by Hal Duncan
“Agreed, but would you disobey your orders? Don’t you fear this more?”
“Ever the pitiless and the proud,” says Smith.
“I shed no tears for this one; it solves nothing. Don’t waste your time.”
And fook you and yer mammy too, Powers, ye cunt, thinks Seamus. I always knew ye were a prick. He pulls his left foot forward again, trying to get it under him for support, but it’s no use. His right leg isn’t working at all now—sure and it’s probably busted from the fooker kicking it—he heard it crack, so he did, and it hurts like fookin buggery—but he could still walk if the bastards would only let him, he’s sure. He’s not that fookin drunk.
“I hate my handiwork,” says Smith.
“Why hate your craft? It’s not to blame for his misfortune.”
“Still, I would rather that this task had fallen to another.”
“All things are trials except to rule the lords; freedom is for the dukes alone.”
Well, maybe he is that drunk, thinks Seamus, ’cause sure and the two of them aren’t making any sense at all, by Christ. What’s all this shite about lords and dukes? What the fook are the pair of them blathering about? Is it the Duke of Underland they’re gabbing on about—no, Sunderland, he means—no, Butcher Cumberland, it is—or is it Slumberland—ah, bollocks!—what the fook’s whoever it is got to do with anything? Oh, Jesus, but he shouldn’t have drunk all of the captain’s fookin whisky, though, ’cause he’s a fookin mess and he can’t even keep his fookin thoughts straight, never mind these gobshites talking utter rot.
“I know,” says Smith. “There’s nothing I can say against this.”
And Sergeant Seamus Finnan tries to pull his left foot forward over the mud, and tries to pull his mind out of the haze of blood and whisky that he’s swimming in, but it’s no use. He’s fucked, and his whole world is fucked along with him, and all that he knows is the taste of bile burning in his throat, and the stink of whisky and puke that fills his nostrils now—by Christ, but it’s better than the stench of corpses—and the rough hands of the CMPs—Powers and Slaughter—pulling his arms near out of their sockets as they drag him through the wasteland, through the fookin wasted, wounded land, with all its cesspit scars of trenches and the open sores of craters; and they throw him down into the dark of the dugout and he lies there, wishing the world would stop its spinning, Jesus Christ Almighty, wishing the world would just fookin stop.
Outside, the shelling of the German batteries sounds like the distant boom of thunder.
AN ADAMANTINE WEDGE, A STUBBORN SPIKE
He feels Smith pulling him up onto his feet, leaning him against the wooden shoring of the dugout, the solid but swaying surface of it against his back, and he tries to roll his head up, tries to raise his hand to wipe the blood and mud out of his eyes, to look the bastard in the face, but his arm is being insubordinate and just sort of waving in the air. He feels Smith grip his wrist. His foot slips and he stumbles, slumps, only the wall behind holding him up.
“Hurry it up and put the bonds about him,” Powers says. “You want the Captain to see you wasting time?”
Through vision blurred by booze and blood, Seamus sees Smith hold up the manacles in his hands, a gesture that says, Look; shut up and let me do my job.
“Put them about his hands with firm strength,” Powers goes on. “Strike with the hammer. Nail him to the rocks.”
His legs give way, and Smith has to drag him back up by his lapels, steady him against the wood.
Seamus retches again, spits blood and bile, and looks from Powers to Smith and back again, and then at Slaughter standing in the doorway, saying nothing. The red collar of his tunic, under his greatcoat, is all covered in Seamus’s puke; it serves the bastard right. That’s what ye get for a fookin rifle butt in the stomach, ye fookin redcap bastard.
“It’s done, and not in vain this work,” says Smith.
Seamus’s head is clearer now, not much, but just enough to know there’s something wrong. There’s something fookin wrong.
“Strike harder. Tighter. Leave nothing loose,” says Powers.
Seamus watches the man’s lips moving and even with the double vision and all, he’s sure the movements of the mouth don’t match the words. Oh, aye, there’s something fookin wrong, all right.
