“And where is this, precisely?”
“Aha! And that, my girl, is the question. Somerset? Devon? Experts are still divided on the issue.” He flicked through the book until he came to a large-scale map of the south-west, and his plump hands hovered over the page. “I feel a nebulous force, but ill-defined, somewhere south of Bristol. But precisely where…? Glastonbury? At any rate, when we have done up here, and gathered as many to our number as we can, then south we shall head, in hope and expectation!”
She finished the broth and set aside the bowl. “And the person you’re seeking next?”
“He lived with us in Summer Land, for a time––a brief while––before… Ah, before he left, under somewhat ignominious circumstances. I have his address. But whether he will still be there…”
“I want to come with you.”
Mr LeRoy regarded her, considering. “Very well, you shall. But I must warn you that his manners leave much to be desired.”
Across the clearing, Ajia saw Reed Fletcher hug Daisy, then move across to where Smith sat alone on a fallen log, looking beyond the clearing to where the woodland fell away down a twilit hillside.
Mr LeRoy turned his attention to his map book. She murmured her excuses and crossed to Smith and Fletcher.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything? You two seem to be getting along fine now.”
Fletcher and Smith sat side by side on the log. Fletcher shuffled up so that she could sit between them.
She looked from one to the other, wondering who might be the first to break the uneasy silence. “Well?” she said, nudging them both at the same time.
Fletcher said, “I buried the hatchet, after what happened back at the nursery.”
Ajia turned to Smith. His expression was tortured, as if he were still wrestling with inner demons.
At last Smith said, in barely a murmur, “I’m not proud of what I did, Ajia. Certainly not proud. I don’t know how I feel about it.”
She laid a hand on his arm. “You saved my life,” she said.
“By killing someone else,” he replied, instantly.
She hesitated, thinking about her words. “Who’s to judge what’s right and wrong? You obviously felt, just then, that what you were doing was the right thing to do. And you did it.”
It was a while before he spoke. “We’d concealed ourselves in the wood, Daisy and me, Elvira and Jasmine. Then we heard the gunfire.”
He stopped, staring down at his big hands hanging between his knees.
Fletcher said, quietly, “What made you come back?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I… I just couldn’t leave you there, under attack. Maybe I thought I could be of some help, rather than hiding away in the woods. Daisy tried to stop me. She thought I’d get myself killed.” He shrugged. “But I just couldn’t sit there, doing nothing, with the Paladins… So I set off back through the woods. When I came to the house, I saw the Paladin capture you, hold his knife to your throat. Then the Paladin called out, and Mr LeRoy, Daisy and the brownies emerged.” He stared into the distance. “And it would have been so easy for them to have kept hidden, not risked the danger they were putting themselves in.” He turned and looked at her, bleakly. “So how the hell could I just stand there when I was the only one left, and the Paladin knew that? But he didn’t know where I was. I had that advantage.” As if unconscionably, he reached down and his fingertips brushed the head of his hammer hanging at his waist.
“It was him or me,” Ajia said. “If you’d not… not attacked him, he would’ve slit my throat. You might not like what you did, Smith, but if you hadn’t acted…” She looked at him. “Would you have been able to live with my death?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps not. There was no right thing to do, Ajia.”
“Or perhaps there was,” Fletcher put in quietly. “If we go on to defeat Drake, make this country a better place. Then what you did in saving Ajia would be justified.”
“So the end justifies the means?” Smith said bitterly.
“That isn’t always so,” Fletcher replied, “but in this case I think it is.”
The two men were silent for a while, staring at each other, and Ajia felt that there was more being communicated between them than she was able to interpret.
“And back then, Reed?” Smith said at last. “What I did back then, or rather what I didn’t do then? Was that justified? Did the fact that you survived justify my inaction?”
Fletcher opened his mouth to speak, but in the end just shook his head and looked away.
Ajia looked from one man to the other. “What did you mean, ‘back then’? What happened?”
