Read Castles Made of Sand Online
Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Castles Made of Sand
CopyrightCopyright © Gwyneth Jones 2002, 2008
Frontispiece copyright © 2002 Bryan Talbot
All rights reserved
The right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
http://www.boldaslove.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA
This edition published in Great Britain in 2003 by Gollancz
A CIP record for this book
is available from the British library
ISBN 0 575 07395 0
Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,
Lymington, Hants
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
EpigraphHere begin the terrors
Here begin the marvels
Acknowledgements, Dedications, Bibliography, Discography, Commentary and contact details can be found at
http://www.boldaslove.co.uk
Castles Made of Sand
, Locations and Sources
(Short version)
LITERARY SOURCES:
Ma Bohème
, Arthur Rimbaud (
Arthur Rimbaud Collected Poems
, tr. Oliver Bernard, Penguin Classics);
Led Zeppelin From Early Days To Page and Plant
, Ritchie Yorke, Virgin Publishing; Verses from the Qur’an, A. J. Arberry,
The Koran Interpreted
, London 1955 (quoted in
Night, Horses and the Desert
, an anthology of classic Arabian Literature, Robert Irwin, Allen Lane);
The Ancient Celts
, Barry Cunliffe, OUP;
West Kennet Long Barrow Excavations
(the Avebury Monuments DoE official handbook, HMSO);
The Bone Cave Excavations
Alveston, Gloucestershire (Time Team investigations);
The Mabinogion
tr. Gwyn Jones, Everyman;
Arthurian Romances
, Chrétien de Troyes, tr. D. D. R. Owen, Everyman;
Le Morte D’Arthur
Vol II, Sir Thomas Malory, Everyman;
Mistress of Mistresses
, E. R. Eddison, Ba1lantine;
Lord Jim
, Joseph Conrad;
Uncle Vanya
, Anton Chekov, ed. David Lan, RSC; ‘Green Tea’, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, and ‘The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar’, Edgar Alian Poe (
Great Tales if Terror And The Supernatural
, ed. Wise & Wagner, Hammond and Hammond); ‘The Scarlet House’, Angela Carter (
A Book of Contemporary Nightmares
, Michael Joseph). Special thanks to Betty Gwilliam and Jim McLaughlin for Irish dialogue.
LOCATIONS:
South Lakes Wild Animal Park, Dalton in Furness, Cumbria; Swadlincote, Derbyshire (courtesy of Miss Ann Halam);
Lonely Planet Guide to Washington DC
;
The Rough Guide to Amsterdam
; Padstow and District, North Cornwall; Ross Castle, Kilarney, Co. Kerry; &
Focal Buiochais
to the people of Baltimore and Inis Cléire, West Cork.
Watch out for
The Annotated Castles
feature on the Bold As Love site, for Ax’s playlist, and a full chapter-by-chapter breakdown of sources and acknowledgements.
http://www.boldaslove.co.uk
PROLOGUE
About four a.m. Fiorinda and Sage decided they’d better leave the Disabled Toilet, fond as they had become of the place. They woke Ax and persuaded him that this was a good idea. Cleaners, Ax. Folks with brooms and buckets; you don’t want to meet them. The Rivermead Centre seemed deserted, blank corridors echoing with departed revelry. In the car park (ominous clanging noises from somewhere, no other signs of life) Sage hugged them and set off into the dark. Almost immediately he came loping back, hands in his pockets, shoulders forward, a dearly familiar tall silhouette, to where they were standing bereft, not knowing what to do with themselves. No, no no, he said. This is wrong. We stick together. C’mon, come back to the van.
They crossed the ghostly arena, with its shadow-buried rainbow of towered stages and marquees, and headed into the campground, still smashed enough that even Sage found his own back yard a puzzling wonderland. They could have gone on forever, they probably did go round in circles once or twice: on access lanes, or threading their way by paths only staybehinds used, between rows of tents that lay like sleeping animals: hand in hand, or in Indian file, brushing past spider-pearled thickets of Old Man’s Beard and Michaelmas daisies; discussing their route in rapt whispers. It would have been paradise to go on forever, through the chill, river-misted night…no need for a house or a home, sleep under a hedge somewhere with the stars rustling overhead.
