Later, when his grandmother had settled down to watch her favourite show, Arthur snuck upstairs to her bedroom and found the wooden box in which she kept her frugal savings. Into it he placed the ten new-pound note she had given him, shuffling it into the bottom of the fives so that she wouldn’t get too suspicious.
* * *
Gwenhwyfar waited nervously in Mocca Coffee, a hot chocolate clasped firmly in her hands.
She was early, and kept her eyes on the swinging door. It was busy in the small café, as it was Saturday, and many walkers were taking refuge from the flash storm outside. She didn’t know how she was going to recognise Isolde. Several blonde girls had already entered and left the building, some with dark coats and a few with green.
She checked the clock. It was just gone one. Suddenly it dawned on her that she should have told her parents where she was going and when she would be back. What if Isolde wasn’t who she said she was? Another candidate wandered into the heat of the coffee house, with near-white hair and a pink flush to her cheeks. She was clutching an expensive looking phone and a large statement bag. As she approached, Gwenhwyfar put her drink down and sat forwards.
‘Are you Gwen…?’
She was tall and reminded Gwenhwyfar a little of Viola, though she was not as waif-like. Her deep-set eyes were bright blue and she had thin, carefully plucked eyebrows that defined the arch of her strong, bumped nose. ‘Yes.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Are you Isolde?’
The pale girl nodded and they both shook hands.
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ Gwenhwyfar added. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I’ll go and order one, thanks.’ She offered a quick smile. ‘I won’t be a moment.’
On her own once again, Gwenhwyfar powered through half of her hot chocolate, keeping her eyes on the bar. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, a suspicious character perhaps, or something that would tell her that what she was doing was a bad idea. Isolde soon returned with a latte, and settled into the armchair opposite.
‘Thanks for taking the time to meet me,’ she started. She couldn’t be older than twenty, and Gwenhwyfar found herself wondering why someone seemingly so pampered was recruiting members for a rebellious cause. ‘It’s much easier to talk in person.’
‘I can imagine,’ she agreed. ‘Thanks for meeting me here. It’s not really park weather.’ Rain sheeted down the windows, and a man was hurried past the café with an inside-out umbrella.
Isolde rummaged through her giant bag, her forearms vanishing. ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’ She produced a large notebook and a pen. ‘So why are you interested in Free Countries?’
Gwenhwyfar hadn’t been expecting questions. ‘I’m not sure, really. I just saw the flyer and was curious.’ Isolde fiddled with a small trinket hanging around her neck. Gwenhwyfar was distracted. ‘Is that gold?’
‘You can see it if you like.’ Unfastening it, Isolde held it out for Gwenhwyfar to handle. She took it delicately, turning it to see it shine.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ Isolde explained. ‘My grandfather gave it to her when they first started dating. She left it to my mum when she died, and then my mum gave it to me.’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Thank you,’ she beamed. She fastened it back around her neck.
‘So how long have you been living in England?’ Gwenhwyfar asked, feeling more at ease.
‘Seven years.’ Isolde leant into the soft cushion of the armchair and put her notebook to one side.
‘Where in Ireland are you from?’
‘Fermanagh, in the Lakelands.’
‘Do you miss it?’
‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged. There was a short silence. ‘You’re Welsh, right?’
‘Yep,’ Gwenhwyfar nodded, pleased to talk about her heritage. ‘I just moved here. My dad got a job in the city. My mam’s English though. She’s wanted to move back for some time.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Isolde remarked.
‘Closer to my aunt. So how come you moved here?’ She took another sip of her lukewarm hot chocolate. ‘If you miss Ireland so much?’
‘My dad got transferred to run Heathrow. It’s not all bad. We get free flights, so we go away a lot.’
Gwenhwyfar nodded. Isolde had to come from a wealthy family if she wore gold. Her father had once told her that there were hardly any reserves left and that everything had to be recycled at a high cost.
Isolde picked up her notebook again, positioning it on her knees. ‘Have you ever been part of a political group before?’