Fletcher and Smith were silent. After a while, Smith said, “Go on, tell her if you must.”
“You sure?” Fletcher asked.
Smith just shrugged.
Fletcher looked from him to Ajia, then said, “We’d both been at Summer Land for a while, six months, whatever. This was a couple of years back. I was getting itchy feet, and I know that Smith here was. He never shut up about it. How he was tired of the place. Wanted to hit the open road. We’d always got along okay, hadn’t we?”
Smith shrugged, grudgingly. “We rubbed along, I suppose.”
“So one day we told Mr LeRoy we were grateful for his hospitality, but we needed time away from everything, and we set off. We lived rough for a while. This was summer, so pickings were sufficient. But when autumn passed and winter set in, we found the going tough. Even with my foraging, and this”––he tapped the bow slung over his shoulder––“we didn’t have enough to eat. So one day we raided one of those emergency government food stores. But we’d reckoned without the place being guarded. And it just so happened that this guard was armed.”
She winced. “What happened?”
Fletcher looked at Smith. “You want to give her your side of the story?”
Smith stared through the opening in the trees at the streetlights appearing as night fell over the city. It made what had been an ugly scene of mean terrace houses and narrow, potholed streets appear gaudily attractive.
“No, go on. I’ll correct you when you get it wrong.”
Fletcher smiled to himself. “To cut a long story short, the guard appeared from nowhere and cornered me. He aimed a handgun right at my head and told me to drop the food and get down on my knees.”
Ajia looked from Smith to Fletcher. “But what could Smith have done, in that situation?”
Fletcher snorted. “Smith was on the other side of the warehouse. The guard didn’t know there were two of us. So Smith, if he’d come up behind the guard, he could’ve incapacitated him.” He flashed a look at Smith. “You wouldn’t have had to kill the fucker. But oh, no, you thought of number one. Turned tail and ran, leaving me to face the sodding music.”
Smith looked at Ajia, something like an appeal in his eyes as he said, “I could have acted, yes. I had my hammer. But… but I couldn’t bring myself to use it, to injure the guard.”
“You could have disarmed the guard without using your hammer,” Fletcher said.
Smith just shook his head and stared down at his hands.
Fletcher went on, “So the guard cuffed me, called the cops, and I was carted off to the slammer. Did three months, and when I got out I went to ground. Went home to Sherwood and started a new life in the bunker. Alone.”
Smith said, “Looking back, Reed, I admit it. What I did was cowardly. Even if I hadn’t attacked the man, I could have helped. But I panicked and ran.”
Fletcher said, “It’s over now. Spilt milk, and all that.” He hesitated. “And anyway, what you did back at the nursery, saving Ajia, that took guts. Considering what you believe and all that. We’re quits, okay?”
All three sat and watched the lights of the city glimmering in the gathering darkness far below.
“And what lies ahead?” Smith said a little later. “More bloodshed and mayhem. Daisy lost two good people back at the nursery. So far we’ve been
lucky. More of us could’ve been killed back there. But if that luck runs out, and the Paladins have their way…”
“Then at least we’ll have shown the bastards that some of us, at least, aren’t taking Drake and his dictatorship lying down. Some things are worth fighting for, Smith.” Fletcher looked at Ajia. “I think the girl’s a good example of that, don’t you?”
Before Smith could reply, Mr LeRoy called to her from across the clearing.
Mr LeRoy was preparing to venture into town in search of his latest recruit. They decided to leave the minibus in the cover of the spinney, rather than run the risk of driving into the city. Mr LeRoy, Reed Fletcher and Ajia were to break cover and head into an area of the city known as Idle––where Mr LeRoy’s acquaintance, one Paul Klein, had last lived––while Daisy and a couple of brownies were to head to a nearby village and buy provisions and petrol.
They would meet back at the minibus in the early hours, then continue northwest under cover of darkness.
