Rainbow Bridge (32 page)

‘She’s clearing the ground,’ said Fiorinda, handing Ax his surreal permission to be English. ‘Removing impediments. She’s going to get you in the end.’

He put the envelope away. ‘I don’t want to think about that right now.’

‘So what’s been happening?’ she demanded. ‘What did the Gaians tell you?’

‘The word is they’re planning to talk you into a novitiate,’ said Sage, grinning. ‘They want to hang onto you,, my brat, an’ I can’t blame them.’

‘They can forget it. What about the Chinese? What’s David Yen think about this? I’ve been scared he might wait ’til I’ve left, and decide to have a pogrom.’

‘There’s no risk of that,’ said Ax. ‘Things have moved on.’

They were bright-eyed, full of themselves.

‘How are you Fiorinda? How are you feeling? Are you doped at all?’

‘Full of milk. Smelling of stale milk and baby sick.’ She grinned. ‘I hope you can get used to that, it’s my signature for a while. Stitches melting nicely, I don’t have to have them yanked out, I am glad to say. Not at all doped, just weak from lying in bed in this nunnery. If you hadn’t come, I was going to shoot an arrow e’en from that very window, and have my outlaw band bury me where it fell.’

‘Your outlaw band’s in Huddersfield, playing to rave reviews without you, I call it shallow and ungrateful of them. Don’t you call it shallow, baby?’

‘Such is fame. You’ll make her scream if you talk like that. She gets furious when people say things to her that she doesn’t understand. It’s more of a penetrating squeak than a scream as yet, but I warn you she goes for it.’

The baby did not scream. She was too interested in staring at her father.

‘So, if we asked you to climb out of the window, could you do it?’

‘Sure. You have a getaway car?’

‘Fuelled up,’ said Ax. ‘We hope to kidnap you quietly, but we’ll brave Mother Superior if we must. What about it?’

‘Two minutes.’ Fiorinda scooted out of the bed. She tossed her nightie, the night bra, her pants and towel (bleeding nearly over, thanks to Gaian herbalist), replaced that kit with fresh, dug out her stash and dressed in the clothes the Few had brought: every move nailed by a fascinated tiger and a hungry wolf. Yep, I’m back. Skinny as ever, except for the bosoms, it’s my nature. Their gaze made her blush, hey, there’s a small child with us you know.

‘Where are we headed? Huddersfield?’

She didn’t want to join the gang, she was guilty of wanting to be alone with baby, tiger and wolf, but where else? It felt extremely weird to be normal shape again, she cinched the belt of her trousers and looked up. They were smiling enigmatically.

‘Further than that,’ said Sage. ‘Are you up for a long drive?’

‘We’re going home.’

To London first, in Ax’s black Volvo coupé; which had been on blocks in a garage in Brixton, untouched by Hu Qinfu or other souvenir hunters. Then the roads to the South West. A car that had been cramped for the three of them was ridiculous for four, plus baby gear and a cat in a carrying-case. They didn’t care.

They slept at roadhouses, and passed into Cornwall through a Chinese checkpoint at the Guinevere Bridge. They were welcomed with silence, and some tears; their privacy was respected. Better to have come back in triumph, but this is how we win. Piecemeal solutions, step by step. We’ll live the way our people live, surrounded by the conquerors. Across Bodmin Moor, and up the lane from the Powdermill in twilight, hazel catkins shaken under the budding branches of the oaks; the little Chy rushing over its boulders. The stone at our turn, half-buried in red bracken, that says
Tyller Pystri
; which means the magic place. Up the hill and there’s the twin beeches, sky-fingering crowns streamlined by Atlantic gales. Open the gates, park the car on the hardstanding under them. The back porch, where the spare keys are waiting, in the old Dutch clog hanging from its nail. The cottage room, cold from long absence, the deep windows where night looks in.

They named the baby on Fiorinda’s birthday, in a ceremony at the waterfall pool, under the holly trees. Sage and Fiorinda had seriously intended to dunk her bodily, where the water swirled and bubbled. Ax refused to countenance this, so they compromised with a washing-up bowl, and Chy water warmed by ATP from Sage’s fingertips. Now you belong here, little one. Your name is Cosoleth, Sage’s choice; and Huafeng, after the Skipton Fort surgeon, with a different
feng
. You’ll obviously find this direly embarrassing when you are old enough to have an opinion, count yourself lucky we allowed you the veil of foreign language, Peace Flowers-Blown-By-The Wind. Could be worse, how would you like to be called Pit-Viper, hm?

