A History Maker

by Alasdair Gray

  He flings his right hand toward the flag crying, “That flag flew over us in the bonny days when we were many and strong. Will we abandon it now just because we are few and weak? Have we become so sensible — so comfortable — so unmanly that we can bask like lions in the sunlight of victory but flee like hens from the shadow of certain death? A heroic defeat makes brave men as glorious as a victory I think!” He points upward at the public eye which floats round the standard between him and his crescent of soldiers, but he looks to them as he declares, “There is the eye which will show the world how the Ettrick clan will die, will show your sweethearts and aunts how their men can die! I ask you to die with me so that our death will be viewed and viewed again to the last days of mankind and television and time! Is anybody with me?”

  As nearly everyone draws breath to roar their support Wat yells, “Stop and listen! Listen to me!”

  All stare at him. The public eye draws near. With a gesture which tries to dismiss it he says, “Yes Dad, we fight to show our contempt for death but we old ones have done that more than once. Remember the bairns, the fourteen-year-olds! This is their first war. Give them the chance of another. Send them home.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” says Craig Douglas walking into the crescent of troops behind the standard, “Let the fledglings he speaks about take one step forward.” In the front rank some lads glance sideways at each other but none move their feet.

  “Come,” he says kindly, “Ye cannae hide from me! Charlie and Jimmy, you’re fourteen — I know my sons’ ages. And Sandy, Kenneth, and Alec are my kin among the Bowerhopes. Step forward, loons, or I’ll command each of ye singly. An auld bitch like me cannae have mutinous pups.”

  Twenty boys shuffle forward. He smiles and says, “You were bairns when I brought ye into battle two days since. Now you are warriors. This is my last order for you. Go behind the Northumbrian lines with General Shafto. Return to your aunts. When your wounds heal join the veterans and Boys’ Brigade in the Warrior house where you will be the only officers. Review this war from start to finish. Learn from our mistakes. Teach the Ettrick youngsters how to avoid them. Prepare future victories to avenge the losses of today. Away with ye!”

  Still the boys keep their places, some looking sideways at each other, some staring doggedly ahead. One raises a hand.

  “Aye, Charlie?” says the General.

  Do you think … if we fight beside ye … we’ll let Ettrick down, Dad?”

  “I doubt it, Charlie.”

  A renewed silence is broken by an older boy in the rear.

  “Permission to speak, Uncle.”

  “Granted.”

  “The young loons ken the laws of democratic warfare as well as we. You were elected to lead us in battle. You cannae order men to retreat unless their wounds or characters make them encumbrances.”

  “I agree,” says Craig Douglas gently, “Step back those who choose to die with the rest of us.”

  The youngsters step back.

  “I tried, Wat,” says the General, sighing and strolling to the standard, “But all my fledglings have turned into eagles. Will you leave me now?”

  “You’re a waster, Dad,” said Wat glumly, “An arrogant feckless blood-crazy waster. But I cannae live alone among the women.”

  “So I have reason on my side after all!” shouts Craig Douglas with a laugh. Everyone but Wat echoes it. Even Shafto and the herald are laughing.

  “General Shafto,” says Craig Douglas in a voice cutting the laughter short, “Thank Sidney Dodds and say we will meet his men — ” (he glances at his wristcom) “ — in nine minutes.”

  “Good!” says Shafto, grinning. He salutes and strides back down the hill with the herald. The public eye remains.

  “Mibby I’m a waster, but I’m not feckless when it comes to strategy,” Craig Douglas tells his army, “We cannae win this fight, but we won’t lose it if you do what I say. I and Joe Dryhope will take the rear guard, Colonel Wardlaw the right wing, Archie Elphinstone the left. Wat leads the van with three picked men who take their cues from him. The outcome depends on that … No spying! This collogue is private,” he tells the public eye. It soars upward while the Ettricks pull on their helmets and form a circle.

  The public eye is now so high above the standard that hill and moorland and armed companies are spread beneath like a map with streams of ants pouring across.

