A Song Of Stone

Chapter 8

When I go down to meet our lieutenant, the soldiers are in the hall, watching the shell, now disinterred, going out, carried on a stretcher. Its pallid bearers handle the solid deadness of it with a facsimile of respect even more faithful than that they reserve for their leader. Baby small and tenderly, precisely as though those who bear it are transporting someone they do not wish to wake, the shell leaves slowly, to be dumped somewhere in the woods. I make a mental note to inquire precisely where, on the off chance we might survive to see peace again, then go on my way, to the library and the lieutenant.

I enter the library's wall thick dimness by its already open door and step into the silence with due deference. The lieutenant sits in an ancient chair, her head lying on her greenshirted arms, folded on the table in front of her. The opera cloak has been discarded, draped like a fold of night across the back of the seat behind her. A map of our lands lies crumpled beneath her head, her curled, bedraggled hair hovering like a dark cloud above us all. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open slightly; she looks like any woman sleeping, and less remarkable than most. The ring on her small finger glints faintly.

How many devotees of Morpheus we have this morning. I feel a small moment of power over the sleeping lieutenant, thinking that I could reach between that old opera cloak and her shirt and slip her automatic pistol from its holster, threaten her, kill her, take her hostage so that her men are forced to leave the castle, or perhaps by the boldness of my action compel them to recognise me as the stronger leader and agree to follow me.

But I think not. We each have our position, our place, as much in these martial matters as in anything else and perhaps more so.

It would, anyway, be underhand, even ungallant.

And besides, I might make a mess of it.

An atlas, old and heavy, lies by the lieutenant's head, opened at this place. I lift one dusty side and let it fall. The thud, flat and resonant, awakens her. She rubs her eyes and stretches, sitting back in the creaking chair and casually, unthinkingly, placing her boots on the table by the map. These are not army boots, nor are they the ones she wore when we first met her; they are long riding boots, of soft brown shining leather, a little worn but still good. They look like an old pair of mine, the last ones I ever outgrew; another pair of refugees abducted from our past, no doubt exhumed from some cupboard, store or long sealed room. I watch small flakes of mud fall from their soles to caress the map. “Ah, Abel,” the lieutenant says as I find another chair and sit across from her. Inelegant in waking as in sleep, she grinds a finger in one ear, inspects the waxened end, then her watch, and frowns. “Better late than never.”

“The lateness is not all mine; our eldest servant has just died.”

She looks concerned. “What, old Arthur? How?”

“The shell passed through his room. He was uninjured but I believe his heart gave out.”

“I'm sorry,” she says, taking her boots off the table, her frown still there but troubled, even sympathetic. “I take it he'd been here a long time.”

“All of my life,” I tell her.

She makes a strange little noise with her mouth. “I thought we'd got away unscathed, there. Damn.” She shakes her head.

I begin to feel a fractious annoyance at her sympathy and seeming sorrow. If anyone ought to feel aggrieved it is I; he was my servant and she has no right to assume my role in this, even if I have chosen not to play it to its limits; it is my right to underplay it, but not hers to understudy me.

“Well, no; we were scathed,” I say curtly. “I'm sure he'll be much missed,” I add. (Who will bring me my breakfasts in future?)

She nods thoughtfully. “Is there anyone we should try to inform?”

I had not even thought. I wave one hand quickly. “I think he had some relations, but they lived at the other end of the country.” The lieutenant nods, understanding. The other end of the country; in the present circumstances one might as well say on the moon. “Certainly there was nobody nearby,” I tell her.

“I'll see he's buried, if you like,” she offers. I can think of a host of replies to this, but restrict myself to a nod and, “Thank you.”

“Now.” She breathes deeply, stands, strides to the windows and pulls the curtains open to the sky. “These maps,” she says, settling into the chair again.

We discuss her miniature campaign; she wishes to strike this afternoon, before we lose the light. The day seems fair, and without such luxuries as weather forecasts, soldiers as much as anybody else are reduced to the sort of weather lore that has apocryphally guided shepherds through the ages; best to attack when one can, lest rains set in and make the whole proceeding sodden as well as lethal.

