by Adam Roberts
‘It is glamorous. Many headless go into the military,’ he replied. ‘I have considered it myself, but I fear it’s not a choice I can make.’
‘I was given no choice,’ I said.
‘No?’
‘The police chevaler, Bonnard, compelled me.’
‘Him!’ Mark Pol barked. ‘A foul person. He treated me most barbarously. Cruelly - and it was not as if I’d done anything wrong.’
This peaked up my anger again. ‘You hope, by repeating that, to make it true,’ I snapped.
He didn’t reply. For a while the group of us sat, watching the fire as the flames brightened against the darkening sunset sky. They passed between them the bottle, and also a glass jar of babyfood, taking two fingers’ scoop of the latter for each sip of the former. I was neither hungry nor thirsty.
‘Now this liquor,’ Mark Pol, said, holding the bottle by its neck, ‘is a rice wine. I did not know that it was possible to make wine from rice, but it has been managed. And the question is whether it is permitted or forbidden by the Bibliqu’rân. It is not mentioned by name, and therefore perhaps it is not forbidden. But, say some, the only thing permitted is the wine of grapes and so it must be forbidden. Therefore the trader who brought this stuff here has been unable to sell it, and so, at a cut-price, it ends up with the likes of us. We, perhaps, are not so fussed as to the precise reasoning of scripture.’
The others murmured. ‘My view,’ boomed one of them, ‘is that rice is a form of grape.’ He took his sip and passed the bottle round. One more turn around the ring of them and it was empty.
‘Sieur Cavala,’ said Mark Pol in a different voice. ‘I fear that you have come to kill me in revenge for this attack upon this woman.’
‘You have good reason for your fear,’ I replied.
‘Do you love her?’
‘I do.’
‘Are you with her?’
‘We are going to marry,’ I said. ‘She and I plan to travel to Montmorillon. We’ll live there as well as we can, and have children.’
‘Bravo,’ he said quietly. ‘I congratulate you, even though it’s your love that gives direction to your impulse to revenge. But I ask you: what if I am not guilty of this assault upon her?’
‘Again with this refrain?’
‘Has she accused me?’
‘She,’ I said, and stopped. ‘She forgives you,’ I said, to imply that I did not.
‘A moment, for I must press you on this matter,’ he said. ‘She has said she forgives me?’
‘She has.’
‘But has she said, without ambiguity, that it was I who assaulted her?’
I did not answer for a long time, but eventually I said: ‘No.’
‘We were all of us sinners,’ Mark Pol said, sounding sober though he must have been drunk. ‘All three of us, me, you and Gymnaste too. She forgave us all. It was her nature. Has she told you much about the assault upon her?’
‘She has not.’
‘It is too painful a matter, I daresay.’
‘I daresay.’
‘You believed I was the guilty party before,’ he said. ‘You have believed it for a long time. But what if I am not guilty? I only raise the question, you understand. But I am interested in how you would answer it.’
‘If not you, then whom?’ I snapped.
‘There was a third with us on that walk.’
‘Gymnaste? Do you seriously propose Gymnaste as the attacker?’
‘Why not?’
‘It was not in his nature.’
‘How can you know what was in his nature?’
I pondered. ‘He was a truthful man, beheaded for heresy.’
‘He told us he was a truthful man. But perhaps he was not truthful when he said this.’
‘You,’ I said, ‘delight in this manner of paradox. I don’t believe Gymnaste was the assailant.’
‘Then, Sieur Cavala,’ he said. ‘What of you?’
‘You are talking nonsense,’ I said quickly.
‘Perhaps I am. But only you know how much to trust your memory. You have been in space. There is a curious forward-backward time dilation, is there not? It affects the efficiency of ordinators, does it not? Are you certain you can depend upon your memory?’
‘I could hardly forget something like that!’ I snapped.
‘But might you have done it half-awake, as a sleepwalker walks? Be honest with yourself and with me. You desired Siuzan Delage before, did you not? You desired her on that walk—’
‘I loved her!’ I cried. ‘I love her still!’
‘And is not the sexual act an aspect of love?’
‘You make it filthy with your words.’
‘I am only suggesting. You must be sure. Ask yourself this: could you have committed this assault upon her, and then denied yourself the memory as something repugnant to you? Is your rage at me a transferred rage at yourself for your own appetites?’
‘Nonsense,’ I said, with less force. ‘She loves me. She is preparing to travel with me to the Land of the Headless - she has agreed to marry me, to spend her life with me. Why would she do this if I were her attacker ?’
‘Perhaps because she loves you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she has not accused you directly because she wants to forgive you. Perhaps she loves your good qualities enough to want to forget about this one bad act. Perhaps she is one of those victims of whom we sometimes hear, who falls in love with her assailant. Human love is a complex thing.’
