Castles Made of Sand

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Because I’m not a tawny owl,’ many voices murmured the response.

  ‘They came for the water voles, and I said nothing,’ piped up Jackie Dando, Romany and ex-regular, entrepreneur who kept the band supplied with drugs.

  ‘Because I’m not a water vole,’ the sad chorus answered.

  ‘They came for the buttercups,’ sighed Brock, one broad hand on the hilt of the naked sword at his side, the other tucked in his rifle sling. ‘And I said nothing.’

  ‘Because I’m not a buttercup,’ moaned the barmies, mournful and low.

  Fergal, tramping beside Sage in the middle of the troop, glanced curiously at the living skull, clearly wondering what to make of this. Oh, you wait, thought Sage. You have no idea. They can keep the litany going indefinite.

  ‘Brock.’

  ‘Yeah, Sage?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  From the top of a rise they looked down on a small wood, roughly circular, a red earth track connecting it to one of the little grey lanes that wandered over the plain of the Trent. They knew there was a clearing in the centre, obscured by foliage. Their tech couldn’t give them much detail. Wethamcote, with its church towers, couple of tower blocks, suburban housing, lay to the west. A farm and outbuildings stood about a mile away; there was no track between the farm buildings and the wood.

  ‘The clearing wasn’t there six years ago,’ said Ax, ‘for what that’s worth… It’s a likely candidate; let’s get down there.’

  Onward.

  ‘It’ll be the horse-sacrifice,’ said one barmy to another, ‘that’s the biggie.’

  ‘You seen it done?’ asked his partner, in a cautious undertone. They knew what Ax thought about blood-daubed Pagan rituals.

  ‘Er, yeah, as it happens. Down in Kent, last year. Just out of curiosity.’

  ‘That must make a fuck of a mess, disembowelling a live horse to death.’

  ‘You bet. Don’t worry, if we find an active venue there’ll be no doubt.’

  Ax was in the lead, watching the silent fields, feeling the mood of the barmies; missing Sage’s physical presence at his side, but they couldn’t both nursemaid the Irishman… He should have known that the smack meant trouble. But he had reached for that solace himself, when he was hard-pressed, and he hadn’t had the heart to blame the guy. Shit, if I lose David Sale, what then? The choices that he’d made were forcing him down an ever-narrower path, to an end which he had foreseen, but foresight doesn’t help. I’ll have to quit the band, he thought. Jordan’s right, this isn’t fair. I have to admit that my life as a musician is over.

  It felt like death. It felt like an unforgivable crime—

  They reached the wood. The men fanned out, muttering about armed, sentient trees, trained to attack like Navy dolphins. Cyborg birds with cameras for eyes, Wiccan spiderwebs wired to the police station (obviously the police in town were raving Pagans, or they’d have closed the hardcore down). The jokes were many, but there was an edge to them. Ax kept his rifle on his back; so did Sage. The lads got into comfort mode.

  ‘Please,’ said Ax, resignedly, ‘don’t open fire on any squirrels, badgers, or bluetits—’

  ‘N-not unless they shoot first, right Ax?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’

  Their tech said there was nothing warm and big here besides themselves. The trees were thick and in full leaf. The lads moved through them, commendably silent. Everyone reached the perimeter of the clearing more or less together, and found a tall wattle fence around it, as if holding back the trees. There was a gate: barred but not secured; they went in. Inside the earth was bare and level, as if beaten by many feet. On one side, incongruously, stood a grey prefabricated hut, like a festival ground toilet block. The centre space was taken up by a gaping, smooth-walled pit, dug out to a startling depth. At the bottom, in the midst of the pit, stood two dark trunks of carved wood, like totem poles. Lashed to the top of each of these was the remains of a human body: a young man and a young woman. They seemed to have been naked, but it was hard to tell, through the blood, after the way the bodies had been ripped apart.

  There was a thick butcher-shop smell, mingled with other scents less insistent: an earthy incense, piss and sweat, fecal matter, grease and fear.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ said Jackie, pleased, ‘how’s that for a smoking gun?’

  ‘Shit,’ gasped another lad, more attentive. ‘How? H-how’d they do that?’

  The totem poles were very tall, three, four metres: and the bodies appeared to have been ripped to bits in situ.

