The Prince's Pen

by Horatio Clare

  Ludo said, ‘You what?’

  Levello nodded emphatically and leaned and whispered again. After a minute Ludo recoiled slightly, amazement and calculation fighting in his eyes. Then he broke a great strange grin. He gently removed his brother’s hand from the microphone, paused, looking at the floor (the first time I ever saw him search for words) then raised his head and spoke.

  ‘Uzma. This is... remarkable. It seems my brother has another idea, and now I must answer for mine.’

  He turned and strode to his pack. He returned, holding a familiar bottle. He wrenched its cork out with his teeth and blew it away like a fat pellet.

  ‘I believe it is the duty of Muslims to spread the word of God,’ Ludo said, in a solemn tone, though with a something disbelieving grin. ‘But on my life I never will force any man, woman or child to follow me where I go now. For me, and with all my heart, there is no God but God, and Muhammad – Peace be Upon Him – Muhammad is His Prophet!’

  And with that he upended the golden bottle, holding it high, and let the contents pour, splattering the stage. And the Muslims in the hall jumped up and shouted praise to God, and those of us who were not Muslims, perceiving that something (however bizarre to us, yet wonderful to him) had happened to our Lord, who at that moment was never less our Lord nor more a simple man – we raised our voices too, and shouted our salutes.

  ‘If I’d only known he was going to do that...’ Moose said, shaking his head at the fuming puddle, though he was smiling. And perhaps Ludo might have understood the sentiment, but not then nor ever after did he bend, backtrack or let on. For in between offering to become a Muslim and becoming one, a miracle, as he saw it, had happened, and Ludo – never a man to ignore a sign or deny a moment its deserts – had chosen the name by which he would bless it and give thanks.

  ‘Do you think he’s confusing Islam with taking the Pledge?’ Roger le Gallois asked me later. ‘And if he is, shouldn’t someone tell him?’

  We were settled in sleeping bags in a tepee somewhere in the rocky dark higher up the valley. There was a little encampment of tepees there, owned by the university. By this time I had had a few words with Ludo and had been appraised, in frustratingly vague outline, of what Levello had proposed. My head was still spinning with that, and Ludo’s conversion.

  ‘He means it,’ I said, staring into the embers of a fire.

  ‘He’s going to start reading the Koran, and stop shaving, and make a pilgrimage to Mecca?’

  ‘Well,’ I smiled, ‘I don’t know if he’ll tick all the boxes. But he’s on his way, that’s certain. Notice I’m not reading to him tonight.’

  ‘Little Crian?’

  ‘Aye. And she’s a Muslim, her family came from Somalia.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Roger said something quietly, almost to himself.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Can stars trace new tracks?’

  There were many rumours about that trip. We’d all had some mystical experience. We’d seen things. We’d struck a deal with the White Goddess, or the red devil himself. All nonsense. It happened as I have described, and the next day we met Theo the Bug. Levello had him all set up in one of his summer places.

  Those hills, the Rhinnogs, you ever been up there? There’s nothing. A lot of old rocks and one or two ruins, hell in the winter. But Levello had a place in a high valley. It took most of the day to reach it up stream beds, through angry woods and past any number of pickets. I must have missed a lot of them but what I saw were enough to stop an army. They could have riddled that old Land Rover a hundred times and we’d never have seen where it came from. The house itself had a flagstone floor like you never saw – huge, octagonal. It had been used for meetings since who knows when. There were trees growing up the stairs and most of it was shell, but they’d made bits very comfortable. Uzma was in a holiday mood, having dressed for the outing, perhaps satirically, in a full veil and thousand ICU sandals. When Levello, laughing, protested it wasn’t the best gear for the Rhinnogs in February, she said: ‘A girl can go out however she wants, right Clip?’

  To Ludo, as he put out a hand to help her out of the Land Rover, she said: ‘You approve, don’t you sailor?’

  All you could see were her eyes, and ankles.

  ‘Theo!’

  ‘Uzma! You are – in the pink!’

  The burka actually was bright pink. She embraced him with an affection that made me jealous. But he was such a gentle soul, Theo, you took to him straightly. If we’d been able to tour him around the garrisons I’m sure he would have converted them to peace by his merest appearance. But they would have shot him, or more likely flown him to a room in the East and made him run their world – so, instead, he helped us break it.

