Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  All around, birds flew upwards with an amplified shuffling sound of wings and rustling leaves.

  Polystom had wrenched his left wrist with the recoil and, muttering curses to himself, he replaced the guns in their box and sat on the floor, nursing the jarred joint. For five minutes he wondered, bitterly, if he had broken it, but he seemed to be able to flex it slightly, and he probably (he told himself) would not have been able to move it all if he had snapped any bone. But it was hugely sore. Sprained. The stupidity! He’d tried to brace his joints, he really had. But now he knew he was facing the ridicule, howsoever elegantly expressed, of his two lieutenants. How did your pistol practice go sir? Hurt your wrist sir? What a shame, sir.

  With his good hand he packed away the guns and shut the case. Only as he was leaving did it occur to him to check whether he’d hit his target. Holding the case in his good hand, and clutching his sore arm against his chest, he made his way over to the tree. A portion of the bark on the extreme right edge had been splintered by the passage of a bullet.

  He had Nestor bandage up the wrist with a splint of cured leather that allowed a degree of movement. ‘Try and make sure the bandages are underneath the sleeves,’ he told his servant, unable to keep the peevishness out of his voice. ‘Sir,’ said the butler. ‘I think it needs to come up over the base of your hand, sir, if it’s to do you any good.’

  Supersensitive at supper, Polystom thought he detected sly smiles being exchanged between his lieutenants, but neither of them spoke directly about his sprain. They started on a lengthy military anecdote, swapping the narrative voice between themselves, their hilarity spiralling higher and higher as they proceeded.

  ‘. . . so the order comes down to dig out the old river bed . . .’

  ‘. . . although the mud is practically fluid, but nonetheless . . .’

  ‘. . . digging for hours and hours, but every spadeful slops back . . .’

  ‘. . . and then . . . and then the colonel himself comes down . . .’

  ‘. . . to see what’s taking the platoon so long . . .’

  ‘. . . and he doesn’t recognise any of us because we’re so muddy . . .’

  ‘. . . and he’s shouting and waving his pistol around, when . . .’

  ‘. . . plop!’

  ‘. . . plop!’ (They made this sound by flicking their tongues inside their cheeks.)

  ‘. . . he loses his grip on it and it goes flying into . . .’

  ‘. . . into the mud . . . disappears completely . . .’

  ‘. . . and how he raged! “Dig over here, now!”’ (A gruff, doggy voice for the colonel.)

  ‘. . . “you lot! Stop digging there and dig here!” ’

  ‘. . . “I want my gun back! That was my grandfather’s pistol!” ’

  ‘. . . “Where are your officers? I want them to report to me now!” ’

  ‘. . . “Been in the family a hundred years!” . . .’

  Until they couldn’t continue because they were laughing so hard. Polystom smiled, leaning towards them, trying to get caught up in their manic hilarity, but he felt excluded from the game.

  That night, in his bed, his wrist throbbing and keeping him awake, he told himself that things would be different after a tour of active service. That was the thing, he said to himself, that separated him from the younger officers. They had seen battle, and he hadn’t. Once he had been there, once he had purified himself in the heat of battle, then he would be one with all other soldiers. Then he would feel real.

  That night, Polystom’s men were sleeping naked under the stars. The Autumn Year was practically at an end, and the nights were very chilly. The point of this exercise, the lieutenants had said, is to toughen you physically. You must be ready for every hardship. You will sleep tonight naked, on the lawn, under the chill night sky. We’ll be keeping an eye on you from the house! And as Stet and Sof slept the heavy sleep of the wine-sozzled, under their blankets, the mass of their men, acting without conscious decision, contracted and contracted, bodies pulling closer to bodies for the shared heat, until the whole platoon was a connected mass of bodies.

  Polystom found it hard to sleep. He had nightmares. Most nights he woke, sobbing, from horrible nightmares.

  In a week Polystom’s wrist recovered, and he spent long days alone by himself in the forest, honing his pistol shooting. He held one gun in his right hand, braced his right wrist with his left hand, squinnied along the length of the barrel and fired. Powdery clumps of tree-stuff spread and flew. The sensation of action at a distance was a very agreeable one. Once expected, the loud crash of the firing action did not startle, but rather exhilarated. He varied his practising from day to day. One occasion he would shoot trees, aiming for the dead centre of the trunk. Another day he would wait until a bird settled on a distant branch and then he would take aim at that.

