At the Edge of the Game Page 17

  Like two snowballs mashed together, Pluto and its companion object Charon had been combined into one greater - though still small and insignificant - world. I flew by this new planet without slowing to orbit. I instructed the computer to arc the ship back into the inner Solar System. It was time to return to Earth, to see how Dexter was getting along, to make some decisions about what I would do next. I had been away for several days, and it would take several more to get home, even by the direct, high-energy route.

  The stars burn through sheets of green glow. The Northern Lights, making a daring southern foray, are entirely in keeping with this new age. What particle would not accelerate when confronted with a world in such a state?

  Phase 1 of Heathshade’s grand strategy has taken place, has been completed successfully. We of Heathshade’s intrepid party began by making a long detour up the quay towards Treacy Park, before veering back townwards, slipping through O’Mahony Avenue and Pearce Square, finally reaching Carrick’s other church. We made our reconnaissance, made contact with the others, and now we’re back, having encountered no enemy.

  In that other church, things are just as one might expect when hundreds are crammed into an enclosed space for several weeks. The people are hungry and sick, and the stench is so unholy that it has probably driven God from his own premises.

  Outside the heavy doors is a pile of bodies. Also, the paramilitaries visit on occasion, and they are of that ilk that can’t bring themselves to ask even routine questions without accompanying them with punches and kicks.

  Not surprisingly, the St Nicholas people are willing to join Heathshade’s merry band. A diplomat now, our hero orders a goodwill gesture to copper-fasten the alliance. Some food is gathered together – not all that much, really - and a party dispatched back across the river to deliver it. Short of a re-enactment of the loaves-and-fishes incident of antiquity, it will be pathetically inadequate to feed the huddled hundreds over there. But it’s the thought that counts.

  ‘You’re very good to think of them,’ Daisy Carruth says to Heathshade.

  ‘They’ll appreciate it,’ he replies.

  Daisy takes her daughter Joanie by the hand, and the three of them, very much the nuclear family, go and sit on the blankets in her patch of floor space.

  Helen watches as Heathshade gives Daisy the benefit of his wisdom on some subject or other, and Joanie settles down to sleep in her mother’s lap.

  ‘Cynical bitch,’ she mutters, more or less to me.

  ‘They’re probably well matched.’

  ‘Are you going to take part in his plan?’

  ‘I’m already part of it. I was shot at, wasn’t I?’

  Curious how strong the urge is to mention this.

  ‘What do I do if both of you are killed?’

  Both of you?

  ‘You know what, Helen? If they shoot at him, I’ll dive in front and catch the bullet. Then there’ll still be one of us, and you won’t have to worry.’

  I step outside to get some fresh air, and to get away from her. The raw night-time cold hits me head-on, but anger provides insulation. Pound down the steps of the Friary. Left or right? Neither way leads anywhere I want to go. That red-brick house across the road. I give the front door a few good, satisfying kicks and it yields. Completely dark inside save for the dim night sheen in the landing upstairs. Up I go, and find myself in a back bedroom, looking through the window across the river at the enemy position. The reddish light of their fires marks out, just barely, the roofline against an auroral backdrop.

  What if I just set out on my own? That would show her. Just follow the river, sixteen miles or so through… what? Salt flats, lifeless white dunes. Then… some chance of safety. I must make her leave with me, get out of here before it becomes a battlefield. What can I do to make her trust me to do what she needs me to do? If I could persuade her to leave, we could shelter for a while in the hut on the African Wall. It’s not so bad there.

  The enemy circles the city, flies around a rotting corpse. Thousands of citizens pass by the hut, trudging westwards. The Shapes come closer to the hut each day. I had to repel one of them with the force weapon this morning. It withdrew over the edge of the Wall, down towards Dublin Far City. I ran to the edge and watched it spiral away, rejoining the white pulsing mass of the orbital swarm.

  Two days after the loss of the Cylinder to the Shapes, the stars themselves began to fall, ripping the firmament, blasting country, gashing earth. Deep, black craters pock the desert and the cities.

