I feel I am reduced by her, so close to you. I fear my own seduction into a vulgar judgmentality, just the kind of facile moralism I have most despised in others.
I rise and make my way to our apartments; the pillows on your bed are piled oddly, and when I take them away, I find a pair of bullet-holes in the headboard. I replace the pillows and proceed next door to my own room. There is a smell of something burned here; perhaps old horse hair. I can find no obvious source for the odour, though when I sit on it to remove my shoes, perhaps the mattress on my bed feels different. I look up; the tassels forming the fringe of the bed’s canopy appear dark and soot-stained just over where I sit. Well, there seems to be no other damage.
Arthur has the other servants bring me bowls and jugs of steaming hot water, produced by the fuel-omnivorous stove in the kitchens. The bedroom’s fire is charged with logs, and lit. I bathe alone, complete my toilet and then dress before the roaring fire.
From our windows, I look out upon our other guests, those fled, shaken out from the patchwork lands about and amassed here upon our lawns with their tents and animals, their choice of campsite by itself a mute appeal for sanctuary. There was a cathedral, in a town not far away, but I understand it fell to guns some months ago. It might have been a fitter focus of attraction, but perhaps for those gathered here today the castle serves in its place; its stony existence over the years by itself somehow an augur of good fortune, a talisman guaranteeing life and charity for those nearby. I believe this is what is called a pious hope.
I conduct my own inspection of the castle. The lieutenant’s men remaining are those most needing rest; the more seriously wounded, and two who may be shellshocked. I feel I ought to talk to some, and so I attempt to engage a couple of the wounded in conversation in the makeshift ward that was our ballroom.
One is a heavy-set man, prematurely grey, a jagged, ill-healed scar on his face a year or so old, who hobbles on makeshift crutches, one leg wounded by a mine which killed the man walking in front of him a week ago. The other is a shy youth, sandy haired and of a pale and flawless complexion. He has a bullet in one shoulder, all strapped and bandaged; his chest is smooth and hairless. He seems sweet, seductive even, made more so by his air of injured vulnerability. I think, in another time, we might both have taken to this one.
I do my best, but in both cases each of us is awkward; the older man is by turns taciturn and garrulous - angry, I suspect, at whatever he considers I represent - while the boy is merely wincingly demure and diffident, his long-lashed eyes averted. I am more at ease with the servants, sharing their mixture of quiet horror and unfeigned amusement at the uncouthness of the soldiers. They seem happy just to be busy again, returned to their purpose and taking solace in the familiarity of duty and service. I make a remark about keeping occupied that meets with politeness rather than genuine appreciation.
I take a stroll through the grounds. The people in the camp seem almost as tongue-tied as the soldiers. Many of them are sick; I am told a child died yesterday. I meet the wife of the village Factor tending a fire by one of the tents; we saw her husband yesterday on the road when the lieutenant intercepted us. She and he live here, for now. He has gone with the other fit men of the camp in search of more food, hoping to plunder farms already ransacked many times.
I feel I should be doing something assertive, dynamic; I ought to make my own escape, try to bribe the soldiers still in the castle, attempt to form the servants into a resistance or rouse the people of the camp . . . but I think I do not have the character required for such heroics. My talents lie in other directions. Were some barbed comment all that was required to wrest and maintain control in this, I might leap to action and emerge victorious. As it is, I see too many options and possibilities, arguments and counter-arguments, objections and alternatives. Lost within a mirror-maze of tactical potential, I see everything and nothing, and lose my way in images. Men of iron find their soul contaminated, their purpose corroded in the presence of a surfeit of irony.