  His lieutenants had constructed a massive grid of felled logs which they floated out past the pier. Days of training now involved, it seemed to Polystom, the genuine attempt to drown the men. He occasionally came down to watch, but the antics depressed him. He felt a sick kind of sadness in his gut at it all. Playing at war. He was impatient now for the real thing. He wanted the charade-death to vanish, and real-death to come onto the stage. Was he really eager for death? He couldn’t decide. Partly it was a desire to remove himself from this home environment in which Sof and Stet could be so carelessly insolent to him. Surely things would be better on the battlefield. Then he would have actual command, instead of this courtesy title – a courtesy title that invited so much discourtesy from his lieutenants. Or, if not precisely discourtesy, then at least an unquantifiable lack of deference, a something not-right in their manner.

  Their twin faces, grinning, as if sharing their secret joke. As if Polystom was the butt of their joke.

  The last day of the year arrived, and Polystom held a Year’s-End banquet for all his men. On the ting-ting of midnight, as the clock marked the transition into Winter Year, everybody cheered. Polystom gave a lengthy speech, not especially coherent, but his men cheered his every sentence. Before dessert was served Polystom was so drunk he couldn’t coordinate his spoon, bowl and mouth. Nestor, as discreetly as was possible with a figure sitting at the top table, crept in and helped him away. Carried him like a baby back to his own bed, put him into his pyjamas and left him sleeping. Polystom woke several hours later, into the chilly small hours of a new Winter Year, and vomited copiously, liquidly, all over his bed. The choking, gushing noises brought Nestor through, and servant helped master to the bath-annexe, washed him, dressed him in clean pyjamas and helped him, groaning and limping, to a new bedroom. The following morning he was too ill to leave his bed. Nestor brought him honey-broth at eleven, and he could barely keep that down. But through the open window, the chill fresh air touching his hot face, he heard Stetrus and Sophanes drilling the men in a jog round and round the house. Left hep left hep left hep jump! Left hep left hep left hep jump!

  They trained for a further three weeks. Polystom wrote to General Demus requesting embarkation orders, informing the General that the platoon was now ready to report for action. He informed the General that it had not been possible to hire a private balloon-boat, but said that they would be travelling charter to Berthing, and would take military transport from there. The General’s aide wrote back, detailing the code of an appropriate transport, the destination on Aelop (the military brass, Polystom realised, tended to use the world’s less familiar name in official communication), and the name of a colonel who would meet them on their arrival. Polystom replied with his gratitude, and in a PS asked after the folder, marked with a C, for which they had been searching in his uncle’s estate. Had they found it, in the end?

  Polystom received no reply to this communication.

  ‘We’ll be needing some rifles for the men,’ drawled Stet over dinner one evening.

  ‘The army doesn’t,’ said Polystom, meaning to go on provide the rifles itself? But that was ridiculous, of course it was. �
��Have any particularly favoured models?’ he concluded lamely.

  ‘They need to be able to fire bullets,’ said Sof. A slight pause, and both men chortled in unison.

  Polystom ordered fifty rifles from the supplier of his pistols. There was no point in skimping on such a thing. With an order so large, the gunsmith sent a partner down by company plane. Polystom, his two lieutenants and the gunsmith took lunch together, looking through a calf-bound catalogue book. The lieutenants, both smoking and gesturing vaguely, systematically chose the most expensive of everything; the most expensive barrels; the most expensive bayonets; the priciest stock. ‘We’ll need several thousand rounds of ammunition for each of them,’ said Sof. Polystom, a wealthy man, raised to regard the particulars of money as vulgarity, blenched a little. Each rifle was worth, in money terms, ten men. The price of each weapon could feed a servant for a year or more. And this expense was merely laid over the top of all the other expenses, all the enormous expenses accumulated during the months of this military experiment.