‘Not really.’
‘So you won’t know what’s involved then, or what we do.’
‘I read what was on your website, but that’s as far as I got.’
‘Well, we’re quite different from other causes. I’ll start with the basics. Ultimately we’d like the reinstatement of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as sovereign states.’
Gwenhwyfar frowned. ‘So you support the Celtic Rebels, then?’ She wasn’t sure about that. They had been responsible for a strain of violence in the Highlands, as well as in what the New Nationals were now calling Southern Ireland, a small area in the south of Ireland which had changed coats and was now considered to be part of a newly-defined United Kingdom. There had been trouble, too, at the Welsh borders, with random attacks on any Welsh citizen deemed not “Welsh” enough. Isolde shook her head.
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘we believe in independence gained through non-violent means. The New Celtic Rebels have nothing to do with Free Countries. In fact, we believe they’re only hindering any positive developments.’
Gwenhwyfar drew her eyes away from an older man sitting in the corner of the café. She imagined he was watching them, but her suspicion subsided when his wife joined him. ‘What else do you believe?’
‘We think we should disarm all nuclear weapons and remove supplies of viruses in laboratories which can be used for biological warfare. We also want to work towards free and unbiased education, gender and race equality, the redistribution of wealth and the eradication of poverty. Oh, and we’re very keen on helping the environment, and on the importance of free and uncensored speech,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘So you’re against nuclear weapons, then?’ The rest of the list sounded logical to Gwenhwyfar, and the Welsh nationalist inside her was easily seduced by the notion of being free from English “tyranny”. ‘How many members are there in Free Countries?’
Isolde put her mug down on the small coffee table between them. ‘That’s the thing… because we’re so anti-Milton, we prefer to operate what we call a chain-group. There’s a few people in charge of flyers and the website. When they get a hit, they have a contact, who contacts their contact, telling them the server address of the person interested. That person, in this case me, messages the person interested and gets them to meet. If the person interested, you, decides they want to join Free Countries, their only point of contact would be me. It means that if one of us is ever questioned, we won’t be able to reveal other Free Countries members because we won’t know them.’
‘So basically, apart from the person who recruited you, you’ve no idea who you’re working for?’
‘Nope.’ Isolde seemed happy about it, careless even. ‘There are code names, obviously, but if I passed them in the street I’d be none the wiser. I think it’s cool, in a way. It means my identity is safe.’
‘But what about protests? How do you organise things like that?’
‘We don’t. We can attend any protest individually, but we’d have no idea if anyone else from Free Countries was there or not. We don’t believe in protests as a method; it brings too much attention and just gets you on the heightened surveillance list. At the moment we’re recruiting.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then we do what the Alpha tells us to do. They’re in charge. When the time comes we’ll get a message through the grapevine, and then we’ll
act.’
‘Act how?’
‘I don’t know. We don’t believe in the current government though,’ she murmured quietly. ‘We think the call of elections in May is going to be a televised sham.’
There was another silence. Gwenhwyfar wondered how Isolde could be so dedicated to something she knew so little about. ‘So what’s your code name?’
Quickly she scribbled something down, tore out the page from her notebook and handed it to her. It read Omega Iota Zeta.
‘Each code name indicates a member number, or rank,’ Isolde explained. ‘That’s why the Alpha is the first. The second is Alpha Beta. The six hundred and twenty fifth would be Alpha Beta Alpha. I figured it out, even though we’re not supposed to know. I’m five thousand, one hundred and nineteenth. You’d be five thousand, one hundred and twentieth.’
Gwenhwyfar tried to catch the threads of her calculation. How on earth had she arrived at that number? ‘What would my code name be?’
Isolde wrote it down on another piece of paper. It read Omega Iota Eta. Gwenhwyfar wasn’t sure how she was supposed to pronounce it.
‘So there are over five thousand members of Free Countries?’ Her stomach felt the pumping of her heart. She hadn’t expected to get involved in something so huge.