‘It certainly is,’ said one of the other headless, staring at the fire.
I must confess that his words threw me into a great inner confusion. My purpose crumbled away. Now, I could not remember attacking Siuzan on that walk. But, it is true, my memory was a patchy thing. And it is also true I had desired her before that attack. I have tried, in this memoir, to be honest; and I have honestly recorded the desire I felt. It was not pure, but men are not pure and we are subject to fleshly desires. All men are capable of this assault. But could I have assaulted her?
Could I?
If I had repressed that memory as a repugnant thing then surely there would be some vestigial or fragmentary part of it in my consciousness. I searched, but I could not find it.
Then again, I thought back to the way Siuzan talked of that portion of her past. She was evasive, as if trying to avoid lying whilst also trying to avoid stating a truth directly. What if the truth she wanted to avoid was my culpability?
This was a very disconcerting thought.
The night on which the attack had happened. What did I remember of that time? I remembered lying on my back upon the cold desert ground, looking at the stars, woken from some bad dream - but what dream? I could not recall. I remembered hearing Siuzan crying out in her sleep . . . or had it been her crying out that had woken me? I was not certain. The more I tried to fix the memory, the more friable it became.
Why had she cried aloud in the night?
I had been woken by the cold. Was I sure of that? Did I actually remember waking because of the cold, or had I filled that element into my own narrative to explain why I was awake? I remembered that my male organ had been solid, locked with the frost of arousal. I remembered the sense of disgust I felt inside myself at this development - the memory of that was sharp and real. But I could not recall the cold which supposedly had woken me. For what reason, truly, had I woken? Why had Siuzan cried out in her sleep?
What word had she cried out?
And here is the strange thing about memory. To apply the pressure of mental scrutiny to any given memory is to disperse it. I felt, with the corner-of-the-eye apprehension of something seen and not seen with which you will be familiar, that I knew the word she had shouted out. But I could not bring it to mind. It had been one word, a single syllable. Or had it been longer? Two syllables? A single word, though. But what word?
I tried to give order to my confusion. What could I remember? I tried to take a panoptic view of the previous three years. There, as if lining the walls of my inner cha
mber, were my army comrades, and all the hardships and dangers of training and war. There also, ubiquitous as scent in the air, was my rage. I had spent the whole time since Siuzan’s violation in a furious state. I remembered the efforts I had made, the peril and pain I had put myself through, in order to escape the camp, to seek out and kill Mark Pol and take his crime for my own. My whole life had, for a time, become focused into that aim, all my rage flowing through me and showering down upon that point - blows, mentally pre-enacted, pouring down upon Mark Pol’s shuddering body, pounding out life and blood and dashing him into a dented stretch of crushed flesh bashed into the ground. That anger seemed very vivid to me.
And here he was, sitting a yard from me, the man himself. And yet the anger did not seem to be able to fix itself upon him after all.
Why not?
And yet - surely - surely - it was not possible for a man to rape a woman and then simply forget that he had done so?
A voice chimed inside my thoughts, sounding rather like the voice of Levitt Dunber (but he, surely, could not be my conscience). It said: you would remember assaulting a woman you hated, or about whom you felt only indifference. But how could you possibly remember doing such a thing to the woman you loved?
That state in which a person is neither entirely awake, nor entirely asleep.
My memory was porous, unreliable on details. But is not everybody’s memory like this? Perhaps, as Mark Pol said, the effect of travelling faster than light, which affected ordinators in ways different to organic brains, perhaps this had pulled holes out of the fabric of my memory. But, I revolted: I could not have forgotten something so profound. And what of Siuzan? Could she truly have fallen in love with a man capable of such brutality? Would she truly be planning to spend her life with such a man? No, I told myself, and no and no.
I looked over to Mark Pol.
What word had she cried out, that night? I could not remember, but I could (I realised) remember the effect that word had had upon me. The sound of her voice had sent a smack and a recoil through my nerves. Why should that be?
‘Sieur Cavala,’ Mark Pol said. ‘I fear we have drunk all of the rice wine, and there is none left. Do you, by any chance, have any wine in your pack there?’
‘No,’ I said, dull.
‘Anything at all?’
‘Sugarcake.’
‘I used to have a sweet tooth,’ said Mark Pol. ‘But since beheading I have lost the appetite for excess of sugar. I have lost all my teeth as well. But not because of sugar!’ He laughed at this.
‘I do not believe what you say,’ I said to Mark Pol. I tried to make the words loud, aggressive, but somehow my heart was not in it.
He understood that I was not referring to his appetite for sugar. ‘You may believe,’ he said carefully, ‘or disbelieve. Does it matter what I say? You must believe yourself, that is the important thing.’
‘I am not capable of such a foulness,’ I said, again without conviction.
