Strandpiel 9:Geskeidenis
How dual nationality works out for one proud user.
Currently embuggered by loads of ideas and very little time to commit to record because of the demands of a new job. LOTS of ideas for continuing old stories ("Many worlds", et c) and barely enough time to sketch them out for retrieval later. Building skeletons, basically. Still, taking sick leave has some advantages… pain and discomfort are a bugger but at least I can do this.
A series of episodes and glimpses into the later life of a new character. Readers do appear to want to find out more about her. Trying to keep everything in roughly chronological and sequential order with lots of call-backs and flashbacks to related tales.
Bekki is having an enhanced spiritual experience and a practical history lesson… her first teacher Susan Sto Helit would recognise what may be happening here. She did much the same in Thief of Time… I am cannibalising notes written at the time to guide the coming plot of my long-stalled tale "Ripping Yarn", about the tail-end of Empire in Howondaland with a plot not unlike that of the movie "Zulu". altough there wasn't a Johanna Smith-Rhodes in Zulu. There ought to have been, though.
"This is Howondaland?" Bekki asked. She looked out over rolling red-earth veldt and distant hills under a brilliant blue sky. She'd visited regularly with her family to meet relatives at Home. She knew the look and feel of the land and associated it with her ouma and her oupa and her aunts and uncles and cousins. A place where without any great fuss and drama, the family from Ankh-Morpork was always quietly accepted by a greater whole and made to feel loved and welcomed. It represented warmth and security and Family. Bobotie and koeksisters with Rooibuis tea. Oupa Barbarossa, larger than life, throwing out his arms and roaring "Welcome! Where are my beautiful little girls?"
But this Howondaland felt somehow more solid and real and vital. It also felt deeply troubled and oppressive, as if a great weight hung over it. Bekki sensed that her dreamscape was trying to tell her something. Daddy had said that when you walked in the Other World during your dreams, it was still a real place, but thoughts and the feelings and the accumulated weight of memories and events associated with a place were magnified. The abstract becomes real, Daddy had said. It speaks loudly to you. It shouts sometimes, but not in words. It projects pictures. Bekki had found her father's wizard-talk hard to understand; she realised why Irena and Olga would snort with derision and ask "Why do wizards have to over-intellectualise things? They kill it with words!"
Irena, her Witch-Godsmother, would shrug here and say something like "It's still the real world you walk in every day. But when you Step Out, it becomes the real world, plus."
Bekki looked across to the kindly older lady who was guiding her. Who had been dead, technically speaking, for the best part of a century. Not that it appeared to have slowed her down very much. Then again, she was a Smith-Rhodes woman. Bekki wondered if her own mother would, when her time came, also find death to be a minor inconvenience to living a full and active Afterlife. She considered Johanna Famke Smith-Rhodes, her mother. And decided that was a silly question. Of course Mum would shrug it off, swear, and keep going. Her great-great grandmother was the living – well sort of living – proof.
Bekki looked into the hills across the river. They were shrouded in something ominous. Something alien and frightening. She sensed this was the plus.
It didn't help that she and her several times great-grandmother were currently hanging in the air, several hundred feet up.
"You get a better view from up here." Johanna van der Kaiboetje Smith-Rhodes remarked, as if this was no biggie. She drew Bekki's attention to a scattered cluster of buildings in the lee of some high hills.
"That's the Omnian mission station at Lawke's Drain." she remarked. Activity was going on. Men in red coats, soldiers of some sort, were unhurriedly unloading crates and sacks from ox-drawn carts. There was a sense of men doing a job that needed to be done, but quietly getting on with it without undue drama. A working party further along was trying to establish a crossing point over a wide shallow river. The ground showed signs of the recent passage of lots and lots of men and animals, as if an army had passed this way.
