Submergence (30 page)

English Catholics often regard Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
as Protestant propaganda. Some may even agree with a Jesuit view at the time which held it to be ‘a huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs’.

Foxe was a fanatic, yet also a kindly and gentle man, a good friend, by many accounts. He was tutor to the children of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was executed for treason in 1547. Among those children were Thomas, 4th Duke of Norfolk; Jane, Countess of Westmoreland; Henry, Earl of Northampton and their cousin Charles, commander of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada. Despite his close connection with the Catholic Howards, Foxe was involved in suppressing the cult of the Virgin Mary. He escaped from England during the reign of the Catholic Queen, Mary Tudor, and lived in poverty among the Protestants in Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Frankfurt. He wrote his first account of Christian martyrs in Geneva, with particular attention to the Protestant martyrs, and returned to England when Elizabeth took the throne. The cathedrals and all the wealthy
churches purchased a copy of the book, as did every bishop and vaulting churchman. Foxe became a literary celebrity. Later editions of the
Book of Martyrs
ran to thousands of pages and listed the death sequence of each martyr with formality and a level of detail no jihadist will ever match. Indeed, if the standard of martyrology is set by the dim standards of al-Qaeda, Foxe could by comparison be held up as a trustworthy historian.

He was an English Catholic, far removed from Saif’s gap-toothed insistence. He was descended from St Thomas More and, on his mother’s side, from the Blessed William Howard, who was executed in Titus Oate’s Popish Plot and beatified by Pope Pius XI. He revered Donne, read the republican Milton, and celebrated his recusant ancestors and the whaling captains who followed, also lawyers, farmers, priests and vicars, Jesuits who worked on the English Mission and who were buried in Rome, many Benedictine nuns who entered the convents in Leuven and Cambrai, colonial officers, newspapermen, spies for Rome, and spies for London; his father was Thomas More XVI.

God help him. He was a pocket of moisture, emptying into the sand.

He wanted to make a run for it like the French security officer in Mogadishu, who tiptoed away from his captors while they slept, and escaped barefoot through the streets of the shattered city at night, making it after several hours to the safety of Villa Somalia, which serves as the Presidential Palace of the Somali Transitional Government.

England had lost him, Britain had. Everything was green above and around him, but it was no paradise. The quarrel of leaves, vines, sloughs and quicksand brought him back to the comics he had read as a boy, which often dealt with the fight against the Japanese in Burma
in the Second World War. The Japanese wore thick glasses, always squinted, and paced through the jungle with their bayonets attached, like insects, until there was a shout of ‘Tommy let them have it!’ in the caption box and the British and the Americans fired and those Nips, as the comic had it, exploded backwards with a resounding
aieeee
! Aieeee: a word which as a boy he thought was Japanese.

The American naval base at Manda Bay was even closer than Lamu. A few hours by speedboat. Hidden inside, he knew, was a helipad and huts belonging to a covert unit which flew SEALS and other specialised personnel into Somalia after an air strike on the enemy. The unit was charged with proof of kill: getting DNA samples from corpses after an air strike.

The sky could always open up. In 2010, one of the leading al-Qaeda commanders, Saleh Ali Nabhan, was killed by an American missile. He had been travelling in a convoy on a coastal road between Mogadishu and Kismayo. A few minutes after the kill the men from Manda Bay rappelled down from helicopters. Grazing Somalia only with their boots, not ever unclipping their harnesses, they zipped Nabhan’s corpse and another into body bags, and took them up into the helicopters.

It was macabre how many fingers and parts of Muslim martyrs the United States of America had held on to. They were frozen solid and given a number. Who knew where these relics were stored, or for how long, or if a Muslim chaplain was ever brought to pray over them?

There was no way for him to signal the Americans. The camp was undetectable by satellite, unless you had an idea where to look. Even if they found it, it would be almost impossible for them to kill the holy warriors and save him alone.

There were prayer beads, sweat, raindrops. The men sat cross-legged on the sheeting. In their disillusionment talk of battles increased. He was raised to be merciful, but combat always reverted to blockbuster
action. His captors deserved to die. Let them be martyrs. It was import ant to kill them before they launched another attack on innocents as they had in Kampala in 2010. The jihad could not win.

Say it did. The caliphate would have its own power structures and careerists. Everything would be scrubbed with cheap soap. Women would be hooded and put in their place. Macroeconomics would be beyond such a regime. Organised crime would flourish because the clerics have no idea how to deal with pornography, gambling and drug addiction other than by public beating and execution.

He read the jihadist literature. He respectfully spoke the words aloud. The Arabic was powerful, but his mind was settled on other books. He preferred Bacon’s
New Atlantis
to More’s
Utopia
. He had read it again and again. The first time had been by chance, in the army. It comforted him nearly as much as the rosary he recited for protection: it propounded a celebration of a society organised around the pursuit of knowledge and the duty of compassion.

