Castles Made of Sand

by Gwyneth Jones

  Maybe it was just as well he’d known, and been tormented by that vision, all the time he was helpless. Or else he’d be a gibbering basketcase now.

  The rest of the barmies, plus assorted civilian emigrés were at Alain’s place in Brittany. The Chosen were there, and his mother. Marlon Williams; and Mary. The Powerbabes, Roxane; the members of DARK, Anne-Marie and Smelly Hugh, and all the children. Anne-Marie’s family had had to leave, because of AM’s magic. The Babes, DARK and Rox had got themselves into dangerous trouble and had had to be moved out. The rest of his friends were still in England.

  The Heads had recently returned there to organise a jailbreak. They were waiting for the word to go ahead.

  From Suresnes they went to an old brownstone building, on the Isle de St Louis, long occupied by Alain and his crew. A council of war was convened in a first-floor room with swooping chandeliers, a football-pitch of polished oval table; windows overlooking a courtyard where chestnut trees towered. There were barmy army staff officers and netheads, French government suits, and significant French Counterculturals, including Alain and his musclebound girlfriend Tamagotchi. Alain wore his Ferrari jumpsuit, Tam was a tin-foil Courreges space person; adding a glimmer of rockstar lightness to the proceedings. Sayyid Mohammad Zayid was there, with an entourage of English Islamic soldiers. Richard Kent, at Easton Friars, was with them on a video screen.

  Until this morning they’d still hoped that Ax’s return would work miracles. Richard had been due to be at Heathrow with enough force, disguised as military honours, to protect Ax if things went sour. It was clear now that Benny had never intended to let Ax land. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing Ax Preston back on English soil. So they were back to the cat and mouse game: Preminder warning them he couldn’t guarantee Fiorinda’s safety, using the threat of her death ‘by mob violence’ to hold off the invasion that he knew was being prepared.

  Benny, who had seized the initiative when Fergal Kearney died, claimed to speak for the Second Chamber Group, the acting government: but he might not be the leader. It was thought that there was someone else in the background.

  They talked about the invasion. The ‘Free English Army’ had been gathering for months, sneaking over to France in small parties, partly financed by Allie’s ransom fund. They had weapons, ammo, sea transport. No air power, but there would be a first wave of parachutists, dropped from borrowed helicopters. There was resistance on the ground, waiting to join them. They believed popular feeling was on their side. But the Celtics were organised too, and the other nations of Britain neutral at best. Wales, Scotland and Ireland, though they acknowledged Ax’s claim, still recognised the Second Chamber Group as England’s legal government.

  Ax felt himself going into an Ax Preston routine, and let it carry him. Details, difficulties… Which cities can we count on, what about the regions, what fuel and power sources will we control? I have been here before, he kept thinking. The barmies had been ebullient, convinced it would be a walkover now that Ax was back. He must keep them that way: but the people round this table were not so optimistic, and rightly so. This was not a good situation, not a walkover. He worked hard at making everyone believe he was still Ax Preston, and wondered (his mind wandering) when should he break it to his backers that he didn’t give a flying fuck? Not now. Get Fiorinda out of jail first.

  When everything had been said he gave them a speech he’d been thinking out on the plane, because he’d known there was a very good chance that he’d end up here, rather than on the tarmac at Heathrow. Short and positive. It seemed to go down okay. He dealt with a blur of congratulations, the flesh-pressers, and went into an adjoining room with Mohammad and Alain, Lurch and Tam.

  It was a quiet salon, decorated in brown and gold. Someone had given him a letter from Fiorinda, written before she was formally arrested, and smuggled out of Rivermead. He read it, put it in the inside pocket of his jacket and walked over to a mirror on the wall, to hide the tears. So Elsie’s dead. My little cat; I won’t see her again. The face in the mirror stared like an old friend who knew you when, and you don’t want to meet him because you don’t want to be reminded.

  ‘You look the same as you always did,’ said Alain. ‘The astonishing Mr Preston. My God. A year chained up in the jungle, and ten days later he’s planning the first invasion of England since the Conquest.’

  ‘Better without the beard,’ said Ax.