Bekki frowned. Lawkes Drain was a great big military fortress, wasn't it? Guarding a strategic river-crossing on the frontier, to deny it to the Zulus next door. The original buildings, site of an iconic battle, now preserved as a shrine and as a tourist attraction. Mum said her Uncle Baal ran tourist parties up there from the family plaas, not that far away, for a consideration expressed in rand. Uncle Baal was apparently a sort of Vondalaander Dibbler.
But where was the fortress?
Her ancestor smiled tolerantly.
"The fortress was built later, liewe hecksie." She said. "This is Lawkes Drain, as it was. Then. When it happened. Or perhaps a week before it happened."
Bekki realised.
"We've gone back in time?"
Johanna nodded.
"Time is not fixed here, liewe hecksie. I did say I was going to give you a history lesson. I passed through Lawkes Drain on the way out. With the Army. We can call back here. But I need to show you my memories. This may help in your fight, in your time, with that fool of a woman who is presuming to teach you a history of which she knows nothing."
Bekki looked at her.
"How did you know that…"
Johanna patted her arm. it was a warm loving touch.
"We're nearer than you think, liewe hecksie. We like to keep in touch with our family. I witnessed your battle. Where you and the Hergenian girl stood up and said "no, we will not take this."
The ground flew away beneath them. Lawkes' Drain receded in to the distance.
"But you're all…"
"Dead? Ja. Our times came. We passed on. That doesn't mean we have to be strangers, or that we can't take an interest. And it's something to take an interest in. You would not believe how monotonous it can get, sometimes."
Bekki considered this.
"Are you around all the time?"
Johanna laughed, amused.
"Hell, no! That would intrude on your privacy. It would not be right. And vorbei, we have other things to do here. We have Afterlives to lead, you know? But at times of crisis, or high emotion, or decision… you are alerted. Prompted. To pop back and observe. To help, if we can. Although most of our descendants have the psychic ability of rocks. Your mother is a fine and an admirable woman, but she wouldn't recognise a message from the spirit world, even if it kicked her very hard in the guava."
Johanna sighed, resignedly.
"I fear I'll only ever get to have a proper sit-down getting-to-know-you conversation with your mother when she dies and joins us here. A shame. I like her. But the Smith-Rhodes family has never had much of a magical streak in it. Magical ability isn't a survival quality in the Veldt. We have never bred for it."
Johanna, the oldest Johanna, turned and smiled at Bekki.
"Until now, liewe hecksie. You are the first. Do you realise how rare that makes you? A Smith-Rhodes with magic? From your fine and gentle father. A good man. He brought something new to our family. You."
They were passing now to a mountain, standing proud from the surrounding earth. From the right angle and if you squinted sideways and covered one eye, it looked a little like a lion, or perhaps a really weather-eroded sphynx.
An encampment of tents and parked carts was set up beneath its feet. A mighty army had indeed passed this way and made its orderly lines. But something was terribly wrong…
"These are bad memories for me, liewe hecksie." Johanna said. "I may need your support."
"You have it, ouma." Bekki said.
Her ancestor smiled.
"Dankie. This may be unpleasant for you too. Maar, hou jou lyn. Staan vas. This was terrible for me too."
They flew down over the terrible scene. The battle was nearly over. Men, lots of dead men. In the red coats of Ankh-Morpork. Nearly naked black-skinned men. Scattered weapons. The black warriors were there. In their hundreds and their thousands. Many dead, some feebly struggling still. In the sky, vultures wheeled unhurriedly. They could afford to wait. The black warriors were already stripping the dead. Looting. Pulling on the red coats of the fallen. Finishing off those who were not quite dead yet.
"That, I learned later, is not desecration or disrespect for the fallen." Johanna said, quietly. "The Zulus believe stabbing a man in the stomach to finish him is respect for a worthy foe. It allows his spirit to ascend to Heaven as a great warrior. And taking an item of his clothing to wear is a tribute to a brave warrior. Apparently you assume something of his bravery in so doing."
They watched the terrible, heart-breaking scene unfold.