Instead they reached the van, which was full of people, mostly unknown to the proprietor (as far as he could tell). They tiptoed past a couple of staybehind women having a hushed, early-hours conversation, stepped over the bodies on the floor in Sage’s room (the boss’s actual bed had remained sacred), and slept in the midst of the crowd. Many hours later Ax and Fiorinda woke alone, fully dressed, surrounded by digital hardware, and followed the scent of frying bacon to the kitchen—where Sage and his brother Heads, George and Bill and Peter, (all four skullmasked as usual), George Merrick’s wife Laurel, Bill Trevor’s posh girlfriend Minty LaTour, plus a grab-bag of Heads crewpersons, were cooking and eating a huge fried breakfast.
Sage was cheerful and sweet, but a distance had been re-established.
From there it was straight back to business as usual. The newly inaugurated Dictator and his girlfriend had to get to London, and establish a
modus vivendi
with the suits. The Heads zoomed off to Truro, where they’d promised a free gig for the Cornish (most of whom had no tv reception at present, so they’d missed the big concert). The show must go on, while none of the ongoing emergencies let up. The three leaders of the Rock and Roll Reich didn’t have another chance to examine their private life, all through the winter. But at last there came a pause, an equilibrium. At last a chance to take stock, count the bruises, relax a little. A dangerous time.
Sweetness And Light
‘What’s that?’
‘Haydn. Okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. Cruise, Sage.’
‘Tisn’t working.’
‘I wonder…’, muttered Ax. The Heads reckoned their boss was only safe to drive unaided when he was so wrecked he
knew
he was in trouble, which was not the case this morning. Still, there was a lot more room per vehicle on the roads these days, despite bomb-crater-sized potholes and long stretches where the surface had been hacked off by the righteous and never replaced. The van’s erratic glide wasn’t going to meet much opposition. Let him do without the autopilot, if it makes him happy. This is a holiday.
‘I think I fell in love with you,’ he said, ‘the night we did the concert at the end of the Islamic Campaign. You remember?’
‘Nah.’
‘Sage, you are having me on. Cast your mind back. Bradford Civic Centre, end of January last year. Arabian Nights décor, inadequate stage crew. We’d been running around the Yorkshire Dales with a bunch of hippy guerrillas for three months, playing live-ammunition wargames with the Islamic Separatists. I sell my soul to make peace, we agree to do an armistice gig for both the armies. No bands, just you and me: Aoxomoxoa on noise, stunt-dives and horrible special effects, Ax Preston on guitar. Worked out pretty well, considering.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t mean,
I don’t remember
. I meant, what, only then, Ax? Now you have hurt my feelings.’ The living skull turned to him, grinning in blithe affection.
If truth be known, he’d rather have had the guy’s natural face today but—
‘
Shit!
Watch the road—!’
Unfortunate that they should have hit a patch of traffic at that moment. Horns blared. A woman with a horse and cart was left yelling furiously… Well, strictly speaking, horse and cart rigs should keep to the left hand lane but—
‘Sage, I think I’ll drive.’
‘No, no, no.
My
van.
I
drive.’
‘Fuck. How old are you? Three and a half? Listen, if we were in a sports car I think I might let you kill me, but you could take out twenty innocent bystanders with this thing. I’m going to drive. Stop the van! NO! (he corrected himself, urgently), PULL OVER! Get off the roadway,
then
stop the van. DO IT, Sage—’
But when the great grey space capsule was parked on the hard shoulder (Sage having accomplished this feat without incident), Ax stayed where he was. The cab filled and brimmed with stately, joyful music, they smiled at each other: time was away and somewhere else.
‘Nah,’ said Sage at last, ‘can’t be true. You can’t have fallen for me only that night. I have never felt more
understood
in my life than I did then, first time on stage with you. You must’ve been practising.’
‘Maybe it was love at first sight.’
‘Hahaha. I
don’t
think so!’
In the lost past they had not been friends. They’d had one of those personality-clash feuds beloved of the music biz media: Aoxomoxoa, of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads, shameless commercial techno-wizard (aka Sage Pender), always picking a fight with Ax Preston, the modest, critically acclaimed guitar-man.
‘Okay, not love,’ Ax conceded (though from this vantage point, all of it looked like loving). ‘
Intrigued
at first sight. Or from an early date. Remember when I took you out drinking after you’d been slagging off my band on the tv?
Complacent nostalgia wank-aid for dreary little left wing acne-suckers
—’
‘It all comes back to you.’
‘Oh, I remember every word. That was when I first really looked at this—’ He reached over and traced the eyesockets and cheekbones of the skull. ‘There’s a lot of digital masks around. This is something else. It’s a serious piece of coding, and an amazing work of art.’