Band of Gypsys

by Gwyneth Jones

  The prisoners in the red room were almost as poorly informed as the garrison. Their shutters had been locked as usual, and the outer door of the suite secured, when the servants left after dinner. Their suite was so deep inside the house they would hardly have heard a rocket attack on the distant façade. They wouldn’t know when the power was cut off, (which should have happened early on): their corridor had never been on the Wallingham House private renewables grid. Ax and Fiorinda sat on the bed, watching the lamplit room from a cave of curtains; holding Sage’s hands while he lay on his back and kept his head still. His eyes were much better, but still heavily bandaged most of the time. They made conversation, the real words silenced.

  ‘It’s chilly tonight,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Don’t you feel that the season turned this week, like a leaf? Like a waterwheel, tipping over into autumn?’

  ‘You “feel” that cos you know it’s close on equinox, my brat.’

  ‘What does an equinox do? Is it registered by our brains?’

  ‘Yeah, whether you know it or not. It makes you happy, slightly.’

  ‘It’s always cold in here,’ complained Ax. ‘I’m dreading the winter.’

  Endless corridors, endless galleries, endless vast public rooms. The word had been around midnight, but Ax didn’t know if that meant kick off or the perimeter taken. If midnight was the perimeter they should be inside by now. How long before they locate us? It’s good that we can’t get out of the suite, he told himself. We’d be fools to be out there, don’t want to commit prematurely. If they fail we’re innocent, we knew nothing.

  Fat chance of getting away with that—

  He listened: searching the silence until he thought he could hear the guards breathing outside the barred door of the suite. Calculating, approximating as best he could. This part of the May plan had never been executed, there’d been no need for it. The ground floor window that is only directly visible to camera eyes, no sight lines. Get basement and ground floor locked down, leave a party to mop up. A couple of men to run a firecheck on the non-combatant servants in their quarters, and keep them quiet while the main force sweeps up and inward. Clear up as you go, and you should never have to engage with major numbers—

  You don’t know where we are, that wasn’t on the plan, you’ll have to work it out. Don’t head for the show-off rooms the Preston family occupied.

  It’s a fortress, what does that tell you, trainspotters?

  Make for the central keep.

  find out if we can fly—

  Ax’s imaginary Scots were still on the ground floor when there was a muffled thunder of boots outside. They got off the bed, Sage too, nerves thrilling, is it fight or flight? A mass of armed men, must have been twenty of them, burst into the royal bedchamber. Oh, fuck. Never-seen-action fatigues. Not the rescue party.

  ‘You’re to come with us!’ yelled the foremost guy, red and blue flashes on his sleeves and shoulders: an officer in Wallingham’s private army. ‘Come on! Now!’ He was wildly brandishing an assault rifle, lost to all respect.

  Ax set the barrel of the gun aside (it had been jabbing at Fiorinda). ‘Come with you? Why? It’s the middle of the night. What’s going on?’

  ‘There’s a helicopter waiting, Mr Preston,’ cried a second, calmer man with officer’s flashes. ‘On the roof of the great library. You have to come quickly Sir, Ma’am,’ He looked at Sage, and flinched away from the Zen Self champion’s bandaged blindness. ‘And Mr Pender.’

  ‘But…but wouldn’t we be safer staying in here?’ said Fiorinda doubtfully. ‘If there’s some kind of trouble?’

  I could do it, thought Ax. The guy who just called me Mr Preston, not that sickening Your Majesty, he could be turned. I could grab the wavering rifle from Mr Weak Link there, turn this around. All it takes is boldness. But what then? What then…? He stared at Fiorinda, rushing on disaster, telling her we are fucked, I won’t kill and they’ll call my bluff. I can’t do it.

  Fiorinda stared back, grey eyes like stones in the dim light.

  ‘Just wait a moment,’ said Ax. ‘I asked you to tell me what’s going on. Is the house on fire, is this a drill? Has war been declared?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Sage, unhurriedly. ‘What the fuck’s up?’

  Both officers were very disconcerted to be addressed by blind Sage. They glanced at each other, breathing hard, and quickly eyes front again.

  ‘There’s been a disturbance,’ cried Mr Nice. ‘A… Possibly a break in.’

