If Then (33 page)

Something catches on his boot, gets snagged up in his pedrails. Christopher blows on the colloid to clear it. This country is unfamiliar to him, high, dry and dusty. No rain has fallen on these parched rocks and the sun is hot on his iron skin. He reaches down to free his feet. Sandbags, a trail of sandbags heaped up like his entrails, and there are men here, huge misshapen lumps of men, badly made, with horse shoes on the soles of their boots and barbed wire and sections of palisade fused into their backs, moving dumbly toward him. He runs through them, and up a rocky ridge, his claws scuffing on the dry rock. He is much further into the war game than he would like to be. The omega symbol insists upon it. He gains the high ground. Golden wisps of destiny form a trail down through the gullies and dried riverbeds and ending somewway in the waters of the horned bay. The land forms an omega symbol extending into the sea. Golden destiny. He leaps down the gully, running horns-down toward it.

26

H
e swam deeper underwater
, craving the darkness. The colloid at the heart of the armour opened at his approach.

Entangled inside, the boy Christopher had drowned with an abject expression of shock upon his face, the lips twisted with the syllables of his final outraged words.

James yanked the boy free of the supporting webbing and the luminous dead face drifted away. James let a little air out of his lungs and resisted the urge to surface, the urge to live. Then he pulled himself into the machine. The colloid closed behind him and the sea sluiced out of the cockpit.

The webbing held the odour of sour brine, of another man’s fear.

Hector had promised to save him from the war. The armour was the fulfilment of that promise.

An upward cascade of bubbles, followed by a swelling dome of water flowing over water. The armour rose up out of the sea.

On the beach, prisoners, bound tightly in bandages, were carried from a cart, their faces covered, a target pinned to their hearts. Each packaged man was placed upright against intermittent posts. One post was empty. The firing squad executed the line of men and marched by without glancing over at the results of their work, or at the leviathan wading through the shallows.

He surveyed what remained of the battlefield; the encampment of headquarters, the campfire smoke rising from hundreds of dug-outs along the crescent shore, the burning scrub on dark hills, the glimmering surface of the salt lake, and looming over it all, the high rock ridge.

The show was over. The landing had fulfilled its purpose. More black ships would come the following night to step up the evacuation.

The sand shimmered with golden godstuff. He saw ghostly trails of marching men, data ghosts of things to come. A snowfall would cover the battlefield with forgetting; then the snows would melt, and the water would wash all the bones down the great gullies and onto the beach, where the remaining stretcher bearers would bury them.

Red reflections of the sunrise were dispersed across shell casings, overturned boxes of ammunition, an abandoned shovel and more ammunition, forming a pattern, a pathway through the battlefield. In the armour he did not have to think, only to follow.

When he had carried a stretcher across the battlefield, every detail had been vivid and prolonged. In the armour, what he saw through the colloid had the dispassionate quality of something projected upon a screen; heaps of burnt clothing and split bodies, the dead enemy, Turks no more, the men and women he had evicted, scores and scores of them lining the steep sides of the bluff. The sun reflected off broken eyeglasses, smashed watches, and shrapnel half-buried in flesh, every reflection a wink in the right direction. The dead came up to his ankles and were caught up in his iron tread. The godstuff quivered with their suffering, a wailing inorganic chorus as if made from a wet metal fingertip encircling the rim of a glass.

Gaining the high ground, he could appreciate how the Process had reshaped the Sussex coastline to adhere to the contours of Suvla Bay. Fat folds of loamy earth had been pulled back, with porous pseudo-rock shaped over the underlying chalk. Wide heat lamps, ranged like floodlights around the bay, had simulated the intensity of the Aegean sun. These were now turned off. Under the watery light of England’s wan star, the sea was no longer glassy and blue but a turbulent green. To the west, he saw the Newhaven factories, brushed aluminium cylinders each the size of five aircraft hangars and fashioned with no regard to the surrounding scale of terraced housing. The noise of the factories was loud and spectral with glitchy crunching interventions.

