Kemner’s men are good. They keep a fluid yet constant distance between us, they do not allow us to communicate and they do not rise to baits like stumbling, slight increases or decreases in speed or comments about their hair. They imagine, therefore, that they have communicated nothing to us about themselves beyond that they are in the position to kill us all, and have no intention of reversing roles. They are mistaken. The way they have deployed is extremely revealing. Our guards are moving in a mild curve behind us, so that we are caught in the focus of their field of fire if they should choose to gun us down—so much is to be expected. Around them, however, are other men whose eyes are turned outward. They watch the hills and the trees around, and they carry long guns. They are looking out, but also at everything which is not immediately within their sphere of control. In the control tower there is a sniper. These men are not pro forma. They are paying attention in a way which is unique to people who have recently been attacked and expect to be attacked again. And they are expecting attack not just from outside, but from within the bounds of Corvid’s Field, which by rights should be their safe zone. Their fingers rest close to their triggers, and they are intense and even a bit twitchy. In other words, someone has given them a serious case of the willies. That information is worth something, but it slips away as we come in view of our destination, and my stomach lurches and all the hairs on my neck tingle as if there were a spider walking over my lips.
Corvid’s Field has been hit by a Go Away Bomb. This place was not supposed to be a target—at least, it wasn’t one of our targets—but on the other hand, what is supposed to be a target and what actually gets blown up (or Gone Away) are movable feasts in war. Beside the runway, concealed from the approach road by the bulk of the tower building, the ground slopes away in a smooth line, as if excavated in a single go by a very big, curved shovel. A large section of forest and a fragment of a wooden outhouse have disappeared, along with the latter half of a cargo plane. The plane has rolled back a bit, or been pushed, so that it’s now a sort of open corridor out over the excision, which unlike all the ones I have seen in testing is not empty. Bubbling up from the centre there is water, or something looking very much like it: a silvery, frictionless fluid filled with bubbles. Little waves roll out from the middle, and a fine spume drifts over the surface, making crazy shapes like giants and gurning faces.
It smells wrong. A lake like this should send out a rich, warm scent of water. Even if it’s a burst pipe or (less appetising) a sundered septic tank, there should be a strong smell to go with it. Looking at Kemner, I wonder about aviation fuel or chemical waste—it would suit her new persona very well to have a tame lake of fire behind her throne room—but there’s not a whiff of either. There is no smell of anything at all—and yet there’s a great quantity of whatever it is, bubbling away in front of us. Has the excision uncovered a well of naturally distilled water? Or saline? In the centre of the lake the surface heaves, a glassy bubble pushing up and then bursting to send a column of the stuff up twenty feet into the sky. Is Addeh Katir geothermically active? I have no idea. It was not included in the briefings we were given when we arrived. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be. But a bad feeling is creeping up on me, above and beyond the obvious dread associated with the business of being in the hands of a grade-one loon; a sense of Oh shit. It is visceral and possibly—in the most literal sense—existential. I am worried about existence.
Kemner gestures, and Carsville appears in the aisle of the truncated cargo plane. He is blindfolded, but his arms and legs are free. Piranha, I decide. She has found a breeding population of piranha, and she intends to feed us to them. Do they have piranha here? I have no idea. I know piranha are by origin South American, but on the other hand it would be quite like the imperial Brits in their day to have imported a few to add local colour. What ho, Sergeant Daliwal, how are the fish today? Pukka, are they? Had enough goat? I swear, if I never eat goat again . . . The Italians eat it, you know, but they’ll eat anything if it’s got enough garlic. Can’t fight, though, can they? Quality of man, Sergeant Daliwal, is what it’s all about. Your lot know that. Why they signed up with us, of course. What’s that? Anand lost another finger? Chap’s careless. They’re piranha, not bloody whelks. It occurs to me that the man is probably an ancestor of Dr. Fortismeer. He is exactly the sort of person who would feel that a mountainous Eden was incomplete without ugly, ravenous fish in an ornamental lake. Eat burglars, more fun than a haha! Aha, ahaha ha! Hah? Sort of a test project, y’see; if it goes well, we’ll have a few more! Hah! Like to see the natives swim the moat then! Eh, Sergeant Daliwal, eh? ’Scusing your presence, of course, good man . . .
