So we left them at last, having tried and failed to persuade them to take some payment for all they had give us. Then Nan come running after us, calling out, and we slowed so she could catch us up.
“There’s one thing I’d ask,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say it in front of him though. He’s scared enough already.”
She wasn’t talking to me when she said this, nor yet to Cup or even Ursala. She was talking to the drone.
“What is it you want?” Monono asked. Nan ducked her head in a kind of a courtesy. When Monono talked in that dead machine voice, it was hard even for us that knowed her not to be a little bit scared of her.
“Don’t start your road here. Start it a few miles on. We like the world where it is. It don’t need to come right up to our door.”
“The road is going to join up all the villages of Ingland,” I said. “To make a gene pull. It means there’ll be more babies.”
Nan laughed. I think it was the first time I ever heard her do it. It wasn’t what you’d call a happy sound. “Then we definitely don’t want it.”
“We’ll start the road at the first settlement we reach,” Monono said. “That’s at least two miles away.”
Nan nodded, satisfied, and went away.
“You think two miles is far enough?” I asked.
Ursala smiled. Then she laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked her.
“If this works, Koli, two hundred miles might not be enough. The world is about to change, and you can’t control it. You can only build it and see what happens.”
52
It would be wrong to say we made a road.
A road got made, but the big engines done all the work their own selves without us saying or doing anything to help or hinder them. They covered most of a mile on that first day, and they kept up the same speed after that. If there was forest in the way, they teared the forest down – not just what was right in our way but a wide strip on both sides, pushing the trees back and planting asphel where they used to be. Most of the cut trees went into the belly of the hot mix machine to make more asphel so our engines didn’t ever need to stop. It seemed like they could keep on going until all Ingland was covered in a hard black coat, except that Monono had told me she was not going to let that happen.
We went north at first, as well as east. We had got to, for we was following the line of the land and keeping the sea ever on our right-hand side. The chalk give way to clay and limestone, and in some places to a rock that was dark grey and hard and brittle like glass. The trees was triptails, then chokers, then chokers mixed with oaks. The engines didn’t care what they et or what they cut through, and anything that could run or fly or crawl fled away in front of them.
The trees couldn’t run, but if the sun was out they could fight back hard. The shiny metal of our engines got bashed and scraped and dented as branches that was as thick around as the cope-stone of a well swung at them and tried to topple them. Some days, we had got to stop to give the big machines time to repair themselves. And some days when the sun come out strong, we knowed we would not make no headway, and just digged ourselves in and waited.
We watched all this from the biggest of the crawlers, which Monono put dead in the middle of our tally so we’d be safe from anything that come against us. The crawler was so big it had a whole room up at the top of it, as high off the ground as a lookout tower, with walls of glass and seats for two people. Me and Ursala took the seats, while Cup squatted out on what Monono called the wheel-arch, with one arm hooked around a mirror that looked back at where we’d been. She liked being outside, where she could look straight down at the big wheels and straight up at the crawler’s jaws as it bit through dirt and rock and trees. “I feel like I’m in a bottle when I’m inside there,” she said when I offered to switch places with her. “And I don’t want to miss this. You should be out here too, Koli!”
The first time we got to a village the people all come out to us. They had seen us come rolling through the ruck and ruin of a stand of chokers that stood forty strides tall. They had seen the trees bring their fury down on us, and they had seen us come out whole. The trees was now on the ground behind us, being cut up small and fed into the hoppers of the asphel mix.
I guess I can imagine what the Ramparts of that village must of thought when they seen we was heading right for their gates. Anyway, they met us as a red tally, every woman and man carrying a weapon of some kind, whether it was a sword or a mattock or a piece of tech. They didn’t try to fight us. They was only just able to stand their ground, most likely thinking they would be going into the hoppers too as soon as we was done with the trees. Their fear was a painful thing for me to see. They looked on us like we was monsters, worse than shunned men or beasts or even chokers. Like we was the ending of the world, when we was looking to be its bright beginning.
“We don’t mean to hurt you,” I told them. But I was a man with a drone hanging next to his shoulder and an army of tech at his back. I could see my words rung hollow. “We’re just laying down a road, as you all can see. It’s like the roads of the world that was lost, hard enough and strong enough to bide the trees and the weather. When it’s done, you’ll be able to walk it safe as anything. What’s your name here? Your village, I mean.”
“Leece.” It was one of their Ramparts that said it. He was a young man to be a Rampart, with black hair that was slicked down with some kind of oil and a gold torque around his throat. His tech was a rod as long as his forearm, all shining black. His hands shook as he held it, and his voice was straining towards a sob.
“How many are you?”
As soon as the words was out of my mouth, I seen how they would be read. The man gathered himself up and pointed the black rod at my chest. “You’ll find we’re enough.”
“I didn’t mean to slight you,” I said quickly. “Or to offer threat to you. It’s only that the road will let you visit the villages close by without fear of trees and beasts. It will let you be more than you are. You see how fast our engines is moving. In a few weeks, you and your neighbours will be able to walk a straight, clear road when you want to trade with each other. You won’t have to wait for rain.”
“We don’t trade. We haven’t traded with anyone since my mother was alive.”
“Well, maybe now you’ll start again.”
“We won’t.”
He still was afraid, and he still believed we was come in violence and despite. His fear and his anger was just about boiling over, and talking to him longer was not going to abate it. If I said a wrong word, he would loose that tech on me, and I had no idea what it might do. I give it up and we went on by, followed for a little way by the Rampart and his people. I guess they wanted to make sure we was not staying.
At Dinder, that was also called Dene, we was met by a ditch that had been digged across the path in front of us. The ditch was five feet deep and ten wide. On the other side of it, there was maybe two dozen fighters, young and old together. Like the people we met before, they was carrying whatever they could find that you could stab or swipe or hit with. When they seen the monster that was rolling through the trees towards them, the teeth and the blades and the wheels, and smelled the burned-pie stink of asphel, they was near to pissing themselves, but still they held their ground.