But the warming stuff streamed down the side of Hearn’s chin. The man barely smelt it, the thin lips flickered for a second to the taste.
Hearn slept there for more than an hour.
When he woke at last, his eyes explored the hut with the inevitable foxiness of a man who thinks he may have woken up dead. He saw, however, the edge of the hearth and, through dazed chair-legs, a soldier reclining back-on. Halloran leant in the doorway, looking out.
Hearn’s mouth and memory were desperately dry though, and he wanted to be assured of the reality of these two man-shapes. However it hurt, he coughed a number of times. Phelim turned.
‘Hoy, up off your ribs, Terry Byrne,’ he called. ‘Run and bring Allen!’
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked Hearn, motioning towards his own canteen on the table.
‘No. Some water maybe. I never wanted any of this.’
Yet Hearn’s eyes flickered towards the hearth, showing that, despite himself, he considered the fire a great blessing.
‘Keep yourself covered,’ called Halloran, fetching water.
‘Indeed. I get the balance of my five hundred when I’m well again. Surely justice and mercy will follow me, all the days of my life.’
‘Justice and mercy of a kind will follow you if you’re able to help Allen. I’ll give you that much.’
‘That’s not your affair. I vomit up their mercy.’
Allen came in with the adjutant and Byrne. He took a chair brusquely and straddled it. Hearn lay vigilant.
‘You won’t exhaust yourself with insolence this time,’ Allen stated. ‘If you’ve anything to tell, tell it straight, and I’ll guarantee you the remission of the remainder of your punishment. I will also take you down to the port, to a fit hospital.’
Hearn pushed himself up on his hands but Allen pushed him down gently by the crown of the head.
‘Tell it without gesturing,’ said Allen.
The man whimpered, for seconds only.
‘I came to you standing up in the open to tell you what I know about the committee. For the sake of the committee. Not for your sake or my sake. I wanted to tell you to take your remission of remainders to the devil!’
‘Very well,’ said Allen, finding a fault of absorbing interest up the sleeve of his coat. ‘I’ll take your pride for granted. But what have you to tell me?’
One of Daker’s fat crow-shrikes had wandered right into the hut. Byrne chased it out with a flick of his foot.
‘You’re in the business of putting down rebels now, Captain,’ said Hearn. ‘I know some of them have to die. But if I’m to help you, you’ll have to swear of course that you’ll destroy the smallest number you need to.’
Here was Hearn making friends to himself of the mammon of iniquity, swearing people in.
‘That goes without saying.’
‘Oh, no! The things that have gone within saying with you people have broken the backs of my people. You have to swear by God and mean it.’
Who’s conscripting God these days? thought Halloran.
The Captain got up and walked into a corner.
‘Be sensible, Hearn. How can anyone make an oath like that? What you mean by the smallest number is not what I mean by it. I can tell there’s mockery in you, and if you are mocking me, I’ll hang you, gamy back and all. The Court of Enquiry have my vote of thanks, flogging you.’
‘That aside, you’ll have to swear.’
‘Does he know anything, Garside?’ asked Allen over the prone body he would have liked to kick.
‘I think so, sir.’
‘He knows I do,’ said Hearn.
Allen stopped stock-still.
‘Very well then. It will disappoint you to see my good faith. Just the same, I swear.’
‘Swear what?’ Hearn, prostrated, was in a position to ask.
‘To take only what lives are necessary,’ Allen sang with a venomous sort of patience.
‘To save as many lives as you’re able,’ Hearn insisted slowly.
‘Damn it!’ the captain roared, but composed himself. ‘I swear by God,’ he recited, ‘to save as many lives as I am able. But just try lies on me, Hearn, and see what! By tonight it’ll be martial law and I’ll be martial as a pike if you’ve tried lies. Understand that?’
‘Quite a homily for you, Captain Allen,’ said Hearn, and fell asleep immediately.
