Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  Except they weren’t his boots. They were the Gunner’s boots, the Gunner’s leg protector on one side and the tight twine of puttees on the other. Although, they weren’t exactly the Gunner’s, because the Gunner’s had been bronze, and these were real: leather boots, canvas puttees, wool army britches, canvas and leather bags and holsters hanging off him, as real as the stiff crackle of the thick canvas groundsheet he was wearing as a cape. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were flesh and blood; but they were not his hands: they were a man’s hands—perhaps the hands that his would become one day, but weren’t yet. Strong wide hands, grubby and calloused by work.

  Somewhere at the back of his mind, the sense that he was a boy of nearly thirteen standing on a traffic island in London was fading away like the vision of the bronze plinth at his feet; but before it retreated to a point where he couldn’t connect with it anymore, he was able to notice other changes as they happened.

  His fingers rose to his face, and even without a mirror, he could tell it wasn’t George he was feeling. The chin was covered in a strange rough bristle, the nose was longer, and all the planes of the face were wider, flatter, and wrong. The skin that covered them somehow felt thicker and more rubbery as he kneaded it against the bones of his skull. In fact, his whole body just felt denser and blunter. It was as if his center of gravity had moved lower, and the pull of that gravity had doubled. He no longer felt light on his feet, and it wasn’t tiredness that made him feel that—it was a reconfiguration of his muscles and a thickening of his bones. He felt bulkier and stronger, but he also felt in a way that was as tinged with sadness as it was full of wonder, that he’d lost something irretrievable in this growth. Like something you don’t notice until it’s gone, he was missing the green ease and lightness in his body. It didn’t feel like a body that could run full tilt and without much thought all the way from St. Pancras to Hyde Park, for example. His body had just fast-forwarded fifteen years. It wasn’t that he had become fat; it was that he had become strong, like a flexible tree sapling that grows into a solid trunk, which can’t bend as easily but carries more weight.

  What he felt was simple age, and the inescapable weight of growing up.

  He was also feeling an insistent itching, and he realized he was scratching at those itches without thinking about it. He looked up at the clear winter sky through the birch branches and wondered at the brightness. He heard the wonder in a deep voice saying:

  “I thought it would be midnight.”

  He realized that the voice had come out of his mouth. He heard it all, the sounds of this new world dialed up around him. He heard a distant cracking and popping, and behind that an even fainter whine like an engine. Much closer, too, he heard the rattle of harnesses and wheels, men moving about, metal sliding against metal, and the sound of someone coughing his guts up close by.

  And then he heard the Officer’s voice right beside him saying:

  “Thought what would be midnight, Gunner?”

  George looked down from the delicate fretwork of birch branches against the pale winter sky and saw the world he had fallen into, and realized that he was, as advertised, eye-deep in hell.

  A horse’s body hung upside down from a tree, frozen and unmoving on the sharp stump it had been blown onto, its legs pointing skyward in an obscene imitation of the branches it had replaced. The other trees around it looked as if they had been hacked and slashed by some wayward giant, randomly splintered and shattered trunks jagging up out of the plashed earth at crazy angles. Below it, the earth was torn up in senseless ridges and random shell holes, strewn with barbed wire and the smashed detritus of war.

  The Officer was standing in front of George, still carrying his greatcoat, and he too was now flesh and blood, no longer a statue.

  “Nothing, sir. Sorry, daydreaming.”

  The words came out of George’s mouth as if he were partly on autopilot. It certainly hadn’t occurred to him to call this man “sir” on a conscious level.

  “Well, snap to and get those nags into some kind of cover before that spotter plane gees Fritz into lobbing a wake-up call our way.”

  George looked at the horizon and saw a tiny twin-winged plane moving slowly against the light, like a paper cutout. He realized that was the source of the distant whine.

  “Sir,” he heard himself say, and he saw his hand rise to the overhang of his tin helmet in a sketchy salute. Again, he hadn’t thought of doing it, but some part of him was like a passenger without control of the body he was in. He didn’t feel detached from it, just not wholly at one with what it did. It was the same feeling when he found he had reached back over his shoulder without looking and patted the muzzle of a horse that he hadn’t really known was there.

  “Come on, then,” he heard himself say. “Let’s find a better ’ole.”

  He turned and gathered two leading reins in his hand. A pair of chestnut-colored horses stood there. Behind them he could see a pair of field guns being set up for action by teams of gunners working fast to manhandle them into position just behind the lip of a shallow ridge. Some wore greatcoats and mufflers, others wore shaggy sheepskin jerkins, but all wore tin helmets and looks of fierce determination as if they were working against the clock.

  George could feel his heart thudding with adrenaline. He realized there was a huge sense of apprehension churning in his gut, as if something very, very bad were about to happen. He could see by the tight faces around him that everyone else felt the same. It was as if someone were playing a single unending note on a violin, a note so high that you almost couldn’t hear it, but just audible enough for it to be painful in its persistence, in the way it underpinned everything. His mouth was dry, and he felt he would murder someone for a cup of tea. Which was strange, because George—normal George—didn’t much like tea at all.