The trail of reflections ended on the escarpment. The armour took him over the threshold, from the past and into the future, and suddenly the colloid was lashed with squalling rain.

He clambered down the steep muddy valley side. Through the rain, he saw the smoking outline of a half-ruined farmhouse. The godstuff flowed back into him and brought with it news of life under the earth. Ruth.

27

“
R
uth
?”

He leant over and kissed his wife on the back of her neck. She stirred sleepily. The tent canvas had been painted with the image of a man, a woman and a child, and it cast kaleidoscopic shapes across her face. She made a satisfied sound then a warning note: I know you are there, don’t wake me. Quietly, he put aside his blanket and untied the entrance to the tent. Long spears of deep green grass quivered with dew. He got out and stretched in the September sun.

The peace camp was east of Firle, near to Friston Forest. The Order’s small handmade tents had been pitched in a semi-circle near to an ancient burial mound. Outside the next tent, Leo Brilliant put the dixie on a morning campfire. He was naked aside from an Indian loincloth. The canvas snapped in the breeze; in place of wooden pegs, the Order hammered sharpened bones into the earth to keep the guy ropes taut.

“Another beautiful day,” said Brilliant.

“Yes,” replied James. He could not remember what day it was, though. How long had they been in the peace camp? Three weeks? A month? Two corners of time’s white tablecloth had been folded together, and now his undifferentiated days were spent nestling in a munificent hollow of the Downs.

God, it was good to be back in England.

The peace camp contained over a hundred souls all told, men, women and children.

Brilliant poured tea into a tin mug for James.

“Any plans?” he asked. The slight man raised his dark brows questioningly at James.

“Rest and recuperation,” said James.

“Have you spoken to Hector yet?”

No, he had not. Hector was leader of the Order, but he had, for the past days, weeks, months, lived alone on retreat in a painted caravan in the forest. Every couple of days, the senior members of the Order would hike out to confer with him.

The tea was strong and good; he accepted it with thanks and wandered over to a large bell tent painted with a red cross, Blore’s peacetime version of an advanced dressing station. On the cot, the boy Euan was sleeping; his colour had returned. A young woman with the name of Blue Raven administered an unguent of herbs and berries gathered from a copse of slanted trees; he asked her what species the trees were because they resembled none that he had seen before, but she could only say that they were not native to these isles.

Mornings in the peace camp followed a routine, with every member of the Order responsible for camp duties – tending to the latrines, washing breakfast dishes, gathering wood – then partaking in vigorous exercises, from wrestling to fleet foot races, even archery. Meditation was also encouraged.

Removing himself from the camp, James sat cross-legged in the shade of a heart-shaped hawthorn bush, and considered the lessons from the lodge of instruction.

Aum tat sat
.

From the whirlwind of chaos comes One, the Law. From the chaos of mechanical death comes the Order, a sign of new life in the West, representing reverence to all art, science and philosophy as revealed by the tree of knowledge through the fire of life energy.

Aum tat sat
.

He had strained his heart carrying men up and down the ridges of the Karakol Dagh. Even meditation made him tired. He could barely read half a dozen pages of a book without nodding off.

Aum tat sat
.

The mantra could not entirely efface the memory.

Aum tat sat
.

Glimmers of godstuff had led him to the farmhouse. He pulled aside the rubble and the ceiling of the cellar to reveal Ruth and the children huddled there. Agnes looked up at him and screamed. He lifted Ruth up in the palm of his hand and watched as the rain ran off her limp body and in between his iron fingers. He gathered the children in his other hand, and beseechingly, blindly, he had staggered north. When they came to a river, the armour stopped, the colloid swung open and he was released into the driving rain. His khaki drill was ragged, soaked and stinking. Ruth regained consciousness and she smiled sadly at him. Her forehead had been gashed, and she was damaged in her heart, too; she was not at all as he needed her to be. The boy was dying. All their feelings were sacrificed to the necessity of the hour.

James did not know what to do. The rain made it hard to think. He carried the boy on his back until they joined a convoy trudging north; the other people were a mix of refugees, the evicted, and the not-quite-men of the soldiery, but all wore the same blasted expressions. People from the past and people from the future had become a single convoy.

