The Apple-Tree Throne

by Premee Mohamed

  The ethereal clink of fingernails at the window, no rhythm this time. I close my eyes.

  “What a coincidence. You’re in the past, sir,” I say to the empty kitchen.

  Braddock! This cannot be!

  “I often don’t believe it myself,” I tell him.

  Silence from the far side of the cold glass. I make myself a cup of cocoa and head upstairs, where with the curtains shut, there is only a plaintive whispering that does not interrupt my full-bellied slumber.

  it hurts

  “I daresay it does, sir,” I murmur, and roll over in the bed that was once his.

  ***

  I dream of war not every night but enough, and I can scarcely remember my life before it. And perhaps to those not of a military bent this seems understandable— I was twenty years old, and did not plan to run away and find my fortune, and found myself declared ‘89TH P’T’ in a vigorous stamp on my intake forms at the draft office. They had only found, apparently, another eleven percent of young Grobbers superior to me to throw into the enemy’s gaping maw. The cream of the country, dribbled between the enemy’s voracious and waiting lips.

  And such an enemy! They did not even fight as civilized armies fought, they leapt ratlike from bushes and roofs and pits without warning or rules of engagement. And I, who had never been more than thirty or forty leagues from my parents’ small home on the outskirts of town, found myself packed into a ship smelling of young mens’ sweat and fear, and they tossed us out onto the sand of what had once been the junction of España and Neo-Gall and Prushya, and then it was the Disputed Territory, and then it was Gundisalvus’ Land. We fought nameless foes in a nameless land.

  We knew that Captain Eleutherios intended to continue his expansion, and it was hoped, they explained to us, that by forcing him to fight on two, then perhaps three, four, five fronts, that he might be defeated at one of them. He had more soldiers than us, seasoned fighters of a dozen nations, older and better provisioned, and we developed the Kodaks from our spy cameras and saw their men stretching into the distance one night, gone the next. We were as terrified as if we had been asked to fight against monsters, or ghouls, or were-wolves. Everything smelled of dust and resin and salt and gunpowder, and I thought: I shall never be the same again.

  But those of us who have come out the other side, I find, do not always understand this lessening of my previous life. They never dream of war, they tell me. They returned, and it was like returning to your horse and picking up the reins again, ready to ride. They slipped back into their life as if never gone, as if the war were simply something they had picked up — a stone, say, which would not soil the hands unduly — and now they had replaced it, and moved on. This is not to conjecture that they never look back, but they don’t as often as I do, who often feels that I have lived only three years instead of twenty-and-three. I shot and rode and cleaned and killed and ran and ducked and starved and hid and screamed and stabbed for three years, and now I am back, and it is not that my hands ache to do any of that again; it is that I ache, I, myself, to do something, anything, and I cannot.

  As a boy, I used to have terrible nightmares — as if my brain chewed up the day’s events, like a wasps’s mouth making paper for its nest every night, that terrible efficient manufactory of wriggling grubs and fiery stings. Many nightmares stemmed to the day of the very last gallows execution, which our public school had been permitted to go watch; but I did not want to go, and had resigned myself to simply shutting my eyes at the crucial moment, and hoping that the other boys did not see.

  Vic, though, sensitive to my distress, offered to sneak off with me, and we gratefully went to the new reservoir pond at the aqua-plant behind what used to be Kinallen Street, and we fished with string on twigs, and caught nothing, and stared at the sky. I remember her soft, breathless voice telling me about the gallows-tree, how the man that drove in the last nail was cursed to die by his true love’s hand, how there would be the morbid collectors there, trying to get the dead man’s shoes, clothes, snip locks of his hair, steal the rope if they could, and the police would have to hold them back, and perhaps they would send their alley-rats, the children they had taken in, to snatch at the corpse with their nimble hands.

  “Vic, I thought we came here to get away from horrible things,” I had whispered, and she said, “I think it’s better to hear them from a friend, don’t you?” and we had linked hands, there in the warm sunlight, our fishing rods unmoving in the still water, for the aqua-plants were very new then and we did not know that the ponds were regularly cleared of fish, lest they be minced in the machinery and gum up the works.

  And I had thought of that day when I returned from war, seeing, as we stepped off the troop train, a viz in a shop window showing an execution happening at that very moment, except there was no gallows, no steps, no hooded man, only a device of brass and glass about the size of a steam-cart, into which the man was placed and from which — a minute later — his corpse removed. I stood frozen in front of the window, perspiration soaking through my already soaked clothes, and the murmurs of the men around me faded, and I thought of Vic, and Clark, and how one day their children might go to something like this, see the light blink inside the thing’s porthole and wonder whether that was the soul of the dead leaving, yes, the visible soul of the condemned dead.

  I thought there would be flames, demons, the ghost whispers at night. At the very least, I thought there would be chains.

  “So did I,” I tell him. “But it seems you are just as you were in life, at the last moments.”

  Yes. My…my throat, my clothes…

  “But you can speak now. You could not before. It seems ghosts are not trapped in a moment, as in the stories.”

  It seems not. I have learned much during the day, when I cannot be here. It is good, I think, Braddock, that we can continue to improve ourselves even after…after…the worst.

