Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I may die of an ague or a fit in this very night,’ said Bates.

  ‘Everything dies.’

  ‘That is less comfort,’ said Bates, ‘than it ought, perhaps, to be. But if I die I pray that Jesus Christ take my spirit into his hands.’

  ‘Jesus Christ is big-people religion.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Bates, urgently but in a gravel voice, his eyes closing, ‘no, no. He came to save all the creatures of God’s world. Many Lilliputians have converted to the religion of the true saviour - you too, my little friend, could welcome him into your heart, into your heart. For souls are the same size, though the bodies differ.’

  He may, or may not, have finished this sentence, before he fell asleep. But he was ill, and he slid into sleep, and he slept the uneasy sleep of the feverish. Consciousness of the throbbing walls of the cave leering up over him did not entirely leave him, and his own body tormented him, bringing him almost awake with pain. Almost. He sat up, and felt a great gout of phlegm leave his body from his nose. He was lying down again, and the tiny man was close up against his face. He could not rouse himself, tho’ the creature was at his eye, at his eye, and it was holding a tiny knife in its tiny hand. Bates tried to give voice to the Lord’s Prayer, but the tongue would not work. He dozed, or half-dozed, or quarter-dozed. He shivered. The pain never quite withdrew itself from him. Time passed, or re-passed, unaccountably.

  ‘Fear not,’ said the tiny being. ‘It was for your sake I killed my fellow.’

  For my sake? But the words would not come.

  ‘We are at war with you. We were ordered to follow you and slay you. We were to slay you, because you survived the pestilence. But I foresee a greater danger, for us all, and so with my own hands I have killed my friend.’

  Your friend!

  Then Eleanor was somewhere about, near at hand but out of sight. Bates wanted to turn but could not. And whilst he knew that this was because he was lying upon the stone floor, he also thought he was standing, and Eleanor was behind him, and he tried to turn. Eleanor! Eleanor! Think of Democritus. The Continental calculator and man of science, Leibniz. He, like Democritus, believed atoms to be the basement of the real world. But what if they were wrong? O Eleanor!

  A deeper sleep swelled, neaptide-like, and Bates sank down.

  It was light outside. The rain had stopped and a bright sunshine filled the cave mouth.

  Bates sat up, slowly. It was not that he felt refreshed by his sleep, for the night had been desperate and uneasy. But he was no longer shivering. His clothes were drier, although not entirely dry. He put a finger to his face, and the lump in it was gone.

  A fire was burning. A thread of smoke stretched to the ceiling and rolled away into the depths of the cave. Bates shuffled forward towards the heat and warmed himself at the low flame. There was the little fellow’s tiny plane, and there was the fellow himself.

  ‘I brought in wood and straw,’ said Gugglerum.

  ‘For a fire?’ said Bates, with a croaky voice. ‘But it will be wet.’

  ‘At dawn, when the rain stopped, I flew in my craft to a great barn. There were many mighty beasts there, and some big men. The big men were alive, or dead, I know nothing of that; but whilst they lay I gathered wood and straw and tied it and flew in my craft here.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have cut away the musketball.’

  ‘Cut away?’

  ‘Out of your face.’

  Bates felt his cheek again. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘I did it when you slept, though you slept ill.’

  ‘Did I not wake when you cut me?’

  ‘No,’ said the little man. ‘My knife is true Blefuscudan make, and finer than any of yours. It parts the skin so sly, so fine, that your nerves hardly know it. Afterwards I threaded the wound with thread.’

  ‘You carry thread? And a needle?’

  ‘No needle. But I pricked and fed the thread through the holes in your skin.’

  ‘With your fingers?’

  ‘My fingers are fine,’ he said.

  Bates did not know what to think of this. ‘Thank you,’ said Bates.

  ‘It was poisonous to you,’ Gugglerum said. ‘It was putting poison in your blood.’

  ‘I believe it had become inflamed,’ said Bates.

  ‘You would have died.’ The little man was perfectly matter-of-fact.

  ‘It is true,’ said Bates. ‘I was not well,’ conceded.

  ‘I shot a bird.’

  ‘A bird?’

  ‘It will be an easy matter for your strength and size.’

  ‘What will be an easy matter?’

  ‘The unfeathering of the bird. Do you have a knife?’

  ‘I lost my knife,’ said Bates, remembering the mad old man who had beaten him with a stick. The nightmarish night of storm and cold and pain.

  ‘That is poor news, for with my knife it would be great labour to fillet the bird. Can you cook?’

  ‘I am a gentleman,’ said Bates. When it became clear that this did not supply Gugglerum with an answer to his question, he added: ‘It has not been my custom to cook. Rather, I employ others. To cook for me.’

  ‘This is poor behaviour,’ said the little man. ‘You must follow instruction from me.’

