Six enormous Nubians, the six former guards of the royal palace, now mounted the steps in black leather hoods and ludicrous codpieces, and each stood beside the handle of his axe. The army’s bandsmen introduced a sinister low roll on their drums. The sustained note trundled through the assembly like a plague rumour. The crowd began to shift uneasily. Something—or someone—was expected.
The guards positioned each prisoner in front of a block. Now General Bassa himself appeared before the less-than-enthusiastic crowd. The dictator was low and heavy beside his executioners, with tiny legs and a barrel chest built to carry racks of medals, and stamped about with his silver cap pulled down to the bridge of his nose, bellowing commands that no-one out of service would be able to fathom. His ceremonial marching drill finally came to an end. He stamped both boots and turned to face the line of prisoners, drawing his sword and lifting it in a prepared signal.
The Lord Chancellor had brought us to the front of the congregation. As he gathered our little group into a knot he looked about angrily. ‘Who are we missing?’ he called out. ‘Where is the chimney-child? Where is the dumb-boy?’
Trebunculus shrugged, genuinely puzzled. I pantomimed the same.
Septimus Peason’s wrath settled on his guards. ‘Better a sheepdog to round up our strays than you,’ he snorted. ‘Half of you go to find them, quickly. This is no time for truants. Now, Princess, it is time for you to join your ill-fated family.’
Cries of anguish were suddenly heard as the Princess Rosamunde shook herself free of the Lord Chancellor’s hand and rose upon the wooden steps. She looked even more beautiful than the day I had first met her, clad in scarlet and gold wire, and she accepted her fate with pride and high bearing. I wished I had been able to warn her of my strategy.
Our chance of escape increased as several of our guards made their way into the confused mob. As it was, all attention was focused on the preparations on the platform. The band’s prolonged drum-roll increased in intensity. The members of the Sultan’s retinue were forced gently to their knees, and when the Sultan himself refused to obey, he was struck across the backs of his legs so that he fell forwards. Rosamunde defied all demands to bend herself. Her honeyed eyes glared out above the heads of the crowd, defiant and dry. I wanted to cry out to her, to show her that I knew what I was doing, but did not dare for fear of calling attention to myself. If Menavino and Scammer did their work, all would be well. It was essential to hold my ground and remain calm to the last moment.
A giant, primitively constructed microphone was dragged before General Bassa as a pair of soldiers attempted to untangle a rats-nest of sparking cable. He was forced to tip onto the toes of his boots to speak into it. An electric squeal resonated through our bones.
‘UPON THIS DAY,’ the amplified words bounced out across the harbour square, ‘THE HISTORY OF CALABASH REACHES AN END.’ The crowd twitched beneath the deafening, echoing onslaught of his words. ‘IN A LAND WHERE THE HANDS OF TIME HAVE BEEN STILLED FOR SO LONG, IN A KINGDOM WHERE THE RULERS HAVE DENIED US THE RIGHT TO SHOW THE WORLD OUR STRENGTH, WHERE INERTIA AND SLOTH HAVE ERODED OUR MANHOOD, WE MUST RESTORE OUR BIRTHRIGHT, STRENGTHEN OUR RESOLVE, GRASP THE SPINES OF POWER, TAKE UP OUR WEAPONS AND TEACH OUR ENEMIES TO TREMBLE BEFORE THE MIGHT OF A BRAVE NEW NATION.’
His words did not appear to have the galvanising effect he was hoping for. Farmers and fishermen shuffled awkwardly amongst each other. Women fearfully clutched their children to their breasts. The bare-chested girls from the fields appeared angry and dismayed. General Bassa had failed to give the populace a reason to follow him. They had been denied nothing until his militia seized power. They were not disgruntled citizens, but a happily settled people who had known nothing but peace and prosperity. They were unsure how to react to this onslaught.
‘MY POOR CITIZENS, YOU HAVE BEEN SO REPRESSED,’ bellowed the General. ‘THE SCALES HAVE NOT YET FALLEN FROM YOUR EYES, BUT THIS MOMENT WILL LONG BE REMEMBERED. FROM THIS MOMENT ON OUR NATION BECOMES A MIGHTY FORCE. A TIME OF REVOLUTION BEGINS NOW. DEATH TO THE OPPRESSING TYRANTS OF CALABASH. OUR MASTERY OF WORLDS BEGINS TODAY.’
