Towards the end of July it was still raining, Ludo hadn’t smiled for a month, and we were ready. We set a date for R-Day (Revolution Day, Resistance Day, Our Day, what you will) and determined that its first shot should serve as a diversion as well as a signal of intent. Their transportation programme had not been a great success but our enemies had not abandoned it; naturally, we had infiltrated volunteers into the emigrant population. Before dawn on R-Day they would blow up the Dylan Thomas Dome near Meknes, in that region of Morocco where those who had taken the ICU bribe had been resettled, along with those whose homes had been demolished for the dam-construction programme. And then Wales would rise, and England and Scotland too, we hoped. In the double dark of the back of that night, in a cave near Sennybridge, I stared into oblivion, reviewing the state of our islands, a state which, whatever happened, would vanish with the morrow.
There are fifty roads across the border, two bridges and the railway tunnel. Most of the crossings were closed and all were guarded by our foes, either manned or patrolled by Killbots. Eastwards, England was controlled by the Unity Administration and garrisoned by the enemy and their turncoat allies in the British National Army – allies who could be relied on only to follow whoever would pay them. Further east still, across the channel, the World Unity Government had its claws sunk in the guts of Europe.
In a few hours the uprising would begin and either deliverance come from the west, as it had before, or the defying light would be snuffed. If we met success the fight would spread through the British Isles and perhaps beyond; three nations might rise and throw off the invader. If unsuccessful, a week would see our end. How would my death come? I had plans for a bullet from my own pistol. Beyond that, my only worries were for Ludo and Uzma. Our enemies would put them in cages. As the minutes trod on I resolved to see Ludo dead before he was captured, and prayed that Levello had similar provision for Uzma. Then again, she might be on a boat now, bound for some distant obscurity. He was a cunning man, Levello.
I was dropping off when a stir at the back of the cave told that Ludo was up. It must be time for the prayer before dawn; day was coming on. And I felt a sudden, breathless sense of the brink before us. Was this insanity? Had we, provincial as we were, put our own interests and those – as we saw them – of a small land of green rumples above and before the massed benefit of the peoples of the wide world? Too late to answer, now. I wished I could see Uzma again and talk to her. She knew more of the world than any of us. Through a half-dream in which I saw her, and sighed, a hand came, from a place which seemed distant, but was the darkness of the cavern.
‘Clip, are you awake? It’s started. They’ve blown the Dome.’
‘Ludo...’
‘Good morning,’ he said, and I heard a smile in it, the first anyone had detected since she died. ‘Happy Rebellion Day.’
Around the cave-mouth shapes moved, black against the paling stars. We piled into three vehicles and wended down, without lights, towards the barracks at Sennybridge.
The plan had us going in with the second wave – I had argued like a horse-haggler to stop Ludo leading the first. We would secure the base and establish an operations room from where we would direct, as well as we could, the actions of the battle. All over Wales, I knew, attack orders were being received – mostly read as texts to phones which had never been switched on before. We had arranged a distribution to hundreds of section commanders. I thought of hands shaking, mouths suddenly dry, of realisation, everywhere – this is it! And because they knew nothing of our Bug, nothing of our access to the drones and Killbots, most of those reading the orders would surmise they were a death sentence. One line of reassurance was all we had allowed, on grounds of security.
‘Trust the fight will be fairer than it seems – the odds will favour the brave. Ludo.’
Far away in some steel-ringed bunker our enemy would be springing for his weapons. They would read some of the messages – perhaps all, we could not gainsay it. They would realise the go-code had been given and they would have a sense of the scale of the rising. All now depended on the Bug – could he blind and deafen, prevent the co-ordination of the defence? Would the programmes he had written for the drones, and such direct control as he would take, mesh with the timings of the attacks? We had made it as simple as we could. The assault on Sennybridge followed the same pattern as all the rest.
We were still two miles from the target when it started. Two huge explosions folded into one detonation, an eruption of light and noise and blast. Fountained bursts of fire and debris flung up, then a rumbling pause, then shots. Two of Theo’s drones attacked a flight of helicopters which had been warming up for their dawn patrol. All were destroyed, along with the crew’s mess, the armoury, the maintenance hangars and the canteen. At the same time, so it must have seemed to the defenders, their Killbots went berserk. Jimbo Looney himself was on the keyboard, so we learned later, and he turned a pack of four on their stewards, on the guards, on anything that moved inside the wire. Then he assaulted the lines where the soldiers were billeted and the first wave swept in behind.
There is an old story, probably a myth, that Saint David once distributed leeks to his fighters, ordering that they be pinned to the Welshmen’s battle dress so that they might know friend from foe in a muddy struggle with the Saxons. The story says the stratagem was a great success and the Welsh that day gained victory. We copied the idea, with three finger-daubs of metallic paint (scratch-remedy I think it was, silver, for cars): one on the left shoulder, one on the chest and one between the shoulder blades. The idea was to prevent death by friendly fire – the drones and Killbots could see it clearly – but we were not convinced it would be successful. So we kept space between the Killbots and the fighters: Jimbo and his crew pressed home their attacks, all the way to the muzzles of the enemy guns, where, kamikaze fashion, they blew their robots up. After that it was up to us. At Sennybridge I saw it work.
