The Sword of Feimhin (29 page)

Penny darted her head down under the wall. Her lips were trembling, so it was hard to whisper. ‘Oh, shit!'

‘Hush!'

Penny didn't want to look at it, but the bearded man bade her lift her head again. Together they peered over the lip of the wall, ignoring the rain that was running unchecked over their faces. The old man, whose face was remarkably unlined for his age, whispered into her ear, ‘I doubt it is interested in you or me, but still we mustn't draw attention to ourselves.'

Penny couldn't have moved even if she wanted to. Her muscles were frozen with terror. ‘Who are you?'

‘My real name would sound altogether foreign to your ears,' he whispered. ‘But they call me Jeremiah at the mission.'

‘You work in a soup kitchen?'

‘I'm a lay brother. We try to help those who cannot feed themselves. We give succour on a more spiritual level too.' He smiled an apologetic smile. ‘I came to see how my friends, the itinerants, were getting on. Then I saw this curious thing happening just as you emerged from your crack in the ground.'

Penny studied him; his straggly white hair was plastered
to his scalp and he had rounded cheeks. Rain drops glistened in his white moustache and beard. His speech was quaintly formal, but he seemed so gently spoken that she didn't feel threatened by him. She blurted, ‘I saw it before – in the abandoned Tube tunnel.'

‘You did?'

Penny looked sideways at Jeremiah. There was a strangeness about him, proven in the fact he knew her name.

Jeremiah's hand waved her down again just as the thing turned to look in their direction. There had been the impression of faces around the edges of the cloud. She recalled the bespectacled face of the man and the fox's head, but it seemed just as impossible now as it had before. How could anything have more than one face? And yet she was sure that she could see different faces studding the surface of the monstrous thing as it twisted and bulged in that slimy amoeboid crawl.

‘What is it?'

‘It's a very ancient being. Its name is Shedur.'

Penny cowered, the name sent fear through her heart.

He said: ‘Ah! Something new is happening!'

Penny darted her face back up over the wall to see. The thing was breaking up. It was the most terrifying spectacle she had ever seen.

Jeremiah actually chuckled. She thought he did so to reassure her because she was shaking with fright. Penny couldn't stop herself staring at the monster, which was fragmenting into many smaller bits. And each bit …

Oh, my God, there's a different face in every bit!

Penny's whole body was trembling. Still she couldn't help looking over the wall. She saw each of the smaller bits of the monster take on a life of its own. They were spreading out, taking on vaguely human shapes to move away in awkward staggers, each one of them heading in a different direction.

A jolt of panic swept through Penny. She wanted to find somewhere to hide. Somewhere to creep into and hide forever.

‘I think it's safe for us to go to them now.'

‘W-what?'

‘We should go to see them – the people who live in the camper-van.'

Penny felt sick to think there might be people living in the van, the same van the thing had just come out of.

‘I – I think we should stay away.'

‘Oh, I think the danger is past. Shedur has gone away.'

‘I want to go home.'

‘Don't you think we should go and see if they're all right? Shouldn't we find out if they're hurt – if they need help?'

‘I can't – oh, God – no!'

He almost patted her shoulder, but stopped his hand an inch away, startling her not with the motion but with the fact he stopped. ‘There's no need for you to go at all. I'll go on my own. You may stay here – watch out for me.'

Penny felt guilty, cowardly. Didn't she need to know about the thing? Hadn't it frightened her half to death
down in the tunnels? And had already determined on going back again to the City Below.

She thought,
I can't. I don't dare to
.

He had already started out on his own.

‘Wait, I'm coming with you.'

‘Well now.' He turned around to look directly at her with those kindly eyes, the brown of mahogany. ‘You are a determined young lady, but we should be careful still and keep close together.'

He led her to the camper van. Its tyres were flattened out like melted candle wax. The rubbish all around must have belonged to the people who had lived there. There were hundreds of bags with the name of a nearby supermarket amid a small hill of discarded bottles.

‘Why do you care about them?'

He ran a hand, shiny with rain, through his beard. How calm he was compared to her. There was a neatness, a precision, about him that reminded her of Father. ‘I care about people.'

The single chamber inside was also full of rubbish and horribly smelly. There were clothes strewn over the floor and bundled in the corners. Amid the clothes, there were bottles and crumpled plastic bags that contained the dog ends of cigarettes. Penny saw one of those machines that people used to roll their own cigarettes.

