Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Is that what the Lilliputians had been doing, three mornings before in Scarborough? Had they scratched Bates with some new type or variety of animalcules, hoping to infect and destroy him? But his own defences had learned the ways of the invaders. They were experts now, like Sir Balian defending Jerusalem. They knew what they were doing.

  ‘It is a deal to explain to you, sir,’ said Bates, urgently. ‘I would ask you, ask you as one gentleman to another, to trust me. I can heal you.’

  ‘Step away, sir,’ said Longley, waving his hand weakly. ‘Leave me in peace.’

  ‘It is a life-and-death question.’

  ‘I know of what it is a question.’

  ‘But will you not permit me? I can heal you - your men too.’

  ‘You are a crazy man,’ said the Captain. ‘A deluded man. You are a- I mistook you, sir, when I thought you a kindred spirit. Leave me in peace.’

  ‘Why do you doubt me? You do not know the experiences I have lived through.’

  ‘Nor do you know mine.’

  ‘I ask humbly and in Christ’s name—’

  ‘Enough blasphemy, sir. Consider that I am about to meet my maker. Do you think I want to do so with the odour of impiety about me? Show some compassion.’

  ‘Captain—’

  ‘Cheeks!’ rasped the Captain, in an approximation of a shout. ‘Corpo ral, come here! Come here!’

  Bates looked and saw the Corporal, by the fire, turn his face in their direction. ‘Sir!’ he barked, and got to his feet.

  There was no time.

  Bates acted on the spur. He could think of no other way of communicating his immunity to the dying man. It was, he reflected afterwards, uncharacteristic of him; but circumstances had altered many of his characteristics.

  He pressed forward and grasped the Captain’s head between his hands. The sick man opened his eyes very wide, and wailed feebly. He scrabbled at Bates’s arms, but feebly. Bates pressed his lips to the Captain’s mouth, and kissed him as hard as he could. He tried to push his tongue into the man’s mouth, and to force as much spittle as possible. He was aware of the ungainly texture of stubble upon the fellow’s chin and lip, and the sour decay-y tang of his breath. He felt the man’s wasted muscles twitch and flip as he struggled. Then Bates felt stronger arms clasp him from behind, and he was wrenched away from the Captain and hurled to the ground by a growling soldier. ‘Enough of that,’ said Charlie Cheeks, standing over him, and behind the Captain rasped and coughed. Bates wanted to say, No don’t spit it out, it will save your life! But another soldier had hurried over and contributed to the moment by planting his boot on Bates’s midriff.

  [9]

  The Dean cowered. A French officer came by, and the Dean leapt out at him and grasped at his sleeve. His mouth was working, his eyes wild, pleading. Eleanor twiddled her fingers and the image shrank beneath her. She swung it about. The giant members of the army - two dozen, all in French uniforms - stood motionless as the statues of Aegyptian Memnon. French officers rode around their legs, shooting off pistols, their mouths working furiously. ‘Is there no way to capture the sound of these events?’ Eleanor wondered.

  The Brobdingnagian had sat himself down crosslegged, and leant forward to bring his enormous face close to her. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They are seeking to persuade the giants to fight,’ Eleanor said. ‘To no effect, evidently. They do not wish to fight,’

  ‘The big fellow is come,’ said the Brobdingnagian. ‘The Christ man, the Mithras man. Wherefore should we fight?’

  ‘They call you cowards, I daresay,’ said Eleanor. ‘Your kind, I mean.’

  The huge face was impassive.

  ‘But, look: the English have a brigade of yahoos. I have seen them in action before.’ She paddled her hand on the floor, and swept the view like a bird’s flight to the west. A twisting cord-line of apes was running down the hill and splashing into the river, roaring and contorting as bullets clattered through them. How ferocious they looked! Leather jerkins and hourglass-shaped helmets. Fangs and wild gesticulations.

  ‘West,’ said the giant.

  ‘The English camp.’

