Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  As I hang dying, the winds are my winding-sheet; and I see Taliesin fall silent in front of Magog, who brings forth the coffin of jewels and gold and silver. And Taliesin weeps and turns back to the West and far country; Magog would kill him, but dares not break the oath of greeting, not for fear of Odinn, but for fear of the warband.

  As I hang dying, the winds are my winding-sheet; my eyes swim as fishes and I see the weighted body of Lancelot, scraping head downwards on the shallows along the river to the North Sea. And Magog will rule the Britons now by cross and by raven.

  As I hang dying, the winds are my winding-sheet; and the ravens of Odinn sit on the oak tree above me . . .

  When he reaches this point in the Edda, Gog feels a black cap being pulled down over his inner mind and falls into uncons­ciousness again. In his stupor, he hears the ravens croaking closer and closer. The noise provokes a waking dream, in which he turns his head to see that the sound comes from the idling engine of the black car. Maire gets out followed by Miniver. She is scolding him. “You fool. It’s got his name on. You don’t want him to know who he is, do you? All those years, breaking down his sense of identity. You might as well not have had a war, if you couldn’t at least do that.” And Gog sees Miniver scuttle forwards like a crab and pinch the Gogwulf Edda and sidle back into the car again with Maire, the car that makes off down the road, its engine croaking like a flock of ravens.

  When Gog comes properly to his senses, again there is no trace of what he has read or done or dreamed. So he staggers on towards Hadrian’s Wall. And the Wall is not there. A great shelf of earth is the only barricade that survives below Simon-burn. On the top of the barricade, following the straight line of the Roman fortifications, a tarmac road has been set, down which the convoys of lorries pass all night, rolling towards the North Sea. A ditch on either side of the road shows that the Romans feared a stab in the back from England as well as the frontal attack of the Picts and Scots. The wall was not so much a wall as a strip of fortress a hundred miles long, dividing the South from the North, defending each from the other, prevent­ing their coalition; but now it is gone and the people are uneasily one.

  Gog crosses the road and climbs to the top of a small hill, where his map marks the site of an old Roman camp. Under the moon, he looks back over twenty miles of the hills that hump slowly down from the quiet Border into England. He unrolls his ground sheet from his pack and curls up in the roots of an old hawthorn tree, twisted into ridged curlicues by the blast. The set whorl of its roots has been hollowed out by sheep into a dry, bare resting-place, which provides a break of root and earth against the prevailing wind from the south-west, a wind that wails through the hawthorn all night, while Gog sleeps fitfully, waking occasionally to see boles and branches like great black jellyfish supporting trailing black weeds in the sea-howling sky.

  X

  When the rain sifts through the first grey crack of morning, Gog wraps his groundsheet tighter about him, trying to conserve the warmth that seeps away from his skin, which seems to be cut into patches of cold and warmth that have no connection with each other except for an invisible seam of epidermis. Gog feels the rain gather on his neck and form a puddle above his collar­bone; it beads his hair and fills the drum of his exposed ear. Eventually, he is forced to sit up and thank the dawn for being a wet flannel to his face. He rises and pulls his sodden pack onto his shoulders over the groundsheet, which hangs as a gluey cloak about him. So Gog stumbles off, Learlike into foul weather. “Fool,” he says to himself, “fool.” He does not know why he is where he is, only that there is nowhere else he can think of being.

  Gog has not gone ten paces over the slopping hummocks and slimy tufts of grass towards the shelter of a distant stone wall, when the ground gives way beneath him. He finds himself sliding down a ventilating shaft and dropping into a vast underground hangar, roofed with corrugated iron and lit with electric lights. Racks stretch into the distance supporting every form of military equipment; it is as if the genie had let Aladdin into the quarter­master’s store which supplied the whole world war. There are wirelesses and webbing, bayonets and barbed wire, bazookas and belts, light tanks and hobnails, mess tins and iron rations, socks and spats, camouflage netting and flares, picks and rifles, sten guns and spoons, spittoons and polish, and all the etceteras of survival and destruction needed by the compleat soldier in his combined role as navvie, skivvy, tramp, dummy, gunner and ripper.

