Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  When Gog is walking again on the track up the hill, with the sweat stinging his eyes and his heart rackety in his ribs, he can­not believe the attempt at murder; but lead pellets or imagina­tion smart in his arm, and he begins to consider every wall on his flank as the hiding places of his enemies, Magog or Maurice or the woman in the motor-car. Who knows if the busbies of the redcoats won’t pop up over the piled stones in the thin red line of the Peninsular War with levelled muskets and the officer at the far end, all tricked up in gold braid and cockade, won’t he lift his sword and shout, “Fire,” with the volley crackling out to pit Gog with bloody holes and break his bones with balls of lead and tumble him forwards before the firing squad in a final obeisance? And that blob of scrub, suppose that a thin black executioner rises and points a sten-gun and drills Gog length­ways and sideways for good measure so that twenty little spurts spout from his veins? Or suppose, Gog is struggling head down­wards against his pack’s weight, counting each pace higher as halfway to peace and utterly oblivious of the threat behind him, when a hand comes hot from heaven to stove in his skull with an iron pipe, a hand belonging to a killer who has crept up behind him unheard on the soft grass in his rubber soles? Gog looks about and each fold in the ground wraps the body of a villain and each rock shields the weapon of a murderer and each trunk shades a highwayman and the very ground may be mined and the very clouds may rain bombs and there is no shelter under earth or in fields or below heaven, only the knowledge that every tick of time is imminent with quick death or slow death, but death certain as the heart has a beat or the pulse a rate.

  So Gog hurries on with nature rising in a conspiracy all about him on his way over the next three ranges of hills. He leaves the threat of the stunted firs, each poking up a hairy snout inquisitively from its plantation, and he reaches the windy peaty nothing of the high moors, with the purple ling heather brushing at his bare ankles like dry tentacles and the bracken crackling under his heels to give him away and the dwarf furze pricking his calves to leave a trail of blood droplets for hounds to follow and the tormentil flowers peeping at him with yellow eyes and common speedwell asking him questions with pale-blue petals as taunting as the inquisitive woman’s stare in the car and the scattered sheep, deeply suspicious, bleating out his precise where­abouts and the saddle of fell between Glengaber Hill and Peat­shank Head making him visible clear down to Yarrow for any­one with binoculars and the soggy stepping down by Deuchar Burn full of boobytraps of bottomless bog.

  And once out on the road again, there’s no mercy to be expected from passing cars, when any driver can flip his wheel one inch aside and catapult walkers to perdition. And the bonnie banks of Yarrow aren’t bonnie any more, but full of smooth white stones handy for chucking at strangers. And it’s no better going up over the second range of hills, they’re scraped so bare that anyone on the road’s as good a mark as a fly on a marrow. And the traveller down the hill is a sitting duck for the squad concealed behind the peering peepholes of that old border tower fifty feet high. And the road along Ettrick Water is so crashing from the cataracts that no one can hear if Magog’s not creeping up behind, so glance back, glance back, and if there’s nobody, perhaps he’s ducked into a gateway, he’s a sharp one, he won’t get seen however quick a look back, so don’t fall into the stupor of the march then, staring at those black boots, slog, slog, slog­ging it through the Borders, don’t let the rhythm of the road unhinge the sense, the hearing what’s following, but up now, over the last hills before Hawick, limp-­loping in the low sun, hardly daring to fill the water-­bottle because the burns are poisoned by foul factory or foul play, and down the last slopes in the twilight, where the dark coppices hide werewolves and botgasties, and the evening wings up like a raven, and back on the main road, it’s worse really, with the lorries bashing up to flatten whomsoever, and even at the houses of Hawick at last, they’re pill-boxes and waiting dungeons, and fatigue’s a double pack on the back and feet drag scuffling and sack-heavy, but then there’s the lights of a cinema showing THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS, and Maurice’s bribe will easily cover a place to paradise, only one and threepence for a chance of rest and oblivion, with coloured celluloid to chase away the spooks and hobgoblins, and musty plush to recline on, while eyes feast on houris and heroes and happenings incredible.

