by Indra Sinha
Far below her, in the area enclosed by the castle walls, Lorelei sees something strange, a little girl skipping along in an old-fashioned Alice-in-Wonderland party dress. Chasing a hoop? Surely not. Perhaps it’s a Mad Hatter’s tea party. The child vanishes from view, but her presence is reassuring. Lorelei takes off her shoes and runs down the hill, puts them on again when she reaches the path at the bottom and steps out onto the rotten drawbridge wondering if her heels will spike through the powdery timber.
Someone else is there, a young man with a rucksack. He is throwing morsels of bread into the water for outsize carp that appear from the depths, opening O mouths to suck the crumbs down green whirlpools.
Hello, the young man smiles. Seems pleasant, and Lorelei is glad to have company. He asks if she plans to enter the ruined courtyard and if he might accompany her. She agrees and is still wondering what they will talk about when he runs round in front and sweeps from under his jacket a rusty blade the length of a sword. Lorelei does not have time to scream before he hacks off her head.
She is reborn three seconds later minus half her points, her innocence shattered. She has learned the first lesson of cyberspace: that although everything around her, including herself, is fantasy, the terror is real.
Immortals only
The assassination of a prince of the virtual realms at this party would spark off the First Wyrd War.
Great Tew
Lorelei died and was born again in a place called Shades, a remote region of cyberspace, little visited by tourists. Shades is a multi-user game, a place where unusual folk come to escape ‘reality’ (Eve, note the ass’s ears I affix to that vulgar word) and to enact agonies and ironies upon one another. A place, I say, but the cave, landscape, castle and underlying labyrinth of Shades are no more than words on a screen, descriptions to be navigated solely by the compass of the imagination. They are, nonetheless, completely real to the characters who inhabit them. Such lands are discovered only by chance. Each player finds his or her own way there. For me, the path to the murder scene beneath the castle walls led directly from a spot in the ‘real’ world. I can even supply the grid reference: 51°58’N, 1°35’W, Ordnance Survey SP 296309. It was at this place, at 4.10 on a cold afternoon fifteen years ago, that a wormhole from cyberspace opened up and sucked me in.
I’d spent the morning driving round the lanes of north Oxfordshire near the village of Great Tew, looking for signs to a circus. Third time past the same old man wheeling his bicycle up the same lane, I stop to ask for directions and then realise I have forgotten the name of the farm.
‘Where Chipperfield’s Circus has its winter quarters,’ I tell him, ‘a farm where they have lions and bears and things.’
The old fellow looks me up and down.
‘Don’t get lions in England,’ he says.
‘This isn’t a normal farm,’ I say, speaking more slowly. ‘It’s where the circus spends the winter. They have all sorts there, tigers, lions, elephants . . .’
The ancient man shakes his head. ‘Won’t find elephants round here, s’all sheep and dairy.’
‘It’s a fucking circus.’
The old man’s lips wrinkle back from his gums revealing half a dozen discoloured teeth, and a thick tongue slides forward through the largest available gap.
‘Hehehehe,’ he cackles, ‘sorry. Well, wouldn’t you?’
Like Lorelei, I am on an advertising shoot. Our mission is to take portraits of a bear and a bull. We will blend them together to make a picture sequence showing the bull transforming by degrees into the bear. The pictures will illustrate an ad for a thing called a modem, which lets your computer telephone another computer for the latest share prices. Use this modem thing, our idea is, and don’t get caught out when a bull market turns bearish. The fact that you can check share prices from a computer on your desk or at home seems to me incredible. That you can even have a computer at home is amazing. I have never met anyone who has used one, either at home or at work: I’m going to be the first person I know to try one out. Before heading for Oxfordshire I had visited the Bristol office of the Apricot computer company. On the back seat of my car is a large box containing a computer called an Eff-One, Apricot’s answer to Apple’s newfangled Macintosh. The modem and the magical disk are sitting on the passenger seat in a plastic bag as I follow the old git’s directions (‘Back the way you come, bear left not as in bear haha, go on ‘bout a mile and a half and look out for elephant do.’).
Actually it is bear shit we have to watch for. Stinks like dog dung, only more so. Bear droppings are dark and fibrous, with that bitter-sour reek so insulting to the nostrils when you step in it. Sooty the black bear is young and unused to lights. She defecates a lot, dropping merds a foot wide. The small art director complains of the reek and Stak, our dapper Greek photographer, who never loses an opportunity to talk about wine, chips in that he would far rather be inhaling the bouquet of a good claret (albeit his favourite ‘claret’ – nothing is ever what it seems – is a cabernet sauvignon-syrah-mourvèdre-grenache blend from the Beka’a Valley).
‘We’ll give her a break,’ the trainer, Jim, tells us, ‘She’s young and cuddly as a pup, but bears are unpredictable. You can’t tell what she’s feeling from the look on her face. She could just go.’
We go instead. Stroll round the farmyard. Steaming animals, hay smells, the ever present dung-reek, smoke from a wood fire. Along the fence stands a row of travelling animal wagons, cages on wheels. Some are huge – what beasts must they be for? We enter a field and a dozen grazing animals look up. Not cows, camels.
