Cal accepted a lit self-roll cigarette from Tajh’s disembodied hand, dangling down out of the opened window above their heads. ‘Okay, for argument’s sake let’s say you’re telling the truth: there’s something going on; the old geezer is important in some way. Shit, who’s to say if he’s going to live? What proof can you show me that any of this is real?’
Mark thought about Padraig and moved from scratching his stubbly chin to the side of his brow, close to the oraculum. He thought about what they had seen in London. Their escape had hardly been an orderly affair. Nor had it been covert, given the clanking bulk of the Mamma Pig. So they were an easy target. With Seebox’s regular army reinforced by the Paramilitaries, and now the possibility of killer drones, it was a nasty situation. That was why Sharkey and Tajh were attempting to rig up a radar link to the roof-mounted satellite dish.
But, as Cal had just reminded him, they had rescued Padraig. It had seemed impossible, but the fact was that they had.
Who would have bloody thought it!
For Mark just thinking back about Clonmel and Padraig brought home a deep pang of nostalgia for those lost days: a summer of high sunshine and friends. He recalled leaning back against the wall of the dairy in Padraig’s garden and looking up into the ancient pear tree, its stunted branches providing shade in the hot sunshine. He recalled how Padraig would bring Mo a moth or a butterfly in the cradle of his hands. How delighted Mo was as she let them go, gazing up at their erratic dancing flight. He recalled the joy, the intimacy of friendship . . .
Mark turned his head to the sceptical Cal. ‘You know that this thing in my brow, this oraculum, is embedded in my brain. It has changed me. And Nan’s has changed her too. I can’t explain how it works in any logical way, but I do know that on Tír the oracula connected us to a source of power that we could use just by thinking about it.’
He stopped talking because he didn’t want to elaborate on where the source of power came from: not merely a goddess, but Mórígán, the goddess of death. But now a new thought crept into Mark’s mind, and the implications frightened him.
‘This thing, you say, connects you to something powerful? You realise how that sounds to me?’ Cal said.
‘I suppose I do.’
What was increasingly frightening Mark was not Cal’s scepticism, but his realisation: What if the real connection is to the Fáil?
‘Sounds like bullshit – that’s what it sounds like to me.’
‘Well, maybe I can understand that. But these things in our heads, they do more than just give us powers to fight. They do . . . deeper things, allow us enhanced communication for example. We can read people’s minds. We can understand what somebody is thinking. We can understand their speech, even if they’re talking in a language we’re never heard before.’
Cal shook his head, exhaling smoke. He took a final drag on his cigarette before docking the butt-end against his heel.
‘I can see how implausible it might sound to you. But the fact is you have helped Nan and me in rescuing Padraig. I know you don’t have any idea of why that might be important, but we think it is. We’re both grateful to you.’
‘You put the crew through unacceptable risk.’
‘We both think the risk was worth it.’
Cal spoke quietly, but with an underlying tenor of strong emotions: resentment, frustration – anger. ‘This crew is a guerrilla structure.’
‘I know.’
‘But have you figured out why?’
‘Security.’
‘Attrition, pal. The average survival time of a crew is no more than a few months. They get wind of us, one way or another, they take us out.’
Mark fell silent. They’d talked of this before.
‘Maybe it does have something to do with you. Maybe they are hunting you, not even you and Nan, but specifically you. I don’t know shit. But one thing I do know – I bloodywell feel it – is those bastards are getting closer.’
‘Nan and I, we might be able to help.’
‘How?’
‘We sense things. We might sense it if the crew is in danger.’
Cal grunted. ‘Maybe you could, maybe you couldn’t.’ He wiped his hand across his sweating brow. ‘This country is going to pot. I don’t understand it at all. I can’t believe it is happening. All I know is I’m going to fight it. But’ – He struck his open hand against the side of his head – ‘it’s so difficult to fight against something that you don’t understand. Something you don’t have a clue as to why in the name of god it is happening.’
Mark nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘I wonder if even now you see what I’m getting at? It’s all down to attrition, man!’
Sharkey, who was barefoot and had stripped down to a T-shirt and shorts, interrupted the tense atmosphere by heading towards the sea, hopping from one foot to the other in the freezing dirt. He still had a dressing over his wounded shoulder, but he had found an oil-stained pilot-styled cap and was doing his Biggles act:
‘Damn near bought it, there, old chap!’
Mark found himself smiling, as he looked at Sharkey – all elbows and knees, jogging away into the mist. Sharkey had broken the tension and even Cal looked a little more relaxed.
‘You boys feel like joining him?’ Tajh’s head was poking out of the cab window. Her voice was inside his head: Do it! Don’t lose the opportunity to bond. Mark sighed. He felt too tired for this, but he climbed to his feet.
‘Shit – okay!’
It was probably a daft idea, but Mark and Cal abandoned their jackets, footwear and jeans, and followed Sharkey’s lead.
The deserted beach was no more than thirty yards away, a steep drop into a tiny cove of tide-worn rocks and brown sand, easier to run on where it had been wetted by the tide. The water was a darker plane beyond the sand merging into the mist. They ran at the tide, splashing out through the shallows, their feet slipping and sliding on seaweed before they fell into the freezing water. It wasn’t long before all three of them were forced back out onto the sand, the bodies blue with cold, the steam of their breath clouding their vision.
