“No. No.” Fletcher was shaking his head vigorously. “I live in a hole in the ground. Like a mole, as Smith said. It suits me.”
“And there you were, criticising Summer Land for being passive. But this is my point. Why don’t we put together a new band of Merrie Men? The four of us can be its nucleus. There might be others out there willing to join. In particular, other eidolons. We just have to find them, and for that, conveniently, we have Mr LeRoy. There must be more folkloric figures than just us and the generic faeries who made up the funfair folk. I don’t know enough about British legends to be able to come up with a comprehensive list, but off the top of my head I can think of at least one big name, up there with Robin Hood in the recognisability rankings. King Arthur? Yeah? If there’s an eidolon of Robin Hood, there must be an eidolon of King Arthur. It’d be weird if there wasn’t.”
She looked to Mr LeRoy for confirmation and got a shrug of the shoulders which implied he didn’t disagree.
“He would be a good place to start,” she said. “You can’t go wrong with an actual, for-realsies, sword-wielding king on your side. I don’t suppose you know where he is.”
“Not a clue,” Mr LeRoy said.
“Well, we can figure it out. And I remember this TV programme I saw once about British paganism. My dad was watching it, actually, on one of those documentary channels way up the planner, the ones you only look at when you’re bored and there’s nothing else you fancy. I was just faffing around in the living room while it was on. But there was this one bit about a nature spirit called the Green Man. His face appears in carvings on churches, and loads of pubs are named after him. Kind of a god of vegetation, I think. Mightn’t there be an eidolon of him too?”
“I don’t see why not,” Mr LeRoy said. “He’s a deity associated with fertility and the harvest. He’s also known as Jack-in-the-Green, and someone dressed as him often appears alongside Morris dancers at May Day festivals. As it happens, I do know of a couple of similar eidolons whom I came across during the early days of Summer Land. Like Reed, they didn’t want anything to do with me. They just got on with their own lives. Both were fairly special, though.”
“There!” said Ajia. “So that’s four potential team members already.”
“You’re proposing that we go looking for these others?” said Smith.
“Look for them, find them, convince them to join us. Once they see we’re serious, they’ll jump aboard.”
“Ah, the optimism of youth,” said Mr LeRoy.
“What would you prefer we do?” Ajia replied hotly, her temper overcoming her usual deference towards him. “Sit on our arses? Let Derek Drake carry on running this country into the ground? Thanks to his policies my mother was kicked out, exiled to a place she’d never been to before even though it was her”—air quotes —“‘homeland’. My father fell into a depression and killed himself because of that. Drake fucked my life as surely as he’s fucked Britain, and I’m getting to the point where I’ve taken enough of all this shit. In fact, I may be past it. Last night I saw Paladins kill people in cold blood. Makes me feel sick even just thinking about it––not only what they did but the fact they can get away with it and there won’t be any comebacks. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to retaliate against them. Thought about it, at any rate. Don’t tell me they don’t deserve justice, them and the regime they protect.”
“And we’re the ones to deliver it?” said Smith.
“If not us, who? Nobody else seems willing or able. We’re not just your average citizens. For some reason, by some process we don’t understand, we’ve been made extraordinary. What’s the good of that if we don’t use it?”
“Use it and wind up dead ourselves,” said Fletcher.
“So what? If that happens, at least we’ll have tried. But if we don’t even try, how can we hold our heads up? It’d be a complete waste of the gifts we’ve been given.”
She sat back, breathing hard.
“Well? I’ve said my piece. Your thoughts, gentlemen?”
There was silence in the bunker, the three men exchanging glances. Ajia knew they were going to dismiss everything she had said. They weren’t going to call her a hysterical girl, not openly, not to her face, but it was what they were thinking.
Never mind. I’ve spoken passionately. I stand by every word.
If her scheme was ever to be enacted, however, she would need them with her. She couldn’t do it on her own.
“Quite the rabble-rouser,” Mr LeRoy said eventually.
