Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Yes,’ said Bates. His mouth was dry.

  ‘In this satchel there is a person.’

  ‘Satchel ?’

  The stranger bowed. ‘Is the word incorrect? I apologise. This sack, this bag.’

  ‘No, sir, I understand the word.’

  ‘Please, will you take this satchel to the Tower of London. It is this tower which is the command position for the defence of London, as we believe. The generals, the munitions, the forces, they gather there. The person inside the satchel will be able to work such things as to . . . to make more swift the ending of the war.’

  ‘There is a Lilliputian in the bag?’

  The stranger bowed, and opened the flap of the satchel. A Lilliputian unhooked himself from a small padded harness inside and climbed out to stand, at attention, on the tabletop. Bates, as amazed and as unsettled as he always was in the presence of these tiny beings, smiled, made his smile broader, opened his mouth to show his teeth as if he were going to eat the thing. The Lilliputian stood motionless.

  ‘He has a training, a special training,’ said the stranger. ‘He is a warrior of great courage, great value. If I were to approach the Tower I would be shot, of course. And the naked streets are dangerous places for the little men, with traps and cats and all things like this. But if you were to bear the satchel, you would be able to release him inside the fort. Yes?’

  ‘I know nobody in the Tower of London,’ said Bates. ‘I have no contacts in the army.’

  ‘You go to the Tower, and tell them that you bear a message from Colonel Truelove.’

  ‘I do not know the gentleman.’

  ‘Heis captured,butwe believethat the...English, excuseme,that you... do not know that he is captured. You will present to the guards and tell them that you bear a message from him, for attention of General Wilkinson only, for the general only. Once inside, find a quiet place to release the warrior from the satchel.’

  Sunlight laid squares on the floor. Light is a weight upon the earth, a mighty pressure from above, and yet it is constituted of the tiniest of particles.

  Bates felt as if the moment of choice had already passed behind him. He did not have the language to phrase a rejection. All he could say was: ‘I will do this thing.’

  [6]

  27 November 1848

  You are a strange figure, somebody told Bates. Sometimes your spirit is enormous; sometimes it shrinks to nothing. To nothing, Bates thought, and I lie abed for days. But not now, he thought. Now I have a task, to test myself, to prove myself to God.

  The Frenchman had insisted on the urgency of his mission, and had pressed Bates until he offered up a promise to undertake it the following dawn. ‘Dawn, mind, sir,’ said the Frenchman, before leaving. ‘If we co-obstinate . . .’

  ‘Co-ordinate,’ corrected Bates.

  ‘Just so. If we co-obstinate, such that the little warrior is inside the Tower at the right moment, then we can complete the war much sooner. Much sooner. There shall be less deaths, so.’

  He departed, with a gait that looked to Bates like an insolent jauntiness. But it was much too late for regrets. He shut his door, pulled up a chair and sat opposite the miniature human on the tabletop.

  ‘Good evening, my friend,’ he said.

  The Lilliputian was silent.

  There was some uncanny aspect to them. Bates had often thought this. He could not feel comfortable in their company. They unsettled him. He tried to visualise them as toys, or marionettes, but then they would shiver in some inescapably human way, or their little eyes would swivel and stare, as if penetrating beneath the decorous levels of manner and behaviour. They carried within them a strange elision. They were sylphs, but they were also and at the same time devils.

  But it was too late for regrets.

  ‘You are reticent, my friend,’ he said. ‘I cannot blame you if you harbour resentment against the English peoples. My people have committed . . . terrible crimes against . . . your people.’

  The Lilliputian said nothing. Was his silence the outward sign of some savage indignation?

  ‘Believe me,’ Bates went on, ‘I am your friend. I have devoted my life to your cause.’

  Nothing.

  It occurred to Bates that the Lilliputian might not speak English. ‘Mon ami,’ he began, but his French was not good. ‘Mon ami, j’espère que . . .’

