Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Cheeks coughed next to him. Bates started. ‘You scared me!’

  ‘Those explodings don’t scare you, but my cough do? What a powerful cough I must have, to be sure.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you had come behind me.’

  ‘Mesmerised,’ he said, in a chiding voice. ‘By a great light in the sky?’

  ‘It is indeed a—’ and the rest of the sentence was squashed by the squeal and the crash. As the reverberations died away, Cheeks was saying:

  ‘—and everything about it. Eh? Why do you think they’re doing it?’

  ‘Doing it?’

  ‘Shootin’ at it, like it’s a great grou-ou-ouse?’

  ‘I’ve no notion.’

  Woe-oe-oe, screamed the sky. Woe-oe-oe CRACK.

  ‘—from London myself, and bitterly sorry the city’s in French hands,’ Cheeks was saying, when the noise died. ‘You’re a Londoner, no? So how you get out? That’s the question. What deal did you strike with the Frenchies to get out? That’s what we all want to know—’

  Another cannon shell hurtled with steamwhistle vehemence and crashed explosively into the Fausse-lune. Bates’s earnest denials, ‘No, nothing, I swear, I am a true patriotic Englishman’ were inaudible.

  ‘And why shoot at it?’ boomed Cheeks.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘And why shoot at it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the enemy, that’s why. Why else? That’s why.’

  Another shell scraped through the air with its appalling friction, and this one hit its target. Fiery confetti fell away. The thunder quietened once more.

  ‘I reckon, the Lieutenant reckons, e’en the Captain reckoneth,’ said Cheeks, gaily, ‘that you know more about that there monster,’ jabbing the point of his rifle up at the sky, ‘than you—are - let - tin’ - on.’

  ‘Nothing! I swear it!’ Bates said, oppressed by the noise in the sky and the apocalyptic fire above him, and by the presence of Cheeks so close by him, with Cheeks’s rifle and its bloodthirsty little mouth. Was this the moment? Were they to kill him now? ‘I beg of you-I beg of you—’ His heart was swooning.

  But Cheeks did not shoot him. Instead he left him alone, and Bates lay down again under the cart with his face behind the great wooden wheel and closed his eyes. He was so tired that he repeatedly drifted towards sleep, only to be repeatedly jarred awake again by the expected-unexpected horror of the cannonade.

  Finally he did sleep. He woke again with the silence, and dozed further; and then woke once more with the cold, but curled up as best he could and slept again. Finally it was daylight that woke him. The great silver shape was still there, scratched and scuffed on its leftmost side but as implacable and apparently unmovable as the moon itself. The bombardment, clearly, had not dislodged it from the sky.

  The soldiers were scowling as they built up the fire to cook their breakfast. Bates tried to rub life and warmth back into his limbs with his free hand, and sat with his back to the cartwheel. For a while he simply stared at the object in the sky. He tried to determine whether it was a naturally occurring celestial manifestation (as it might be, an asteroidal or planetary thing) or some artificial or constructed device, like a great balloon. If it were the former then the most pressing question, or the question with the most alarming implications, was: How did it come to be suspended in the sky by some freak of electrical or gravitational vortex, sitting as a tennis ball might do upon a jet of air except on a much larger scale? Perhaps it rested upon a tourbillion of unknown energy. For there was a great deal that science had yet to uncover. But if it were a manner of balloon or other aërial device - then who had constructed it? To what purpose? Was it perhaps a French machine of war? Or from some other nation - Chinee, Aztec, which?

  Bates wondered: could it truly be the comet? He could piece in his mind the comet small in the sky, then larger, then here; but he could not relinquish the idea that there might be some disconnection between the two phenomena. Was this truly the comet? Had it come visiting? Wormwood, Wormwood, and the ending of the world.

  ‘Did you see the green light?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘Green light? No.’

  ‘Vous avez vu la lumière verte?’ he said, with a facetious expression on his face.

  ‘Captain,’ said Bates, getting to his feet, or as close to an upright posture as his left hand permitted him.

  ‘Unhook him from that cart,’ Longley ordered. ‘We don’t want to be dragging him along behind us when we go, after all.’

  ‘You speak of a green light?’

  ‘Before dawn, there was a great wash of green light. It was like unto an aurora.’

  ‘Sickly,’ said Cheeks, slotting the key into the padlock of Bates’s manacle and pulling it out from the cartwheel. ‘Hup hup, stick your wrist in here then.’ The handcuffs were linked together again, linking his wrists before his belly.

  ‘I saw no light. Though I slept fitfully.’

  ‘Some new devilish French trick, I’ll wager. There’s been no noise of war this morning. Nothing from over the hill at all.’

  ‘They’re all abed, and its nigh on eight o’clock,’ said a man in a lieutenant’s uniform; presumably Harrison.

  ‘Cinderella,’ said Cheeks. ‘Or is that the wrong’un?’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Bates. ‘I ask you: is it truly needful to keep me shackled in this fashion?’ He held up his two chained wrists before him, as if to say Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

  ‘I have checked your handiwork, sir,’ said the Captain.

