The Carhullan Army

spilling from the corners of her eyes. I stood as well, made a move to comfort her, but she waved me away and forced a smile. ‘I knew you were going to ask me,’ she said. She wiped her face with her gloves, picked up the saw and fitted it into the pale gash in the trunk. I took the other end and drew it back and forth with her. We worked in silence. I tried to concentrate on the task at hand but my mind would not cooperate. All I could see was a picture of myself, holding a gun to Shruti’s head and the redness in her spilling through her hair onto the ground. I let go of the saw and stood back. ‘That’s why people put those little idols out there by the stone circle, isn’t it? For Veronique?’ Shruti nodded. ‘Yes. Something like that.’
    That evening, the meeting did not run with its usual smoothness and civility. For most of the day the women had been ruminating on the events of the night before, working themselves up about it. They were tired and they were shaken. Those who spoke out did so with anger, interrupting, chipping in over the top of one another, breaking the rules of the meeting.
    Jackie stood beside the fire, listening to the comments of each woman who took the floor, and she did not object to the swell of voices, nor to the disorder. She nodded a couple of times whenever a new protest was shouted out. It was loud in the kitchen, and full of unrest, and she made a point of turning her left ear to the speaker, as if she was partly deaf and was trying to hear what was being said on her good side. It occurred to me that the scar on her face marked some internal damage. There was nothing of the previous night’s swagger about her, though she still wore her fatigues and stood tall, with her chin held high. Instead she seemed every bit the mediator, collecting up a list of grievances as if she might be planning to pass it on to an arbitrating body. But I could see she was acting a part, it was simply another rotation of her personality. Her eyes were focused on nothing and no one.
    I did not know how she could stand there, confronted by so many angry women, and not be intimidated by them. At that moment she was colossal, more incredible than even the iron-jawed woman I had dreamed in the dog box. But the mystery of her was less profound now. Before, I had wondered what had gone into the creating of her. I knew her stock, her inheritance. She was part of the old North, the feuding territories, and those antagonistic genes rubbed in her, creating the friction that fired her pride. And perhaps her time in service had aggravated that configuration, contracting with it, organising it; eventually making her unbreakable.
    But there was more to her than regional spirit and vocational strength. In a book she had lent me there had been a quote, written out in her own hand at the beginning of the first chapter. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most that will conquer . And I could see it now – the portion of her that had been immolated the day she pulled the trigger and took Veronique’s life. She carried a piece of dead self with her always, and still she lived, and it was this tumour, this mass, that gave her system the supreme immunity it had. It was this that gave her a shield, that she could better blunt her enemy’s sword, and drive in harder her own. She had killed her love with her lover, and cured herself of human weakness.
    When the women had finished talking and the murmurs of discontent faded, she stood up, tossed a few more logs into the range and closed its grate. She cleared her throat. ‘How long?’ she asked. Her voice remained low key, moderate as ever, but the question was clearly audible. The room was quiet but for the cracking and spitting of the fire. ‘How long have we got?’
    When nobody spoke she surveyed the women in front of her. There was a resinous stillness surrounding them. They were all waiting for her and, if they understood the question, they were unwilling to answer it. Only she moved, bringing her hands from the pockets of her breeches to her hips. Her arms looked like skinless wings. ‘I picked up a transmission this week on the radio,’ she said. ‘There’s to be no succession to the throne. The Authority is working on a new land charter. They’re setting up a commission to evaluate the current level of jurisdiction. In the next eighteen months they’re going to sweep the unofficial zones, and readministrate the