By that afternoon, after we had crossed the entire valley on an excellent dirt road through the jungle and had reached the top of the next range of hills, I had a pain in my stomach. Savitsky noticed me holding my hands against my groin and said laconically, “I wish the doctor hadn’t been killed. Do you think it’s typhus?” Naturally, it was what I had suspected.
“I think it’s just the tea and the rice and the other stuff. Maybe mixing with all the dust we’ve swallowed.”
He looked paler than usual. “I’ve got it, too. So have half the others. Oh, shit!”
It was hard to tell, in that jungle at that time of day, if you had a fever. I decided to put the problem out of my mind as much as possible until sunset when it would become cooler.
The road began to show signs of damage and by the time we were over the hill and looking down on the other side we were confronting scenery if anything more desolate than that which we had passed through on the previous three days. It was a grey desert, scarred by the broken road and bomb-craters. Beyond this and coming towards us was a wall of dark dust; unmistakably an army on the move. Savitsky automatically relaxed in his saddle and turned back to see our men moving slowly up the wooded hill. “I think they must be heading this way.” Savitsky cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”
It was a distant shriek. Then a whole squadron of planes was coming in low. We could see their crudely painted Khmer Rouge markings, their battered fuselages. The men began to scatter off the road, but the planes ignored us. They went zooming by, seeming to be fleeing rather than attacking. I looked at the sky, but nothing followed them.
We took our field-glasses from their cases and adjusted them. In the dust I saw a mass of barefoot infantry bearing rifles with fixed bayonets. There were also trucks, a few tanks, some private cars, bicycles, motorbikes, ox-carts, handcarts, civilians with bundles. It was an orgy of defeated soldiers and refugees.
“I think we’ve missed the action.” Savitsky was furious. “We were beaten to it, eh? And by Australians, probably!”
My impulse to shrug was checked. “Damn!” I said a little weakly.
This caused Savitsky to laugh at me. “You’re relieved. Admit it!”
I knew that I dare not share his laughter, lest it become hysterical and turn to tears, so I missed a moment of possible comradeship. “What shall we do?” I asked. “Go round them?”
“It would be easy enough to go through them. Finish them off. It would stop them destroying this valley, at least.” He did not, by his tone, much care.
The men were assembling behind us. Savitsky informed them of the nature of the rabble ahead of us. He put his field-glasses to his eyes again and said to me: “Infantry, too. Quite a lot. Coming on faster.”
I looked. The barefoot soldiers were apparently pushing their way through the refugees to get ahead of them.
“Maybe the planes radioed back,” said Savitsky. “Well, it’s something to fight.”
“I think we should go round,” I said. “We should save our strength. We don’t know what’s waiting for us at Angkor.”
“It’s miles away yet.”
“Our instructions were to avoid any conflict we could,” I reminded him.
He sighed. “This is Satan’s own country.” He was about to give the order which would comply with my suggestion when, from the direction of Angkor Wat, the sky burst into white fire. The horses reared and whinnied. Some of our men yelled and flung their arms over their eyes. We were all temporarily blinded. Then the dust below seemed to grow denser and denser. We watched in fascination as the dark wall became taller, rushing upon us and howling like a million dying voices. We were struck by the ash and forced onto our knees, then onto our bellies, yanking our frightened horses down with us as best we could. The stuff stung my face and hands and even those parts of my body protected by heavy clothing. Larger pieces of stone rattled against my goggles.
When the wind had passed and we began to stand erect, the sky was still very bright. I was astonished that my field-glasses were intact. I put them up to my burning eyes and peered through swirling ash at the Cambodians. The army was running along the road towards us, as terrified animals flee a forest fire. I knew now what the planes had been escaping. Our Cossacks were in some confusion, but were already regrouping, shouting amongst themselves. A number of horses were still shying and whickering but by and large we were all calm again.
“Well, comrade,” said Savitsky with a sort of mad satisfaction, “what do we do now? Wasn’t that Angkor Wat, where we’re supposed to meet our allies?”