She whispered, ‘There's nobody here?'

‘Not any more.'

‘What?'

‘You should look more closely.'

Then Penny realised that the clothes piled on the floor, or against the walls, weren't just rags. They looked suspiciously abandoned – as if the bodies within them had been sucked right out.

‘Your eyes do not deceive you.'

Penny couldn't get enough of air into her lungs to breathe. She thought again about that overheard conversation at the broken down train, the repair man's jokey expression:
‘Hoovering up.'

It was late evening under an overcast sky. The crew were sitting around an open fire next to the Mamma Pig in a state of shock. Mark watched Cogwheel rolling a cigarette. He was talking, in between spreading the tobacco into the paper, about a time when he would have liked to have been alive. ‘It's a thing I dreamed about at college.'

Cal was drinking whisky from the neck of the bottle. ‘What college?'

Cogwheel squinted in the direction of his miserable companion through the rising pencil of smoke. ‘The College of Experience.'

Cal tossed the bottle to Bull, who took a swig in silence. Cogwheel waited for the bottle to do its rounds, via the itchy, restless Sharkey, and finally to him. He took a drink, coughed into his fist, then returned to rolling the cigarette. ‘Back there in the historic Sixties there was another kind of underground.'

Mark glanced over at Nan, who shrugged, put a finger to her lips. He was only just coming to realise how much she liked to observe people.

Tajh had grabbed the bottle from Cogwheel and confiscated it. ‘We need to stay alert. After today, the likelihood of an attack is going to be heightened.' Bull grabbed the cigarette roller from Cogwheel and headed for the Mamma Pig without a word. It was his turn to be look out.

‘This isn't fair,' Cogwheel said.

‘You were talking about another underground?' said Cal.

Cogwheel grumbled. ‘Shit, shit – and more shit.' He accepted a lit cigarette from Tajh and took a drag. ‘Okay. If I can recapture my thoughts. I was talking about a more spiritual kind – in a cosmic sense.'

‘You mean comic?' said Cal.

‘I mean there was a movement back then, one that advocated a laid-back alternative. Those people interest me – the people they called Crusties.'

Cal snorted. ‘Named after the clagg around their unwashed arses?'

‘Gentle folk who were into meditation, vegetarianism, mandalas, pacifism.' Cogwheel puffed contentedly on his cigarette, then continued. ‘A philosophy very different from the more militant aspects of the prevailing underground.'

Sharkey grinned. ‘Hey, that's us, folks.'

Tajh laughed too. ‘Oh, come on, Cogwheel – you and your Crusties! You imagine yourself as some kind of post-apocalyptic hippie.'

‘I can think of worse things.' Cogwheel's eyes wandered around the circle, attempting to locate the confiscated whisky bottle. ‘I truly would love to understand that long-lost philosophy of life.'

Cal yawned. ‘Dead and buried, you ask me.'

Cogwheel spoke though a cloud of smoke. ‘I mean, if they lived today – and you know, maybe they do, somewhere – they would be implacably independent of any of society's social structure.'

Mark followed Nan's gaze. She was looking across the fire – fuelled with timber they had collected from the surrounding woods – at the tall, slim figure of Jo Derby, who might have perked up at the mention of society, but was otherwise still lost in the stunned silence she had fallen into after her rescue. Mark saw that Tajh was also keeping an eye on her.

Cal flicked a cigarette from a pack and caught it in his mouth. He lit it. ‘I'm beginning to think like a Crusty myself.'

‘Well, at least you're thinking.' Cogwheel grinned. ‘It seems to me they were thinking ahead. They were very pure people in their way. They believed in what they were doing.'

The whole conversation was aimed at lightening the tension around the silent Jo Derby. Sharkey was beginning to get the idea. ‘And what, exactly, did they believe they were doing?'

‘They perceived themselves as different – certainly. They opposed any conventional stereotype.'

Cal belched. ‘So they definitely wouldn't be up for an honest day's work?'

‘Hell, no! That would undermine the aspirational apathy of what they were about in the first place.'

With the air of assumed innocence Nan turned to Cogwheel. ‘How, then, might such a Crusty earn his living?'

‘As lazily and as independently as he could.'

