Castles Made of Sand (34 page)

‘What d’you tell Marlon?’

‘Something like the truth. He…he was scared. I’ve always told him too much. I don’t remember all of it. I get blanks, you know. I tried to leave him smiling.’

Fiorinda looked down. Tears fell on her hands.

‘I’ve made a new will. George knows, he’ll tell you about stuff like that.’ (If he’s left me Tyller Pystri, she thought, I’m going to kill him.) ‘I’ve told Ruthie to look after the cottage until Mar decides what he wants to do with it. You and Ax can go there any time, if you want. My desk’s sorted, I mean, my Minister for Gigs desk. Allie very nobly helped me with that, though she hates my guts. She loves you, Fee.’

‘I know.’

He took her hand. ‘Now listen, my brat. You have the Few, and David, and you have Fergal, who will look after the barmies in London and down here in the south. You have a tough job, but there are people you can trust. You don’t
need
me, Fiorinda. You’re much stronger than I am.’

‘What shall I tell Ax?’

‘Tell him that I love him. Tell him I didn’t have any choice. Tell him I’m sorry.’

And the seconds ticked away, and the minutes ticked away, soundlessly. This crippled hand, holding mine. It will be gone. He will never touch me again. She could not conceive of what it would be like, on the other side.

‘Just stay with me here, for a few days—’

‘I can’t. George is going to drive me to Caer Siddi in the morning. He hates my guts too, but I’m still the boss, an’ rock and roll feudalism’s good for something. I, um, I need to get there soon. I need medical support, pretty constantly. Caer Siddi’s one of the few places, if not the only place—’

‘In the morning!’

‘Yeah. I’m sorry, I thought you knew. We’ll be leaving early. Don’t get up to see me off. Please don’t do that. This is our goodbye. Well, that’s about it. I’d better go.’

They stood up together. He was very pale, under the wheaten gold of Ndogs sunscreen. His blue eyes had that inward, covert concentration they get when he’s so smashed walking across a room is a feat of acrobatics. So this is it.

‘Stay with me tonight. Stay here with me, just once, what harm would it—’

He shook his head, ruefully. ‘I wouldn’t be any use to you, babe.’

Fiorinda gasped and recoiled, and her stricken face broke him. He stumbled and half fell, to his knees, clinging to her, sobbing, ‘Oh God,
Fiorinda
. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh please Fee, I love you, don’t send me away like this, please don’t be like this, please—’

She crouched over him, holding him, rocking him, stroking her fingers through the warm lamb’s fleece. ‘All right, all right, I won’t be horrible. Don’t cry, don’t cry. Always love me, and it will be all right. Darling Sage, it’s okay. I don’t mind if you have to do this, I don’t care about anything, as long as you always love me—’

‘I’ll always love you.’ He stood up, wiped his eyes and bent and kissed her, the soft pressure of his lips, his hands on her shoulders. ‘My brat. Goodnight.’

She went into the mediaeval bedroom, in which the three of them had slept together only once. He is still here. I have hours and hours left. The hours passed, the light began to grow around the curtains at her windows. Before it was fully light she got up, washed her face and left the building. She hurried across the arena and the campground. The morning was cool and fair, the tented township very quiet. She came to Travellers’ Meadow, and the van wasn’t there. That preposterous grey space capsule, which had been her home, her rock, her refuge, the centre of her life since Dissolution Summer, was gone.

She stared at the bare earth where it had stood, stunned, trying to grasp the size of this task that the two men of destiny had left for her. In Rainsford’s-the-Gym, just out of curiosity, she had once tried (when they weren’t looking) to lift one of those fat weights that Sage and George tossed around so casually. What happens?
Nothing
happens. There is no strain, no mighty effort, no terrible costly victory. Absolutely nothing shifts.

I cannot do this, she thought. I can’t keep Ax’s England going. It’s impossible.

Something touched her hand. Silver Wing was beside her, a skinny unbrushed child in a brown smock, her small face pinched with grief, her eyes brimming. Silver didn’t say a word, nor did Fiorinda. They hugged each other. He’s gone. Our wild best friend, our beautiful lord. He’s gone, and nothing’s going to bring him back.

