Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  Thomes overreacted, ripping away the stained canopy and exposing his crew to full view – and an old-fashioned dogfight. The larger craft had superior speed and heavier conventional weaponry, but Oblong’s pursuing contraption was nimbler, its controls more sensitive.

  Valourhand seized the syringe with the most juice left and distributed the others. ‘Keep your hands away from the needles,’ she warned as she twined the mooring rope round her leg. ‘I’m dropping in. Distract them.’

  ‘Shoot the bitch!’ yelled Thomes.

  Oblong yawed left, then right. Valourhand swung on the rope like a trapeze artist. The marksman waited and waited, judging the swing. Morval, transformed by the need for physical action, judged the dynamics with precision. Her syringe lodged in the marksman’s shoulder. He dropped his weapon and screamed as a drop of liquid mistletoe burned into his flesh. Seconds later, Valourhand landed. Thomes lunged at her with a spear from the rack, slicing her thigh.

  ‘For Gregorius, for Tyke,’ she cried, as the crossbowmen fumbled to reload. ‘And a thigh for a thigh,’ she added, stabbing Thomes and pressing the plunger, before she and the rope swung away. Thomes danced like St Vitus before crashing into his invisible pilot. The craft rose and dived like a swallow before plummeting into the Island Field, throwing out Apothecaries like rag dolls from a pram.

  Oblong landed the Hoverfly near the South Bridge. Valourhand and – to his surprise – Morval seized discarded weapons from the ground and supported Finch’s force by attacking the Apothecaries from the rear. The mysterious samurai knight and his huge dog fought beside them with panache and ferocity. The tide was turning in the fight for the bridge, even though General Finch and his scooter were in the river.

  Orelia had been watching Persephone. The Myrmidon had put her and her archers in full control of the riverside battle, but Persephone looked distracted. Events since her aunt’s death had taught Orelia to focus on the oddest facts and reason from there. Persephone had been Madge, who had been Nona. Scry had recognised neither, which suggested that Nona had changed appearance at least twice. She thought of Bole’s mind, and how his personality had been lurking in Wynter’s – and then she remembered a most peculiar incident at the Unrecognisable Party.

  She strode over to a huddle of musicians, sent to the Island Field in the hope of serenading the Scholastics to victory. They were lying prone behind a stand of bulrushes. The Precentor looked terrified. Persephone and the Myrmidon were no more than fifty yards away.

  ‘This is terrible,’ he stammered.

  ‘Which is why you’re going to do something about it.’ She whispered in his ear.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Do it.’ She ushered the school band to their feet.

  The Precentor raised a shaking baton and Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune, initially shaky but quickly gaining in confidence, echoed across the water. The music’s easy decadence could not have sounded more incongruous, but it transformed Persephone. She danced along the riverbank, beautifully – and as she did so, the Myrmidon went berserk, waving arms and bellowing in rage.

  *

  Behind the Myrmidon, the eelman eyed the huge legs and the powerful tail snaking back downstream. How could he, little more than a water snake, possibly bring down this monster? His love of Nature and his essential pacifism brought the answer: seduce rather than fight.

  He coiled up the creature’s right leg, caressing the amphibian’s skin while at the same breaking through into the creature’s subconscious with messages of escape and freedom. They were kindred spirits from the mixing-point, after all.

  As he soothed the Myrmidon, it ceased to flail and let out a strange keening sound, paradoxically suggestive of both pain and release. Slowly, and not without grace, it subsided to its knees and disappeared beneath the water.

  His last duty done, Ferensen unwound himself and barrelled along against the current, soon no more than a shadow heading north. The Myrmidon followed. At the underwater tile where he had surfaced after his fight with the spider, Ferensen paused. The Myrmidon, as beautiful in water as it was ugly on land, circled the tile and disappeared for home.

  Ferensen swam on, passing shallows where he had waded as a boy. Yet he did not linger. A deeper will propelled him towards an inland sea festooned in weed, the great Sargasso. It was time.