  Two artillery spotters were receiving orders from the Officer. One had a trench periscope strapped to his back. They nodded and set off over the lip of the ridge, keeping low. They held a spool of telephone cable on a bobbin between them that unwound as they ran. Then one stumbled and lay still. The other man kept hold of the bobbin and carried on, running until he disappeared over the ridge.

  The Officer swore and trained his binoculars on the fallen man.

  George felt the horses pull against the reins and found himself jogging away from the guns. He led them toward a dip in the landscape that had two walls of a ruined farmhouse at the bottom of it. He ducked them under a low arch, and wasn’t surprised to find two more horses already hobbled and waiting, faces obscured by nose bags, contentedly chomping away at the contents. Except for the lack of a roof, the protective walls of the ruin made for good cover. High above them, George heard the distant engine whine getting louder.

  There was another soldier crouched by a wall, trying to get a fire going under a large blackened teakettle. His helmet lay on the ground beside him, and he was wearing one of the shaggy sheepskin jerkins.

  “Char’ll be up in half a mo’. Tell them to keep their hair on,” he said.

  George found he was hobbling his horses as if he’d been doing it all his life, but the watching part of himself in the back of his mind was looking at the shoulders and hair of the soldier hunkered down in front of the small fire. He had a cigarette parked in the side of his face, and George could hear the pop-and-suck of his smoking without using his hands as he squatted before the meager blaze, looking at something held in front of him.

  Maybe because he was trying not to think too hard about why the man carrying one end of the telephone wire spool had not gotten up when he had stumbled and fallen, George concentrated on the back of the man’s head.

  The soldier had dark hair, the same color as George’s, cropped short on the back and sides. When he swept his hand back through the unruly longer hair on top, George felt something tug at him in the pit of his stomach at the familiarity of the gesture. He suddenly and fiercely wanted this moment to freeze. He didn’t want whatever was going to happe
n next to happen; because whatever was actually going to happen wasn’t going to be the thing that tug had so treacherously hinted at. Because that was impossible.

  The man picked the ragged stub of his cigarette out of the side of his mouth and spun it into the fire, then stood up, stretched, and turned.

  George’s heart stopped.

  Any heart would stop if it saw the impossible happen.

  Any body would forget to breathe.

  Any throat would choke up so tight that there was only room for one small word to escape.

  A word as small as:

  “Dad?”

  The eyes that he knew so well, the eyes he’d known he’d never see again, crinkled at him, and one brow rose higher than the other in an expression George not only remembered but had himself practiced to death in front of the bathroom mirror in the weeks after the funeral, so he would not ever forget. The doors of his heart burst open, and he felt light again as he started to run toward him.

  “Who you calling Dad, mate?” The soldier laughed. “I reckon I’m younger than you. . . .”

  George stopped dead as he realized that though the eyes were smiling good-naturedly, there wasn’t a hint of answering recognition in them.

  Then the ground skipped beneath his boots as the first bomb hit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Gunner’s Last Laugh

  The Gunner was up to his neck in water that was filling the hole he had dug in the gravel spit. Now that he had moved the skeleton of the girl from where it had been blocking the outflow at the base of the water tank, he was definitely feeling a small current moving past his ankles.

  He held his breath and submerged himself. Sure enough, water was moving through a low arch that came up to just below his knees. He closed his hands on the flaking bars that blocked it. They moved. He stood up and hacked at them with his boots. He kicked and kicked at the ancient metalwork. As he did so, he thought of the Walker’s sneering face and imagined his boot was pounding into the center of it. It allowed him to rise above the exhaustion that was sucking at him just long enough to make a space he might have a chance to crawl through. He reached down again and confirmed that this was so.

  He scrambled carefully to the top of his hole and gathered up the bundle of heart stones wrapped in his cape. He pulled out his matchbox and lit a final match. The skeleton of the young girl gleamed whitely back at him. He had arranged the scraps of her dress over her as decently as he could, and he had covered her face. He looked at the long hair and thought of Edie. He remembered how pale and shaky she had been when she was separated from her heart stone, how the life seemed to drain from her and be replaced by an enormous, all-pervasive fear. The match guttered out, and he thought how scared Edie would be if she were left in a dark place like this, without even her warning stone for comfort.

  He paused for a moment to reach into the scrabble of sea-glass in the bundle and picked one at random. He reached for the skeleton and found a shred of dress by touch alone. He tore a piece off and wrapped the heart stone tightly inside it, so no light would blaze out if the Walker were to appear. He wrapped it in several layers, because the main point of all the digging he’d done was to make sure that if the Walker used his mirrors to come back here, the absence of warning lights might make it impossible for him to ever get out again. The Gunner reckoned if he couldn’t see into the mirrors, he might just be stuck here forever.

  He reached into the skeleton and placed the tight parcel of cloth where he thought her small heart would once have beaten.

  “Sleep easy, little ’un,” he said. “He can’t hurt you no more.”

