New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  One of the unique things about her are her eyes, which are wet and sparkling and green-grey, and are windows which show you her soul.

  She was and is wonderful. She is full of wonder, too, sweet as any child’s. The exotic or brand-new, the odd sublimity in the beauties of Nature or in the human spirit, they never fail to exalt her.

  I remember how she came to me, that first day two years ago when I hardly knew her: walking like a superbly-gowned spirit, whistling an archaic and haunting monody. I was sitting among fragrant lilac shrubs, beneath walls that were, then as now, carved with heraldic griffons and a lipping, worn frieze of Teutonic Eagle bas-reliefs. The wall itself is very, very old, and is cut out of the same dark and heavy-veined Cambrian stone that built all her Pembrokeshire estates.

  Anyway, I looked up from my “Northanger Abbey’, to see faint clouds move as silent as ghostly galleons, in a sky of perfect blueness, and her. It was a magic moment: I was moved more deeply than I can say, though I think Annah sensed it.

  We have never spoken of the matter.

  Then, falling from a clump of low trees, moving to Annah’s mouth-music, a host of what might have been bleached-white leaves swooped down in threes and fours, as she raised her unclothed arms to beckon. They were strange mutated butterflies. Soon hordes covered her with dew-dusted ivory tissue that was tremblingly alive...

  A cuckoo called, somewhere. Then Annah, in her long gown of black and gold French lace, laughed and sang some more husky-voiced bars of music, and the flying creatures exploded from her like snow-flakes caught in a gale.

  ‘So ...!’ I said, standing politely, then bowing, simultaneously tossing the calfskin-bound novel to one side.

  We walked side by side through a copper-coloured coppice, avoiding the toadstools, then entered a sunshine-filled glade. I blinked as she spread rich scarlet cloths, and we sat down half shadily beneath a continuation of those same moss-encrusted walls. Before us a tiny Greek fountain chuckled a jet of water into a green, circular fishpond eye-lashed with white lilies, and half covered over with the pink and white and blue water-flowers of Far Asia.

  ‘Music—’ she said, and grinned cheekily as an urchin. She picked at a burr, or a knot, in her swirling hair. (Which was dyed deep russet then, I remember).

  ‘A mouth-symphony, my dear?’ I said, nearly sadly because my own defensive irony tasted bitter to me, and guilt was producing its time-honoured melancholia. ‘You draw me,’ I continued in the stilted manner of the Court, ‘as the Sirens Odysseus, but I may not come: and my bonds, though abstract, are real. Duty.’

  We silenced.

  She began to unpack the picnic-basket she had of course brought.

  I saw the water’s greenness glimmer momentarily, heard a diving goldencarp plop: innocent, dartingly unaware, huge dragonflies flew by on iridescent gossamer wings. ‘But then,’ I said glibly, scratching the bridge of my nose, ‘all is -”by the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods—” and, see, Circe my enchantress, how you play the lyres of men’s opened hearts ...’

  She coquetted to my courteous sally, but fear of my own honey lies had frozen me, and perspiration pricked un-nervingly like needles of ice. Because I dared not play the old games of love, not with her. So I sat back and let my hands hang loosely around my knees, and I thought not of her merry country tune but of the profound music of Bach and Beethoven, and I weighed that against hers and her lovely but technically less than adequate instrument, those cherry-coloured lips. I smiled to myself then, wearily, and shook my head, for there was poignancy that way. You see, there were giants in those days, heroes, and now, nothing.

  ’I am so lonely,’ Annah whispered.

  Nothing.

  She tickled the bare skin above my ankle-bone, above the stylishly embossed leather of my boot, with a single yellow flower. I remember how uneasily I smiled, and looked away.

  ‘At Court,’ she sighed, ‘all arts are beneath the finest, most generous lady Muses. Emannuel, do they still dance the pavannes and galliards of the first Queen Elizabeth? Are there still balls with a thousand glittering guests, and Lords and Ladies acting out their grand roles in the theatre of reality, as we females display our finest wiles and plumage to all?’