‘And counting,’ Isolde said, proudly. ‘If you join you’ll recruit our next member, and then they’ll recruit someone else. We only ever have to recruit one person each, but as the Alpha recruited many, somehow the cause seems to expand. I think there may be different branches of code names, which means my estimate of numbers could be much too low.’
She frowned. ‘Can you leave once you’ve joined?’
‘Yes. It’s quite easy, as no one knows who you are. We get contacted every now and then to check we’re still active and alive—it’s usually something coded that we have to respond to—and if you don’t reply in the timeframe, the whole pyramid shifts up a level. Everyone gets promoted to the number above. Technically, if you want to leave you can just not answer to the check-ups. I was Omega Iota Sigma not too long ago.’
Gwenhwyfar was beginning to feel seduced by the secrecy. She could join for a little while, couldn’t she? Isolde had just told her that it wouldn’t be permanent, that she could always drop out. ‘What happens now?’
‘Now you wait to hear from us. If you’re in, I’ll phone my recruiter and tell him. Then he’ll pass it on and get it to the top. They keep any information they have on us completely safe. In the meantime you’ll be sent a key for coded messages. You have to memorise it and destroy it afterwards. It’s easy once you get the hang of it, almost like learning a second language.’
‘What information do they have on us, then?’ Gwenhwyfar asked.
Isolde shrugged lightly. ‘Just your phone number, and it’s not like that means anything to anyone. So, are you in?’
‘I’m in,’ Gwenhwyfar gushed before she could stop herself.
‘Great. I’ll let Omega Iota Epsilon know. Don’t tell anyone we’re on a first name basis, by the way. We’re not supposed to be.’
‘Couldn’t they see us talking online?’ Gwenhwyfar stood with Isolde, who gathered up her coat, bag, phone and notebook.
‘Not as far as I know. It’s encrypted.’
That relaxed her slightly. At the end of the day she would just be connected to Isolde and whoever came beneath her. It wasn’t as if the Alpha would ever come knocking on her door, demanding that she rebel.
It didn’t take long for the two to part ways, and Gwenhwyfar remained in the coffee shop a little longer to allow Isolde a head start. She wondered where the other girl went to college, concluding that it had to be somewhere local. Eventually she donned her coat for the rain, pulling up the waxy hood. When the weather showed no signs of relenting, she braved the storm and began the long trek back home.
Lower Logres
She half expected to hear something from Isolde or Free Countries on Sunday, but after checking her inbox and Internet browser several times, resigned herself to a much longer wait. Monday morning arrived with a sky cleared by the weekend storm, and once again the weather was brilliant and blue, as if they had been given a second summer. She debated with herself whether or not to tell Viola and Bedivere about what she had signed up for on Saturday, but as they talked over the most recent celebrity scandal, she decided against it.
It was after registration when Mr Hall came into their tutor room with Emily, Hattie, Charlotte and Hector in tow. It took a few moments for the class to fall silent, but when it did, the atmosphere was thick and uncomfortable. The Furies stood sheepishly beside the deputy head with red faces, while Hector hovered nearer to the door, his arms firmly crossed.
Mr Hall eyed them all sharply. ‘Well?’
Charlotte elbowed Emily in the side.
‘Sorry,’ Emily blurted out, not meeting Gwenhwyfar’s eye. ‘Sorry for playing that prank on you.’
Miss Ray seemed surprised that this was happening now, in front of everyone. Gwenhwyfar felt her face heat up with embarrassment. Was she to be denied her dignity, on top of everything else?
‘Sorry Gwen,’ Charlotte added, her face red like beetroot. ‘Sorry I ripped your hoodie.’
‘Sorry I tried on your clothes,’ Hattie mumbled.
Emily’s blue eyes slunk to Bedivere, who observed the scene with a scowl. ‘Sorry Bedivere, for tricking you,’ she added. ‘It was wrong of me.’
Blushing, Bedivere looked away.
‘Hector?’
