Rainbow Bridge (6 page)

He flipped back to that graceful, ominous mission statement.

In the cities, flower-gardens, in the countryside, cultivated land
. That’s easy to read. The government the Chinese put together will be made up of acceptable public figures, looking pretty but walled in Chinese authority. Food production will be a priority. ‘I think they mean to keep the damned camps.’

But the big agricultural labour camps were all in unoccupied territory.

‘Maybe your fifth General’s going to turn up,’ said Sage. ‘To finish us off.’

Ax believed there was a fifth General, who had not yet appeared. His friends weren’t sure whether to take this seriously, his reasoning seemed bizarre. But Ax was the one who had studied China; their knowledge of the vast superpower was vague. Capitalist Miracle, Global Expansion of Asian Economic Sphere, and what else—?

‘I’m sure there’s someone. Four is not a good number, and the invasion was a phenomenally high-profile operation. They wouldn’t do that.’

‘There,’ said Dora, with satisfaction. ‘All done.’

‘Terrific.’ Sage tried to admire the effect in a tiny make-up mirror.

The murmur of the
tafseer
grew on them, a sad and sonorous music, with occasional bursts of English. Dave Wright the poacher, who had dropped by for a brew, reviewed a wild harvest Cherry and the Adjuvants had collected before the rain. Ax watched them, idly. Parasol mushrooms were approved, and the fresh young spiny puffballs. The poacher’s sinewy, earth-coloured hands hovered over some little purplish ’shrooms, and set them aside. ‘It says edible on
First Nature
,’ said Chip diffidently, crestfallen. ‘Non-psychoactive, but a useful protein source.’

‘Ah, that’s the website. I’m the man that’s been living off the land.’ What about the handsome penny buns? Dave sucked his teeth. ‘Ooh,
my lord
. Which of you mad little louts picked these fellers?’

‘It was me,’ confessed the junior powerbabe. Eye-candy Cherry was looking thin and wan, her poreless chocolate skin grey-tinged. She needs feeding up, thought Ax. As don’t we all. ‘Found under oak and beech, edible and delicious.’

‘I hope you washed your hands before you et anything after. Lucky you showed me. I better take these and get rid of them.’

They’d talked it out, the Few were in full agreement with the plan their leaders had devised in hiding. But already they faced a challenge that might wreck them. Right now they were waiting for something to happen, and hoping it wouldn’t.

Fat chance.

‘With mushroom poisoning, by the time you’re sick it’s too late, did you townies know that? Rush you to the hospital, if there was one, there’s nothen’ they can do except watch you die in ’orrible disgusting agony—’

It needed no foretelling for us to know that this world is a mosque, and we walk here answerable to GOD—

‘Here we go.’ George was liaising with site security, a bead in his ear. ‘He’s been sighted. On his way, with a fuckin’ mini-army.’

‘Good,’ said Ax, getting up. ‘That’s good. Sooner we get this over with the better.’ The Few crowded round the broadsheet, now switched to the outside camera feed. Ax went to talk to Muhammad; stooping on the way to break off a piece of boletus cap and shake his head at the comedian.

‘Wanker.’

‘Heheheh.’

Colonel Kent came into view out there, with the barmy chiefs of staff and a troop of other-rank paramilitaries. Reich security and uniformed Forest Rangers were escorting them, heckled by a minor rabble of rubber-necks and fight-fans.

‘How d’you want to do it?’ asked George. ‘Have the ring-leaders in here, or we go out to them?’

‘Have them in here with the walls pulled up,’ said Ax. ‘We can’t be out of sight with the paramilitaries. This has to be done in public, but in our control.’

‘Let’s have some dignity, aye,’ agreed the leader of English Islam.

Ax went to warn the baby-minders. George told the escort to stall for a few minutes, the main space of the marquee was swiftly re-organised. Richard and his company marched in to find Ax and his friends, with their Islamic allies, ranged in a hollow square, the Triumvirate at the back, cross-legged on a camp-bed
divan.
Crew persons started cranking up the walls: letting in the cold grey day.

‘I’ve come for that meeting you promised me, Ax,’ said Richard.