The Nubians grasped their axe handles and stood beside the exposed necks of their victims. A terrible stillness fell across the faces of the crowd. Executions were clearly not what they wanted. The General’s own sword quivered with tension. The drum-roll ceased. Nothing moved. This was the second when everything hung in the balance. I had been a fool to trust our fate to a mute boy and a dishonest child. I buried my face in my hands, too frightened to look. And in that frozen moment, all that could be heard was a strange muffled hammering.
Suddenly, with a great tearing groan, the back of the execution platform angled sharply and dropped away, falling to the ground with a splintering crash, tipping everyone, the Sultan, his mother, his concubine, the Princess, his retinue and the Nubian executioners backwards onto the nets at the harbour wall, and bouncing some, including, inevitably, a handful of tiresome performing dwarves, right over them and into the sea.
Menavino, I knew, was a brilliant carpenter. The men who had erected the wooden platforms and benches for the Sultan and General Bassa were not. The mute apprentice appeared from the profusion of splintered wooden bones with one of the great execution axes balanced across his shoulder. I had seen them stacked at the side of the platform as we approached the harbour. Even Scammer was dragging a chopper almost as tall as himself. A few strategically accurate blows had been enough to loosen the entire structure.
With a great roar the crowd went wild, surging forwards to surround the tipped platform, overrunning the startled militia, snatching their muskets and discharging them into the sky. In the ensuing chaos I grabbed the doctor’s hand and pulled him to the harbour edge. General Bassa had fallen to the ground a few yards short of the dock, and was already back on his feet, yelling at his disarrayed troops.
At that moment a strange new sound was heard. It echoed over the hillside, booming out across the harbour, startling clouds of starlings from the trees, and all the while growing louder and louder, an ominous clanking, grinding noise, as that of a hundred camshafts hammering, peppered with the bang and crackle of electrical connections. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up in confusion as the smoke-belching monstrosity hove into view, tearing and shredding its way out of the woodlands. I knew that here was the General’s great war machine, the Belligeratron, designed to wage war on the people of Cole Bay.
The great wooden carcass was designed to hold hundreds of soldiers in its belly. It moved across the fields on immense iron stilts, lifted and dropped by pistons. Within its oaken cage I could see searing flares and bolts of electricity, rubbing plates, flailing cables, iron cogs, and flywheels lethally spinning. Everyone on board looked terrified. Along the sides, cannon bays had been constructed from panels of riveted iron and shafts of wood, but the cannons had not been properly secured, so that every time the war machine moved forwards they shifted back and forth, crushing the men who had been assigned to operate them. At the rear, pulsing exhaust pipes belched oily black trails. Oil was also pouring from a dozen different valves and tubes. The air stung our nostrils with the cuprous tang of unshielded voltage. It was a wonder the whole thing hadn’t exploded into a ferocious fireball.
I could see Major Maximus balancing at the helm, trying to calm his men as the contraption twisted and shifted over the land. Every few moments a metal boom swooped over his head, completing a powerful electric circuit. He had to keep ducking to avoid it.
The General was elated. He pointed and yelled to the cowering populace. ‘Behold, our new weapon of conquest! Let our enemies witness this sight and tremble!’
A small explosion rocked the rear of the machine and several soldiers screamed and fell off, dropping sixty feet to the ground. The crowd scattered as the eight stamping legs of the Belligeratron approached, looking like an angry animated version of the Pavilion Pier. It managed to make the roller coaster at the Cole Bay Kursaal look like a safe ride.
The General turned and saw me. ‘You brought us the science, boy,’ he confirmed. ‘We followed your design.’
‘No, I gave you a jet engine that didn’t work.’
‘Not that piece of rubbish, this, this!’ He held up the sleeve of his tunic and yanked it back, revealing my wristwatch. I checked my own arm and found nothing.