I was silent. The mushroom cloud on the horizon was growing. It had the hazy outlines of a gigantic, spreading cedar tree, as if all at once that wasteland of ash had become promiscuously fertile. An aura of bloody red seemed to surround it, like a silhouette in the sunset. The strong, artificial wind was still blowing in our direction. I wiped dust from my goggles and lowered them back over my eyes. Savitsky gave the order for our men to mount. “Those bastards down there are in our way,” he said. “We’re going to charge them.”
“What?” I could not believe him.
“When in doubt,” he told me, “attack.”
“You’re not scared of the enemy,” I said, “but there’s the radiation.”
“I don’t know anything about radiation.” He turned in his saddle to watch his men. When they were ready he drew his sabre. They imitated him. I had no sabre to draw.
I was horrified. I pulled my horse away from the road. “Division Commander Savitsky, we’re duty-bound to conserve . . .”
“We’re duty-bound to make for Angkor,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.” His perfect body poised itself in the saddle. He raised his sabre.
“It’s not like ordinary dying,” I began. But he gave the order to trot forward. There was a rictus of terrifying glee on each mouth. The light from the sky was reflected in every eye.
I moved with them. I had become used to the security of numbers and I could not face their disapproval. But gradually they went ahead of me until I was in the rear. By this time we were almost at the bottom of the hill and cantering towards the mushroom cloud which was now shot through with all kinds of dark, swirling colours. It had become like a threatening hand, while the wind-borne ash stung our bodies and drew blood on the flanks of our mounts.
Yakovlev, just ahead of me, unstrapped his accordion and began to play some familiar Cossack battle-song. Soon they were all singing. Their pace gradually increased. The noise of the accordion died but their song was so loud now it seemed to fill the whole world. They reached full gallop, charging upon that appalling outline, the quintessential symbol of our doom, as their ancestors might have charged the very gates of hell. They were swift, dark shapes in the dust. The song became a savage, defiant roar.
My first impulse was to charge with them. But then I had turned my horse and was trotting back towards the valley and the border, praying that, if I ever got to safety, I would not be too badly contaminated.
Doves in the Circle (1997)
Like “The Opium General” and “A Winter Admiral,” earlier in this collection, “Doves in the Circle” is another more or less non-fantastical story.
That said, it does mention the Kakatanawas, a native American tribe featured in The Skrayling Tree, a recent Elric book.
“Doves in the Circle” was originally published in 1997, in an anthology, The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories (Penguin), edited by Nicholas Royle.
Situated between Church Street and Broadway, several blocks from Houston Street, just below Canal Street, Houston Circle is entered via Houston Alley from the North, and Lispenard, Walker and Franklin Streets from the West. The only approach from the South and East is via Courtland Alley. Houston Circle was known as Indian Circle or South Green until about 1820. It was populated predominantly by Irish, English and, later, Jewish people and today has a poor reputation. The circle itself, forming a green, now an open market, had some claims to a
ntiquity. Aboriginal settlements have occupied the spot for about five hundred years and early travellers report finding non-indigenous standing stones, remarkably like those erected by the Ancient Britons. The Kakatanawas, whom early explorers first encountered, spoke a distinctive Iroquois dialect and were of a high standard of civilisation. Captain Adriaen Block reported encountering the tribe in 1612. Their village was built around a stone circle “whych is their Kirke.” When, under the Dutch, Fort Amsterdam was established nearby, there was no attempt to move the tribe which seems to have become so quickly absorbed into the dominant culture that it took no part in the bloody Indian War of 1643–5 and had completely disappeared by 1680. Although of considerable architectural and historical interest, because of its location and reputation Houston Circle has not attracted redevelopment and its buildings, some of which date from the 18th century, are in poor repair. Today the Circle is best known for “The Three Sisters,” which comprise the Catholic Church of St. Mary the Widow (one of Huntingdon Begg’s earliest commissions), the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Sophia and the Orthodox Jewish Synagogue which stand side by side at the East end, close to Doyle’s Ale House, built in 1780 and still in the same family. Next door to this is Doyle’s Hotel (1879), whose tariff reflects its standards. Crossed by the Elevated Railway, which destroys the old village atmosphere, and generally neglected now, the Circle should be visited in daylight hours and in the company of other visitors. Subway: White Street IRT. Elevated: 6th Ave. El. at Church Street, Streetcar: B & 7th Ave., B’way & Church.
