Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Then I speak, although Boudicca does not call upon me, for I am the mightiest of the Britons in battle. And I counsel that we should march day and night to the west country and meet with the rest of the Silures beyond the Severn river and catch Suetonius as he comes out of the passes of the western mountains. For it is hard to defeat the Romans by pitched battle against their armoured legions­; but by stealth and by stratagem, we will destroy them. The British are many and if they fight, they will pick off the invaders one by one; it is the act of a fool to strike the trunk of a tree with his fist, when he may strip off the twigs one by one and break off the roots one by one until the tree withers of its own.

  But Myrddin gives a sign to Boudicca and she reaches into the bag between her breasts and looses a hare, sacred to the moon; it twists in fear as it runs through the host of warriors. And Myrddin says that the twistings of the hare are a sign of the Gods that we should march on London; I think the old Druids practised divination for truth, but the new ones for advantage. I do not think that Myrddin means to give Boudicca good counsel in defeating the Romans; he means to draw Suetonius east by massing outside the Roman centre of London, thus saving Mona and the power of the Druids in their sacred groves.

  So we march upon London, which Wayland, the smith of the Gods, first built by Thames side; in oak he built it, but the Romans have added stone. And we march to destroy our own city and our own kind; but we are beleaguered by bad omens. The estuary of the Thames turns blood-red and corpses are seen on the shore where no corpses are. Nine ravens fly on the left of us and a single magpie sits on a dead oak tree. We pitch camp, waiting for the omens to favour us. The days pass, with Myrddin forbidding Boudicca to advance. And messengers come, saying that Suetonius has already harried the Druids and the holy island of Mona and its sacred groves with fire and sword, so that they are destroyed utterly, and Suetonius is riding alone with his horsemen to London with all speed. And I counsel that we advance to destroy him as he is cut off from his legions; but Myrddin has cast a spell over Boudicca and she will not move. And I see that Myrddin did not wish to save Mona, but to destroy it, so that he may become the Arch-Druid. He does not wish to meet Suetonius yet in battle, but to sack London, so that he may bind the tribes to him by blood and booty before they meet the Roman army.

  Suetonius abandons London, leaving it to the old men and the women and the girls and the children. He takes away its veterans and its garrison to prepare for the final battle. He leaves London to the slaughter so that he may build up the strength of his legions in the north. And I counsel pursuit before he can group his forces, but Boudicca will not heed me. For Myrddin guts the belly of a living goat and in its spilled entrails he sees that through London lies our victory. So we march towards the city on the clay and the marsh, where the Roman roads meet that bind us down and divide our island.

  It is not for victory we go to London, but for vengeance. Boudicca cannot forget the rods on her bleeding back and her fouled children, Myrddin cannot forget the burning groves of Mona and the murdered priests. And we scatter the old men at the north gate of London and scale its walls and pass along the straight paved ave­nues flanked by columns as many as the trees of the forest and there are houses without number which have water beneath their stone floors and marvels beyond counting brought from beyond the sea. And we slay every living thing within the walls, each man and each woman and each child and each beast, yea, even to the worm in the ripening apple, except for the thousand girls and women that Myrddin keeps for sacrifice in the sacred grove of Andrasta on the hill called Hampstead outside the city, that same sacred grove where the sons of Albion were rooted after spawning the first race of the giants that fought with Gogmagog. And when London is empty but for the dead and when blood flows beneath the stone floors of the houses instead of water, we take up the booty and pile it outside the walls before Boudicca and Myrddin, copper and bronze and tin and iron and silver and gold, hide and cloth and silk and amber, beakers curiously forged and harness fit for the chariot of the sun, so cunningly is it worked, and corn and wine beyond measure. And Myrddin orders the city to be burned in vengeance for Mona, and we fire London. As the smoke rises in a great cloud of jet, we leave the city. And Boudicca shares out the booty among the tribes, with Myrddin advising her and blessing it so that the Gods shall not curse it for being denied to them. But it is borrowed booty; we never deny the Gods but for an hour.

