Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Underworld

Katherine Barley took a moment to admire herself in the full length mahagony mirror in the hall. She fastened the top button of her frock coat, brushed a sliver of ash from her bell bottoms and, ajusting her cap to a suitably rakish angle, braved her first step into the frigid streets of Knightsbridge in June.

The choking ash from the Icelandic eruptions, which had driven that hardy people into exile over three years before, drifted down all around her like ghostly snow on christmas day. There seemed no end to the permanant gloom, although the more optimistic natural philosophers still held to the opinion that the ordeal must end soon. The catastrophic failure of three successive harvests in the blighted northern hemisphere had cut a swathe through man's arrogant presumption of civilisation and were it not for the bounty of her benificent Empire, England surely would have starved. As it was the peasantry of France begged for crusts at Spain's fortified borders and whole towns in Russia were white with gnawed bones. The growing industrial might of the newly united Germany had stilled the iron claw of famine at its throat for a year longer but her lack of a navy or sun blessed foriegn dominions had lately exhausted her attempts to see the crisis through.

Katherine's friend L, a refugee from the Icelandic melts, had brought their two horse carridge round to the front of the house. It was all the more important to keep up appearances when no-one was watching. When the Prince Regent had died of asthma brought on by the first of the falls a long line of noble carriages had followed his cortege with few but their footman aware they were empty inside. Thanks to the tireless navigations of her majesties merchant navy, every ship carrying food to the motherland had ferried refugees back to the Antipodes or the cape. England's five and twenty million was but a tenth of that now. Katherine had chosen to stay, if England was to die she would share her grave she told herself, but in truth her motivations were mixed. The loss of so many of the first wave of ships to the revived pirates of the Barbary Shore had decimated the ranks of the landed gentry and new industrial class alike. Their distant relatives on foriegn shores, or panicking creditors packing their trunks back home, were all too happy to liquidise their new found assets for a song. Katherine found herself the owner of a string of properties in London's most sought after districts and estates in Scotland she'd never heard pronounced, let alone seen. She was gambling on living through this, but what else was there to do?

L whipped up the horses and they clopped over the cobbles. L was accustuomed to the cold of course but Katherine still found it strange. It was like a permanant October of a particurly cheerless kind. The white shroud of pumice, blasted high into the stratosphere to carpet the northern latitudes, reflected the sun's energy uselessly into space, she'd heard, while the dust caused the rains to fall impotently into the sea. Potable water was now rarer than champagne, they would all die of thirst before they ran out of tinned oysters.

The party was being held, with a stunning lack of imagination, at the main dinosaur hall in the Natural History museum. As the parties dwindled in number and attendance so they increased in debauchary and L had wondered if they were still fit for their company. Katherine, who required no want of competition to stand out in any crowd, regarded them as mere opportunities to conduct business. A deal made with someone with his trousers around his ankles was seldom struck to her disadvantage. L kept a wary eye out for the packs of abandoned dogs which had posed such a threat after the first mass evacuations. Though a brief, bloody campaign by the Inland Militia had put paid to the worst of them, as they had to the rioters and looters, one couldn't be too careful.

They clipped past the Palace. The Royal Family were safely ensconsed in Bermuda where what was left of the Navy sheltered them from the American hordes. The windows were boarded, the stumps cut eight feet up, tracing the line of last winter's snow. Katherine tried to remember the feel of the sun on her face, the sparkle of light in the first leaves of spring, even bird song. She couldn't really do it. She'd either adapted entirely to this situation, in which case she was saved, or surrendered to it, in which case she was doomed. She ajusted the silk bandana protecting her
nose and mouth and thought of nothing. The hooves of the horses were stilled in the feathery ash, though the grit was so engrained in their skins it was almost impossible to feel clean. She remembered how the first sunsets, before news of the eruptions had reached them, had been so beautiful. The first sprinking of the dust which was to obliterate the sun had painted the sky in a cornflower riot of colour. Now there was only shades of black and grey and brown. Even L's blonde hair was washed of all colour. Even the blue of her eyes was lost in the sepulchre of London. The Thames frothed with pumice. She squeezed L's cold hand.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Redevelopment

Katherine hauled at the heavy controls. The hydraulics, older than her and almost as well traveled, creaked like a rack then groaned like the sinner upon it but, eventually, responded however grudgingly. She was doing the work of four men but that, at least, she was used to. She sat back, sweating in a shirt two sizes too big. Though the tank was ridiculously heavy, pathetically underarmed and dangerously ill armoured, the driver’s seat remained surprisingly comfy. Sometimes she wondered if Rolls Royce wouldn't have been better advised to go into the luxury cars market.

She halted the lumbering leviathan and risked a peak through the turret. A line of abandoned cars had been trashed and smoke still curled from a few shattered windows but all in all the gentrification was proceeding apace. A movement caught her eye for a moment, her trigger finger tensed then relaxed as, pleased as punch, a crow hopped with its prize into the sturdy lower branches of a bizarrely intact tree. The sun flashed on the wedding ring on the mangled, severed hand. Katherine slipped back down and kicked the engine into gear. Clouds of black diesel belched out the back and she trundled on down Downing Street. In her experience the future was routinely underrated.

At School by the Sea

She’d been at the school for two terms now, with a reputation for being a loner when in truth she was simply alone. Perhaps it was best. Girl cliques can turn on one of the own like sharks with the scent of blood in the water. Some girls would betray all their friends to be the most popular girl in the school. Katherine’s only choice was vilification for copying the others, in a vain attempt to fit in, or ostracism for being herself. Alone in the dorm, she flicked through her diary for the new year, tearing out all the information save the phases of the moon.

She slipped through the woods and took the off limits path to the cliff tops. She clambered down the sandstone blocks, the cliff fortifications so eroded that it was hard to swear where the sport of nature ended and the work of man began. She was relieved to find her favourite cubby hole free of courting couples, glue sniffing pre teens or self pleasuring tramps. Framed by the embrace of the sheer crags around here, the sea lay like before her like a millionaire’s private movie screen. The wash and boom of the waves, a dizzying leap below her, churned in Dolby stereo sound. Impossibly ugly container vessels, long having abandoned any attempt at being ships, clopped along the horizon. A few gulls wheeled and clamoured, though they no longer nested here. She clutched a book as she always did, but seldom cracked its pages. The sea here knew everything she needed to know.

There was more though, sweet as it was in the last of the sunshine, she longed for the first of the autumn gales. She would stand here, the wind slapping her face like a mother, giving herself to the elements, the weather and the iron in the rain. She’d been taught that every drop of water on earth had been brought here by comets, plunging to the steaming planet in its infancy. Every drop of rain, every slash of spray, dreamt of comets from the furthest reaches of the heliosphere. A rain of destruction had brought life to the world. There was always hope. All she had to do was find a way to hang on. Everything would turn up in time, where else was it going to be?

Dead Ground

In the final year of the plague she asked if her child, although illegitimate, could be quietly interred in the church grounds if its time came. She was motivated less by the shreds of her faith than the cherry blossom on the last tree left in the churning mud. Her request was denied on the grounds of long standing tradition so she buried the child herself with the last of her strength, clawing the stony ground with bloodied fingers. The Cossacks gazed down, on the crag above the convent, sat on their squat, pig eyed ponies. It was beneath their dignity to rape her again.

Katherine wept as she piled stones over the frail, twisted body in a vain effort to keep the dogs at bay. She wept for this child and all those she had left by the roadside. She threw herself over the grave and shivered herself to sleep, cheating the carrion crows, but when she dragged herself back to her feet they were waiting.

She walked down the hill, without looking back, into the trees where the ground was soft as carpet to her heels bare and sore. She slipped through the gates, hanging off their hinges at the Convent and pushed through the leaf littered cloisters. The sores on her arms were beginning to flower. She coughed and swallowed the blood that bubbled in her throat and then spat out her lungs in her hand. She lay in the courtyard and stared up into a sky as pitted and brown as her eyes.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Gardens

They strolled on through the gardens, arm in arm to preclude any chance of a stray brush of hands. The folds of her full length long black crinoline dress whispered against the high laced boots she still affected. She wasn't quite yet ready to surrender to her age. Old men played chess with strangers beneath the elms. It is impossible to beat, or be beaten by friends over time and remain friends. If she glanced to her right she knew she'd see the sky was clearing, but over her left shoulder the clouds were dark as iron with rain.