  ‘Further west.’

  It occurred to Eleanor that she had not tested the limits of this visualisation enabler. She pressed her palm on the floor and slid it and the point of view swept, faster than the wind, westwards. Her view flew over the ranks of the English and along a road where the camp followers had parked their carts and caravans. On she went. Fields and cottages, and a sole horseman galloping. Flecks of wet dirt scattered from the beast’s hoofs.

  ‘It has taken me beyond the horizon,’ said Eleanor, wonderingly. ‘It is a marvellous machine. It is the device from the French novel - I forget the name of the novel, but it has the devil in the title. And sticks. Sticks.’

  She swept past the horseman. The outskirts of York came into sight: houses numerous enough now to line the road. An inn, and a stableyard. A broad low building. There were people here, in the streets; some in motion, others standing and looking east. Eleanor lifted her hand, fiddled on the floor with her fingers’ ends. A dozen people, scattered about on the street, all standing and looking east. They were listening, Eleanor realised, to the noise of battle over the horizon. She moved her viewpoint about the streets, and in towards the centre of the town. There were few enough people out or about; they had, she supposed, vacated the town when news of battle had reached them. She made a rapid dart westwards, swept over the ornate block of the Minster’s tower, over the river flat and bright as a swordblade, and along the west road. And, yes, here was a line of carriages and handcarts, and a hundred people, or two hundred, making their way in that direction that was opposite to the noise of war. She stopped for a moment, and examined them, as dispassionately as any myrmecologist ever peered down a brass tube at insects. Some of them were well dressed, others were poorly clad or ragged; but one man pushing a handcart was wearing a new blue suit in three pieces and a hat; whereas one of the men seated in a high brougham, urging his horse on with repeated flourishes of the reins, like an angler—he was wearing only one boot and had holes in his trousers. Why was he in the carriage and the other man on the ground ?

  But there were no more than a few hundred of these fleeing citizens, and Eleanor wondered what had happened to the rest of the inhabitants. Had they already gone? Had they elected to remain? She pulled her view back eastward to the town, and spent some minutes flying birdlike along the routes of roads. The medieval clutter of rooftops and the rickety jigs and twists of the ancient passages. And here she saw another reason for the emptiness of the town: in a house’s back yard a sheet, with six people laid out on it, like cutlery in a drawer, head beside feet beside head beside feet. The plague.

  She was surprised she had been so unobservant as not to have noticed it before. Everywhere she looked in the city were corpses; laid out in open spaces, or beside half-dug and abandoned graves, or on pallets before houses. There were many people sleeping in the precincts of the Minster; except when she moved her magical eye closer and closer, and saw the flies itching their way across stubbled and unresponsive faces, she understood that they were not sleeping.

  ‘A little north,’ boomed the giant.

  She was so entirely captivated by her powers of seeing that she knew not how much time had passed. She moved her point de vue north, over rooftops of grey and carrot and brown. Housing thinned. The ground became more uppy-downy. Over a field and there - she saw what the giant had been directing her towards. Lying along the westward flank of a hill, like the gigantic Python Apollo slew, lay the straight fat pipe of the cannon. Her father’s cannon. Its base was buried in a group of wide brick buildings, surrounded by a circular wall. And along the road leading to the gate in this wall came hurrying the horseman, the same one Eleanor had seen earlier galloping away from the battle. He thundered right up to the gate, and men busied themselves in hauling the metal doors apart so that he could enter.

  ‘My father’s cannon,�
�� she said. And then, because she had spoken in a hushed voice, she said again, loud and enunciated, for the giant to hear. ‘My father’s cannon. He built that great device.’

  ‘The plates.’

  She saw what he meant. Running her magical eye along the straight enormity of the barrel towards its elevated end she saw the two house-high metal plates positioned thirty yards apart on either side of the mouth.