  At sunset Myrddin leads us up to the sacred grove for the sacrifice of the thousand captives, and from the hill called Hampstead I see the city below us glowing here and there in the night, as black and fiery as Annwfn beneath the world, where the flames burn on the great nothingness of molten pitch, where noon is as dark as midnight, and where we begin and where we end. And London’s fires die and all is darkness and the red Thames grows cold and my heart is heavy to see this work of folly and destruction, when Suetonius and his army are still to the north.

  Pine torches blaze from the branches of the trees, as the tribes drink and feast. And within the sacred grove itself Myrddin and his myrmidons sacrifice the women and the girls to Andrasta. The screaming of the victims is like swine flogged to death to make their flesh soft; but many of these victims are Britons, even if they lived with the Romans, slaves who had no will of their own. And Boudicca stands at my side and pleads with me, ‘Gog, the Slayer of the Romans, be not angry. We do as we must do, we follow the laws of the Gods and the Druids. So did our fathers and our fathers’ fathers, when they drove away Caesar. The Gods have given us two victories and they ask for their sacrifice, especially Andrasta, Goddess of death and birth, sacred to women.’

  Boudicca bids me walk with her through the sacred grove, where the women would groan from the oaken stakes which impale them between their legs, but that Myrddin has had their breasts sliced off and sewn in their mouths. And I say, ‘Boudicca, these are woman as you are. Did the Roman tax-gatherers do this to you and your daughters? Are not rods and rape better than the stake and the sword? Are we worse than the axe of the Romans?’ And Boudicca says, ‘What is is. As the Gods will.’ And she is pale beneath her red hair and she vomits behind a bush.

  So we come upon Myrddin, prophesying from the entrails of a living girl, slit open and tethered. And some women are hanged from the oak branches by the legs and some are cut by the spear and some are scorched by the ember and their screaming makes me grind my fists in my ears. And Myrddin has changed the commandments and has given some of the young girls to the warriors; they lie moaning with men about them as bees. And I reproach Myrddin, ‘Will Andrasta never be satisfied?’ And he turns to me, the blood falling down the long nails on his fingers as the gutted girl moans at his feet, ‘Not until every Roman and friend of the Romans is dead on this island. The entrails say that we should sack Verulam.’ And I say, ‘More fire, more slaughter, while Suetonius gathers his army? You want vengeance, Myrddin, vengeance without victory.’ And Myrddin looks at the entrails of the girl and says, ‘This is the way to victory, Gog, the Slayer of the Romans. Shall any Briton who has been here ever be forgiven? What we do to the Romans will be done to us, if we lose. So we shall win and shall be ruled under the laws of the Gods and their servants, the Druids.’ And I say, ‘But these are not Romans, these are Britons.’

  I look down at the gutted girl and I know her; the Romans took her six years before as a slave when they came to get their taxes. And she moans, dying, and I take my sword and I slay her. And Myrddin threatens me, saying, ‘You defy the Gods?’ And I say, ‘No, you defy the Gods. Your rule is murder and by murder you shall die.’ And I raise my sword to slay him, but Boudicca holds my arm. ‘Gog, shall you be an outlaw, with all men’s hands turned against you? When you slay a Druid, there is no forgiveness, only wandering in torment until the beasts kill you.’ And I lower my sword and I say, ‘Boudicca, he is a false Druid and against the people.’ And Myrddin smiles and commands the great horn with the boar’s mouth to be blown and the warriors assembled. And he greets the leader
s of the tribes and asks them and their hosts whether they are content with the rule of Boudicca and himself, and they are drunk on wine and rape and blood and booty, and they clatter their spears on their shields. And Myrddin puts a laurel wreath on my hair, mocking me and calling me Gog, the Champion of the Romans.

  So we leave the sacred grove on the hill called Hampstead, we leave it a graveyard of women for the fanged Andrasta. Behind us is the black city of London in its acres of ashes with the Thames winding through. And we march on Verulam and we burn and we slaughter there. And we delay for another sacrifice and I know that the Gods are angry against us. For they have allowed Mona to perish and a false priest to make us butchers, to bind us by blood to the vengeance which must come.