  I turned back smiling. ‘There are, and they do. But, come now,’ I said, as falsely sweet as saccarine, ‘does Melpomene speak in you? Lady, surely you need have nothing to do with the Muse of Tragedy...’

  I could have bitten my tongue out of my head.

  I’d forgotten who the Lady was to whom I spoke, how she had suffered ...

  But she only smiled a wistful little moue, and murmured, ‘Ah, how I would love to return there, to Londres.’ She met my eyes, her mouth smiled archly, but behind her expression was a naked pleading, a burning anguish. I thought in desperation. Look, I cannot tell her that her life is a closed book, can I? Can I?

  Nor that the Empire says to me: Kill this woman—

  * * * *

  Two

  It was cold. I let my two hands walk across the leather cases on either side of the piloting gear, thinking. Two massive cases: one held the intelligence reports, documents and souvenirs from Admiral Deschernes, diplomatic effects. I still had the choice, you see, and it would be so simple, to forego what we’d all sworn to do. So unnervingly simple.

  ‘We grant to our servant Emmanuel Kyygard, for faithful service to the cause of Empire ...” I hear him say it, as I eye the compass again. An estatehood from King Charles, almost certainly, for a victory of this gargantuan magnitude, for now we owned the Mediterranean. And the excuse would do: I would gracefully bow out of court intrigue and Imperial service itself, for I can no longer serve it with the quasireligious fanaticism my society demands. But in that future time, when I earn my bread by the sweat of others, there will be no more need of the King’s pieces of silver, and I’ll wash my hands clean of guilt, of hypocrisy, of the whole bloody business ...

  Looking down upon fallow fields, cruising slow, low enough now to pick out tattered scarecrows and individual clumps of yellow dandelions beside the hedgerows, I thought then of the summers of my lost childhood. Of lovely Cornwall. Of mornings when the sun would lie, golden, across wheatfields equally yellow; but when the western wind galed, I remember, I would think of the corn-ears as bearded, impudently tossing heads, and I’d clap my chubby hands together and laugh in delight. In September the sky is a scroll; its parchment was the leaden overcast that unrolls into the northeast from the Atlantic’s wild white sea-horses of surf. Annah had ridden with me; at our tumbledown, deserted ancestral castle of Tintagel, I left a posy of fresh-cut roses on my parents’ grave. Yes, there I would ask - would have asked - to be granted my ‘place in the sun’.

  I spat into the wind again, wearing an iron frown.

  Temptation comes to us all, I know, but that vision was damnably seductive. Inwardly I fingered the magic touchstone, duty, and I thought in sad anger, Ah, pale Charles, father of lies, lies-

  South of the Thames still, we drew in sight of the outskirts of the capital itself, noticing the great grey sprawls of good English stone, the warm, ruddy brickwork, the spires and Imperial monuments. This: the greatest city of Europa and almost certainly of the world, even China or Brazil. Over half a million souls, they say. They say too that the Londres which was, long before the Fires, that our ancestors’ city was still more vast, pointing out the hieroglyphic outlines still visible from high altitude. And perhaps ‘they’ are right, whoever they are; but I’ll never know now, no matter how many self-contradictory encyclopedias I consult. I’ll never know.

  ‘Emmanuel...’ Annah touched my arm, pointed, but despite my introspection I had seen. From our destination-of-record, the white Greenwich station, vast-hulled shapes were rising from their underground hangars, as threateningly grey as stormclouds. Yes, it’s a magnificent spectacle, when a flight of skyships from the Grand fleet claws for altitude.

  Absentmindedly I altered
course to the northwestward, to overfly the Isle of Dogs and perhaps Limehouse, in quick avoidance. And crossed Old Father Thames. In the vee-formation of battle, the twenty-odd dragonshapes laid a course for interception: I glanced up from the compass, saw, was shocked numb.

  ‘But - What is Kuard doing?’ A cold hand, clenching inside my breast, froze off the words. Annah had gasped. I knew, then, what this might mean. And the falcons of the king raced for us, still rising as quickly as the pearl-like bubbles in weiss beer.

