God Emperor of Didcot (23 page)

Smith turned the jar upside down in case some stray tea had got caught in it. He shook it, but nothing fell out. It was then that he noticed a single teabag taped to the base. He pulled it free. Obviously an emergency teabag, intended for situations much like this. Sensible chaps.

He put the teabag in the cup and added the boiling water. He stirred it for a while with his knife, squashed the teabag against the side of the cup – interesting aroma –and dropped the bag into the sink. Then he added a little milk and stirred it again, as per the advice of the United Kingdom Tea Council.

It didn’t taste bad. He was unable to identify the sort: it reminded him slightly of Kenyan tea, although the rich aftertaste seemed unfamiliar, as did the purplish tint. Still, it was refreshing enough. Some sort of local brew, perhaps, a speciality of Urn.

Hot tea ran into his innards, refreshing him. He felt a bit better: his head was clearing very quickly. The stuff was sharpening him up a treat, in fact. In a moment he would be able to go back outside and help the men get ready to give some Ghasts a pasting.

Smith opened the cupboard and looked around for a biscuit. There was nothing. What I need now is some tiffin, he thought. ‘What I need now is some tiffin,’ he said, to make sure.

He left the kitchen. Another door branched off the corridor; it seemed to lead to a lavatory. He approached the door. There was a sign on the door. It said, ‘Please leave this toilet in the same state as you found it’.

How absurd. What kind of a fool would find a toilet, presumably needing a wee, and leave it still needing a wee? He chuckled at the stupidity of the idea and had another sip of tea. He stopped chuckling and tried again.

This time the tea went inside him instead of down his shirt-front. ‘Mm, tiffin,’ he said. His nipples hurt a bit from the hot tea.

Smith noticed that no more tea was entering his mouth and checked his cup. It was very deep. In fact, it was one of the largest mugs he had ever seen. Clever thing, technology. He looked down the well-like mug, into its depths. ‘Helloooo,’ he called. The cup was so deep that a man could fall into it, if he was not careful. Smith would not fall into it. No fooling me, he thought.

‘Smith?’

That was his name; he turned around to see Major Wainscott standing in the doorway. Major Wainscott had a beard, which was clever of him. ‘Clever beard you’ve got there, Wainscott,’ Smith observed.

‘What?’ Wainscott demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you, man?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with me,’ Smith replied. ‘I’m the tiffin, you see.’

‘You’re ill, Smith,’ Wainscott said.

‘Piffle.’ Smith wandered back into the office, reflecting that he needed another sit-down. At the edge of his vision, Wainscott was becoming quite agitated. He had run into the kitchen and was making appalled noises, presumably because there was no more tea.

‘Sorry about that,’ Smith said. ‘I had the last teabag.’

Wainscott peered at him. ‘Smith,’ he barked. ‘Smith, you hear me?’

Smith smiled at the absurdity of the situation. ‘Of course I do,’ he said.

‘Smith, where did you find that teabag?’

‘Stuck to the bottom of the pot. Why?’

Wainscott exclaimed ‘Balls!’ and ran for the door.

Terror struck Smith at the thought of being left alone. ‘Wait!’

Wainscott turned around at the door. ‘Smith?’

‘Haven’t got any tiffin on you, I suppose?’

But Wainscott was gone. Smith felt confused and glum.

He spotted a magazine sticking out of a small bin. He fished it out. It was
What Ho
, the
Monolith on Sunday
’s colour supplement. The front cover said, ‘Azranath the Butcher shows us round his lovely citadel. Top fashion model Olivia Marshing-Purdah tells us her diet secret’. He opened it.

The pictures lunged out at him. He blinked and he was falling, tumbling into the photos of famous women caught shopping and noted actors carrying their babies. The gaudy text rushed around him as he fell into the
Monolith
’s colour supplement. ‘It’s full of stars,’ he gasped, and the last thing he heard was the muffled thud of his head striking paper, and then the floor.

He was in the tea-fields, walking – drifting – through the crop. It stretched on forever, to the horizon and beyond, a carpet of moral fibre under the brilliant sky. He took a deep breath of pure, rich air, that seemed to feed and clean his lungs.

‘Allo!’

He turned: a bearded man in ragged robes stood behind him. The man wore a pointed hat, and carried a long stick in one hand. In the other was an ice-cream.

‘Alright, young’n,’ said the man. ‘Time we spoke.’

‘Hello,’ said Smith. ‘I’m Isambard Smith.’

