The Prince's Pen

by Horatio Clare

  They caught one near St Clears, two girls and boy who sold their lives well, and another full of Semtex near Sennybridge. The boys there had orders to surrender rather than blow the load because we couldn’t afford that road closed. They were hauled off to enhanced interrogation in Hereford. They could not tell more than they knew: drive the caravan to Cardigan and await instructions. The bangs were meant for the barracks at Aberporth but no one had told them that. Their names are on the Martyrs’ Monument in Cardiff and their souls are in God’s keeping.

  The Invaders had read the same books I had on how you defeat an insurgency. There’s one by a Frenchman, the Butcher of Algiers. Torture and summary execution, my friends, those are the time-tried methods. And they used them on us, and once or twice we had to use them on them. Traitors we shot: my department and my least favourite job. Some little terraced house in the back streets of Llandrindod, a rainy night, not a cat stirring and some poor turncoat tied to a chair in the kitchen and beaten bloody by the time I got there. We tried to be slow to convict, but once we moved we could not afford to be squeamish.

  ‘Clip’s coming,’ they’d tell the poor sod, ‘Cut-lip Clip is on the way. You know what happens then? Two minutes after Clip walks through that door you will be dead or singing. And sing well, or it’ll be both...’

  I never messed about. ‘Why did you do it?’ was my first line. That’s the thing they wanted to say, even if they were terrified to spill another word. They threatened my family, they offered me money, they said they’d kill me, torture me, put out my eyes... They want to tell you this: they’re desperate to share their reasons because part of them reckons that if you can only understand the whys you might begin to see other things from their point of view.

  If they didn’t answer that I’d give them the bullet. No hanging about. If they did answer I’d dig the rest out of them. Any hesitation and it was always the bullet. When they were dead we used to rag the corpse a little, before it was dumped, to spread rumours of vile torture, to discourage the others. You still wish you had been there, do you, you young braves? Sit in the pub sometimes, do you, listening to the old and their war stories, wishing you had had the luck to be born into the Generation of Heroes, the ones who fought for freedom? Thank your stars and count them. Go work out your heroism on the Playstation. If you weren’t there you were bloody blessed.

  Oh, I know what you want to know. When my time comes, when St Peter or Allah or whoever straps me in and addresses me with the pearly pincers I know what the question will be. Did you ever torture anyone? Did you ever make anyone scream – I mean really scream? Ever see someone go mad with pain? Ever looked into tormented eyes, wild with it, and promised a little bit more, unless an answer was forthcoming? Have you seen how a body convulses against the straps when the pliers prove stronger than the roots of fingernails? Can you see the disbelief in their eyes when they realise how far pain can go – that it has, in fact, no end? Have you heard the unholy sound a man makes when you wire his genitals? Or watched a girl screech and screech and beg as they beat her feet? Ever see your hands shaking as you tore up the cotton wool, to stuff in your ears, so you could block out the endless and broken way they always cry for their mothers, and carry on?

  Did you ever smell a torture room, did you? The coppery blood, the piss and shit, the smell of agony, pain’s breath, the rank sweet stink of it... Every scream has a smell. You don’t forget the debris. The blood and excreta, the flayed-off flesh, burnt hair, the little bloody bits of someone glistening in the dirt – have you actually seen that? Or are you just content that it should all be done behind your back, for your sake, in your name? Did you ever say to yourself, over and over, I had to do it, we had to do it, it was war, it was them or us, it was an Enemy Combatant’s life against the lives of who knows how many? They chose to do it, no one made them, they are worse than us, they would have done worse to us (if there was worse), they were on the wrong side and they chose it, they asked for it, there was no choice, they gave us no choice, they did it, they did it by their silence, by their guilt, they could have stopped it if they weren’t so wrong – they were torturing themselves!

