Band of Gypsys (40 page)

The Adjuvants compiled artefacts, they did not write songs.

‘It sounds like a Japanese condiment… Hey, d’you remember when Ax and Sage had that huge, huge fight, and Sage stripped down the Heads’ banner from the gates and walked off with it, stalk stalk, the Heads behind him, down Buckingham Palace Road in the dark?’

‘Yeah. Off he went, shining like Achilles. I love it when he
stalks
.’

They didn’t know what had happened to Rox. Cagney and Lacey had been requisitioned, probably boiled down for ammunition. They were almost sure their leaders were dead, because Mursal would have produced them if he could. Or the Chinese would have produced them by now. But it was comforting to reminisce. If they could get away with it—

‘Knock that OFF,’ snapped Allie. ‘I’ll kill you if you talk about them.’

‘Well, what
are
we allowed to talk about? Suggest us something.’

‘I don’t care. Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Blackpool Illuminations, multicoloured hedgehogs, WHATEVER YOU LIKE.’

Allie believed that she had sent Sage to his death. She hadn’t told the others, but she was certain he had not been returned to Wallingham. He had been killed. She’d known what was going to happen when he was talking to her, he had been
fey
that afternoon. But she had ignored the premonition and she’d let him go… Chip and Ver sat up, shocked and contrite. They got on either side of Allie, patting her shoulders awkwardly.

‘Hey, Allie, don’t cry. We didn’t mean anything. You’re our tower of strength. You look out for everyone.’

‘You know what? You’re the new Aoxomoxoa, that’s absolutely true.’

Rob snagged the palmtop, checked the screen, blinked: scooped out an earbead and inserted it. Gunfire exploded in his head. ‘Good news. They’re not in chemical suits, and I see no gas masks. We may be okay.’

In ways Dilip missed the edge that living with HIV had given him, the long effort to keep on dancing: but he had lost the feeling since California. High spots like the Mayday concert, and his b-loc trip to low orbit, but it was over, it was over, time to quit the departure lounge, head for the gate. The fate of the Triumvirate had taken him painfully by surprise.
Has anybody here seen my friend Abraham? I just looked around and he was gone.
The Chinese invasion, not so much. How instantly, how naturally, the Few had become to the besieged palace what the Few had been to England. Unskilled paramedics at the road accident, bodies in the bucket-chain, an accidental chivalry of butterflies, and now back to where it all began. Just like yesterday, take up my guitar and play. Except that DK’s instrument had always been his own body. Not the machine code, but the dance.

He felt he knew everything; and regretted nothing but those things one always regrets, misdeeds, words spoken out of turn. He was ready: but it was sudden and strange, in the State Apartments, when the attack burst through. He passed in seconds from the frightening chore of smothering incendiaries to the realisation that the siege was over, and that this was where his plane was going to take off, here, where he had been the mixmaster general of Immix, with sea-green Fiorinda, one perfect night in the DJ’s box above the whirling, shrieking, Ballroom—

He burned the books and buried the scholars

The sacking of the Insanitude brought a wave of reaction. The survivors fled to the Tower, where they holed-up impregnably in a far more precious, far more ancient building. The people of England came out on the streets, for the first time since the invasion. They gathered, in protest and mourning, at the forbidden Big Screen sites: singing and playing, dancing and making speeches. A second Deconstruction Tour broke out and raged. This time the targets were not giant supermarkets, car lots and fast food outlets. Mobs of desolate lads and girls attacked Utopian Science wherever they could find it: smashing and burning b-loc development labs and immix studios. Trashing technology parks and gene-infusion clinics: all so that Ax Preston’s legacy should not fall into enemy hands. The Warehouse on Battersea Reach was burned out down to the annexe. The Zen Self scanners did not escape. Joss had ordered them moved three times since his son had disappeared. The chain of command had become too long to be secure, they were found and trashed by the despairing kids. Disks and hardware; books and documents at the hedgeschool science centres, at Reich-friendly universities like Cambridge and Sussex, went onto bonfires heaped in tears. In a few days, about ninety percent of the seedcorn Ax had guarded so faithfully was gone.

