‘Quite some battle, this eh? Biggest we’ve yet seen.’ The woman—the Beetle Lady, he remembered she called herself—blinked at him through eyes kohled with weariness and smoke. ‘Who d’you think’ll win?’ Klade shrugged.
‘I think we’ve had it, personally—I mean, the West…’ Klade nodded. Disloyal though he knew it sounded, he was easily bored now by such military talk, and another ravener was bellowing too close by for comfort.
The Beetle Lady leaned forward. Rummaging through insect veils, her fingers snagged at the torn edges of a newspaper clipping. It was of a familiar head and shoulders, and just at that moment the guns roared her name. MA-RI-ON. ‘Knew her, I did,’ she breathed as another shell shook the ground. ‘Long ago, when she was a girl…’
The ravener had passed by, but Klade still felt a sense of something imminent as the words poured from the Beetle Lady’s mouth like a tumble of stones. Over the battle’s roar, she told him how she’d once lived in a place called Luttrell, doing the necessary social rounds with her doctor husband until one summer had been brightened by the arrival of a senior greatgrandmistress and her ailing son at a fine nearby house. The house was called Invercombe, and the place had been so perfectly beautiful that the Beetle Lady much regretted that she hadn’t visited more often when she could, especially as it was now ruined.
The battle-song had fallen quiet immediately around them, but was raging everywhere else. They were at its quiet unbeating heart, and now, creeping around them in pale tendrils, furrowing the mud and brightening his visions, came tendrils of ghostgas.
‘Look, listen—the thing I keep forgetting, the thing I haven’t told you, is that Marion Price had this theory. It was a way of looking at the world which made absolute sense of it. Even this battle, here and now, and these …’ The Beetle Lady clattered her insect cloak, which seemed to Klade now to be chirruping and crawling with the ghostgas. ‘If I could just remember. How did it go?’ She cocked her head. ‘It was all about life and about death as well, and how they both mattered as much as each other and they fitted together in a perfect tapestry …’
Both Klade and the Beetle Lady grew less and less coherent as the ghostgas glowed and day and the battle drew on. She told him how she and her husband had been posted to tend the wounded at the start of the war, which should have been fine and interesting work, for her hobby was insects, and she’d never encountered so many of every conceivable shade and variety—the maggots, worms, flies, lice, scorpions, wasps, fleas, dragonlice and beetles which thrived on war in a way which humans seemingly didn’t.
By now, the big guns around them had mostly quietened, and all that was left was the rattle of small arms, the occasional light bang of a grenade, the screams of the wounded. All signs that the battle was ending, and that the remaining enemy positions were being tidied up. The only question, Klade thought as this woman continued to mutter and ramble about her old, lost life, was, who’d won?
Bang. Screams, and soldiers’ voices. Klade peeked over what was left of their wall. The ghostgas had faded, but it was hard to tell how much of the rearranged world he now saw out there was real and how much was some terrible vision. A head lay nearby, and a scorpion-thing was plucking at the frayed flesh of its neck. Flies, the great black swarms which somehow appeared at the end of every battle, were shading out what was left of the light.
Bang.
The Beetle Lady chuckled. ‘Told you the Easties would win, didn’t I? Don’t think they’ll be that impressed by the likes of us, though. Look—perhaps I should show them this …’ Again, she produced that ragged newsprint photograph. ‘I could tell them that I knew Marion Price …’
‘Everyone says that.’
‘Ah, but I did. You haven’t been listening, have you? Knew her at that lovely place called Invercombe. Surely you’ve heard of it. It’s on the channel down from Bristol, and not so very far from Einfell. Ah, so you have heard of there—all those stories, eh, of changeling sprites and gremlins? Marion Price wasn’t anything special then, just a maid, but pretty enough, to be sure. And she was with that poor ill lad—did I mention him. Now what was his name? Something posh and big-guilded anyway, an Easterner for sure. Not that he was a bad sort, and they became what you might call an item. Even heard that she might have got in the family way with him.’
