Age of Legends

by James Lovegrove

  The truth was, Drake and the Grail did not always agree on everything, just as in their City days he and Emrys had not agreed on everything. Emrys, while alive, had more than once called him reckless and said that his wilder impulses needed curbing, usually after a trade went wrong and Drake had lost money for the company. Even when Drake went into politics––a decision bolstered by Emrys’s urging––there had been instances of tension between them. The Summer of Terror was a case in point: Emrys had not been happy about that at all. He had understood why Drake had exploited it as a stepping stone to power. He had been less certain about other aspects of the event. “Ask yourself what you have gained,” he had said, “and whether the price is worth it.” To which Drake had replied, using the kind of economic terminology that Emrys should have appreciated, that simple cost-benefit analysis would prove him right in the long run.

  Even in his new incarnation as the Grail, Emrys had sometimes openly doubted Drake’s judgement, and now and then had become somewhat exasperated with him. The frequency of such instances, however, had declined noticeably over the past two or three years. If anything, Emrys had been getting milder in his reproofs, becoming a mellower proposition all round. Drake took this to mean that he, as Prime Minister, was getting things right more often than wrong.

  On his way back to the house, Drake allowed himself a small grin. There were some who might say that the Grail did not actually speak to him. That he only imagined it. That its voice was inside his head. There were some who might even think that he was in some way schizophrenic and that the conversations he was holding with the Grail were in fact conversations with himself.

  Anyone who thought that, knew nothing.

  As his Bell 407 plummeted to earth in a field just north of Portsmouth, Drake had clutched the steel briefcase containing the Grail, praying harder than he had ever prayed before. Above the screaming of tortured metal, the grinding of the broken rotor and the shrill alarms from the dashboard, he had heard himself begging for life at the top of his voice. Emrys, in the passenger seat to his left, had been clinging on to the armrests, teeth gritted. Captain Unsworth had been grappling with the cyclic and the collective and pumping the anti-torque pedals for all he was worth, battling to keep the aircraft horizontal and stable. If either of the other men had been beseeching God for help, Drake had seen no sign of it. Only he, of the three aboard, had been invoking divine intervention.

  And the Grail had answered.

  It was the only explanation.

  At the moment of impact, the power of the Holy Grail had spilled out, enfolding Drake and cocooning him. He alone had survived the crash because he alone had been begging God to save him.

  It was, everyone said, a miracle that he had not been killed. Drake had seen pictures of the crash site. The helicopter’s fuselage was like a shattered eggshell. Pieces of debris were strewn across a whole acre of prime arable land. Air accident inspectors determined that the cause had been a faulty main rotor gearbox. Bearings inside the second-stage planet gear had come loose, resulting in a sudden, catastrophic failure. Shards of metal had hurtled outward. One had collided with a rotor vane, resulting in significant damage. The vane had sheared off, striking the tail boom and compromising the rear rotor. From then on, the Bell had been hopelessly crippled and utterly doomed.

  Drake himself was hauled from the wreckage by a couple of Polish-immigrant farmworkers who had been cropping an adjacent field with combine harvesters. He was barely conscious but, by all reports, he would not let go of the briefcase, which was itself unscathed. He was comatose for a week, and the first thing he asked about when he came round was where the briefcase had got to. It turned out that it had been handed to Harriet for safekeeping, along with the rest of his personal effects. He demanded that it be brought to the hospital and placed by his bedside. The next time he was alone, Drake opened the lid and inspected the Grail. The chalice in its foam insert was intact, as he had hoped and expected. He vowed there and then that he would not let it out of his sight until he could find a secure home for it.

  It was during the ensuing weeks of convalescence that the Grail first spoke to him. To begin with, Drake assumed the chalice was addressing him in Emrys’s voice because he missed his dear friend. He had been unable to attend the funeral service. Doctor’s orders. Although Drake was in surprisingly rude health for a man who had just spent a week in a coma, he was told it was medically unadvisable for him to leave hospital. Maybe it was guilt about that, or a more general survivor guilt, that was making him hear Emrys talking.

