by Kim Newman
She also had to watch her step. Before its (temporary?) breakup, the Moth Club had experimented with eyeholes. Too small, and they severely limited peripheral vision (those Hooded Conspirators must be almost blinded); too big, and they gave away your identity – in which case what was the point of a mask? She wished she still had her confiscated goggles.
Spend three and fourpence… we’re going to a dance!
Amy went towards the noise – the chanted rhyme and the beat of skipping.
The main cavern was hosting a Black Skirt rally. She kept to the shadows.
Clutter was tidied away or got rid of, changing the character of the vault. It was more like the hold of a warship than the innards of a theatre. Spotlights shone bright beams which cast stark shadows.
An unrolled backdrop hung on a rear wall. A painted plain of blasted trees and burned-out huts represented the aftermath of battle. The canvas was still stained with the arcs of stage blood overenthusiastically sloshed by Handsome Helena in her controversial Grand Guignol production of the Scottish Play. Girls still had nightmares about Vanity’s Lady Macbeth, who – in an added business intended to ‘beef up’ the Bard – clawed out her eyes during the mad scene and tossed two poached eggs slathered in raspberry jam at the front row.
The skipping and chanting stopped dead. Amy thought she was discovered, but heads did not turn her way.
The Black Skirts were assembled before the Queen Ant.
Rayne sat on a huge throne used in history plays. Her feet dangled. Thirty or forty girls, mostly Violas, stood to attention in the cleared space. Arranged in order of size, titches at front and beanpoles at back. Once ordinary girls – friend or foe or indifferent – but now part of the Black-Skirt army. Lapham, St Anne, Phair, Hone, Pulsipher, Stannard, Vail, Sundle, Dungate, Acreman, Brydges, Aire, Inchfawn, Oxenford and Frump – apostates of Desdemona. Pelham, House Captain of Desdemona. Mansfield, daringly in black trousers. Skipping done, they wound their ropes around their middles like belts.
The ranked silhouettes on the backcloth looked like the trees of Birnham Wood, ready to march. One of the smudge pots was lit. Greasy smoke pooled.
Amy couldn’t make out what Rayne was saying. Her audience nodded, as if agreeing. Rintoul and Beeke flanked the throne like handmaidens. Besides black uniforms and ropes, they wore black shoulder-sashes pinned with ant-shaped clasps. The Cerberus had their own bench. Gould of Goneril, of the talons and teeth, sat alert, like a good dog. Garland, an expedient defector from the Murdering Heathens, was on her knees in front of Buller, polishing her shoes and smiling like a convert.
Three hooded grown-ups also stood near the throne. Amy recognised them. Ponce Bainter wore his hood tucked into his dog-collar. The Professor was still all in tweeds. Kali’s father had a new hood, with a bigger Red Flame.
The Black Skirts had a hierarchy. Orders of rank were denoted by brooches, sashes, clasps, badges, ropes and pins. The insignia must be manufactured on the premises. By Viola costumiers? Rayne’s ant brooch was copied over and over, in simplified form. The design impressed Amy. She remembered Light Fingers’ advice. The ant emblem was more striking than her moth sigil. She had seen it chalked up around School, inked on exercise books and scratched in snow.
Some Black Skirts thought it a great jape to daub black treacle ants on the backs of gray blazers. Greys were Minored for unknowingly sporting sticky insects on their uniforms. Black Skirts weren’t punished for putting their mark on someone else’s kit.
A canvas sheet was spread on the floor before the throne – a backdrop face-down. On it was traced a design in black paint. Amy recognised the Runnel and the Flute, and recalled the strange traceries and plain of hatching eggs of her Purple dreams. The spirals drew her eye in. She felt dizzy looking at the Runnel to the Flute, as if her mind were pouring out and circling a plughole.
Down the drain was the Purple.
She crouched, making herself small, wishing her Moth Club friends were with her. Being alone among the Black Skirts felt less like an adventure and more like dangerous foolishness.
Rayne kept talking, as if leading a prayer. The rhythm was different from the skipping rhyme, but the words made no more sense…
‘Hierophant elephant sycophant phoo
Antelope antedates Antony Stew
Cormorant coruscant celebrant mites
Antimony antipathy antagony bites…’
Amy got the message… ant, ant, ant, ant, ant!