  No, gentle God. The honest answer is I didn’t torture anyone, ever, not with my hands. But I did have someone do it for me. A woman, as it happens, a proper little woman, neat as a pin and awfully handy with them. She was called Elsie and we were grateful for her. So give me the bullet, merciful Lord. I did that many times. It’s the ultimate crime, isn’t it, taking life? If it’s worse than torture I don’t know, but held to be, isn’t it? Well I never made anyone else commit it for me. I shot plenty. I can’t count them. So shoot me, dear good God.

  We’re coming to it now. Death or glory: not our preferred strategy, normally, but there comes a tide in the affairs of men when you either punch the buggers out or suck their toe-caps forever – as Shakespeare didn’t exactly put it. Ludo had settled on his plan.

  ‘Bring down everything. Bring the sky down on their heads, one strike, then in we go. We’ll bomb the camps and castles open and give the garrisons the old All-For-One and ten minutes to choose...’

  I still objected, as was expected: ‘But what’s to say they don’t fight? They’re bigger than us, even without the drones. We won’t get them out of Conway or Beaumaris or even Cardiff bloody Castle without tanks, and not even the Irish can get us tanks.’

  ‘The satellite missiles will help. They’ll have no control, they’ll be panic blind. Those conscripts have never seen us at fighting strength, and they know we honour a good surrender.’

  ‘But they’ll never buy it Ludo! They’ll send heavy bombers, ballistic missiles, the whole basket. They won’t care what they kill. And even if they do surrender you’ll never get all the troops out – it took a year to get them in!’

  ‘Tush, Clip. They won’t have a clue until they’re beaten, and we can’t be stopped by bombers. We’re too dispersed. Theo can hack them too, if necessary. They won’t even find the country if he switches off their guidance software. We’ll give the garrisons ten days to get themselves to one of the ports and we’ll lay on ships – tankers. We’ve got them, haven’t we? They can take the clothes they stand in and a bag of food.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘A few miles out and scuttle the ships,’ Ludo said calmly, and winked.

  ‘Get out of it!’ I shouted.

  ‘Oh, but you’re cruel-cool, Clip! You were weighing it!’

  (It was very funny at the time, which only made it worse, after.)

  The planning went well, and the disposition of forces, thanks to the caravans, and we kept security very tight, and Theo said he was inside their system like a ‘vood-vorm’, and we were getting set to go, that early summer, when our enemies saw fit to make us the test-target for their second artificial army, and these weren’t terracotta, but titanium and steel.

  Automated Security Units, they announced, would put an end to the insurgent threat. There were three types. A tracked, domed thing like a psychotic R2D2, mainly used for patrolling roads, though they could cross fields and climb shallow gradients, and two spidery things, one the size of an Alsatian, designed for urban warfare (it could run up stairs) and then there were the big spiders, which were the bastards. The size of a pony, they could scamper all over the countryside, go pretty well wherever you could, and much faster. The Invaders unloaded dozens of these things and waited to see how many of us they’d kill before we worked them out, if we ever did. They had heat sensors, motion sensors, audio sensors, infra-red, and they could be controlled directly or let off the leash on their own. Anyone in the wrong place would be challenged: a rasping, automated bark.

  ‘Citizen! You are designated potentially hostile! Kneel down or be fired on! Obey in three seconds, two, one...’

  And that was in guard mode. In combat mode they just opened up. They were terrible good shots and armoured like the devil. Even a direct hit with an RPG had to be a bit lucky just to put them off their stride. The old M
ilan and Javelin missiles were better but we did not have many of those. They earned their nickname: Killbots. Two of them working together could slaughter an entire squad in a couple of minutes – fifteen professional soldiers, methodically shot to bits.

  You can see one of each type in the National Museum in Cardiff, together with a film of one of the big spiders attacking. It moves like it’s a bit disjointed, but so quick. It comes scabbing across a field towards you, firing. They tended to conserve their ammo so that their guns wouldn’t jam but every shot was aimed. In the film the spider walks into an IED – an IED beautifully sited, shielded from the spider’s metal-detectors and set off by Roger le Gallois, incidentally – and you have the satisfaction of seeing it blown to bits. Cheers all round, though there’s no counting the numbers they killed.

