Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  “My human father was a better man,” Ben said, bitterly.

  Oonagh curled herself into the throne on the dais. “I didn’t know,” she said, with a faint tone of apology. Like an underwater creature, her colour changed to match the stone. Her downcast eyes and drooping mouth might have been carved, a picture of regret. “You disappeared. We were told you had gone on retreat and did not wish to be found. All your subjects, I think, were told the same. Perhaps he hoped you would die soon, earn your place back and return before anyone would have cause to question.”

  “I loved Arran that much?” Ben felt slightly sick at the thought. He had enough romantic complications as it was. “It doesn’t seem like me to be that serious over anyone.”

  Geoff gave him a glare. “Is that so?”

  Oonagh smiled. “It is like you to refuse to give way under threat. I do not know what you felt for Arran, but your pride has never taken well to ultimatums.” She raised her head and her moonstones gleamed like eyes. “I am thinking that it is clearly time for your father to consider his own spiritual well-being. He should retire to the forest to work out his debts to the gods. Kingship is full of toil and better suited to a younger man.”

  Bloody hell. This was too much to cope with. God knew what he’d expected, but being offered a past and a crown was not part of it, let alone the idea that he should snatch them both from the hands of his own father.

  Staging a coup to take over a kingdom—that was so far from being his style he was inclined to laugh at the idea. But it was pretty obvious that if he played along with Oonagh’s game while the first step was being prepared, he’d qualify as an honoured and trusted ally. He’d be given the same freedoms he’d enjoyed so far. With that freedom he could, perhaps, figure out what he wanted to do next and find a way to achieve it.

  “This Chitrasen isn’t the father I remember. Not the father to whom I owe reverence and thanks. So I’m not saying no to that idea. But I…I need time to think. Give me an hour or so alone? I’m not… This is a lot to take in.”

  “Of course.” Oonagh unfolded herself and stood. He didn’t think there was suspicion in her face, but it was difficult to be sure. “I’ll have you escorted back to your rooms.”

  Ben took another look at the prisoners in the cage, his echo of a second soul furious and tender of Sumala’s restraint, his own hating the sight of Geoff, hating himself because of it. “What about these two?”

  “They can wake or sleep as you wish,” said the queen. “But I will not have them released. Not yet. When you have remembered who you are and given me your word that you are my ally, as you once were, then we can discuss this decision.”

  “I’m supposed to be your champion.” Geoff shook the bars again, filling the room with a sound like rain. “How can I do that from in here?”

  Oonagh laughed. “In truth, this solution should have occurred to me earlier. If it is your destiny to be my champion, my champion you will be, even though locked in a box. Until such a time, you are a great deal less trouble in here. Shall we?”

  She offered Ben her arm, led him away. He stopped at the door and looked back, found them watching him with the kind of wary, shell-shocked expression he imagined he wore himself. No need to fake the need to stop and think. He felt he would unravel like a weak seam if anyone spoke another word to him.

  Returned to Arran’s chambers, Ben walked a relentless circle around the walls. Arran was not there—a small mercy for which he was inclined to thank God. Sitting down was enough to throw open the lids on his mental confusion, letting everything stream out and swirl dizzyingly through his head. The doubt and disbelief were literally sickening. He could feel them in his stomach and at the back of his throat. The more he tried to pick them apart, make some sense of what he’d just learned, the more he felt he was going to throw up. He didn’t want to see Arran again until he’d also had time to think through the did we or didn’t we crawl in the flesh of that remembered something between them that might have been sex.

  Shit, had Geoff been dealing with this kind of confusion for the last seventy-odd years? Unanchored, dislodged from anything he understood, estranged from anything he could rely on? If he had…

  If he had, he would be the one person in this world who might give Ben a straight answer. Throwing on a cloak from the wardrobe, raising the hood over his face, Ben slipped back outside, retraced his steps. The wand still lay on the floor of the room where he had dropped it. Sumala sat cross-legged in meditation in the cage, and Geoff flinched, hiding something, trying to pretend he hadn’t been attempting to pick the lock. His guilty look fell away when he saw Ben, to be replaced by something more complicated, but no less wary.

