I found us a table and, having paid, Simon folded himself into the booth opposite me. The room was loud with the clank of cutlery and rank with cigarette smoke. The floor beneath our table was slimy with mashed peas. “Too utterly grotesque,” groaned Simon, but not without a certain grim satisfaction. “A real pigsty. The Motormaniacs strike again.”
I sipped my tea. The balance of milk to brew had been seriously overestimated, but never mind; it was hot. “You want me to drive a while? I’m happy to spell you.”
Simon dashed brown vinegar from a satchet over his chicken and chips. He speared a long sliver of potato; the soggy digit dangled limply from his fork. He glared at it in disgust before popping it into his mouth, then slowly turned his basilisk gaze toward the food counter and the kitchen beyond. “These subliterate drones have no higher challenge to their vestigial mental faculties than to dip overprocessed potatoes into warm oil,” he said icily. “You’d think they’d get it right eventually—the laws of chance, if nothing else.”
I didn’t want to get involved, so I unwrapped my Twix and broke off a piece. “How much farther to Inverness, do you reckon?”
Writing off the chips as a total loss, Simon moved on to the chicken, grimacing as he wrestled a strip of woody flesh from the carcass. “Putrid,” was his verdict. “I don’t mind it being lukewarm, but I hate congealed chicken. It should have been chucked in the bin hours ago.” He shoved the plate aside violently, scattering greasy chips across the table.
“The apple whatsit looks good,” I observed, more out of pity than conviction.
Simon pulled the bowl to him and tested the contents with a spoon. He made a face and spat the mouthful back into the bowl. “Nauseating,” he declared. “England produces the finest apples on the planet, and these malfeasant cretins use infectious tinned refuse from some flyblown police state. Moreover, we stand amidst dairyland which is the envy of the free world, a land veritably flowing with milk and honey, but what do we get? Freeze-dried vegi-milk substitute reconstituted with dishwater. It’s criminal.”
“It’s road food, Simon. Forget it.”
“It’s stupid bloody-mindedness,” he replied, taking up the bowl and lifting it high. I was afraid he was going to fling it across the room. Instead, he overturned it ceremoniously upon the offending chicken and greasy chips. He pulled his coffee to him, and I offered him half of my chocolate bar, hoping to pacify.
“I don’t mind the money,” he said softly. “I don’t mind throwing money away—I do that all the time. What I mind is the cynicism.”
“Cynicism?” I wondered. “Highway robbery, perhaps, but I wouldn’t call it cynicism.”
“My dear fellow, that’s exactly what it is. You see, the thieving blighters know they have you—you’re trapped here on the motorway. You can’t simply stroll along to the competitor next door. You’re tired, need a respite from the road. They put up this façade and pretend to offer you succor and sustenance. But it’s a lie. They offer swill and offal, and we have to take it. They know we won’t say anything. We’re English! We don’t like to make a fuss. We take whatever we’re given, because, really, we don’t deserve any better. The smarmy brigands know this, and they wield it like a bludgeon. I call that bloody cynical.”
“Pipe down,” I whispered. “People are staring.”
“Let them!” Simon shouted. “These scum-sucking slop merchants have stolen my money, but they do not get my calm acceptance of the fact. They do not get my meek submission.”
“All right, all right. Take it easy, Simon,” I said. “Let’s just go, okay?”
He threw the coffee cup down on the table, got up, and stalked out. I took a last sip of tea and hurried after him—pausing in the parking lot to gaze in envy at the punters taking tea in the comfort and privacy of their automobiles. It suddenly seemed the height of prudence and taste.
Simon had the car running by the time I caught up with him. “You knew what it would be like when you went in there,” I charged, climbing in. “Honestly, sometimes I think you do this on purpose, just so you can gripe about it afterwards.”
“Am I to blame for their criminal incompetence?” he roared. “Am I responsible?”
“You know what I mean,” I maintained. “It’s slumming, Simon. It’s your vice.”
He threw the car into gear, and we rocketed through the parking lot and out onto the motorway. It was a good few minutes before Simon spoke again. The silence was merely the calm before the storm; he was working up to one of his tirades. I knew the signs well enough, and, judging from the intensity with which he grasped the steering wheel, the storm was going to be a doozey. The air fairly trembled with pent-up fury.
Simon drew a breath and I braced myself for the blast.
“We are doomed, of course,” he said slowly, picking out each word as if it were a stone for a slingshot. “Doomed like rats in a rain barrel.”
“Spare me.”
“Did you know,” he said, assuming my ignorance, “that when Constantine the Great won the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the year 312, he decided to put up a triumphal arch to commemorate his great victory?”
“Listen, do we have to go into this?”
“Well, he did. The only problem was that he could find no artists worthy of the project. He sent throughout the whole Roman Empire but couldn’t find a single sculptor who could produce even a halfway acceptable battle frieze or victory statue. Not a man easily deterred, however, Constantine ordered his masons to remove statuary from other arches and attach them to his. The artists of his age were simply not up to the task, you see.”
“Whatever you say,” I grumped.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “Gibbon considered it the turning point of Roman history, the beginning of the decline. And it’s been downhill for Western civilization ever since. Look around, sport; we have finally reached the nadir. The end of the line. Finis! Kaput! We are doomed.”
“Oh, please don’t let’s start—” My plea was a paper parasol raised against a typhoon.
“Doomed,” he repeated for emphasis, rolling the word out like a cannonball. “No doubt there was a curse placed upon our sorry heads from the cradle. You’re an American, Lewis; you must have noticed—it’s in our very demeanor. We British are a doomed race.”