  Rog and Moose were chased by one in the early days of the deployment. Their retelling became quite a comic turn (they got away by jumping in the Teifi, which was amusing in that Moose couldn’t swim) but I debriefed them after it happened and there was no laughter then.

  ‘The wheeze of its joints and the suck-suck-suck of its feet through the mud – Christ,’ Roger said. ‘You know your worst nightmare? Right...’

  Our nightmare came a few days later. We were over near Pumsaint, meeting with two area commanders, finalising plans for the rising. A place called Troed­rhiwygelynen – meaning ‘little holly tree at the foot of the steep slope’, which is a fair description. A close valley, thick-treed, the lower half of which was all strewed wreckage from the blown dam. We were wrapping up when a scout burst in shouting there was a patrol on the way, two trucks.

  ‘Coming fast,’ she gasped. We scattered. Ludo, Crian and I went out the back and up through the wood with five fighters. There was a Land Rover waiting half a mile away over the top, but that patrol was on us quick, too quick.

  Betrayed! I kept thinking, betrayed! We were barely halfway up the hill and they were fanning out below us, their bullets plucking and hissing. Bark and woodchips, zipping ricochets, scatters of mud, the ground unstitching around you and that crack over your head, the devil’s whip, which says he only just missed you that time. The fighters we had with us were very good, all old British Army Gurkhas, and they snapped to the drill, a classic fighting retreat, two covering while the rest fell back, then all cover them, and so on, a kind of fleeing leap-frog with a lot of metal pouring down the hill at our tormentors.

  I’ve met one or two, like Roger and Moose and Crian, who do seem to flower in a battle. I’ve heard them singing and roaring in the fight, seen how they turn retreat into attack, watched them flank their enemies and roll them up, out-thinking them, out-shooting them, breaking their bravery and killing them. But I have never felt or fought that way when the bullets are looking for me. First I feel small and weak, shrinking up in my skin. Then I feel too big, an easy target, and wish to God I was an earwig that could cower under a stone. The sights of your weapon shake with your hands. Your gun feels small, your own bullets too few, too slow; you seem to watch yourself and your own death coming for you, flying at you on hot wings through the trees. You can’t aim. Sweat runs in your eyes even though you’re freezing. You can hear your breath panting, gasping like a snorkel; your vision turns tight and strange. You can almost hear yourself groaning with the fright of it, you think in whimpers and shattered prayers and all you want to do is run, run, run!

  Twenty of them must have been on us, near enough, but the odds were shortening. The gradient was with us and plunging fire is hard to hide from. Our fighters were beautiful, it was like watching a dance – aim, shoot, move to next cover, aim again, shoot, shoot, down, change mags, up, shoot – and all the time they were talking to each other, curt and clear, co-ordinating, and I saw soldiers below us going down, winged or killed, and there was that sobby-screaming. Crian was ever so calm, lying prone, eye to the scope, with Ludo spotting for her and carrying her rifle when they moved. Every time it cracked there was another of them gone to make his accounting. The Barrett is a heavy old gun for a slender girl but it tears off heads at the roots of the neck.

  Their attack stalled and we burst across cleared ground near the top and were into the last tree-line and if we could just hold on, hold them off... I had heard Ludo on the hotline to his brother and I knew Theo’s drones must be on the way to close the doors of hell behind us. None of them would survive pursuing us across the open hill, even if they wanted to, against Crian.

  Then it came. Exactly as Roger had said, so quick, scuttling quick and big, bigger than anything in nature, a monstrous insect. Your blood really does go cold, something gasps in through your mouth, plunges to the sick pit of your stomach and all the way down to your bowels. It was the first one I had actually seen. I didn’t know their surfaces were sticky-coated so that they gathered their own camou­flage from woods and hedges. It was a thing from a child’s nightmare, bits of stuff hanging off it, and charging us. And though it came out of the wood so fast, into the open, its spider-legs stabbing it over the ground, it was no faster than Crian and in the seconds it took me to squeal in fear she had hit it four times and one of its front legs was smashed and now it was crabbed and slower, but still coming, and she hit it again and again – and how were we to know? We didn’t know that its cold brain assessed all threats in a digital blink and targeted the most direct.