The Rebel Countercultural MPs held out, in the Palace of Rivermead, making fruitless appeals for international intervention, while the historic city of Reading was patiently taken, street by street. The bricks and mortar citizens had fled, with the co-operation of the Chinese: but the campground by the riverside had been allowed to fill to bursting, with fugitives from places like Glastonbury—which had fallen on the first day.

The wise-women and gentle-men of Rivermead had performed a great deal of ritual magic in the shock of the invasion. About the third day, they’d given it all up. They couldn’t help noticing that no signs from Gaia, no wonders, were supporting the resistance. Whereas the presentiments of disaster (of which there’d been plenty) had been consistently reversed. Now there was a dearth of any visions at all—except the kind easily explained by strong medicine or the lack of it. The belief that the Triumvirate had escaped from Wallingham and were alive was strong: but nobody tried to conjure their survival. Something like that comes as a free gift, it’s insanely costly otherwise. They had to conclude hope must die to be reborn.

Anne-Marie set her fiddle in its case, wrapped the case in silk and laid it in the safe-hole under the floor of the bender. She arranged her other treasures around it, touching them all with love. Several bars of gold, a velvet bag of uncut gemstones, a withered wreath of traveller’s joy. The children’s umblicals; an iridescent black shirt that Sage had given to Silver, when she was a little girl. A cut aubergine with the name of Allah written in the seeds (given to Ammy by a Muslim wise-woman, who found it in her shopping the day of Ax’s inauguration); which Ammy had sealed in perspex. Photographs of her parents. The kids’ Hedgeschool Certificates, all gilt and glowing colour.

Her eldest daughter sat on the bench by the firepit, hunched over folded arms and scowling. ‘They’re
dead
,’ said Paradoxa: meaning Ax, Sage and Fiorinda. ‘Don’t be so numb. If they weren’t dead they’d be here!’ She was eighteen. They’d hoped she would be a vet, but Para wanted to recover from the disease of being human. She’d been living in an extreme Gaian community in Brighton, without clothes, abandoning language; fucking like dogs. She’d come home because of the war: angry and contradictory as ever. Anne-Marie shut the hole, replaced the bacterial damp-proof membrane and smoothed down the rugs.

‘They’re not here because this is not the fight. The fight’ll be keeping the flame of what Ax did alive. An’ even that’s not important, neither, because there’s always another Ax. It’s the cause that matters.’

Paradoxa tugged the plaited scalplock, her one vanity, that dangled from her dirty naked skull. ‘Mum, you’re not making sense. If you believe that why are you still here? They’ll kill us all, you know. Go into hiding!’

‘I’d have to stay in hiding then, wouldn’t I love?’ Anne-Marie applied her fingertips to the outer edges of her narrow black eyes. ‘Or they’d send me “home” for re-education. I can’t be tossed with that.’

‘They hate women. The females we see are trannys. They’ll rape us with dogs before they kill us. There are no real women in China, because of the One Child Policy. They grow babies in vats.’

Anne-Marie wasn’t into dehumanising the enemy. It would be daft, when all she had to do was look in a mirror. She let go of her Chinky eyes, and spread her hands on the bender floor. Earth and stone rose up into her veins, through the layers of bright silk and the dpm. The myriad weaving of little creatures that makes one soil different from another became united with her blood. Come England, come…conquer the conquerors. I know you can do it. But if you’re wise, my country, don’t you ask anything of magic. Magic isn’t to be used, it just is. You leave it alone.

‘What’s right for one person isn’t right for another. I wish Ax was here, but I know why he isn’t. This is my home, pet. That’s all there is to it, reelly.’

