Age of Legends by James Lovegrove

Author:James Lovegrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

“MY REASONING IS that they’ll have regular checkpoints on all the major roads surrounding the forest.”

“Your reasoning?” Smith said. “Or is that a guess?”

Fletcher stared him down. “I was in Helmand, remember? I’ve been on patrols. I know how these things work.”

“Ignore Smith,” Mr LeRoy said. “Go on.”

“They’ll back up the checkpoints with patrols. I reckon that’s what you came across earlier, Ajia. I’ll take you north, for five or six miles, to the old Haxley road. I’ll see you across, dodging the patrols.”

“And then you’ll turn tail,” Smith said.

“And then I’ll have discharged my duty, Smith. Done what I said I’d do. You’ll still have a couple of hours till dawn. My advice is to travel at night, hole up during the day. Find transport of some kind as soon as you can. Which way will you be heading?”

Mr LeRoy said, decisively, “North.”

Ajia looked at him. He sounded certain. She wondered if he’d been consulting his map while she had been out there.

Fletcher went on, “I’ll give you what I can spare in the way of food and water. But that isn’t much.”

Ajia nodded, surprised by his generosity.

They set off.

They travelled by the light of the moon and the stars. The night and the forest seemed magical to Ajia, a city girl born and bred. She wondered if it were the Puck in her, responding to nature.

She scouted ahead, using her speed to dart forward half a mile then zigzag back towards the trio as they made painstakingly slow progress north. Smith and Fletcher were relatively fit, but on his own admission Mr LeRoy was more accustomed to chomping than yomping. Every few hundred yards he demanded they stop so that he could regain his breath. Smith accepted the situation with good grace, but Fletcher was not so tolerant.

At one point, when Ajia returned to the fold to find Mr LeRoy sitting on a fallen trunk mopping his brow, Fletcher was striding back and forth, chuntering. “We need to get a shuffle-on. We’re still an hour from the road. You’ll want at least that long to put as much distance between yourselves and the closest Paladin patrol before sunrise.”

“The way’s clear for another half a mile,” Ajia reported.

“Good,” said Fletcher. “Come on, you two!”

Smith helped a groaning Mr LeRoy to his feet and they struggled on.

For the next half a mile they followed the edge of a low ridge, which Fletcher reported was a deer run. It was concealed to the west by the forest of beech, and to the east by a wild tangle of hawthorn, elder and blackberry brambles.

Ajia sprinted through the forest on a course parallel with the deer run. From time to time she crossed the run, fought her way through the shrubbery, and surveyed the land beyond, just to be thorough. There was neither sight nor sound of Paladin patrols.

At last the deer run petered out into dense woodland, and Ajia re-joined the others. In the splintered moonlight falling through the treetops, she made out Mr LeRoy’s sweating, cherubic face.

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