A Country Life

CHAPTER 19 - PETER

When the Wessex Road reached the point it joined the remains of an ancient motorway north of Bristol, Peter slowed his horse and waited, sword in hand, listening for signs of pursuit be it friendly or otherwise.  Dawn was still an hour or so away, and he still wanted to make the Shirehampton ferry before dawn - but that aim looked ever more unlikely now that he had come to the old motorway. Wes and Jep had been left behind by agreement. Neither had a horse as fast as Peter’s, and Jep knew paths through the thickets and copses of trees which the pursuing knights would not know of. The plan - made in a hurried and gasping conversation following the deafening and blinding bolt of arrow-straight purple lightning from the sky - was that Peter would make as fast as possible for the ferry, get to the Ashton Protectorate and rouse their yeomanry to come to the aid of Berkeley’s.  If Wes and Jep made it through the night, he would pick them up on the way back.

Now, it looked like he might need to wait out the day in hiding. He doubted that if any of the knights were still coming after him he could avoid them out on the open road - they had been found easily enough in the dark. Deciding that he might as well press on until dawn and then find a place to hide, he urged his horse on again. Peter had visited the motorway on several occasions in the past, where it ran north and south a few miles east of the Berkeley boundary. Much of the road surface had crumbled and disappeared under hundreds of years of dirt, leaf mulch, encroaching vegetation and animal activity, but here and there patches of solid concrete and tarmac remained. In amongst the thickets of brush and brambles that grew in clumps on the roadway were the occasional remains of vehicles, abandoned where they ran out of power and scavenged for whatever material they could provide for the survivors of the plague. Surprisingly often, whole vehicles remained, much of their structure resistant to the ravages of time and weather, even bright colours still visible under layers of grime, moss and lichen. It was by one of these that Peter stopped some ten minutes later, just as dawn was breaking.

Peter urged his horse a little way into the woods to his left and tied the reins to a tree, leaving the horse to munch on the sparse grass and leaves. Taking his pack he went back to the old motorway and crossed to the other side, where thick overgrowth and a ditch seemed to offer opportunities to hide himself. Searching along the ditch that ran beside the carriageway he came across a large object almost entirely hidden by brambles and scrub. A small animal trail led into the thicket, and when Peter pushed through to see what lay within he discovered a large, multi-wheeled vehicle lying on its side. How it got there, he could only guess - perhaps pushed out of the way after it broke down, or crashed in the chaos caused by people escaping towns and cities when the panic of the plague took hold in the final days of the last age. Hidden almost completely inside the thicket of brambles and covered in green moss, the truck was almost entirely invisible from the roadway. The animal trail led to the rear of the truck, where one of the large rectangular doors had fallen open. Peter crouched down to peer inside, but all he could see was a pitch dark space smelling of fox scat and something else, like rotten meat. Peter considered his options for a moment, then entered the truck and felt his way carefully inside. Roots and bramble runners hung down from small holes in the side of the truck’s trailer, through which Peter had to push to reach the far end. Small shafts of sunlight coming through holes in the sides and roof of the truck provided a small amount of light once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and dust and fungal spores danced in the air where they were caught in a slanting beam of sunlight. Once he reached the far end, where the darkness was greatest, he laid his longsword on the ground and held the shorter falchion in his right, then settled down to wait out the day.

After an hour, during which time Peter became convinced something had recently died inside the stuffy space he’d hidden in, the sound of a horse reached his ears.  Pressing his face up against a small hole in the side of the trailer, Peter watched through gaps in the brambles as a grey-cloaked knight came down the road from the north. When the knight reached the point where Peter had come off the road he slowed his horse to a walk, then halted opposite the overgrown wreck. He stood in his saddle and stared down the road a while, and looked like he might have been about to move on when his attention was drawn to the woods opposite by an untimely whinny from Peter’s horse. Dismounting and drawing his sword, the knight cautiously stepped into the woods, where he would surely find Peter’s horse tied to the tree.