Band of Gypsys

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I was there.’

  ‘Also we lost the First Aid box. I left it in their van.’

  ‘Ah…’ A stern frown. ‘Now, tha’s unfortunate.’

  ‘But fear not. The good young witch remembers much of the wise lore the evil old witch once tried to teach her, although she never paid attention at the time. Got to be Hedgeschool GNVQ Herbalism equivalence. I shall boil leaves and make poultices, as soon as I have fashioned a pan from something, and found some clean water.’ She grinned. ‘No frowning at me. Don’t get too sane, Captain Sensible. You’ll find it doesn’t suit the mood.’

  He hadn’t been thinking of his eyes, he’d been looking ahead. She was right, better not. ‘Hahaha, okay.’ He sat up, stretched, and ran his fingers through his dirty hair. ‘Gagh, I need a haircut very badly. You’re being unusually positive about all this, my brat. Any special reason?’

  ‘You’ll have to bear with me. It’s the feel-good hormones.’

  They hugged each other at last, and she yelped because her breasts were tender. How fabulous to hold her, in freedom. But Sage let go, and sat back on his heels. Shades of sepia and grey, sharp angles, green and earth tones, better all the time—

  ‘What’s up between you and Ax?’

  ‘Oh… N-nothing.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me. I know there’s something. I haven’t been on another planet, Fiorinda. Just blind and helpless and in pain—’

  ‘All right, all right! You see, I, er, I found out he had volunteered for those expiatory rites, to stop them doing whatever they were doing to you.’

  Ouch.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘So, I screamed at him, and I may have said things such as it was his fault we came back to England, and that we had ended up in Wallingham—’

  ‘Oh, Fiorinda.’

  ‘—I know, I know, the Terrible Word. Please don’t oh Fiorinda me. He said evil things too. I wish I hadn’t done it but you’re out of date. I said I was sorry this morning, and we are all right. He didn’t ask me or tell me, Sage, just unilaterally went and offered to be their fucking human sacrifice—’

  ‘That’s Ax. If he’s going to jump off the cliff he jumps, you get no warning.’

  ‘Sage, you don’t suppose he’s doing something terrible now—?’

  ‘No… Hey, what happened to my board?’

  ‘It’s okay. Ax took the transceiver out, that’s all.’

  ‘Fuck. You didn’t tell me he was foraging for information.’

  The earth bowed, the sun rose up. Veined ivy leaves shone as if waxed and polished, copper gleamed in slashed verdigris. With full daylight the spell of dawn was broken, and they were plunged into anxiety. The issues came crowding, none of them good. Sage chewed the joint of his right thumb.

  ‘You didn’t hear from my dad, after that one call?’

  She shook her head. Of course not, stupid question.

  ‘George and Bill didn’t turn up at the club again. You don’t know what happened to them?’

  ‘I only saw Peter. I was told they’d be left alone if I co-operated.’

  For what Jack Vries’ word is worth.

  ‘Mm…’ She stared at the dirt on her feet. ‘You think it was always about the scanners?’

  ‘Yeah. I think as soon as he saw the Lavoisier video—whenever that was—Greg Mursal put the same reading on it that Ax did.’

  ‘That we three were screwed.’

  ‘Exactly. No value in humouring the bleeding-heart rockstars no more, an’ every reason to get hold of a Neurobomb: fast. When we ended up under house arrest, all they had to do was set me loose, so I didn’t vanish from their custody, and pull me in off the street. Jack did the robust interrogation, but I don’t think Greg took much persuading.’

  ‘We were in even worse trouble than we realised.’

  ‘Nah, we knew. No offence, but I think tha’s you believing your own propaganda, sweetheart. The things Greg and Jack thought permissible, that culture in government, went way back. It was in place before Dissolution. Remember Paul Javert? The Home Secretary who arranged the murder of about thirty people, on Massacre Night? We never managed to root it out, never even tried, we just kept clear, an’ made appeasement work for us. While we nurtured the young shoots of the Good State—’

  ‘Except when my father took over.’

  ‘Apart from that blip. The fucking A team, and then the fucking Lavoisiens, left us with no place to hide: but we were always going to collide with the bad guys, in the end. An’ whenever it happened, we were always going to be outgunned.’

  ‘No,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Not outgunned.’

