A Song Of Stone

Chapter 18

I lie against gnarled roots, breathing hard. I want to stand or at least sit up but the gunfire is still crackling around me and I dare not raise my head. My hands are aching; I had forgotten they were burned when I was digging with them. The jeep lies on its back on the bank of a deep roadside ditch, its rear resting in the water in the ditch's bottom, front wheels pointing at the slowly lightening clouds. The road is dotted with the litter of refugees, the jeep just one of several vehicles lying on or beside the road. Opposite me there are trees; a dark mass of conifers. Twisting and looking through the branches of the bushes, I can see a stretch of broken, sandy landscape, ridged and hummocked and scattered with low, leafless trees. On the highest swelling of ground there is an old windmill, a black painted clapboard construction, feathered sails tattered and forming a crucifix raised against the grey extent of sky.

Something moves against the dawn light to the east; a man running, crouched, from one low stone wall towards another. Light flickers from the open doorway of the mill. The sound of the gunfire comes at the same moment the man drops to the ground. He tries to rise, then as the gunfire cracks again he shakes and jerks and lies still.

Looking back, I see a dark figure moving round the side of the windmill from the other side, a rifle held one handed, the other arm held up, hand clenched and full, by his shoulder. I squint, trying to make the fellow out in the still deficient light. I don't think he is one of the lieutenant's men. There is silence for a few moments as the man moves towards to the door. No sign of movement comes from inside the mill. The soldier edges closer, just a stride's length away.

A single shot cracks out, and the man jerks away from the side of the mill, dropping the rifle and staggering forwards as he clutches at his side. Where his side had been, against the mill's sloped wooden planks, there is a small pale gash in the black slat. He half runs, half falls past the mill's open door, arm moving, throwing something. More firing; he hops, arms flying out and for an instant he has the comical look of somebody trying to imitate the mill's shape, his spread limbs like the building's four spread sails. Then he drops, collapsing like a bag of broken bones, folding and collapsing to a sitting position on the ground outside, before toppling over and disappearing into the grass.

The explosion in the mill is a single sudden flash of light and a ragged jolt of sound. Grey white smoke drifts out of the mill after a moment or two. I lie there for some time, waiting, but there is no more movement, no more sound.

In a little while, birdsong begins. I listen to it.

Still nobody moving. When I shiver, I decide to get up. I stand shakily, using the bushes for support, then I wipe my face with the back of a shaking hand. I remember I have a handkerchief somewhere, and finally find it. I walk across the sandy soil towards the mill, crouching and feeling foolish, but still afraid that there is somebody else here, more patient than I, lying watching and waiting with a gun. I stop by a stunted tree, gazing into the darkness of the mill's doorway. Something creaks above me. I duck and almost fall, but it is only the branches, moving in a faint breeze.

Mr Cuts lies sprawled on a barbed wire fence just below the mill, half kneeling, arms on the far side of the wire, face laid against the barbs, the ground below him saturated with dark blood. His gun dangles from one hand, swaying in the breeze.

A little way up the slope is the soldier who threw the grenade into the mill, lying in long grass. His uniform is unfamiliar though I wouldn't be able to recognise him anyway because his face is a red ruin of bloody flesh.

I walk up to the mill and step inside. The interior reeks of smoke and a musty odour that must be ancient flour. My eyes gradually adjust to the deeper gloom. There is still dust or flour in the air, circling and settling as it backs away from the breeze from the doorway. Out of the ceiling, a single great wooden shaft descends, linked by an axle to a pair of huge and ancient millstones balanced coupled on their stony track like dancers frozen in the figure. Funnels and channels lead from hoppers to the stones, the outworks of a doubled heart. An octagonal wooden dais surrounds the great stump of rock. Not much else remains, no sacks or sign of grain or recent flour; I think the mill last worked long ago.

I stumble over a couple of tape twinned gun magazines. There is a man lying on his back by the side of the door, chest opened and bloody. Beneath the bloody, floury mask is a face I recognise as one of the lieutenant's men but cannot put a name to. By his side lies a radio, hissing. The grenade seems to have gone off a little way past him, beneath where a spiral of wooden stairs lead up into a greater darkness, their wooden steps ruptured and splintered.

By the rear of the mill's torus of stone, the lieutenant sits, her back to the wooden wall. Her legs are spread out in front of her and her head rests on her chest. Her head jerks up as I approach, and her hand comes up too, holding a pistol. I flinch, but the gun flies from her hand and clatters on to the floorboards to one side. She mutters something, then her head flops back. There is blood beneath her, its surface coated with a thin patina of flour. A grey white dusting on her hair, skin and uniform makes her look like a ghost.

I squat by her, putting my hand to her chin and raising it. The eyes move behind their lids and her mouth works, but that is all. Blood from her nose has left twin rivulets over her lips and down her chin. I let her head fall back. The lieutenant's long gun lies nearby her hand. The exposed magazine is empty. I try various little levers and catches and eventually find the one which frees the other clip; it too has been used up. I cross to where the lieutenant's pistol lies. It feels light, though when I open it I can see there are at least two bullets in the magazine.