I retire to the castle, climb to the battlements and by the tower - the same one in which I was imprisoned last night - inspect the trio the lieutenant had suspended here. They sway in a damp breeze, uniforms flapping. The dark hoods over their heads, I see now, are pillow slips of black silk, where often our heads have lain. The moist fabric clings to their features, turning their faces into sculptures of jet. Two of them, arms dangling tied behind, have their chins on their chests as though gazing morosely down at the moat. The head of the third man is thrown back, his hands clutching the rope at his neck, his fingers pressed between the rope and black-bruised skin, one leg drawn up behind his rear, his back still arched and his whole body frozen in that last desperate posture of agony. Behind the black silk, his eyes look open, staring up at the sky, accusatory.
It seems unfair; all they did was try to unearth some booty in a building abandoned by its owners, not expecting to incur the lieutenant’s vengeful wrath. She says it was to make a point, to provide an example, by initial ruthlessness to make a more lenient regime the easier to maintain.
Above them, on the flagpole, the old snow-tiger skin ruffles heavy in the gentle wind. The two rear leg-pieces have been crudely tied to the lanyard, the skin itself looks worn and thinned in places, it is matted with the rain that’s visited us over the last few days and still troubles the distances of plain, and in all is just too weighty for the use the lieutenant’s men have tried to press it to. A stiff breeze will hardly lift it, a strong wind will make it snap and sail all right, but much more - a decent gust - and I suspect it will snap the flagpole too.
It seems an ignominious end for this aged heirloom, but how else would the old thing have ended its days? Thrown out upon a midden, burned in some bonfire? Perhaps this is a more fitting end.
It stirs itself in the curling breeze, and looses a few anointing drops of soaked-up rain upon the bodies hanging under it.
The cold weather means the lieutenant’s trophies have not yet started to smell. I leave them and the furry flag to their fixed contemplation of all things pendulous and pending and walk along the serried summit of the castle.
From these brave battlements with a chosen bird of prey I used to fly my spirit free. From this quarried perch, I as much as the quarry they seized was gripped by them, and through those sleek carnivores, swift death’s craftsmen, I felt that I partook of their airborne, slicing skill, and saw, in that stooping instant of mortality, a kind of ephemeral persistence. Here were the old rules, written across the sky in dark, gliding purpose, in curved lines of flight, in the panicking dips and flips and desperate lunges, dives and sprints of the target, all answered by instant flicks and turns executed by the following, closing hawk. Here was the sudden buffeting connection - sometimes, close enough, you heard the thud of talons hitting flesh - the small puff of feathers that hung upon the air, then the long, corkscrewing fall, the raptor’s wings scrabbling for purchase in the air, its prey limp or struggling weakly, also flapping, and the whole, this binary avian creation - one dead or dying, the other more alive than ever before, as though transfused - that death-melded twin secured by claw and tendon, rotating about their shared axis as they dropped locked together, drizzling feathers, distributing the game’s last plaintive cries and then falling finally to field, lawn or wood.
The dogs were trained to frighten off the hawks, then with their warm cargo come running back to the castle, across the stone moat bridge, through the courtyard, up the winding stair and out on to the battlements, a trail of feathers and blood behind them on the spiralled steps.
With those surrogate hunters I sought to be part of that ruthlessly elegant struggle of life and death, evolution and selection, predator and prey. I believed I might, through them, withstand the air’s stern siege and the slow weathering of time and the onward tramp of age, by meeting it with no cloud’s means - giving way and giving in - but a carving use instead; a fixity of vision and of grasp that would let me - so delegated, unreduced - stand, co
nnected and defined.
The dogs died last year; some illness when there was no vet to be found. Generations of devotion and meticulous breeding went with them.
I let the damn birds go when first we left the castle, fleeing from a fate that instead found us, and where they sail now, what they see and take, I cannot know.
The wind wraps me, the wind comes to me and leaves across the beaten plains. Slim slivers of sunlight prise underneath the clouds and, reflecting, appear to take instead of give, dazzling like camouflage, by their jarring contrast, bright on dark, breaking up the few remaining shapes and signs of civilisation still evident, in better light (like that the memory provides), within the steady chaos of the landscape’s reach.