Allen put his fist to his brow and shook his head. But within a short time, Hearn’s eyes opened again. The fire, tended by Phelim and Byrne, had warmed away some of the drowned-blue from his eyes and lips.
‘Once you have them confused in the dark, they’ll be easy as cattle,’ he muttered. ‘And a little child shall lead them.’
At this stage, Halloran and Byrne were cleared out of the hut and launched into the pleasant morning out-of-doors. In fifteen minutes, Allen came forth from the adjutant’s hut bawling: ‘Corporal!’
‘Sir!’
‘Run and tell the officer at the convict lines that any transport found outside his hut is to be arrested as a rebel.’
‘Sir!’
The Marines were being marched back to hutments, their feet stumbled in the red dust. One squad of ten men had fallen out and was listening to an officer. They were to go off on a reconnaissance on this glorious day of sun. They leaned to the officer’s words and their faces were tight and intelligent with pent energy.
‘It is not expected that we’ll find enemy scouts –’ Halloran overheard from the officer. And yes, he thought, in an army such as the one in the forest, where you call the general by his first name and act together with your leaders only as an especial favour, scouts are hard to come by.
Byrne remained in the adjutant’s hut, where Hearn kept calling, ‘Send me back to the hospital!’ Desperately allured by the fire and the three blankets, he made a few noises of rebuttal but went back to sleep in the end.
Before nine o’clock, Allen and his officers climbed the brick-brown hill behind Government House. Halloran stood by further down the slope with two Marines and watched the lieutenants nodding as Allen pointed to this or that hard hip of land. The generous morning continued to gild them all with an heroic light. Halloran himself gazed across the river, across mangroves to a tableland as blue and hazed and comfortable as chimney-smoke. He felt himself to be very much the centre of this world. With his hat off, he found that the tawny drench of light through his eye-lashes was made of gold rods all bearing on him. He was the focus, he was the central screw. Take him out and the hills would fall apart. He contained the world and was not contained by it.
Feeling so sanguine, he remembered with an unaccountable pleasure Hearn’s prophecy. And a little child shall lead them.
The officers nodded for a last time and came down the hill.
18
‘Give a man a swallow,’ said, as a matter of form, a hoarse guard in the portico.
‘Why don’t you give this man a swallow of yours?’ Halloran asked him, corking up his own near-empty canteen again. For hours, he’d been waiting outside Government House. The sun was still up, but the north wind had come on hard, and had night-damp on its breath. He was beginning to need the part of his spirits that Hearn had drunk, but he knew that in a furore you couldn’t ask for such special adjustments as the topping up of a Marine’s spirit ration.
He had been forgotten there. He knew nothing of the plan the officers had hurried about cherishing all day. He had no idea of the wherefore of the parties sent out in the afternoon to get in heaps of brushwood. All day people came and went with faces urgent from knowledge; of what, he didn’t know.
After the sun went down, he waited there, stock-still, letting the night get at his cheek-bones. He didn’t want to be there, but neither did he want to go to the kitchen to boil his beef. At last, his
errant legs took him there, in the true sense of the word. There he was at the door, aimed nose-first into the rotten bonhomie of his brothers-in-arms. He dipped his raw soul into the place and followed bodily, thinking, how long can I stand the sorrow of these evenings? It was warm though; he would have liked to have been there alone.
He took a sliver of beef from his knapsack and a string from his pocket. He tied the string around the beef and lowered it into the cauldron on the hearth. Some men were making bread on the edges of the fire, and Halloran remained watching them, too close in to the fire, the heat thumbing his eyeballs. He got on his haunches and wriggled closer to the blaze and the pain. Why? he wondered.
I’m not what you call a man of affairs, he said blinking at the heart of the flames. I’d shoot myself or drop the business of any mangey empire because of the pain of being homeless. Occasionally he stood and fished his beef out, but each time it looked more indecent, and he would put it in the pot again. In the end, he knew that it would not improve no matter how strenuously it was boiled. He sat and ate it and finished his canteen. On the basis of being soldiers, the others made a riot of noise, but Halloran thought of how he’d fire so high above the rebels’ heads that Goliath would be safe.