Others have written their accounts. It was not down to Ludo – no. Even after Crian it might have been different, but the country was too small, the confrontation too desperate and desperately cramped, the stakes too high. We were as two Piranhas fighting in a coal hole: only one could live. In Sennybridge, and, we soon learned, around the country, the assault succeeded dreadfully.
Imagine being them. Suddenly the barbarians are over the wire. Your best weapons, your Killbots, turn on you and they are remorseless. Your own drones are slaughtering you. Your air cover has gone, your helicopters are carnaged, your computers won’t talk to you, your phones are dead, anything in the air can’t talk to the ground, your planes are blind, your artillery and fixed positions are being hit by drones or satellites, your mates are dead, your commanders are dead, no one’s coming to help, you can’t get a medic... Some will still fight then, the Specials will, some NCOs and sundry hard nuts, and some did – but the enlisted boys and girls? The ones who were just doing a job? In the back of many minds was the old All-For-One. If we just surrender we’ll go home, they think.
We could not understand most of what they said, the odd word here and there, but screams need no translation. By the time Ludo and I arrived – you should have seen him striding in, hot for it, looking for someone to fight! – our people were giving coups de grace to their wounded, and also to their unwounded. I saw a seventeen-year-old girl with a pistol striding along a line of prisoners. She gut-shot every one: three in the time it took me to get across and stop her. Guts is bad, too. Terrible.
‘What in hell are you doing?’ I scream at her.
‘Killing fuckers!’ she squeals.
I saw then how it would go, as I looked at her, with the bodies she had maimed floundering on the ground behind her. And I sensed that what we were doing we would pay for, though I had no idea how.
White flags flew but gave no succour. By the end of the day tens of hundreds of them were dead and the killing did not stop. The Roman general Agricola had thirty thousand men when he marched into our hills. Our Inva
der came with the same number, and two thirds as many corpses we burned or rolled, heavy and stiffening, into the never-surfeited sea. It was a terrible day, the Day of the Bug.
In the evening, when they had dropped every bomb and fired every missile, Theo sent his drones and satellites their self-destruction codes. Across the skies were explosions like higher fireworks. Everywhere people looked up and saw the tools of their oppression in flames and falling; the heavens rained dead drones. It was like watching the stars burn down. The other sight that lingers is Ludo, in a shot-up room in those barracks, when he realised that his once-dreamed dream of a merciful triumph was slaughtered, dying, screaming for clemency in tongues none cared to understand.
‘What are they doing? Can’t we stop them?’ he roared, and when he saw that I could not, for that is what he meant, and that the curse he had cast the night of Crian’s death was fulfilling, his face filled with disgust. Though it may not have been meant for me it fell on me, and something else went out for me then, and the time of my sorrows came on.
It took two weeks to leash the dogs of war. They were still killing prisoners on the quiet, in lambing sheds and out the back of pubs, until the day Ludo himself shot a man called Maldwin, because Maldwin had been caught charging people to watch prisoners fight his mastiff. That got the message out. And then the other people emerged, the good people, who had been hiding prisoners from the slaughter, concealing them in attics, woodsheds and spare rooms, and Ludo made his famous address – looking like hell – in which he thanked those people, granted freedom to all prisoners and said our darkest chapter was now closed, and all in the islands now were equal, and all life sacred.
Poor man, he looked like the very bandit our enemies had always said he was. The festival of horrors now over, we looked about us with cleared eyes. Like murderers the day after the maddening moon, blood rimmed under our nails, we stared at bitter victory.
We woke to a new country; an overgrown, ragged land, verdant and tumbledown, scarred and dangerous, mined and bombed, with spots like devil-sick where cadavers sank into the undergrowth. The Invaders had closed many roads rather than police them: they were cracked, pitted and overgrown. Bracken and heather had come down from the tops to meet briar and broome from the valleys. Woods had put out, hedges spread, ditches overflowed. There were flocks grazing the main roads and occupying parks in the city centres. Rugby grounds hosted teams of cattle. Wild dogs and crows as big as buzzards lived in evacuated villages where the populations had been transported. There were funerals everywhere at the end of that summer, when people realised their loved ones were not coming back from the struggle. I kept coming across them: crems and little graveyards in the rain, with clumps of small figures in black, desolate, with no coffin to follow.
Ludo went around with a face like a fortnight and barely spoke. In September he disappeared completely. The questions became frantic: where is he? I shook my head and counselled patience because it was not hard to work out. Sure enough, he reappeared with his nose sunburned, still not happy, but at least with a longer stride. He had been to Mecca.
All the while, the people, Ludo’s people, looked to each other and to him and worried the one question none could answer: what becomes of a generation who have killed their way to victory? Oh, we did all the usual things. We rounded up the guns, rolled out post-traumatic-stress counselling, encouraged people to be open about things they had seen and done, and to admit what they regretted. Truth and reconciliation, Ludo decreed, were to be the orders of the day. But although the guns came in and the stories came out, there was a sense of things unfinished, abandoned not resolved.