"They also thought the red clothes were pretty natty. Blood-red. A worthy cloak for a warrior." Johanna said, drily. "And they really, really, needed crossbows and ammunition. The Zulu Empire did not manufacture them."
Bekki noted her ancestor was breathing deeply and heavily, as if preparing herself for an ordeal. Bekki took her arm to steady her. She looked frail, and old. Bekki was reminded that she was nearer seventy than sixty. Probably.
Here and there, little knots of desperate soldiers were still fighting last stands. Their battle over and lost beyond rescue. But still they fought.
Johanna led them to one particular battle..
The woman was red-haired. In her middle twenties, possibly. She was dressed in Boer khaki, hatless, her tangled red hair streaming. As Bekki watched, the whip she was desperately flailing in her left hand to keep the Zulus at bay tangled around the assegai of a warrior. Perhaps cleverer and more astute than others, he tugged with his spear. The woman was tiring. She gave a cry of despair as he pulled the whip from her left hand, disarming her, taking the weapon away. But she still had a machete, the all-purpose weapon, in her right hand…
"Your mother realised it too, I think." Johanna said. "A whip is a great thing. You can do tricks with it. It's a useful weapon. We are all good at it. But ultimately, a showy distraction. Gets in the way. As I found out down there. You notice she doesn't carry it much, these days. Your Aunt Mariella doesn't use one at all."
Bekki recognised the machete. Here, it looked new, sparkling, yet to be enamelled black.
"Yes." Johanna van der Kaiboetje Smith-Rhodes said, quietly. "That is me down there, liewe hecksie. As I was on the day. And that is the sword. It was new, then."
Bekki, appalled, realised how much like her mother the woman looked.
And her face was contorted with fear. And despair. And regret. Yet still she fought, alone in a circle of cautiously encroaching Zulu warriors.
"The history books tell you how she fought alone and how brave she was." Johanna said, quietly. "That she fought till the last, roared defiance, and never gave in. That the bravest of Boer women fought till the bitter end and was one of the last to be overcome at Isandhlwana."
They watched the woman, tears streaming down her face, screaming "Make an end, you bastards! Kill me!" as she swung her sword. Another Zulu fell. There was a spray of red. Bekki winced and looked away, feeling the horror.
"I was terrified." Johanna said. "And heartsick. My husband was somewhere else nearby. Probably dead. I just wanted it to end and to join him. Quickly. And maybe an hour before, we'd been in among a mighty unbeatable army that was going to roll over the Zulu country. Or so we thought. But just then, I really didn't want to carry on living."
The end came quickly. As the woman tired, Zulus who had been cautiously creeping up behind her rushed forward. They leapt. She fell, submerged, still feebly struggling, among a press of black bodies, and was lost to view.
"And that's where it should have ended." Johanna said. "Charles and I had no children. Then. He should have died, I should have died. There would have been no Smith-Rhodes family. No descendants. Ultimately, no you."
She took Bekki to a different part of the battlefield. Two or three men on horses were galloping away, pursued by Zulus. One of the riders, wearing an orange and not a red jacket for some reason, was encumbered by a body slung over his horse. He had a strange multicoloured sort of sash draped about him. The other two riders seemed determined to defend him and get him out of there. Bekki gasped. He looked a lot like Uncle Julian. The resemblance was striking.
They watched the three riders gradually put more distance between themselves and pursuit. They galloped to distant safety.
"Charles Smith-Rhodes, my husband." she said. "He escaped. Not the Charles Smith-Rhodes of your time. The man I married. The son of Sir Cecil Smith-Rhodes. He rescued the Ankh-Morporkian flag. Important. To a certain mind. To deny it as a prize to your enemy."
"He rescued a flag, and abandoned you?" Bekki said, indignantly. Johanna laughed, amused.
