The Restoration Game (5 page)

Dark Britannia was already based on
The Krassniad.

This wouldn't have been a surprise if I'd actually read the book, no matter how long ago, but I hadn't.

I put down the glass and started flipping back through the pages I'd skimmed. Incident after incident—the encounter at the inn, the alley of the magicians, the betrayal at the ford—suddenly seemed highlighted because they were all in the game. I could have kicked myself for not having noticed them earlier.

Then I started flipping forward.

Duram and his band—now a horde—indeed conquer the mountain fastnesses, using weapons—some of them magical—that they have taken from fallen Vrai. Inside one of the fastnesses, Duram finds a cave. Within that cave, he finds the secret of the power of the Vrai: an inscription that confers magical power on weapons and people exposed to it. The descriptions are contradictory, but there's no doubt that weapons exposed to the magic are sources of power. Whoever holds them, holds the land. Whoever wields them wins his battles—unless, of course, overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, he loses them in battle and they pass to the enemy, as has indeed just come to pass.

As soon as Duram and his most trusted comrades have proclaimed their rule, they face an uprising of folk who—now they come to think of it—prefer the Vrai, almost literally the devil they know—backed by barbarians from outside the domain, who've taken advantage of the civil strife to press in upon the land from the plains to the east. Duram's men ride out to meet them….

Battle is joined, a welter of valorous deeds and slain foes. Just not
enough
slain foes. Duram and his men perish gloriously.

And there the story ends.

There is, of course, a coda. There always is. This is the usual once-and-future king deal, whereby Prophecy tells that some day another liberator (perhaps, or perhaps not, a descendant of Duram) will arise and free the Krassnar.

So much for the legend.

The book's sombre afterword outlined what actually happened.

In history, the Vrai were restored and Duram's men slaughtered. The Krassnar, after a massacre of the rebels, settled down in sullen acquiescence. The Vrai were much weakened politically but increased in population, and eventually in 1887 the whole little country was rescued—as the official legend still has it—from the Ottoman Empire by the Russian Empire. The peasants went on as before. A small proletariat developed around a British-owned copper mine. The Vrai became part of the Russian aristocracy. This wasn't like a Western aristocracy: nobility was a rank in the civil service. A scion of that nobility was one Avram Arbatov, born 1894, executed 1937: the Bolshevik ethnologist who compiled the tales that became the legend recounted in this book, and to whose memory my mother had dedicated it.

There was something missing from that dedication, but I knew just why my mother had not seen fit to mention a rather significant fact—or at any rate significant possibility—about Avram Arbatov. There were family feelings to consider.

I put the book down and took a big gulp of red wine. I felt so creeped out that I actually looked over my shoulder. Nothing there but the cat. I took a couple of deep breaths, invited the cat to my lap, and sat hugging him for a minute. The cat did his creepy thing of suddenly staring over my shoulder at a point in the air where I (looking over my shoulder again) could see nothing. I picked up the book again and fanned its pages.

That was when the old photo fell out, onto the table. I stared at it for a moment, bewildered. Then I recognised myself, and everything came back. I remembered where the story and the incidents within it had come from.

They'd been my bedtime stories.

Amanda had told me them, starting when I was the little girl in the picture. I hadn't remembered them, but they must have remained in my subconscious, because they had come out when—two years earlier, in the pub with Sean and Joe—I'd outlined the scenario for Dark Britannia.

And the magic mountain—in the game and in the legend—really existed, and really was mysterious and forbidden territory. You could see it on the horizon from Krasnod, white-peaked, high above the shimmering haze from the plastics factory and the dust from the mine. Even before I'd clicked to the connection between the game and the book, I'd always mentally pictured the mountain in the game as Mount Krasny (known from 1927 to 1936 as Mount Kuibishev, then as Mount Yezhov, then as Mount Krasny again). And I knew the tales about Mount Krasny, oh yes.

They'd been my daytime stories.

Daytime stories
: when I was too young to go to school and my mother was at work, I was looked after by Nana. She wasn't really my Nana, I knew that because my mom had shown me photos of my real Nana, a pretty lady called Gillian who lived in a huge house with a car and a fridge and a dog and lots and lots of rooms with pictures on the walls. But I'd never met Nana Gillian, and I met Nana Krassnia every day. So the latter was Nana. She wore an over-coat and a kerchief and rubber boots, summer and winter, indoors and out. At least, that's how I remember her.

Nana took me to the park every day. She took me to wait in line with her at the shops. I trailed around after her while she cleaned and tidied the flat. (She didn't
have
to do that, she kept telling me. She just couldn't stand the mess that “that mother of yours” had left it in.) She let me help her while she peeled potatoes for dinner.

From her I learned that things were going out of the world. They had started going out of the world around about the time I was born. The time I was born was called
Before.
Before, we had this, Nana would say. Before, we had that. I came to the conclusion that I was one of the last things that had been made, and that I was very lucky to have been made at all. Any later and it would have been After, and that would have been too late for me.

None of this really bothered me. I took it quite for granted that one by one things disappeared from the world or stopped working, like cars, or elevators, and no new things came along to replace them.

One winter morning the sky was very clear above Krasnod—the plastics factory had stopped working—and I saw, in front of the ragged, looming range of the Caucasus mountains, the peak of Mount Krasny shining white above the rooftops in the blue sky.

“Nana,” I said, as she tugged me along the sidewalk, which was all nice and frozen so your feet didn't squelch in it and it wasn't smelly, “I want to go to Mount Krasny!”

“We can't,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Nobody goes to Mount Krasny.”

“Why not?” I said.

Nana was patient. “Because it's a Zone,” she said.

A new word!

“What's a Zone?”

“A place where people can't go,” she said.

