THE BANKS OF THE NILE

RITCHIE SMITH and THOMAS PENMAN

Against a baroque and densely textured patterning of cultural fragments, vivid and evocative, Emmanuel Kyygard bestrides a treacherous and blood-soaked age. Here the shadows of Renaissance and Reformation, Machiavelli and Borgia, and dark future centuries of violence infested by the tang and bite of the black light of decadent science, interact to touch a nerve. Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman present their depiction of a vision of the future rich in betrayal and glittering with menace. A future in which the iron demands of Empire draw forth a more dreadful resolution than any mere staining of the map of Europa with blood.

* * * *

HUNG UP in a wind, cradled under the silver-fish hundred and sixty yards of our zeppelin, we fell across the countryside.

Boreas, the North Wind, had met us over the Vosges: it was late summer there. Or early autumn perhaps, the coming on of the season of mists and mellow fruitlessness. Below us the French wheatfields' richness had spread yellow-bronze friezes of a peculiar washed out hue; but now, with the flesh of Europe still passing beneath us, there appeared the seas of blood-red poppies of Flanders. Each one is a bloody grave-mark: a place, but no name, no date ... Passchendaele, the Somme ... A hurting-time in the elder world, but long centuries ease those recollected pains.

And yet the rustle of the wind in our dirigible's struts, as I stood in the bows, might have been the faint whispering of the dead resting still beneath the crimson plains. To the southwest lie the beaches of England's Normandy, another graveyard from another war. Southward is Versailles, and the Isle de France.

The past is too much with us. I turned my head out of the wind and spat; it was a long way for my blessing to fall.

The powersong of our steam-jet ducted fans throbbed anew, deepened, as I guided us high above the sunny pewter of the Channel, and paused to smile with an ironic benevolence at the shipping there. Across the straits rose Dover's white-washed cliff fangs, bared powerless now: soon we sailed above their reach, into the Empire of Albion. There, where old Father Thames wound through the ringwalls of Londres eastward to the sea, waited Charles IX of England. Son of the last occupant of the Iron Throne, Empress Elizabeth, and, so rumour whispers, the greatest and most exotically flamboyant of her generals.

'Emmanuel Kyygard ...' Annah said, and I focussed on her, on her arched brows; she was basking in a tepid blaze of sun that cobwebbed her black satin catsuit and glistened on her tooled and embroidered boots of Spanish leather, "high emissary of the King...' She half knelt and slid a black, iron-wood hilted blade from its sheath beside my calf, 'lover...' her naked, willowy white arm lightly caressing the rib-like weaving of aluminium over our heads, 'if you are knighted for this work, will you remember me...?'

The north-needle swung away as I over-compensated for Boreas' wicked autumn breath, then settled. I unhooked both elevator bars from their ratchet-stops and hauled on them, the wind-strummed control cables creaking metallically as they passed on the pull to the great fins at the stern. I looked out in exhilaration, as we soared, amidst scudding masses of grey cumulus: our 'Lady of the West' pushed on, into the Thames estuary, over a glittering shield of finely-beaten silver four thousand feet below.

I wasn't sure what 'yes' or 'no' answer I could give. Annah is all feminine subtlety, you see, and her words are always either pleasant nothingness or contain the most grandiose of implications. So I looked up, and away. Anyway, it was cold, and southward on the Wash-like bank I could see where the citadel Hungry-gates squatted, monstrously, a fantastic conglomeration of monolithic keeps ringed by flying buttresses that rose up and fountained into cyclopean Doric architecture; its pentagon of faces gleamed with the polished pink of granite. Cunningly carved emplacements hid the batteries of gigantic steam cannon that guard the approach to our Imperial city.

New course set, I stepped up to her.

'Annah of Hesse, of Wales and the Deutschland's marches,' I began, retrieving the knife, chucked fingers under her chin, lifted it, 'you're a lovely lady ...' I parted the curtain of her glossily dark hair and kissed her forehead and smiled blindly over the top of her head. I said: 'When my Weird is finally set upon me, and I am becoming intimately acquainted with the King's implements of torture, beneath the White Tower, then I shall name you "beloved", Annah Roman.' I tugged one of the coalblack loops of her waist-length hair, marched my fingers down the high, thrusting crest of her breasts, and smiled into her mercurial eyes.

My lady looked at me, green eyes oddly bright. 'We might tell a tale of glory to the King, Emmanuel. And sit among the Lords of Albion, once you'd reaped your share of what was harvested yesterday: for it was you who gave victory to the Empire.' An errant bumblebee buzzed impossibly across our wickerwork nacelle; perhaps it had mistaken Annah's ash-of-roses perfume for the fragrance of the living flower. Again, then, I remembered the scenes new-burned into my memory: our Navy appearing like so many phantoms outside Naples, and the antlike confusion of the Italians, since certain secret documents indicating that we were sailing to engage the Soviets above the arctic circle had, by a circuitous route, via myself, fallen into their hands...

For some time, even after our dirigibles phosgene-bombed their refugee ships, the cathedral, and the Red Cross hospital not far from Admiral Caraveggio's land headquarters, I had thought that their reluctant fleet dared not emerge. Though with a quarter of our admiralty's strength concealed below the horizon, or blinded perhaps by their foolish belief in the grace of God, the chances seemed to them the sort of odds professional gamblers might accept.

A fine plan. We feigned retreat; then our elite battle-cruisers, soft black feathers of smoke trailing behind them, lanced up from the south-west to make withdrawal impossible for their windjammers, and we burned their fleet and broke them ... Annah was laughing, now, tinkling laughter as bright and hard as amber.

I shut the doors of memory, and locked away the memories of insect-struggles in the burning water below far below ...

'Ay,' I said heavily, 'perhaps I will tell the king of glory. And perhaps then: "Arise, Sieur Emmanuel..." You would like that, wouldn't you?'

Amber broke, brittle. She turned away, walked off.

* * * *

Sometimes I think that what I love is not her, but only my own Romanticized image of my lady of the West. And now, perhaps, I should tell you about her; the whole source of strength in me, the great love of my life, ever since I returned from several years' exile in Far Asia, much changed, writing haiku in flowing Japanese characters, into kung fu fighting, bearing the long samurai sword that, to this day, never leaves me ...