  The script of the end of the film, which Gog sees in the cinema at Hawick, is written as follows:

  SHOT 287 KING HAROLD, DRESSED IN SKIN­TIGHT CHAIN MAIL WHICH SHOWS OFF HIS ATHLETIC FIGURE TO ADVANTAGE, LEANS WEARILY ON HIS BROADSWORD. AT HIS RIGHT HAND STANDS THE ENGLISH CHAMPION, GOGFRITH, WHO IS SUPPORTING KING HAROLD’S FAINTING DAUGHTER, THE BEAUTEOUS HILDA (Wigs by Arden, Clothes by Lanvin). IN THE BACKGROUND, DRAWN UP IN A CIRCLE FOR A LAST STAND, SHAGGY ENGLISH WARRIORS IN SHAGGIER CHAIN MAIL.

  KING HAROLD

  So let them come. Here will we stand. On Hastings hill, let all men say, the Britons knew how to die!

  HILDA

  (WITH PASSION) So young!

  GOGFRITH

  (WITH MORE PASSION) It shall not be!

  SHOT 288 KING WILLIAM OF NORMANDY, DRESSED IN SKIN-TIGHT ARMOUR WHICH ALSO SHOWS OFF HIS ATHLETIC FIGURE TO ADVANTAGE, WEARS A SURCOAT OF WHITE SATIN EMBROID­ERED WITH SILVER LILIES TO SIGNIFY FRENCH LUXURY. HE LISTENS TO THE EVIL COUNSEL OF MORTUS, BASTARD AND ENGLISH RENEGADE, JEALOUS OF GOGFRITH’S LANDS AND DESIROUS OF THE BEAUTEOUS HILDA. MORTUS HOLDS IN EACH HAND THE END OF A CURVED BOW, BENT IN THE MIDDLE.

  MORTUS

  (WITH EVIL, SUBTLE SMILE) And with a string, break the iron wall. (PRODUCES AN ARROW MAGICALLY WITH A WAVE OF HIS HAND) And with a point, pierce a cunning hole.

  KING WILLIAM

  Only a brother knows how to beat a brother. HE LIFTS HIS HAND IN A SIGN OF COMMAND.

  SHOT 289 LINES OF NORMAN ARCHERS SLIP THEIR BOW-STRINGS ONTO THE NOTCHES OF THEIR CURVED BOWS.

  SHOT 290 THE CIRCLE OF ANGLO-SAXON WAR­RIORS LOCK THEIR SHIELDS AND PEER ANXIOUSLY INTO THE SETTING SUN.

  SHOT 291 A LINE OF NORMAN ARCHERS FITS ITS ARROWS ON ITS BOWSTRINGS.

  SHOT 292 A SECTION OF THE CIRCLE OF ANGLO-SAXON WARRIORS PUTS UP ITS HANDS TO SHADE ITS EYES.

  SHOT 293 A DOZEN NORMAN ARCHERS POINT THEIR BOWS UP IN THE AIR, READY TO FIRE.

  SHOT 294 SIX ANGLO-SAXON WARRIORS LOOK AT EACH OTHER, SHAKING THEIR HEL­METS IN DOUBT.

  SHOT 295 KING WILLIAM DROPS HIS HAND AND RUBS IT, TIRED OF HOLDING IT IN THE AIR FOR SO LONG. MORTUS SMILES EVILLY.

  SHOT 296 LINES OF NORMAN ARCHERS FIRE THEIR ARROWS INTO THE AIR.

  SHOT 297 KING HAROLD RUBS HIS CHINGUARD.

  KING HAROLD

  To fight is easy. To wait impossible.

  GOGFRITH

  We shall not wait long.

  AN ARROW STICKS IN THE GROUND BETWEEN THEM.

  SHOT 298 WARRIORS FROM THE ANGLO-SAXON CIRCLE FALL OUT WITH ARROWS STICKING FROM EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY AND CREVICE AND CRACK, UNTIL THE UNBROKEN CIRCLE LOOKS MORE LIKE BATTLEMENTS.

