Castles Made of Sand (54 page)

He had not expected to be alive.

‘You’re a very sneaky brat!’

‘Hahaha. Me, Boudicca!’

His breath caught. ‘How long did you say?’

‘’Bout four minutes now. Sssh. Hang on, my baby.’

‘Talk to me.’

So they talked, softly, about the antics of little plastic armies on the kitchen table at Tyller Pystri, in the lamplight of an evening long ago, until Sage couldn’t talk, he could only look at her, and the seconds ticked by; and she knelt there by the tide with his life in her arms, flickering like a candleflame in a draught—

‘Will they get here, Serendip?’

‘Everything’s fine, Fiorinda. Don’t let him go.’

When the helicopter landed, that’s how Olwen and the Heads and the medical team found them: Sage lying at the edge of the sea. Fiorinda holding him, the magician’s head beside them. Olwen Devi saw the great dark ragged gap under Sage’s right ribs and stared at Fiorinda, open-mouthed in appalled amazement.

‘Just do it!’ snarled Fiorinda.

They had his riven body onto the stretcher and an IV pumping plasma into him as swiftly as George Merrick’s hands would move.

‘Hi, George,’ whispered Sage.

‘Hi, boss. Got the bastard, did yer?’

‘I did.’ And at last he closed his eyes.

The helicopter rose and rattled away, eastwards, Sage’s body hooked up to all the life support they had. Rufus O’Niall’s head was in a sack, and Fiorinda kneeling on the floor, clinging to Sage’s lax hand, tears streaming down her face.

God send each good man at his end, such horse such hounds and such a friend.

Six days after Ax’s velvet invasion—as the media people were calling it—he was in Somerset, facing a pitched battle. At first everything had gone well. Benny Preminder’s régime was in disarray. A hastily commissioned emergency Prime Minister had welcomed Ax’s return. In Yorkshire and the North-East, people were celebrating now. In London they were ringing the church bells and throwing street parties. (Amazing. The mob that tried to burn Fiorinda must’ve been aliens, popped in from another dimension.) But it wasn’t over, by no means. The Celtics were digging in, wherever they held the balance of power, and in the South-West they were determined to fight. The success of an invasion is measured in hours, but the hours can stretch to days. Ax had come to meet them, because he couldn’t let this go on, and here he was, not thirty miles from his home town, facing a situation he couldn’t defuse.

The barmies were encamped on the north flank of the Polden Hills, facing the enemy across the valley of the Brue. Early on the morning of that sixth day Ax was in a canvas mess tent with his friends, waiting for news. Kathryn Adams had returned to the US. Alain and Tamagotchi were in Paris, and Mohammad was in Yorkshire. Rox was in London. Allie and Dilip and Rob, Chip and Ver, should have been there too, but they’d forced Ax to admit they had a right to come along with the army. To be here, on this neo-mediaeval battlefield—

The news that meant either peace or war would not reach them by telecoms. Negotiations would be over immediately, if the Celtics detected any anti-Gaia modern means of communication in use, and the Celtic netheads were
good
, so it wasn’t worth the risk. They didn’t know how the news would reach them. They’d been eating breakfast, a tired spread of bread and cheese and jam, some very suspect sliced meat; vacuum jugs of dandelion coffee. The Few, what was left of the Few, sat over the remains of this buffet, making hopeful conversation. Ax studied a paper map. He’d been so savagely in need of his chip, these last days, that if he’d been anywhere near a working neuro-prosthetics clinic he’d have demanded a replacement over the counter,
do it to me!

Failing that, he had to devour the map and
think
,
visualise
, because it’s always the detail that counts, the lie of the land—

‘We need to retake Reading,’ said a militarised Dilip. ‘If we could walk in there, and make it look never in doubt, that would swing it.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Rob. ‘We could do it. The town’s ours. They may not love the staybehinds, but they hate the fucking Celtics.’

Allie said, ‘Ax, do you want that briefing on Greg Mursal now?’

‘Greg what? Who he—?’

‘He’s the Prime Minister.’

He glanced over with a wry grin. ‘Sorry. Yeah. I’ll get to it.’

The emergency Prime Minister, alas, was not a major issue. The people who were in a position to control the future of England were just about two miles away, in the enemy camp.

Push wood on the fire, Jackie. Good wood on the fire, Jackie—

‘I’m going out for some fresh air.’