I remembered how I was always losing things in Calabash. I remembered being stripped and bathed by handmaidens in a rock pool. I remembered placing my watch on a rock. I didn’t remember putting it back on. It was one of the new ones with a button on the side that made it light up, the type that came out just before digital quartz watches arrived in the shops. It was mechanical, but electric.
All timepieces had been banned in Calabash; the closest method of temporal calibration they possessed was the shadow of the Tower of Trezibaba, acting as a sundial across the city. The General had taken my wristwatch apart and copied it on an immense scale. But the result, manufactured with the wrong materials and without the remotest understanding of the principles at work, was out of balance, off-kilter and lethal to everyone inside, outside, above and below it.
The piston legs crashed down singly, in rotation, the way a spider tentatively walks. Occasionally, because some of the larger cogs were shearing teeth, two or even three legs lifted at once, and the entire war machine lurched to one side, causing shouts of alarm to rise from within its troop-cage.
‘The Belligeratron will stride through our shallow waters to the crossing point that will take us to your world,’ explained the General. ‘So you see, boy, we no longer have need of you.’ Bassa bared his teeth as he unsheathed his dress sword and waved it menacingly at me, aiming the tip at my throat.
‘Kay, I’m behind you!’
The doctor threw me a sword he had yanked from one of the dropped soldiers, and I managed to catch it by the handle. It looked as though this was where my school fencing lessons would finally pay off. I parried the General’s thrust, deflecting the point of his blade from beneath my chin, and advanced on him, driving him back to the dock steps. Behind us I could hear the crackling, smoking war machine advancing to the edge of the harbour.
Our blades clashed again. The General was strong, but I had the advantage of height, and pushed forwards. Unfortunately, I stepped onto a roll of netting and my foot slipped. I came down heavily onto one knee as the General pressed his advantage, bringing the glinting tip of his sword over my heart. With my foot tangled hopelessly in the coils of the net, I flinched, preparing to feel the steel shaft pierce my flesh.
I’ll say this for General Bassa: he was always confident in his contemplation of victory. He was certainly not expecting to be hit on the back of the head with a ten-foot oar. Rosamunde brought the blade down with a powerful crack across his skull and he dropped the sword, falling backwards into the harbour.
‘Kay, get out of the way!’ called the doctor. The Belligeratron was almost upon us. I grabbed Rosamunde’s hand and we ran clear as the clanking war machine took its first apprehensive steps over the side of the dock.
On reflection, this probably wasn’t the best move for such a patently unstable mechanical device. The front two legs drove down into the water but failed to secure a stable footing on the shifting sandy bottom of the bay. As the great cage lurched forwards at a forty-five-degree angle, men tumbled from its many platforms, but there was worse to come.
It was now obvious that the General had not entirely grasped the fundamental problems of dealing with high-voltage electrical devices. My watch had possessed a waterproof case. The Belligeratron did not. The first of the unsheathed cables hit the ocean with a spectacular bang. Others followed, trailing sparks across the water just as the General came screaming out of the sea like a smoking rocket, only to arc across the bow of the Belligeratron and fall back into the water again. Fish shot six feet into the air, instantly fried, and fell back. The other legs of the war machine flailed vainly in an attempt to find a foothold, but it was too late. The centre of gravity had shifted too far, and in a cascade of deafening electrical explosions the entire device slid away from the dock as it went over into the boiling sea.
Chapter 47
Waking Up
‘If there’s damage, I’m holding you financially responsible,’ warned Cottesloe.
‘I don’t see how,’ said Pauline. ‘My son is an independent agent. He might not yet have the key of the door but he’s old enough to sort out his own debts. Besides, my husband’s out of work, so just where you think the money would come from’s a mystery.’
Bob shifted uncomfortably on the pebbled slope. ‘How much petrol did you say was in that thing?’
‘Enough to get him a fair way out, it’s a big tank. They don’t make them like that anymore; 1933, the Skylark, and built to last, it can get through the heaviest seas.’
The sinking rain-mist was the colour of tracing paper. It made the ocean opaque and flat, and reduced visibility across the water to little more than fifty yards. ‘I don’t hear it.’ Pauline spoke softly, almost to herself. ‘If it was anywhere near you’d think you’d hear it.’
