The Carhullan Army

touch them, making sure they were properly stowed, praying he would not find them.
    But now I was safely away, beyond exposure and explanation. I was alone. Here in the empty Lakeland village I couldn’t have explained to anyone exactly how secure I felt, even if there had been someone around to listen to me. The village reverberated with silence, with human absence. There was not a soul to be found and I liked it. It had been so long since I had felt that. Even on the Beacon Hill above Rith I could see people moving in the streets and I knew they were close by. Here I was breathing air that no one else’s breath competed for. I was no longer complicit in a wrecked and regulated existence. I was not its sterile subject.
    Standing opposite the gutted church, in the wet deserted roadway, something unassailable crept over me. I felt the arrival of a new calmness, an assurance of my own company. The only noises, other than the movement of wind through the trees and the trickles of water, were the animal sounds of my tongue moving in my mouth, and my boots grating on the ground as I adjusted my stance. I was aware of my own warm predominance in the environment, my inhabited skin, my being. I suddenly felt myself again, a self I had not been for so long. I remembered how I had experienced the same feeling in this place when I was young, when I had been here walking, before the restrictions.
    The hikes had always been long and steep. ‘Get on, lass, just over that brow,’ my father would call back when I lagged behind, aching and winded. ‘You’ll live,’ he would shout back to me. ‘You’ll live through it. It’ll not kill you.’ It was here that I had first understood I was stable on my feet, capable of direction and distance and stamina. It was here in the blue fells that I first knew I was strong, and that I had it in me to be stronger.
    Now, once again, I was in that landscape, where human beings had always journeyed to feel less and more significant than they were. Where the mountains stupefied and emboldened them, bringing them high and to the edge of what they thought themselves capable. As I stood and looked in the direction of the summits I felt properly dressed in my own muscles, and ballasted by my sense of physicality, as if I belonged outside, away from the crowding, the metered artificial lighting, the ethics of a lost society.
    Ahead of me the hills were disappearing under heavy cloud, another front of rain was moving in, obscuring the horizon. I took a deep breath, picked up my rucksack and put it on. Inside its material the butt of the gun rested firmly against my back. I didn’t know how good a shot I might be – it had been years since I aimed through the sights – or even if the gun still worked. But I was pleased to have it, pleased that I could offer it to those at the farm.
    I walked through the settlement and began upwards towards the fells. On the howse there were delicate purple harebells growing in the grass between limestone outcrops. It was too late in the season for them, but at that moment they were the loveliest thing I had seen. As the clouds drifted down, thunder rolled again, sounding loud in the hollows of the mountains, and after a moment or two, rain began to run down the soft cambers of the sky. I stopped, put the bag down, and stripped off to the waist. I put the damp bundle of clothing into the top of the rucksack, tied its neck, shouldered it, and walked on. The clean October air passed over my skin. Rain snaked down my shoulders and arms, dripping off my breasts. I knew I must look peculiar. But there was no one around to see me. The driver of the van was long gone, back to his lonely life at the draw-off tower. The closest human beings to me now were the women of Carhullan. By the end of the day I would be with them. I would be one of them.

FILE TWO

COMPLETE RECOVERY

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    I had first heard about the farm at Carhullan when I was seventeen. Even then it had notoriety, a bad reputation. Its lamb was being sold in Rith, its vegetables and honey, and char when the tarn on its estate held them. The women living there traded every month in the border markets, with organic labels and low prices. When they arrived in town conversation about them picked up, the way it used to when the travellers came for the horse-driving trials.
    They were a strange group, slightly exotic, slightly disliked. I could remember seeing them in Rith’s market stalls, setting up their tables,