  A refugee party stops by the hut. Their leader – a man called Ammatas – asks if we have water. I draw some from the well for him and his women and children sitting motionless in their cart, drawn by a thin-ribbed ox. From Jerusalem they have come, their home now a smoking ruin in a charred wasteland. He has already lost an uncle and a brother during the family’s hazardous traverse of Dublin Near City’s southern outskirts. He says that they aim to reach the Pillars, gateway to the Western Ocean, where they shall seek means to cross the sea and find possible safety on the other side. He eyes my force weapon, says that we would be welcome to join his group. We accept his invitation without hesitation

  So we walk the ancient road that runs along the two-thousand mile length of the African Wall. Aurochs and other beasts sometimes charge past us, singly and in groups, running from the grass fires to the south. Greater stampedes are triggered whenever a star impacts close enough for us to feel the shockwave. The foot of the African Wall, so very far below, has become littered with the decaying carcasses of creatures caught up in the panic.

  Everywhere we see the same scene of disaster – destroyed crops, befouled rivers, devastated towns, wide-eyed locals. They are always incredulous when we tell them of the release of the Shapes into the human world. These people know only vaguely of the war in the Cylinder, certainly are little aware of the spectral nature of humanity’s enemy. The Shapes have not pushed this far west yet, but soon enough the uneasy villagers will become acquainted with their wrath.

  The battle is inevitable. There is, in the end, no escaping from it. One way or another, the enemy must be faced. All else must be set aside until that moment has come and gone, everything that constitutes life. There are only warriors now. When the fighting ends, the human beings who once stood here may re-emerge, or they may not. Those who survive will inherit all.

  My precious blanket, dragged away by clumsy stumbling feet. Ruined my shallow sleep, left me awake and cold in my smelly clothes.

  Please let me go back to where I was. It wasn’t a good dream, but I don’t want to open my eyes. God, did I really sleep at all? Jaw aches with tension of tiredness. Legs sore with straining for comfortable position. The foul taste in my mouth makes me feel sick. Little wonder Helen won’t come near me. Got to find some toothpaste somewhere.

  More feet. A heavy boot skids off my skull.

  ‘Come on, George.’ Helen. She’s tugging at my arm, making me get up.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Planes.’

  ‘What?’

  She’s not crazy. Everyone’s piling through the antechamber doors to see. I can hear myself now that accumulation of sonic energy that heralds the arrival of prop-driven aircraft.

  Thick, greenish cloud canopy obscures all. The squadron’s mighty vibration may shake cloud spherules into full-fledged rain. The day feels ripe for it, spreading down granite, pooling in softening ice, washing frost from windows. Swiss-cheese snow textures. The Suir may thus be replenished. That’s what happened before, what washed us here, coughed us up on this river rock. Perhaps now it will pick us up like soggy fallen leaves and, in the style of a sewer, carry us all the way to the Atlantic.

  Three planes follow the line of the river, transporters that would drop supplies on beset African populations. Iron birds, release your nutritious pellets on our Irish mound.

  Down the slippery Friary steps, rushing past the red-brick house whose damaged front door still hangs half-open. Round the corn
er, in time to see the first crates tumble out of the cargo hold. White chutes float towards the frozen Suir. We descend a slipway as the planes bank a long, lazy loop back from whence they came.

  ‘Men only!’ Heathshade shouts. ‘My men only! Women stay back.’

  No one pays him any notice. Great.

  The crates break open on impact, release their bounteous payloads. Grey-skinned frenzied people fall to their ragged knees and tear at wrappings. Into cankerous mouths go powdered milk, grain sugar, dehydrated soup.

  Helen and I claim a crate of our own. We use our coats for sacks. Got to establish some sort of a hoard, gain independence from the church groups, maybe use that red-brick house as a new base.

  The planes are coming back, have circled round for a second run. Powerful engines roil those strange green clouds. Amazing, this - my hypothesis was right. A light sprinkling of rain reaches us with the second batch of crates.

  And just after that, those Unity IRA bastards start shooting.

  Warburton takes a bullet in the head and, as in slapstick, falls right over. Starving people abandon their newly acquired food piles and run away. I try to cover Helen with my own body. The crate is no good for protection. A bullet whips through it. Splinters dig into my face. I pull her to her feet and we make a run for it like everyone else.

