A Song of Stone

  Do I see another face, calm, pale but composed at the stairhead as we go clattering down (white fingers on torn, dark wood, the other arm swaddled in bandages, cradled to your milky breast)? I think I do, but then the steps, in flights, turn the sight and take it from me.

  The hall, level again. I see an armoured figure standing near the door, a black opera coat around its shoulders. I make to touch its hem as we pass by, arm going out in supplication, mouth working in the attempt to produce words. My arm flops down, brushing the floor, knuckles hitting the door step, cracking over it as we step outside and into the courtyard. The door is slammed on further enquiry. I hear boots running across the cobbles, then shouts and cries.

  Not the well again, I try to say. I am unwell, and not long welled up. Have pity. (Perhaps I say it, I think, as they bundle me off the stretcher and drop me in the footwell of a jeep. No no, not the jeep, I’ll have no truck with that; I shall travel in the van. They look at me strangely.) The bottom of the jeep smells of mud and oil. Something cold and stiff is thrown across me, over all my body, cutting out what light there is. The vehicle’s suspension dips, words are muttered, a distant rattling noise is overwhelmed as the engine cranks roaring into life and starts the steel beneath me shaking.

  Springs creak, air hisses; two heavy pairs of boots find footing on me, pinning my head and knees. The engine coughs and revs, gears grind and then we jerk and jolt away. The courtyard cobbles shake me, the passageway amplifies the engine’s blare, then we’re outside, beyond the walls, arching over the bridge - a few more shouts and a single, flat shot - and heading down the drive.

  In my mind I try to follow our route, attempting to combine the map of memory with the blind movements of the jeep; here my head is forced against the sill, here the boots that rest upon me weigh more, or slip back, or slide forward. I thought I knew the lands about here well, but I believe I lose the way before we even leave our grounds. We turn left out of the drive, I think, but I am still confused. My head is hurting, and my ribs. My hands, too, still ache, which seems unfair, as though their wounds belong to a much earlier time, and ought by now to be long healed.

  They mean to kill me. I think I heard them tell the servants they were taking me to a doctor, but there is no doctor. I am not being taken to be helped, unless it’s to be helped to die. Whatever I was to them, I have now become nothing; not a man, not a fellow human being, just something to be got rid of. Just stuff.

  The lieutenant believes I wanted to kill her, or you, my dear, or both of you. Even if I had the power of speech, there’s nothing I could say to her that would not sound like a sorry excuse, a hopelessly contrived story. I wanted to see; I was inquisitive, no more. She had taken over our home, taken over you and yet still I did not resent, did not hate her. I only wanted to watch, to have confirmed, to witness, to share the tiniest part of your joy. The gun? The gun just presented itself, promiscuous in its very being, a casual pick-up, inviting the hand it’s designed to fill and then - in my damaged state, stuck to it, stuck with it - easier to retain than to abandon. I was leaving, you would never have known I was there; luck, simple fate decreed my downfall.

  Not here. Not here. Did you really say that? Is that what I truly heard? The words echo in my head. Not here. Not here . . .

  So cold, my dear. The words, the meaning so matter of fact, so pragmatic sounding. Did you too think I came like some covetous swain in a bitter rage to kill the two of you? Has our shared life not taught you what and who I am? Have all our judicious indiscretions, our widespread pleasurings and reciprocated liberties not convinced you of my lack of jealousy by now?

  Oh, that I should have injured you, that even now you nurse that wound, however minor, at your breast, thinking that I meant it, and worse. That is what hurts, what injures me. I wish I could take and suffer the wound I so carelessly inflicted. My hands clench, beneath the stiff tarpaulin. It would seem that my hands have become my eyes, and my heart; for they both weep, and ache.

  The steel floor beneath me hums and judders, the tarpaulin ripples and beats, one flapping corner continually tapping me on the shoulder like some manic boor trying to attract my attention. The noise of air rushes all around, eddying and reverberating, tearing and roaring, ferocious in its meaningless intensity and creating a calm more determined than mere stillness could have pretended to. My head buzzes, infected with all this resounding emptiness.

