The Sword of Feimhin (19 page)

Nan's head and body were ensheathed in blue-black lightning. With a whip-crack detonation, a bolt of lightning burst from her brow and struck the third target, causing both the target and the supporting tree to explode into splinters.

Mark chuckled. ‘She's had a bit more practice than me.'

Every member of the crew was staring at the target in astonishment. Mark heard Sharkey's half-hysterical bark of laughter. ‘Hey, baby – all hail! You guys got the magic. You want some bike lessons, first one's on me.'

*

Nan hung behind when Mark went over to the bikes with Sharkey. Cogwheel, the only member of the crew still breakfasting, had come out to sit against the plank table in his wheelchair.

‘What about you – what's your special role?'

‘Me? Just the general factotum.'

Nan heard an educated tone in Cogwheel's voice. ‘Factotum?'

‘Driver, when they let me. Engineer – and inventor extraordinaire.'

‘What do you invent?'

‘Let us say that I provide the brains, machine-wise. There's no shortage of brawn, as you have seen for yourself.'

Nan smiled at him. ‘Would you care to show me?'

‘If you wouldn't mind giving me a shove to that monster of a vehicle yonder, where I shall duly demonstrate.'

Nan pushed Cogwheel through the open door and into the barn, past bench-mounted drills, lathes and other heavy maintenance machinery. She brushed her fingers over a narrow, high grille above the place where Cal had been welding the broken bull-bar.

‘You have constructed this machine of war yourself?'

‘Hardly – certainly not on my own. But I can claim some credit for the basic engineering and some of the add-ons.'

‘How enterprising!'

‘Glad you think so. The truck started out more humbly, as a heavy duty Mercedes. We've been adding some interesting curlicues.'

‘Curlicues?'

‘Making it our very own armour-plated personnel carrier.'

‘Armour-plated – ah, I understand.'

‘You're stroking 530 brake horsepower. Sixteen speed gearbox. Took us months to get hold of a European long wheelbase meant to pull twenty tons over the high passes
in the Pyrenees or the Ardennes. The plating is half inch hardened steel – aimed to stop any shit except for armour piercing rounds. You're looking at fifteen tons and you can see it doesn't sit on the floor. Four by two, rigid axle base. And speed.'

‘Speed?'

‘We disconnected the road speed limiter so it will top 70, downhill, with a following wind and despite its bulk. At low speed it would pull the front wall off a house.'

Standing back, Nan admired the menacing vehicle, not that she understood anything Cogwheel had just said. With its steel walls camouflaged to look like some kind of official army ordinance and solid steel guillotine blades coming to a fearsome looking vee in front of the bonnet, it reminded her of the battering prow of a warship.

‘Your idea?'

‘My idea; Bull and Cal cannibalised the blades from a snow-plough.'

‘What do you intend to do with it?'

‘Break through roadblocks.'

Cogwheel used a remote to spring open the door on the driver's side of the cab, then used the same remote to bring a shelf lift down. He used his arms, biceps bulging, to transfer his paraplegic body to the shelf lift, then used the lift to ferry himself up to the level of the cab. Nan watched him transfer into the driver's seat, then shut the door. His grinning face looked down at her through the opened side window.

‘You intend to take the fight to them?' she said.

‘That's the plan.'

‘May I come up there to join you?'

‘Be my guest.'

She went around the cab and climbed three steps to open the opposite door. Cogwheel flicked a switch to illuminate the interior. There was more space in the cab than she had imagined and room enough to seat three people comfortably. The main body of the truck contained weapons and ammunition. He indicated the mounts, at the front and rear, for the heavy machine gun.

‘The wheelchair – the accident was due to this war?'

‘I wish. It was a road traffic accident, when drunk.'

Nan leaned her left elbow on the dashboard and her head on the hand. She looked Cogwheel in the eyes. ‘Tell me about Cal.'

He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Oh – pathologically anally retentive.'

‘What is this anally retentive?'

‘You'd better ask your boyfriend.'

‘Tell me more about the enemy.'

‘The Goonies are light on brains. They piss around and murder people because the guys in power don't give a shit anymore.'

‘Goonies?

‘The paramilitaries and Skulls. They use roadblocks to control people. Stop and search so they can rob, rape, murder. With the Mamma Pig we can go looking for their roadblocks.'

Nan blinked, thoughtful. She peered at three tiny human figurines sculpted out of papier mâché, and guessed that Cogwheel had fashioned them. ‘What do these represent?'

‘Faith, hope and charity.'

‘What you call the three virtues?'