  Ax came into the ruin quietly. His foraging bag clinked as he set down his bundled jacket. They jumped up, and would have grabbed him: but he shook his head, recoiling from their touch. ‘Hey,’ he said to Sage. ‘Look at you!’

  ‘No thanks. I’m staying away from mirrors for quite a while.’

  He brought the bag and they sat down together, under the ivy and bramble thatch. ‘Milk and apples. Best I could do, for a start. There’s no sign of a search, in the sky or on the ground. I think we’re okay for the moment.’

  Sage and Fiorinda cracked a half-litre each and drank.

  ‘Did you pick up the news?’ asked Sage, wiping his mouth.

  Ax saw where the raiders had laid him down two nights ago: he remembered the little man with his briefcase, the vivid lamplight, the darkness. It seemed like a fever dream.

  ‘I siphoned off the tv at a farmhouse. Apparently there’s been a break-in at Wallingham. Nothing serious but the club’s to be closed this week, because it upset us. “Merry We Meet” will be a previously recorded programme. I suppose too many people were involved, they had to release something. But they haven’t admitted we’re gone, and that’s good. It suggests they’re hoping to cut a deal and get us back, which implies there’ll be no full scale hunt yet. Not unless the Scots have told them where to look, which is possible… The international situation is where it was, headline story still Roumanian and Belarus militias aiding the Uzbek resistance: China protests to Brussels… For what the English tv news is worth.’

  He spoke briskly, calmly. He might have been reporting on another disaster entirely, one of those terrible situations of the past, that they would beat, of course, because they always did. But he didn’t look at them.

  ‘Why did the Scots let us go?’ prompted Fiorinda. ‘Will you tell us?’

  ‘You’ll think I’m insane,’ said Ax, still not looking at them, ‘but all the time were were in Wallingham I meant to stay in office. I knew things were ugly. Not what Fiorinda had to face in the green nazi days, but almost worse, because it was sustainable. I wanted the Few to get out, and you two, if you would go. But I would have stayed, been the tame President, if I had to live and die in that prison. To do some good in a bad situation, same as we were at the beginning, when Pigsty was in charge. When they had tortured you, Sage, and when I knew Fiorinda was pregnant… Shit, I don’t know how you can ever forgive me, either of you, for what I d-did, for getting you into—

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Leave that out, babe.’

  ‘Well, there was no question we had to cut and run. But right until then I would have stayed. Dig a little hole to the light and air from under the landslide. There have to be people who do that—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fiorinda, dead straight. ‘That’s what I signed up for.’

  ‘An’ me. All my own idea, not your persuasion.’

  He looked at them wonderingly, as from a great distance.

  ‘Okay, so now I have to tell you about Iphigenia. I have to go back to last summer, in California. Fred talked to me about a scenario where China decides to annexe Europe, and the USA lets it happen—’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Sage grinned indignantly. ‘Good of him!’

  ‘Yeah, really. It was one of his top bad possibilities. I didn’t…have a handle on China at all. I just knew some Pan-Asian Utopians, chat-room buddies: and th
e stuff everybody knows, knew, about the Great Peace Sphere. Fred’s people were watching this huge country, that somehow came out of the Crash even stronger than it went in. With a new leader, or leaders, hiding behind a façade of old geezers, and a mission to unite Asia; or maybe more. Fred’s scenario had the US abandoning the last of the Central Asian fuel reserves in a decade or so’s time, and China taking that as a cue to expand westward. They wouldn’t meddle with the Russian Feds, they don’t like the Feds but they have a stable stand-off there. They’d see the chaos of the former European Union as a rationale they could use (Fred didn’t think the EU would survive, can’t imagne what gave him that idea): they’d announce that something must be done. In they would go, shock and awe, and Europe would collapse before them. I didn’t believe it, and I thought it wouldn’t be my business. I’d be long gone. Of course, the ‘A’ team speeded things up.’

  Ax drew a long, painful breath. ‘Before we left, Fred told me that if he knew it was coming he’d get word to me—me personally not the English government—using the codename that means, sadly we’re going to have to let the Soviets rape Poland.’

  They stared at him, riveted.