I look at the dead man at the door, at the two dead men visible outside, Mr Cuts hanging on the wire like an image from an earlier war, the grenade thrower keeled over in the swaying grass with no discernible face. I hold the lieutenant's pistol in my burned, shaking hand.

What to do? What to do? Become furious, my muse murmurs, and I squat by the lieutenant again and put the muzzle of the pistol experimentally against her temple. I recall the first day we met her, when she blew out the brains of the young man with the stomach wound, after kissing him first. I think of her a little while ago, kneeling naked on the bed, firing at me, nearly killing me. My hand is shaking so much I have to steady it with my other hand. The muzzle of the gun vibrates against the skin at the side of her head, beneath her brown curls. A small vein pulses weakly under the olive surface. I swallow. My finger feels weak upon the trigger, incapable of exerting any pressure. For all I know she's dying anyway; she seems concussed or in some way losing consciousness and all this blood must indicate a serious wound somewhere. Killing her might be a release. I steady my grip and sight along the barrel, as though this makes a difference.

Then there is a creaking, cracking noise from above me, and then a disorienting sense of movement, and a deep, surrounding rumbling noise. I stare wildly around, wondering what's happening, and see the world outside the door moving, and cannot believe my eyes, and only then realise that the mill itself is rotating. The force of the breeze must have just become sufficient to make the airy wooden circle turn to face into the flow of air. Grinding and resounding, with many a mournfulsounding moan and painful creak, the mill turns, and as though its sails and gears and stones are lode eventually it settles its face towards the bitter north. I watch the view through the door change, sliding away from the road and the forest on its far side, taking away the sight of the dead men and gradually slowing and steadying and grumbling to a stop, to display the way west, back down the road it seems I'm fated never to travel to the end of but always to return down, the road back to the castle.

I look again at the lieutenant. The breeze tumbles in through the open door and disturbs her flour greyed curls. I put down the gun. I cannot do this. Walking to the doorway, feeling faint and dizzy again, I look out into the dawning day and take some deep breaths. The ragged, half empty arms of the sails are lifted as though in vain entreaty to the wind, feathered and powerless.

And yet, some part of me still says: Exert, assert your self… but does so too well, its sentence pronounced too clearly. I do not know, I cannot impersonate such vivacious anger. It is known to me empirically, but no more, and that knowledge pins me.

I look back at her. What would she do? And yet, should I even care what she would do? She sits there, nearer death than she can know, and in my power. I am in control, I have prevailed, even if only by luck. What would I do? What should I do? Be like myself, act as normal? And yet what is ever normal, and what value or utility has normality in these abnormal times? Less than nothing, it seems to me. Therefore act abnormally, act differently, be irregular.

The lieutenant deserves my ire for all she's taken from us. including the chance that we had to escape, those few days ago when she stopped us on this same road. That first interference led to all the rest; to the taking of our home, the destruction of our family's inheritance, to the lieutenant taking my place with you and as must have been her intent my planned murder. That first shot of hers, that spun me, dropped me; that was in the heat of the moment. But when they put me in the jeep, took me away from the castle, in the traditional hour of execution, that was cold blooded, my dear.

The tolerance I've exhibited and felt towards our lieutenant has been a relic of more civilised times, when the ease of peace means we may allow each other such genteel leeway. I thought, through a display of civility, to show my contempt for these desperate days and our lieutenant's brash assumptions, but forced beyond a certain point, such politeness becomes self defeating. I must allow myself to be infected by the violent nature of the times, to suck in their contaminating breath, take on their fatal contagion. I look at the gun in my hand. Still, this is the lieutenant's way. To kill her with the weapon she might have used to kill me might he poetic just or not but it seems like too easy a rhyme to me.

The wind caresses my cheek and tugs at my hair. The mill flexes, seems about to move again, then settles once more. I put the gun down on the floor, then pick it up again, check that its safety catch is on and stuff it in the waistband of my trousers at the small of my back. I look quickly about, searching for a. lever, some control.

I run up the splintered stairs, going briefly dizzy with the sudden effort, then in the upper darkness of wooden gears and spars and bins and hoppers, at last I find a wooden lever like something out of an old railway signal box, attached by rusted iron rods to a wooden iris in the mill's wall pierced by a horizontal axle that disappears through it to the outside. I pull the wooden handle. A noise like a sigh, and a groan. A sensation of tapped power shakes the mill, and the horizontal shaft starts to rotate slowly, turning the creaking, grinding, wood toothed gears that convert the power from horizontal to vertical and send it to the floor below, and to the stones. I race back down again, almost failing at the bottom in my haste. The great millstones are trundling slowly round their track, shaking the whole mill with their low, deliberate thunder. They slow perceptibly as I watch, the wind outside losing some strength, then slowly they speed up again as it stiffens once more. Here is a different end, here is a fitter poesy. A strange excitement shakes me and sweat breaks on my brow. I must do this while the resolution still burns in me.