  ‘They are charged with electrical power,’ she said, and then she said it again in a louder, slower voice. When the giant’s puzzled expression did not change she added: ‘The shell is given a quantity of magnetic potency, and these plates can be charged with a positive or antagonistic electrical power to influence the direction in which it flies. It is not, they say, precisely accurate method. But since the cannon is too large to be moved or aimed...’

  She looked again. There was a scurry of activity in the yards and spaces at the base of the cannon. A shell, long as two tall men, shaped like the pinnace of a metal church spire, was being borne from a warehouse; on a railcart along its twin lines all crowded about with soldiers.

  ‘They are loading the gun,’ observed the giant.

  ‘But why. At whom do they intend to fire? That horseman rode in with orders, perhaps - but what?’

  But she knew at whom they intended to fire. ‘If they fire cannonballs at the French army,’ she said, starting up from the floor, ‘They could very well strike this comet, this comet, this cometary craft!’

  ‘It is that they intend,’ said the giant, with his mournful and apparently endless voice.

  [10]

  Bates was manacled and kept in a tent. He sat on the floor with his arms behind him, and he waited. The light through the fabric of the tent faded, and still Bates sat. He passed through stages of fear, indignation, resignation and finally boredom. A trooper flung the flap back and kicked a metal bowl into the tent, and Bates caught a glimpse of an apricot-coloured sky and trees inked black on the horizon, and closer at hand two men building up a campfire for the coming night. Then the flap was closed again, and he was alone in the dark of the tent.

  As nobody unlocked his manacles, he was forced to lean over the bowl and devour its contents as a dog might do. Then, since he was prone, he rolled to his side and slept. He woke with the pain in his shoulders, altered his position, and slept again.

  ‘Come on,’ said a voice. ‘Up you get.’ It was dawn, and Bates’s arms were numb and spangled with pain. Arms lifted him upright and hurried him, blinking, through the tent flap and outside into a cold, clear light. The sun was not up and the moon was setting, but the comet - larger than ever - shone with its eerie silver brilliance. ‘My arms,’ he moaned. ‘My shoulders.’

  One trooper held him, and another went behind to unlock the manacles. Bates had time, momently, to absorb his surroundings; the dark-blue completeness of the sky; the green lacework of distant trees; the grass, marked here and there with chinks of mud, whispering and whispering and spreading itself ready to receive the sunlight. It was vivid, in the core sense of the word; it was alive, alive. Every needle-thin strand of grass, alive. Every atom of tumbling air was alive. When his wrists were freed he chafed feeling back into his arms. He was led over to the smouldering campfire, where half a dozen soldiers stood, rubbing and squeezing their hands against the cold. A trooper brought Bates a tin mug of hot coffee negra. With the drink his power of speech returned to him.

  ‘I might think about becoming angry,’ he said, in as genial a tone as he could manage. His voice croaked, and he had to clear his throat several times. ‘I come, an English gentleman, and try to heal your Captain—and I am treated as a criminal.’

  ‘The Captain,’ said a trooper, shaking his head. It was Cheeks.

  ‘Aye, your Captain.’

  ‘He’s most fiercely angry with you, sir,’ said Cheeks, grinning. ‘Assaulting him like that? In front of his men? Who’d blame him for his rage?’

  ‘I most certainly did not assault him.’

  ‘Neither do we blame you, sir,’ said Cheeks.

  ‘Handsome man, the Captain,’ said one of the other troopers, and a laugh guttered round the group.

  ‘You misunderstand—’ said Bates.

  ‘Truth is, we’re waiting on the Captain. If he, God forbid it . . .’ and Cheeks paused instead of saying the word ‘. . . then command moves along and it’ll be Harrison’s business. But even if he lives, it’s a dilemma. If you’re a French spy—’

  ‘The idea!’ exclaimed Bates, too loudly.

  ‘Then we’ll have to shoot you. Spies is shot, everyone knows that.’

  ‘It’s preposterous.’

  ‘Shoot you, leave you at the side of the road,’ said one of the troopers.

