A Song of Stone

  No time passes, or some does.

  I lean forward to jam the face-plate of the armour helmet against the winch’s chain, then, a link’s length at a time, I nudge the face-plate up until I can nod my head back, flicking the metal cover over and open. It swings and clicks. I can see at last, even if there is not much to be seen. Would that the air were fresher. I look up; a stone corona of reflected light stares back, empty.

  Seeing does not help me undo the length of bell-pull. After another panting hiatus and more dizziness, I lean back, hold my tied wrists above me and reach up and forward with my mouth, angling the loose length of bell-pull towards my teeth.

  The smell is appalling; moisture drips on to my face. I gag, and have to stop. When the moment and the urge both pass, I make the attempt again. Eventually I snag the loose piece and grip it with my teeth. I pull on it, twisting my wrists again and trying to force my hands through.

  Something gives. My wrists are coming free. One hand slips out, wet and slippy and raw as birth. I spit the filthy rag from my mouth. I tear the grubby loop off the other wrist, then reach, arms and back protesting, and lift the weight of the helmet off my head. I let it fall into the water at my side, then try to push myself upright, hands pressing down on the bucket’s rim. No success. My back aches as though fresh burned. I reach up to the bucket’s chain and reel it towards me, hand over hand until that linking strand’s at its fullest stretch, brought down in a series of squeaking lengths until it goes taut. I grasp it and haul and finally my wedged-in back and shins pull free.

  The water is only up to mid-calf level. I try to stand but cannot; my legs buckle and I have to reach out to either side for support, leaning precariously back. Finally I push the bucket over on to its side and sit on it, waiting, shivering, for some sort of feeling to return to my legs.

  I black out again, coming to sprawled in the cold, fetid water, floundering and spluttering. I kneel in its scum-surfaced chill and feel around for the bucket. I sit on it.

  I do not know how much time passes. I sit with my head in my hands, trying to breathe life back into my body, shivering every now and again. At some point the background noise changes, something ends, and when I look up, sensing another alteration, full night has now resumed; the rim of rock-reflected electric light has gone and there is no halo above me any more. I put my head down, then try standing. Pins and needles assault my legs, from groin to toe. I stand there, looking up into the darkness.

  It is some time before I feel ready to make my attempt. I don’t know how long. Nobody else comes to relieve themselves down my oubliette, or laugh at me, and indeed it seems perfectly silent and quite dark above.

  I grasp the bucket’s rope again, swinging my weight on it to test it. It creaks at the top and gives a little. It feels unsafe. I am not sure I have the strength to pull my way to the top. Perhaps I should just sit here on the bucket until the morning. They will take pity on me eventually, or just remember me, and perhaps lower a rope to let me out. Or not; perhaps they will leave me here until I die, or throw rocks and stones down, burying me. Can I rely on the compassion of the lieutenant? Or on your love? I’m sure of neither.

  Then I lean back, my shoulder-blades against the wall behind, and shuffle my feet forward through the water, past the bucket and the submerged helmet to the far wall of sharply curved stone. I tense and strain, levering myself up. The back of my head and my spine compete for which can produce the most anguished complaint, but I ignore them both; the chain end of the rope coils in my lap. My feet are now half a metre above water; my head is a metre above them. I rest there, wedged. I was too small to do this, that last time I was here. Like this, though, I can stop and rest on my way up the shaft, relieving my arms if they become too weakened by the effort.

  I set off, pulling on the rope, my breath panting, my heart racing the higher I go. My arms start to quake and quiver and burn with fatigue; I stop to rest, arms splayed downwards and to each side, grimacing as my head and back encounter rough protrusions in the stone. My legs start to quiver too. I resume and shuffle on upwards, settling into a racked, unsteady rhythm; one hand gripping the rope, pulling, then one foot up, then the other hand, and the other foot.