  SHOT 299 MORTUS GRINS MORE EVILLY.

  MORTUS

  England is thine, mine liege!

  KING WILLIAM

  (TROUBLED) A knavish trick to take a kingdom.

  (SHOUTS) Charge!

  HE JUMPS WITH ONE BOUND IN HIS ARMOUR ONTO A HORSE, WHICH GALLOPS ON SHOT.

  SHOT 300 GOGFRITH HOLDS HIS SHIELD, AS FULL OF ARROWS AS A HALF-PLUCKED GOOSE, OVER THE COWERING HILDA. KING HAROLD STANDS UPRIGHT AND PROUD.

  KING HAROLD

  How shall we fight the air? England must fall when death from the sky . . .

  AN ARROW STICKS IN KING HAROLD’S HELMET. HE STAGGERS AND FALLS.

  SHOT 301 GOGFRITH LEANS OVER ONE SIDE OF THE STRICKEN KING HAROLD.

  THE WEEPING HILDA, STILL BEAUTE­OUS DESPITE HER TEARS, LEANS OVER THE OTHER SIDE OF HER FATHER. HER BLONDE LOCKS TOUCH HIS HELMET. BELOW THEM, KING HAROLD KEEPS A HAND OVER HIS EYE POLITELY.

  SHOT 302 (CLOSE UP) GORE COMING THROUGH KING HAROLD’S FINGERS OVER HIS EYE.

  RESUME SHOT 301 KING HAROLD

>   (GASPING) I die (GASP) for England! (GASP, GASP) Gogfrith! (GASP) I give to thee (GASP) all I treasure! (GASP, GROAN) The throne is lost (GASP) but Hilda (GHASTLY GASP) was mine (GASP) and (PREGNANT GASP AND PAUSE) . . . KING HAROLD JOINS THE HANDS OF GOGFRITH AND HILDA ON THE BLACK CROSS THAT WE NOTICE FOR THE FIRST TIME IS PAINTED ON HIS MAIL CHEST.

  SHOT 303 (CLOSE UP) THE THREE HANDS, ONE BLOODY, JOINING ABOVE THE BLACK CROSS.

  RESUME SHOT 301 KING HAROLD

  Hilda is (GASP) now thine! (LAST GASP.)

  SHOT 304 KING WILLIAM LEADS THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGING UP HASTINGS HILL, WITH MORTUS FAR IN THE REAR.

  SHOT 305 GOGFRITH PULLS THE KNEELING HILDA UPRIGHT FROM HER FATHER’S BODY.

  GOGFRITH

  The King is dead, but . . . his people still live, and shall for ever!

  SHOT 306 THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGES UP THE HILL.

  SHOT 307 GOGFRITH WAVES HIS SWORD IN THE AIR.

  GOGFRITH

  Round me, Britons!

  SHOT 308 THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGES UP THE HILL.

  SHOT 309 THE LAST OF THE BRITONS FORM ROUND GOGFRITH.

  SHOT 310 THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGES UP THE HILL.

  SHOT 311 THE LAST OF THE BRITONS WAVE THEIR SWORDS.

  SHOT 312 THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGES UP THE HILL.

  SHOT 313 THE LAST OF THE BRITONS WAVE THEIR SWORDS.

  SHOT 314 THE NORMAN CAVALRY CHARGES UP THE HILL. IT IS A LONG HILL.

  SHOT 315 THE LAST OF THE BRITONS WAVE THEIR SWORDS. THE SWORDS ARE LONG TOO.