  ‘The men?’

  ‘My men.’

  ‘You seem well enough yourself, Captain.’

  ‘I’m much recovered, thankee. Much recovered.’

  ‘Yet yesterday you claimed you were certain to die.’

  ‘The Almighty still has His uses for me in this world, I suppose.’

  ‘That makes me the instrument of the Almighty,’ Bates said.

  ‘The men you tended in the cart,’ said the Captain. ‘They are better.’

  ‘Better ?’

  ‘Healed. Or on the way to being healed.’

  Bates felt his heart rise. ‘You see! It is as I said—the sickness is . . .’

  ‘I have decided to execute you,’ the Captain said.

  Bates was silent.

  Longley turned and shouted some orders. His men stamped out the last of the fire, began gathering their kit and harnessing the horses to the two carts. ‘Captain,’ Bates cried. ‘Did I mishear you?’

  But the Captain was otherwise occupied. Cheeks stood, with a mild-looking smile on his face. The thought crashed into Bates’s mind to run - to make as rapid a dash for it as possible. He looked around: what if he could make it to that low stone wall, and leap over it? But Cheeks would overtake him easily and finish him. Then where was sanctuary? Those filigree trees, void of foliage, on the horizon? How could he possibly make it to that destination? That hill? But on the far side of it the battle was even now readying itself to recommence.

  The circle in the sky was white as a spirit-eye. Death was about to swoop upon him. The pigeonhawk of death.

  The cart behind him lurched and pulled away. Bates felt the scrape of the wheel against his back, and turned, for his shirt was tugged, the tail caught in the axle. The act of turning about freed it, and Bates watched the conveyance dwindle, with faces staring from the back of it. Yesterday those faces had been oblivious and on the edge of dying; now they looked fresher and recovering. One of them winked at him.

  He turned back. His skin was crawling. ‘Captain. Captain. I don’t understand.’

  ‘The queerest thing I ever saw,’ Cheeks announced, apropos of nothing. ‘That greeny-greeny light. Like something from a poem I did once read.’

  ‘Captain!’ called Bates.

  But he understood that this was the place he was to die. They were going to murder him here, and leave his body in the grass at the roadside. The rush of imminent mortality quickened his heart. ‘Explain to me your reaso
ns, Captain! At least that!’ Sweat upon his brow. He thought: Eleanor! Never to see you again.

  ‘One man,’ Cheeks was saying, ‘shouted Green! Green light!, like a fool.’ He balanced his rifle by laying the centre of its gravity across his forearm. ‘And you know? Private Green started up with, What? What? We might have laughed,’ he concluded, ‘save that the light itself was too foul a thing.’

  ‘Foul.’

  ‘Diabolic.’

  ‘You do not intend to murder me, I hope,’ Bates tried.

  ‘I?’ said Cheeks, with all the appearance of innocency. ‘I’s a soldier,’ he said (or did he say ‘as a soldier’?). Then, with a grin, ‘My intent don’t enter into it.’ And he flipped up the rifle and aimed his sightline along the barrel, and straight at Bates’s heart.

  ‘Oh!’ Bates half-cried, half-shouted, to think his whole life had come down to this sordid moment. He shut his eyes. But, as it happened, it was not to happen just then. It was not to happen for another full minute. The Captain wanted to have a word first.

  The Captain was, it seemed, much recovered from his previously sickened state. He was well enough to ride again. ‘For which I’m grateful to the gods of good health,’ he announced, pleased, as one of the men led his horse over. He patted its nose. They were alone now: Bates, Cheeks, the Captain, his horse, and the man holding the beast’s bridle. The other soldiers had gone off down the road with the two carriages. Bates thought of the possibilities. To start running now - just to run. At least to have that rush of air on his face before the thud of a rifled ball opened up the flesh of his back and pushed him, face forward, into the dirt that was his true medium. But he did not move. Cheeks was aiming his rifle. The Captain carried a long-barrelled pistolette in his belt holster. He was a dead man. And he would never see Eleanor again.

  ‘One last thing,’ said the Captain, and with a hough! and a heave he pulled himself into the saddle. ‘It was the French you were spying for?’

  ‘I cured you and your men,’ said Bates, speaking quickly. ‘I could cure more. How many more English soldiers are sick with the plague? How many will die? I could save those lives. For my country.’

  ‘As you explained it,’ the Captain said, ‘I could save those men myself.’ He laughed. ‘And not only myself - but any of the men in that cart.’

  ‘For Christ’s mercy and love,’ Bates said. His mind was dry. He had the feeling that he was missing something obvious, some form of words that would hold off this monstrous and offhand sentence of death.

  ‘The French, then?’ the Captain asked again. ‘Your treachery?’

  Bates could feel the very pressure of his death upon his back. The predatory raptor-claws in his flesh. It was a real pressure, as if the medieval sketches that showed angels and devils upon men’s shoulders and whispering in their ears were given literal life. The tiny devil hissed Run! Run! in his ear. It was so real Bates fancied he could even hear it. But to run and be shot in the back—it was too terrible a thought.