  Suetonius gathers his army in the north and we come upon him at last. He is a brave leader and he stands his men with their backs to the forest so that they cannot flee; a plain lies before them sloping down to our host. And we draw up our carts behind us, for our women to watch the victory. And we are as the sea in numbers and the Romans as mere rocks; we are as the clouds and the Romans as mere mountains; we are as the sands and the Romans as mere cliffs. And we charge up the slope in our hundreds of thousands against the line of the legions. But the javelins come down upon us as death from the heavens and drag our shields to the ground and the legions drive forwards and break us as an iron ram and we are cut in two and caught between the Romans and the carts and we are slaughtered in our thousands and our tens of thousands, until our piles of corpses even outnumber those we slew in the three cities. And the Romans spare no man and no woman and no living thing, yea, down to the little dog that runs at Boudicca’s feet. And Boudicca flees, with the poison ready in the hollow of her cairngorm broach. And Myrddin flees, for what priest will stand in the battle-line if he can fall down to Annwfn from his bed? And I fight with my back to a cart, swinging my bronze ball big as a man’s fist, studded with spikes, until the Roman dead are about me in a wall high enough to defend me. But the Romans throw in their darts until I bleed in thirty places and I sink to my knees, dying, as the standard of the XIV Legion bears down upon me, borne up by a centurion holding a painted shield, bearing the device of a red eagle in flight and from each wingtip hangs down a flail . . .

  When Gog has finished reading the typed pages, he does not know whether he has been looking at the translation of a chronicle or part of a historical novel or a mixture of the two. There is nothing to show the source of the piece, whether it came direct from the inspiration of the pre-war Gog or whether it was a free rendering of some ancient manuscript, still surviving or destroyed by bombing. If he has invented it himself years ago, Gog is startled by his old preoccupations with slaughter and torture and war. Perhaps only in peace could he allow himself to depict the horrors which the human species reserves for its quarrels. Yet if the account is true ancient history, Gog can only feel that all wars are the same. An eye-witness has told him of the liberation of Belsen and the permanent enslavement of the liberators to the nightmares of their memory. Belsen will have its chroniclers, but Gog knows now that he is too weak to be one of them. How could he ever have chosen to translate such brutality from any source?

  The piece is about a hero called Gog. True. But then, if it is so aptly about Gog, surely it is spurious. Granted, there is enough circumstantial historical detail, presumably correct, to convince the unwary that it is indeed a translation. Ergo, it is only a translation to the printed page of the ragbag of Gog’s pre-war mind, his fascination with the people and his knowledge of the bloodiness of the mob, his hatred of the cruelty of power and his vainglory that he could use his own powers for the people without corruption. So Gog’s new processes of logic speak, but they give him no answers, merely new questions. Why did he once spend years hunting down these stories of the people’s revolts against London, unless he himself was in revolt, a leader without a following, a searcher in the butcher’s shop of history and of the imagination for the dreams of glory that he would never dare to make fact?

  Of all the evidences of the past that Gog has met in his journey, only the story of Boudicca in Hampstead’s Grove remains in his hand. The rest, oh the rest, that is at the mercy of memory and memory must err. Gog sits at his empty desk by his empty shelves, looking out over the few safe trees that make Hampstead Heath now into a park for the people, he sits and looks out over a great city that is soon to be at peace and to rebuild for the third time its ruins and its errors and its power over Britain. He is no longer angry at the prospect, even if he does not welcome it. He is merely indifferent. For he knows that the city will rebuild itself despite him and without him. He can neither cause its destruction nor its flowering. If he spent all his money, he might be able to restore or knock down a whole street. But what is a whole street in a warren of avenues and roads and closes and squares and crescents and mews and dead ends?

  So Gog looks at the nine pages of typescript in his hand that he cannot remember having written. He wonders whether this is ballast enough to keep him steady through his future voyage. Can he recreate on the evidence of these nine pages the obsessions that allowed him to live unaware through the overcast years of the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Franco? Were not these obsessions with the mythical people a denial of living persons? Was not this concentration on proving himself a populist hero on the page an excuse not to have to prove himself a mere man dying perhaps a coward’s death for the Republic in Spain? They also serve who only stay home and write. Perhaps. But they serve best who work or fight as men among men.

