‘I’ll have to think it over,’ said Ax, realising he’d been doublecrossed.
‘That’s the first count,’ said Neil. ‘The second count is that you are known to be a wily fucker, but once you have our badge on you, you’ll have a hard time wriggling out of the bargain. We’ll be recording the operation, for legal reasons, hope that’s okay.’
They laid Ax on his back on a reed mat. The tattooist took out his inks and needles from a briefcase. ‘My name’s Billy,’ he said to Ax, in a piping little old voice. ‘I’m not a Scot, I’m not Celtic. I’m a wanderer, maybe older than Celtic, maybe nothing. I chose this spot: I’ve been around here before. It’s called the Wood Court, and it’s holy. No shrine nor stone nor sacrifice, none of that, it’s just a right place.’
Two massive reiver hands settled on Ax’s skull, with a vice-like grip, and the lamps moved closer, so he felt their heat.
‘Keep yer head still,’ advised Billy, ‘and it won’t take half an hour. If you can’t, it’s going to be longer.’
Ax kept his head still.
When the job was done, everyone got back in the van and they drove on. Another jolting drive, then the van seemed to leave the road. It stopped again. The men got out. The Triumvirate glimpsed the trunks of trees, early morning in a wood: then the doors were shut. After a while Neil put his head in, and reported that everything had gone according to plan. The police had been avoided. The rest of the war party was well on its way to the border. No trouble, except one of the injured men had died. Fatalities on the Scots’ side now stood at three, the bodies being taken home, of course. It had been a smooth dismount. What about us, asked Ax. What’s the delay?
We’ve been told to wait for dark, said Neil.
They stayed in the back of the van all day, too burned out to sleep or to talk much; or to feel much anxiety. The Scots came and went, grumbling out of boredom, and once producing sandwiches. Ax spoke when he was spoken too, expressing hopes for peaceful change, the swift collapse of the Second Chamber. He was sickeningly aware that events had passed out of his control. He kept thinking, it’s going to be tough being Ax Preston, in public, with this thing on my face. He’d expected his eye would close up but it didn’t, the needlework was just tender… Later they heard urgent conversations in Gaelic; perhaps triggered by radio messages. No one told them what was going on, and for the moment they were beyond caring.
All they really noticed was the quiet that interrupted the sound of the reivers’ voices. It was very quiet that September day, in the unknown countryside a few hours’ minor-road driving from Wallingham. The stillness, and the dying fall of summer’s end.
The van set off in the rain, as soon as it was fully dark. By this stage the three were completely indifferent, just longing for the journey to be over. To be alone together, to speak freely to each other, for the first time since June. They weren’t thinking any further. The van bounced along, neither faster nor slower than the night before, keeping to neglected roads and presumably heading north: though it seemed to make some strange turns.
It pulled up again. The back doors opened, Neil hopped in and spoke to the men in an undertone. Then he said, ‘Take your gear, English, and get down. This is free, gratis, you are free.’
They took what they were carrying and got down onto the side of the road. It was still raining, softly. Neil handed out Fiorinda’s guitar case, and the visionboard. Fiorinda had her tapestry bag, Ax had the Les Paul.
‘The white box!’ cried Fiorinda. ‘That box, could you hand it to me—’
One of the men in the van picked up Sage’s First Aid kit, and hefted it thoughtfully. Neil jumped down, and slammed the doors shut. He looked at them without speaking, then got back into the cab and the van drove away.
It drove away.
What the hell’s going on?
‘We’re back where we were,’ said Ax.
He was right. The dark mass he pointed to was the wood behind the ruined cottage where Ax had been tattooed. They led Sage between them along grey, ragged black-top: through the charcoal-shaded night, between bracken-scented banks, until they reached a turn-off. This must be the track the van had taken the night before. Soon they saw the ruin. The lean-to kitchen had enough of a roof, mainly brambles and ivy, to give them shelter.
Sage took Fiorinda in his arms, with a wordless sob, and reached out for Ax. They hugged each other in inexpressible relief. There was nothing to do but wait for morning. They made Sage a pillow from Fiorinda’s Kashmiri shawl, and he lay where the Scots had cleared the stone floor for the tattooing ceremony, with his bandaged head still—which was another great relief to them all. Ax and Fiorinda sat on either side of him, backs to the house-wall.