  Heathshade and his men fire back, and in the resultant crossfire more fall. Though not us. Thank God, not us.

  We duck around the quayside corner and make it back to the refuge of the church.

  Where tons of prized foodstuffs lately fell from the sky, the swollen Suir is resurgent. No longer is there a solid ice floor to walk on. Black water strains through the Old Bridge arches, pounds the ancient stonework. The sky is still green, even in this pre-dawn twilight. The sharp cold has departed, replaced by an unwholesome dampness, a sick vileness that besets in a way dry cold never does. There’s no food left. None at all. Time for desperate measures, and measures don’t come any more desperate than following human train wreck Marcus Heathshade into battle.

  A trichotomous plan was agreed yesterday, and Heathshade declared that he would undertake the most hazardous of those diverse prongs himself.

  He left at six o’clock this morning. I suppose it constitutes leading by example. The St Nicholas group was briefed on its mission last night and sent away suitably armed. A man called O’Daly was given command of the men on this side of the river. He was no replacement for Heathshade, and he knew it. No attempt was made by him to embolden the men at 06:30, as they trudged away to meet their fate.

  No such worries for me. I have different concerns. Helen grips my arm as though she expects that at any moment my manly instinct to join the tribal war will win out. No fear of that, anyway. I am a worthless, cowardly bastard, undeserving of food, shelter or human society.

  But I have some unwilling experience of what it’s like to be in the line of fire, and my desire to experience it again is weak indeed. Some subsection of my brain is working hard to come up with a trick of logic that might prove to everyone’s satisfaction that this is not my fight anyway, that I’m a neutral, or that my priority must understandably be the needs of my woman. I suspect that there’s more merit in the latter thread than in the former. I’ve partaken of their food and shelter, after all. Now I refuse to repay them. But it’s not my fault - it’s her idea that I stay here.

  My posting as lone, unarmed ‘guard’ of the churches is a joke, a non-job devised by him in one of his more inspired moments of malice. There would be more dignity in being an out-and-out malingerer. That would be a badge of perverse courage.

  On schedule the fighting begins. Gunfire and shouting are heard above the patter of the rain and the ambient rush of the flood. Some of the women find that they can’t bear to sit while their men-folk fight, and run down to the corner of Friary Heights to look across the river.

  ‘I’m going too,’ I tell Helen.

  Perceiving that she must allow me this much, she acquiesces. ‘No further than the corner, okay?’

  From this side of the Old Bridge one can see the Bridge Street barricade afire and, beyond it, the West Gate in a similar state. A Molotov cocktail draws a bright arc and whooshes flame all over an IRA man. That’s O’Daly’s men at work. Heathshade will be pleased. Hopefully the St Nicholas men are doing the same at the Cook Lane and Church Street barricades.

  Heathshade crossed the river armed with nothing but a knife, but no doubt was cheered by the kiss he received from his lady. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Helen stiffen at the sight of that. Jealousy? Or hardwired womanly pragmatism? Maybe it’s best not knowing.

  His planned route was mapped out at the candlelit council of war. First along Strand Lane, then up Jones Lane, ending at a blocked archway according to scouts. Somewhere around there he climbs a wall and drops into the back garden of one of those old houses. He chooses his moment to break into the house, which with any luck is empty. Thus he breaches the perimeter of the Main Street stockade. His purpose is to find weapons of the sort that can do real damage, and bring them back across the river for Phase 3 of the campaign. The frontal attack is only a diversion. Lives will be lost, and all in aid of giving Heathshade cover. They really do have that much faith in him. Then again, it’s either do this, or probably die anyway.

  The Molotov cocktails have all been thrown, and the attack has broken down into desultory gunfire. A few shotguns are a poor match for massed machine guns, but the men are hanging in there, keeping the IRA occupied. I find that I am edging across the bridge, using the indented walls for cover.

  I spot Heathshade hurrying down the quayside, hunched under a heavy load. My chance to do my bit. I scramble the length of the bridge, but when I reach the corner I see that Heathshade has been caught. An IRA man has him at gunpoint.

