Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  When the champions of stone and wood and night are dead or fled, the Trojans blow the trumpet for the advance against the metal giants standing before them. And the horsemen charge against the giants and brass breaks them and copper scalds them and iron severs them and they fall about us until we are walled nine cubits high by a rampart of heaving horses and twisting men. And Hand of the two brass faces upon his cheeks shatters many a jawbone with a swing of his head and Hyle of the clubfoot bound with iron breaks fetlocks as faggots for the furnace and Coban of the copper arm studded with bolts cracks necks as nuts for the oven and Guantok with sickles growing upon his wrists lays spearmen low as weeds before a scythe and Peachey of the clashing maw grinds down men whole in his bronze mouth and Brereton of the burning cauldron sears horses and riders into screaming steam and iron-girt Slayd with the headless Hutton on his back with spiked flails for limbs winnows the Trojans and beats them bloody with iron points and Scofeld of the axe-pointed tongue one cubit long hacks furrows in the faces of warriors so that there are bloody mouths where there were once noses and Kock cracks rib against spine with the blows of his hammer head and Kotope of the crushing ears pulps arms between copper lobe and copper flap of each ear as in a vice and Bowen rolls back and forth upon the fallen in his brass barrel set about with glass.

  Then the rampart of the slain and the wounded and the neighing and the wailing is wrenched apart and Corineus of the red beard and King Brutus rush upon us as a mighty wind. And King Brutus picks up Bowen by either rim of his brass barrel and hurls him a league high and three leagues South so that he falls in the watery mouth of the Dart and plunges to the depths. And King Brutus puts out either hand round the copper ears of Kotope and twists them out and widdershins until they loosen in his grasp, and he kicks Kotupe earless clean from off the field with one blow of his boot. And King Brutus meets the hammer head of Kock with the knuckles of his right mailed fist and shivers it into a hundred pieces, and he winds the axe-pointed tongue of Scofeld about his wrist and swings him round and round as a flail to knock the headless Hutton off the back of the iron-girt Slayd, so that he may beat the two fallen giants to death with the body of the third.

  And Corineus of the red beard spits into the cauldron of Brereton so that a dense fog arises, and he seizes Brereton by the throat and burns off his head in his own scalding weapon. And Corineus of the red beard reaches deep into the clashing maw of Peachey with his mailed hand and drags out the brass-bound gizzard of the giant, who chokes on his own tripes. And Corineus of the red beard bends back the wrists of Guantok so that his two sickles pierce the red points of his two nipples and his life’s blood flows in two streams down his chest. And Corineus of the red beard wrenches off the copper arm studded with bolts from the shoulder socket of Coban and drives it as a stake through the iron-bound clubfoot of Hyle. And Corineus of the red beard spreads his mailed palms wide as a roof beam and boxes the cheeks of Hand of the two brass faces, so that they shatter in splinters of metal.

  And so King Brutus and his champion, Corineus of the red beard, stand before Magog and me, and the Trojan host stands in a great circle about us so that we cannot flee.

  And Magog my brother in his voice of iron struck on the anvil says, O Strangers, by what right do ye dare to slay the sons of my father Albion, on whose skin ye tread and in whose holy name I speak?

  And King Brutus gives answer, My right is by the oracle of Diana, in whose temple I set up three altars to Jupiter and Mercury and the goddess and spoke nine prayers and walked four times about the altar of Diana and poured out the sacred wine and lay down before the altar on the skin of a hind until the third hour of the night. Then the goddess Diana appeared to me and spoke thus :

  Brutus, past land of Gaul and the bed of sun,

  There is an island, an ark upon the ocean,

  Its moat is ocean – there few giants live

  And it is solitary for thee and thine.

  Find it! And thereafter stay for ever.

  And for thy sons, another Troy shall rise,

  And from thy blood will stem the island’s Kings,

  To rule in blood the quarter of the world.

  For this reason, I now call this island Britain and my companions Britons, after my own name, for this island was Albion and thine and is now Britain and mine.

