Chapter 5b

Ships of various stripes turned up over the next two hours, most very badly piloted. The pirate, it turned out, made a much better captain than the grumpy Russians, who drove the Durmstrang ship smack into a wall, or the drunken Scandinavians in a Viking longboat, who managed to park it successfully but then fell overboard. (They sheepishly admitted that they had stopped off at Estonia to pinch some duty-free vodka.) The Peruvian woman then turned up in an astonishing Peruvian boat like a bundle of straw, which she'd driven from Lake Titicaca; her journey across the bay was alarmingly wobbly, but then, she did have the very valid excuse that she was piloting her ship single-handed. All the same, Voldemort eventually resorted to standing on top of the Vanguard submarine and giving arm signals.

A sodden Finn ambled up to me, thought for a moment and pronounced, "Good morning."

"Good morning," I agreed. She offered me the bottle. I declined.

She then stood beside me for a moment, watching Voldemort waving furiously in an attempt to stop a brilliant silver quinquereme colliding with a catamaran. His sleeves contrasted against the tentative sunshine like plumes of black smoke.

I suppose, with no wind, voices carry a long way. Momentarily we heard a faint, excited shout of "No, no, you idiot, left..."

The Finnish woman took one more swig of vodka and gestured towards the Dark Traffic Controller. "Voldemort..." she said, and then, either overcome or devoid of any further English vocabulary, shook her head in disbelief and trundled back to the other Scandinavians.

I thought she put it rather well.

000

"They're a very weird bunch," I observed doubtfully some time later, "to be saving the world with."

Voldemort was sprawled out next to me on an ornate Chinese rug. He gave a honk of laughter, spraying lemonade everywhere, and spluttered, "How d'you think that's different from the normal set-up?"

Eh? "What?"

"All right, put it like this," he said, settling a cushion more comfortably under his head. "When I first started in the MGB, the chap I had to report to was an ex-Comdiv of the Red Army. Before he got his leg shot off he used to command a division of sixteen thousand people. And then I would go back to Britain and delegate all my various evil deeds to people like dear old Bella and Lucius, who had commanded precisely no people, and whose CVs contained... well... nothing."

I lay back and closed my eyes. The gentle sun licked my eyelids while I pondered this. "The witzy world's very small compared with the Muggles," I observed.

"We're small fry, Harry. We really are. Secrecy is our only defence, really... I always found it very odd when your side wondered what the Death Eaters' tactics were and where we'd learnt them. Our strategy was precisely the same as the Witzyworld's always used, writ on a smaller scale. Clandestine activity, guerrilla warfare..."

"I don't want to know how the Death Eaters kill people, thanks," I said firmly.

There was a long silence. I opened one eye to see him staring at me speculatively with the narrowed eyes that I had come to associate with imminent ghastly lectures. "I don't want to talk about politics AT ALL," I shouted before he could get his mouth open, "pretty much ever, because they bore me to tears."

"Ah, Harry," he said, stretching out on the rug like a basking shark, "the universal nice-person's aversion to telling others what to do. Sadly, the only people who enjoy politics are those who are hated by the rest of the populace, which is why all the world's governments are up shit creek."

"What about you?" I said absently, meaning the Death Eaters.

"Me? I'm not a government, am I? Unless I secede from the United Kingdom and declare my own nation..."

"Transylvoldemort," I suggested.

"Transylvoldemort, and Nova Pottia. That would do."

"You would be supreme ruler," I observed. "There'd be nobody more important than you."

"Would Nova Pottia declare war on me?" he said suspiciously.

"Are you taking the piss?" I spluttered. "There's been enough wars."

"And the various Ministries of Magic are very strict about national sovereignty. Ah, I begin to like the sound of this."

"No-one could ever disagree with you."

"And no minions to mess things up. Mmm."

I was beginning to say that he should really consider putting this idea into practice after the war, and the head-washing be damned, but two shadows moved over us; and their owners turned out to be Svetlana-Chubby-Ginger and Yevfimy-Greybeard, and the happy mood evaporated. "What?" Voldemort said irritably in Russian, and there followed another interminable argument, during which I sat and fidgeted and finally went to sleep on the cushions; I would rather have gone to the extreme other end of the docks, or, indeed, back to Wales, but felt it would be unfair to abandon poor old Voldemort.

I drifted off on my cushions and had a very odd set of dreams, cruel dreams in which Voldie was his scary old self and threatened me with death and torture and madness and god knows what else; but all the time a part of my consciousness was saying in a puzzled voice, "But he's right here, next to you. The sun's shining. You're in Scotland," and then it in its turn was drowned out by the real Voldie's voice saying "Harry. Harry," and his warm hand on my shoulder.

