They untie the tiger skin and throw it down, flopping wetly on to the grass. They tie you there instead, pulling down so that you are hoisted up, bowing the flagpole, bumping against it as they raise you feet first to its top and tie the lanyard. You hang, still twisting and untwisting, offered to unbounded depths of sky.
The soldiers desert the roof and, soon, some smoke drifts up.
The grey wisps turn black, filling the air around you, the rolling tumbling locks and curls of black being caught and blown away by the dampening wind.
I see you, unseeing, disappearing white in grey and black. I lower my head, and by and by, small flakes of soot drift down and cover me.
The people fall back to their tents and carts, some striking camp, some already on their way. Rain and cold moatwater drip from me. The portcullis groans and scrapes, and engines start. One of the soldiers walks out to me, takes me by the elbow and supports me as I stagger, then guides me almost kindly back across the bridge. I want to break away, to run for my life, or dash out to the refugees, to shout and wail and demand their help, or somehow to shame the soldiers into a show of contrition or regret, but I have no strength left, no warmth for you or me or anybody or anything else.
The other soldiers meet me, show me my castle all dressed in flames, fire leaping exultant from every door and window, then with their trucks and jeeps and the gun, they leave the place to blaze and smoke and take me with them out of it.
I see you through the fire, I think, cold and white and in a still point poised, untouched between those warring tides, at full mast floating in that swift, turmoiling mix, flying in the wind’s swift gust, and all downfalls at once saluting.
CHAPTER TWENTY
And now, my dear, I’m finished. The tale is done, and done with us as it would. There has been an evening, and with the dawn comes worse. I watch the day die slowly, the sunset’s gaudy show dragging clouds down with it and finally outdoing the castle’s last weak glow.
A bird of prey, returning hunter, is circling and wheeling, rising and falling over the last surrendered warmth our home breathes up, cutting edges through that quiet grey smoke and surfacing beyond and banking back.
A hawk, I do believe. One of mine I let fly out, come back. I gaze up, submitting for a moment to an easy admiration of the beast, imagining that it knows somehow that I am here and you are not and all is lost, that some honed slayer’s instinct brings it back to acknowledge all our fates.
But it is just a bird, and stupid in our terms; its delicately fierce frame, that narrow-pared skull, holds just sufficient sense for its carnivorous function, and contains no room for any further thought. Carved to fit its place in life through the struggles of all its ancestors, sculpted by the vast simplicity of evolution it has no more sense of our tribulations than does a knife, or a bullet, and is just as blameless. What we call its cruel beauty appeals to our found sense of awe, but it is our pride, our ferocity and our grace that we deify in it, and at our peril forget it is that saving subtlety of mind that lets us think at all which we put below the talon’s crude mechanic grasp, and - precisely by our reckoning - it is we who remain forever above it.
I hear the sound of other guns, that great rumble rolling over the land from some distant front, somehow surprising me, forcing the unknowing world back upon my consciousness, as I stand here; bound, condemned and waiting.
The soldiers say they will move on tomorrow. They shooed the refugees away to take over their mean camp upon the lawns, and now a couple of husbands and one of our servants float in the moat too. You, forever silent one, are still raised up within the clearing air, poised blackened over the collapsed and gutted shell of the castle, your composed eyes at last observing dryly what the air now offers you, and I wonder will the hawk, preferring cooked or undone meat, visit you or I.
For I too am tied, in Mezentian hyperbole, made a toy, a puppet of before the cannon’s mouth. They tied me here by arms and legs and body, the artillery piece’s broad muzzle in the small of my back - a larger, more potent gun, where there was a smaller one - fixing me like a sacrifice from an airy altar rifled, cross-bowed like an unknown quantity, a wrong answer, a kiss at the bottom of a page, like a mill’s limbs, indeed, but unrevolving. I have been more comfortable, it is true, but I can lean back on the steel tube of the gun to take the weight off my splayed legs. My arms, pulled back by the ropes, have gone numb and so at least no longer hurt, and the men threw a blanket and a coat over me, so I should not die too soon. I was even fed some bread and a little wine.
All my attempts at playing the man of action, the lieutenant’s murder and the responsibility for yours, secured me just one more day of life, and cost us everything. Their intention, at the next day’s light, is to raise me to the skies, elevate me, spread over the gun’s great snout, set a charge but no shell in the breach and then throw dice for which one gets to pull the firing lanyard.
I made my pleas, I tried to reason, to appeal somehow, but they see a fitness in my death, I think, that is not entirely predicated upon their - admittedly correct - conviction that it was I who killed the lieutenant. My pleas were too eloquent, perhaps, my attempt to use reason doomed from the start, and as for my try at appealing to them man-to-man - as a chap unjustly accused, a chum, a mate in trouble - that was, apparently, just laughable (for certainly they laughed).
Still, for all my fear - felt in the guts that will bear the brunt of my release - I think I can still savour the fact that my life ends with a blank, and see the possibilities for touches the soldiers might not appreciate. And so I want the hawk to come down and peck some living part of me, or the soldiers to raise me up now, place an old tin helmet on my head, sponge some water into my mouth and stick a bayonet in my side . . . But I am anyway between these thieves, and a calm eye in the circle of their vehicles, something they have already grown bored with.
