Rainbow Bridge (8 page)

The girls had been checked over. Pearl had suffered a fractured skull at some point, but it was healing. Silver had bronchitis and a fever; they were both anaemic, and full of roundworms. Neither of them was exactly lucid, as yet, but they were re-united with their father and their baby sister, clean, and warm: it was a start. Two hours ago Sage had been sure he would never see his son again. He could not stop staring at the miracle beside him. The gleam of golden-hazel eyes, the Welsh accent that was a constant reminder of their separation. Not a five-year-old. A young stranger capable of incredible feats, a reserved, enclosed, private knight-errant.

‘D’you think she’ll be okay?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Sage. ‘You have done excellently, Marlon. I am very proud of you, and the girls. Your mother’ll be proud too, when she knows the whole story.’

‘I’m, er, really glad you two are getting on better.’

‘Mm, yeah.’

Sage had taken responsibility for not getting in touch sooner, rather than tell Mary that her son had been wandering in the hellhole of Occupied Berkshire. Maybe this had been a mistake: the détente was in tatters. Ah, well. He drank cider, from a paper cup. He didn’t like cider, but Marlon detested English beer, so there you are. To be with him, just to watch him breathe—

‘What’s going to happen now, Dad? Is England going to be okay? Can you guys come out of hiding after this, you and Ax and Fiorinda?’

‘I don’t know. We’re still non-persons at the moment. But they know where we are and what we’re doing, and they seem to approve. The Chinese are keeping their options open, best way to put it… Do you love her? I mean, Silver?’

His son gave a little start, like a wary animal surprised—

Fuck.
Why
did I say that?

‘I don’t know,’ whispered Marlon. ‘It’s deeper than love.’

The truth, which would have horrified Richard beyond apoplexy, was that Ax was already talking to the Chinese. He’d been approached, overtures had been made. He expected to be approached again at the fest: he didn’t know when, or where. Both parties had every reason to keep the negotiations secret. He watched Dave Wright’s debut in the comedy tent, from the side of the stage, and saw the Chinese agent in the front row. He walked away from that venue, his knitted cap pulled well down, a scarf around his face. The sky was starless, thick with cloud, Gintrap were in the middle of their set. He went into a booth selling hot fruit wines and joined the people getting warm by a charcoal brazier. Shortly, the agent came up with two steaming, fragrant pottery beakers. The two men didn’t drink their wine. They left together, heading for the Reich’s site fence (not much of a barrier), and crossed a stretch of heath to an old tourist car park, now the official VIP Hospitality Area. Ax was afraid he had company, and he was supposed to be alone: thankfully the shadows kept their distance. He was very scared. No question the Chinese knew about that confrontation with Richard Kent; no idea how it would affect this. He was taken to a parked car, in the darkness away from the trailers. The agent, who was not Chinese, just someone working for them, motioned Ax to get into the back.

Soft light showed him a tablet lying on the seat. He opened it: after a second or so Wang Xili looked out. A head and shoulders shot, you couldn’t see much of the room he was in. The handsome General of the South West was in uniform. He smiled, disarmingly. ‘Mr Preston, good evening. Please imagine that all the proper salutations have been made. I know you’ll want to keep this short.’

‘You’re right, and likewise. This is my answer. One day, the ruler of Chu sent two high officials to ask Zhuang Zi to assume control of the government. They found him fishing. He asked them about a famous sacred tortoise, which was kept at the capital in a jewelled casket and had been dead three thousand years. Wouldn’t that tortoise rather be alive and wagging its tail in the mud? The officials had to agree. “Clear off then!” shouted Zhuang Zi. “I, too, will wag my tail in the mud here.” General, you are not asking me to assume control of the government, nor offering me death in a jewelled casket; but my answer is the same. I will wag my tail in the mud.’

‘Hahaha! That’s very good! Is that all?’

‘I’m afraid you overestimate my importance.’

The tablet screen winked out. The agent, who had not spoken a word, opened the car door. Ax left the tablet on the seat and walked away. That was it.

He kept walking, not caring much where he was headed. A frieze of slender tree boles loomed up, twigs stung his face. He was on the brink of one of the heath’s plunging wooded valleys and he knew the self-appointed bodyguard close to him now, the familiar presence like warmth in the cold dark.

‘Sage? Is that you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s not very fucking clever,’ said Ax. ‘Suppose something had gone wrong? You like the idea of Fiorinda left to cope on her own?’

