“Perfect,” Creedmoor said. “You’ll be happy enough here.”
He filled his water-skin but left Liv with their bags and all their food.
“Hunger sharpens the senses,” he said. “Bear in mind, Liv, that I am an excellent tracker.”
“Where would I run to, Creedmoor?”
“Exactly. Take care of the old fellow. Keep yourself to yourself. The Line are a few days behind us, but they’ll find us again; the bastards do not give up. Good luck.”
He turned and ran back the way they’d come, leaving her alone among the oaks, save for the General, who was looking into the pool and talking quietly to his reflection: “Once upon a time . . .”
CHAPTER 37
OUT OF THE OAKS
In the morning Liv drank, washed herself and her clothes, and sat for a while on the rocks by the pool, warming in the sun. When she was dry, she dressed herself and returned to the cave.
The General had been energetic overnight, pacing and stumbling and muttering and gesturing as if giving commands, and so she’d tied him by his leg to a gnarled root. This procedure was by now so familiar that she had to make a particular effort to recall its oddity.
He sat on the floor and addressed the root in learned tones.
“Once upon a time there lived a miserly couple who had no children and expended their affections upon the serpents that slithered in the churchyard around branches and bones, when once upon a time a beggar . . .”
She sat before him and held his jaw open, so that his discourse devolved into wet guttural noise, and forced a strip of dried meat down his throat. With a little encouragement, he began chewing, and eventually he swallowed. She worked some water down him, then wiped his bearded chin dry.
“Are you well, General?”
He said nothing.
“The oaks seem to do you good. You talk more, and how can that be bad? Creedmoor’s gone. We’re alone. Will you speak?”
He fixed her with a glare of fierce command, as if about to pronounce a sentence of execution or order her to charge a motor gun emplacement. It was, of course, quite meaningless.
She sighed, and untied him. She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, and with the other hand she led the old man down to the pool, where she began to strip him naked.
He struggled. She held his thin flailing arm up and tugged his shirt over his head.
“Do you know, General, one could learn a great deal about the operations of the mind by a comparative study of your kind. If the devastation were less total, if perhaps only parts of the mind were damaged, here and there, one could learn, from the ways the injuries might differ from subject to subject, how . . .”
She got the shirt off, exposing a sunken hairy brown chest. “This is how I pass the time, General.”
She unbuckled his belt. His trousers were foul, and he was greatly in need of a wash.
“Creedmoor suggests that I should kill you, rather than risk your secrets falling into his masters’ hands. Murder may be his answer to everything. Watching John Creedmoor attempt moral reasoning is a ridiculous and revolting experience, like watching a dog walk on its hind legs or a cat trying to give a sermon. Nevertheless, he may be right.”
As she spoke, she removed the General’s cracked and battered shoes, leaving him naked, and urged him gently into the water. He stood in it up to his waist, swaying in the faint current, and shivered despite the sun.
“It would be simple enough, and probably not even cruel. I could stop feeding you, or simply hold you underwater. I think he rather hopes that I will. It would relieve him of the burden of making a choice. He could run back to his vile masters and say: The woman did it, blame her. And perhaps they would forgive him and put him back to work and the world would go on again the same as ever, for ever and ever.”
She sat on a rock and folded her hands in her lap. “I will not do it.”
The General stood in the water and stared impassively up at her.
“Is that right or wrong, General? What would you say, if you could say anything meaningful? I’ve read your book. On the one hand, you were ruthless. You burned cities, torched fields. You had traitors executed. You told ten thousand young men it was