Birchwood

by John Banville

  I searched for hours, pacing the hills in a numbed trance. Rain fell. As the light began to fail I found them on the road. Only one soldier remained. He staggered ahead of me dragging Ida along by one limp arm. She was a heavy load, lying down on her back like that and her heels bouncing over the stones. He stopped and swore and began to beat her with the butt of his rifle, smacking her skull in a bored weary tattoo and saying over and over in a reedy voice, You nowghty girl you! You nowghty girl you! Poor Ida lay there silently, her head rolling from side to side under the blows as the rain fell on her. The soldier looked at me and paused with the rifle lifted above his shoulder. He looked at me, and at Ida, at me again, with his mouth hanging open, and then shrugged and lowered the rifle.

  Tucking micks,’ he muttered. ‘Barmy!’

  He reeled away down the road. I carried Ida on my shoulders back to the camp. How did I carry that weight so far? Perhaps it was not far. Silas said nothing. After all, he had been expecting this or something like it, some disaster, he was not surprised. Her blood was all over me, even in my hair. We wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on her bunk. In the night she woke and cried out for Mario. I found him lying in our caravan staring at the flame of a guttering candle. I told him he was needed for a deathbed scene. He looked up at me expressionlessly for a long time with those strange still eyes.

  Tuck off,’ he said softly at last, and turned his face to the wall. It made no difference. She was already dead. I arrived back as Silas was closing her eyes, and it was as if he had closed a door on a whole world.

  33

  ODD, BUT I can remember no tears. Lamentations seemed somehow superfluous. If one stopped and thought for a moment about her death one said yes, really, it's logical enough, and it was, with the grotesque logic of the times. When we looked back now we saw that it was for this death we had waited, suspended up here in the mountains, as though a sacrifice were necessary before we could move on, and the sacrifice of course was the slaughter of innocence. Or is all that too subtle, too neat? We buried her next morning, wrapped in a white shroud, beside the stream, and there was silence but for the noise of the spade and the larks singing, no prayers, no eulogies, nothing.

  With the murder of the innocent went our innocence, and in its place came something brutal and icecold. We struck camp that very day and travelled down into the plain. It was strange to be on the move again, to hear the wheels groan and the hoofs stamping. We had thought to leave death behind us in the mountains, but down here it was everywhere in the air. It was as bad as we had been told, worse. There was a smell of death. No beasts grazed in the meadows, no smoke rose from chimneys. Children sat motionless at the crossroads staring out of huge round eyes. We passed by a woman lying laughing in a ditch. The fields lay fallow. After a week we reached the coast and headed southwards in a storm. The wind roared for days, buffeting the frail walls of the caravans, filling our mouths and eyes with salt. When the wind dropped it was winter, and there was ice in the hedgerows, the fallen leaves were brittle with frost, and the air grew fangs. Now the hoofs on the road had a steely ring, and the mornings were black as pitch. My teeth went bad. We had no money, no food. That was a terrible time.

  We came to a town, and an echo rose out of my past. Yes, there was the broken rampart, the belltower, the barracks. I was, if you like, home. There was no welcome there for me. Everything was the same and yet changed. Silas saw me looking, and smiled.

  ‘Aye, Master Little Boots, you recognise this place? Here we end our journey.’ He winked. ‘I know someone’

  We rumbled down the empty main street. A bell chimed thrice, three sombre strokes. Children threw stones at us in an eerie, malevolent silence, and fled. We entered an empty crooked square. Here the houses along two sides were fine bright edifices, wine-red brick and white windows curtained with lace, while their counterparts facing them were low thatched shanties, ruined, most of them, with their walls breached as though by cannonshot. The roofs were in tatters. Shattered fireplaces hung in mid-air. Even the worst of these wrecks were inhabited. One, its front wall gone completely, was like a grotesque cutaway illustration of the times. On the lower floors an emaciated mother was cooking something frightful in a black pot while her brood of rickety children scuttled around her, and upstairs the father, tended by a dutiful daughter, lay on a pallet made of sacking, doing his best to die. They paid us not the slightest heed as our gaping cavalcade went past.