"Nothing to forgive, liewe hecksie. He thought I was dead. A reasonable thing to think on that terrible day. He should have rescued himself. I'd have shouted at him if he hadn't. I do not forgive him, though, for the man he rescued and slowed his horse down with. Needlessly. That was Lord Rust he was carrying. Rust. The imbecile who led that Army to destruction and saw two thousand men slaughtered. Under his leadership. Rust. The man who thought the Zulus would run if they saw good cold Ankh-Morporkian steel."
Bekki caught her ancestor's incandescent anger. It was like Mum when she really went off bang. Scary.
"He got to Lawkes' Drain. With Rust. But that's a different story."
"And what happened to you?" Bekki asked.
"Watch." Johanna said.
Bekki saw her ancestor, a young woman, dragged to her feet by Zulus. Her clothing torn and bloodstained. An important Zulu in a lionskin cloak and ornate headdress stepped forward to scrutinise her.
"What are you waiting for, you bastard?" the woman said, in a hoarse croaking voice. "Rape me. Or kill me. Or whatever you have in mind. Just get it over with quickly."
The Zulu general nodded and made a very slight smile. Then he made the warrior salute and raised his assegai and shield to her.
"Luckily for you, my parents are not formally married." he said. In Vondalaans. "So I am truly a bastard. And I don't rape. Or condone rape. Anyway. Too thin. Too pale. That disfiguring skin blemish and the flame coloured hair. Lady warrior, I assure you you have no fear of rape. Come with me. The Paramount wishes to speak to you."
Johanna sighed.
"I was a guest of the Zulus for over two years. Till the war ended. Didn't see Charles again for a long time. The fierce lady warrior who fought to the last sparked something in them. I was an enemy worth respecting. I learnt about them. Their language, their culture, their history. What can I say? I liked them."
Bekki saw her ancestor again, walking in a Zulu kraal, dressed in a native manner, a sarong-like dress appropriate to a married woman that covered her breasts and everything down to the knees. Incredibly, she wore her machete. She was also treated with friendly respect by the Zulus around her. She looked very much at home, in fact.
"They retrieved my sword." she said. "The Paramount King said a warrior should have her weapons. It would be shameful if I didn't. I promised not to use the sword on my hosts, and we understood each other. So he gave me the sword back. I hope his descendants didn't come to regret that too much. A good man, Ceteswayo. The history books say he was insane and power-hungry. Don't believe them."
"Why is it that people don't like ginger hair and freckles very much?" Bekki asked. It was one of life's indignities that she felt keenly.
"Ag. Some men don't. They have a prejudice. Based on the colour of your skin. Happens a lot in this country."
"Is that an ironic comment?" Bekki asked.
"You're quick, liewe hecksie. I like you."
Bekki got as full an account of the Zulu War as was possible before the magic, or whatever it was, wore off. She returned to her own bedroom, wide awake, with possibly three hours to go before breakfast. She spent the time writing down as much of it as possible before she forgot. What was it Godsmother Alice had said about history… eye-witness accounts are always valuable primary sources… She also made a note to look up the Lord Rust who had commanded at Isandlhwana. And write him into the essay. Just to annoy his descendant, her history teacher. This thought made Bekki smile. As Godsmother Alice had said, keep it objective in whatever you write, and however you interpret the known facts. Including the known facts about the generalship of the Rust family. She could not be penalised for sticking to the known facts.
She was looking forward to presenting her essay to Miss Lonsdale-Rust.
Her training in witchcraft was also progressing. The latest lesson involved the vital Witch skill of Mucking Out The Stables. Irena and Olga thought this was a useful skill for a young witch to learn.
What made it interesting was the fact the stables were on the wide flat roof of the mews at Pseudopolis Yard. A flat roof sixty feet up is not the usual sort of place to find a stables. Not even Bloody Stupid Johnson had designed a roof-level stable. Anywhere.
But these were not ordinary horses. Not at all.
