Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I could hardly forget that,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘And once again in a cave some miles to the west of here. That first time I survived, as you did, because my vital energy, or the vitalist intellect of my body’s components, defeated an enemy inexperienced in attacking humanity. The second time I was saved by a Blefuscan. But this time, this third time, I shall be the illness. I shall be the scourge. For too long I have wallowed and been passive. For now I seize the doom.’

  ‘You are brave.’

  ‘My love,’ he said. ‘Forgive me for using such words with you, but it is the truth, my love. I shall love you always and with a pure and unsullied devotion, as a knight-at-arms would love an inaccessible maiden in—’

  But there was something wrong with Eleanor, a choking in her throat. He started forward, concerned, and then immediately understood that she was laughing. Laughing! ‘My darling,’ he said, in a wounded voice. ‘Pray do not mock me.’

  ‘Mock you!’ she repeated. ‘Oh I apologise my love, but,’ and the laugh poured from her again in a series of arpeggio vocal striations.

  ‘What is so funny?’

  ‘Your self-fashioning, my dear! And now the pomp in your voice! Oh the pulpit tone of it! Purity!’

  A din of self-righteous wrath and injured amour-propre skittered through his thoughts, and took only a single second to flow straight out again, and he joined in with her laughing. ‘You’re right! What a fool I am! Oh, it is my curse, this foolish self-theatrics!’

  ‘The purity of your love for me,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Or yours for me!’

  ‘Don’t,’ she added, growing serious again, ‘misunderstand what I am saying. I am not denying the strength of it.’

  ‘The strength of the love.’

  ‘It is a force, and real, this emotion. It is realer than any I have felt before. But hardly pure.’

  ‘Pure,’ said Bates, the words popping into his head from some unpremeditated place and surprising him as he spoke them with the sudden realised truth of the sentiment they expressed, ‘is a kind of lie, most especially where love is concerned. How could there be such thing as a pure love?’

  ‘It is for the impurity that I love you,’ she agreed. ‘It is the impure humanity in you.’

  ‘I am your jakes,’ he said. They both started laughing again, Bates feeling a freedom in his chest that he could not remember having experienced for a very long time. And perhaps never. His cockstand was as rigid as ever he had known it. His eyes were brighter; the sheer liberty of being able to say to this beautiful woman, whom he loved, and who had saved him from the terrifying consummation entailed by the disappointment of actuality - to say to her what he truly felt.

  She was laughing hard and pressing her hand to her mouth. ‘Then,’ she managed eventually to get out, ‘then Jake shall be my name for you.’

  ‘A private name.’

  ‘A private name.’

  ‘A name for the privates.’

  And more laughter. But noises behind them, over by the farmhouse—a cough, the chutter of subdued male voices in conversation - stoppered up the laughter. They grew serious, and stood arm in arm. The stench of death was still there, still all about them, in the stillness. ‘And yet,’ he said, in a low voice, attempting what he knew, in the attempt, would be the unsuccessful and last throw of words, ‘you will not marry me.’

  ‘And yet,’ she said.

  ‘Is your marriage to be your pure love?’ It was not a rebuke.

  ‘In the eyes of the Church,’ she said, plainly. ‘For I shall marry a Churchman.’

  ‘And there may be something to be said,’ he mused, ‘For keeping these things all separated off from one another.’

  She kissed him and then, without a word and with a haste that - had he not known better - he might have thought unseemly she turned and hurried inside the farmhouse again.

  Bates went to Portioli and explained to him that he, Abraham Bates, would be accompanying the party into the sphere, and that Henry Oldenberg would be escorting Mrs Burton to York. ‘I have,’ he assured the Italian, ‘experience of missionary work. A kind of experience. I shall take the Dean’s place.’

  ‘Then the Dean,’ said Portioli, ‘must be ready to escort Captain Longley as well as his affianced.’

  The night was interrupted by the moaning of Longley. An inflammation had taken hold upon the raw burnt-up stump of his hand. The fingers were all gone, all save the littlest, and the body of the hand itself was bright red, like the painted face of a savage, and swollen to twice its size. He cried in the night, but there was nothing to be done. ‘It looks poorly for him,’ said Portioli, in a low tone. Some time before dawn Longley fell into a deep sleep.