Outside the tent Ax’s driver, a Welsh Independent Volunteer called Bronwen Palmer, slouched in the open door of her jeep.
Stay with the vehicle
was the only way to hang on mps—mobile power-sourcing, otherwise known as motor fuel. Take your eyes off your ride for a moment, even if you’re driving the Dictator himself, and it will get siphoned, the fuel-cell will be drained; or it will vanish.

Ax nodded to her, took out a cigarette and looked north. Glastonbury Festival site, was over there, beyond the Celtic position, a
great wen
; dwarfing the little towns of Shepton Mallet, Street and Glastonbury itself. Something like a hundred thousand people. Women who
actively want
to bear fifteen babies before they’re thirty, and see fourteen of the kids die. Pagan priests who
actively want
to keep the ‘unfit’ in dogkennels and sacrifice them on feastdays (with the occasional glorious physical specimen for dandy); because Gaia has spoken…

He didn’t believe it. As the leader of the Rock and Roll Reich should know, it’s all surface and moonshine. But surface and moonshine can be monstrously effective, you can have a wild idea and haul the people along with you
for a while
; he knew that too. The warriors wanted their pitched battle, it was their day in court, and either they would have their way, or Ax would back down, lose the initiative, and there’d be hell to pay. He did not want the job of
dux bellorum
. He almost wished he’d refused, but back in Paris it had seemed there was no other way, and maybe that was still true, if there was hope at all—

‘What pisses me off,’ he said, ‘is the number of people who think I’m surprised the Reich ended up like this. I am not surprised.
And
the other people who think this proves there’s something fundamentally wrong with being green, with treading lightly, or loving this beautiful country. There is
absolutely fuck-all
wrong with the music; or with turning your back on consumerism. The Celtics are criminal lunatics, but they’re not responsible for the Crisis.

‘After the Second World War, when the world was obsessed with Global Thermonuclear meltdown, Albert Einstein said he didn’t know what kind of weapons would be used in the Third World War: but he knew that if there was one, the Fourth World War would be fought with sticks and stones. As it turns out, the Third World War was fought with rotten money, and peasant soldiers in client states, over decades. But it looks as if Einstien was right.’

‘You could duck this,’ said Bron, ‘and win a war of attrition.’

Yeah, right, he thought. Like the Welsh did, when the last global civilisation was tumbling? ‘Nah. I’ll fight. It’s the best option, when you look at the alternatives. What are you Independent Welshpersons going to do?’ he added, in her own language. ‘Clear off back to the valleys would be my advice.’

‘Taking a wild guess, we’ll wait and see, and leg it for the winning side at the worst moment for the other fellers.’

‘Right.’

‘Of course, I’m talking about the Northerners. Hypocritical tight-arses.’

She had not expected Ax Preston to be like this, an unassuming feller with a few strands of silver in his dark hair, a demon for work and a distracted look. Didn’t know what she’d expected, really. She liked the directness. He gives you the feeling he’s not just moving his mouth, to be polite: he’s
talking to you
. That’s what I will tell people, she thought.

‘Are you going to smoke that cigarette? Er, Sir?’

‘No. It’s Ramadan.’

It will be Yap Moss again, he thought, tracing the landscape with his gaze, fitting it to his plans. And they don’t know. Very few of the so-called warriors over there were in Yorkshire, very few have been in combat. They don’t know what can happen in an afternoon. He felt sickened.

The Celtic command post was a Iron Age roundhouse prefab, with a reed thatched roof and wattled walls. Fiorinda and the Heads drove up to it, Fiorinda in the front with George. She was dressed as she’d been at Drumbeg, but cleaned up; and her hair was brushed until it glowed. Rufus, in the sack at her feet, muttered like something overheard in a bad dream.

They parked a respectful distance from the tooled-up warriors guarding the doorway. There were shouts of excitement somewhere not far away, but here the crowd was silent, pressing close and staring: sombre, tattooed, pierced, wild-haired men and women.

‘Rehearse me again,’ said Fiorinda.

George repeated the Irish with her.

‘I’ve got it.’ She pushed back her hair. ‘I
wish
I had some make-up.’

‘You look terrific,’ said Bill.

‘Never better,’ said Peter. ‘I never saw you look better.’

‘Knock ’em dead, my love,’ said George. ‘You’re on.’