‘Insh’allah.
You
shouldn’t be alone out here.’

They had been living outdoors since September. They had the night vision of wild animals, they were changing into Ashdown foxes. Or wild boar, timid and savage. Ax sat on a log in the rustling dead bracken, Sage sat beside him.

‘How d’you get on with Wang Xili?’

‘I played hard to get, it was brief. Who else was following me?’

‘It was the Islamics, I’ve sent them back. They’re good, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah, but it won’t do… We’ll have to talk to Muhammad, I can’t have those kids following me around. Thank fuck
Rich
isn’t onto us. That would be hell.’

‘Rich is in a world of his own. He thinks the Chinese don’t know you’re here.’

‘Corny knows the score. He knows fucking well what he’s leading those damned fools into, and he doesn’t care. He wants it.’

‘Carn’ argue with a man in that state of mind.’

They thought about the irregular army they had joined as rockstar officers, in that long-ago baptism of fire. The idealistic ruffians, the psychos, the villains; some lasting friends. Cornelius had said twenty thousand, he could be right. The Chinese didn’t tolerate recalcitrance, and they were
thorough
. All those men, and women, were going to die: abandoned and betrayed by Ax Preston and Sage Pender.

‘At least they can’t muster many rock bands between them.’

‘Not funny, Sage.’

‘Sorry.’

They had spent a decade using the music as a tool of social control, taming the beleaguered English with free concerts; selling Ax’s Utopian manifesto with stirring anthems and spectacular futuristic tech. They had forged rock and roll idealism into a national religion, a passion that made hard times sweet, and it had worked. They believed they could, possibly, do the same again. But the Reich would lose all value to the invaders, awful prospect, if Rich and the barmies started using the same tricks.

‘They wouldn’t do it,’ said Ax, after a pause for anxious thought. ‘They’re heartbroken death-wish idiots. They’re not malicious. Well, not much.’

‘Mm… In ways it’s going to be worse talking to Muhammad’

The leader of English Islam had been Ax’s sponsor in the Faith, and a major force in bringing the separatist war to an end. Immensely tolerant, yet respected by the most conservative of his own people, he’d been the Triumvirate’s most valued ally in this endless, fearsome rollercoaster ride. He knew
everything
. But Islam was a connection they could no longer afford. No baggage, no allegiance except to the new masters. Stand or fall alone, it’s the only way to do this; if it can be done.

Something about, goodbye forever. Something about, cancel all our vows—

A wave of desolation swept over them. Everything must go. They must be ready to sever themselves from their families, from the Few.

‘Remember when we were going to get married?’ said Ax, at last.

It was bizarre to recall, but a royal wedding, Fiorinda in a cloud of tulle, had once seemed like a good idea—when Ax had been trying to live with the Second Chamber. Really it would have been hateful, worst aspects of the gilded cage, but,—

‘We weren’t. We were both going to marry Fiorinda,’ said the shadow beside Ax, somewhat distantly. ‘I was never asked. Too New Agey.’

Fiorinda I know thought Ax. We can fight like hell, we
do
fight like hell, but she’s part of me, I can’t lose track. I will
never
get a handle on this big cat.

‘Well, I’ve changed my mind. I’m asking you now. Will you marry me? And please don’t fucking laugh. I’m desperate.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘All right, spurn me then… Where is Fiorinda, anyway?’

‘Took Min and went home. She gets so hellish tired. Ax, what am I going to do about Marlon? I very stupidly swore blind I’ll send him back to Wales, but he’s way past that. I can’t tell him what to do.’

‘I bet you can. You can be very intimidating… Let him stay with the folks, and lose Mary’s number. You’ll probably never see her again anyway.’

The cold air smelled of leaf mould, disembodied bass from the arena was like the roar of distant traffic; on a winter’s night in a lost world. They sat in silence, the darkness restoring intimacy, the thrill creeping up on them: is he going to touch me? What’ll I do if he touches me? Standing up together, they managed to cross that ever-perilous borderline, into each other’s arms.

‘You okay, babe? I mean, fuck, you know what I mean. Are we okay.’

‘As long as you never let go,’ mumbled Ax, his face against Sage’s shoulder. How gaunt he feels these days, but strong: long bones strapped together with ropes of steel. ‘I’m never
sure
, big cat. A day in the public eye and I’m thinking, fuck, can I possibly be lovers with this bloke? If I touch him he’s just going to belt me one.’