  ‘And I suppose,’ complained the Dean, ‘that I’ll be expected to nursemaid this fellow on my journey? I am no nursemaid!’

  In the predawn Portioli was busy, rousing the men. The cart on which Longley’s men had brought him in was now being loaded with military necessaries. ‘We must enter the sphere with equal force to persuade and compel,’ said the Italian.

  ‘Hence the gunpowder,’ said Bates, watching anxiously as a French trooper and the English private Dartford hauled a small barrel whilst smoking pipes the entire, time.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Portioli.

  ‘But perhaps it would be better not to smoke whilst handling the . . .’

  ‘Psssh,’ said the Frenchman.

  ‘But I mean to say,’ winced Bates.

  Dartford moved his pipe to the left side of his mouth without using his hands. ‘Don’t you fret,’ he said, in his raspy voice, ‘none, fret none, sir. I’ve rolled a thousand barrels of the powder in my time.’ A faahsand bah-wwls. ‘And ne’er a slip.’

  ‘But a naked flame so close to the—’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Dartford, interspersing the words with grunts as he and the Frenchman hoisted the barrel into the back of the cart, ‘uuHH, you, uuHH, fret.’ And afterwards, ‘Mercy, my old ’ammy, mercy,’ to his comrade.

  ‘The sphere has touched the ground!’ crowed Portioli. ‘Our duty awakes!’ And he marched off, with the two others behind him, calling a reveille to all the men. Away to the east the dawn was starting to pour its chilly apricot along the undulating line of the horizon. The wind was tart and shivery. Bates, buttoned up as he was, stamped his feet and gave his hands a rub. The cart was filled with instruments of death, and he stood at the lip looking into it, half-wondering whether he should take for himself a pistol, perhaps; and half-thinking that the boards of the cart were still thick with the excremental residue of the sick men it had once transported: dried and hardened, to be sure, but offensive for all that. A pistol might be the thing. Still standing on the ground, he leaned a little way forward into the cart itself, the lip of wood pressing against his loins. That disgusting smell, almost indistinguishable against the wider stench of decay in all the air, was starting to work its hideous effect upon him.

  ‘Still,’ said the voice.

  Bates began to straighten up, and the voice said fiercely: ‘Be still! Do not move!’

  ‘Gugglerum.’

  ‘Turn your large head to the left.’

  Bates looked. The tiny man was there, seated upon the barrel of gunpowder, and holding in his right hand a small tar-brand alight with flame at one end.

  ‘My friend,’ said Bates, carefully. ‘I feared I had lost you amongst the dead bodies on the battlefield.’

  ‘Understand this,’ said Gugglerum. ‘If you displease me with anything you do I shall plunge this flame into this deadly powder.’

  Bates could see that the fat stopper was out of the barrel. How the little fellow had managed to remove so toughly inserted a cork was beyond Bates to imagine. But that was not the pressing issue.

  ‘It will destroy you,’ Bates said, slowly. ‘If you do that.’

  ‘And you also. Our lives are short, and our spirits rejoice in victory.’

  ‘Do not set the powder alight, my friend.’

&
nbsp; ‘You betrayed me.’ Such a squeaky, grasshoppery little voice. Yet it was plein with death, and Will, and with a ferocious kind of strength.

  ‘By no means,’ said Bates, levelly.

  ‘You abandoned me to a landscape of decay. You promised to take me to the King. I saved your life.’ There were several more sentences like this, but they were spoken so rapidly and at such a pitch that Bates could not quite follow what was being said.

  ‘I apologise,’ said Bates.

  ‘Do you think the pyndoonemel will abate? I have listened to the conversations you have had, and you intend to go into that large circle in the sky. To go there! To go there!’

  ‘You have seen, I think, the power to make death it possesses?’

  ‘But the pyndoonemel are as deadly! You must come with me . . .’

