Age of Legends Page 10

  “I imagine you have plenty of questions,” he said. “I’ve been too busy to answer them. You’ve been rather busy yourself. That or too polite to come and pester me. Now’s your chance. Captive audience.”

  She joined him in the back of a beaten-up old four-door Land Rover Defender, to which his large caravan was attached. Perry drove.

  Mr LeRoy helped poured cups of tea for her and himself from a tartan Thermos flask. “You’ve done a terrific job repainting the rides, by the way,” he said. “I so appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome. Can’t say it’s not been fun.”

  “I’d be happy for you to carry on, if you care to.”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “Wonderful. And now, those questions. Fire away, dear girl. Whatever you’d like to know.”

  “It’s hard to know where to start,” said Ajia. “So, everyone here at Summer Land, they’ve all died and come back to life as faeries? Yeah?”

  “That’s about the long and the short of it.”

  “How? How is this happening?”

  “I have a theory,” replied Mr LeRoy. “I’m not sure how correct it is, but it’s the best I can do. Britain is suffering. You don’t need me to tell you that. Under Derek Drake this country has gone to the dogs. We have sunk into a mire of intolerance and scapegoating. Foreigners are no longer welcome, nor is anyone who doesn’t meet the criteria of white, straight and nominally Christian. We have segregated ourselves from the rest of the world, both diplomatically and economically. Our officials are corrupt and venal, part of a wealthy elite who prosper while the vast majority struggle along in increasing poverty. We are like some first-world banana republic, barely scraping by, a laughingstock to the rest of the globe. True?”

  “No argument.”

  “You could say Britain is sick. What does the body do when it’s sick? It reacts. There is inflammation. There is a fever. And I would say that we, us funfair folk, are symptoms of the sickness. We are the inflammation. We are the fever.”

  “What?”

  “A balance has been disturbed and something has bubbled up from deep within the national psyche. Britain’s collective consciousness is sending out alarm signals, and we are the heralds of that.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?” said Mr LeRoy. “Well, if you have a better explanation…”

  “I don’t,” Ajia admitted.

  “Consider, if you will, the rash of UFO sightings across America during the Cold War, particularly in the ’fifties and ’sixties. One can think of it as reflecting the paranoia of the times, the fear of being overrun by hostile external forces. In that instance, it manifested as airborne craft of great sophistication, seemingly from another planet. Were the UFOs real? Some seem to think so. Perhaps they were conjured up from some great wellspring of imagination, ideas given a sleek, technological tangibility. And in our own case, perhaps the same thing has occurred, only in a different guise. People used to tell one another stories about faery folk all the time. They were cautionary tales, but they were also a means of quantifying abstract concepts such as bad luck and explaining natural phenomena for which there was no scientific rationale as yet––storms, nightmares, crop failure, blight, disease. These myths and legends once suffused daily life at every level. They were a way of making the world make sense, and they were widely held to be the truth. You might even say they were the truth, until science supplanted them. And now here we are, with our nation on its knees, so many people needing reassurance, looking to understand why things can have gone so wrong. Some primal, organising power has responded by turning to the past, dredging up these thought-forms which once provided succour and justification, and giving them corporeality.”

  Ajia mulled it over.

  “You’re not convinced,” Mr LeRoy said. “The main plank of my theory is the timing. It all follows on immediately from Prime Minister Drake’s ascent to power. Everyone at Summer Land was transformed after Drake and the Resurrection Party began their campaign, myself included. I would count myself among the first, in fact. I’d only just heard of the bloody man when I had my fatal heart attack. He’d been in the news for barely a month, starting to make a name for himself, and one day I was in the company of a nice young chap, in the throes of––shall we say exertion?––when I began to experience severe chest pains.”

  Ajia saw Perry dart a glance at Mr LeRoy in the rearview mirror.

  Jealous much? she thought. Don’t like it when he mentions previous boyfriends?

  No. The look, she decided, was concern. Perry genuinely cared for Mr LeRoy and didn’t relish hearing about him at his most vulnerable.

  “All at once the pain receded and I felt darkness closing in around me,” Mr LeRoy continued. “I knew I was dying. It felt very peaceful, I remember. I was lying on the bedroom floor, staring up at the ceiling. I knew my time had come, and I was fine with it. But, as it turned out, my time hadn’t come. I was gone, but then paramedics arrived and defibrillated me back to life. And like you, like all of us, I came back different. Altered. It took me some time to realise what about me had changed.”

  “What was it?” Ajia asked.

  “I was aware of others. Others the same as me. I was conscious of their whereabouts. I knew where to look for them, and when I found them, I was able to counsel them and help them through the period of adjustment. It became a kind of mission for me, locating the faery folk as they appeared and taking them under my wing.”

  “You brought them to Summer Land?”

  “I didn’t own Summer Land back then, at the beginning. I was a folklorist––a professor of history specialising in early modern Britain, pre-Christian religion, paganism and suchlike. I had a tenured position at one of the lesser provincial universities. Summer Land came later, as the number of waifs and strays I was gathering around me grew and I couldn’t find accommodation and employment for them all. I needed somewhere where they could shelter together, these poor lost souls who had come to rely on me for direction and leadership. A funfair happened to arrive in town, and I caught wind that the family who owned it were considering selling up. It seemed the perfect solution. I pooled together my savings, sold my house, and bought them out. So began this peripatetic lifestyle of ours.”