"Have they gone?" I said sleepily, rubbing my eyes and licking stale lemonade off my lips. "I thought they'd never bugger off."

"You weren't the only one. I didn't kill them, though."

"I've changed my mind. You can kill them," I said, rolling over and sitting up; and fortunately he just chuckled. Then he stopped chuckling and started filing his claws again.

"They're worried about the Vanishing Spell pocket universe," he said unenthusiastically. "They think it's a specific, single place. That is, that all the Vanished objects are stored higgledy-piggledy together. So those two, since they show signs of understanding nuclear physics, are worried that either the missiles will have detonated there, or that the gradual accumulation of all that plutonium will cause an explosion anyway. Oh, and everything would be irradiated, obviously."

"Can't be," I said.

He gave me a Look. "Why can't it?"

"Because my bits don't glow in the dark."

There was a pause, and I elucidated, "You Vanished my bits, the second day we were here. Then you Restored them. They're not irradiated, so..."

Voldie's non-eyebrows shot up; so did his wand. He pointed it at my crotch, then hesitated.

"Mmm," he said. "Ahem. The Röntgen Charm detects radiation by causing affected areas to glow green. I won't be able to see it through your trousers, so if you could, er..."

"Pull the other one!" I said, unable to believe my ears. "Use the Aobnmetp thing!"

"The how-much?What gibberish are you talking now? How I wish I'd never aimed at your skull when I cast that Killing Curse!"

"The yellow thing called Aobnmetp that measures radiation!"

He mumbled "aobnmetp" to himself a few times, then finally glared at me, made the yellow thing appear from nowhere, and said "Are you talking about the dosimeter, Harry, which says ДOЗИMETP on it?"

"Yes! Look, it says on!"

"Dear god, illiterate as well as stupid! Pull your top up."

I obligingly pulled up my T-shirt. Voldemort switched on the dosimeter, took the phone in one hand and, with the other, reached matter-of-factly for the waistband of my underpants. I screeched in horror, vetoed that plan and started a long argument, which was finally resolved by my undoing my fly and letting him wave the phone over my undies. The soft chattering of the dosimeter proved that my privates remained unsullied, and Voldemort was extremely satisfied.

"Well, that proves it," he decided, plonking the dosimeter down next to a cloisonné opium pipe. "The things we Vanish can't be all stored in one big heap, or, if they are, the plutonium isn't irradiating things and the bombs haven't gone off. Excellent. We'll have to show the Russians immediately, except, erm," he coughed apologetically, "perhaps we should Vanish something more, er, innocuous and restore that instead..."

"I AM NOT FLASHING MY BITS AT THE RUSSIANS."

"Well. No... So if I Vanish a lump of rock and Restore it, that should satisfy them. And, er, yes. Thank you."

"You're welcome." I sat up, drank some more lemonade and looked round at our meagre fleet. The harbour was now dotted with magical ships. The sight was bizarre: some were much bigger than others, all were much smaller than the subs that surrounded them, and none was moving. There was no tide to necessitate a rope or an anchor, and no waves to bob them up and down. They sat scattered across the motionless waves like the abandoned Lego of a giant child. "What are we doing now?"

"Figuring out which subs to dredge up," he said gloomily, tapping his claws on the dosimeter. "All the ships are here, except for the one that Albert thought he might be bringing, and I bet he can't get it to work, anyway, so... We've had an argument about which detection system to use, but we'll skip that. According to the data at Menwith, there should be a sub a bit south of Iceland, so we're going to aim for that one. It's one of the other two Vanguard submarines, the British ones. They're called Vindictive and Vainglorious, or something else beginning with V."

"Voldemort?" I suggested.

He looked at me suspiciously. "I hope you're not actually calling me vindictive and vainglorious?"

"Well, you are."

A Chinese witch sat down next to Voldemort, picked up his dosimeter with a puzzled expression and tried to inhale through the phone. Voldemort silently removed it and handed her the opium set, then said, "True. And there are American and Russian subs; we'll leave them till later... So, they basically trap the sub in a great big net," he said glumly, "and tow it to the surface."

"And crash it into the pier."

"Yevfimy and co. will not be steering... Where are you going?"

"I'm not staying here if she's smoking," I objected, standing up. "I hate fag smoke, it gives me a headache."

Voldemort's face contorted into an expression of profound intellectual agony. "Potter, she's not actually smoking opium. It's a bubble pipe."