  The Lilliputian turned on his heel, clambered back inside the satchel, and was gone.

  In the small hours of the morning Bates discovered that the Lilliputian did indeed speak English. He had somehow mounted the arm of the chaise longue on which Bates was sleeping, and called in his wren-like voice: ‘Awake! Awake! For the sun will soon scatter darkness like a white stone scattering crows in flock.’

  Sleepy-headed, Bates found this hard to follow.

  ‘We must be on our way,’ cried the Lilliputian. ‘We must be on our way.’

  ‘It is still dark,’ Bates grumbled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his forearm.

  ‘But it will be light soon.’

  ‘You speak English.’

  The Lilliputian did not say anything to this.

  Bates rose and lit a lamp, dressing rapidly. He used yesternight’s bowl of water to rinse his face, laced his feet into his boots and looked about him. The Lilliputian was standing beside the satchel.

  ‘You are eager to go to war, my little friend,’ Bates said.

  The morning had a spectral, unreal feel about it: the citrus light of the lamp, the angular purple shadows it threw, the perfect scaled-down human being standing on the table.

  ‘I am a warrior,’ it piped.

  ‘But we must remember that Jesus is the Prince of Peace.’

  The little figure slanted his head minutely, but did not reply.

  ‘Well well,’ said Bates. ‘Well well, we shall go.’

  The little figure slipped inside the case.

  Locking the door to his rooms felt, to Bates, like sealing off his life entire. Perhaps I shall die, he said, but his mind was so muzzy with tiredness that the thought carried no sting. Perhaps I shall never return here. But he didn’t believe that, not truly. He did not truly believe that.

  His fingers slipped and fumbled at his coat buttons, and then hoisting the case with its precious cargo he strode out.

  His heels sounded on the pavement in Cavendish Square. The air was chill. The western horizon was still a gloomy and impressive purple, but the sky to the east was bright, the colour of tawny wine, with the morning star a dot of sharp light like a tiny window, immeasurably far off, open in the wall of an immense yellow citadel.

  At the top of Charing Cross Road Bates saw a solitary person in the otherwise deserted streets, a hunched-over infantryman stumbling or hurrying north. He drew back automatically into the shadow of a doorway, and then rebuked himself and reemerged. He imagined sentry questions. Who goes there? An Englishman! A loyal Englishman! God save the King! What’s in the bag? Nothing - sir - nothing at all, save some personal belongings . . . but that would be easily disproven, a quick search would reveal his true cargo. Papers! Papers for the General . . . to be perused by him alone. To be seen by his eyes only! Would that satisfy a sentryman?

  He walked on, and the dawn swelled in brightness all around him.

  By the time he reached Holborn the sounds of fighting were unignorable.

  From a distance the cannon-fire sounded like the booming of bitterns over estuary flats, or the stomach-rumble of distant thunder. But once down the dip and up the other side of Holborn the battle seemed to swoop out of the imaginary into the real with appalling swiftness. Knocks and bangs three streets away, two, and then rifle fire tattering the air, men in beetroot uniforms with bayoneted rifles trotting en masse, or hurrying singly from firing position to firing position.

  Bates was fully awake now.

  He ducked down one side street, and then another, trying to stay clear of the scurrying military action. He was vividly aware of the stupidity of his position; a civili
an, an unarmed and inexperienced man wandering the streets in the midst of a war. A bomb swooned through the air, exploding somewhere away to his left with a powerful crunch. It actually bent the air, staggering Bates like hot breath from the ovens of hell. He almost fell quite over, danced to recover his balance.

  A siren sang a pure note inside Bates’s ears.

  Panic took him for a space of some minutes. He dropped the satchel and tried to claw his way through a barred oak door. When his right fingernails were bloody the panic seemed to ebb from him, leaving him panting and foolish. He retrieved the satchel, hurried to the end of the street, turned a dog-leg and found himself on the riverside.