He placed himself once more on the ship which in 1623 sailed from Peru bound for Japan. The vessel lost its way in the unexplored vastness of the Pacific. The sailors were without victuals and were preparing themselves for death when they spotted land on the horizon: New Atlantis. Drawing close they were amazed to see it was not a squalid atoll, but an island with the low and certain boscage of a northern country – a Gotland or an Anglesey. They sailed into the harbour of the capital, Bensalem, a small town, finely built in a style reminiscent of Dalmatia and manorial Somerset, and were met in cordial order by a man in a headscarf more daintily made than a Turkish turban. This Oriental personage, with hair falling down from under the fabric, with the aspect of a gentle Sufi, was a Christian. New Atlantis had been converted to Christianity at a very early date through the miracle of a cedar ark which had sunk in the Mediterranean Sea, travelled improbably on the currents, and bobbed up not far from New Atlantis. There was an orb of light over it and when a theatre of boats
approached, it broke apart to reveal a pillar of light, ‘not sharp, but in form of a column, or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven; and at the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplendent than the body of the pillar’.

While their ship was repaired and provisioned, the sailors were taken ashore and accommodated in rich lodgings. After some weeks of recuperation they were given a tour of New Atlantis, with great care taken that they kept their distance from the New Atlanteans in the outlying towns.

New Atlantis was a country in which the guilds and the church, the farmers and the traders, were happily married. In its hills were caves with pits. Scientists were lowered to the bottom on ropes and there coagulated, indurated and refrigerated materials. Hermits sat apart in the same blackness, without candles. Atop the hills were towers of stone and wood for the observation of meteors, lightning, wind, snow and hail.

The New Atlanteans studied nature and imitated it. They developed flying machines and glided off hills and had ‘ships and boats for going underwater, and brooking of seas’.

In the towns were institutions that resembled the modern research university. These places of invention brought forth gyroscopes such as were later developed for nuclear submarines and ‘divers curious clocks and other like motions of return’, all of them ‘strange for equality, fineness, and subtlety’. The inventors, scientists, mystery men – the traders of illumination and timekeeping – all processed through the towns. The best of those who had advanced the cause of knowledge were immortalised in a hall of statues, ‘some of brass; some of marble and touchstone; some of cedar and other special woods gilt and adorned; some of iron; some of silver; some of gold’.

Often in his despond he sat himself down in a cool part of the inventor’s hall in New Atlantis. It stood oblique from the twenty-first century jihadist camp, yet was connected in his mind, as he supposed the jinn
cities were connected in the minds of some Muslims, as Danny’s undersea world was not yet connected. The hall was of the highest quality brickwork – red, Venetian – and the light slanted down through the high windows in a different way to the light through the windows in the rooms frequented by Yusuf al-Afghani.

If he could remain in the inventor’s hall he would be gathered up by the New Atlanteans and cured with kindness. His health would recover, and he would be shown other curiosities, perhaps a clockwork dove that when wound up flew the length of a pasture and returned with each beat of a wooden wing, slower, slower, and deeper, apparently tired, and came to rest again in his hand.

It was clear to him. Religious authority would not stand a chance once it had to confront the issue of species survival. There would be a shift in morality from goodness to necessity. Islam and Evangelical Christianity would lose their dominion as quickly as the Roman Catholic Church did in Quebec in 1968. What could be accomplished by a Last Judgement the governments of the fascist future would not themselves accomplish? New cults concerned with the harvesting of body parts and brains, he believed, would absorb the mystical agency of angels, demons, miracles and creation myths. Religious belief would be reduced to its most sensible parts.

Politically, the jihad would become outworn, its arguments and methods a sideshow, agitators among other agitators, as in the dying days of anarchism.

In tennis, the future decided the past: where the racquet ends up influences where the ball goes. Everything depended on the follow-through. There was no follow-through in modern politics. You could see that in the failure of politicians to grasp the nettle on climate change and in the talk of philosophers about wasted lives.

The thousands of illegal migrants who journey by sea, he was certain, would turn into millions. When the vessels and rafts were turned back, rammed, sunk, as they inevitably would be, authoritarianism would follow. There would be race riots again. The walls were already being built higher and into a maze. He was one of those laying the bricks. He had seen it in the British embassies in Africa, where the new rule was that an African seeking a visa to enter the United Kingdom could only meet with a clerical officer of local nationality – a pseudo-Roman – and never with a British consular officer.

Of course none of this touched on Danny’s question of a reboot of mankind, where the genetic distinctiveness of human beings breaks down.