Bloodtide

There were these little leaflets they were selling on that cheap grey paper that's been re-cycled about ten thousand times. We sat in the back of the limo and read all about it, all about us. As if we were something from the old movies. Half of it was true and the other was just… well, whatever people cared to think! How our marriage had been blessed by the old gods. How Sigs had been given a magic knife which he gave to Conor (I wish). Or how he'd been given it to protect me if Conor turned against me. (Yeah, yeah.) How me and Conor met each other when I was only eight and we'd pledged to wait for each other. How we'd met in a dream. How the marriage had been forbidden by our fathers but of course they came round in the end.

But the best one was about me being this Robin Hood person. And that was true. That's to say, when I saw all those people and how much we meant to them, I decided to make it true. It was gonna be just like the games me and Sigs used to play. Well, it wasn't play at all, really. We robbed the rich to give to the poor. Now that I was married to Conor, the people would be freed, the people would be fed. I was gonna make sure of it…

'I'm a legend!' I told Conor gleefully.

'And I'm just an accessory,' he complained, pulling a face. He was jealous! Well, what do you expect? I mean, he was the prince. But me – I was the princess. He had to do something but us princesses, we bring all the good things just because. I was the sacrifice and I liked it. I was joining the houses of the ganglords together and if I could be happy like that, so could everyone else. I just thought – my father! How did he know? He had sacrificed me and it was all perfect. I was in love. I was going to make the world better.

I looked out of the window and my heart just filled up for them all- all of them out there, in their thousands and their tens of thousands and their hundreds of thousands. I thought, they depend on us. They need us. We can't let them down now.

16

As they drove back out beyond Camden, bumping and jerking across the ruined roads, the sense of relief in the convoy grew. The final possibility of ambush had gone; Val had been as good as his word. What was more, the well-wishing was just as strong once they crossed the border into their own lands as it had been in Val's. The crowds swelled on each side of the road to cheer the newlyweds home, the same light of hope in their eyes. And the men and women in the convoy – the suspicious army chiefs, the hard nosed businessmen and women, the smugglers, the gangmen who had thought they were driving to their deaths when they entered Val's lands – began to eye each other suspiciously to see if they shared the unfamiliar feelings that were stirring inside them. It had been a long time since hope had been at large north of the city.

They had begun to believe at last that the great dream of unification, of breaking out into the big world, was possible after all.

Home was once a kingdom of toppling towers, of flaking concrete, shattered glass and brick dust underfoot. There were flooded towers, great ruined houses, ancient stone buildings with no roofs. The floors of churches a thousand years old had stone flags slippery with algae.

That was then.

And this was now: flat, green and low. An open acreage of crippled suburbs. The wide acres of brick houses, detached and semi-detached, estate after estate of them opening out on either side of the crumbling roads that used to be Finchley. The walls would stand for centuries, but the roofs of most had long gone. Many of the old houses were now factories, shops and offices. The gardens enclosed by the old housing estates had been cleared and the fences knocked down to form fields. Beyond the houses, on the fringes of the city, were the big fields that grew seven-eighths of the fresh food for the enclosed city, acres of beans and potatoes and cabbages and leeks.

No one travelled far these days. Petrol was a luxury for the rich. Buses and trains lay rusting in the street, every useful part cannibalised decades ago. The bus stations had been turned into cowsheds. The tunnels where the Northern Line trains once ran were a home for rats, mice and other vermin – thieves, for instance, or beggars sheltering from the rain. And prisoners. The prisoners of London kept prisoners of their own. Lifetimes had been spent trapped in these filthy, damp passages.

Conor's headquarters in Finchley occupied several whole streets, an old estate of luxury houses. It was flanked on one side by an old railway cutting, on another by a reservoir. The old North Circular road on the other side was planted with razor wire and mines and was overlooked by wooden watch towers and armed guards. A great brick wall ran right around it all. Headquarters looked like a prison from outside, but the wall was to keep the prisoners out, not in.

All around it brickwork crumbled, doors peeled and rotted, paving stones cracked, telegraph and lamp-posts leaned, toppled and fell. Conor had a smaller population than Val but he was a hard ruler. With every second penny they earned going to Conor – it used to be called protection money but the ganglords called it tax these days – the people had little to spare.

But inside the Estate the houses were all perfect, the paintwork bright, the roads and pavements manicured to perfection. Conor took a pride in making his own place as exactly like it had been in the old times, when there was still society. The Estate ran its own small power station. All the houses had electricity, running water and gas. For Conor, his family, his relatives, his friends, as well as all the top men and women in the organisation and their families and servants, life went on as it used to a hundred years ago. There were bin collections, schools, central heating. There were television, radio, computer games. The brick wall and a thousand security measures kept ignorance, poverty, violence, cold, damp, disease and hunger well away.

Wide electric gates opened to let the convoy through. As they drove deeper into the compound, the roar of the crowd, who had been thirty thick at the gates, died quietly away.

Signy turned to Conor. 'One day,' she said, 'the whole of London will be just like your headquarters.'

Conor smiled at her. 'One day,' he lied.

'We'll make it happen. We have to. Because we love each other and they love us,' Signy said.

Inside the compound was the usual round of face-to-faces that the powerful have the world over. It was Signy's chance to meet the men and women who helped Conor run his tiny kingdom. With her father these people would have been colleagues; under Conor even the most senior were servants. Yet this pleased her. It was one of the things she would have to help change.

After the reception Conor had something to show her.

'But I just want to stop,' Signy moaned. It had been a very long day. She only wanted to bathe and rest.

'No, first come and see…' He pulled at her hand excitedly. She pulled back. He got cross and dragged hard. Signy laughed and relaxed and let him run her out across the neat tarmac and carefully weeded paving stones, off behind the houses to an area of patchy woodland and grass fields. The people in the Estate walked and ran their dogs here, and their children played safe from the desperation of hunger on the other side of the high wall. The leaves on the trees were pushing through, lit bright green from the sunshine overhead. There were windflowers in the glades and primroses at the edges of the trees. Signy was enchanted. In her part of London woodland was almost unheard of. She wanted to stop and linger and listen to the birds and dig her fingers in the earth and run under the trees, but Conor dragged her and pulled her until they burst out into a field.

'Surprise!' Conor bent over, out of breath and gestured forward.

She stared a second and then she said, 'Some surprise.'

It was some sort of weird tower. It was a great round body on four tall legs, thirty odd metres above their heads. It was made of metal beams and painted panels. Rusted metal legs zigzagged up. There was a ladder going into its stomach.

It was an old water tower. The water system in London had long ago fallen into disrepair; most people took their water from rivers and drains. But if you and your neighbours could afford to get a tower like this, you could have water on tap. This one was huge. It had once supplied water to the Estate, but it had grown old and had been replaced.

'Go on…' said Conor, pushing her. He pointed up the ladder. Signy ran to it and began to climb. Conor came up behind her.

The tower had seemed almost short and stubby from the ground, but once you started climbing it went on