The Peacock Cloak

anymore.”
    “Damn,” Richard said. “Well get home quickly, will you, so we can listen to the news there.”
    “What news?”
    “What do you mean ‘what news’? Haven’t you heard? Blair has just cut a deal with the Brythons. He’s conceded the lost land.”
    “How do you mean he’s conceded it?”
    “He’s agreed to accept the existence of the State of Logres.”
    “What… He’s… Are you sure? On what terms?”
    “On the basis that they’ll let him return and set up a government of sorts here in part of the occupied area.”
    “And the Brythons have agreed to that?” Thomas asked. “To Blair coming back out of exile?”
    “Yup. They’ve agreed he can return and set up an administration in Ipswich.”
    “Blair back in England. I can’t believe it.”
    “I don’t know what he thinks he’s playing at,” said Richard, “but I bet the Brythons can’t believe their luck.”
    “He’s bloody sold out,” Jack said.
    Thomas thought privately that Blair had probably struck the best deal they were going to get, but he would have found it hard to say this even to Richard, let alone to Richard’s friend. All the inhabitants of Churchill Camp had lost their homes – and pretty much everything else – when Birmingham was taken by the Brythonic militias and renamed Dinas Emrys, ‘City of Ambrosius’. Virtually all its English population had been driven out at gun point. A significant number had been killed.

    There was a BCL checkpoint just beyond Wilburton. Three young Logrian soldiers stood beside the barrier, guns over their shoulders and an armoured car parked beside them. The flag of Logres – the thorn bush on its golden field – fluttered over their heads.
    Thomas pulled up and leant out of the window:
    “ Sut dych chi heddiw ?” he asked the soldier who came to check his papers.
    The soldier was surprised to have an Englishman ask him how he was in any language, let along in Brythonic.
    “ Da iawn ,” he muttered uncomfortably, looking at Thomas’ identity documents and then at Richard’s and Jack’s and passing them back through the window.
    “Okay,” he said in bad English, “you could go now.”
    He gestured to one of his companions to lift the barrier.
    “I wish you wouldn’t talk their language to them,” muttered Richard, as they passed through. “This is England. We’re English. Why should we change the way we talk for people who came here from outside?”
    Thomas shrugged.
    “It gets me through the checkpoints quicker.”
    And it invariably winds you up, he silently added.
    “I speak Brythonic better than a lot of them do actually,” Thomas said. “I reckon that chap there would have been a lot happier talking in Spanish.”
    Richard snorted with disgust.
    “Well they’re not really Brythons at all are they? They’re Spaniards and Frenchmen and Africans and Christ knows what, who’ve persuaded themselves that claiming to have a distant ancestor from these parts entitles them to live here.”
    Thomas said nothing. Not that he disagreed. It was just that he felt there was only so many times that it was useful to repeat the same point.
    “Want me to fix that radio of yours?” Richard asked after a while.
    He was good with electrical things. He had once, in more prosperous times, been the technical director of a large electronics company down in Cambridge.
    “It’s probably not worth bothering,” Thomas said, swerving to avoid a pothole. “It’s as old as the car. Fifteen years. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.”
    “Well we’ve got to make things last nowadays haven’t we?” observed the Brummie Jack in the back.
    And then the radio came unexpectedly to life.
    “Of course we must have the historic centre of London,” Chairman Blair was saying in his disarming bloke-next-door way, “including, you know, the Houses of Parliament…”
    “Oh,” said Thomas. “It must just have been a loose connection.”
    “Ssssh!” Richard commanded.
    “…London is the capital of England, after all,” said Blair, though the Brythons had always insisted that Llundain was a Celtic name and that Londinium had been a Romano-Brythonic city long before the first Anglo-Saxon ever set foot there.
    “…and of course, while we are prepared to recognise, you know, the State of Logres, our people must have the right to return to their own homes if they want to.”
    “I want to go back to Birmingham ,” said Jack the Brummie. “I don’t want to