  At one of the two streets leading out of the square Silas called a halt. We reined in the horses and waited, for what, we did not know, looking expectantly toward Silas, who sat in his doorway, puffing on his pipe, and considered the sky above the houses with a faint dreamy smile. Down at the end of the street which his caravan blocked a sliver of sea was visible. The silence was strange, deep yet light as the chill winter air, tingling, itching to be broken, as it was at last by a thin high-pitched whistle. Silas's ears seemed to twitch, but still he gazed upward, puffing and smiling. There was a stirring in the rubble of one of the shattered houses, and a small woman in a wide flowered dress with her head hidden by a black shawl stepped out into the square, shook the dust off herself like a dog shaking water out of its fur, and hurried toward us. There was something in that walk, the way the arms sawed, haunches rolled, shoulders strained at the delicate stuff of the gown, that reminded me of another time, a road, a chase. She reached Silas's caravan and stopped, and he, with a great show of surprise, whipped the pipe out of his mouth and bent to help her up beside him. We craned our necks and stared. What woman was this, rising out of the ground in a strange town? She put her foot on the rim of the wheel and Silas yanked her arm, the wind blew, the dress billowed, and there was revealed to us, instead of the pink knickers, say, we had expected, a pair of coarse tweed trousers hitched up around the knees and tied with binder-twine. The two, already deep in conversation, disappeared into the caravan, and we were left with the silence again. Someone laughed uneasily. I was excited and obscurely alarmed, for I had seen in that strange man-woman, behind the echo of that other one we had fed as he fled from the peelers, another fainter echo out of a deeper past. I began to step down from the seat, intending to creep up and spy on their secret conference, but Mario reached out a hand and held me fast.

  ‘Is none your business, boy,’ he growled, and it was at that moment that my real fear began. That black shawl was there to hide more than mere gender.

  Half an hour passed. Magnus and Ada played a game of cards. The twins went back for another look at the starving family. Sybil sat on a wooden box behind Silas's caravan, staring intently at nothing and brushing her hair, stroke after slow stroke, endlessly. Now a noise that had begun as a vague distant buzzing became the quavering voice of a concourse lifted in song. The sound drew nearer, rising and falling like an ill heart's beat behind the houses up at the other end of the square. We turned our faces thither, awaiting the appearance of the singers, but instead there crept out of the mouth of the street a horde of squat grey creatures, scores of them, crawling on their bellies and scuttling over each other's backs, or hopping in that strange way they have, as though each hop were a pounce, stopping, rising on their haunches to sniff the air with delicate snouts, their black eyes glittering. Rats! They scattered into the broken houses, and the procession arrived and crawled painfully toward us across the square like a snake with a broken back, a wavering string of emaciated townsfolk. Their sad song rose like a moan. In the van there marched a priest with cropped red hair and cracked boots holding a rough wooden cross aloft, and out at the side, stalking the line like an outrider, was a figure in a cocked hat and gaiters, white trousers, a green jacket. Strongbow! There he was, in full regalia, as preposterously plumed and groomed as ever. I almost laughed to see him, my ridiculous friend. If I threw a stone at him would he remember that day when he chased me off the town's historic ramparts? It seemed unlikely, for he had larger issues to occupy him now than the irreverence of little boys. Behind the priest a coffin was borne along on
the shoulders of four stooped men. It was a small box. They were building them smaller now. Famine shrivelled its corpses. I wondered if this were one of Silas's sliding contraptions.

  Singing, weaving, staring blankly, they marched across the square. In the wake of the coffin a crazed old woman stumbled, softly wailing. I recognised her. The rest looked away from her as though embarrassed by her tears. Here was no place for such a show of grief, too many were dying, silence sufficed. Silas's caravan stood in their path. The priest halted and lowered the cross, and behind him a convulsion of halting ran back through the crowd. The song trembled uncertainly, soared on one last note and faded. Strongbow came marching up, conferred briefly with the priest, then stepped up to the caravan and rapped with his fist on the window. There was no response, and he retreated a pace in confusion, stamping his heels. One of the coffin bearers moaned very softly. Strongbow cast a sidelong glance at the other caravans and their silent attentive occupants. He was about to speak when the door above him opened and Silas stepped out on the driving board and leaned down and asked,

  ‘Well, my good man?’

  Strongbow's plume bristled.