—New York: A Traveller’s Guide.
R. P. Downes, Charles Kelly,
London 1924
1
If there is such a thing as unearned innocence, then America has it, said Barry Quinn mysteriously lifting his straight glass to the flag and downing the last of Corny Doyle’s passable porter. Oh, there you go again, says Corny, turning to a less contentious customer and grinning to show he saw several viewpoints. Brown as a tinker, he stood behind his glaring pumps in his white shirtsleeves, his skin glowing with the bar work, polishing up some silverware with all the habitual concentration of the rosary.
Everyone in the pub had an idea that Corny was out of sorts. They thought, perhaps, he would rather not have seen Father McQueeny there in his regular spot. These days the old priest carried an aura of desolation with him so that even when he joined a toast he seemed to address the dead. He had never been popular and his church had always chilled you but he had once enjoyed a certain authority in the parish. Now the Bishop had sent a new man down and McQueeny was evidently retired but wasn’t admitting it. There’d always been more faith and Christian charity in Doyle’s, Barry Quinn said, than could ever be found in that damned church. Apart from a few impenetrable writers in the architectural journals, no one had ever liked it. It was altogether too modern and Spanish-looking.
Sometimes, said Barry Quinn putting down his glass in the copper stand for a refill, there was so much good will in Doyle’s Ale House he felt like he was taking his pleasure at the benign heart of the world. And who was to say that Houston Circle, with its profound history, the site of the oldest settlement on Manhattan, was not a centre of conscious grace and mystery like Camelot or Holy Island or Dublin, or possibly London? You could find all the inspiration you needed here. And you got an excellent confessional. Why freeze your bones talking to old McQueeny in the box when you might as well talk to him over in that booth. Should you want to.
The fact was that nobody wanted anything at all to do with the old horror. There were some funny rumours about him. Nobody was exactly sure what Father McQueeny had been caught doing, but it must have been bad enough for the Church to step in. And he’d had some sort of nasty secretive surgery. Mavis Byrne and her friends believed the Bishop made him have it. A popular rumour was that the Church castrated him for diddling little boys. He would not answer if you asked him. He was rarely asked. Most of the time people tended to forget he was there. Sometimes they talked about him in his hearing. He never objected.
She’s crossed the road now, look. Corny pointed through the big, green-lettered window of the pub to where his daughter walked purposefully through the wrought-iron gates of what was nowadays called Houston Park on the maps and Houston Green by the realtors.
She’s walking up the path. Straight as an arrow. He was proud of her. Her character was so different from his own. She had all her mother’s virtues. But he was more afraid of Kate than he had ever been of his absconded spouse.
Will you look at that? Father McQueeny’s bloody eyes stared with cold reminiscence over the rim of his glass. She is about to ask Mr. Terry a direct question.
He’s bending an ear, says Barry Quinn, bothered by the priest’s commentary, as if a fly interrupted him. He seems to be almost smiling. Look at her coaxing a bit of warmth out of that grim old mug. And at the same time she’s getting the info she needs, like a bee taking pollen.
Father McQueeny runs his odd-coloured tongue around his lips and says, shrouded safe in his inaudibility, his invisibility: What a practical and down-toearth little creature she is. She was always that. What a proper little madam, eh? She must have the truth, however dull. She will not allow us our speculations. She is going to ruin all our fancies!
His almost formless body undulates to the bar, settles over a stool and seems to coagulate on it. Without much hope of a quick response, he signals for a short and a pint. Unobserved by them, he consoles himself in the possession of some pathetic and unwholesome secret. He marvels at the depths of his own depravity, but now he believes it is his self-loathing which keeps him alive. And while he is alive, he cannot go to hell.