  ‘All right,’ began Fiorinda, at last. ‘All right, I get it, but—’

  ‘But, Ax, it doesn’t seem possible,’ said Sage. ‘The Chinese were taking over Uzbekistan when I was in London, and I was having a hard time getting distressed about that… That’s a hell of a blitzkreig.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s possible,’ said Ax. ‘Anything we think we know could be months out of date or plain lies. The Chinese could have invincible post-fossil fuel military technology. Or something. All I know is that last year, a staggering new weapon was so to speak detonated. And the hidden superpower on the block, the China nobody knows, didn’t react at all. All I know is that the Scots were given orders to dump us, last night, and somebody, probably Fred, sent me the word Iphigenia three months ago.’

  He put up his hands to sweep back the wings of dark hair from his temples, a gesture aborted as his fingers brushed the raw needlework—

  ‘Could there be such a complete embargo?’ said Fiorinda, acutely.

  Ax shook his head. ‘I dunno, Fio. The tv and radio felt normal, what passes for normal. No strange gaps. Of course it’s easier without a free press, but we never managed to keep a wall up, not for more than a few hours. But I’m sure Fred never knew about my cry for help when we got arrested. Iphigenia couldn’t have been his response, you both spotted that. So it was something else, and it doesn’t make sense he would use that code for anything but what we’d agreed… I’m sorry, I know should have told you about the China Takes All scenario. But it was so far fetched, and you two get so pissed off when I try to tell you the details—’

  Sage said. ‘This is what was eating you, all the time, in Wallingham.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah. I suppose.’

  ‘I knew you were in some kind of extra hell.’ Sage reached out, but Ax still didn’t want to be touched, he flinched away, shaking his head.

  ‘What were you supposed to do?’ asked Fiorinda, who had grown very still, very concentrated. ‘When you got the warning?’

  ‘Nothing. Europe’s going down, so go quietly, go to earth, that’s the best chance for modern civilisation… Fred tells me, unfortunately I’m going to have to sacrifice you guys, to get a fair wind, I’m supposed to keep it to myself. Make what secret preparations I think useful, but don’t take the warlord route, be nobody’s figurehead. Lie low and say nothing.’ He grinned, without humour. ‘What I have been doing, basically.’

  Oh, those quiet conversations with Fred Eiffrich, both of us knowing he was just a big puppet really, and I was a little puppet. But though we were wood and pulled by strings, still trying to get beyond that, still trying with all our might to hold up the falling sky—

  ‘That was then,’ she said. ‘This is now. Fred’s plans are gone with the winds… Are you thinking we should turn ourselves in and tell all?’

  Ax wanted the others. DK and Allie, Rob and the Babes, Rox, and Chip, and Verlaine: George and Bill and Peter, Smelly and Anne-Marie too. He could see them, in his mind’s eye: very vividly. Sitting around on the debris and the broken timbers, in their flashy rockstar streetclothes, the way he’d last seen them on St Stephen’s Green. The inner circle of the Reich, listening while he told them the bad news. Terrified, tearstained, bloodsmeared faces around a table, on Massacre Night, the night the old world ended. We were prisoners, then, expecting to die within the hour…Déjà vu comes thick and fast. He had always been here before. Been in this exact same ruined room before, facing the last stand with his friends. Strangely, it had been a happy dream. But Fiorinda had been missing: oh God, where’s Fiorinda?

  She was not missing now. She was right beside him, rock steady.

  ‘I need to know something, Fio. Do the Chinese have a Neurobomb?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I could be wrong, but… No, I’d say not.’

  Birdsong rose in a vertiginous silence, a silence like falling into space.

  ‘I can’t decide,’ said Ax at last. ‘I have no decisions.’ He tried again to rub his aching temples, and flinched again from the needlework. ‘Okay. I don’t think we should turn ourselves in, not right now, not yet. I think we should stay here, it’s as good as anywhere, for a few days. See if we can get a better idea of what’s going on.’

  Fiorinda nodded. ‘Agreed. We’ll do that.’

  Sage remembered other times when he’d watched these two divvying up the world between them, moving the plastic armies of a game of Risk, on the kitchen table at Tyller Pystri, in lamplight long ago. A boardgame has swallowed us, he thought. But I have my beautiful guitar-man, and my rock and roll princess, and we are out of jail. This lifted his heart, dumb and personal though the shelter might be. He noticed that Ax’s bundled jacket was moving.