  Bates recovered the dead bird-a sparrow, or something of that sort - from the mouth of the cave where Gugglerum had shot it. He sat upon the floor like a country wife and pulled its feathers out, one after the other. Tiny fleas, white as rice grains, crawled onto his fingers, and he flicked them away. When the bird’s carcass was denuded Gugglerum told him to coat it in mud, of which the night’s deluge had generated a great supply outside the cave. Bates, under instruction from the Blefuscan, then carried this ball to the fire and dropped it into the midst. From a pile of dry sticks and straw - and surely the tiny man had made more than one journey with his craft, to accumulate so large a pile - Bates built the fire up. They sat for a while as it cracked and chuckled.

  ‘You have done Christian acts today, sir,’ Bates said, ‘though perhaps you do not recognise them as such. But Christ knows what you have done, sir. He will not forget.’

  Gugglerum said nothing.

  ‘Christ tells us,’ Bates explained, ‘to turn the cheek. If our adversary strikes us on one cheek we should turn the other to receive another blow. I killed your comrade, sir, though it was in self-defence. But you have returned that act with kindness. You have saved my life. Thank you.’

  He turned his back to the fire to warm his coat. A thin steam was coming from his clothes now.

  ‘You had survived the pestilence,’ said Gugglerum.

  ‘I was truly sick,’ said Bates. ‘But God, in his wisdom, spared me.’

  ‘Our allies said, we must send in reinforcements.’

  ‘Your allies?’

  Gugglerum stared at the fire.

  ‘Your allies - you talk of the French?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then - who?’

  ‘Your enemy,’ said Gugglerum. ‘This is the army you are fighting.’

  ‘You must mean the French, then? Our enemy is the French.’

  ‘No. You and the French are one man, one form.’ He thought for a moment, then said. ‘You share dimensions with the French. These are your allies.’

  ‘The animosity between the Fran and the Anglo-Saxon races has a long history,’ Bates said.

  ‘Nevertheless. Your enemy will slay you and the Fronssai both. Your land will be strewn with the bodies of your kind. You fight this enemy and you do not even realise it.’

  ‘You speak,’ said Bates, turning to face the fire again, ‘of your own kind, I fear. The Lilliputians.’

  ‘Not they.’

  ‘Your people, of Blefuscu.’

  ‘Not we.’

  ‘The Lord know you have good reason to be angry. We have treated you in ways that shame any Christian nation. But peace, peace between our peoples. Peace is possible. Look how we sit and talk! We two!’

&n
bsp; ‘The bird.’

  ‘The bird?’

  ‘Take the bird from the fire.’

  ‘How? I shall burn my hands.’

  ‘Find a stick outside.’

  Bates went out of the cave into the sharp, clean air. The sunlight fell upon his skin like a blessing. The view was across green Yorkshire dales and hills, laved by the rain and shiny in the morning, gleaming as if newly made. He found a stick, and came back inside. Using the cleft of the stick he levered the mudball from the fire. The stick hissed as the flames touched it. Once he rolled the baked mudball on the cave floor, he used the end of the stick to crack it open. Inside the flesh of the bird was cooked.

  He and Gugglerum ate in proportion to their size. The little man filled his belly. His quantity was a snack for Bates, though savoury and reviving.

  ‘My people believe this alliance to be in our interest,’ said Gugglerum. ‘But I see they are wrong. My friend A’gglem was furious to kill you, and complete what the pestilence should have done. But I see the truth, that you must live. Not for your sake, or your people, but for the sake of my kind. We quarrelled, A’gglem and I fought. I killed him.’

  ‘It is the pestilence,’ said Bates. ‘Yes? It is the pestilence. When you talk of this great enemy that will destroy both French and English? You refer to—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are you immune to the infection?’

  ‘Of course. There is no such thing in my land.’

  ‘No disease?’

  ‘There is no plague amongst us.’

  ‘But you cannot mean that the very concept of . . .’

  ‘There is no such thing as plague among us.’

  Bates nodded slowly. ‘So it was with the anthropophagi of North America,’ he said. ‘Or so I have read - another great wrong of my people, we brought diseases unknown to these people and smallpox and typhus destroyed many of them. I am sorry again, my little friend. Sorry that we have introduced such a thing to your world.’

  ‘We cannot become ill with such disease,’ said Gugglerum.

  The truth came to Bates. ‘You are immune?’

  ‘They do not exist in my land.’

  ‘They do not? Diseases do not?’

  ‘There is no such thing.’

  Bates was amazed. ‘But,’ he said, shortly, ‘they exist in my land.’

  ‘Nevertheless, they do not afflict us.’

  ‘You must have your own forms of sickness! You must have some manner of fever?’

  ‘These are big-people afflictions. These are unknown to us. They cannot afflict us.’