  ‘There you are,’ said Levello, ‘just ask Theo.’

  In the cellar Theo had a great many computers, which he took us down to meet.

  ‘Built them all to his instruction,’ Levello said, proud as a new dad. They used the heat off the machines to warm the house.

  ‘Actually where do you want to go?’ Theo asked, settling into his chair. Ludo looked enormous standing over him, and a little lost.

  ‘Where can we go?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Anywhere! Well. How about Fishguard?’

  ‘Feesh-guard,’ Theo said, thoughtfully, and there we were, looking down on it. ‘Where in Fishguard?’

  ‘The barracks?’

  ‘Barr-acks,’ said Theo, as if he were practising his English.

  ‘What’s those Clip?’

  A row of tuberous lumps the colour of dolphins, with a few uniforms fussing with them.

  ‘Robot subs.’

  ‘Those bloody things.’

  ‘You want to do something?’ Theo looked up over his shoulder at Ludo, and there was both reluctance and longing in his gentle face.

  ‘You bloody bet. Can we?’

  Theo looked at Levello now. Levello nodded. Theo’s fingers rapped. ‘You can do it,’ he said. ‘If you press Enter.’

  There was a cross-hairs over the cylinders now. I’m sure we’ve all seen it enough times. Ludo leaned in and pressed the key firmly. A spinning reel of milli­seconds began to flash down in one corner of the screen and then there was a squirt all across it like squid ink, as if something had burst in the machine, and then you saw it was smoke, and there was a uniform skewing off, like an ant on fire, capering towards the dock. I thought it was a woman, don’t ask me why. I know it was.

  ‘Have you got any chai, Levello love?’ Uzma shouted, down the stairs.

  ‘Coming, angel!’

  ‘Yeah – do! Don’t you start playing with Theo’s stuff, boys, alright? You’ll be there all day.’

  ‘Spend a lot of time down here, do you?’ Ludo asked his brother.

  ‘A bit. Since we got it running, yeah.’

  ‘Well. When was that?’

  ‘Christmas.’

  That was the second time I saw Ludo look for words.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, at last.

  ‘It’s heavy business,’ said Levello.

  ‘Heavy business,’ echoed Theo.

  I felt myself flush. Six weeks! We had been children for six weeks! Levello had drones – what else did he have? I hadn’t heard a thing – and I was supposed to be Ludo’s head of counter-intelligence! Uzma, I thought. Technology from Pakistan. That’s a dowry.

  ‘Where do you fly your drones from?’ Ludo asked casually, as we climbed the stairs, ‘Old RAF Valley?’

  ‘I haven’t got any drones!’ Levello cried. ‘What an accusation!’

  ‘What? That wasn’t...’

  ‘Theirs,’ said Levello.

  Ludo turned around slowly and looked at Theo. ‘You’ve – broken their codes?’

  Theo wobbled his head, cast a shy glance. ‘Broken. Not exactly.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t broken them, they’re working fine. Apart from the odd bug. He’s – administering t
hem,’ said Levello.

  ‘He’s administering them?’ Ludo growled, like a man, like a king, actually, being set up for a pratfall. ‘Well – what?’

  ‘Theo is Systems Administrator Number Star One’ Levello announced, grandly. ‘Theo the Bug!’

  ‘Number Star One? And that means?’

  ‘It means that the Central Committee of the People’s Federated States couldn’t even get a cup of coffee if Theo decided to give their percolator a headache.’

  ‘Is not bad system,’ Theo said, as if embarrassed on behalf of whoever designed it, ‘but does bad things.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love a cup of coffee,’ sighed a sofa, over the arm of which I now perceived a pair of beautiful if not rugged shoes. ‘Can you show them how to do it please, Theo? They can be right dozy, these two. Actually I’ll have a chai. And will you come and read to me, lovely Clip?’

  Levello offered Theo’s services, on the condition that Theo offered them, and Theo did. His only request was that he might work out of his office, which was fair, of course, much as we would have loved to have taken him south. I think perhaps Levello was relieved. Oh, I know he was. Ludo was the head of the resistance and Levello knew the terrible, cursing power of the Bug as well as anyone. If he had been the kind of man to wield it we would never have made it to Machynlleth. They’d watched us on that hillside, be sure.