  But the voice from the Grail persisted. And Drake listened. And he learned that, as he suspected, the Grail had engineered his survival. The Grail had given him a new lease of life.

  “You prayed to me,” the Grail said. “Never have I been prayed to with such sincerity or such need. You awoke me from dormancy. You summoned out of me all the power that is mine to bestow.”

  The upshot of this was that the Grail had inadvertently distributed its blessings elsewhere at the same time. As Drake understood it––and even he would have to admit that his grasp on the principles was shaky––too much mystical energy had been released at once for one body to contain. It would have destroyed him, like a balloon being filled with air until it popped. In a great outpouring of God-given might, the Grail had sent sizzling tendrils of its essence in all directions, arbitrarily touching people other than him and altering them.

  In many ways it was Drake’s own fault that all manner of strange, awful beings now infested Britain. Not that he could have known that that would be the consequence of his actions. He had just wanted to live, and thanks to the Grail he had managed to. But he’d been left with a permanent inconvenience, like a hangover that would not go away.

  Hence the Paladins. They weren’t merely bodyguards. Drake had put together a special unit of service personnel and MI5 operatives not only to provide him with protection but to tidy up the fallout from the Grail’s activation. Each of them had been handpicked and personally vetted by Drake, and each could be relied on for loyalty and discretion.

  Not least their leader, Major Dominic Wynne.

  MAJOR DOMINIC WYNNE, who at that very moment was supervising the transfer of the bedraggled hideosity known as Jenny Greenteeth to a secure location: Stronghold, the Paladins’ headquarters five miles outside Swindon.

  And who was very much looking forward to the next time he could fuck his boss’s wife.

  He was in the back of a Paladin rendition vehicle, a ten-wheeler truck with an integrally-built containment unit. The rear doors of the containment unit were half-inch-thick steel, as were the sides and roof, which were reinforced by tungsten carbide ribs. Wynne shared the space with five other Paladins, all fully armed, and the creature known as Jenny Greenteeth.

  Jenny Greenteeth, bound with enough chains and padlocks to restrain an elephant, hissed and snarled at her captors. When that didn’t get a rise out of them, she called them foul names, and when that didn’t work, she spat.

  Eventually Wynne said, “Do you want me to use this again?” He held up an electric prod.

  That cowed her. He had delivered a shock with the prod once already, just to let Jenny Greenteeth know who was in charge here, and she seemed to have no desire for a second helping.

  “Yeah, thought so. They’re all piss and vinegar till they get fifty thousand volts up the arse.”

  Next to him on the bench seat his second-in-command, Lieutenant Noble, sniggered.

  The rendition vehicle entered the Stronghold compound via its one and only gate, bypassing three layers of electrified fence with landmined strips of ground in between. A short access road led to the main building, which was large, circular and divided internally into wedge-shaped sectors. Purpose-built, the structure served multiple functions: command post, barracks, detention centre and more. It had cost the taxpayer a little under £20 million and been constructed in record time by a workforce consisting largely of East European labourers on temporary v
isas, who had been summarily deported the day after completion of the project.

  In a basement level, Jenny Greenteeth was borne by forklift truck past a guard station and along a broad corridor lined on both sides with solid steel doors, each the entrance to a cell. Wynne and the five other Paladins marched behind. Still seething about her captivity, she managed to keep from speaking again until the forklift arrived at the door marking the windowless, ten-yard-square chamber where she would be spending the rest of her days.

  “Why don’t you bastards go after the other lot?” she said.

  “Shut it,” said Wynne, waving the prod under her nose.

  Jenny Greenteeth was not to be deterred. “It’s always us, isn’t it? The obvious ones. Never the ones who pretend they’re normal.”

  “The fuck you rabbiting on about?” snapped Lieutenant Noble.

  “You mean you don’t know?” the river hag said with a kind of preening puzzlement. “Surely you must. All this time you’ve been persecuting my kind, harassing us, rounding us up, you haven’t realised there are others out there? A different breed?”