‘Was that you, on the phone,’ said Ax. ‘Saying you were fine?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why the fuck did you say “relax”, when you were being tortured?’
‘It was for the best. I was coping, an’… This is superficial: true.’
‘We’re going to have to change that arrangement.’
The night was mild and faintly moonlit, though there was no definite break in the cloud. They could see the rain falling straight and fine, and hear the faintest silver whispering.
‘Ax?’ said Sage, after a while. ‘What does Iphigenia really mean?’
‘Oh, yes,’ murmured Fiorinda. ‘I’ve wondered about that, too.’
‘It means Poland.’
‘Poland?’
‘It’s a secret codeword for Poland, used by FDR and Winston Churchill in the lead-up to the Teheran conference, during World War Two.’
‘D’you know what it means, in this context?’
‘I think so.’
Poland. Now there’s a koan. But Ax didn’t seem inclined to enlighten them. Ax and Fiorinda divided the utterly mysterious, ominous and peaceful night between them. When it was Fiorinda’s turn to lie down she pillowed her head on Sage’s shoulder—at which he murmured without waking, freed his arm and folded it around her; and remembered that she had dreamed of this. Not a premonition but a dream of longing: when she had been held hostage by Fergal Kearney, who was really dead, and his body inhabited by her father. That she might find Ax and Sage again, that they might sleep together under a hedge, in the wind and the rain, on the open road; like so many others in these Dissolution years. Without a house or a home, no direction known.
EIGHT
Wood Court
At five the rain had stopped, and the starless sky had taken on a grainy transparency. Ax lay down beside Fiorinda and kissed her gently: the hollowed curve of her cheek, her parted lips. She opened her eyes, and smiled. A hard bed but a sweet wakening. They lay nose to nose, holding hands, no surveillance, no walls, no lies, only the air above them, the earth beneath.
‘I’m going foraging,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right?’
She looked at him soberly. ‘Ax, before I forget, I am truly sorry for all those horrible things I said, which were lies. Will you forgive me?’
He smiled, a rueful gleam in his eye. ‘All of them lies?’
‘Especially that one.’
‘Well, same here.’
She knew she hadn’t entirely fixed the damage, blame it on stress but that had been a bad fight. Ax’s cruelty would linger too. Sage’s visionboard lay on the cleared floor, with a panel removed, showing its innards.
‘What’ve you been doing?’
He showed her the transceiver, and tucked it back into his jacket pocket. ‘Cannibalising, don’t worry, I can put it together again. I’m going to try and get hold of some news. And we have to eat. I won’t be too long.’
He bent to kiss her, once more. She put up her hand, and briefly laid the palm against his chest.
Such a whirling, terrifying blank when he thought about the future, he had to quickly cauterize that whole area. Do this, only this. Bag on my shoulder, fill it with food somehow. Blackberries, if nothing else. But where am I heading? He stopped to look around. The track to the
ruin skirted a valley full of trees. Beyond the treetops, and ahead of him, to the south, a bare heath, punctuated by clumps of tall pines, stretched endlessly into a vista of wooded hills. Not a house, not a mast, not a telegraph pole. Not a sound, apart from birdsong; and the clatter of a wood pigeon, suddenly bursting from the trees. We left Wallingham, we drove…north, no, more like west? Cumulatively, take out the turns, he thought west. This was our first stop, but how far had we driven? How can there be a place like this in the crowded south east?
Where the fuck am I?
Ax had once had a brain implant, a datastack of useful information about England, including full Ordnance Survey; the works of long dead Greeks and Romans as a freebie on the side. Because of that, he knew his country uncannily: things came to him, like direct intuitions. But he couldn’t name this landscape. He gazed for a long time, the beauty of it filling his heart and stinging his eyes, and then set off, walking softly, swiftly, alertly, to the lane: where he turned right, downhill, keeping to the shadows, an animal with a spurious air of purpose.