  So Gog walks out with his nine pages to the bonfire in the garden. He puts a match to each page in turn, holding it until the flames lick at his fingers, then he drops it onto the ashes until all but the corners of the pages, a few nondescript words, have been consumed. Gog remembers too little of his old self to return to his preoccupations. Even if he remembers just enough of the past to know that he may never escape it, yet he does not remember enough to know how to relive it. For all his concentration on himself, he may not know what sort of a man he is. Only future and repeated actions can prove his characteristics to himself. He cannot go back, he is too listless to go forward. So he condemns himself to the extended present. He waits for an elastic time of waiting.

  Two events put an end to this drift in Gog’s life at Hampstead, this dragging of the sea-anchor that touches no bottom. The Americans drop a second atom bomb on Nagasaki, thus fulfilling the prophecy of the Bagman and making the fourth and final burning of London imminent, unless the B.B.C. is made over to Wayland Merlin Blake Smith. And Gog’s half-brother, Magnus, invites Gog to lunch in the City five days after the dropping of the bomb and the last warning before the end of the world.

  XXXVI

  The chophouse in the City has seen better days. Old wood adds dark splendour with time and labour; but where the cuffs and elbows of the customers have not rubbed the tables into a deep gloss, scars and roughness in the wooden surfaces show the absence of polish and servants. The wine-coloured leather of the cushions on the seats of the benches in the alcoves is worn through to brown underlining and even to coils of horsehair. The brass of the old carriage-lamps is green with decay, their glass is often cracked. The prints of coaching scenes on the walls collect more dust on their frames than the passengers of the Brighton Flyer ever did from the summer road. The long horn hanging on the putty-coloured walls, once creamy-bright, is almost black with the breath of disuse. There is one old boxing-print, too, that stirs Gog’s memories back to the reading of his boyhood and the remembering on his road; Tom Cribb stands left arm forward and shoulders steady to meet the onrush of the mighty blackamoor Molineaux, while the Fancy and the dandies gamble about the Ring. An advertising model of a Regency buck striding along for the sake of elegance and Johnny Walker has lost his stick and both hands, war-wounded under his wrists of white china. Even the cutlery on the table is weary of jabbing too long into tough game; the prongs of the forks are bent and the edges of the knives
are barely sharp enough to cut water. The one starched napkin in front of Gog, whiter than the dreams of nuns and folded carefully into the shape of a swan’s body, only serves to accentuate the shabby-genteel squalor of the remainder of the room, where Gog sits waiting for his half-brother Magnus.

  There is no one in the room, except for Gog and the waiter, who replies to every request for a different form of drink or food with the remarks, “We’re out of stock, sir . . . Before the war, sir . . . What with rationing, sir . . . Sir? Sir? Sir!!” He is both deferential and condescending, with all the lordly humility of the wise underling, who, but for the grace and hierarchy of God, would be sitting in the place of Gog with enough inside knowledge to get exactly what he wanted. But Gog does not know what is hidden under the counter or in the cellar, so all he can do is to order nearly the whole length of the immense wine list in front of him and end with a weak beer, home-brewed and fit only for home consumption.

  When Magnus comes in through the door, he is so much what Gog expects that Gog can hardly believe such a parody of memory to be flesh and blood. All the shortage of clothing and cosmetics in London has not stopped Magnus from wearing a bowler hat as furry as the rump of a badger, a suit matte with newness, a white stiff collar with points sharp and untrimmed, a silk tie aslant with bars of garish and distinguished old school colours, and black shoes patent-fresh and fit to squeak, if their leather had not been stripped off the more aristocratic and infant of beasts. Under the bowler’s rim the face of Magnus is another version of Gog’s own, refined to the point of absurdity by the crucible of genes. Both have long chins and large noses; but the chin and nose of Magnus have been pinched in, not squashed broad. Gog’s full mouth is compressed in him into a rosebud pout with two thorns at the edges. The heaviness of Gog’s brows and forehead becomes a narrow protuberance of skull, which distends the skin so much that the pallor of the bone is visible. The eyebrows and lids of Magnus seem to be lifted in permanent surprise, as though both of his cheeks are caught in an invisible vice which squeezes the eyes back into their sockets and the features forward and upward in points of extension. Only Magnus’s metallic helmet of greased yellow hair fails to remind Gog of a pinched version of himself, become a lank weed that nature forces to grow artificially high in its search for the light.