A Song Of Stone

Chapter 6

Bright morning comes; the bloody fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.

I stand, then haul myself up to kneel at one of the tower's narrow windows, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and gazing out to witness the dawn.

Brandished and flagrant, the sunlight strikes this dun plain and makes of it a cauldron where rising vapours multiply and summit only to, in clearness, disappear, dissolved within an oceanic waste of sky.

I take in the view while expelling my own waste, as, going on a slow curve out, my personal contribution to the moat floats free, golden in the new day's haze and splashing, foaming on the dark waters below, each sunstruck, brassily delineated droplet a shining stitch within a rope of gold; a glowing sine like a metaphor for light.

Lightened, I return to my makeshift bed by the side of the cold, page clinkered grate; I intend only to rest, but fall asleep again, to be woken by the sounds of a key turning and a knock at the door.

,Sir?”

I sit up, disoriented with the hollowness arising from sleep needlessly resumed and then uncomfortably interrupted.

“Good morning, sir. I've brought some breakfast.” Old Arthur, wheezing from his journey up the narrow winding stair, squeezes through the door and deposits a tray upon a trunk. He looks apologetically at me. “May I sit, sir?”

,Of course, Arthur.”

He collapses gratefully upon a paper piled chair, producing a cloud of dust which circles lazily in the sunlight shafting through the broken windows of the tower. His chest heaves, his legs splay and he pulls out a handkerchief to pat and mop his brow.

“Beg your pardon, sir. Not as young as I used to be.”

There are times when there is simply nothing to be said; were someone equal to my station to pronounce such a phrase, I would select a reply with the judicious relish of a marksman in the bush who's come upon a perfect specimen of his prey, nearby and unsuspecting, and has to decide upon which gun to use. With an old and valued servant, such sport would be an impropriety, demeaning and diminishing the two of us. I have known those, mostly born to but none deserving our rank who revel in such chances to insult those who wait and those who serve, and by all appearances derive much satisfaction from such ignoble play, but theirs is a wit born, I think, of weakness. One should only spar with those near equal to oneself, otherwise the contest tells us nothing beyond the embarrassingly obvious, and they unwittingly confirm this who in their propensity for picking on those ruled out from replying directly expose themselves as most likely defenceless against those who could.

Besides, I know that those beneath us have their pride; they are simply ourselves in different circumstances, and those of our station allow each other self esteem carelessly enough. We are all our own legal system, where we feel the need and see the opportunity; apprehending, judging, dispensing and, where we can, enforcing whatever by our personal philosophy we deem legitimate. The spat out criticism of some waiter is as likely to be followed behind the double swing of the kitchen doors by the favour returned, un metaphorically, as an extra hidden sauce on the next dish, and surely many a slighted servant has nursed a grievance until able to return the contempt through well placed gossip, or acting on their own dose gathered intelligence of what is most precious to their tormentor the damaging, injury, breaking or loss of that treasure. There is a nicely calculated weight of balance in such unequal relationships that is far more easy for those above to ignore than those below, but which we disregard at our peril.

Such mistake perhaps finds itself reflected and exaggerated in the distorting mirror of our present difficulties. To my present regret I never did care much for politics, even as something to despise with any knowledgeability, and so arguably speak with less authority in this than other matters, but it seems to me that the conflict now surrounding us was at least partly born in a similar lack of consideration. There are tensions between states, peoples, races, castes and classes which any given player individual or group — simply neglects, takes for granted or attempts to manipulate for their advantage only at the risk of their very existence and by placing in jeopardy all that they hold dear. To do so knowingly is to he foolhardy enough; to do so without such awareness is loudly to proclaim oneself an utter idiot indeed.

How many pointless tragedies, struggles to the death and bloody wars have begun with the search for some small advantage, one minor. piece of territory, a slight concession or minor admission, only to grow, through mutual resistance, up welling pride and actions demanded by that self righteous sense of justice, into an encompassing horror that altogether obliterates the very edifice the contestants sought only to amend?