Given a choice between friends and lovers, she'd always plumped for the former. Comradeship lasted longer than passion and, when she let them down in the end as she inevitably must, the pain though sharp as ever, didn't cut to the heart. She thought of herself as a good person, she couldn't help it, but her choices were catching up with her now. In this, if in nothing else, she knew herself less than exceptional. From her times in prisons, on slave ships, with the whip in her hand or lashed to the oar, she'd never met anyone who thought of themselves otherwise. Every rapist thought the girl was asking for it, every thief that the victim deserved to be robbed or somehow, bizarrely, just didn't exist. Every traitor had a moral rationale for his betrayal and rehearsed it to himself as he counted his gold. She wondered if her fondness for the company of L and her other friends in her youth, long gone but still sweetly remembered, was not in some way born of this. The gentle, furtive acts they perfected or blundered into could be seen by one as the ultimate expression of love and love making and the other as simply messing around. Her fulfillment was found in what others, in other circumstances, would dismiss as mere idle foreplay. The girls could dismiss it a childish games if they wanted, at least later on, and she too could cast it aside when the pull of the time streams tugged her rootless body away. In the final analysis most people's lives are tinged with tedium and their loves are much the same. We all have our moments, she mused, but few escape regression to the mean.


All in all, she was glad she'd opted for the quiet life this time around. An unlived life may not be worth examining but too much experience drains too much out of you. Quite why she'd married a Russian, particularly this Russian, was a mystery best forgotten. Their attraction had never been attraction per se, she was no stranger to that despite all appearances, it was more attritional somehow and to her chagrin and relief she'd succumbed. Alexi Markov fingered the brown paper package in his hand. A devotee of every second hand bookshop in town, he loved the feel of books beyond their contents. He spent hours admiring the heft of the leather bound volumes, crowding the shelves in the firelight, while she sat reading or staring into the flames.

Tiring of the clump of the mechanical stilts of the motorpedes on the roadway and the clatter of the Gentleman's Ornithopters overhead, they stopped for tea in Regents Park before returning to their town house. With the boys both off at boarding school there was no hurry to return. Despite the stern public notices warning patrons off such behaviour, she fed crumbs of seedcake to the fat, waddling pigeons. Once driven to extinction on their native isle by the pigs and the rats and the clubs of visiting sailors, a few stray sailors amusements had thrived in the botanical gardens of England and France. Some kept them as pets though, in truth, their smelly habits and querulous squabbling made them less than ideal in the house. She patted a Quagga, quietly cropping the verge, as the howls of the Thylacines carried over the limes. She was content, if not exactly happy. England had fallen without firing a shot. The last of her battleships rusting in port. It was hard to see how things could ever be otherwise.

The blood in my mouth tastes of you

Strapped dirty and naked to the rough hewn torture table, still damp with the fluids of the last to lay here, she cricked her neck to eye the transformer with contempt. The barbed electrodes, clipped harshly to all the usual spots, bit pleasingly into her flesh, the well defined discomfort a distraction from the torment to come. From deep within she tried to summon the rage she'd need to survive this.

Markov motioned to the serge uniformed girl standing by the devices. Her dark hair had been cut with blunt scissors. She avoided Katherine's eye as she dialed up the voltage. Katherine liked her oversize cap. It confirmed the absurdity of the current situation although irony would be little use to her here. She closed her eyes and then opened them again to fix on the ceiling, pretending it showed the stars. She bit her lip as if to complete the circuit and she was wracked with broiling, churning pain. She blinked rapidly, her only concession, and tried to tell herself she'd paid for worse than this before now.

She tried to breathe, her lungs filled with blood. She smelt her own flesh burning. Markov stroked her lithe, writhing belly and she stared at him, that was really going too far. She spat at him but her spittle described a pathetic arc like a doomed sattalite to land on her ribs and did nothing to cool her. Markov withdrew, still there were no questions. What did they want from her? All her comrades were dead, their brutalised corpses trucked round the villages to be exhibited in the squares as an example to others. Her brothers in the forest skulked in their holes, waiting for the planes from Britain and America they knew in their hearts would never come. She counted down the seconds but there was no end to her torment. She strained, suddenly panicking, at the thick leather straps pinning her wrists and ankles, then at the collar round her neck. She stared, wild eyed now, round the room. Markov and the girl were gone, the iron door closed behind them. She could smell her flesh burning. Smoke began to curl from the buzzing apparatus. She spasmed once more, in frustration with so much more than this. Her urine flowed helplessly. She lay back for the rest of the ride.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The last night on the liner

Imagine this, she said, stroking a stray lock of her long flaxen hair, imagine this.

You're a third class passenger on a cruise ship. You have no say over its direction of course, there is no captain, but you're on a fantastic voyage and everything's so exciting till you realise you're confined to your cabin. You press your nose to the porthole, glimpse the sun, sparkling on the waters, sailing ships in the distance, exotic ports even but the more you strain to use your imagination to fill in the gaps the more your state's driving you mad. What's worse is you don't know if everyone's at some wonderful party or they're locked in their cabins just like you.

So, you have time on your hands, you are not unintelligent. You fashion a key, from whatever is at hand. Somehow you find that easy, maybe that's your one talent or no-one else even ever tried before, too busy drinking tea and eating biscuits, who knows. And finally you hold the key. The key that will not only unlock your cabin and set you free but perhaps unlock everyone else's cabin too. You don't want to steal anything, you're not a thief, you don't want anything, just to catch a glimpse of how other people live. The chance to talk to someone, anyone new. There's no thought in your head you won't return to your cabin. You're not unhappy there, anymore than you plan to run away to India when you go up on the train to the lakes for a day.

Anyway, you make your key and you're fool enough to try it and sure enough it unlocks your door but you step out and instead of finding yourself in a corridor, free to venture a little up or down at your own pace, in your own way, and the next cabin up had been your only intention, well you find yourself..this is hard to explain...You find yourself stepping into every room at once. Only it's always a slightly different you. And you're aware you've been...splintered, not splintered, you're like twins, free, and whole and individual but also linked inextricably. If you'd been separated at birth and met years later you'd have the same hair, the same type of dog and if that never happened and she died on the other side of the world somehow you'd know, even if you didn't know her name.

So you step out of your tiny, dreary cabin into everyone else's cabin at once, but more, into every port the ship has visited, every ship there's ever been, every possible ship on every possible ocean. Something wonderful has happened, but something went terribly wrong. And, well, you find the key broke in the lock as you turned it. It's stuck there, you can't get back. You can't even make another key, that was only possible in that cabin, at that time, only that version of you could have done it. You can no more cut another key than walk on the water, only you can sometimes, by accident maybe, you can sometimes find yourself on a corridor, lost in the bowels of the boat with all the lights blown, you can fumble through another door. You're changed now, it's like losing you...never mind. You can't meet yourself there mind but, well, pretty nearly. It's easiest to wander into a cabin you've just left somehow, another you, your things are everywhere, if you look everything but a letter.

And, so, what do you do? You have nowhere to go because you're everywhere at once, but still you must keep looking. There has to be a purpose for this, even if it's only one you imagine for yourself. Only that can save you from the..insanity which stalks you. You have made a terrible mistake but if you do the right thing, if you all can do the right thing perhaps there can be some hope of ...restitution.

Ellie stirred beside her. Katherine was aghast. She had assumed she was soundly asleep. Ellie was willowy, athletic even in sleep grunted like a baby.
Nothing babe, she stroked her hair one last time, go back to sleep.
Ellie grunted and turned over. The stately liner chugged on into the diamond arctic night.


Tickets for the fortieth anniversary cruise had proved hard to find but she had, after all, after all this time, certain connections. The magnificent ship had symbolised all that was truly splendid about the long Edwardian era and she wouldn't miss its last voyage for the world. This world at any rate. Its elaborate radiography device chittered above them, steering safe passage through the icebergs. It seemed certain the interglacial really was ending this time, after all these years of false alarms in the yellow press. The glaciers were demonstrably on the march again, not just in Norway and Iceland but throughout the Empire from New Zealand and Pakistan. Some said, the usual posse of shrill, attention seeking alarmists she hoped, they'd make it down to Derby again.

Katherine decided to go for a last stroll along the quarter deck and slipped out of the single bunk, careful not to disturb her friend. Her own bunk lay pristine but she was restless now. If she wanted to chunter, she should do it to the stars, where it could do no harm. Katherine slipped out of the cabin. She took her heavy sweater after leaving L's draped over the writing desk. There was a note there with clear simple instructions. The iron door clicked.

Ljósadís opened her eyes. She glanced at her watch. She pulled her boots on.

The White Schooner

Two score yachts or more, stripped of their sails, bobbed in the blue jeweled marina. An air of hopelessness pervaded them at the best of times, despite the wealth lavished on their purchase, as few saw the ocean more than a few days a year. This was hardly that and few could look forward to more than a few years hauling coal or opium or fueling some peasant's last fire. As Katherine rowed through to the Stjörnudís they strained at their bounds like chained stallions but she was powerless to set them free. She'd known there had to be sacrifices. Everything had to pulls its weight here. She slid passed the last of the river junks on its return from her vessel. This last one had carried champagne, salvaged at vast expense, and four acoustic torpedoes. The surly crew had their money and ignored her as they spat into the water playing Western games of cards.