He feels cold metal snap around his wrist, his hand raised up above his head and locked there. What the fook is this? His legs buckle and he slips again, shouts out as pain explodes in his shoulder, with all his fookin weight on it and all. Ah, Christ, is that what a dislocated shoulder feels like?
“This one has skills,” says Powers. “He can escape from the impossible.”
“Aye, but this arm,” says Smith, “is inextricably fixed.”
Seamus moans, trying to push himself back up onto his wobbling legs. Damn right it’s fookin fixed.
“And clasp this now securely. Let him learn he is a duller schemer than the dukes.”
He tries to curse them, tries to ask them what the fook they’re on about, what dukes, what bloody dukes—but his tongue’s too thick to form the words and it just comes out of his busted lips as a formless moan. Is this some fookin Orangeman secret code or something? Ah, Jesus, but that shite doesn’t matter over here, does it, with the 1st Dubs and the Orangemen of the 36th Ulster fighting side by side and dying side by side and—Oh, but that’s not what he was saying earlier, is it? Ah, Christ, now what the fook was he going on about? Did he really say that the King could go fook himself? He didn’t, did he?
“No one could justly blame me…except him,” says Smith as he pulls Seamus’s other hand around to snap another manacle into place, to drag it up over his head. Another click and Seamus hangs there like a puppet, arms in fookin agony. Aw, Christ, he’s fookin lost his mind, or it’s the fookin whisky, or they’ve knocked his fookin brains out of his head, or all of it, but he’s either seeing things or hearing things, or both, because the world just isn’t right. This fellow—Smith—this fellow’s lips are mouthing different words to what he’s hearing—Christ, but he’s sure of it—and this is all wrong. He’s seen Powers kick the shite out of a prisoner before, but never this. Jesus, this is the kind of awful shite that Fritz would do to a soldier caught on the wrong side of the wire.
Powers comes closer, reaches behind him, pulling his rifle’s bayonet out of its sheath. He passes it to Smith. O, Christ. O, Jesus Christ.
“Now nail an adamantine wedge’s stubborn spike square through his breast.”
O, Jesus Fookin Christ Almighty.
“Alas. Alas,” says Smith. “Prometheus, I groan for thy afflictions.”
PROMETHEUS
Seamus looks down at the point of the bayonet pressed to his chest. This is insane. He must be dreaming. He must be drunk and dreaming, out of his head on the captain’s whisky and in a bloody nightmare. Sure and what day is it, he thinks, and who’s the prime minister, where am I, what am I doing here? But even though he’s drunk and only just coming round from a fair fookin beating obviously, he can remember it all just fine. He knows exactly how far the trench is from the River Ancre, that it’s the 28th of June, that it’s Lloyd George and Haig in charge; and everything fits so fookin well together except for the words and the spike, that he’s sure it’s happening to him, here, now. He can’t doubt but that it’s happening. But sure and he has to.
Smith holds the bayonet there for what seems an eternity.
“Do you hesitate and groan for the duke’s enemies?” says Powers. “Beware or maybe one day you’ll be pitying yourself.”
“You see a sight that’s hard to watch,” says Smith, but his lips are mouthing, God, I’m sorry. Jesus, but the look on his face is—Jesus—it’s the way that Seamus looked when poor Thomas went doolally and Seamus and the lads had to…had to try and beat some sense into him and afterward, when he was walking away, Seamus caught a glimpse of himself in a wee shaving mirror hanging from a hook on the wall and it was that same fookin look. I’m sorry I have to do this
to ye. It’s the look of someone telling themself there isn’t any choice.
And the bayonet drives through his chest and, breaking skin and flesh and bone and heart, it drives right through and thuds into the wood against his back.
“I see him meeting his deserts,” says Powers, as Seamus Finnan’s world goes blinding white with pain.
Sure and it has to be a nightmare. It fookin has to be.
“Put straps around his sides, though.”
His world is blinding white. The pain goes right through the center of his chest like the fookin gas huts where they had to practice to prepare themselves for the mustard gas over here which thank fook he’s never had to suffer yet though he’s seen those as have, by Christ, not getting their masks on before they got not a lungful but a half a breath, and them gasping, grasping, like him now with it burning in his lungs, in his heart, in his throat, like something trying to get out.