‘And I am Merlin!’ cried the old man. ‘I walk the land, guarding it for the future. And you, Isambard Smith, must hark at me, for there be a battle coming anywhen soon, and it be up to you to win it. So you may ask of me what you will, and I’ll guide you best as I can.’

‘Ah,’ Smith replied. ‘This is obviously some sort of hallucination. My brain isn’t working right. I’m afraid you’d best come back when I’m feeling better, Merlin.’

‘No!’ cried Merlin. ‘Now is the time, my lad! Ask now, or never!’

‘Very well,’ said Smith. ‘Will we win the war?’

‘Nope,’ Merlin said. ‘Not with what you’ve got now. You feel it, you know it, but you don’t think it. You drink the tea, the tea that grows from the land, but you don’t see how truth lies. This is no scrap between two men – when a man wars with us, he wars with the land, see? You turn the land on him, and you’ll scag the bastard for sure. See?’

‘I think so,’ Smith murmured. ‘Can I ask another question, Merlin?’

‘Speak the words.’

‘Am I ever going to get anywhere with Rhianna?’

‘Get anywhere?’ Merlin’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are we talking runs, a four, or a six past her boundary?’

‘The full trip to the pavilion, I suppose.’

Merlin smirked. ‘Keep your pads on and your bat straight, lad.’

‘What does that mean?’ he replied, but everything was starting to fade.

*

The sky was a bland off-white. There were planes above him, space-fighters, frozen in the air. He blinked. He was on his bed on the
John Pym
and he was looking up at the model kits he had hung from the ceiling.

Heads leaned into his vision. People were looking down at him. ‘Hello,’ he said.

They crowded in. He felt like a goldfish in a bowl.

‘I feel odd,’ Smith said.

‘You shouldn’t do.’ This was a gaunt, long-faced man with a thin moustache: W, the spy. ‘By rights, you ought to be dead. You drank the Tea of Death.’

‘The what?’ Smith started to sit up and a hand pressed him back into bed. It was Rhianna. Smith felt pressure on his fingers; she was holding his hand. She sat by the bed, looking both concerned and strangely pleased, as if she knew how to make him feel better again and was looking forward to showing everyone.

‘The Tea of Death,’ Rhianna said. ‘The Tea of Death is a very rare, very potent psychotropic drug, Isambard. You were experiencing a realignment of your consciousness, prompting you to react psychically to both the external world and your inner landscape—’

‘In short, you tripped your nuts off,’ Carveth said.

‘Carveth?’ Smith tried to move again, but Rhianna pressed him down, gently but firmly, and felt his brow. He could get used to that.

‘Be still, Isambard. Sauceress O’Varr says you’re really lucky to be alive. The Tea of Death is actually the product of the blessed crops of Urn that’s passed through the sun dragons to rain down upon the sacred land. Isn’t that fantastic?’

Smith thought about it. He said, ‘Are you telling me I’ve just drunk dragon pee?’

Rhianna laughed. ‘Oh no, the rain part’s purely symbolic. It’s not literally a liquid.’

‘Good!’

‘It’s solid.’

As Smith choked, W interrupted. ‘What you ingested would have killed a man of lesser moral fibre. In fact, we were planning to slip the teabag into the Hyrax’s dinner. The very fact you’re breathing is testament to the nature of the common man of the Empire. The common man, you understand, who will liberate Urn.’

Smith said, ‘Well, can someone get me a straight cup of tea?’

‘Right, good plan,’ W said, and he stood up in a stiff, awkward way and strode out of the room.

Rhianna leaned closer. ‘What was it like?’

‘It. . . I saw all kinds of funny stuff. I had a dream about Merlin, and then there were these curious sensations—’

‘What were they like?’

He frowned, struggling to remember feelings that, now they were past, he did not have the words to depict.

‘Strange. I felt as though I was floating on some kind of magic carpet ride, drifting through purple haze eight miles high above Kashmir. I looked down and saw endless fields beneath me, with some sort of small red fruit in them, going on forever. There was a sign down there. It said, “Pick your own”.’

‘“Pick your own”,’ Rhianna echoed, awed. She smiled at him, which made him feel much better. ‘Amazing,’ she said dreamily.

Smith pulled himself up so that he was sitting. Thankfully, he was still fully clothed. He took a deep breath. ‘Rhianna?’

‘Yes, Isambard?’

‘Thank you for looking out for me. I mean, it’s good of you to make sure I was alright. I could have got addicted to morphine or something.’