The white schooner's mainsail was up and rigged moments after her crash trained crew saw her approaching. She saw the headgirl she'd left on watch lower her absurdly long brass telescope and bark the orders out in Cantonese. Such an aggressive sounding language to western ears unused to its inflection. The meanings of its words changed with the tone in which they were said, much as in English it struck her. She pulled at the oars, heavy with the sweat of years of toil. Much as she enjoyed the clean physicality of rowing, the ever more parlous state of her back was not helped by the constant slapping of the waves.


Ljósadís sunned herself on the prow, she'd learned to grab what moments of leisure she could regardless of the embarrassment of company. Pearson, her long suffering but trusty first mate, did his best to avert his eyes as he stared resolutely forward from the wheel, plotting their path through the rebel mined harbour. Something about the Icelandic girl's appearance, not that he'd caught more than an unwilling, fleeting glimpse mind, obscurely troubled him. He was a man of the world but the girl reminded him of a painting more than a woman come of age. The answer struck him and he blushed before he had time to look puzzled. Katherine had long ago introduced her friend to her little box of wax strips, improvised from medical gauze and melted candles. They both found they preferred it that way.

Katherine clambered aboard. No less poised onboard than she was on land she still found the transitions problematic. The Chinese girls, refugees from the bombed out international school, nodded to their skipper as they busied about the deck. She had made a good choice although she still found their names largely interchangeable. The Lee Enfields, plucked from the brave but bloodied backs of men who'd need them no more, inconvenienced them little. Their natty blue and white banded Breton shirts had been her chosen uniform but the bandannas, and their fierce slogans of revenge, had been the girls' own invention. Rage alone could power this ship and of that, despite their youth, there was plenty. She was prepared to overlook the minor breach of discipline.

She slipped up to check on her friend. Dozing in the sun her cropped blonde hair was almost painfully bright. A discarded movie magazine lay beside her half finished fruit cocktail. Ljósadís hadn't heard of Grace Kelly, nobody had in fact, not yet, but no more improving literature had been to hand when they'd slipped from Vladivostok so abruptly. Katherine ran her salt calloused hand over the glittering brass rail as if her fingers trailed Ljósadís' arm but the sailor in her noted its smoothness. She'd been at pains to insist that such fripperies were the last, not first, items to merit attention while they were in port and their almost liquid sheen reassured her that the smallest cog in the smallest gear was shipshape and Bristol fashion.

The gull bright canvas flapped like freshly landed fish about her ears as she entered the wheelhouse. Pearson, as was his wont, made to step aside from the wheel but Katherine motioned him back to his station. It was a degree or two cooler in here. The looted tank armour degraded both her beloved boat's ambiance and handling but such precautions would prove prudent before they saw the dawn again. She moved to the still primitive sonagraph. It was a tangle of telephone wires and radio valves but she had done her best. On a whim she sent a ping coursing through the limpid waters, like an angel flicking a cathedral bell.
Pearson tapped a dial. "We have a head of steam Miss."
"Sometimes I think I do Pearson. Could you give a shout to Ljósadís...On second thoughts, I'd better do it." She rapped on the shot flecked window and the slumbering girl jerked awake and then grinned. She'd jumped up to take her chosen spot on the Bofors before she realised she was still nude. She shook her head at her sun befuddled silliness and slipped on her blue deck shoes before tripping lightly to the gun.

Barley cupped her hands round her eyes and regarded the heavy green glass, bowed like an old fashioned, or was that new fangled, diving helmet. Heavy formless shapes, like malevolent amoeba, teemed at the heads between the cliffs. A pod of whales perhaps, or more likely waiting Nippon submarines. She was glad the harpoons once arrayed for show round the officers mess were now racked here, close at hand. She sighed, how she missed the Ramilles, then pulled herself together. She brushed a hummingbird feather from the blue serge of her still immaculate blazer and straightened her tie.

The deck girls had completed their intricate pavane of departure. They made a pretence of manning the ropes now, a periscope would not reveal their life jackets or released safety catches. The Stjörnudís would make every appearance of innocently leaving the freeport under sail, in the hope that any attack could be evaded through an unexpected burst of steam. If it came to it the Royal Engineers manning the old Moorish fort on the head could offer some token of covering fire. They'd worked wonders in restoring the Napoleonic cannons to something approaching working order. Despite the odds Katherine remained oddly self confident. Naturally the Schooner had its own resources should some scuffling break out but she planned to keep her powder dry till engaging the main fleet of marauding Nippon battlecruisers.

The Stjörnudís slipped anchor, the rattle of the chain set her teeth on edge but her blood sang with obscure excitement all the same. Ljósadís tested her elevation controls. She wore one of the crews headbands now. Katherine hoped she hadn't guessed the meaning of the bandanna she'd been silently handed. Or, if she had, that she wouldn't take its suicidal bloodlust too much to heart. Bleak as the situation might appear on paper, this was only the beginning, of that she was sure.

She nodded her head and Pearson swung the wheel with a practised hand. A moment later than she was used to, the Stjörnudís slewed starboard. Despite her heaviness in the water, courtesy of the nuclear device in her hold, the boat was ever eager for the fray. On a beach still snake patterned with the skittering footprints of half a dozen laughing schoolgirls, a stately white Ibis stalked for stray fruit cake crumbs. It managed to maintain its dignity though to the locals they were vermin of a kind. Markov kicked the absurd bird aside in his haste to the water's edge. He raised his opera glasses, the boat was definitely moving. He nodded deftly to the weasel, hunched over the battered field radio, to send the prearranged morse to Japanese Central Squadron.
"What?"
"Send..The..Signal."
"Oh, right you are then, Guv."
Despite himself, Markov bit at his black mustache. Barley had done little to hide herself. She was usually more careful. Still, we all get lazy bones the day before we die.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Lines in the Sand

Katherine gunned the eager sunflower Elise. Puppy keen to overtake, it cornered like a house fly although at times she was uncomfortably aware how near her leather trousered bottom was to the ever more potholed road. She laced through the rumbling military convoys, thankful the waves of the troops from the back of their open troops seemed good natured for the most part. It was all a bit of a blur at this speed but she didn't recognise their insignia or even their flag. She knew the sleek, cheap Lotus was an anachronism in this day and age but the lack of other traffic made it tricky to judge if it was ahead of or before her time. She floored the accelerator again to make full use of a rare strip of good tarmac. The hazier the destination in her mind the more important it seemed that she get there on time.

"You need to get out, best to err on the safe side."
Jet biplane bombers filled the sky. The port began to pop with geysers of spray. The Italians were bombing their own navy now. The few remaining windows in the old convent rattled in their black lead frames.
"There's a safe side?" She was momentarily tempted.


Polite applause rippled around the sun dappled Hove County Ground. Sat on her rough wooden bench, Ljósadís licked her new fangled vanilla cornet. She didn't understand much of what was going on around her but was gamely determined to enjoy the incidentals as best she could. Katherine smiled beside her, twirling her parasol, they had that in common at least. Ranji, cutting a more portly figure than the dashing prince she remembered, turned another ball from Schofield Haigh to leg and he and Fry crossed for the single. Ljósadís clapped briefly, mimicking Katherine's dutiful applause although missing the tempo. Rhodes, as dour as ever, toiled away from the sea end and her attention wavered. Several of the members were still resplendent in their black top hats an hour after tea. She was glad to see that standards were being maintained. With the battle as good as lost it seemed to her ever more important to keep up appearances. She passed Ljósadís the opera glasses. All the bonbons were gone.

She wrestled the freezing controls in the cockpit of the Dakota. She'd always thought it one of the most beautiful of planes, as fine as the Spitfire in its way. Form followed function here as anywhere. She tried not to glance at the fuel gauge. She'd been running on fumes and there was no sign of land. The radio was a failing hiss of static. Behind her, still trussed in the salt rimmed trunk, the princess began to thump in panic. There wasn't long to go now, either way. The clouds were looking decidedly odd now. All in all, she decided to climb.