  I make a few dangerous yards up Bridge Street and take a sharp right through a narrow alleyway, right around to where I can sneak up on Heathshade’s captor. I’m sure Heathshade sees me, but he keeps his eyes steady on the IRA man. I take a big, heavy rock in my hand and edge closer, until I can hear them talk.

  ‘British Army? You’re joking.’

  ‘No joke.’

  ‘What are you doing in my country?’

  ‘Air crash.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Heathshade. Marcus Heathshade. Lieutenant.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’ The man laughed. ‘My friend, you may be a soldier, but an officer you are not.’

  ‘I’m a lieutenant.’

  ‘Not even NCO.’

  ‘Well, you’re not even a soldier, mate.’

  ‘I’m soldier enough for you, Englishman. My name is Darach Glandore, revolutionary field commander. I have fifteen well-trained fighters under my command. Dont tell me I’m not a soldier. I’m the best kind of soldier there is, inspired by love of country.’

  ‘I love my country too.’

  ‘Stationed up north?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We shoot members of the occupying Crown forces.’

  I swing the rock, mash Glandore’s skull. An untidy damped pulse of crushed bone registers in the gristle of my two arms. Heathshade finishes the job with a rifle butt, smashing down once, again, again until no possibility of life remains.

  ‘Pick those up,’ he says to me, pointing at the pile of weapons. I do what he says.

  We head back to Bridge Street, in through a door in the alleyway, up a narrow, creaking stairs in a room that smells of boiled carrots.

  ‘Everything ready?’

  ‘Everything’s ready, Marcus.’

  O’Daly’s bald scalp is blotched pink with the excitement of it all.

  ‘Okay. We wait.’

  There are still sporadic attacks on the West Gate and Cook Lane barricades, mainly carried out by the men of St Nicholas, as hungry for revenge as they are for food. Fiery bombs fly.

  But, Heathshade tells us, the paramilitaries are conserving ammo now. There’s less firing, right
enough.

  The unprepossessing individuals in this room are more uncomfortable in the quiet. They hold their captured machine guns uncertainly. Discarded on the floor are the ineffective shotguns, airguns, even a crossbow. I want to take one of these, to be part of it.

  But no. A glance from Heathshade re-confirms my outcast status.

  Minutes pass, and not a sound is heard from the direction of the barricade. Then – something. Heathshade alerts the men.

  ‘Almost time, lads. Keep it together now.’

  The Unity IRA contingent climbs over the Bridge Street barricade. We can just about see them from where we are.

  ‘You all know what to do. Follow my lead.’

  The IRA men pass by our position. Heathshade butts through the weak downflowing glass, starts spraying bullets. The others do likewise. Dust and bits of ceiling and wall are falling. The coarse wooden floorboards underfoot vibrate. Will this decrepit house collapse with the noise of so much unleashed materiel?

  ‘Don’t let up, lads!’

  The battle fever has them all, but not me. I think I’m going into shock. I’m not up to this, especially now that they do let up, and the laughing starts.

  An ambush well planned and executed. Heathshade has some Neanderthal blood in him. The proof: Boehm’s book.

  Ammatas works the whip to keep the animals moving towards the west. The back of the jerking cart is not the most comfortable venue in which to read, but the book was in my belongings. I didn’t pack it. Neither did Helen, she says. I find the page on which I stopped all those months and – as I recall the ambassador remarking – ‘Neanderthal bows are crude, and the third line will have to move well up the hill before the enemy is within range of sharpened wooden arrows’. Ah, yes. The battle. ‘The railway track runs along the foot of the hill that the Neanderthal warriors are about to scale. Impressive earthworks await them at the top. Sharpened beams protrude from the circular mound, and a deep, dry moat rings its outer edge. The steel-tipped assegais and pikes of the defending warriors flash in the afternoon sun. The clan living on the hill is in possession of weaponry beyond the means of most Neanderthals. How they could have acquired it is difficult to imagine. Perhaps they have sparked the envy of their neighbours with their wealth, and that is the genesis of the current conflict. The defenders are issuing defiant roars that carry down the hillside on the dry breeze.