The hawk settles on you, my dear. I try to watch it perch and pull and pluck and tear with a disinterested eye, but find the exercise impossible, and have to look away, at the bare trees and the dark tents and the remainder of the lieutenant’s men.
They are busy finishing off the castle’s last reserves, consuming its food and wine or busy with the women they decided to keep from the camp. Tomorrow they may fire a few more rounds back at some hazy westward front, and then retreat, but perhaps not.
There have been arguments. They seem uncertain, now. Some want to abandon the gun entirely, thinking it might slow them down, complaining that they have nothing they particularly want to target. Others want to offer their services to a larger concern, or find some other shelter, citadel or town which they can threaten with the gun, and so be paid for sparing.
I do not understand their war, nor know now who fights whom for what or why. This could be any place or time, and any cause could bring the same results, the same ends, loose or met, or won or lost.
I look around their appropriated camp and see them, quiet or snoring, stoking a fire, smoking the lieutenant’s dry cigarettes, guzzling their booty, checking their weapons or with their women.
I am too tolerant, I suspect, for the truth is that I feel sorry for these brutes. They kill me now but they’ll die later, writhing on the blood-muddied ground with no lieutenant there to kiss them and then swiftly dispatch; or they’ll live limbless, institutionalised, with a ghost of pain forever haunting the abbreviated memory of flesh, or carry the wounds deeper still, in the abyssal darkness of the mind, and toss tormented by the dreams of death decades hence, alone in their sleep no matter who lies by their side, transported by the recollecting claws of that embedded horror back to a time they thought they’d lived through and escaped, forever dragged back and down.
It is my estimation that, unless one’s involvement is peripheral, nobody survives a war; the people who come out the other side are not those who went in. Oh, I know, we all change, every day, and each morning emerge from our cocoon of sleep a different person, to confront an unutterably alien face, and any illness,
and all shocks, age and change us by their given degrees . . . yet when the illness is past or the shock faded, we rejoin, more or less, the same society that we left, and recalibrate our selves by it. Such triangulating solace is denied us when that community itself has changed as much as or more than we have ourselves, and we must remake our own beings as well as the fabric of that shared world.
And the soldier, giving up his place in the braided stream of citizenry to be disposed into martial rank and file, surrenders more than any to the vagaries of that turmoil. The refugees, collectivised by misery and mischance, take their lives with them when they move, with some practical, if also partial hope of later resurrection; when soldiers take the lives of others, and have theirs taken, they go to their cold ends not to be commended or condemned, or contemplate a life so stamped with error, but merely to embrace the empty truth of the mind’s obliteration.
Dear lieutenant, I think we all seduced you, deflected you from a course that might have let you live. Seeking something in the quick of us, searching to secure a kind of love with the provenance of age and land and family, you took over our premises; you presumed to the legacy that was ours, and if you did not see that such assumptions have their own ramifying repercussions, and that the stones demand their own continuity of blood, if you did not understand the gravity of their isolation, the solitude of their trapped state or the hardness of their old responsibility, still you cannot fault the castle or either one of us, or complain that you were led to your own conclusion.
I left the castle; you brought us all back.
The night comes deeper on them and they shelter, in their tents and trucks, closer to me. My body aches from far away, displaced by time and cold. I still believe the hawk will come and be my deliverance, pecking out my eyes in some final unmeant extension of torment, or perhaps instead it will deliver me, stabbing at my bonds, fraying the ropes, freeing me from the ties that bind me so that I might have one final attempt of my own at flight.
. . . But the dawn is my more likely release. Or I might - ignominious, this - succumb to exposure sometime inside the night’s cold kiss, relinquishing, like the castle, my last warmth to the wrapping sump of moving air.
I ought to shout and scream and curse, hurl imprecations at these fools, at least disturb the wretches’ sleep on my last night, but I fear what other torture they might devise if I annoy them so, for from what I’ve heard and read and seen, the brutalised man, so deficient in every other type of imagination, displays a fine resourcefulness when it comes to concocting ingenious ways to hurt.
I can blame none of us, and everyone. We are all the dead and dying, we are all the walking wounded. The three of us, this ruined castle, these sad warriors, we none of us deserve our ends in this, but should not be surprised by that; it’s a cause for remark, even celebration, when someone does receive their just deserts.
Castle, you should never have burned. That mill was tinder; kindling filled with air. You were stone. You felt the earthy rumble from its revolving wheels with ancient scorn, and yet you burned in its place, and now stand, but for your caved-in, black-raftered skull, looking hardly altered from this outward, down-dimmed view, but gutted, all the same, as I shall be soon. They have told me that they might set charges, to level you completely, but I think that it was said more to bring me down, rather than you. Would they waste good explosive, just to waste you? I don’t believe so.
Castle, I did you a disservice saying that this could be any time; once your stones would have ensured protection as well anything might, but in the days of cannons and artillery, you only swing them to you, like compasses the loaded guns, and bring that fire down upon you all the quicker.