The first thing she did was reach into her shoulder bag of soft, embossed Spanish leather and gather the handful of cheap fountain pens she'd purchased at the peeling port station. Her fingertips brushed the composite barrel of her Glock and found it still uncomfortably warm, like a toilet seat in a busy train station. She tossed the pens around the dismal hotel room. With its narrow iron bed, dusty still lives and chipped jug and bowl on the washstand she could have been back in Eastbourne, except for the limp ceiling fan and incessant seethe of tetse flies. Over the next several weeks the pens disappeared mysterious into the darker corners, like jeweled tropical fish in an abandoned aquarium, as she filled the hotel stationary, strips of hard toilet paper and then even the pale slats of the blinds with her notes. Times, places, dates, she tried hard to remember, if not make sense, of them all. Recording something for posterity was, at this late juncture, absurd of course but it helped her keep a tenuous hold on events. Every day at six in the morning and four in the afternoon she waited on the jetty for the incoming ferry. She didn't know who she was waiting for and no-one ever came. Her beauty and then, at length, the increasingly disheveled state of her hair and only dress drew similar amounts of attention from the gentlemen and muttered disapproving comments from the ladies. She smiled hopefully at everyone who disembarked from the mainland. The hills, still forest clad in this remote region, chattered and clattered with snakes and monkeys and heavy winged parrots fleeing the trappers long poles. When her money ran out she lived off crusts from the cafe she'd frequented during happier afternoons. The bills from the hotel management began to pile up but, as their only guest now in a twenty two room establishment, Mrs Tu Yan was loathe to throw her out on the street. They took green tea by the koi pond. Two identical oriental children ran past them laughing, in silk tunics of cerise and scarlet. The tumour in her pancreas sent her insulin haywire. The lizards waited for her on the sun dusted wall. She had nothing now. Most people accumulated possessions on their travels, she sloughed them off like layers off skin. Mrs Tu Yan was lamenting what she termed a growing lack of manners amid the more common elements in Shanghai. There was, she noted in her affected Manderin, a certain want of chivalry in the world these days. Katherine nodded, more with tiredness than agreement, and watched an alien green fly struggle in her lukewarm tea. Chivalry, it was as good a word as any. She rescued the insect with a careful finger then flicked it to the waiting carp. Like her it would have to take its chances.

She opened her hymnal on page 65 in the dim Methodist chapel. Despite the dour nature of her surroundings and the sharply inclement April outside, it was always fun to attend her own funeral. Words in several hymns had been underlined in pencil, other verses crossed out in what seemed like the same hand. The paper was thin enough to roll reefer. The muddy organ churned out the same introduction it did every time and Katherine found herself joining in lustily. She might join the Salvation Army. It seemed a good way to meet men.


Chunky good hearted girls thumped around the field playing rumbustious hockey. They clashed their sticks in the bully off like Kendo fighting Samurai. A girl in black rimmed glasses practised riffs on her trumpet while a friend turned the pages of her music book and thought about boys. Their straw boaters hung on their backs like familiars. The trumpet might have been made of gold, catching gleams of the drowsy sun between the lime trees. House martins swooped and glided with precise joy around the eves of the main dormitory. Two girls lingered in the changing rooms after tennis to share a pilfered woodbine. Miss Barley had taught her for two terms now, French and Geography and whatever came to hand. The unusual circumstances of her arrival had long been overlooked by the headmistress who had come to rely on her academic and administrative skills more completely than she'd care to mention. Rolls had been declining recently, what with the recent unpleasantness in the east, but Miss Barley had proved uniformly popular with the girls. She also knew, unlike some others, where the boundaries lay. Katherine clutched a slim volume of Keats to her breast. She had permission to take six of the more trusted girls to the music hall on Friday night. A special treat. After dinner she played a little piano in the deserted assembly hall. Liszt's 'Consolation' was a particular favourite, if slightly beyond her rusty fingers. She couldn't remember when she'd last been able to practise, or indeed had learned to play at all. She looked around the dim chamber. Improving banners hung like medieval tapestries in a Baron's banqueting all. There was no-one about. She chanced 'After the Rain' by Eric Satie, then a little Philip Glass. All the girls loved her and she loved them back. She was happy here. She turned down the piano and picked up her gas mask. She'd better get to bed. Her form were up at six to man the Anti Zeppelin guns.

"Have you ever been in love?" It was as good a question as any.
She shrugged, then smiled, then shrugged off the smile. "I suppose, in my time."
She reached for her hand, suddenly.
"Don't leave me."
"I won't, I couldn't bear it."
They were both lying, however much, in other circumstances, they might have wished otherwise.

Radiation burns bloomed on the backs of her hand. Her cheek would always be scarred now. She didn't really mind. She'd always wanted to feel more like a pirate.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

A Sojourn in Iceland

Katherine strolled through the flower strewn meadow in her soft leather boots. Insects buzzed and fluttered around her voluminous skirts, the chirrups and calls a gauze of life in the brief, vivid summer. What they lacked in variety of species they made up in number. In the hazy distance the birch forests shimmered in the heat. She'd seen the country denuded by the Vikings, the winds whipping away the topsoil and the sheep cropping the rock bare but this Iceland had escaped such depredations. Laki towered above her, it was obviously still to explode. The observatory, perched on its top, glinted prettily in the sun. She could have told them, but she didn't have the heart. A sea eagle soared lazily over Grímsvötn, this was such a beautiful spot, but isn't beauty always perched on the edge of desolation?


The discovery of the lights, blinking back from the ecliptic, in 1859 had excited much comment. A chance observation, made with the sun directly behind the earth, had revealed strings of pearls reflecting back like cats eyes. Theories of huge diamond asteroids, and public subscriptions for funds to explore ways to mine them, had been reluctantly abandoned as the practicalities had asserted themselves. With the first heavier than air flight having taken place only twenty years before, trips to the minor planets were fanciful to say the least. Her suggestion, a week after her arrival on a battered whaling schooner in Reykjavík, that the 'lights of laki' might be artificial in nature, solar reflectors, built by alien colonists of the belt, had been met with scorn in the papers but an invitation from one Erasamus Hindley, the somewhat eccentric visiting English professor at the observatory, had been the result. It seemed self evident that a space faring species would become accustomed to zero gravity, regardless of their origins, through their long sojurns between the stars. That they would prefer to mine the volatile rich asteroids and drink in the golden bounty of the sun, while eschewing the gravity wells and no doubt noxious atmosphere of the inner planets seemed self evident to her.

She had accepted the note in her hotel more in the hope that the errant Professor had fortified the observatory with some proper tea and perhaps seed cake, the native's fondness for rotten shark and whale meat had not grown on her. She was stunned by the beauty of the women here, although she'd often been struck by the disparate and constant beauty of the women of all four corners of the earth. Perhaps rotten shark meat was good for the skin. It was strange, she'd often thought that a vigorous mixing of the races produced the most lovely women, hybrid vigour if you will, yet here in Iceland, long the most isolated people on earth, every girl was a princess, carved fresh from the white of the ice and the blue of the skies in her eyes. Despite the ravages of the implacable ice, the ashfall and smallpox and famine never more than a wet summer away, a vibrant common beauty bloomed as sweetly in the bars of Akureyri as it did in the meadowlands here. She gathered herself and pressed forward through the meadowsweet and dandelions. Her ribs felt tight in her tightly laced bodice. The silk of her shirt was sheened with sweat beneath her arms. It had, to coin a phrase, been quite a while.

The slight breeze was still cold as it cut from the ocean. The cart road up Laki, over five thousand feet high, twisted yellow and white through birch, flower speckled grass and finally tumbles of glacial rubble as barren as the moon. She waved to the waiting coach driver, as his two tough little ponies cropped at the verge. Katherine already loved the tough, piebald little horses. Dwarfed by the conditions, toughened by the winters, wild as the wind and beautiful as the flowers, no two were the same. She loved their ragged coats, their eyes dark as the northern winter, their reluctance to take even sugar from her hand. She clambered aboard the cart, in truth it was little more than that, and the tough little ponies clipped off without needing the husky driver's bidding.

She attempted to engage the driver in a little conversation. Her Icelandic was ignored, as was her Danish. She didn't stoop to attempting her few words of Faroese. It was hard to break the ice with the locals, so to speak, but friendships once established would endure while even the lava wore away. She liked it here, she could see herself riding wild horses, making chains of wild flowers and climbing the glaciers with gangs of wild eyed boys. She would have stayed if she could but, of all her myriads of possibilities, that was her only closed option. She sighed and arranged her layers of heavy skirts over her knees. It didn't do to push things. The mighty great geyser itself would soon be blocked by tourists throwing in stones to trigger its eruption. All they'd had to do was wait a little while and soon one would be waiting forever. Still, the Gullfoss Waterfall was as beautiful as ever. She imagined bathing in its bracing waters, still fizzing from the tumult, and the face of whoever might be waiting by its side.

