The Peacock Cloak

uninjured.
    Jenny hugged him. Thomas hugged him. William pulled away.
    “I’m all right. Don’t make a fuss.”
    “I’ll put the kettle on,” Thomas said. “I’ll make us a pot of tea.”
    (They were English after all. This was the whole problem. They couldn’t be anything other than English.)
    When Thomas brought the pot over the table, William was staring distractedly at the window while Jenny stroked the back of his hand.
    “I’m worried about Harry,” William burst out. “That’s why they’ve let me go, isn’t it? They’ve found Harry somewhere, or they know where he is. That’s how they know he wasn’t with me and that I wasn’t lying. Otherwise…”
    He put his hands over his face and began to cry in a strangled, lonely, distant way that was very like his mother.
    “They were about to start on me,” he said. “I was stuck in this interrogation room with them and they were going to start on me.”
    “But they didn’t, did they?” Thomas said.
    “No, but…”
    “Whatever they were going to do to you, I suppose, is what you’re thinking they’re now doing to Harry.”
    “Well it is, isn’t it? It is. It’s happening to him now.”
    William nodded. It was an appalling thought for all three of them. They’d all known Harry since he was a funny reckless indomitable little toddler.
    “The thing is Dad, I actually think he did it. I think it was him that went through the fence with those rockets.”
    “Stupid Harry,” said Thomas, “ Stupid, stupid Harry.”
    Jenny began to sob. None of them thought even for a moment about the dead child over in the Brythonic settlement of Tre Morfa.

    On TV the Logrian politicians came over like weary grownups pushed to the edge of their patience by foolish and ungrateful children.
    “The Saxons are going to have to learn that if they want a state they must behave like decent human beings,” said the Prime Minister of Logres.
    One of his coalition partners – Emrys Llewellyn, the leader of the Gwlad y Greal religious party – said that this incident confirmed the need for the Logrian state to retain control in perpetuity over all of the country formerly known as England:
    “This appalling terrorist attack has exposed the folly of handing over even the smallest part of our land to a people who have always refused our offers of peace. Little Angharad was an innocent child who had done no harm to anyone. She must not be allowed to have died in vain! We must bury, once and for all, the dangerous, the lunatic, the criminal notion of a separate so-called English state. If the Saxons want their own country, they should return to Saxony.”
    Later a news bulletin confirmed that two terrorist suspects had been arrested: Harry Duckett and John Fison. The Fisons lived just two doors down from the Ducketts. They had once owned a farm on the site of the Tre Morfa settlement. According to the bulletin both Harry and John were members of the English Young Socialists, the youth wing of Chairman Blair’s organisation, the Labour Party of England. But Blair himself denied any involvement in the attack.

    Late that afternoon a military bulldozer arrived, accompanied by two tanks and a platoon of soldiers. Colonel Rhys was with them, the BCL civil liaison officer for the Cambridgeshire military district, his face taut, his gaze fixed on the soldiers and the job in hand.
    They knocked down the Fisons’ house first. Then the bulldozer pulled back from the wreckage with a bit of the Fisons’ blue living room curtains still dangling from its great blade. It turned awkwardly on its tracks and rolled along the road towards the Ducketts’, crushing the tarmac as it went.
    Richard, Liz and Harry’s younger brother Ned stood watching, under the eye of two Logrian soldiers.
    “Where were you born, eh?” Richard demanded of them. “France? America? Spain? This is our land and you won’t make it yours even if you knock down everyone’s house.”
    But they didn’t answer him. Perhaps they didn’t even understand. The bulldozer rolled forward. In about twenty-five minutes all of Richard’s and Liz’s extensions and improvements were reduced to a heap of rubble. The Ducketts themselves were so completely covered in the dust of their own pulverised home that they looked like statues, like plaster-cast corpses from the ruins of Pompeii.
    Thomas called down from the window, “Liz! Richard! Ned! Come over here and let us look after you!”
    Liz looked round with a