Old Arthur sits, panting on the seat in the cloud of dust his sitting raised. It occurs to me that he has aged significantly in the last few months. Of course, he truly is old; by far the most venerable of our staff, and as we approach the grave I suppose the steps grow steeper. He was the only one to choose to stay with the castle rather than come with us and trust to the roads and the supposed anonymity of the fleeing displaced. We understood, and did not try too hard to “persuade him otherwise; the road promised only prolonged privations, while the castle, occupied by others, offered the chance for someone of his years to take advantage of any dregs of respect the warlike young might still bestow upon the innocent old or at worst, perhaps, a quick end.

He sneezes. “Excuse me, sir.”

“Are our guests treating you well, Arthur?”

“Me sir?” The old fellow looks bemused.

I meant it in the plural. "You and the other servants; are the soldiers treating you decently?”

“Ah.” He looks at his handkerchief, then blows his nose in it and folds it away. “Yes, sir, well enough. Though they do tend to make a terrible mess.”

“I think they have lived outside, or in ruined places, for too long.”

“Sir, given it was them and their sort did the ruining in the first, place,” he says, leaning closer and dropping his voice, “perhaps that's where they belong!” He sits back, nodding but looking alarmed, as though he wishes not to take full responsibility for what his lips have just expressed.

“A good point, Arthur,” I say, amused. I swing my legs to the floor and sit up. I lift a glass of tepid milk from the tray and drink. There is toast, an egg, an apple, some preserves and a pot of coffee, which tastes tired just from the length of time it has been stored, but is still welcome.

“D'you know, sir,” Arthur says, shaking his head. “One of them sleeps outside the lieutenant's door each night, like a dog! It's that one with the red hair; Karma I heard someone call him, or some funny name like that. I saw him last night, lying there in the doorway with just a blanket over him. Apparently he always does that wherever she is; at her feet if they're camping in the outside, sir; at her feet, just like a dog!”

“Commendable,” I say, finishing the milk. “And they'll tell you you can't find the staff these days, eh?”

“Shall I fetch some fresh clothes, sir?” Arthur asks, smoothly resuming his professional manner. “There are still some in the laundry.”

“I ought to wash first,” I tell him, choosing a slice of toast; the bread has been unevenly toasted, but one must become inured to such privations, I suppose. “Is there any hot water?”

“I'll fetch some, sir. Will you be bathing in your own apartments?”

I rub my face, greasy from the day and night before. “Am I allowed to?” I ask. “Does our brave lieutenant consider my punishment complete?”

“I believe so, sir; she told me to take you breakfast and let you out, before she left.” His eyes widen as he takes in what I have just said. “Punish you, sir? Punish you? What right has she?” He sounds quite indignant. I have not heard his voice raised so since I was a child, and used to torment him. “What but what right? What could you do, in, in, in your home that let her?”

“I let slip a sack of what was neither edible nor mountable,” I tell him, trying to calm him. “But what do you mean, «left»? Where has she gone?”

Arthur sits tutting for a moment or two longer, then hauls his attention back. “I oh, I don't know, sir; they left I think there's a half dozen of them still here the rest, the lieutenant and the rest, the ones she took, they left just after dawn. just a handful of them still here. In search of hardware, the ones that left, that is, I think I heard one say, but that could be wrong sir; my hearing…” Arthur shakes his head, withered fingers trembling near one ear.

“And our good lady? Is she abroad?” I ask, smiling.

“Abroad, with them, sir,” the old servant says, expression troubled. “The lady lieutenant… she took her too, as some sort of guide.”

I use the little fruit knife on the apple, silent for a while. “Did she indeed?” I say eventually, dabbing at my lips with a napkin, clean but not, alas, pressed. “And did they say when they expected to return?”

“I did ask, sir,” Arthur says, shaking his head. “The lieutenant

lady just said, "In good time." I'm afraid that's all I was able to get out of her.”

“Indeed,” I mutter. “Probably no more than man can get into her.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Nothing, Arthur,” I say, letting him pour me a cup of coffee. “Draw me a bath, will you? And if you could sort out some clothes…”

“Of course, sir.” He leaves me to my thoughts.