  ‘Providence has made you immune,’ said Bates, wonderingly. ‘It must have its purpose in doing so. Perhaps - and I have often thought along these lines - some manner of universal justice applies. For you are so vulnerable to the greater size of our kind that Nature has given you this compensation.’

  Gugglerum looked at him with his unnervingly unwavering stare.

  ‘You brought this pestilence from the Pacific islands,’ said Bates. ‘I suspected it. You have somehow brought it hither, and use it now as a weapon of war.’

  ‘We did not bring it.’

  ‘Do you mean that it is we that brought it? That our sailors brought it back with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? You are cryptic, sir. But how - in what manner have you used it as a weapon of war? Tell me that, tell me only that.’

  ‘The Dean of York,’ said the little man. ‘He is great amongst your kind?’

  ‘The Dean? He - how do you mean?’

  ‘He is a great man of God. I had hoped to find him. But I have found you.’

  ‘You confuse me sir.’

  ‘You must speak to the King.’

  ‘The King of England?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Sir! I cannot merely stroll into the Court and demand an audience with the King!’

  Gugglerum seemed to revolve this sentence in his mind. Then he said: ‘But the Dean of York may?’

  ‘I suppose - I do not know, in truth. He is no Archbishop, I know that. But perhap he has affairs that take him into the Court.’

  ‘Then we must follow after the Dean.’

  ‘He,’ said Bates, with a pang (for the memory had been obscured in his heart whilst he broke fast with this little man), ‘persuaded one of the giants - one of the giants to us, you know - to carry him and . . . another person. To carry them to York city.’

  ‘Then we must go there.’

  ‘To give the Dean some message that he, in turn, must carry to the King?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what message?’

  ‘Words to save your kind.’

  ‘To save our kind? What can you mean? How can that be? Do you mean,’ Bates said, ‘that you have a cure for the pestilence?’

  ‘I have understanding.’

  ‘You veil your meaning, sir.’

  ‘I have the way to a cure. The Dean has such a way. You have. Come,’ said Gugglerum, leaping to his little feet. ‘We must not delay.’

  ‘But you can fly to York in your device, can you not? It will take me the Devil’s own time to walk there.’

  ‘You are the Dean’s friend.’

  ‘I,’ Bates began. But he could think of nothing to say beyond this word.

  ‘He would not listen to a sole Blefuscan warrior. He would try to swat me like an insect. You must introduce us.’

  ‘I,’ said Bates again.

  ‘We must leave now, for there is no time to lose.’

  [5]

  The light of the stars was dampened by the splatch of brightness. The cries of the French militia below them, Oldenberg and Eleanor stared skyward at the comet. It was a circle of light, large as the shield of Satan of which Milton speaks.

  The giant lowered them slowly to the ground and they stepped off. The Dean, adjusting himself to his new situation, was ready. ‘Mes chers citoyens,’ he cried, advancing towards the French soldiery. ‘Allies! I bring news from the coast, from the command of Colonel Larroche and the frigate, the frigate Sophrosyne. Allies, my friends! Allies.’

  But Eleanor was not happy to leave the Brobdingnagian. ‘Sir Giant!’ she cried, even as she was dropped onto the ground and the huge creature unfolded upright again. ‘Sir Giant! The light in the sky - the light in the sky—’

  The giant seemed to sway against the paling sky.

  ‘What is that great globe of light?’

  He was swaying away.

  Three French soldiers stood in a row with their rifles lowered, but from behind them stepped an officer. He spoke, in fluent and unaccented English: ‘Good morning to you, good morning to you both.’

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the Dean, shaking this officer by the hand. ‘Splendid. I am the Dean of York. I have come from the coast . . .’

  ‘Riding an unusual sort of horse,’ said the officer. ‘Leave him, Madame, the giant I mean. He goes to confer with his fellows.’

  And indeed the giant was raising his leg and placing it down again and moving like a stormcloud away to stand alongside his fellow Brobdingnagian.

  ‘They are sturdy lads,’ said the Dean. ‘Strong arms for the army of France.’

  ‘They are no good,’ said the officer.

  ‘No good?’

  ‘They mislike killing people,’ said the officer, with disgust in his voice.

  ‘They mislike?’

  ‘It is good English?’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ said the Dean, half-bowing, ‘your English is as good as any native’s.’

  ‘My English mother,’ said the man. ‘But my blood is French.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘I am unused to speaking it, though I spoke it often as a lad. English. English. They mislike the killing, the giants. They are good for smashing buildings, and for breaking cannons. They will march about with their clubs and break houses. But they are squeamish. They are squeamish.’

  ‘Permit me to introduce myself, sir,’ said the Dean. ‘I am the Dean of Yor
k. That,’ he swept his right arm in a semicircle, ‘is in a sense my town.’

  ‘You gesture to the south,’ said the French officer, dryly.