And everything up here was geared up to flight and flying. There was an adapted Clacks tower that also served as a sort of Mission Control. You could clacks from it. It was staffed by goblins. But the platform at the top also housed an observation post, staffed by a duty Watchman, who manned, or personned, the omniscope link that served for communication with the duty Air Police flight. And with the longer-range long-haul flyers of the Pegasus Service, wherever they were in the Disc. It also linked to HEX, the University's thinking engine. The Pegasus pilots off-handedly referred to it as the Control Tower. Sam Vimes himself liked to loaf around up there, when he wasn't too busy, watching what was going on or just observing the City.
There were hangars for the collection of broomsticks and magic carpets that had accumulated in the inventory of the Air Police. A group of Dwarfs, ground crew and flight technicians, were based here. They could be heard at all hours tinkering with the technomancy that made it all work. Buggy Swires had his aviaries here, for the birds the Feegle pilots flew.
Periodically, a Dwarf would race out into the middle of the huge white circle painted on the roof with two wooden paddles, and perform a complicated ballet-cum-semaphore dance to guide a pilot down to land. For some reason a large letter "H" was painted in the middle of the circle.(1) Nobody knew what it was for. But it felt right. The circle would not be complete without it. Bekki thought it was a magic circle which needed a rune. Wizard stuff. Her father would know. She shrugged, and trucked the latest wheelbarrow full of muck to the service lift that ran down the outside of the building. Harry King's boys would collect and dispose. Getting the muck to ground level required a lift. Getting hay and straw and fodder up here needed a lift too.
Lieutenant Olga Romanoff, who commanded the Air Police and was the accepted Squadron Leader, had her office up here, near to the action. Olga was another Witch, with an interest in broomstick and flight technomancy, who had found her niche in the Watch. She also had a responsibility for Bekki's further vocational education.
But the stables were big. There were stalls for eight Pegasii. Not all of them would be here at any one time. Some were in Lancre, where the flying horses were bred. The Air Police had a forward base there too. Others would be around the Disc on missions. At any one time, no more than two or three would be in the stables where, with wings folded back against their bodies, they would placidly eat hay and watch the world go by like any other horse at rest.
Bekki was enthralled by them. It made the shovel-and-brush-and-wheelbarrow work worthwhile.
As she worked, she wondered when her flying lessons would begin.
Godsmother Irena had smiled slightly.
"All in good time, devyushka." she had said. "Remember I told you we begin by learning witchcraft from the ground up?"
She had shown Bekki the wheelbarrow, brush and shovel.
"This is starting at ground level. You get to the sky when I think you're good and ready."
Bekki sighed. She got on with it. As she worked, she wondered about the psychic link she'd established to her dead ancestors. She found it hard to think of them as dead. Even though she had looked up the birth and death dates of all four Johannas. They were definitely dead to this world. But she suspected she'd meet all of them in the sort of dreams that were more than dreams. The ones her father had advised her not to dismiss as "just dreams." And he should know.
Well, if they're my spirit guides, I'd rather have them, than that drunken Indian Mrs Cake has to make do with.
She'd met Evadne Cake. Mrs Proust had introduced them. Although Mrs Cake had haughtily said she wanted nothing to do with anything so common as witchcraft, she was a bona fide spiritual medium, if you please, Bekki had realised, at a deeper level, that this was a very specialised form of Witchcraft in action. Mrs Proust had mildly said all witches could do it, if we could be bothered to, but as a rule, girl, the dead are going to be as interesting from the other side of the grave as they were when they were still alive. So half the time, it's hardly worth the bother. Having to shuffle to one side inside your own head to let somebody come in and have a go at operating your voice, and things… then getting them to shift, afterwards. Bloody inconvenient, if you asked her.
Mrs Cake had looked reflective at this and said "True, that."
Bekki had gathered that Mrs Cake and Mrs Proust, while not exactly old friends, understood each other's point of view. Which was as good as.