Within the fields, the outcrop hills and the stands of trees, the stagnant oxbows gleam with a soiled yellow grace, alive to the eye from this angle only. The trees, lately coloured within the season’s slow turn chill, now are bared black shapes, branches bared for the weight of snow and the force of winter storm. Higher, the forests glisten with the clouds that slew above them and about, and snag their slow grace down.
I listen for the sound of artillery, but the freshened wind has quartered, and holds the gunfire back. That distant, artificial thunder has become an almost comforting companion over these last weeks. It is as though we have relapsed into a more primitive system of belief, as though by the fractious meddling with our collective, lived-through histories we have woken one of the old gods; a storm god, one to stride, hammer-footed, anvil-headed over the land, amorphous, angry and omnipresent, while thunder like the sound of cracking skulls splits over all our darkened lands and the air conducts the lightning’s breath to earth.
That woken deity marches on us now, towards the castle’s doors. The noise is like the earth’s gut rumbling, like an old fist slamming empty boards in an abandoned heaven overhead, and for all that the freshened wind has formed its own front against the blast, and moving air displaced all that noise, we know it is still there; what wind conceals, the mind insists upon revealing, providing the memory of that sound.
Air and rock, even the seas, forget quicker than we do.
A shout in the mountains fades over seconds, the earth itself rings like a bell when its sliding and colliding continents spasm, but that signal too fades over days, and for all that great storm-waves and long tsunami can circle round the globe for weeks and months, our modest lump of stem-flowered brain quite outdoes such crudely mechanical recollection, and what echoes in the human skull may resonate for a long lifetime of joy, fear or regret, only over decades slowly decaying.
Squinting against the barrage of light, in the distance I believe I can make out a few moving forms, frames made skinny, elongated against the ricocheting brightness of the reflecting water. I have no binoculars or spotting scopes left - they have been requisitioned - but either would be worse than useless, staring into this already painful light. Are those refugees I see, implicit in the shimmer of shadows against light? They could be soldiers, I suppose; they might even be you, my dear, leading our lieutenant and her men on an unintentional wild-goose-chase, but I think not. It might have been a herd of cattle, up to a few months ago, but most beasts hereabouts have been killed and eaten since, and the few that remain are closely watched and not allowed to wander.
Refugees, then; a pre-echo of the coming front, the very image of the deep, soughing trough before the great wave falls, an in-drawn breath before the scream; a rush of dead cells in these arterial ways, a scramble of dry leaves before the coming storm. Bared and broken trees line their way, the splintered stumps, the pale heart-wood naked to the air; hacked, torn down for camp fires as though by massed gunfire. They stand, grown but broken, in imitation of their fretful mutilators.
The light changes, dimming the brash coruscations of the view. The river, tributaries, drainage ditches, oxbows, pools and flooded fields dim as the clouds shut off their direct source of sun. Now I can see some thin parings of smoke rising from the plain, marking where villages, farms and houses were, the dwellings built from, growing on and taking in the land and all its separated product now combining with the barren air.
I look for you, my dear, our lieutenant and her men, but all is lost within the fractured surface of the view, all is foundered in its prostrate complexity, and the sintered land has you absorbed.
And so I stamp these stones, I walk this elevated way, I rub my hands and watch my breath like a warning go out before me, and can only wait.
I am cold; I gather phlegm in my throat and send it too towards the moat, then smile at that encircling water. There, like leaves scattered by the autumn wind, like those wasting cells again, and like the dispossessed who clogged up all our roads, I see the downward filtered, the long way travelled, the by-that-stream transported finches; the birds we shot and I lost, all dead and wet, bedraggled, cold and slowly turning in our sustaining ring of water. Our dead chicks, come home to roost at last.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The night comes to the castle, and I return to sleep. My dreams, my dearest, take the same direction as my last conscious thoughts, turning to you, still unreturned. Such reveries tease from my mind the old, lascivious memories - summoned up, swelling from the depths, by the mounting pleasures they recall.