She tried to listen and her head hurt. She tried not to listen and her head hurt more. She tried to understand… but the words weren’t to be understood. They were like music… to be felt.
And she felt stark fear.
Her Purple dreams bubbled up, intruding into her waking mind. She looked at the blasted heath backdrop and saw it as the Purple, extending into the far distance. Littered with bloodied corpses and cast-off armour, the plain was vaster than the space under the Drearcliff Playhouse. Ugly birds flew slowly through skies she had thought painted. Beyond the purple horizon, dark fires burned.
She stood and was drawn towards the ranks of the Black Skirts. She walked in a curve towards them, as if entering the Runnel…
Despite what Light Fingers said, there was a place for her in the anthill… she could shed her wings and join the reinforcements who were going to advance. She could get the three and fourpence and buy a ticket to the dance.
She wanted to be part of something. This was bigger than the Moth Club, than Desdemona House, than School… this was, in the end, everything. The Purple and the Back Home. She could be a part of it all.
She was close enough to see Rayne’s smile. A tiny insect crawled across her face and she did not twitch. There were ants in her eyes!
…Amy was horrified by Rayne’s face, and more horrified by the lull she had been in.
They had nearly had her. She had nearly given in.
She had been following the Runnel and forgetting the Flute.
The Black Skirts didn’t even want her. Because of what she was. Because, when she got close, when she saw Rayne’s smile, she knew what was wrong with this picture. The farmer had two left feet. The kitchen window was upside down. The wind was blowing in one direction and the weathervane pointing in the other. The cat had too many eyes. She would always see what was wrong… and she would never completely give in. She could be unmasked, unwinged, made to skip, made to chant… but inside would always be an uncrushable, persistent bud of resistance… of glory.
Kentish Glory.
‘Queen Ant, Queen Ant,’ recited Rintoul, ‘you sit in the sun,
As fair as a lily, as white as a wand…’
‘I send you three postcards,’ Beeke took over, ‘and pray you read one.
You must read one, if you can’t read all…’
‘So pray, Miss or Master,’ said Rayne, clearly and loudly, looking straight at Amy, ‘for down will you fall!’
She was noticed!
‘Down, down, down will you fall,’ said the Ant Queen and her Princesses in unison. They all pointed at Amy.
‘I spy strangers,’ said the Professor loudly. Heads turned en masse.
The lines of perspective on the backdrop changed… the birds froze, painted again. A spell had been broken by Amy’s presence.
Again, she had interrupted the Ritual of the Runnel and the Flute.
The Professor pointed at Amy and screeched. She still wore her mandibled gauntlet. Arcs crackled between the talons.
Who was under the hood? A mistress? A tall, stout Sixth?
Amy backed away, fast… up the stairs and through the trapdoor. A rush of Black Skirts jammed together as they came after her. The ants were swarming. They clacked their mouthparts, jumbling their rhymes.
‘…hierophant, elephant, Antony Stew… down, down, down will you fall!’
She let the trap drop on them with a bang. She hurried through the auditorium and foyer and out of the theatre.
Blinking in the sunlight, she realised she s
till wore her mask.
She tore it off and stuffed it back in its secret pocket.
The trapdoor wouldn’t keep back the Black Skirts for long.
XIV: The Viola–Goneril War
JUST OUTSIDE THE Playhouse, Amy ran into Frecks’ triad. She started chattering about wanting to borrow something from Light Fingers and wondering where she was.
Frecks shrugged. Kali looked away. Beauty was blank.
Beeke and two other Black Skirts came out of the theatre. They looked around purposefully.
Had Amy been recognised?
She went on about the book she needed a lend of, trying to seem as if she’d been with Frecks and company for ages. She flapped her hands in an exaggerated ‘silly me’ manner and was breathless with jollity… rather than terror.
‘Sisters Dark,’ Beeke addressed the triad. ‘Did you see a foolish girl running just now? A Grey pest who’s shoved her snout where it’s not wanted?’
‘Running? No,’ said Frecks – not lying, since Amy had walked.
‘Keep an antenna out,’ said Beeke. ‘You know how things are.’
She went back into the theatre. The other Black Skirts stood by the doors. They unwound their ropes and began skipping slowly.
