Jack of Ravens

8

While President Johnson was outlining his Great Society, they were holed up in a leaky warehouse in St Louis. By the time the US had started bombing North Vietnam in earnest on 8 February 1965, they had moved to slightly better surroundings in an old meat-packing plant in Chicago.

There was no sign of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders anywhere near their lives. Church couldn’t make the guilt go away entirely; he knew they were being left alone because he had chosen to walk away from the battlefield. With the lamp containing his stolen Pendragon Spirit still safe in his bag, he could claim to be little more than an average person, trudging through life below the radar of the forces that controlled everything.

On 21 February, black revolutionary leader Malcolm X was shot and killed. Marcy cried all night and there was nothing Gabe could do to drag her out of her growing despair at the worsening political situation.

All around them the misery continued to mount. On 6 March the first American soldier officially set foot on Vietnam’s battlefields, and two days later 3,500 marines landed to protect Da Nang airbase. In between, Alabama state troopers attacked 500 civil rights workers preparing to march, and by the end of the month the Ku Klux Klan had murdered another civil rights worker in the same state. At home and abroad, the spider-people — in metaphor and reality — continued to take control, spreading despair, crushing hope.

‘Existence needs its king to lead its troops,’ Tom said to Church as he browsed a day-old paper one morning. Church gave his standard response: it was somebody else’s job now.

Over the months, to Tom’s annoyance, Niamh had sided with Church. She pointed out that people were fighting back of their own accord. Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 supporters took the fight for civil rights back to Alabama. A further 25,000 marched on Washington in April to protest against the spiralling Vietnam War.

‘Music is the voice of hope,’ she pointed out to Tom as he listened to his growing record collection, and he had to agree: Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Judy Collins joined the anti-war marches, and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan spread the message of discontent.

On 5 September, writer Michael Fallon applied the term ‘hippie’ to the San Francisco counterculture in an article about the Blue Unicorn Coffeehouse where campaigners for sexual freedom and the legalisation of marijuana met.

And on Christmas Day 1965, the Libertarian came to town.