  “Do you think that’s the reason you’re ruler of the faery folk? Because you were a folklorist?”

  “A good question, and you’re right,” said Mr LeRoy, nodding. “There is invariably an element of suitability in the case of each of us who becomes an eidolon.”

  “Okay, I have no idea what that word means.”

  “Eidolon. Comes from the Ancient Greek. It has several connotations. A spirit image. A simulacrum. Something which lives on after death. I’ve taken to applying it to everyone who has died and been returned to life imbued with faery folk characteristics.”

  “Right. And where does suitability come into it?”

  “We weren’t simply properties which were temporarily vacant, waiting for someone to come and take possession. We were each of us chosen as an eidolon for specific qualities we already had. Goblins, for example, tend to be those who were somewhat lumpen and thuggish in former life. Elves––well, they’re more the aesthete sort, aren’t they, Perry? Perry was an arts graduate. A ceramicist of considerable talent. Then there was some business with drugs. I don’t think he wants me to go into it any further, judging by the way he’s hunching his shoulders and gripping the steering wheel; so I shan’t. Another factor in the eidolon selection process is nominative determinism.”

  “Nominative what now?”

  “Determinism. The influence one’s name has on one’s destiny. Look at me. Auberon LeRoy. LeRoy is a version of the French le roi, meaning ‘king’. Essentially I was King Oberon long before I became the eidolon of King Oberon. And you. You who have become the eidolon of Puck. Smith tells me you used to work as a bike courier, is that correct?”

  Ajia nodded.

  “So you’ve long been about
going places fast,” LeRoy said. “It’s there in your surname––Snell––which is derived from an Old Norse word, snjallr, meaning quick and lively. I looked it up. As for ‘Ajia’…”

  “Urdu for ‘swift’. My mother called me that because I was a month premature. Her idea of a joke.”

  Mr LeRoy clapped his hands. “Precisely.”

  “So both my surname and my given name mean the same thing? Shit. I never realised. Doubt my parents did either.”

  “Whether you’re aware of it or not, nominative determinism selected you from the start to grow up to become someone who nips around on a bicycle delivering packages and latterly, in this new phase of your existence, Puck. You could not have been anything other than what you are, Ajia. It was written in the stars.”

  “Or in my birth certificate.”

  “That too. If you conduct a survey of the funfair folk, you’ll find similar examples. One of the elves is called Faye, and another, believe it or not, Elvis. There’s a brownie with the surname Neate, a goblin who goes by Hobb, and among the boggarts, tricky little devils that they are, you’ll find a Rook and a Crooke.” Mr LeRoy smiled with an almost childlike glee. “It’s really rather fun, and it does seem to confirm my hypothesis that there’s some sort of intelligence at work here. I spoke of an ‘organising power’, didn’t I?”

  “You mean, like a god?”

  “No, more in the sense that nature likes patterns. Physics likes patterns too. The structure of crystals. The symmetry of a snowflake. The spiral of a snail’s shell. The way the wind can sculpt sand dunes into symmetrical waves. Bees and their honeycombs. Subatomic forces in balance. Things, left to their own devices, tend towards configuration and orderliness. So it is with us. Whatever brought us back to life and recast us as folkloric beings, it wasn’t random. It acted with a will. A design.”

  “A design,” Ajia echoed. The idea was outlandish, but then her ability to run several times faster than the fastest human was outlandish, so the one thing kind of cancelled out the other. Outlandish was her new normal. “Doesn’t that imply a purpose?”

  “There is a purpose. It’s like I said, we eidolons are alarm signals from the collective consciousness. Canaries in the coalmine. Britain is in distress and we’re its cries of pain made flesh.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “So where does someone like Jenny Greenteeth fit in?”

  “Yes, Smith told me that the two of you had a run-in with her,” said Mr LeRoy. “He praised your resourcefulness and your quick thinking. Said you saved the day. Jenny and her ilk, Ajia, are incarnations of the darker side of our nation’s folklore. There’s us, the more or less respectable entities, and then there’s them, our shadowy counterparts. I suppose you can’t have the one without the other, just as you can’t have day without night or light without shade. What’s that saying about taking the rough with the smooth? And they are a very rough lot. They despise us funfair folk, and they’ll attack us at any opportunity. That’s another reason why it’s useful to be on the road, constantly moving from place to place. We’re less at risk that way.”

  “Smith mentioned other river hags.”

  “That isn’t the end of it. Far from it. There are worse creatures out there than Jenny Greenteeth. Much worse.”

  “Ugh. You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Black Annis. Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones. The Shug Monkey. The list goes on.”

  Ajia found even just the names unsettling. “And someone else knows about them, don’t they? Smith was talking to Jenny Greenteeth after we captured her, and he said she had ‘influential friends’.”

