The lieutenant stiffens suddenly; she tilts her head, as though listening for something, or to something. She looks at me, frowning, but I think does not see me. Perhaps I can hear something. It might be distant gunfire; not the nebulous thudding of artillery but the flat crackling of automatic small-arms. The lieutenant steadies her gun, lowering her cheek to the stock. The soldiers lying along from her see this and take sight too.
I look back to the soldiers at the mine. The tractor sits idling, connected to the gun. They seem to be having problems with the trailer’s towing point. Half a minute passes.
Then a soldier comes running out of the brick building, waving a rifle and shouting something. Instantly the mood changes; the soldiers start looking around, then move; some head for the office building, others make for the cab of the truck, where the driver is standing on the cab’s step, looking, it seems, right at us.
Then firing sounds from somewhere to our right, and the ground beneath the soldiers heading for the office building leaps and flicks in miniature detonations of earth and stone. Two men drop.
The lieutenant makes a hissing noise, then her gun erupts, spearing flame and hammering twin spikes of pain into my head. I jam my fingers in my ears, eyes screwing up involuntarily, as I duck back and down. The last thing I see of the mine is the windscreen of the truck shattering white, pocked with wide black holes, and the driver being thrown back, falling and folding as though belly-kicked by a horse.
The firing continues for some time, punctuated by the sharp snap of grenades falling amongst the buildings of the mine; I glimpse up to see the lieutenant pausing to flip her magazine, then again to change the spent pair for another taped-together set lying by her hand, each movement executed with a smooth, unhurried skill; the gun barks on, hardly pausing. The air reeks with a bitter, acrid scent. A couple of thuds behind and below may be the impact of returned fire, and I think I hear the lieutenant’s radio squawking, but she is either ignoring it or cannot hear. Soon the only sound is from the lieutenant’s guns and those of her men.
Then it stops.
The silence rings. I open my eyes fully, gazing at the prone form of the lieutenant. She is looking along the row of men lying by her side. They are each looking, checking. All seem uninjured.
I pull myself back up to the little tunnel of flattened bracken I left at the summit of the cliff and gaze down to the mine. A little smoke drifts. Some of the office building’s windows look eroded, the metal frames buckled, the brick surrounds edging them pulverised to curves, with flakes and fragments of orange brick scattered on the ground beneath. The front of the truck looks as though a giant has filled an immense brush with black paint and then flicked it, spattering dark spots all over the metalwork. Steam issues from its grille and the holes punched in its engine cover. A dark pool of diesel spreads slowly out from underneath like blood beneath a corpse. The tractor lists, one tall rear wheel and both front tyres flattened. Bodies lie fallen and sprawled all across the ground, a few with guns at their sides or still clutched in their hands.
Then, movement at the door of the office building. A rifle is thrown out, landing and skidding along a length of the narrow-gauge rails. Something pale flutters in the doorway’s gloom. The lieutenant mutters something. A man hobbles out of the building, face bloody, one arm dangling, the other waving what looks like a sheet of white paper. He is shot from our right, his head flicking back. He falls like a sack of cement and lies still. The lieutenant makes a tutting noise. She shouts something but the words are lost in the sound of firing coming from the top storey of the office building. Returning fire from our right flank kicks dust out from the bricks around the window and then, with a bang, something flashes over the tractor, gun and truck and disappears through the same opening; the explosion follows almost immediately, pulsing a quick cloud of debris through the window and shaking dust from the eaves of the building’s corrugated iron roof.
The silence resumes.
I stand upon the track at the entrance to the mine’s compound in the deep dusk light; the sky is a cooling turquoise bowl above the dark, silent crowds of trees. The sunlight drains slowly up the slope beyond, falling back before the shadows. The air is fragrant, full of the smell of pine resin, replacing the stink of cartridge smoke. The dull red gravel beneath my feet rasps as I turn to survey the killing ground.