Perhaps we destroyed what you were a part of the instant steel struck stone in quarries, and mason’s hammer and cannon’s shell compound the injury alike. All is construction in the end, including this; a dying man addressing a burned-out building. My ultimate mistake, my final folly. But then we are the naming beast, the animal that thinks with language, and all about us is called what we so choose, for lack of better terms, and everything we name means - as far as we are concerned - just what we want it to connote. And there is, anyway, a reciprocity of insult for our name-calling here; for our fine, defining words tame nothing in the end, and should we ever fall victim to the unseen grammar of our life, we must brave the elements and suffer their indifference, full requited, in return.
The hawk is gone now. The descending darkness leaves you hanging alone like a single pale flame poised above the castle’s husk, barely touched by a deep ruby glow emitted from the embers deep inside. Perhaps still the bird will return and peck my bindings loose, or maybe the remainder of those whose gun this was - and who may well have been the lieutenant’s ambushers this morning, on the road - will suddenly attack, prevail against my tormentors and then free me, all overcome with gratitude and acknowledgement. Or the chilling wind and thickened cloud may presage snow, which will drift down and cover me and soften the contours of everything around, including the hearts of the soldiers here, so they’ll take pity on me, and let me go.
Do I want an end too tidy? Or too loose? I do not know, my dears, though an answer will dawn on me, no doubt.
I think I want my death, now. Do I? Am I paradoxical? We are all that, too; in us the right feels and controls the left, the left the right, what we see is all inverted, and we are always in two minds.
Come dawn and cover me, come light and make me shade. From this razed place, erase me.
Life is death and death is life; to caress one is to embrace the other. Why, I have seen dead beasts, by mountain streams, by gas distended, quite pregnant with productive death. And you, my dear, you created our most fitting statement - though I could never say this to you, never hint that I even felt this way - by that one bloating of your own, when you gave birth, to death. (That we hid, that we did conceal, fearful for the only time of our closeness, threatened by all that we shared. It was after that still utterance of our love that you declined to articulate much else.)
Perhaps, my unfair fair one, you saw it clearer than the rest of us, and by never wanting to discover what we tried to find through you, knew it all the time, and so stayed true. Perhaps, however unjustly, your sex itself put you closer to what we, denied or denying it, had to struggle for. Perhaps you alone saw our fate from the start, gender and proclivity equipping you to harbour conceptions we could not.
Some rain falls on me; I lick the moisture from my lips. As no hawk has come down to tear my bonds and no liberating soldiers attacked, I have had to relieve myself, standing here. Should I be ashamed? I am not. Water is most of what we are, and we ourselves are but bubbles, the body a temporary eddy, a standing wave in the stream of our aggregated course. We spend our most formative months aquatic, in a life that even then is loaned to us, an independence that from the start has strings attached, and whether our end is a composite unbinding or a binding decomposition, hardly matters. It is enough to walk this shore and scuff our way on sandy symbols without caring whether that strand strangles us.
Still, as the warmth cools upon my leg, I shiver, suddenly afraid, as though the repetition of this childhood action brings with it the fearfulness of childhood too, and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
But my fear is most formality, my dear departed Sophist, a lip-service - trembling, I’ll admit, not stiff - the body levies for itself, while the mind stays unastonished. And unconvinced that there is much reason to go on now apart from habit. If anything follows this existence, I might as well see it now rather than later, and if - as I suspect - the only meal that follows this aperitif is the little worms’ feast, then why store up yet more coy memories to have to bid farewell when the inevitable comes round?
As for the vulgar interest in seeing our lives’ continuing result - teasing out the present’s knot a little further from the future, before it falls back into the pas
t and tangles once again - I find no great compulsion to see for seeing’s sake what I can’t help but feel will still end up being more of the same. Every age, containing us, contains each other to the limit of our mutual understanding, and tomorrow, when it comes, will be but another day in a nearly endless procession of days upon days, and it will come and it will go, as all the rest have done and as we do too; for its own measure it will be, then for an infinitely longer time, not. And if we, swirled round inside that ever ebbing tide and sinking for our first and final time, are able to clutch at a few more of those straw days, I could believe that we do so not so much in the feeble expectation of saving ourselves, but more in the malicious hope of taking them down with us.
And what of superstition? The castle had a chapel once; our father, who is in the ground, had it excised. I stood, a young child, in the dim splendour of its window’s great rosette, the day before the workmen came, crying at the thought of its removal, for purely sentimental reasons. Some days later, when that stained, dogmatic stillness had been removed, released from its metal sieve, I stood with you on the altar, blinking out at the living lushness of the summer countryside revealed.
The very intuition there must be something else beyond this physical world makes me guess it’s wrong. We set ourselves up too thoroughly in this, and if we must indulge in such anthropopathism at all, why then I’d claim that reality could hardly miss a chance so tempting, and must feel duty-bound to let us down. The way things happen, just how they operate, includes an all-embracing brusqueness, an encompassing lack of ceremony and respect against which we can shore all our pious holdings and most cherished institutions and which we may rail against and oppose for exactly as long as we live, but which includes all our aspirations and degradations, all our promises and lies and all we do and all we don’t, and which sweeps us in the end aside with less effort than metaphor can convey.