  My right hand lies near my forehead; I find the control to move it closer, and the tarpaulin shields the movement. I touch my temple, feeling wetness, the pain of raw, scored flesh; a long, still slowly bleeding wound in a crease, a ridge along the side of my head, extending from near my eye to past my ear. The blood drops from my brow. I catch a few drops and rub it between my fingers, thinking of my father.

  What a sorry race we are, what sad ends we continue to contrive for all our selves. No harm meant, my dear, yet so much damage done. To you, to us, and to me, already harmed but about to be put beyond further harming. Should I go so uncomplaining to my end? I’m not sure I really have much choice.

  We are all our own partisans, we are every one, when pressed, combatant, our clothes our armour, softly encasing our unsteady frames, our flesh the mortal fabric most suited to the fray. To the last man, at least, we are soldiers, and yet there are those who even in the face of death never discover the animating savagery such martial revelation demands, their particular character requiring a combination of circumstance and motive the situation has not produced. The merely cunning tyrant preys upon the tolerant intelligence of those better than they. Armies by brutality forge the brotherhood amongst their troops they should extend to all, then turn one against the other. Does our lieutenant do something similar to me? Does she have me in her spell, too? Would I have acted otherwise had she been a man? And am I to discover at my death a capacity for willing suffering, and a fatalism, I never guessed at in my life?

  Perhaps the descent from property and polity to this rude cess of rule by gun has so abraded my sense of worth that I can envisage my surrender to its liquidating processes with relative equanimity; a hanging leaf that feels the storm’s breath and happily lets go. I think now I may have been shortsighted not to have realised that though we live in periods of peace, they are as much the store of just their opposite as accumulated wealth, two-faced, implies impoverishment in its gift. We are the only animal naturally perverse; it ought not to come as a surprise to me that this applies as much in greater matters as it does in more intimate situations. We draw up rules for relations between systems, states and faiths, and for those between our selves, but they are written on the passing wave, and however much we dodge and gloss and wheel and skim and are adroitly gauche with our modifications, justifications and epicyclic excuses, by our own trammels we’re caught at last, and tangled in our lines fall back to others, no better prepared.

  Some part of me, resentful and frustrated at such forbearance, would lie here in sly deceit, gathering my strength, collecting my resources and then leaping up, startling and surprising them all, seizing a gun and turning the tables, bending them to my will, forcing them to accept my authority and take the direction I desire.

  But this is not me. I am still lost within my body, communications with the useful parts still patchy, my legs twitching, hands clenched involuntary, head and ribs hurting, mouth working but only to dribble; if I tried to leap I might do no more than jerk, or even if I did leap up a child could knock me down, and should I try to grab a gun probably I’d miss, or be defeated by the button on a holster.

  And even if I were well and whole and in the best of spirits I doubt I could assume the lieutenant’s mantle so. These soldiers know what they want to do, they have a mission and a course, they are within their natural environment, however much they may resent it, however they may yearn for resumed civilian roles. But that civility is the only place I know where I can be be myself, the sole state that I can understand and that makes sense not just to me, but of me.

 
I would like to return to you, my dear, and to our castle, and then be free to stay or go according to our desire, that is all. But would leaping up, taking a gun - in the unlikely event that I could - taking charge (just so), accomplish this? Could I kill them all, return and rescue you? Kill the lieutenant, your new lover, kill the others? I believe Mr Cuts is in the jeep too, and Karma, though I’m no more sure that they are than - if they are - how I know.

  Too much impoderable. Too much to think on.

  I might leap up and escape, perhaps, somehow avoid their shots and then be allowed to go, not worth the effort of pursuit. But to head where? Can I abandon you, abandon the castle? You two are my context and my society, in both of you I find and define myself. Though both may be taken, one despoiled for ever, one beguiled for the moment, still I have no real existence without you.

  There is no recourse for me. The choices that have led to this conclusion lie too far back down the track, or up the stream - our view of it itself a choice - to make any difference now. If I had always been a man of action, or if I had not loved you so, or been less inquisitive, or if I had loved the castle less and quit when the quitting was easier - or loved it a little more, so that I was prepared to die there rather than hope to flee and eventually return - then I might not lie here now. Perhaps if I had been less fixed on you and on the castle, and you on me, and we had been more conventionally social creatures, less prideful in our refusal to hide what our feelings for each other were, things would have been different too.