‘Keep calm,’ says Stak. ‘They are to-ta-lly harmless.’
He bends, uproots some grass and walks towards them. A she-dromedary, misliking his hubris, or perhaps mistaking his intentions, works up a big gob of green slime and lets fly. Stak leaves fast, camel closing behind (exit pursued by a camel) teeth lunging for the seat of his pants, art director and I helpless with laughter.
After the shoot, Stak offers to take a picture of us in front of the lion’s cage. We pose proudly.
‘Can’t get you both in,’ Stak says. ‘Step back a bit.’
The art director’s shoulder touches the cage, the lion gives a furious roar and charges the bars. Stak doubling up in a fit of giggles. ‘Bugger, missed it’ he says. ‘You both leapt right out of frame.’
I get in my car to go home and drive away in the wrong direction. Twenty to four.
The Rollright Stones
Picture a lane glittering under a watery sun, lined with elders that reach out to scrape woody nails along the car. I am lost. Stop to take bearings, consult a map. It feels as if all day I’ve been roaming this countryside. The sun is low, the trees casting long shadows across the road. There’s a chill in the air. In the manner of the best fairy tales I emerge from a reverie to find myself staring at a circle of weathered stones. In the failing light they look incredibly ancient, like rotten stumps of teeth that the wind has stuck its tongue unto.
I get out of the car and am walking towards the circle when an elderly woman materialises from the shadows.
‘So sorry,’ she says, 1 was having a cup of tea. It’s twenty pence to see the stones.’
She takes my small coin and, licking her forefinger and thumb, carefully tears a leaf from a book of tickets. Then, since I am her only visitor that afternoon, she comes over to join me by the stone circle and tells me their story.
‘A very long time ago,’ she says, ‘an earl and his followers were approaching this spot, just like you a minute ago, when up jumped this ugly old witch, barring the way. She declared:
“Seven long strides shalt thou take,
And if Long Compton thou canst see,
King of England thou shalt be.”
‘Well, the earl was thrilled. He was already where we are, almost on top of the hill. Long Compton’s just the other side. He shouted:
“Stick, stock, stone,
As King of England I shall be known.” ’
The old lady pauses and peers up at me. She is wearing a straw hat about seven sizes too large for her.
‘Take you, you’re a big chap. You’d think you could get to the top in a few strides. Be honest, you would, wouldn’t you?’
I nod.
‘Ah! Got you!’ she cries in triumph. ‘Got you, she would have, that old witch. Lump of stone you’d be. That’d be you standing there, all oolitic. You see, just as the earl took the last stride, into view popped a small mound – and what do they call it when the moon blots out the sun? – an eclipse. Yes, well this mound just rose up out of the hillside and eclipsed Long Compton. The crone laughed and shrieked:
“As Long Compton thou const not see,
King of England thou shalt not be.
Rise up stock and stand still stone,
For King of England thou shalt be none.
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be,
And I myself an eldern tree.”
‘When he heard these words, the earl felt his muscles start to stiffen and realised that his body was turning to stone.’
‘Look.’ She points across the lane to a stooping shape eight feet high. ‘That’s his lordship. His knights were cowards. They’re down the hill in the other direction. Must’ve hung back, waiting to see what would happen, but that didn’t save them from the witch.’
She beckons me to the centre of the stone circle.
‘The common soldiers had more courage but less sense. They surrounded the witch to taunt her, or maybe to poke her with their pikes, and here they all are to this day – a bunch of poor old oolitic limestones.’
‘What happened to the witch?’ I ask.
‘Oh her?’ says the old woman with a strange smile. ‘She’s still here.’
Old Mother Shipton
‘She turned herself into an elder tree. Why do you think the elders round here are so overgrown? It’s because the locals don’t dare to cut them back. And you know what else? Under the stones is a cave of the fairy folk and from time to time someone stumbles across the opening and vanishes, never to be seen again.’
‘It’s a good story,’ I say, ‘but I’ve heard it before.’
Homer used bits of it in The Odyssey, Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, Pratchett in Wyrd Sisters and Shakespeare in Macbeth. The Rollright witch surely inspired the three hags who flagged down Macbeth, causing Banquo to give that great start of alarm (well, it had to be visible from the gods): ‘What are these, so withered and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants of th’earth, but yet are on’t?’ The heath encounter, foul hag, promise of kingship, equivocating double-talk that betrays, faery cavern, connivance of nature (earth mounds, or woods, that move) in the hero’s downfall – all are found in Macbeth. Shakespeare must have known the story of the Rollright witch, for Stratford-on-Avon lies a handful of miles to the north.
‘Knew about her? I should think so’, says the old woman with a good deal of scorn in her voice. ‘Of course Bill Shakespeare knew all about that witch. She was far better known than he was.’