‘He’s not a strong boy,’ said Bob worriedly, ‘he could be thrown out. He can’t swim because of his chest. You should have kept the keys locked away. It’s plain irresponsibility allowing them to—’
‘To what?’ Cottesloe rounded on Bob. ‘To be stolen by some young thief who I’ve trusted and employed out of the goodness of my heart when God knows he could have been getting himself into all sorts of mischief, hanging out with the little sods on the front who jam up my machines with aluminium discs and chewing gum and Belgian coins? You’re lucky I decided not to call the police. And this is the thanks I get?’
That was enough for Pauline. She twisted her head to blow the hair from her eyes and came a threatening step closer to Cottesloe. ‘You think we should give you thanks? When it’s you who’s persuading the hotel management to shut down the Scheherazade? Don’t think we don’t know what goes on around here. It’s because of you my husband’s out of a job. If you weren’t so short-sighted and money-mad you might see what could be done to the place instead of wanting to board it up. The council is just waiting for an opportunity to tear it down and chuck up a couple of concrete office blocks so they can get a quick return on the land. They’ll cut you out of whatever sordid deal you think you’ve got going with them, and you’ll wonder why even fewer people come down here to spend money in your poxy arcade. They won’t come down here, Mr Cottesloe, because people like you will have turned Cole Bay into a shit-hole, excuse my language. Just take a look around you and see what’s happened to the front, it’s falling to bits, and the only way it will get any better is if the people with influence like you use it to do a bit of good instead of lining their own bloody pockets.’
Bob was used to hearing his wife speak her mind, but even he was startled by her outburst. Under normal circumstances he would have told her to calm down, but these were not normal circumstances, nearly a dozen of them huddled together on the beach in the drizzle, staring out into the rain-blurred sea, and the crowd slowly growing because people sensed that something was happening, and nothing ever happened in Cole Bay, events only occurred by the absence of things happening, which made today strange and somehow special.
‘So you go on and worry about your precious motor launch. My son’s not healthy—’
‘Aye, not healthy in the head either—’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I knew his old man, remember? I was there the day he ran down the street without his trousers on, shouting at the top of his voice. I saw where you had to put him, to stop him from being a harm to himself. Like father, like son, I should have known right from the outset.’
Pauline’s eyes narrowed in fury. ‘If I wasn’t a lady I’d tell you exactly what I think of men who behave like pigs in troughs. My son has a mind of his own, and if he de
cides to waste his life working in that smelly, filthy, dishonest, germ-infested drug den you call a penny arcade that’s his business, and you should be thankful that he hasn’t called in the police because they’d close you down if they knew half the things that went on.’
‘That’s slander, Mrs Goodwin, you want to be careful what you say to me. I run respectable establishments—’
‘Like The Crow’s Nest, I suppose, and perhaps if you hadn’t replaced Dudley Salterton with strippers and smutty comedians and fired him from a job he lived for, he might not have gone home and killed himself.’
‘Pauline!’ said Bob, shocked. ‘You don’t know that. Nobody said that.’
He placed a restraining hand on her arm but she pushed it off. ‘You’re just as bad. Why you can’t stick up for yourself is beyond me. Just once you could have put your foot down, but no, you spent your time creeping around behind my back seeing that blowsy cleaner Doreen what’s-her-name, a woman with no qualifications in anything except bathroom maintenance, rinsing yourself with her cheap soap and thinking I wouldn’t notice. I heard you apologising to her down the phone, thinking I was out.’
‘It didn’t mean anything, Pauline. It’s all over. I meant to say something to her ages ago but she kept on.’
‘Nobody ever says what they mean until it’s too late to make a difference.’ Pauline was nearly in tears. ‘Nobody wants to take the blame, for anything, for anyone, and it all gets left to other people—’ she faltered, then rallied so sharply on Mr Cottesloe that he nearly fell backwards over the pebbles. ‘And don’t think I don’t know what’s going on with the pier. You’re on the committee for that as well, aren’t you, deliberately letting it run down and fall into the sea rather than fix it up—’ She marched on him, backing him up against the groynes.
‘You know as well as I do that the pier has been advertising for a buyer for years now, that the council would sell it for one penny if they really thought that someone wanted it—’
Calabash Page 28