Again, the possibility was not covered in my briefings. It will almost certainly have been in Gonzo’s, if it happened, but now is not the moment to ask. Kemner’s head flunky appears in the plane behind Carsville, and shoves him over the lip of the plane into the lake. Pirates again, I’m thinking, but of a very different kind. Plank-walking? Join or die, perhaps. Carsville shouts, flips and lands arse first and submerges. A second later, he is bolt upright, on his feet, sputtering, then he falls over. He is about thirty feet away, maybe a little more, and this time when he comes up, he flails wildly, striking the water. The piranha theory gains currency in my mind, but I don’t believe it. My existential fear is in full flood. This is a wrong thing. It is an antithing. It has the quality of not. I am coming to believe, because I can see familiar debris, because of the shape of the excision and what might be the rear end of a delivery-system rocket shadowed in the centre of the lake, that this water is fallout from a Go Away Bomb. This stuff I am looking at is somehow not stuff I should ever see with my eyes. That would mean that Go Away Bombs are not clean and perfect after all, and that the wanton messing we have done with the basic level of the universe is not, after all, completely free and without consequence.
And then a hand reaches up out of the water and grabs Carsville by the shoulder. He falls backwards, under the surface, which heaves and billows as the struggle begins in earnest.
Ben Carsville fights for his life. He may be an arsehole—I may have had to hit him in the jaw to save his men from a gas attack—but he’s not a coward (whatever that means in the real world). Nor is he a pushover. He surges up, and roars, and pummels at the person in the lake with him. This is a new Carsville, animated and furious, and actually quite impressive. He goes under, and comes up belly first, and he seems afraid, despairing and beaten. His opponent has him in an arm-lock, and is gradually ripping the joint apart. Carsville shouts and dives beneath the surface, reappears having somehow reversed the hold. He grins fiercely, then loses his grip. His opponent springs back, throws punches which start out scientific and grow more desperate. The two men flail at one another, cling together, grapple and throttle. They are well matched. Kemner has selected her executioner (or is it another prisoner?) with ominous appropriateness. It seems that neither one can defeat the other. Is that a draw? Or will she have them both impaled? Then finally, for a moment, the two men square off, eye to eye and mano-a-mano, and one of them lifts the other up, down, and holds his head below the surface.
This is the life of Benedict Anthony Carsville, as it flashes before his eyes. Most likely, as he struggles he is thinking about the toughness of his opponent’s jacket, the strength of his arms. Possibly, as some men do in battle, he is worrying with terrible intensity about things like the smell of cows in the rain and the answer to last week’s crossword. Be that as it may, this is what ought to go through his head:
He does not remember being born. No one does. Some people will tell you that they do. There are hypnotists who can help you recall it. They can also help you remember your time in the army of Rome, your life as an alien being in a far-off galaxy and what it was like to be a garden snail during the Renaissance. These recollections should be treated with the utmost caution.
He remembers his mother’s orange trousers. They were made of stretchy velvet. She wore them the whole time
. He remembers her hair, which was dyed, and the fact that it made him sick when he sucked it. He remembers his father, who had only one arm, and he remembers playing football with a balloon. The balloon took a very long time to do anything, so the game was a continuous exercise in frustration and delight.
He remembers the day they came and covered the playground in special rubberised tiles, so that it would be safer. They dug up the grass and the mud and replaced them with a scientifically proven composite which would reduce the chances of broken bones and scuffs. He watched the large, bored men going to and fro with rolls of underlay and stacks of special tiles. They laughed and stopped for tea, which was awful because he wanted to go on the swing. They fitted a governing device to the swing so that it couldn’t go beyond a certain angle. He never really liked the playground after that, because it was just like being indoors. It smelled wrong. It was even and controlled. He waited for the new flooring to weather and split like the decking at his uncle’s house, but it didn’t. His father told him it was biologically and chemically inert, and he wanted to know what a “nert” was. His father thought this was funny.