Sharkey lay back on the elbow of his uninjured arm, showing the white of his toothy grin against his dusky skin. ‘Why’s this old fart so important to you?’ he asked Mark.
‘I think, maybe, he might understand what’s going on.’
Mark joined Sharkey, sprawling flat on his back, his heels close to the surf. Cal flopped down on the other side of him, lying prone, the side of his face pressed against the sand. Mark’s jaw trembled with cold as he spoke. ‘We were only kids. None of us had any real idea of what we were getting into. All I know now, looking back at it, is that we were seduced into something . . . well, something incredibly dangerous.’
‘And all that shit has to do with what is happening here?’ Cal said.
‘Yeah.’
Sharkey looked Mark in the face. ‘I don’t share Cal’s scepticism. You’re talking about something I can empathise with: the idea of getting involved in something dangerous – something you can’t ever wholly escape from.’
Mark squinted at Cal’s prone figure, a dark silhouette against the lightening sky.
Sharkey said: ‘We did a whole bucket load of stupid things when we were kids. Me and Bull, we got ourselves involved in a couple of wars. Sometimes I think we never escaped from those wars.’
Over the ensuing minutes, the first clear shafts of dawn broke over the sea, awakening greys, then pallid blues, then the flush of violet. They gazed at the silvery horizon. The first glimmer of daylight amid the dissipating mist was beautiful. Frost crinkled the seaweed nearby. This was England, not just Cal’s country, it was Mark’s country too – and yet it felt curiously alien to him, as if the very molecules of his being no longer belonged here.
‘Hey, the dip was fun!’ Sharkey grinned.
The tide was
coming in. Mark sat forward, bringing his goose-pimpled thighs up to his chest and holding his legs bent up with his hands. Seagulls shrieked overhead. ‘I really do think there are too many things in common with our experience on Tír for the events here to be coincidence.’
Cal spoke then, his voice a growl from deep within his chest. ‘Don’t treat me like I’m stupid, pal!’
‘I’m not.’
‘I know what you’re doing. I just figured it out. You’re slipping and sliding around the truth.’
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s really happening – you’re ignoring what’s behind it all – the word for it is evil. You think you can pretend that evil don’t exist? I’ve been up to my nostrils in it, all my life. Hoping nobody was going to make a wave. Nearly drowned in it when those fuckheads murdered my father. Heard Tajh tell you that – she tells everybody. But don’t you go thinking you understand. I’m talking about my father, the dad who abandoned me as a kid. You moan and groan about being adopted. Nobody ever took the trouble to adopt me. I thought a whole lot about that when I was growing up, in and out of trouble. I knew my father was out there somewhere and when I was ready I went looking and I found him. I made it my business to find him when those tattoo-heads started laying it on people like him. I found him. And you know what? He was just another alcoholic shithead, an ex squaddie just like me. And here’s me, an idiot who goes into the fucking army, man, to try to have something to believe in, something to fight for. I saw things to believe in all right. I saw evil every fucking day.’
Mark and Sharkey dropped their heads in silence.
Cal lifted his face to the sky and he exhaled. ‘I hardly had time to get to know my waste of space father before he became another of those statistics nobody gives a shit about.’
He turned on his heel and stalked back to the camp.
Mark followed him. But he wasn’t so stupid as to think he could console Cal in his present mood.
Mark looked in on Padraig, nodded to Tajh and Nan who were looking after him, then wrapped his leather jacket around his trembling and jerking shoulders. He looked down at the battered harmonica he lifted from his pocket.
Fathers and sons!
Cal had returned to his perch on the step.
Mark stood over him. ‘You’re lucky.’ Mark could actually hear his teeth chattering. ‘At least you got to know your father.’
Bull looked down at the pair of them from the top of the Mamma Pig, where he was still working on the satellite dish. Tajh came down out of the cab to put an arm around Cal’s shoulders.
Mark shrugged his shoulders at Tajh. ‘Sorry.’
Nan signalled to him from the open porthole in the side of the Pig, but he was still concentrating on Tajh. She shrugged, her eyes closing with a sigh. At that point the heavy engine started up. They heard it revving, as if Cogwheel was testing it – or maybe deliberately breaking up the mood.
Tajh said: ‘We’re all fagged out with exhaustion. I’ve been lying awake all night thinking about things.’
‘Thinking about what?’
‘Thinking about you, what you and Nan have been telling us. There are things that we’ve been noticing too that make little sense as we understand things.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’m beginning to believe you – maybe there is a pattern to what’s been happening in London: the riots, the wasted streets, whole districts in flames. And now the whole country.’
‘What sort of pattern?’
‘I just can’t say, but I’m just beginning to see that it isn’t just random chaos, as people were assuming.’
Mark thought about that walk with Henriette, seeing London from a very different perspective. Then he looked back towards the porthole only to discover that Nan had disappeared.
Cal asked: ‘What’s happening with the drones?’
