Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  But Bates was feeling a new wave of nauseous illness sweep through the ecliptic of his wellbeing. He was not able to pay attention. Humming and nodding and widening his eyes on a random pattern that seemed to satisfy, or at least not to offend, the Dean’s gabbling, his own thoughts were dragged inwards, sinking towards the black sun in his belly, a sort of anti-helios, emanating a corrosive, hot terror. He could feel the inevitability of battle, a miasma of pain and death, gathering all around him. It was unbearable, yet there was nothing to do but bear it - nowhere to escape to, no way to meet the terror head-on and defeat it.

  [5]

  From this point onwards his sense of reality degraded. The relentless, continuing sequence of events acquired a phantasmagoric, hallucinatory feel. It would not be precise to call this succession and supersuccession of imagery dreamlike, for Bates was struck on several occasions by how utterly unlike his experience of dreaming it was - how unvaried, how sharp and distinct in places, and yet how muffled about with a fog of exhaustion and unhappiness. Between this time, when the apes came over the hill, until such time as they were free on the North Road and coming into Scarborough, Bates abandoned all pretension to being an active partner in the real world. He became instead a sort of sponge, soaking up the experience as do clothes doused in the washtub, and then shuddering and twisting and agonised as those same clothes are when the washerwoman wrings them out.

  Apes attacked. Monsters. Oh!

  Then he experienced a snapping, some sort of breakdown, breakup, breakalong for all he could say. He was aware of it as it happened. He could not be unaware of it.

  Battalions of apish demons.

  His fever manifested itself as a vivid hallucination of gorillas swarming down upon them from the hills. He looked. There were a dozen of the beasts until such time as Bates looked again; and then there were hundreds. Warriors Achilles. A-kill-ease. Millions of them. A killion a million. They wore leather tunics, pleated with horizontal bands of stitching; they wore tall leather caps, not unlike a bishop’s headpiece, on their black-hairy and hourglass-shaped heads, and these bonnets were tied under their great chins with buckles. As they galloped over the grass on legs and arms towards the road a great hullabaloo broke out amongst the French soldiers. Shots were fired. Sticks snapping in the heat of an open fire. Bates merely stared. The apes ran by. They planted their knuckles on the ground and swung their bodies and their legs pendulum-like between the two upright pillars made by their mighty arms. The pairs of knuckles hit the ground with a slightly missynchronised tha-thad, tha-thad. There were rifles tied to the creatures’ backs. Behind them came men on horseback.

  One ape lumbered close to the carriage, his great jaw slung low. The creature was displaying all his teeth, hideous embodiment of aggression - those monstrous, shark-sharp incisors, monumental jags of tapering ivory readying themselves to sink into Bates’s flesh. Bates flinched. His poor, edible flesh. His suet flesh.

  It was all a terrible fever-dream.

  Bates pressed his forehead to the glass and closed his eyes tight. He waited for the vision to pass. But the sounds of battle continued to resonate, forcing themselves in at his ear, packing themselves into his tiny ear-canals and injecting their myriad little echoes and resonances into the centre of his head. It was a cacophonous symphony, with a choir of men’s yells and shouts, and the timpani batter of guns firing, the violin whinnying of horses (hhhuohnnhhm), the scrape and drag of some counterpointed rhythm, the brassy yells of the apes, the snowbell tinkle of the harnesses, and then a hollow and distant boom, like a wide-chested man in the audience coughing a great consumptive cough.

  Pain speckled Bates’s face, but he did not open his eyes. He perspired. He felt ill, terribly ill. Make it go, Mamma. Take it off. He felt as if he were dying.

  They were in motion. The carriage lurched and swung round to the right. He wished it would not. He wished it would stay still. He wished he were not so hot and ill.

  Bates kept his eyes closed.

  The Dean was saying something. Bates kept his eyes closed. There was a throb deep inside his head, pain plucking the cord at the very centre of his cranium, and that is where Bates put his attention.

