Blue-Eyed Stranger Read online

  “Are we all in now?” Matt called. “Okay, I’m going.”

  Billy had to hold on to the roof while they jogged and swayed over winter-pitted concrete, out of the car park and onto the smoother tarmac of the road. Then he dumped the jackets on the floor, resituated the blacking tin on his lap and eeled into the seat next to the other Billy.

  “How do, Constant.”

  “How do, Billy-boy.”

  Billy-boy was a gentleman of seventy-five, with a beer belly and a beard that would have done Father Christmas proud. He had blacked up already, so his white moustache and eyebrows stood out startlingly from a face whose features could have been called handsome, fifty years ago. He passed Billy a battered hip flask with the top unscrewed, which Billy took hesitantly.

  “That’s last year’s plums, Constant. You look like you need it. Up all night poaching, were you?”

  “Something like that.”

  The side had solved the problem of having two Billies by the traditional means of nicknames. Naturally, the older of the two became “Billy-boy,” or “the Boy” for short. Billy himself, since he had never yet missed a practice or a dance-out, had been christened “Constant Billy” after the dance of that name. This was often shortened to “Constant” to avoid confusion. He wasn’t sure that there was really any confusion at work, but he liked the name and the praise that it implied.

  The home-distilled plum brandy was hot and sharp on the tongue. It burnt his throat like paint stripper and settled uneasily in a stomach empty of anything but a slice of cold toast. Still, he took it for the kind gesture it was, and smiled. “It’s not bad. Have you got a new still?”

  “No, not at all. More like the old one’s just getting settled. She’s a bit of patina on her now. Stills’re like people, aren’t they—better when they’ve had a bit of time to mature.” The Boy smiled and accepted Billy’s hip flask in return. There was nothing special in it, just the same Famous Grouse whisky from the bottle he’d managed to eke out all year.

  Traditionally, both flasks, having been opened, now had to be handed around to everyone in the side, and all other owners of flasks were obliged to join in the informal communion. So for a time, the minibus was full of hands rising out of seats, curving around seat backs to grope for the next bottle and pass it on. Seven men in the side meant seven flasks, seven sips of concentrated spirits, and it was only half past nine in the morning.

  By virtue of their sex, the women of the side, in the four seats closest to the driver, could refuse to drink alcohol at any time without incurring the raised eyebrow of shame. They were having their own communion of coffee from a thermos, and declined the offer of early morning drunkenness in favour of talk about music and the birth of Nancy’s first great-grandchild.

  Fatigue and alcohol settled into a warm glow of peacefulness in Billy’s chest, a bubble strong enough to hold back depression and darkness for a while at least. “How long until we get there?” he asked, wondering if he should black up in the van or wait until they arrived, when things might be a little more stable.

  As he should have expected, this prompted a round of I know the roads better than you do one-upmanship from which he tentatively drew the conclusion that there were five different ways they could get to the Trowchester Summer Festival and that the timings could vary from an hour to an hour and a half. Once this had been properly chewed over, everyone had forgotten that Billy had asked the question at all. He was far too bored with the subject to ask again and risk setting it off a second time.

  “Did we ever get a vote on Cotswold versus Border?” Matt called over his shoulder, prompting a general groan.

  “I’ve just put the face paint on!”

  “We’ve only brought the ragged jackets.”

  The Boy reached into his bag and triumphantly flourished a set of red baldrics. “I brought Cotswold kit. I could go for a bit of proper dancing instead of all this galumphing. There’s no art in this Border stuff at all; it’s just skipping about like big girls’ blouses.”

  Billy sighed as the bagman’s feathers began to flutter with wrath.

  Graham, the bagman—the man in charge of the side’s finances and bookings—was already fully dressed for the Border style of dancing. His face was so heavily matt black it looked like a hole beneath his top hat, which was festooned with crow feathers. Despite the heat from the risen sun warming the white metal roof, he sat like an angry blackbird in full plumage, tattered jacket closed to hide all evidence of a shirt. “I’ve said it a dozen times, Boy, the public don’t want to watch Cotswold. They think it’s silly. They like Border because it’s masculine and aggressive and it looks pagan, and that’s what’s in at the moment.”

