Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  He sat up. Such arid speculating, and he was on the very edge of his own bloodied death. The urge to find a final resting point was the urge to locate a unity in this multiplicity of atom-people, Lilliputians, humans, Brobdingnagians, over-giants and the rest. But the unity was there, of course, not in what grounded them, or in the sum of the scale-series they represented, but in what they all shared. That the universe hummed and found plenitude in Mind. And what was God, if not Mind?

  ‘Bates,’ said a voice. The silhouette had the winter sun behind it, and for a moment Bates couldn’t see who it was. But, of course, it was the Captain.

  ‘Feeling better, Captain? Up and about? I’m very pleased to see it.’

  ‘Despite your unnatural assault upon me,’ the Captain said. He was leaning on a walking stick, and looked thin. But he did look better.

  ‘Because of it,’ countered Bates, quickly.

  ‘I’ve a mind to order the men to shoot you now,’ said the Captain, calmly. ‘We’re moving camp, heading back towards York. I sent Harsent out on horseback and he’s reported that battle is joined. It’s the major battle. It’s the Blenheim of our days, and I want to be involved. And we can’t have civilians, or spies, drifting about in the furnace of war.’

  ‘I can shift for myself, sir,’ said Bates.

  ‘Nonsense. If you’re a spy you must be shot. If an Englishman you’ll want to pick up a rifle and join the fight. There’s no middle ground.’

  ‘Then give me a rifle.’

  ‘Give you a weapon,’ said the Captain, ‘for you to aim it at me and lodge a ball in my skull? No, no. I think it’s safer, for the cause of the war, to perform the extermination.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Bates, getting to his feet. ‘As one gentleman to another I appeal to you. On my word of honour I am no spy.’

  ‘Your word of honour?’ asked the Captain. ‘Or your parole d’honneur?’

  ‘Let me ask you, sir, why you think a spy would be wandering the Yorkshire countryside? Why a spy would save the life of an English army Captain?’

  ‘Wandering,’ agreed Longley. ‘But in the company of a Lilliputian. Come from London are you, sir? London, where the French rule?’

  ‘I travelled north as the assistant of the Dean of York - surely you don’t consider him to be a spy?’

  ‘The Dean of York,’ mused Longley. ‘And where is the Dean?’

  ‘Captain Longley,’ said Bates. ‘I’ll not lie. The Dean and I became separated. I met with the Lilliputian, the same killed by your Corporal. He, it is true, was once an enemy of ours. But he had repented of his ways. He begged me to take him to the Dean, to impart the secret of curing the plague, and I...’

  ‘Cheeks,’ called the Captain, and in a moment the Corporal was there.

  ‘The Corporal has already,’ Bates began to say. But Longley spoke across him.

  ‘Cheeks, execute this man, and leave his body behind when we move camp. There’s no need for a burial party in his case.’

  ‘No!’ Bates could not help the exclamation.

  ‘We’ll be having those manacles back, then,’ said Cheeks, reaching for his keys. ‘Wouldn’t want to leave an adornment of such fine iron on a corpse, now, would we?’

  The Captain was walking slowly away, putting weight on his walking stick. ‘Captain!’ Bates called after him. ‘Wait! You have sick men! They’ll die - but what if I were to cure them? Would you believe me then?’

  ‘Hsh now,’ said Cheeks. ‘Hssh. There’s a good gentleman.’

  ‘Captain! I can do it, I swear!’

  The Captain stopped. Then, without turning, he said. ‘A rescission, Cheeks. Keep him chained, but put him on the cart with the sick men. If he’s cured them by tomorrow—’ and he closed the sentence with a cough.

  Cheeks looked, grinning, into Bates’s face. ‘Looks like you’ll keep your fancy bracelets, my lady,’ he said.

  Camp was struck, the tents and other paraphernalia gathered and stacked onto the cart, and all with startling rapidity. Cheeks pulled Bates over to a covered cart, drawn by one sluggish-looking horse. Inside lay eight men, all of them ill. The stench was severe.

  Bates clambered into the cart and eyed the shadowy space, counting the bodies and trying to determine which of these men were the sickest.

  ‘I’ll be on yer carridge behind,’ said Cheeks, ‘with my rifle in my lap like I was cradling a little baby. You’d best sit here, in the light where I can see yer, and where I can shoot yer if you try to go leapin’ and runnin’ away over the moors.’

  ‘That man,’ said Bates, indignantly, ‘is already dead. That one there! You’ll not be expecting me to cure the dead, surely?’

  Cheeks peered in. ‘He’ll have to tarry the burying,’ he said. ‘For we’re going presently and not pausing to dig soldiers’ graves.’

  ‘But I want it officially logged! There are seven sick men in here. If I cure seven men, and not the eighth, I want it officially noted that this was because the eighth was dead when I first encountered him!’

  ‘Chuck chuck,’ said the trooper, grinning. ‘Chuck chuck chuck.’