  I have been here before. What did Verlaine say, a long time ago? Time is a helix. Time is a kaleidoscope: the pieces remain the same, only the pattern shifts. He remembered sitting in a hotel room with Sage on the night of the Armistice Concert after the Islamic campaign. When he had vowed he would die before he played the game of soldiers again—and here he was, back from the dead.

  Be careful what you swear to God.

  This was the ops room. A work table spread with desktop hardware, maps, documents, phones, recconnaissance images. They sat around it and entered a different atmosphere: the world of the Floods Conference, where the fate of England was part of a much larger problem. A world that had recently become very, very strange. He wondered how Mohammad came to be at home here.

  But there was so much he didn’t know.

  ‘We can speak freely,’ said Alain. ‘We are secure as we know how, in here.’

  ‘So let’s talk,’ said Ax. ‘Bring me up to speed.’

  ‘After David died,’ began Mohammad, ‘and Fergal revealed his true colours, Fiorinda dealt with the situation her own way. She spoke to me in such terms, eventually, that I had to accept what she was doing. But I had George Merrick onto me, and Richard; and Alain here. We started making plans—’

  ‘Fiorinda was keeping the peace,’ said Lurch, to Ax. ‘By any means necessary. She was saving lives.’

  ‘She ’as immolated herself for your fucking Utopia, Ax,’ said Tamagotchi.

  Ax wanted to slap them both. How dared they think they had to defend her?

  ‘The warning Fiorinda gave me,’ Mohammad went on, grimly, ‘and the evidence of my own eyes, told me your wife was the intimate hostage of a very evil man, and more. That we faced something more than human evil—’

  ‘This would be the Celtic secret weapon problem?’

  ‘They have grown fangs, Ax; the masters of those rabid primitives we were fighting on the streets of Amsterdam,’ said Alain. ‘We have known for some time that the Celtics were looking for a way to reduce the population of Europe, but drastically. They have spread cholera among the drop-outs, they have destroyed food stores, but it’s been small stuff. We’ve lived in fear of a major bioterrorist attack, but we knew there were ideological objections. An engineered plague was too ‘science’. It could even be they were restrained by commonsense, not wishing to include their own hides in the firesale… Last winter we learned, I speak for the French Counterculture, for the techno-greens, that the means had been found. It was in England, and it was not scientific, it was magical—’

  Ax noticed the young American’s worried frown. Like the word dictator, he thought. They just won’t have it. Well, they’ll have to learn.

  ‘Well then, Fiorinda was passing information to us, but could tell us nothing about this “magical weapon”. Naturally we suspected Fergal was involved. Then Fergal died, in that spectacular way, and Fiorinda was accused. We learned, over here, that her friends were secretly convinced that she was a witch. We couldn’t believe it, of course, it seemed madness. So we took over where those two boys, Chip and Kevin, had left off, and tried to discover the truth. We traced a connection between the “Swedish clinic” you have heard of, and a certain Rufus O’Niall. We put this together with other information, disregarded information, strange tales of Rufus, his extremist affiliations, his power to destroy anyone who thwarts him… This is very hard to believe, but we are sure we are right. All this time, Fiorinda has been in the hands of her father, who was wearing the body of Fergal as a disguise; and it is Rufus O’Niall who is the Celtics’ super weapo
n.’

  Ax nodded. He could not trust himself to speak.

  ‘You don’t look surprised, Ax. Did you know this, about her father?’

  He thought of the dark exercise yard in which he had walked with Fiorinda, unable to speak to her, unable to touch her, knowing the horror his girl had hidden, and that he couldn’t save her. The wet heat of Central America fell on him like a shroud. How could he explain all that to Alain?

  ‘Just before I was kidnapped I’d realised Fergal had to be some kind of imposter. And Sage had tried to tell me, more than once, that there was something weird going on, something about Rufus, and that the bastard was still after her. I didn’t believe it. When I was stuck in the jungle I suppose my mind was more open. I finally put the clues together.’

  ‘Fathers obsessed with their daughters, kings who lock their daughters away, and try to possess them, it’s the fairytale of patriarchy,’ said Tamagotchi.

  ‘The worst crimes are family crimes,’ said Mohammad. ‘Always.’