Then Mrs Cake had looked long and hard at Bekki, and smiled one of those old-lady smiles that said she knew. Bekki didn't feel comfortable around that sort of smile.
"well, young lady." Mrs Cake had said, shaking her head slightly. "Have you got some spirit guides!"
Then she had gone all distant and said "Speak good honest Morporkian, will you! Can't understand a bleeding word I'm saying here!"
This was closely followed by
"Hei, liewe hecksie! Dit is lekker om jou weer te sien."
"Would you credit it, love. This one's foreign. Trying to get me to speak in some sort of foreign… I keep telling them and telling them, speak Morporkian, will you!"
Bekki tried to make sense of it.
"Err.. I know you are going to be one of four people. Which Johanna are you, please?" she asked.
"Sorry, Mrs Cake. She's right determined, this one. If it helps, she's from the really mad bit of Howondaland, and she keeps pushing me out of the way… ow! That hurt!"
Bekki blinked. Three different voices were emerging from the little old lady's mouth. And one seemed out of synch with the others.
"If it makes you feel more comforteble, I will speak Morporkien." said the other voice. "Sit over there, you silly little man. Wait till I em finished. Dankie. Besides, getting this voice to articulate Vondalaans is difficult. Rebecka. I em your great-aunt Johanna. Your grendfather's sister. Perheps you could warn Andreas concerning gelloping a horse where there are ant-bear burrows? The two do not go together. This is important. While I em fond of the great hulking lout, I would prefer not to see him here justnow. End it is good to see you, little one."
Mrs Cake was now speaking Morporkian with a Howondalandian accent. A plausible one. Some comedians tried to "do" the accent for laughs. It made her teeth grate.
"Is oupa Barbarossa in danger?" Bekki asked.
"Tell him to take care where he rides. Also thet riding a horse efter drinking is not a good idea. Oh, and your cousin Johanna hes distinguished herself. Tell her we saw how she fought on the jungle trail et Kokoda. We are proud of her. She hes the Silver Star. You will read ebout it in the newspapers. I must now leave. Take care!"
Bekki blinked. Mrs Cake came back to everyday reality.
"Bloody Howondalandians." she grumbled. "Not you, Bucket. The other sort. Come over here, taking our voices and making us speak in foreign. And their Morporkian ain't much better either."
Bekki looked at Mrs Proust. The ugly old witch smiled.
"I'd read the evening papers if I was you, love. And pass the warning onto your grand-dad."
It was actually in a message from the Embassy. Lady Katerina Vinhuis, wife of the new Ambassador, gaily told Mum she must be so proud. Your niece Johanna, I believe she was a pupil at your school, has been cited for the Silver Star for bravery in combat? It must run in your family. She killed three beastly insurgents in a running battle in Smith-Rhodesia, at Kokoda on the Border…"
Bekki noted that the sixth in the line of Johanna Smith-Rhodeses was now making her reputation. No doubt with the inherited Sword.
She also wrote to her grandparents saying "Watch where you ride. I heard about how ant-bear holes can trip a running horse and forgive me if the thought worries me…"
She now suspected the thing with her spirit guides was really real. She wasn't imagining it.
Offered a tea-break in the Air Police office, she confided her story to Olga and Nottie Garlick. Neither witch showed scepticism. They heard her out and paid attention.
"Makes sense." Nottie said. "Hey. When you're brought up in a castle and there's family history going back a long way. Even if most of our ghosts are now squatting in Mrs Ogg's laundry room. It happens. Families create their own magic. I go round to Nanny Ogg's now and again and talk to them. They appreciate it. Having a descendant they can speak to. You get to hear some stories."
"Same here." Olga agreed. "My family goes back a long way, too. There are some ancestors you really don't want hanging around. Some past Grand Dukes were not nice people. Not nice at all. Govno, the current Grand Duke is a bit of a bastard. And he's my father!"
