"Did you know, Ireland is whole again?" O'Connor ventured to tell him, unsure of the limits of Healey's knowledge of the outside world. Seeing Healey's surprise, he added more detail. "A referendum three years back. No one saw any reason to stay in the UK now it's gone, so they finally agreed. Bet you never thought you'd see that in your lifetime."
They were eating a cold meal at Bucky's rest, Buckarton Beach that was, as the sun set over the sea of his newly-reunited homeland and cast them all in the fiery hues of its descent. The gentle sound of waves slapping against the short stretch of beach reverberated back to them off the steep cliff walls, a gentle and rhythmic backdrop to the eager conversation that had started up over dinner. Everybody wanted news from the mainland, which had been silent for nigh on a decade, though none of them had any interest in the affairs of nations or governments. They had asked about food, clothes, technology and culture, and O'Connor had obliged as best he could. He showed them photographs of his life in Ireland on his smartphone, allowed them to pass it around and exclaim in awe at the rich, bright colours of its screen and the many functions. He told them about his tablet, left behind at Tintagel, that was stocked with new books and movies, and about electric cars and plastic surgery and mixed martial arts and drones. He confirmed for Healey's pleasure that Britpop was dead, and he tried to explain Tiktok and social media and the ubiquitous modern internet. They refused to believe it without proof, this magical medium through which information flowed like water, where you could instantly watch movies from anywhere in the world (except here, Healey had thought bitterly, even though we asked for a satellite dish when we had the chance). Once they had grasped it they tried to imagine making Tiktoks from Tintagel, little stupid dances with the ravagers behind them, grwm for a scouting mission to find car batteries. They laughed and joked and tried to avoid talking about the political undercurrents that left them abandoned, though in truth Healey doubted most of the team he had brought with him understood enough about the world outside to imagine what politics could be. In their rudimentary school they taught children how to read and write and told them a little about the world they had left behind, but even by adulthood none of them had ever heard any news about politics or nations or wars or presidents or politicians. It had even taken O'Connor time to explain to them what a soldier was, or an army. Half of his team were wildlings, born after the Quickening; the other half, even Lily, were what the elders called in-betweeners, people who were still very young children when the Quickening happened. Only Healey remembered the world before as anything more than a vague shadow in the background of his parents' lives, and his knowledge of it was little better than a child's, an eighteen year old boy in his first year of university.
"Does that mean Great Britain is finally dead?" He asked, thinking back to how essential the politics of the division had been to him then, an Irish boy at a British university, and how little it all seemed to matter now.
"Not completely," O'Connor replied. "The King still has a formal presence in Brussels, bankrolled by the Americans I think."
How ironic, Healey thought, from fund-raisers for the IRA in Boston pubs to government support for the King in a Brussels office. "What's he gonna do?" He asked. "Without land, and without people?"
"There's still some land on the Chagos islands," O'Connor told him, adding, "Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, I think," when he saw Healey's blank look. "But that's going through some kind of appeal at the UN, so he might lose that too. Gibraltar is already gone, too, and they handed over Hong Kong a month before the outbreak. Most of the refugees in Europe gave up yonks back." He was fiddling with his smartphone as he spoke, flicking through pictures of his family, before he turned it off to preserve the battery. "The general feeling is they'll dissolve the whole thing if he loses the Chagos appeal, and then he'll get some settlement I guess and Britain will disappear. It's not like any of the refugees or their families want to move to the middle of the Indian Ocean anyway. Weird, isn't it? From an empire where the sun never set, to a couple of hundred people camped out on Tintagel, because of a stupid virus."
Well, Tintagel was where it all started, so he thought it made sense for them to be clinging on there. What would the original Arthur make of it, though? A council of elders made up of two women, a black man for his namesake and an Irishman in place of Merlin. And Lily for their fey Morgan?
