by Adam Roberts
Round the corner from the entrance there was a glow. It was a candle, lit in the corner. One individual, or perhaps two, lay on a heap of rags by the wall. He, or they, were not moving. ‘Good day,’ said Bates. ‘I of course must apologise for entering uninvited, but—’
He felt a painful crack on his shoulder, ah!, and he spun about. Someone had struck him! An old beggarman in filthy clothes, rheum flowing from his eyes, he had bustled up from the other corner and had struck him with a staff. Struck him! And now he was raising his staff for a second blow.
‘Sir!’ cried Bates, holding his hands before him. ‘Please sir! I ask only shelter for a short space until the storm—’
The staff landed thwack! on Bates’s forearm and made him shout in pain. He danced backwards. ‘I assure you,’ he said, in a higher-pitched voice.
‘Get away o’ my house,’ cried the old man.
‘Sir, I am begging shelter . . .’
‘Get away and out!’
‘The storm outside - it is not weather to cast a stranger—’
‘Get out!’
‘The Bible, sir. Think of the Samaritan, he—’
The stick swung again and caught Bates hard on the side of his head. This was a severe knock. Bates spun about and stumbled, but did not fall. His head resounded with pain; it rang with pain like a gong. He staggered sideward and collided heavily with the wall. His vision was jarred double. To prevent himself from sliding to the floor he reached up, grasped at the wall, and a piece of plaster the size and shape of an ear came away in his hand. There were flashes of light inside his eye, like miniature inner lightning.
He heard a swish, and, stunned though he was, Bates understood that the staff had been wielded once more and had missed his ear by a fraction. He needed no further persuasion. He lurched, he stumbled and ran, loomed left, hauled himself right, fumbled at the front door and in moments was outside again in the rain. An ache gripped at his skull where it had been hit. The rainwater dribbled and stung on his skin.
Behind him the door shut with a thud.
He stood for a moment in the downpour gathering his wits, and then, despite everything, he returned to the front door. ‘Let me in sir, I pray you!’ he called through the wood. ‘Sir!’ and knocking, ‘Sir! I beg you!’ and knocking again. He shouted that he would pay for lodgings, that he had money, although he had none. But the air outside was silvery dark, and very cold, and he had nowhere else to go. The rain was falling enormously all around.
He had, he realised, lost his sack inside the house. ‘Sir! Please allow me at least to retrieve my satchel! It is all I have to eat!’
But there was no reply. The yard was slithered over with a covering of water. The rain made glassy stubble all across the face of the duckpond. It hissed like a huge serpent over the slate roof. There was no helping it. Anger came up inside him, and he picked pebbles from the side of the pond and hurled them at the flank of the house. But he fast became tired of this, and the anger was soon washed away by the inundation. Bates clutched his head and stumbled away.
‘Eleanor,’ he shouted aloud into the teeth of the storm, trying to spur his spirits. ‘Eleanor!’ But it was very hard to feel anything except sorry for himself in this freezing and soaked universe.
It was purple-and-black night now, completely wet, completely cold, with the occasional bone-coloured flicker from lightning that projected momentariness upon the shivering grass. A great surf-crash of thunder followed hard upon each flicker. In all the universe now Bates was aware of only two things: the sensation of the cold and constant pressure from the rainfall; and the enormous sound of it - the mocking applause of it, as if the cosmos were a cynical audience rejoicing in his suffering. He stumbled through the mud and back onto the road. His muscles twitched and juggled with chills. Oh, but he was freezing to death. He was soaked in ice-water and pummelled with blows from above.
His sufferings stretched the time out; swelled each minute to prodigious proportions. It seemed to him that he had walked on for hours, though it was not so long. The road he followed turned right but he could not see the turn in the darkness with his head down, and so he stepped into the ditch. The trench was a foot deep with water. And there he stood, shivering, up to his shins in it. This was the lowest point of his journey - of what, afterwards, he would call his great odyssey of discovery. Naturally, such grandeur of self-characterisation bespoke that one (of the two) Abraham Bateses who possessed energy and the higher spirits. The heartened and not the depressed Abraham. When, in later life, his blue devils afflicted his spirit (as naturally they did, for they were a part of that same soul they attacked) he would recall to himself the rain, the terrible cold and hopelessness of this moment - standing, in the dark, in the ditchwater, and every scrap or atom of life purged from him. He would recall it to remind himself that even the most terrible sufferings have a finite duration.
He stood there for long minutes. Only the completeness of his prostration of mind prevented him taking such action as, for instance, throwing himself forward and drowning himself there - or of ripping his sodden clothes from his body, like Lear on the heath, and raving. But he did not do these things. He was as perfect a physical emblem of passivity as could be imagined.
And then, as if remembering something he had forgotten, he said the word aloud: ‘Eleanor!’ It was a mumble. He said it again, speaking more distinctly.
There was a glimmer of light, away to his right.
‘Eleanor!’ he cried.
With some difficulty in the dark, he clambered out of the ditch and lurched off towards the gleam. A house, with people inside. A light in the dark. He would beg shelter - he would sleep, like Joseph and Mary, in the stable, yea in the pigsty if needs be, but he would get himself out of the flood.
