replied. “In fact, that must have been what it was.”
“Then I’m going on,” I murmured. “What about you two?”
Courtland gave Tommo a slap on the back of the head. “Idiot! Yes, I’m still coming—and so is porridge brains here.”
I jotted another note to the effect that Tommo had thought he had seen someone, added the time, tore out the page and left it under a small pile of stones as before. I made a similar note in my log, and we walked on, this time with a more nervous gait and with frequent looks over our shoulders.
After ten minutes or so we reached the top of the hill and entered a grove of beeches. Their heavy canopy was draped with creepers, and the occasional moss-covered fallen trunk blocked our way.
Considering that we were less than two hours from the village center, it seemed odd that we were walking in a place almost completely unvisited for five centuries, yet was somewhere I could visit and be back by eleven. If I was so inclined. Being in the Outfield was exciting, but worrying, too. I could feel my heart beating faster, and my ears twitched at every sound.
After twenty minutes more of easy walking across a grassy plain with only giraffe, elk and deer for company, we entered a small spinney near another land crawler, then walked out the other side and came to an abrupt halt.
“Munsell in a canoe,” whispered Tommo.
“What is this doing here?” said Courtland. “I mean, why would anyone build a pipeline that goes from nowhere to nowhere squared?”
“I don’t know.”
In front of us was a good-sized oak. But not the usual drab grey variety. This one was bright, univisual purple. The bark, leaves, acorns, branches and even the patch of grass beneath it were full edge-of-gamut magenta. We stared at it for a while, as none of us had seen anything so large bearing such an inappropriate color. This was a chromoclasm — a fracture in the magenta pipe of the CYM color feed, where the dye had soaked up through the soil and stained the surrounding foliage. National Color doesn’t like anyone knowing anything about pipeline routes, partly because of the potential for damage by monochrome fundamentalists, and partly because local villages would ask for costly spur lines. But Courtland was right. It didn’t make any sense. We weren’t on a route that went from anywhere to anywhere, nor was there any way to tell in which direction the pipeline ran. But it looked as though we had found the breach the Colorman had been looking for.
“Good job Violet isn’t here,” said Tommo. “The brightness would give her a migraine in a flash, and you know how ratty she gets when she’s having a headache.”
“What’s that?”
“What?”
Courtland didn’t answer and instead walked into the purple grass and picked up a human femur. It too had been stained magenta. He looked around and found another bone, this time the left half of a pelvis, and tapped them together. They made the dullish thud that fresh bones make, and not the ringing click of the long dead.
“What do you think, Court?”
“Couple of years.”
We were all looking around then, to find something that might give a clue as to who it was or where they were from, but the bones had been scattered by animals. We didn’t find the skull, but I did find a single brogue, a belt buckle and a celluloid collar. It had a postcode and a name scratched on it: Thomas Emerald. Courtland and Tommo didn’t know him.
“A lot of Rebootees were lost out here,” said Courtland. “They never stayed long enough for us to learn their names.”
“He had three spoons on him,” said Tommo, picking them out of the soil and rubbing the magenta mud off so that he could read the codes engraved on the back, “and none of them were his. Do you think the codes are registered to anyone?”
“They’d be worth a small fortune if they’ve got clear title,” said Courtland. “Let me see.”
So Tommo handed them over, and Courtland put them in his pocket and grinned avariciously at him.
“Nice one, Court,” said Tommo. “Thanks for that.”
“Why would he take spoons with him on a toshing trip?” I asked.
“Maybe he didn’t,” remarked Courtland, with a greedy gleam in his eye. “Maybe he pulled them out of the soil at High Saffron.”
We looked at one another and walked on.
We came to a river and, after wading across, walked past the five-arched bridge that had once carried the roadway, now sitting rather pointlessly over a grassy dent. The mutual anxiety we were feeling had momentarily cleared the bad air, and we walked along side by side for a while, talking nervously.
“So,” said Tommo with forced bonhomie, “what was Violet like?”
“Exactly as you might imagine.”
“Yikes.”
Courtland voiced what we were allreally thinking about. “Why didn’t we find Thomas Emerald’s skull?”
We suddenly stopped and looked nervously about, the unspoken horror of having our brains eaten by Riffraff suddenly making us more than jumpy. But no matter how hard we stared, it was simply an empty landscape with trees, wildstock and grassland. And aside from the occasional pwoing of a bouncing goat, it was quiet, too—oppressively so. We were utterly alone. At least, we hoped we were.
“Okay,” said Tommo after I had told everyone to move off, “what do we do if we see a Riffraff?” “Run,” I said. “Fight,” said Courtland.
“You fighting is good,” said Tommo. “While they’re occupied with you, Ed and I will be activating the ‘run like a lunatic’ plan.”
We passed through a grove of beech trees that had grown over the track in happy profusion, then came across some grass-covered earthworks, a few bramble-filled pits and a deep, grassy ditch that zigzagged away to the left and right of us. We paused for a moment on the edge of the open moorland and stared at the road, which carried on in a straight line until it vanished over the summit. It was the loneliest section of the route, a two-mile stretch without any sort of cover at all. I looked up at the sky to confirm that the likelihood of lightning was low, then set off at a brisk walk.
The course of the road was easily delineated by the flat profile and two low, grassyridgesabout thirtyfeet apartthat might once have been walls. The landscape up here was different, as the road had been disrupted by several large pockmarks, some of which had filled with water and might have been natural dew ponds but for their uniform roundness. Here and there we could see rusty scrap and twisted aluminum poking out of the turf like a metallic harvest that no one had troubled to remove, and the wildstock were considerably tamer. As we approached the isolated herds that drifted across the upper pastures, they parted languidly to let us through, with only the mildest sense of curiosity. It portended well, as they spook easily, and Riffraff were known to kill and eat them. I even spotted an antelope I hadn’t seen before. It was a dark reddish color with stripes down its front and back legs, the latter doubling as a convenient place to display its bar code. I jotted down as much of its Taxa as I could before it turned away.
We walked like this in silence for a good forty minutes until we encountered the first proper structure we had seen since leaving East Carmine. The flak tower stood in a commanding position at the top of an escarpment that looked down on the broad, fertile valley hiding the remains of High Saffron. Cynics that Courtland and Tommo were, I think even they were impressed, and we all stopped to soak up the view.