“But you’ve no intention of following up on what I’m suggesting,” Ajia said. “Right? You think it’s a ridiculous idea.”
“Not necessarily.” Something glinted in his weary, red-rimmed eyes, like a spark being kindled. “I think it’s a long shot, dangerous, and very possibly doomed to failure. But like it or not, you’ve struck a chord. I’m no firebrand, Ajia, God knows. As an undergraduate I was the straight-down-the-line sort, never once going on protest marches, never even handing in an essay late, and my academic career was all about plodding towards tenure and not making waves. Summer Land was the most radical thing I ever did in my life. It’s time that that changed. After all, what’s the point of Perry sacrificing himself for me––for us––if no good comes of it?”
“You’re in?”
The ghost of a smile flitted across his careworn face. “I’m in.”
“And you, Smith?”
Smith ummed and ahhed.
“No one’s asking you to kill, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Ajia said. “But you’ve been with me from the start. You’ve helped me this far. I probably wouldn’t be alive if not for you. I’d really love it if you’d carry on as my number one go-to guy.”
She knew Smith felt protective towards her and she was using that, or rather abusing it. She thought that maybe she had laid on the appeal to his paternalistic side a little too thick, but in the event it worked.
“All right,” he said. “I’m not hopeful, but you’ve made a good case.”
“And you, Reed?”
“Nuh-uh.” Fletcher folded his arms. “You three do what you want. Count me out.”
“Oh, come on,” she chided. “Deep down you know this is the right thing. You can feel it inside. Your blood’s stirring. I don’t know how long you’ve been hibernating in this bunker, living off squirrel meat and dandelions…”
“Year and a half.”
“And that’s far too long. It’s about time you lived up to the person whose eidolon you are. The dashing outlaw, battling on behalf of the common people against tyranny. Put that marksmanship of yours to good use.”
“Still a no. Maybe you can wrap these two around your little finger, but not me, Ajia.”
“Okay. Pity, but there you go. What I’d like, though, is for you to help get us out of Sherwood Forest.”
“I might be able to do that,” Fletcher said. “Assuming you have some sneaky plan in mind for getting past the Paladins’ cordon, because I sure as fuck don’t.”
“Actually,” said Ajia, “it just so happens I might.”
Chapter 17
HARRIET FALLON WALKED into Derek Drake’s life at a lavish Christmas party thrown by Thurlow, Sage, Wright Ltd. at the Savoy Hotel, a celebration not so much of the festive season as of the company’s projected annual pre-tax profits, which were in eight figures, edging towards nine. This was in the early 1990s, and while the boom years of the previous decade were fading into memory, there were still fortunes to be made in the City of London, not least by hedge fundies.
It was Emrys Sage who introduced them to each other, and for that, as for so many reasons, Drake would be eternally grateful to him.
“I think the two of you should get along nicely,” Sage said, with a hint of a smile and the merest suggestion of a wink, before leaving them alone.
Sage had told Drake beforehand about Harriet. She was the daughter of a friend of his––Robert Fallon, recently deceased––and was enjoying a modestly suc
cessful career over in the United States as a model, although her willowy, slightly haughty looks made her best suited for the covers of the higher-brow women’s magazines and adverts for, of all things, cat food and feminine sanitary products. She was also an heiress, albeit sole beneficiary of a much-depleted estate and a large, crumbling house in rural Gloucestershire, Charrington Grange, a white elephant of a place which she was trying to sell in order to pay off death duties and her father’s various debts. That was why she was over in the UK, and she informed Drake that she had no intention of staying any longer than she had to.
“As soon as I’ve got everything sorted financially, I’ll be on the first plane back to New York,” she said.
Drake’s reply was characteristic. “Not now you’ve met me, you won’t.”
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“No one’s ever said I am deficient in that quality.”