Cogwheel stared into space through the windscreen. ‘Not that I have come across much evidence of such.'

‘You are agnostic, I think.'

‘Takes one to know one.'

Nan laughed. ‘And now – you can start her up?'

The cab vibrated with a powerful thrust, letting Nan know about it through the entire length of her spine.

‘You feel that?'

She laughed, enjoying the vibration in her throat as she spoke. ‘But tell me about Sharkey. He seems different?'

‘We don't ask too many questions here, but he claims to have some Indian blood in him. I refer to the country, India, and not the Native Americans. Different, you said. More like weird. He and Bull come as a package. Those two gentlemen have been, shall we say, making havoc together.'

‘They are – how do you say it – gay?'

Cogwheel laughed. ‘Gay? I doubt it, in either sense of the word. More like natural born killers with good reason for their anger.'

‘Cal is a warrior?'

Cogwheel laughed at the term, toying with a spot on the windscreen. He spat on his finger and wiped it off. ‘No
questions, remember. But you ask me, I'd guess ex-military, without a shadow of a doubt.'

‘So the answer is yes. He is a warrior?'

‘If I'm right, most likely SAS. Which means he would be expert in stealth operations – operations behind enemy lines.'

‘And Tajh?'

‘Our funky Amazonian woman?'

‘Tajh must have a special skill?'

‘Communications.'

‘So Cal's the officer. Bull and Sharkey – they're the warriors. You're the brains. And Tajh is communications?'

‘Communications is a major problem. We have to be watchful, all the time. You don't know who to believe, what messages to trust. You get paranoid about the increasing number of crews being hit. You have to go on your instincts.'

Penny was staring at the Scalpie's dagger. She was sitting on the platform in the map room, her knees drawn up to cradle the case, rocking to and fro, her head clasped between her outstretched fingers. The platform was perched at an arm's reach from the ceiling, within easy drawing and painting distance. Her eyes followed the spiral blade, forged out of a black somewhat fibrous-looking metal she didn't recognise. She stared, her breath arrested, at the glowing symbol in the hilt. That the dagger was special – special and magical – she had no doubt. Who could have forged such a thing? Penny had no answer to that any more than she had the answer to an even more pertinent and scary question: why had the Scalpie tried to kill Mark?

Studying the dagger, immersing her being in its powerful presence, she was beginning to see through it to the underlying pattern. She was following the flow of it over the streets and underground.

Gully interrupted her musing. He was standing in the open doorway leading in from the vestibule. Penny made a pocket of her knees and her body, so he couldn't see she was examining the dagger.

‘I got you some medical shampoo – an' a comb for the nits.'

‘Go away, Gully.'

‘Why you neglectin' yourself, gel?'

‘Stop calling me gel.'

‘I know you been obsessin' again with that dagger.'

She whined and squeezed down on her head. If only Gully would stop pestering her so she could sketch the ideas that were proliferating inside her mind.

‘You're goin' cuckoo, Penny. You got to stop this.'

‘I won't stop it.'

‘Why not? Why won't you?'

‘I just can't.'

From the moment she had met Mark and Nan – from when she had seen the black triangles take fire in their brows – she had sensed the importance of their presence. She knew then, she just knew, absolutely, that she had been right all along. Something really cool was happening, something very exciting … and scary. The clue to understanding it was underground. The pattern, the labyrinth, was there, if she could only figure it out.

‘There ain't no bleedin' City Below. That's just some kind of a daydream.'

‘Shut up, Gully, please?'

‘No, I ain't shutting up. No way, gel.'

‘You will if I tell you.'

‘How you goin' to make me then?'

‘Oh, Gully, it's not just a dream. It's a labyrinth. I've been finding my way through it. I can see the way, inside my head.'

‘Wot you talking about? It's just them silly maps an' things.'

‘The maps are showing me the way.'

‘The way to cloud cuckoo land.'

‘You're not helping me, Gully. I need to focus.'

‘Only a month or two since you got that plaster off your arm. I can't keep looking out for you, gel.'

‘I'll be careful. I won't do any more climbing.'

‘Just come down 'ere an' forget about all that. I'll brew us a cuppa.'

‘Not just now. Gully, I can't.'

‘Why not? What's the matter with you?' His voice was plaintive, pitiful. These days Gully sounded pitiful a lot of the time.

He reached up, as if to touch the back of her hand, but she withdrew it, her hand clawing up under its own will, like a crab retracting its claws.

‘You're breaking the rules.'

‘Wot rules?'

She knew as she said it how it would provoke him, but she had to say it. ‘You mustn't touch me. You know I can't bear to be touched.'