  ‘Emmanuel,’ she said, with overtones of fear casting a shadow on her words, and I didn’t dare look at her face, ‘it can only mean one thing. Those rumours drifting about in back-alley Ravenna ... they have heard too; they think that someone, somewhere, against the Empire ... has found an ...’ she choked, could not say the words.

  ‘Impossible,’ I snarled. ‘No: this is a maneuver rooted in political crisis only. Eireland say, or some petty rebellion or assassin’s plot... Unless they do know something ...’ my voice trailed off into silence. I knew that my face wore a glassy grin, but it had nothing to do with me, for fear churned in me, with another emotion more hateful still. I swayed to the heliograph, but another trellis-work of grey clouds suddenly covered the sun, drowning us in twilight.

  Oh God, merciful one, cherisher of the meek, shield of the hapless ...

  She was almost shouting.

  ‘Emmanuel ... we came back incognito ... They aren’t expecting us for some days or more. The Fleet must imagine the Lady of the West captured...’

  God only knew what fears walked, what suspicions festered, now that the old Terror was loose once again.

  The skycruisers mounted the sky ahead of us, outspread. Sun glinted from burnished parts as the lean sleek craft approached more slowly. Clearly they meant to drive us back, away from Londres. High over Ming Street I finally cut our power, a gesture of surrender.

  ‘They might want us to put down at the Lea marshes ...’ I thought with my mouth.

  Or perhaps Greenwich itself, of course. My hands heaved on the steering bar; hydraulics groaned, and, rearward, the great black rudder, emblazoned with the heraldic ideogram of England’s ruling house, the White Boar rampant, clicked in its lock-cogs and turned us.

  Alicia of Aragona, the Duke’s orphan who thought herself a woman already, tumbled out from the glass-panelled nacelle slung aft, her voice peppering us with a hail of questions that Annah tried to answer as soothingly as might be.

  I thought of Cornwall, and the thankless future, as I slowed the engines’ drumbeat, and when the sun disposed of its cape of grey I thumbed open the code-book to the cipher of the day and leaned across our heliograph.

  * * * *

  Three

  ‘Then,’ I mumbled, fingers clasped on the flask of mulled wine, blinking bleared eyes, ‘it is not merely gossip culled from some Gypsy riff-raff, but... cold truth.’

  We were all ‘safe’ at Greenwich now. Kuard van der Thorn sat in my cabin and shook a grey-maned, almost leonine head. Outside, through the bubble windows, I could see his own fleetship This England in another of the pens, aswarm with sweating, jovial mechanicals preparing her for flight. Then he stabbed at the map on the aluminium flap-table spread between us: at a collage of umbers and greens washed by sea-blues; foreign conurbations picked out in Cardinal red, trade routes cobwebbing in amber. Europe’s patchwork quilt of statelets, cowed by the traditional red of Empire.

  ‘No. Yesterday, the first accredited reports came in official sources. On the diplomatic front the Kaiser of the Deutschold affirms it, as do our consulates and the governors of our German provinces ... No.’ He shook his head, and the lines on his face shifted as some profound, unfamiliar expression disturbed his legendary stolidity. ‘The Austrian ambassador says nothing, knows nothing, but... Vienna was - how can I say it? - destroyed. Blasted into nothingness. Eighty thousand deaths...’ his voice dwindled to a whisper, and I sat back uncomfortably, hearing in his tones rats’ feet as they fared among dead grasses. ‘My son Eli may have ... I...’ his voice cracked like a broken wineglass, fell in pieces. ‘At Ferdinand’s court, he was. And there is no word.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, softly, after a moment had died, ‘friend of my father, friend of me.’ Then: ‘Austria will be staggering in total confusion, all communications disarrayed. Do not give up hope. You must not give up hope.’ My words, so grossly clumsy.

  ‘Ay,’ he did not even raise his frosty grey eyes from the map, ‘you’re right,’ he lied. ‘I have prayed, for the first time in my life, that it may be so, that Eli may be well. Many times. They seem only words ...’ He looked away, emptily.

  An awkward moment stretched until it broke. ‘Is Hungry-gates red alerted? And the Fleets?’