"Oh," I said, watching as the Chinese woman exhaled a stream of huge pink and turquoise bubbles, which wobbled delicately along the lines of picnickers and quietly froze over the sea. Illuminated by the slow sun, they were really quite beautiful. I sat down again and enjoyed the colours until I heard Voldemort snicker.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Look," I pointed out, "that bubble isn't popping. It doesn't need a bubble wheelchair or anything..."

"That one's me," said Voldemort. He added as an afterthought, "Actually, they're all me."

Some shouting, laughing Finns and Russians started playing tennis with the bubbles, Banishing them back and forth towards each other. It soon became clear that none of them was a proper Beater. I snorted and was about to comment on their poor technique when I saw that some of the dead bubbles, frozen on the water in the middle of the bay, were moving.

The sea swirled. Its surface trembled. Then a great bronze... thing... swelled out of the water like the rising head of a hippopotamus. Two enormous metal hoops rose inexorably above the dock, resolving themselves, no less perplexingly, into the strangest ship I'd ever seen in my life (not that I'm any sort of expert, I suppose). It would be impossible to describe, so I won't try. All I could think was that it was not recognisably Western, or Chinese, or Middle Eastern, or anything, really. God only knew which culture had produced this leviathan.

A small, dark figure on the bow vanished with a crack. An even smaller dark figure, which had been hovering in mid-air beside him, followed suit. I identified Albert and Lakshmi long before they Apparated beside Voldemort, nodded politely and said, "Good evening."

"Hottie," said Voldemort in an unignorable voice. "What's that thing?"

Albert raised an eyebrow. "A ship, I believe," he said, as the Russians and Chinese gaped. "I liberated it from the Angolan Ministry. If yeu don't like it, I can always take it bek?"

000

So at last our mighty fleet was assembled, and fuck me, what a sight it was. I don't really know much about boats, but we had amassed three junks, two catamarans, a Viking longboat, a Peruvian thing made of reeds, an Egyptian thing made of papyrus, five Western-style ships of various types and a dhow; plus, of course, Albert's Angolan thing, about which there is nothing more to say. Voldemort, gloomily deciding that the operation could be postponed no further, gave the magical equivalent of a slideshow presentation; he coaxed a white marble column out of the naval concrete, sat on top of it and created various moving pictures on its flat front.

"... We've got various issues to consider, such as navigating the ships, the need for careful handling of the subs, the spells we're going to use to manoeuvre them. – Someone cast a Sobering Spell on the Finns. Thank you..."

I wasn't needed for any of this. I had thought that perhaps Voldemort might like some moral support; but if so, he hadn't mentioned it, and in general he seemed to be doing rather well. He hadn't collapsed, screamed or wet himself, at any rate. The presentation was a bit basic, even for me, so I just sat on a rug fifty yards away, basked in the sun, and bit my nails.

"... NO, for god's sake, a submarine is NOT a big fish. It's a machine. A ship. A big tin can full of Muggles..."

My nails became tiny and perfect. I wondered what to do next. I thought about life for a long time while Voldemort laboriously explained about plutonium, driving his message home with a lot of moving pictures of subs exploding and killing everyone around them. Eventually I found myself arranging little pebbles on the concrete.

Attached to a small piece of grit, I discovered an ant. It was frozen, of course, and about a third of the size of the boulder it was dragging along. I gazed at it for a while and thought of Robert the Bruce watching his spider.

"Why does it glow in the dark? Because it's fucking radioactive. No, it's not magical. It's a completely natural phenomenon..."

Like Robert the Bruce, I eventually had some profound thoughts. My profound thoughts ran thus:

Being powerful is a very lonely business. Here are the most powerful magicians in the world (and me on their coat-tails for some reason, despite the fact that the boat in Voldie's Horcrux-hidey-hole didn't notice I existed), and they don't even have an animate ant to keep them company.

The ant reminded me amusingly of our little boats tugging an enormous nuclear submarine along behind them. Perhaps we weren't so powerful after all.

I kind of wanted to help it carry its piece of grit, but I had no idea where it was going or what it wanted to use it for, so that wasn't much use; which just reminded me dismally that it's easy to stomp on things, but very difficult to help them.

Anyway: Voldemort's crash course in nuclear submarines came to an end; the crews milled between their respective ships with excited shouts and much amateur interpreting. I could keep track of Voldemort by his shiny bonce, which bobbed up and down periodically among the rabble as he gave orders; it was a good thing he was so tall. I couldn't see what I was supposed to do, so I just sat and remained submerged in the crowd.