  He grasped the bundle and dropped back into the hole with a splash. Even though he knew he could move underwater without needing to breathe, he didn’t actually feel that he could. He knew this was because there was a gap between what he was—a bronze statue— and what he had been made to represent—a man. The man side that had been instilled by the maker would go through all the agonies of drowning, even though he, as a statue, wouldn’t die. Although, since he was sure it was nearly midnight, that was going to be something of a technicality, as he was about to die as a statue for entirely different reasons.

  He was going to do it anyway, he decided, since the point was to get the heart stones that the Walker so clearly valued out of his clutches forever.

  “He who laughs last, mate,” he said into the darkness. “He who laughs bloody last . . .”

  He grasped his helmet in one hand, the bundle of heart stones in the other, and took a deep breath. He ducked below the surface and pushed himself into the narrow water duct.

  He kept his eyes open, but he might as well have closed them. The jagged shards of bar he had kicked out from the crumbling stonework rasped against the gravel in the pipe. As he pushed himself deeper into the pipe, the gravel spill thinned out, and he was crawling over a water-smoothed layer of slime on top of something that gave way as he moved on it.

  As he pushed forward, he felt the acid burn of oxygen starvation scorching up from his lungs and tightening across his throat and gullet. His eyes bulged and his mouth began to strain against itself, the automatic reflex to breathe fighting the willpower he was using not to do so.

  His teeth ground together, and he pushed blindly on. He knew in the part of his brain that was not occupied by the horror of the searing lack of oxygen that he was crawling away to die like a rat in a hole, but the fact that he was hiding the Walker’s precious stash of glass gave the otherwise futile gesture a point. He held on to that thought as his willpower finally gave in to the inevitable, and he reflexively opened his mouth and breathed in water.

  And as he did so, he squirmed around and made his screaming body face the unseen sky above the ground, so that he would not die facedown, but looking upward. After all, since this was the last choice he was going to make, he wanted to look toward a place where maybe a happier ending than the lonely death that would come for him at midnight was possible.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The Broken Lace

  The ground jumped as the bomb hit, and George was knocked onto one knee. The horses were pulling and bucking at their restraints. The soldier with his dad’s face was running across the ruined space, swearing as he looked up into the sky. He grabbed the Lewis Gun set up on a stand against a low wall and squinted through its sights as he knelt beneath it and aimed almost completely vertically.

  As he opened fire, George found he was grabbing the horses’ bridles and pulling their heads together, automatically stroking and shushing them. His calming noises were drowned in the rip of heavy-caliber gunfire as the Lewis Gun rattled through the bullets held in the circular drum mounted on top.

  George looked up and saw a yellow-and-black biplane turning overhead, so low that he could clearly see the goggled face of the spotter sitting behind the pilot as he leaned out and dropped a bomb by hand.

  He had a sickening sense of the world going slow as the tiny bomb seemed to fall straight toward him; but slow as it felt, he didn’t seem to have time to run. Or maybe it was something else: maybe it was the impulse in the body that was not his, the Gunner’s instinct driving his movements. Whatever it was, he found that instead he was turning his back to the blast and protecting the horses’ heads with his outstretched arms.

  The second bomb fell somewhere beyond the walls of the ruin, and though something smacked into the other side of the wall and made the dust bounce out of the cracks between the stone, George and the horses were unhurt. The Lewis Gun was suddenly silent. George looked over and saw with relief that the soldier was still in one piece, just trying to snap on a new drum of ammunition.

  “Bloody spotter plane,” he swore. “We’ll be in for a pasting now.”

  The soldier stared after the aircraft that was already a diminishing shape, heading for the horizon, and shook his head, sick at himself for missing.

  “I don’t know why they let me waste rounds with this thing. Couldn’t hit a bloody barn if they
locked me inside and made me let rip with a full drum of ammo.”

  He locked off the weapon and turned to George with a rueful smile.

  George realized that the soldier had been right. He was impossibly younger than George. It was his father’s face, but it was the face from photographs from before George was born and when he was a baby.

  The soldier saw something on the ground between them and bent to pick it up from where he had dropped it on his run to the Lewis Gun. It was a thin pocket-size book with a scuffed red leather binding. Several black-and-white photographs had strewn themselves across the ground. George picked up the ones nearest him before the restless horses could mash a hoof on them. One picture was of a bright-eyed girl in a wide hat, smiling coyly to someone out of the frame, showing a lot of teeth and neck and shoulders and sitting in front of a potted aspidistra plant. Another picture showed the same girl on a chaise longue in front of a painted backdrop of trellised roses, holding a tightly wrapped bundle on her knees and rather awkwardly tilting it forward so that the camera could catch the bug-eyed outrage of a small baby being shown to the world.

  “You see the horse in the tree?” asked the soldier.

  George nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  “Bloody shame, that. I mean, I’ve seen some things out here, but animals? I don’t know. This isn’t their fight, is it?”

  George shook his head and then realized that the soldier was holding his hands out for the photographs he had retrieved.

  “Sorry,” George grunted, and held them out. The soldier took the pictures and looked at them. He grinned ruefully.

  “The wife.”

  “Very pretty,” George swallowed.

  The other man beamed proudly. “She should be. She’s on the stage.”

  “Right.”