2
“Well,” says Kate Doyle to Mr. Terry McLear, “I’ve been sent out and I beg your pardon but I am a kind of deputation from the whole Circle, or at least that part of it represented by my dad’s customers, come to ask if what you’re putting up is a platform on which you intend to sit, to make, it’s supposed, a political statement of some kind? Or is it religious? Like a pole?”
And when she has finished her speech, she takes one step back from him. She folds her dark expectant hands before her on the apron of her uniform. There is a silence, emphasised by the distant, constant noise of the surrounding city. Framed by her bobbed black hair, her little pink oval face has that expression of sardonic good humour, that hint of self-mockery, which attracted his affection many years ago. She is the picture of determined patience, and she makes Mr. Terry smile.
“Is that what people are saying these days, is it? And they think I would sit up there in this weather?” He speaks the musical, old-fashioned convent-educated, precisely pronounced English he learned in Dublin. He’d rather die than make a contraction or split an infinitive. He glares up at the grey, Atlantic sky. Laughing helplessly at the image of himself on a pole he stretches hard-worn fingers towards her to show he means no mockery or rudeness to herself. His white hair rises in a halo. His big old head grows redder, his mouth rapidly opening and closing as his mirth engulfs him. He gasps. His pale blue eyes, too weak for such powerful emotions, water joyfully. Kate Doyle suspects a hint of senile dementia. She’ll be sorry to see him lose his mind, it is such a good one, and so kind. He never really understood how often his company had saved her from despair.
Mr. Terry lifts the long thick dowel onto his sweat-shirted shoulder. “Would you care to give me a hand, Katey?”
She helps him steady it upright in the special hole he had prepared. The seasoned pine dowel is some four inches in diameter and eight feet tall. The hole is about two feet deep. Yesterday, from the big bar, they had all watched him pour in the concrete.
The shrubbery, trees and grass of the Circle nowadays wind neatly up to a little grass-grown central hillock. On this the City has placed two ornamental benches. Popular legend has it that an Indian chief rests underneath, together with his treasure.
When Mr. Terry was first seen measuring up the mound, they thought of the ancient redma
n. They had been certain, when he had started to dig, that McLear had wind of gold.
All Doyle’s regulars had seized enthusiastically on this new topic. Corny Doyle was especially glad of it. Sales rose considerably when there was a bit of speculative stimulus amongst the customers, like a sensational murder or a political scandal or a sporting occasion.
Katey knew they would all be standing looking out now, watching her and waiting. They had promised to rescue her if he became unpleasant. Not that she expected anything like that. She was the only local that Mr. Terry would have anything to do with. He never would talk to most people. After his wife died he was barely civil if you wished him “good morning.” His argument was that he had never enjoyed company much until he met her and now precious little other company satisfied him in comparison. Neither did he have anything to do with the Church. He’d distanced himself a bit from Katey when she started working with the Poor Clares. This was the first time she’d approached him in two years. She’s grateful to them for making her come but sorry that it took the insistence of a bunch of feckless boozers to get her here.
“So,” she says, “I’m glad I’ve cheered you up. And if that’s all I’ve achieved, that’s good enough for today, I’m sure. Can you tell me nothing about your pole?”
“I have a permit for it,” he says. “All square and official.” He pauses and watches the Sears delivery truck which has been droning round the Circle for the last fifteen minutes, seeking an exit. Slumped over his wheel, peering about for signs, the driver looks desperate.
“Nothing else?”
“Only that the pole is the start of it.” He’s enjoying himself. That heartens her.
“And you won’t be doing some sort of black magic with the poor old Indian’s bones?”
“Magic, maybe,” he says, “but not a bit black, Katey. Just the opposite, you will see.”
“Well, then,” she says, “then I’ll go back and tell them you’re putting up a radio aerial.”
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 28