by Adam Roberts
Bates got to his feet and approached the carriages. The two in which the party was travelling were parked side by side, but the third carriage - the one containing the mysterious device - was a little apart from its fellows. A large cover or blanket had been thrown over it, and a fire lit not far from it, as if in concerted effort to keep it warm (but why would it matter if a mere machine felt the cold?). A single soldier sat besides the embers of this fire, his rifle horizontal in his lap and his chin resting on his starched collar.
Bates stopped. His heart was shuddering, suddenly, very forcibly in his chest. Did he dare to take this chance?
He looked about him, but apart from the slumbering soldat he was alone with the carriage.
He stepped as lightly as he could past the dying fire and lifted the cover. It was of some dense-woven wool or staple cloth and was leaden with dew. Bates grasped the hem of it, felt the weight of water it held, as if it were woven out of the fabric of rainclouds. Lifting a corner revealed the wood of the carriage, and an opening perhaps three feet square. Through this aperture Bates looked upon the blank wooden face of what, surely, must be the device itself. The Computational Device! A small door was set into this wooden flank, with a brass handle set into the top. Without another guilty glance Bates pulled this handle and the door swung down, a flap.
It was evident that this was the aperture through which the little people inside received their food. A long narrow tube was fixed to the inside with a tiny tube at the bottom and a miniature tap-handle; from here they could take their drink. A number of smaller brass boxes arranged in a line against the inside bottom of the flap perhaps contained their dainty food.
Bates hunkered down and peered through the opening. There was a fascia of wire, the outside of an inner cage perhaps, and through it he fancied he saw, in the shadows, movement. In the diffuse light of the early morning it was difficult to be sure.
He put his hand against the mesh: ’twas cold to the touch, the wire strands taut and ungiving. There was space, just, to insert a finger.
The finger went in. He moved it, as much as he could, wiggling it a little. He was considering, in point of fact, how to frame a question to the little folk who - surely! - laboured within. Could he promise to free them? Would that be the wisest course?
But then there was - ouch! - a sudden and fierce pain in the end of his finger, a thorn-stab or splinter-bite, as if Bates had pressed his digit firm upon the sharp end of a needle. He barely contained a yelp of pained surprise as he yanked the hand away from the grill - withdrew it so vehemently that he almost lost his balance. He put a foot out backwards to stop himself falling over, and his heel kicked up the ashes of the fire. He let the covering fall from his left hand and it fell, heavily, wetly, immediately, back into position.
The soldier woke with a cough and a cry of ‘Parcours!’ Bates, his heart labouring momentously in his chest, turned quickly. ‘Good morning,’ he said, too hurriedly, putting his hands into his coat pockets. ‘Bonjour.’
The soldier scrabbled at his rifle, and slotting his hand over the trigger. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous . . .’ he started. Then he stopped. ‘Je ne dormais pas.’ Then, as if realizing that he was not obliged to explain himself to this Englishman, he growled, and sniffed, and said: ‘Le mot, c’est bonjour. Bonjour.’
‘Ce que j’ai dit,’ said Bates, taking one step backwards.
‘Vous avez dit bongjo. C’est pas ça. Bongjo, bongjo.’
‘Je dois,’ said Bates, and could not recall the French for ‘to leave.’ He smiled, and turned, and hurried back inside the inn.
Inside he examined his hand. There was a scarlet pearl on the very tip of his index finger. He put this to his mouth and sucked the gem away. Had he jagged himself on some internal cog or spur? Or had one of the little people, furious at his probing, stabbed him with a tiny dagger?
After breakfast the party took the road once more. Bates resumed his place inside their coach next to a gloomily introspective Dean of York. Despite several conversational prompts, Oldenberg refused to explain further his fantastical comments from the previous night. Indeed he refused to be drawn into any exchange at all.
Bates stared through the window of the carriage as they jolted along. They crossed through a pair of gates and over a railway line where the road intersected it aslant: for one moment the metal rails flashed perfectly parallel like an artist’s perspective lines sketched out to the horizon. The carriage made no bump or rattle over the railway.
The road wound on, and ever on, but Bates saw no people. Many of the fields were empty. Some were occupied with grazing cattle or sheep of European size. Once they passed a paddock in which a horse stared at them, and seemed to bow his head in exaggerated civility as they passed (except that he was only reaching down to drink from his trough). But there were no people tending these animals. This puzzled Bates. Animals must needs be tended. Where were the people?
‘Ar-rêt-ons!’ came the Colonel’s voice.
They stopped. ‘Watering the horses, I’ll be bound,’ Bates observed to the Dean. Oldenberg scowled and did not reply.
Everybody clambered out and walked stiffly. When their legs were stretched, Bates, the Colonel and two other French officers stood in a semicircle watching the men affix nosebags.
Bates asked the Colonel about the vacancy of the countryside.
‘The people, the paysans, they have departed,’ was his reply.
‘Why?’
‘Fighting,’ said Larroche. ‘The war.’
‘Fighting? Recent or long ago?’
‘Recent.’
