The City's son

CHAPTER 33

An army was gathering in Battersea Park. Streetlamps flickered beside the river and white light rippled along the road to Chelsea Bridge as bright spirits filled empty bulbs. The Blankleits flexed their fields and chattered in excited flashes. A few had fused together peaked caps from glass, semblances of military uniform and now they threw each other badly executed salutes. The Russian in the ragged coat leaned against a lamppost and drank, shaking his head at their enthusiasm.

Gutterglass had been busy too. Foxes and feral dogs yipped and barked and play-fought on the grass. They’d bounded with canine obedience after the Pylon Spiders who’d come by their bins, interrupting their scavenging with stories of a hunt to be joined. Deep in the park’s wooded thickets, far from the white lamps of the shore, glowing amber figures practised their war-waltzes, building their charges with slow turns. Shockwaves uprooted trees and twisted the fallen leaves into whirling vortices. All one hundred and eleven Sodiumite families were called, and most came, but of Electra and her sisters there was no word. Rumour fluttered through the ranks that Filius Viae was biting his blackened nails at their absence.

Pavement Priests moved through the throng, giving benediction in the name of the Lady of the Streets. Their steps were painstakingly slow; they were hoarding their energy for the battles to come.

And, sitting on park a bench, facing the Thames, Beth was pouring the prince of this little war party a cup of good, strong tea.

‘These’ — he sprayed crumbs over the half-empty packet of HobNobs resting on his lap — ‘are amazing.’

‘You should try the chocolate ones.’ Beth said. ‘They’ll blow you away.’

‘There are chocolate ones?’ he said in an awestruck voice.

She laughed. ‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper.’

‘Grasshopper?’

‘It’s a kind of insect.’

‘I know what a grasshopper is, Beth, I just don’t know why you’d call me one. I’m at least two legs short for one thing, and I can’t jump like they do, I mean, I wish but-’

‘Fil, it’s just a-’ Beth interrupted, but the odds against him being familiar with Kung-Fu were astronomical. She sighed. ‘Never mind.’

Steam whistled from the kettle and she smiled her thanks to the Blankleit whose lap was heating it (she couldn’t pronounce his name, so she’d nicknamed him ‘Steve’). She poured water into the two chipped Mr Men mugs she’d dug out of a skip. She counted to ninety in her head, fished out the teabags, added milk and handed one to Fil.

Who stared at it.

‘What am I supposed to do with that?’

‘You drink it.’

He squinted at the liquid suspiciously, and then took a large gulp.

Beth smiled and sipped her tea while Fil doubled up coughing and spluttering. ‘ Ow,’ he wheezed hoarsely.

‘Hot?’

‘It’s scalding! People actually drink this? Voluntarily? That’s barbaric.’

‘We usually let it cool down a bit first.’ She reached across and lifted a HobNob from the packet on his lap. ‘So what you’re saying,’ she said, returning to their previous conversation, ‘is that we’re totally boned.’ She made sure that her face was turned away from Steve so he couldn’t read her lips.

‘I didn’t say that at all,’ he protested. ‘It’s simple: all we have to do is get this little lot’ — he jerked a thumb at the variegated horde in the park behind him — ‘across that bridge, east into the City to Blackfriars. Get ’em formed up and then march on St Paul’s without ol’ Rubbleface noticing it.’

‘Yeah,’ Beth dunked her HobNob, ‘but the Whities and the Amberglows will be trying to rip each other’s throats out as soon as they get within a hundred yards of each other. I can’t imagine that will attract any attention. And the Pavement Priests are determined to charge on Reach with flags waving and a bloody fanfare. And I have no idea how to control the dogs. Remind me what happens if Reach’s forces catch us in the open?’

Fil raised his tea cautiously back to his mouth, darting furtive glances at Beth to check that he was doing it right.

‘They pull us apart like an overfull binbag,’ he replied. ‘Probably.’

‘Oh, so we’re only probably totally boned.’

‘Exactly.’

There was a long silence.

Neither of them had mentioned the kiss. That moment on Canary Wharf was stranded in time, like a lonely shout that needs to be taken up before its echoes fade, or be forgotten.

Be careful of that kiss, Beth cautioned herself harshly. They were at war. She thought of her dad, frozen in grief at his kitchen table. How could you ever let yourself love someone — yes, she let herself think the word love — when they might not survive the night?

Fil was engrossed in a one-sided staring contest with the last remaining HobNob.

‘It all seemed such a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Simple: meet a girl, round up a ragtag army, carry out an all-out assault on a skyscraper God.’ He gazed at the biscuit. ‘Discover HobNobs.’

Meet a girl. Beth stared carefully ahead and said nothing.

‘Fair point,’ he said into the silence, ‘put like that it sounds like a really terrible idea. But it’s at least half your fault. I was all for scarpering. I’d’ve been out of here faster than a sewer rat down a pipe. It was you got me to stay.’

Beth’s smile was tight-lipped. ‘That’s me, a siren call to self-destruction.’

He gazed out over the water for a while, and then, later enough that it was almost a non sequitur, he said, ‘I’m glad, though. Glad I did stay.’

Beth looked at him. ‘Even if it was a terrible idea?’

‘Even if.’

Beth studied the paving between her feet as though following the cracks might show her the branching of her possible futures. She splashed the dregs of her tea onto them and stood up. ‘Fil,’ she said, ‘a word?’

She mouthed goodbye to the Blankleit and led Fil through the treeline, under the cover of the massive beeches. Fallen leaves crunched under her feet. Finally, she turned to face him. Her heart was clamping up hard in her chest, but she saw he already knew what she was going to say.

His expression was neither wounded nor indifferent, both of which she’d feared. Instead, his grey eyes were intent. ‘This is about last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You think it was a mistake.’