  ‘For the sake of all that is holy,’ cried the Dean, gripping at Bates’s arm. But there was a bellow of pssha pssha! from the coachman, very loud in Bates’s ear, and the whole carriage shook and danced into motion. He was pressed back into the seat by the suddenness of the motion.

  The Dean released him.

  Bates felt the wind upon his face. He tried to absent himself, internally, he yearned for a swoon; but his consciousness clung stubbornly.

  Shortly the coachman relented and the horses slowed to a stop.

  Bates opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was that the glass in the coach window had been broken all to crumbs and was sprinkled about the seat and the floor. He put his head outside through the gap and saw the Dean standing on the grass, in gabbling conversation with the French coachman, a fellow who spoke no English. To the left was the third carriage, with its mysterious cargo; its two escorts sat on top like kings of the mountain, their rifles held in one hand.

  Bates sat back, closed his eyes and tried to compose himself for sleep. He bethought himself of his breathing, which was forced and over-emphatic. By dint of putting his will into his own body he steadied his breathing, and made it regular. Sitting there eyelids shuttered against the world he found a curious pleasure in simply telling off the pulses of his own breathing. His eyeballs felt hot. He could not distinguish between the voices outside and the voices in his waking dream.

  He did not know how much time passed.

  Eventually he found the strength to clamber out of the carriage on wobbly legs. The woman was there, the same lady they had encountered earlier on the open road. She was standing beside the Dean. She was helping him communicate with the French soldier. She spoke French. A gentlewoman, a woman of quality.

  The fresh air revived him a little, but he felt horribly feverish and ill in his head. His chest felt raw. The innards of his chest.

  The sky was cloudy. The light was silver-bright.

  The sound of the third carriage’s approach broke the conversation. All turned to meet it; Larroche on the top and an uncertain sway to the passage of the thing, as if the axle were bent. It was making a surprisingly emphatic noise of grinding and skirling. When it reached them and arreted the reason for this noise became apparent-a dead horse was being dragged behind it on a makeshift sled, a stretch of tarpaulin roped to the back of the carriage; dragged through the dirt and over the stones of the road.

  Larroche said something loud and quick in French. Bates’s mind was jangled and he could not decipher the français . The Frankish. The Colonel was hopping nimbly down from the driver’s seat, one of the men from the Computation Device coach hurrying over to him. The Dean, and then the woman, followed. Bates could not imagine why the carriage had been pulling a dead equine over the road in this fashion.

  Unsteadily he made his way to the rear of the coach, where the Colonel was, it seemed, bowing to the head of the beast. But it appeared that the horse was not dead, although the many cuts and red chips in its hide, the little flows and spreads of dried blood over its musculature, indicated a creature badly injured.

  ‘Monsieur le cheval,’ Larroche was saying directly into the beast’s ear. ‘I can promise you little, but only this: that if you speak I shall do for you the coup-de-grâce. Do you understand?’

  The horse’s fat eyeballs rolled, the white rims of their bulging brown jelly showing like a border. His lips quivered, foamy with spittle, and pulled back to reveal two clumps of teeth, slab-shaped protrusions at the front of the elongated jaw. A tongue, black as a tadpole’s tail, large as a boot, moved somewhere inside. The eye rotated and rotated, giving that impression of intense terror or insanity which only a horse’s staring eyes can properly convey.

  ‘Monsieur le cheval,’ Larroche said again.

  The tongue moved.
‘Wait,’ said the creature. Sapient horses were rarities, for they mostly resisted assimilation into the English army, a resistance that thwarted the traditional modes of horsebreaking even unto death. But some had been persuaded to join, for all that. Bates had never seen one before except from a distance. He had never heard one speak English. Their palates were ill suited to the language, and it required a special attention by the listener to understand the words. All was high-pitched and snickery, with vowels trilled upon like grace notes, and consonants formed by smacking the tongue against the side or roof of the mouth. Bates understood ‘wait’, but could not follow the sentence which followed.