Sharkey winked at Nan and said, ‘Hey, Cogwheel, what does this Crusty music sound like?'

‘Maybe like a clock ticking, or the sound of rainfall, or birds twittering, or a waterfall, or a stream – or the sea. I think they might have called it ambient. You could see it as a kind of poetry in tune with nature. You might listen to it and imagine the song of lovely cotton-wool clouds in the blue summer sky.'

Jo Derby's shoulders shook as she began to weep. Tajh crossed over to sit beside her. She put her arm around the woman's shoulders and lifted her eyebrows at Cogwheel. ‘It sounds very relaxing.'

‘Kind of like an electronic sedative.'

Nan followed the whispered conversation of Tajh and Jo Derby. She saw how Jo took a deep breath, then slid her spectacles further up her nose. Tajh called over to Cogwheel. ‘I'd like to hear it. Do you have anything like that you could play for us?'

‘Oh, I think I might be able to lay my hand on something.'

Cogwheel played the ambient music and they lay back around the fire and listened to it, enjoying a few minutes of comradely contemplation. Nan rested her head on Mark's shoulder, watching the sparks rise up into the dark. ‘I presume,' said Cal, ‘that these Crusties had no objection to getting money off the State?'

‘Ripping off the system was socially acceptable.'

Cal started to laugh again, and once started, he was unable to stop. Perhaps, Mark thought, it was the need to save them all from more of Cogwheel's ambient music that induced Jo Derby to speak. ‘Thank you, all of you, for saving my life back there.'

‘Think nothing of it,' said Cogwheel.

‘This from a guy who wasn't there,' said Cal.

‘Thank you, anyway – all of you.'

‘Me too?'

‘I'm sure if you had been there, Cogwheel, you'd have fought every bit as bravely as your companions.'

A grin split Cogwheel's face from ear to ear.

Cal spat into the fire.

Jo shrugged. ‘But now, Cogwheel, I'm going to have to spoil the party, because this point in time is where your Crusty dream would end.'

Mark looked over at the woman they had rescued, hearing the tremble of fear in her voice. ‘What are you saying, Jo?'

‘There are no state handouts today and nothing for the seventy per cent of people marooned in London; those who
can't escape the city. There are no jobs and the bulk of the population are devoid of any form of income.'

‘But what can they do – all those people?' Mark asked.

‘Go to hell – or the soup kitchens!' Tajh said.

‘Or bloody well fight,' said Cal.

‘But why isn't the State doing more for them?' Mark asked.

‘What is the State any more?' Jo's voice had a tone of exasperation. Her face was still pallid with shock. Cal offered her the bottle of whisky but she shook her head.

Tajh said, ‘I'll get you a mug of tea, if you like.'

Jo nodded. ‘Strong, please.'

Mark couldn't get his head around what he was hearing. ‘I was away from London for just a couple of years. All of this has blown up while I was away. How could everything go to pot in such a short space of time?'

Jo looked as if she couldn't believe she was sitting around a fire with a crew of resistance fighters. She took a shaky breath. ‘I don't think it happened in the last two years. Things were going bad under the surface for longer. I think, perhaps, the conspiracy was active for years, maybe even decades. We were too complacent to notice. We were all preoccupied with our own small worlds. We took normality for granted – the fiscal system, law and order, every other facet of what we would call the civilised society. We went out to work to generate income. We paid our taxes, so the State could function. The schools, the health services, the social services, the army, the police, the folks who collected
the rubbish from our streets – these were the real pillars of society. And when they began to fall apart, there was some sort of domino effect. When one pillar fell, the strain of it provoked cracks in the other pillars. And all the while the underlying conspiracy was undermining everything from within.'

‘What conspiracy?'

‘A deliberately stoked culture of selfishness coupled with violence. It undermined the morality that lay at the heart of it all. I'm a Methodist. I was brought up in a religious family. I can see, now, where religion might have come into it. Might have done more to expose the spreading rot. But Grimstone subverted that. Oh, I realise now, listening to Mark, that must have been his role all along. Grimstone was somehow, everywhere, at the very root of it.'

‘Well,' Mark nodded, ‘I can confirm that he's been spreading the word – his version of it – for many years. And you're right. It was never the Holy Word of God, at least not any kind of Christian interpretation of it, as far as I or Mo could see.'

‘Tell me what you remember.'