  At a table in the cleared middle of this cornucopia of war materials sits the Bagman, fiddling away at a massy pyramid of valves and tubes and wires and lights, and holding a black microphone in his hand. His white beard is a tuft of filaments, sparks seem to fly off his mustachios, as he berates the deaf world.

  “Give me the airwaves, or I shall destroy a great city in the Far East. You shall see a cloud rise higher than the Rising Sun, the awful wrist of God raising Itself from the cursed city and opening into the spread hand of His wrath. And this warning shall be as nothing to you in the hardness of your hearts. And again the Lord shall open His hand and smite a great city utterly, yea, the dust that bloweth in the wind shall be of more substance than the foundations thereof. This second warning shall bring you peace on earth, but that peace shall be as the poppy in the fields of corn, a peace that passeth and is taken away. For how shall ye pacify the heavens when ye deny the Lord’s servant in your midst? The time of the final solution . . .”

  Now the Bagman deigns to look up at the bewildered Gog, who has collected his limbs together in their due order and has advanced towards the Bagman.

  “It is the time of Gog and Magog,” the Bagman intones, “the time of the last act of the world. To prove this, who should drop in at the studio but Gog himself, who was here at the beginning of Albion and shall be at her end. Well, Gog, tell the people, your people, what you shall do to Magog when you find him in London.”

  Gog looks at the microphone which the Bagman holds towards him and then he looks round the visible audience, the gape of haversacks, the eyes of binoculars, the snouts of rifles, the ears of buckles. The invisible audience at the end of the air­waves, the men and women yawning and stretching as they rise to go to work in the shiver of the dawn, he can imagine them. Out of sight, in mind.

  “Magog?” Gog says. “In London? He is here. Everywhere. He wants to kill me. To kill us. Daily. In the farm. In the factory. He’s there, Magog is. In the plough that crushes your foot. In the lathe that takes off your thumb. In the loom that threads your guts into the weave. In the potter’s dust that poxes your lungs. In the dum-dum that makes a stew of your chest, the incendiary that lights your hair like a wick. Magog’s there. His machines can kill you as you tend them. What comes from his machines can kill you if your brothers use them on you. Magog! We are Magog’s men set to murder our own, till we can turn on Magog and kill him.”

  The Bagman nods his hoary head, approving. “And when you get to London, the great wen?” he prompts. “When you find Magog sitting in his cesspool of pride and corruption, what then?”

  “He is as the hydra,” Gog says. “So many heads. Every hair a stinking chimney stack, every pore a sewer. Magog covers the earth and the millions live under his brick rags like lice. What shall I do when I meet Magog in London? Magog is London and he has swallowed up Albion. How shall we wring the neck of a whole city?”

  “Call down the fire,” the Bagman says, “unless they deliver unto me Broadcasting House.”

  “Even if they do,” Gog says, “will you not destroy London? How can you build Jerusalem on the Thames in the smut of Mammon and the belching of Moloch and the maw of Magog who consumes all? When Jerusalem was first in London town, before she fled to the Holy Land, what was she like?”

  “I am Wayland Merlin Blake Smith,” the Bagman chants. “And in my third coming as William Blake after the second destruction of London by the Great Fire, I set down my memory of the first sacred Jerusalem in London, which I built in my original incarnation as Wayland, the smith of the old go
ds of England.

  “The fields from Islington to Marybone,

  To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,

  Were builded over with pillars of gold,

  And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

  “Her Little-ones ran on the fields,

  The Lamb of God among them seen,

  And fair Jerusalem his bride,

  Among the little meadows green.

  “Pancrass and Kentish-town repose

  Among her golden pillars high,

  Among her golden arches which

  Shine upon the starry sky . . .”

  “Yes, London was Jerusalem,” Gog says. “Before memory, before history . . . Jerusalem here . . . the golden age . . . What went wrong?”

  The Bagman continues his chant, sad and low:

  “What are those golden Builders doing

  Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington,

  Standing above that mighty Ruin

  Where Satan the first victory won?”

  “And what’s my bloody watchman doin’, muckin’ about with me wireless sets,” a voice says from down the hangar. Gog looks up to see a dumpy field marshal slithering towards him, with medals clinking against each other all the way from his gold epaul­ettes to the shine of his Sam Browne belt. Then the marshal takes off his cap of red and gold to reveal the sleek scalp of Maurice. He rips the microphone out of the Bagman’s grasp and pulls its wire from its socket. “I’ll ’ave your whiskers one by one with tweezers, if you give ’em a wireless bearin’ on me whereabouts.”