She raised her opera glasses. A man of comfortably upholstered dimensions was waiting in the high domed observatories small gravel courtyard. A fine set of mutton chop whiskers, the heavy tweed of the alpine adventurer and a spindly set of eyeglasses impressed themselves upon her eye as they clopped ever closer. The horses were almost cantering now, strong as pit ponies, she wondered if they had names. The cart slewed to a halt, only then did it strike her how rough the ruts had been on her back.
"Miss Barley?"
"Professor Hinley I assume."
The Professor held out a hand to help her down. It was quite uncessesery yet still she appreciated the gesture. Politeness and manners are all that keep strangers from each other's throats, even here. They retired to his study for refreshments. She was encouraged to see a full tea tray, scones, lemon cake, a little sharp cheddar. She realised she hadn't eaten all day.
"A most singular theory, Miss Barley." He proffered a china cup of English Breakfast tea. A professor's stipend clearly didn't run to a butler.
"The merest trifle Sir, I trust I merely echo your more considered imaginings."
"Indeed. There can be no doubt. We have visitors." He plumped for the fruit cake, she a slice of lemon curd.
"Some are calling them Angels." She had no idea if the idea had yet occured to the populace at large, but the public's desire to see Angels in the clouds was surpassed only by their fondness for the devils beneath their beds.
"No doubt, perhaps that's what they are."
"Should we persue this?" She was serious. "Won't the populace fear invasion?"
"Perhaps to unite against a common enemy would still the hand on the swords which lie between us."
"Perhaps." She knew better but it was too wearying to say. "My feeling is, if they wanted our planet they would have taken it long before our first cart wheel bit in the clay. They are happy where they are, mining the minor planets and the sun. We too should be..content."
"How many would you put their number?"
"There is no way of knowing how many lights are inhabited, or how many might inhabit each one. Perhaps a billion?"
The Professor was taken aback. Katherine was surprised. Had he genuinely not considered that the visitors, infinitely more advanced in the ways of natural science and possessed of far greater materials and energy than the trifle which accrued to the earth, might already far outnumber the inhabitants of earth. The visitors might have worked their for a million years, there simply was no way of telling.

There was barely an hour of darkness at this time of year. Katherine and the Professor, fortified by a small glass of port his comely visitor had politely declined, waited patiently for the limpid sky to reveal their quarry. As luck would have it the clouds were few and the great refractor, now pinned in its position, revealed the pearly strings. As the earth completed an orbit of the sun over the course of a year so the entire plane could be surveyed. Perhaps three thousand of the lights had been catalogued by the Professor. She wondered if the visitors were aware how their solar arrays reflected the light of the sun back to the third planet in the system when she sun was directly behind. She remembered the eyes of sugar gliders in the forests of Australia, reflecting her miner's lamp back at her as the Doprodonts scratched in the clearings. Perhaps they were waiting for mankind to venture out to them, alerted to intelligence if only by Mr Marconi's radiophonic dabblings. Perhaps they were entirely artificial. Perhaps they just didn't care.

The Professor took his photographic plates, absurdly heavy in their frames, while Katherine tweaked the crank to stare at Saturn, at Jupiter, at Europa herself. She imagined twirling the focus dial until she could see her own bare footprints up there. Other worlds, other times, she felt ragged as a spider's web strung between two waving branches. She returned the mighty mirror to its previous settings relinquished the worn leather seat. Though the Professor seemed eager to share his theories through the night she elected to retire as soon as seemed proper. Her travelling had tired her and four days of drift without food in that leaking lifeboat before her rescue had played merry havoc with her skin.

She breakfasted with the professor, although kippers were never entirely to her taste at so early an hour, and cadged a lift down to the nearest town. There she bought a paper, some necessary toiletries and made the acquaintance of one Ljósadís Jónsdóttir. The girl wore clogs and a hessian dress and worked canning fish and sewing through the winter. Katherine hired her as her chamber maid on the spot. The observatory, after all, could do with a dusting. On the way back to the Observatory Katherine told her a little of the stars while they named all the horses together. As the weeks passed, as Katherine's plans for an exothermic drive took shape upon the professor's easel, as funding was arranged from Her Majesties private funds through the usual channels, Katherine and Ljósadís became friends.

Tiptoeing into their room after a long autumn night at the eyepiece, Katherine lay carefully beside her and watched her sleep. It was the tiniest details which mattered ever more to her, the candlelight flickering through her flaxen hair, her chemise still carelessly open. She slipped out of her clothes, easier now as she'd gradually sloughed the restrictive fashions of the day in favour of the boy's work clothes she felt most at home in, and snuggled down around the sleeping girl. Ljósadís smiled in her dreams and Katherine's fingers longed to wake her. She bit her lip and for a moment her heart was cold as the heart of Europa. She knew the ship was little more than a futile gesture, there were three years left here, little more. She knew they'd both die in the breathless void between Mars and Jupiter some little time after. Was it worth it? When the Visitor's sleek mechanical pods began to land in the ice, burrowing in like ticks, their ariels upstanding like bloodworms in the ooze, the priests and the dreadnoughts would be as helpless as eachother. She brushed a stray strand of her from the blonde girl's temple, then kissed the spot. She slept but her dreams were strange to her and she woke unrefreshed.


The second bench tests of the improved Exothermic drive were an outstanding success, thanks in no small amount to the dedication and precision of Pearson's detachment of Naval engineers. Ljósadís, still nominally in Katherine's employ out of the generous bursary Her Majesty had seen fit to bestow her, heard the whoops as she tended to their horses. She felt the ground shimmer around her. Miss Barley had said she would show her every star in the sky and she knew she'd be as good as her word. And when Katherine ran out of new stars to point to her, when the single porthole iced over and the canary died, when the only warmth left lay in each other's thin arms, when the oxygen pumps fell silent and the last of their water dried on her lips, Ljósadís would tell her their stories.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Red London

Like so many malevolent mechanical toads, the red tanks squat in the bullet pitted entrances to Whitehall and Pall Mall. All the phone lines are down. A few breached barricades of buses and prams still burn on the A41 out of Finchley but yellow British bulldozers, driven by uniformed British men, are fast clearing them away. Several oily stains, which might once have been men, are doused with spades of dank sand and forgotten. Bulbous primitive helicopters thunder into Hyde Park every couple of minutes. Soldiers in outsized caps and coats, which make them appear even younger, check the ill printed papers of sullen throngs at the checkpoints every hundred yards. Not one of them can speak three words of English and not one will have to learn. Already some of the blanket 'preventative restrictions' are being lifted. Katherine's Russian is clipped and precise and the barbed wire parts like old testament reeds.

Despite, or perhaps because of their wearying familiarity, the elements prove more of a drain on her still tender psyche. Katherine battles to her rented, cold water flat against the sullen drizzle and the relentless brown of the buildings and the dead battleship grey of the sky. Her stockings are laddered and her court shoes are still damp from the downpours three days before the unopposed invasion. All the way home, she can't remember if she smokes here. A newspaper poster of the newly crowned Queen peels from the wall above her bed. She presumes it's the Queen, the doesn't recognise the face at all and it seems bad form to ask. The damp conquors the ceiling, febrile continents of mould spread is strange configurations, like maps of the 16th century. She reads a Cosmopolitan from more than a world away and hides it under her mattress from herself. Her skin is smooth as a snake's in her sleep. Sometimes she feels like an Calcutta street hustler's cobra, she can't hear the music but on she dances just the same.


Over her lumpen valve radio self selected trades union officials welcome what they now coyly term 'recent developments'. The voices of others are strangely absent but entirely uncommented upon. She struggles in vain to find the light programme. She listens to dinner music from the south of France while she still can. The cinematograms in Leicester Square blare stirring martial music from their darkened lobbies. Mighty posters of gaunt but godlike workers, cast from bronze or hewn from granite, hang from Marble Arch, already tattered at the edges. The streams of refugees, heading for rumoured ships waiting on the Clyde and the Tyne, have run down to a trickle. Maps, printed several years before, instruct the remaining populace on the approved new names for their capital's landmarks. Due to overwhelming proletarian demand, apparently, nearly every prominent building, square and park is to be renamed after the same person, to avoid confusion perhaps. A sudden shortage of wood means the hangings are from dock cranes, six or ten at a time. Katherine fills in her reports dutifully, like a postcard from a South Coast holiday. The bells of St Pauls are lowered and smelted for busts of the new Praesidius. The last three rooks lie butchered in the tower's litter ruined grounds.

She's awoken by the drone of four engined bombers, blackening the sky like Passenger Pigeons. They drone across the grim horizon to land in barred airports in Belfast and Dublin. One by one they taxi in turn to their resting places, facing west across the Atlantic. Their rivets are rough as an old miner's hands. She wonders when Markov will turn up like a bad rouble. Alan the Weasel would be in his element, trading sour cabbage for widow's wedding rings. She leans down damp swollen sash windows and reads the letters dumped in the postbox next to her own. A mother's birthday letters to the last known address of a long lost son. When she goes out, to search unsuccessfully for sugar, for the first time anywhere the stray cats run scared.