  ‘You said it,’ said Lurch, child of stunning privilege, a princess of the empire.

  In front of him, Ax had a blown-up detail from the latest GPS images of central London. They had GPS again, so civilisation returns, in time to monitor its own destruction. He was looking at the reason why he hadn’t been able to land at Heathrow. There was a bonfire piled on St Stephen’s Green, outside the House of Commons. He could see the raw wooden steps leading to a platform on top, a pole sticking up. A roped perimeter surrounded the pyre, mounted police standing guard. Obviously the stage set was meant to terrify, but it wasn’t a bluff. The bastards meant business. Any time, any day, they could switch on their rent-a-crowd lynch mob, and this was how she would die.

  His skin crept. I think I dreamed of this.

  Push wood on the fire, Jackie, Good wood on the fire, Jackie—

  Our last stand, and I knew she was lost.

  ‘We don’t know how they mean to use Rufus,’ said Alain, ‘but as you may know, Ax, the Zen Self research, and our investigations, here is France, into la féerie scientifique, says the potential is there.’

  ‘We have found that magic is like telepathy,’ said Tam. ‘Like the telepathy artefacts of Zen Self experiments. Power of ancient legend that exists in reality, but it’s pitiful, like a vestigal limb. If Rufus O’Niall is what we think, he is like nothing on earth. He is like the wild, crazy version of some element that can only be created in a lab, for picosceonds, but that we know to be awesome.’

  ‘And he’s Fiorinda’s father,’ murmured Mohammad.

  ‘She has refused to confess that she is a witch,’ continued Alain, ‘But the people who are holding her know she’s O’Niall’s daughter, and perhaps they know for sure that she has inherited something. That’s good because it gives her value, but equally, it means they will never release her.’

  ‘But if she has, uh, magical powers,’ said Lurch, hopefully, ‘can’t she use them to escape? In some secret way, that wouldn’t be obviously weird—?’

  Tam and Alain rolled their eyes. Americans!

  ‘I doubt she’d do that,’ said Mohammad kindly. ‘Not after all she’s suffered rather than take that road. She has her reasons. She won’t do it now.’

  ‘We must try and break her out,’ said Alain, after a silence. ‘Your return has made the situation highly volatile. We have a plan, but Rufus—who is still involved, we don’t doubt—will surely intervene, and what then? I won’t conceal from you, it’s a desperate situation. Our only hope is in the anti-Rufus, the White Rabbit, our Rambo—’

  White Rabbit and Rambo were codenames. ‘Who is “Rambo”?’ asked Lurch. ‘Is it that a person, or what? A Hollywood human fighting machine?’

  ‘Tuh! Not Rambo, Rimbaud, proto-rockstar, alchemist of the mind. It means our blue-eyed madman, the champion of the quest.’

  ‘Sage is dead, Alain,’ said Ax. ‘I’m sorry, but I know. He died months ago.’

  Alain put his head on one side. ‘You think so? I hope you’re wrong.’

  ‘So…we have to make a decision…’ Ax had lost the thread. He was trying to find Fiorinda’s presence in his mind, but she was not there, she was gone—

  ‘You’re worn out, lad,’ said Mohammad. ‘There’s nothing to decide right now. Let’s get you to bed.’

  ‘Me? No. I don’t think I’ll sleep.’ Ax searched around the table for the faces of his friends. Where’s Allie, and Rob and Dilip? Where’s everybody gone? He was startled to see the bandages on his wrists, where the cuffs had galled. Am I free, or is this another dream?

  Alain went to him. He had noticed, in the barrage at the end of the meeting next door, that the astonishing Mr Preston did not like to be touched, so he didn’t touch. ‘You needn’t sleep. Just eat something, take a little soup, and lie down.’

  ‘Would someone stay with me? I’m afraid to wake up back there.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you, don’t you worry,’ said Mohammad.

