by Adam Roberts
‘Aha, the giant people, they were here. The army of France has sworn in many of these. Yet they are reluctant to fight. It is a cowardice, say some, in their great hearts. Others say it is a moral choice, as with the holy men of India or the farthest East.’
‘Perhaps the giant man brought her to this place?’
‘Was he coming here?’
‘He was going to York. He may have passed through this place.’
‘But look, my friend,’ said Portioli. ‘Look back across the field of many dead. There are no giant corpses. They were here, ready to join the battle. But they have vanished - who knows where?’ Bates scanned the field, but it was clear that Portioli was correct, for it would not have been possible to hide even one Brobdingnagian corpse in the mess of human bodies.
‘She is not here,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘I am relieved of a great pressure of anxiety. But, Mr Portioli, I cannot go with you. I must find her. I must go on, perhaps to York city itself. She has gone there, I do not doubt, with the Dean.’
‘Dean?’
‘The Dean of York.’
‘But I have this Dean!’
‘You have him?’
‘In the farmhouse. He is there, come, come.’
‘I can scarcely believe . . .’ But he went on; and soon enough the low broad shape of the farmhouse was visible, with a dozen or more French soldiers sitting along the wall outside taking as much heat as they could from the winter sun. And through the low-lintelled door, there indeed was Henry Oldenberg, sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket over his knees for all the world like an old woman.
‘You!’ he exclaimed upon seeing Bates. ‘You!’
Bates ate a little, and slept in a cot at the back of the house. When he woke he felt a little better, although agitated by a dream that he knew to be important, that might disclose some plangent and essential mystery at the heart of things - a dream he chided himself to remember even in the midst of dreaming it—but which fled away on waking, such that after splashing his face with cold water and smoothing back his hair it had gone entirely, leaving only this impression of a great solution lost.
The farmhouse was large, with several outbuildings and a two-storey barn; an arrangement of buildings occupied by three or four dozen French soldiers. A great many more were dead, their bodies laid in the far field behind a stone wall. Most of the French were ill. Bates felt the pincer of guilt upon his heart - that he had attended to his own exhaustion rather than to these his brothers in Christ. He approached Portioli. ‘You must forgive me my - former distraction,’ he said. ‘I have had, as we all have had, a terrible number of weeks. But it does not excuse my behaviour.’
‘There is no need to apologise,’ said the Italian.
‘Will you permit me to cure your men?’
‘It is hard for me to think of them as my men,’ said Portioli, ruefully. ‘Although you are correct in so describing them, I think. I am faute de mieux the commander here.’
‘I must go among them. I hope you trust me to do that?’
‘To save them,’ said Portioli. ‘Of course.’
‘You sir,’ said Bates, tears of - joy?! - tickling the backs of his eyes. ‘You sir are a good man.’
‘I am not sure,’ said Portioli. ‘Show me first how you intend this cure.’
Bates sat down, his head still dizzy, and gathered enough of his wits to be able to explain to the Captain the nature of the fever. Rather than disbelieving, Portioli breathed a great sigh. ‘This of course explains! This explains! I understand, my dear Monsieur Bates. And you have suffered this fever and survived?’
‘I have.’
‘The Dean, also?’
‘Him also.’
‘Then pass to us your immunity, Englishman.’ And he angled his dark face to receive Bates’s kiss.
Bates worked his way around the men, explaining to each in turn what he had to do. Some were too ill understand what he said to them; others were resistant but too weak to prevent him, or else accepted his ministrations. Three looked fiercely at him, and brandished their rifles, and them Bates left alone; although - subsequently, when they saw their comrades recover, they altered their opinions. For Bates the hours he spent doing this came to seem to him an act of penance, and it worked a kind of cure upon his own mind even as it passed the expertise to fight over the bodies of the French. It calmed him. Some of the men were handsome despite their sickness; smooth-skinned and fierce—eyed, beautiful with the beauty that the young possess without knowing it. Others were made hideous by their suffering: boils and pustules upon their faces and around their mouths, slime in their mouths and the stench of death everywhere about them. With these Bates bethought himself of Christ and the lepers, and said a whispered prayer to the Lord before embracing them. Had Christ felt revulsion when touching such foulness? Had He needed to conquer his own inner fear of defilement? And there was a profound sort of liberation, a freeing of the spirit, in this abasement. It gave him some understanding of what, had anybody asked him prior to these times, he would have dismissed as Romish impostures; the mortification of the flesh, nuns who kiss the sores of beggars, priests who deathify their flesh. For it became, with the ninth man, a ritual: an embracement of the essence of flesh, which is that, like fire, it is continually in the process of wearing itself out. Corruption and decay were not unfortunate side-effects of the incarnation of human spirits in this world; they were the very ground of all spiritual possibilities; and Bates discovered a strength in overcoming his own squeamishness that he had not found through all his previous prayer and church-devotions.