  I slip, near the top. One tired hand encounters something slick and slimy on that filament and my grasp fails; I jerk down, instinct clamping both hands to the rope as the winch housing creaks loudly above. My grip catches on the quick friction and I stop, legs dangling. My palms and fingers burn as if charred, making me moan into the rope as I hang there, bright stars of light flashing dizzyingly across my field of vision. I swing like a hanged man, feet bumping into the shaft’s walls. Tears course down my cheeks. I push out with my feet to wedge myself. I could drop, give up, stop the pain flooding from my hands just by surrendering to the earth’s seductive pull; death or unconsciousness, it scarcely matters. But something in me will not let go and knows the union of those burned hands on that cold and run-out rope for what it is; a fuse.

  Moving my fingers, making them open and close on that rough surface, makes me gasp. I weep with the pain and effort; my arms are shaking so hard I am certain they must buckle and give with the very next exertion. Deciding to rest, I push up with my shoulders and almost cry out when my head drops back, unsupported, and hits off horizontal stone.

  I have achieved the ground’s summit; I am surfaced. I can feel and hear the difference and smell the fresher, cooler air.

  I bring my feet up and out, then roll to one side, clutching at the rocky wall, almost falling back down again as my clawing grip on the stones slips. Instead I flop off the stone circle and fall down on to the cobbles of the courtyard, at the side of the lieutenant’s gun, bulking in the courtyard’s stony ring of darkness. I press my hands to the cold, soothing cobbles, letting the castle cool my rope-scorched skin.

  The castle is not quite dark; its electric lights are out but a few old garden torches flicker, feudal. A scrappy silence reigns; I hear a distant cough, and a cry; perhaps human. I stand, waiting, breathing hard, swaying a little. The night sky sends down a little drizzle, sprinkling rain upon my upturned face; I raise my hands to its coolness, as though in surrender. The fading light of the guttering torches catches on the metal-solid mass of the gun, its dumb mouth raised to the blackness. I stumble to the nearest jeep, just to sit. I hold my hands in front of my face, flexing them despite the pain.

  Sitting back, I find a bag stuffed down between the seats, and something hard within. I reach in, sucking on the pain, and bring out an automatic handgun, heavy and dully gleaming. I turn it over. Its coolness soothes my hand. I hold on to it and push myself away from the jeep, walking down to where the dropped portcullis blocks the passageway under the guard chamber. Beyond the short, dark tunnel there is a hint of firelight illuminating the broken balustrade of the moat bridge. I peer through the black grid of wrought iron.

  I hear a snore, almost underneath me, from just the other side of the portcullis. I start back. There come the sounds of someone waking, shifting and muttering. I gain the impression of darkness moving, of people rising to fill the space in front of me. Then a rasp, and a match flares. I shield my eyes, and through the separating grid of metal see first a hand, then a dark face, then three more. The men from the camp stare back through the pierced gate, its apertures graphing a resigned concern on to their drawn and grimy faces.

  ‘Who is that?’ I ask. The match flickers. I can read nothing in these faces; are they frightened, resigned, angry? I cannot tell. ‘Do I know you?’ I ask them. ‘Do I know any of you? Who are you? What’s happened? What time is it?’

  The match flickers, near its end. Dropped at the last moment, it falls, but extinguishes before it hits the cobbles of the passageway. I open my mouth to repeat my questions, but there seems no point. I can hear shuffling, settling noises, and sense the men lowering themselves again, lying down once more.

  I try the iron wheel which raises and lowers the portcullis, but the padlock has been secured. I start
to turn away, then recall the key I took from Arthur’s bedside and slipped into one pocket. Did I remember to transfer it when I changed my clothes? I gently pat my pockets with my free hand. I find the key, lift it out with clumsy fingers and try it, but it rattles loose in the padlock’s opening, useless. The men stir at the noise, then settle back, and soon soft snores begin again.

  I stand there, heavy-handed, clutching a wrong key in the almost total darkness, then turn and leave the men waiting beyond that locked but open gate and walk back up towards the heart of the castle, motive and yet motiveless, but already, I think, guessing that I am heading for some slight undoing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dark on dark the castle stands, held in suspension in the air’s warped symmetry, of some solution no guarantee, but letting me, soiled and unearthed, enter it by its unlocked door. In the lower hall, lit by a last few fitful stumps of candles, something like a massacre is tableau’d. Bodies, littered, lie; wine pools, dark as blood. Only a snort and something muttered deep in sleep witnesses that the scene is one of torpor rather than murder.