They were supposed to have a safe conduct. Unarmed, no wires, no panic buttons, nothing, they walked in: Fiorinda casually swinging the sack. Inside the roundhouse it was, unexpectedly, almost as light as day, because there were ATP patches all round the walls. Fiorinda grinned when she saw that. A trestle table of pale raw timber faced the entrance, across a space of beaten earth and the hearth pit; a row of people, mostly men, sat behind it. Others were standing on either side. She recognised intimates of those winter evenings at Rivermead, but not Benny Prem, Glastonbury leaders. The rest of those at the table were Scottish and Irish ‘military advisers’. She knew some faces in that contingent too: people who damn well ought to know better than to be in this company.

‘Hello Jack,’ she said brightly, to the worst of those who’d seen her humiliated as ‘Fergal’s’ whore, ‘where’s Benny?’ She grinned. ‘Is he not feeling well? Hello Phil—’ This to Phil Maclean, Scottish radical rockstar: who had been a friend of the Reich last time they met. ‘How’s the band?’

She emptied her sack onto the table, lifted Rufus’s head by the hair and set it upright. Salt trailed from the mouth; which moved, slackly, but no distinct sound emerged. The life in it was running down at last. There you go. One dead magician, boys. Think about it, those of you who know—

She said her piece, looking the chief of the Irish party straight in the eye.

‘
Coir paisean a bhi ann, agus nior fear, bean no leanbh sin Eireann Naofa, go dtabharfainn mise no mó churadh an locht.
’

It was a crime of passion, and there is not a man, woman nor child in Holy Ireland, that would give me or my champion the blame.

There was a dead silence.

‘Well?’ said Fiorinda.

One of the men at the table (which of them was the first would be cause for endless speculation) stood and bowed, without a word. Then another did the same, then one of the women. There was a rush. They were all on their feet. One or two even dropped on one knee. The armed guards around the walls decided to pitch in, going down in a wave.

Fiorinda drew a breath, and nodded.

‘Good. That’s very sensible.’

The tableau came to life. A babble of voices.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she told them. ‘Later. Now I have to be somewhere else.’

She walked out, the Heads close around her, into the waiting crowd. The bonfire at Westminster rose up and there was bile in her throat, but she raised her clasped hands above her head. ‘It’s peace!’ she yelled. The warriors cheered. She and George and Bill and Peter leaped into the jeep and roared away.

While Fiorinda was pulling her stunt, Sage was on his way from the Celtic camp to Ax’s position, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd. Neither of them had yet seen Ax. They’d come to Somerset straight from the South Wales branch of Zen Self labs; where he’d been patched up sufficiently that he could sit in a car. It was a tour de force, but worth it at this juncture, when something like ‘the return of Aoxomoxoa’ could swing the balance. He was drugged to the eyeballs, and as comfortable as possible, it’d be a while before he could
lie down
anyway. All he had to do was smile, like dowager royalty; maybe a little wave now and then. He was not afraid for himself, because all this seemed like a dream, anyway. He was afraid for Fiorinda, walking into that den of wolves without him. But she would be fine. She could look after herself, and she had George and Bill and Peter—

The jeep coughed and died. They were halfway up a little lane, eaten away by flowers and grass, that lead to Mr Dictator’s camp. He stayed the back with his medical support, while the driver and his mate decided what to do. They’d run out of fuel, must have been ripped off, better leave the hero and go and fetch help… Everyone in the jeep knew that Sage couldn’t move from that backseat, but the cheering crowd of Aoxomoxoa fans had no idea. These were the Cornish Celtics, coming over to Ax’s side because their hero had returned. Shit. Fate has called our bluff, or put it another way, fucking stupid cock-up. He hated the thought of being carried out of here on a stretcher, but it might have to be.

There was a sudden commotion. Four young men came barging through the crowd, hauling a great big roan horse, saddled and bridled in Celtic retro style. Everyone was overjoyed. What a great solution!

‘Aoxomoxoa! Aoxomoxoa! Can you ride? Uh, Sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never tried.’

If Olwen had been there she would have stopped him, but the Zen Selfer medics wouldn’t argue with Aoxomoxoa. He had achieved the quest! He almost wished they
would
, but too bad. Can’t let the punters down. He knew that if the fight happened it would be a close thing, could hang on a thread, and
Ax is not going to lose because of me
. Still a few dregs of superpower in the tank, I’ll be fine.