“I know what’s needed. Don’t harass me.”
The blizzard of his agony howls into his head, so raw a pain that he can hear it, he can fookin hear it, drowning their distant voices.
“I’ll harass you all I want and more. Go lower. Surround the thighs with force.”
He hears the distant thunder of the shells, the ringing sound of metal upon metal, hammering in his ears.
“The work is no laborious task. It’s all but done already.”
Doom. Doom. Doom. And all the time the howling of this pinned animal inside him.
“Drive the fetters strongly, all the way; they have to stand up to a harsh critique.”
“Your mode of speech,” he hears Smith say, “suits your physique.”
“Be soft yourself, but don’t reproach me for stern strength of will.”
“Let’s go. His limbs are in the net.”
He hears the voice hissing up close, right by his ear, over the hurricane of white noise and his own—Jesus, it’s not a moan, it’s not a sob, it’s not a keen, it’s not a scream. What kind of fookin sound is that?
“Now, now. Be proud,” says Powers. “Plunder the powers of the divine and give your gifts to the ephemerals now. How can your workers soothe you in this sorry state? It seems we called you Foresight falsely; or perhaps you can foresee just how exactly you’ll escape this fate.”
And Seamus feels his lips open and he hears the sound come out his mouth, the sound of a thousand rivers roaring.
A DUGOUT, THE SOMME, 28 JUNE 1916
Smith steps back from the crazy Irishman cuffed to the metal frame of the bunk in the corner of the dugout, lying there dead to the world but babbling on in drunk delirium. He’s never heard anything like it and it puts the fear of God in him, by heck; he’s heard some of the other paddies speaking their Gaelic, and he knows it don’t sound nowt like this. Those boys from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers have a lilting, soft sound—the ones under this Finnan fellow’s charge, at least, seconded from the 7th to the 1st after the slaughter of Gallipoli, so they say. Students from Trinity mainly, those boys. Could have been officers but they chose to fight beside their friends. Call them the toffs among the toughs, they do, though this Finnan’s an exception. A tough among the toffs, ye might say. And whatever tongue it is he’s speaking, it’s not the gentle brogue of his Irish Pals. It’s something…else.
Powers steps forward to give the man one last boot in the stomach before wheeling and striding out of the dugout, Slaughter following on his heels. Typical redcaps, thinks Smith. Busted lip and bloody nose, two eyes that’ll be black for a week—they’ve left him in a right state, by heck. He’ll be hurting some when he wakes up all right, and it won’t just be a sore head from too much firewater.
Poor fellow’s done for anyway now, thinks Smith. It might have been fine if it were just the stealing of an officer’s whisky. He would have lost his stripes, for sure, and there would have been a big to-do, a court-martial and a prison sentence—commuted to field punishment, most likely—but if the Irish lads under his charge are anything like Smith’s own Sheffield Pals, they were needing something to take their minds off what they’d done…and what they’d still to do…as anyone could see, as even the captain might have seen. There’s worse things in the world than a sergeant stealing his captain’s whisky and dishing out a little to the scared young boys he’s only trying to care for best he can.
But the charge is sedition now and that’s something else entirely. There’s trouble enough amongst the paddies that have heard about the Easter Uprising back home, without their own sergeant staggering around and roaring like a wounded bear about republican martyrs—MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse. Why the fuck are we fighting for the British when they’re killing Ireland’s sons at home? That’s treason, no matter how you look at it.
Smith shakes his head. He’s sorry for the man. He truly is. But that kind of talk is just asking for the firing squad when the troops are skittish enough as it is about the rumors of a Big Push.
Finnan rolls over onto his back, his free arm flopping loose, hand grasping as if at some imaginary firefly, and Smith jumps back. The muttering stops for a second, then starts up again, louder than before. It’s not English, that’s for sure, and if it isn’t Irish, what the hell is it? Smith knows a little Kraut—Scheisser and Hände hoch—but it’s not so guttural and ugly as all that. Latin or Greek? He doesn’t think so. He wasn’t the best student by a long way and he never made it to the local grammar school or nowt, but Smith’s still had enough of those rammed down his throat, from his teachers and from Mad Jack Carter—is there no escaping it, by heck?—with all his talk of Homer’s heroes. He’s heard enough bloody Taciturn and Virgin, as they used to call the buggers, to know it’s none of that.