  Howls of protest burst from various corners of the bus, but Graham waded on like a lone voice of reason. “And big shows like this will pay us to do Border because it fits in with their . . .” he waved his hands in the air like windscreen wipers, describing vague shapes of indignation and scepticism “. . . theme—which seems to be a sort of ‘Robin of Sherwood woowoo mystic ancient greenwood’ sort of thing. So what they don’t want is Cotswold with its ring of church bells and cricket and ‘Is there honey still for tea?’ fuddy-duddy wholesomeness.”

  At the continued cries of indignation, Graham’s hands flew up, tossing a ball of helplessness into the air. “Don’t look at me, I think it’s as stupid as the rest of you do.”

  “I quite like Border,” Annette put in. As the fiddler, she was theoretically entitled to leadership of the musicians, but she was locked in a polite war for the position with Margery, the melodeon player, whom nature had fitted out with a more dominant personality. “They have some very good tunes.”

  Cotswold versus Border was a conversation topic that could run and run. Everyone in the side had an opinion, and a strong one. Billy liked both, but that wasn’t the point, of course. It was undeniably true that Cotswold required more technical expertise, was more of a challenge to dance, and was far less of a crowd pleaser.

  Cotswold was also the real deal in terms of being the tradition that had been handed on intact from its fifteenth-century roots. The ethnologists of the nineteen hundreds had got there just in time to record the original Cotswold dances and tunes as they had been handed down for generations in each of the villages where they had been danced. By the time the erudite gentlemen had tried collecting the dances of the Welsh borders, the tradition had almost completely died out, with only a handful of original dances surviving. When revival fever blew through the borders, the majority of dances had had to be made up from scratch.

  It irked Billy on a deep level that the public—having decided that Border looked more ancient, looked more pagan, and was therefore more exciting—had taken to the modern reconstruction with far more enthusiasm than they ever showed the real thing. It was surely wrong, on a moral level, to prefer the fake to the true. Yet people seemed happy to lie to themselves gleefully about the past, turning it into some kind of theme park and refusing to look at what was really there.

  Billy hated it, hated playing along with it.

  But, on the other hand, the Border styles were also fun and alive, changing with the times and vibrant with possibilities, an honest reflection of what the folk enjoyed right now, and he loved that. He also quite enjoyed the fact that the outfit scared the willies out of small children and gave the side an air of danger that Cotswold with its flowers and hankies, bless it, could never dream of.

  Billy’s opinion was complicated and would take a long time to explain. He supposed it was fortunate that no one ever left a gap in the conversation long enough for him to give it.

  As if to mock their careful discussion of routes, the A23 was closed due to flooding, and the diversion choked with such heavy traffic the journey took an extra hour to complete. It was almost lunchtime when they pulled up in the exhibitors’ car park at what looked like a very impressive affair indeed. Three finely shorn fields around the showground shimmered with multicoloured rows of vehicle
s. In the distance, a wire-mesh fence curved around several acres of enclosure. Feather-flags on carbon poles bent and strained at each gate. Inside, distant bouncy castles bulged like overweight rainbows. Billy could hear the cheery boom of someone talking over the PA in the central exhibition ring.

  Spilling out of the sweaty hot minibus into the fresher warmth of the late-spring day, Billy wiped his brow on a spare towel and then waited as the musicians finished painting their faces. They had just begun to put the kit away when he plucked it out of Nancy’s hands so he could do his own. It’s like I’m that character from Ballad of Halo Jones, Billy thought. If I don’t remind people I’m here all the time, they forget I exist.

  A single strand of bells buckled on around his black trousers at the knee. He clipped his tankard to the black leather baldric he’d made for it and shrugged that over the shaggy jacket, covered in torn strips of cloth, that clipped around the throat and fell to mid thigh. Black silk top hat, somewhat worse for wear for being third-hand, with a pair of steampunk goggles with red lenses strapped to the front. Leather fingerless gloves and a long red-painted stick in his hand and he was ready to go.