I knew her because I am a linguist, of sorts; specifically I could speak Welsh. And, returning to England to become a commissioned agent provocateur, I'd distinguished myself in the Troubles up in the North. Then resumes from the civil service's secret section had at last acknowledged me impeccable on the usual security counts, and their sovereign needed a man skilled in the black arts of espionage, violence, and the less theatrical sorts of blackmail and corruption, and so--

The King himself interviewed me: my fourth audience. The long arm of Albion had brutally eliminated the rebel Earl of Pembrokeshire, a Lord of the West, a month previously at one of the German courts. He was regretfully still extremely popular in the House of Sovereignty. Therefore the government's Act of Attainder against his sole heir, his Lady, had been ignominiously voted down. It had become a matter so delicate that the King wished me to root-out additional evidence against the Lady of Pembrokeshire herself, and to call on the royal cavalry, sack her mansion house, and bring her in chains to Londres.

That, Charles said, would present his enemies with a 'fait accompli', and should she meet with some accident on the long and arduous journey to us in the East...

I understood him perfectly.

Unfortunately, I fell in love with the lady, and only luck saved me from disgrace and probable execution. But Annah is so enchantingly beautiful she is impossible to resist: she wears her long hair like glory, sometimes black as ebony, or sometimes a fiery blend of metallic colours, as if coppers and rusts and golds were magically to become as soft and sweet-smelling as heather. Whenever she moves, she is as graceful as a swan. We're a striking, outre couple, I suppose, her blend of vivid colours and chunky rings and embroidery against my frosty-faced austerity, the loose black or white judo-robes I still wear, and that terrifyingly long sword dangling across my shoulders.

Even now, though, the King, or someone, forbids us to marry. We wait: sometimes I pray: sometimes Annah still hopes.

I soon found out she was nimble of wit; and she paints, in a luminous, chiaroscuro manner consciously evocative of Rembrandt; she loves music, deeply, as I do; she's quite a virtuoso on the harpsichord,-and is almost magical with a flute. She is also very passionate, icily sardonic, full of doubts, wild, and her technique in bed is probably better than mine - perhaps the odd few years she's older than me account for it, but then I like to think of her in basically sensual terms, because she purrs and scratches just like a cat, is moody, never says good-bye, has claws...

She laughs much: a cool stream chuckling over stones; or when her nerves are stretched, like the sound of silver shillings flung as hard as you can upon a marble floor. Her palate favours foreign liqeurs, as mine does. I might add, she prefers sunrises to sunsets, which is the mirror of my own opinion; she also values Venus, the bringer of peace, above Mars, the bringer of war.

One of the unique things about her are her eyes, which are wet and sparkling and green-grey, and are windows which show you her soul.

She was and is wonderful. She is full of wonder, too, sweet as any child's. The exotic or brand-new, the odd sublimity in the beauties of Nature or in the human spirit, they never fail to exalt her.

I remember how she came to me, that first day two years ago when I hardly knew her: walking like a superbly-gowned spirit, whistling an archaic and haunting monody. I was sitting among fragrant lilac shrubs, beneath walls that were, then as now, carved with heraldic griffons and a lipping, worn frieze of Teutonic Eagle bas-reliefs. The wall itself is very, very old, and is cut out of the same dark and heavy-veined Cambrian stone that built all her Pembrokeshire estates.

Anyway, I looked up from my "Northanger Abbey', to see faint clouds move as silent as ghostly galleons, in a sky of perfect blueness, and her. It was a magic moment: I was moved more deeply than I can say, though I think Annah sensed it.

We have never spoken of the matter.

Then, falling from a clump of low trees, moving to Annah's mouth-music, a host of what might have been bleached-white leaves swooped down in threes and fours, as she raised her unclothed arms to beckon. They were strange mutated butterflies. Soon hordes covered her with dew-dusted ivory tissue that was tremblingly alive...

A cuckoo called, somewhere. Then Annah, in her long gown of black and gold French lace, laughed and sang some more husky-voiced bars of music, and the flying creatures exploded from her like snow-flakes caught in a gale.

'So ...!' I said, standing politely, then bowing, simultaneously tossing the calfskin-bound novel to one side.

We walked side by side through a copper-coloured coppice, avoiding the toadstools, then entered a sunshine-filled glade. I blinked as she spread rich scarlet cloths, and we sat down half shadily beneath a continuation of those same moss-encrusted walls. Before us a tiny Greek fountain chuckled a jet of water into a green, circular fishpond eye-lashed with white lilies, and half covered over with the pink and white and blue water-flowers of Far Asia.

'Music--' she said, and grinned cheekily as an urchin. She picked at a burr, or a knot, in her swirling hair. (Which was dyed deep russet then, I remember).

'A mouth-symphony, my dear?' I said, nearly sadly because my own defensive irony tasted bitter to me, and guilt was producing its time-honoured melancholia. 'You draw me,' I continued in the stilted manner of the Court, 'as the Sirens Odysseus, but I may not come: and my bonds, though abstract, are real. Duty.'

We silenced.

She began to unpack the picnic-basket she had of course brought.

I saw the water's greenness glimmer momentarily, heard a diving goldencarp plop: innocent, dartingly unaware, huge dragonflies flew by on iridescent gossamer wings. 'But then,' I said glibly, scratching the bridge of my nose, 'all is -"by the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods--" and, see, Circe my enchantress, how you play the lyres of men's opened hearts ...'

She coquetted to my courteous sally, but fear of my own honey lies had frozen me, and perspiration pricked un-nervingly like needles of ice. Because I dared not play the old games of love, not with her. So I sat back and let my hands hang loosely around my knees, and I thought not of her merry country tune but of the profound music of Bach and Beethoven, and I weighed that against hers and her lovely but technically less than adequate instrument, those cherry-coloured lips. I smiled to myself then, wearily, and shook my head, for there was poignancy that way. You see, there were giants in those days, heroes, and now, nothing.

'I am so lonely,' Annah whispered.

Nothing.

She tickled the bare skin above my ankle-bone, above the stylishly embossed leather of my boot, with a single yellow flower. I remember how uneasily I smiled, and looked away.