Bekki had made tea for all three. This had formerly been Nottie's job. But Bekki was now youngest witch. This, she gathered, was another vital Witch skill. She had assumed it uncomplainingly.
They each took a sip.
Olga reflected.
"The Agateans have this sort of religion." she said. Your ancestors don't go away when they die. They sort of hang around. Or pop back every so often. Help out. They become sort of Small Gods to the family. The family is expected to honour their memory. Shrines. Ceremonies. Things become heirlooms and get handed down the generations. Over time they become a sort of guardian spirit. Ponder Stibbons might dress all that up in wizard-talk and speculate it has an accumulator effect. Belief gives them power. The longer it goes on, the more belief gets fed in, the more power it attracts. Localised magic only the family can tap into."
Olga sipped her tea again.
"And because so far, the Smith-Rhodes family has been as un-magical as anything you'll find anywhere, you've all been building up this power and nobody's noticed. It's been building up with nowhere to go to. Until now."
She smiled pleasantly at Bekki.
"Your mother. Lovely lady. Good friend. I like her. She would be the first to admit a frozen chicken has got more magical sense than she has. She's typical of your family. No magic whatsoever. Your family has different priorities, right? Then your family gets its very first magic user. Ever. Who is a Smith-Rhodes by blood. Your father can't do it, devyushka. He only married into your family. You've got the blood. You can do magic. You get the whole lot. At once."
She reached over and patted Bekki's shoulder.
"What's it like to discover you're Agatean?" she asked, pleasantly.
"How soon can I start flying lessons?" Bekki asked, changing the subject.
"All in good time." Olga replied. "What's that word you people use? Justnow."
"I'd prefer na-now" Bekki said, frankly.
She remembered flying, in her dream-that-was-not-a-dream, with the first Johanna. She wanted that again. Without the battlefield beneath, this time.
Bekki was still doing swords practice. Much to the despair of her tutors, and to the vocal disgust of her sister Famke, she was still utterly incapable of hitting back. Especially a friend. Her heart just wasn't in it. She felt silly and useless.
Until the evening Emmanuel-Martin de Lapoignard had a brainwave.
"Beccs. Let me try this." He said. "I know it makes me look stupid.."
He took a cardboard cut-out of a human face, which had eye-slits cut in it and elastic bands looped through its ears, which he used to secure to his own ears.
Bekki blinked. It was the face of Parsifal Venturi.
"We took iconographs of each other." Manni said, his voice muffled. "Class Art project. We learnt to develop them in the dark room in the cellar. You know, true iconographs using silver nitrate. I had this idea. I got Parsi to pose and look smug and important. Blew the picture up to lifesize, and…"
"En garde!" Bekki shrieked, seeing the hated face. Memories of that smug, oily, patronising, bullying, sneering, braying little shit Parsifal welled up in her.
"Bloody hell!" Manni shouted.
Ten minutes later he was rubbing a lot of bruises.
"I did this for you, Beccs." he said. He grinned. "It looks like it worked."
"Oh, Manni!" she said, almost sobbing. "I'm so sorry. You know I love you!"
He let himself be hugged.
"It was worth it." he said. "sister."
In the background, Johanna Smith-Rhodes and Emmanuelle de Lapoignard shook hands, grinning. Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons was speechless, for once, her mouth gaping open in astonishment.
A day or two later, a crossbow target bearing a lifesize iconographic image of Parsifal Venturi appeared on the Butts, on a quiet morning with hardly anyone around but a mother teaching her daughter to shoot. It was very soon riddled with accurately placed quarrels.
Again, to be continued…
(1) Olga and Irena maintained it was pronounced "N". "Our alphabet." Olga said. "It's an "N"".
Notes Dump:
Somewhere in a sea roughly halfway between two continents, the one of the tale being currently written and the semi-glimpsed one of future tales yet to be committed to paper, where isolated ideas are given lifebelts and a signal rocket against being rescued in future.