  The side stepped away from their van, and a change came over them. Before, they had been eleven not very remarkable people. Now, in kit and among the public, they were the strange and fearsome priests of a lost religion. Even the musicians—otherwise ordinary middle-aged women—clad all in black greatcoats, with faces as black as their coats under red-veiled, wide-brimmed black hats, were making festival-goers shiver with delighted terror at their eeriness as they passed.

  When Billy walked through a crowd now, heads turned to follow him, eyes widened. He stood tall, let his stride open out, reflecting back confidence, arrogance, a little hint of danger in return for their wariness. His legs had more than recovered from this morning’s bike ride. Warmth and company and half an hour’s snooze had put some fire into him. He was ready to perform, to dance and laugh and heckle. To bask in the fact that, even though it only happened when he had a mask on, everyone was actually seeing him.

  “Look, I’m sorry. Maybe you can take it back?” Martin, now under his ninth-century name of Ametel, massaged the back of his head. The leather strap of his helmet had begun to rub through his arming cap. It felt like it was rubbing through his hair too, would leave him with a stripe of bald patch like a Celtic monk’s tonsure. He wished the sun wasn’t quite so warm. Light on chain mail looked very fine, but it made you feel like you were trapped in a toaster, and he didn’t need this grief on top of everything else.

  Stigand, who was new to reenactment, didn’t know when to take a bit of friendly guidance. “That bloke on the Viking stall swore to me it was a Viking brooch. I’m a Viking, it’s a Viking brooch, what’s the problem?”

  Martin cast a help me! look towards his second-in-command, Rolf. Got a sympathetic eye roll in return but nothing more, and wasn’t it great that Martin had to handle everything himself? Surely there was someone in the society better equipped than him to argue authenticity? Some backup somewhere would have been nice.

  At least Rolf was dressed for the part, his spangenhelm hand welded and worn through a ten-year career with that other society we don’t name, until the cheek pieces were impregnated with genuine dirt and sweat, and the shine of the metal glinted unevenly over dozens of dents.

  His armour was much the same. Top-quality chain mail of riveted rings, over a gambeson of leather that had once been woad dyed but was now so stained with ground-in fat that the colour of it couldn’t be guessed. Rolf was such a fiend for authenticity he stored his chain mail in pig fat to simulate the pigs’ stomachs in which it was said the Vikings sewed their armour to keep it gleaming and waterproof for long voyages. Certainly the smell of him was something you rarely encountered in modern life.

  The new recruits were a different matter. Martin couldn’t fault the kit of Kayleigh (also known as Ulf). Basic, but entirely in line with the guides, and she’d even managed to make her own turn shoes. The colours were excellent—bright weld yellow and undyed sheep’s-wool brown. The weave was perfect in the cloth, thread count per inch was fine. She’d even overstitched the seams with a contrasting undyed sheep’s-wool white, in a display of dedication to which some of his old members hadn’t yet risen.

  But that chest! Double D at least, and obvious as a neon sign. Plus, she’d pulled her hair up in a high ponytail, like Sif from the Thor films, and done her face in eyeliner and lip gloss.

  He sighed. “Ulf, you’ve got to make an effort to look less like a woman. Firstly the makeup’s right out. Secondly, ponytail gathered at the base of the neck, or put it under a hat. Thirdly, can someone lend her a gambeson? You might want to cover that . . .” He gestured somewhat helplessly towards her front. “You’ve got to disguise your shape. The rule is, women are allowed on the battlefield so long as they look like men. A sports bra might help. Squash it all a bit, you know?”

  Stigand sniggered, and Kayleigh swiped at him with her borrowed shield. “At least I haven’t bought a bit of overpriced jubbly tat. It’s so gay! I told you.”

  “It is not gay!”

  Martin scratched at the sore stripe in his hair again and hoped he had not visibly flinched. He should say something. Something along the lines of, If you don’t like gay, you’d better get out of my society. But God it was hard enough being one minority. He really wasn’t sure he could face being two.

  Besides, Bretwalda needed the new members, needed to grow, needed not to have people worried about watching their language, or worse, pissing off because they couldn’t bear to have a leader who was both black and gay.