Even at that age—four?—I knew a circular argument when I heard one.

“But why can't they go?”

“I'll tell you when we get to the park,” said Nana.

And of course when we got to the park I ran to the swings and climbing frame and forgot all about it until a while later when by chance I glimpsed the mountaintop again.

Nana was sitting on a bench at a wooden table with three other
babushkas.
They all had coats and kerchiefs and string shopping bags, and were keeping half an eye on other little kids running about. They all looked at me as I ran up.

“Nana,” I said, “you said you'd tell me why people can't go to a Zone.”

I remember what happened next quite vividly, because it was the first time I'd seen anything like it. All four grandmothers looked over their shoulders at the same time. Then the other three all turned to Nana and looked severe.

“It's all right,” Nana told them, waving her hand dismissively.

She turned back to me. “Listen, dear,” she said. “It's dangerous to go to a Zone, that's all. And it's best not to talk about it.” She opened her arms and took me to her lap. She whispered in my ear: “I'll tell you stories when we go home, dear. Now run along and play with Ivanova.”

Nana kept her promise. She told me strange and terrible tales: of people who had ventured to the slopes of Mount Krasny and returned with
two heads
; of an ancient knight who had sought the last resting place of St. John, and found the Devil's daughter; of kine that had strayed on the slopes and ever after had given blood instead of milk; of the haughty, lordly, flame-haired Vrai, the only folk who could enter the mountain's labyrinth of crevices and return unharmed, or indeed enriched; of the peculiar four-winged lizards that haunted the mountain's forested foothills; and, quite in the same tone and manner as she recounted all the rest, of that time in her own youth when “that wicked man Beria, the Mingrellian with cruel eyes” had been seen in town, and the mountain's side had glowed for seven nights.

I could understand why my schema for the game had unconsciously echoed the book and the tales from which it sprang.

That correspondence still creeped me out. It felt like destiny.

I already had a bad opinion of destiny. Here's why.

1.

Destiny is how my mother met my father. That's how she tells it. When I asked about my father, she told me a story. Here's the true story. I'll tell you later how I cobbled it together. Ask yourself if destiny had anything to do with it.

This is another scene that's going to need different actors, a trawl of the vintage shops for the costumes, and of antique shops for the props. It's Edinburgh, Scotland, late December 1979. Midevening. We're in a ground-floor flat in a big apartment building just off the top end of Leith Walk, in an area that is on the downswing of one of its many cycles from posh to poor. The poor in this case are the five students, all male, who share the rent on the flat.

So we're in the front hall of this flat. There's a big, battered table on one side, with an even more battered sofa beside it. That still leaves a lot of room: this was originally the entrance hall of a big posh house. The floor is marble, covered with frayed rugs. This floor and just about every other floor in the flat is crowded—not completely, not Tube platform at rush hour crowded, but as crowded as you'd expect with maybe forty people having a party. There are fewer than thirty guys, more than ten girls. It's not a sophisticated party. It's filling the gap between Christmas and New Year. The music is loud. Conversations are louder. The air is heavy with smoke from cigarettes and joints. Drifts of empty beer cans are stacking up in the corners. Bottles of spirits or fortified wines pass from hand to hand, mouth to mouth.

We zoom in on Young Amanda, from behind. Young Amanda is about five foot six, with wavy strawberry-blonde hair to below her shoulder blades. She's wearing a loose velvet top and tight blue jeans. The viewpoint lingers for a moment, tracks up. We see she's leaning over the big table in the hall, and sifting through a stack of mail. She stops sifting and picks out a brown envelope addressed in faded type. We're peering right over her shoulder now.

The date on the postmark is 1976. Amanda slides a thumb inside the envelope and works it open without tearing. She eases out a few sheets of close-printed paper and leafs through them.

Male voice, off camera: “What are you doing?”

Amanda turned, smug that she hadn't been startled; she'd been nerved for a challenge ever since she'd gate-crashed the party. She found herself looking up at the face of a tall, thin young man. Hair down to his collar, beard fringing his face. The face wasn't bad. He wore a denim jacket and check shirt over a red T-shirt, and grubby jeans. In one hand he held a can of beer, in the other a corncob pipe. A green plastic Pentel pen-top and a black notebook stuck out of his jacket's breast pocket. On his lapel was a Labour Party badge, a rounded rectangle of red enamel inlaid with stylised shovel, pen, and fire-brand in brass. The side pockets bulged with enough weight to make the open jacket swing like a coat.

“Just idle curiosity,” said Amanda. She reached for the can of Coke she'd left on the table. “What's your name?”

“Ross Stewart.”

“Hi. Amanda Stone.”

“Oh. Uh. Right. Pleased to meet you.” Ross grinned and shuffled sideways a couple of paces. He put down his can and started filling his pipe from a tartan plastic pouch of tobacco, glancing sidelong at Amanda. “How long have you been here?”

“Half an hour,” Amanda said, shrugging.

“I meant, in this country.”

“Since the summer. I'm studying at the university.”

“Edinburgh? Me too. Third year, electronic engineering and business studies. You?”

“First year. Anthropology, with a side course in non-Slavic languages of the USSR.”

“Anthropology, huh,” said Ross. He frowned. “Structuralism and that?”

“Well, that's part of it,” said Amanda, feeling defensive for no obvious reason. “I mean, Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach are among the set texts, you know.”

“Fucking Lévi-Strauss,” said Ross, with abrupt vehemence. “I blame him for Pol Pot.”

Amanda had to laugh out loud.

“It's not fucking funny,” said Ross. “Structuralism, right? Theoretical antihumanism, Althusser and that. That's where Pol Pot and Ieng Sary studied—the Académie Française.”