The Fall of Koli Read online

  The boy rolled his eyes and looked away out of the window.

  “Stanley, this is Koli Faceless,” Lorraine said, pushing me forwards. “You heard Cup and Ursala talking about him earlier. Koli, this is my son, Stanley. Stanley Banner. And that bearded loon at the head of the table is my husband, Paul. Sit down, dear, right here.” She pulled a chair out for me that was facing the scowling boy. Ursala went and sit back down again next to him, and Cup went next to me. Lorraine took her own place at the end of the table facing the man, Paul.

  When I went to sit down, I seen something else that was there. It was big enough that I should of seen it first, except my eyes was drawed to Cup and Ursala. Right at the end of the room, as far from where we come in as you could get, there was a statue. At least I guess that’s what you’d have to call it. It was in the shape of a great rock, but you could see it wasn’t no real rock for it was cast in dull gold metal that had a kind of a green shine to it. I guess it was the mix of copper and tin that gets called bronce and is harder even than iron hammered out on a forge. Stuck into the top of the rock there was a sword. This was made of bronce too, but there was a big shiny stone set in the end of the hilt that was pure white and shined like there was fire inside it.

  Once I seen the statue I stared at it, for it was a beautiful thing and big besides – the rock coming up to my waist and the sword standing higher than my head. But Lorraine was bidding me sit, with a hand on my shoulder, and I had got to look away at last.

  “I’m sorry to have held you up, dearest,” Lorraine said to Paul.

  “Not at all, my love,” Paul said, giving her a big, wide smile. “Why don’t you go ahead and say grace?”

  Lorraine grabbed hold of my hand, and Stanley’s. Paul took Ursala’s and Cup’s. I think we was meant to close the circle with our other hands, but we was too slow and Stanley didn’t make no move to reach out. Anyway, Lorraine had already started talking to someone named Jesus. She asked Jesus to shine his light on us all, and she thanked him for the good things we was about to eat. I knowed enough to see this was a prayer to a god I hadn’t never heard of before. I was curious about that, but I didn’t ask. People either don’t like to talk about their gods at all or else they talk too much and you wish they would stop.

  After Lorraine was done, Paul didn’t let go of Cup and Ursala’s hands and he didn’t stop smiling. “I want to clear the air,” he said, “before we eat.”

  We all waited. I had already noticed the good things Lorraine thanked Jesus for, and my eyes kept going back to them. The table was so full of food I was surprised it hadn’t broke in two. It was good wood though. A single piece of oak polished to a high shine. The chairs we was sitting on was of the same wood, and so alike in the colour and the grain I thought they all might of come from the one tree.

  “We got off on the wrong foot,” Paul said. “It’s been so long since anyone visited us out here, we went into a… you might call it a threat response, as soon as we saw you. Obviously some level of wariness, of readiness, is a good thing. A necessary thing. And that’s why we’re trained to err on the side of caution. But there’s a point where caution…” He stopped, and seemed to forget his words for a moment. A lot of expressions went across his face almost too quick to see – like he was surprised, then troubled, then maybe angry. He ended up with another big, slow smile that was not happy. “We needed to make sure you posed no threat to us,” he said. “It was only reasonable. I hope you see that.”

  “You can’t be too careful, I suppose,” Ursala said. “We’re lucky you reached a conclusion before we drowned.” She said it lightly, like as if it was a joke, but I seen in her face she didn’t find nothing funny about all this.

  Paul nodded, and Lorraine laughed, long and hearty. “We did cut it a little fine,” she said. “I’m hoping you’ll enjoy my fresh bread so much that you’ll forget about your narrow escape.”

  “She made the marmalade too,” Paul said. “With oranges from our own arboretum.”

  “She’ll chew it up and spit it in your mouth if you ask,” Stanley broke in. He had started eating before Lorraine was even finished talking to Jesus, and he didn’t look up from his plate. “Like a mummy bird with her chicks. She loves that stuff.”

