Paradise [Draft 1]

Chapter 11: 1 Kings (13520)

Chapter 11: 1 Kings (13520)

Christmas and then New Year passed quietly on the farm. They were snowed in at the end of December, but by the end of the first week of January the sun was out and melting much of it. Piles of dirty snow still clogged up the farmyard, but most of the fields were uncovered and the slaves were sent out, up the hills to the north to mend the fence that kept the sheep out of the forest.

It was hard physical work as all the rotten old fence posts had to be first pulled out, then the hole deepened with a long metal pole called a pinch. Melissa was in charge of the pinch and carried it around on her shoulder like an amazon warrior carrying a spear. When it came time to work the hole, she brought it down into the ground with a earth-rumbling thump. After that, Helen and Tina would take turns with the sledgehammer on the new fence post to drive it into the hole. Melissa always took over for the last five or six hits. After that the wire was applied, spun out from a wooden spindle and attached to the posts by metal pegs with a clawhammer. It was slow going, they would do not much more than a hundred feet in one day and after lunch they got even slower as their muscles got tired. All three of them were dressed in warm waterproof leggings and coats, with scarves, gloves and woolly hats. There was occasional drizzle, but they were well protected and would stay out even in heavy rain, only sheltering under the trees in a downpour.

As they worked, they talked.

'Was it just up there that you saw them?' asked Tina, pointing to the hilltops above the forest. The trees were Forestry Commission pine trees, a crop that would now probably never be harvested.

'Yes,' confirmed Helen. 'You go through the woods, then there is a path to the top. From there you can see the windmills. After the windmills is the desert and that's where I saw them.'

They were speculating about the Fire Foxes, the tribe of lunatics that was said to live in the desert beyond the hills. This had been one of the topics they had discussed for much of the day. Melissa had heard rumours though that it was not the Foxes this time, but Evermarch troops returning from their campaign in the north.

'Was it an army Land Rover you saw?' asked Melissa. 'Maybe it army.'

'I don't know, maybe,' admitted Helen. 'They weren't dressed like army though. More sort of Laurence of Arabia. They'd just come out of the desert.'

'The army are back though,' put in Tina. 'I heard Ruth and her brother talking about it.'

'What would they be doing looking over our valley though?' wondered Helen. 'Think about it. They were looking us over. They looked down the valley with binoculars and left. If that was our army then why would they be scouting their own land?'

Neither of the other two could provide an answer to that. This wasn't the first time Helen had thought it all over. She got a bit of news from Ruth and a bit more from her occasional phone calls with Ray, but the truth was that no one knew what was going on, everyone was guessing, and actual facts were hard to get hold of out of all the wild speculation. The men she had seen in the desert could have been anyone, but there had been no word of Fire Foxes since then and a lot of chatter about the army. She felt she was right. Why would their own army stop at the Zone Line and look the valley over? Look it over for what? Most likely it was just random desert dwellers, she generally came back to thinking that after her worried analysis had run its course. She just wished there were better protected on the farm.

When Helen tuned back into the conversation, it had moved on to their lives before the reditus. Helen, the most talkative of the three had long since told the others all there was to know about her. Her marriage to Ray Lorric, and how it eventually crumbled for what now felt like ridiculously petty reasons. Her affair with Gary Vincent and their emigration to Australia where they had run a backpacker's hostel for eight years. And finally, how they had been there right up to the day when her bit of Australia had suddenly ended up where Norway had once been.