Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(28)

“What did you do to your leg?”

“What?” Even subvocalising, Rudi sounded out of breath.

“Your leg. What happened?”

“Ballooning accident.” The fall of snow stopped; a branch high in the tree bent all on its own, steadied. “Years ago. Just a moment, please.”

Another soldier came along the fence. He was dressed in snow-cammo, mottled shades of white and grey, the hood of his combat suit pulled up. From inside the hood, the twin turrets of his image-amplifier protruded. He was carrying a short automatic rifle, and from his posture he would rather have been anywhere else than here, walking endlessly round and round a fence in a snowy forest. Gwen had tried to work out how many of them were on patrol, which might have allowed her to time them and get some idea how big the perimeter of the fence was, but they all looked alike.

He passed by, and a minute or two later there was a fall of snow, a creaking of branches, and a sudden thud to her right, accompanied by several muttered swearwords in her ear.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rudi said. “Absolutely excellent. Never better, thank you.”





BACK AT THE flat, Gwen showered to get rid of the sweaty feeling of the stealth suit, and when they were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee Rudi showed her what he had seen from the tree.

He’d managed to climb up far enough to look over the fence, and the video he’d taken with his phone showed... at first Gwen couldn’t quite work it out. The forest was in an area of steep little hills and valleys, quite wild, considering this was after all Luxembourg. On the other side of the fence, however, the land was perfectly flat. It was as if the forest had been cleared and the entire site had been levelled and then given over to a rather quaint-looking vista of fields and hedges and little copses of trees. Gwen thought she could see, above one stand of trees, a drift of smoke, and in other places as Rudi panned the phone’s camera she caught sight of solid-looking stone-built houses. In one shot, she could see in the distance the Luxembourg forest rising on the other side of the farmland, maybe a mile or so away.

There were people in there.

She couldn’t make out their faces or even what they were doing, even with the image zoomed to maximum, but she could see them moving about.

When they had watched the video half a dozen times, Rudi got up stiffly and limped over to the worktop to make more coffee.

“I don’t understand,” Gwen said. One of them had to.

Rudi didn’t say anything, just busied himself with the kettle and coffee grounds and the cafetière.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

He didn’t answer straight away. He stood watching the kettle as the water started to drum inside and steam emerged from the spout. He seemed to be playing a weird game of chess with the cafetière, the mugs and the sugar bowl.

Finally, he said, “Not for sure, no.”

“But you have an idea. Whatever it was, it happened all of a sudden. The authorities didn’t have enough fencing in stock, then they didn’t have enough trucks to transport it out there. It took them by surprise.”

“There are stories,” Rudi said, “and maybe your friend Lewis has heard them, of a holy grail, the Creation Myth of the Community.”

Gwen shook her head.

“No one knows how the Community was created,” he said. “It’s common knowledge now that an English family named Whitton-Whyte did it, or had it done for them, but what’s not so well-known is that they seem subsequently to have lost the knowledge of how to do it. Either it was lost, or stolen, or destroyed, no one knows, not here or in the Community. There are stories of a book of instructions, floating about somewhere, which tells how to map a new landscape over an old one.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” she said.

He shrugged. “People in the Community have been looking for it for a very long time. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.” The kettle stopped boiling. Rudi let it settle for a few moments, then poured water into the cafetière. “We still haven’t decided what to do with you,” he said.

“What?”

He put the lid on the cafetière and turned to look at her. “We still haven’t decided what to do with you.”

“If you think you’re just going to hide me away somewhere, you’d better think again,” she told him. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“I’m not certain what it is.”

“Then I want to know what you think it is. Otherwise I’m not going anywhere.”

Rudi rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way where?”

He turned back to the worktop, and pushed the cafetière’s plunger down. “Have you ever,” he asked, “visited Poland before?”





1.





CHRISTMAS HAD COME and gone before any of them got a break, and it was another two months before the emergency leave rota rolled around to Mr Pasquinel’s department, and even then he didn’t feel that he could put his workload on everyone else’s shoulders.

“There’s just too much to do,” he told his department head one day over lunch. “Too much we don’t know yet.”