  Paul give Stanley a hard look. “Second warning, Stan,” he said. “Three’s the charm. If you’ve forgotten how to behave in company, I’ll give you a sharp reminder. Never doubt it.”

  “Oh, I believe you, Paul,” Stanley answered him. “I know you’re a man of your word.”

  “Anyway,” Lorraine said, with maybe not quite so much cheer as before, “we’d ask that you give us the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure we’ll all be good friends in no time. And that starts with trust. Mutual trust. Please break bread with us. And afterwards, we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  I wasn’t so sure yet about the good friends part, but I was all in favour of the breaking bread. It was sitting right in front of me, and I could feel the warm coming off of it. It looked like it had a good crust too. Besides that, there was butter, a plate of cheeses and slices of tomato covered over in sweet-smelling leaves that I never come across before. Oh, and also a pot with the stuff Paul called marmalade in it, and a little wooden spoon to scoop it out with. It seemed to be a kind of orange-coloured jam. I didn’t know what the fruit might be, for it didn’t have the scent of peach or quince. As well as water to drink, there was milk and spiced tea. Everything smelled so good it was making my mouth water.

  Lorraine seen me looking round-eyed at it all, and laughed again. “Well, dig in,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder and giving it a shake. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, hon.”

  We et the food. Well, not all of us did. Me and Cup and Ursala, being about halfway starved, went in like needles. I don’t think I even stopped to breathe until I’d et up three slices of bread, covered so thick with butter and that orange-coloured jam that it spilled over the edges. Paul and Lorraine just watched, with their hands resting flat on the table, Lorraine smiling on us all like Dandrake at the last sup.

  Stanley filled up quick and after that just picked at his food. He kept looking at me and then at Ursala, turn about, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “Is there something on my face?” I asked at last. I know that sounds like a come-along to a fight, but I didn’t mean it as one. It was just so strange the way he was staring.

  Stanley pointed at my head, then waved his hand around in a circle. “Yeah, there is. Way too much melanin.” He give a short laugh.

  “Too much what?” I said.

  “Melanin. In your skin. It’s maladaptive, way up here in the north. I was wondering how many million years of evolution it would take to get you looking like normal people.”

  “That’s enough,” Paul said sharply.

  Lorraine shaked her head and give us a sorrowing look. “You’ll have to forgive my son. Growing up way out here, his experience of the world has been very limited. That’s no excuse for bad manners though, and he’s going to apologise right now. Aren’t you, Stan?”

  “Am I?” Stanley said. Paul pushed his chair back like he was about to stand. “Okay, yes, it looks like I am. I’m sorry I drew attention to your pigmentation. That’s a very personal thing, and I swear I won’t mention it again. Even if you change colour really suddenly.”

  “I think it would be best, Stan,” Paul said, “if you held your tongue entirely for the remainder of this conversation. Our guests have come from a long way away. If you listen to them instead of spouting inanities, you might learn something.”

  He didn’t learn nothing for the next few minutes though, because the three of us went right back to eating and didn’t have a word to say. I was still wondering why the boy was so surprised by the colour of my skin. Skin could be any colour, almost. Then I gun to question how many people there was on this ship, and how long he had been here. Maybe Paul and Lorraine was all the people he knowed. That would be a sad thing – like as if som
eone lived his whole life in the Underhold.

  “The signal we were following,” Ursala said after a while, “claimed to be – or to be speaking for – something called the Sword of Albion. Is that who you are?”

  Paul Banner shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you can’t ask that,” he said. “It’s completely meaningless when you put it in those words.”

  “Is it? Why?”

  Ursala was asking the question to all three of them, but Stanley didn’t even look up. He was chipping at the wood of that beautiful table with the handle of a spoon.

  “It’s like asking someone if they’re the concept of freedom, or the human spirit, or Ingland itself,” Lorraine said, smiling again. She lifted up her hand towards the statue I told you about that was standing out at the end of the room like there was one chair too few at the table. “Sword of Albion is many things to many people. A movement and an idea. An aspiration and a principle.”