At this, it seemed, Mark Pol lost his temper. ‘Boh!’ he cried. ‘Of course you are - we all are, all of us men. It is precisely in the nature of men to be capable of such business. No cant, Sieur Cavala, not between the two of us. Incapable? Pah.’
‘I love her,’ I cried. ‘We are to be married.’
‘Again, my congratulations,’ he said. ‘How lucky that things have worked to your advantage.’
This pierced through me. ‘What do you mean by that?’ I snapped.
‘And you already know what I mean,’ he said, turning away from me. But he turned back, because he could not resist elaborating his imputation. ‘I mean that when you first met Siuzan Delage she was as far above you as the moon itself. When you first fell in love with her the most you could hope for in return was her pity. And isn’t it insulting to bear another’s pity? I have always found it. But, miracle! Now, after all that has happened, she is beheaded and reduced, dragged so far down that she is prepared to become your wife rather than live in single headless squalor. Is there no benefit to you in that debasement? What was it that dragged her down anyway? You know.’
‘I would - never—’ I said. Then: ‘Are you suggesting that I assaulted her with designs that she would be . . .?’
‘Shamed? Brought to your level? Made accessible to you?’ Mark Pol snorted through his neck valve. ‘You may, or may not, have planned it as such. The heart has instincts which sometimes it follows. The mind is not always privy to those motivations. You know the commonplaces of policemen: to solve a crime, ask yourself who benefits from the crime. Well . . . have you benefited? You can answer that question for yourself.’ He raised the empty wine bottle as if to toast me. ‘Congratulations on your impending marriage, Sieur Cavala.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No? Very well. It hardly matters. I must say,’ he added, turning back to his friends, ‘much of this stems from our culture’s attitudes to the sexual act. Before beheading I was very inexperienced in that matter, for all that I bragged. But since my execution I have become more experienced.’
‘You?’ I was incredulous. ‘Who would favour you with such intimacy?’
‘Oh a number of women,’ he declared airily. ‘Matthea here, for example; she indulges me, from time to time.’ He pointed with his right arm. The headless woman to whom he gestured put her hands together and wagged them up and down. The gesture seemed, somehow, happy. ‘When I can scratch together enough money, of course,’ he added, chuckling in his own shame. ‘I would not expect her to debase herself out of charity!’
I felt a revulsion swell inside me. I could not sit there any further. I pulled myself to my feet and hurried away. I felt a terrible nausea, a sickness and trembling in my very bones. I had not yet eaten my evening meal and so there was nothing in my stomach to vomit, but I retched and retched. I felt, as perhaps all people do who stumble upon the content of some great secret, as if the answer had been directly in front of me the whole time and yet I had not seen it.
Six
I tried the various little tricks that we all learn to try and recall things momentarily forgotten. I tried thinking about something entirely different in the hope that the memory would pop up unbidden. I tried associative thinking. I tried looking up at the stars, as if that would prompt the thought. But none of this was any good. That one night, on which so much depended, remained hazy in my thoughts.
I asked myself: was that very haziness itself a significant thing? This one night had had more impact on the course of my life than almost any other. Surely it should be crystal clear in my thoughts! I recalled my prolonged fury, years’ worth, directed at Mark Pol. And what if I had created him as a scapegoat to my own guilt? Was my rage at him actually a rage at myself?
Back at the house Siuzan was waiting for me. I stood in the doorway and she embraced me, and immediately she sensed something not right.
‘What’s the matter?’
I went inside and she followed. ‘Siuzan,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you wish to marry me?’
‘Of course.’
‘You are sure you wish to go away with me to Montmorillon tomorrow? ’
‘What is this?’
‘Siuzan, I’m sorry.’
‘Of course I’m sure of these things.’
‘But do you know me, Siuzan? Are you sure of me?’
‘I know you better than anybody,’ she replied. ‘Love grants a clearer knowledge than other people know.’
‘Do you forgive me, Siuzan?’
She stiffened at this. ‘There is nothing for which you need forgiveness. Why are you talking in this manner?’
I didn’t know how to reply. ‘I met Mark Pol Treherne on the way home from work.’
‘So this is why you are so late?’ Then, with a start, she added, ‘But did you hurt him?’
‘I did not. I left him well, and living, and even happy. He was laughing when I left. But he said, or he suggested . . .’
After a silence, she prompted. ‘Suggested what?’
We w
ere standing at the foot of the stairs. One of the other occupants of the house came down, greeting us civilly, and walked past through the door into the night. When we were alone again I said: ‘Siuzan, we have never properly talked, you and I, about the walk to Cainon. About the night you were . . . assaulted.’
She turned a little away from me. ‘I do not wish to talk about that,’ she said.
‘I understand, but - but it is important to . . . Siuzan. Please. I cannot remember the night you were attacked. Or I can remember only pieces of it. My memory is partial.’
‘Better so.’