  *

  The Myrmidon’s departure signalled the end. The Apothecaries and the Rotherweird Defence Force laid down their arms. Nobody cheered: this was a victory without euphoria. The rusty tang of blood infected the air. The wounded cried for help. Aftershock at the brutality of hand-to-hand combat induced silence, soothed only by the Scholastics’ band, who played to the finish.

  Persephone, flushed from her dance, approached Orelia. ‘I have Nona under control,’ she said. ‘My name is Varia. I’ve bided my time. She’s not so evil, seen in the round; as much a victim as a perpetrator.’ She paused.

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Orelia quietly.

  ‘You’ll find the four stones in Wynter’s study, set around a jade obelisk – and you’d best have this.’ She removed a silver ring from her finger and gave it to Orelia. An unusual setting held four chips of coloured stone rising on tiny silver tendrils from the centre. Orelia did not ask what the ring did; she knew. It had controlled the Myrmidon, hence the monster’s confusion when Varia had started to dance.

  ‘How did she create you?’

  Varia shrugged. ‘That she hides from me, but the mixing-point rebuilds cells as well as merges them. I’m her and she’s me, you might say. But she underestimated me. Many have. Dancers require a peculiar sense of purpose. In time, I think she’ll forgive me.’

  ‘If they were to let you go, what would you do?’ Orelia asked.

  ‘I’d teach your people to dance,’ she said. ‘What else? Wood carving apart, I’ve never seen a community with so much intelligence and so little art.’

  Denzil Prim arrived with the sub-gaoler. ‘Nice moves, Miss Brown, but you’d best come with me, for your own good.’

  ‘Call her Varia,’ said Orelia. ‘That’s the name she prefers.’

  ‘I know the way, Mr Prim,’ said Varia, leading the two men off.

  *

  ‘You remind me of the Scarlet Witch.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Valourhand with less aggression than she would normally greet such a sexist and patronising remark. The samurai knight had fought with gusto, and under the helmet lurked a bewildering mix of white hair and a face of boyish simplicity. He had skilfully disabled rather than killed. She liked his taste in armour too.

  ‘Marvel Comics,’ he explained. ‘She has the ability to change reality.’

  ‘You’re taking the piss.’

  ‘Samurai never take the piss.’ He paused. ‘Was mistletoe involved?’ he asked.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Ambrose the Thirteenth for my sins.’ He stooped to bind the Mance’s wounded foreleg. ‘We Clauds are of both good and evil effect,’ he said.

  ‘Valourhands likewise,’ she sighed.

  Far below Orelia watched the conversation and, in particular, Valourhand’s animation. At last, she thought, at last.

  *

  ‘You saved my life,’ Gorhambury said, helping Sister Prudence ashore.

  ‘Actually, you also saved mine, so we’re quits.’

  ‘I thought Apothecaries couldn’t swim.’

  ‘As a teenager I had charge of the bees. At dawn, with nobody about, I taught myself.’

  Gorhambury turned pink. Did nobody about imply she swam naked? The thought prompted a statement unuttered by him in his lifetime. ‘This calls for a drink.’

  Sister Prudence, on equally novel ground, accepted, just as Fanguin appeared, waterlogged and anxious.

  ‘Where’s Bill?’

  ‘Fanguin, it’s over.’

  ‘No, it’s not. You must call a meeting in the Island Field at two. Everyone comes, even the wounded. But I have to find Bill, and we need the charabanc
.’

  ‘What’s so urgent? There are dead to bury and—’

  ‘Don’t you see?’

  Gorhambury plainly didn’t.

  ‘What do we do about history? Apothecaries have been to the other place – everyone’s seen the monster. Who is Persephone Brown? Do they investigate or forget? It’s like the Green Man. Get it? But we can’t trick them this time.’

  Fanguin had once explained to Gorhambury the miraculous effects of Bill Ferdy’s Hammer, the brew which wiped the memory clean of at least a day’s events. Although Gorhambury’s own memory of Midsummer’s Day had been inexplicably vague, he had dismissed the idea as preposterous.

  Boris arrived, laden with smashed coracles.

  ‘We need the brew, Boris,’ said Fanguin.

  Boris grasped the point immediately. ‘Consider it done.’

  Behind him, Miss Trimble was tending to the wounded. He gave her a wave, dropped the coracles and ran off towards the bridge to find Bill Ferdy and the charabanc.