  It shot her through her foot, thrust out behind her as she lay at her gun, and the strike spun her sideways, and it shot a bright spray out of her thigh, then one through her hips, and still she struggled to bring the rifle back to bear and every one of us was firing at it now, up and firing, and there was a flicker of red giant flame with white at the heart of it and the blast wave knocked me down. Roaring, then the echo of the roar, then nothing until the bouncing thud and patter of falling metal and earth. At first, through the smoke, I thought she had killed it. But there was a crater there: the Bug had squashed the spider.

  We went as fast as we could run across the hilltop with the Gurkhas covering us and Ludo carrying her broken in his arms, as he wept and begged her not to die. We reached the vehicle and he laid her down in the back, stripping off his shirt to cushion her. She could not move, not an arm, not a finger. Her life poured away in a red drain. It ran out of the door and dripped from the chassis. She never took her eyes from his face.

  ‘Love, Ludo,’ she said, ‘I love you, I love you, my life – I loved you, always, with all my life...’

  And he tried to stop her, he said save your breath, darling, save your strength, we’ll get you home, you’ll be safe, I love you so much, you saved me so many times and now I’ll save you, I promise you darling, don’t die, I love you too much. She seemed to smile then and she said: ‘I am safe, my love. I love you and I am safe.’

  We survived, thanks to her, her courage and terrible skill. And we wept as we drove away into the dark-gathering hills. And Ludo said nothing, made no sound, as the tears ran down his face. He said nothing that night, as we lay up in thick forestry, waiting for the scout who would lead us away at dawn. Not until the contact arrived in a logging truck, when the first streaks of our tomorrow barred the east did he turn to me, suddenly, with some new and dreadful stillness in his face.

  ‘I’ll kill them all for that,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not understanding.

  ‘No. I mean no prisoners,’ he said. ‘Never again.’

  And so it was not just my nightmare that fell that day, by the little holly tree at the foot of the steep slope, and not just Ludo’s either. Crian was right – she was safe. Until that day our fight had been a great and honourable thing, so I believed. But afterwards – well. All-For-One meant something different then.

  I bear my share of it. I found out who made the call, a silly old man who lived by the bridge where the valley begins to narrow, who had seen us going through and had visions of wealth beyond fantasy, wealth pouring down to his children and their children, his name living in some infamy, like Christ or Judas: the man
who stopped the war and brought peace to half the world. He got my gun in his mouth. I can see his crossed eyes squinting up the barrel now, mad with desperation for – what? For someone to wake him out of his nightmare, or for one more second of it? And then his brains are half over the back of his settee and half spilling down his parlour wall. It doesn’t do to dwell, and no revolution can stomach traitors, and I came out of that house with my mind on Crian’s dying eyes, not his – but still.

  Still with me, are you? Want to hear the rest? I’m telling it for me now, as much as for you. And for the historians, of course. Historians – in the hope of your absolution! I’ll not look for it, though as you see I think Ludo’s is a special case. He never made a more tense call than the one to Theo to find out what he made of the Killbots.

  ‘I need teenagers,’ Theo announced, ‘but grown-up kind, not idiot.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Maybe say thirty.’

  ‘Got a job for them, then?’

  ‘When I have thirty computers and thirty teen­agers I have job, yes.’

  ‘And you can sort these bloody Killbots then, can you?’

  ‘Easy.’

  ‘God is great.’

  Recruiting thirty teenaged gamers without develop­mental disadvantages was easier than you might imagine. The war had grown everyone up. We put them under the control of a dreadlocked youth from the Rhondda known as Jimbo Looney, sent them north for training, then brought them south again to a newly appointed pothole near Ystradgynlais: dry, secure and, thanks to the computers, very warm. Jimbo and his cohort went a bit pallid in their weeks under­ground but they didn’t seem to mind.