Once I thought I saw a little blue glow in the porthole of one of the ships; but it was so faint it was impossible to tell whether it had been anything supernatural.

At last the ships began to gurgle off into the Gare Loch, leaving great dark whirlpools and frozen waves; the shouting and bustling slowly diminished until the last Chinese bloke walked onto the deck of his ship, waved at Voldemort and disappeared into the hold. Voldie looked around with a perplexed expression and finally noticed me sitting on my rug; as the ship smashed down into the ocean he came striding over, robes sweeping away.

"I forgot about you for a while," he said. "Are you all right?"

"Never better. Well done for your slide show – don't tread on my ant!"

"Dear god, I'm not allowed to tread on ants now?!"

"Yes, just that one."

"Nutter. – Thank you. Really, it was pretty much all right. I'm never happier than when I'm telling people how useless and incompetent they are... I take it I can sit here, can I? No ants?"

"Yes, you can. – So that's why the Death Eaters keep fucking things up."

"Bitch."

"Yep. Are we going back to Wales now, or do we stay here?" I asked as he folded his legs neatly onto the rug next to me.

"I think we'd better stay here," he said glumly. "I won't be any happier in Wales, anyway. I'd only worry about what was happening here."

"D'you want anything to eat?"

"No. Stress upsets my stomach."

This sentence sounded so silly coming from a Dark Lord that I sniggered all the time we were playing noughts and crosses, and after issuing various dire warnings he finally got fed up with me and cast Rictusempra. While I was spastic and helpless on the rug I noticed him looking around uneasily; when I finally managed to stop guffawing he was definitely glum.

"I wish all those people were still around," he said nervously.

"They – hee hee! – can't be, can they?" I said practically, wiping away tears of laughter. "We need them to – ha! – drive the ships."

This did not appear to reassure him; he carried on fidgeting worriedly. I sat up, put my arm around his shoulders and patted his bony body. He reciprocated rather mechanically. It didn't appear to help.

"Look, just don't think about it," I cooed soothingly. "Think about something – hee! – else for five minutes. Sing a song or something..."

"What shall I sing?" he said in leaden tones.

"Ten Green Bottles," I said randomly.

In a voice like ashes falling from the sky, he sang nervously, "Ten green bottles... sitting on the wall. Ten green bottles... sitting on the wall. And if one nuclear warhead... should accidentally fall... There'll be no green bottles... sitting on the wall."

I couldn't admonish him for this rather gloomy choice of lyric, because at that moment there was a great roar from Faslane Bay. Waves surged forwards and froze, forming a giant crater of water, and masts reared up from the sea; moments later our fleet of magic ships was heaving into view, with between them, caught in a glowing net, the Vanguard submarine. Gulliver had been snared by the Lilliputians.

Any belief that Voldemort was sanguine about this development, however, would be sadly unfounded. As the noise first rang out he levitated three feet into the air. His arm was still around my shoulders, and as he jumped he suddenly clutched my throat so tightly that I choked and went temporarily blind. We sprawled across the concrete and I managed to extricate my neck from his grip. While my headache was fading and my vision returned, I made out that the nuclear monster was trapped in the bay and that Voldemort, far from pouncing on me to rip my throat out, was bending over and coughing helplessly; coughing up blood.

"Oh my god," I said, forgetting my sore neck immediately and grabbing his shoulders. "Have you got radiation sickness?"

He stared at me in wide-eyed, naked fear, at his blood all over my fingers, at my terrified face. I prodded his face to see if it would instantly bruise, show that it was all over. It didn't.

"Accio dosimeter," I said feebly, and it came sailing across the concrete and landed neatly in my palm.

It said there crackling as peacefully as a kitchen fire. I shoved the phone anxiously into Voldemort's face. No change.

He began to breathe again, and looked a little calmer. "What on earth did you go and say that for? Of course I'm not... hah..." he ran out of breath again and had to lean on my shoulder.

"You started bleeding out of nowhere," I mumbled, feeling ridiculous. "I thought it must be, you know." I pulled out my wand and cleaned the blood off our hands and robes.

Voldemort did a few experimental coughs and prodded his breastbone. "When I'm frightened there's this pain in my chest. I think I must have ruptured something."

The tension over the last few days had been unbearable. The concept of poor old Voldemort straining hard enough to give himself internal injuries, and the sight of fresh blood, made it worse; so as the various motley crews walked across the concrete, calling out to him for instructions, we can perhaps be forgiven for breaking down in hysterics.