  ‘You don’t need to know!’ shouted Frantic Guy, rifle flapping again. ‘It’s not for you to know. You just come with us, right now!’

  Their men were in a tight pack, looking nervously around the room.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Ax. ‘We hear you. Give us a few moments to pack.’

  Everything they meant to carry was already assembled by the bed. He headed for the armoire, took down a suitcase and began to fill it with clothes they never wanted to see again: with an appearance of haste but no hurry. Fiorinda, whatever you’re going to do, do it. Oh shit, my babe, magic drives people mad, and you’ve already been to that hell once. How can I ever escape from doing violence? How cold it is over here. He wanted to tell her no! Don’t do it to yourself, we’ll find another way… When he realised that his throat had closed, his mouth was dry. He was in the grip of an overwhelming dread, coming at him from the ghost’s favourite territory.

  The Haunting Of The Red Bedchamber had served its purpose when they’d heard it mentioned by the servants—since they happened to know that Sage and Fiorinda’d made the fucking thing up. Their friend the ghost had confirmed that the bedroom was bugged; and was a good psychological tool. The ghost was always listening. Told ourselves there were no cameras or mics inside the bedcurtains but never dared believe it. Fucking sickening. So there’s no ghost, there never was a ghost, but his hands had begun to shake. Something invisible, animal and repellent watched him, creeping closer. He kept shovelling clothes, slow make it look fast, this is not a small thing, this is too much babe, don’t know if I can stand up and get back to you…

  Mr Frantic shouted incoherently, rushed over and grabbed Ax by the shoulder. Ax turned, slow make it look fast: raising an eyebrow.

  One of the men in the pack wailed aloud. They were backed up on each other like sheep, up against the wall by the fireplace. Mr Nice, lightish skinned, round in the face, was a sick shade of grey. He yelled at his partner. ‘You don’t touch Ax! You don’t lay your hands on Ax!’

  But he was backing up himself, and so was Mr Frantic. What did they see? It had them penned: an invisible black sheepdog. Ax stumbled to his feet, dread like a tugging wave. Fiorinda was staring at the invisible black dog too, and Sage’s bandaged eyes were fixed on the same spot. Ax crossed the room, they scooped their bags, their treasures, the First Aid: bolted through the suite, slammed the outer door and crashed the bars into their sockets.

  The night guards must be in the red room with the others. The corridor was empty and dim: lit by infrequent ATP lamps in wall brackets. Somewhere, not far away, there was a considerable firefight going on.

  ‘My God,’ gasped Ax. ‘That was strong medicine, Fiorinda.’

  ‘Fuck!’ breathed Sage. ‘It was real, there was a real ghost! Hahaha!’

  Fiorinda was chalk pale, her eyes huge. ‘I’ve seen that happen before. I didn’t do it Ax. The internal world and the external world change places. They did it to themselves. They had laid hands on the king.’ She stared at them. ‘The ghost was Wallingham… We’re all playing with fire.’

  They listened to the sounds of battle, and grew calm.

  In his blind negotiations, Ax had tried to insist on non-lethals as weapons of first resort, zero casualties as the objective: starting the bidding low to keep the final price down. Who knows if the Scots had understood, or complied? Battle plans always break down at some point. No regrets, but the size of what they had done came home to them.

  ‘We better get this under control,’ sa
id Ax. ‘You up for that, big cat?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Lead on. Jus’ make sure I don’t fall over anything.’

  ‘Go ahead, I’ll take care of the old lady,’ said Fiorinda.

  Running through stately corridors in the dark, it was like high-class hide and seek: except for the smell of cordite, the glue-sniffer sting of non-lethals. Hoping not to hit any tear gas. Yells and flashes below as she crossed a gulf of stairwell. She found an English body, and shame gripped her. We did this. Oh, fuck. More English bodies. At least these ones weren’t dead, just moaning and wriggling in the grip of sticky webbing—

  Lady Anne had been sleeping when the attack came. Like Margaret Thatcher, she needed very little sleep: but she treasured the hours from midnight to three am, when she relinquished command to Tom Lacey, Wallingham’s peerless steward; her ally in many skirmishes with the conniving National Trust, years ago. Usually she slept unaided, but she had taken a pill, tailored to give her a measured dose of oblivion, as she was exhausted by the stress of the Mr Pender situation. She had a guilty fondness for prescription drugs.