‘I say, pal-o-mino, you’ve gone scarlet,’ observed Frecks. ‘Been doing anything you shouldn’t haven’t oughtn’t to have been?’
‘Not I, sir.’
‘You don’t say so, sir.’
‘Say so sir, I do.’
‘Thought as much. Any notion what Nosey Beeke was on about?’
Amy shrugged.
‘Another of life’s mysteries,’ said Frecks.
Frecks, Kali and Rose had no sashes or badges. Amy hoped that kept them out of any inner circles of sinister Black Skirt intent. They hadn’t been at the meeting under the stage – though Desdemona was represented by Pelham, Inchfawn and other feckless Gone-Blacks.
Something was up among the ‘Sisters Dark’. Amy didn’t think it would be cheering to know what it was. It had to do with the Purple.
She wanted to confide her worries to her friend, but a voice in her head – very like Light Fingers’ – cautioned against it. She couldn’t tell whether Frecks had covered for her with Beeke or just not realised Amy was the pest the Black Skirts were after.
Not realising things was becoming a Frecks trait. It was unlike the old her. Last term, her keen perception fringed on the borders of Ability.
‘I’ll keep looking for Light Fingers,’ Amy said.
‘Please yourself,’ said Frecks.
Amy walked on. She happened to look back and saw Frecks’ triad ambling towards the theatre. Were they invited to the meeting after all? If so, they were late. Being late wasn’t a Black Skirt sort of thing. Rayne had spoken about being ‘neat, efficient and cheerful’. She was most likely always on time. Or early, in order to catch you out. It was impossible to tell whether she was cheerful or not. By her own strange standards, she might be. And being cheerful wasn’t the same as being happy.
Crossing the Quad, she saw Wychwood – blazer still streaked with black – and a few other Greys milling about in the cold. Black Skirts were suddenly in short supply. Usually, they were all over the show. They couldn’t all be under the stage, surely? There wasn’t room, even in the scenery vault. Like so much else lately, this struck Amy as ominous.
Wychwood was heading towards the Gym. Amy hadn’t thought of checking there for Light Fingers. It was skipping territory. With Black Skirts in session elsewhere, Light Fingers might have found refuge between wooden horses and climbing ropes. Amy followed Wychwood out of the Quad.
Outside the Gym, Goneril House was gathered. Captain Flo Rhode-Eeling, proudly Grey, was flanked by stars of the cricket elevens and netball teams, plus the outstanding runners, jumpers and chuckers. Some wore cricket caps and scarves and held bats as if they meant business.
The javelin champion Kat ‘Shoshone’ Brown wore the Red Indian headdress she affected on Sports Day and shouldered her favourite spear, Strikes-Like-an-Adder. The shot-put virtuoso Helen ‘Overwhelming’ O’Hara juggled miniature cannon balls. Euterpe McClure represented the Murdering Heathens.
Amy was brought up short by the Goneril Gang. All were still in Grey.
They were preparing for War – or, at least, serious scrimmage. Shoshone Brown wasn’t the only girl flying martial colours. Sharpshooter Jemima Sieveright wore a trenchcoat inherited from her Victoria Cross-winning brother, with darned bullet holes and slight singeing. She had an air-gun, not the wooden rifle issued by the QMWAACC.
The school falconer Netta Kinross had Polyphemus, her one-eyed prize bird, perched on her leather armlet. Amy was wary of Kinross. She hoped never to have a falcon set after her while aloft.
Roberta Hale, still nervous in the open, had showed up, hands mittened and a muffler around her face.
Pinborough, who fought under the soubriquet of the Blonde Bruiser, wore singlet, shorts and big red boxing gloves. She jabbed the air to keep the circulation going. Smaller girls kept heads well away. Smudge said Pinners strung the knocked-out teeth of former opponents on a necklace. Ker, whose father was a rebel general in Formosa, sat on the steps with her knees up under her chin. The least-bullied Second in School, Ker was proficient in Chinese Boxing. She could (and did) floor girls twice her weight. Her family were headhunters, which made Pinborough’s string-of-gnashers seem tame.