He remembers kissing Lisa Crusky. She tasted in the main of snot, because they were only nine. There was an aftertaste of girl, which he wasn’t sure was very nice. He remembers kissing her brother, Niall Crusky, and being beaten for it. He did not understand why, and actually still doesn’t. Niall Crusky tasted exactly like Lisa, except without the tangerine ChapStick and the snot. After that day Lloyd Carsville insisted that his son wear grown-up clothes, in grey and blue. Benedict was the best-dressed, most uncomfortable child in school. As he got older, though, it started to look good on him, and he established that there were advantages to this. Girls—girls had soft parts boys did not, and he had discovered he was interested in those areas—became most aware of Ben Carsville’s angel face and suited, conscious cool.
He was good at games. He was good at football, at hockey, at shooting and tennis and everything else. Everyone agreed he was a handsome lad, and always so well dressed. He was hot-tempered too, quick to pick a quarrel and quick to make friends. He was like a damned Greek, his uncle Frederick said, kind of admiring. Uncle Frederick worked with a lot of Greeks in the olive oil business. Most people found this funny and joked about the Mob. Uncle Frederick explained patiently that the Mafia was Italian and that in any case he actually did import olive oil. Someone had to.
He remembers his first great seduction; not his first time having sex (oh, yes, he remembers that, but it was unexpectedly drab) but his first conquest. It was on his nineteenth birthday. Gabrielle Vasseli was madly in love with him. Ben was madly in love with her older sister Tita, who was twenty-six. Gabrielle arrived in her sister’s car, and Ben focused the full force of his charm on Tita for a few seconds as he held the door.
“Thank you, Miss Vasseli,” Ben Carsville said. “Are you sure you won’t come in as well?”
Tita Vasseli looked at him and Ben Carsville saw in her eyes, in the flicker of amazement and the involuntary swallow, that she was going to say yes. Ben was the rarest of things, a genuinely beautiful man. Good-looking men are commonplace, and beautiful woman are not rare. Male beauty, capable of overcoming the stigma attached to it and undeniable, is one in many hundreds of thousands. Tita Vasseli wanted to possess this boy, to bathe in him, wash herself in him and have some of it rub off. At the very least, she wanted to bone him as he had never been boned before. She moistened her lips and sought a way to put this
to him.
Gabrielle wrapped her arm around Ben Carsville’s waist.
Tita Vasseli hated her baby sister for a full ten seconds. Then she recovered herself and felt a certain relief.
Ben Carsville didn’t mind. He knew what he knew. If he never saw Tita Vasseli again, he would know it for ever. The answer was yes. He seduced Gabrielle in the meantime. Tita Vasseli went home, spent a few days trying to concentrate and finally admitted to herself that she was a spluttering kettle of sexual frustration liable to boil over, melt the kitchen counter, fry the ring main and short out the neighbourhood. Weighing the consequences, she coolly decided that the only way to deal with this situation in an adult fashion was to go full steam ahead with her first plan vis-à-vis Ben Carsville, id est the boning. She made the call. When Gabrielle caught Tita and Ben in bed together a month later, the wailing rattled the ceiling and the gnashing of teeth was ghastly to behold. Tita was abject but also quite pleased. Later that day she showed Ben something so obscene he almost passed out.
He enlisted out of boredom, and because, in his entire life, he’d never found anyone who could say no and make it stick. (Ben Carsville’s life was not like Gonzo’s: Gonzo was charming, and his relentless forward momentum made him irresistible. But he knew doubt. Ben Carsville did not. He knew only that from the day they covered his playground, the earth beneath his feet was smooth, conquered, featureless.)