Gone, with you. A guide; some sort of guide, indeed. You, who could get lost between adjoining rooms, you to whom two hedges constitute a maze. If the lieutenant has no maps nor any of her men a decent sense of direction I may never see you or any of them again. The lieutenant jests, I think. You may be a mascot or a trophy to recompense her for those worthless prizes I consigned to the waters yesterday, but not, I trust, truly a guide.

But she has taken you from me. I feel a kind of jealousy, I think. How novel, considering what we've shared, one could even say disseminated. I might even think to savour this unfamiliar bouquet, at least to swill it round before. I spit it out, but it has always seemed to be an ignoble emotion, a confession of moral weakness.

I feel I am reduced by her, so close to you. I fear my own seduction into a vulgar judgmentality, just the kind of facile moralism I have most despised in others.

I rise and make my way to our apartments; the pillows on your bed are piled oddly, and when I take them away, I find a pair of bullet holes in the headboard. I replace the pillows and proceed next door to my own room. There is a smell of something burned here; perhaps old horse hair. I can find no obvious source for the odour, though when I sit on it to remove my shoes, perhaps the mattress on my bed feels different. I look up; the tassels forming the fringe of the bed's canopy appear dark and soot stained just over where I sit. Well, there seems to be no other damage.

Arthur has the other servants bring me bowls and jugs of steaming hot water, produced by the fuel omnivorous stove in the kitchens. The bedroom's fire is charged with logs, and lit. I bathe alone, complete my toilet and then dress before the roaring fire.

From our windows, I look out upon our other guests, those fled, shaken out from the patchwork lands about and amassed here upon our lawns with their tents and animals, their choice of campsite by itself a mute appeal for sanctuary. There was a cathedral, in a town not far away, but I understand it fell to guns some months ago. It might have been a fitter focus of attraction, but perhaps for those gathered here today the castle serves in its place; its stony existence over the years by itself somehow an augur of good fortune, a talisman guaranteeing life and charity for those nearby. I believe this is what is called a pious hope.

I conduct my own inspection of the castle. The lieutenant's men remaining are those most needing rest; the more seriously wounded, and two who may be shellshocked. I feel I ought to talk to some, and so I attempt to engage a couple of the wounded in conversation in the makeshift ward that was our ballroom.

One is a heavy set man, prematurely grey, a jagged, ill healed scar on his face a year or so old, who hobbles on makeshift crutches, one leg wounded by a mine which killed the man walking in front of him a week ago. The other is a shy youth, sandy haired and of a pale and flawless complexion. He has a bullet in one shoulder, all strapped and bandaged; his chest

is, smooth and hairless. He seems sweet, seductive even, made more so by his air of injured vulnerability. I think, in another time, we might both have taken to this one.

I do my best, but in both cases each of us is awkward; the older man is by turns taciturn and garrulous ~ angry, I suspect, at whatever he considers I represent while the boy is merely wincingly demure and diffident, his long lashed eyes averted. I am more at ease with tile servants, sharing their mixture of quiet horror and unfeigned amusement at the uncouthness of the soldiers. They seem happy just to be busy again, returned to their purpose and taking solace in the familiarity of duty and service. I make a remark about keeping occupied that meets with politeness rather than genuine appreciation.

I take a stroll through the grounds. The people in the camp seem almost as tongue tied as the soldiers. Many of them are sick; I am told a child died yesterday. I meet the wife of the village Factor tending a fire by one of the tents; we saw her husband yesterday on the road when the lieutenant intercepted us. She and he live here, for now. He has gone with the other fit men of the camp in search of more food, hoping to plunder farms already ransacked many times.

I feel I should be doing something assertive, dynamic; I ought to make my own escape, try to bribe the soldiers still in the castle, attempt to form the servants into a resistance or rouse the people of the camp… but I think I do not have the character required for such heroics. My talents lie in other directions. Were some barbed comment all that was required to wrest and maintain control in this, I might leap to action and emerge victorious. As it is, I see too many options and possibilities, arguments and counter arguments, objections and alternatives. Lost within a mirror maze of tactical potential, I see everything and nothing, and lose my way in images. Men of iron find their soul contaminated, their purpose corroded in the presence of a surfeit of irony.