My hands slip easily under the lieutenant's armpits and I pull her up. She makes a small moaning sound. I place her by the great stone circle of the mill wheels” track, kneeling her before it like some votary in a temple. I take the weight of her upper body, preventing her from collapsing. One flank of her is wet with blood. A wheel passes slowly in front of her on the track. My hands shake as I hold her there, letting the great stone pass, then I let her fold forward, her shoulders on the edge of the track, her head lying on it like a sacrifice. I lean back, my heart hammering violently; the next stone wheel rumbles round, ponderous and lethargic towards the lieutenant's skull, casting a shadow over her head. I close my eyes.

A terrible, grinding noise shakes me, and then the noise stops. I open my eyes. The lieutenant lies, her head caught, wedged between millstone and track, but intact. I think I hear her make a whimpering noise. I spin round to the door. A weak breeze pants at holed sails, impotent and denied. I leap up and try to shift the stones, move them back so that her head will be freed, but they refuse to shift. I quiver with rage, shout out and try to push them the other way, to crush her skull with my own strength, but even so I know I do not push with all my might, and the result is the same, and she stays, stuck but uncrushed, her head stopping the stones.

What am I trying to do? Could I remove her now in any event, bring her round and say sorry? Or will I live with the memory of the stones moving, her brains splattering? I laugh, I admit; there is nothing more to be done. I cannot kill her and I cannot free her. The radio lying near the body by the door makes a sudden crackling noise. I back away from the lieutenant, leaving her kneeling there, pressed and held, a supplicant half prostrate before the round altar of stone. At the door of that extemporised fort I turn to the breeze, then leap out, running away, turning my face to the wind and to you, MY castle.

Cold rain meets me, my dear, but I set my face to you alike with that battered wooden tower, and drops in the breeze's hidden surfaces give me tears at last for all of us. I stop at the jeep, as though this last mode of transport could somehow bless my journey, but it has nothing to offer me. I take to the road alone in that cold dawn and by those wasted fields in that rain seeded air I walk.

We are liquid beings, my dear, born between two waters, and that infectious rain seemed then like something sent from you and its eye made strands there for me to hold and be guided by. My spirits, away from that fabrication of wood and stone, begin to lift, at the thought of returning to you. I thought I never would, but now again I have the chance. I can find a way in, or wait for the lieutenant's men to leave, leaderless and fleeing. I can reclaim you if you'll let me.

I think, just for a moment, that I hear a scream, following me from the mill, and I turn to look back at it again, but it has to fight the sounds of the rain and may only have been the radio again, and besides I was not sure I heard it at all; I turn towards the castle once more, head down against the shower.

I do believe I have an aim at last; to take you away, with no chattels and no intention of ever returning to the place that's been our home. The lieutenant and her men relieved us of all our fragile goods and our loyalty to the castle's stones, and so cast us together and alone into the free air of flight, at last alive to its pervasive force in all its wayward eloquence. The lieutenant's light fingers might have stolen you from me a little while, but you'll be mine again as you have been before.

Walk me, walk me, wind. Lead by your resistance and take me to my darling one, conduct me to our keep, my perfectly faithless refugee. The ring, I think, stopping.

I should have taken the ring of white gold and ruby that was on the lieutenant's hand, the one she took from you that first day, in the carriage on our way back along this very road. I look back, hesitating.

I hear an engine noise just then, from the direction I've been heading in. I take shelter behind an old fashioned horsedrawn cart lying pushed on to its side by the road, one big, woodspoked wheel raised to the sky. The engine sound comes from one of the lieutenant's trucks, an olive face with a rictus grinning grille and two bright headlight eyes. It charges past my hiding place, trailing clouds of wind caught spray behind, its wheels making a tearing noise at the road surface. The canvas cover over the steel frame flaps and cracks in the slipstream as it roars past. I glimpse men sitting inside, huddled busy over weapons.

I stand out beside the cart, watching over it as the truck races down the road in the direction of the mill. The truck's own wind and shower envelop me, rocking me, until the freshened breeze comes back. I decide I will not be ashamed of the relief I feel now at the prospect of hers. Let them find her; let them rescue her. She deserves no less, I suppose. It was a foolishness to treat her so. The trees behind me creak, some old leaves are scattered up from out of a ditch and another cold gust sways me. makes me shiver.

The truck's brakelights blaze, and it stops, near the distant, canted jeep. Trees between me and the mill bow, slowly, then flex back, and from their dark heads beat black bird shapes.

The truck, made tiny by the distance, reverses closer to the mill. I turn and look west, to the castle, and the rain stings me, wind gusting again. The truck has stopped. Men are jumping down. Then a sound comes from right beside me, and I jump, hand shakily to my back, feeling for the pistol wedged there.

But it is just an old piece of rag, some shred of sacking caught on the wheel of the ancient cart, and catching the wind now, too, and turning the wheel.

I wipe my eyes and watch the small figures running up towards the mill, jumping from the truck, leaping the ditch, vaulting the walls, running across the intervening ground, stopping, leaping, running, running up, the first of them just approaching the doorway of the mill.

Where the wooden arms, though broken, though only half set, though ragged with their holed fabric, still sail their course round now, and free at last salute the passing air.

I turn my back, and run, along, the road at first, then when that turns, still straight for you, heading over fields and through woods, through the cutting rain and choking wind, and see it all and see nothing, forever before my eyes the sight of those wasted windmill arms, saluting and saluting and saluting.