The light was small, and Bates lost view of it several times. He had to leave the road and walk, with mud-clogged feet, directly across a field, and start up a slope before he found from whence it was issuing.
It was a cave, set into an escarpment where the hill rose more steeply and lost its covering of grass. Bates stopped at the entrance. The light inside did not flicker, as a candle or fire would; which could only mean it was gas. A lamp! It showed the entrance to the cave as a rough a-shaped hole in black and glistening rock; but it showed, also, that blocks had been laid at the floor of this entrance to smooth the path in, and that therefore this was more than a mere wild hole-in-the-hill. This was a place used by humanity. Shepherds, perhaps, might shelter here. Bates stepped in under the roof, ducking his head a little, and called out.
‘Helloa,’ he cried.
He had entered that place which would for ever be associated in his mind with Knowledge, as if it were Plato the Philosopher’s cave, or a cavern from Fairy Romance that led through to an otherworld that gave the hero glimpses of a Truth hidden from ordinary eyes in our ordinary world. He would find out soon enough. ‘Hello,’ he cried again, stepped forward, and wiping the wet from his face with his right hand. ‘Do not refuse me shelter on this night, friends! I saw your light and came to it! A poor traveller, caught in the storm—’
And the light went out.
[3]
The giant strode easily through the rainstorm. Rain came in myriad lines and bars, like an artist ’s shading of blue-grey on some mighty sketch. It filled the Dean’s boots and soaked into the Dean’s clothes. In mere moments he was wet through. Oh! He had not felt such elation since his supply of white snuff had been exhausted. ‘On! On!’ he cried.
But the giant stopped his striding, and turned his back to the wind. Leaning forward to give his tiny passengers some shelter, he caught them up in his hands, his great paws big as the hand of God, and he brought them both up to his face. The pores in his nose loomed like whirlpools. ‘On! On! On!’ squealed the Dean.
‘You,’ said the giant, with his infuriating and penetrating slowness, ‘are wet. Shall I place you in my,’ each word a boulder dropped slowly from his great cracked pink lips, ‘pocket?’
‘Yes,’ called Eleanor. Her dress was wet and clung to her form. Oh, it reproduced the lines of her body, as a sculpture working in finest Valaprozzi marble might carve a dryad and capture the wrinkles and folds of cloth so perfectly that the form appeared naked! ‘Place me there, Sir Giant!’
It was in the Dean’s heart to demand a saddle on the creature’s shoulder - or the crown of his head! To sing Laudamus cum spirito in exulto at the very topmost of his voice as his steed strode at forty miles an hour towards York - the rain and wind slapping his face and the elements themselves joining his joy! But he checked himself. The prospect of being in a pocket with his fiancée was appealing too. To be in a pocket with a handsome young woman! Tucked up together in a pocket, truly.
‘I shall put you,’ said the giant, ‘inside.’
‘Me too, Sir Giant!’ cried the Dean, raising his arm. ‘Adsum! Adsum!’
Carefully the giant placed his hands, first the left then the right, in at his large pocket and deposited his charges. He folded the pocket-flap over the top and it was dark. A bouncing motion told that the fellow had resumed his onwards march.
‘My dear!’ squealed the Dean, trying to settle himself, to brace himself against the fat fibres of the cloth so as to counter the upset of the motion, ‘my dear! Who would have thought that you and I, engaged to be married, should find ourselves the pocket-pets of such a creature.’ His eyesight, dimmed at first, was beginning to resolve a faint image from the darkness. The fabric, spun of Brobdingnagian wool, seemed woven of soft cables, and light made its way very faintly in at the edges of this grid. Eleanor, bless her beauty, Eleanor had steadied herself with one leg out and the other curled underneath her.
As the giant moved the ropes that were interlaced to make his coat rubbed and groaned, like a ship’s at sea. The noise of the storm outside rushed, rushed upon the ear. It was a regimental assault, and roar, and the ordnance of thunder.
And the Dean thought to himself with a kind of glee: I have the Calculating Machine in my pocket, or at any rate its key! His elation bubbled into a fantasy of the future. Received in York as a national hero. Marriage to Eleanor in the Minster. Preferment-a family! Eleanor with sons and daughters about her. He in a large house in the town, working his investigations into publishable form. His investigations unlocking the mysteries of the cosmos. The Garter, a permanent place at court. A statue in a London square. Eleanor gazing up at him with pure love, a love prompted by admiration.
‘My dear,’ he called, raising his voice. ‘We shall soon be there!’
‘Indeed.’
He scrambled a little closer to her. ‘I have decided that we shall marry in York Minster, my dear,’ he called.
‘A grand prospect,’ she said.
‘I shall be a hero of the patria! We shall have the most magnificent of ceremonies.’
‘Very good, my dear.’
Her calmness punctured his mood a little. He felt the edges of irritation. If only he had some of his snuff! Lacking that, he reverted to a desire to provoke some reaction from his fiancée, for good or ill.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We must embrace. ‘Twill make our passage in the pocket easier to York.’