  ‘But,’ said Cheeks, holding up his hand, ‘but, but, if you’s a loyal Englishman—’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘Then the Captain says he’d consider you one of his troop. All Englishmen have to pull together to defeat the enemy, you know.’

  ‘And any way in which I can help . . .’ Bates offered.

  ‘Then he’d shoot you for assaulting a superior officer.’

  Bates stared. ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘It could go either way,’ said Cheeks.

  ‘Right.’

  A breeze started. The sun was coming up. The flank of a loosely strung tent bellied and flapped like a sail. The light filled out, gleamed. In the face of such immanence of vitality the prospect of his own death was beyond his comprehension. Whatever language Death speaks is not ours; and most of us spend no time acquiring the complex grammar, in which every verb is irregular and only the past tense obtains, until it is too late.

  ‘Should the Captain recover,’ Bates said, ‘it will surely be on account of my intervention. I would never, of course, seek to exploit any sense of obligation that he might feel... except that, and to speaking of ethics, saving a man’s life is...’

  ‘If I w’s you,’ said Cheeks, ‘I’d hope the Captain passes. Harrison would probably take you back to York for trial. I’d say he’d not want the burden of orderin’ you straight death. But the Captain, now . . .’

  ‘Oh the Captain,’ agreed another soldier, nodding.

  Bates drank the remainder of his coffee. He was handcuffed again, but this time with his hands in front of him. He was given no instruction, so he sat himself down, crosslegged, by the remains of the fire and watched the comings and the goings. It was impossible to avoid staring at the Captain’s tent. Soldiers lifted the flap and stepped inside. The flap would twitch and rise, apparently by itself, and a man would emerge. The weave of the tent fabric changed hue, delicately but noticeably, as the sun moved into the sky. Bates contemplated his new-found gnosis. He had dedicated so great a portion of his life to the Lilliputian cause itself that his natural curiosity about the universe in which they were located had atrophied. It was his universe too, his, Abraham Bates’s. But it made deep sense. Not a leaf fell but that divine Providence marked its passing; and what other name for that force than Intellect, the divine principle itself? Thought; sentience; will. Not an atom moved in the void but it loved and hated, it thought and dreamt. Lilliputians below Lilliputians, and beings a scale smaller than they. Brobdingnagian towering over Brobdingnagian, and beings a scale larger too. Where was the foundation to it all? At what point did it all converge? And what if this were a world in which there was no fundament? Atoms composed of miniature atoms, and they in turn - or giants for whom the entire cosmos was but one component cell, they themselves but specks in the eye of something unimaginably colossal. And so on, and so on.

  The coffee was no breakfast. He felt it swell in his bladder across the course of a half-hour, until he needed to void the processed fluid. But no soldier would answer his hail, and in the end, with some shame, he crouched by the fire and fumbled at his trowser with bound hands and unspooled an unbroken thread of urine from his loins. After this he lay on his back and stared at the sky, like a child. Hunger polished the inside of h
is empty stomach, and made his head giddy. It gave heft to speculations that he would otherwise have dismissed as gossamer. Larger and larger beings, smaller and smaller, and the principle of Mind operating at every level. But Bates’s heart revolted at the idea that this sequence continued without end, into the infinite: as the schoolyard rhyme put it, fleas with tiny fleas on their backs, and fleas on those, and so on. That couldn’t be. There had to be a ground, against which everything could be measured. This was God. But at which end? Was God the ultimate principle of Magnitude, the biggest of the big? A child would think so. But could it not also be that God might be the smallest of the small, the fundamental particle or spiritual building-block, out of which the variegated enormity of the universe is constructed? Bates wanted to believe that the very largest scale and the very smallest curled round upon one another, and became the same thing. That God the Giant and God the particule élémentaire were the same God. But this, he saw, had more to do with his own mind’s preference for neatness than with reality. Who was to say that the cosmos was determined by a principle of neatness?