  “Where do you go when you are not here?”

  I do not know what it is called. It is like here, with every road and landmark and signpost, but there is no living man. It is grey, but there is no mist; all colour is present, but faded, and sounds are heard as if from many miles away. Only animals can see me, and other ghosts.

  “Do you see angels? Devils?”

  No. It seems they do not live here.

  “Have you seen…God?”

  No. I suppose He too does not live here. Perhaps He visits to mock us. But He has not yet deigned to show Himself to me. All this, Braddock, all this I never…I did not believe I would…O, and the others! Their cries!

  “I would have thought the other men from the 407th would be there with you,” I venture. “That they would have come home, as you did.”

  I do not rightly know. I have not seen them.

  “Or perhaps where they died,” I say, and shut my eyes. “Where you led them to death. In the Burantai Pass. But then, the greater part of you bled out there too. Or the graveyard, where the rest of you reposes? Is the destination determined by volume or weight? Let me think.”

  I have tried to visit Mossley. I cannot. It is very difficult to move about, whether day or night. Perhaps I will become more proficient at it as…as time goes by.

  I almost tell him that he was not buried at the military cemetery with his noble kin, but stop out of pity — or no. Let us say mercy. We forgot both, in war.

  I do ask whether he has seen my parents, though I had been reassured many times, as a child, that they went to Heaven. I suppose I had thought myself well over the grief, after all these years, but perhaps I am not. Perhaps we never get used to it; time is not the salve we believe it to be, but an ineffectual substance of utility only for reassuring the nervous. But he has not seen them.

  I have become accustomed to his new appearance — I am no longer shocked by the soaked uniform, the blood upon his face and hand, the spray of gore across one cheek as evenly as if sprinkled with table-pepper. His face is calmer now too, more the face
I remember — the pearly grey eyes are unchanged after death, and his expressive brow and lip. He is not quite black-and-white, like an image on the radioviz, but neither has he the world’s colours. Perhaps that too will change.

  “Can you see the future?” I ask him.

  I can barely see the past.

  I wonder how calm he truly is — does he wear a mask? Would he prefer to be screaming half the time, like me? For his family does so treasure the past, and would be hurt if he could not remember it. Love must be like that. You look both forward and back, and no matter what you do, all the weight falls to the past. But I have never been in love.

  “What do you want, Wickersley?” I finally ask him.

  You know the answer to that.

  “I don’t,” I say. “Sir.”

  His eyes bore through me. I wonder where he was looking when he died, whether that is imprinted upon his pupils now, the flawless imago my grandmother swore would appear at the moment of death. Certainly I do not wish him to approach closer so I can check. At any rate, the question is moot; it seems that he has not yet learned the ghostly talent, so essential to pulp novels, of passing through solid matter. I dare not look; and I cannot look.

  I was facing his way when Captain Eleutherios did the grisly deed, but I was too far to see more than a poppy flower springing suddenly upon the golden chariot, bright red, and then the silence as the enemies who had encircled us in the valley grinned, sheathed or re-holstered their weapons, and walked away. God! That poppy blooming upon the gold!

  It had not even been that the esteemed Major-General Wickersley had been such a thorn in the enemy’s side that he must be eliminated. It was that his mistake had been noticed, and they thought it amusing to make an example of him. They did not know his history, his promotions, his battle-plans. They knew that he had led his men to butchery. They knew that his mistake must not be allowed to go unnoticed.

  Into the face of Wickersley’s silence now, I repeat, “Tell me. I am owed. You owe me, you thief of sleep.”

  Leave here. Leave this place. Cease troubling my family and my possessions. It is you, not me, who is the thief; you have stolen this house, this life, stolen Rosalyn. Why must I say such obvious things to you, an intelligent man? I thought I knew you better than this.

  His voice, though thin and insubstantial, trembles with rage; and I find myself, perhaps in response to it, like an echo, feeling anger rather than the guilt and remorse which he believes I should express. “Are we bandying names now? Are we accusing each other of thievery and despoilment? Very well! Your life was stolen a month ago, upon the field of battle where all men should be proud to die. And along with it was stolen the lives of nine hundred and seventy-eight other men. We trusted you, and we believed you acted with full intelligence and good intentions. Neither of those were true. If I have taken any thing of yours, Wickersley, you may consider it reparations for the great crime you committed in your last day on Earth.”

  I pause, breathing hard; his face reflects such emotions as I have never seen him express in life. Perhaps that is another thing he has learned in his ghostly education.

  “And Rosalyn has a brain and heart of her own, and can choose her own companions as freely as anyone else,” I add. “To say she has been stolen insults her, not me.”

  O, the great romantic. You would fight to defend her then?

  “What’s left to fight?” I tell him, and I am suddenly tired of him, more tired than I have ever been, and I pull the curtains closed.

  He is still talking. I can hear the edges of words rather than their substance. I stuff cotton rags in my ears, taking a certain vengeful glee in picking it out of his luxurious cushion, and go to bed.