In the service someone knocked out one of Ben Carsville’s front teeth, and he had to have it replaced. He got a fine, elegant scar under one eye from a brawl over who jogged whose elbow at the bar. He was run ragged, reached the end of his physical capacity and then discovered more within himself. He glowed. And then it all sort of smoothed out. No war, no problem. Just more slow promotion—endless, inevitable, upward progress. He watched war movies because it was the only combat around. He watched Apocalypse Now two hundred and fifty times. He applied for and received duty as a peacekeeper in Africa. It was fine. The bad guys shot at him—but he was in a tank and wearing protective gear. Anyway, they never hit him. Once, out of curiosity, he stopped his armoured car and got out, walked into a fire zone, and took out a machine-gun emplacement by blowing it up with a grenade. He got a medal for bravery under fire, but in truth he had been neither.
He remembers coming to Addeh Katir. He remembers the sense of hope as he landed, the plane swinging out over green canopies of forests, over mountains like shattered glass and endless interconnected lakes. He remembers the people, open, suspicious and angry, abandoned and proud. This, at last, was a place which could say no in a great voice, and mean it. He fell in love.
Addeh Katir took three days to break Ben Carsville on its wheel. It wasn’t remotely interested in his good looks. By the time he arrived, the Katiris had been living with Erwin Kumar and his bandit police and his foreign backers for more than a decade, and they were sick of it. Some of them—shepherds, probably, because Ben Carsville had ordered a mini-ovicide around Red Gate—took up arms and shot at his men. They fired bullets and arrows and darts and pebbles. Ben Carsville’s command lost three men to pebbles in his first week. They were hit in the throat. The fourth one got lucky: he was hit in the eye and lost binocular vision, but didn’t actually expire immediately. The unit medic patched him up, but while he was waiting for transport back to the main HQ it transpired the pebble was coated in resin from a vilely poisonous tree. Private Hengist started to scream. He screamed for seven hours until finally his lungs collapsed and he died. (Shepherds are the natural enemies of wolves and hunting cats. Like wolves and hunting cats, and like sheep, they are not interested in the Geneva Conventions or the Biological Weapons Treaty. They have a job to do, and they do it. Shepherds do not need to read Clausewitz to understand about total war, because they live with it all the time.)
Ben Carsville didn’t care any more that Addeh Katir was a beautiful place. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this, ever given him any cause to believe the world contained no-win situations. He didn’t care that Addeh Katir’s people were vibrant and noble, traders and musicians and historians, with a gentle traditional religion and a powerful sense of community. He just wanted to be who he had always thought he was. He wanted to be bigger, stronger, more debonair, more dashing. It didn’t really matter whether he was good at his job as long as he looked right. He was living in the war zone now, and he got his silk dressing gown out and he marched up and down his fence to show how in control he was and how he did not give a damn. H
e exhorted his men to greater efforts in personal grooming, tried to get them to understand that there were no chance encounters, only actions and reactions. They followed him for a while down this strange road. If his luck had been transferable, perhaps they would have followed him to hell. But Ben Carsville’s luck was an intensely selective, individual thing. His unearthly beauty was dulled by dirt and anguish, but somehow it still worked. Snipers turned aside from him. They picked those nearby instead. When Ben Carsville walked his ramparts with a cigar, bullets zinged through the air to his right or left in case he was talking to someone. He could stand where he liked and do as he pleased. The other side was not interested in his death, but in his ruin. His reality began to diverge from everyone else’s in marked, dangerous ways. Then he got punched out, taken down and disgraced by Gonzo Lubitsch and his smart-mouthed arsehole friends.
He remembers the plunge into Ruth Kemner’s lake. He remembers the warm, sweet water and the strange sense of coming unstuck. He remembers going to climb out, and the ghastly, stomach-churning feeling of a hand dragging him down into the mud. An enemy. A monster. He struck out, found his target. He struck again, shook the water from his eyes and saw his man. He remembers being horrified, but he honestly does not remember why. It was important but not relevant. The man was inimical. The man was trying to take his life. He didn’t need to know more. This was the moment where he would be what he wanted to be. He lunged: instinct, pure and bleak and hot.
Ben Carsville is fighting for his life, giving everything he has. He tries so hard. We watch, and we wonder if we will be next. The lake churns. Blood and bubbles. A figure staggers upright. I look. I do not know whether this is what I expected or not, and I don’t know whether it is good or bad.