  With the Bug our communication problems were solved. One thing I learned in war – and it holds for peace for all I know – when you haven’t got communications problems you haven’t got problems. Don’t ask me what kind of phones Theo gave them, they looked normal to me, but Theo said they might as well be unhackable. It crossed my mind, too, that if the brothers ever did fall out then Ludo’s end of the hotline would make a tasty tracker for a five-hundred-pound thermobaric signal of displeasure, but Ludo growled when I raised the point.

  It was still an unfair fight. God knows how many programmers they had, and how many machines, and we had one Bulgarian who lived on sardine sandwiches, adored Uzma, had a thing for breakfast TV in Welsh (which he was learning) and also for books of philosophy.

  Ludo went to pray while I read to Uzma. An old gift-edition of The Economist World Briefing it was, all lovely glossy paper. And not exactly ornamentally written, though still I tried to put it over as you do: romantically, engagingly, even comically, if you’re reading to the most beautiful girl in your life. And then the meeting was over, the deal was struck, and we set out south again, with much news. We would not say a word about the Bug, of course, but rumours of Ludo’s conversion ran wild ahead of us.

  At first we feared. We feared prating bigots, homilies and holy hobnobs, endless visits to mosques, Muhammad, Peace be Upon Him, says this; Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, says that. Submission – submission! Submission was what we hated. We demanded it of those who opposed us in the beginning, yes, but they were mostly small-fish gangsters, or gangs like the Gweilch. But we said sign up to this, our way’s the way, then carry on: we’ll all be stronger for it. We didn’t want to pay knee-service to some dusty ideology in which there was no room for our pleasures, which regarded pleasure itself as sin. So we kept a wary eye on Ludo, lest he yaw towards something we felt sure he was not, and could not and should not be. We loved him and followed him because he espoused no higher law than the freedom and benefit of his people. If he was going to go setting something higher than that, well, people were going to have things to say about it.

  It took a while to see our fears unfounded. My own were petty. I was jealous of Crian and his other teachers, who were mostly like her, beautiful Muslim women. I read the Koran like fury, over and again, so that I might retain my place at the heart of Ludo’s mind. But I did them a disservice, Crian and Mizbah, and Ludo too. I should have trusted in his innate sense of disputation, especially when it came to texts.

  ‘A God of conscience is my God,’ he said, ‘not a God of priests and imams. I read the book,’ (said with a blush) ‘and I honour it, but the form of my faith is for me alone, and I alone will answer for it – to Him and to none other.’

  We had a man come to see us who said Ludo should marry Crian, repent for all his debauchery and give his life to contemplation, alms-giving and the Haj.

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Ludo boomed, indignantly.

  The man ignored this and criticised Crian for dressing immodestly. I thought Ludo was going to brain him.

  ‘You dare to come in here and have immodest thoughts about this girl, to her face, and blame her for it?’ he roared, looking like a dragon that had downed a tank of petrol. ‘Get out! Scat you, you..!’

  Such confrontations spread in story. It became clear that Ludo was forming a conception of Islam that had been widespread already but never loudly espoused. Muslims who weren’t offended by others’ failings, but rather pitied them, who were glad to see a woman unhumbled – Muslims who had kept their eyes downcast in the presence of the severely orthodox – these people soon found a champion in Ludo, whose prodigious oral memory rapidly equipped him with enough verses and hadiths to best pretty well anyone in a quoting contest.

  Very soon he had assembled a core of quotes and precedents, a body of knowledge he delighted to display. ‘There shall be no compulsion in religion,’ was one of his favourites, always followed with: ‘That’s the Holy Koran, by the way, look it up – book two, verse 256!’

  ‘Religion is good advice,’ was another we heard a lot, from a hadith, that one. ‘Take care of your own selves. If you are righteous, the misguided will not succeed in trying to lead you astray...’ was a riposte he made to any who brought a religious dispute to him, as many did. Those of us who feared a brutal application of Shariah Law were relieved to hear the familiar boom of ‘God commands justice and fairness – Koran 16, verse 90!’ along with my favourite clause in the whole book: ‘One who is compelled without intending to violate or revolt is not to be blamed.’

