The Art of War

by David Wingrove

  ‘And?’ It was Meg who asked the question. She was leaning forward, watching him, fascinated.

  He looked down, then bit into the tomato. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and looked up again. ‘And it worked. I liberated the words from their old context.’

  He popped the rest of the tomato into his mouth and for a while was silent, thoughtful. The two women watched him, indulging him, as always placing him at the very centre of things. The tomato finished, he took a long sip of his lemonade. Only then did he begin again.

  ‘It’s as if my mind is made up of different strata. It’s all there – fossilized, if you like, and available if I want to chip away at it – but my memory, while perfect, is nonetheless selective.’

  Ben laughed and looked at his sister again. ‘Do you remember that Borges story, Meg? “Funes The Memorious” about the boy with perfect recall, confined to his bed, entrapped by the perfection – the overwhelming detail – of past moments. Well, it isn’t like that. It could never be like that, amusing as the concept is. You see, the mind accords certain things far greater significance than others. And there’s a good reason for that. The undermind recognizes what the conscious intelligence too often overlooks – that there is a hierarchy of experience. Some things matter more to our deeper self than others. And the mind returns them to us strongly. It thrusts them at us, you might say – in dreams, and at quiet moments when we least suspect their presence.’

  ‘Why should it do that?’

  Ben gave a tiny shrug. He took an apple from the basket and lifted it to his mouth. ‘Maybe it has to do with something programmed into us at the genetic level. A code. A key to why we’re here, like the cyphers in Augustus’s journal.’

  As Ben bit deeply into the apple, Meg looked across at her mother and saw how she had looked away at the mention of Augustus and the journal.

  ‘But why Nietzsche?’ Meg asked, after a moment. She could not understand his fascination with the nineteenth-century German philosopher. To her the man was simply an extremist, a fanatic. He understood nothing of those purely human things that held a society together – nothing of love, desire or sacrifice. To her mind his thinking was fatally flawed. It was the thinking of a hermit, a misanthrope. But Man was a social animal; he did not exist in separation from his fellows, nor could he for longer than one human lifetime. And any human culture was the product of countless generations. In secret she had struggled with the man’s difficult, spiky prose, trying to understand what it was Ben saw in him, but it had served only to confirm her own distaste.

  Ben chewed the piece of apple, then smiled. ‘There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity about his thinking that I like. And there’s a fearlessness, too. He’s not afraid to offend. There’s nothing he’s afraid to look at and investigate at depth, and that’s rare in our culture. Very rare.’

  ‘So?’ Meg prompted, noting how her mother was watching Ben again, a fierce curiosity in her eyes.

  He looked at the apple, then shrugged and bit again.

  Beth broke her long silence. ‘Are you working on something new?’

  Ben looked away. Then it was true. He had begun something new. Yes, she should have known. He was always like this when he began something new – fervent, secretive, subject to great swings of mood.

  The two women sat there, watching him as he finished the apple, core and all, leaving nothing.

  He wiped his fingers on the edge of the cloth, then looked up again, meeting Meg’s eyes. ‘I was thinking we might go along to the cove later on and look for shells.’

  She looked away, concealing her surprise. It had been some while since they had been down to the cove, so why had he suggested it just now? Perhaps it was simply to indulge her love of shells, but she thought not. There was always more to it than that with Ben. It would be fun, and Ben would make the occasion into a kind of game, but he would have a reason for the game. He always had a reason.

  Ben laughed and reached out to take one of the tiny radishes from the bowl. ‘And then, tomorrow, I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.’

  Warfleet Cove was a small bay near the mouth of the river. A road led towards it from the old town, ending abruptly in a jumble of rocks, the shadow of the Wall throwing a sharp but jagged line over the rocks and the hill beyond. To the left the land fell away to the river, bathed in brilliant sunlight. A path led down through the thick overgrowth – blackberry and bramble, wildflowers and tall grasses – and came out at the head of the cove.