  And within minutes the whole troop was on the road; Bates in his cart, Cheeks riding next to the driver of the large carriage that followed behind - containing, perhaps, the Captain himself. The cart he was in had a deformed axle, like a farm truck, and swung high and low, high and low, with a juddery and lurching unsteadiness, as it moved. Cheeks kept his smile aimed at Bates, and ran his hand lovingly up and down the barrel-shaft of his rifle.

  There was little Bates could do, but that little required him to swallow his disgust. He made his way, shuffling on crouching legs, from man to man. The floor of the cart was slippery, the wooden slats painted with filth, and it was human filth, and even as Bates’s gorge rose, and his throat constricted, he found himself thinking of her - of Eleanor. His membrum virile twitched and thickened. Oh, he revolted himself. Oh. He did. Sweet Eleanor, and her skin, the softness of her skin, that he might roll her plump flesh through his fingers, as soft and yielding as materia faecalus. That so pure a face, so angelic a body, should be tethered to such filth. He deserved the filth. He deserved it. He moved through it now, and it was his proper medium.

  Some of the men were very far gone; faces rimed with dried filth, blood and phlegm mixed. Most had sores about their mouths, like bubbles of blown glass. Their hair was all matted together into one mass. Their breath, as Bates leaned over each in turn, was corpsey. But he kissed each man, drawing together what little spittle he had in his dry mouth, and holding down his bulging stomach contents by an act of will. Each soldier received the kiss slightly differently, some moaning, some lying motionless, one muttering, another clasping clumsily at Bates’s head as if to draw him in. Bates could not stop his heart quickening at this, and he almost forgot himself entire. Eleanor was strong in his thoughts, and he almost blew out a mess of his own seed then and there. Oh, foul! He disentangled himself and shuffled to the back of the cart, and daylight, and fresh air, and could contain himself no longer. He put his chest on the lurching lip of the cart’s end and vomited up a pocketful of burning slime. When it was all out, he sat back. Corporal Cheeks was watching him. He had raised and aimed his rifle, and his finger was on the trigger.

  ‘Have you any water?’ Bates called with a raw voice. ‘For the love of Christ himself! Water!’

  Cheeks, still smiling, placed his rifle back on his lap. But he said nothing in reply, and did nothing but watch Bates.

  The afternoon drew onward. Despite his physical discomfort Bates seemed to float, or bounce, in a kind of visionary moment or ec-stasis. Eleanor. Her face, her face. Elle, as the French said. Elle-même. And or was French for gold. The gold of her soul. His thirst grew worse, and was scratchily ever-present in his throat. Eventually he picked up one of the sick soldiers’ canteens with his shackled hands, and debated with himself whether it would be hygienic to drink its contents. In the end the thirst overcame the caution, and he took long swigs. The water was w
arm, but tasted sweet.

  Then, with only his griping hunger to contend with, he sat and watched the countryside pass. The fields were seamed together with greystone walls of an apparently immense antiquity. Irregular stones, packed without cement into structures, and those laid like veins and nerve-lines that stretched from hill to hill, forms that seemed to have been naturally grown by the environment rather than constructed by men. Sheep arranged themselves in the fields on the principle of the nine queens of the famous chessboard conundrum. The sky greyed and greyed, as if seeking newer and more varied hues of grey and silver-blue, until finally the sun laid its severed head upon the horizon rail. But over and above everything, the blank white eye of the comet glowered down upon everything. Bates contemplated how quickly he had become accustomed to seeing that new object in the heavens; although it was as malign and deathly-looking as ever it had been.

  The carts were drawn up at the side of the road, and troopers ran back and forth with their rifles to scout, establish guards, and build another campfire. A soldier, not Cheeks but a man who introduced himself as Green, helped the still handcuffed Bates from the cart. ‘Grub,’ he said. ‘Grub.’

  ‘What of the sick?’ asked Bates, slightly dizzy and with pains in his legs where they had been folded beneath him.

  ‘They’ve their canteens, water. If they’re well enough they’ll drink from them. If they’re not well enough to drink from their own canteen they’re beyond help anyway.’

  ‘But food . . .’

  ‘They don’t keep the food down. Come o’er,’ and he led Bates to the fireside, where the flames coated the wood like the eagerest strands of grass wriggling in the most tart of breezes, and sparks swirled and danced like fairy lights. A leg of meat - perhaps cow, or perhaps Brobdingnagian hare - was being coated in tar prior to being tossed into the flames. A jar of colourless liquid, or at the least a liquid that wholly absorbed the colour of the firelight, was passed from man to man. Bates took his turn and swigged an acidic and bright-tasting mouthful.

  ‘The comet seems very low,’ he observed. ‘Low and large.’

  ‘Low and large,’ echoed somebody.

  ‘It’s elbowed out the moon,’ said Captain Longley, standing without the assistance of his walking stick and looking strong. The sun was over the horizon but the sky was still bright. Bates peered again.

  ‘Luna yonder,’ shouted a soldier, pointing with his whole arm, straight as a rifle from his shoulder. And there, yes, was the C-shaped moon.

