The Navigator

Owen stood up on the chest and scrambled through the window and on to the branch of a sycamore tree. He swung expertly to the ground from a low branch and set off across the fields.

Owen crossed the burying banks below the mass of the old Workhouse and climbed the sloping bank, passing through the long, tree-lined gully that split the slope. It wasn’t that he was hiding from anyone. He just liked the idea of being able to move about the riverbank without anyone seeing him. So he found routes like the gully, or tunnels of hazel and rowan, or dips in the ground that rendered you suddenly invisible. The riverbank was ideal for this. There were ridges and trenches and deep depressions in the ground, as though the earth had been worked over again and again.

It took ten minutes to skirt the Workhouse. It was a tall, forbidding building of cut stone perched on an outcrop of rock which towered above the river. It had been derelict for many years and its roof had fallen in, but something about it made Owen shiver. He had asked many people about its history, but they seemed reluctant to talk. He had asked Mary White about it.

“I bet there are ghosts,” he said. She leaned forward in the gloom of her small shop and met his gaze with eyes that seemed suddenly stern and blue in a wrinkled face.

“No ghosts,” she had said, giving him a strange look. “No ghosts at the Workhouse. But there are other things. That place has been there longer than anyone thinks.”

It took another ten minutes to reach the Den. Owen checked the entrance as he did every time. A whitethorn bush was bent across it, tied with fishing line. Behind that he had built up a barrier of dried ferns and pieces of bush. The barriers were intact. He moved them carefully aside and rearranged them behind him. He found himself in a clearing just big enough to stand in. The space was lit from above by the sunlight passing through a thick roof of ferns and grass so that it was flooded with greenish light. In front of him was an old wooden door he had pulled from the river after the Winter floods. He had attached it to the stone doorway of the Den with leather hinges, but it was still stiff and took all his strength to open.

Inside, things were as he had left them. The Den was roughly two metres square, a room dug into the hillside, its roof supported by old roots. The floor was earth and the walls were a mixture of stones and soil. Owen had found it two years ago while looking for hazelnuts. He had cleared it of fallen earth and old branches, and had put an old piece of perspex in a gap in the roof. The roof was under an outgrowth of brambles halfway up the steep part of the slope and the perspex window was invisible while still providing the same greenish light as the space in front of the door.

He had furnished the Den with a sleeping bag and an old sofa that had been dumped beside the river. There were candles for Winter evenings, and a wooden box where he kept food. The walls were decorated with objects he had found around the river and in Johnston’s yard a quarter of a mile away across the fields. Johnston kept scrap cars and lorries and salvage from old trawlers from the harbour at the river mouth. Owen had often gone to Johnston’s, climbing the fence and hunting through the scrap. That was until Johnston had caught him. He winced at the memory. Johnston had hit him hard on the side of the head then laughed at him as he ran away.

Before that, Johnston used to come to the house three or four times a year, selling second-hand furniture, but he hadn’t been back since he’d caught Owen.

But that had been last year. Now Owen had a lorry wing mirror, a brass boat propeller, a car radio cassette and an old leather bus seat with the horsehair filling poking through. He had also found an old wooden dressing table painted pink. He looked at himself in the mirror as he passed. A thin face, his hair needing a cut. He had a wary look. His eyes a little older than they should be. He made a face at himself in the mirror and the eyes came alive then, youthful and dancing. He let the mask fall again and saw the same watchful face looking back.

He spent as much time as he could at the Den. Sometimes, he felt that people were watching him, whispering that he was the boy whose father had killed himself. Suicide, that was the word he heard. He could see it in people’s eyes when he went into shops. A strange boy. One day he heard a woman whisper behind him. “Like father like son.” “He’ll go the same way,” another voice said. Sometimes it was just easier to stay away from them.

Owen sat down heavily on the bus seat. He knew he was in trouble. He’d skipped school again that week and spent his day around the harbour where the river met the sea. He couldn’t help it. He kept being drawn back. And yet when he got close to the edge of the dock, he could feel the terrible panic welling up in him. The coldness, the heavy salt greenishness of the water filling his mouth and his lungs, and then the terrible blackness below. Each time he would come to as if he’d been asleep, finding himself many metres from the edge of the dock, his limbs trembling and his mouth dry.

It had been like that for as long as Owen could remember. He wanted to ask his mother if he’d always suffered from such fear, but she seemed so weighed down and lost in her own thoughts that she barely noticed him these days, and when he did ask a question she raised dull, lifeless eyes to him, staring at him as if she was struggling to remember who he was.

That was the worst thing of all, so he had stopped asking questions.