  Later, drunker, laughing genuinely at a joke told by Stet, he felt less bitter about the transaction. Best that the men be properly armed. No point in going to all this bother and then giving the men inferior weaponry. Stet, standing on a chair in the garden, was doing the characters in his joke in different voices. Sof had wet his face with tears by laughing so hard. The gunsmith’s agent was nodding and beaming. And then the ghost is there, said Stet, barely able to get the words out between his own volleys and detonations of laughter, and he’s holding a sock! A sock! And the ghost says, slipping up an octave to do the ghost-voice, what’s this for? And the butler replies, dropping deep and gravely, you put that over your foot. Your foot? says the ghost. What’s a foot? And so on.

  And so on.

  The guns arrived within the fortnight. So did the first heavy snowfall of the Winter Year. The two lieutenants, as inseparable as twins, forced the men out, uniformed but bootless, marching and hopping through the snow. Left hep left hep left hep jump! Left hep left hep left hep jump!

  At lunch, Polystom decided to call in at the barracks, to show his face amongst his men. He did so occasionally; showing his face. But this day he paused at the door, where he could see that inside the men were all treating themselves after their march: buckets of water heating on the central wood-oven, towels soaked and wrapped around their red-blue feet. He decided not to go in. They would have had to stand to attention, and that would have been extremely uncomfortable for them.

  The snow fell, stopped, fell, stopped, making the daylight grey and filling the landscape. Polystom, in uniform, overcoat, scarf, gloves, hat, three pairs of silk socks beneath his boots, wandered the woods. His woods.

  His entire estate looked austere in the snow: beautiful.

  Colours had been wiped away, until only black, blue and white remained. The trunks of the trees had darkened in contrast to the white brilliance of the snowfall. Polystom walked with a slow, careful, snow-walker’s tread; cracking the surface of the frost-drifts like opening a new pot of coffee, and then sinking in up to his calf. His figure vanished into the space between the trees, leaving a crocodile of oval shadows lined behind him over the white lawn, like two columns of dark tortoises imperfectly synchronised.

  He had been suffering from nightmares for weeks now.

  Out in the forest, where the air was cold enough to scrape his lungs, where frost had furred the pine-needles with a white imitation mould, he felt himself escaping the horror of the nightmares. He had been too ashamed to tell anybody. Of his many anxieties, one of the more acute was the fear that his saggy-eyed exhaustion would give away the fact that he had not slept properly for such a long time. But his two lieutenants seemed oblivious to his haggardness. ‘Of course,’ they confided, over beef shreds in wine and glazed root mash, after another day’s unrelenting training in the icy weather. ‘They’ll find no snow on the Mudworld. No, it’s a deal hotter than that. But it’s always worth toughening them up.’

  Toughening them up.

  His nightmares concerned the flayed men. The curious thing, he thought to himself, was that they had taken such a long time to manifest themselves. The experience itself, watching the execution in the grounds of his dead uncle’s estate, had been unpleasant. Of course it was unpleasant. But he had sat through it, believing his duty required as much. And afterwards he had told himself that it hadn’t been so bad, drinking with the General and his aides back at the house, laughing at the experience. We got under their skin, laughed the General. Justice is more than skin-deep, he said. All of them laughing a little over-loud, drinking a little more than they otherwise would. Polystom’s dreams that night had been unfocused, menacing but not specific. The following day he had flown himself back home, and that night in his own bed he had slept deeply. For weeks, he succeeding in blotting the spectacle of two flayed men out of his head. Sophanes and Stetrus had arrived, and the various other distractions of assembling his platoon had crowded other thoughts away. There had been a single night when he had woken moist with sweat from a dream of being pursued. In the dream he had not looked behind himself at his pursuers, but with the logic of dreams he had not needed to because he had known that it was the flayed men who were after him. He woke, gasping, his bedding in a ruckled heap where his flailing arms and legs had messed it up. It had taken him three tall glasses of wheat whisky to settle his nerves. He had settled to sleep again nervously, tentatively, like a man who has been shocked by a bare wire reaching out to touch it again to see whether he had indeed switched the thing off now. But this second sleep had been blissful, blank, and Polystom had woken late in the morning. The following night was alright, and the night after that too. He had congratulated himself that he was past the experience.

