Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Someone hits him with a broom handle.

It’s a very ordinary broom handle. It’s light and strong and not a terribly frightening thing. It breaks on his head like balsa. Pestle drops Ike and turns around, wrath-of-God slow. Scary as hell.

It’s only as I glance down at the fractured broom in my hands that I realise who was dumb enough and brave enough to do the deed.

Oh bugger.

Dodge. Twist. I am air. I step, skip, shuffle. Elvis Walk (defensive, agile) becomes Lorenz Palace Step (random directions making up a usable pattern of attack), and on and on. My hands blur and slap, stroke and twist. Humbert Pestle lunges. I gouge his eye. He roars and strikes down. I savage the muscles in his arm. He kicks, and I punish the joint, lock it, stress it, let it go and whisper away into the space next door as he slams into where I was. I do all these things and it is not enough. Somewhere over there Ike Thermite is broken, out of the fight, and Ike was infinitely better at this than I am. Ike was a senior student. It’s not enough.

He hits me. It’s not a full strike, just a love tap. It picks me up and winds me. No time. I roll. I feel his foot stamp on the ground. Keep moving, don’t tense; breathe, live. I move. Blind Man’s Sword: a sequence to use when you cannot see, a system of deflections and evasions which appear to imply knowledge of the enemy’s movements. Bluff. It works. I move again. He is stalking me, moving smoothly and fast. He is too big to be that fast, or maybe too fast to be that big. I can see. I wish I couldn’t. A thumb fills my vision, and I duck, move away off-axis. It’s a feint. A kick lands in my chest, and I feel my ribs flex. All the air comes out of me. I see colours, black and white and grey and red all at once, then purple and yellow together, laid over each other, then other colours without names. I dodge the follow-up, turn my shoulder and shunt him back, just as Ike did.

I’m going to lose.

I stare up and around in desperation. Where is Sally Culpepper and her gun? Elisabeth is on the gallery. She has Leah behind her, safe for the moment. I meet her eyes.

And I see her.

I see Elisabeth Soames in every moment that I have known her. Every frame of every minute. Elisabeth with cake. Elisabeth stamping her foot. Elisabeth as Andromas. Elisabeth kissing me. Elisabeth, as revealed by a single, white, little-girl sock protruding from the end of a sofa. And I see her, a million years ago, in Master Wu’s house, asking about the Secrets. About the Iron Skin meditation.

There aren’t any of those.

But there are. I am fighting one. Therefore . . .

I will make one up.

And he does. It is a good secret. It is so good, it could almost be real.

I will make one up.

You sneaky, underhanded, cheeky old sod.

Align the chi . . . Feel the ocean . . . You will storm the strongest fortress.

I look at Humbert Pestle. He is unbeatable. He is impregnable.

He is mine.

In that moment I place my absolute trust in the hands of a dead man who wore sandals in winter and asserted a belief that the Chinese space programme was unfairly disadvantaged by the position of the Moon. This is perhaps a slender thread from which to hang the future of the world. Like spider silk, it is strong enough to do the job.

I slow down. It’s not about fast; it’s about where I need to be, and where he needs me not to be. I step lightly. It’s not about power; it’s about timing. Humbert Pestle chops at me, but I am not there. He strikes, but I am outside his centre line and the blow has no strength. Well, it snaps my head back and it hurts, but that’s all it does. I crack his hand as he withdraws it. He tenses. I slide past his guard and slap him. It doesn’t hurt him, but it is extremely embarrassing. I have just girly-slapped him in front of all his ninja kiddies. I have no respect. So nyah.

He slashes at me. He tries to catch me with a fist coming up as I go down, but I am already turning away, and he looks for a moment like some guy posing at the beach, arm bent and tensed, massive bicep straining. Hey, Pluto, where’s my spinach? Nyah nyah nyah. He breathes. I breathe with him. His elbow catches me on the way back and nearly stuns me, but the follow-up is in the wrong place, because I am in the right one. I stamp on his instep. Something snaps. He’s tough enough to ignore it, but it hurts anyway. The rhythm of his breathing is broken as he holds in a grunt of pain.

I touch Humbert Pestle, and I listen to him. I let my hands rest on him as I stroke aside his terrible punches. I taste the air as he exhales. I learn him. I understand the way he moves. I know where he is strong, and where he is not. He is a fortress. But he is not invulnerable. I breathe out. I breathe in. Humbert Pestle works through his pain. It is irrelevant. He breathes out. He breathes in.

Now we move in concert. I mirror him, step with him. I stick to him, slip and slide and duck and dive. His mace-hand goes over my head with a terrific woosh. It frustrates him. He stalks me some more, and finally he is following me. He does not know it. He thinks he is setting the pace, but he has fallen into a rhythm. It is syncopated and abrupt. It varies. But it is a pattern, and I know it intimately, at a level beyond mistake. I can break it. He cannot. He doesn’t realise he has to. I could strike now, hit him endlessly—but there’s no target. He has made himself into a weapon, an armoured monster. There’s no point. I breathe out. So does he. I breathe in. So does he. We are locked together.

We fight some more. We breathe. The thing is, I am a littler guy than Humbert Pestle, and I’m using a lot less energy. I don’t need as much oxygen. His heart rate is going up. He’s starting to feel tired, and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t understand. I can see it in his face. He’s cross and just a little nervous—he should not be feeling this way. Not so soon. He does this kind of exercise every day. He’s pretty much the hardest bastard in the world. He may not be a young kid any more, but he’s in tip-top shape. He can’t be tired. Push through it. It’s the enemy.

I breathe. He breathes. He throws a combination so fast I can’t imagine being able to block it. I don’t have to. I was never going to be in its path. I was already leaving the target area when he decided to launch it. I slap him again because this man is trying to kill me, so I don’t feel bad about messing with him. His ninja kiddies look shocked and unhappy now. They’re watching him, all of them, even while they fend off the Voiceless Dragon School and keep this area clear. Come on, Humbert! Snap him like a twig! He is weak! What’s the hold-up?

No pressure.

Humbert Pestle is fifty-five. That means his maximum safe heart rate, notionally, is around one hundred and sixty-seven beats per minute. I can see the vein in his neck walloping away. He’s at around one seventy now. I breathe. He is still with me. We’re still in this weird mirror dance. He throws a couple more punches, but they’re weak and slow. There’s not enough oxygen in his blood. He should back off, but he won’t. It’s not who he is. Weakness is an enemy. Fight through it. I look at him. It’s time. I slip a punch and come round in front of him, and I look into his eyes and sigh.

I put everything I have into it. I give him my grief when I heard about Master Wu. I give him poor mad George Copsen’s horror at destroying the world, and every stupid death I saw in the Go Away War. I give him Micah Monroe and the soldiers who didn’t make it. I give him the foal-girl we buried in Addeh Katir. I give him the crazed cannibal dog in Cricklewood Cove and Ma Lubitsch’s endless mourning. I give him my broken heart when Leah shook my hand.