Even Nellie Pugh wouldn’t take bets on a match between Ker and Pinborough, and neither was inclined to take on the other. Indeed, Amy would worry about anyone who went up against the both at the same time… assuming they could get close enough without being impaled by Brown’s feather-tipped spear, brained by one of McClure’s beamers, ripped apart by Polyphemus or catching a discus in the throat from Rhode-Eeling.
Amy was surprised.
Tamora was the warlike crew, but they stayed home. Aside from the odd maniac like McClure, Goneril was known for ritualised, formalised, good-humoured competition… not extremes of violence. Generally, they got on with their games and chose not to intervene in other business. Wary truce between Rhode-Eeling and Gryce kept Tamora and Goneril, perceived as the strongest Houses, from outright hostilities. The usual Goneril girl was jolly if on the dim side. They had a few Unusuals, like Marsh and Gould, but generally relied on the tiresome, demanding business of exercise and practise to maintain their reputation for being top at sport.
Relying on Abilities wasn’t quite playing the game, old thing.
Marsh, scarf around her gills, was here. Her sport, of course, was swimming – which was only held in summer term. To keep in trim, she took a dip in the ocean every day, even when it was stormy or freezing. She was pop-eyed and fish-lipped, but sleek as a seal in the water.
Gould, one of Goneril’s few Black Skirts, was under the stage with the Cerberus. She was School champion at Hare and Hounds and an accomplished huntswoman. Her cell was decorated with heads, furs and antlers. She brought back broken-necked rabbits for midnight stews, though softer-hearted girls baulked at eating bunny-wunnies.
Seeing the massed ranks of Goneril – down to Firsts and Seconds with cricket stumps and huge boxing gloves – ready for battle didn’t make Amy queasy the way the Black Skirts did. But she didn’t care for the implications either.
‘…it’s Viola,’ Rhode-Eeling said, contemptuous. ‘Have you forgotten what babies they are? New bonnets don’t change that. Goneril can’t let the affront stand, can’t let this rot go on. Skipping is not a sport… it’s a bally pastime.’
A Viola advantage, Amy realised, was that Mansfield had memorised acres of Henry V and would deliver more stirring addresses to the troops. They’d still get a battering, though. A stage-trained swordswoman accustomed to blunt tips and opponents primed to bleed and fall down and die on cue would come off worst against a sporty duellist who cared more about winning than looking pretty as she fought. This was likely to mean more Grand Guignol. The Violas would get a chance to play the deat
h scenes they so loved.
Despite herself, Amy felt a surge of hope.
The battle Light Fingers had worried about, that she had herself dreaded, would be fought and won and the Black Skirts broken before any more damage was done.
And Amy didn’t even have to be in it.
…then she remembered the way the Macbeth backdrop had shimmered into the Purple, and had dreadful premonitions.
Rhode-Eeling had the heartier Ariel Greys – like Haldane and Manders – on board. The Goneril mob even took in a lone Desdemona Sixth – Hern, School’s best yachtswoman.
But Amy wasn’t invited into this army, and nor were any of her intimates. Despite Frecks’ urging, she and Light Fingers hadn’t gone up for netball.
‘Girls,’ continued Rhode-Eeling, ‘one of our own has fallen into black company…’
That was about as clever as it got in Goneril.
‘…and it’s down to us to rescue her, to show her the error of her ways, to bring her back to our side and the right track.’
So this was about Aconita Gould, of all people. The right head of the Cerberus.
Amy didn’t see how this was going to work. Did Rhode-Eeling expect her House to march across to the Black Skirt rally like the Greeks intent on reclaiming Helen of Troy? That had lasted ten years and no one came out of it terribly well. Even if they got Wolf Girl back, what then? They could hardly strip her kit and force her into Grey. Perhaps there would be an intensive talking-to, with Rhode-Eeling appealing to Gould’s House pride. If so, she’d missed the latest news… Black and Grey cut across the whole school, and meant more than Houses or anything else.
Ker leaped up and flexed, doing light bends and passes to show off her limberness – then flat-palmed the wall with enough force to crack a brick and shake a rind of ice off the lintel. Pinborough punched the air and, in her signature gesture, flicked her fringe out of her eyes before launching her knock-out blow. Now Amy came to think of it, that mannerism was a dead giveaway. If the Blonde Bruiser were ever matched with a fighter who wasn’t a Dim, she’d regret that tell.