Rumours abound. A destroyer, carrying the Royal Family to Canada, is presumed lost to unspecified submarine activity in the Irish sea. Loudspeaker vans alternately appeal for calm and demand spontaneous and heartfelt celebration. Members of the former cabinet and its shadow are retiring from public life for health reasons, or plunging through fourth floor plate glass windows, with metronomic regularity. The People's Emergency Committee issue patriotic orders that the straggle of strikers left picketing the ports are to be shot. The collapse of bread supplies is traced to the nefarious activities of the Americans and Jewish saboteurs. The New Times and People's Telegraph soldier on in 'changed circumstances' with much the same staff as before. Katherine cleans her anachronistically sleek sniper's rifle, her hair still uncomfortable in its blunt cut bob. She prefers it cropped short, as she'd worn it as a girl. She wonders at the heaviness of everything here, the spoons, the shoes, the door handles. She wonders if those who'd most stridently berated the niggling faults of democracy in their homeland still welcome its annhiliation quite as much as they'd hoped. Oxford and Cambridge are quiet as lambs. She feeds the sparrows everything she has and the little she steals and still they go hungry. Rascally cockney sparrows line up for their ration in silent, industrialised rows.

Sometimes the power of a gesture rests in its very futility. Her duty is clear even as her loyalties are blurring. She longs to be gone from here and staring at the sea, longs to stand cold and spray flecked and wind smacked and lonely and at one with the gulls and the sky. She is no English martyr. She is here to do a job, in this new worker's paradise, whatever job needs to be done. Whatever the calamity, however noxious or alien the system, there is never any shortage of quite ordinary chaps suddenly quite happy to betray, butcher or bury their neighbours. Already the statues are being erected. Already she confuses the Dear Leader's determined, if not handsome features, with her last glimpse of her father's face in her dreams.

Powdered egg and semolina, housewives queue for turnips after nine hours of work. Gangs of turned out dogs haunt the streets, baying till morning between the rumble of armoured cars. Katherine visits the National Portrait Museum and catches sight of herself, in sentimental pastoral garb, in 1736. Hudson had caught her eyes, the old fraud, and they stare back at her now but still she feels oddly insulted. There are blatant white gaps everywhere, the good stuff was packed on the first armoured trains back to Moscow. She washes her newly prim hands in a porcelain sink as heavy as fossils. The latest headlines warn against 'provocations' and 'stern measures' against the hooligan anti proletarian elements. The bathroom ceiling drips steadily, long after the rain. Plans for huge vampire castles, jagged slags of concrete white as wedding cake icing, are front page news in papers of six pages. The future, it seems, has begun.


Grown men make little pistol gestures to each other in the Post Office queue for identity papers and tell themselves this is enough. The heroes are already dead, their skulls splintered, unknown and unlamented. Nelson has been pulled from his column, libraries cleansed of unhelpful works, everything is now forbidden or compulsary. As ever a few fight, a few more collaborate with unseemly glee and everyone else just gets on with their lives as if the clouds are the same colour they ever were. Even the rowing boats on the Serpentine are confiscated. Alan the Weasel pulls up a fourteen year old's skirts in a rancid back alley while his mother waits in his purring Austin, doing her lips in the mirror. The holidays are renamed. There will be a red star atop a New Year's Tree this year. The schools are reopening. Katherine waits on a rooftop, fortified only with vimto and spangles, as meagre crowds are bussed in and mustered for the Dear Leader's parade.

The leaves of the trees wave in approbation. The black limosine is heavy and slow as a hearse. Katherine stares down the calibrated sights and Laura Veirs sings in the shells in her ears but her thoughts are elsewhere. She blinks and gathers herself. The crosshairs meet on a bald spot his statues curiously omit. He is fatter this time than she's seen him before. In the snows of a railway station in Estonia, in the heat and stink of Alexandria, how many times does she have to do this? She slows her heart to a crawl, to a stop as she squeezes the trigger.

She doesn't wait to see if the heavy mercury tipped bullet hits home. The stock is in her pocket before a speck of heavy Georgian blood despoils Markov's purloined brass rimmed binoculars. Crude sickle winged jets roar over even as the motorcade slews to a stop, twisting grotesquely as a snake forked by a gardener. Ships hoot on the river. Daisies bloom before the mower's blade. She will let their revenge consume them. War is the only thing which makes a difference. Heavy shod children clap and skip in the puddles in the playgrounds, no matter how bad things get, people still have a good time. Already she can hear the grindings of extraordinary engines and, for a moment, quiet as pins in a drawer, the ticking of every watch in the country.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Tea with Professor Hinley

“Ah, the summers we used to have, at least, the summers a boy remembers.” Professor Hinley was in typically expansive mood as they strode across the quad in the freshly washed sunlight of early June. Far off came the unmistakable thwack of leather upon willow and the occasional muffled splash as some lithesome undergraduate toppled off his punt into the cam. Katherine enjoyed the light kiss of the sun on the back of her neck but wasn’t one for nostalgia, in her position there seemed little point. The old boy must have cut a dashing figure in his undergraduate days all the same. A cloud put a hand over the sun for a moment and the air was like ice on her cheekbones.
“If we could return to the facts of the matter..Professor?”

Hinley had paused as the first swifts of the year tore screaming through the quadrangle. There'd be fewer of them every year now, but Katherine bit her tongue. The delirious gang roared in tight formation, up and over the tiled roof, like so many experimental 50’s British fighter jets. She watched them go and felt her heart fly with them. They did everything on the wing, sleep, eat, mate and die. There were connections everywhere. He was looking older, or perhaps she was feeling younger. Either way, it was time to focus on matters at hand.

Professor Hindley stared on at the space the swifts had instantaneously vacated. Despite his affectation of good humour an observer might have said he looked sad for a moment. Miss Barley's visits were ever more infrequent now, and the notes on her 'voyages extraordinaires' by degrees more random, despite her best efforts at categorisation. Still, he had reconciled himself to the inevitable. He knew the college had long since passed from its former pre-eminence as the locus of her investigations, however vital his role had been at the start. Just as the weeds and birch had reclaimed the still sealed off site of their former laboratories, indeed the first ferns had cracked the concrete cap while the remnants still smoldered, so the lure of the chronosphere had inevitably enticed, enraptured and now perhaps captured the girl. Still, one must press on regardless, despite Miss Barley's ever more obvious distance from the original aims of the project and the occasional unpleasantness in the press. Terms like armageddon and apocalypse were tossed around with all too gay an abandon these days, in his earnest estimation. There have been a thousand minutely discussed and devoutly believed scenarios for the end of the world, or, to be more precise the end of our undisputed soveriegnty in it. Be they economic or ecological, geological or theological, the only factor they shared in common was that, up till now, they'd been wrong. He'd fancied he'd write a paper for the Royal Society on the matter, science, if anything, should be an optimistic endeavour, but Miss Katherine had proved somewhat reticent on the matter and he knew better than to press her on such issues now.
“Tea?”
“Most kind.”
“Our assassins will be waiting.”

They skirted her mausoleum without comment. The pink blossom hung heavy on the aging cherry trees, long after it had blown from the avenues which led to the river. Even the sun was reluctant here. A few leaves from the previous autumn, or perhaps many autumns before that, clung to spider dank shadows. She shivered as she walked over her grave.


Markov and his disreputable cockney sidekick Alan the Weasel were indeed scuffing their shoes in the Professor's immaculately disheveled study. His batman, Caruthers Smith Thompson, barely caught her eye as he bade her enter, so keen was he to keep the two miscreants in view and protect his master's silver.
“Markov."
Even as he greeted his surly visitor, the Professor's habitual bonhomie was strained. The Russian, for his part, stared at the English woman with barely concealed loathing while the Weasel's glare was tinged with polecat lust.
“Miss Barley, more beautiful than ever. The whole...” He passed his hand over his face “It suits you.”
He half rose to acknowledge her, his English had improved, if not his dental hygiene.
“I don't know about that.” She kept her thick leather jerkin tight around her, despite the warmth of Thompson's generous fire.
“You must have Russian blood.”
“Oh, I've had plenty, in my time.”
“Now, now, such unpleasantness is long forgotten.”
“Not by the dead, in my experience.”
“Tea, Mr Markov?” The professor stepped in before things became strained, he hated any fuss or bother. He arranged his not inconsiderable bulk in a leather chair which sighed softly in accepting its accustomed burden. “and a little raw meat for your friend?”
The professor smiled winningly. Alan's teeth showed for a moment, they might almost have been filed to their points. The Hurricane Lamp above the alcove which afforded a splendid view over the tarpits began to rock a little in the still, early summer air. She glanced around at the familiar study, the bound leather volumes of Kepler and Newton, the quills in the Xin Dynasty vase on the writing desk next to the new fangled typography apparatus. She was touched to see one of her few attempts at a watercolour tacked up behind the easel on which she'd first outlined her plans for the chronotheric interloculur to the skeptical high table. Hinley had been the only one who'd listened. She really should have worn a longer skirt.