‘Family way?’
‘You know.’ The Beetle Lady mimed an outwards curve over her moth-winged belly. ‘Although everything was going wrong by then already, just as it seems to have done ever since. Doubt if the poor thing ever survived. Now, what was that boy’s name? And then there was his mother …’
But Klade was hunched back and scarcely listening, suddenly shivering inside what remained of their brick and earth shelter. Followers were unreliable witnesses to their own daily existence, let alone what had happened years ago but still, even as the footfalls and gunshots of the victorious Eastern soldiers grew close, he felt that here—in the Beetle Lady, and her stories and her buzzing, stirring clothes—was some essential truth. A maid—some high-born lad—and a place not far off from Einfell. Even the name, Inver-something. Hadn’t Silus said that to him as well?
‘Tell me again,’ he whispered. ‘Was it really …’
But the soldiers were blocking the holes in the bricks with their boots and guns.
‘Up you get.’ The Eastie with the highest rank, who had one eye which roved and blood shining down his front to which many flies were clinging, smiled down at them. ‘Turned out quite nice in the end, didn’t it?’ The other soldiers chuckled, and one of them cocked his gun, but then the Beetle Lady flapped herself up and waved her clattering arms.
‘Look, listen, look …’
She muttered something more, and the flies swarmed about her. For a moment, their cloud grew so dense that Klade couldn’t breathe or see. ‘Don’t know who I am, do you?’ she shouted in the buzzing roar as the soldiers stumbled back from her. ‘Look—I’m Marion Price, you fools! Can’t you see?’ Then, still beaded by bluebottles, she started singing in a voice which was so keen and beautiful that even Klade for a moment believed.
As she pirouetted covered in gleaming insects, the Beetle Lady looked oddly beautiful. She could have been anyone—saviour or nemesis—in the hot evening light, which gleamed towards the clustered roofs and junctions of a nearby station. The soldiers glanced at each other uneasily.
‘Lying, ain’t she?’
‘’Course she is …’
But their guns were lowered. The soldiers turned to their corporal as, swaying, arms upraised, the Beetle Lady still sang.
‘Guess we could keep her. Put her up there in that engine shed for a spot of interrogation. Least until morning.’
‘You don’t reckon?’
‘Bit old for that…’
‘We’ll see how cold it gets, eh?’
‘And him?’
A gun, once again, was cocked, and Klade gazed into the hole in the world which it made.
‘Run!’ called the Beetle Lady. His back flayed by the hot expectancy of bullets, Klade scrambled up the slope. But none came.
Then he was out.
The Bonny Boy was away.
III
THE MONTH WHICH HAD FOLLOWED the victory at Droitwich was one of steady advance. It really seemed, at least to Ralph’s officers, and sometimes even to Ralph himself in his brighter moods as they followed the quietly unwinding roads and occupied the undefended and often near-empty towns, that the West was in abject withdrawal. But then came Hereford. Even the weather, previously mild and dry and warm, had betrayed them as it broke into torrenting rain just as they were establishing their forward positions, and with it and the crackle of thunder had come the boom and whistle of Western shells.
Vital weeks had now been wasted in ugly stalemate, and many lives and precious ordnance and stores had been lost in the muddy roads and damaged tracks which snaked from the supposedly safe Midlands towards this new front line. Ralph had argued from the start that they lacke
d the necessary numbers to properly support their supply lines, but London had repeatedly assured him that the counties of Worcestershire and Salop were entirely tamed until the first sabotages had begun. Not regulars in proper uniforms with clear lines of command and appropriate ranks, but shabby groups subsisting on pillage and stolen weapons, many of them women and children. Ralph had to admire the skill with which the West had responded to their summer of defeat: retreat and retreat until the lines of your advancing enemy were overstretched, then use your own starving citizenry to attack from behind. Hereford itself no longer seemed like a prize worth the fighting, but a symbol of Eastern vanity and Western cunning shaped from rubble. And still its citizens refused to submit to his offers of sanctuary and free passage.