  This last was particularly useful in the prosecution of the war, though, as Ludo pointed out, Shariah’s injunctions as to war were pretty well in line with our own code. It forbids maiming, injuring children, women and the elderly, as well as damaging animals, crops and buildings. The suicide sheep, swept-away towns and the odd enhanced interrogation we excused under the compulsion without intention clause, agreeing that we did not intend any of it, and wouldn’t have done it, had we not been forced to fight off the unjust Invader.

  There were two areas in which Ludo was radical. The first was the hudud – a table of punishments laid down by the Koran – which include amputation for theft, stoning for adultery and other dire consequences for alcohol consumption, fornication and bearing false witness.

  ‘Do we not call him the All-Merciful?’ was Ludo’s line. ‘These punishments are all very well in theory – I am sure we can all think of drunken thieves, liars and shaggers who deserved no less. But if these laws are God’s laws, then these punishments are His also. Though these sinners may justly fear stoning and amputation in the next life – unless Allah is Merciful with them, as I expect He will be – they will not suffer them here on earth. Or at least not in Wales! Is not the sixth of the Six Pillars of Faith to believe in Allah’s determination of affairs, whether good or bad? Well then, let us so believe.’

  And no doubt some muttered that as a thief and a fornicator Ludo had much to gain by this inter­pretation, but some will always mutter. His other radical line concerned women. ‘The Koran says God commands justice and fairness,’ he repeated. ‘So here it is: while I live women will have equal rights in all things. Anyone who seeks to oppress, limit, undermine or in any way restrict a woman merely because she is not a man will answer for it. And if I have got this wrong I will answer for it. But I will answer to God, and women’s oppressors will answer to me, and I promise you, I am very far from All-Merciful. Got it?’

  His high-hearted embrace of the Faith, and his love of philosophical and theological fun and games set a fine spiritual cement to the fashions ins
pired by Uzma. He was once challenged about the praying – five times a day, including once in the pre-dawn dark – wasn’t it a bit much?

  ‘Never!’ cried Ludo. ‘Haven’t you tried it? It is excellent exercise, and a wonderful way to limber the body while humbling the mind. Give it a go. It’s like doing yoga with God.’

  His interpretation of Islam might not, perhaps, have been sufficient to convince his new spiritual brethren in far-off Waziristan or wherever that this was a man holy enough to die for under the guns of the Invaders, but it did – some said bastardise, others rejuvenate – certainly reinvigorate the religion and the country. And yes, it lead to trouble later, and a pretty strange turning in my life – but there I go again. It is not just my age that has me running out of sequence. It’s all I have to remember, and the bits I’d rather not.

  If we were going to clear the country of the Invaders it would not be enough to meddle in their computers. We had to rake them off the earth. We could not let their garrisons see one chink of hope between us. We had to bring everyone out from underground, arm and provision them and set them ready. If anything went wrong, if the Bug slipped, we would all be caught out of our holes and slaughtered. The Invaders’ work would be done in a day and a night. And so we schemed and scrapped and as we closed in on our plan it became clear that Ludo might be about to get us all killed, and it was remarkable to me that he did not sink under the burden of the last word. But then it is a king’s prerogative to hazard the lives of his people, and his duty to look confident while he does it. That is what makes him king.

  Caravans! It was a stroke of I don’t know what: I’m slow to claim genius and wary of divine inspiration. But – caravans! Every year, every sunny day, the lanes and roads of Wales are jammed with them, have been since man first figured out the correct sequence of horse and cart. Well, next time you are stuck behind one, spare a thought for the revolutionary war. How do you move thousands of people around the country and God knows how many guns, without being spied from above? Crusaders, Road Kings, Excaliburs, Rangers, Quests, Free Rovers, Explorers, Venture VIIs: now you know why they call them such proud names! May Bank Holiday weekend that year was chaos on the roads. And of course the Invaders mounted road-blocks and spot-checks, but we had Theo chock full of sardine sandwiches, his buggy fingers flying over the keyboards, and if his hacked drones saw trouble the guns were thrown into ditches or over hedges, and everyone had a cover story – mostly ‘going to see Grandma in Mold’ – and most of the loads got through.