Over flutes of Krug Grande Cuvée they sounded each other out. They discovered a shared interest in classical music, particularly Mozart, and a mutual inclination towards religious faith, his being firmly entrenched, hers a faint but still tangible residue left behind after a Catholic upbringing and a convent education. Politically they were compatible. Humour-wise, his occasionally coarse jokes didn’t offend her. By evening’s end they knew they were destined to be a couple. A month after that, they knew they were destined to marry.
By then Drake had already agreed to buy Charrington Grange off her, and they were planning its renovation.
ON HER SIDE, Harriet considered Derek Drake to be the right man at the right time. In Manhattan she had had a string of boyfriends and numerous flings. In fact, she’d built quite a reputation for herself: sexually voracious, with a penchant for alcohol and recreational drugs, a party girl through and through. She had begun to tire of all that, however. The lifestyle was exhausting, not to mention expensive. She mightn’t necessarily have been ready to settle down, but she had reached the age when she was on the lookout for something else, something more.
Derek was physically unprepossessing, not least after some of the toothy, all-American Adonises she had slept with. He was not the best endowed man she had ever had, nor the best in bed. He was, though, a man who was going places. Emrys Sage kept talking him up to her, praising his verve and ambition and hinting that a glittering future awaited him outside the City, in a wider sphere. Harriet did not need Emrys’s approval of Derek, and didn’t seek it, but she welcomed it nonetheless. Her father had always said that Emrys was no fool, and if he was championing Derek, it weighed heavily in Derek’s favour. Above all else, what Harriet was looking for in life just then was stability, and Derek appeared to represent just that.
His wealth didn’t hurt, either. By purchasing Charrington Grange, he made her financial headaches disappear with a finger-click. Harriet knew that as Mrs Derek Drake she would never have to work again if she didn’t want to and would always be comfortably off.
Did she love him? Absolutely. Would she have loved him if he’d been poor? Probably not. She was, aside from all else, a pragmatist.
NOW, AFTER NEARLY a quarter of a century of marriage, some of it contented, some of it less so, Drake and Harriet sat on the floor of the museum of holy relics, facing each other. The door to the Grail chamber was shut. Drake had ushered Harriet out of the little room as soon as he had overcome his surprise at her intrusion. He had also closed the main door to the museum. In the several minutes since, each had been waiting for the other to start speaking.
“So,” Harriet said, finally breaking the thorny silence, “is it some kind of trick?”
“Is what some kind of trick?”
“You don’t have to use that politician’s technique of repeating back the question to give yourself time to think. Honest answer, Derek. First thing that comes into your head. The voice that comes from the cup, Emrys’s voice––is it a trick?”
“No. No trick. How could it be?”
“I just wondered if it was something you’d set up, using a voice synthesiser or something like that. Some sort of clever software, like Siri only you’ve made it sound like Emrys.”
“What would be the point of that?” Drake said.
“I don’t know!” she snapped. “Because you miss your old friend? Because you wish he was still alive so you’ve re-created him using computer jiggery-pokery? You tell me!”
“No. It’s nothing like that. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to do that.”
“You could have hired some tech whizz-kid who does. If that’s what this is, then frankly, Derek, it’s bloody peculiar. Borderline crazy. Especially since you were on your knees in front of that thing, like you were grovelling.”
“I was just… talking to it. Did you… Did you happen to hear what I was saying? Or what the Grail said to me?”
“No. Does that matter?”
“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “It doesn’t. We were just having a conversation, that’s all.”
“But that’s just it. That’s the issue. You were having a conversation with an inanimate object.”
“But it isn’t simply an inanimate object,” Drake said. “I have no idea how to explain this to you, Harriet. The whole thing’s incredible. Impossible. There were times when I even thought it might all be in my head. That’s why I was so stunned when I realised you could hear Emrys too. With hindsight, I shouldn’t have been. Because it’s a miracle but it’s also quite real. I know that. I’ve always known that.”