‘So far south? I believed the French to have occupied and pacified the whole country to Derby - and further north than that, as well.’
The Colonel shrugged. ‘Perhaps there are some brigands, some English soldiers who do not fight in the regular manner.’
‘Brigands?’ Bates felt an uncomfortable sensation trickle upwards along his spine. ‘We’ll not encounter them?’
The Colonel shrugged again. ‘Possible,’ he declared.
‘Will there be fighting for us?’
The Dean, leaning out of the coach, barked: ‘The soldiers, man, the soldiers. Why else would we be travelling with them?’
‘Fighting?’ Bates said again, plaintively.
‘Fighting and killing too,’ said the Dean.
Bates felt a lightness at his temples. Had he been broken in two at the waist and the blood drained from him he could not have felt more faint. Sweat shimmered out of him. His breathing was a wren’s wingbeat.
He was going to be sick upon the floor.
He was going to fall into a faint. He sidestepped. His legs were losing their ability to brace themselves.
‘Monsieur Bates?’ the Colonel was saying. ‘Monsieur ? Are you unwell ?’
‘I must—’ Bates said. ‘Sit—’
Oh but this was terrible.
‘Monsieur Bates?’
The blackness swooped, swirled around him. The bird that preyed on the souls of men, and carried them off to death. Death falling from the sky, as a comet come down to Earth. He felt the pressure of the earth under his buttocks, against his hands, waiting to swallow him up. It occurred to him only belatedly that he was on the ground. He must have sat down inadvertently.
‘Monsieur Bates?’ came the Colonel’s voice, somehow muffled. ‘I am concerned.’
‘It will pass,’ gasped Bates. ‘A small - fit that has come over me. I cannot - perhaps some fever or-I assure you, this is uncharacteristic of me, I am not one given to—’ But it was hard to force the words out; the incoming tide, as it were, of panic was too great, probing further inevitably inward and inward.
Behind him a horse coughed.
The noise was like a rifle shot to Bates. He manipulated his face with fingers that were trembling. ‘My apologies,’ he called, from behind the coach. ‘Gentlemen . . . I apologise.’
They were staring at him. But why were they staring so?
‘I,’ he s
aid, feeling his face heat with shame. ‘I fear I am indisposed. I am a little feverish.’
‘Monsieur,’ said the Colonel.
‘It is regrettable,’ he said ‘But I am sure it is the mildest of fevers—’
The Colonel took a deep breath. He sucked a great lungful of air into his lungs as if preparing to scream, as if about to yell at Bates. The sight was so disconcerting that Bates even moved back half a yard. The Colonel’s mouth was open, as if a flock of black birds were about to swarm from the orifice, as if the panic shout of the god Pan himself were to issue from him.
The Colonel bellowed: ‘Al-lons!’
And the soldiers bestirred themselves, unhooked nosebags, trotted back to their positions, while the Dean stomped grumpily back to the carriage. As he passed a trembling Bates the Colonel murmured, not unkindly, ‘Monsieur you have a nose-bleed. Monsieur you are bleeding at the nose.’
Bates brought the end of his finger up to his upper lip, and felt the warm moisture there. He was fumbling to get his handkerchief out of its narrow pocket as he made his way back to the carriage.
Back inside the carriage the Dean regarded him with a distaste so naked that Bates almost cowered. ‘I am not in my best health, sir,’ he said. The Dean grunted, folded his arms.
‘I believe, sir,’ said Bates, a growing pressure inside him, ‘that a little rest will ah.’ He was still dabbing at his nose with the now bloodied handkerchief. ‘I am not myself - sir, I, sir, I, ah, ah,’ and he sneezed. It was a huge sneeze, the release of some intense cranial tension that sprayed bloodied spittle everywhere.
‘Sir!’ barked the Dean. He fumbled for a kerchief and dragged it over his waistcoat front.
‘Permit me to apologise again,’ said Bates again, miserably, searching his pockets for his other kerchief. ‘I am ill. I am abject. Please forgive me.’
But in reply the Dean merely leant back against his seat, and in a moment was asleep.
Bates stared through the carriage window as the procession rocked slowly along the road. His eyeballs felt hot as if candles planted on his jawbone were cooking them with insistent flame. His scalp itched. He tried to distract himself with the prospect out of the window, but there was nothing to see. The green hills lay low all the way to the horizon, making the distance seem an easy reach. Stone walls marked horizontals and verticals and slants across the green, dividing up the pasture like lines of stitching in green cloth. A table of green fields. Who had said so? Beautifully trimmed and laid green cloth, bright in the sun. A copse of trees, an irregular oval running up to the peak, gave the impression of a different sort of cloth: darker green, rougher, gathered into numerous little bunches like the tight bubbles of velvet upholstery.
But there was no sign of life.
He contemplated the episode at the watering-stop. He could not think what had happened. He could not think of it at all. Look out of the window.
There was something out of the window for him to see. But not yet.