  I climb the helix stairs. My feet stick on some steps and crunch on others, for all my care. In the passageways and rooms above, a welter of wrecked tables, fragmented seats and fallen desks confronts me; here are curtains, crumpled in heaps beneath windows, here a dull glinting of shards and metal hoops where the chandelier has fallen and smashed; in the ballroom’s fireplace the kindled remains of splintered chairs and drawers smoulder, lifting lazy curls of smoke into the gaping darkness above. Two sleeping bodies lie wrapped in the ripped remains of the wall-wide tapestry; an exposed, soldierly hand still clutches a wine bottle’s neck.

  Everywhere glitters the jagged wreckage of vases, lights and figurines, the spikes and blades discovered from their earlier, unshattered selves sparkling like embedded icicles in a scatter of twisted, torn scraps that were once parts of books and maps, paintings and prints, clothes and photographs, all strewn like grey and drifted snow across a landscape of deeper destruction, the resultant softness of that peaceful coating like an atonement for the violence required for its creation.

  Such wanton destruction. My home, our home, laid waste, sacked and ruined; the collected treasure of a handful of centuries, an entire family tree of ancestors and half the countries of the world all obliterated in one night of frenzied abandon. I gaze around, shaking my head, my senses reeling at the realisation of the scope and scale of what has been lost here. So much beauty, so much elegance, such grace; all devastated. So many lovingly accumulated belongings, so many precious possessions, so much crafted wealth, all obliterated for an adult exaggeration of a childish tantrum; liquidated to the transitory currency of destructive glee, surrendered for no more than the fleeting, blood-hot rush the vandal feels.

  There is, nevertheless, a part of me that exults in what’s been done, and which feels freed, liberated by all this havoc.

  Where has so much of our irregular enjoyment originated, if not from breakage? We have broken taboos and laws and moral strictures, and been the evangelically infective cause of the same behaviour in others. So much that society values and makes most of, we have slighted, exploded and broken down. The more abhorrent the act, the more we have luxuriated in it, the elemental pleasure of the deed magnified and multiplied by the delicious joy of knowing the apoplectic rage so many others would exhibit should they gain knowledge of what we’ve done, let alone - another wicked, erotically arousing thought - what sclerotic heights of outrage they’d achieve if they were actually to witness such an act’s commission.

  So much have we done with the body - our own and others - that by now there are no prohibitions left to ignore, no sanctity still to defile or sanctions remaining to be broken. We have stopped at unfeigned rape, unwilling torture and actual murder, but acted out these all, embraced great pains and courted death through sweet constriction many times. What is left that does not necessitate coercion, and thus demand that we reduce ourselves to the level of the common rapist or the menial torturer, that miserable breed who can only achieve their purpose through the material overpowering of others? Nothing, I’d thought until now.

  I had believed that all that remained was the prospect of the same acts performed with a new cast and the odd, trivial variation. It was, admittedly, a matter for only a modicum of regret, something easy enough to live with, like the realisation that it is impossible to conquer every longed-for object of desire, or the distant prospect of death in old age. Now I see there was always this; the destruction of what we valued, of the property we held dear. I feel that I was blind, not to have understood that some of the morality we shared with others involved restrictions worth the breaking, and hiding in that subversion a deal of previously unglimpsed pleasure.

  I do not think this is something I could have done; nostalgia, some dreg of familial feeling, respect for craft or the comprehension of the impossibility of undoing such ruination would have stopped me, but the deed having been done by others, why should I not relish it and glory in the result? Who else should? Who else deserves to? Not these casual destroyers, these temporary occupiers; I doubt they knew that the paintings they slashed to shreds, or the vase they threw against a wall or the book they tossed into the moat or the desk they smashed and burned in the grate were each worth more than they might ever expect to earn, in peacetime or in war. Only I can justly and with due discrimination appreciate what has been destroyed here. And did these materials, this wealth of merchandise and art not owe me one last balance of enjoyment, one last cherishing, even if it was just the valedictory recognition of their lost worth?