  ‘Get this yoke on up owwa the way there!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Get owwa the way!’

  The priest pointed a shaking finger at the silent procession at his back.

  ‘You're blocking the street,’ he roared. ‘Can you not see it's a funeral, man!’

  ‘Why, so it is,’ said Silas.

  ‘You bloody get!’ Strongbow cried, and made a grab at Silas's leg and missed. With a banging of boots and a clatter of buckles two peelers came running. More old friends! Sergeant Trouncer straightened his helmet and said, ‘Right! what's up here?’

  The consumptive constable behind him could not speak for lack of breath, but he backed up his superior officer with a fierce look out of his sheep's eyes. They all began to shout at once. The priest waved his fists, Strongbow stamped his feet and rumbled menacingly, and Sergeant Trouncer bellowed at the constable, who drew his truncheon and made to clamber up on the caravan. Silas kicked him on the side of the head, and as he toppled backward in a swoon he brought down Trouncer with him, and Trouncer clutched at Strongbow, who fell on the priest, and the four of them collapsed in a heap, flailing and roaring, and the cross poked the priest in the eye. Silas gleefully clapped his hands on his knees, the old woman shrieked, Mario began to laugh, and then the coffin exploded. Screws flew out of their sockets like a volley of shots, the lid flew open, boards splintered, and the corpse, O! that terrible swollen thing, slid down between the shoulders of the crouching bearers and rolled across the ground shedding a foul bandage in its wake like a snail's trail. Listen, listen to me, I have seen worse, I have seen things more terrible than this. The mourners fled in all directions waving their arms and screaming, and even the four felled pillars of the community scuttled away panicstricken. Only the old woman remained. She knelt and tore her hair, and laughed hysterically with that same raucous cackle I had heard long ago among the blackcurrant bushes. I stared down at the corpse lying in its wreckage. Silas lashed his horse, and the circus thundered out of the square.

  34

  OF HIM in the dress there was no sign until, a mile outside the town, he leaped down from Silas's careering caravan and vaulted a ditch, tripped on the other side and fell flat on his face, bounced up again immediately and scampered away across the fields. Our pace slackened as the panic evaporated, and then the horses would not go on, but halted and stood with lowered heads, shuddering and coughing. I got down and walked about the road in a daze. Up on the caravan Mario shook his head and laughed softly to himself.

  ‘Boom,’ he murmured, over and over. ‘Boom!’

  Silas with his coattails flying and his black hat askew came rushing back along the line.

  ‘Come on, come on, keep moving, no stopping yet! Get up there, Little Boots. Mario! The soldiers are after us, get going.’

  He was in fine fettle, full of excitement and glee. Mario smiled at him wildly and opened wide his eyes and said,

  ‘Boom!’

  Silas halted in his tracks and began to laugh helplessly.

  ‘Mad,’ he cried, ‘stark mad! Gabriel, keep your eye on him, don't let him get behind you. Crackers!’ He scampered away. ‘Come on now, children, come on!

  We whipped up the horses and turned down a boreen into a field, forded a stream and struggled up a hill of thorns, and when we reached the road again we met Rainbird pedalling furiously past us in the opposite direction. He soon returned, pale and breathless. Sergeant Trouncer and a dozen peelers, backed up by a squad of troops, were hot on our trail. They dogged us inexorably all day, until at evening we lost them. The weather turned, and a bitter wind blew up from the east. The land was hard and bare as a bone. With the cold came hunger pains. A sulphurous glow faded slowly out of the western sky, and in a bleak twilight we stopped at a pub, the same one we had visited on my first day travelling with the circus, an age past. This time there was no music. We crowded into the doorway and stared in silence at the chairs crouching empty by the tables, the lamps smoking, glasses gleaming, at our indistinct selves rippling in the mirror, and then Silas strode to the deserted bar and rapped upon it with his knuckles, and Rainbird darted under the flap of the counter and popped up grinning on the other side.

  ‘A ball of malt, my man,’ said Silas, but his words rang dully in the eerie stillness. He glared at the empty tables, daring the ghosts to show themselves, and turned to us in the doorway. ‘Come in, friends, and state your pleasure. It's on the house tonight. Come!’