  ‘Listen, Gugglerum, my friend, listen to me, I beg of you, I pray you.’ As he was speaking there was a chill that began to penetrate. ‘Inside the house is Eleanor.’ He thought of adding the woman I love, but sensed something in his miniature companion that would be liable to the vacuum collapse of irrational rage if love were brought into the question. ‘The Dean is there, the Dean of York, the very man you were seeking when you found me. The Dean of York will escort the lady to York town - and you can go with them. He is an intimate of royalty. He will serve your purpose much better than ever I could.’

  The Blefuscan moved the flaming stick closer to the circular hole in the top of the barrel.

  ‘Don’t!’ cried Bates, in an anguish that channelled a sudden realisation that Gugglerum was not here to negotiate. At once, with whole vision, Bates saw how slender was the thread spun from Portioli’s passionate adventurousness: if Gugglerum slew him, and the others; here in this place, then who else would have the knowledge—or the position - to attempt the assault heroic upon the Littlebig castle? What supplies would they take with them? Who else would do the necessary missionary work?

  ‘Eleanor and the Dean have survived the plague,’ he said, ‘just as I have. They can pass their strength to others, as I have done.’

  The little man stood astride the hole and held the little brand before him.

  ‘You can go with the Dean! He will take you to royalty.’

  ‘I can no longer trust anything you say,’ said Gugglerum.

  ‘But you saved my life,’ said Bates.

  ‘ You are thinking,’ squeaked Gugglerum, his amber-coloured face indecipherable, ‘whether you could move your fist fast, whether your reach could grab me, or this flame, before it fell to the powder below.’

  ‘I am thinking only of talking with you,’ Bates lied.

  ‘You are thinking of whether your heavy legs could run fast enough to outpace the flames that will burst from this detonation. But you could not.’

  ‘I beg you - no. You saved my life. That means that you have taken on a responsibility.’

  ‘Such is another,’ said Gugglerum, ‘incomprehensible big-person belief.’ He held the matchstick-sized brand, with its gleaming cowl of flame, directly over the hole.

  Bates thought: Perhaps the powder is damp, and will not explode. He thought: Perhaps the barrel is hooped, and will contain all, or even some, of the explosion. He thought: Perhaps I will survive the explosion with only scars, or burns, but well enough to go on. He thought: Perhaps I will die, but it will not matter, for the others will live, and the assault heroic will be accomplished. In every direction he looked he saw hope, and if he probed into the hope he found only further complications of hope, and opening of possibilities. It is the tyranny of hope that it cannot be construed in any except its single, linear mode. It is a one-size-fits-all-clients, and a one-dimensional thing. The powder itself was four hundred thousand dots of blackness each of which would oxidise with an instinct close to instantaneity, and the outrush of superhot material would burst over him no matter how he tried to run. For, like hope, an explosion knows only one direction, and the same direction at that—outwards.

  There was another voice: the bearish, brown-red, potchy voice of Private Dartford. ‘What’s this?’ It was only Dartford’s head; resting its chin on the side planks of the cart, and close to the little fellow. Were he a lizard, Bates thought (but why? apropos of what?), he could have whipped him with his tongue.

  ‘I just loaded that barrel. Don’t you go disarrangin’ it.’

  Gugglerum was undismayed. ‘Do as I say, you both, or you both will die at once. Fetchez-vous the Captain Portioli.’

  ‘He wants Portioli here to murder him,’ said Bates. ‘I would beg you to refuse his request.’

  ‘I have no intentions of murder,’ said the little man.

  A shadow passed over the cart; the smaller of clouds, high in the zenith, interrupting the light of the sun.

  ‘Murder him?’ Dartford said coolly. ‘Why would ’e want ’at?’

  ‘If you move towards me I shall drop the flame.’