Tajh answered: ‘I don’t know.’
Mark was still wondering about Nan. Where was she? What was it she had been attempting to tell him? He felt so anxious about her he searched for her presence with his oraculum.
‘Shit! Something’s wrong. Nan is gone.’
The crew reacted with surprise. The atmosphere immediately grew tense.
Tajh jumped up into the Mamma Pig to confirm that Nan was not there. Sharkey, Bull and Cal were just standing there, all looking at Mark. He searched for Nan through his oraculum.
Mark looked at Tajh: ‘It’s okay. She’s safe.’
Nan clearly overheard him.
Mark swung round to face the crew, who had been staring at him in silence as he communicated with Nan, his oraculum flaring. ‘She says that the wind is rising. The sea has gone out a mile.’
Sharkey said: ‘That just ain’t possible, man.’
Cogwheel, who had been leaning out of the window of the Mamma Pig with a fag between his lips didn’t agree with Sharkey. He flicked the sparking remains out into the dirt. ‘Shit, guys, I really do hope I’m wrong, but what Nan is describing sounds like only one thing I know: a tsunami.’
Mark took off, shorewards, to meet her. ‘Hell, Nan! I was worried about you.’
‘Worry about yourself. I’ve been moving in a circle around this spot. Something very strange is happening.’
‘Strange, how?’
She shook her head. ‘The changes in the birds, the wind, the tide – it’s becoming very peculiar indeed.’
‘Your chatting is not helping us,’ Cal barked from the topmost step of the Mamma Pig, where he stood glowering down at Mark and Nan. ‘What’s the fuss? Are we being tracked? Can we expect a drone attack?’
Nan spoke: ‘I don’t know if we are being tracked or not. I don’t think we are under a drone attack, but I do believe we can expect a storm, a very big storm, coming in from the sea.’
Cogwheel chipped in: ‘She’s talking about a tsunami.’
Cal laughed. ‘We don’t get tsunamis in England.’
‘Hsst!’ Tajh waved them all to silence.
Then they all heard it: a roaring, rushing sound in the far distance.
‘Shit!’
The Mamma Pig became a commotion of activity. They threw everything that had come out of the Pig back in through the portholes, while Cogwheel started up the engine. As Mark helped Nan back in through the port, Cogwheel performed a five point turn, then headed out, revving through the heavy gears.
‘Where we heading?’
‘We’d best take a twisty route; keep the things in the sky off our backs. Tajh, can you plot a route that’ll give us the least hassle?’ Cal hesitated long enough to light one of Cogwheel’s self-roll cigarettes off the dock-end of his previous.
‘I have a question,’ said Mark.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Sharkey is right. Tsunamis don’t usually hit the East Anglian coast. What if this isn’t down to natural forces?’
Nobody volunteered an answe
r.
A Sense of Purpose
Mo woke with a shock to realise that she was listening to birdsong. It had been so long since she had heard anything so sweet that it threatened to disorientate her. When she stepped outside her tent, closely followed by her Shee guardian Usrua, she spotted the two slender olive birds with yellow breasts that had woken her with their song. They resembled chiffchaffs back on Earth. Then she noticed lots more of them, and other varieties too. They were feeding off insects that buzzed and swarmed around a proliferation of tiny red, pink and yellow lichens that peeped out of the cracks between the rocks.
‘Isn’t it strange, Usrua, how loveliness could still survive, despite what’s been happening here?’
‘Life is life.’
‘It troubles me that we had to kill them all – all of the defenders.’
‘We were obliged to do so. We offered quarter but none responded since surrender is forbidden to the Tyrant’s legionaries.’
‘Why would he be so cruel as to forbid defeated soldiers the opportunity to surrender? What purpose would it serve when all is otherwise lost?’
‘Their lives matter only in as much as they serve his purpose. Once surrendered, they would be of no further purpose to him. As captives they might even prove useful as informants to the enemy.’
‘But that is monstrous.’
‘It is the logic of war.’
Mo shut her eyes. She recalled the arrival of Kate on the dragon, how it had blacked out the evening stars. At the time it had appeared to put a cap on those days of neverending battle, the chaos of flames, the fury and horror. There was a particular memory she would have preferred to forget, when the Shee had set fire to the base of a tower full of desperate defenders. Now Mo wondered if she would ever rid herself of the awful memory of that tower consumed by flames, wheeling Garg sentinels in the sky directing new avenues of attack, the screams of the dying.
Mo opened her eyes again to gaze up into the dark-skinned face of Usrua, seeing her feline features in the flared and flattened nostrils that were already half way between those of a human and a great cat. She also saw a hint of stripes coursing over her guardian’s brow, larger than usual canines and butter yellow eyes that could open wide to become all pupil, so moonlight reflected off the retinas like mirrors. Even the prickling patterning over the curve of her cheeks suggested the whiskery profusion that would spring out when she transformed into her battling feline spirit. Mo thought about the description she had so often overheard when human-like races on Tír spoke of the Shee: they called them a warrior race. How astonishing to think of them as beings bred specifically for war . . .
The Return of the Arinn Page 6