The self-sacrifice was given sharpness by the fact that Bates longed to talk with the Dean about Eleanor’s whereabouts. He wanted the conversation eagerly, and yet he feared it; for what if the Dean had only bad news about her? The agony of uncertainty was so acute that it was palpable pain in his own body. And, nevertheless, he embraced even that. His own suffering gave strength to him. It was petty enough, he knew, when compared to the sufferings of the world around him; but it was his. For a small man, Divine Providence provided an appropriate suffering, perhaps: for the Blefuscan Bates had killed in the hotel room, striking him with the Bible, had experienced but a small blow, yet it had surely been a great suffering proportionately. And so it was for Bates.
When he was finished he washed his face and drank some water, and then he ate a circle of stale bread from Portioli’s supply. And finally he sat down on the Dean’s left hand, with Portioli on the right.
‘Henry,’ he said, in a gentle voice. ‘I must ask after Eleanor.’
The Dean looked at him with one watery eye. ‘She is my fiancée,’ he said.
‘I know that.’
‘I have seen the way you look at her.’
‘I respect God’s commandments,’ said Bates. ‘Believe that I do. She had her choice, and she chose you.’
This seemed to mollify Oldenberg a little. ‘They’re all dead,’ he said, grumpily, sweeping his arm at the wall. ‘Ten thousand, perhaps. More than a thousand, at any rate. All slain. All,’ he added, with a spurt of vehemence, ‘save this blackamoor . . .’
‘Dean!’ Bates said. ‘Do not forget your manners, I pray you.’
‘He claims to be Italian,’ Oldenberg continued. ‘But his mother is Abyssinian.’
‘I apologise,’ said Bates; but there was a calm expression on Portioli’s face.
‘There is no need,’ he said. ‘I have often found such hostility amongst the English.’
‘Black as the Devil,’ grumbled the Dean, drawing the blanket around him as if it might shield him from the whole world. ‘His mother an Abyssinian maid! Born, I daresay, amongst the very foothills of Mount Abora.’
‘In Genoa,’ said Portioli, gently.
‘He asked after the giants,’ said Oldenberg. ‘But I’ll not talk to him. Have ye any snuff, my dear fellow?’ he added, darting a claw from the blanket to grasp Bates’s arm. ‘Any of my snuff? Have ye chanced upon any, on your travels here?’
‘I
’m afraid not, Dean,’ said Bates.
Oldenberg’s gloomy countenance reasserted itself and he sat back in the chair. ‘Of course not. Neither has this blackface. Neither he, although he comes from the land of opium itself.’
‘Genoa,’ said Portioli, again, giving his head the mildest of shakes.
‘Dean,’ Bates prompted. ‘Eleanor?’
For a minute, or more, it seemed as though Oldenberg was not going to say anything. But eventually he spoke. ‘She was taken up.’
‘Taken up?’
‘With that treacherous giant. She ran to him and he was swept into that Satan’s sphere - all the giants were; all at once.’
Bates looked at Portioli, but he only said: ‘I did not see it. I was here the whole time of the battle. The most I saw was the light of the green colour that flickered over the lip of the hill, there, and that filled the valley.’
‘That death light,’ cried the Dean. ‘The comet, you see. It was the comet and it has swooped down upon the world as its master intended.’
‘Its master?’
‘The Devil, of course. The Devil. Who else? The Devil. Diabolus. Bolus means sphere, and this is the Devil’s throne, and that’s where Eleanor is.’ And with that he threw the blanket over his own head, like a grieving woman, and would say nothing more.
Bates and Portioli walked to the lip of the hill and watched the mendax luna for a half hour. ‘It is lower in the sky,’ Portioli said. ‘Every day it comes a little lower. I can only believe that eventually it will rest itself upon the ground.’
‘Yet it can be damaged,’ said Bates, scrutinising the scuffs made upon its surface by the English bombardment.
‘That was a fierce cannonade,’ said the Italian. ‘But it has torn some rents in the surface of the thing.’
‘If it can be damaged,’ said Bates, ‘then it can be destroyed.’
‘Possibly so, my friend. But it would require a thousand mighty cannons bringing their fire upon it over many nights to break it up. So many cannon shells, and mighty ones, from the great cannon at York that the English captured last week. So many, and all that has resulted are some nips and tears in the outer skin of it.’
‘It is a machine,’ said Bates. ‘I think.’
‘I think so too. Deus ex machina.’
‘Yet no deus, I think.’
‘Your friend the Dean thinketh it a devil?’
‘And I have met soldiers who think it is Wormwood, the day of judgment. But I think it a machine, and inside it a giant.’
‘Brobdingnagian?’ Portioli asked, but immediately answered himself: ‘But you mean a giant to whom the Brobdingnagians are but shrimps and mice. No? And why could it not be so? If there are miniature people to whom e’en the Lilliputians are giants - then why not extend the scale up?’
‘Perchance there are giants to whom even that creature,’ and Bates waved his right thumb at the sphere, ‘is but an atom. Perchance every world that moves through the aether interstellatum is but an atom in the body of some super-gigantos.’