'At Court,' she sighed, 'all arts are beneath the finest, most generous lady Muses. Emannuel, do they still dance the pavannes and galliards of the first Queen Elizabeth? Are there still balls with a thousand glittering guests, and Lords and Ladies acting out their grand roles in the theatre of reality, as we females display our finest wiles and plumage to all?'

I turned back smiling. 'There are, and they do. But, come now,' I said, as falsely sweet as saccarine, 'does Melpomene speak in you? Lady, surely you need have nothing to do with the Muse of Tragedy...'

I could have bitten my tongue out of my head.

I'd forgotten who the Lady was to whom I spoke, how she had suffered ...

But she only smiled a wistful little moue, and murmured, 'Ah, how I would love to return there, to Londres.' She met my eyes, her mouth smiled archly, but behind her expression was a naked pleading, a burning anguish. I thought in desperation. Look, I cannot tell her that her life is a closed book, can I? Can I?

Nor that the Empire says to me: Kill this woman--

* * * *

Two

IT WAS cold. I let my two hands walk across the leather cases on either side of the piloting gear, thinking. Two massive cases: one held the intelligence reports, documents and souvenirs from Admiral Deschernes, diplomatic effects. I still had the choice, you see, and it would be so simple, to forego what we'd all sworn to do. So unnervingly simple.

'We grant to our servant Emmanuel Kyygard, for faithful service to the cause of Empire ..." I hear him say it, as I eye the compass again. An estatehood from King Charles, almost certainly, for a victory of this gargantuan magnitude, for now we owned the Mediterranean. And the excuse would do: I would gracefully bow out of court intrigue and Imperial service itself, for I can no longer serve it with the quasireligious fanaticism my society demands. But in that future time, when I earn my bread by the sweat of others, there will be no more need of the King's pieces of silver, and I'll wash my hands clean of guilt, of hypocrisy, of the whole bloody business ...

Looking down upon fallow fields, cruising slow, low enough now to pick out tattered scarecrows and individual clumps of yellow dandelions beside the hedgerows, I thought then of the summers of my lost childhood. Of lovely Cornwall. Of mornings when the sun would lie, golden, across wheatfields equally yellow; but when the western wind galed, I remember, I would think of the corn-ears as bearded, impudently tossing heads, and I'd clap my chubby hands together and laugh in delight. In September the sky is a scroll; its parchment was the leaden overcast that unrolls into the northeast from the Atlantic's wild white sea-horses of surf. Annah had ridden with me; at our tumbledown, deserted ancestral castle of Tintagel, I left a posy of fresh-cut roses on my parents' grave. Yes, there I would ask - would have asked - to be granted my 'place in the sun'.

I spat into the wind again, wearing an iron frown.

Temptation comes to us all, I know, but that vision was damnably seductive. Inwardly I fingered the magic touchstone, duty, and I thought in sad anger, Ah, pale Charles, father of lies, lies-

South of the Thames still, we drew in sight of the outskirts of the capital itself, noticing the great grey sprawls of good English stone, the warm, ruddy brickwork, the spires and Imperial monuments. This: the greatest city of Europa and almost certainly of the world, even China or Brazil. Over half a million souls, they say. They say too that the Londres which was, long before the Fires, that our ancestors' city was still more vast, pointing out the hieroglyphic outlines still visible from high altitude. And perhaps 'they' are right, whoever they are; but I'll never know now, no matter how many self-contradictory encyclopedias I consult. I'll never know.

'Emmanuel...' Annah touched my arm, pointed, but despite my introspection I had seen. From our destination-of-record, the white Greenwich station, vast-hulled shapes were rising from their underground hangars, as threateningly grey as stormclouds. Yes, it's a magnificent spectacle, when a flight of skyships from the Grand fleet claws for altitude.

Absentmindedly I altered course to the northwestward, to overfly the Isle of Dogs and perhaps Limehouse, in quick avoidance. And crossed Old Father Thames. In the vee-formation of battle, the twenty-odd dragonshapes laid a course for interception: I glanced up from the compass, saw, was shocked numb.

'But - What is Kuard doing?' A cold hand, clenching inside my breast, froze off the words. Annah had gasped. I knew, then, what this might mean. And the falcons of the king raced for us, still rising as quickly as the pearl-like bubbles in weiss beer.

'Emmanuel,' she said, with overtones of fear casting a shadow on her words, and I didn't dare look at her face, 'it can only mean one thing. Those rumours drifting about in back-alley Ravenna ... they have heard too; they think that someone, somewhere, against the Empire ... has found an ...' she choked, could not say the words.

'Impossible,' I snarled. 'No: this is a maneuver rooted in political crisis only. Eireland say, or some petty rebellion or assassin's plot... Unless they do know something ...' my voice trailed off into silence. I knew that my face wore a glassy grin, but it had nothing to do with me, for fear churned in me, with another emotion more hateful still. I swayed to the heliograph, but another trellis-work of grey clouds suddenly covered the sun, drowning us in twilight.

Oh God, merciful one, cherisher of the meek, shield of the hapless ...

She was almost shouting.

'Emmanuel ... we came back incognito ... They aren't expecting us for some days or more. The Fleet must imagine the Lady of the West captured...'

God only knew what fears walked, what suspicions festered, now that the old Terror was loose once again.

The skycruisers mounted the sky ahead of us, outspread. Sun glinted from burnished parts as the lean sleek craft approached more slowly. Clearly they meant to drive us back, away from Londres. High over Ming Street I finally cut our power, a gesture of surrender.

'They might want us to put down at the Lea marshes ...' I thought with my mouth.

Or perhaps Greenwich itself, of course. My hands heaved on the steering bar; hydraulics groaned, and, rearward, the great black rudder, emblazoned with the heraldic ideogram of England's ruling house, the White Boar rampant, clicked in its lock-cogs and turned us.

Alicia of Aragona, the Duke's orphan who thought herself a woman already, tumbled out from the glass-panelled nacelle slung aft, her voice peppering us with a hail of questions that Annah tried to answer as soothingly as might be.

I thought of Cornwall, and the thankless future, as I slowed the engines' drumbeat, and when the sun disposed of its cape of grey I thumbed open the code-book to the cipher of the day and leaned across our heliograph.