  For prideful, scornful we have been, have we not, my dear? Had we been more prudent, less disdainful, had we hidden our contempt for the trite morality of the herd and concealed our activities, we might have kept the wider pool of friends, acquaintances and contacts that gradually dried up around us as the knowledge of our intimacy spread. It was not even just that awareness that gradually isolated us, it was rather the undeniability of that perception, for people will tolerate much in others, especially those others whose esteem is judged worth the winning, but only if the possessors of that knowledge can credibly pretend to themselves and others that they do not know what they really do.

  That cosy self-delusion was not enough for us, however; it seemed part and parcel of the same outmoded morality we had already twice denied, through our own close but prohibited union and the wider compass of hardly less scandalous liaisons we partook in and encouraged. And so, in our vanity, having found stimulation in these earlier scandals and desirous of new ways to shock, perhaps, we made it too difficult for those around us with any regard for popular judgement to deny what we were and what we did.

  We still had friends, and were received civilly enough in most of the places we had come to know, and nobody with a home like ours, with well-stocked cellars and a generous disposition ever lacks for numbers to make up a party, but nevertheless we became aware of the withering away of invitations to the other great houses as well as to the type and scale of public events where some minimal investment in the stock of moral convention is one of the conditions of entry.

  At the time, we accepted our semi-outcast status with the displaced indignation of hauteur, and found no lack of eager acolytes avid to encourage such conviction. Later, as all slid down to war and the lands around us emptied, that winnowing seemed no more than an acknowledgement of our principled and brave detachment, and we professed ourselves pleased, to those still around to listen, that those fled fainthearts had finally left us alone. Later still, with only ourselves left to talk to, we stopped talking about such things, and perhaps hoped that, still and fast within our hollow home, the approaching hostilities too might ignore us, just as departing society had.

  We might have done things differently. I might have done things differently. So many other choices might have led to me not lying here.

  But now that I am, I know not what to do. If there is a remedy, it does not lie in my hands. And of course there is a sort of remedy, and it lies in the lieutenant’s hands, and it is called her gun.

  My time is come, I think, my dear. Certainly in another sense it has been and gone. I think I tried the best I could to protect you and the castle, and now, perhaps, in going to my death without complaint, I might at least take with me the comfort that I leave you, if not our home, in safer hands than mine proved to be. There may be no saving the castle; its worth is arguably half gone already just by the inner ruining of it, and it will remain conspicuous and attractive to guns as long as these troubled times persist. But for you there is hope; at the lieutenant’s side, if that is the way it is to be, through the mobility, skills and ordnance of her band there may be some safety, and a sanctuary of sorts. Her arms may protect you better than mine ever did.

  So little goes as we expect, and yet still I am surprised when there’s a shout - the lieutenant’s - and I am thrown forward suddenly, squeezed half-way beneath the seats in front while more yells ring out. Gunfire chatters in the distance, and a sequence of thuds shakes the jeep. I imagine at first that we have left the road and are suddenly pitching over a field of rocks, but something about the impacts says this is not so. We swerve violently. Shots crack out from immediately overhead, there’s another sequence of piercing thuds, mixed with the sound of glass breaking and a gasp and scream, and we swerve even more violently in the opposite direction. Shouts nearby that are close to screams, then a terrific, near back-breaking crash that sets the world spinning and ignites lights at the back of my eyes. I tumble through darkness, glimpse the light of day but briefly, then something hits the back of my head and I am dimly aware of landing on something cold and damp and soft and smelling of earth with a weight pressing on my legs.

  The sound of machine-gun fire blasts in around me. The acrid smell of the black powder fills my nose, making my eyes water.

  ‘Karma?’ I hear someone say, distant somehow, as though outside. I think I have my eyes open but it all seems very dark. Coldness is seeping through to my knees.

