looked up to find the man with the cellphone leaning over me.
“You,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes and HRH is not a patient man.”
“Sorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.
Eventually, a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had coloured stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.
Then we were rising up into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southwards and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.
About then, the noise seemed to get less – or maybe I got used to it – and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.
Dave was still irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathise with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles, for the powers’ sake?”
Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”
“But,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”
“He changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.
“That’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.
“I know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”
“Oh, give him the right advisors and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”
This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!
We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.
“Yik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that?”
“Aztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.
I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real. Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.
At last, there was another of those warning pings. The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came towards the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.
“Messieurs,” he said, “you’ll have twenty minutes. The royal flit will circle during that time under the protection of the Prince’s personal mages and then put down on the pavilion roof. You’re expected to have the stadium secured by then. All right?”
“All right,” Arnold agreed. “Thanks, monsieur.” Then, when the officer had gone back to the other soldiers, he said, “Bloody powers!”
“Going to have to hustle, aren’t we?” Chick said. He jerked his head towards me. “What do we do about him? He’s not skyclad.”
Arnold was the one in charge. He blinked slowly at me as if he’d noticed me for the first time. “Not really a problem,” he said. “He’ll have to keep out of the circle, that’s all. We’ll put him on boundary patrol.” Then he actually spoke to me. “You, mon gar,” he said, “will do exactly as we say at all times, and if you set so much as a toe over the wardings, I’ll have your guts for garters. That clear?”
I nodded. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t the faintest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but I didn’t quite like to. Anyway the flier – flit or whatever – started making a great deal more noise and going downwards in jerks, hanging in the air and then jerking sickeningly down again. I swallowed and sat back, thinking that it would probably all be obvious what to do, the way it is in dreams, and took a look out of the window. I had just time to see a big oval of green stadium surrounded by banks of seats crowded with people, and blue, blue sea somewhere beyond that, before we came down with a grinding thump and everyone leapt up.
The soldiers went racing and clattering off to take up positions round the roof we’d landed on. They were carrying rifles. It was serious security. We clattered off after them into scalding sunlight and I found myself ducking as the flier roared off into the air again just above my head, covering us in an instant of deep blue shadow. As it did, the others bent over some kind of compass that Dave had fetched out.
“North’s up the narrow end opposite,” Dave said, “pretty exactly.”
“Right,” said Arnold. “Then we go the quickest way.” And he led us rushing down some stairs at the corner of the roof. We clattered along boards then, somewhere high up along the front of the pavilion, and raced on down much steeper stairs with crowds of well-dressed people on either side. They all turned to stare at us. “Ceux sont les sorciers,” I heard someone say, and again, when we got to the smart white gate at the bottom of the stairs and a wrinkled old fellow in a white coat opened it for us, he turned to someone and said knowingly, “Ah. Les sorciers.” I reckon it meant, Those are the mages, you know.
We rushed out into the enormous stadium, hurrying across acres of green, green grass with blurred banks of faces all round and all staring at us. It really was exactly like my worst dreams. I felt about an inch high as Arnold led us trotting straight towards the opposite end of the oval. I could see he was going to take us right across the square of even greener grass where the wicket was laid out, flat and brownish, right in front of us.
Now,