  At this speech of the usurper, Magog throws himself upon King Brutus and I grapple with Corineus of the red beard.

  I grasp Corineus of the red beard by the neck with both hands to pull his head from his shoulders, but he drives his knee into my vitals so that I bow forwards in pain, bringing him down over my back and shifting my grasp. And now I catch him by haunch and shoulder with my arms behind him and crush him against my back ribs and straighten upwards until he screams and clasps my hair with one hand and puts a thumb in my eye so that I have to fall upon him to drive the breath from his body. But as I fall, our joined ankle brings Magog topsy-turvy upon me, just as he has King Brutus in a lock and is about to slice open his throat with the scythe in his nose. King Brutus steps back and leaves the field to his champion and Gogmagog, for the prophecy is that he shall live to found Troynovant or New Troy, not be carried into the site of the city on a bier.

  And Corineus of the red beard, rising from the ground, catches Magog about the ribs with his left hand and catches me about the ribs with his right hand and presses out the breath from our bodies until our ribs crack like the skin of roasting pigs. And Magog and I link our four hands in one mighty fist behind the back of Corineus of the red beard and we press against his ribs. And we each hug the others tight in the shackles of our arms, making the air quake with our breathless gaspings. And we hear the ribs of Corineus of the red beard split, one, two, three, two on the right side and one on the left. But the splitting of his bones rouse him to wrath and with a mighty heave he throws us up over his shoulders so that we slip down the further side of his back and our heads dangle on the ground and our joined ankles are a halter round his neck. Now he rushes forward with both hands pushing at the fork of flesh about his neck and the speed of his going knocks our faces against one another so that the scythe on the nose of Magog slashes my cheeks and I strike out at my brother and we fight, tearing at one another, as we are dragged swiftly over gorse and rock and heather to the top of the high cliff above Plymouth, where Corineus of the red beard swings us about until our two heads dangle over the edge of the granite and he slips the halter of flesh from about his neck and pushes us down and we fall joined through the bright air, howling and the sky moaning blue tears above us.

  And a great darkness comes upon me falling and a great pain and I am again in that cave where I was begun, but now my own red blood is washing me for my death. But in the void that is the starting and stopping of all things, I hear the voices of the Trojans and I am raised up and I wake to find cloths bound about my wounds and chains bound about my feet. And behold, the teeth of the rocks have severed me from Magog at the ankle and we are two. Gogmagog is dead and we are Gog and Magog. Once I had been bound by links of flesh to my brother; now I am bound to him by links of iron with a chain about our legs.

  And we are made to march the full circuit of the island, while the site of New Troy is chosen by King Brutus, who now wears the white fur leggings of Magog as a border to his long robe of royal red, so that two strips of white fur run up the front edges of the robe from ground to shoulder and then run down at a slant to meet in the middle of the chest of King Brutus where he wears a clasp of gold wrought in the shape of a bull. And Magog always strides ahead of me, reproaching me for his fallen state and dragging me by the chain on my ankle behind him. And the brass shields of the Trojans are all about me pressing me onward. And over the tops of the armoured ranks I can see the dew as tears on the rotting brown grass of Albion.

  And we come to the marsh of London. And a league towards the river Thames from the hill of sacred oaks at Hampstead, King Brutus makes the Trojans build the first gateway of New Troy towards the North. And they
chain Magog and me to either tower of the gate and call the gate Aldermanbury, for King Brutus dies and his son Locrine comes after him and is an evil ruler and breaks his pledged word to marry the daughter of Corineus of the red beard, so that the father rises up against Locrine and is put to death by a stratagem and his body is hanged upon a gibbet of alder outside the North gate, above the chains from which Magog and I rail and spit and throw filth at each other, for we cannot grapple unto death since we are separated by the twenty cubits of the full width of the gate.