  “Four minutes from now the massacre of the decade begins,” says a voice. “The day is mild and dry, visibility good, the ground in fine condition. General Craig Douglas said he has a strategy which will prevent defeat. What can it be, Wolfgang Hochgeist?”

  “I cannot possibly say,” says another voice, “For I do not think it can be done. The remark was, I fear, a nervous one. The nervous Craig Douglas nature appears in all males of that blood, especially in Wat Dryhope, the General’s eldest son.”

  “So what can Craig Douglas do?”

  “He can form a compact mass round the standard and fight on the spot till the last man drops, but too many of his soldiers are children for such a Teutonic stand. The Scottish temper and steepness of the hill indicate a downhill charge toward a more defensible standpoint. There are three: Blind Ghyll Quarry half a mile to the west; a windbreak wood to the south; and to the east, where the sea cliffs descend to an old atomic power station, the most tempting standpoint of all — a long concrete jetty in good condition. If the standard could be got there a troop of forty might hold off a thousand till nightfall, but Dodds commands five armies and has held back three to block approaches to the jetty, quarry and wood.”

  “The Ettricks are unpegging the guy ropes of their standard!” cries the other voice. “Where they aim it when lowered will give a clue. Here comes the umpire!”

  A white airship appears between clouds overhead, a red cross on the side and fifty small aircraft fixed to the underside. From a porthole comes a vivid flash then the clang of an enormous bell. The Ettricks stay in a tight mass round their standard on the hilltop. Three columns of Northumbrians approach the hill from different sides and start climbing to the top in curving paths that leave no straight opening for the force on the summit to charge through. The company on the summit regroup round their standard which dips to horizontal. Ropes, banner are swiftly twisted round the pole, it becomes the spine of a central column with a short column in front, longer ones on each side and behind. Dodds’s vanguard is nearing the summit when the Ettricks charge from it and crash like a torpedo through Shafto’s column.

  “Where are they going? Where are they going? Where are they going?” demands the public eye at an altitude which keeps the whole field of action in view. Among the soldiers below other eyes record the bloody strife of individual bodies.

  “To the jetty by way of the cliff,” says Hochgeist, “But it is too far, much too far away for them! Hopeless!”

  “Yet most of Ettrick have passed through Shafto’s men with surprisingly few losses and now run into Milburn’s ranks like a knife into butter! Dodds’s men on the hilltop are breaking formation and pouring down after them like an avalanche. The best the Ettricks can do is let their heels defend them. Their central column has gained the bottom of the slope and now pushes by the shortest way to the cliff top, why? They can’t mean to pitch their standard into the sea?”

  “Indeed no,” says Hochgeist, “Their last ten victories would be discounted by the War Council in Geneva. Craig Douglas may wish his clan to perish on this promontory for sentimental reasons. I believe the Picts made a historic stand here once.”

  “But his clan will be wiped out before they reach it! Craig Douglas turns with his rear guard to face the enemy and now he’s really in the thick of it! What a man! Look at the action of that sword! But the Northumbrians are overwhelming him while the rest chase and surround the Ettrick standard which is shedding its defenders like an onion shedding skins yet fighting and thrusting upward all the time with Wat Dryhope in the lead! And they’ve reached it — the cliff edge — wh
at are they trying to do? Are they actually raising the standard for a last flap of the old flag?”

  “Aha!”

  “There’s hardly a dozen left!”

  “Aha!”

  “Why won’t they surrender that damned pole? What are they trying to do, Wolfgang?”

  “Something very clever which has never been done before and which only a hopelessly outnumbered force in exactly this cliff-edge situation could achieve. I have underrated Craig Douglas. What a pity he did not live to see his plan carried through. But his nervous son may actually succeed.”

  The Ettrick standard, wagging like a corn stalk in a gale, is planted a yard from the cliff edge by its last few defenders. Wat holds the pole while landward of him three youngsters grasp ropes which stop it toppling into the sea. An Ettrick remnant hack and thrust to hold back a Northumbrian throng whose main wish is now to grab these very ropes.

  “Get a hold before you kill them!” screams Dodds from the rear.

