Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 5
“Listen,” he said as soon as they arrived and the WPC had brought out her notebook. “I take responsibility.”
“Oh yes, why’s that, sir?”
“I’m the leader of Bretwalda. I should have intervened earlier. I shouldn’t have even let it get started. I don’t quite know why it did.”
“They spooked Jasper.” Snorri had dismounted, but stood with his hand reassuringly on his horse’s shoulder. Jasper too had calmed down and was grazing on the nettles which grew high around the fence, though his back hooves stomped from time to time with lingering nerves. Snorri seemed torn between an animal lover’s indignation that anyone could blame his charge for anything, and an understandable guilt over the possible injury of a very old lady.
One of the crow-people—Martin gathered they were morris dancers, but they weren’t anything like what he pictured when he thought of the term—had brought a plastic chair from outside the crepe van for their casualty. She sat in it looking very composed and severe while a fluttery woman with a pennywhistle between her teeth redid her bun with numerous hairpins.
“We wouldn’t have spooked the horse if you hadn’t been trying to barge in.” That was the plump guy who seemed to be their leader. Schoolteachery, Martin thought, as one who should know. One of those men who came into teaching with unreasonably high ideals, and grew more and more disheartened with every year as the world around him failed to live up to them.
“That’s probably true,” Martin acknowledged to the police. “We were booked in the arena at one thirty. We were very keen to get on. We’re a new society and it’s our first show, and it would make a lot of difference to our long-term financial viability if we were asked back here next year. We wanted to be on time.”
The WPC made a note. Her partner’s stance relaxed from battle ready to at ease. Martin spared his father a grudging moment of acknowledgement. On settling in Britain, his father had taken elocution lessons to learn to speak with Received Pronunciation, replacing his Sudanese accent with the British accent that meant power, education, and wealth. He had married a woman with the same accent and passed it along to his children, drumming into them the necessity of sounding like one of the elite. And Martin had to admit that people did indeed take him more seriously once he spoke, as if he’d given them the Masonic handshake. Perhaps that was why his father was also so anti-gay. He was anti anything that might put himself or his children on society’s—heh—blacklist. He’d be absolutely livid if he ever found out Martin had risked attracting the attention of the police. Another thing to keep quiet about.
Please, he thought, please let me get out of this without an arrest.
“Plus, there’s a certain image you’ve got to keep up if the public is going to accept you as fearsome warriors,” Martin went on, deliberately earnest, as posh as he could be. “You can’t visibly stop for a chitchat before walking on. We’d confirmed earlier that that was our spot, so we thought they were just being difficult, not letting us through.”
He shrugged, shamefaced, as he looked at their victim, the wreck of what must have been a very well-loved instrument, and all the court of worried people standing around her. People who had every right to be pissed off. “We did barge in. We didn’t think that’s what we were doing, but we did.”
Now he was able to see them all closer, Martin’s attention was caught by the tall bloke who stood behind the old lady as though he were a bodyguard behind the throne of a queen.
They all wore the same thing, these guys: black boots, black trousers with bells on a strip of red leather tied just beneath their knees. A huge coat covered all over with dangling strips of black cloth that rose and fell as they moved, giving the appearance of feathers. On the back of the coats, red tatters replaced black over their shoulders and down their spines, like a Tiw rune, or perhaps like bloody wings.
Their blackened faces were shadowed under black top hats, some with black feathers, some with red bird skulls. Martin had to hand it to them. It was an eerie look. As someone who knew something about dressing to scare the shit out of an enemy, he was begrudgingly impressed.
But it made it difficult to regard them as people rather than as some sort of raven priesthood. And that made the man with the goggles on his hat stand out all the more. Martin wasn’t sure he forgave them the blackface, but oh, lord, it made that bloke’s blue eyes stand out as startling and as luminous as the eyes of a Siamese cat. Beautiful. He couldn’t stop looking.
