The Protectors war

Chapter Five

River Great Ouse, Cambridgeshire, England

August 20th, 2006 AD-Change Year Eight

"Why is it called adventure," the elder Loring asked. "Instead of-"

"Discomfort? Fear? Unending toil?" his son called back over his shoulder.

"Being stuck in the middle of a complete balls-up?" John Hordle grunted in agreement and took a hand off his paddle long enough to swat a mosquito. "I'd rather be sitting in a good pub with a girl, sir," he said. "Say that Gu-drun from Bob's place. Talking about me adventures."

The three men paddled in silence for a moment; the three canoes were traveling roughly abreast, usually close enough for easy conversation as the winding banks of the Great Ouse passed by slowly on either side-except that those banks were far less firm and definite than they had been a decade earlier. Most of a millenium of banking and diking and drainage had been undone in eight years, as the waters broke the bonds men laid on them and sought their own level.

Then Hordle chuckled. "What a bunch of bloody liars we are," he said. "If we wanted it all that much, we'd be in the bloody pub right now. Nice enough now and then, but right boring if you do too much of it."

"Speak for yourself, Sergeant," Nigel Loring said. "I'm at the memoir-writing phase of life's progress. Good God, man, I was writing my memoirs just last month. Maude said-"

He halted abruptly, but there had been a hint of returning life under the mock severity of his tone.

Glad to hear that, Hordle thought. I can understand it and all, but I don't half like the way he's acted so: not quite there when nobody's trying to kill us. A smile: Of course, someone's been trying to kill us far too bloody often just lately.

"You and Alleyne are still young enough to be accumulating interesting incidents," Nigel went on, visibly pushing memories away.

"Interesting like this bloody swamp, sir?" Hordle asked. "Reminds me of some book my mum read me when I was small-well, when I was young-what was it called? Swans and Amazons?"

"That'd be 'the Coot Club' in Swallows and Amazons, Sergeant," Sir Nigel said.

"About a bunch of kiddies mucking about in boats around here, any rate," Hordle said. "Certainly has changed a bit, eh?"

They all smiled. Even in the dry months of late summer, the stream's course was often not where twentieth-century convenience had put it, and the land on either side showed the glint of shallow open water and patches of green reed bed-patches that had grown larger as they passed ruined Bedford and came closer to the Wash. The standing water and warm weather also bred mosquitoes in stinging swarms, not to mention gnats, and a pervading smell of rotting vegetation filled the hazy air.

"I blame you, Father," Alleyne Loring said. "Watch out, there's a dead tree trunk just under the surface ahead."

They all slowed and carefully swerved to the right; the tree was a large oak that had tumbled downstream in one of the floods that had ripped uncontrolled through the Ouse basin in the years since the Change, and planted itself with the root-ball upstream. That held a dozen sharpened spikes waiting just below the surface.

"You blame it on my bad example, eh?" Nigel said.

"No, it was all those copies of the Boy's Own Paper you kept in the attic for me to discover when I was eight," Alleyne said. "Not to mention the stack of Henty, and the Haggard and Kipling. Other boys of my generation learned to be sensitive and socially conscious, and I was marching to Kabul with Roberts or finding the caves of Kor and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed."

If you'd met my grandmother, you wouldn't have needed Haggard for the latter, Nigel muttered, but under his breath.

"That's right, sir, and he loaned the books to me too," Hordle said. "Fair turned our heads, they did. I'd have been a Labor MP, else."

"Oh, rubbish," Nigel replied. "It's your own dam' fault, my boy; I inherited all that from my father. I didn't make you take up all those books with the wizards and elves, at least-you came to that entirely on your own."

"Oh, I'd say those were rather useful. Certainly the hobbies they encouraged were."

It would be a bit intimidating having Sir Nigel as your dad, Hordle thought, not for the first time. Maybe that's why young Mr. Loring would hang out with those reenactor burkes.

He'd gone along with that himself, rather than being very enthusiastic. At least until he'd learned the events were good places to pursue his real hobby.

Some of the girls looked good in those low-cut blouse things, even if the boys were a right bunch of pillocks, and the beer was better than passable. Even the mucking about with swords was good for a laugh, before it turned serious after the Change.

He dug his paddle in to turn his canoe aside from a sunken cabin cruiser whose crumbling prow reared above the slow-moving brown water, trailing long streams of algae.

Thank God my dad just owned a pub. Talk about pop-u-larity!

"At least it's an open swamp around here," he said aloud. "Less stressful-like, when you can see what's coming."

Dead trees stood in the fields about, their roots killed out by winter's spreading water, and the floods had kept brambles at bay as well; the more so as this had been corn-growing land, much of it in great hedgeless fields. Most of the lowland was tall open grass; taller brush and trees survived and thrived rankly on bits of higher ground-ground that often showed the snags of ancient buildings, built in an earlier era where experience showed floodwaters were less likely to reach. Birds swarmed overhead and on the water-mallards the most numerous, but also tall gray herons and snowy swans, grebe and the Canada geese that seemed to flourish like bindweed everywhere on the island. Their gobbling and honking was occasionally loud enough to drown the sound of the water and wind; overhead a hawk floated with the noon sun on its wings, feathered fingers grasping the air. Native otter and alien mink slid down the banks with a plop and flash of sleek fur as the canoes ghosted by.

There weren't any of the feral cattle and Pere David's deer in sight that they'd noticed off and on the past few days, but something was cropping great stretches of the tall grass.

"Watch out!" Alleyne Loring called again, but there was excitement in his voice this time.

A snorting sound followed, like a great bellows being pumped-or pumped slightly underwater, because there were splashes with it.

"Ahead, to the right, about two hundred yards," the younger Loring said.

Hordle gaped, then shut his mouth with a snap and a deliberate effort of will. Ahead was a section of bank still standing, the left a cluster of buildings and the right now a curving island in the midst of marsh. In the deeper water just below the middle of the curve structures topped by gray knobs and pits floated, like some uncouth driftwood sculpture; for a long moment his mind rejected the sight, despite having seen it before.

Seen it in Kenya, he thought, feeling his i

"I'm surprised they can endure the winters," Nigel Loring said, curiosity in his voice.

"Anything that lives in the water most of the time must have good insulation," Alleyne pointed out; as you drew closer you could see the massive tubby bodies below the surface. "I don't know how well they'll do in the long term, but these seem to be flourishing as of now. We'd best be careful-that female has a couple of: what do you call them? Calves? Cubs?"

"Call them bloody dangerous, sir," Hordle said fervently.

He'd visited Kenya before the Change at the Crown's expense-the British army had long-standing arrangements there to secure open space for training unavailable in the then-crowded homeland. He'd mixed enough with the locals to learn that the comical-looking animals were in fact as belligerent as wild boar, and when you scaled one of those up to five tons and gave it four giant teeth like ivory pickaxes a foot long: the fact that it ate grass by choice and would spit you out after it bit you in half was no consolation at all.