glad.
The tunnel was tight, narrow and damp, and Siggy was sick with fear. Sick, partly because he was always terrified before every mission, and this was the first one he had been on personally for six years, since the Wallace operation. A general doesn't risk his own skin. This was the culmination of so much. Conor was a bogeyman in his eyes, too. Then there was Signy. His beloved sister. He knew she was mad, but he didn't realise that he was scared of her, too. He trusted her. Hadn't she always delivered to him whatever she promised? Whose side could she possibly be on if not his own?
33
Siggy
I wasn't just feeling sick. I had a migraine, a fever and the squits. I had to keep hanging behind and squirting yellow stink on the stones. Some soldier! Some king. It'd been years since I'd done anything like this. I was cursing myself, wishing I'd let Styr do it on his own. I mean, maybe it was no worse than it always had been, but I used to be used to being afraid, you know? And now I was just so scared. I could see Styr looking at me every time I stopped.
'Maybe you should go back,' he teased. I didn't even smile. The passageway was getting narrower and narrower, I was feeling claustrophobic and I was thinking to myself, if the gods want me to do this sort of thing, why don't they make me enjoy it? Look at Styr, he was practically having a tea party. It just wasn't fair.
I don't know how far we got. There weren't many landmarks at that point, but we must have been quite a way into the main part of the bunker because we could hear Conor's troops. They were in different tunnels, of course, but ours ran pretty close to some of theirs, and you could hear them quite clearly. At least once, they must have been just a foot or so away. You could hear their voices and their kit banging on the walls as they ran along.
All of which meant we had to be dead quiet ourselves in case they heard us. Actually, they probably wouldn't have known who we were even if they had; as far as they were concerned our boys were all coming down from the top. But even so, we were on our own, miles from any support, behind enemy lines. Even though we knew our tunnel didn't meet up with theirs until right at the end, just the thought kept us on tip-toes.
Trouble is, it didn't matter how quiet we were. Someone knew exactly where we were.
It started with a scraping noise – quite soft to start with but it stopped us in our tracks. This noise wasn't muffled; it was in there with us. In our tunnel. You could tell. It began slowly, then it got louder and it was followed by an almighty BANG – a real big bang like a giant hammer coming down behind us. It made the rock shake under our feet, it made your insides shake. There was a pause and a brief movement of air in the tunnel. We stood still eyeing one another.
'What the fuck was that?' said someone suspiciously, but it was pretty obvious what it was. Then it happened again, right in front of our eyes this time. We could see it in the lights of our head torches – a section of the tunnel coming down. It wasn't a collapse either, it was far too neat a job for that. It was a slice of rock about half a metre thick. We had a fraction of a second to look under it as it came down -BANG! I can't describe how huge it was. It thudded down a few feet in front of us so violently we were sure it was going to bring the roof down. The men shouted and we all turned and ran back the way we'd come, but we'd had it, we knew that at once. We ran about ten steps and there was the other block, the one we'd heard before, cutting off the way.
Styr said, 'Now that's what I call a trap.' And that's what it was. Conor must have known about this way in the whole time and he'd got the last cut in after all. I stood there thinking, is that it? So we were going to win but I wasn't gonna be there?
Of course Conor would be long gone. The bunker would be empty, except for the body of my sister. Let's face it, if he knew we were coming down here, he must have known who told us, too.
Someone said, 'They'll rescue us when they get down here,' but I was already thinking it was a good job we had weapons on us, because I didn't fancy dying of thirst down here. The only other chance, I suppose, was that Conor wanted to get us in person to bargain with.
We sat down, leaning against the walls of the tunnel, and waited. No one was really scared yet It was almost like a relief because we weren't going into the fighting, despite the knowledge that it was going to get awful in there soon enough. Only Styr was up on his feet, pacing the section of tunnel, leaning his ear against the walls to see if he could hear anything.
And then – it was only half an hour later by my watch, although it felt like hours – there was a clatter far above us. We all looked up towards it. There'd been other noises in that time, knockings and rumblings, the sound of voices once or twice, so we knew there must have been other passages quite near us. But again, this noise wasn't heard through rock, it was inside with us. Someone shone a torch towards the clattering and we could see a small opening. An airhole. There were lots of them all the way along the tunnel. Something was falling down this one towards us.
It clattered and rattled on the rock, getting louder rapidly on its way down. Everyone was cringing and getting ready to duck, because they were sure it was going to be a grenade of some sort. But not me. I was staring up there and smiling away because… I
I felt it leap into my hand like it did before. I just stood there with my whole heart and soul singing with the strength of it. Then I walked forward to the block of stone that stopped our way forward, struck my knife into it hard, and I began to saw a hole in the rock under London.
34
Under two hundred metres of rock the only evidence of the fire-bombing was the sound of distant thuds, like the footsteps of a giant far above their heads. Sometimes the light fittings shivered ever so slightly. Later, as the evening came on in the day so far away, the lights went out.
Above, the blue-uniformed soldiers waited in the passages leading up to the surface, armed with heavy weapons, laying their booby traps. Conor could have run, but where to? No one would hide him, but he would never go anyway. He had not yet lost everything. There was one thing left, something more powerful than cities or armies or reason itself. He still had the knife.
The knife meant everything to Conor, and it meant everything to Signy, too. Over the past weeks and days, she had quietly and systematically made her way into every cranny and slit and crack in the whole bunker, but she still hadn't been able to find where Conor kept the key. On that last day she stuck close to him, watching, waiting; but he gave no sign of going in the end to his most sacred treasure. On the morning of the final attack he had his son called to him. Vincent, now eleven years old, stared in horror at this strange, trembling fattier who had never had anything to do with him before now. Conor made him read to him and watched his face closely as he stumbled over the words; it was all the boy could do to keep his eyes on the page. After half an hour, Conor turned away abruptly to scold his wife for spending no time with the boy.
'Now look, what's his life been for?' he asked. He meant, that the boy had been brought up for a future that would never happen. Now he would die without ever even enjoying the present Vincent understood something of this.
'We can escape. Why can't we escape?' he begged. But neither parent answered him and he was scared to question these dangerous people any further.
Conor sent the boy back with his tutor and moved to a table to eat, but he was able to take nothing. He stayed