Five centuries before Lorelei’s death and resurrection, a child was born in a cave by a river. Ursula Sontheil entered the world after a labour during which not just her mother’s waters but the caul of the sky broke; her mother’s cries of pain were translated into lightning flashes; her farts and the drumming of her heels on the earth floor became claps and rumbles of thunder. This was the stormy summer of 1488 and the baby girl would be better known as Old Mother Shipton, the most famous beldam of her day. She was eldest of a trio of seers. Nostradamus was born fifteen years later near Avignon and, in London twenty-four years after that, the wizard John Dee, who lived to be a contemporary of Shakespeare. The prophecies of Nostradamus and Dee are obscure, but Mother Shipton’s was a lucid style of sybilry. She unambiguously foresaw the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, the motor car and the internet. (You see, Eve, this is not entirely irrelevant. A denizen of the usenet newsgroup sci.maths has shown that Nostradamus forecast the Pentium Bug, lambasting Intel and Bill Gates by name. John Dee’s contribution is harder to pin down, but his invocations, babbled in an unknown angelic tongue, inspired Aleister Crowley, and other gnostics, including the spiritual heirs of the Cathars, with what results we see today throughout the world wide web. Shipton, Nostradamus, Dee – proto-cybernauts all.)
Much taken with the old lady’s tale, I begin scanning the ground for a little fragment of stone – one nobody could possibly mind me taking – for good luck. In the gathering gloom, when the witch’s back is turned, I prise a small chip from the muddy field. Had it originally flaked off one of the Rollrights? No way to tell. I put it in the glove compartment and, mind buzzing, drive home to Sussex and Eve. Eve and I need luck. Lots of it. We are about to move to a house we’ve been arguing over for months, a place so run down that it has been on the market for a year, so overgrown that from the road it’s invisible, hidden behind salutes of green leaf-smoke fired at the sky by woody, irresponsible cannons.
In a Sussex hedgerow
The mind plays tricks, sees shapes in hedges, things that aren’t there. Or maybe they are there, for Sussex, on evenings when the woodsmoke closes in, is a shape-shifting magical countryside. Its trees and hedges are transforming themselves under my tired eyes to stilt-legged magicians and witches. I should heed the warning signs and stop to rest, but don’t. At some point the road slides away from underneath me and whirls round and round; the car’s headlights, revolving like a lighthouse beam, pick out a hedge of ash trees that come spinning from the night, slide past the bonnet and smash into the rear. When the car finally becomes quiet, I find myself in darkness, lying flat on the floor. My seat has absorbed an impact which might have killed me had the car hit head first. I sit up to find a wrist-thick spear of ash raking through a shattered window. Crawl out of the passenger door, unhurt save for a scratch. Before leaving the wreck, I remember to retrieve the little piece of Rollright stone.
The car is a write-off but the computer, which had been in the back seat, works when I plug it in. There is no sign of the modem or disk, they must have been lost in the crash.
I’d probably never have touched a modem again, if four days later, Eve hadn’t come into the room holding a magazine.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ she says.
There is an article about the Rollright Stones. It says that anyone who tries to remove a piece of the Stones draws down a curse upon themselves – a curse which will only lift if the stone is returned. A man from Banbury took a chip from one of the stones – and returned to his cart to find its wheels locked solid. A young soldier took a piece of a Rollright stone to India – and was soon dead of typhus. A farmer from Little Rollright once removed a capstone to bridge a stream . . . As Eve reads I can almost hear the old woman’s voice:
‘The moment they got the ropes round that stone, strange groans and cries of pain started coming up out of the earth. It took a team of twenty horses to drag the stone down to the bottom of the hill. It didn’t want to go, and it crushed a man. In the end they got it lying across the stream and went sorrowfully home. But by morning the stone had flipped over and was lying on the bank. They went at it again and another man died and next morning the stone was flipped over again. Well, no matter how stupid you are, you learn in the end. The farmer realised that he must take the stone back. And do you know, just one horse pulled it all the way back up that field as easy as you like into its proper place.’
At the weekend we hire a car, get the children in and drive back to the stone circle. I take the fragment of stone from my pocket and, with a sincere apology to Old Mother Shipton, tread it into the turf.
‘There you are,’ says a voice. ‘I knew you’d be back. You left this behind.’
She hands me the bag with the disk and the modem.
130.43.43.43
130.43.43.43 was the IP number of an internet ‘gopher’, an archive of texts, called wiretap.spies. Into this machine, hal
f a decade ago, a person or persons unknown placed verses looted from a translation of Kama Sutra; and not any common-or-perfumed-garden Kama Sutra, but one that Eve and I had worked on together in an effort to break out of the poverty trap and because we wanted to travel.
In the seventies Eve was an editorial assistant in a publishing firm and I was a junior copywriter in a London advertising agency. Somehow we persuaded her company to commission me to make a new translation of the text, and Eve to find pictures. This gave us the chance to spend six months running round India, pestering museum keepers and gallery owners, meeting some odd people: the elderly Englishman with a reputation as an international art smuggler; a sinister tantric poet. On a steam train from Lucknow to Bombay, Eve read me her favourite lines of John Donne’s:
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