It was honestly hard to see their faces, the paint reflecting no light at all, and so all he got apart from those eyes was a sense of stature. The guy had to be six feet tall, and built like a runner, sinewy and slender. Something about his poise kept dragging Martin’s gaze back to him, even when he closed his startling eyes. He had the air of one of Tolkien’s dark elves, a beautiful and mysterious creature capable of walking unseen among lesser mortals.
And that was just plain ludicrous. Martin didn’t know what he was thinking, concentrating on long, long legs in tight black trousers, and not on imminent disaster. He should rein in his hormones and get back behind his fledgeling society. Figure out how best to handle this without turning it into a disaster from which they would never recover.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He addressed the old lady personally, coming out from the shelter of his companions, deliberately crossing the distance to meet one to one, instead of as part of a crowd. “Jasper’s generally a pretty placid horse, or we wouldn’t take him out on the battlefield. I think he’d just never seen anything like you lot before. You’re pretty scary looking.”
“I suppose we are,” she agreed, graciously. “I can see how he might have been spooked. I don’t blame him. I shouldn’t have tried to . . .” She cast a regretful look at her drum, and he understood that she valued it as he valued his sword—that it too was a thing removed from modern, disposable, commercial life.
“I will of course pay for the drum to be repaired. Or if that can’t be done, then I’ll pay for a new one. We have insurance that will cover it.”
That brought a softening throughout the morris troop. The old lady even smiled—sad but genuine. “Thank you. I wonder if it could be repaired? It was my husband’s, for years and years before he died, and I was hoping to leave it to the side when I went to join him.”
“I’m just glad . . .” It felt worse and worse, the more he got to think of these people as people. It took all the gloss of tribal conflict off the altercation and left it a silly spat between civilised grown-ups who ought to have known better. “I’m just glad that was the only harm done. I’d never have forgiven myself if you’d been hurt.”
The blue eyes behind her shoulder changed shape. Smiling, maybe. Martin smiled in return. Damn it, he had to somehow get that guy to wash the paint off. He itched to see his face for real.
Even though he’s a racist arsehole? Even though they all are?
You don’t know that.
Yeah right.
Because there was always the possibility that this lot were part of the little England, everything was better in the days of yore before all these bloody immigrants strain of folk dancers, and nothing yet had said otherwise.
“So . . .” The WPC referred to her notebook for the name. “Mrs. Cleveland. I have sufficient evidence to support an arrest on charges of affray, or even ABH. Do you intend to press charges?”
“I don’t think so. I rather think it was a misunderstanding. And I don’t think I am actually bodily harmed, so that one wouldn’t stick. I suggest we just shake on it and call it a day.”
This time, when Martin stole another glance at the young man’s blue eyes, he found them looking back. Hard to read as they were, without the small clues of the rest of the face, he thought they were warm and puzzled and curious. A gaze that made him want to smile and preen a little, with his skin prickling and a flutter of interest low in his belly.
“And Mr. Cartersly.” This time the WPC addressed Rolf, who was still rubbing his breastbone, where the redheaded dancer had broken out with his unexpected kung fu. “Do you intend to press charges against Mr. Patterson?”
Rolf took off his helmet. Since he all but lived in it, this was a momentous occasion, like Judge Dredd doing the same. There was a reason for this—his buzz cut of dark stubble was only suitable for a slave in the ninth century—but it still made being able to see his whole face seem disconcertingly intimate.
He grinned. “Are you kidding? That was some punch. You at all interested in joining us, mate? Because I’ve got a spot in the left flank of the army that would be perfect for you.”
Having left the ring in the sure hands of the fly fisherman, the fete organiser stepped out from beyond the Portaloos, with a harried expression and a clipboard clutched to his chest.
“Things seem to have calmed down here,” the policeman told him. “Do you wish to make an official complaint?”
“I wish . . .” The organiser’s flatcap had come off entirely now. He was using it as a stressball, twisted and clutched in one hand. “I wish stuff like this didn’t happen all the time. But you know it does. And I haven’t got the time or energy to sue them all. If they’re sorted out and ready to go on, I’m happy to fit them back into the programme in the last two slots of the afternoon.”