  Maurice turns on Gog. “Lofty again, bugger me. Turn up, ’ere there and everywhere, don’t you? Like a bad dream. Can’t close me peepers without you poppin’ up your ugly mug. What brought you down ’ere to me depot?”

  “I fell through a hole in the ground.”

  “Got to ’ave ventilation. We ain’t worms, you know,” Maurice turns and waves expansively round the vast dump of war goods. “ ’Ow do you like my little ’ome from ’ome?”

  “You could start a war yourself from here,” Gog says.

  “I will, I will,” Maurice says, grinning. “You know what these big wars are for, Lofty? To give cash back to the people what gave it originally to the White’all bandits. Look at this lot. I pick it up dirt cheap, the government practically gives it away. Now the war’s over against the jerries, it’s surplus. You can’t pull an ’aycart with a tank, can you now? Shoot a rook with a six-pounder? Now the army’s bein’ demobbed, they’ve got piles of this junk just layin’ around disfigurin’ our ’eritage, England’s beautiful countryside. I’m a preservationist, I am – I preserve what I can flog. I cart away the eyesores. Just to ’elp tidy up the place for peace and all. I don’t charge ’em ’ardly nothin’ for carriage. I must admit, I do cart away the junk by night sometimes, without askin’ a by-your-leave, when the sentry’s ’avin a kip on the side. But it’s just to get rid of the eyesores. Then I tuck the junk away ’ere, leavin’ England’s green and pleasant land green and pleasant, sort of.”

  “What’s the use,” Gog says, “of storing up all this war surplus, if it’s surplus?”

  “Use your loaf, Lofty,” Maurice replies, his glib chops sliding about like two lumps of lard in a hot pan. “Of course, it’s so ’igh up where your loaf is, the bats may ’ave nested there. What’s surplus ’ere may be needed express over there. No sooner ’ave big blokes stopped a big war in one place than little blokes start a ’ole lot of little wars somewheres else. Then they need all this junk again. Stands to reason. War’s based on surplus. You get too many blokes, so you’ve got to put ’em down. So you make too much stuff to put ’em down with. So you ’ave to get rid of the stuff. But then the blokes begin breedin’ up again and the ’ole ball rolls on, keeps on rollin’.

  “Me, I’m all for surplus. Buy cheap, sell dear, that’s the gravy. Like I told you, I’m a sort of Robin ’Ood. White’all screws you to pay for this lot, then I screw White’all and get it for a whistle. Then I flog it to foreign bleeders, what don’t know better than carvin’ each other up like Christmas turkeys all the year round. So the wogs knock each other off with the ’elp of me surplus, and we don’t ’ave the bother of knockin’ the wogs off to keep the White Cliffs of Dover white and all. They can ’ave a good punch-up on their own, they don’t need us, thank you kindly. What’s usin’ a gunboat compared to floggin’ two gun­boats to two blokes what ’ate each other? So the wogs take care of their own and we don’t ’ave to spend nothin’ on defence, which ’elps the economy and ’elps the British people like you and me. Buy British, I say. You Croak Better That Way.”

  “Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” the Bagman warns sombrely, “and to Gog that which is Gog’s.”

  “But I am,” Maurice says. “I bleedin’ well am doin’ just that. The stuff I can’t flog to the wogs to keep ’em ’appy mur­derin’ one another, I change over to peaceful purposes for people like old Gog. Swords into ploughshares, that’s old ’at. But bayonets into brassière ’ooks, cartridges into cosmetic cases, parachutes into knickers, you name a necessity and I’ve got it ’andy. There’s nothin’ I can’t turn into somethin’. If I can’t flog a gun, I’ll use it as a fishin’ rod. Every bullet’s got its billet, and if you can’t fire it and blow a bloke’s breakfast apart, you can ’ave it flat in a fancy pattern and use it to keep your cuffs together. Don’t matter ’ow the bullet ends, war or peace, do it? So long as you get paid proper.”

  “It’s all the same,” Gog agrees, “all the same. War or peace. The people get killed fast or they get killed slow. But they die all the same, without doing what they want to do. And some­one’s always making a packet out of it. Fast or slow, a profit.”