  “Now!” yells Wat. At once the ropes are flung aside and grasped by Northumbrian hands. The pole too has been released to a Northumbrian. Wat stands a pace away, eyeing him. There is a pause.

  “You surrender?” screams Dodds from the rear. Soldiers round the standard, Ettrick and Northumbrian, stare at Wat whose great height and sudden composure make him seem the only man fit to answer. Though bruised and bloody he no longer looks clumsy. With a goblinish grin he shouts, “No!” and lunges at the Northumbrian holding the pole.

  “The Ettrick survivors now assault the Northumbrians holding their standard!” says Hochgeist. “Though hopelessly outnumbered the surprise of their attack in this narrow space has made the four or five Northumbrians holding the ropes release them and … OVER SHE GOES!”

  The public eye takes in a picture to be replayed in slow motion for centuries to come: a toppling steel pole tipped with an eagle, a flame-like banner unrolling behind like the tail of a comet, both going down toward the wrinkled blue-grey silk of the North Sea, then striking it obliquely and passing under with a splash. Half of the silvery length shoots up again at an angle then the whole length settles and finally sinks.

  “Was that allowed by the rules?”

  “I think so, yes,” says Hochgeist, laughing,

  “Because the rules do not forbid it. The Northumbrians captured the standard in fair fight. It was they who let it fall in the sea after an Ettrick counter-attack in a battle which still continues.”

  “Yes the Northumbrians have gone berserk,” says the public eye. “It’s an ugly sight, but who can blame them? After half a century of victories Clan Ettrick has drawn on a technicality so even if the entire Ettrick army is exterminated it retires unbeaten. Exterminated it will certainly be unless — good! There goes the bell for end of play. And now as the Red Cross aircraft descend on the field of honour some of you may want to switch to the banks of the Alamo for a peep at the big fight between the Tex and Mex sharpshooters; but I know many will stay with us here to learn the final body-count as the medicals get down to business.”

  The Northumbrian to whom he released the standard was the first man Wat Dryhope had deliberately killed. In previous fights his blows had been dealt in the thick of things, as much for defence as aggression, but his lunge at the Northumbrian had not been parried. His sword pierced a heart below a bewildered face because his victim had thought the battle over. Weary and disgusted Wat fell to the ground, saw the standard topple past him, heard renewed screams and yelling. Wanting no more he rolled over the cliff edge after the standard and lost consciousness.

  Later he saw seagulls far beneath pecking at something in the waves. For a while he thought he was looking down on his drowned body. Aches in every muscle soon dismissed that idea. He was dangling on the cliff-face over a partly solid and partly yielding projection. When his hands gripped it sharp spines jagged the palms and fingers. He groaned but held tight, trying to turn sideways.

  “Is this the last of the Ettricks?” asked a face in a globe three inches from his nose.

  “Fuck off,” he muttered, then yelled it with the full force of his lungs.

  “Wat Dryhope, eldest son of the slaughtered general,” said the face, “And clearly a reader who likes the robust language of twentieth-century fiction.”

  “Hello, can I give you a hand?” asked another voice. Wat wrenched himself round and saw grey rock split by horizontal cracks. His torso lay on a clump of whins rooted in a crack above a narrow ledge. Twisting his face upward he saw the cliff top a few feet above with a figure kneeling on the edge. It was General Shafto, stretching an arm down and saying, “Come on — let’s have you.”

  Wat raised a bloodstained right hand whose fingers, he knew, could now hold nothing, but Shafto gripped the wrist and dragged Wat up and over the edge as he fainted again.

  He wakened a minute later with the neck of a flask between his teeth and a mouthful of burning fluid which set him spluttering.

  “My aunts say this stuff does more harm than good,” said Shafto taking a swig, “I don’t believe them.”