* * * *

THREE

'THEN,' I mumbled, fingers clasped on the flask of mulled wine, blinking bleared eyes, 'it is not merely gossip culled from some Gypsy riff-raff, but... cold truth.'

We were all 'safe' at Greenwich now. Kuard van der Thorn sat in my cabin and shook a grey-maned, almost leonine head. Outside, through the bubble windows, I could see his own fleetship This England in another of the pens, aswarm with sweating, jovial mechanicals preparing her for flight. Then he stabbed at the map on the aluminium flap-table spread between us: at a collage of umbers and greens washed by sea-blues; foreign conurbations picked out in Cardinal red, trade routes cobwebbing in amber. Europe's patchwork quilt of statelets, cowed by the traditional red of Empire.

'No. Yesterday, the first accredited reports came in official sources. On the diplomatic front the Kaiser of the Deutschold affirms it, as do our consulates and the governors of our German provinces ... No.' He shook his head, and the lines on his face shifted as some profound, unfamiliar expression disturbed his legendary stolidity. 'The Austrian ambassador says nothing, knows nothing, but... Vienna was - how can I say it? - destroyed. Blasted into nothingness. Eighty thousand deaths...' his voice dwindled to a whisper, and I sat back uncomfortably, hearing in his tones rats' feet as they fared among dead grasses. 'My son Eli may have ... I...' his voice cracked like a broken wineglass, fell in pieces. 'At Ferdinand's court, he was. And there is no word.'

'I am sorry,' I said, softly, after a moment had died, 'friend of my father, friend of me.' Then: 'Austria will be staggering in total confusion, all communications disarrayed. Do not give up hope. You must not give up hope.' My words, so grossly clumsy.

'Ay,' he did not even raise his frosty grey eyes from the map, 'you're right,' he lied. 'I have prayed, for the first time in my life, that it may be so, that Eli may be well. Many times. They seem only words ...' He looked away, emptily.

An awkward moment stretched until it broke. 'Is Hungry-gates red alerted? And the Fleets?'

'What--? Yes, yes. But Emmanuel, a single night's work ...' He was holding my eye, and the faintest puzzlement passed over him as I must have - flinched perhaps -'We must have dispersal, 'way across the Continent.' Authoritative again, he swept a heavy, age-scarred hand over the glossy paper. 'Londres is here, so central. Look, one single... Bomb ... and our Empire would fail; collapse. The work of centuries, of how many lives.'

'Yes.' I coughed. The wine's fieriness licked the back of my throat. I stood suddenly, looked down again: at a pewter flask engraved in Cyrillic with the Boar carved obsequiously upon it. I looked again at the map, saw the shadow of a Boar rampant over all. That shadow was suddenly ringed with flame. For, one day, the shadow would be gone, and only the flame remain.

I thought of Espana; the Tagus glittering like snow-crystals in the early morning when Annah and I and a flamenco dancer and her guitarist, all of us from Seville, had begun a five hundred mile trek to Gibraltar; I thought of the coast of Barcelona where we'd transshipped for Portsmouth. And sipping my vintage, I thought of the other places, so many of them, so many. The Dordogne, Carnac and Navarre, spring along the Danube, and the Rhine valley where the golden flowers are the softest blanket imaginable under a drowsy May sun. Waterfront inns in the North, taverns like a dream of gold and smoke. Camus said that once, about Holland... I knew Europa, had roamed her, knew her secret places. I had found the true 'Europe', and loved her, for all that she was, for all the scabs men's sordid use of her had left, for all the surface cheapness and hardness beneath it all, she was still beautiful, as she had been beautiful once, long ago when she was green and young.

Lying upon her now, gross and warlike and corrupt, Empire. Compounded of all the old evils of ambition and rabid nationalism - and how many crimes have been done in those names?

And yet ... England, my England. What kind of a dilemma was this that came to gore me?

I unclenched my fists and looked at my family's old friend, who was gazing abstractedly down at the Imperial chart, not seeing it perhaps, thinking of his son who was lost. Somehow I was sure those stern old eyes could read me, see the twisted thing, the guilt inside.

I turned away, suddenly, walked to the ports and looked out at the energetic confusion of the Greenwich mooring station. I felt his gaze implacable on my back. 'I must see the King. What Machiavelli games does he plan, now?'

'Nothing,' his voice was flat, the words tumbled obscenely. 'No webs are woven. Emmanuel... if there is more to come, this may be the end. The end.'

I watched Annah in her long sable coat, three or four catwalks away, talking earnestly with some Negro. A triple gold ear-ring glittered in one ear; his Afric garb was strange, aggressively outlandish.

'Who is responsible? Does anyone know?'

Vice-admiral van der Thorn may have shrugged. 'Who can say. But Ferdinand and his Archduchess had called a convocation of the powers of Europe. The armies-in-exile were represented there, of course. The Free Flanders regiments, the Scandanavians, the Germans, all those. And those who keep them in arms too, as sword and shield against the Imperial progress. France's Marshall of the Field, the nephew of the President of the Italian Confederacy, one of the Kaiser's highest generals, two Iberian counts. It may well have been a serious attempt to unite the Continent against us. Did you not know this?'

'My God. No, I did not!' Undermined psychologically, I turned away from the port and walked blindly back to my seat. Kuard's eyes were on me; but I could not meet them.

'Few do, of course. They wished to keep it deadly secret, but we heard, we heard. Admittedly, only those in the highest circles of government know it. But I would have imagined that you would've heard, Emmanuel. As a master of the sovereign's intelligence, and figuring somewhat high in the scheme of power-politics these days...'

I paused, shrugged. 'I've been away.' I frowned. 'But then - it seems our Albion is the prime suspect, eh?'

'No,' he said, erect in outrage, then shook his head, slowly, firmly. 'Never England. I cannot believe even Charles would - No. Not us. Someone else. I will not even consider "perhaps" ..." He lapsed into brooding silence again. Not his only son. Not Eli. Not by the most malicious of all means. Not by an English hand.

To each his burden: to each his blindness. His patriotism was of the old order. And while he would always speak for England, right or wrong, there was a certain indefinable point after which he would feel he could no longer actively serve her. The murder of Vienna, alone, was far beyond this.