Paradoxa took her crossbow and went to look for her father in the town. Anne-Marie finished straightening the bender, putting fragile ornaments out of the way, as if she were preparing for a visit from her old man and his drinking buddies. At last she burned lavender and rosemary to sweeten the air, and sat watching the flames, seeing faces there and singing softly under her breath,
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, as live as you and me…

She never found out what happened to Paradoxa, except that the girl hadn’t hooked up with Hugh, by the last time they managed to talk on the phone.

The younger teens and the children of the campground had been living in the Palace, where they were thought to be safe. When Rivermead burned, they were evacuated back to their homes in the tented township. There were no safe places. Wang Xili, the General in Command of Subduing the South West, had
warned
them. There was no such thing as a non-combatant Countercultural, old or young; this had been policy throughout the invasion. They could have reneged, they’d been given time. They knew they if they reneged they would be spared, that had been policy too.

He had warned them.

Down by the river, wild clematis had turned to silver elflocks in the hedges; the michaelmas daisies stood in starry lilac sheaves. Travellers’ Meadow, where Aoxomoxoa’s van had been a rock and a refuge for Fiorinda, was trampled and bloody—littered with bodies as if a night of Dissolution revels had ended in a huge deranged brawl. Anne-Marie ran around turning up faces: looking for her second and third daughters, Silver and Pearl, who had not come home from the crêche. Now it was here she couldn’t believe how she’d got into this situation, by what degrees, by what mad stubbornness? She ran all the way back up to the hospitality area, through the confusion and the smoke and the racket: took little Safire, who was howling, in her arms, and screamed at the boys to follow her. Forced to abandon Ruby, dragging Jet, the six year old, by the hand, she rushed to the washhouse, a substantial building of recovered brick and timber; served by a borehole and a biomass generator.

‘Stay here!’ she screamed, and ran to get Rubes.

The laundry was seething with mothers and sobbing children, but there were islands of quiet. Jet looked around, and with decision led his sister to a counter where a row of wicker baskets full of washing stood, abandoned on the last halfway normal day. ‘Sit on the floor,’ he ordered. The chubby little girl sat, obediently. He tipped a basket over her, so she was buried under an avalanche of socks and pants and teeshirts. ‘Stay there. Don’t make a sound!’ He waited to see she didn’t immediately crawl out. Then he took his knife, a kitchen knife he’d secretly been carrying around with him, big in his small hand, and went to help his mother.

That day was the end of any organised resistance. Ax’s England, the nation of Dissolution, was no more. The dream had lasted, from Massacre Night to the fall of Reading, a little less than nine years. Shocked and saddened reactions went flying around the globe. A Radio Delhi newsreader reminded listeners that this was the first successful foreign conquest of the UK since 1066, and quoted (brave man) the judgement of a Norwegian chronicler of that time:
cold heart and bloody hand, now rule fair England.
The virtual movie called
Rivermead
, buried by the Lavoisier scandal, was swiftly put into distribution. Sales and downloads of the Reich’s music rocketed. But though the tributes were generous, the protests were muted. Ax had been a romantic dictator but his Presidency had failed, his vision no match for the realities of a corrupt and brutal regime. His country was in better hands now, and it was to be hoped that Crisis Europe would accept the object lesson calmly. England’s close neighbours made the most conciliatory moves they could think of, and prayed that the New Masters of the Universe would let them be.

The blackberries were stripped. The horse-chestnuts had dropped their freight of spiny conker-cases, and rustling, rusty-edged leaves, into quiet Sussex lanes. Hazel cobs were fattening. One misty morning in mid-October the bonded girl who worked in the dairy at Towncreep Farm, and lived over the garage, glanced out of her window and saw someone in the yard. She wasn’t alarmed. There were a lot of travellers about, because of the war. They were mostly harmless, just hungry; and if they thieved a bit, she tended to sympathise. But this shabby intruder was acting strangely. He squatted on his heels by the wall, looking intently at something propped on his knees. It was after milking time. She’d usually have been having breakfast with the family, but she’d come back up to her room. Her bondholders had felt they had to watch the news: the girl had felt she couldn’t.