Katherine found herself again, it was so easy to drift off these days. She accepted her Darjeeling in a china cup so ancient it was almost transparent. A dash of milk and a pinch of sugar, the admirable Thompson never forgot what one preferred. She wondered if he ever forgot a face, or rather her face, her appearance had proved somewhat malleable over the years. She'd read that a large portion of the human brain is devoted to facial recognition, so important in such an essentially social - and warlike - creature as ourselves. She wondered if her own abilities utilised a similar sphere of grey matter. She recognised times far younger or more ancient than she'd known, just as one sees the face of one we've loved in their earliest photograph or one step from the grave. She had seen too many of her fellows born, age and die and had no wish to see the same of her country.

The weasel scratched himself like a tinker's second best dog. Katherine rather liked dogs, they always seemed so busy, places to go, people to see. How much easier than her current position. She affected to gaze around once more, the ornate brass spyglass, the quagga head on the wall while in fact observing Markov's nervous, expectant fingering of the one shot revolver in his jacket pocket. At least Barley hoped that was the nature of the item. The unmistakable whiff of freshly grilled crumpets under the tiny grill next door regained her attention.
“Is that a new picture, professor?" Markov didn't miss much, except when brushing his teeth in the morning. The touch of the gun, as so often with those of his dubious profession, momentarily emboldened him far beyond its meagre range.
“Hmm?" The professor cast about for his slippers. Archie, the aging academics indefatigable African Grey, trilled briefly from his customary perch high over the symphonion.
“The Vermeer."
“Is it? I wouldn't know."
"Perhaps a minor Pieter de Hooch?"
“No Miss Barley, I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but the brush work is unmistakable. The perspective from the Camera Oscura is..."
The Professor waved a hand, bored with Markov's persistence. His eyes were intent, like a terrier shaking a rat.
"A present from Miss Barley I take it? A find like that, I'd have it in a more prominent position."
“Oh, one should never put the focus of interest in the centre of the canvas, any common street dauber knows that."
“Thirty six Vermeers, who'd have thought it?" Markov seemed almost genuinely interested.
"He was forgotten for two hundred years, one could pick them up for a song." Barley was annoyed, though he'd taken the bait, there was no need to gild the lily. The professor held that every Vermeer held a novel, a different novel for everyone who saw it, and a different novel every time they glanced at the picture anew. The mark of truly great art was that it didn't merely afford you a view of a daubing of a particular tree but that it changed how you saw every tree in reality from that point forth. Barley considered that Hinley should stick to chronospherical physics but theoretical science, like poetry and fast bowling, was a young man's game. The professor was only 157 but his reading glasses hung from a mantled gas lamp and, she reluctantly conceded, even her own back ached in the mornings sometimes.

Thomson served the weasel with a pointedly chipped mug, a batman must be as good a judge of character as he is discrete about disseminating his conclusions, while Markov held his scalding black tea in the palm of his hand without the least semblance of pain. Six years in handcuffs plays havoc with one's nerve endings. If she'd been the one to clap him in irons on that Turkish galley, she'd been the one to release him as she recalled. She hoped he'd grown beyond grudges. Revenge is so ravenous, it consumes you by the end. The professor tucked into a slice of moist Jamaican ginger cake. Katherine plumped for the fruit slice, if only she had time to bake more often. The knife Thomspon had slipped to her plate was larger than it need be and curved like a Saracen's smile. She kept it close at hand. A prickle of sweat inched down her neck.
"I'm in a position to offer thirty thousand."
"A trifle, Markov, let us be serious here." For all his other worldly affectations the professor was sharp where money was concerned. Money, he'd once pointed out to her, was how grown ups kept score.
"I'm not talking about the picture."
"What precisely is your position here Markov?" Katherine found her voice a little sharp, Markov was right, there was no need for unpleasantness. He turned to her, in a poor approximation of the Professor's amiable style.
"A go-between, an enabler, a messenger, nothing more."
Barley's gaze was blue ice and even Markov seemed embarrassed by her stare.


He'd left her to drown in a St. Petersburg sewer, she'd pursued him through the white nights, on steamers and rowboats, through gaily turbaned cathedrals till running him aground in St. Michael's square. He rubbed his wrists reflexively. She softened just a little, after all, killing thta was something she couldn't help but understand.
"What makes you think I'm interested in money?"
"We're all interested in money."
"My fealty to the Estonian cause is well known to your..ah..employers."
"You need to recognise reality, an intelligent woman like you, the Imperial necessities."
"I scarcely think you're interested in the political ramifications of this affair" harrumped the Professor.
"To practicalities then. Do you have the, ah, mechanism here? On the premises..Sir?" From Markov's rancid mouth the title was sulkily insulting.
The professor beamed. "It is..readily accessible."
"I'm prepared to go as high as fifty thousand."
"You don't even know what it does Markov."
"My instructions are to prevent falling into revolutionary hands. I can toss it in the Volga for all they care after that."
"Fifty thousand?"
"Fifty thousand."
"Yes, but fifty thousand what?"

Katherine paused as Thompson returned with the crumpets. no, pikelets, she corrected herself, accuracy is so important sometimes. The knife flicked out of her hand and speared the Weasel through the throat even before Markov had tugged the tiny gun from its hiding place. Thompson levelled the Professor's ancient fowling piece at Markov's greasy head.
"I'd put that down if I were you, Sir." The servants were as well spoken as the academics here. Markov lay the revolver on the crumpet tray. Barley reached across and buttered one, she just couldn't resist. The weasel gurgled gently and died.

"I wish you wouldn't keep doing that." Markov seemed almost upset at the abrupt demise of his long time low life partner in skulduggery. It was a softer side she seldom saw, and certainly didn't like. A sentimental assassin will always let you down in the end.
"I was aiming for you."
"I could talk to the embassy, perhaps they could manage..sixty?"
"The embassy?"
"Certain..representatives."
Katherine allowed herself a moment's indulgence as the hot butter cascaded over her taste buds. She imagined the grinding of the gears, the heavy iron doors of the mechanism parting to reveal the sapphire effluviance of the inner chronotheric flux, she saw herself poised over the heavy, ornate signal box levers. motioning Thompson to toss the trussed Markov in. Torn apart by a sabre toothed tiger, buried alive under the yurt of the Scourge of God. Whatever his fate, at least he'd get his money's worth. She sighed, it all seemed so futile. The Russians couldn't operate the mechanism even if they possessed it and she simply didn't need it any more. Sometimes she wondered, when she was finally landed and gutted like a cod, if they'd find nothing inside her but gears and pistons and chronotheric lubrication. The professor, she knew, had used it but once, to visit his long dead sister in Worthing. Worthing in happier, less cynical times, ah, the summers that they used to have. Katherine sighed, time was not on her side, it was the first thing the mechanism had taught her.

The professor eyed a heavy drop of the Weasel's blood as it hesitated, trembled then fell heavily to his magnificent Afghan carpet. He relaxed a little as he saw how it suited the pattern.
"More tea, Mr Markov?"
Thompson was already hand cuffing the Russian's hairy wrists behind his back.
"Shall I dispose of..this..in the usual fashion?"
Barley bit into the last of her crumpet as a precautionary measure. The professor nodded his aquiescence, what Thompson actually did with the occasional bodies which turned up in the professor's rooms was something of a mystery but none had ever turned up again. Not dead, anyway. Markov looked between the three of them, somewhat aghast. He couldn't believe, even at this late juncture, that everything he'd ever been told about the English was true.
"You're not just going to kill me."
"Of course not, but then lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off, did you know that Mr Markov?"
"It's laughing, for a man." The old rouge was brave, she give that to him.
Markov swallowed, any Russian would have been kinder and killed him by now.
"What should we do with him, Professor?" Barley, for once, had no idea.
The professor beamed. "A sprat to catch a mackerel, my dear."
Thompson was happily trussing the Russian, a sheaf of only partially forged documentation spilled from inside his jacket. Five minutes with the Professor's fountain pen and she'd have admittance to the ambassador. She tucked Thompson's knife into the slash in her airshipman's jerkin, alongside her own needle blade. Markov was beginning to put up some belated resistance. Barley fed Archie some sunflower seeds.

China Crisis

Tacked to a splintered Lee Enfield, jabbed by its bent bayonet into the softwood stern of the floundering junk, the tatty red ensign fluttered like a goldfish in petrol. More water, more sweat, oil and cordite than coral sea now, shipped over the blasted freeboard of the listing merchantman. The barely watertight compartments could not keep it afloat much longer but, ever optimistic in the face of certain mortality, she reasoned her imminent sinking was not necessarily a bad thing. Despite the guillotine fall of evening, the wounded junk’s declining and most unshipshape profile was all that could save her from the Dreadnought’s greedy gunnery. If she could lash herself to a stray batten, and heaven knew there were enough of them littering the cratered waters now, she might still slip to safety on the ever receding shore. Struggling for the first time to catch her breath in the dank tropical fug, Barley ripped the old flag down and, not for the first time, acknowledged the precience of its designer in choosing blood red for its motif as she bandaged her bamboo gashed forearm. Was it for the first time? The idle thought felt familiar but it was so hard to keep track and these days she tended, if only privately, not to bother. Despite the worrying throb behind her still ringing temples, she felt oddly comfortable, the smell of her own blood reminded her of home, wherever that was. She smiled the better to face the pain. Red pleased the dragons which live in the clouds, red flags bring fair weather and women. She tightened her own bounds with her teeth.