It dawned on him that chewing this meat had nothing more to do with his hunger than would brushing his hair. He wrapped it in cloth and packed it away still tethered with string. There was some comfort in tidying up his kit, in hiding away the few scraps on which life and the soul survived. He had some flour in his kit, and with it a pickled cut of bad meat like a lump of drowned man. Out of such scandalously silly things grew all the hanging gardens of the spirit. They kept poetry in the poet, vision in the artist, wisdom in the seer. He couldn’t feel that this was a quaint truth, but an obscene one.
And then the sense of mortality swamped him fore and aft. Each man laughed in his byre of flesh – he wondered how – and the seconds went on hard, little rat’s feet across the roofs, but no one heard except Halloran.
‘Allen wants us,’ said Byrne above him.
‘Oh. Is Hearn well?’
‘He’s got a fever. He’s talking about being guilty.’
‘He’s a fool,’ said Halloran rising.
After the kitchen, it was only a quarter warm in the hallway. Allen bustled past once, saying, ‘Wait here!’
‘All very well for him,’ said Halloran.
A light shone in the back parlour, and where he stood with Byrne, it was not altogether dark enough to excuse Halloran from listening to the boyo, he himself feeling far too exposed to go fingering his own red-raw despairs.
Byrne talked himself in circles. He felt that there was some bond of brotherhood between the two of them, and he couldn’t quite lay his tongue on it.
But he tried. My heaven, he tried!
Amongst the rest, he said, ‘I think the moment’s coming, Halloran. You know what I mean. I mean the moment of my salvation that I’ve been talking about. It’s since those fellers took to the forest that I’ve felt it. Those fellers in the forest and the men of the regiment, they’re all my brothers, see. All sons of God though sinners. I tell you I’d die for any one of them here and now. Here and now in this hallway. In the valley of tears, as the saying goes.’
‘Listen!’ said Halloran, and Byrne jumped and listened, bug-eyed, for the moment of salvation.
The night had emptied of all human sounds. At the back of the house, a loose door or window yelped. The roof rustled as if the black-butt shingles had put their leaves back on.
‘Everyone’s gone,’ Byrne whispered thunderously.
‘Yes,’ said Halloran. ‘They might all be dead, you know. It happened to the Assyrian army once, so why shouldn’t it happen to a few dingy Marines? The angel of death might have touched the lot of them, but missed us in this bit of a hall. And we’ll have to stay here in the sting of death for the rest of our lives, because the moment we step out of the door, he’s got us!’
Byrne dropped his musket.
‘You’re mad as a saint, Corporal,’ he said, searching for it on the floor.
Some time later, Allen and the adjutant came from Howard’s bedroom. Allen crooked his finger at Byrne and Halloran, and they both came to attention and marched up to him.
‘I have a message for each of you to take down the hill. If you don’t get it straight and give it straighter, God help you!’
He schooled both of them in the same message. It was quite unintelligible. He made them recite it five times each, which Halloran resented. When they had delivered it, they would follow the hill behind Government House until they came to a natural terrace they both knew well by sight.
‘The pass-word is Pindar,’ said Allen, and then, needlessly pedagogic, went on, ‘Pindar is an illustrious Greek poet of ancient times.’
Halloran thought of the time Allen had found some of his raw poetry in the back pages of the company orderly book. ‘Oh,’ he’d said, ‘it knows nothing of Greece or Rome.’
Byrne was to take his message to the officer guarding the transport lines, Halloran to take his across the parade-ground, roaring ‘Pindar!’ when he came level with the adjutant’s hut.