No one need know, anyway. You’ll be Coz, for all practical purposes.

They treated Ax’s citizenship papers with respect: copied them, stored the scan in more than one location and filed the document carefully. The more idiotic something like that seems, the more likely it is to grow fangs and tear you to pieces. Fiorinda came across the diamonds again when she and Sage were sizing up the larger of the upstairs bedrooms, with a view to turning it into Coz’s room eventually. The other upstairs room was Marlon’s, though he rarely came here; and always would be.

The baby was on the bed in her basket, very gaudy in a dress made from a Hawaiian shirt by Ruthie Maynor, Sage’s housekeeper, who lived nearby and kept Tyller Pystri in order. Baby clothes had vanished from the face of the earth, but the solutions to this problem were entertaining. Min the kitten—now a huge, dappled and spotted young cat—sat beside her looking touchingly devoted; actually watching for his chance to get in the basket, his main object in life. Sage was measuring walls with a metal tape, what a bizarre activity for Aoxomoxoa.

Fiorinda sat at the dressing table—furniture dating from when Tyller Pystri had been a holiday rent, before Sage’s time—sorting through a heap of debris she must have tipped out of her bag when they first came home, and dumped here in a tidying fit. Strange things happen when you’re looking after a new baby, items vanish and reappear in weird places. The jewellery case had shed that rather tactless reminder of the Rainbow Bridge incident. She couldn’t remember what it was, opened it and got a face full of glitter. She held the necklace to her throat.

Sage came over to admire the effect. ‘Will you wear it?’

‘No… The stones are good, though. I’d sell them if I dared. It’s interesting that she likes diamonds.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, no reason,’ said Fiorinda, secretly thinking that she knew of a diamond Elder Sister would like to own. ‘She gives us diamonds, she gives us sexy state-of-the-art videographic hardware. What do you think she wants in return, Sage?’

They looked into a threefold dressing-table mirror where the back lawn was reflected, starred with spring flowers, blossom trees all around. Ax had been dead-heading the camellia hedge. He’d finished this chore and was playing guitar, sitting on a green bank, a basket of bruised red flowers at his feet. They could not hear the music, which made him seem far away, and infinitely precious. I will grow old in this house, thought Fiorinda. This is where I will grow old and die.

‘I dunno,’ said Sage. ‘I suppose we’ll find out.’

She looked up, they shared a faint, grim smile.

Tyller Pystri had no outbuildings. Sage’s twelve acres held one other potential dwelling, an L-shaped ruined barn by the track above the house; halfway to the boundary where the cliff top became National Trust property. Sage and Ax and the baby strolled up there one balmy day near the end of April. They climbed into the loft, and set Coz’s basket down a safe distance from the drop.

She liked their singing. At her most alert she listened attentively, and opened her soft beak of a mouth to make her approval noise, eh, eh, eh. She was dozy now, where’s the fun in being awake in the daytime? Fiorinda still maintained that Coz didn’t scream, but Fiorinda had the knack of barely wakening, when she fed the baby at night. She was four weeks old, and the volume and variety of her yelling was coming on by leaps and bounds. In some lights her eyes were as vivid as when they’d startled Ax, but mostly they’d turned cloudy; baby blue. She had no hair at present, the dark thatch had fallen off. ‘I fucking pray she doesn’t turn out yellow,’ said Sage. ‘Yellow curly hair is an evil burden, bane of my life.’

‘She has eyebrows. I don’t think she’d have eyebrows at this point, if she was going to be a blonde.’

They walked around, kicking up mealy straw dust, squinting at the blue sky through the rents in the roof, which was partly intact here; vanished over the long arm of the L. ‘She could have a grand piano, couple of them, and we’d still have rooms for visitors. It’s no distance from the house, but it’d be her space.’

‘You reckon you can get planning permission?’

North Cornwall homeboy grinned sheepishly. ‘I can swing it.’

‘Ooh, I probably don’t want to know about that.’

‘It’s more of a problem exac’ly where the money would come from.’

The Triumvirate had been very broke since a hostile government had decided that they personally owned the Reich. It was a hell of a mouth to feed, even in its reduced and battered state. They had no idea what was going to happen about all that, in the future that was still so uncertain.

‘We have to sort out our finances. We aren’t penniless, just screwed-up.’