Slowly the road brought them round the hill, and into a flatter stretch of land. Their way lay past a good-sized cottage, its red roof shining as if the building had been glazed and baked in an oven. The garden gate was open. Onion plants were growing in the kaleyard. Their leaves made elegant arcs over their flowerbed like giant green eyelashes. No smoke came from the chimney, and nobody came to the door to watch the passing of so many carriages and men.
A half an hour later Bates caught sight of a figure on the road ahead of them: a woman, dressed in mourning. She trod the road with the half-hearted step of the weary, and was carrying a small satchel. A baby was cradled in her arms.
At any rate, she was the first foot-traveller Bates had seen for days. He pulled down the carriage window with a crashing noise, and put his head out.
‘Madam,’ he called. ‘Madam!’
She turned. Her face was beautiful: her hair tied back in such a way as to frame, like tethered curtains, the pure artwork of her features. Her eyes were opened, circular, not to startled or comical extremes, but ingenuous and beautiful. The O of her rosebud mouth was exactly the same size as her open eye. This is what first struck Bates: the precise balance of arrangement made by these three separate features in the whole of the visage, eye, eye, mouth. Everything else - the clarity and pallor of her skin, the regularity and sharp delicacy of her features, the manner in which her hair, though dark, seemed to soak up the morning sunlight - all this additional information, expressive of beauty, registered with him only subliminally. Afterwards he would recall the face as beautiful, but at that moment he was struck, with a combined sense of chivalrous alarm and a deeper, more visceral thrill of satisfaction; for he could see that the woman was afraid.
‘I did not mean,’ he called to her, ‘to alarm you, Madam. Madam!’
The coach was bringing him closer to her. Her face, looking backwards over her shoulder, became larger. The fear he had thought he had seen resolved itself, as the picture became clearer and its details more distinct, into a questioning, even querulous expression.
‘I only meant to ask a question, Madam! Are you from these parts?’
‘I am not, sir,’ she called back. Her voice was that of a gentlewoman.
As the coach drew level Bates could see that the quality of cloth in her mourning dress was high, silk pointed with damask. What he had taken for her baby was in fact a shilling loaf of bread, swaddled in a coarser grey cloth, carried like a sleeping being.
‘I only ask, Madam,’ Bates said, loudly, ‘because the land is so deserted. A wilderness! I wondered if the population had fled some calamity - some battle . . .’
They were level with one another.
‘I am not from this place,’ said the woman, clearly. ‘I am fleeing calamities from over to the west,’ and she tossed her head in that direction. ‘I had taken the emptiness in this country for a sort of safety. Is this the North Road?’
The coach was drawing away now, the woman’s form receding. ‘Calamities to the west?’ asked Bates, his voice piping soprano suddenly.
‘War birds,’ said the woman. ‘Battles, dead. Is this the North Road?’
‘I believe so,’ said Bates, clearing his throat to restore his manly tone. ‘But, Madam, tell me of the battles in the west. Battles between the French and the English?’ One of the draw-horses coughed noisily over these last words of Bates’s.
‘I could not hear you, sir.’
‘War birds? Madam, what do you mean?’
But her figure was diminishing, and was soon nothing but a peg-sized mark against the green. Then the carriages rolled around a curve in the road and she vanished from sight.
Bates resumed his seat. His fever seemed to have abated somewhat.
‘Woke me,’ said the Dean, aiming a gooseberry-sour look at Bates, ‘when you opened the damn window. Woke me!’
‘My apologies, Dean,’ said Bates, absently.
‘Woke me,’ the Dean muttered.
‘I was speaking,’ said Bates, a spurt of nausea in his torso, ‘to a person upon the road who reported calamities to the west. Battles.’
‘Calamities,’ scoffed Oldenberg, as if the word were too tame to describe the dark reality of the cosmos, which he particularly understood. ‘We are a nation at war, sir.’
‘Of course, sir, of course.’
‘There has been,’ said Dean, ‘a persistent comet. It portends no good fortune with it, such a star.’
‘Persistent comet?’ asked Bates, not paying full attention. His thoughts were on the beautiful young gentlewoman. Should he instruct the driver to turn about, retrieve her? She could travel in the carriage with them. Would the driver listen to a command from him? The Dean was talking.
‘Indeed. As if the astronomers had not decided the orbits of cometary bodies fully last century! But this one seems to defy astronomy, sir. So they say. This new comet appears in the skies, and seems to loiter there in a manner quite impossible. It bodes no good at all.’
Soon, after applying mo
re of his snuff, the Dean became much more well-mannered, not to say garrulous. He started to explain the nature of cometary orbits, the attractive impulse of the sun that carries them round in ellipses; the marvellous linkage between the angle of the ellipse and the speed of the comet, such that although the body will travel ten thousand miles an hour close to the sun and one thousand far away, yet if the ellipse be plotted and the wedges swept out by the orbit computed they will always be of the same area for the same time elapsed - the section swept out rapidly close to the sun wide and shallow, that one swept out far from the sun narrow but deep. But this new comet seemed to follow different rules, and the astronomers were troubled by the anomaly, for a theory that did not describe accurately all phenomena was no theory at all.