“All right, then.” The policeman nodded to the WPC, who made a final note. “You’ll be happy to know I’m not going to make any arrests at this time. But WPC Harker and I are going to be at this fete all weekend, and we will have an eye on all of you. Any more funny business and that decision can be rescinded. Are we clear?”
A general mumble of agreement from everyone. Martin shook hands with plump-crow-guy and was pleasantly surprised when the grip turned out to be no more than firm and friendly. He’d been expecting a competitive vice.
“Listen,” he said, partly out of the giddy elation of not being arrested, partly out of the desire not to let the blue-eyed stranger get away. “It looks like neither of us is on for another three hours. Why don’t you all come back to our encampment? We’ve got benches and a fire. We can brew up tea and coffee for all, and I’ll go get everyone chips.”
He didn’t miss the way they all turned to Mrs. Cleveland for her decision, but he thought it was understandable enough. She glanced at Martin, undecided, and over her shoulder, like a bright-eyed shadow, the lithe young man looked at him too.
“You’d be doing me a favour, honestly. I feel kind of terrible about all this.”
That was true. Whether or not he continued to feel terrible would depend on what they did now. A self-righteous and angry rejection, and Martin could rule them all off as a bunch of probably racist, BNP-supporting wankers and stop feeling quite so guilty. And if they accepted the hand of friendship and came, he could also stop feeling guilty, and start feeling positively intrigued.
“That would be very nice,” she said and stood up, prepared to set off right now. “And you can tell me all about what it is that you do. That chain mail looks terribly heavy, for example. Is it as bad as it looks?”
Martin grinned. Now here was a topic he could talk about all day long. “It weighs approximately three stone, on its own. With the helmet, sword, scramaseax, and shield, I’m carrying about five stone in equipment. When you take it off at the end of the day, it feels like you’re floating.”
Both horses had already left, being taken back to their makeshift paddock. Rolf ushered the rest of the army away, looking back to Martin as he did so. Martin smiled again. “If you go with Rolf, he’ll show you around. Chips for everyone? Salt and vinegar?”
He collected the orders. Didn’t like the beanpole’s snooty look, but the rest of them seemed decent enough. The young man he’d been eyeing had disappeared, and Martin had a flash of thinking maybe he really was some otherworldly spirit in disguise, before he reappeared from behind the crepe van where he’d been returning the chair.
Ha! Martin thought gleefully. Separated from the pack. He moved in, warily elated like a hunter closing on his prey. “Hey.”
Oh, the way the guy moved. Like . . . appropriately enough, like a dancer, all assurance and grace. His half-obscured expression belied it though, caught off-balance as though he didn’t know what to do about being singled out for conversation by a black guy. Martin’s heart sank a little.
“Hey?”
“I don’t think I can carry enough chips for thirty people on my own. Any chance of a hand?”
A duck of the head to try to conceal a quick and secret smile, and Martin thought, Or maybe he’s just shy, and was ridiculously charmed from head to foot.
“Yes, of course.” The smile grew, although the blue eyes were now focussed somewhere to one side of Martin’s waist, the guy’s head tilted away. Martin struggled with the desire to take the man’s face by his sooty chin and turn it so that he could not carry on avoiding Martin’s admiration. Just as he had dismissed this as too intrusive for a first meeting, the dancer laughed at himself and straightened up.
He grazed Martin’s gaze with his own for one blue-hot moment. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to people talking to me. To be honest, I’m not even used to them seeing me at all. I’m Billy, by the way. Billy Wright.”
Martin took his hand and blessed whoever had invented handshakes. Long fingers, rough from some kind of manual work, sinewy and strong. Pulse beating in Martin’s palm like a drumbeat.
“Martin Deng. And I haven’t been able to stop looking at you since all this started.”