  Ben stepped out on to the flattened ledge of rock, easing the strap of his shoulder bag. Below him the land fell away steeply to either side, forming a tiny, ragged flint-head of a bay. A shallow spill of shingle edged the sandy cove. At present the tide was out, though a number of small rockpools reflected back the sun’s brilliance. Low rocks lay to either side of the cove’s mouth, narrowing the channel. It was an ancient, primitive place, unchanged throughout the centuries, and it was easy to imagine Henry Plantagenet’s tiny fleet anchored here in 1147, waiting to sail to Jerusalem to fight the Infidel in the Second Crusade. Further round the headland stood the castle, built by Henry Tudor, Henry VII, whose son had broken with the papacy. Ben breathed deeply and smiled to himself. This was a place of history. From the town itself the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed in August 1620 to the new lands of America, and in June 1944 part of the great invasion fleet had sailed from here – five hundred ships, bound for Normandy and the liberation of Europe from Hitler and the Nazis.

  All gone, he thought wryly, turning to look at his sister. All of that rich past gone, forgotten – buried beneath the ice of the Han City.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The tide’s low. We’ll go by the rocks on the north lip. We should find something there.’

  Meg nodded and followed him, taking his hand where the path was steepest, letting him help her down.

  At the far edge of the shingle they stopped and took off their shoes, setting them down on the stones. Halfway across the sand, Ben stopped and turned, pointing down and back, tracing a line. ‘Look!’

  She looked. The sun had warmed the sand, but where they had stepped, their feet had left wet imprints, dark against the almost white, compacted sand. They faded even as she watched, the most distant first, the nearest last.

  ‘Like history,’ he said, turning away from her and walking on towards the water’s edge.

  Or memory, Meg thought, looking down at her feet. She took a step then stopped, watching how the sharp clarity of the imprint slowly decayed, like an image sent over some vast distance, first at the edges, then – in a sudden rush -at the very centre, breaking into two tiny, separate circles before it vanished. It was as if the whole had sunk down into the depths beneath the sand and was now stored in the rock itself.

  ‘Here!’ he called triumphantly. She hurried over to where he was crouched near the water’s edge and bent down at his side.

  The shell was two-thirds embedded in the sand. Even so, its shape and colouring were unmistakable. It was a pink-mouthed murex. She clapped her hands, delighted, and looked at him.

  ‘Careful when you dig it out, Ben. You mustn’t damage the spines.’

  He knew, of course, but said nothing, merely nodded and pulled his bag round to the front, opening up the flap.

  She watched him remove the sand in a circle about the shell, then set the tiny trowel down and begin to remove the wet, hard-packed sand with his fingers. When he had freed it, he lifted it carefully between his fingers and took it across to one of the rockpools to clean.

  She waited. When he came back, he knelt in front of her and, opening out the fingers of her right palm, set the pale, white-pink shell down on her palm. Cleaned, it looked even more beautiful. A perfect specimen, curved and elegant, like some strange, fossil fish.

  ‘The hedgehog of the seas,’ he said, staring at the shell. ‘How many points can you count?’

  It was an old game. She lifted the shell and, staring at its tip – its ‘nose’ – began to count the tiny
little nodes that marked each new stage on the spiral of growth.

  ‘Sixteen,’ she said, handing the shell back.

  He studied it. ‘More like thirty-four,’ he said, looking up at her. He touched the tip of the shell gently. ‘There are at least eighteen in that first quarter of an inch.’

  ‘But they don’t count!’ she protested. ‘They’re too small!’

  ‘Small they may be, but they do count. Each marks a stage in the mollusc’s growth, from the infinitesimally tiny up. If you X-rayed this you’d see it. The same form repeated and repeated, larger and larger each time, each section sealed off behind the shellfish – outgrown, if you like. Still growing even at the creature’s death. Never finished. The spiral uncompleted.’

  ‘As spirals are.’

  He laughed and handed her back the shell. ‘Yes. I suppose by its nature it’s incomplete. Unless twinned.’

  Meg stared at him a moment. ‘Ben? What are we doing here?’

  His dark green eyes twinkled mischievously. ‘Collecting shells. That’s all.’