'I predict,' he said, 'enough pointing fingers, but a general rising of Europe is something else.'

I nodded. Kuard was probably right, their horror of the unleashed Fires or not. Almost certainly.

'But come ...' he broke the mood, smiled with an aged charisma. 'I recall some mention of glad tidings of victory, hmmh?'

'Ay.' I cleared my throat. Already, the well-polished rhetoric of my story was beginning to bore me. 'The Italians planned with the Soviets in a bastard alliance against us; but I caught a--' I searched, '--hint of this, by the slow addition of whispers, and contrived to obtain a copy of their Admiralty's battle plan. Knowing dates and the rendezvous point, a part of our fleet lured them out from Naples before the Russian navy arrived: we had additional ships concealed beneath the horizon, who sailed nor'-eastward, entrapped those rather stupid tinsel captains without their Eastern ally, and sank the greater part. As for Naples,' I added as an afterthought, 'come dusk we bombarded the city until it was afire, as a prelude to withdrawal. From The Lady of the West it was like a hellfire sea. Lord Sidney thought that in light of their treacherous surprise-that-failed, a lesson was needed.'

'Their plan of battle, say you?' He looked at me sharply. 'But - how did you manage that?'

I shrugged three lives. 'A piece of luck. Now, Sidney takes the Fleet to scour the Eastern Mediterranean for the Crimean-based enemy's warships, though I fear he'll lose them. Deschernes and the flagship were lost.'

'Hmm. Not all good news then. I'm sorry to hear of it, he was a good man Deschernes. Sharp at the dice-table, a generous heart, polished manners. I knew him well when he was - commodore, it must have been...'

'Ay,' I said. Paused. 'I must see the King...'

He nodded. 'I have no time for more myself, Emmanuel. I am bound for the Continent--' there he stopped and reflected on something. 'But, certainly, you'll find the King at the Tower, not at the Chelsea Palace. With Whitesmith; they've summoned there the Council-of-Empire to discuss this - situation.'

'Thomas Whitesmith?' I had stood up but paused now, head cocked, smiling crookedly. 'Is not Manchester first minister still?'

'Emmanuel,' his eyes warned me, 'There have been changes, since you went away. Northumbria is now the second man of the Empire, and I'd be wary of treading too close to him.'

'Hmmh... What of Manchester, though?'

'They say Earl Hollingshead still occupies the White Tower--'

'A few levels below the ones he is used to?'

The tired old eyes flickered momentarily.

'There was some whisper of ... I don't know, intrigues, plots in cobwebbed family crypts. Or somesuch. Whether true or invented, Whitesmith is in the chair now, and Hollingshead is no longer.'

'Even the name,' I hazarded, 'Is no longer a la mode?'

'I take care not to enquire into such matters. As I said, Emmanuel, it is a time of changes.'

* * * *

FOUR

WHEN we walked down the extending stairway outside the insulating cabin, the pens were all iron clamour inside vastness: a place of dragons. The next hangar's roof had been opened, and Kuard's own beast was now straining at the mooring lines, ready to depart. The flagship bellowed steam, and shrieked of its brute mechanical strength in spite of the flowing gracefulness of its lines. In one of the midships power-pods an Old salvaged diesel throbbed.

As we passed above, sweaty, grimed faces peered up at us from lathes and presses. Van der Thorn loitered, smiled down. I think his face was like a map of Passchendaele I saw once: contour lines of trenches that wrinkled on yellowed paper. The lines on his proud, eroded old face were faintly twisted with long-ago laughter.

'My Fleet,' he said to me, 'is configuring into a patrol-net. I myself will cast over to Brettaigne, help set up the best defense umbrella we can erect.' Nostrils flaring, he stared up at the leaden torpedo, incredibly huge and cloud-like over us. Two hundred, three hundred yards long, with the lifting capacity of giants, the grace of kestrels: the skyship 'This England', pride of our Fleet and scourge of the enemies of his majesty.

Again Annah caught my eye, fondling that Negro's leopard-skin doublet, laughing with him...

'Frafric... their Representative at Large, isn't he?'

'I beg your pardon?'

I motioned slightly.

'Ay. Look him up sometime, Emmanuel - the king will be telling you more. He's got great plans, him.' Kuard nodded. 'To aid this one against the Soud Afrikaan fiefs. Then to glean easy pickings off the loser; finally strangle the victor with blockades; and raise the glory-flag of Empire.' He grinned, predatory again. 'Ay, it's "still waters run deep", with King Charles.'

'If you had plumbed those depths ...' I whispered, to myself.

'And Emmanuel,' he ploughed on relentlessly, deaf, perhaps half senile, 'I have been thinking. Charles is likely to be pleased with your work in Italia. The next time I see you, what chance you might be, say Marquis of Cornwall?'

I smiled, emptily.

'It might be. God go with you, Kuard. And...'

He frowned, for several reasons.

'And?'

'Nothing. No matter... Good luck.'

'Fare thee well, Emmanuel..." He climbed a stairway to the sky; willingly mustered hands dragged it away. A diesel roared throatily, and long plumes of steam trailed from the eggshell-smooth engine nacelle. From the workpits beneath, a few rusty cheers and whoops came up, ignorant patriotism speaking its imbecilic mind. The straining kite-lines were cast off from the skyship, and she rose as softly as a huge ball of thistledown, and soon glowed with afternoon sunlight. I climbed quickly up a gantry, onto the perspex roof. Effortlessly, she glided off to the south-east, still rising. I watched until his craft was a silver collar tailed temporarily there on the horizon; and then I turned away.

I knew I would never see him again.

Quickly I found Annah sitting tailor-fashion on a bench of plain, gnarled wood in a wagon yard behind; she was watching the fire where some old silver-painted oilcloth from a skyship was being burnt in a heap. And as she watched, she swayed and sang an old song, a centuries-old, minor-key lament, in sad French. It was a long regret, over the dying of the religious Light: '... a Lyons, a Lyons ...' She sang of a Gothic cathedral, blasted, its great stones tumbling down; of the ritual burning of the Gospels.