Beth swallowed a boulder of empty air. ‘Yeah.’

‘You think — what? It’ll distract us? It’s too risky?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You think we should just be friends?’

‘Yeah.’

He stepped in close to her. The frost-cloud of his breath washed over her face. ‘You wanna do it again?’

‘Yeah…’

There was supposed to be a but somewhere on the end of that, but somehow Beth never got it out, because his lips with their rough pavement grain were already against hers, and she was tasting the heat of his tongue. Their hands rose, and they held each other’s heads as though the kiss were a promise they were holding each other to: a promise simply to be there, a promise to survive.

But they couldn’t keep that promise, could they?

Beth wound her fingers into Fil’s hair and pulled him back, hard, and he came away from her, gasping. She looked at him, r eally looked, into his wide eyes, and saw him for the trap that he was. His voice sounded in her memory: Reach is going to kill me. It was like standing above some unimaginable precipice, her toes curling over the edge. This was too much of a risk. An image flashed into her head, a floor littered with photographs. Now was the time to stop. Little detonations were filling her veins. The blood in her ears was artillery-loud. Now was the time to back away. Her head was ringing.

Now.

They fell in an awkward tangle of limbs into the chill leaves, their hands hovering uncertainly on one another’s bodies. For a fraction of a second Beth thought she wouldn’t have the nerve. Then she pushed her fingers inside his clothes and as her hoodie rode up she felt the shocking heat of his palms pressed up against her bare skin. Then he was tugging at her T-shirt and she was pushing it off over her head. And it was happening, it was happening so fast, and she was going to let it happen No, she thought, no, she was going to make it happen. She pushed into him and kissed him, determined to be bold, guiding his hands to her bra.

Unfortunately he struggled a bit with that, and she broke away after a few moments. ‘Christ’s sake, Fil, it’s a bra, not a Rubik’s cube.’

‘A what?’

‘A puzzle-’

‘Puzzle? You mean like a test? I have to pass an exam for this?’

‘It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,’ she laughed. ‘Here, let me.’ She unhooked it and then hesitated, suddenly aware of him looking at her in a way that made her shiver all over. She’d never simultaneously wanted and not wanted something anything so much as for him to look away…

Okay. In her head it sounded more like a prayer than a decision. Okay.

‘Take your jeans off, then,’ she said as she wriggled out of her own. Nerves made her voice haughty and she winced inwardly, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He didn’t look away, of course, and neither did Beth as he stripped. She studied the play of his muscles under the skin intently, and the sharp lines of his hips. It would have been rude not to.

They stepped towards each other tentatively, like new dance partners. Beth blushed as they each put cautious hands on the other’s hips, and she saw his face colour too. They broke into enormous, jaw-straining grins.

‘Wow,’ he said.

A sound came through the trees: a commotion, blowing the silence apart. She could hear shouting, and the crackle of branches broken by running feet. From overhead came the thud of churning air, stirred by heavy stone wings.

Fil dropped to a crouch, pulling Beth down with him. For a moment Beth was certain they’d been busted, and a burning tide of embarrassment went through her, halted abruptly by the chill realisation that it was much more likely they were under attack. She cocked her head, probing with her newly sharpened senses, listening for the enemy.

And then she heard Ezekiel’s voice over the beat of his wings, pealing out again and again with evangelical joy: ‘It’s the Cats! Filius, come quickly, it’s Fleet! The Cats are here!’

Fil stopped rooting through the undergrowth for his clothes long enough to turn to Beth with a sheepish little shrug, but she cut him off before he spoke.

‘Later,’ she said, vibrating with a mix of relief and aching disappointment and a kind of anticipation that made her knees feel like untied knots. ‘I know.’

Four lithe feline shapes threaded their way over the grass, following the indirect and mysterious paths that cats always do. Pavement Priests and Lampfolk and Masonry Men all stood back in awe as the four-footed legends slid through their ranks, imperiously swishing their tails.

Names were whispered, passing through the ragtag army like a breeze through rushes, names from never-quite-forgotten stories:

Cranbourn, the Herald.

Wandle, the Dream-guide.

Tyburn, they whispered fearfully, the Executioner. A black Cat bared its teeth as it passed.

Fleet…

Fleet!

Now and then one of the Cats would stop and stretch and rub itself along the inside of somebody’s leg, and that fortunate soul would immediately collapse in religious ecstasy.

Fil shoved his way through the milling crowds into the clearing where the Cats circled. Beth raced in a fraction of a second behind him, pulling her hoodie over her head, only to find she’d got it on the wrong way. She clawed the hood out of her eyes in time to see him fall to his knees.

The mangy tabby at the head of the group bounded into his scrawny arms.

‘Fleet,’ he whispered, ‘ Fleet — dear Thames, we’ve needed you.’ The tabby purred back at him, loud as a motorbike.

The other Cats, one black, one black and white, and a Persian grey with a chunk of her ear missing, rolled on the grass and chased the rippling light spilling from the Blankleit skins. The Persian sat down, put its hind leg behind its head and licked itself clean with long strokes of its bright pink tongue.

‘Um, Fil,’ Beth said, watching the infamous feline war party with growing unease, ‘aren’t they just, you know… cats?’

He didn’t answer, but an indignant voice from inside a bronze of a World-War-Two fighter pilot shouted ‘Blasphemy!’

Beth ignored him; she was following Fil’s gaze. He was looking past Fleet, past the eager soldiers, straining to see into the dark. Beth knew what he was looking for: a shimmer of vast estuary water skirts, a smile of church-spire teeth, hands that had cradled the fabled Great Fire. He was searching for some sign of the One these feline bodyguards ought to be protecting.

But as they stared together into the darkness of Battersea Park, only the darkness looked back.