  We entered warily, and Rainbird busied himself with bottles. The first drink went down in an uneasy silence, but as it settled on their empty bellies a kind of delirium set in immediately, and the revels began. I would take nothing, and sat in a corner nursing my hunger. Glasses fell, and a keg burst and sprayed the mirror with froth. Someone knocked over a lamp. The blazing oil sprang across the floor with a roar. They poured porter on the flames. Mario, sitting cross-legged on a table, vomited repeatedly into his lap. Something was dying here. I watched it twitching in the drunken faces that I could no longer recognise, these impenetrable masks of grey and yellow wax. For all their laughter and their shrieks the silence was still there beneath all, the anguish and the dumb longing of those whose absence sat beside us like an implacable black bird in this house of the dead. It was not hunger that was killing us, but the famine itself. The black smoke was poisoning us. The plague was here. Silas alone seemed immune, presiding over the Totentanz with his old wicked gaiety, leaning against the bar and jogging his glass in time to the fevered rising rhythm of the dance.

  I went out into the yard behind the pub. The night was moonless, tingling with ice. The wind sang over the invisible fields. I do not know how long I stood out there, gazing into the dark. Perhaps I fell asleep on my feet. The noises came to me unnoticed at first, voices and the thud of boots, clatter of metal and wood, and an oddly familiar crackling. I started back into the pub, thought better of it, and scurried around the side of the building under the poplars. One of the caravans was on fire, and there were soldiers on the road scurrying about against the glare like tin men. Away in the dark somewhere Sergeant Trouncer was roaring commands. Silas and the others blundered out of the pub and tripped over each other, swearing and squeaking. I set off at a run toward the blazing caravan. Magnus overtook me.

  ‘Get back, Gabriel, get back!’

  A challenge rang out nearby and I veered away, flame spurted from the muzzle of a rifle, and over my shoulder I saw by that brief livid light Magnus halt as the back of his head exploded. He went down like a stricken spider, arms and legs spinning, and in his place there popped up before me, like a sad and lovely aunt sally, the image of him dancing in a field in April rain with mouth-organ music wreathed around him like flowers. Magnus! I found a horse unharnessed and leaped upon its sagging back and rode away across the fields.

  PART III.
Mercury

  35

  FOAM FROM THE HORSE'S flapping lips flew back into my face and froze on my eyelashes, my cheeks, and frost burned my eyes. A sliver of moon like an icicle swung into the sky. At a ditch old Incitatus baulked and slung me over his ears. The fall loosened every tooth in my head, and my eyeballs seemed to spin in their sockets like tops. I felt that something had come loose at the back of my brain. After that wallop my reasoning shut up shop, I ceased to think, and only a frantic and basic set of instincts kept me going. I was filled with darkness. And the cold! O bitter, bitter.

  I survived that night, and many others, don't ask me how, wandering the countryside, half starved, half mad too I suspect, for how long I do not know-was it weeks, months, years? I fell in with a band of tinkers who fed and clothed me and asked no questions. One night, prey to a nameless panic, I fled the camp. The roads were choked with refugees, forlorn bands coming from nowhere and going to the same place, jettisoning in their wake a spoor of broken belongings. Their charity kept me alive. God knows what they thought I was, this crazed filthy creature perched on a starved nag. Perhaps they saw in me a celestial messenger of hope, anything is possible. I was not grateful for their kindness. I despised and loathed their misery, their helplessness. My accent impressed them. Some even called me sir. Sir! What a people!

  I travelled, but I did not travel far. My journey described a wide circle the centre of which was, unknown to me, the circus, carrying me with it toward its goal by some mysterious intangible magnetism. The first faltering days of spring arrived. I remember gaping in bafflement at the green buds on a tree which had been bare when I lay down under it the night before. I could not cope with the season of resurrections. One day the horse died, buckled under me and flopped on its side on the road, coughed up unspeakable stuff, kicked, and was gone. There is a point at which one decides to surrender. Under one's dancing feet a black chasm waits always, always inviting. I had felt that darkness beneath me for so long that it had come to seem like a last refuge into which I could fly, and now as I left the dead brute there on the road and plunged into the woods I was content to think that I would never again see the light of day. But life, whatever it may be, is not simple.