My face twitched. I was about to throw some angry words at her, tell her to cease from singing that song, but I stopped. It didn't matter who might be listening. The danger was small and, more, it no longer mattered, really, if the King began to suspect I was one of the 'true believers' he detested so vigorously. I was through with Imperial service. One way or another.

So, instead, I walked across the grassgrown cobblestones and sat down beside her.

'Hello.'

'Hello,' she said, still staring into the quivering sun-yellow flames. And that was that, for a moment.

I said, unnecessarily, 'I go to see the king.'

She turned, looked at me solemnly. 'Do you think you will find out the truth?'

Later or sooner, it would make no difference in the end. I too peered at the warm blaze. 'I don't know. I think I have his confidence. It's hard to be sure, with Charles. I could tell you stories ...'

'What, Emmanuel, what if the story is true, it was the Empire?'

I looked into the flames a moment without answering. Then I tried to find an answer that would not be cliched, meaningless, flat, and dead.

'Then ... we do what we must, of course.' I didn't really feel as if there was any 'of course' about it.

We watched the flames then. Bright and leaping, consuming everything.

She began to sing another song, even older, no one knew how many centuries Old. A slow, sad ballad.

'Hark, the drums do beat, dear love - no longer can we stay;

The bugle-horns are sounding clear, and we must march away.

We're ordered down to Portsmouth, and it's many the weary mile,

To join the British Army - on the banks of the Nile..

I thought of the eroded funeral mounds that men still call 'the Pyramids', for no real reason, and of the daughter of the Israeli army-general. Old memories ...

'Oh Willie, dearest Willie, oh don't leave me here to mourn:

Don't make me rue and curse the day that ever I was born;

For the parting of our love would be like parting with my life,

So stay at home, my own true love, and I will be your wife ...'

I thought of Annah.

'Oh my Nancy, dearest Nancy, sure that will never do.

The government has ordered, and we are bound to go...

The government has ordered, and the queen she gives command,

And I am bound on oath, my love, to serve in a foreign land...'

It too was about imperialism and war and sorrow. But it was all clear-cut, predictable, unavoidable - fate, destiny. Weird. A hard road one must travel down. The sort of philosophy my father would have accepted joyously, perhaps.

I shook my head. Things weren't that simple anymore. I knew you could read that in my face. Hard roads there were, but so many; one must choose, nowadays, choose some ideal that will define one's solitary path to commitment.

It was a long song, but it came to end eventually, as dark rainclouds gathered in the sky. The fire was dying too; large drops of moisture began to spatter down, and red embers hissed. So I stood up too, nodded, indicated that she should stay, and said, 'Yes. Yes, that was - quite beautiful, Annah ... It helped,' I lied.

I squeezed her hand for a long moment, blew her a kiss; then, as she didn't say anything, I turned and left by the gates. She would back me, all the way, to the hilt. Whatever I chose.

Through the cherry-gardens, past a last sentry box, onto the cast-iron pier; there a long launch was waiting, which walked with six bladed legs upon the grey Thames. Backed by the tide, it took me to the shores of the city and to the antechambers of the king.

* * * *

Inside the Tower a stentorian aide announced: 'Emmanuel Kyygard, colonel-in-chief of Intelligence, and high emissary of the king ...' and I entered. Three men only were in the roomy conference hall: standing, Klaus Dekker, the German provinces' over-governor facing the uncouth and notoriously vigorous Duke of Northumbria, and, seated on a quilted-ermine throne, the king himself, Charles, effete son of the Empress Elizabeth.

'Ahh, our dear Emmanuel ... What news from Deschernes and the Fleet?'

I quickly knelt, kissed the offered ring. 'Your majesty, a great victory--'

Charles' eyes glinted as I spoke my picturesque quarter-hour long tale, but his mouth showed nothing at all.

'Good. Very good,' he said at last, judicially. He allowed some teeth to appear. 'You bring hoped-for tidings of good news, Emmanuel... We will examine the reports you bring and would speak with you in private, later, on these things. But stay for the moment. We discuss the "German question", that old perennial. Also, there are some things which you must be acquainted with, shortly.'

I bowed, sketchily. 'I understand full well, sire...'

Whitesmith rumbled heavily, 'Deschernes is dead, you say?'

'Ay, my lord Northumbria, lost when the Prince of Wales went down.'

'Hmm.' He turned his big blond head away, reflectively.

I could imagine his thinking. It's time for new blood; so that living museum-piece van der Thorn might as well be pensioned-off, because this is a new England now...

I saw Klaus Dekker absentmindedly finger the multicoloured imitation windowpane. The stained glass in the Norman arches threw rainbows around the massive chamber, and its famous facetted-silver walls gleamed. Set upon the floor's rich Persian carpets was the mahogany conference table, polished to its familiar mirrorness where Northumbria perched, and several uncomfortable plaited-metal armchairs; very little else. A spartan ambience?

On the table I noticed the usual untouched ebony ashtray. The king gloweringly disapproved of tobacco. A portrait of the late Empress hung behind Charles' right shoulder; her mad jade-bright eyes followed you inescapably about the room. I stood at something like waried ease, and watched his majesty whispering asthmatically with the inscrutably-frowning Whitesmith, overriding his shaken head and mutters of 'no, by my oath'. Then the king hushed him with a gesture, and smiled demurely.

* * * *

At some sleight-of-hand signal Dekker hinted at a bow, and began his setpiece speech. 'German nationalism is, in truth, reflowering, Majesty. Covertly: a little more stiffness in the dissension here and there, recently the development of a "maquis" of sorts in the backwoods ... The Deutschold and the still-free relics of the old Teutonic middle-Europe make no strong moves, secret or otherwise, but ... any major upheaval in the situation between Europe and the Empire and... The Kaiser would like to seize the chance, of a united Deutschold once more, but whether he is strong enough, or the Empire ever weak enough even behind our unfortified frontier ... So: where are we going vis-a-vis our Reichland, to butcher a phrase?'

Affected, Frenchified speech - sickly-sweet, as far as our Duke was concerned. I could see that much.

'Mmh. I think ... Northumbria?... a taste of our Dublin City regiments, hmm?' King Charles pursed his lips, steepled his fingers to Ely cathedral. 'Yes, a whiff of auto da fe, the death-kiss of mass reprisals ... perhaps some manufactured incident on our borders with one of the smaller fry of dukedoms, say a punitive raid... thus let us plan, ay?'