  And so the new Britons build the New Troy on the site of London marsh and the sons of Albion are chained as porters to the gate of Aldermanbury below the gibbet where Corineus of the red worms is hanging. But Magog begins to give counsel to Locrine how he shall put down the followers of the hanging champion, called after him Cornishmen. And Magog is released from his shackles and is taken to the palace of New Troy and sits at the right hand of the King and he knows the Queen and she begets a son, the apostate Magus. And I stay chained by iron at the gate under the shadow of the body of the dead hero of the Trojans, and I stand upon another body, the body of my dead father Albion . . .

  At this point in his reading, Gog moves an elbow which catches the edge of a heap of books and dislodges them. As they topple, dust rises as sharp as lime to the throat and nostrils, so that Gog hacks and sneezes and splutters. This movement of air trembles the pillars of leather and paper and print and glue; they quake and shimmy and slide and finally crash on one side of Gog, on the other side, over him and under him, behind and before in a great tumbling of volumes that entombs him in a rubble of learning. He feels the Gogmagog translation in his hands and the vellum in his lap tear and crack into fragments. He kicks and struggles as the books crush him with their masonry of covers and pages, he is interred as fully as a blitz victim beneath a wall. He coughs again and again to clear his lungs of the grime of ages; but each time that he draws breath, he gathers a throatful and two lungfuls of ancient dust that make him hawk once more in desperation. With each heave of arm or leg, another cornice of books thuds down onto the pile, adding to the weight of archaeology and mysticism on Gog. After three or four gigantic jerks and splutterings, Gog has only succeeded in bringing most of the library upon his head or his limbs, while his final kick merely causes a smashing of glass in the window-seat and a blast of wind from the courtyard which blows the dust even more cloakingly into Gog’s windpipe, so that he is buried alive and gassed simultaneously, as if he were an Old Contemptible in a Flanders trench assaulted simultaneously by poison clouds and mortars.

  Gog lies prone for nearly a minute, feeling the dead weight of the research materials of the past crush the blood in his veins, until his fingers and feet begin to go numb. Carefully he tries to breathe through the hairs of his nostrils without moving ribs or diaphragm, yet he cannot suppress a choking belch of dust that makes him gasp for the air which will not reach his lungs for the puffing powder of the pages. And Gog knows that he will be slowly pulped and choked under the documents of Evans the Latin, if he cannot move. So slowly, slowly, he begins to draw his limbs close to his body. His left arm, its wrist scraped bloody on the metal hasp of an old tome, is pulled through the crevices of piled paper until Gog feels his elbow against his belly and his fist against his chin. Then his right arm is inched in, although bent backwards by the collected works of some forgotten historian; Gog has to move that arm sideways and upwards by an agony of force, until he can bend the sinews and draw it in, dislodging another layer of dust into his mouth, which explodes in a further detonation of exhalation. But Gog’s two fists and elbows are now touching beneath his chin and can force the weight of the burying books a little way off his chest.

  Now for his legs. Gog swivels both feet in the sockets of his ankles to make two crannies, then suddenly heaves sideways with the trunk of his body into the little space cleared by his forearms above him, the space no higher than the coffin lid above a corpse. This successful heave allows Gog to get his legs together, one on top of the other, and it is only a matter of time before he forces his knees upwards until they touch his elbows and eventually his chin.

  So Gog lies in a ball of flesh below the pyramid of books, Gog lies under the dust of learning, gathering his forces to erupt out of his living tomb. And then, with a violent splaying of limbs and jerking upwards, Gog explodes out of the paper blocks of wisdom, sending books flying about him as though they were shaken by a trembling of the earth’s crust, his coughing sounding as loud as huffs from a volcano. Fearful of a quick reburial, Gog continues to scrabble and flounder among the tearing of paper and the ripping of bindings and the haze as thick as ash. Like a sea-monster thrashing on a beach in a sandstorm, Gog makes for the window as for water. Kicking and lunging through the flotsam of the library, he reaches the remaining panes of the window and hurls himself through the glass onto the paving-stones of the courtyard and into air and life. He leans back, clearing his throat and spitting against the wall of the house under the window, sensing the indrawn breaths line his lungs as sweetly as spring water lines the casks of thirsty sailors, feeling the hot blood throb in his forehead from the wound in his temple.