‘Are you sure you’re in the right place?’ asked Chip, who had not found his coat, and sat cloaked in a multicoloured blanket. ‘This is the non-violent solutions tent. Anger management is somewhere else.’

Velcro ripped, and a frantic child came shooting out of the crèche. He saw the guns and began to scream, racing for Dora, holding up his pudgy little hands.

‘Mama, mama come inside! Don’t shoot my mama! DON’T DARE!’

Rob came after, grabbed Mamba and swept the kid up in his arms. Smelly Hugh followed, hugging Safire. ‘I’m well sorry,’ said Smelly. ‘I sed you can’t go out, there’s men with guns, an’ Mamba went berserk.’

Rob glared at the barmies.

‘You’ll have to excuse him. My kids don’t like guns.’

‘They’ve seen
enough
guns,’ cried Felice, appearing behind Smelly, with Ferdelice clinging to her hand. ‘We all have. Are you fuckers out of your
minds
?’

Safire began to howl very quietly, hiding her face.

‘I wasn’t planning on a meeting,’ said Ax. ‘I’ve told you how I feel. But if you guys want to talk things over, that’s fine. Hand your weapons to security, please, for safe-keeping. F’lice, cool down, it’s not necessary.’

Richard relinquished his pistol. Cornelius Sampson, the old soldier, another British Army veteran and Richard’s long-time lover, ignored the instruction. He was not searched. The rest of them disarmed fairly willingly, under Felice’s baleful eyes.

‘See,’ murmured Rob. ‘See, nobody’s going to shoot anyone. C’mon, good boy, let’s go back in the warm.’

The children and their minders retired. Richard noticed for the first time that the tent walls had been raised, and that there was an audience looking in, held back by a cordon of Rangers and security crew.

‘What’s going on—!’

‘We think this should be in the open,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘All right,’ said the Colonel, with a deep breath, and a shine in his eyes. They saw they’d made him hopeful, but they couldn’t help it. ‘All right, that’s all right.’

Chairs were brought for Colonel Kent and for Cornelius. The rest of the deputation sat easily on the floor, chiefs of staff in the front row. The history of these dozen or so eco-warrior vets, including one woman, went back to the original Green rampage, when Pigsty Liver had been in charge. Richard Kent had tamed them by appointing them as general staff, but the discipline they’d acquired only made them more of a threat now. And each of them was a chieftain, commanding hundreds, perhaps thousands of hardcore, volatile followers.

‘I’m here at Ashdown to organise the armed resistance,’ announced Richard, as if he were doomed to repeat this line until somebody answered him.

Ax looked at Cornelius. He’d been hoping Corny might be a voice of restraint, but he saw the tough old man’s expression, and his heart sank.

‘I think everyone’s heard the message, Rich. And I told you, it’s a bad idea.’

‘I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but that sounds like cowardice, Ax. And I can’t believe I had to come and find you hiding behind the non-combatants
—
’

‘I love the way that’s become a big insult,’ snapped Dora.

‘We’re not here to insult your womenfolk, Ax,’ shouted one of the chiefs. ‘We just want to know, are you for or against us? Don’t waste our time.’

‘We’re
staybehinds
!’ shouted someone else. ‘We’ll
stay
!’

‘You talk about non-violence,’ cried Richard. ‘Is that going to impress these people? My God, where
were
you during the invasion? Did you ever turn on the tv? Do you know what happened at Reading? Or do you hope they’ll give you a piece of their pie, is that it? You think you can
negotiate
? You’re dreaming. Human lives
are like grass to them
. They spare the work of hands, but they have slaughtered men and women and children, mown down anyone who stood in their way—’

‘Richard—’

‘It was a bloodbath at Glasto too,’ shouted the Hawk, a handsome young man in a rawhide jerkin, black hair in a braided scalplock, tattooed arms and throat naked to the cold. ‘But they never touched the Abbey. They want our mediaeval shit intact, they’re gonna turn England into a fucking theme park. I followed you once, Ax, and brought my men behind me. I trusted you when you converted to Islam. I’ll follow you again, to the death, but I won’t stand by and see my nation exterminated—’

‘They’re gonna dynamite
our
sacred sites, may ruin fall on them.’

