Band of Gypsys (37 page)

‘I need to know something, Fio. Do the Chinese have a Neurobomb?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I could be wrong, but… No, I’d say not.’

Birdsong rose in a vertiginous silence, a silence like falling into space.

‘I can’t decide,’ said Ax at last. ‘I have no decisions.’ He tried again to rub his aching temples, and flinched again from the needlework. ‘Okay. I don’t think we should turn ourselves in, not right now, not yet. I think we should stay here, it’s as good as anywhere, for a few days. See if we can get a better idea of what’s going on.’

Fiorinda nodded. ‘Agreed. We’ll do that.’

Sage remembered other times when he’d watched these two divvying up the world between them, moving the plastic armies of a game of
Risk
, on the kitchen table at Tyller Pystri, in lamplight long ago. A boardgame has swallowed us, he thought. But I have my beautiful guitar-man, and my rock and roll princess, and we are out of jail. This lifted his heart, dumb and personal though the shelter might be. He noticed that Ax’s bundled jacket was moving.

‘What’s that you got under your coat, babe? Something alive?’

‘Oh… It’s a kitten. I found this kitten.’ Ax went to the jacket, and brought out a scrawny tabby kitten with bat-wing ears. It sat looking very small in Ax’s big hands, stared around boldly, and yawned: displaying a fine set of white needle fangs. ‘The mother was dead, and there were two dead kittens, but he’s all right. I… I’d like to keep him?’

They realised that the person telling them about Iphigenia hadn’t been Ax. That had been an Ax Preston automaton, saying the lines. This was Ax, this piteous little boy, bereft and frightened, hiding a kitten in his coat. It reminded them how bewildered they were themselves. How lost.

‘Is he old enough to lap?’ asked Sage, keeping it steady with an effort.

‘Yeah. I’ve given him some milk. I’d say he’s about five weeks. And he’s strong, and seems pretty healthy, considering.’

‘Has he got a name?’ asked Fiorinda. ‘May I hold him?’

‘Min. I’m going to call him Min. Dunno why, it just came to me.’

Much later, records revealed that GCHQ at Cheltenham had picked up the same dramatic intelligence that had caused the Edinburgh Assembly to abort their deal (an order Neil Cameron had interpreted freely, and thereby put the Triumvirate of England forever in his debt). It had been set aside, along with an accumulation of data that had pointed in the same unlikely direction for weeks. Rumour had it, after the records came to light, that intelligence officers had deliberately kept quiet, either in righteous despair—or because nobody dared to tell Lord Mursal his house was on fire. But that was probably nonsense: appalling blunders happen all the time.

The weather continued calm and fair, unusually calm for the time of year. Early on the morning of the twentieth of September a domineering old man, once a Methodist Minister, was sitting in the glassed gallery at the top of a cottage on the Coastguard path. Or South West path as the tourists had called it—but it belonged to the Coastguard again now. He liked to watch the ocean from up here: he plagued his housekeeper to help him dress, and work the lift for him, at ungodly hours. He sat like a mummified giant, his limbs withered but hardly shrunken by age, dressed in old tweeds and a Gortex jacket, gazing at the western horizon. He was a hundred and two years’ old, but his eyes were still giving good service: glinting blue from cavernous sockets.

A swarm of little purple clouds appeared, popping up above the line between the sea and the clear, apple-green sky of dawn; in a very curious manner. The old man applied his right eye to the telescope that stood by him on a brass swivel stand. His jaw dropped. He felt no fear, he was too old to be afraid of anything: but his blood turned to ice water in his veins from sheer astonishment. Other witnesses of this sight were convinced the fleet was extraterrestrial. The old man wasn’t fooled for a moment. He sat back, frowning, trying to remember something, ah yes.

‘
For I dipt into the future
,’ he declaimed, with satisfaction,

‘
Far as human eye can see…

Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

Heard the heavens filled with shouting and there rained a ghastly dew

from the nations’ airy navies—
’

He didn’t have to press any buttons. He didn’t need to shout, either, but he always did. ‘Chesten! CHESTEN!’, he yelled, swinging the motor-chair around. ‘Where is the woman, is she deaf. CHESTEN! Bring me the red phone, I need to call Joss. NOW, not next week!’