  He was being a coward, he knew that, but there was too much to do, too much to worry about right now. This could wait. “Stigand. It is jubbly.”

  The brooch in question, well, he could barely bring himself to look at it, the experience was so painful. An electroplated Thor’s hammer that owed more to Marvel than to mythology, covered in enamelled designs and studded with semiprecious jewels that glittered in the sunlight.

  “I can’t count the number of ways that this is wrong.” He turned it over. “Look at this clasp—invented in the 1980s. Pseudo-Celtic knotwork. Even if the Vikings weren’t an entirely different people to the Celts, with an entirely different style of art, the Celts themselves would piss on this as making no sense. Viking jewellers didn’t use any of these stones, and in any case, they certainly hadn’t invented faceting yet. You try and wear this, I will ban you from the field.”

  It had already been a very long, very hard day, after a very long, very hard night.

  Angry with the Head and everything she represented, Martin had taken up McKay’s offer to teach his class yesterday afternoon. He had gone home seething and packed his car. He had driven here, seething. He had put up his own heavy Viking ship-tent, assembled the firebox, and filled it with sand. Assembled his bed frame and made up a bed with a blow-up mattress and reindeer-skin rugs. He had put out the benches and the cauldrons, the tripod, the trivet, the baskets of spare mugs and plates.

  Then he’d cut up some wood, started a fire, fetched water from the standpipe, boiled a kettle, and made himself another Pot Noodle, which he ate in solitary splendour before retiring to bed at midnight. At which time—naturally—the other senior members of the garrison had arrived, shining their headlights through the walls and shouting as they put up their own tents.

  This morning he had risen at dawn. The sunlight through the white canvas of the tent left little option. Besides, some unutterable bastard over in the World War II encampment kept blowing reveille on a bugle, and at five o’clock in the morning the sound carried like an air-raid warning.

  So the day had started with first-day-of-a-show-lack-of-sleep dizziness. Things improved a little over breakfast, once he had cut more wood, remade the fire from the embers, fetched more water, boiled another kettle for three black coffees, and then eaten a plateful of bacon and eggs.

  By the time he’d got dressed in
kit—a story behind every piece of clothing, every one made by himself or a friend, and precious in a way nothing of disposable modern-day life was valuable—he’d come out of his tent and had one of those it must have been just like this moments.

  Athelstan and his family had set up their weaving enclosure by then, and Edith, in charge of the society’s encampment, had managed to erect shady pavilions under which the warriors could lie in the heat of the day. She’d dressed the canvas rooms with food and artefacts of the period and was now feeding the picketed horses their hay.

  For just one moment, so long as he didn’t lift his eyes above the rope barrier that cut off their encampment from the rest of the show, he might have been waking in the ninth century. Everything he saw was Viking or Saxon, handmade, perfect for its purpose, simple, beautiful, and right.

  The early morning air had smelled of woodsmoke, dew, and horses. Edith already in full kit—mantle and kirtles and wimple—was like a figure from an illuminated manuscript brought to life.

  His troubles had been struck dumb, and he’d thought, It’s going to be okay.

  Then Edith had come over to ask for money for the garrison’s food, handing him a stack of forms listing who had come, whether they were paying for a full day’s food or just lunch, how many children were present for whom she could only claim half a ration, and the moment had been lost. It had been one long administrative niggle from then until now.

  Meanwhile, Stigand was still refusing to back down. “You’ve got orange stones in your necklace, so why can’t I—”

  “I have got carnelian beads because my character is from the kingdom of Meroe in Nubia, one of whose principle exports was carnelian. Unless you also happen to have a Sudanese parent, that excuse isn’t going to fly for you.”

  “But the bloke said!”

  “Stigand. Are you going to believe the word of some shopkeeper who makes a living selling horned helmets and ‘genuine Viking claymores’ to people who don’t give a toss whether that’s what they were really like, or are you going to believe your authenticity officer, who reads archaeological journals for a hobby? Hint. One will get you onto the battlefield and one will not.”