Sage went to sit in the hayloft opening, long legs folded up, looking back towards the chimneys of Tyller Pystri. Ax sat by the baby basket; Coz slept. Sage’s pathologically unreconstructed cottage had been the spiritual home they visited mainly in dreams. Brixton Hill, Ax’s place, had been where Fiorinda had her music room. The wicked way men think, forever keeping score, forever wanting to put our mark on her. Ax knew what he was being asked.
I have lived in your house, will you live in mine, is that going to work?
Sage’s averted profile, thick yellow lashes shielding the laser-blue, struck him as unbearably touching.

‘Come over to my side, big cat?’

Sage came over. ‘I love you,’ said Ax. ‘Don’t you believe that?’

‘Sometimes I think a threesome can’t work long-term.’

Ax measured Sage’s long fingers against his own, and kissed the palm. ‘I’ll never leave you. I wish I could say, I’ll never let anything hurt you again—’

‘Sssh… Ax, what makes you sure the offer you want is on the table?’

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ said Ax. ‘But we keep going forward.’

He still had to collect his present from Elder Sister; delivered in person.

They sat thinking of changes, in this unchanging place. ‘A building project will be good, tactically. It’ll make us look—’

‘Trusting,’ agreed Sage. ‘Yeah. I thought of that, too.’

Ghosts

When the Insanitude site was opened Ax went up to London alone. He didn’t see why Sage and Fiorinda had to watch the sifting of those ashes, while providing photo-ops for Chinese mediafolk. The gesture was significant, the English finally being allowed to bury their dead. The event turned out to be lo-key; depressing as a poorly attended funeral. He did not feel much emotion, but it was eerie when they got to walking around inside the pavilion—no nanotech, just panels of translucent, rigid plastic—that had been erected over the ruins. The State Apartments had
vanished.
There were labels, as if on the site of some ancient city crushed by aeons: telling you in Chinese and English that this was where the Throne Room had been; this the Ballroom Everything was ground level, melded into the same charcoal porridge. The Met’s Civil Disaster Squad worked alongside Hu Qinfu’s team, suited up so as not to contaminate any human remains with their DNA. It was hard to tell them apart.

The Few had stayed away, quite rightly, but Roxane Smith had turned up. Ax walked with hir at the head of the sad little procession, annoyed because he didn’t want to talk to Rox. People thought he blamed hir for ducking out of sight in the invasion. He wasn’t such a hypocrite. It was hir slippery performance in the time before, under the Second Chamber that still stuck in his throat: when the cunning old critic had turned hir coat, dissing the Reich from a great height. They found neutral topics: Cornelius Sampson had recently died, without recovering from his dementia. But he’d been kindly cared for, and he’d seemed to appreciate that, before the end.

‘Richard thinks Corny knew him,’ said Rox. S/he’d got hirself onto Richard Kent’s list of approved video visitors. Ax ought to thank hir for that, Rich was in a very lonely position. ‘And was happy to have him there. Though he never really spoke, or showed any sign of recognising his own name—’

‘Yeah, he told me.’

I’m on the list too. Been talking to Rich myself, thanks.

‘More like an old dog,’ sighed Rox, ‘than a human being. Old and blind, but still knowing master, and glad to be patted.’ S/he stopped for a breather, leaning hard on hir ebony cane. ‘I’m thinking of leaving the country.’

‘Good idea,’ said Ax, staring at the masked, Noddy-suited ash-sifters through a plastic barrier. Then he felt that he was being vicious. ‘How long d’you think they’ll keep it up? Find a tooth and lay some concrete, with a memorial slab—’

‘I haven’t a clue. It’s a strange ritual.’

Ax was thinking of DK. Would he be reassured when he was told that some fragment with Dilip’s barcode on it had turned up? Not really. A good part of Ax wanted to forget that doubtful story, and go with the positive things. Dian Buckley’s appearance at Ashdown seemed so long ago, so irrelevant. But they’d discovered, when they tried to find her, that Dian was dead.

She caught pneumonia and she died; it happens.

An armed policewoman came up.

‘Mr Preston, sir. There’s a phone call for you.’

He had an earbead. ‘Yeah? So patch it through.’

‘I’m sorry sir, I can’t do that. You’ll have to come with me.’

Ax did not trust the Metropolitan Police. Of all the police forces in England they’d been the ones who co-operated, consistently, with whatever bad guys came along. They’d been supervising when Fiorinda was about to be burned alive. The woman was giving him the big-eyes, it’s important but I can’t explain.