  Gone, then. And with all that, vanished too is so much of what drew us back even as we left the castle, those few days ago. We may now relinquish these walls unencumbered, I think. Only the construction’s own fabric now remains, and I would not like to hazard how long that will outlast the trove that it once sheltered. The shell of it, the body alone endures; comatose, vegetative, abandoned by the inhabiting quick, its self-possession quite annihilated.

  But with that loss, we gain. We are released, able finally to quit, to walk away with our hearts as well as our feet.

  I step through the deserted Long Room, passing to the brittle applause of broken glass and the ferrous accolade of collapsed armour figures, fallen swords and unknown metal debris. A little moonlight is seeping from the clouds rending and departing overhead, allowing me to see. I tear one sagging hanging from a wall, gritting my teeth to the fiery handful of pain that results. I set one marble maid upon her base again and set her broken arm on the bookcase by her side; she shines milk-white in the grey-blue light, luminous and ghostly.

  Stooping, I pick up a little figurine. It is a shepherdess; idealised, but still exquisitely realised and quite beautiful, as I recall. She has lost her head, and broken from her base. I squat and look about for other pieces. I find her bonnetted head, and rub a little plaster dust from her delicate features. Her nose has been chipped, its tip shining whitely through the thin blush of glaze. The head sits precariously on her slender flute of neck; I place her carefully on the bookcase shelf beside the arm of the statue then walk on, through the devastation. . . . And find I cannot help but recall another tumultuous spoilage, long ago, instituted by Father if carried out by Mother. It was, too, the occasion of our first separation.

  The memory’s hazed, not so much by the accumulation of other, intervening events as due to my lack of years at the time. I remember that after the initial exchange of shouts, Mother screamed and Father only talked, that her voice assaulted the ears and that one had to strain to hear his, most of the time. I remember she threw and he ducked, or tried to catch.

  We were in the nursery, playing, when we heard their voices, raised, and rising to us in that airy space of brightly painted attic. The nurse looked flustered, hearing the shouts and screams, the harsh words and accusation filtering up from the bedroom on the floor below. She went and shut the door, but still the noise came to us, carried by
some by-way of the castle’s much-altered geography while we played with bricks or trains or dolls. I think we looked at each other, keeping silent, and went on playing.

  Until I could stand no more and ran past nurse and hauled the door open, sobbing as I ran down the narrow steps while the woman cried out after me, calling me back. She ran, following me, and you came padding behind her.

  They were in his bedroom; I charged through the door just as Mother threw something at him. A piece of porcelain, part of his collection, it flew, white as a dove, across the room and smashed on the wall above his head. I think he’d made to catch it, and might have, but for my sudden appearance. He scowled at me as I ran towards my mother, crying and wailing.

  She was standing by a display cabinet against one wall; he was by the door connecting to her room. He was dressed for a trip to town. She wore filmy night things under a housecoat, her hair was wild, her face striped with some beauty treatment. In her left hand she held a piece of lavender paper with writing on it.

  She was not aware of me until I thudded into her thigh and clamped myself to her, begging her and Father to stop shouting, stop arguing, stop being horrible to each other. I smelled her perfume, the treasured natural odour of her and the light, flowery scent she favoured, but I detected something else too; there was another perfume, darker and muskier than hers, which I realised only later must have emanated from the sheet of mauve notepaper she held crumpled in her hand.

  I thought, perhaps, that just by being there, just by reminding them of my existence I might stop them shouting, never imagining that my presence, that very existence, might itself provide a further stimulus for dispute. I did not know that the whole course of our lives from then on had been determined by two pieces of paper in that room. One - white, severe and crisply edged, folded neatly in Father’s jacket - was a letter with a seal of state upon it, sending him to a foreign capital to represent his country; the other - a mauvely fragrant tissue, hotly crumpled in Mother’s hand - had been hidden by Father, discovered by Mother, re-hidden by her and then revealed, minutes ago, in response. Both represented an opportunity for the holder, together they defined a calamity for our family.