THEY LEFT THE spinney and followed a track over rolling moorland. Fletcher had elected to leave his bow and arrows back at the minibus. He would pass muster in his grubby army fatigues in the city, but might have aroused undue attention if armed with his bow.
They trooped through the bracken and emerged after fifteen minutes in a suburban council estate where the doors and windows of every other house were sealed with steel shutters. The gardens of those houses still inhabited were filled with either broken-down cars or abandoned fridges, and tethered dogs prowled back and forth with lunatic intensity. Ajia had last seen such indications of destitution in the sink estates of north London, and was well aware that poverty was the rich loam in which prejudice took root and flourished.
She recalled the news reports about Bradford from a couple of years ago. Prime Minister Drake’s hate-fuelled policies had found eager adherents in the city which boasted a record number of members of the once-banned terrorist organisation known as National Action. The thugs had rejoiced when the first of Drake’s repatriation laws was passed, and had helped the deportations on their way with some ad hoc and supra-judicial eviction of Pakistani and Bangladeshi families in the city.
These depopulated estates were the sorry result.
From time to time Mr LeRoy consulted his map, and pointed the way through litter-strewn streets. They left the council estates in their wake and came to wider streets of older, stone-built houses––small terrace houses, and larger Victorian edifices built for prosperous mill owners––every fifth one of which was a burned-out shell. She averted her gaze from these places, and marshalled her fear.
These fire-bombed properties stood in mute testament to the fact that hatred of the foreigner still festered in the hearts of English men and women.
They hurried on.
Curdled clouds were scudding across the face of a half-moon, fifteen minutes later, when they came to a terrace of back-to-back houses.
Fletcher sniffed and peered down the street. “Who could bring themselves to live in a shit-hole like this?”
“Some have no other option,” Mr LeRoy said.
“And Paul Klein lives here?” Ajia asked.
“Well, this was the address he gave me,” he said. “He’d fallen on hard times and took what he could get. His life wasn’t exactly a bed of roses before his eidolon established itself, and he went through hell when it happened. Disorientation, terrible dreams. It was lucky for him that we were passing, a little north of here, and offered him sanctuary.”
Ajia said, “Back in the clearing, you said he left in––what was the word?––something circumstances?”
Mr LeRoy smiled. “Ignominious circumstances. Yes, he did leave under something of a cloud.”
“What happened?” Fletcher asked.
“Let’s just say that he rather fell for one of the brownies––Maya, as it happened––and that his sentiments were not reciprocated.”
“And he took it badly?”
“You could say that.”
Ajia winced. “He didn’t take it out on Maya, did he?”
Mr LeRoy shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Now,” he went on, indicating the street, “shall we proceed? We’re looking for number 42.”
Ajia found the even-numbered side of the street and counted along the stone-built houses. Some dwellings were fire-gutted, others boarded up, and lights glowed in the windows of the few still occupied.
They came to number 42 and gazed at its soot-stained facade. It was neither fire-damaged nor boarded up, but no lights shone behind the squares of newspaper that passed for curtains in the downstairs windows.
Across the street, Ajia noticed a man working under the bonnet of a white van. His head was plunged into the innards of the vehicle, illuminated by a halogen lamp.
Mr LeRoy picked his way across the mouldy flagstone path, nimbly hopping around pert mounds of dog turds, and knocked on the door. Ajia remained at the gate, looking up and down the moribund street.
Mr LeRoy knocked again. There was no response.
Someone called out from across the street.
“I said, you looking for’t little chap?”
The local had emerged from his tinkering with the engine and was wiping his hands on a rag. He was squat and balding, and reminded Ajia of a boggart.
The three crossed the road and approached the mechanic. Behind the windscreen, a hand-drawn sign read: £100 ONO.
“Friends of his, are y’?”
“We’re business acquaintances, let’s say,” Mr LeRoy said, his Home Counties elocution clashing with the local’s broad West Yorkshire brogue.
“Odd chap,” he said. “Well-balanced, like.”