  The next day I purchase shutters at Aylesbury & Dewman’s, and Clark and I install them on every window in the house. He effusively approves of this — “Bang-up job, my lad. Well, if you are to be caretaker of the place, you cannot be too safe; and at any rate, I like the look of them. I never did like how places in the city lack shutters. You’ll be cooler, too, come spring. A capital idea. I shall suggest it to Mrs. Clark for our own little kingdom.”

  We make tea army-style, thick enough to float a horseshoe, and sit in the kitchen to enjoy the heat from the fire. One of the servants — surely young Alastair, not sullen Mrs. Boyle — has put a bowl of plums upon the table and the light dances off the clouds in their glossy surfaces. It is all very quiet and domestic, and my lids irresistibly droop. For a moment I wonder whether I can become vampyre-like, as in that wonderful novel that came out a few years ago. I could sleep by day — perhaps not in a coffin, I grant — and go about by night, so that my sleep will not be so constantly interrupted by the ghost. Except then what will I do at night? I can barely fill the days.

  And anyway, it seems too much like defeat. I have been defeated enough. And I am still fighting a war on more fronts than I ever have.

  “Have your papers come yet?” Clark asks, hefting the pot to see if we need to make a fresh one.

  “No, not yet. I did go yesterday to give the office my new address, however.”

  “Mine haven’t arrived either. We’re still on active duty, you and I.”

  “Dashing military types, and all that.”

  “Dashing my foot,” he says, raising his brow. “Grow a moustache first. Moreover, you need to buy new clothes; I wouldn’t hang your current stuff on a broom to scare crows, and it’s getting colder by the day. Or have you forgotten that that happens every year?”

  I close my eyes. “I will. I just…haven’t had time yet.”

  “How are you filling your time?” he says curiously.

  “Oh, you know. This and that. The hours just fly past. Speaking of which, I’d better be off — I have an appointment at three o’clock.”

  “I’d best be off home myself. I’ll see you on Sunday, old man.”

  Because I’ve lied about it, I am now obliged to put on my coat and walk out with him; we part ways at the bottom of the hill, and I debate simply returning to the house to sleep. But the air is crisp and clean, and the fug of pain clears itself from my head, and I head back through the gate to take a turn around the estate.

  The gardener at the far end of the main lawn raises his hand to me as I pass; I wave back, and we touch our caps to each other. I wonder if he might permit me to help at all with the upcoming harvest. It would be something to do for a few weeks, and the exertion might help my leg.

  There is a pretty, formal garden with roses still blooming, as well as irises and some other flowers I cannot identify; there is a rockery; there is a very small hedge maze, in which one could not possibly get lost unless one were a child or of unusually mean stature, or proceeding upon hands and knees. I try it and succeed in getting myself lost, immediately, and am forced to stand to get my bearings. I emerge all in a lather, and covered in bits of privet; fortunately no staff are nearby to witness my brief humiliation.

  There is an enormous stand of wild raspberries, roaring with those particularly bright, furious autumn wasps like hopters around the fruit. I dart in and out, avoiding flight paths, and pick a large, soft handful to eat as I walk. There’s a lot of brambles as well, but I don’t feel like getting scratched any more. There’s a looking-glass garden, and a statue-garden, and a garden with nothing but empty trellises— roses, perhaps? Or grapes, or beans? Or…what else does one grow on a trellis? But they must be waiting to work on it next year. I dislike this one, and hurry through it, and across a well-kept lawn that ends abruptly in a chin-high forest of unkempt shrubbery, just beyond which grows a sinister old oak-wood, all greens and coppers and golds, and the thick bittersweet scent of fallen leaves. It cries out for a walking-stick and a satchel without a map, as if no one could look at it without being lured inside for a long journey that might take one to another land.

  I resist the temptation. I do not wish to be here, true; but I do not wish to lose myself in there either.

  Wickersley wou
ld have been here constantly as a child, I am sure — he would have loved the magic of an oak-wood, and could shirk his lessons the way we public-school boys could not. Perhaps he pleaded with his bookish older brother to accompany him, play their games of pirate and cowboy and knight and bandit, or perhaps even the four or five years between them was too much for Cliff to deign to do so more than once in a blue moon. He would have obstinately avoided the formal gardens of rose and rhododendron except to oblige his parents when they insisted the boys pose for tintypes outside. What interest could they hold for a boy adventurer such as he?

  Just as Clarkie had said, Wickersley had never outgrown styling himself as such, not till the moment of his death. He truly believed that everything would turn out all right if you could simply bash your way through it, brazen it out. Out here, I think of him climbing the trees and swinging from the branches, the pink cheeks, white arms, black hair flying in the wind. He joined the army, I think, so that he could have brothers who might actually play with him. A fool, but an understandable fool. A known quantity, as the brass always say.

  For no reason I remember a day a few weeks before our fatal maneouvre — hot, dry, barely a drop of water left in everyone’s canteens, and the water-train so heavily guarded that they could not travel at any speed through the convoluted landscape to our camp. There was a lot of tooth powder (Dr. Ortweil’s Patented Aniseed & Charcoal Dentifrice For Military Use Only) but only a few toothbrushes, so we passed them from man to man, moistening them a bit between mouths, and someone — who had it been? Cunningham, wasn’t it? — had politely declined.