‘Reading’s gonna be
their
capital, walled city, no English allowed.’

‘The Counterculture lives. Death or glory, man!’

The crowd outside gasped. The soldiers in the back rows of the seated company, some of them in regular forces uniform, started protesting. They weren’t fuckin’ hippies. They were decent citizens, they wanted this quite clear. One of the young Islamics, outraged beyond endurance, cried out, passionately—

‘The Great Chastisement is rightful and merited! It has fallen on us from God, the Chinese are instruments of the Most High. No hand should be raised against it!’

A hejabi girl grabbed him, and hissed at him in spanking Punjabi to shut his big fat mouth.
The Great Chastisement
was a term the Chinese liked about as much as they liked
Counterculture
—

A Forest Ranger shouted for order. ‘Let Mr Preston speak! Show some respect! This is deplorable! Who do you think you all are?’

But it was Richard who plunged on, the words spilling out of him, lines that he’d obviously been repeating to himself, over and over. ‘What are you going to tell me? That we were the pariah of Europe under the Second Chamber, and no one’s going to help us now? That we stand alone? That half the world lives under Chinese rule, and the USA has gone belly-up, so why shouldn’t we? That we should be
grateful
for this forcible invitation to join the fucking “Great Peace Sphere”?’

‘It’s an idea. Richard, listen. We have contacts in Pan-Asia—’

‘You mean
virtual
Asia,’ shouted a chieftain in battledress, a chain-mail coif and a repro Norman steel cap. ‘That stuff’s not real, Ax. The datasphere is a globalisation fairytale. I believe in earth and stone, trees and rivers, flesh and blood.’

‘Yeah, right,’ growled Sage. ‘And the world was created five thousand years ago by Noggin the Nog; or no, sorry, was it Galadriel? Bertram the Bold, you’ve never been a great argument for the rationality of yer cause.’

‘Please don’t stick your wires in my brain, Aoxomoxoa.’

‘Why didn’t you do an immix set las’ night, Sage?’ yelled the only woman among the chiefs. Not all of them were Pagan Fundamentalists: she was a Techno Green. ‘Why the Robbie Williams singalong? Are you running scared?’

‘We didn’t do immix because immersion code is
PROSCRIBED
,’ roared George Merrick. ‘That means not just we’re in trouble, Looise, but all our crew, and all their families. What the fuck kind of employers do you think we are?’

‘As I was
saying
,’ Ax broke in, still patient, ‘until trouble that had nothing to do with the Chinese stopped us, we were talking to Pan-Asian Utopians, and what we were hearing from them gives me hope. Not proof, but hope.’

‘Hope of what?’ breathed Richard, a grey shock rising in his face.

‘That we can live with this. That we can come to terms with them.’

‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

Ax pushed back his hair. The mark the Scots had put on him stood out, precise and midnight. ‘Richard, do you think it was national pride that made me pick up an assault rifle, in Yorkshire, long ago?
Not fucking guilty
. I was fighting to keep things together. That was why you were fighting, too, when we first met. The sane people versus mob rule,
do you remember?
That’s why I got into this, whether I was playing guitar or trying to talk sense to the wreckers in the streets. I haven’t forgotten what the Green Revolution was supposed to be about. It was about saving the living world, and that’s a true and worthy cause. But I want more than that. I believe in a future that can still be ours, and I believe
this is not the time
for guerrilla warfare. This is a time for teaching and learning, building bridges, saving what we can. I
will
fight, yeah. For hospitals and schools that work, sanitation and power, and people who can be good to each other. Who can read and write and
handle simple arithmetic
.’

‘Oh my God.’

Was the little mob out there behind the cordon listening? Not likely, thought Ax. Anyone with a brain cell or two wouldn’t be anywhere near. He could not shift Richard. He was preaching to the dogfight fanciers, but he went on with it, anyway.

‘Remember what I said in the Commons debate on violence? I’ve finished with the killing game. Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong, I stand by that—’