  A shadow passed again. But this could not be the same cloud, for clouds do not pass and repass the same spot. This circling, and recircling, and revolving the same spot on the ground beneath. And then, a flurry of wings; and Bates experienced epiphanically, the bluetopia of London, the bird of Apollo, they bickered noise, light, light and shadow in riffling alternation. The action of wings. The chilly noises. Dartford’s head was back, his mouth loose and open. He raised his hand in salute. But he was not saluting, he was shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun. And he was looking up into the sky. Bates moved his own head, and looked too. And there, a blot against the great wash of light, he saw the shrinking sight of a bird, carrying its cargo in bronze-coloured talons. An owl, perhaps, or kite; or - but, no, it was not possible to see distinctly what manner of bird had plucked the little man from the cart and carried him away.

  Away.

  FIVE

  THE GIFT

  It is a year, or a little more than a year, after the events previously related. It is London, the great city of Empire, somewhat reduced in material prosperity, with a noticeably thinner flow of humanity along its streets, but the same city for all that. Establishments exist all along Charing Cross Road, spreading west along Oxford Street and south over the river into the streets, spread like the cables of a net through the clogs of housing and manufactories of Southwark and Kennington and the Borough, all promising CURE FOR THE PESTILENCE, or GUARANTEED CURE FOR THE RECENT PLAGUE, enquire within, or more ambitiously, CURES ASSURED for the LATE PESTILENCE but also FOR ALL THE PANDORAICAL AFFLICTIONS OF MANKIND, BUBO, AGUE, GOUT, CANKER, INFLUENZA, WATER-SICKNESS AND INFLAMMATION OF THE BONES: members of royal families and aristocrats from seven nations treated; testimonials upon request; the cost of consultation and treatment guaranteed not to exceed one guinea. The French flag still flies from one broad marble building abutting the Thames, but the Union Flag flies from St Paul’s breast-shaped dome—rebuilt, after the recent war, using the newest concretised materials by Brobdingnagian craftsmen. The joint committee for governance has recently renegotiated the terms of its Royal Charter, and British-born representatives for the first time sit in the majority, although since constitutional change required a two-thirds vote the French-born delegates were still a powerful bloc. The King, who had spent the war and the subsequent tribulations in an estate upon Anglesey, with a boat crewed and ready to depart for Ireland at a minute’s notice, has returned to the capital only weeks before.

  And here is an old friend: Abraham Bates, in a purple velvet suit. He is sitting at a café with the paper folded on the table before him, and a glass of sugared coffee half drunk, and he is watching the pigeons. He is watching the pigeons and they are watching him.

  It was not for wealth or position or status that she married the Dean, or at least not only for those things. Not primarily for those things. He understands this now, although arriving at the full appreciation of it has taken him many months, and he had no easy time of it during those months. He fought the demons jealousy and rage, entities small enough to live inside him yet lar
ge enough to rampage and rail like giants. But the battle has brought him a sort of inner peace, at last, a way of treating with his own allergy to contentment without giving way, as he always had been used, to the blue wraiths of dread melancholy. He feels he is now able to hold the ideal of spiritual and sensual love at exactly the correct distance from his life: neither overwhelmingly intimate nor inaccessibly remote. The fact that her marriage to the Dean was entered into for precisely this reason on her part too gave him a warmth in his soul which was amongst the most prized of his non-material possessions. This a point of connection.

  And here she comes now.

  In the space of a year he had been redeemed in the official eye. Once a despised Ami de France, now a hero of Great Britain redivivus. The Littlebig downed and slain. The enormous aerial circle had lost its rigidity, and was now bowed and belled over the Yorkshire countryside, half submerged in the great foul effluvium that had gushed, extraordinarily copious, from the rents in the side of the structure. Like human diarrhoea except on an incomparably greater scale, and with certain other peculiar properties. It had, for instance, remained in a fluid, or semifluid, state for many days: and even now - nine months after its emission—it had not precisely hardened. There had been enough of it to fill the entire valley. It covered the great mass of decaying soldiery in many plumblines’ depth of dirt. Portioli, Bates and the other men who had survived had been obliged to build boats, like Phoenicians, from such materials as they could find - binding together sheaves, cutting and strapping. And on these unlovely constructions they had oared their way across the valley through a faecal sea, until they broached clean turf and could disembark. By that time the Littlebig was dead, or dying. It is now dead. Unless it is still dying. It is difficult to be sure.