  “It’s also the name of this ship,” Stanley said, rolling his eyes. “That might be relevant.”

  Lorraine nodded. “Yes, it is. But the context is important too.”

  “Ah,” Ursala said. “I see.”

  “I don’t,” muttered Cup. “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “I think we’ve been invited to take our pick,” Ursala said. She set her knife down on her trencher, like she was done with the meal and the conversation both.

  But Lorraine kept on talking, with that same warm smile on her face, like there wasn’t no quarrel here nor no need for one. “So that must have been quite a voyage,” she said. “Deep waters. A fog as thick as cheese. And that was the first time any of you had been in a boat, I’m guessing?”

  “We’ve been in plenty of boats,” Cup said. She was fierce proud of her skills in sailing and fishing. “This was the first time we’d been in charge of one, but we knowed what we was doing.”

  “Which was why you were sinking when we saw you, I guess,” Stanley said, not looking up from his plate. “Takes a stone-cold expert to scuttle a ship like that. It’s not something a random idiot could do.” Cup give him a hard stare. I think she was about a half an inch away from leaning across the table and smacking him in the head.

  Before that could happen, Lorraine stood up. “I think it’s about time for Stanley’s treatment,” she said. “We won’t be long. Come along, Stanley.”

  The boy just stared at her and kept on sitting where he was. A change come over him. Up to then, it was like everything that was going on here was kind of a joke to him, and he was only just hiding a smile. But the treatment, whatever it was, wasn’t no joke at all. He was struck hard by it, and couldn’t hide his dismay. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from entertaining our new guests, Lee,” he said. “I could bear to miss it this once.”

  “No,” Lorraine said. “You couldn’t.” She held out her hand, just exactly the same way she done for me. And Stanley took it, though I could see in his face he wished like anything he didn’t have to. He got to his feet.

  “Don’t wait for us,” Lorraine said to Paul. “Show them the lab. We’ll join you there.” She led Stanley to the stairs and they both went down together. He took one look back at us. His face was a strange thing to see, full of strong feelings that was hard to tell apart, each from other – like he was scared and sorrowing, angry and full of spite all at once.

  “What kind of treatment is the boy on?” Ursala asked Paul, once they was gone down out of our sight. “I’m trained in medicine, as you’re aware. It may be I can help.”

  Paul didn’t seem to hear the question. “The place you sailed from,” he said, picking up the talk as if nothing had happened. “What did you say it was called again?”

  “Many Fishes. It was on a headland right where lost London used to be.”

  “London is gone, then,” Paul said.

  “Completely. It’s at the bottom of a lagoon that’s at least thirty miles in diameter on its long axis and maybe eighty feet deep.”

  Paul looked off out of the windows for a while, tapping his thumb against the side of the table. “That’s a hard thing for me to assimilate,” he murmured. “They said, even if emissions stopped overnight, there was no way of saving the east coast, but I didn’t believe anything could ever…” His words trailed off.

  “You talk as if you actually remember it.” Ursala couldn’t keep the surprise out of her face, or out of her voice. “But that’s impossible, of course. These are things that happened centuries ago.” She give Paul a long and thoughtful stare. “Tell me, Mr Banner, how long has The Sword of Albion been at sea?”

  “Oh, it’s been a while,” Paul said. “You lose track, in the day to day, but it’s definitely been a fair while now.”

  “And where did you sail from?”

  Paul throwed up his hands, holding that question off like it was running at him too hard. “I don’t mean to be awkward, but our operational parameters are classified. Yes, I know I’m out of touch when it comes to recent events. We’ve had our own business to tend to out here – important business. Moreover, we’ve had to limit our contact with the land. Our orders are very specific on that point.”

  “Orders?” Ursala repeated.