He couldn’t get through. The South West Peninsula was cut off, excised from the telecoms world: as comprehensively silenced as Western Europe had been, when the Internet Commissioners imposed their lightning-strike quarantine, to contain the Ivan/Lara virus, years ago.

In the dusk before dawn Ax came face to face with a countryman, and a shotgun, on the path by the little stream in the valley. They both retreated, silently. Ax waited a while, and continued on his way. It wasn’t the first time he’d been seen (he insisted on doing all the foraging), but it was the first close encounter. The very few people who were out and about kept their distance, just as Ax himself did… On his way back he found a brace of rabbits slung on a post. He looked up and saw that Wood Court was just visible through the trees, though there was no sign that it was occupied. He brought the rabbits home, and laid them by the bed of cut heather and bracken that now covered most of the kitchen floor. The invasion was forty eight hours old. The EBC said English forces in the South West were ‘fighting like cornered rats’, but they were being rolled back at such a speed that you could hope the rats weren’t dying much.

‘I’ve just heard a statement from Washington. The US government has come clean. They’d ceded Pacific and Eastern Seaboard beachheads, some time ago, in secret talks. That’s how the stunt was done. The Chinese came around the back of the world in three hops: up beyond the atmosphere, down to the NorthWest Seaboard, up and down again: they crossed the Atlantic from Nantucket or somewhere.’

Sage nodded. ‘Any word on the design; or how the ships were fueled?’

‘Nope, but they had some pretty graphics of the flight plan.’

Ax could get pictures now: Sage had fixed that. He saw a new bundle of hazel rods, which had not been there when he left. They’d been raiding the coppice-farm again. It filled him with terror when his darlings left the den, but he couldn’t stop them. He had to go out and fetch news, and forage: he couldn’t be on guard all the time.

Fiorinda had been whittling the end of a hazel pole to a point, with Sage’s pocket knife. She returned to this task, smoothly detatching a long shaving, which Min the kitten danced and jumped to catch.

‘What now? Are the Chinese going to take a card?’

‘I dunno, maybe. The US are saying their Chinese allies have no territorial ambitions. They’re going to occupy England and Roumania, purely to contain the dangerous mess that is Crisis Europe. They’ll brook no resistance, but nobody gets any trouble unless they ask for it.’

‘Good of Fred to give us three months’ notice,’ remarked Sage.

Iphigenia
: now it all makes sense. The ultimatum China had delivered to Brussels, over the Uzbek resistance, had expired at midnight on the nineteenth, making that stunning attack on the South West of England a legitimate act of war. So that’s all right, and if the remaining world powers had needed an excuse to do nothing, they had one. Not that anybody seemed fussed. Ax just wished he knew when those secret talks about the beachheads had been held. When exactly did you sell me out, Fred? But he bore the man no ill will. Never judge until you know the whole story; or even then.

Min approached the rabbits, quivering with excitement. Sage scooped him up, and dropped him on the heather bed; fairly gently.

‘Any news of the Few?’

‘Nothing… I’m still hoping they got away, out of the country.’

It was strange. England had been invaded, but when Ax came back from his forays they struggled to think of questions, and he struggled to form answers… Sage resumed knotting strips of birchbark into a long string: hippie guerrilla skills coming in useful again.

‘Where’d you get the rabbits?’ asked Fiorinda, at last.

‘Oh…yeah. Not so good. Some one saw me in the wood, a bloke with a shotgun. I thought it was okay, just a chance encounter, but when I came back those were on a post. What are we going to do?’

‘Eat them.’

Ouch. Ax must get better at foraging. They’d had nothing to eat in two days but the apples, some milk, a few crumpled tomatoes and the last of the bar snacks. He was afraid to make too many raids on the milk halt, and they couldn’t cook the garden vegetables, because of the smoke of a fire.

‘Of course.’ They’d just have to risk the fire. ‘But, listen, this is serious, someone knows we’re here—’

They were shaking their heads.

‘It’s beyond our control, Ax,’ said Sage. ‘Someone knows we’re here, and he gives us rabbits. Let’s take it as friendly.’

‘What else can we do?’ asked Fiorinda gently. ‘We have to face it baby, either we’re among friends, or we’re not going to last long.’

‘Okay. But we could get further out of sight. I’ve been thinking, about that big house? Place where I found the apples?’

‘NO,’ they said together, instantly.

‘No walls, I veto walls,’ added Fiorinda.