  ‘Looks like…some kind of large meat-tearing animal?’

  ‘Well, thanks, Sage,’ wailed the young man. ‘That’s really fuckin’ helpful!’

  ‘Sorry. Okay, let’s have a closer look.’

  Aoxomoxoa swung himself over the rim, hung there and dropped lightly. He walked around looking up at the grisly remains. ‘Dead no more than a day or so, I’d say. Fuck. Definitely claws and teeth. Dogs or something. Fucking big dogs. One skull crushed, front to back, not much face left. The other, er, missing.’

  ‘Is someone recording this?’ asked Ax.

  ‘Yeah, Ax.’

  ‘Good. Make it thorough, try not to disturb anything. Sage, will you get out of that, now.’

  Chris, the lad with the cam, made his record. Brock unrolled a climbing rope, because even Aoxomoxoa might find coming up those slick walls a challenge. Fergal joined Ax. The rest of the barmies were hanging back, devoid of the ghoulish curiosity you’d expect from such a bunch of ruffians.

  ‘We should get away from here,’ whispered Fergal. ‘Away, right now.’

  The words sounded panicky. The look he turned on Ax was of stern, vindicated satisfaction.

  Fiorinda and her escort were at the Rose and Crown, a fine old inn on Wethamcote’s market square. She was at breakfast when the call came from her Triumvirate partners. She went off to her bedroom to talk to them. When she came down she told the others that the sacrifice venue was found, and they must stop asking questions: lay off the topic. Nothing more. She lived with her special knowledge through the kiddies’ bonfire building by the river, the madrigals and folkdancing in the square, the lunch in the mediaeval church (where the Christians were broadmindedly serving Lammas bread and ale). The crew had put up big screens in a public park, where Wethamcote’s teens, and plenty of their elders, gathered excitedly for recorded footage of the summer’s big outdoor gigs. Wethamcote hadn’t had reliable tv or broadband reception for several years. They’d learned to live with the power-cuts, interrupted water supply and so on, but being cut off from the media had been, people said, the hardest loss. Made you feel as if you didn’t exist. They had longed for the Reich to notice them, and nobody ever had… As Fiorinda walked to and fro, through the garlanded streets, people kept coming up, old and young, all dress codes, wanting to tell her how wonderful it was to see her. To be remembered.

  The security crew fielded a graveyard full of posies.

  The Adjuvants didn’t seem to mind being sidelined.

  It was five in the afternoon before she escaped. Roxane had just returned to the fray, from hir afternoon nap: Chip and Verlaine were tireless. She left them playing bar billiards, and discussing with some locals when the ancient feast of of Lammas ought to be celebrated. Given the calendar changes, right back to Julius Caesar… Upstairs in her pleasant room, with the wonky floor, the pretty view, the dead tv peering from its perch, she sat on the side of the bed, head in her hands.

  Maybe this is it.

  For a long time now, she had been afraid. Since when? Not when the old man took her, like a piece of fruit. Fiorinda had been in charge then, a child with a plan and not a qualm about trading sexual favours for her big break. Not when Rufus had left her pregnant, or even when her baby died. She had lived in pain (and to an extent maybe she always would, because you don’t ever really get over stuff like that); but not afraid. Not even after Dissolution, when she found she could touch the fire, pick up
a flame in her hand. Dreamlike, inexplicable, but so much of what was going on was dreamlike, bizarre. Ignore it, it’ll go away.

  She had only been afraid since the Mayday Concert at Rivermead when she had just turned eighteen, and her father came to claim her in the form of a bouquet of roses. She’d torn his flowers to pieces, blood on the thorns. She’d fought for her life that night and beaten him off, but she would have lost if Ax and Sage hadn’t been there. She’d probably said some mad things, but luckily they’d been forgotten, disregarded. Fiorinda had a mega panic attack, brought on by stress and her damaged-child past, no other explanation needed—

  But Fiorinda knew because she knew. She knew what her father was, without ever putting it into words, not even in her own mind: and she knew she must never tell anyone. So then it was just living in fear, being very happy despite the fear. Forgetting the terrible immediacy of that night, hoping that she was delusional. Hoping Sage, who’d seen her with the fire, had forgotten or counted it as an optical illusion. Just poor damaged Fiorinda, still secretly obsessed with her father, how embarrassing—

  Then along comes Fergal Kearney, using the word magic with horror and revulsion, and crazy Fiorinda finds she knows DAMN well what he means. The horror in her blood. Two days ago she’d visited Rufus’s manor house: found nothing there, not a qualm, and what a reprieve… But now this. The human sacrifice? No, something worse than ritual murder. Something in her lovers’ voices. Something they weren’t telling her, and the tone in which Fergal, back in Brixton, had pronounced that word magic.