  Paul pushed his plate away with his hand, like he was too full to take another bite though he hadn’t touched any of the food at all. He stood up from the table. “We’re out here on a mission,” he said. “And the mission comes before anything. It always has. The damage we sustained when we were attacked has set us back a little, but that’s all. We carry on. Our goals haven’t changed.”

  Ursala spoke up again. It seemed to me that she was weighing her words very carefully. “From what I can see, the damage is considerable,” she said. “Both inside and out. How did it happen?”

  Paul lifted up his arms as if to say the meal was finished and we should all get up from the table. I done it without thinking. Ursala and Cup stayed where they was.

  “I’d like to show you something,” Paul said. “It may go some way towards offsetting any bad impressions we’ve made.”

  Ursala tried again. “We were talking about your ship. It seems to have been through some sort of—”

  Paul didn’t wait no longer, but walked across the room to the stairs. The drone followed right behind him, keeping the same distance from his right shoulder the whole time. We didn’t have no choice but to follow, though Cup done it as slow as she could manage and hung back from the rest of us as we went down the stairs.

  6

  I thought we was going back into the shaking room, but we didn’t. There was more stairs, and we went down and down. It seemed we had to be going deep into the ground, except that there wasn’t no ground under us here but only water – and we was not under the water yet, for whenever we went by a window I seen the light outside.

  By and by we come to a big door that opened in front of us. Paul led the way and we kept right on following, through a lot of rooms that was all of them strange to see. The first was full of white metal cupboards with signs of the before-times on their doors. The next was full of shelves, and all the shelves was stacked with what looked like narrow boxes, all more or less the same size. I wondered what was in them.

  Then there was a room that had tech in it, but I couldn’t tell what the tech was for. There was just too much of it, and all of it was strange. My eye couldn’t rest on nothing for long without being pulled away to stare at something else. I’ll tell you just one thing, and let it stand for all the rest. There was a machine that looked like you was meant to ride it, for it had a seat and a place for your hands to hold onto, and a wheel like a wagon wheel at the front end of it – but there wasn’t no wheel at the back and the whole thing was set inside of a thing like a sawhorse, so it couldn’t go nowhere.

  All of these rooms, no matter what was in them, was like the room I waked up in. There was a great deal of stuff piled up on the floor all around, and most of the stuff seemed to be broke. Broke furniture, broke tech and things so broke you couldn’t
even tell what they used to be a part of.

  At last we come to a room I somewhat recognised. It was like the workshop in my mother’s mill, with tools hung up on the walls and a big bench to work at. I knowed they was tools because some was ones I used in woodsmithing, like screwdrivers and pliers, but the rest I couldn’t guess at.

  On the bench was a great sprawl of tech, more than I ever seen together in one place. Right in the middle of it was Ursala’s dagnostic. My eye went there first, because the dagnostic was so big, but I seen straight after that the DreamSleeve was sitting next to it. I give a yell – I couldn’t keep it in – and I run and picked it up. I wanted to call out to Monono to ask her if she was okay, but I didn’t. I guess I was already thinking it might be better not to let Paul and Lorraine know all the things there was to be knowed about us.

  “Oh yes,” Paul said, walking up next to me. “You’re welcome to take that. I wouldn’t sync it with anything else though, if I were you. It has a virus.”

  “It’s got a what?” I asked him.

  “Malware. At least, I assume it’s malware. There’s a lot of code on the chip that doesn’t have any business being there. If the device is glitching, or showing you inappropriate content, that would be why.”

  I nodded like I knowed what he meant. And since I didn’t have the sling I had made, I tucked the DreamSleeve into my belt. I didn’t want to let go of it after, and kept my thumb resting on the top of it to make sure it was still there. I wished I could turn it on right then and there, and ask Monono if she was all right, but I made myself wait.

  Ursala wasn’t paying no attention to any of this. She had gone in a straight line towards the dagnostic and now was pressing the buttons on the sides of it one after another, making lights of all colours go on and off across it. I guess she was making sure it still was working properly. Paul watched her close, but he didn’t say nothing.