  She had known nothing of Tom Lacey’s last stand, or the decision to move the prisoners. Her household officers had been unable to page her rooms, her women had been silenced. Roused out of bed, she was brought to her study in her nightgown: in lamplight, meaning the generator had failed. The drug clouded her mind, usually so sharp and decisive. She thought they were Wallingham men, holding her up by her arms because she did indeed feel on the point of falling.

  ‘Where are they kept, ye auld witch—’

  ‘Let me find my glasses.’ The plan of Wallingham flung down on her desk, the confused sounds she could hear, had flooded her with the greatest of terrors. Fire. But the hands were extremely rough, and the faces unknown to her. Instead of taking out her glasses she pressed the panic button, then opened a small drawer in which she kept a powerful talisman, a gold locket holding a nub of shrivelled flesh. She thrust it into the ringleader’s face.

  ‘Begone from here!’

  She was struggling, a tinder-limbed, pitiful grotesque, in the arms of her captors, when the study doors were flung open and the young queen marched in. Fiorinda knew these raiders at once. They tended to naked ropey limbs and heads scoured of hair, instead of dreads and ragged layers: plus skin more luminously white than you often see in England. But they were obviously just barmy army squaddies, the Scottish version of Ax’s hippy guerrillas. The lunatic dregs of radical society, getting shot and not even asking for sixpence, and well over the top as usual.

  Her heart went out to them.

  ‘Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing!’

  Altercation followed. The Scots were not willing to relinquish their prey, neither Lady Anne nor her elderly lady’s maid—who was being roughly held still in a corner. They were righteous, stubborn, and unfavourably impressed by her ladyship’s weapon of first resort, an object which Fiorinda suspected was the preserved and sanctified heart of a newborn.

  Abomination. Shall not suffer a witch to live, etc.

  So, not Celtics then. Must be the other team.

  She had to yell at them for about five minutes, handicapped by the fact that she could hardly understand a word they said, before she brought them to admit that raping politically sensitive VIP old ladies wasn’t in the deal. All right, didn’t mean to insult anyone, not raping, beating up the old ladies—

  Different, but enough like barmies for me to hold them.

  ‘Lady Anne, you’ll be able to contact Lord Mursal, or whoever you wish, in a few hours. Meanwhile you’ll stay in your bedroom, under guard, and you won’t be harmed. You’re in the hands of a civilised nation now,’ (pause to glare at the trainspotters) ‘and you’ll be given civilised treatment.’

  She didn’t know if it was gratitude, or undying hatred that she saw rise in the mad old eyes, as the PM’s ritual consort was led away with her servant. Nor did she care. A baby’s heart, how cute. Just don’t get killed on my watch.

  Someone had turned the power back on. As Fiorinda and her new friends headed north from Lady Anne’s suite, the great public rooms were suddenly ablaze with light. The reivers started muttering.

  ‘What is it now?’

  The leader of the detachment said something incomprehensible.

  ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t understand. I may be a musician but I’m hopeless at languages. Is there a MacLean in the party?’

  This put them on their dignity. An older man with a grizzled bullet head spoke up, in the same precise, nit-picking English as Sovra Campbell.

  ‘The men are just saying, they accept the ruling on summary justice against persons, but what would the cailin rua’s opineenion be on the removal of property?’

  The cailin rua (it means red girl) barely hesitated. ‘Make it small stuff,’ said Fiorinda, feeling like Lady Macbeth, and good about it. ‘Don’t waste time.’

  The illusion that they’d taken control was shortlived. They left Wallingham in the bare, windowless back of a van, which they shared with a dozen or so reivers. The Triumvirate sat close together: not touching, because they didn’t want to show weakness. They were no longer themselves. An hour ago they had been Ax and Sage and Fiorinda, in prison. Now their charmed lives were over. What they had been, what they had done, their whole extraordinary career was over. Scenes rose up, all played to music. The reckless energy of Dissolution summer. The young Fiorinda screaming her desperate pain from Reading Main Stage: firelight and night. A huge crowd under a pure blue sky, held silent and entranced, passionately exalted by Ax Preston’s guitar. The fabulous weirdness of Aoxomoxoa’s immersions, turning the world inside out in the Insanitude ballroom… It was bad to know they’d sold England, but they could tell themselves the country was surely better off this way. There was nothing to soften their own shame, their loss of status. It was devastating.