  ‘This disease is a weapon of war,’ said Captain Longley. ‘You said so yourself. Ergo the French concocted it. The fact that you know so much about it,’ he shook his head. ‘That very fact condemns you as a spy, my dear fellow. Cheeks—’ And pursuant to his commanding officer’s orders Cheeks raised his rifle again, and sighted down the barrel at Bates’s chest. And this time he was not playing. Bates, trying to think of something to say, as if thinking of something to say were the most important thing in the world, could think of nothing. Nothing at all. And the finger squeezed the trigger.

  [11]

  The sky was amber, streaked with purples and blues. Eleanor watched a great seizure in the English lines. Horseman prancing ho and ho, up and down the lines, and men gathering their weapons and trotting back up the hill. The French charged down the middle, but were repulsed by cannonfire and an unyielding phalanx of red. But as the French jarred back and withdrew this same phalanx retreated too, in order. The central ground of the battle was emptied, and as the French regrouped the English cannon began laying out rows of feathery smoke, and churning up the turf and steaming gouts out of the river.

  ‘The assault heroic,’ said the giant, in a mournful voice.

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Eleanor. ‘Are the inhabitants of this airship here merely to observe this battle? Why did they pluck you from the field?’

  ‘And you with me.’

  ‘Did they intend to take me?’

  ‘I mediate.’ The Brobdingnagian gestured by slowly uncoiling an immense finger. ‘Those—’

  In the bleary and white distances of this huge space Eleanor could make out the huge figures; three, or maybe more of them - for, strange to say, their very size, and the very fact of there being nothing but clear air between her and them, somehow obscured their details. They were too large for the brain to apprehend them. Great round-bellowed giants, but somehow not.

  ‘They are the masters of this craft,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Not they.’

  ‘No?

  ‘They are beings twelve times my size,’ said the Giant. ‘But the master of this craft is greater, far, than that. Twenty thousand and more.’

  ‘Did you say thousand?’

  ‘Twenty thousand.’

  ‘Where is he?

  ‘We are upon him. This is the suit of clothes he wears. This is the manner of his giant steps about the cosmos. He is an explorer. I can speak to those great beings, and they can speak to him. Or so I surmise.’

  After a moment, Eleanor said: ‘It is hard to comprehend the existence of so large a being.’

  The giant said nothing.

  She was hungry, and roamed about the white floor for some time. And, to her surprise, she found food: long stems of white grass growing upon a fold or ridge of the floor. They smelt sweet, in a distant way, and when Eleanor tried one she was surprised how well they tasted. She explored her immediate area, climbed the strange hillocks, peered into the vast white distances all around. Plain fluid ran in perfectly straight lines, eight such lines in parallel rows. She tested the fluid; it was water, or something very like. It attended to her thirst, at any rate, although after she drank she felt a little elated, or heady.

  The giant was stretched out on his back and seemed to be sleeping.

  Then the sky rang like a low gong, and Eleanor felt a tremor pass through her feet. She dropped where she was and tried to summon up an image on the floor; but this portion of the strange space did not seem to function after that manner. So she ran over the pliant whiteness to where the giant lay. ‘Sir Giant!’ she cried. ‘Sir Giant!’

  There was another shudder.

  Here, where she had been before, she pressed her palm into the floor and the image coalesced in the magic substance. She scanned the land below. The image that first greeted her was of thousands of faces - English soldiers looking up, directly at her. Then, with perfect co-ordination, they all cheered: mouths flying open and eyes widening, some of them raising arms and fists.

  There was another shudder.

  She moved her godlike eye through the air. There, briefly, she saw a flash on the horizon; and caught the briefest glimpse of a blot, flying faster through the air than any bird. The cannonball.

  ‘They have begun an assault upon this place!’ she exclaimed. There was none to answer her, or to heed her words.

  All around her the life inside this bizarre place seemed unconcerned. Although each detonation brought palpable shudders through the whole structure, none of the strange inhabitants seemed perturbed. She leapt to her feet and climbed a nearby eminence and observed. As she became more accustomed to the scale of her surroundings, she found herself able to make out more and more detail. The space curved up and round, and what she had first taken for uniform whiteness revealed itself, on closer examination, to be a patchwork of creams and pales. In addition to the hyper-giants, lumbering round-bodied types, were a dozen or so Brobdingnagians; some lying, and some standing about with puzzled expressions. But then
, with a physical jolt, she saw that what she had taken for fields of waving grasses were in fact hordes - crowds of human-sized albino people flowing hither and thither on who knew what strange purpose.

  The cannonade seemed to have finished.

  Eleanor ate some more of the sweet grasses and refreshed herself at one of the queerly regular streams. The water, she noted, flowed out from a lip a hundred yards away, ran straight without the benefit of grooves or runnels, and disappeared into a sort of mesh several hundred yards further away.

  The Brobdingnagian - her Brobdingnagian, as she thought of him—was sitting up; his head like a watchtower, his shoulders like buttresses. She went over to him.