  He stood and walked past her, scanning the sand for new specimens. Meg turned, watching him intently, knowing it was far more complex than he claimed, then got up and joined him in the search.

  Two hours later they took a break. The sun had moved behind them and the far end of the cove was now in shadow. The tide had turned an hour back and the sea had already encroached upon the sands between the rocks at the cove’s mouth. Ben had brought sandwiches in his bag and they shared them now, stretched out on the low rocks, enjoying the late afternoon sunlight, the shells spread out on a cloth to one side.

  There were more than a dozen different specimens on the bright green cloth – batswing and turitella, orchid spider and flamingo tongue, goldmouth helmet and striped bonnet, pelican’s foot, mother of pearl, snakeshead cowrie and several others – all washed and gleaming in the sun. A whole variety of shapes and sizes and colours, and not one of them native to the cold grey waters of the English south coast.

  But Meg knew nothing of that.

  It had begun when Meg was only four. There had been a glass display case on the wall in the hallway, and, noting what pleasure Meg derived from the form and colour of the shells, Hal Shepherd had bought new specimens in the City and brought them back to the Domain. He had scattered them by hand in the cove at low tide and taken Meg back the next day to ‘find’ them. Ben, seven at the time, had understood at once, but had gone along with the deception, not wishing to spoil Meg’s obvious enjoyment of the game. And when his father had suggested he rewrite his great-grandfather’s book on shells to serve the deception, Ben had leaped at the opportunity. That volume now rested on the shelves in place of the original, a clever, subtle parody. Now he, in his turn, carried on his father’s game. These shells that now lay on the cloth he had scattered only two days ago.

  Seagulls called lazily, high overhead. He looked up, shielding his eyes, then looked back at Meg. Her eyes were closed, her body sprawled out on the rock, like a young lioness. Her limbs and face were heavily tanned, almost brown against the pure white of her shorts and vest. Her dark hair lay in thick long curls against the sun-bleached rock. His eyes, however, were drawn continually to the fullness of her breasts beneath the cloth, to the suggestive curve of leg and hip and groin, the rounded perfection of her shoulders, the silken smoothness of her neck, the strange nakedness of her toes. He shivered and looked away, disturbed by the sudden turn of his thoughts.

  So familiar she was, and yet, suddenly, so strange.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, softly, almost somnolently.

  The wind blew gently, mild, warm against his cheek and arm, then subsided. For a while he listened to the gentle slosh of the waves as they broke on the far side of the great mound of rock.

  Meg pulled herself up on to one elbow and looked across at him. As ever, she was smiling. ‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’

  He returned her smile. ‘You forget. There are no cats.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. Daddy promised me he’d bring one back this time.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded, but said nothing of what he was thinking. Another game. Extending the illusion. If their father brought a cat back with him, it too would be a copy – GenSyn, most like – because the Han had killed all the real cats long ago.

  ‘What are you going to call him?’

  She met his eyes teasingly. ‘Zarathustra, I thought.’

  He did not rise to her bait. Zarathustra had been Nietzsche’s poet-philosopher, the scathingly bitter loner who had come down from his mountain hermitage to tell the world that God was dead.

  ‘A good name. Especially for a cat. They’re said to be highly independent.’

  She was watching him expectantly. Seeing it, he laughed. ‘You’ll have to wait, Meg. Tomorrow, I promise you. I’ll reveal everything then.’

  Even the tiny pout she made – so much a part of the young girl he had known all his life – was somehow different today. Transformed and strangely, surprisingly erotic.

  ‘Shells…’ he said, trying to take his mind from her. ‘Have you ever thought how like memory they are?’

  ‘Never,’ she said, laughing, making him think for a moment she had noticed something in his face.

  He met her eyes challengingly. ‘No. Think about it, Meg. Don’t most people seal off their pasts behind them stage by stage, just as a mollusc outgrows its shell, sealing the old compartment off behind it?’

