Two Tribes by Chris Beckett

Author:Chris Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

SEVENTEEN

Cally doesn’t like those bits at all. She thinks I should stick to the diaries and not make stuff up. And she says that in any case, this whole Charlie story is ahistorical. It’s like writing about the Wars of the Roses and giving them tanks. ‘Admit it, Zoe,’ she says. ‘That’s the Patriotic League you’re describing there, the Patriotic League in all but name. You’re conflating completely different periods of history. You know perfectly well that the earliest mention of the Patriots as an organized force won’t be until many years later.’

We’re drinking the stewed green tea they serve up in glasses in the Institute’s rather dingy tearoom.

‘If we confine the historical account to actual records we might achieve greater accuracy,’ I tell her, ‘but we do so at the expense of realism, and our histories will be skewed towards the small minority that records its own life, and the even smaller one that has its life recorded by others. I don’t want to write that sort of history.’

A huge praying mantis alights on the edge of our tin table and stands there trembling. Cally smiles, but says nothing. Little motes of dust glitter and gleam in the beams of yellow light that are streaming into the room from its three rather grubby south-facing windows, making visible the invisible air.

‘You are right about the Patriotic League,’ I concede. ‘The Patriots don’t emerge as an entity for some years. But I’d argue that, even back in 2016, we can see the battle lines of the Warring Factions era beginning to emerge. A realignment of classes is taking place, and the new stories that are beginning to be told are already prototypes of the positions that will later serve as flags on the battlefield. For instance, the meanings of words like ‘liberalism’ or ‘the Left’ are mutating rapidly. And something resembling the Liberal faction of the future is beginning to part company with what will become the Democrats.’

Cally makes that side-to-side movement of her head that signifies that one acknowledges a point only with very major reservations.

‘And, most obviously of all,’ I tell her, ‘we see the resurgence of a narrative of national and cultural solidarity that will provide the ideological raison d’être of the Patriots. You can hardly deny that, Cally! It’s right there in the record. And that being so, is it really so fanciful of me to imagine that early prototypes of the Patriot militias were already beginning to form?’

‘Well, okay, but the ideas you’ve put into their mouths are completely unrealistic,’ she says. ‘We’re familiar with Tianming these days because we’ve only recently emerged from Chinese rule, but I very much doubt that someone like Finch would have come across it back then, let alone refer to it in a gathering of that kind.’

‘Probably not. But he would have made that same point in another way.’

‘I wonder. And in any case, the language would have been much more inflammatory. Foreigners are a menace . . . Anyone who disagrees with us is a traitor .

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