  8

  The Tree of Good and Evil

  Despondent would understate the expressions of the three countrysiders standing guard by the Witan Hall door, and Gabriel’s arrival did not alleviate their despair.

  ‘So sorry,’ one said. ‘All that work up in smoke.’

  It took a moment to register that the remark referred to him, such was Gabriel’s sense of mission.

  ‘Still, a great place to rebuild,’ said a second in a strained attempt at good cheer.

  ‘True enough,’ said Gabriel, looking around at the billhooks, charred wood and empty jars of acid littering the verandah. The hand in his pocket itched as he walked closer to the sealed door.

  ‘Nothing works,’ said the first man, laconic as countrysiders tended to be.

  ‘Worse than that,’ said the second, ‘the harder we try, the stronger it gets. Thank God, they’ve plenty of food in there.’

  ‘They’re in perpetual night on the first day of spring,’ said the lugubrious third.

  ‘Watch!’ replied Gabriel as the green shoot wrapped around his little finger pulled Gabriel’s hand from his pocket, or so it felt.

  They laughed. It resembled the stem of a young sweet pea.

  ‘You’re a one, Mr Gabriel,’ said the first.

  Laughter swiftly yielded to wonder as the fragile thread of green unwound of its own accord and attacked the tentacular growth, boring, encircling and prising. The live-dead wood of the gnarl responded. At Gabriel’s command, everyone took cover, so as not to be torn apart by the flailing stems.

  It ended in an explosion of splinters, shreds of vibrant green and a shattered door.

  Gabriel helped usher the children through the wreckage, blinking, into the sunlight. Megan Ferdy came last, the captain of a once stricken ship.

  9

  Two Journeys: Over Ground and Underground

  The battle decided, Ambrose Claud ran up the road to his bicycle and, with adroit use of the gears and short intervals on foot, he made the escarpment rim in record time. The rolling landscape basked in spring sunshine. The spire of Hoy’s church stood proud. The tiny valley of Rotherweird had saved the world: no Ragnarok, no Doomsday.

  At breakneck speed, he returned the way he had come.

  *

  The boy stumbled for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Watch your feet,’ chided Fennel.

  ‘I don’t wanna leave. I want my inheritance,’ he whined.

  ‘Want doesn’t get without work.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No buts, Percy. We Croyles don’t whine, we fight.’

  Percy scowled in the subterranean gloom. His mother’s maiden name had achieved increasing currency in recent weeks: we Croyles this, we Croyles that.

  Fennel held the lantern to the map she had acquired at the Unrecognisable Party and with one finger marked their way towards the only exit on the far side of the river.

  Reassured, she marched on and resumed her pep talk. ‘Aeneas left Troy in defeat and founded Rome. You’re better off. You’ve an existing title to claim.’

  Percy’s step lengthened, driven by a burning sense of entitlement.

  ‘That’s better,’ added Fennel as the path descended and the walls grew damp.

  10

  Is Ignorance Bliss?

  Gorhambury called the meeting for two o’clock in the afternoon. As at the election, the town emptied onto the Island Field: the able-bodied and the wounded, adults, children and babies-in-arms.

  As at the Midsummer Fair, the Ferdys set up trestle tables behind Gorhambury’s makeshift rostrum. Fanguin, Aggs and the Polks stood poised to fill the rows of thimble-size glasses from the ancient barrel embossed with H for Hammer, should the vote go that way.

  Gorhambury put the motion fair and square. ‘Today you witnessed the past’s power to infect the present. A few of you have visited the place where the monsters who plagued us are made.’

  Many glared at the Apothecaries, but Gorhambury ignored them.

  ‘The way in has long been hidden, but Mr Wynter knew it from the distant past, for this other place can extend life too. So, is it “forewarned is fore-armed” or will it be “ignorance is bliss”? You have the choice, because Bill Ferdy has a miraculous brew which can erase today from your memory.’

  His audience paid close attention. Through these months of toil and crisis, Gorhambury had gained authority, even fluency.