Silver birds chirruped in perfect circles around the shattered topmast, their tiny gears tinkling in the gathering gloom. A part of her, the purest part perhaps, longed to save at least one of the sparkling mechanical wonders, at least to test her arrows if she ever made it to the hills. Her broken arm splinted as best she could manage, she watched a dog paddle past, barking maniacally at the smoldering flotsam like dead whales in its path. She reached out an oar in a vain attempt to bat it onboard but it yapped past her whispered entreaties and paddled furiously for the open sea. With only her left hand to work with the first wash of the bow wave snatched the oar from her grasp. She looked up, the Imperial battleship was closing for the kill. She blinked, suddenly tired. Ash from the grumbling volcano still fell like stars, like snow, sizzling into the pumice ruined waters. She glanced at her immaculate pocket watch and noticed her brown eyes had turned silver.

She risked a quick shout for survivors but the scrawny crew, such as it was, were clearly long gone. Fifteen year old boys with pigtails and eyes as dark as hers had been, she struggled to remember how many they'd numbered. O’Brien, the grizzled Irish jade smuggler who’d betrayed her a week before she’d stepped on board, stared back from his position by the mainsail. The garrotte around his neck made his grotesquely swollen tounge stick out at her in an oddly juvenile gesture of defiance. Slipping up behind his slumped and frankly obese body, she deftly slipped the bamboo from the Windsor knot and draped the tie back around her own slim neck. A boy had risked all to smuggle her into the dorms at Eton after all, or maybe Harrow. Anyway, it was a keepsake and one day she'd remember of whom. The giant battleship bore down on her now, searchlights scouring the sullen waters. She waited till one, then two, then three blinding lamps locked on her stricken vessel then tripped the contact mine’s electrical mechanism. Too close to turn its heavy weaponry down on her, the battleship would chose to run her down. Excited shouts in ill schooled mandarin serenaded her descent into the blood warm waters. Machine gun fire ripped the sea about her as she dived with a flick of her tail a full fathom down.


She let out a long breath to clear her ears and had at least reached the shallows when the lone mine exploded. The battleship’s armour belt was scarcely scratched in all honesty but the explosion was impressive enough for the moment, sending the fruit bats fluttering up out of the trees in vast chattering, somehow prehistoric waves. Bats always turn left after leaving their cave, she'd observed, while people instinctively turn right. She was still wondering what that meant when she hit sand, her belly flopping in her improvised crawl, and hauled herself up the wreckage strewn beach.

Hooting alarms and rattling black boots on steel gantries had replaced the intrusive rattle of machine gun fire from the Dreadnought. As if conscious it had been lured far too near the shore in its lust for destruction, the great ship doused its lights even as its mighty machinery lumbered into reverse. The cannons the remnants of the Highlanders had set up on her instructions on the hilltops opened fire as if on this command. The twelve pounders, salvaged from scuttled thirty knot torpedo boats, bounced off the deck armour, raking the unfortunate deck crews with sears of shrapnel. She limped up to the palm tree line, the explosions warming her back even as they wrecked her ears. Increasingly her objections to the current situation were more asthetic than moral, the problem with war was that it was so noisy. Another explosion rocked her, and she stooped almost to profanity, at the best of times she'd never been much of a beach person. The shadows twitched. Two of the boys from the junk were waiting for her, one even bore a still lukewarm cup of black tea. She slipped her blade of shanghai steel back down beside her thigh.

I knew you’d come back for me, the shorter one said. I know, she smiled. In contrast to his rustic chatter, the inflections of her own mandarin were flawless. She caught herself, in the peasant garb she'd no doubt have to adopt it was a weakness, she’d have to work on that. The boys made as if to help her up the ghostly sliver of path to the Highlander’s position. She shrugged them off and led the way, despite her dizzy head. The popguns still enthusiastically, if ineffectually, shelled the wallowing Chinese warship, caught like a warthog in a spider‘s web. The ash flittered down like dead moths. It promised to be a long night.

The lights of Her Majesty’s Electric Frigate Ramillies glittered for a careless moment in the distance. Sub-Lieutenant Pearson would be tugging the canvas from the experimental rail gun whose brass plate bore her name. She quickened her step. This could get messy. The trusty Pearson’s primary attribute was an unabashed relish of the pursuit, rather than any great concern for the finer points of ballistics once the quarry was run to ground. She glanced at the elfin boys and found their youth frightened her more than the Chinese gunnery, then up at the burly, sweating highlanders, stripped to the waist as they fed the guns. A shell pocked turret on the Dreadnought swung heavily in their general direction. They should all find some cover but all there was were the trees. She thought about the dog again. She paused to sip at the dregs of her tea. She hitched up the red duster, her broken arm already healing, and wondered how 'don't dally lads' might sound in a more guttural Mandarin. Time was running out, in her experience anyway.

Just over the horizon a light flashed, even smaller than a star. A shark finned slug smashed hopelessly into the crest of the ancient mountain above them at better than Mach seven. If was hardly Pearson's fault, even if the intent had been there to kill her, if it was hard for her to remember whose side she was on, and even which sides there were, how much more problematic for her companions. The second solid steel projectile sliced clean through a stand of palm trees on the beach they'd just vacated but the third ripped the Chinese man of war just as Barley and the ship's boys reached the Highlander's dug out position. The three chaps manning the guns fired another toy shell into the ruined battleship as a silver bird chirruped in the padded silk pocket of her beautiful suit. She marveled at the vitality of its sapphire blue, electric even in the sepulcultural evening, the precision of its tiny stitching, and that but for her English blood, the fabric was almost dry.

The fruit bats flapped lazily in the swaying trees about her, settling in for the show. A fourth slug ripped through the water by the enraged but impotent Dreadnought, ripping deep into the sea bed and bringing a mini tsunami to the shore. The fifth ripped it open along its five hundred foot length like a tin of bully beef. She stilled Captain Henderson's mini fusilade with a brief touch at his shoulder. By morning all would be quiet here, but for the rumbling volcano, by dawn even the bats would be gone. The Imperial Chinese sailors teemed into the water ahead of even the rats, dodging the bullets of their officers' revolvers as best they could. The Ramilles edged closer, soon a boat would be dispatched. She knew Pearson would usher the boys with her into the officers mess. On a whim she plucked the imperial avian automaton from her pocket and set it free upon the air. Tomorrow the Chinese might be the least of her problems.

The Temporal Adventuress


Katherine watched her fingers hesitate above the lever. Although fashioned from heavy brass the exquisite balance of the intricate clockwork mechanisms concealed within meant the merest touch of a forefinger would send her spinning into the darkness. She was accustomed to the rustle of her black crepe mourning dress with her every breath but at this moment drew conscious that only silence reigned. Valves blinked. Paper mache insulation, strong as steel and fire resistant as water, sucked in the glow of the stained glass panel before her. She could back out now, she could just walk away, they could send another rabbit, knowing it would never return or hear it's horribly mutilated wailings from afar. There was no urgency, no - she tried to force a smile despite her utter isolation - pressure of time. If she stayed her hand, who could blame her?

If she stayed, after all, she had many suitors, good prospects indeed for one of her middling station. If she stayed she would never want for money, comfort or love. If she stayed she would bear two fine sons perhaps, marry a gentlemen from the continent, even travel to the wild and westernmost reaches of the new world before returning to the familiar bosom of her home. If she stayed she might find employment better suited to her sex and temperament, some succour for her idle hours, perhaps behind the counter of a provincial library. Katherine blinked, the rarest of occurances. When she opened her eyes, she saw her hand on the rotor's tiller.

Her stomach lurched in a most singular fashion. She clutched at the guard rails and missed. She reached again and her hand passed through the study wrought iron as if through dust motes in a stray shaft of sun. She took a breath and found she didn't really need to breath but exhaled if only for the sake of convention. Something had gone terribly wrong and yet, if this was death, she was neither sorry nor greatly surprised. The heavy set dodecahedron steadied around her, its rivets easing after their spasm of unnatural torment. Despite the hundreds of hours she had spent here, fashioning the mechanisms, polishing the very idea, she knew, even now, she would not need it anymore. She wondered how much the Professor had noted. Her hand reached for the door latch. Despite herself, she stepped boldly outside.