There was chaos, of course, and I missed all that too. When I finally came round, that day in Rex’s office, the elves had already come out of their millennia-long exile and had simply taken over the country.
Well, no. That’s not exactly true; they didn’t simply take over the country. They put the country to the sword. They killed hundreds of thousands of people; they laid waste to towns and cities. They forbade us to have internal combustion and mains electricity and telecommunications and a Government and, for reasons which escaped everyone, a music industry. The Crash and the chaos that attended the end of the War brought us to our knees, and they were never going to let us get to our feet again.
We waited for the rest of the world to notice our plight and come to our rescue, but the rest of the world had its own problems. The United States were no longer united; California was just the wealthiest nation in a continent of intermittently-warring countries. It was going to be another decade at least before Continental Europe emerged from what, by all accounts, was a bizarre Dark Age. Australia and New Zealand had come through the Crash pretty well, but only a die-hard optimist would have held their breath waiting for help from that quarter. We were all alone, trapped on an island with countless twitchy sylvan psychopaths.
Bizarrely, there were some compensations. For instance, it turned out that magic actually worked.
Well, maybe not magic per se, but all that weird fringe stuff like crystal ball-gazing and tealeaf-reading and palmistry and astrology and cutting open animals and reading the future in their entrails.
It turned out, in those days following the elvish Occupation, that these things always had worked. They just never worked as ways of foretelling the future. What no one had ever cottoned on to was that they all told you what was happening, or what had happened, somewhere in the world. This of course was useless, unless you were a journalist, where explaining what’s happening or what has already happened is part of the art.
The elves thought it was really funny that we had got it so wrong for so many years. They thought it was so funny that it was the only form of communication they allowed us to use. You could find yourself flayed to death for trying to start a local postal service, but the elves smiled benignly on you if you started reading animal entrails.
It was one of those fields of endeavour where size really does matter. The interior of a rabbit, read by an expert, might, at a pinch, tell you what was going on in London. A pig would give you access to some random gossip and hard news from across the Atlantic. Cut open a cow, however, and the world was your oyster. The guts of an oyster might, if you were lucky, give you a clue to where you left your favourite socks.
That was how the Chronicle had scored over us, over and over again. After years and years as a national newspaperman, Liam had inherited a farm so enormous that it seemed obscene to describe it as a smallholding. He had access to hundreds of cattle, seemingly thousands of pigs, and uncountable numbers of chickens. Liam’s animals gave the Chronicle access to news the Globe could only dream about.
Some people were better at it than others. Rex wasn’t bad, but only the best-intentioned critic would have described him as an expert at reading the entrails of recently-deceased animals.
Alice, on the other hand, was an absolute star. When Alice left Rex and moved in with Liam, the Chronicle became, in its way, as well-informed as any national newspaper had been in the days before the Crash. Alice could slaughter a chicken and ask it any question you wanted, and the geometries of its guts would tell you the answer.
And that, in the end, was what this stupid little war was about. Rex wanted Alice back, and he thought that if he just kept going she would, in time, realise she’d made a mistake and had gone off with the wrong bloke. It wasn’t the most bizarre situation I had ever seen, but it was up there in the Top Five.
“Liam just tried to sign me up,” I said.
Rex looked up from his desk. He’d had a bath and changed his clothes and slapped on some aftershave to try and cover the residual smell of pig’s blood, but if I was a betting man I would have been putting money on him scrubbing himself raw for the next week to get rid of the stink.
“Liam’s always trying to sign up my staff,” he said, going back to the page of copy he’d been reading when I came in. “He tried to sign up Harry last month.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “Harry threatened to kill him if he ever did it again.”
“I just thought you should know.”
He looked up at me again, a fearsome-looking little gnome of a man with the sweetest nature of anyone I’d ever met. He sighed and pointed at the chair he kept for visitors. “Sit down.”
I sat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I was tempted.”
He thought about this confession for a few moments. “I can’t offer you any more money.” He clasped his hands in front of him on top of Harry’s copy. I knew it was Harry’s, even reading it upside-down, because it was full of commas. Harry put commas in everywhere; he just couldn’t help himself
“It’s not the money, Rex,” I said. “Why do you carry on? He’s got half the livestock in the county, he’s got thirty-odd journalists, he’s got that sodding steam-powered press, he’s got that witch —” I stopped. “Sorry.” ‘That witch’ was Alice.
He shrugged. “I’m not going to give up,” he told me. “Despite what I said earlier, we are going to keep on reporting the news until we absolutely cannot report the news any more. Even if we have to exist solely on local stories.”
“If we do that we’ll last about a fortnight,” I told him. “The advertisers will just go over to the Chronicle.”
He leaned forward. “If I have to pay for this paper out of my own pocket,” he said calmly, “this paper will continue to be published every Thursday.” He sat back. “We got some useful copy out of the pig; I think if we’re creative we can spin it out for another three or four issues. What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy, if you want the honest truth,” I told him. “You and Liam.”
He chuckled. “Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I’m doing Ernie Hazlewright’s funeral in the morning.”
Rex looked sadly at me and propped his chin on his hand. “I’m going to miss old Ernie,” he said. “He was a proper old lad. Fought in the Falklands. You make sure you do a good job on Ernie.”
I sat and looked at him and I felt my shoulders start to slump, the way they always did when we had conversations like this. The Globe was like a black hole; I could get out far enough to peek over the event horizon, but I couldn’t escape the gravity of its impending doom. Rex was going to ride the paper as it went down the tubes, and I was going to be sitting alongside him in the front seat.
It was a lovely Spring morning, fresh and cool. I could smell the dew-damp earth of the fields on either side of the road.
There were fifteen of us in the journalists’ pool, riding through the French countryside with a column of Alliance armour. The War was in its third year and it hadn’t gone nuclear yet, apart from places like Kiev and Istanbul. The Alliance was finally making some headway against the Union forces. Everyone felt pretty good.
A black and white road sign went past our humvee. On it was the name Ste. Ursule du Lac.
Only an optimist would have called this a village. It was just half a dozen houses and a school grouped around the Norman church of St Ursula. It was deserted.
The Union had something they called police battalions. They came in behind the fighting units, and when an area had been pacified, they were supposed to stay behind and make sure that law and order were restored.