  Limitless fear. He is hunting me down.

  He will break through these people to find me, these cheerful, suffering people of England, the way he once broke into my body—

  She stayed like that for what felt like a long time, her thoughts in chaos, fists knotted and pressed against her temples. Then, moving briskly, she got up, changed out of her garden-party frock into practical clothes, tied her hair in a scarf and slung her tapestry rucksack on her shoulders. She slipped a note under the door of the room that Rox was sharing with Verlaine (for old sakes’ sake, though everyone knew it was Chip and Ver who were the item these days). GONE FISHING, SEE YOU IN THE MORNING. She had a calm word with the security crew in the van, in the Rose and Crown’s carpark. Hailed a cycle taxi and had it drop her at a roofless out-of-town shopping mall. Preparations for some theatre and dance were going on, but nobody saw Fiorinda. She set off on foot into the fields, heading for the venue Ax and Sage had described.

  It took her about an hour to reach the grove.

  Where the red track entered the trees a few wildflowers survived, in the margin of the potato rows. There’s Rest Harrow, the creeping herb with small dark leaves and dusty pink sickle-shaped flowers, lover of edges and broken ground. ‘I don’t like pink,’ she murmured—but she picked a sprig, because the flower reminded her of Sage and Ax, serenading her with her own music. She entered the enclosure, twisting the stem of Rest Harrow between her fingers, and walked around, looking at the objects hung on the wicker walls. Animal skulls. Clay pots full of grease. Stones and bones. Painted symbols, blah… Like gran’s witchy basement. Nothing to be afraid of.

  At last she knelt on the rim of the pit. Something in her rose to greet the savagery down there with the same acceptance, the same bleak welcoming that she had felt on other occasions. Massacre Night, a friend lying screaming, trying to hold his ripped belly together. The withered body of a murdered child. Yes. This is the truth about the world, the inside of things, let it be seen, let everyone know… But she remembered Fergal Kearney saying how real do you want it?, and her fear of spooks, of an evil superman, seemed like an insult to the dead. Poor kids, whoever you were. Poor broken flesh, I didn’t mean it, what’s worse than this? Nothing. Her vision blurred, her eyes brimmed—

  She wiped her eyes and stood up. The sprig of Rest Harrow, with Fiorinda’s salt tears clinging to it, dropped into the pit. A toilet block, a little generator in a concrete hutch…well, how civilised. Bastards.

  Better not stay too long. It’s not what I thought, but this is an evil place.

  It was twilight when she found the strip of trees where the barmies were camped. She’d called them once, been afraid she’d have to call them again and ask for more directions, breach of security, what a klutz. But no, a sentry loomed out of leaf-dapple shadows, a big sturdy woman-warrior (the barmy army had a few of those). A veteran: the enamel pin on her teeshirt, a circlet of moorland rushes, said she’d been at Yap Moss, the last battle of the Islamic Campaign. She seemed reluctant to let Fiorinda by.

  ‘Hi. Er, was there a password?’

  ‘Oh, Fiorinda., I’m fucking glad you’re here. This is bad shit. Really bad, unbelievable. Dogs can’t jump that high.’

  Unpremeditated, Fiorinda pushed the rifle aside and hugged the woman.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  The barmies were in the middle of the trees, ragamuffin men, looking scared, sitting around in a circle. She knew them, at least by sight: they’d all been in Ax and Sage’s guerrilla band, in Yorkshire. They all stood up, clutching weapons.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, to her boyfriends. ‘I had to see for myself.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Ax. ‘Understood.’

  They hugged her briefly, first Ax and then Sage. Everybody sat down. Sage’s arm stayed around her—an unusual public display of affection, but she wasn’t complaining. ‘Any new developments?’