I watch the lieutenant’s men as they cautiously check the prostrate forms littering the earth, guns levelled and ready as they frisk and search each body, expropriating guns, ammunition and whatever else takes their fancy. One of the fallen moans as he’s turned over on his back and is quieted with a knife, breath gurgling from the wound like a sigh. Curiously little blood.
The lieutenant has checked the gun, finding it intact; Mr Cuts seems fascinated by it, climbing over it to test its controls, spinning metal wheels, hauling on its levers, pulling the shining steel plug of the thread-ridged breech open and sticking his nose inside. The lieutenant tries to use the radio, but has to climb back up to the ridge before making contact. The trailer behind the truck is opened, revealing boxes full of shells and charges for the field gun.
The back of the devastated truck yields more ammunition, various supplies, food and several crates of wine, mostly undamaged.
The jeep that left the farm appears up the track, heralded by a shout from the man the lieutenant has left on the ridge. The men from the jeep all whoop and laugh and back-clap those who took the mine, telling of their own fire-fight, surprising another truck further down the track leading to the mine. Stories are told, joking insults traded, and a sense of relief fills the air, as obvious and sharp as the scent of pine. Two dozen or more they have killed. In exchange; one trivial flesh wound, already cleaned and bandaged.
Something moves at my feet. I look down and there at my feet, like another wounded soldier, I see a bee, crawling heavy and awkward, clambering blindly over the cold surface of the gravel track, dying in its thick, furry uniform as the season’s chill turns against it.
Another shout from the man on the cliff-top and an engine’s roar comes from down the track. One of the trucks from the farm comes bustling up, lights flashing. It rumbles straight towards me; I have to step back off the track to let it roll growling past. It turns, swaying, in the centre of the buildings and grates to a stop. I look down at where its wheels passed, expecting . . . but the bee, uncrushed, crawls on.
We leave quickly after that; the truck takes the gun, booty and us, while the jeep leads the way, struggling with the weighty ammunition trailer. At the farm the second truck assumes the burden of the trailer and the farmer is breezily informed where his horses may be found. His look is dark but he wisely holds his tongue.
The lieutenant takes to her jeep again; I am left in the rear of the second truck with some of the joking soldiers; a bottle of wine is pressed into my hand and a cigarette offered as we jolt down the track and into the gathering darkness beneath the trees.
There is one last act, just before we find the first narrow metalled road; a jolt of brakes and a burst of gunfire from ahead sends everyone diving for their guns and helmets. Then shouts tell us the matter’s settled.
It had been a pick-up, full of comrades of those killed at the mine, shot even as they hailed the lights approaching them. They too are dispatched without injury to the lieutenant’s men, only one of their number even escaping the bullet-torn vehicle, to die face down on the track. The pick-up, on fire, is nudged out of the way by the leading truck, settles on its side in a weed-choked ditch beneath the trees, and begins to crackle with exploding ammunition. We leave it blazing in the night alone, and bump off, singing, for the road.
I watch that distant burning for some time as we ride the long straight road back. The blazing pick-up, the bushes, the overhanging trees and whatever lies about to be infected by their fever produce a pyre that grows and yet does not; a quivering, climbing conflagration beating at the night sky and spreading just as we diminish it by moving off from it, so
that the whole unsteady mass seems fixed, and that furiously unrepeatable consumption, for a while, enduring.
But then, from the cold jolting of the truck’s open rear, swinging wildly through the bends created by empty vehicles long abandoned, I watch as all we have consigned to the starry night’s attention eventually succumbs, and the glaring flames die down.