While they were eating their simple meal and talking about these things he had been watching her, stealing glances when he thought no one would notice or care. Seated at a suitable distance from everyone, facing the waves and the setting sun, she had cast back her veil to eat, and he could see all the details of her face burnt orange in the fading light. The firm line of her jaw, the pale cheeks and high brow, the mysterious, limpid black pools of her eyes. Even though by community consent she ate less than everyone else she was bigger, healthier and stronger than most of the women at Tintagel, who were uniformly small and skinny, slips of girls raised on fish and apples. Sitting slightly apart from them, nibbling on a cold roast potato, withdrawn into herself as she kept her senses focused on the rim of land that framed the bay, Healey found himself again dwelling on the impossibility of their connection.
"This Gorgon," O'Connor asked, interrupting his reverie and drawing Lily's attention from across the fire, "Have you fought it before?"
The question brought back harsh memories of blood on snow, desperate flight through frozen forests with the beast at their rear, horrible screams of dying comrades and distant snarling of ravagers breaking the winter silence. The broken spear haft in his hand, terrible realization that a crossbow bolt and two spears were not enough to even slow the thing down. It had been huge, looming over them suddenly in the dark forest, its strength prodigious as it hurled Healey's comrade far into the shadows behind it and surged forward straight onto his spear. Panic, flight, the familiar sinking filthy feeling of abandoning a colleague.
"Yes," he replied simply. "We lost. And ran."
"And you haven't been back to its territory since?"
Healey shook his head. "We only see it when it visits us and–" too late he caught the sudden shake of Lily's head, warning not to tell this newcomer too much.
"It visits you?" He demanded immediately. "What, you have tea and biscuits?"
He could see O'Connor's face clearly in the lambent glow of the setting sun, and could tell now that he was not going to let this line of inquiry go until they spilled another of their dirty secrets. Perhaps the man was wondering how they knew the Gorgon was smarter, how they knew it could organize ravagers. Perhaps he had already guessed from the strange and arbitrary rules applied to Lily and only to Lily that they were hiding many things from him, that this world was a lot more complex than he had been told in briefing rooms on his ship. Did the people on the mainland know any of the things that the survivors had learnt in the years of their isolation?
"They probably don't teach you this in soldier school, O'Connor," Lily put in from across their circle, "But ravagers can breed."
And then it all had to come out, the whole filthy arrangement. They had all seen it in the first days and weeks of the Quickening, of course, what happened to pregnant women who were quickened. They did not die, the sainted role of motherhood did not protect them from the virus, and they joined the gangs and hordes of wandering ravagers like everyone else, like children and old people and priests and your ex who probably deserved it and all the family members of the survivors. Most of the time the baby died, and the mother died with it, a horrible death that the survivors had no time to witness or spare compassion to care for in those terrifying initial weeks of fighting and running. But a small number carried the fetus to term and it was born the way all babies are born, squalling and helpless in the ruins of its quickened mother's society. One in-betweener with the team, Gazza, had seen his own mother go through the hideous corruption of childbirth, hiding in a closet in his own house while his family prowled hungry and full of rage through the house he had been raised in, and he was able to tell O'Connor all the disgusting details.
"Are they born infected?" O'Connor asked, face twisted in disgust at the scenes they described to him.
"Of course, how could they not be?"
The newborn ravagers were just as helpless as any other infant. Their mothers abandoned them, with no more maternal feeling than an animal that lays its eggs and leaves them to fate. Survivors could not feed them or care for them for fear of infection, and so they shriveled and died where they lay.
Until the Gorgon came, and found a solution with its rat cunning. It started about eight years ago, a year after Healey's first encounter with the thing. Early in summer, the Gorgon emerged from the forest on the edge of the Field of Songs, stood watching their defenses from the shadows of the woodland. The watchtower had called, and by the time Healey arrived Lily was there as well, standing on the tower with the watchers, veil on, ignoring the questions and conversation of the people around her in that way she did when she was submerged in her blood, sensing them. "Let it approach," she had told them, "I will go and meet it," and as if it had heard her the Gorgon came forward, walking slowly and purposefully through the Field of Songs. It did not become lost and distracted amongst the constant small sounds and movement like other ravagers, but marched straight up to the quarantine pits, cradling a filthy screaming infant in its hands.
