We had reached the door of the circular Lago meeting house.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘this is where we need your help.’
‘You want me to address the Grand Council of Coneys?’ I said. ‘And try and broker some sort of eleventh-hour deal? I can take offers back and forth to Smethwick, and even, perhaps, have a few ideas of my own.’
‘Perish the thought,’ he said, finding my comments somehow amusing. ‘Better rabbits than you have tried and failed on that score. You’re not here to help us, rescue us, lead us to freedom or otherwise give us the benefit of your wisdom. We’re not going to see any hoary old “Hominid Saviour” bullshit this evening, thank you very much – we’ve got troubles of our own.’
‘Then what am I here to do?’
Doc opened the meeting-house door to reveal a large room with about two hundred rabbits inside, all either elderly, young or infirm. There was also a smattering of humans, but Pippa was not amongst them. The tables were arranged seven long in five rows, and in the centre of each table was a huge pile of sliced bread. On the table in front of each workstation were tubs of dandelion-oil margarine, and the air was full of gossip in English and Rabbity.
‘You’re on sandwich-making duty,’ said Doc. ‘It’s important everyone gets to eat before the attack.’
‘You wanted me in the colony to make cucumber sandwiches?’
‘Each contributes according to the level of their abilities. Besides, we were getting low on doilies. You can’t serve cucumber sandwiches on a plate without doilies.62 It’s just not the done thing.’
I opened the box Lance had given me, and it was indeed full of doilies. Quite nice ones, too. Plain white. Ornate.
‘Hello, Mr Knox,’ said Kent, who seemed to be in charge, ‘you can be on cucumber-slicing duty. It’s more efficient with fingers – even without thumbs you’re more dexterous than us. We can slice, but not slice thin, and that’s the secret of really good cucumber sandwiches.’
I turned to say goodbye to Doc, but he had already gone. I think he removed himself quietly on purpose. The dialogue between us was done, our understanding was complete. I wouldn’t see him again, nor ever know what happened to him, although it was likely he faced his death with more courage than I would ever possess. I took my place next to a young woman who was also missing her thumbs, and she nodded politely, gave me a sharp knife and I started slicing, although not without some difficulty. I’d only recently lost my thumbs and it was the first knife I’d handled since getting out of custody.
‘You came prepared,’ she said with a smile.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The chef’s hat.’
We were, I learned later, only one of twenty-six work gangs making cucumber sandwiches, the snack of choice for rabbits when nerves need to be calmed and the future is in doubt. Carrots are more for pleasure and everyday eating, dandelion leaves for when you just want to shoot the breeze – equivalent to a cup of coffee and a Danish. Radishes are for a hangover, parsnips for when you need a boost, turnips when there’s nothing left in the larder. There were gallons of tea, too, but that was handled by someone else.
I worked for ninety minutes, and must have sliced several hundred cucumbers. The finished sandwiches – once given a sprinkling of salt and with the crusts cut off – were taken off by waiter rabbits who plied backwards and forwards between us and the troops with the sandwiches on trays. It all worked in a rota system, so everyone got to go outside and offer words of encouragement, and to say their farewells. The news that filtered back was not good. Numerous drones had been seen overhead, and more artillery pieces had been observed moving into position and then waiting at readiness. Tanks and bulldozers were massed at the main gate, and infantry had moved up behind the tanks in case the rabbit had weapons of which they were unaware. And everywhere, ahead of everything, were the foxes, hundreds and hundreds of them, grunting and howling and yelping in their excitement, a murderous carpet of orange-coloured hate.
Most of this I found out much later on when researching for my book. It was Smethwick who had first encouraged, then begged the use of flame-throwers to clear the warrens, as rabbits, he said, ‘are full of surprises’. The ranking army officer, to his credit, told Smethwick that ‘if you want to do that kind of shit, old boy, you can get your own people to do it. There’ll be no unnecessary suffering to rabbits on my watch. I’m not sidestepping the ICC63 on taxonomic grounds only to be collared by the RSPCA. It’s conventional force only. Any overreach is on your shoulders – and don’t you forget it.’
Although I was busy and quite swept up in an odd shared sense of destiny, at the back of my mind was also survival – which involved surrendering to the first human I met. A fox, I knew, would probably be after revenge. They’d know who I was, not least because of the fox claw that was still around my neck.
The Battle of May Hill
The rabbit’s ‘Circle of Lifefullness’ has since been adopted by humans, and the movement is growing. Some say it was what the rabbits were here to do in the first place, to deliver a new faith, a new way of doing things. I try to adhere to the Five Circles as much as my human wiring allows, the same as the rest of us.
‘Take a break, Mr Knox,’ said Kent when I was down to my last cucumber. ‘Why not take a tray up to Mum? She’s with the Venerable Bunty and the commanders at the top of the hill.’
I glanced at the clock. It was half past seven. Thirty minutes to the attack.
I loaded up a tray, dispensed with the chef’s hat and made my way out of the meeting house and into the colony. All seemed quiet, the only movement from those who were wielding trays piled high with cucumber sandwiches and offering up refills of tea. The rabbits seemed to have lined themselves up ten deep around the entranceways, ready to defend themselves, wherever the first wave of foxes would arrive.
I walked to the top of May Hill from which there was a commanding position to view the battle. It took me a while to get up there, and it was five to eight by the time I arrived.
‘I brought up some refreshments,’ I said once there was a suitable lapse in the conversation. I noted that they were all does, all Wildstock, and all speaking in Rabbity. Connie noticed me and walked over to help herself, accompanied by the Venerable Bunty.
‘Just the ticket,’ said Connie, eating several sandwiches in quick succession. ‘Glad you could make it. Lance did a good job, I hear.’
I told her he had and then thanked them both for leaving a back door from which I could escape. The Venerable Bunty told me it was the least they could do, but when I said I would leave them to their battle, Connie asked me to stay.
‘You need to be here,’ she said simply. ‘Did you and Doc duel it out?’
I nodded.
‘And?’
‘He let me win.’
‘I thought he might.’
‘This battle,’ I said, ‘can you win?’
‘In a traditional sense, no,’ said Connie, ‘but sometimes, when the long game is played, you can lose a battle and still win a war.’
‘Did killing Mr Ffoxe actually make a difference?’
‘It showed that foxes could and should be subject to justice. Mr Ffoxe killed over three thousand rabbits that we know of, and wouldn’t have stopped.’
‘But wasn’t he just the shill?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t Smethwick have been the target?’
‘We needed to delay and escalate things all at the same time. The timing had to be just right. You’ll see.’