  The sun at its low angle, with sunlight trembling off the water, turned the river to metal. Bates hurried on. Fifty yards downriver and he was at the deserted tollbooth of London Bridge’s Middlesex side.

  ‘You there!’ called somebody. ‘Hold yourself! Friend or foe!’

  Bates stopped. ‘An Englishman!’ he called.

  From where he was standing he could look down upon the bridge, and across the pale brown rush of the river. The Thames’s flow seemed enormous, the water standing up at the leading face of the bridge’s pillars in burly lips, the trailing edge leaving deep scores in the surface that broke into wakes and ripples hundreds of yards downstream. Riflemen hurried along the half-completed embankment, ducking behind the unplaced stone-blocks, or jumping into the holes where such blocks were yet to be placed. The sound of horses’ whinnying, like metal skittering over ice, was in the air from somewhere on the other side of the river. An artillery unit laboured with a recalcitrant field gun, poking its snub over the bridge’s parapet. On the river’s surface, a boat jockeyed against the fierce pull of the water, three sets of oars flicking up and down like insect legs, hauling the craft alongside a small quay onto which soldiers were alighting.

  And then, with the sounds of multiple detonation, smoke flowered into the air. French dart-shells hurtled over the horizon, threads against the sky, and careered into the masonry alongside the river with astonishing vehemence. The ground shook. Ripples shuddered across the face of the water. Stone cracked and puffed into the air as smoke. Bricks, pillars and blocks tumbled and clattered. More explosions. The ticktock of bullets, British rifle fire, although Bates couldn’t see what they were firing at. Then the giants came; heads rearing up like the sun over the horizon, but these suns followed by bodies, and the bodies supported on enormous legs. They strode up the river, the water blanching into foam about their thighs. They were dressed in crazily patched leather clothes, padded with numerous metal plates that were too poorly burnished to gleam in the light. With the sun behind them, four marched.

  He was so stunned by the sight as to not understand how much in shock he was. He blinked, and turned. People were rushing on all sides, faces distorted as they shouted. He blinked again, turned again. The French, soldiers of ordinary size, were visible on the south bank, some firing over the water, some attempting to cross the bridge. English troops were defending the position. Bates stood in the midst of it, a single gentleman in modest but expensive clothing, his coat buttoned all the way to his chin, carrying a leather satchel briefcase. One of the English soldiers, hurrying to the bridge, caught his eye. ‘You!’ he yelled. ‘You!’

  Still numb to his surroundings, Bates turned to face him. Smoke misted up and swirled away, to an orchestral accompaniment of clattering explosions.

  Everybody was looking north. Bates followed their glances. Another thunderstroke.

  One of the Brobdingnagians had climbed up to the dome of Saint Paul’s. He had driven his metal-tipped staff through the shell of it, as if breaking the blunt end of an egg. He lifted it out, and struck again, and the dome collapsed, leaving a fuzzy halo of dust.

  Bates turned to look for the soldier who had accosted him. He was not standing where he had been standing. Bates looked around, and then looked down, and saw him lying spreadeagled on the floor. Blood, as dark and sluggish as molasses, was pooled all around him.

  Bates stumbled, half-awake, from the tollbooth and down a side street. A crazy trajectory. He ran past a row of scowling arches and turned into a doorway, pressing himself up into the shadow against the side wall.

  The sounds of battle had become chuckles and creaks. It took him a moment to realise that the fighting was moving away, sweeping round beyond the wrecked cathedral and into the fields to the north. He fiddled with the catch on the briefcase and whispered inside, and as he did so he was struck by how peculiar it was to be whispering.

  The street was deserted.

  The Lilliputian’s high-pitched voice warbled from its hidden place. ‘You must go on.’

  ‘I will be killed,’ said Bates, a trill of nerves shaking the last word. He was near tears.

  ‘Death is the soil of the world,’ said the Lilliputian, the oddness of the sentiment made stranger still by the ethereal, piping voice that uttered it.