  “Someone in power certainly knows about Jenny and her kind,” said Mr LeRoy. “How could they not? You can’t have horrors like that roaming the land without it coming to the attention of the authorities. I’ve long harboured the suspicion that there’s a conspiracy to keep the fact of their existence out of the public domain, but how high the conspiracy reaches, I couldn’t say. The intelligence agencies, at the very least, have to be in on it. Does it go any further, perhaps all the way to the top? Maybe, but Derek Drake seems too much of a reactionary buffoon to be trusted with that kind of information. If he did know, his first instinct would be to have all of the monstrous eidolons eliminated. Since they continue to be at large, one can only assume he has been kept in ignorance.”

  “If the intelligence agencies know about those other eidolons, surely they know about our kind as well.” Ajia was surprised to hear herself say “our kind”. Even after only a few days, she was beginning to realise she belonged with the funfair folk. Whether she was comfortable with this was another matter.

  “They might do,” said Mr LeRoy, “but then we can pass for ordinary humans, can’t we? And Summer Land enables us to slip around the country practically unnoticed. Who looks twice at the people operating fairground attractions or doling out candyfloss? Provided we don’t draw undue attention to ourselves, we can continue to go undetected and unmolested by the people in charge. Long may that situation persist.”

  Chapter 10

  ONE OF THE great drawbacks of being a national leader was that you got very little time to yourself. You were obliged to attend meetings, play host to dignitaries from overseas, sign countless documents and make the odd appearance on broadcast media and in public, not to mention show your face in parliament most days. Rarely did you get home before midnight. In fact, Derek Drake wished someone had told him in advance just how much damn work was involved. He might have thought twice before launching his bid for political supremacy.

  Then again, his country had been in its hour of greatest need. Britain had been crying out for someone like him––another Churchill, another Thatcher––to pull it out of its death-spiral. He could not have refused to heed the call. His conscience would not let him.

  Nonetheless, in order to maintain his sanity and his sense of self, Drake made sure there was always room in his daily schedule for three morning engagements. They were sacrosanct.

  The first was his session with his cosmetician.

  The second was breakfast with Harriet. He never missed that. They might not talk much at the table, but at least they were together in the same room. It kept alive a marital connection which even he had to admit was held together by the slenderest of threads these days.

  The third was his visit to his collection of holy relics. This was an opportunity for Drake to reflect on the greatness of God and remind himself that his position of power was nothing short of divinely-appointed. Although it wasn’t just that. It was much more.

  The interior of the converted stable block which served as his private museum was a self-contained microclimate. Air conditioning held the temperature steady between 16 and 20°C, the chilly side of warm, while dehumidifiers maintained a constant relative humidity of 30%. Certain artefacts, the parchments ones in particular, needed a dryer atmosphere than that to preserve their integrity and so were kept in vacuum-sealed cases.

  In all, the relics numbered nearly a hundred, the product of three decades of assiduous collecting. In his younger days, when Drake had had more spare time, he would travel far and wide across the world to source and buy the items. Later, he had relied on commissioned agents to do the legwork for him, although more often than not he would fly in to make the actual purchase himself. There was nothing quite like the thrill of authorising a bank transfer on his phone, or sometimes handing over a suitcase full of cash, and holding his new acquisition in his hands for the first time.

  The collection included numerous body parts of saints. Drake owned fingers belonging to canonised individuals; a couple of whole mummified hands, one a man’s, the other a woman’s; a few skulls; a nose; a toe; even what looked like a shrivelled hoop of beef jerky, which he had on good authority was a foreskin. Most of these treasures were contained in reliquaries––caskets made of silver, gold or varnished hardwood.

  There were phials of blood, ornate
things of crystal and filigreed metal, more than one of which had been officially venerated by a pope.

  There were several splinters of the True Cross and a brittle twist of twig which had formed part of the Crown of Thorns. There was a rusty nail reputed to be one of those driven into Christ’s hands when He was crucified, and a flake of iron from the blade of the lance with which the Roman soldier Longinus pierced His side, the so-called Spear of Destiny.

  There was a tiny fragment of linen which had been cut neatly from the Turin Shroud, and another similar shred of material from the Sudarium, the cloth used by the Saint Veronica to wipe sweat and blood from Christ’s face as He made His torturous way towards Calvary.

  There were effigies of Christ and the Madonna which were reputed to have wept blood, and there were a number of ikons and Bibles which had performed miracles for people who had prayed before them, curing ailments or bringing financial windfalls.

  The collection had cost Drake a significant chunk of his personal fortune. The prices of the relics themselves had been steep, of course, but there were additional expenses. More often than not, Drake had to supply a replica of the artefact as a substitute for the original, a plausible fake that could be put on display so that the faithful would still have something to worship. Church officials had to be bribed, as did customs officers, and in neither case did the turning of a blind eye come cheap. It wasn’t a poor man’s game, amassing the most extensive private showcase of religious artefacts on the planet. Far from it.

  But it was worth every penny.

  Derek Drake was an unswerving believer. He had been since boyhood. It wasn’t fashionable for a kid growing up in the 1970s to go to church, study the Bible, and openly espouse Christian values. His parents weren’t religious, or rather they were Church of England, which was much the same thing as being not religious, and it surprised them that their son, their only child, should be quite so devout.