  Feeling like a complete bastard, Ben pointed the wand at Sumala, switched her off. It felt like a sacrilege, and he was not surprised at the way Geoff backed away from him, his face hard. “I say! Was that really necessary?”

  “I want to talk to you in private. It seemed the only way.”

  The cage was basic, large enough so that Geoff could pace from one side to the other, check the fit of the bronze bars into the stone of the floor. He sat down, leaning against them, stretching out long legs in scuffed soft flying boots. “I could murder a smoke.”

  “Sorry.” Yielding to the change in the atmosphere, Ben grabbed the cushion off the throne, lowered himself to the ground too, leaning a shoulder on the bars. The buzzing tang—a kind of sugar-free mint taste—of the time field around Sumala filtered even into the half of the cage where Geoff sat, setting his teeth on edge. “I don’t smoke. I can’t offer you one.”

  What to say, now he had the chance? It seemed self-indulgent to talk about Chris, to stake claims neither of them had much chance of acting on.

  It was Geoff who sighed, tipping back his head to rest on the bars. “So how long have you been in the Service?”

  “Sorry?”

  A quizzical look, the mouth tilted at one side. “At home, I mean. I’m assuming you’ve come over from India? Volunteered for the war effort. Lots of chaps from the Empire in the RAF, thank God.”

  For a moment, Ben was overcome with the urge to get up and wipe the dust from everything, take down that tapestry and beat it until the colours came through again, find a broom somewhere and spruce up the place until it shone. He recognised the urge as a way to stop thinking, to avoid emotion and decision. His mouth felt as gritty as though he had actually tried it when he said, “You still think it’s the forties, don’t you?”

  Hard to tell in the dim underwater light of the place, but he thought Geoff’s face paled before the man raised his jacket collar in both hands and tipped his face into it. “It isn’t?”

  “No. It is…was 2011 when I was brought here.” There was an abyss of a thought. He had no more idea than Geoff did whether it was still 2011. It might already be a hundred years in the future and too late.

  “And the war?”

  “Long over. Oh, and we won.”

  “God.” If Geoff had been standing, he would have staggered, lowered himself to his knees. It showed in the tremble of his hands as he bowed his head into them, gasped softly, as though he’d been hit in the stomach. “You’re telling me the truth? So help me God, if you aren’t…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s why he’s older. The skipper, I mean. They didn’t drain him of the time. I’ve just been in here for twenty years.”

  “Not twenty,” Ben corrected, gently. It didn’t seem a time for petty jealousy, when he was watching a man be destroyed in three easy blows. “Closer to seventy.”

  Geoff’s hopeless look made him smile, one of those shamefaced smiles people give when they know it hurts and can’t do a thing to change it. “It’s complicated. He’s displaced in time too, but he came back to earth fifteen years ago, and has been living in normal time ever since.”

  Ben took a breath, and he was surprised how much he hurt, surprised by his own thought that there wasn’t much to go back to if he was going to be all
self-sacrificial about this. But he still said it. “Fifteen years isn’t much, after all. And you should have seen him when he found out you were alive—like every Christmas come at once.”

  Geoff’s tragic look was startled into a smirk, but it faltered immediately and died. Putting his hand in one of the pockets of his overalls, he scooted closer and passed Ben a little pouch of leather that felt squishy in his hand. Geoff’s touch was firm and businesslike, but that matinee-idol face wore a look of misery too profound for any hero. “Be that as it may. I have to trust someone, and if the skipper trusts you then that’s as good as a pass in my book. I shouldn’t have let myself get distracted because there’s more at stake here than just us.”

  He rubbed a hand through stringy, unwashed hair and scowled. “Oonagh is raising an army,” he said quietly. “I’ve been told it’s an invasion army. I understand now why…my contact in the resistance…wanted you dead. You’re obviously a key link in Oonagh’s plans. Now that she has you, the time must be getting short. We have to tell Chris it’ll be any day now. He should tell the authorities. You heard all that business about pollution?”