  “Sir, want me to zap her?” Lieutenant Noble asked Wynne. He too was carrying a prod. “Or I could just…” He patted the sidearm holstered at his hip, a Glock 17. “Double-tap to the head. Save us a whole lot of bother. Plus, get us some payback for Hemmings.”

  Hemmings was one of the Paladins who’d been involved in the operation to secure Jenny Greenteeth. While he and three others had been subduing her and putting on restraints, she had caught him sidelong with her talons, dislodging his helmet and slashing open the lower portion of his face. The wounds were not life-threatening, the doctors said, but Hemmings would be permanently disfigured.

  “Hold on,” said Major Wynne, pensive. “These others. Can you tell me anything useful about them? Such as perhaps where we could find them?

  “Hee hee hee!” Jenny Greenteeth cackled like something demented. Her body shook hard enough to make her chains rattle. “I don’t believe this. You Paladins, so puffed-up, so proud of yourselves. Think you’ve got it all sorted, with your weapons and your stupid uniforms. But you haven’t even heard of Summer Land.”

  “Isn’t that a supermarket chain?” said Noble.

  “I thought it was a rock festival,” said another Paladin.

  “It’s where they all gather,” said Jenny Greenteeth. “Their safe space. The piece of shit who trapped me in that cage, Smith, he lives there most of the time. He was headed there when I ran into him––him and the tricky little bitch with him. I overheard the two of them talking. Smith was bringing her to meet LeRoy. LeRoy’s the man who runs Summer Land. King of the fucking faeries.”

  Wynne rolled his hand in the air, a keep talking gesture.

  “No,” said Jenny Greenteeth. “If you want more, you’re going to have to offer me something in return.”

  “Such as?”

  “Freedom.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Worth a try,” said Jenny Greenteeth. “How about a room with a view?”

  “Down here? I don’t think so. What if I let Lieutenant Noble shoot you instead?”

  “Any time, sir.” Noble drew his Glock and chambered a round. “Just say the word.”

  Jenny Greenteeth eyed the gun speculatively. “Then you’ve got nothing to bargain with.”

  “Apart from your life,” said Wynne.

  “My life is over anyway. I’ll fester down here forever, won’t I? Might as well be put out of my misery.”

  “Name one thing that might make incarceration more tolerable for you.”

  “Water,” Jenny Greenteeth said straight away. “Plenty of water. Soak me daily. Douse the floor of my cell with it. Water is treasure to me. It’s my home. If I’m never to know the caress of a river current again or the warmth of a summer pond, the slipperiness of a stream or the pounding of a waterfall, let me have the next best thing.”

  Her expression was plaintive. She was even trying to smile, although all this did was show off those repulsive teeth of hers, grey-white fading to green at the gum line, like a row of leeks. Wynne felt a pang of something that was not quite sympathy; more a kind of detached pity. It reminded him of some of his one night stands, how they’d look at him the morning after with eyes cloyingly full of hope. They honestly thought he might want to see them again. As if.

  “All right,” he said. “You have a deal. Once every morning and evening, we’ll hose you down.”

  “Thank you. Oh, thank you!”

  “Now tell me more about this Summer Land.”

  LATER, WHEN HE was upstairs and could get a signal, Wynne phoned Drake. He relayed the information Jenny Greenteeth had given him.

  “Did you have any idea about this, sir?”

  “These ‘others’?” said Drake. A momentary pause. “No. Is she telling the truth?”

  “It isn’t the first time I’ve heard mention of a secondary group of creatures, distinct from the likes of Jenny Greenteeth. Most of the things occupying the cells at Stronghold are incapable of intelligible speech. They’re monsters that can’t do much apart from gibber and roar. There are several, though, who are more or less sentient, and a couple of them have muttered about a separate race. A superior race who keep themselves to themselves, stay aloof from the rest. I just thought they were rambling, or trying to deflect attention elsewhere. Now I’m not so sure. Besides, Jenny Greenteeth hasn’t got anything to gain by lying.”