  SHOTS 316 to 387 HACKING AND HEWING AND STABBING AND STICKING AND BELT­ING AND BASHING AND CLOCKING AND CLOBBERING AND TRIPPING AND TUMBLING AND DASHING AND DRUB­BING AND GASHING AND GROANING AND MOANING AND MAULING AND KICKING AND KNOCKING AND WRENCHING AND WRECKING IN A MOUNTED MONTAGE OF QUICK CUTS. UNKINDEST­ CUT OF ALL TO:

  SHOT 388 GOGFRITH CHOPPING OFF THE HEAD OF MORTUS. ALTHOUGH RINGED WITH ENEMIES, NEVERTHELESS WITH ONE SWEEP OF HIS SWORD HE CLEARS A WAY THROUGH THEIR RANKS TO THE NEAREST HORSE, ACROSS THE WITHERS OF WHICH THE BEAUTEOUS HILDA IS LUCKILY LYING. WITH ONE MIGHTY BOUND, GOGFRITH LEAPS INTO THE SADDLE AND GALLOPS OFF OVER ENGLAND’S MAGNIFICENT DOWNS INTO THE SUNSET (WHICH IS DUE NORTH IN 1066).

  NARRATOR’S VOICE:

  And so, the lovers rode off into the greenwood, where the beauteous Hilda would bear a son, named . . . (SUSPENSE) Robin Hood! And King William, now called the Conqueror, rode to London Town to build a Mighty England for Robin’s Merrie Men!

  SOUND OF SEVENTY PIECE STRING ORCHESTRA PLAYING “HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN.”

  THE END.

  The critics have called the next feature of the double bill, a sleeper. It is. When the usher wakes Gog after the final curtain in an empty cinema, Gog cannot remember a better ninety minutes of riveting, fun-packed, thrilling, magical, side-splitting, mammoth doze.

  VII

  By Borthwick Water under the road bridge, Gog sleeps. Occasional noises of army lorries passing overhead on the devious errands of war disturb Gog’s restless rest. Morning seeps greyly over the river; on the wilting waters, the reflections of the mill chimneys stretch out their creased fingers. Already, there is the clipping of feet overhead on the bridge and the soft brushing of the tyres of bicycles. When Gog climbs up the embankment to the wall by the river, he sees the first mill shift of men and women going to their work, their fingers already busy at rolling cigarettes or striking matches or stuffing pipes, their faces stitched with threads of wrinkles from lack of sleep, their direction towards­ their toil as purposeful as the movement of a shuttle. The mill gate is open and it swallows them up, young and old, and the hooter sounds and the gate closes. These are not the mills of God but of men; but they also grind people slow and grind them exceeding small without any intervention from the Almighty.

  Gog leaves the dark town of Hawick behind him, a black rage in his heart against the machines of Moloch devouring their sacrifices. And as he takes the road out of the edges of the town into the fields, he sees that a vast and gobbling contraption has broken loose and is eating up the corn harvest, sown early here for midsummer reaping. Instead of a line of men with scythes, swinging at the stalks that bow low before their masters loitering forwards, a red tractor supporting the whirling skeleton of a water-wheel sweeps up the corn stalks, digests them in a clank­ing maw of wheels and iron plate, and farts them out in neat small oblong turds of hay. These smoking droppings fall regu­larly in the track of the machine that is eating up men’s food, and Gog runs forward along the spoor towards the monster. As he pursues it, it turns at the end of the field and begins crawling and whirling towards him, the reaper-wheel spinning round its cross-bars of death and the goggled devil in the tractor gnashing gears like the teeth of Furies.

  Gog reaches up with both hands at the rotten branch of an old oak tree in the middle of the field, standing bare and alone in a patch of grass, in front of which the corn parts as the waves of the sea part in front of the bow-wave of a ship before the prow reaches them. Gog breaks the branch off with the hanging weight of his body and he projects it out before him, priapic and terrible, and he tucks its centre of gravity under the crook of his right elbow and he uses his left hand to raise its point erect off the ground. And he shouts, “Machines shall not eat men,” and he lumbers off towards the approaching and gobbling wheel, his oaken lance at the ready, his legs clumping down in a carthorse’s trot, his pack jouncing on his spine, with so much sweat trickl­ing down his forehead into his eyes that a vizor seems to be interfering with his sight. Over the sound of the pounding of his blood, Gog hears the yell of the enemy, a roar of dismay. And then, there is a shock that wrenches his lance from his hand. He is flung from the ground forwards into the air. The monstrous machine groans and rumbles and halts. Rods of whirling weight flog into the falling Gog, who plunges from bruising into black­ness as he is stretched on the wheel and dragged down and broken against the ground.