  “I did. But Oonagh claims her plan is to leave this world altogether and look for a new one.”

  “And my informant tells me that her plan is to leave this world and take ours. You should see the army. I don’t believe for a moment she’d muster a force like that and intend peace.”

  Ben remembered, suddenly, the wood in which he had crashed to land—the wood full of armour, the sense he’d had of being watched by hostile eyes, though he’d never caught a sight of them. And they were camped just outside the place where he’d come through to this world, waiting for the order. “Shit!”

  Geoff’s eyebrows went up and his mouth quirked. Ben remembered that he came from a more genteel time. But he only said, “Quite. Pester the queen for some cigarettes for me, would you?”

  Ben laughed. He quite liked the guy, truth be told, and that made it all a hell of a lot worse. Still romance could take a backseat for the moment in favour of the question of how to get out of here alive. He worked the knot loose and opened the pouch he’d been given, frowning at the contents. “If I get the chance. So what’s this?”

  “Ah.” Geoff reached through the bars to lay fingertips carefully on the small bag of dirt. “That’s how you talk to the skipper. Throw a little pinch into still water. You’ve got to say a rhyme over it, ask for him. Then you’ll be able to see him, in the reflection, like a magic mirror. You’ll need something to write on—sound doesn’t get through, unless you’re both in the same world.”

  Ben squished the thing in his fingers. “What happens if you throw the whole lot in?”

  “I don’t know.” Geoff was clutching at his hair again, bowed over grief as if it was a stomachache. “But there’s a portal where a handful of this will break the barrier between worlds and you can walk across.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  The little unhappy grin again. “We were caught, just at the last moment. Hence the cage. I’d say talk to the skipper first. Plan it. If he’s on the other side with a machine gun when the queen’s forces roll up, you’ll have a lot better chance of making it through.”

  All of a sudden Ben had a flash on the Great Escape, realised with a strange wringing twist of regret and guilt and nostalgia that Geoff had gone all escape committee on him, as though it was a foregone conclusion that only one of them was getting out alive. Geoff dropped his gaze, as if he saw it too and was embarrassed. “If you can bring me paper, I can draw you a map.”

  He was about the same age as Ben, but he had the weary, beaten eyes of a man three times as old.

  “What about you? Sumala?”

  “We’ll manage. There’s still a war on, after all. Or there will be soon. More important things to think about.”

  “Shit.”

  Geoff laughed again, covering his eyes with a hand. “My sentiments exactly.” He waved the other hand in Sumala’s direction. “Wake her up before you go, would you? She’s the brains of the outfit, and her father may help if we can get to him.”

  “You think?” Ben had no time for parents who disowned their own children, doubly so when the child was himself.

  “Worth a try, isn’t it? We’re not brimming over with options. Unless you happen to have a key to this cage in your coat and a spare army in your pocket?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said again, acknowledging the point, trying to get across his regret that things should be as they apparently were. I’m sorry was about the only thing that could cover it. “Well, good luck then.”

  Geoff gave a complex smile. “You too. And look after him for me.”

  Ben almost said something flippant, God forgive him, out of sheer habit. He caught himself in time with a shock and nodded instead, serious, focussed, tucking the pledge away like the sacred trust it was.

  He’d been swamped in doubt, before, but a moment’s conversation with a fellow human being and he knew exactly where he stood. Reincarnation be damned, he was Ben Chaudhry now, and that was the only thing that mattered.

  It could have been reassuring, Chris thought, picking his way between the brambles that had overgrown his garden path, to discover that he had begun to feel confident and at home in this decade. He must have done, mustn’t he, for the arrest and the time in a cell to feel so shattering. If he’d been uprooted and shoved straight back to the insecurity and unreality of his first weeks in the nineties, it must show that he’d begun to put down roots. They couldn’t have been severed as they just had been, unless they’d been there in the first place.