  ‘Tu parles français?’ Larroche asked.

  A meagre spring drizzle was coming down now, out of the grey sky, dotting upon the horse’s flank and settling gently all about on the grass. The quality of the light was changing from blue-grey to grey-blue. It was colder.

  Bates felt very unsteady upon his feet. He was not well. He was an ill man.

  The breath heaved in the creature’s vast hooped chest. It steamed out of the giant nostrils once, twice, three times, somewhere between breathing and coughing. ‘I smpeak all the yahoo smpeech,’ he said. ‘Tous les langues.’ Or this is what he seemed to say. It was hard to be sure.

  ‘My friend,’ said Larroche. ‘I am cavalry officer, and a friend of horse. Understand? I wish to hurt you. No, I wish not to hurt you - excuse me. Parle-moi et la fin sera rapide, comprends?’ The horse said nothing. ‘If not, and the soldiers will break your legs, break the four legs, and we will leave you here. Understand?’

  The horse wheezed. ‘Owing the Engri-i-i-iss no loyalty,’ he said. The t of the last word was clicked again the beast’s teeth by the tongue.

  ‘Of course you do not,’ agreed Larroche. He pulled a long-barrelled pistol from his jacket and rested the barrel against the creature’s skull, just above the eye. A fat vein wriggled like a worm under its skin near that place. ‘What loyalty should you owe them? Of course not.’

  ‘The,’ the beast said, and then pursed his flexible lips as if reaching for a tuft of grass, ‘mmmachi-i-ine. They seek it. Il y a une grann-nne force la-bas.’

  ‘Une grande force? To the south?’

  ‘Oui, oui, oui, oui,’ said the horse. ‘Cassez-pas mes jambes, s’ it vous mplaît. A large force.’ Uh larssh forssh.

  ‘You have seen it?’

  ‘Ego ipse oculis meis vidi,’ said the horse, labouring over each word.

  ‘They will attack?’

  ‘We were to mdrive you south.’

  ‘Drive us south? Oui?’

  ‘Oui, oui, oui, oui,’ said the horse.

  ‘Then go we must north, avancer, advancer,’ said Larroche, in a loud voice. ‘This is a trap. Turn about the coaches, rapidement, rapidement. A trap-a much larger force awaits us to the south, allons, allons.’

  He stood and pulled out his pistol. Without another word he fired a bullet through the spacious skull of the creature. One shot. Blood glooped up through the hole in a gush. The eyeballs jammed in their movement and were still. The chest ceased its motion. One of Larroche’s men was already untying the beast’s carcass from the rear of the coach.

  Bates was staring at the dead creature. The hole, so much smaller and neater than the many other wounds on the beast’s body, seemed insufficient to bring to an end so large a life.

  ‘Back in the coach,’ cried the Dean, bustling Bates towards the carriage once more. ‘No time to delay my dear fellow.’

  But as he stumbled back to the carriage Bates felt his grip on the cosmos loosen. He could barely make his legs work. His mind was full of worms that wriggled and squiggled. The Dean’s head swelled like a balloon, and Bates’s own hands felt ridiculously distant and absurdly fat.

  The carriage bearing the Computational Device was now the second in train; the coach in which Bates sat shivering was the last. ‘This makes us more vulnerable, I fear,’ said the Dean, although it seemed he was not talking to Bates. It was not clear to whom he was talking. ‘Vulnerable to attack,’ came his words. They flapped in the air. They were bats. A kill ease. ‘Attack from our own side, which is an unpleasant irony.’ Bullets of iron, of copper and bronze, of gold and silver. Pigeons flying off to the left in great numbers. The Dean was talking but his words were now nothing but mew-mew and mow-mow.

  Bates shuddered with cold. Or heat. He could not distinguish between hot and cold. He could not see properly. Everything swam. His seat, thin leather over wood, seemed to be convulsing, a sheet being shaken out by the washerwoman on a breezy day. Bates could not get comfortable.

