The cleared land was an island, though. Beyond it was wilderness. The hedge around the field further north where the men labored at clearance was typical-it had sprouted twenty feet high or better, a wall of hawthorn and bramble, and the hawthorn had spread further horizontally both ways, covering the old farm lane and sloping out into the field from all four sides as well. The faster-growing bramble intertwined with it and went on ahead, reaching out nearly to the center of the field, each cane starting a new plant where it dipped and touched the ground. It hadn't reached the center of what had been an open space yet; that was merely chest high with dock and nettle. Most of the land was a tangle taller than a man, with bramble canes ranging from pencil-thick to thumb-thick coiling between each other in a mass of thorns and tough wood and dense green leaves hiding it all. It was thick with birds as well, their voices louder than he'd ever heard on an August day before the Change, and with insects and small game. Rabbits burst out and fled in hysterical bounds as the dense scrub was chopped down.
His skin itched just looking at it; bramble thorns broke off beneath your skin, and often the result was infection and septicemia. Most of lowland Britain was like this now-big patches even in the south and a continuous mass of it from the frontier of settlement here to East Lothian in Scotland -save for pre-Change forest and moor. Plenty of saplings were already sprouting through the ground cover-oak and beech, ash and alder-but it would be generations before the king trees grew tall enough to close the canopy and shade out the scrub.
"You're certain of them?" Nigel asked, tilting his head towards the men in the field.
Both Hordle and his son nodded.
"Hordle introduced us," Alleyne said. "Brief acquaintance, but I agree with him. That means taking the farmer's men on his word, but they haven't turned us in yet, eh? And he did give us some very useful pointers on Newport Pagnell. He's hunted that far north a few times."
Hordle continued: "You didn't have much to do with Bob, sir; he mustered out to take up the farm about the time we got back from that mission in France, four years ago. But I've known him a good long while now, since before the Change. I, mmm, warned him to volunteer for escort duty back when we took the queen out of London, and recommended him, like. Warned him to get the missus and his boy in the convoy as well. He vouches for his folk; one of them's an Icelander, but he's got no use for the queen's party. And we need fresh horses and supplies."
Nigel nodded agreement. He and Alleyne couldn't ride their war mounts in full harness for long-that wore the beasts out, and they might need trained reflexes and best speed before they reached the coast. The same held for his son, and Hordle's weight was a trial for anything he rode in any event. Eight years wasn't long to breed up a horse herd, and they were still scarce despite imports from friendly Ulster.
He took a firmer grip on his lance, his hand on the shaft and the butt resting in the ring welded to his right stirrup. The shield slung over his back clattered as he rode along the cleared lane until the farmhouse was hidden from view, then down towards the men working in the field ahead.
A broad strip had already been chopped free of brush near the dirt roadway, and the gate had been hacked out of a mountain of vegetation covering it. The cleared land looked as if giant moles had been at work, holes pocking the deep brown boulder-clay soil where the roots of the bramble bushes and blackthorns had been ripped out.
Every so often in the cleared space there was a great heap of brushwood twice man-height, and a few smoking circles of ash showed what would be done once the cuttings had dried enough to burn. A little farther out the farmer and two helpers were chopping at the heavy tangle with billhook and ax and machete, piling it in mounds then tearing out roots and an arm-thick stump with a wheeled machine whose steel tines were pulled by four oxen.
Hard work, that, Loring thought. More difficult every year.
The three men turned at the sound of hooves, quickly snatching up weapons-two longbows, which the law now said every adult had to keep and practice with, and a billhook that would slash through men as easily as tough thornwood. The area to the north of here wasn't quite clear of human life; a few thousand feral outlaws still haunted it, even after plague spots like Milton Keynes were burned out. The Brushwood Men probably weren't technically cannibals these days, but they weren't really human anymore, either, and it would be little consolation to their victims that the raid was for food stores and tools rather than long pig.
The men at work relaxed when they saw the horses and harness, and eased further when they were close enough to see faces. All three wore tough cord trousers, boots and knee-length linen smocks, the classic smock frock of the English rustic. The last men to wear them as daily routine outside plays and pageants had been dying of old age about the time Nigel Loring's great-grandfather used his head to stop a 7mm bullet from a Boer Mauser at Spion Kop. Two years ago an order had gone out from Highgrove to "encourage" the making and wearing of the archaic garments in every Commandery.
The king had thought it would introduce an element of tradition and continuity into the countryside. Nigel didn't think the effect in front of him was quite what Charles had had in mind:
" 'Ullo, Bob," Hordle called, as they rode into speaking distance. "Told you I'd be dropping by with some friends."
"Hey, mon, I see yuh," the farmer replied. "Little John an' he friends always welcome at Jamaica Farm. I don' forget who get we out of London."
He was black-not exactly a startling sight even these days, but rare; there hadn't been all that much of a New Commonwealth immigrant presence on the Isle of Wight, nor on Man and Anglesey and Arran and Orkney. The yawny-drawly Caribbean accent was strong in his deep bass voice, turning it soft and pleasant. Standing side-by-side, his head would have been a few inches below Hordle's, which made him merely tall instead of towering, and he was strongly built, corded muscle moving under the sweat-slick ebony skin on his forearms.
The dreadlocks do rather clash with the smock frock, Nigel thought fleetingly. So does that gold hoop earring.
An equally big blue-eyed man leaned on a long-hafted billhook. He-Nigel blinked-had a leather rugby goalie's helmet on his head, set with a pair of bull horns above his ears and tufts of his white-blond hair sticking through the straps. Beside him a lean redhead set his bow down and looked dourly at the three riders; he wore a Scots bonnet and by his weathered face was nearer forty than thirty, the oldest of the three by most of a decade.
"Nice pinnie you've got on there, Bob," Hordle said, grinning and nodding at the smock frocks. "Fetching, it is. Though maybe it'd look a bit daintier with some flowers embroidered about the edge? And a lace collar?"
"Dese dress de national dress," Bob replied. "King Charlie, he say it get we in touch wit' our English roots. Mon, English roots be strong!"
He pointed to where his machete rested, amid a tangle of arching brambles taller than a mounted man's head. "Dese, dey got canes grow t'ree inches a day, and grow new roots where da hell dey touching; you leave one bit of root, dey grow up again. And we out of weed killer-use de last from Wyevale Garden Centre, two, t'ree year ago. Feeling de English roots more and more on Jamaica Farm."
"Oach, aye, indeed," the redhead said. "And it is often on Skye I felt the hankering for just such a smock frock as this, so English I was. Archie MacDonald, at yer sairvice, sair."
His voice had a soft West Highland lilt, almost Irish save for the rolled R's.
"Ja," Gunnar Halldorsson put in, naming himself as well. "Me too. Studying marine engineering in Reykjavik, sometimes I felt naked without a smock." His thick-fingered hand tented the coarse linen away from his body. "In memory of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother carried off by Vikings in the year 900, ha? So, the hat too." He flicked thumb and forefinger against one of the bull horns.