  Yet the dust of the books still eddies from the broken panes and Gog begins to cough incessantly again. So he rises and lumbers out of the courtyard past the oak tree down the dark corridor, where he fumbles at the latch of the street-door until the door opens and looses him into Fore Street in the white clear morning. And Gog must drink or cough up his lungs in shrivelled scraps of paper. So he runs up the street until he sees an old tap leaking on the outside of a grey-walled house down an alley. And Gog clambers over the garden wall and turns the handle of the tap and scrubs his hands under the falling jet and cups his palms and begins to scoop and splash water into his mouth and face as if he were used to the Sahara rather than the rainy island of the world.

  When Gog has laid the dust in his lungs and has slaked his thirst, he returns to Fore Street. He is guilty at the mayhem which he has left in the den of Evans the Latin and he is determined to go back and put the worst of the mess to rights. But look as he will in Fore Street, he cannot find the door leading through the corridor into the courtyard. No door seems exactly the door he once entered, yet all doors look vaguely like the door. He tries knocking on several doors, only to be met with silence or angry stares or curses. So Gog goes back down the street to the Brutus Stone. But there is no one about, only the spurious inscription. BRUTUS STONE, 1185 B.C., placed there somewhat after the event.

  Hunger gnaws like a rat in Gog’s belly, so that he walks eastward into the rising sun over the bridge that crouches upon a green sliver of island and crawls on diamond piles to the far side of the river, where an hotel promises good scavenging in the dustbins. There is stale bread enough to be found even under rationing; for the West Country does not go short of food, and the hotels always justify their prices by what they waste. And there is fresh milk on nearly every doorstep, for the hand moving quick enough to tuck the bottle out of sight under a coat. Thus Gog feeds and turns left onto the road towards Exeter. At least, he hopes it is the road towards Exeter. The signpost says so, but who can trust signposts in Britain any more, ever since the Home Guard twiddled all the signposts around so that the way to Plymouth is marked Paignton and the way to Ashburton is marked Kingsbridge, all to confuse German spies who may be trying to find their way around – as if a spy wouldn’t have a map and a compass and find his way around perfectly well despite the heroic Home Guard. In fact, the only people confused by the signposts pointing the wrong way are the various foreign troops trying to get to the South Coast on the way to Europe, and these poor souls are always finding themselves in Bristol rather than Plymouth Hoe, with the natives chuckling over the stupidity of all aliens and saying, “Everyone knows the way to Devon’s tother way.” Yet an instinct for the past makes Gog cross the silver Dart and swing left, trusting to the signpost saying EXETER via NEWTON ABBOT. Magog and his men may have turned the directi
ons round to confuse; but as Gog walks up to the rise and sees the serpent river flash its scales in the sun while it slithers along the vale below and beside him, he feels sure that he has walked this way before in ’thirty-nine, in ’thirty-nine, when just such a morning peace fell in brightness from the air and war was a threat rather than a presence and nature made a like Munich of light and green and road and stone to appease the most troubled spirit.

  Past the nostalgia of Roman lettering on the milestones to Newton Abbot, past the fat porker tooting on a fife and hind legs at the inn sign of the Pig and Whistle, past the slate roofs of the cottages glistening like slicked tents, past the giant’s stilts of the telegraph poles mired behind tall hedgerows, and over the rise to see the curdled ridges of fields in pats of olive and emerald butter all the way to the burning side of the churn of the sky. The peace of the road is only broken by one convoy of army lorries, which grumbles by on its ordained and mysterious errand, forcing Gog into the nettle and brier patches on the side of the road. These sting and scratch him into a brief awareness that rural quiet is bought sometimes at the price of world war.