‘Er, yes,’ Rhianna said. She smiled again. ‘Perhaps I ought to become ship’s medic.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly got the most experience of being medicated.’ She looked less impressed by this, and he added quickly, ‘Look, I’ve been thinking about things, and I think that—’

‘Greetings!’ Suruk stepped into the room. He carried a steaming mug. ‘Tea,’ he declared, setting it down on the bedside table. ‘The warm beverage of warriors.’ He stepped back and stood in the middle of the room, drinking from his own cup, peering down at Smith. Go away, Smith willed him. Leave me with Rhianna. Just because you don’t have any private parts. . .

Rhianna let go of his hand and stood up. ‘Well, I’ll leave you boys to it. See you later, guys.’

She left. Smith watched her go away – something he seemed to end up doing a lot – and gave Suruk one of his stern looks.

‘Is it good tea?’

‘It’s lovely tea. Thank you very much, Suruk.’

Suruk nodded. He closed the door. ‘So, are you a seer now too?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Smith gritted his teeth and strained.

‘No, I didn’t see anything there.’

‘Hmm. Perhaps you have become psychic. I know – can you tell what I am thinking of?’

‘Is it war, or cutting the heads off things?’

‘Indeed! Both!’

‘I think that was just a lucky guess.’

Suruk sipped his tea, a surprisingly difficult activity for someone with mandibles. ‘I am glad you are well,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We will have every need of good fighters when the time comes to strike.’

‘Yes, we will.’

‘The city is well defended. In a fair fight, I do not know who victory would favour – but as we stand now, I doubt there will be a fair fight at all. I fear that the Edenites will simply shoot us down before we come into range. Their guns are large, and armour thick.’

‘So we go to our deaths, you’re saying?’

‘Almost certainly. I personally do not mind – much better to die on my feet, swinging a blade – but I understand that this might trouble you. Especially since you have yet to spawn with the ship’s females.’

Smith looked away. He did not want to feel angry and afraid, but he did. ‘It’s better that we go out fighting,’ he said. ‘I mean, the bloody Ghasts mean to wipe us out anyhow. Even if they do win, we’ll hurt them first.’

Suruk chuckled. ‘Well said. The death-screams of a thousand enemies shall be a fanfare to proclaim us to our ancestors!’

‘Well, I need to get up. Not doing a lot here.’

‘No, Mazuran. Sleep, for it is the evening. I shall help the others; you must save your strength for acts of war. You will need it,’ he added, and he opened the door.

*

Smith slept badly, but he did not dream. Soon he woke again, and he lay in the dark cabin for a while, feeling fear stir slowly in his gut. He switched the light on and sat up.

The clock said that it was half-past twelve. He felt clear-headed, but fragile. Smith sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, stood up and put his boots and jacket on. He opened the door and stepped outside.

In the corridor, needles rattled softly in their dials. Even the life-support systems seemed to hum less loudly than before. He walked down the passage, opened the airlock and went out into the night.

His boots were quiet on the metal steps. The
Pym
stood in the shadow of a little wood, where the overhanging branches would break up its shape. To his right the M’Lak skimmers were black hillocks in the dark, like burial mounds. The night was cool on his skin; the air was fragrant with tea and earth.

A voice hissed behind him. ‘Who goes there?’

‘Isambard Smith,’ he said, raising his hands. A small man stood there, a knife in one hand and a silenced Stanford gun in the other. The fellow had crept close enough to touch Smith before challenging him.

Wainscott’s men had trained their recruits well. ‘I just needed some air.’

The sentry relaxed. ‘It’s you alright. Fair enough.’ The man stepped back, and faded into the tea fields. Smith watched him disappear and thought: If all our men are like him, we’ll give the Ghasts a run for their money. We certainly deserve to.

He walked into the wood. Someone had cut a narrow path between the trees and he followed it, not quite sure where he was going. For the first time in a long while, he wanted peace and quiet, to be away from the weapons and preparation for war, to forget about his duty and the fight to come.

Yes, peace and quiet. That would be good. The Imperial Code said that it was noble and right to find peace in the countryside. Being in the country enabled the citizen to reflect on life. Very true, thought Smith. Had not Merlin said something like that? Yes, he’d said that victory would come from being one with the land. Well, this was certainly a good—

He tripped over a root. Smith fell onto his hands. He stood up, said ‘Arse!’, brushed his stinging palms together to get rid of the dirt, and stopped.