‘I was adopted here in London by Grimstone when I was a baby. I know nothing of my mother. I believe my father may have been – or now I see the situation, may have become – a traveller.' Mark hesitated. Then he showed her the harmonica. ‘It's all I have of my father.'

He explained a little more of what he knew.

‘Now I'm no longer sure about anything. I talked to my
adoptive sister, Mo. She was born in Australia. Her mother was part, or for all I know, wholly aboriginal. But now I think maybe there was always more to it – the adoptions I mean.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I think – I don't really know for certain – but I think our parents may have been … heck, I don't know … somehow special.'

‘What do you mean? You think your birth – the births of all four friends – were preordained.'

‘I wouldn't say it was anything in any religious sense, but I think our births were predicted. We were picked out very early, for some reason.'

‘But why – you must have some notion.'

‘I really don't know, but what if there were some way of predicting the future – of selecting individuals on the basis of such a prediction?'

‘Fate?'

Mark's turned to Nan. Fate was what the word Fáil meant on Tír. ‘Something like that, yes.'

Nan stared into the fire, cradling the mug in her hands.

‘I know how it sounds, but on Tír we saw a lot of things that would make no logical sense here. It's weird, really. The two worlds seem to be linked in some ways, but in other ways they follow different rules.'

Jo nodded. ‘It's an extraordinary story.'

‘I know it is. But what if beings on Tír, long ago – a very long time ago – knew more than we know on Earth today?
What if they had a different kind of learning or knowledge? What if they had a deeper level of understanding of what makes up the universe?'

Mark was thinking back to the words of the dying high architect. The Fáil had been constructed by a race of magicians called the Arinn. He explained what little he knew of the Fáil.

‘It's a fucking fairy story,' said Cal.

Jo spoke quietly. ‘I saw Nan's eyes, Cal. And we both saw what Mark and Nan did to the roadblocks – the lightning that came from those things in their brows. I'm struggling to come to terms with it too, but I can't deny what I saw.'

Cal sighed. ‘But you can't explain it, neither.'

Jo shook her head, staring into the fire.

‘It's bonkers,' Cal muttered. ‘You all know it is. There just has to be some ordinary explanation. Maybe it's some new kind of weapon.'

‘I'm every bit as shocked as you are' Jo said. ‘I'm even more shocked to consider what it might mean.'

‘What might it mean?'

‘I thought I understood. I thought I had figured it out. But, if what Mark and Nan are telling us is true, the real explanation runs much deeper and the danger is much worse than we imagined. Please, Mark, go ahead and explain what you and Nan are trying to do. This magical sword you've been talking about.'

‘The Sword of Feimhin.'

‘You believe this sword is somehow connected with what's happening here in London?'

‘Once you understand the connections, it does have a logic of its own. If the Tyrant is connected to the Fáil, and if Grimstone is his disciple …'

‘Tell me more about this man, Padraig,' said Jo.

‘Padraig is Alan's grandfather. We believe that he is some kind of druid. The hereditary keeper of the Sword.'

‘Tell me more about Alan – the other friends.'

‘Alan and Kate made up the four with me and Mo. We were drawn into Tír from Earth. Alan's grandfather, Padraig, was the only one who had any real understanding of what was happening. He told us he was the guardian of the Sword of Feimhin. He showed it to us and warned us how dangerous it was. I don't think the Sword is just a weapon. As far as I know, Feimhin was a warrior prince from the Bronze Age. I don't know if he actually came from Ireland, or if he just ended up there, but once he got hold of the Sword, the world became a nightmare of bloodshed and destruction. Padraig described an “Endless war”. But he did more than just talk about it; he showed us the Ogham – a kind of Celtic rune system that covered the walls of the barrow grave where Feimhin had been buried along with the Sword. Padraig's ancestors had been guardians of the grave for centuries, maybe even millennia. He was afraid of it because he feared what would happen if the Sword fell into the wrong hands. He feared its capacity for malice. I'm not sure I believed any of it at the time. I was pig-headed
and thought he might be making a romantic yarn out of it. But never-ending war was what we encountered when we arrived in Tír.'

‘A war brought about by this Tyrant?'

‘On Tír they call him the Tyrant of the Wastelands. His symbol is a silvery triple infinity. You find it everywhere there, just as Nan and I have been finding it everywhere here in London.'