“Listen, darling,” Harriet said, choosing her words with care, “I’m being very patient here. I could be having a fit of the screaming abdabs right now and no one could blame me, but I’m staying calm, I’m being reasonable, I’m trying to parse this whole thing. Are you telling me that that cup––?”
“Not just any cup. The Holy Grail.”
“Yes, I know it’s the Holy Grail, or alleged to be. I remember you going off to buy it. I remember how excited you were. And I remember you begging me to fetch it for you when you were in hospital, after the crash. It obviously meant a huge amount to you.”
“A huge amount? It meant everything. It still does.”
“But back to my question. That cup––I’m sorry, the Grail––is genuinely speaking back to you? It’s sentient?”
Her eyes were wild with disbelief. Drake wondered if his own eyes had looked like that, the first time the Grail spoke to him.
“I can see that this is hard to accept,” he said. “I don’t know the whys and wherefores of it myself. I can only tell you that the chalice has power. Divine power. It once held our Saviour’s blood, and His essence still resides within it.”
“If that’s the case––and I’m going along with this for now but I’m not buying into any of it––how come it’s using Emrys Sage’s voice? Why him, of all people? Not that he wasn’t a great man, in his way, but he wasn’t exactly Jesus. Why isn’t the Grail speaking to you in the voice of Christ instead, or even God?”
“I’ve thought about it long and hard,” Drake replied, “and the only conclusion I can draw is that the Grail chose to take the guise of someone from my own life whom I loved and admired.”
“Why?”
“So that it wouldn’t scare me. So that it would be comprehensible to me. If it had boomed at me like a voice from on high in an old Hollywood Biblical epic, or if it had gabbled away in authentic Aramaic, I’d have been baffled and probably terrified. I might have rejected it. Instead, it presented itself to me in a familiar, relatable guise. As Emrys.” He spread out his hands. “And just like Emrys did when he was alive, the Grail advises me. It’s my guide and consultant. It’s helped me throughout my political career. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s got me where I am today.”
At that moment, Drake paused to ask himself why he was coming clean with his wife about the Holy Grail. Could he not have lied? She had given him what was practically the perfect get-out clause. He could simply have agreed that it was all a cunning trick. Computer ji
ggery-pokery, just as she’d said.
Yet hadn’t the Grail itself told him, just minutes earlier, that he should place his trust in Harriet? This had been in relation to Vasilyev and the video clip. “Don’t underestimate your wife’s capacity for forgiveness,” it had counselled. “She might surprise you.”
Moreover, for a while now Drake had been experiencing a deep-seated desire to share the miracle with someone. For years he had kept the Grail to himself, and at times the strain had been almost unbearable. Everything happened for a reason. There were no accidents. Perhaps he had left the museum door open today on purpose, without realising it. Perhaps he had been hoping someone would come in and find him genuflecting before the Grail. It wasn’t that he had been distracted by Vasilyev’s implicit threat of blackmail. Secretly, subconsciously, he had left himself open to discovery.
And who better to share all of this with than Harriet?
It was almost a relief to be able to bring her in on it. She was his wife, after all. She had been part of his world for nearly half his life. She had a right to know everything about this integral aspect of his existence.
Well, almost everything. If this was to be a confession, it wasn’t going to be a full confession. But Drake was willing to give her enough of the story to satisfy her and shrive himself of the burden of being the only one in the world who communed with the mightiest religious artefact of all time.
Harriet shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “I still think this is all a fraud. You’ve engineered the whole thing. Fitted the Grail with some sort of bespoke AI device.”
“I swear to you, I haven’t. I could pretend I had, Harriet, and that would make me look like a demented lunatic in your eyes. Instead, I’m telling you the truth, even though it risks making me look even more like a demented lunatic.”
She half laughed. “You have a point. You know, Derek, don’t you, that I’m going to have to check this out for myself? If that is the actual, authentic Holy Grail in there, I can’t just let it be. I may not be as devout as you, but I’m no atheist either.”
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