Band of Gypsys (36 page)

‘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.’

‘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 the 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.