The boy looked to Gwenhwyfar blackly. His cheek had almost healed, though there was still a faint imprint where Gwenhwyfar’s nails had been. She hadn’t seen him at all last week, and wondered if he had been in school.
‘Hector!’ Mr Hall barked.
‘Sorry,’ he obliged, and despite the sneer the deputy head was satisfied. Gwenhwyfar averted her eyes, insulted. Where was her apology from Mr Hall? Then again, what good would it do? Sorry didn’t solve anything. The group hovered while the deputy gazed at her expectantly.
‘Gwen?’
Her countenance blackened. She wouldn’t say they were forgiven, because they weren’t. ‘All right,’ she mustered. ‘I appreciate the fact you realise you were wrong.’
Mr Hall looked to Miss Ray, his mouth open to scold, but her tutor stepped forwards quickly and waved an end to the scene.
‘Thank you girls, you can sit down now.’ She nodded to the deputy. ‘Mr Hall, I suspect you’ll be wanting to get Hector to his lesson?’
With a final displeased glance at Gwenhwyfar, Mr Hall stiffly escorted Hector out of the room. The rest of the class returned to their normal buzz, whispers rippling across each table.
‘Well that’s that, then,’ Viola said to Gwenhwyfar, who was exuding false indifference to what had just transpired. ‘Hector didn’t look happy, though.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Bedivere remarked, glancing awkwardly towards Emily’s table with ruddy cheeks. ‘Think we’ll be seeing much more of him?’
‘I won’t,’ Viola declared. ‘Tom’s ditched him, too. I made sure of that.’
‘And Lance?’
‘As far as Lance is concerned, his and Hector’s friendship never existed.’
Gwenhwyfar nodded. It was comforting to know that her friends stood beside her. She also knew, however, that all she had gained Hector had lost, and doubted that he would soon forget it.
* * *
‘Arthur!’
He was waiting for them outside their History room with the rest of their class, standing on his own, half-in and half-out the doorway to their empty classroom. He brightened when he saw them. Bedivere hurried over.
‘You’ll never guess what,’ he told him. ‘The Furies just apologised. Hector too. Mr Hall brought them all into our tutor room before registration and made them do it.’
Concerned, Arthur looked to Gwenhwyfar. ‘He did?’
She nodded, reluctant to trawl over the particulars. ‘He would’ve got me to apologise too, if
he could, but I didn’t. I mean, what have I got to be sorry for?’
‘Nothing, that’s what,’ Bedivere declared stridently.
‘Are you all right?’
She met Arthur’s worried gaze. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, really.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’m just glad it’s over. I hope that’s it.’
They let themselves in when the second bell rang. Marvin Caledonensis wasn’t as late as expected, and by the time Gavin and Tom arrived he was already writing on the board.
‘You’re a little early aren’t you, sir?’ Tom remarked, obviously thrown, as he and Gavin found their desk.
‘Early to you, late to others,’ Marvin muttered, his back to them as he scribbled out his clean, chalk letters. ‘Yes Tom, I am indeed early. But I thought I’d put a bit of effort in, as your mock exams are fast approaching. I hope you’re all ready to use those brilliant minds of yours.’
There was a murmur of discontent at the mention of exams, but with the threat of failure the class soon settled to work from their textbooks. With the low hum of chatter still present, and with Marvin occupied at his desk, Gwenhwyfar prodded Bedivere firmly in the back.
‘How did it go on Friday?’ she whispered, craning over her desk. ‘You know, the after-school club?’ Morgan looked up, and Arthur turned around.
‘It was pretty weird,’ Bedivere said, eager to share. ‘Good, but weird. He gave us wine and everything.’
‘Wine?’
‘Red. Vintage, too.’ He looked to Arthur. ‘Where did you say it was from?’
‘Bordeaux, in France. It was over thirty years old.’
Bedivere’s eyebrows arched. ‘No wonder it was expensive.’
‘I didn’t like it,’ Morgan volunteered. ‘It was too bitter.’
The Future King: Logres Page 20