  ‘No,’ another voice says. More gunfire. Something tickling my nose may be grass. I smell fuel.

  ‘There,’ a last voice gasps; the lieutenant. ‘The mill. Quick; now!’

  A terrific burst of firing nearby, bringing the smell of black powder again. Then it lessens, and shortly decreases still further while the more distant fire continues. I think I can hear people running and the sound of feet thumping on the ground. I try to shift my legs; they cannot move up or down, trapped by something heavy on top of them. The smell of fuel grows greater. Gunfire still sounds all about. I begin to panic, feeling my heart beat wildly and my breathing become quick and shallow. One of my arms is trapped, too, caught between my side and something solid.

  I wriggle my other hand out from hard folds of tarpaulin and find grass-covered earth near my face; I am lying on the ground, the jeep on top of me. I dig my fingers into the cold soil like talons, grip and pull with all my might. My legs slide a little; I try to kick them and attempt to find purchase with my feet. I use my trapped arm to lever myself away from whatever it’s pinned against, and realise that it is my own weight that’s keeping me there. Something drips on to the back of my head. The smell of fuel is growing stronger all the time. The earth thuds up at me and a sudden, sharp crack sounds like a grenade going off in the midst of the firing.

  Pushing up, then clawing at the ground once more, I succeed in pulling my legs part-way through the constriction behind. My feet encounter what must be the upturned transmission tunnel; I kick and pull and heave, trying to prise my shoes off, but they refuse to move. The liquid dropping on to my head feels warm, like engine oil. I try rolling over, turning round so that my back is to the ground. My legs stay as they were, uncomfortably twisted. There is some light now. I push the tarpaulin away from my chin and reach up, finding the back of the seat in front. I haul on the seat-back and pull up on one leg with all my might. My leg comes slithering free; the other one follows a moment later. The liquid dripping from above falls on my face now, and I taste it. It is not oil or diesel fuel, bu
t blood. I spit it out and wriggle towards the dim light, pushing the crumpling folds of the tarpaulin down around me like some discarded piece of clothing.

  The edge of the jeep’s bodywork stops me. There is only a hand’s width of opening to the outside, where the young dawn’s paleness hints at the shape of things. My panic returns with the increasing smell of diesel. I was ready to die just a couple of minutes ago, full of a fatalistic acceptance, but that was when there was no hope, and now there might be. Besides, I imagined that the lieutenant would grant me a quick death; a couple of bullets to the head and all would be over. To die, trapped, being burned alive does not seem quite so attractive.

  I make one attempt to shift the vehicle above me bodily by pushing up on all-fours before telling myself not to be stupid. Feeling around, I decide there is no other way out. Above me, by the top of the driver’s seat, my hand encounters what feels like the back of somebody’s head. Wedged between the seat-top and the ground, it is still warm, and the hair is matted and glued with blood. Something shifts under the hair, bone grating. I pull my hand away quickly, and a piece of fabric, cold and wet and sticky, comes with it and wraps itself round my fingers. I shake my hand, desperately trying to get rid of it. It flops by my head and in the trickle of light seeping in from outside I can just make out that it is Karma’s bandana.

  It seems I must make my own way out. I turn and start digging at the dew-damp ground, tearing divots of soil away from beneath the small opening. The gunfire continues unabated and another two grenade blasts erupt, the second one pattering shrapnel off the body of the jeep above me. I grip and rend and dig and push, hauling out whole clumps of grass, roots tough and straggling and snapping as they quit the cold earth, then forcing the clods of earth back past me and down and reaching back to excavate some more.

  My head swims at one point, and I have to pause. The noise of firing sounds quieter, further away. I bury my face in the dirt-spattered grass beneath my face. It smells of an earthy dampness, blood, diesel and black powder. I lose myself in it for a moment. The sound of firing is less now, I’m sure. I can hear individual shots. Another grenade blast, some distance away. Using one hand, I test the trench I have gouged in the soil beneath the bodywork. A little more. I rip grass and soil away from the far side of the hole, then twist round on to my back and push up, using the transmission tunnel as a step and heaving with all my might through the grainy slickness of the soiled grass.