“Well-balanced?”
“Aye. Has a chip on each shoulder. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, if you were his size?”
“Is he at home?” Mr LeRoy asked.
“What’re you wanting ’im for?” He looked the trio up and down. “You don’t look like coppers.”
“Has Mr Klein been in trouble with the police?” Mr LeRoy asked.
“From time to time. Little chap likes his booze, gets ’im’sen into trouble like. But we look out for him. Friendly lot round here,” he added, though this quick glance at Ajia, taking in her colour, belied the claim.
The local pointed down the street. “Your chap’s in’t Idiot Hut, doing one of his turns.”
“Idiot Hut?”
“That’s what we called the Working Men’s Club. The Idle Working Men’s Club.” He laughed at his joke.
“If you could perhaps direct us…” Mr LeRoy said.
“Aye, it’s along’t street, then first left ont’t main road. Hundred yards along on’t right. Can’t miss it. Big building, all lit up. Tetley’s, if you like a crap pint o’ piss.”
They thanked him and moved off.
The mechanic called out after them, “Not interested in buying a van, are y’? One hundred quid. Ninety for cash.”
Mr LeRoy waved a cheery refusal and they continued on to the end of the street and turned left.
The Idle Working Men’s Club was an impressive eighteenth-century building with a crow-stepped frontage and a long, arched window over the entrance. Loud music belted out into the night. Two huge bouncers, with the sinister bonhomie of their calling, vetted a line of punters at the entrance.
Fletcher said, “If I were you I’d sit this one out, Ajia.”
“Like fuck I will. I’m coming in. It’s a free country, as they used to say.”
“Yes,” said Mr LeRoy, “‘As they used to say’. Are you quite sure?”
She bridled. “You don’t think I can handle myself?”
“I have no doubt on that score, my dear. However, we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?”
“I won’t,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
Mr LeRoy nodded and led them across the road to the rear of the short queue.
When they came to the entrance, a bouncer said, “Members?”
“I’m afraid not,” Mr LeRoy said.
“A tenner each, then,” the bouncer said, then saw Ajia. “But the Paki lass can sling her hook.”
“She’s with us,” Fletcher said, bristling.
The other bouncer joined his mate. “Trouble?”
“Paki wants in.”
The second bouncer winked at her. “Better not. Won’t be safe in there, luv.”
“But we’re together,” Fletcher protested.
The first bouncer’s already hostile expression hardened. “Then you can all piss off, right?”
“It’s okay,” Ajia said. “Go in without me.” She smiled at Mr LeRoy and whispered, “See you inside.”
Mr LeRoy and Fletcher handed over their ten pound notes and were duly processed into the throbbing interior of the club.
Ajia crossed the road, sat on a low wall, and waited.
She’d show those fuckwits.
She waited until there was no longer a queue at the door, then pushed herself from the wall, slipping into Puck mode and sprinting towards the entrance.
She was past the bouncers in a split second, and if they noticed a blur and a stir of wind they gave no sign. She stopped dead in the foyer and looked back. The two men were sharing a joke and laughing. She pushed through a pair of swing doors into the dimly-lit, smoke-filled interior, arriving just as the throbbing music stopped and an besuited MC took up the microphone on small stage opposite the entrance.
The room was filled with drinkers––men and women all dolled up for a night out––seated around a hundred small circular tables. Others patrons stood around the perimeter, leaning against the wall clutching pints and cigarettes. The darkness worked to Ajia’s advantage: in the gloaming, the shade of her skin was not immediately apparent.
“Welcome back, ladies and gents. You’ve pulled your plonkers and had your pints pulled, and Wee Paul’s back for the second half, the star turn who might be three foot nowt but knows how to please the ladies. You know what they say about short-arses, aye? And he can do magic tricks and tell a joke or three, an’ all. Ladies and gents, let’s hear it for Wee Paul!”
The crowd erupted in an explosion of applause and whistles.
Age of Legends Page 29