Owen emptied his bag. In the kitchen he had found some cheese and some chocolate biscuits. He took a magazine from the small pile that he kept in the Den. The cheese was a little stale and tasted odd with the chocolate biscuits, but he ate everything and washed it down with the milk. Outside, the wind sighed through the trees, but the Den was warm and dry. These are the best times, he thought to himself. No one knew where you were, but you were safe and warm in a secret place that no one else knew about but you.

He had found the Den a few years ago, when things were normal, or almost normal. Those were the days when he could talk to his mother. About most things, anyway. Except, of course, when he had tried to talk about his father. She would open her mouth as if to reply, but her eyes would cloud over and she’d turn away. But at least then they had been happy, living together in the small house. “Me and you, son,” she would say. “That’s how it is, me and you.” And he had been glad to have her. In school he had always been a loner. Not that anyone actually bothered him much. They just seemed to think that it was better if he went his way and they went theirs. Fine with him.

But then his mother started to change. She said that something in the house was “weighing on her”. That there was something in the air itself that left her unable to think straight. She started to forget things. Little things at first, then it seemed as if she forgot almost everything, wandering through the house, vague and forgetful.

Owen read on until the light changed, almost as if a rain cloud had arrived overhead, the light dark but silvery, so that he could still see the letters on the page. He listened for the sound of the rain falling, but there was nothing, not even the sound of the wind. In fact, a stillness seemed to have fallen outside, so complete that you couldn’t hear the sound of birds or insects. Owen decided to investigate. He slipped on his jacket and heaved the old door open. He was careful to replace the branches that hid the door, even though he was aware of their loud rustling in the still air. He paused. There was a sense of expectancy. He began to climb towards the old swing, which was the highest point overlooking the river.

It took ten minutes to get up to the level of the swing tree. The air itself was dense and heavy, and Owen was breathing hard. He skirted the ridge until he got to the swing. It was a piece of ship’s cable which had been hung from the branch of an ancient oak protruding over a sheer drop of fifty metres to the river. The rope part of the cable had almost rotted away to expose the woven steel core. No one knew who had climbed the branch to put the cable there, but Owen knew what it felt like to swing on it. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. You knew that if you lost your momentum or your grip there was nothing to save you from the long drop to the stones of the river far below. Local children had used it as a test of nerve for years. For Owen, it wasn’t the bone-crunching impact of the stones that he feared, but the clammy touch of the water.

For some reason he couldn’t explain he felt that there was someone watching. Almost without thinking, he crouched down behind a heap of old stones and peered out over the river. As he did so he saw a part of the bank below him start to move. At least he thought it was part of the bank, but as he looked closer he saw that it was in fact a man. He was wearing some kind of uniform, which might have been blue to begin with but was now faded to a greyish colour. There were no insignia on the uniform except for heavy epaulettes on the shoulders. The man’s hair was close-cropped and steely grey. In one hand was a narrow, metallic tube, almost gun-shaped, and on his belt there were oddly shaped objects – thick glass bulbs with narrow, blunt, metal ends.

There was something else strange about him and it took Owen a little while to work it out. Then he realised what it was. Even though the man was obviously fully grown he was barely a metre and a half tall and just a little taller than Owen himself. The man was staring intently across the river. A small knot of hazel trees on the slope meant that Owen couldn’t see what he was looking at, but a dip in the ground led towards the man’s position and Owen crept along it.

As he got closer, he could see how tense the man was, how his left hand gripped the metal tube so that his knuckles were white. As Owen drew level with him, he could see that he was looking in the direction of Johnston’s farm and scrapyard. Owen knew that Johnston’s scrapyard had been getting bigger, but he hadn’t looked at it for a long time and now he saw that it seemed to have expanded to cover field after field. At the fringes of the scrapyard he could see small black figures moving busily to and fro. And as he watched, a figure in white emerged from the fields of scrap and stood facing in the direction of the river. Owen heard a sudden intake of breath from the man in front of him.

“The Harsh!” he exclaimed then went silent as the cloaked figure raised his right hand in the air. Owen heard a voice that did not seem to be human, a cry that swelled and seemed to be both angry and triumphant, and full of youthful arrogance and ancient fury, a cry that seemed to flow like a raging river until Owen covered his ears and pressed his face to the ground.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the cry stopped. Owen looked up. The man in front of him had not moved. If the cry had shaken him, he did not show it. He seemed to be waiting for something. The wind had stopped and every branch and leaf was still. The birds and insects made no sound. Even the noise of the river faded away into silence. The man waited and Owen waited with him. The silence seemed to stretch on and on. Owen’s muscles were taut and his hands were clenched into fists though he didn’t know why. And then it came, soundlessly and all-enveloping. A kind of dark flash, covering the sky in an instant, sweeping across the land and plunging everything momentarily into total blackness like the blackness before the world began. And then, just as suddenly, it was gone and the trees and grasses seemed to sigh, the very stones of the land seemed to sigh, as if something precious had gone for ever.

