Free The Penal Colony by Richard Herley Page B

caught by the
bracken in such a way that, the point uppermost, it had scarcely
been visible to someone coming down the hill.
    He estimated he had wasted at least two hours
on the search. The sky had clouded over completely by the time he
had returned to the ridge and set out, down across the bracken and
gorse to this area of more imposing scrub, even woodland,
wind-shaped and flattened when seen from above, greenly gloomy and
claustrophobic once inside. The undergrowth, deprived of light, was
relatively sparse and easy to get through.
    He had dug up a few bulbs and roots and had
cautiously tasted them. The first he had spat out instantly: it had
tasted vile, like concentrate of garlic. Even the leaves of this
plant, resembling those of lily-of-the-valley, generated a
revolting musk. He had got some sap on his fingers and now could
not rid himself of the smell. None of the other roots had been
edible.
    He had never been really hungry before. His
stomach hurt; he felt dizzy. For the first time in his life he
began to know what hunger meant.
    He crouched and turned over a flat rock,
looking for he knew not what. A woodlouse scuttled away from the
light; three more were clinging on blindly. A small, pale brown
slug. Two blue-black beetles. In Africa the natives ate termites,
or their larvae, or something, by pushing a twig into the nest. The
twig, with its cargo of grubs, was carefully extracted and then
pulled between the lips. In France they ate snails. What was a
slug, if not a snail without its shell?
    Routledge put the rock back.
    The decision to forage inland was already
looking like a mistake. There was nothing in these woods for him.
He should have trusted his instinct and stuck with the coast. There
had to be easier ways of finding food than this. Real food:
rabbits, seabirds, shellfish.
    Several times since retrieving it, he had
taken the knife out of its sheath and examined the details of its
construction. The banded pattern, fawn and brown and black, of the
hilt; the brass guard, the long, strong steel of the blade, were
the products of a technology which, compared with anything
available to him now, was fantastically advanced. On the mainland
he would scarcely have looked at the thing twice. Now he admired it
as a collector might admire his most coveted possession. The knife
belonged to him: it was his. He valued it, in a way he had not
known since his childhood. And the knife was already his
accomplice, his trusted friend. It knew his secret. On his service
its point had entered and breached a human heart.
    He stood up. He would definitely take his
chances and go back to the coast.
    “You won’t be needing that,” the white man
said.
    He was the tallest of the three, the heaviest
and the most frightening in appearance, with ginger hair tied in a
pony-tail, a huge red beard, and a goatskin jacket which in style
owed more to the Visigoths than to contemporary Britain. Only his
incongruous Birmingham accent gave him away.
    His two companions were younger, both black,
dressed in ragged jeans and sweatshirts. The first, who also wore a
skimpy and much stained leather waistcoat, was wiry and small,
carrying a spear, a length of reinforcing steel rod sharpened to a
point, below which hung a bunch of seagull quills. Round his neck
Routledge was amazed to see a pair of rubber-armoured roof prism
binoculars costing, at current prices, some seven hundred pounds.
The second black, of average build, with a sheepskin headband and
wristlets, had a felling axe at the ready, held across his chest.
His expression indicated that he would not mind using it.
    It was impossible that the three of them
could have crept up behind him in total silence; yet that was
exactly what had happened.
    This time there would be no escape. The white
man was armed with an S-shaped crowbar.
    “Chuck your blade down here,” he said, and
Routledge complied.
    “Standard issue, that,” said Spear, giving it
to the white man.
    “Now the club,” the