The chip van had been disguised as a pavilion reminiscent of Robin Hood. Inside it, the cooks all wore the narrow green hats with long feathers of the Disney movie.
As they joined the queue, Martin took his helmet off and hung it in the crook of his arm by the strap, like a particularly butch lady’s handbag. His long hair, in a curtain of braids, was tied back with a woven band, the authenticity not even slipping enough for elastic. His face looked less harsh without the framework of metal, but his expression was troubled.
As Billy wondered if Martin’s earlier comment had been flirtation or criticism, Martin sighed, seeming to brace himself up for an unavoidable confrontation. “Look, I’ve got to ask you this. You do know how offensive the blackface is, don’t you? Are you meaning to be racist or are you just doing it by accident?”
Billy took a step back, accidentally jostling a large woman with terrible sunburn who was waiting in the queue behind him. His heart sank dangerously low in the bubble of his current mental-okayness, distending the sides of it, threatening to make it pop.
Another one of these complicated questions and no one else from the side there to dismiss it in a sound bite. Everyone got fed up with Billy’s explanations. Everyone seemed to think he was incapable of getting to the point. No one seemed willing to keep listening long enough to realise that he had several different points at once.
“It’s . . . difficult,” he tried, and then despised himself for wishing the question hadn’t come up. Martin wasn’t asking out of intellectual curiosity like most of the people who raised this issue. He was asking because he wanted to know—depending on the answer—whether his feelings mattered to Billy. Whether Billy thought he was a real person or not. “Complicated.”
Martin’s thoughtful expression slipped into a minor register, but he didn’t push or dismiss Billy, yet. He just nodded at the queue ahead of them. “We’ll be here for half an hour. You’ve got plenty of time to explain ‘complicated.’”
“Seriously?” Billy was astonished. Since when had anyone ever given him the chance to give his opinion with all the nuances? Martin would doubtless interrupt and ride all over the explanation halfway through, but the offer in itself was unprecedented. “Okay, then.”
He took off his hat and used it to fan his hot face as he tried to marshal his thoughts. “Well, the blacking comes from Victorian times, when morris dancing had been made illegal. Um, the Victorians thought of it as aggressive begging and decided they were going to stamp it out.”
“Heh.” Martin cradled his helmet in one hand as tenderly as if it were a nest full of baby birds. “They’re responsible for the idea that Viking helmets had horns, you know. Tossers. We’re never going to see the back of that one.”
Billy laughed, relieved that things were friendly between them, his fragile normality still holding up.
“To be fair, they had a point about the dancing.” He waved a hand at his get up. “In the Border and Molly traditions, the dancers were generally agricultural workers. By the end of the winter, money and food would be thin on the ground, so they’d go round the more affluent houses and dance. Normally, people would put some money in the hat, or hand out beer and food, and everyone would be happy and no one would get hurt.”
Up by the hatch of the chip van, a live role playing mage with a very fine dragon puppet on her arm was reaching for a battered sausage with onion rings. She added salt and vinegar to her chips and then came past them both, offering them the special weirdos-of-the-world-unite nod of recognition. The minidragon nipped one of Billy’s tatters in its jaws as she passed, startling a laugh out of him.
They edged further up the queue.
“But?”
“But sometimes the house owners would be the kind that didn’t want to give their hard-earned money to a group of burly strangers at the door, and they’d tell them, ‘Be off with you, you disgraceful beggars, and get a real job.’”
Still Billy hadn’t quite got to the point, and still Martin was patiently waiting for him, neither pushing nor changing the subject. Billy felt . . . too much. Seen, heard . . . exposed. He was unused to it, and it felt frighteningly intimate.
“If that happened, the dancers would do something to show their displeasure. Usually they were plough boys, so they’d come back to that house in the middle of the night and plough up stripes in all their careful lawns. But because there was that threat there, it meant that the dancers could be accused of demanding money with menaces. It meant that the householders could set the police on them and have them arrested.”