Lily went to meet it, and Healey had watched in amazement as she stood before the giant Alpha, even her tall, solid form dwarfed by the huge ravager, and took its burden from it. They had stood there for a moment, calm and still, and then it had turned and sauntered away, its derision for their feeble defenses somehow clear in the proud set of its enormous, heavily-muscled shoulders. One of the watchers had moved to fire a crossbow at it, but Healey raised a hand of warning and they held their fire. At the edge of the forest it had turned once to look back at them, a long and level stare, and with that Healey came to understand that a deal had been struck. A year later it returned for its progeny, which had grown under Lily's care, and brought with it two more infants. They built the beast pens, and Lily's responsibilities expanded to include feeding and caring for the babies that no one else could touch.
In return the attacks on the northern road declined. They could send scavengers further afield, towards more remote settlements like Boscastle and the small hamlets along the stream that used to be called Valency. Not into the Gorgon's territory itself, but its ravagers avoided them so long as they remained respectful of its range. They had begun discussions about making a second, smaller community, perhaps just an outpost, along the cliffs in that direction, but then last year the Gorgon had not come, and they had put those plans on hold.
"Where does it find the babies?" O'Connor asked. "There can't be so many survivors that it can find a newly-infected mother every year." He had not yet adapted to their language, of talking about the quickened, or ravagers.
"Prob'ly breeds 'em on its own," Gazza told him. "Someone saw once, it keeps a group of women close."
"It… it…" O'Connor did not finish the sentence. The idea was too disgusting to put into words, and he was still almost speechless at the horror of their arrangement. Healey watched him look across to Lily, wondered if he was going to ask how? How can Lily do these things? But in the rush of these revelations, his shock at the greasy, blood-slicked grotesquerie of their arrangement, he lost track of the other mysteries and fell into silence.
"So," Healey finished. "Since it didn't come last year, we don't know if it still lives, or if its territory has been taken by some other Alpha. We don't know what we're walking into. But if it's there, so long as Lily is with us we have a chance. And if it's not, well…" He looked across to Lily, who had restored her veil, and she shrugged. "Well, I guess we'll do what needs to be done."
"We always do," one of the team said quietly. "We always do…"
They fell into silence after that, but as the sun slid behind the horizon he roused himself from his reverie to contemplate the morning. They had much to do. He had brought Boz and Shell with them precisely because of this beach, so he set them to work now, sent them off to check on the small boat drawn up to the high tide line. Some years back the community had made the effort of scattering small boats in the coves near Tintagel, to be used in emergencies if foraging groups had to flee from gangs of ravagers. Each boat had a map of the route to Tintagel, in the hope that if any survivors came to hide in a cove they might take the opportunity to travel to sanctuary at the community. No one ever had, but this boat at Bucky's Rest offered a quick retreat if it was needed. Once Boz and Shell returned to confirm it seemed seaworthy, he gave his instructions. Boz would stay in the cove for two days, and if they needed to send any messages back to the community they would dispatch Shell as a messenger. She was to run back to the cove and together they would sail back to Tintagel with any message she carried. The rest of them would leave at first light, scouting along the cliff edge until they reached the location of the radio. They would check the area, make a decision, and try to save anyone alive and bring them back by sundown. If that failed, Boz would give them one more day and night, and leave at first light on the following day to take the sad news to Tintagel.
They all nodded agreement. Healey assigned watches for the night and reiterated the basic rules of survival to O'Connor: no noise, no shooting, no light, no bravery.
Could he understand the inverted rules of this world, where soldiers were useless and scampering girls worth their weight in apples? They would find out in the morning, he supposed.