‘Dizzying speculation.’
‘We cannot lose ourselves in such speculation. We must attend to the matter in hand. If Eleanor is inside that sphere then inside that sphere is where I must go.’
‘To rescue another man’s wife?’
‘She is not married to him,’ Bates said, sharply. But he rebuked himself. ‘She is not yet married to him, although they are, it is true, affianced, it is true. They are. But it is possible to love another’s wife with a pure heart, to love all life with that human love that exists in a ratio inferior to the love of God himself. As Sir Lancelot loved Guinevere, although she was married to his King and best friend.’
‘Sir Lancelotta,’ said Portioli. ‘An Italian man.’
‘I had thought French,’ said Bates. ‘Lancelot du Lac.’
‘So styled in the French romances, bien sûr. But at first he was Lancelotta di Laca, from the Laca region of Piedmont.’
‘If you are correct about the sphere lowering itself, day by day, until it rests on the Earth, then perhaps there will be the chance to enter it through one of the rents caused by the bombardment.’
‘Possibly. But it is a huge space; a world-in-little. Would one say worldkin?’
‘One might.’
‘Would one say worldicule?’
‘A word formed on the analogy of ridicule, perhaps?’
‘I thought, on the analogy of animalcule.’
‘I see. But I would search it even if it were the whole world itself.’ And as he said it he believed it, as if the spirit of the romances des chevaliers had entered, to some degree, into his timid blood. ‘Search the whole world and retrieve her.’
The following day the men were showing signs of returning health. The Dean, however, had withdrawn into a miserable state; he only left his rocking chair to attend to his bodily functions; and he spoke to nobody. The day after, as Bates sat nearby staring at the stone wall and trying to think through his situation, Oldenberg spoke up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You have no need to be sorry,’ said Bates.
With a little gunpowder flash of his old anger he retorted: ‘Do not tell me what I need, sir! Nor what I need not, neither! A gentleman never apologises or explains, and I ama—I am a gentleman. But nevertheless, nevertheless, it might be said. I might say. I do say. I should not have abandoned you. When Eleanor and I climbed aboard our giant, I should not have left you behind. It was not the action of a Christian.’
‘I forgive you,’ said Bates.
This seemed not to anger the Dean. ‘Truly?’ he asked, in a small voice.
‘Of course. We are brothers in Christ, sir.’
‘Perhaps I have misjudged you, Bates.’ He mused for a while, and chewed on the edge of his blanket.
‘I am not the man I was,’ said Bates. And he felt it in his heart to be true.
They were, it seemed, merely waiting. For what? ‘The news has gone back,’ said Portioli, ‘to your people and to mine. Two mighty armies were sent here to clash, and they have both been swept away into death. Whichever nation can raise a new army, or bring up new forces, will claim the field. They need only march here. As to which will come first, I do not know. That is in God’s hands.’
‘The English hold York?’
‘The French had not yet taken it. But I do not believe the city well-garrisoned it. I do not believe they needed to: many of the citizens had fled before the French, and those few who remained, being English, would not need a force to subdue them. But the French hold the coast.’
‘They have suffered at the hands of the plague,’ said Bates.
‘The English too.’
‘How long must we wait?’
‘It is in God’s hands. But should the English come first, then we,’ and he gestured to his men, ‘will become your prisoners.’
‘And if the French, then the Dean and I will become yours.’
Bates discussed this latter possibility with the Dean, seizing an opportunity when the two men were alone in the farmhouse one afternoon. ‘If the French come here they will imprison us.’
‘Amis de France,’ grumbled the Dean.
‘But we have the key,’ said Bates in a lowered voice. ‘We can barter the key for our freedom—and if the English come first, and are hostile to us because they have heard, somehow, of our collaboration - then the key to the Computational Device will free us!’
‘I do not have it,’ said the Dean, dolefully. ‘I do not have it. Eleanor wore it about her neck, and she has been taken away from me. My comfort in my old age! Like David and Bathsheba, but the Lord has taken her.’
‘I shall retrieve her,’ said Bates. ‘I shall recover her. I shall rescue her.’
The following day the mendax luna was lower again in the sky; and again neither French nor English armies came marching to claim the field. Bates went out with Portioli and two French soldiers - now fully recovered - to glean such provisions from the fallen
men as was possible. An unmistakable stench was gathering, like a miasma of evil, in the valley. Its odour was in the farmhouse too, of course; and familiarity with it reduced its offence; but to walk amongst the dead was to steep oneself in it. Portioli and the Frenchmen were as pale as bones, and all of them stopped at one point or another to vomit. Bates misliked the stench of it, of course, but he also welcomed it, the mortification of its rasp in his lungs; and below it all an odour of immerding that thrilled his body. They gathered such packs and pouches as were not too badly defiled and carried them back to the house.
‘We cannot stay here for much longer,’ Portioli opined. ‘Two more days, I think, and we should abandon the field.’