‘What about cannibalising the house? There’s bound to be stuff.’

‘Now tha’s a
good
idea.’

Ax cleaned the rabbits and spitted them, wrapped in herbs. Fiorinda lit a fire, and they devoured a feast, rabbit with tomato and marrow kebabs, and salt from the birchwood saltbox which was her talisman.

Later that morning, Sage decided to start a video diary. When they raided the empty house he took the visionboard with him. Then Ax and Fiorinda decided to join in. They helped Sage to map Wood Court, for sound and vision, and the three of them became
auteurs. S
tyles emerged. Fiorinda recorded home improvements and created installations (which the kitten wrecked, but the destruction was equally valid). Ax made narratives. The maestro let his camera eye rest on details that took his fancy. His diary entries were turning leaves, gosammer spider threads. The dusty, mourning flowers of summer’s end, goldenrod in fallen sheaves. Knapweed, fumitory and purple vetch, fading by the track to the road.

The Few could have been safe. But the time to leave had been when Fiorinda told them it was over in a voicemail. Once the Wallingham situation was established, nobody was going to quit. Sage’s ‘disappearence’ had dashed their fragile hopes, but they’d been reliably informed that he was okay, just back in Wallingham, having ‘violated his parole’. No one believed Sage had got into a brawl with some ex-barmies of his own accord: Peter’s story (when the search parties had found him), suggested entrapment. But “Rick’s Place” was still running, although Bill and George couldn’t get in. So hopes were dashed again but it wasn’t the end. What else could they do but hang on? Then the police informed Allie about the Wallingham break-in, early on the morning of the eighteenth, and they were in another crisis.

On the twentieth she was in her new office, doggedly trying to contact everyone who might have been at ‘Rick’s Place’; and who might talk to her. Were you there on the seventeenth? Did you see Ax or Fiorinda, did you speak to them? Did you see Sage? Do you know anything more about this break-in? Dilip arrived with his current squeeze, an emigrée Vietnamese ceramics artist called Nathalie Qu. Chip and Verlaine turned up on their precious bicycles, and started trying to make a drama out of the South West Peninsula’s telecoms crash. Allie’s assistant, a quiet young man called Charlie Middleton, was in his cubbyhole with the longer list of non-hopefuls, Rick’s Place regulars who certainly wouldn’t talk to Allie Marlowe. He was sending them personal emails, to leave no stone unturned.

‘I grasp I can’t get through to anyone in Cornwall to Somerset today,’ said Allie irritably. ‘Other than that, what’s the difference? Wake up, Chip. Thing fall apart, it’s
normal
. It just doesn’t get reported any more.’

‘Perhaps it’s more significant that the European Union is technically at war this as of morning,’ said Dilip. ‘Isn’t that something we should discuss?’

Allie wished they would all leave, but wanted them to stay, just for the company. ‘How can that have anything to do with Wallingham? It’s not that I don’t care, DK, it’s just there’s fuck all I can do about it—’

Verlaine groaned. ‘The ultimatum? Come on, that’s a canard, the New Masters of the Universe know Brussels has no control over us Rogue States.’

Reflexively, he glanced out of the window: the bikes were still there, locked to the Courtyard railings. They were Giffords of Wiltshire Roadsprites, semi-AI and much loved. Chip’s machine was green and Ver’s was blue, with detail in mauve and acid-yellow. Their names were Cagney and Lacey.

Allie rolled her eyes, and stuck her finger in her free ear.

‘Allie, who are the “masters of the universe”?’ asked Nathalie, timidly. ‘I never understand what Chip and Verlaine are saying.’

Nathalie was tiny, beautiful and very chic. She tried to make friends with Allie, whose history with Dilip she knew. Allie couldn’t look at her without thinking, I’ll probably see you at his funeral: but she knew that wasn’t fair. DK was in reasonable health, at the moment. It would more likely be some other young girlfriend by the grave.

‘They mean the Chinese.’

‘Oh.’

‘They’re talking about the Uzbek Ultimatum, darling,’ explained Dilip. ‘It ran out at midnight.’

(when did DK start calling people ‘
darling
’, so unlike him?)

‘
Listen
, I appreciate you all being here, but I need to make these calls, and Charlie’s busy too. We are
trying
to establish whether Ax and Fiorinda are okay.’ Allie hardly dared hope she might hear anything about Sage.