At least the weather was finally improving, and the last of the mist which had cloaked Ralph’s morning departure from Advance HQ was replaced by innocent autumn sunlight as the repatched rails bore him in fits and starts back towards London across the innocent-seeming countryside. Choppy seas of hills, and the old stone crowns of abandoned aether mills which mimicked the sarsens that had surely stood there before. Wary trackside guards, waiting for the next explosion or wrecking spell, made yet more edgy by the latest story of poisoned apples left ripening in orchards for them to pick. Ralph had no idea whether that was true or not, but it often seemed :hat things had got to the point where such distinctions scarcely mattered. The heavily armoured train finally picked up speed after it had passed the freshly fortified castle at Warwick. Pricked by guilt to be staring aimlessly out of the window, he returned to studying the papers and maps he’d spread across the seats of the carriage.
A neatly typed report attempted to make sense of the essentially unknowable situation of Western morale. On the one hand, there could be no denying that there was a general sense of pessimism. But capitulation was another matter, and there remained a feeling that London and the Great Guilds would still concede most of the West’s territorial, legislative and trading demands if they could just hold on, and a near-religious faith A as being placed in their much-vaunted new weapons. Essentially, Ralph thought, these people had lost too much to admit that it had all been pointless, which meant that the thrusts by his companion armies towards encircling Bristol and cutting off Bath and Gloucester and Swindon, which he’d previously thought of as exercises in planning and logistics, would have to take place. But first, he would have to capture Hereford.
He slanted the fluttering angles of light across a typewritten final addendum, which dealt with what it termed the alarming fondness which many lower ratings of his own side were now displaying towards Marion Price. Of course, the report meant the myth, not the real person who, as the report went on to confirm, was rarely reported on these days in the Western press in any case. Most likely, any real deeds by a single person would have got in the way of all the stories and songs and medallions, although there was some suggestion that she was no longer in accord with the main policy-makers within the Merchant Venturers. She might even have fallen ill from one of the many diseases which were said to be rife in the over-brimming Western hospitals, or possibly have been killed or captured in one of her famous forays to the front, although no verifiable trace had been found of her despite many disproved reports.
Ralph sat back, remembering that evening after the victory in Droitwich, and the small madness which must have seized him to ever put credence on that ragged lad’s report. The train rocked on, and tiredness crept over him in a painless grey wave. The papers fell loose from his fingers. The clouds, the hills, the sheep, the fields, the whole onrush of the journey, crept by him, then suddenly, as his eyes jerked open and his senses jarred with all the things he’d planned and failed to do, the train was huffing into London’s Great Aldgate Station. He got up and snatched his falling papers just as his ADC poked his head around the door and the train gave a final jolt. Then he was climbing out into sunlight and pigeons and steam, his throat raw and his face stiff and his left arm numb with pins and needles, and there were the kids and there was Helen, and everything was much too blurred and quick.
‘You really must learn to unwind,’ Helen said to him through the bathroom door as they prepared for bed that night. ‘It’s not as if we don’t have our own difficulties and privations. But we just laugh and get on with it…’
Moving within the strange, soft weight of his dressing gown in the tiled expanse of their bathroom, Ralph opened his shaving kit and stropped up the razor with its soap-encrusted diamond stud, lathered his face, and drew the new blade across the roughness of his cheeks. Then he washed his face, and enjoyed the warm oblivion of the water, although the huge white towel he dried himself with came away streaked with pink. He sighed, and the gaunt-looking man in the mirror sighed back at him. He’d never been much good at this.
‘People are still talking about Droitwich. You should take more credit.’ Helen’s voice slowed as she neared the open crack of the bathroom door. ‘Everyone says I’m married to a military genius. But I suppose that’s all shop to you, isn’t it? Even here in London, it’s so hard to think about anything but the war…’
Her voice trailed off, although Ralph, as he stood at the mirror watching two thin rivers of blood make their way down his neck, could tell that she hadn’t moved away.
He cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’ He dabbed himself, clicked off the lights and crossed the long space of the room. The sheets felt coolly enormous as he climbed into bed. The air was hissingly quiet.
‘Darling, I can’t wait for this to end.’
‘Neither can I.’
‘And I’ve so, so missed you.’
She leaned over him on her elbow. It was never truly dark here in this city. Despite the room’s velvet curtains, the endless electric wash of London filtered in, glowing silver on her cheek and shoulder and the fine, sharp cut of her fashionably short bob of hair. He could hear the rustle of flesh against silk as she breathed. Beyond that, the sound of traffic.
‘My hero.’ Her fingers touched his jaw not far from where it had scabbed, played with a top pyjama button, moved down. ‘And the children are so, so proud, although I know they’re not always good at showing it.’
‘I know it’s difficult for them. I should spend more time …’ Ralph swallowed. Bat-wings of night flickered before him. There was this new kind of creature the West had long been rumoured to be developing. He’d doubted their true existence, but reports he’d read today on the train before sleep had ambushed him suggested they’d been encountered by a reconnoitring party near Slough. Like bats—moths—nocturnes were suicidally drawn to heat. Their acid wings filled engine vents and cooling systems to cause irreparable breakdowns. They were also drawn to human faces.
Helen’s eyes were shining a little too brightly. Moving slightly up the pillow so that he could only see the pale edges of her cheek, she slid the strap of her night-gown from her shoulder and offered her breast to him. He drew himself to her, filled with sudden need.
There was blood on his pillow in the morning—a surprising amount of the stuff considering it was only a cut from shaving, as if in evidence of some crime—although Helen, who had primped and primed her already obvious beauty, was simply amused. Perhaps, Ralph thought as he pulled on his uniform in preparation for the morning ahead, women have a different attitude towards the stuff. After all, they have to shed it every month. He paused in mid-trouser leg, struck by a regret, a memory. Women bled, but Marion never had—not in the near-three summer months in which they’d been lovers. All their talk of science, love, nature, and he’d thought himself obsessed with her body, yet he’d never known or noticed that she was pregnant. Not until he was in the heart and heat of this damnable war, when it was all too late.
Outside, traffic was muffled in fog and the city’s great structures seemed, in their dimness and size, to drift with him as he followed the ribboning pavements. He had to think hard about the route he was taking, then backtrack and dodge a ferocious tra
m. He was breathless and nearly late by the time he reached the base of the greyly robed triumphal arch of the Halls of the Great Guilds, and regretting he hadn’t called for the car and saved his energies.
Greeted in the chilly mosaics by staff officers even younger than those who served with him at the front, Ralph was led up ascensions of stairs. Tea ladies steamed past. From the balcony of a large auditorium, he looked down on a vast map of England. The land was green and flat as a weed-scummed pond. The cities were numbered dots. Across this placid surface, pushed by long poles wielded by beautiful acolytes, sailed the flagged armies and fleets of the East and West. Their movements were dictated by the ribbons of paper which streamed from a far wall. Beyond, through enormous doors, lay the sea-on-shingle rush of the reckoning engines where all the messages of war surged and were resolved.
The meeting room was predictably enormous, although it would have been bested in almost every aspect by the halls of the specific guilds which lay around it along Wagstaffe Mall. The guilds, for all that they had worked together here on the difficult business of running the nation for several Ages, were always more willing to outshine each other than they were to co-operate. Ralph, as he raked back his chair and sat down at the furthest end of the table and golden doors which would have admitted a medium-sized ocean liner boomed shut behind him, thought he detected a shoddiness to the stonework of the pillars, a murkiness amid the great paintings. None of them were quite of the best. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. Perhaps, he thought, clearing a sandy dryness in his throat, I’m getting the hang of being back in London, to notice such things.
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