I search for you in my dreams, stumbling through a landscape of desire where clouds and snowdrifts become pillows, a stroked cheek, pale heavy breasts. Submerging in hidden, fern-fringed clefts, surrendering to the clinging pool and its sweetly bitter perfume, I see trees that rear, tumescent, from curved collected veins of roots; smooth fissured rocks in plunging gorges; rearing stems pulsing with sap and life; downy fruits, fallen and creviced; rifts cracked in the earth itself surrounded by stony crests and crowns, and become aware that every feature hides something craved. Worshipping before and lusting after, I find myself half-lost, as though by your nature already partially infected.
I would possess this land; I want to take it, make it mine, but I cannot. The water remains water, nothing else, the towering trees stay just trees; fruits rot, and the stones, smooth and curved, seem to promise something if only they could be lifted, prized away . . . but they will not be moved.
All that’s to be done is toss and turn in this too-big bed; before now, in similar circumstances, I would have ascended to a higher level and gone in search of a compliant maid or other servant with whom to while away the night, but we have only men left in our employ these days; nothing to excite in those hired hands.
Adrift on this raft of bed, I roll abandoned in my dreams like a ship without way, pitched and driven by swell and gust, your body a distant memory, like a misty glimpse of land.
Then, by a strange reversal, the image the reality creates. Our brave lieutenant has returned, and sent you to me, to creep quietly into my bed and slip between these sheets. I turn in my sleep and it turns into wakefulness; you kneel, then lie, still silent. I hold you close, my open one. You stare, half clothed, at the bed’s dark canopy overhead. Light - bipartisan, cast by the fire dying in the grate and a steady wash of moonlight pouring through one window - exposes a flush upon your cheek. Your skin and hair are heady with the scent of open air, and your long black, let-down hair hangs heavy and bejewelled with bits of twigs and torn scraps of leaves.
Your eyes have that broken, careless look I remember from when first we met. Watching them from one side, I feel that now I see more in them than I have at any time since. Sometimes only the sideways view tells true; the selves, the faces we manufacture for the world to ease our passage through it are too used to frontal assault, and I think that I see more truth in you just now than ever I did enquiring straight. I suppose I should have known; what has our shared taste taught us if not that the interest’s more, when taken oblique?
‘Are you all right?’ I ask.
You wait, then nod.
The lieutenant’s men sound noisy in the yard; engines rattle down to silence, rifles fall, lights shiver beyond the drawn curtains, shout
s echo round the castle’s walls like voices from the stones, and the castle, more than we, seems to breathe around us.
I persist. ‘How did the day go?’
Another hesitation. ‘Well enough.’
‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’
You shift your head minimally and look at me. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘Where you’ve been. What happened.’
‘I have been with Loot,’ you tell me, looking away. I try to raise my hand to you, but it is caught beneath the tangled bedclothes. I have to shift across the bed, grunting, to free it from the knot of clothes. ‘We drove across to the hills on the far side,’ you continue. I have my hand free now, but cannot raise the wrath to strike you. I may have ascribed you too much wit anyway. ‘. . . been with Loot.’ It could have meant no more than the most innocent interpretation. And besides, I now recall, I have resolved not to be jealous. I smooth the now freed hand through my hair, then yours, loosing fragments of twigs to fall upon the pillow.
‘Did anything happen?’ I ask.
‘They found a goat, tied to a stake in one farm. In another there was a tank of diesel which they tried to drain but could not. They shot the tank to fill some containers from the hole but discovered it held only water. There was a place they think was an orphanage, to the west. I had not heard of it. The children had all been crucified.’
‘Crucified?’ I ask, frowning.
‘On telegraph poles. On the road outside. Twenty or more, all down the road. I lost count. I was crying.’
‘Who could have done that?’
‘They did not know.’ You turn to me. ‘The next man they met on that road, they shot. All of them; all at once. He was walking away and had some cans of food they thought he must have taken from the orphanage. He said he had not noticed the children but they could see he was lying.’