  The wheels were leaping over very poorly surfaced road. Now to make this work, thought Ax, stubbornly positive. He wished they’d been able to manage their own escape, but if it had been possible, where does that get you? Ax and Fiorinda and Sage, either running for their lives or fomenting a horrible civil war… No, this was the right choice, statesman’s choice. And now to make this work. Say it often enough, it’ll come true. For England. For the people he had served, all of them, all ages, all dresscodes, through the years of disaster. He could feel Sage’s exhaustion beside him, and the big cat’s fear of what this jolting journey was doing to his eyes…

  It was a foretaste. There would be months of this. They would be paraded in public. They would be interrogated, hopefully without torture, they would be taken from place to place, moved from one captivity to another. A figure like Ax Preston is either dux bellorum or a greasy banknote: currency, passed from hand to hand. They saw it all, and closed their eyes. We will never escape. Mouths stitched shut. Occasionally one of the Scots asked Ax a question, and he answered calmly and confidently.

  After some time, maybe a couple of hours, the van drew up. They were handed out, into cool air and a feeling of landscape emptiness: almost like the desert. They saw misty stars, a shadowy mass of trees, and a square-angled blot rising in the foreground. Was that a house…? It was a house of sorts that was revealed, when the Scots brought up the big lights. Two gable ends and a chimney, no roof, not much of the walls left. A stone-floored lean-to kitchen silted with rubble. Ax asked were they stopping for the night.

  That got a laugh, because it was nearly dawn. ‘Business,’ said one of the men (if there were women, they were hard to spot).

  They’d parted from the small army that had taken Wallingham, there was only this one van. They moved into the ruined house, the three closely surrounded. Fiorinda noticed that she could understand what was being said to her, which meant this must be a MacLean party, Highlanders. Gaelic speakers, pure English as a second language. She saw that Ax and Sage had realised the same thing, and they were uneasy too. In the hands of the Celtics, for some private business. F
uck, that doesn’t sound good…

  Everyone sat in a circle, there was an atmosphere of expectancy. The high-powered lamps were hooded, to mimimise the escape of light into the sky. Reivers took out their Wallingham souvenirs, and showed them to each other. Gold boxes, trinkets; little rolled-up razored canvases; antique objets. The three larger items of loot felt self-conscious. One of the two commanders of the raid came and sat opposite them, in the open centre of the circle. He greeted Ax and Sage with the respect due for what they’d done back in the house, and introduced himself to Fiorinda, with dignity. His name was Neil.

  ‘Now we seal the contract.’

  ‘I’m not going to sign anything here,’ said Ax firmly. ‘Not until we get to Edinburgh, to the Assembly. I intend to do this by the book, no side deals.’

  He was clutching at straws.

  ‘It’s no’ about signing things, and it won’t wait.’

  Beside Neil sat a small man with a bowed back and a neck like a turkey, dressed in a white singlet and black cotton trousers, seriously tattooed around his bald, wrinkled head; sleeved down his arms. Where had he come from? He didn’t look like a reiver.

  ‘It’s me you’ve got to see,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m an expert.’

  It seemed Ax had to be tattooed. Neil agreed that this stipulation had never been on the table before: but it had always been in mind. If Ax refused, the Celtic Party, largest political voice in Scotland, would simply withdraw support from the Edinburgh deal, and it would collapse.

  ‘The Celtics of Scotland don’t entirely trust the Assembly,’ explained Neil, in a soft-spoken, reasonable tone. ‘They don’t entirely trust Ax Preston either, and you’ll understand that. They’re with you all the way in rooting out the lunatics, Ax. But they remember the Velvet Invasion, and they have a lingering feeling in their minds that Mr Preston kills Celtics, or at least tars them all with the same brush. A little knotwork will make a big difference.’