They were sleeping on rock, in a cave. It was very cold. Ax got out of his sleeping-bag and went to the entrance. We are on the slopes of Mount Elbrus. I am in the ancient world. Far into the distance below, the Caspian basin was on fire. Eco-warriors had set gas and oil reserves alight a year ago, and no one had yet managed to cap the flames. The landscape, under a reddish, Martian dawn, looked like fucking
Mordor
. But the strangeness of it gripped him, and he intensely wanted Sage to see this. A stab of pain: a glimpse of what was waiting for him, when he let himself feel his loss. But not now. He spoke aloud, quoting from the
Odyssey
: ‘
For in my day, I have had many bitter and shattering experiences in war and on the stormy seas
—’

A voice behind him joined in, also speaking Homer’s Greek.

So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more
.

‘You know the Odyssey?’

The older of his minders grinned, his seamed face and the gaps in his teeth reminding Ax of Fergal Kearney. Lalic. ‘I’m a Macedonian. Come and have breakfast.’

With Serendip on his chip, a facet of Serendip, that is, Ax could speak and understand any language that hit him. It felt somewhat like demonic possession, but he could handle it. He was afraid it meant he was behaving as if everyone he met belonged to the same tribe: luckily the eco-warriors didn’t give a shit for national identity. Murderous factions yes, borders no. This war is everywhere. He’d met Lalic and Markus, the younger minder, in the last days of the dambusting tour. They’d said
come with us
, and here he was, on a pilgrimage. The small plane took off from a boulder field. They flew north, over the flames, with the cinder-grey pans of the Caspian sea floor in the east; a sullen gleam of water in their distance. What’s that great wen? Oh, fuck, that’s
Stalingrad
. Volgograd. They landed in marshland. (Lalic and Markus flew by sight, since most of their instruments were bust. They treated their little plane like a motorbike; they’d park it anywhere.) Walking through reeds, they came to a stretch of water, like an arm of the lost sea. There were hippy guys with rifles, who provided a boat. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked, expecting another Apocalyptic Environment-Damage story.

‘Sssh. Wait. She’ll come.’

Something very large glided up. He saw an eye. He’d never seen such a big fish. He’d never been near to such a big, living wild thing in his life.

‘She is a sturgeon,’ said Lalic softly. ‘We think she’s two hundred years old.’

‘Not such good caviar,’ said Markus. ‘Beluga. But okay when there is nothing else left. This is our reserve, it’s what we do: but they are too few to recover; all the sturgeon will go. She is our partner, mascot, wife, you could say. Magic fish.’

The magic fish, fifteen, even twenty feet long, had the muzzle and barbels of a bottom feeder. She cruised around, seeming gravely interested.

‘The war is already lost. Here, as in the South,’ said Lalic. ‘In the west you hear rumours: running out of water, no more fertility in the soil, and you start fighting in the streets. We go on fighting too, with bombs and guns, but we know. We are losing, it is too late, it’s finished.’

‘You can’t say that,’ said Ax. ‘We’re not dead yet. This isn’t the end of a long campaign, we’ve only just begun. We can turn it round.’

He was thinking of Lalic and Markus, and the magic fish, when he set out for the Floods Conference venue, in Amsterdam one January morning, in the different cold of the North Sea coast. The city had reliable grid power, wave power mostly. Good for them. The sky was clear of smoke and the air clean, which made a pleasant change from Bucharest; or London. He walked by the Singelgracht, looking at the buildings, taking in the atmosphere, a dark shape swimming through his mind, like meeting life itself,
life
with eyes looking back at you. He was thinking that none of the mistakes he’d made in England mattered. Spend time with Utopians whose concept of the Good State is that everyone eats meat once a month and we never run out of ammunition (and Lalic was a Doctor of Philosophy once, by the way), and you learn to respect the scale of this task. You make a mistake, you
move on
. Don’t waste time on it.