  “Except a concession to her comfort.”

  “You didn’t see her, sir. She was desperate.”

  “Desperate people will say anything.”

  “At the very least, I think it’s worth checking out.”

  “I agree,” said Drake. “If there are significantly more of these creatures out there than we realised and they’re all in one place, it seems too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “So I have full sanction to track down this Summer Land funfair?”

  “You do.”

  “And if they have numbers and mount a resistance…?”

  “You know how to handle it, Dominic.”

  That tacit confirmation was all he needed. Wynne was being invited to use his discretion. Should the people of Summer Land prove difficult, he and his Paladins were entitled to respond with lethal force.

  This excited him almost as much as the prospect of another tryst with Harriet Drake.

  Chapter 11

  AJIA NOTICED THE four of them strolling around Summer Land––three men and a woman. They were different, not the typical punter. The way they moved, the way they looked around them, made them stand out. They were smiling, enjoying themselves, but there was a tenseness about their body language, as though despite all the entrancing lights and jaunty music they were on the alert.

  She was helping out at the candyfloss stand that evening. Maya––one of the brownies who ran it, and a roommate of Ajia’s––was feeling under the weather, so Ajia stepped in to replace her. It was no chore. Working the candyfloss machine was fun. She found it deeply satisfying to dip a stick into the whirl of sugar strands and stir it against the flow to create a pink cloud, almost like making something out of nothing. And who didn’t love candyfloss? Even grownups grinned as they took their first bite and felt feathery sweetness in their mouths.

  The four people ambled past the stand several times. Usually it was all of them together, but they split up into pairs for a while. The pair which consisted of a man and a woman appeared to be a couple. They had an arm around each other and were chatting flirtatiously as they went by.

  The men had roughly the same haircut, severely short at the back. The woman’s hair was scraped back in a tight ponytail and she had plucked her eyebrows almost to nonexistence. They all walked with straight backs, chests out. Two of them wore remarkably chunky spectacles.

  Ajia could not help but think they were military. This wasn’t so surprising, however. Summer Land had made its way to Wiltshire, a county peppered with army and air
force bases. Some of the punters were bound to come from those.

  What nagged at her about these four was how they spent a long time at each attraction just watching before they paid their money and took part. She saw them do this at every ride that lay within view of the candyfloss stand. They would hang back, sizing things up, as though unable to make up their minds whether or not they wanted a go. If they were military, she doubted they were too bothered about being subjected to the g-forces of the pendulum ride or hurled around in the double centrifuge of the orbiter. With their training they must be able to take that kind of physical stress in their stride. They wouldn’t be short of nerve, either. So why the hesitation? It was odd.

  It occurred to Ajia that she should mention the four to Mr LeRoy. She decided not to. Her doubts about them just weren’t strong enough. She didn’t want to trouble him needlessly.

  Later, she would wish she had gone to him with her suspicions. It might have made a difference. It might have prevented a massacre.

  BY THIS TIME, Ajia had been with Summer Land for nearly a month, and she was starting to feel right at home. The funfair folk were a tight-knit community and the prevailing attitude was very much “us against the world”, but she was used to that. For the past couple of years, since her father’s suicide, she had been living with a similar attitude, although in her case it was just her against the world, her and nobody else, an army of one. Where she had been alone in her defiance, however, now she was in the company of dozens of others who felt likewise.

  She was still busy repainting the rides. She was making friends. She was also testing out her speed, seeing how fast she really could run. Mr LeRoy permitted these trials as long as they were conducted out of sight of the general public. Anything that drew undue attention to Summer Land was a bad idea. He likened the fair to a low-flying jet that didn’t leave a vapour trail. For much the same reason, phones were forbidden to the funfair folk, an edict which carried the penalty of expulsion. Calls could be spied on by the authorities, texts intercepted, data harvested and collated, conclusions drawn. Ajia missed having a phone––it felt like losing a limb, or a friend––but had adjusted to the absence. A small price to pay for safety.