  Then, for no reason apparent to him, the nightmares had come flocking down to him. In the first week of the Winter Year, training almost completed, the prospect – exciting – of embarkation, and out of the mauve (or out of the purple-black of the night sky) came the phantoms of the flayed men to disturb his sleep. The dreams were more or less the same, with subtle variations that deepened the horror. He was on a flat, treeless plain. The two men, flayed red and purple, rose out of the ground and came towards him. Their legs and torso were as Polystom remembered them from the execution, glistening wetly with scarlet, pulsing, marshy, livid and vivid, the inner skin turned out to the world. But in his dream the flaying had extended further, each face ripped clear of skin, each halfway to skull, the pouched and streaming redness running up to eyelidless eyes that stared and stared and swivelled and stared. The arms were flayed too, blood oozing up on the grainy muscles, like red sweat. They held their arms towards him, and he shrieked and ran, ran as fast as he could except that he could not take his eyes off the grisly pursuers, he was running with his head over his own shoulder. And they came after him effortlessly, red gleaming legs covering the ground in great scything motions. Their white teeth. And he was running, sometimes over a flat surface, sometimes over cobbles like a million bubbles turned to stone. One of them, grinning all the time, reached his flayed arm towards him, and the arms seemed to be stretching like red elastic, until the bony fingers clasp around Polystom’s ankle and he felt himself falling.

  Waking up.

  Sometimes, this was the moment Polystom woke. Sometimes, however, the dream would extend, and both flayed men would lay hold of his legs, two hands to each ankle, and yank his legs in disparate directions. These dreams were the worst, because no matter how Polystom kicked and writhed he had the unshakeable sense that he was about to be split in two like a green twig.

  One time he woke to discover he had pissed himself as he slept, and his sheets were cold and oily with it. Another time he woke so wet with sweat that he thought he had pissed himself again, until he realised there was no smell of urine. Often he was screaming as he slept, and bucking about, which would summon Nestor, and Polystom would wake to see his butler over him, concern in his face, holding his shoulders down ag
ainst the mattress.

  The afterimage, when awake, lacked the immediacy of terror that he felt in the dreams, but had its own horrors. The idea of it, of being flayed alive, was more insidiously awful than the reality. The reality was just a painful death, that was all; but the idea was the bearing of everything that was inside to the outside world. The idea was replacing the skin of ordinary sensation, of caresses and sex, with a membrane dedicated only to pain. Everything that a person hid away inside themselves flipped out, displayed; for everybody to see. It made his guts clench to think of it.

  The nightmares settled into a pattern. He had them two nights running, and then slept fitfully though nightmare-free for a third. Then another two nights of nightmare. He called his doctor, who attended, but who could offer him nothing more than a sleeping tablet. Polystom took the tablet, and slept eleven hours, waking feeling sluggish and sticky with sweat. He had no memory of a nightmare, but his sheets were cast off his bed in a heap, and there was a pungent smell of piss. He took no more tablets.

  His sleep had been disturbed before. After Beeswing’s death, for instance, he had woken throughout the night for weeks. But there had been no nightmares as such. These bad dreams he was experiencing now – they were so severe they bled into his exhausted waking hours. He watched Stet and Sof parade the men back and forth, and the image kept flashing on his eyes of one of them stripped of skin. Stripped doubly naked.

  He was drinking far more than even he had been used to do.

  [second leaf]

  He had arranged with the Multi Planet Line to have a charter balloon-boat come down to collect himself, his two officers, and his platoon of men. Three first-class berths, fifty in steerage. It had taken some doing. To begin with the agency officer had insisted that the whole party travel to Apolis, on the southern shore of the Middenstead. This would have involved hiring a large boat. ‘It’s the time delay,’ Stom told the agency officer, although a more pressing worry in his mind was the added expense. He was a wealthy man, but there was a limit even to his wealth, and a boat large enough to carry fifty-three plus crew would be expensive. ‘We would not be at Apolis in time to catch the next balloon-boat, and would have to wait until the one after that.’ ‘Docking at a private house,’ said the agency officer. ‘Even so splendid a house as yours, Steward. It’s most irregular. There are insurance complications, should anything go wrong.’ Polystom was tired, and reached easily for his anger. ‘I’m not prepared to argue this point with you, man,’ he snapped, his voice rising almost to a screech. And then, a moment later when he’d controlled himself a little. ‘I’m Steward of this world. I order you. I have that power, I feel sure. I’m sure I do. I order it! I am taking a platoon of soldiers, my own, to fight on the Mudworld. Where is your patriotism? Where is your company’s patriotism?’