  She smiled at him, then lay down again, closing her eyes. ‘Not you. You’ve said it yourself. It’s all still there. Accessible. All you have to do is chip away the rock and there it is, preserved.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s a likeness even so. That sense of things being embedded that I was talking of. You see, parts of my past are compartmentalized. I can remember what’s in them, but I can’t somehow return to them. I can’t feel what it was like to be myself back then.’

  She opened one eye lazily. ‘And you want to?’

  He stared back at her fiercely. ‘More than anything. I want to capture what it felt like. To save it, somehow.’

  ‘Hmm… ’ Her eye was closed again.

  ‘That’s it, you see. I want to get inside the shell. To feel what it was like to be there before it was all sealed off to me. Do you understand that?’

  ‘It sounds like pure nostalgia.’

  He laughed, only his laughter was just a little too sharp. ‘Maybe… but I don’t think so.’

  She seemed wholly relaxed now, as if asleep, her breasts rising and falling slowly. He watched her for a while, disturbed once more by the strength of what he felt. Then he lay down and, following her example, closed his eyes, dozing in the warm sun.

  When he woke the sun had moved further down the sky. The shadow of the Wall had stretched to the foot of the rocks beneath them and the tide had almost filled the tiny cove, cutting them off. They would have to wade back. The heavy crash of a wave against the rocks behind him made him twist about sharply. As he turned a seagull cried out harshly close by, startling him. Then he realized. Meg was gone.

  He got to his feet anxiously. ‘Meg! Where are you?’

  She answered him at once, her voice coming from beyond the huge tumble of rock, contesting with the crash of another wave. ‘I’m here!’

  He climbed the rocks until he was at their summit. Meg was below him, to his left, crouched on a rock only a foot or so above the water, leaning forward, doing something.

  ‘Meg! Come away! It’s dangerous!’

  He began to climb down. As he did so she turned and stood up straight. ‘It’s okay. I was just…’

  He saw her foot slip beneath her on the wet rock. Saw her reach out and steady herself, recovering her footing. And then the wave struck.

  It was bigger than all the waves that had preceded it and broke much higher up the rocks, foaming and boiling, sending up a fine spray, like glass splintering before some mighty hammer. It hit the big, tooth-shaped rock to hi
s right first, then surged along the line, roaring, buffeting the rocks in a frenzy of white water.

  One moment Meg was there, the next she was gone. Ben saw her thrust against the rocks by the huge wave, then disappear beneath the surface. As the water surged back there was no sign of her.

  ‘Meg!!!’

  Ben pressed the emergency stud at his neck, then scrambled down the rocks and stood there at the edge, ignoring the lesser wave that broke about his feet, peering down into the water, his face a mask of anguish, looking for some sign of her.

  At first nothing. Nothing at all. Then… there! He threw himself forward into the water, thrusting his body down through the chill darkness towards her. Then he was kicking for the surface, one arm gripping her tightly.

  Gasping, Ben broke surface some twenty feet out from the rocks and turned on to his back, cradling Meg against him, face up, her head against his neck.

  At first the waves helped him, carrying him in towards the rocks, but then he realized what danger he was in. He turned his head and looked. As the wave ebbed, it revealed a sharp, uneven shelf of rock. If he let the waves carry them in, they might be dashed against that shelf. But what other option was there? If he tried to swim around the rocks and into the cove he would be swimming against the current and it would take too long. And he had little time if he was to save Meg. He would have to risk it.

  He slowed himself in the water, trying to judge the rise and fall of the waves, then kicked out. The first wave took him halfway to the rocks. The second lifted them violently and carried them almost there.

  Almost. The wave was beginning to ebb as he reached out with his left hand and gripped the ledge. As the water surged back a spear of pain jolted through his arm, making him cry out. Then he was falling, his body twisting round, his side banging painfully against the rock.

  For a moment it felt as if his hand were being torn from his arm, but he held on, waiting for the water to return, his artificial fingers biting into the rock, Meg gripped tightly against him. And when it came he kicked out fiercely, forcing himself up on to the land, then scrambled backwards, pushing desperately with his feet against the rock, away from the water, Meg a dead weight against him.