Sieur Thomas Whitesmith, Duke of Northumbria and governor-general of the North, chief adviser to the king, shook his head annoyedly. 'Forget this about "our Irish wolf-hounds": of what relevance is it?' His tarnished fair hair still moved with the motion. 'What of Vienna? Vienna has been cremated by our Old-weapon bomb--' my world darkened for me, then, '--such a crime, sire, if it doved abroad, would inevitably raise all Europe. The fear of the catastrophic Old days returning is ... deep. This is the kernel, the king-issue. I did not travel through the night and the day from Newcassel to discuss putting some Hun chaff to the Question. We're not, after all, the Soviet Inquisition.'

I might have thought of the Earl of Manchester, below us in the Tower's black-rooms. It's unclear now; I have difficulty in remembering it at all.

'Yes,' said Charles IX of United England, of the Low Countries, High King of Eireland and Prince of Orange-Ulster, Vice-Emperor of Germany, Emperor-in-majesty of the Grand Empire, Duke of Brettaigne ... 'Yes: we must find means of pinning the Austrian target, as a child would a butterfly...'

Cornwall: where all butterflies, they say, are born ...

'Then ...' he twisted one thin alabaster hand on the rich and fine-grained wood, 'we crush.'

'Ay, majesty, ay. But I propose we stay the while. Look, Europa is not united. Italia, France, Soviet Asia, someone will make the first move in carving headless Austria. Only then do we strike from our German provinces, using our massed Irish force, and seize the greater part. You see, the first one who moves - and I've no doubt that the Francais-bastard or someone is marching his armies already - we disclaim most vehemently, though not too stridently, note, in the pious name of all humanity. Others may well add their voice to ours, if we encourage the hope of making more pickings available on the Danube and Rhine axis.'

Coldly, now, came the regal 'Yes'.

'Europe is a pack of dogs. They fight one another while trying to bite the leash of iron we, one by one, lay upon them. For their pains they deserve a good whipping.' He smiled, his eyes flicking about to draw approval from our faces.

'Uhhmm ... yes, yes, that is well planned, our good Northumbria. A Declaration might, if nothing else, cause the slightest fogging of the accusations, certainly if we seem slow to take advantage. Surprised, you might say.' He paused, became introspective for a moment. 'Very well; that is how we will play the game this time around. And how are the back-up arrangements for reinforcing our army in Antwerp progressing?'

Whitesmith sat back, smiled. 'Your majesty--'

* * * *

FIVE

'--A Lyons, a Lyons ...' echoed my footsteps as I walked the dank corridors of stone, there in the vast fortress centred around an ancient Keep. The new and the Old. I thought of psalm 137. In the stony quiet the echoes rang out the old, rang in the new, whatever it might be. From the fortress-city of Old York, soaring from the mossing-over ruins of our fortress of the Isle-de-France ... from Munick, Brest, Stockholm, Hamberg ... from all the strong-cities that were the ultimate guardians of the Empire ... the Council was coming. I rounded another crumbling corner, trod in twilight among stinking rush matting. From a chill alcove a cherubic linkboy rushed up bearing tiny gas-lamp: and I nodded and began to whistle, softly 'A Lyons ...'

* * * *

Back at Greenwich I beckoned Alicia over from some flirting talk with a somewhat anaemic-looking Sky Fleet officer, and discovered Annah sitting tiredly under the craft's preburners. I kissed her, waited, then cast free from the pens. Some mechanicals waved as the bricked-over ground fell away below, two officers saluted with stiff formality. I waved back, leaning over, even smiled. And softly, as a thought in an empty room, we rose.

I turned the Lady's prow about, was facing westward, and dropped my hand to the power-levers. Slowly, reluctantly, we left the vast station behind, with its score or so of stranded whales, and crawled along the twisting silvery road of the Thames, heading into a blinding sunset. Into Rotherhithe I took the course of the old Jamaica Road, roughing-out in my mind's eye complex problems of 'windage', and the non-Euclidean geometry of roaring due east over the spherical world and still avoiding the gaze of Greenwich.

'Emmanuel,' Annah said then, after a moment, so that the wind-silence fell away, 'is it right, that we dare to do this thing?'

'Right', son of Man?

'Yes,' I said, slowly. 'The ever-changing wind turns about, to the north or south; but it moves in its circuits, as we do, under the instruction of God, moving to that Will. I know that now. I've got the strength to affirm, say "yes", even though the Light is dying. Our Lord the Risen Christ has few worshippers truly ... but ... I believe, that what we do now, the evil we resurrect, will also serve that immutable purpose. We must all do what we must. The kaleidoscope of God contained many pieces of vari-coloured glass. Each is a soul: each stained-glass tint is different. But together, they are the rainbow of His Will..Such pretty words.

But winds of hysteria were bursting from their brazen dungeons, armed with ice, in the brain's northern bleakness: I looked at their faces, and I only saw ghosts, or corpses animated with a pallid light, so temporarily that I could not call what we had 'life' at all.

Alicia snuggled between us on the command bridge.

'Annah, Emmanuel?' she asked. 'The Council-of-Empire is assembling in Londres: the king awaits. 'Neath the White Tower ...' she shivered suddenly, like an October birch-leaf under the touch of winds, but laughed to hide it. 'The Whits Tower ... oh God, when I think of the agonies, the vile things, the obscenities they do within ... I... In the chocolate-coloured bolero jacket her ribcage was like flat wings of bone, opening, closing. Agleam with perspiration, her face was as pale as ash, her eyes too bright. I eased the rudder-bar and reflected that, for all she was our adopted daughter still, soon I'd be unable to shield her, though Annah might still comfort.

'Don't, Alicia,' Annah said torturedly. She held the girl close, kissed the top of her head, hugged her again. 'Don't, for you cannot relinquish your vow-burden. Alicia? Think of ... hope. Of miracles. Because there is the Father, and a Kingdom of Heaven. Or think of what we did to Naples, Alicia. And hold on tight to the word "hope" ..