  “Thanks,” said Wat and propped himself up on an elbow. Judging by the sun less than an hour had passed since Ettrick had lowered the standard and charged downhill, yet the only signs of battle on the moorland slopes were some gangrels collecting scattered swords, helmets, shields of the dead and badly maimed. Three or four groups of Northumbrians stood or sprawled in small groups awaiting transport. Departing trucks in the distance showed where the rest had gone. The hospital ship still hung between clouds overhead; all dead and wounded bodies except his own had been lifted into it. A Red Cross aircraft was settling on the ground a hundred yards away; he saw nurses with a stretcher preparing to come for him.

  “You were lucky it was me and not old Dodds who found you,” said Shafto affably, “He’d have pushed you into the sea. He says you got that draw by a trick — a filthy trick.”

  “He’s right. Attacking after pretending to surrender is warfare for weans. When Dad gave his orders we were too feart and excited to think.”

  “You’ll feel better when the medics have put more blood back into you,” said Shafto, “Your dad was a genius. He saw a loophole in the rules and made it work for him. People are tired of the old strategies — that battle will be disked by millions. In a month or three you and me should put our heads together and see if we can work out other new strategies — within the Geneva Conventions of course, always within the Conventions. I want you for an ally one day.”

  As Wat was carried to the aircraft he said harshly, “Am I the last? Are all the rest of Ettrick dead?”

  “No no no!” said a nurse soothingly, “Fourteen are living and most of them can be mended. Your brother Joe will mend.”

  “Good,” said Wat and wept, covering his face with his hands. The public eye floated above it saying, “Goodbye Wat Dryhope, a hero of our time — a brave, nervous, tricky hero obviously shaken to the core by what may be eventually voted The Battle of The Century, a surprising last-minute draw between Ettrick and the five clans of Northumbria United.”

  TWO

  PRIVATE HOUSES

  THE RED CROSS put the dead soldiers into pure white vaults below their homes where useless things were made good again. Women who had most loved them washed the bodies, laying them neatly between their belongings and the weapons and armour returned by the gangrels. Later the whole family came down for a last visit. Sisters, nieces, aunts wept and clasped each other. Children mooned around looking woeful or puzzled until grannies helped them choose an instrument, ornament or video to remind them of a favourite brother or uncle. The living left and the vault was sealed. Clear liquid welled from the floor until it covered everything inside. The liquid turned black and frothy like Irish stout, sank back through the floor into the roots of the powerplant and left the vault perfectly empty and clean.

  On the day after the funeral a morning service was held in the stalk room of Dryhope house. Smooth, milk-white and six feet wide the stalk grew l
ike a tree from the floor and out through the ceiling. All who remained of the family were gathered round it except three members of the Boys’ Brigade: these were at the Warrior house watching replays of the recent war with other junior cadets. In a few days they would return with solemn faces and expectations of being more thoroughly served by women, but now their sisters, aunts and grannies sprawled, reclined or squatted about the floor on rugs and large cushions. The four greatest great-grandmothers were enthroned in chairs. The only two adult males also had raised seats. Joe, smoking a good cigar, lay in a wheelchair with attachments supporting the stumps of an arm and leg. Wat, lightly bandaged, sprawled on a chaise longue.

  A stately woman of fifty was mother that day and stood at a crystalline table, the top patterned with coloured points of light which flowed from her finger-tips and continually changed as she played a Sanctus which had preceded the miracle of transubstantiation for centuries before. The Sanctus ended and two sturdy girls of twelve stood facing her, one on each side of the stalk. Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day. Nurses asked for flasks of cell serum and protein to help the growth of Joe’s new arm and leg, an ointment to ease Granny Tibs’s rheumatic knee, and Elastoplast for the medical chest. The mother struck the organ. With a low humming the objects appeared as diagrams on the stalk, each inside a circle. There were clicks, twangs and gurgles as the outlines received colour and tone. With sharp detonations the images became solid things in round cavities. The acolytes lifted them out and gave them to the nurses. With heavy thuds the cavities became grey blotches which faded from the stalk leaving it an unblemished, delicate shade of palest pink. The mother had made the sound sequence easier on the ear by blending it with chords from the Agnus Dei by Carver, Palestrina, Bach and Berlioz, covering the last thuds with a loud Amen which faded with the blotches fading from the stalk.