  “We all would if we could,” Maurice says. “That’s why I get along all right. ’Cos I’m doin’ what comes naturally to all of us.”

  “Naturally?” Gog says in despair. “This?” His eyes rove round the stacks of mortars and the racks of bombs, round the myriads of burnished buttons, the flashes piled on badges piled on stars piled on piping piled on pips piled on ribbons piled on redcoats piled on flags piled on every fol-de-rol and geegaw of glory invented by the peacock military. “Are we naturally this?”

  “Tooth and claw behind fine feather,” the Bagman says. “Nature’s fang behind the fur. By their bite shall ye know them. Men. The beasts are better.”

  “This?” Gog says. “Naturally?” He moves over to a hump of tin hats and gives it a kick that sends fifty metal crania roll­ing over the floor of the underground hangar.

  “Hey, keep your feet to yourself, Lofty,” Maurice says, dodging the hats. Gog ignores him and scoops up grenades with both hands and lobs them at Maurice, who leaps aside from the iron pineapples. “Their pins’ll drop out, you crazy bugger.” But Gog has just begun. Volleys of munitions and material begin to fusillade Maurice, broadsides of revolvers, shoelaces, great­coats, valves, tyres, berets. The Bagman joins in the assault, firing off anything near at hand. Maurice backs screaming until he reaches the central prop of the hangar, where he falls to the ground and rolls himself in a ball to protect his vitals, his chest on his thighs, his hands under the soles of his shoes. The muni­tions cover him up, make a junk heap above him of canvas and steel and cloth and brass. The surface of the growing heap is always skidding or slipping, as Gog and the Bagman keep hurl­ing stuff onto the pile and as the buried Maurice kicks and struggles in the interior. But after a quarter of an hour of bombardment, the heap reaches thirty feet high to the ceiling of the hangar round the main roof prop, a vast mound fit for the tumulus of an ancient hero instead of the detritus over a modern profiteer.

  Gog and the Bagman stand watching the burial mound. There is no movement from its inner recesses. Maurice lies still under the garbage of destruction. As a coup de grâce, Gog swings round a six-pounder to point at the pile, opens the breech as if he had been an artilleryman all his life, slides in a shell, closes the breech, and fires. The effect of the explosion in the sub­terr
anean space is volcanic. The corrugated iron reverberates and eardrums thunder. The racks fall inwards and the mound flies outwards. The main roof collapses, bringing down the middle of the ceiling and layers of falling sod.

  A great rift is opened up to the cleft of blue above, which makes a tear in the bright cloth of the morning haze. Gog and the Bagman clamber up over gun muzzles and canvas straps and cloth tunics, all now covered with the soft khaki uniform of the soil that insidiously infiltrates and eliminates everything with the slow guerrilla stealth of time. They climb out of the hole in the ground onto the meadow and walk down the hill that looks back twenty miles over the Border. The meadows lollop up and down lazily under their grasses. The trees saunter upright, their branches backed by such clarity of milk cloud that they seem pinned on opaque glass. A white-walled farm-house exhales a puff of white smoke, which teeters in the still air, unwilling to disperse. A rook croaks and a cow answers it, as if a moo could reply to a caw.

  Dew beads Gog’s boots, crushed grass jets its sharp smell onto the hairs of his nose, so that he sneezes. He smiles and opens his palms towards the Bagman, as if the view were his own creation. “Naturally,” he says, “this.”

  XI

  Down the road is Chester’s Fort, and Gog and the Bagman hop over the wall to view the remains. A groundplan of stones divides the tufts of grass, the huge grid of a compass with the foundations of gateways to North and South and East and West, with barracks and bath-houses and quartermaster’s stores and officers’ mess and H.Q. Soldiers’ camps come and go, but their ingredients remain the same. Most camps are transient; but the Romans tried to deny their impermanence and build for ever. Canvas and pegs were derisible to them; even bricks and lime were not enough. Only stone would do for the legionaries, even if the quarries were distant. Yet, after all, the Romans also left and the stones fell or were carted away to make the walls of nearby manor houses. Only the ruins of what the Romans built remain, although they were right in one of their convictions. The state of war is permanent and camps of soldiers, although they are always struck even when pitched in granite, are always pitched again.