  ‘So, this is the motion: Remember, or Forget. To help us decide, Mr Oblong, our resident historian, will speak for releasing our past. Mr Finch, our Herald and Keeper of Records, will speak for maintaining our more secretive status quo.’

  Oblong had been given little notice. His thoughts, cobbled together on a scrap of paper, ran only to headings. Although an outsider, his aerobatics had won him kudos. With the Hammer, he thought wistfully, they’ll forget all that.

  As he climbed the rostrum, Morval resisted the urge to record the moment, preferring instead to weigh the mettle of the gangly historian. Would Fortemain have approved of him? Would Hieronymus?

  A system of amplifiers developed by the South Tower stood ready to project his voice across the Island Field. Oblong, recalling an advocate’s tip, started with a detail before panning out to the wider view.

  ‘When I look down from 3 Artery Lane, I see a tangle of street names – but you and I cannot know who built them, who named them, or when. What stories lurk behind these names? What lessons could be learned? How proud might you be to know your ancestor carved that particular lion or placed the weather vane on that particular tower? Mr Finch knows the answers – but we may not.’

  A low blow, thought Finch, nodding gracefully as Oblong played an even more obvious card.

  ‘I’m ashamed to say that outsiders inflicted this law on you. Why? Only history can tell you. How did Mr Wynter fool us? Why did we believe in his prophecy coins? Because he knew the past and we did not.’

  A half-truth, boy, thought Finch.

  Ember Vine felt discomforted. The historian’s arguments sounded unassailable, and she hated the thought of Finch stepping up to play the atrophied conservative. He was better than that, much better.

  Oblong felt the wind in his sails. He recounted his ignominious ascent up the church tower a year ago to the day. He described the murals, how an escape by coracle two millennia ago had laid the foundations for the Great Equinox Race. He glanced at Morval and turned poetic.

  ‘The blackbird and the worm know nothing of their ancestors. A sense of history is Man’s special gift. Vote to know yourselves. Vote for enquiry and research. Vote for knowledge. Vote “Remember”!’

  He descended to applause, a notch short of deafening, but general and generous, more a breaking wave than a ripple.

  Finch ascended the stairs to the rostrum like Luther to a pulpit, eyebrows bristling and eyes ablaze. He supported himself on his finch-headed staff. His unorthodox use of the testudo and his mounted charge on Amber’s scooter had raised morale at a crucial t
ime in the battle. He too had the ear of the crowd.

  Finch, however, preferred a different orator’s trick: use a good prop and start where they least expect it. He flung back the cloak billowing over his shoulders to reveal a large glass jar, three-quarters filled with round white sweets.

  ‘The latest confection from Sugar & Spice,’ Finch said casually to his mystified audience, ‘Historical Factos!’ He dropped one in his mouth, sucked it for a moment, then announced, ‘Blandly pleasant – but being of the gobstopper family, they change taste and colour as you go deeper.’ Finch’s cheeks bulged. To prove the point, he retrieved the facto from his mouth and held it up. It had turned bright yellow. ‘And, of course, we can’t resist sucking and seeing, layer after layer in search of new hues and different tastes. One facto leads to another.’

  Finch’s sweet jar, still held aloft in his right hand, had acquired a mesmerising quality. Oblong grinned into his hands. Finch’s metaphor only confirmed the joys of historical research. Where was he going?

  ‘Most are harmless to the core, but . . .’ Finch bellowed the but and rattled the jar. ‘But . . . one or two factos have mysterious dark centres – all sorts of creepy crawlies – old enmities, crimes long past – and the darkest heart of all, how to find the doorway to this other place. There you can play God, evade time’s arrow, make your own monsters. You can be a second Mr Wynter.’

  Finch surveyed the sea of faces. Despite the ‘not me’ expressions, he could see the prospect of instant divinity appealed to more than a few. He returned to his quieter opening mode.

  ‘Of course, outsiders like Historical Factos too – so much so they design False Historical Factos for extra impact. But when they hear we’ve a dark mystery filling all our own, they’ll come a-tasting – and it only needs one. What then? Goodbye, independence. Goodbye to our green and pleasant land. Welcome, concrete research buildings and landgrabbers. Prepare to be colonised.’