  Gog opens his eyes to find himself looking through the spokes of the wheel, which has stopped and crushed him. Peering between the spokes are two heads on different levels. The higher head is that of an apple-cheeked country lad, his iron-rimmed goggles pushed up on his forehead to make two black sockets there. The lower head is that of an ageing pippin, yellow and baggy and seamed, as though it has been left on a shelf in the attic to ripen for a winter and has been forgotten for fifty years. The pippin, which wears a red tam o’shanter with a brass cap-badge above an army greatcoat, speaks:

  “Back oop,” it says. “He’s ter great a git t’ pull oot. An’ if he’s croakit, he’s not worth t’haulin’.”

  The lad with the goggles disappears from Gog’s view and the pippin withdraws a little later, so that Gog now looks up at a rift of blue in the cloud overhead, a cleft of bright sky barred over by the spokes of the machine. An engine thuds and catches and races, gears clatter and hold, and the spokes move back­wards, pressing Gog briefly deeper into the crushed stalks and dry ground, then disappearing out of his sight to leave the sky naked to his eyes. Gog smiles and fills his chest with air and stretches his arms and legs and twists his neck from side to side. Incredibly, he feels no pain, and he levers himself into a sitting position, using his elbows. Before him, he sees that the face like a pippin is attached to a pixie’s body, not much more than four feet tall. The pixie, however, does not wear a green doublet and hose below his greatcoat, but corduroy trousers and a leather jacket little bigger than a rabbitskin.

  “Thoo’s alive,” the pixie says. Then he considers his state­ment and finds it wanting and adds doubtfully, “in a manner o’ speakin’.”­

  “Yes,” Gog says. Then, feeling a twinge in his back, he too adds, “I mean, quite.”

  He looks down to where the tractor has stopped a few yards away. The driver climbs down off his seat and walks over and demands:­

  “Wha’ the hell wear ye drivin’ at?”

  “Thoo wert drivin’,” the pixie states. “He were chargin’.”

  “Why were you destroying the
corn?” Gog says. “It’s for men like you, isn’t it?”

  “I wear reapin’ it,” the lad says. “When wear ye born, mon? The dark ages? The corn’s all inside the reaper. It’s no hurt.”

  “And all the men who used to reap the corn?” Gog says. “What do they live on now?”

  “They’re all in t’ army,” the pixie says, laughing. “If it weren’t fer lads on tractors, t’ corn’d rot on t’ stalk.”

  “There’s e’en lassies on the land now,” the lad says darkly. “Female she-males.” He spits into the stubble moodily. “It’s nasty wha’ goes on under a skirt e’en if a lass is wearin’ pants, an’ I dinna like it. The land’s a mon’s job, an’ tha’ tha’.”

  “So it’ll be agen, when t’ men git back,” the pixie says sooth­ingly. Then he looks slyly at Gog. “Hoo coom thoo’s not in t’ army? Or did they let thee oot, ’cos Jerry sent a shell off an’ took a leaf oot o’ thee?” He taps his head significantly. “Ah can see thoo’s got a hole in tha temple. T’ war put thee in wi’ t’ bread an’ took thee oot wi’ t’ cakes, didn’t it, like? Left thee ninepence for a shillin’?”

  “Dinna ask him,” the country lad says. “If he’s one o’ God’s oddlin’s, he’ll no tell ye. I ne’er met a mon sort o’ comical in the head who didna ken he was stronger up thear ’n me.” He puts a hand in the hip pocket of his dungarees, keeping his fingers moving inside the cloth, as though rolling a piece of dough between­ them and his thumb. “But as for ye,” he says to Gog, “ye’re a bluidy menace. Tryin’ to booger up me reaper.”