A Mapwalker Trilogy

Chapter 4

4

Mila walked along the canal path, Zippy running along next to her, excited to be out in the warmth of the afternoon. He sniffed in the hedgerows and snuffled in the reeds as a pair of iridescent dragonflies flitted about his head. Mila thought about Sienna. The young woman didn't know anything about her Mapwalker heritage and it made Mila wonder what her own life would have been like if she'd never known.

A robin trilled in the hedgerows by her side, then the peep-peep of new ducklings came from the canal as the little balls of fluff paddled fast beside her hoping for a crumb. With every step, she was grateful. Grateful that she wasn't in London, in the tower block she grew up in, where she could barely walk a meter or so along the corridor. She used to run up and down the flights of stairs just to expend some of her energy, and to stay away from the other kids in her foster family. Although the word family barely applied, at least it was a roof over her head. She didn't know much about her birth parents, only hints that her father had been a student from war-torn Sierra Leone. In London, mixed-race was normal, but here in Bath, her darker skin and almond-shaped eyes stood out and sometimes, she liked being different.

Back then, Mila would escape to the canals of London, walking for hours alongside the slow-moving water. She longed to get in, to let the cool slide over her body. She wanted to open her mouth and let it flood into her lungs, to slit open her wrists and let her blood mingle with the canal, become one with it.

Sometimes she would go down to the Thames, past the great buildings of the old city, where the river swept towards the sea. It was wild and untamed and although she was drawn to it, Mila knew that if she were to dive into the water, she would lose herself. There were creatures in the ocean, beasts that would hurt her, whereas in the canal, there were only tiny fish, lithe water voles and diving ducks. A tamer form of escape.

After she left school, she traveled along the canal system, getting odd jobs now and then, helping out and learning the ropes from the other travelers, finding a new form of family among the canal boat people. She had saved up for her own boat and one day, found herself here in Bath, where she met Bridget who recognized her Mapwalker ability.

And now, every day she would walk here, along the Kennet and Avon Canal, away from Bath towards Bradford-on-Avon, a nature walk within hailing distance of the city. Seasons changed but the rhythm of the canal pulsed through her life. She knew this earth, this water and something was definitely wrong. Michael's murder had disturbed the equilibrium of the city, and Mila felt the tendrils of dark mist reach even here. She sighed and Zippy ran back to her, his dark eyes looking up with devotion.

"Good boy." She reached down to rub the soft fur around his ears. "Stay close now."

They walked on under a bridge built from thick blocks of stone, her footsteps echoing as she walked through. The coo of a wood pigeon boomed out as the sun dappled through the leaves of the horse chestnut trees at the waterside. A cloud of midges hung over the reeds next to a patch of purple clover and white flowers of wild garlic. The smell was a heady scent of summer as she walked along the bank next to sycamore trees and hedgerows of dog roses where blackberries would grow later in the autumn. Mila scanned the area, letting her senses spread out over the waterway, trying to pinpoint the source of her disturbance.

Water rippled as fish rose to feed on the midges. In the field above the canal, two great shire horses with shaggy feet stood grazing. A bell tinkled behind her and Mila moved to one side as a cyclist zoomed past. Zippy barked in greeting and ran alongside it a little way until returning to walk at her side. Mila smiled down at him. He gave her a reason to be on land, not mapwalking through the waterways all the time.

A friend on a boat further down the canal looked after him when she was away. A woodturner who roved the canal paths after storms, looking for branches to carve into animal shapes and bowls. Zippy was apparently a great helper in retrieving wood but Mila was always happiest when he was back with her. She loved being with Zippy, his quiet devotion, his lack of judgement for who she was or what she did. She missed him when she went into the Borderlands, but if he crossed over, he wouldn't make it back. He would be lost over there, as sometimes she felt she might be.

When Mila mapwalked the waterways, she became one with the canal and lost a part of herself. Sometimes she thought she would never emerge, that she could stay in there forever. Perhaps the water nymphs of old were born this way? Myths of women who lived in water and came out to tempt the sailors. She had read about them in a library book once. Perhaps her father had really been Neptune, great god of the sea. Mila smiled to herself to think she could actually be an ocean princess, rather than a poor foster child from a London tower block.