He stands up, steps back from the man. It’s probably just gibberish, he thinks. Shell shock and firewater and a boot to the head. Nothing more.
But it still makes him uneasy, this strange babbling with its unfamiliar sounds. There’s too many of them. Too many sounds for one mouth to make.
He feels queasy, frightened, turns to go and realizes Powers and Slaughter are standing just outside the dugout, waiting for him, stark silhouettes in the doorway, hulking bulks with sharp points. The red-covered peaked caps, the barrels of their rifles slung over their shoulders pointing upward—even the thick swaddling of their greatcoats seems all angular—shoulders so square, and the flare from belted waist down to the hem. They’re men cut in straight lines, without a curve in them. He looks back at the Irishman, lying there spread-eagled on the floor of the dugout, his handcuffed arm dangling, his left leg twitching like he’s trying, in his dreams, to pull himself out of some churned-up mire of sucking mud. And still there’s that infernal muttering. Where are you now? thinks Smith. Where are you in your head?
But it’s not his business. He’s only here because Powers barked at him to pick up the handcuffs where they’d fallen in the struggle. He feels sorry for the man, more so because the only reason Powers didn’t cuff the fellow himself, he’s sure, is so that he could play the bully a little after being floored by a drunk man’s flailing fist, big man that he is. But it’s not Smith’s business.
“Out,” says Powers. “Don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere.”
A Net of Wires and Chains
Another time, another place.
“You’re not going anywhere,” says Henderson, his hand clamped over Finnan’s jaw, shoving his head away with disgust as he lets go, and turning, striding away into receding echoes of his footsteps—shoes on concrete—and a flap of plastic hanging strips?
Finnan’s head rolls round and down and hangs there, limp. Half slumped, half upright on the metal chair, the wire cuts into his wrists, looped in snares and pulled as tight as the garrote around his neck. It’s the same story with his ankles. They haven’t just tied him to the chair with the chicken wire. His arms behind his back and over the back of the chair, he’s trussed up like an animal in some net of wires and chains all looped and crossing each other so that if he as much
as moves one limb he’s liable to cut another off.
The net of wires cuts into him almost as bad as the memories.
He coughs, moans, his swollen eyes opening just enough to see the meat hook in his chest, a circle of salt around him on the floor—but he can’t understand the image of it; a part of him thinks, right so, there’s a fookin meat hook in me chest, but the rest of him is too busy with the hammering and the howling to be disturbed by a wee thing like physical pain. All it knows is the hammering howling in his mind, rising in him, unfurling.
It raises his head, eyes rolling back to show the whites, opens his mouth and out it comes.
“To the divine sky and the swift wings of the winds, I sing, and to the rivers and their springs; to all the miles of the waves of smiling seas, I call, to the earth, the mother of us all, to the sphere of the sun that watches over everything. Behold the lord. See how I suffer at the hands of lords.”
The voice that gutters from his throat, choked as it is, growls on some frequency that ripples the misty air of the slaughterhouse, sends ice crystals twinkling, tinkling down in showers from the frozen carcasses that hang all round him, row upon row of them all swinging from hooks on chains on rails, rack after rack, white-frosted hunks of dangling meat. Finnan roars at them like a revolutionary preaching to the mob, hearing the words pour from his mouth but only barely understanding them. It’s like he has an interpreter yammering in one ear as a captured Hun screams in his other, except that Finnan’s voice is both.
“See these unsightly chains that the new ruler of the blessed has arranged for me! Alas, I groan. See what torment I’ll suffer down the aeons of my time in misery! When will I see the end? Alas, I groan. Alas for the present and the future woe.”
Teeth bared and nostrils flared, he hears the words coming out of his own mouth, feels them ripping their way up out of the raw wound in his chest and spitting from between his lips. What the fuck am I saying? Where the fuck is this coming from?