Half an hour later he found a milk halt at an unmarked crossroads. A stack of crated bottles stood on the white rimmed concrete platform, a flowerbed planted in the bank had the name of the dairy co-op done in seaside pebbles across the middle. WEALDEN AND FOREST. So that’s a mystery solved. He broke into a pallet—not the one with Volunteer Initiative stamped all over it, not so low we have to steal from the Poor Box—; stowed six cold half-litre glass bottles in his bag and downed a seventh. It filled him with strength and courage. As he stood staring along the road, wondering if the milk would be collected, a liquid gleam appeared at vanishing point. He dropped between the platform and the bank, and retreated under the hedge. Time stands still in country places. There is an England quietly going about its business. A bio-burning milk lorry drew up: yellow plastic roses and a battered Barbie doll in a ballgown tucked into the radiator grille. A snatch of music as the driver and his mate got down. Ax felt something like worship: but he realised that he was a thieving tramp, and he’d better move on.
From the field on the other side of the hedge he saw the roofs of a substantial farm. No slave barracks attached, there weren’t any camps in the south: serf labour only on a domestic scale down here. Two fields further and he was watching a herd of black and white cows return to their pasture, after a dawn trip to the pleasures of the milking shed. A burly young man and a boy closed the gate behind the herd, and ambled back to the yards, sniping at each other idly—brothers, he guessed. He followed like a ghost, hid himself among the farmyard derelicts and old tyres, and stole the signal as they watched tv over their breakfast. He couldn’t get a picture, must be doing something wrong, but he could read the datalines and the sound was fine. He ran through the channels, picking up different versions of the early news.
On the way back he had his bearings and was able to make a circuit of it: first rule of guerrilla life, never take the same route twice. The sun was nearly up as he struck across the uncultivated heath, but he felt confident that he would not meet any company. He’d found no solid food, and now there were no blackberries in sight. About half a kilometre from the wooded valley of the ruin he struck a big house, with cypress hedges around the lawns and the remains of a hard tennis court. It looked as if it had been derelict for years, casualty of the Crisis, or the Crash. The cypresses cast an ugly shade: but there were apple trees behind the house. He filled his bag with fruit, and sat in the rank grass by a garden shed. I must take hold of myself, think. What to do now, what next?
Make a list.
Look after Sage and Fiorinda.
Stay put. Moving targets may be harder to hit but are a fuck of a sight easier to spot. (Simple unless we’re being hunted, but it doesn’t look like it.)
Try to find out what’s going on. (Harder.)
…
…
The tattoo was stinging. He touched it, very gingerly. If that gets infected, I’m fucked… Déjà vu: I have been here before. A hateful, sweltering room rose up around him, the cell where he’d spent a year, the hostage of a crazy drug cartel—invoking the consolation of dangers passed, terrible ordeals safely endured. But the fetid room became Lady Anne’s study, timeshift vertigo became that moment when he had known that he must hand England to the Scots. He fell into a dreadful spin of shame and bewilderment, in which the word Iphigenia rolled like thunder.
Which act had been fatal? The mad instant when he’d punched Jack Vries in the throat? Or the moment when he decided he would never again take up the blunt instrument of violence? The conversation after dinner with the President at Camp Bellevue, in the San Gabriel mountains, when he’d agreed to come back to England? Or the day he’d fixed, incorrigible fixer, an amnesty for the Lavoisiens, thus ensuring the Black Dragon lived to sell his video? All of that history was irrelevant now, and he didn’t mourn it, but he needed to know and he would never know. He needed to assign the turning points because he had to make a judgment.
He’d have given a lot for a glimpse of the utter self-conviction he had once known. A compelling sense of destiny (eventually some little Hitlers realise this), can lead you straight to hell without telling you a word of a lie. But it would have been better than nothing.
Somebody’s house is burning, hell fire red—
oh God help me. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know.
He heard a faint mewling sound.