I retire to the castle, climb to the battlements and by the tower, the same one in which I was imprisoned last night inspect the trio the lieutenant had suspended here. They sway in a damp breeze, uniforms flapping. The dark hoods over their heads, I see now, are pillow slips of black silk where often our heads have lain. The moist fabric clings to their features, turning their faces into sculptures of jet. Two of them, arms dangling tied behind, have their chins on their chests as though gazing morosely down at the moat. The head of the third man is thrown back, his hands clutching the rope at his neck, his fingers pressed between the rope and black bruised skin, one leg drawn up behind his rear, his back still arched and his whole body frozen in that last desperate posture of agony. Behind the black silk, his eyes look open, staring up at the sky, accusatory.

It seems unfair; all they did was try to unearth some booty in a building abandoned by its owners, not expecting to incur the lieutenant's vengeful wrath. She says it was to make a point, to provide an example, by initial ruthlessness to make a more lenient regime the easier to maintain.

Above them, on the flagpole, the old snow tiger skin ruffles heavy in the gentle wind. The two rear leg pieces have been crudely tied to the lanyard, the skin itself looks worn and thinned in places, it is matted with the rain that's visited us over the last few days and still troubles the distances of plain, and in all is just too weighty for the use the lieutenant's men have tried to press it to. A stiff breeze will hardly lift it, a strong wind will make it snap and sail all right, but much more a decent gust and I suspect it will snap the flagpole too.

It seems an ignominious end for this aged heirloom, but how else would the old thing, have ended its days? Thrown out upon a midden, burned in some bonfire? Perhaps this is a more fitting end.

It stirs itself in the curling breeze, and looses a few anointing drops of soaked up rain upon the bodies hanging under it.

The cold weather means the lieutenant's trophies have not yet started to smell. I leave them and the furry flag to their fixed contemplation of all things pendulous and pending,nd walk along the serried summit of the castle.

From these brave battlements with a chosen bird of prey I used to fly my spirit free. From this quarried perch, I as much as the quarry they seized was gripped by them, and through those sleek carnivores, swift death's craftsmen, I felt that I partook of their airborne, slicing skill, and saw, in that stooping instant of mortality, a kind of ephemeral persistence. Here were the old rules, written across the sky in dark, gliding purpose, in curved lines of flight, in the panicking dips and flips and desperate lunges, dives and sprints of the target, all answered by instant flicks and turns executed by the following, closing hawk. Here was the sudden buffeting connection sometimes, close enough, you heard the thud of talons hitting flesh the small puff of feathers that hung upon the air, then the long, corkscrewing fall, the raptor's wings scrabbling for purchase in the air, its prey limp or struggling weakly, also flapping, and the whole, this binary avian creation one dead or dying, the other more alive than ever before, as though transfused that death melded twin secured by claw and tendon, rotating about their shared axis as they dropped locked together, drizzling feathers, distributing the game's last plaintive cries and then falling finally to field, lawn or wood.

The dogs were trained to frighten off the hawks, then with their warm cargo come running back to the castle, across the stone moat bridge, through the courtyard, up the winding stair and out on to the battlements, a trail of feathers and blood behind them on the spiralled steps.

With those surrogate hunters I sought to be part of that ruthlessly elegant struggle of life and death, evolution and selection, predator and prey. I believed I might, through them, withstand the air's stern siege and the slow weathering of time and the onward tramp of age, by meeting it with no cloud's means giving way and giving in but a carving use instead; a fixity of vision and of grasp that would let me so delegated, unreduced stand, connected and defined.

The dogs died last year; some illness when there was no vet to be found. Generations of devotion and meticulous breeding went with them.

I let the damn birds go when first we left the castle, fleeing from a fate that instead found us, and where they sail now, what they see and take, I cannot know.