Just as well the distances in Amsterdam were small. Ax hated bicycles, and he couldn’t buy a bus pass. He’d had a ridiculous conversation with a young woman at the Metrostation: no I can’t sell you a
strippenkart
, Mr Preston, because you’re an eco-warrior, but could I have your autograph? At least she’d had the grace to produce
Put Out The Fire
, and the ‘Miss Brown’ single. New Year’s fireworks piled in funeral pyres, a flotilla of drab, icebound houseboats, white-faced coots pattering across the grey ice…he almost ran slap into someone standing in his path. It was Arek Wojnar, Polish music publisher and radical computer geek: a stocky bloke with a skull-stubble of dark hair, slightly mad-looking pale blue eyes and a light-the-sky smile.

‘Ax! I said to myself, that’s the amazing Mr Preston, and I was right! Striding along, thinking world-changing thoughts. Which hotel are you at?’

‘No hotel. I’m dossing in the Tarom building.’ The block that had housed the Romanian Airlines office was providing accommodation for a raft of Eastern Europe hippies, who had no money at all.

‘Oooh, is
that
where the English are?’

‘No, just me. I’m here on my own.’

‘I see! Travelling light. Good! I was worried for you. You have been spending so much time among the suits.’

Arek was no mean suit himself when it came to wheeling deals and preying on hapless artists. But he reserved the right to be a wild and free idealist in his spare time.

‘Yeah, I was worried too.’

By the time they reached the gabled, turreted Tropen Institut, the winter pavement was awash with dreadlocked outlaws, sober hippies, adventurous suits. They met Alain de Corlay, and moved through the day in an enclave of techno-greens-with-music-biz-connections. Debates, seminars, posters: how much new bad news can you take? The conference was far bigger than had been planned, much of the programme had been moved to university halls, but the museum remained the centre; its tropical dioramas making a very fitting backdrop. These jewel islands that are drowning; this colourful Southern poverty, choking on its own shit. This showcase of human diversity which has become a relentless casualty list… On bilingual placards Ax read the Netherlanders’ core interpretation of what goes on, the same from Aleppo to the Philippines,
in times of trouble, the people will cling together and support each other
. My bus pass would seem to be an exception, he thought. But he liked the sentiment. These different
facets
of Europe, their oddness, their sameness—

In the afternoon there was an angry debate in the glass-roofed Light Hall, the biggest museum venue. The topic in the programme quickly became irrelevant, it was a slanging match between the techno-greens and the pan-European Celtics. The media people had turned out in force, and it was heartbreaking to see their pleasure and relief.
Aha! A binary opposition! Now we get it! Hold the front page!
But what can you do? At the end Ax had to duck out to escape being mobbed by fans—the classic rockstar experience, which he’d never had before in his life. He was outraged, even a little frightened. He’d been living in a hothouse where there wasn’t a media person, or a punter, who would say
boo
to Mr Preston.

Back at the Tarom (having spent a while in a stockroom full of Javanese puppets and carved totem sticks, guarded by kindly Tropen staff), he found Arek, Alain and a bunch of other techno-greens, making themselves at home. ‘Ah, here he is,’ said Alain, maliciously. ‘The man of the moment. It was those fucking dams, Ax. You are
feared
!’

‘I didn’t do anything. I was just holding the coats.’

‘Of course! You didn’t do anything. Nothing is going on in the Danube countries but a lot of running around, gang shootings and knife fights. Along comes Mr Preston and, so quietly, so gently, tells the suits, now let’s be reasonable, this is going to happen, let’s see if we can have it happen in a controlled way. And… KABOOM!’

‘Alain, you can’t call me violent. I am getting stigmatised as the moderate around here, just because I don’t like bloodbaths—’

‘Our US correspondent is looking for you, Ax,’ said someone in Alain’s party.

General laughter. ‘Yeah,’ said Ax, accepting a paper cup of coffee from Alain, at the hot drinks station. ‘Anyone here from the English Counterculture and speaks English? I caught that.’