I am what help I can be. I pencil in amendments to the charts, ploughing a new track here, erecting a bridge with a couple of pencil strokes and by a single solid line and a few wags of the wrist constructing a dam and filling in the waters behind. The lieutenant is appreciative, hmm ing and nodding and biting on one fingernail as we talk the matter through. A curious and novel feeling of what I believe must be usefulness creeps over me, along with the surprisingly agreeable appreciation of what it is to be in a team such as that the lieutenant has around her to command, each man depending on this sort of planning, each life hanging on how well or ill she thinks through what she might ask them together to accomplish. How collective, how even convivial, if also potentially humbling as well as deadly; such exemplary esprit de corps makes the contrived camaraderie of the hunt look a pale and paltry thing indeed.

Later her deputy, Mr Cuts, joins us, and he too sits and studies the maps, listening to what she proposes. Mr Cuts looks to be of late middle age; not quite old enough to be the lieutenant's father. He is tall and spindly with silvery dark hair and wears small thin rimmed glasses sitting high on a great narrow hook of nose.

He is, now I think of it, the only one of the lieutenant's men who is free of facial hair (even if, in the case of some of them, such hair is scarcely more than downy, youthful tufts). I was myself briefly bearded when we lost mains power a year or more ago. For this last year I've used an antique cut throat razor old Arthur discovered for me complete with brush, mug, mirror, whetstone and leather strop in a storeroom. I find myself wondering if Mr Cuts has a supply of razor blades, and whether his nickname is linked somehow to his clean shaven nature.

The fellow sits hunched, concentrating on the maps. He contributes his own grunts and a few suggestions, mostly regarding his pessimistic projections of the distances their vehicles can cover without running out of fuel.

In time I am dismissed, albeit with the lieutenant's apparently sincere thanks. I feel excluded, perhaps denied the witnessing of their more detailed plans by an instinctive or suspicious urge in them to keep their preparations secret, perhaps by the lieutenant mistakenly thinking I might be bored by such martial business. I stop at the library door, decided.

“You're short of fuel?” I ask.

The lieutenant looks up, glancing at Mr Cuts. “Well, yes,” she says, as though amused. “Sort of the way everybody is, these days.”

“I know where there is some,” I tell her.

“Where?”

“Beneath our carriage, in the stables. There are a few drums of petrol and diesel and one of oil, strapped underneath.”

She looks at me, one eyebrow hoisted.

“I thought to use it as currency,” I explain, refusing to be bashful. “Something to bargain with, while on the road.” I give a small frown and gesture with one hand. “But please; feel free.” I smile as graciously as I can.

The lieutenant breathes slowly in and out. “Well, that's very generous of you, Abel,” she says. Her eyes narrow above a tight twist of smile. “Is there anything else you've been keeping back which we might be interested in?”

“There is nothing else which is hidden,” I tell her, only a little disappointed with her reaction. “Everything in the castle and the grounds is open and obvious enough. We have no weapons or medical supplies you don't know about, and you let Morgan keep her jewellery.”

She nods. “So I did,” she says. Her smile loosens. “Well, thank you for your contribution,” she says. “Would you mind asking one of the men to bring the fuel round to the trucks?”

“Not at all,” I say, with a small bow, then leave and swing closed the library door, a strange feeling of both relief and exhilaration coursing through me.

This duty discharged, I climb towards you again, my dear, and stand for a moment at one of the casements in my room. The hole in the floor has been filled in and covered with both a rug and a large ceramic urn, while an old tapestry has been nailed across the ceiling and wall where the hole is. Continued thumping from above bears witness to the servants” efforts to repair the roof as best they can.

I throw open the windows to gaze through mists and scattered showers upon the far, unpopulated lands, our tentdespoiled lawns and catch on that still veering wind, brought over the hills and across the plains the reasserted rumble of distant artillery fire, and the smell of death's decay upon the freshening breeze.