The wind wraps me, the wind comes to me and leaves across the beaten plains. Slim slivers of sunlight prise underneath the clouds and, reflecting, appear to take instead of give, dazzling like camouflage, by their Jarring contrast, bright on dark, breaking up the few remaining shapes and signs of civilisation still evident, in better light (like that the memory provides), within the steady chaos of the landscape's reach.

Within the fields, the outcrop hills and the stands of trees, the stagnant oxbows gleam with a soiled yellow grace, alive to the eye from this angle only. The trees, lately coloured within the season's slow turn chill, now are bared black shapes, branches bared for the weight of snow and the force of winter storm. Higher, the forests glisten with the clouds that slew above them and about, and snag their slow grace down.

I listen for the sound of artillery, but the freshened wind has quartered, and holds the gunfire back. That distant, artificial thunder has become an almost comforting companion over these last weeks. It is as though we have relapsed into a more primitive system of belief, as though by the fractious meddling with our collective, lived through histories we have woken one of the old gods; a storm god, one to stride, hammerfooted, anvil headed over the land, amorphous, angry and omnipresent, while thunder like the sound of cracking skulls splits over all our darkened lands and the air conducts the lightning's breath to earth.

That woken deity marches on us now, towards the castle's doors. The noise is like the earth's gut rumbling, like an old fist slamming empty boards in an abandoned heaven overhead, and for all that the freshened wind has formed its own front against the blast, and moving air displaced all that noise, we know it is still there; what wind conceals, the mind insists upon revealing, providing the memory of that sound.

Air and rock, even the seas, forget quicker than we do.

A shout in the mountains fades over seconds, the earth itself rings like a bell when its sliding and colliding continents spasm. but that signal too fades over days, and for all that great storm waves and long tsunami can circle round the globe for weeks and months, our modest lump of stem flowered brain quite outdoes such crudely mechanical recollection, and what echoes in the human skull may resonate for a long lifetime of joy, fear or regret, only over decades slowly decaying.

Squinting against the barrage of light, in the distance I believe I can make out a few moving forms, frames made skinny, elongated against the ricocheting brightness of the reflecting water. I have no binoculars or spotting scopes left they have been requisitioned but either would be worse than useless, staring into this already painful light. Are those refugees I see, implicit in the shimmer of shadows against light? They could be soldiers, I suppose; they might even be you, my dear, leading our lieutenant and her men on an unintentional wild goose chase, but I think not. It might have been a herd of cattle, up to a few months ago, but most beasts hereabouts have been killed and eaten since, and the few that remain are closely watched and not allowed to wander.

Refugees, then; a pre echo of the coming front, the very image of the deep, soughing trough before the great wave falls, an in drawn breath before the scream; a rush of dead cells in these arterial ways, a scramble of dry leaves before the coming storm. Bared and broken trees line their way, the splintered stumps, the pale heart wood naked to the air; hacked, torn down for camp fires as though by massed gunfire. They stand, grown but broken, in imitation of their fretful mutilators.

The light changes, dimming the brash coruscations of the view. The river, tributaries, drainage ditches, oxbows, pools and flooded fields dim as the clouds shut off their direct source of sun. Now I can see some thin parings of smoke rising from the plain, marking where villages, farms and houses were, the dwellings built from, growing on and taking in the land and all its separated product now combining with the barren air.

I look for you, my dear, our lieutenant and her men, but aft is lost within the fractured surface of the view, all is foundered in its prostrate complexity, and the sintered land has you absorbed.

And so I stamp these stones, I walk this elevated way, I rub my hands and watch my breath like a warning go out before me, and can only wait.

I am cold; I gather phlegm in my throat and send it too towards the moat, then smile at that encircling water. There, like leaves scattered by the autumn wind, like those wasting cells again, and like the dispossessed who clogged up all our roads, I see the downward filtered, the long way travelled, the by that stream transported finches; the birds we shot and I lost, all dead and wet, bedraggled, cold and slowly turning in our sustaining ring of water. Our dead chicks, come home to roost at last.