The hurt was plain on his face. ‘Can't bear to be touched!' He left her then, so she couldn't witness the tears in his eyes. She heard his voice trail out into the main room. ‘Them's your rules, Penny. Them rules is plain cuckoo.'

Penny squeezed a fraction forward on the board, rocking backwards and forwards, blinking repeatedly. Why did he always have to go and spoil things?

When she climbed the awkward gantry it felt as if she were knocking on the door to heaven. Gully had constructed the gantry for her. He had put it all together so she wouldn't go falling off the steps again. Everything she needed was already up here, to help her capture her visions. The marker pens and crayons, the chalks and paints. Why then, after he had made the wonder possible for her, was he still moping about and upsetting her when she needed quiet and serenity to draw and paint? Why couldn't he accept that she was his friend? Why did he need to touch her? Touching was too close, too intrusive. Why couldn't he see that living together in Our Place was only possible if they allowed one another enough space?

She stared at the dagger in the box in her lap for several more minutes, breathing in and out through dilated nostrils. Even though she felt the need rising in her, she could only create in the stillness. She had to clear her mind of the confusion and upset so the vision would emerge. Arguing with Gully was so distracting. There were things she didn't understand about people – like that obsession with sex. Animals did not do sex, they rutted. Father had
explained that to her, when she had asked him about it after the lesson at school. He had been annoyed that she had been subjected to the lesson without his permission. That was why he had taken her into his study and sat her down in the chair.

Sex, he said, was a thing invented by people for some peculiar and unpleasant purpose. She repeated his expression now, word for word, enunciating it clearly.

‘For some peculiar and unpleasant purpose.'

That was the trouble with people. They invented things for peculiar and unpleasant purposes.

Gully didn't understand. He had just got the idea into his head that he wanted to be like those unfathomable people and try the sex. What Penny needed was not the sex Gully wanted, but the exaltation of
being
. Even after she had stared at the dagger and fixed its image in her mind she had to close her eyes for several more seconds so she could assimilate what she had captured of the vision.

Gully had prepared the map room ceiling for her, over-painting the soot and water-stained surface with a thick and creamy magnolia paint. Magnolia was super. It meant she could highlight subtly in white. She could feel the rapture as her mind became one with the vision. She could see the places that were part of the vision clearly enough to begin to sketch them. Extracting the pens from the bag that dangled from a hook on the gantry, she began to apply the images with a confident hand, stroke by stroke, in true and perfect delineations. And so the map was extended.
Her perspective varied because there were vignettes, particular buildings, or a frontage, or a feature – such as Cleopatra's Needle – which deserved to be captured in three dimensions, and sometimes even in full colour. In places she was obliged to show not merely the grandeur and the architectural artistry, but also the spirit of their beauty and essence.

That was what the City Above demanded of her. The people out there, the people Gully sold the sketches to – the lady vicar, Mrs Patel at the corner shop, the woman at the Post Office – all those who bought her drawings because they liked them or they could sell them to their customers, they could see what she was trying to capture in the drawings. But they would be mortified if they knew about the other city; the City Below, that was entirely different. That was where the City Above concealed its secrets.

And now, with the dagger cradled in her lap, it was this darker animal, these sloshing guts and waterworks and liver and kidneys, that she began to fill in. She did so with the same dexterity and vision. It was as if her spirit had taken control of her fingers. She drew and drew, her eyes wide and shining. She could smell those vitally important innards, like blood and digestive juices. She could hear their gut moans, their contractions, their slivering, gliding movements over one another, their valves and sphincters opening and closing. The City Below was alive too, alive in a deeper and darker way than the City Above, powerful and vigorous. She had read about famous artists who had
realised the same truth. Stubbs, who had discovered the soul spirit in his horses through dissecting them. And Leonardo da Vinci, who had also searched under the skin of humans, of men and women, even pregnant mothers with their unborn babies.

And then there were the spirits that roamed it, that lived in the tissues of the heart and lungs, the guts and the entrails. Dark spirits as might be expected to inhabit an underworld; hungry spirits that burrowed and gorged their way into the world of light; beings with wings, vast hordes of them. Through her pencils and brushes they came alive, sometimes partially concealed, or just emerging from the darker layers, and all in between. There were scaly-skinned males with white ovals for eyes; she saw one of them in the disgusting act of sex, reaching for the waist of a horned and winged woman. She saw others, their grotesque faces rising out of the carapaces of crabs, or insects, their expressions of need so very intense. And then the field of her mind simply filled up to capacity with shapes, too many to draw in a hundred years, swarms within swarms, massing, taking to the air, piping and wailing, others resembling a flock of misshapen birds, or monsters with the heads of fish and bodies of Venuses or Adonises, or the rush of scaly fanged demons out of a crack in hell's roof.

