The Vorrh

said. ‘Beneath the hard lid.’ He stared deep into the boy. ‘She is dreaming.’
    * * *

    Peter Williams joined the far-flung outpost just after the rainy season. His journey there had begun in conception. Khaki bed sheets, stained dark by khaki spunk, his father having carried the rifle and the flag for three generations. There had never been any doubt; he was to be a soldier. From the day of his birth to the day of his disappearance, there was only ever one road.
    A great yellow sun had spun in the bluest of Wiltshire skies. His birth had been abrupt and easy, his brilliant red head bouncing in the warm light. The sun was always to be his principle, and he sought to embrace it.
    He had been given a choice of posts and the remote backwater was his most favoured. He desperately wanted to escape Europe. The scars left by the gutting rope of the Great War were still fresh, if those words could ever be used in the same sentence. The rotting trenches had carved gangrene into the heart of the old countries, which clung together like so many old maids in a storm, friends and foes alike. He had been in a slithering ditch at Passchendaele for two years, where no sun ever warmed the forsaken earth. When there was daylight, it was contaminated and heavy, so that it hung densely on the black thorn hooks of splintered trees, the few verticals in a sea of mud, smoke, flesh and metal. The only clear light he remembered was the light that had not existed. He had been one of those who witnessed spectral visions floating over the smeared remains of men and mules. Angels of the Somme, they had been called. An illumination of purity, squeezed out of corruption to flicker in the wastelands. He never really knew what he had seen, but it had helped him survive and erase the impossible reality of that carnage.
    At the age of twenty-three, he had been ready for a far-off land of heat and life. From the moment he’d stepped from the plane and onto the rough-shaved clearing, he had felt satisfaction, as if the place had greeted him with a smile. There was something about the aroma of the jungle and the humidity, something about the teeming life that pulsed in every inch of the land that had reassured him. Perhaps it was the ecstasy of opposites, or the certainty that what he had witnessed could never happen there. Whatever it was he inhaled into his soul that day, it had grown stronger as he had walked through the singing rainforest to the barracks, with the step of a prodigal son.
    The outpost was to the south-east of the Vorrh, two hundred miles from the city and two thousand years away. The tribe who owned the enclosure had been there since the Stone Age; their land was an isthmus at the mouth of the great river, which ran from the sea to be swallowed in the Vorrh. They said it was the other way around, that the forest bled from its heart to invent and maintain the sea. They called themselves The True People, and they had been that forever.
    The sublimation of the True People had led to the survival of their race and the obliteration of their meaning. As the twentieth century had made its entrance, it was deemed necessary and desirable to focus on the tribe’s development, especially if the trade route via the river was to thrive after a long period of poverty. Three European countries had forcibly assisted their evolution. The British were the last to join the noble crusade, and they did it with their characteristic munitions of charm, cynicism and armed paternal control.
    The outpost was an elaborate undertaking. When he had arrived they were just finishing the roof of the church, complete with a joyless bell to summon the newly converted. There were six professional soldiers, two with families; a priest and a dozen bush policemen, aged between forty-two and fifteen, had been wrangled from the more significant members of the tribe. They took their positions very seriously. What they actually policed was a matter of speculation, since no set of formal laws had been introduced, and the previous mechanisms of agreed existence were fast being rubbed out. At least, that’s what the invaders had believed.
    Williams had been an armourer in the Great War, and he was there to equip and train the new police force with weapons beyond their expectations. He had arrived with a cargo of arms and ammunition, which he lovingly unpacked from their solid crates.
    All the hopeless carnage he’d experienced only proved to him that greed, pride and