The convoy reached the Lewes battlements only to be turned away by the
douanier
and his men; James fought his way to the front of the line so that they could see that it was him, but it made no difference. He recognized Edith Von Pallandt on a high observation post, anxiously scanning the faces of the convoy for any sign of her son. He did not know whether to shout out the truth, that her son was dead, or to keep his counsel and so leave her in a state of unknowing. How long would Lewes last without a bailiff and the armour? Perhaps they would find a way to live within the Process without it. Perhaps he was the problem all along. The Lewesians tossed stale loaves and soft vegetables into the imploring crowd, and he fought for a hunk and brought it to Ruth and the children.

They spent two desperate sleepless nights in the convoy. The sick boy shivered and fitted so hard James was certain that death was imminent. Nothing else was worth talking about. Conversation had to walk such a long way around to avoid death that it ceased to be worth the effort. He did not know how to talk about the war with Ruth and he sensed that she was keeping things from him too. She confined herself to serving the children.

To survive, he took what they needed – blankets, medicine and food – from the kit of the soldiers, who did not resist him.

Hundreds of soldiers drifted from the battlefield and into the convoy. They lived a stunned sort of life, hollow but for the echo of an abandoned purpose. With the children between them, he and Ruth fell asleep in the soldiers’ camp. Never did a body of men sleep so quietly and lightly upon the earth.

The next morning, the convoy moved on, leaving behind the accoutrements of war. It was a warm autumnal day, the beginning of an Indian summer. He set Ruth and the children on a cart and pulled it behind him, east across the Downs. The wheels creaked and the birdsong returned to the land. The war fell away like the layers of a dream. Ahead, on an old track, he saw a figure, a man in short trousers, patterned leather belt and a green jerkin with a pointed cowl. The figure carried a stave and was waiting for them.

It was Jordison, from the 32nd Field Ambulance.

“We need help,” said James.

“We’ve set up camp not far from here,” said Jordison. “A peace camp.”

Aum tat sat.

J
ames completed
his meditation and returned to the peace camp. The senior members of the Order were ready to visit Hector. With their cowls up and feet bare, the hikers carried flags that bore the various marks and symbols of the Order: a hieroglyphic monad, the winged circle, a single sperm penetrating the ovum, the yin-yang, the Omega symbol. They sang a hiking song and he looked at each singing face in turn: the mystical stretcher bearers – Lewis Collinson and Jordison, Leo Brilliant and Henry Blore – intermingled with suffragettes from Somers Town, women who had left behind factory looms and gas-lit parlours to live in an eternal peace camp. They wore kaffiyeh headdresses and carried grey Bergen ruck sacks. It was a new way of life.

Their leader was waiting for them at the head of the Long Man of Wilmington. Hector also wore the hiking uniform. His skin was profoundly pale, and his hair had grown out of its military cut into dark curls. His air was serious, even intimidating. His index finger stroked the bridge of his aquiline nose as he waited for the hikers to settle in a circle around him. In his lap, a needle and cotton and the flysheet of his tent.

“This is the Lodge of Instruction,” intoned Hector. “Sign, word and countersign. Sign?”

“The sign of the open hand,” repeated the hikers.

“Word?”

“Order of the Omega.”

“Countersign?”

“Lo, I touch you and pass on.”

Each hiker touched their neighbour on the shoulder so that the gesture travelled the circle.

Hector took up his needle and thread, and continued repairing his tent.

“I walked from my caravan to the shallow tracks around Coombe Hill. The burial barrows across the Downs contain the bones of our ancestors. But before Neolithic man buried his dead, he left them above ground. At Coombe Hill, the dead were left to lie in such a state. I meditated on this, and then the answer came to me. Why did Neolithic man not bury his dead? Because the dead
spoke to him.
He could hear the voice of the ancestors in the same way that the heroes of mythology could hear the gods. To put the dead underground would silence their voices, and he still needed to hear them.