  George and Bill and Peter were hiding in a drop-outs’ hostel in Peckham. As returned emigrés they’d be arrested at once if they were spotted. For others it was less clear-cut. They got by from day to day, Rob lying low at Snake Eyes, Allie at the San. The club venue was closed, of course, and the Reich Office, but she was allowed to keep the Volunteer Initiative limping on. They met Dilip, who sofa-surfing, here, there and everywhere, in the back of a pub in Vauxhall. Not the old drinking hole made famous in Apokryfa, another place that they believed wasn’t under surveillance. Old habits die hard, they were still trying to spin the machine. Dilip was working on a poster campaign, he’d brought roughs along for them to look at. Fiorinda as Sita, the kidnapped princess at the heart of the Ramayana; Hindu myth of the Good State. Virtuous Sita, captured by demons, and rescued by an army of heroes… Dilip had drawn Fiorinda in a garden, walls as high as a prison yard, defying the advances of leering demons—who bore close resemblance to Benny, and other members of the Second Chamber Group.

  The prisoner had been moved again, this time to Holloway, which was scary because of that piece of conceptual art at Westminster; good because the old dump was infested with Myghter Arthur, so they were getting news. She’s okay physically, was the latest word, but she’s in solitary, and very low.

  ‘She looks too passive,’ said Allie. ‘Couldn’t she be more energetic?’

  ‘I think we want her to look innocent and helpless.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Okay, let’s print it. Get it on the streets.’

  ‘Flyposting after dark, it makes me feel so young.’

  Someone behind the bar pumped up the volume on ‘Not In Nottingham’, the song that had led to DARK’s hurried exit. Originally a cute tune from the Walt Disney cartoon of Robin Hood: the dike-rockers gave it hell. Robin’s gone, Maid Marian’s in durance vile, everybody’s trampled by the bad guys…The backroom clientèle exchanged knowing glances. We should find another pub, thought Dilip. Who turned up the sound? This is not safe.

  ‘What next?’ muttered Rob, under the music. ‘I don’t know the story of the Ramayana. The army of heroes and then what? The happy ending?’

  ‘Ah, not quite,’ Dilip frowned. ‘First she has to walk through fire.’

  ‘Ha! The demons make Sita walk through fire? You don’t say!’

  ‘Er, no. To prove herself untouched by the demons, to satisfy the people, she has to walk through fire—’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Dilip!’ hissed Allie. ‘For fuck’s sake—!’

  ‘No, no it’s good. We take the neo-feudalists on their own ground, legend. Sita is perfect. She’s the selfless protector, ideal womanhood.’

  ‘Fuckit, man, we don’t want Fio idealised and dead!’

  They argued. Dilip agreed to think of another heroine, they left separately, crestfallen. Waiting for that knock on the door, you carry on like ghosts of yourselves, keeping busy: clinging to scraps old routines.

  The Heads were using their Oltech phones as little as possible, wai
ting for the order that would set a desperate plan in motion. They stayed indoors a lot. Their natural faces had become too familiar in the Triumvirate’s reign, and you’d get stopped by the police for wearing a digital mask. The news of Ax’s deliverance came. Ax was flying into Heathrow, and elation gripped the secret resistance, but there wasn’t any excitement, hostile or positive, in the regular media. When the happy ending didn’t work out, the Heads weren’t surprised.

  ‘Occasionally,’ said Bill, dryly, ‘it niggles at the back of your mind that we are fucked. Done for in some mysterious way that can’t be beat, no matter what.’

  Yeah, it niggles. The score keeps racking up against you. You know there’s no chance, no hope, you just keep on until the lights go out, that’s all. They knew the jailbreak had to be now, if ever; but instead of Paris they got a call from Olwen Devi. Olwen, who’d escaped with her Zen Selfers early in Fergal’s reign, was at Reading. She said to come and meet her there, in Travellers’ Meadow.

  They took the train (in different carriages, and walking separately from the station to Richfield Avenue). Rivermead was in enemy hands, but the Meadow was so far untouched; mostly deserted. They’d parked the van on its old pitch when they came back from Caer Siddi. It was still there, plumes of seeding meadow grass grown halfway to the windows. They let themselves in and powered up the systems, from force of habit and for old sakes’ sake.

  Olwen arrived a few minutes later with a couple of Zen Selfers. The Selfers were in drab civvies, not their uniform red and green. Olwen had compromised: a terracotta choli blouse and a grey-green sari.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked George.