'Ay,' I said, roughly, 'don't cry, Lissy.' I watched a cloud-tower drift past, a dusty Impressionist mass, looked down at the miles-long waterfront of the capital. 'Please, please don't cry ..." I knelt, then, and fingered the age-smoothed leather of the case, smelt its hide odour: and every stain or blistered discolouration, every cuneiform crack, seemed like a hieroglyph out of Time. My lean hands swept again across the heavy Portuguese leatherwork, knowing it was reinforced with steel mesh, and that the brass fittings disguised heavy antique electrolocks.

I straightened. Of the five other people who knew what the case contained or had found 'it', quite possibly two were already dead. Of all the conspiracies against the Empire, we, the smallest, were going to bring it down. Perhaps that meant something, somehow. I did not know. All my certainties had crumbled into dry dust. All my thinking had been done, the pitched battles fought on the grey plains of my brain: now both victors and vanquished had withdrawn from the field, leaving only stillness.

In a daze I pulled out my silver neckchain, and sorted through to find the correct key. An ice-bright memory leapt upon my back at that moment, rode me: of whispers, about the island cities of Japan, the flowery mountains I had myself found there, and then I recalled the poem had gone on:

The wind circles us, turns our breath to stone;

Each movement is an etch upon Time's mask.

A bright moment traps us, change leads away,

As if our moment had not scored the years.

Yet: every shadow, each whisper, is not.

For now, but for all Time, and Times beyond ...

I had sat there for a long, long time, by the Adriatic shore, on the monastery's sands, while the winter wind rustled among the yellowing, spider-tracked pages, thinking. I do not remember that poet's name, any longer.

Then the key fitted, turned.

So I stood up and brought the Lady around in a slow circle over Westminster and Chelsea, and began to run away from the dusk. Kneeling then, I opened the case. Instruments glittered, inside: dials, bright metal and glass. Almost a work of fine art, full of the precision of Old workmanship; on a be-handled cask of silvery metal wrote a numerical inscription and some words of Cyrillic, the old language, not our modern pig-tongue.

'Emmanuel, God, tell me--' said Alicia, pain in her black eyes, 'I don't want to hurt you, or Annah. But I'm not a child. This ...' she broke off quickly. 'Oh God, what are we doing!'

I touched the rim-rail, looked down on the green fields of the South. The Earth was my footstool, and from this height its faces were one. And consience returned, to haunt me with its ghostly pains. I helped our mass-murders in the Provence, directed the bombardment of Krakow; I played all the Borgia roles; I provoked the 'Milan Days'... Conscience: that's my Cross. How many nails called years, how many wounds called days?

I snarled suddenly. 'Alicia, be silent! I'm carrying enough guilt on my back ... Do you think I could spy out the defenses of Italia again, and block out the images that tell me I am human? Or execute another held-hostage village in our German holds, and by using excuse-words like "duty" and "obeying orders" think it good?'

Silence wheeled down and exchanged glances, silence, like the sound of a gull after it has cried. In an eye of the hurricane calm, we passed over Blackfriars Bridge.

I wondered then if they would understand. Not Alicia, Annah - but others, the 'they' who never die.

I straightened up, and said in a dully normal tone of voice, 'I must visit my parent's grave once more, after this is over...'

These rituals are necessary, you see.

They looked at me, almost startled. I looked away, back to the Thamesside landscape, slightly too quickly.

And Kuard, let us both hope you never search me out in my hiding place, after this ...

* * * *

Below, barges, spread sails that were solitary red wings. The low city slid beside us: moored ships, capstan-dotted wharfs, cobblestoned spaces. Beyond was the metropolitan forest of unwashed stone where crooked-looking spires leaned upon the oddly low clouds. A great net of roads, crisscrossing webs of lane and alley, with a few flower-gardens and quiet, statue-haunted graveyards. And I saw people. I saw faces, turning up, then down. Immemorial faces. I saw England.

The Tower of London drifted into view dead ahead, reflected brokenly in the water. When windows sparkled at us I blinked.

'Alicia ...' winds rang out in that hollow pause. 'The Empire creeps on, grows. But we are not gods, and so, like that of Roma, or Bonaparte, one day our power will crumble. All Europa will rise. And then the Tower will reveal its ultimate secret. Not the racks, not the branding-irons and thumbscrews ...' The Lady of the West swanned down, over the ancient river, '--its arsenal of Old bombs; nuclear bombs. This I say because I know the Empire, its masters, I know how it will act.' I paused: 'And all the cities of Europa - Oslo, Le Havre, Versailles - all those I know and remember ... all will be consigned to the Fire, to save our sovereignty. I cannot think how many people ... As Vienna ...' Words and worlds fell apart; set steady on the rudderbar, my hand whitened around the knuckles. I could only give a blind shake of my head. 'That must never happen, Alicia, no matter what the price.'

Oh God, it must not. Not a second time ...

I set the device, waited until Tower Bridge was coming directly below, then heaved it into the clean air and sunshine and balanced it on the gunwale. A push, and it fell away: Nine minutes forty-five seconds ... nine minutes and thirty seconds ... A plume of spray licked up an impudent tongue, close beneath the citadel's ringwall. And I eased us north-eastward, held the engines at their hysterical shrilling, went over Whitechapel, and due north. I looked down at the walking talking people who were already dead: a cloud of pigeons swept past us, and some grubby street-urchin raised a threatening fist. Then, past Mare Street, I raced us due east again, away from the grotesque light of the distended sun.

Annah Alicia Father oh Father ...

There were minutes and seconds and instants, and each were wounds.

After such knowledge, is there forgiveness? Forgiveness?

--Father, for I have sinned ...

He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life ...

We must all do what we must. The Cross. The nails called years.

I looked back at the orange dusk. Nothing.

In the west at last, a thousand suns - The whole cracked sky blinding white--

The world held its breath. Someone sobbed; a chaos of after-images was burning my eyes out; then the Shockwave hit, tearing the tiller from my hands, blasting us into deafness. I collapsed, was flung onto Annah. For a long time we lay in the rush of scalding air and watched the horizon as it wrenched, sagged, jumped up, fell.

And I couldn't look back. At the lightness still unfolding from the heart of the darkness, at the boiling, twisting black clouds. I could only lie there, caught up in the killing web of history, and cry.