The shed had once been padlocked, but the door had been broken in long ago. He shoved his way through clinging ropes of goosegrass, and peered around. Could it be something human? There was nowhere for anything bigger than a baby to be hidden. The cry came again. He moved aside a slab of cobwebbed composite and discovered a nest, hollowed in the dirt floor, occupied by an emaciated dead tabby cat and her kittens. Two kittens were also dead. The third stood on swaying legs, and mewled again, imperiously. Never say die, little scrap, but I’m afraid she can’t hear you—
He picked the kitten up and held it, wondering whether the cat had been a pet, or feral, and what had killed her. Better get back.
There’d been a bed of herbs outside the kitchen: lavender, rosemary and mint, blue-eyed borage, slug-eaten comfrey. Eyebright, crept in from the heath, but that’s a signature herb, we’ll leave that one alone. Beyond the herbs there were yellowed potato plants, a tangle of tomato vines that held shrunken red fruits. Rock hard runner beans, a menacing-looking marrow. Straggly rocket and spinach. The gable end of the cottage was adrift on white spume, that ran like a river over the trees in the valley, and lost itself in an ocean of rust and wine… Whenever she looked up, to see if Ax was coming back, she found her eyes washed again by a void of light and sweet air. Carried out of herself, into peace. Sage was still asleep. She’d built a fire, on stone, using only bone-dry dead grass and broken laths, but there was no reason to light it.
The ruined kitchen had a sink, and a mixer tap. Verdigrised copper plumbing pipes dangled in space, with no obvious gaps. Never know your luck… She attacked the tap, and managed to dislodge some flakes of rust.
Sage turned over, and lay looking at her with his bandaged eyes.
‘Good morning.’ The bandage frightened her: it was a dirty lie to say he was her daddy-subsitute, but she couldn’t cope if Sage was helpless—
‘Good morning.’ He seemed to listen. ‘Where’s Ax gone?’
She knelt and gripped his hand, possibly it was true she leaned on Sage too hard…‘Foraging. It’s okay, my baby. He’s all right.’
‘Oh.’ Sage listened again, to the depth of silence. ‘Where are we, Fee? Do we know? Did the Scots tell us?’
‘They didn’t tell us anything, but I think we’re in the Ashdown Forest, in Sussex. In it, or on it… We are surrounded by a hundred acres of wild wood and a very beautiful blasted heath, and the distances would fit.’
‘Is there heather?’
‘Yeah. It’s pretty much over, it’s faded, but it’s nice.’
‘Hm. Let’s try taki
ng the bandages off.’
She had closed her eyes, to be with him. She opened them again.
‘There’s quite a lot of light.’
‘I know, my brat. I can see it through the dressing. I want to see you.’
He lay with his head in her lap as she unwound the layers, and looked up. There was an uncanny, fugitive awareness of effort (oh, fuck: what happened to Peter?), but his vision was better all the time, the bloodclots at the back of his eyeballs safely dispersed. I got away with it again, he thought. One day I won’t. Fiorinda was glowing like a beacon fire.
‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ he whispered.
Fuck. He had not meant to say that. But the message in Anne-Marie’s care parcel had been with him in the torture chamber, a guardian angel and a fearsome burden, oh, God, if I let that slip… It had been trapped inside him, speechless, all those days in the red room. He felt the shock run through her, the mingled terror and delight, and the world became new.
‘Yes I am. Ax knows because I told him, how did you—?’
‘By looking at you, my brat, you are shining with it. Well, also there was a cryptic parcel from AM, at the Insanitude. She’s onto you, somehow. I left it with Allie.’ He started to sit up…and the white tiled room attacked. He went under, clinging to her, pressing his face into her belly, oh fiorinda, oh fiorinda, I was so frightened of the dandy man, he hurt me, he hurt me. Sssh, she whispered, sssh, little Sage, you’re safe now, I have you safe… He pulled himself together, mugging apology, and lay back, quietly gazing.
‘How is it? Don’t lie.’
‘Not bad. Don’ think I’ll try reading anything just yet.’
His yellow lashes stood out weirdly bright in the raccoon mask of bruising, the whites of his eyes were still suffused, but not so horrific. She stroked his eyebrows, what a nice texture. ‘Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news, my hero. The good news is the Scots let us go, the bad news is we have no idea why; except Ax knows, and it’s so awful he won’t tell us.’
Band of Gypsys Page 27