  ‘Well, the farmer’s co-operating,’ said Sage. ‘He admits he’s allowed the wood to be used as a venue for a couple of years. He claims he had no choice, which is probably true, but he’s paid handsomely, anonymous packets of notes. He stays away from there, especially around the big dates, but he knew about the pit. He thought it was for the horse sacrifice. He swears he had no idea about the rest.’

  ‘He gets a warning. The cars arrive late,’ said Ax. ‘They park in a layby, they leave before dawn. That’s all we’ve got out of him so far, except he confirms the opinion of our experts—’ A few of the barmies cringed at this, like pack members who have been nipped and cuffed by father wolf. ‘He expects them back on Lammas’ Eve, that is tomorrow night.’

  ‘They’ll be doing a triad,’ offered big Brock, very subdued. ‘They do three sacrifices over a feast like Lammas, an’ keep the bodies displayed if they can get away with it, ter hallow the ground. But I’m talking animals, horses and dogs. Cats, if they are hard up. I’ve never heard of…anything the fuck like that.’

  ‘I wish to tell you, Fiorinda,’ muttered Fergal Kearney, ‘that this is not the ancient ways, this is foul invention. The only meaning it has is for hurrying on the dark, which some bastard fellers think a fine plan—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ax cut him off. ‘Right.’ He looked at the sky, reached in his pocket for cigarettes and took one out; but didn’t light it. Last sawm he’d given up all drugs for the entire month. He didn’t see himself managing that this year, but he could hang on for half an hour. ‘We’re not talking to the local coppers, for obvious reasons, but we’ve arranged for reinforcements. We’ve called in the West Mid armed response squad, and sent for more barmies.’

  ‘The farmer and his family are under close guard,’ said Sage, ‘in case they were thinking of giving anyone a call. We can’t be sure we haven’t been spotted and frightened them off, but if they come back, we’ll be ready.’

  ‘Like a night club raid,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Switch on the big lights, close down the exits and move in. Hey, is human sacrifice the new cocaine?’

  Her levity did not go down well. Someone whispered, ‘It wasn’t dogs.’

  Another voice added, in a hollow tone, ‘We were scared before we got near.’

  ‘An’ that’s not like us, Fiorinda.’

  ‘There was an aura.’

  ‘Fuckin’ Pagans. They use dark, inhuman forces.’

  Angry glances shot around: there were Pagans in the band. You can believe in the old religion without being a sadistic murderou
s neo-feudalist.

  ‘Oh come off it,’ said Fiorinda, briskly. ‘Pagans, Anabaptists, what’s the difference where they go to church? What we have here are some sad bastards whose idea of fun is to watch human beings get ripped apart. There’s nothing unheard of or supernatural in that, unfortunately.’

  The barmies were not yet convinced. ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ announced Zip Crimson, the sharp-dressing hippy kid who was one of the babies of this gang. ‘It’s fascist mediaeval screw the workers shite, an’ I hate the stuff. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen.’

  ‘You could be right. All I’m saying is: not this time. I’ve seen the bodies. I know it looks bizarre. I don’t know what the hell is going on, any more than you do. But trust me, there’ll be a natural explanation. It wasn’t werewolves.’

  ‘Thank you, Fiorinda,’ said Ax. ‘I’m glad we can dismiss that option.’ He put the cigarette back into the pack, saved by the realisation that he was starving. ‘Now, can we eat? The sun is finally over the yard arm.’

  The men relaxed, steadied and possibly shamed by Fiorinda’s calm. A vegetable stew, which had been cooking in an ATP haybox stove, was served (the infidel had all waited to eat with Ax). Everyone ate with mechanical fervour, like good soldiers: Fiorinda did the same, because it would please the lads. They drank water—which the barmies carried with them. None of them would touch agribusiness ground-water—; apart from the Irishman, who had his medicinal ration of red wine. Fiorinda’s saltbox was passed around, and even Fergal, who had hardly tasted his stew, made sure he got hold of it. As he dipped his fingers he looked across the shadows, and their eyes met. He put the salt on his tongue, nodded fractionally, and then quickly looked away.

  It was late before the Triumvirate escaped to the officers’ bender, set deeper into the trees. Sage and Ax shucked their rifles. Sage took off the mask and lit an ATP globe on the groundsheet floor. They sat around the glow, silent in the sheer relief of getting off stage.