The planet, at least, was in no doubt about the upshot. From the World Unity Government came the signal we had barely hoped to ever hear: the British Isles were to be an Autonomous Region. The occupying forces of England and Scotland, prisoners behind their own barricades since the Day of the Bug, trembling lest their turn should come, were withdrawn across the channel. Messages of congratulation came in from all over. And so the world and a slaughter-born kingdom waited to see what Ludo and Levello would do.
Part Two
I did not really understand how I lost the two people I loved. Ludo was off with his brother and Uzma in London. I was not invited. I suppose I sulked a bit. I tried to be philosophical. No one wants to know their dirty-worker after the deeds are done.
Ludo set himself up in a beautiful place in London, on the top of a tower in the river wall. He was always a dockside boy in his heart; he loved the water and the light and the great turmoil of faces. He loved being away, I suppose, from the scars of our victory. He loved London and London, now a free trading port, loved him back. Together they became rich. Ludo put a lot of money and effort into expanding her defences, building up her bulwarks against the sea. People started calling it Lundon, in tribute to him.
I didn’t go there. There was a derelict old place on a hill I’d found. I did it up and settled, intending to surrender myself to contemplation, repentance and reading, and told myself I would write these memoirs, or something like them. But I never got round to it, because almost from the first day I had visitors, who soon all said the same thing.
‘It’s not that I want to speak out of turn...’ they’d say, looking nervy, even though they would have already sought and gained assurances that no one else was listening.
‘But it’s Uzma...’
Had I heard what she’d said? Had I seen what she’d done? Did I know about the new mosques, and did I know how much they’d cost – did I know how many were planned? She’d lead prayers there, and made a speech here, and where would it all end, did I think? Frankly I had no idea, but that did not trouble my visitors, who told me anyway.
A Caliphate, a theocracy, that’s where it was going. And what was Ludo doing about it? Was he on her side? Well, wasn’t he? Didn’t everyone know he was a Muslim now?
I was fed up of explaining that there were Muslims and Muslims, just like there were Christians and Christians, and Uzma was a good woman, and Ludo a good man, and no one need worry, and each to their bloody own, and just leave me be!
They wouldn’t leave me be.
All the mutterings swelled to a scream a year after the end of the war, on a Friday at the end of Ramadan, when Uzma lead prayers for ten thousand up on Crystal Bluff. Some idiots, and I know who they were, set off smoke bombs in the crowd. The bombs didn’t kill anyone but the stampede did – ninety-eight people, and over two hundred hurt. Suddenly Ludo’s kingdom was split and smoking, like an oak struck by lightning. Oh, he made his appeals, but he looked confused, I thought, and, for the first time, irrelevant. There were no personalities involved, somehow, except for Uzma’s. It was about tides, about tribes. The Traditionalists, they called themselves – though they were a scramble of faiths and disbeliefs – versus the Believers.
The Trads had their big jamboree every May day. For two years in a row it ended in sectarian riots in dozens of towns. And what did they want? Or rather, who did they want at the head of this hurdy-gurdy wreck of a thing? Me! Bloody Cut-lip bloody Clip, and it did not matter how often I told them I would have nothing to do with it. It was still me they chanted for. How the rabblement love to hate you until they need to love you! And the old networks, my old networks were active again – let’s have Rebellion Day Two, they said, but this time let’s get it right. Let’s bring down the brothers and kill their wretched woman (they had other names for her) and you won’t have to take over, no, no, just help us get set up with decent government, secular government, put the Believers back in their box, no one else needs to get hurt and we’ll all be happy.
It rose to such a pitch and frequency that I almost said, right, let’s get it over with, then. But I never quite did say that, never got around to saying it or not saying it again, because one fine morning when I was almost happy because I had recently thrown away my phone and put chains around the gate on the track – not that they would greatly deter my stream of supplicants – around
ten o’clock, when I was just making my second pot of tea, a helicopter landed in the meadow and the only man I ever really loved came striding up the track.
‘Lovely morning, Clip! Put the kettle on, mun.’
‘It’s already brewing, Ludo.’
‘Are we talking tea now, or something stronger?’
He looked as bouncy as a young ram, though he must have been in his mid forties then.
‘Come in,’ I said, weakly.
‘Dare I?’ he said, grinning, head back and hands on hips. ‘I hear you’ve an infestation of rats.’
‘I keep telling them...’
‘You can’t tell rats anything, can you? Better just splat them, isn’t it? Well?’
‘I’ve done splatting.’
‘Oh, we’ve all done that,’ he said. ‘Got any milk, or do I have to wring it out of something?’
I took him out the back. Ludo put his hands behind his head and sprawled on his seat, gazing out at the Beacons, at Pen-y-Fan, as it rode up into the springing blue.
I set the tea things down and poured and sipped and waited.
‘Biscuit, Clip?’ said Ludo, with a look I knew.
‘No thank you, they’re for you.’
‘Go on. Have a biscuit.’
‘No, really, I’m...’
‘You might like a biscuit. Look, there’s a chocolate one, have that.’
‘Ludo...’
‘It’s hard, isn’t it, when someone keeps offering. You’re tempted to take it just to shut them up.’
‘I don’t want anything to do with it!’
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