The Queen's Play
Page 14
Near the evening of what turned out to be the final day of the war, I was locked in a fierce combat with an enemy soldier who had quite bravely taken control of one of our elephants. The strain and wounds of the past months had taken their toll, and I knew I would not survive for long. And then the accursed or the blessed arrow, depending on which side you fought, lodged itself in the king’s trunk, and before you knew the weapon had fallen from your hand, the conflict abruptly abandoned. Thus it occurred to you that not even of your own story were you the hero. Privilege and history overran you there as well. Like a pawn clashing in a corner you watched the game end, your life pardoned, simply because it was not you who were its focal point, but another, someone more powerful, one on whom things ultimately hinged. Your blood, your pain, your cruelty were a waste, even if the stain of loss, of disgrace, would stick to you for as long as you lived.
Yet now this was history, dead, forgotten. A vast river of sleep flowed between the past and me. And today was different, full of wellbeing, a fresh beginning. I clutched at this fiction with every bit of my will. And it grew, this thought, that I had somehow escaped from history, was outside it, watching it unroll in a procession of shadowy forms on a cloth-screen in the distance.
Late that day, I went out into the hills. Light slashing through trees, birds twittering and cooing, busily content in their tiny bird lives. Some way up, to my left, there was a group of ancient rock- caves, hidden from view by wild brambles and azalea shrubs, that I had explored on an earlier outing. The walls inside, wherever light touched them, were covered in strange dancing figures and drawings in red, blue, and yellow pigments. I thought of them as I passed the brush on my way along the hill. Were these childish sketches or high art from an earlier time? Who could tell? What the images had meant to those who painted them could now not be discerned, was lost forever. Time was always mocking us, deluding us, here bestowing grandeur on our follies, and there turning our artistry to childish doodles.
Webbed in such thoughts, I emerged from the trees at the head of the knoll. There again was the ancient bell hanging from its rotting wooden structure, between one aeon and another, the sole visible peg in the fabric of time. I hadn’t noticed that the sun had gone behind a bank of cloud, while several others were rushing to cover the sky from end to end. Soon only to the north a patch of blue remained, the eye of heaven that was fast closing, withdrawing from us, locking our age and our misdeeds in the trap of our own making, snuffing out here and now the prevailing stench of our bloody history. Was I then the last witness breathing in the last of my time’s air, which, regardless of the reek of history, came to me laden with the scent of ancient trees?
This age must end, I thought, drifting toward the bell, for a new age to dawn. An age that would revere not the grand, the awe-full, the terrifying, but the small, the commonplace, the briefness of gesture. And, because of this simple turn of attention, rise in triumph over all others. An age of poets, an age for poets.
I moved my fingers over the rough, slowly corroding surface of the bell and, drawing all my strength into my arms, struck the heavy gong with both hands, marking at once the closure of the old and the coming of the new.
For their generous advice and support, I am deeply grateful to David Brooks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Hulse, Satendra Nandan, and Vanessa Smith.
At Roundfire we publish great stories. We lean towards the spiritual and thought-provoking. But whether it’s literary or popular, a gentle tale or a pulsating thriller, the connecting theme in all Roundfire fiction titles is that once you pick them up you won’t want to put them down.