  ‘They’ll not be able to keep the horses at this pace for long, I fear,’ said the Dean.

  Another voice spoke. Bates did not think it his own, but he could not be sure.

  The wind was insistently pressing against his face. Bates was cold. Cold as a cape-bound whaler. Could they not do something about the wind? The wind was roasting him. Sirocco. A kill ease.

  There was a cacophony, a mixture of human voices and the clanging barks of rifles all jumbled against the convulsive bang and thud and jangle of the hurrying carriage. Bates kept his eyes closed. There was a growl close in at his ear, and far behind it he heard the voice of the Dean crying ‘Get thee behind me sathanas!’ and another voice squealing. There was a stink of hot breath, doggy, in Bates’s nostrils, but he did not open his eyes. The world seemed to rock more violently even than before. The hubbub reached a crescendo, a small sound growing smoothly into a great noise, like the guillotine’s weighted blade sliding down its tracks; and then, like the guillotine climax, there was a loud thump. A crack. A howl, falling away and dying somewhere behind them. The wind on his face again. The carriage rocking less violently. A crowing halloo from the Dean.

  At this moment, of all moments, Bates fell asleep.

  A mighty giant, as huge above Brobdingnagian stature as a Brobdingnagian is above humanity, was stretching his arm across the sky. It reached all the way along the horizon. The cloth of his shift was muslin, great billowing white, stained a little purple on the underside. The sky was in danger. The giant was setting a flaming brand to a copse of trees on the western horizon. The whole world would burn. All of us - we insects. Insects!

  The chuttery sound of pigeon wings in flight - fire. The world was alight.

  The hawk of death dipped down towards him. No!

  The horizon was not on fire. The sun was setting. Bates could hardly believe that so much had happened within the space of a single day. So much, in such a short space of time. And a war, he knew, was made up of many days, each one as crammed with death and incident as the day they had just experienced. But - then - he was falling asleep again.

  When he woke it was to find the world dark. At first he could not decide whether this was due to fog or to the fall of night. The carriage was motionless. He tried to get up but his limbs revolted. Oh but he was thirsty! He was hideously thirsty, the innards of his mouth caked and dry and ridged like a lizard’s hide. But he was alone in the coach. He tried to make his mouth function, but there was no co-ordination between his lungs and his tongue.

  He was aware of a disjointed succession of data mentata. His environment, the infinitude of Lucretian atoms falling from their great height for ever and impinging upon his tender sensorium. People spoke to him but the words made no sense. Peculiar fantasies occupied all his mental energies. He had been elected Khan of China, but the role required him to sleep for a million cycles of the world, never again to wake. A Roc carried him away in its beak. He was converted, like Apuleius’s donkey, into one of the sapient horses, and struggled to give voice to his needs. He saw the body of his unborn son dancing under the moon in a city graveyard where the tombstones stood thin as playing cards, his tiny naked body white as bone, skin taut as sinews, great dark eyes. The moon the colour and shape of those lunulae of pale horn at the base of a fingernail. The horns of the moon closed together like a bird’s beak snapping shut on its prey. Then he saw de
sert, a wide red desert, and the red was the rude blush of Adam’s flesh, yet the empty space was the kingdom of the moon.

  It was a blur in his mind.

  He slept again and woke to the foam-grey light of dawn. He fumbled about in the carriage and discovered a military water bottle, placed on the seat beside him - placed there, perhaps, for his own benefit. It was a strange test of his mental abilities to determine how the cap unscrewed, but once it was removed Bates drank messily, greedily, as if this metallic-tasting water were the very nectar of the gods.

  He felt a griping in his guts and knew that a flux of the bowels was upon him. It was a task to get the door open, fumbling and panicky as he was, but he managed it and half-stepped, half-slid down to the ground. His breeches came free and he pulled them down just in time before the mess spewed from his rear. He was squatting next to the great wheel of the carriage, and he clasped one of the wooden spokes to steady himself. It was a position compounded of physical discomfort and indignity.