I do not sing or shout, or drink, or laugh with the merry crew I share the truck’s side-benches with. Instead I wait, for an ambush, crash or climax that does not come, and when, in this night’s loud midwinter, we turn into our home’s drive, I sense the castle’s bulk both with surprise and a sick, sure disappointment.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The hand’s grasp near fits the skull, the covering bone by bone enclosed. And saying this, we grasp that. We each contain the universe inside our selves, the totality of existence encompassed by all that we have to make sense of it; a grey, ridged mushroom mass ladled into a bony bowl the size of a smallish cooking pot (the lieutenant’s men should look inside the webbed and greasy darkness of their own tin helmets, and see the cosmos). In my more solipsistic moments, I have conjectured that we do not simply experience everything within that squashed sphere, but create it there too. Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so in a sense deserve whatever happens to us, for not having had the wit to imagine something better.
So when, despite my gut-felt certainty of doom, we arrive back at the castle uncrashed, not ambushed, and find it hale and whole and everyone within it present and correct, my earlier dread vanishes like mist before the wind, and I feel a curious sense of victory, and even, contrarily, of vindication. As ever, when in this fervidly self-referential mood, I decide that whatever unsleeping force of will continually keeps my life steered to a safe and proper course has triumphed over the half-sensed vagaries of a current that might have led to danger. It could be that I have kept the lieutenant and her men safe from a disaster that would have befallen them had I not been present; perhaps I have indeed been their guide in more ways than they know.
Still, as we roar swaying up the drive, lights making a tunnel of the grey and leaf-bare trees, I consider this supposition, and consider it, to be charitable, unlikely. It is too neat, too self-contained; one of those facile faiths to which we give credit, but draw none from, and whose only certain effect is to make us become what does not become us.
The trucks draw up outside the castle, the men jump down, and laugh and shout and joke. Tailgates bang flat, rattling chains, the gun’s unhitched, the plunder from the mine is manhandled, thrown down and carried off and the soldiers left in the castle rush out to meet those returned from the fray. Backs are slapped, pulled punches thrown, rough hugs exchanged, bottles are clinked and hoisted, and the raucous laughter of relief fills the night air with steaming breath.
I climb demurely down, unable to join in all this hail-fellowing. I look for you, my dear, thinking you might be with this welcoming crowd, or just watching from a window, but you do not appear. I see the lieutenant, smiling by her new-won cannon, surrounded by all this rumbustious camaraderie, looking round with close appraisal at her rowdy crew, calculation written plainly on her face. She shouts, fires her pistol in the air, and in a brief trough-silence, every face turned to her, announces a party, celebration.
Break out more wine, she commands; secure some dancing partners from the camp of dispossessed, have the servants prepare the very finest feast they can from what’s in store, and charge the generator with some precious fuel to turn on all the castle’s lights; tonight we all make merry!
The soldiers whoop for joy, bay at the moon, and raise gun muzzles to the skies, firing in crackling, deafening agreement, a feu de joie to wake the dead.
A quick conference between the lieutenant and Mr Cuts, standing by the gun and looking at the bridge across the moat, while men run from truck to castle, carrying crates between them, arms bowed out in balance, others shoulder drums of fuel and head for the stables while most - directing one truck’s lights at the camp of refugees - go amongst their tents, issuing invitations, indeed insisting on the company of its women at the festivities. I hear shouts, wails and threats; some scuffles start and heads are cracked, but there are no shots. The soldiers start to return, dragging partners by the wrist; some meek, some cursing, some still struggling into clothes, some hopping on grass and gravel as they put on shoes. The faces of their forsaken men, darkly desperate, watch from the shadowed tents.
The lieutenant and her deputy are decided; an attempt will be made. The gun’s unhitched from its truck and reconnected to a jeep.
The lieutenant’s haul is duly hauled, taken through the iron-toothed mouth of the castle’s face, pulled by the grumble-engined jeep. The lumbering artillery piece barely fits, its wheels knocking stones off the bridge’s balustrade to send them splashing into the black moat, the long barrel’s end grating on the underside of the passageway beneath the old guard chamber. The jeep’s wheels skid on the courtyard cobbles and the gun seems stuck, but the laughing men push and heave and it scrapes through and in, to be parked beside the well in the castle’s hollowed core. Its great barrel is elevated to provide more room, so that those two gaping mouths, well and gun, rough stone and rifled steel, both aim towards the night, a silent concert of ill-matched calibres.