“On Suvla Bay, I was shot in the head. Since then, parts of myself have become removed and closed off from me. Consciousness, I realize, is something modern and industrial, like the Vickers gun or the motor car. I wonder, in the deep past, did the minds of our ancestors also contain sections that were not integrated, and were those parts integral to their survival? When the gods or their dead spoke to them, was it in fact a closed-off part of the mind sending through its orders? On Coombe Hill, I realized that humanity has the deepest longing for orders, and our leaders corrupt that longing for their own ends. What we need is control without command.

“As I sit here,” he said, “among the ancient woodland, listening to the voices of our ancestors, they tell me what is going on in the towns and cities, in the streets and the back parlours, in the hotels and the drawing rooms.”

He completed one seam, and turned the material over to inspect his handiwork.

“The glory and honour of war is hymned by old men. Sacrifice is demanded, even though, as a civilized people, we know that sacrifice is magical thinking.”

Brilliant put a lit cigarette between Hector’s expectant fingers. It was a mark of respect. The young stretcher sergeant was gone, and, in his place, Hector had become a more powerful and enigmatic figure, the dark curls clustered either side of his centre parting. Hector put down his sewing so that he could enjoy his cigarette.

“I see their faces in my mind. The red, pompous faces of the rich. The mean, shrunken faces of the poor. I hear their voices in my mind. Their senseless twaddle.”

Hector took a drag on his cigarette to quieten his anger.

“I know it all,” he said. “Their minds are ugly, their bodies degenerate. The ugliness of the war is a replica of the ugliness of their own minds. We must end the war.”

“End the war,” responded the hikers.

“We carry the war within us. It is
our
flame to extinguish. Everything ends with the Omega Order. And when war is ended, then we will end materialism and set our living fire to kindle the imagination of the people, and a new way of life will be born out of the Earth itself.”

He crushed the end of his cigarette with thumb and forefinger, pocketed the dog end, then took up his sewing once again.

“I have spoken,” he said.

The hikers dispersed. James dallied, hoping to speak personally with Hector. The pale man folded the flysheet away in his rucksack, took up his stave and set off back toward the forest.

James called after him, “I wanted to thank you.”

Hector stopped, stroked the bridge of his nose in consideration, and then continued his march toward the tree line.

J
ames returned
to the peace camp and found Ruth frying pancakes on a skillet.

“How have you been?”

“You left me.” She concentrated on cooking. “You left me in this madhouse.”

Ruth called Agnes from her play, and gave her the first plate of pancakes. When the child was gone, Ruth added more ladlefuls of batter to the hot skillet.

“Where are we, James? Do you know what is happening to us?”

“I know these people,” he gestured around the camp. “They were stretcher bearers like me in the war.”

“The war game.”

“It was not a game, Ruth. It was the war itself.”

“These men, though, they’re not real.”

He sighed.

“They are to me.”

“What happened to you?”

Sorrow tightened his throat. He felt a rising sense of panic in his chest; how could he answer that question without taking her through the war, hour by hour? The wailing chorus of the evicted had been transformed into something synthetic, into something that could be
used
. And then, just when he was swimming to his death, there was the armour at the bottom of the sea, waiting for him, a gift from Hector.

“I was ready to die,” he said.

She nodded. “Me too.”

“Hector saved me. He saved us both. He can influence the Process.”

She flipped the pancakes, smiling ruefully at the beautifully mundane undertow of life; she had been so close to death and yet here she was, making breakfast.

“So much suffering,” she said.

The wailing chorus of the evicted.

“We will have to carry their suffering around within us,” he said.

“I don’t know if I want to.”

She considered her husband.

“Once we have recovered, I want to get as far away from the Process as possible.”

“I don’t know if I can leave. My implant. Even if I could, I don’t know if I want to.”

“You want to stay
here
?”

“I have to be part of something greater than myself. I can’t survive on my own.”

“I can. I will.”

“What will you do with the children?” he asked.

“Take them with me, if their parents have not recovered.”

“Where will you go? What will you do?”

“Anywhere. Anything. Not this.”

“You could stay and be part of the Order.”