They left the house. Halloran, however tired, trotted away downhill to escape Byrne. The fall of the road tricked his legs into big lolloping strides. Had anyone ever made so much noise? he wondered. His breath was loud as a windmill, his cold knee-joints clicked and the knapsack thudded. He was afraid, and his jogging eyes saw confusions of shadows and stars, the way a person sees something hurled and coming fast. Beyond doubt, he thought, some fool will shoot me. His belly flesh felt so soft, and the tender walls of muscle arching up to his ribs so chancy. He reached the parade ground, and walked jaggedly from there on, cringing from the futile bullet.
‘Pindar!’ he sang.
But no one shot him.
And having given the message with a great show of regimentality, he became the man who had nowhere to go but away. There were two lights burning for the sake of form far to his left, but the shapes of things were hidden beneath the lines of the hill. If rebels were waiting for him in the groins of the dark and would kill him for his weapon, what an unexampled number of pike-thrusts it would take to kill off his despair and his homesickness for Ann.
He came to the terrace without a scratch, to find that he’d forgotten the pass-word. Yet it escaped of its own accord and shot away uphill.
‘Come on up!’ someone called, soft as a lover.
There were thirty men up there crouching on the terrace. With blankets over their shoulders, they looked like sleeping farm animals. Halloran found Allen, who said nothing but nodded him away to the line of Marines before them.
Here, beneath the big noise of the wind, there was indeed whispering and shivering and furtive noseblowing. Byrne hissed to him, and he was too lonely not to slump down and be warmed by any human closeness.
‘What are we doing?’
‘We have to wait up here silent no matter what we see. On the order we creep down to the track there, form up and load. That’s the lot of it. What can he do with the few of us he has?’
Halloran shivered.
‘You pray for me, Phelim,’ said Byrne, ‘and I’ll pray for you. We’ll pray for each other.’
That’s a bad bargain for me, thought Halloran nodding.
Five hours smothering in the cold black is a hard experience. He kept thinking that dawn was just over the hump of the next quarter of an hour. He scratched his cold hip, coffined in flesh whose last throes and consummate amazement might come in this very darkness, before he had once learnt not to be lonely. At the end of the five hours, his eyes were well up to seeing a line of men coming down the near side of the glen before him. He saw also that the darkness on the hillside across from the terrace trembled significantly, as if there were a similar line of men there.
He heard soon after the pickets yell and fire and flee, as Allen had ordered them to. Then the army of transports went roaring into the town. One column moved across the parade-ground towards the armoury, the other ran towards the barracks from the west. These had a pitch and brushwood fire rise up between themselves and the barrack building and, black against the blaze, heard very close behind them the adjutant ordering his section of Marines to fire. At the same time, those storming the parade-ground saw forty Marines rise out of the ground no more than a spit away. The two volleys sounded almost simultaneously. On the terrace, Allen was exalted.
Both squads were now onto the rebels with the bayonet. Allen’s thirty went down into the glen, corking up the bottle. They stood in one rank and loaded and knelt. Behind them was Allen with his service-sword, and a young subaltern with a sergeant’s halberd, which Halloran thought a savage statement of intention. Halloran himself was appalled by the choral thickness of the yelling in the town below him. It was an ambiguous noise, and whether it signified triumph or confusion or fight or dying, no one could have told. He heard one roar, without doubt the death-roar of some man, bull, singer, saint, brother of Christ and of George by the grace. All the rest was Chinese music.
‘What about the oath?’ asked Halloran softly of the tumult, it sounding such a prodigious slaughter.
But an amazing number of men had got clear of the shambles. They came stumbling uphill now, and the first half dozen of them saw Allen’s men even before the Present arms! was called. At this point, the affair, which had been at least speciously a battle, dropped its mask and became an execution. The air seemed full of breathing. Halloran heard the shocking resonance of the breath of the men in line with him; he was sure he could hear the huffing of a tall man who had decided to be killed and stood side-on to the line, hands on hips, getting his last breath back. And then Byrne muttered,
‘Fire over their heads,’ and heads collided with Allen’s order.