“It has begun,” the little man said softly to himself, his voice weary. And then there was another great cry, but this time filled with terrible triumph. Owen felt a chill run down his spine and he gasped. In a second, the man had turned and taken several swift steps towards him, brandishing the metal tube. But when Owen stood up, he stopped and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“So,” he said, as if to himself, “it is to be you. I suppose it had to be.”

Owen waited, suppressing the impulse to run. The man strode up to him and took him by the arm.

“We must hurry,” he said. “We have a lot to do.”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_d2791428-f9ec-56ac-9bfa-d2b3b1a7fc7d)

Owen didn’t resist. He felt completely bewildered. When the man released his arm he followed. They were going in the direction of the old Workhouse, the small man moving with great speed through the tangles of willow and hazel scrub along the river. After a few minutes, Owen realised that they were following faint paths through the undergrowth, paths that he had never noticed before, but that seemed to be well-travelled. Every so often, the man would disappear from sight, but he never got too far ahead. Owen would round a bend to find him waiting.

“What’s your name?” Owen said breathlessly as he hurried up to him for the third or fourth time.

“My name…” the man said, stroking his chin and leaning back against a tree as though the matter of his name was worth interrupting his headlong progress for, that it was something which merited sitting down and thinking about.

You either know your name or you don’t, Owen thought impatiently. “My name’s Owen,” he blurted out, hoping to hurry the man along.

“I know your name,” the man said in a tone which left Owen in no doubt that he was speaking the truth. “They call me the Sub-Commandant.”

A sudden cold breeze made the trees around them rustle. Owen shivered. The man straightened up quickly.

“Let’s go,” he said urgently and started out again. Owen followed, almost running.

After ten minutes they were close to the Workhouse. To Owen’s surprise the narrow paths had started to widen and there was fresh-cut foliage to either side of them. The grass had been stripped from the ground and he could see that the surface of the path underneath was cobbled. But that wasn’t all. As they approached the Workhouse, he could hear the sounds of people at work, hammers tapping, wood being sawn, the rumble of masonry. When he rounded the corner he stopped and blinked and rubbed his eyes in amazement. The side of the hill leading to the Workhouse was swarming with people, many of them wearing the same uniform as the Sub-Commandant. And instead of there being a smooth stone face, archways were beginning to appear in the rock. Archways and windows, more and more of them. Men were unblocking entrances and passing the stones from them from hand to hand down the cliff. Other men were using the cut stones to construct a wall at the bottom of the hill. In the oak wood on the other side of the Workhouse, teams of women were working with saws at the trees.

Owen realised that he had stopped walking and the Sub-Commandant was now far ahead. He started to run after him, but stopped again when he saw the Workhouse. There were people in every window, smoke rising from its chimneys, and from the highest window a black banner with nothing on it stirred in the cold wind.

He realised that he could no longer see the Sub-Commandant, and that people were casting curious glances at him. He moved forward, calmly at first and then with increasing panic. On a small rise in the shadow of the Workhouse he saw a man who seemed to be directing the work. He was much taller than the others and was wearing a black suit. The suit was shabby and worn through to the lining, but his hair was cropped and steely grey, and his deep-set, penetrating eyes told you that this was no tramp. As Owen stared at him, he saw the Sub-Commandant emerge from the crowd at the base of the rise. Owen started towards them. As he did so, the tall man turned and saw the Sub-Commandant. The two men looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, then the tall man strode forward and they embraced. Owen pushed through the people at the bottom of the rise. The tall man turned to look across the river, still holding the Sub-Commandant affectionately by the elbow.

“It has been a long sleep this time,” he said.

“It has been a long watch, Chancellor,” the Sub-Commandant replied.

“A long weary one, by your face,” the tall man said, glancing at him shrewdly.

“I am tired, but there’s no time for that. The Harsh have had a long time to prepare.”

“I was worried about that,” said the tall man. “We must be quick in our own preparations.”

The tall man’s eyes swept over the crowd until they reached Owen. It was almost a physical sensation; one that left him feeling uncomfortable, as if his most secret thoughts were suddenly visible. But just as suddenly the sensation stopped and the tall man’s eyes were sad.

“I suppose it had to be,” he said, sighing, “although I would have preferred somebody else.”

“These decisions aren’t in our hands,” the Sub-Commandant said.

“I know, but I hope we do not have to pay a price for it.”

Once again, Owen felt that searching gaze sweep over him.

Suddenly, a cry went up from the direction of the river. There was a flash of blue light and a sudden smell of burning in the air.