“You look like you’re doing all right to me,” I told him sourly. “You’re surviving.”
“Oh? Do we look like a surviving civilization to you? Consider our appearance: our hair is limp and greasy, our skin is spotty, our flesh pallid and scabby, our noses misshapen. Our chins recede, our foreheads slope, our cheeks run to jowl, and our stomachs to paunch; stoop-shouldered, bent-backed, spindle-legged, we are rumpled, shaggy, and unkempt. Our eyes are weak, our teeth are crooked, our breath is bad. We are gloomy, depressed, anemic, and wan.”
“Easy for you to say,” I remarked, seeing as how Simon displayed absolutely none of the physical defects he described. His own physique was blissfully free of blemish; his words were smoke and sizzle without the fire, all hat and no rabbit. As expected, he ignored me.
“Surviving? Ha! The very air is poisonous. And the water—that is poisonous too. And the food—that is really poisonous! Let’s talk about the food, shall we? Everything is mass-produced by devious men in salmonella factories for the sole purpose of infecting as many consumers as possible and charging them for the privilege, before turning them over to the National Health, who give ’em the chop and a hasty, anonymous burial.
“And if, by some miracle, we should somehow survive our meager noonday repast, we are sure to be done in by the unrelenting meanness of our very existence. Look at us! We slog numb and shell-shocked through bleak, pestilential cities, inhaling noxious gases spewed from obsolete factories, clutching wretched plastic bags full of toxic meat and carcinogenic vegetables. The stinking rich amass wealth in tax-exempt offshore capital investment accounts, while the rest struggle along stark streets knee-deep in canine excrement to punch the time clock in soulstifling s
weatshops for the wherewithal to buy a rind of rancid cheese and a tin of beans with our overtaxed, undervalued pound.
“Observe any street in any city! You’ll see us shuffling grimly from one hateful upmarket boutique to another, wasting our substance on obnoxious designer clothes that do not fit, and buying gray cardboard shoes made by slave labor in the gulags, and being routinely abused by blowzy, brain-dead shop assistants with blue mascara and chicken-fleshed legs. Overwhelmed by marketing forces beyond our ken and purchasing wildly complicated Korean appliances we neither want nor need with hologrammed plastic cash from smug, spottyfaced junior sales managers in yellow ties and too-tight trousers who can’t wait to scuttle off to the nearest pub to suck down pints of watery beer and leer at adenoidal secretaries wearing black leather miniskirts and see-through blouses.”
Simon had liftoff. I settled back for the ride as his cavalcade of horror rolled on. It was all about the Channel tunnel and a landscape awash in Eurotrash and French fashion victims and acid rain and lugubrious Belgians and Iranian language students and lager louts swilling Heineken and football hooligans and holes in the ozone layer and Italian playboys, and South American drug lords and Swiss banks and AmEx Goldcards and the greenhouse effect and the Age of Inconsequence, and so on and so forth.
Simon clutched the steering wheel with both hands and punched the accelerator for emphasis, bobbing his head to the cadence of his words and glancing sideways at me every now and then to make sure I was still listening. Meanwhile, I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to toss a monkey wrench into his fast-whirling gears.
“We don’t have any place to call our own, but we’ll all have cold Guinness in cans and inscrutable Braun coffeemakers and chic Benetton sweatshirts and nifty Nike Cross-Trainers and gold-plated Mont Blanc fountain pens and Canon fax machines and Renaults and Porsches and Mercedes and Saabs and Fiats and Yugos and Ladas and Hyundais and Givenchy and Chanel pour Homme and Aeroflot holidays and Costa Del Sol condos and Piat D’Or and Viva España and Sony, and Yamaha and Suzuki and Honda and Hitachi and Toshiba and Kawasaki and Nissan and Minolta and Panasonic and Mitsu-bloody-bishi!
“Do we care?” he demanded rhetorically. “Hell, no! We don’t bat an eye. We don’t turn a hair. We don’t twitch a solitary sedentary muscle. We sit transfixed before the Tube Almig
THE STORY CONTINUES IN
THE PARADISE WAR
by STEPHEN LAWHEAD
OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN R. LAWHEAD
THE BRIGHT EMPIRES SERIES:
THE SKIN MAP
THE BONE HOUSE
THE SPIRIT WELL
KING RAVEN TRILOGY:
HOOD
SCARLET
TUCK
PATRICK, SON OF IRELAND
THE CELTIC CRUSADES:
THE IRON LANCE
THE BLACK ROOD
THE MYSTIC ROSE
BYZANTIUM
SONG OF ALBION TRILOGY:
THE PARADISE WAR
THE SILVER HAND
THE ENDLES KNOT
THE PENDRAGON CYCLE:
TALIESIN
MERLIN
ARTHUR
PENDRAGON
GRAIL
AVALON
EMPYRION I: THE SEARCH FOR FIERRA
EMPYRION II: THE SIEGE OF DOME
DREAM THIEF
THE DRAGON KING TRILOGY:
IN THE HALL OF THE DRAGON KING
THE WARLORDS OF NIN
THE SWORD AND THE FLAME
Stephen R. Lawhead is an internationally acclaimed author of mythic history and imaginative fiction. He is the author of such epics as The King Raven, Song of Albion, and Dragon King Trilogies. Lawhead makes his home in Oxford, England, with his wife.
COMING SEPTEMBER 2013
A BRIGHT EMPIRES NOVEL
Quest the Fourth
THE
SHADOW LAMP
The Spirit Well (Bright Empires) Page 34