It was this search for identity that always drove her back to the Ministry, even though she didn't really fit in there. The other trainees were from special families, those who understood their Mapwalking lineage. She was seen as some kind of throwback, a line that had branched off early. Mila wondered if perhaps back in Sierra Leone, she might find people like her. But she'd never been. She'd never left England, never gone to seek her father's heritage or find others like her, Africans who traveled by water. Perhaps that's what drew her to Sienna, who seemed to know even less about her own ability.

They walked on past a ginger cat lying in a patch of sun on a boat piled high with the detritus of living, a rusty wheelbarrow, logs of wood for the winter. It looked up sleepily as they passed, nonplussed by Zippy's exuberance. Mila nodded her head, acknowledging him as part of this world. In the Borderlands last time, she'd seen a cat there, but it had been misshapen, its eyes rheumy, weeping, diseased.

Mila walked on, past the graveyard next to the road, full of stone markers, Celtic crosses, and headstones marking the passing of time. The Bathampton Church was solid, squatting on the land like it would always be there. But Mila had seen others like it in the Borderlands, those where congregations had died and left the building derelict until the border had claimed it, rewriting it out of this history and into the alternate.

The rules were to always go into the Borderlands as a team. That was the official word, but Mila went over alone sometimes when she felt the need to be on the edge. The Mapwalkers went into the Borderlands to retrieve artifacts lost or deliberately written out but now needed back on Earth-side. The things they brought back were kept in the Ministry vaults. But when Mila sometimes traveled alone into those places, she brought back tiny things, shells or stones, coins sometimes, and she kept them on her boat, evidence of another place where perhaps she felt more at home.

Bridget had said she shouldn't keep things, shouldn't mark herself as a Mapwalker, that there were people who could track her because of those objects, that she left a part of herself behind if she went over too much. Maybe she was turning feral, turning Borderlander.

Mila passed a pair of swans with five cygnets nibbling at the grass at the side of the canal. The smell of elderflower lingered in the air, as the chirps of birds came from the hedgerows. She had walked in wild places in the Borderlands similar to this, but the foliage was different. It was as if the land there had crossed from the edges of the map in different cultures, growing strange plants, turning animals into different versions of themselves.

A thrush flew from the hedgerow, a snail in its beak, darting under the weeping willow on the opposite bank. The cluck-cluck of chickens came from one of the smallholdings just off the path. Mila passed a canal boat with a kneeling river goddess on top, her arms outstretched to welcome the day, a laughing Buddha by her side. A tangle of spiderwebs on the guide ropes glistened in the sun.

It seemed idyllic but something was definitely wrong.

Mila bent and put her hand down into the canal water, closing her eyes as she sensed the movement of the ripples and the deeper current as it swept towards the city and on to the river. Over time she had become attuned to the difference of the Borderlands, how her skin felt as she moved from bright sunlight to shade. And she sensed it now.

The border was being tested.

She stood up. "Zippy, come."

The spaniel darted to her side, bouncing up and down as they turned and walked quickly back towards town, back to where the canal ran alongside the manicured gardens of the Holburne Museum.

They kept walking until the canal emerged alongside allotments, little gardens where city dwellers grew vegetables and flowers. Their personalities were evident in the plots, some with colored buckets and different types of flowers, rows of runner beans on poles next to hollyhocks and poppies. One area had a blue gate with five bars, just a gate on two poles with no fence. It was unusual, but always made Mila smile as she passed. The pride people had in these little gardens in the heart of the city made her even more fiercely determined to protect it.

She walked on towards the lock, where the canal changed level. Water could be let in and out with heavy gates and the boat would move up or down as the canal rose and fell with the gradient of the land. The locks had scared her at first and she had avoided moving her own boat for fear of getting trapped in one, but now they were part of her life here. Mila heard a noise further on, a bubbling and boiling sound that filled her heart with dread.

The border was being breached.

A wild squawking of ducks came from up ahead and she raced towards the noise, Zippy by her side. They rounded a corner just past the end of the lock gate.

At the edge of the canal, the water bubbled ferociously. There was a smell in the air, the scent of a bombed-out city, spent ammunition and decay overpowering the earthy scent of nature. How could they breach here now? The thought flashed through Mila's mind as a man burst up out of the water. She could see by the half-moon tattoo on his face that he was one of the warlord's men, a Feral Borderlander. The man began to swim to shore.