  It continued to rain, the drifting, light drizzle that floats beneath umbrellas, that clings and soaks into every surface. He thought for a moment that the path was flooded at the end, until his foot crunched on broken glass. Fragments of his sitting-room window now formed a wide puddle beneath it. The hole where it should have been looked dark, except for the shards, still hanging on by threads of putty. Inside, he could see that someone had smashed the TV and spray painted Murderer on the wall in dramatic red paint. He looked down, his head bowed by the weight of care. God, this is too much. Who chose me to be the scapegoat of the universe? Isn’t it enough to ruin my life once? It has to be done on a regular basis every ten years?

  The shards of window overlapped each other in the grass, slicked with the continuing downpour. He looked at them numbly, just as something stirred behind them. Somewhere between the water and the glass, between the glass and the grass beneath it, Ben looked out from another world.

  “Shit!” The relief was so intense it made his skin feel as if it had been rubbed all over with chilli—a kind of hot/cold tingle so intense as to be almost painful. “Shit. Ben, oh thank God.”

  Ben looked all the more like the prince of his dreams, clad in peacock silk with emeralds around his neck and wrists, and a pearl-inlaid sword belt buckled around his waist, but there was something shattered and fragile about his expression that matched the broken glass.

  Heedless of the damp, Chris splashed to his knees in the mud of his garden, hunting through his pockets. Pen, yes. Paper? He found a bus ticket, wrote in large letters R U OK? and held it up.

  Ben had come prepared. He grinned, looked away, and scratched a reply on the top of a long sheet of parchment. Yes. Invasion imminent. You must tell someone.

  Already done took the back of the ticket, but further searching of the bins outside the front door—tricky when he didn’t wish to take his eyes off Ben in case the connection was lost—netted him a pizza box, that folded inside out and gave him ample space. I will come for you. Think I can reopen the place where you were taken. Can you go back to transfer point on your side?

  Ben ran the emerald necklace through his fingers as if it were worry beads. I think so. They trust me—long story. He still wasn’t looking in Chris’s face. He dipped his quill, fiddled with the feather. Geoff is here.

  A stab of something unrecognisable and that feeling of too muc
h sensitivity grew until he felt flayed, every drop of water against his face a torment of hope and despair. You’ve seen him?

  Spoke to him yesterday. He’s fine. Ben finally looked up, smiled, all challenge and bullshit like his old self. I hate him.

  Chris laughed, the first time in a week, and something wild and giddy started up in his stomach, blue-white and tasting of oxygen neat out of the bottle. Can you bring him?

  I’ll try.

  Good lad. Time, how did you synchronise time between the two universes? Ah… Just get there, OK? I’ll get the passage open. It’ll be early tomorrow if I’m lucky, but check back, yes? Check in tomorrow and we’ll take it from there.

  Shadows under Ben’s eyes, and the rain slid across his smile like tears. Will do. He put the paper down, worried the necklace a little more, bright green flashes like sun through leaves between his fingers. Then he looked up, like a man determined to do a frightening task despite the cost, just as long as he could get it over with, and he said something. Chris watched his mouth move. It could have been “I love you,” but he couldn’t be sure. The pen creaked in his fingers and cracks ran up the plastic casing. He didn’t know what to say. He’d have said it back, like a shot, if it wasn’t for Geoff. But if Geoff was alive, if he really was alive and fine, didn’t that change everything?

  Ben’s smile faltered. Chris reached down for the image of him—he looked so close there, as if he were standing in a grave beneath Chris’s garden, and Chris could reach in and pull him out. But when his fingers touched the glass, there was only water. “I love you too,” he said, but there was only water and grass to hear it. Damn it. Another perfect opportunity missed. What the hell was the matter with him?

  The war had trained him well in pushing down his emotions and getting on with the necessary actions despite them. He got up, vainly tried to brush the knees of his trousers dry and went inside to where his living room was already smelling of damp and cats. There would be time to figure out what to do with two true loves when they were both safe.