Something was calling them and they were responding, emerging in triumph, bursting through with the sheer pressure of bodies, urging one another out into the freedom
of night so they could prey upon the blinkered, unheeding City Above.

*

Gully climbed the spiral iron ladder up to the roof. The concrete was skiddy because of the bird shit. Once on the roof, in the steady downpour and the cold, he scattered the corn. Night was falling and soon it would be a lot colder. It'd be a lot skiddier too because of the ice and maybe, judging from that sky, there might even be snow. That would make it easier to slither accidentally down the sloping roof and end up tumbling through that widening crack in the ceiling. He wiped his running nose on the snotrag from right pocket 2 and he watched the pigeons alight and take off again. They were so graceful he delighted in watching them, up here, on the roof of Our Place. He fed and watched them for several more minutes, his mind empty of anything except the ballet of them flapping their wings as they landed and making that knocking sound as they took off again.

He wiped his nose again, a good, long wipe, and looked up into the dark through the rain. ‘Poor little birdies. You ain't got much, but you got them wings and that's all as you need. You can fly away, and that's perfick.'

Kneeling down in the wet, he set up a basket with holes in the side and scattered the corn under it, lifting it up on one edge, which he propped up with a piece of kindling tied to a string. Then he pulled back into the shadows of the stairwell and waited for Big Ben to strike. Up where he
was, the sound carried for miles. As soon as the clanging began he consulted his two watches, one on each wrist. As he suspected, it was the left one needed correcting. It had lost two minutes and a bit in twenty-four hours. He had to hold the face up close to his eyes so he could correct it before checking the basket out. Two birdies – the blessing of patience. He hauled on the string.

Once he had captured the plumper one and folded back the flapping wings so he could hold it snug inside his coat, he let the other go.

‘There you are!' he said, as he stared up into the rain, watching its flight.

Penny was daft if she thought he couldn't see that box in her lap. He saw it easy enough, and the way she was going to such trouble to hide it from him. That box, and that dagger – they frightened Gully. They scared him shitless.

‘It's okay, me dahlin!' he whispered. ‘You an' me, we're still friends, but wot it is, you see, Penny 'n me, we got to eat. I ain't about to hurt you. Honest.'

After he had wrung its neck he sat on the iron steps for a while, just thinking on things, his hooded head poking up into the growing dark and the rain. He thought about his argument with Penny in particular.

Now just cause you're frightened of that dagger, don't you go back in there an' go pesterin' the gel
.

‘No! I shan't.'

But he didn't rightly know if he could stop himself.

You're lucky – you know that?

‘I know.'

You don't deserve 'er
.

Never in his life would he have had the courage to befriend a real live gel like Penny by himself. Gels was so different.

You just can't tell wot they're thinking
.

Smoke was rising through the ruin from the dossers on the ground floor far below. It was swirling up through a crack before being blown away by the wind. Out there it became lost in the darkening sky. Gully could hear shrieks in the distance. Another Razzamatazz. Soon there would be even more smoke, lots of it, and billowing flames lighting up the sky.

In bright daylight there would have been the tiniest glimpse of St Paul's in the distance, just one piece of its bowl-like roof. Gully had seen the ghosts and wraiths that Penny had drawn all creeping and crawling around the cathedral, another of her nightmare imaginings in the smoky, uncertain air.

‘Instead of criticising me, you should be helping me,' Penny would say.

‘I would if I knew how.'

‘Oh, you're so useless, Gully.'

‘I ain't allitrack.'

‘You're not literate just because you can print your name.'

‘That ain't fair.'

‘Why didn't they teach you at school?'

Gully hadn't learnt much at school. The fact was he hadn't seen much of school, not with his junkie mum. He remembered being hungry and the drunkenness and the beatings. Care, the people called the new place he went to when they put her in jail. Care and foster homes. But there hadn't been much care or much fostering in neither. There wasn't no memories there he wanted to revisit. The only thing he wanted to remember was his nan, who got him away from them when he was twelve. She was the only one called him ‘dahlin'. She had tried to explain the readin' an' writin' before she got this teacher in, an' he told her he had that condition called dyslectrica. It was one a them words that put a fine end to things, that put you into a hole and covered you up, like leprosy, where you rotted away an' your nose and your fingers fell off.