  ‘I will wait here until the fighting has stopped,’ said Bates. Saying so brought him a trembly sense of satisfaction: to be safe, not to die, to stay hidden until the danger had passed.

  ‘No,’ said the Lilliputian. The timbre of his voice had changed. Somehow, Bates could not see how, he had slipped out of the case and climbed up his overcoat. In an instant he stood on Bates’s shoulder, and with a shimmer was on his face. Pressure on his ear. The horrid tickling sensation as if of a mouse on his cheek. Bates could not repress a shudder, raising of his hand to swat the creature that had the gall to touch his face! - to touch his face! It required the fullest effort of will to hold from slapping at the little creature. I must not! He thought. God’s creature!

  Blurrily close to his eyeball, the pink-yellow shape of a head, a lash-like hand, dissolved by nearness. ‘This thorn,’ warbled the Lilliputian, ‘is a weapon. I can thrust it into your eye, and it will explode the eye, as a bomb explodes.’ Bates’s eyelids froze. ‘ If you attack me,’ the creature urged, ‘I will have your eye.’ Bates blinked, forcefully, and again, but it did not dislodge the assailant. His eye was watering; his breaths were coming much more swiftly. ‘If you do not move now, go to the Tower, I will have your eye.’

  ‘My dear little friend,’ said Bates, high-pitched. ‘Man share amy.’

  ‘The Brobdingnagians live to be a hundred and fifty years of age,’ came the sing-song rapid little voice. ‘They are wary of death, for death is a rarity to them. But we of Lilliput live a quarter as long, and hold death in a quarter as much worth. We are a nation of warriors.’

  ‘My dear little friend,’ said Bates, again.

  ‘Go now.’ And the tickling sensation vanished from his face, the ornament-like pressure removed from his ear. When Bates had regained his breath the Lilliputian was back in the satchel.

  The battle seemed to have passed entirely away. Cautious as a mouse, Bates ducked from doorway to doorway, but the only people he saw were British soldiers, all of them hurrying. He hurried himself, jogging down Eastcheap, and came out from between the houses directly in front of the Tower.

  He had no idea of the time. Certainly the morning was well advanced. The sky was crowded with ivory-coloured thunderheads. Spots of rain touched his face, and Bates was put in mind of a million contemptuous Lilliputians spitting upon his skin.

  There was a great deal of military activity around the Tower. Mounted troops skittered by over the cobbles, their horses glittery with sweat, or rain, or both; cannon were positioned at all places, sentries doing their clockwork sentry business, chimney smoke and noise and business and camp followers, all the melee. It seemed odder to Bates than the battle he had just witnessed. He shouldered the satchel, its occupant a fierce wasp, striped in its uniform. Yet who could say? Why not angelic as well? Mightn’t angels’ wings have the sheen of an insect ’s, the blur and light of it? The buzz-buzz? And there was the Tower itself, London’s Tower as white as ice, blocky like teeth, standing taller over him, his parent, his nationhood’s parent. It was Brutus’s to
wer.

  It did not look inviting.

  Nobody challenged him as he marched up the causeway until he had come within ten yards of the closed main gate, with its lesser gate inset and open. ‘Who goes there?’ yelled the sentryman, although he was only a foot or so from Bates. ‘General Wilkinson!’ shouted Bates, startled into life. ‘I bring a message for General Wilkinson!’ His heart stuttered. ‘I have a message for the general’s ears only! From Colonel Truelove!’

  [7]

  He spent much of the rest of the day hiding inside a well-appointed house whose door had been blown, or beaten, from its hinges. The kitchen was wrecked and the food looted, but the other rooms had been left untouched: beautiful furniture, with legs curled and slender as angels’ wands, ornaments with the intricacy of clockwork but without function or movement, globes of glass holding preserved flowers, a new design of tallboy-clock, whose metronomic timekeeper rocked back and forth on its hinged base like a tree swaying in the breeze. The walls were hung with oils of society beauties.