  ‘What’s that you got under your coat, babe? Something alive?’

  ‘Oh… It’s a kitten. I found this kitten.’ Ax went to the jacket, and brought out a scrawny tabby kitten with bat-wing ears. It sat looking very small in Ax’s big hands, stared around boldly, and yawned: displaying a fine set of white needle fangs. ‘The mother was dead, and there were two dead kittens, but he’s all right. I… I’d like to keep him?’

  They realised that the person telling them about Iphigenia hadn’t been Ax. That had been an Ax Preston automaton, saying the lines. This was Ax, this piteous little boy, bereft and frightened, hiding a kitten in his coat. It reminded them how bewildered they were themselves. How lost.

  ‘Is he old enough to lap?’ asked Sage, keeping it steady with an effort.

  ‘Yeah. I’ve given him some milk. I’d say he’s about five weeks. And he’s strong, and seems pretty healthy, considering.’

  ‘Has he got a name?’ asked Fiorinda. ‘May I hold him?’

  ‘Min. I’m going to call him Min. Dunno why, it just came to me.’

  Much later, records revealed that GCHQ at Cheltenham had picked up the same dramatic intelligence that had caused the Edinburgh Assembly to abort their deal (an order Neil Cameron had interpreted freely, and thereby put the Triumvirate of England forever in his debt). It had been set aside, along with an accumulation of data that had pointed in the same unlikely direction for weeks. Rumour had it, after the records came to light, that intelligence officers had deliberately kept quiet, either in righteous despair—or because nobody dared to tell Lord Mursal his house was on fire. But that was probably nonsense: appalling blunders happen all the time.

  The weather continued calm and fair, unusually calm for the time of year. Early on the morning of the twentieth of September a domineering old man, once a Methodist Minister, was sitting in the glassed gallery at the top of a cottage on the Coastguard path. Or South West path as the tourists had called it—but it belonged to the Coastguard again now. He liked to watch the ocean from up here: he plagued his housekeeper to help him dress, and work the lift for him, at ungodly hours
. He sat like a mummified giant, his limbs withered but hardly shrunken by age, dressed in old tweeds and a Gortex jacket, gazing at the western horizon. He was a hundred and two years’ old, but his eyes were still giving good service: glinting blue from cavernous sockets.

  A swarm of little purple clouds appeared, popping up above the line between the sea and the clear, apple-green sky of dawn; in a very curious manner. The old man applied his right eye to the telescope that stood by him on a brass swivel stand. His jaw dropped. He felt no fear, he was too old to be afraid of anything: but his blood turned to ice water in his veins from sheer astonishment. Other witnesses of this sight were convinced the fleet was extraterrestrial. The old man wasn’t fooled for a moment. He sat back, frowning, trying to remember something, ah yes.

  ‘For I dipt into the future,’ he declaimed, with satisfaction,

  ‘Far as human eye can see…

  Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be;

  Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

  Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

  Heard the heavens filled with shouting and there rained a ghastly dew

  from the nations’ airy navies—’

  He didn’t have to press any buttons. He didn’t need to shout, either, but he always did. ‘Chesten! CHESTEN!’, he yelled, swinging the motor-chair around. ‘Where is the woman, is she deaf. CHESTEN! Bring me the red phone, I need to call Joss. NOW, not next week!’

  He couldn’t get through. The South West Peninsula was cut off, excised from the telecoms world: as comprehensively silenced as Western Europe had been, when the Internet Commissioners imposed their lightning-strike quarantine, to contain the Ivan/Lara virus, years ago.

  In the dusk before dawn Ax came face to face with a countryman, and a shotgun, on the path by the little stream in the valley. They both retreated, silently. Ax waited a while, and continued on his way. It wasn’t the first time he’d been seen (he insisted on doing all the foraging), but it was the first close encounter. The very few people who were out and about kept their distance, just as Ax himself did… On his way back he found a brace of rabbits slung on a post. He looked up and saw that Wood Court was just visible through the trees, though there was no sign that it was occupied. He brought the rabbits home, and laid them by the bed of cut heather and bracken that now covered most of the kitchen floor. The invasion was forty eight hours old. The EBC said English forces in the South West were ‘fighting like cornered rats’, but they were being rolled back at such a speed that you could hope the rats weren’t dying much.