‘Sir,’ she replied, and the Dean was gratified to hear a tone of annoyance in her voice. ‘It will be easier to remain as we are. If we were to do as you say we would roll about like a coin.’
‘Nonsense, woman,’ he declared. ‘I am to be the husband, and can hardly need recite to you what the Novum Testamentum says about the husband! Wives go back to your husbands, slaves go back to your masters!’
‘You intend that I be your slave?’ flared Eleanor. ‘What manner of oriental vision is this? Do you see marriage in such terms?’
‘Come come!’ declared the Dean, strangely pleased by her anger. ‘I mean no such thing! Why twist my words, when all I do is quote scripture? I intend for you to be the partner of my life. But the woman to the man is a relation of the lesser to the greater. Surely you do not contest that?’ And yet, the thought of her enslaved! The thought of himself the potentate and she his vassal!
Eleanor was not looking at him. It was hard, in the dimness, to make out her face. ‘I can hardly hear your words over the sound of the storm,’ she said.
‘It is loud,’ he conceded.
‘We can talk of this another time.’
‘Another time,’ said the Dean. He shuffled closer again. ‘A kiss, my sweet,’ he said.
Eleanor did not move. They rolled and jiggled. They moved onward. Slowly she turned her face towards him, pushed with one arm to move her head closer. His lips brushed her cheek, and a bump pushed his face firmly against hers. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ he said.
‘A wife,’ she replied, turning her face away again, ‘should indeed make a husband happy.’
It was possible for both of them to lie flat along the bottom of the pocket. It was not comfortable, for a seam, thick as the bough of a tree, ran along the base; but it was more agreeable than trying to remain upright. The Dean dozed rather than slept. The darkness inside the pocket intensified.
A lack of motion woke him.
His first thought: ‘We have arrived! We are at York!’ He got, with some difficulty, to his feet and began shouting. ‘Sir Giant! Sir Giant! Take us from this pocket, that we may talk with the garrison of the town!’
‘He cannot hear you, sir,’ said the still supine Eleanor.
‘Sir Giant! Sir Giant!’
‘Your voice is small to him at the best of times,’ she said. ‘Muffled within his pocket you must be inaudible.’
‘I demand to be released!’ said the Dean. He leapt, as high as his portly body would manage it, attempting to grasp onto the fabric, to pull his head to the top of the pocket. But the manoeuvre was quite impossible for him. He was frustrated. ‘Sir Giant!’ he cried.
‘Hush!’ said Eleanor.
‘Giant, release us! Let us out of here!’
‘Be quiet,’ said Eleanor, more sharply. ‘Listen.’
The Dean stopped bobbing and fell silent. ‘What am I listening for?’ he asked.
‘The giant is talking.’
Quiet: Oldenberg could hear it, a low rumbling, like the lowest drone of a mighty church organ, broken into portions and cadenced slightly up, slightly down. Then silence. Then it would start again.
‘To whom,’ the Dean asked, ‘is he communicating?’
‘Another giant,’ said Eleanor.
‘How so?’
‘Can you not hear the difference in timbre, the two voices?’
‘Not I.’
‘You have no ear, then, for music.’
They were silent. The conversation seemed to continue for a very long time. ‘What are they saying?’ the Dean demanded several times. ‘What?’
‘I do not know. Even if I could pick out the occasional word here and there, they are not speaking English.’
‘Heathens,’ said the Dean.
But there was nothing to do save wait.
Other voices: human voices, somewhere down below them. Shouting. Who was this? French people! The French were here! The French had come!
And then, with a rustling and a rush of cold air from above, the flap to the pocket was lifted, and the great hand of the Brobdingnagian came down and clasped them both. They were lifted into the night; half-sitting, half-lying on the cupped Brobdingnagian palm. The sky had cleared of cloud, and the moonlight was so bright that it actually hurt the eyes. It was almost as bright as day.
The Dean was excited, and a little scared, and dug his nails into the horny skin to keep from falling. ‘Giant!’ he cried ‘Giant, why have you stopped ? Are we at York?’ They were lifted past the huge face and brought up to the ear, and Dean repeated himself.
‘With whom have you been talking?’ cried Eleanor.
The giant lowered his hand again, nodding with tremendous slowness. ‘With my friend Brulbug,’ he said. There was another giant, tall as a tower, standing thirty feet away. He ha
d achieved that improbable invisibility of the very large, so big that the eye had not at first registered him. But there he was, in plain trowsers and jerkin, with a great shaggy head of hair. There was a forest a little way off, behind him.
‘What good is that?’ cried the Dean, furious. ‘We must get on! Have you forgot our conversation?’
‘I cannot go now to the city,’ said the giant.
‘Cannot?’
‘To York town, to York town, I cannot go.’
‘You promised!’ shrieked the Dean. ‘Well, well, betrayal, is it? Place us on the ground, sir, at once, sir. Put us down and we shall walk, arm-in-arm, the rest of the way ourselves - and no thanks to you sir - and God will not be pleased with you, sir.’