‘Me, same. I don’ know where I get the nerve to hold you, Sah.’

They returned to the arena, found Muhammad, and had the conversation. It was not as bad as they’d feared. Sayeed Muhammad made it easy on them.

Slight Return

Fiorinda dreamt that she was sleeping in the annexe, the army-surplus tent pitched beside Sage’s van in Traveller’s Meadow, on Reading Festival site. Oak leaf shadows danced on her eyelids, she could hear a distant blur of music. In her dream she knew she was pregnant, and it puzzled her that it didn’t seem to matter which of them was the baby’s father. It was Dissolution Summer, Ax and Sage were deadly music biz rivals, and the country was falling apart—

…

The oak tree was gone. The annexe was gone, and the meadow by the riverside. There was nothing left. The hazel bothy was pitch dark, and very cold. She crawled halfway out of the blankets to light a candle stub in their tin lantern, and lay down again, counting over with her eyes the battered hard case of a cherry-red Les Paul Classic (never called the Classic, always ‘The Les Paul’, or ‘The Gibson’). The case that held Sage’s visionboard, which Ax and Fiorinda sometimes called
Rho
, the name of the model, but Sage referred to only as ‘my board’. And the battered tapestry bag that hid Fiorinda’s saltbox, the wooden apple that was the talisman of her magic.

Min sat on the end of the heather bed, blinking at her sleepily.

I have to stop clinging to our little gods, what the fuck happens to my morale if we lose one? But refugees can’t help it—

The missing years returned, filling her mind with wild scenes and horrible revelations, mainly irrelevant. I am pregnant, I am not sixteen, we are starting again from nothing; that seems to cover it. A garret in Paris, a cabin on a cold beach in Mexico, and here we are again. Our house of sticks, this destitution, to which we keep returning, it feels so right. We keep trying to declare ourselves bankrupt, to crawl out from under the mountain of debt that fell on us, but it never works. Fucking global crisis, the death of a civilisation, fine, all things must pass, but the dying takes so long, we are so sick of it… Someone was coming. She sat up, pulling the blankets around her. Min padded up the bed, burrowed into her lap and set his front paws, like plates of meat (he’s going to be a huge cat) on her knees. The two tall men came in, making very little sound as they flowed like smoke into her space.

‘Fiorinda?’

They were holding hands, a rare gesture with them. Brother-enemies, she thought, the annexe dream still her reality. ‘You’re holding hands.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sage, holding Ax’s hand up to his cheek, kissing the knuckles, Ax leant his brow against Sage’s shoulder. ‘Something wrong with that?’

‘Wang Xili must be a terrific date. What happened?’

‘I said no,’ said Ax and let go of Sage’s hand to scoop up the kitten. Min burst into rapturous purrs, pummelling Ax’s chest with razor talons. ‘But nicely.’

‘No repercussions about Richard’s performance?’

‘None at all, it wasn’t mentioned. They’ve made it clear, by everything that’s happened, that they want the Reich. I’ve made it clear we’re interested, but that we don’t want to seem too eager.’

‘A proper, decent reluctance,’ remarked Sage, taking off his boots. ‘Very maidenly collaborators, us. Is there anything to eat? Any offerings at the shrine?’

‘Yeah. A Dave haybox with a chicken stew in it had appeared when I got home. It’s
extremely
tasty.’ She watched them settle. They stow their boots, they touch their totems, they casually brush a hand against my bag; they sniff out the food and tuck in. These two big simple animals, my tiger and my wolf.

‘Where was he speaking from? Was he in the flat?’

An uneasy glance between them.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ax. ‘Head and shoulders, I couldn’t tell.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I couldn’t give a toss.’

‘Dian probably made the whole thing up,’ Sage passed the spoon, ‘to see if she could get me to take her on as Mata Hari. Either that, or Wang is occupying Rufus’s love-nest for exac’ly the reasons stated, to exorcise the pernicious delusion.’

He was keeping the photos in the bathroom aspect to himself.

‘He’s a cool customer, then. The chances that he
really
thinks my father was just your average unpleasant megastar with dodgy politics are very slim.’

‘We don’t know what they
really
think,’ said Ax, around a savoury mouthful of chicken and wild mushrooms. ‘Don’t know what’s going on there at all.’