  ‘What—? Yes, yes. But Emmanuel, a single night’s work ...’ He was holding my eye, and the faintest puzzlement passed over him as I must have - flinched perhaps -’We must have dispersal, ‘way across the Continent.’ Authoritative again, he swept a heavy, age-scarred hand over the glossy paper. ‘Londres is here, so central. Look, one single... Bomb ... and our Empire would fail; collapse. The work of centuries, of how many lives.’

  ‘Yes.’ I coughed. The wine’s fieriness licked the back of my throat. I stood suddenly, looked down again: at a pewter flask engraved in Cyrillic with the Boar carved obsequiously upon it. I looked again at the map, saw the shadow of a Boar rampant over all. That shadow was suddenly ringed with flame. For, one day, the shadow would be gone, and only the flame remain.

  I thought of España; the Tagus glittering like snow-crystals in the early morning when Annah and I and a flamenco dancer and her guitarist, all of us from Seville, had begun a five hundred mile trek to Gibraltar; I thought of the coast of Barcelona where we’d transshipped for Portsmouth. And sipping my vintage, I thought of the other places, so many of them, so many. The Dordogne, Carnac and Navarre, spring along the Danube, and the Rhine valley where the golden flowers are the softest blanket imaginable under a drowsy May sun. Waterfront inns in the North, taverns like a dream of gold and smoke. Camus said that once, about Holland... I knew Europa, had roamed her, knew her secret places. I had found the true ‘Europe’, and loved her, for all that she was, for all the scabs men’s sordid use of her had left, for all the surface cheapness and hardness beneath it all, she was still beautiful, as she had been beautiful once, long ago when she was green and young.

  Lying upon her now, gross and warlike and corrupt, Empire. Compounded of all the old evils of ambition and rabid nationalism - and how many crimes have been done in those names?

  And yet ... England, my England. What kind of a dilemma was this that came to gore me?

  I unclenched my fists and looked at my family’s old friend, who was gazing abstractedly down at the Imperial chart, not seeing it perhaps, thinking of his son who was lost. Somehow I was sure those stern old eyes could read me, see the twisted thing, the guilt inside.

  I turned away, suddenly, walked to the ports and looked out at the energetic confusion of the Greenwich mooring station. I felt his gaze implacable on my back. ‘I must see the King. What Machiavelli games does he plan, now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ his voice was flat, the words tumbled obscenely. ‘No webs are woven. Emmanuel... if there is more to come, this may be the end. The end.’

  I watched Annah in her long sable coat, three or four catwalks away, talking earnestly with some Negro. A triple gold ear-ring glittered in one ear; his Afric garb was strange, aggressively outlandish.

  ‘Who is responsible? Does anyone know?’

  Vice-admiral van der Thorn may have shrugged. ‘Who can say. But Ferdinand and his Archduchess had called a convocation of the powers of Europe. The armies-in-exile were represented there, of course. The Free Flanders regiments, the Scandanavians, the Germans, all those. And those who keep them in arms too, as sword and shield against the Imperial progress. France’s Marshall of the Field, the nephew of the President of the Italian Confederacy, one of the Kaiser’s highest gen
erals, two Iberian counts. It may well have been a serious attempt to unite the Continent against us. Did you not know this?’

  ‘My God. No, I did not!’ Undermined psychologically, I turned away from the port and walked blindly back to my seat. Kuard’s eyes were on me; but I could not meet them.

  ‘Few do, of course. They wished to keep it deadly secret, but we heard, we heard. Admittedly, only those in the highest circles of government know it. But I would have imagined that you would’ve heard, Emmanuel. As a master of the sovereign’s intelligence, and figuring somewhat high in the scheme of power-politics these days...’

  I paused, shrugged. ‘I’ve been away.’ I frowned. ‘But then - it seems our Albion is the prime suspect, eh?’

  ‘No,’ he said, erect in outrage, then shook his head, slowly, firmly. ‘Never England. I cannot believe even Charles would - No. Not us. Someone else. I will not even consider “perhaps” ...” He lapsed into brooding silence again. Not his only son. Not Eli. Not by the most malicious of all means. Not by an English hand.