Meanwhile the second jeep squeezes in too, pulling the ammunition trailer and surrounded by soldiers dragging pale-faced women and girls, some dressed in daytime clothes, others still in night attire.
The soldiers light torches, brandish candles, throw open rooms and chuck thick logs on fires. Outside, others secure the trucks in stables and fire the generator up, flooding the castle with electric light and leaving us all blinking in the unaccustomed glare. When they return, they bring the black, wrought-iron grid of the portcullis down and lock it. The servants not already up are pulled out of their beds, the kitchen stoves are stoked, larders raided and armfuls of bottles lugged up from cellars. The ballroom’s double doors are flung open and spread wide, a collection of recordings is discovered, and soon music fills the space. The fruits of my own taste quickly prove unsuitable, however, and they find fitter strains from the servants’ rooms.
The lieutenant has the tall curtains pulled over to block the light’s escape and quietly instructs a few of the men to take their pleasure, by all means, but also to take turns keeping watch from the roof, lest this jamboree attract unwelcome attention from outside.
The soldiers stow their guns, grenades, take off jackets, bandoleers and bits of combat clothing. Wardrobes and rooms are raided above and a group appear on the stairs laden with clothes of ours and of our ancestors. Shifts, shirts, dresses, trousers, jackets, stoles, wraps and coats of silk, brocade, velvet, linen, leather, mink, ermine and a dozen other species’ hides and furs are thrown, scrambled for, pulled on, brandished with demand and reluctantly assumed; women totter on high heels, made to wear stockings, basques and old corsets. A selection of hats appears. The soldiers and their escorts sprout plumes, feathers, helms and veils; headgear gathered from half the world dances under the lights. Some of the men strap on pieces of armour, clanking round, still trying to dance. Two of them pretend-fight with swords in the hall, laughing as the blades strike sparks from naked walls; they slash a painting, try chopping candles in half. The lieutenant shakes her head, orders them to put up their swords before they hurt themselves or others.
I make to go upstairs, to look for you, my dear, but the lieutenant, smiling, brimmed glass in hand, grabs my wrist as I mount the first step. ‘Abel? Not leaving us, are you?’ She wears the old opera cloak again, its scarlet interior rippling within the black as she moves.
‘I thought I’d check on Morgan. I haven’t seen her. She may be frightened.’
‘Let me do that,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you join the fun?’ She waves the glass at the ballroom where the music thumps and bodies leap and caper.
I look, and give a small pained smile. ‘Perhaps I’ll join you later.’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘Definitely join it now,’ she tells me. ‘I know.’ She reaches out as Lucius and Rolans approach, one carrying a huge tray of food, the other a smaller tray stacked with opened wine bottles. She takes one of the bottles from the tray, then shoos the servants onward to the ballroom. She shoves the bottle into my hand. ‘Make yourself useful, Abel,’ she says. ‘Top people’s glasses up. That’ll be your job for tonight. Wine waiter. Think you can do that? Think that’s within your capabilities? Hmm?’
She seems already drunk, though there has scarcely been time. Was she drinking in the jeep on the way back, or could it be that our brave lieutenant can’t hold her drink? I look at the bottle’s label, trying to discern its vintage. ‘I thought being your guide today might have earned me my daily bread.’
‘Normally it would have, I’m sure,’ she says, going up a step above me to put one arm round my neck. ‘But the guys did all the shooting and you didn’t, and they don’t normally get to have parties in castles. Be a good host,’ she says, knocking me on the chest with her glass, spilling wine on my waistcoat. ‘Oops. Sorry.’ She pats at the stain, wipes it with her hand. ‘It’ll come out in the wash, Abel. But be a good host; be a servant for once in your life; be useful.’
‘And if I refuse?’