  ‘It’s larger now, there’s no doubting it,’ said somebody.

  ‘The British army will not suffer it to come any lower in our sky, lad,’ declared the Captain. ‘Not much longer, lads. Not much longer.’ Bates filled his lungs with fragrant air, and breathed it out. The outward breath took a tremendously long span of time to complete itself.

  ‘Listen,’ said somebody.

  ‘Listen,’ said the Captain, almost simultaneously.

  The men fell silent. At first the most noticeable sound was the snap-crack irregular drumming of sticks burning in the fire. As Bates’s ear became habituated to that sound he made out the distant cold grace-notes of night birds. And then, softer and almost melodic, Bates began to hear another sound: a male choir, very distant; or a series of woodland creatures rustling in a hedgerow. But not rustlings-a rapidly folded together quantity of pops, a fabric of high-pitched booms and clicks. The noise you make when you fold fingers into fingers and stretch, forcing the joints to pop. That noise, repeated in unison ten thousand times. And then the vocalic moaning, or cooing, or humming, but unmistakably human voices, unmistakably male voices, and listening more carefully still, beyond all the other sonic interference, the texture of that sound could be discerned, some very distant yells, and then again some very distant shrieks; some martial cries, and some shouts of pain.

  ‘The battle,’ said Bates, in a tone of awe.

  ‘Over that wide hill,’ said the Captain, ‘and a little further. They have been fighting a half-day, I’d think. Neither side having the advantage, according to my scout.’

  A boom cracked across the sky, like the very fabric of the heavens buckling; and a banshee screamed over their heads and whistled away to the east.

  Everybody stood, silent.

  The chatter of sticks breaking in the fire.

  ‘What?’ Bates started to ask again. Before he could finish the question the sky was rent again: a boom, a scream, and an enormous sound of detonation. Instantly the silver circle had grown a tuft of orange-yellow hair, which spread further out and then dissolved into brown-black smoke. It took a moment for the assembled men to understand what had happened, but when they did an uneven cheer rose from the whole group. There was another explosion, loud enough to fill all the skies of Yorkshire, and another flare of orange light marked the side of the silver circle. Bates tried to say ‘What mighty cannonade . . . ?’ but his voice was squashed by another enormous crash, and another flow of sparks and smoke high above them. And besides, he knew which mighty cannon had created the fusillade: the same device to which they had been travelling, of course. The same the Dean had hoped to use to propel himself to freedom in India (insanity!). The same the French hoped to capture, and then use the calculating engine to orient it, to unloose its enormous explosive power.

  Another shell boomed and shrieked, and passed by over to the east. A minute passed, in silence. Another detonation. In between the crashes the sound of distant cheering could distinctly be heard. Who was cheering? Was it the English army, away over the hill? Was it both armies?

  The shelling ceased. Looking up, all eyes scanned the great silver circle—twice the size of the moon, three times. Its flawless silver surface was now cratered, but in irregular oval patterns that revealed a strange network of lines.

  There was a long pause, as everybody there waited for further noise. The silence flowed slowly around them,

  ‘Food, food, food,’ said the Captain, jollily. ‘Harrison, if you’d be so kind as to locate a fork with a suitably long handle?’

  They ate, but the chatter was sparse. Afterwards Green took Bates back to the cart, unlocked one wrist from the handcuffs and fixed the empty ring to the axle. Bates, alone, manoeuvred himself underneath the cart for cover and tried to sleep. But something unspeakable, foul-smelling as liquefying flesh, dripped between the planks of the cart above and soiled his clothes and hair. He rolled out under the night sky and tried to sleep there instead, under the baleful silver eye of the scarred circle. It took a long time.

  He started to dream, or rather hovered on the very edge of a dream, as if all his consciousness were a dam-wall bulging under the cataract pressure of - something, some fluid waiting to burst through and flood, when—

  He was startled awake. The bombardment had started again: a screaming across the sky from west to east, another, another, and then a great detonation seemingly right overhead. A firework throwing fiery confetti onto the world below. Frosty snowflakes of fire scattering from the flank of the great circle. Bates scrabbled beneath the shelter of the cart; a puny enough haven, to be sure, but better to have something over one. Peering out, he watched the circle. Another shriek and whoop filled the sky and another explosive crash. A long silence, and then another. For an hour or more it went on, screaming tutti crescendi all leading to the same conclusion of wrenching and sparking crashes. Bates started counting at five, and had reached twenty-one before there was any pause. By then the whole camp had come out of their tents and were standing around watching the barrage.

  The dust cleared, blown like moonclouds from the face of the great circle. There were more scratches and patches upon the silver purity now, but not many.

  ‘Shelling the moon itself,’ shouted somebody. Somebody else began singing:Cannonade-balls of old England

  And oh! for old England’s great balls—

  The silence had just enough time to settle, like dirt in a cup of clear water, when the firing began again. Bates watched and watched. For
every seven shots, one went wide, howling away to the east to land who knew where - in the sea, perhaps. Or on some village trying to sleep, who knew?