Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  The giant angled his great head, as if trying to catch at this stream of words.

  Then Eleanor’s vision resolved itself. She had been confused, for a second, by her unusual vantage point - raised so very high. The sky was there, she saw, and there a fiercely bright moon, and the giant’s face. But the stars were orange and seemed to have fallen to the floor of the world, for the space above her was empty of their light and the space below glittered with a receding vision of light.

  She looked again. ‘Dean,’ she said.

  She looked again and saw more clearly: the lights below were campfires, perhaps a thousand of them. A very great number.

  The forest that she had thought she saw was not composed of trees, but of hundreds of Brobdingnagian giants, all equipped in a livery of blue. ‘The army of France,’ she cried. ‘Dean!’

  ‘We are in the champaign before York,’ the Dean shouted, extraordinarily excited. ‘We are before York, and the French have invested the city!’

  ‘Two armies,’ said the giant, and with his free hand he reached out two dozen yards and gestured. The moonlight really was intensely bright, giving the whole scene a curiously oneiric vividness. Eleanor could see very clearly, etched in silver and black and illuminated by a thousand orange nests of fire, the myriad tents of the French. The field running down a slope. A river dividing them. And, on the far side, the Union Flag; the tents and fires of the British.

  ‘In the plains before York town! A great battle,’ cried the Dean. ‘In the heart of Britain - for heart, in the human corpus, is upperwards, and towards the neck, and so I say the heart of Britain is northward, at York.’ He was childishly excited.

  ‘Two armies,’ said Eleanor. ‘But the Brobdingnagians are all on the French side.’

  ‘Not all, surely,’ said Oldenberg. ‘Some must have stayed loyal. Sir Giant! Sir Giant! Is it not true? There are some who have not betrayed their loyalty?’

  She had never seen moonlight like it before. Never had moonlight been so bright.

  ‘But the moon,’ said Eleanor, in a wondering voice, ‘the moon.’

  ‘What do you say, Madam?’ asked the Dean. ‘Sir Giant! Have you talked to your giant friends? Is there to be battle here in the morning?’

  ‘The moon, moon, moon,’ said Eleanor, pointing. She sounded like a child. The sight of it had reduced her to inarticulacy.

  ‘War!’ said the Dean. ‘You giant fellows always complain how you hate it, and yet here you all are, lined up and ready. War!’

  ‘The moon is not full,’ Eleanor cried, pointing again at the steel-coloured sliver hanging over the horizon, like a clipped slice of thumb-nail. ‘The moonlight is not - it is not from the moon that - not the moon, not the moon—’

  ‘What are you saying, my lady?’ said the Dean.

  ‘Look how bright the moonlight,’ said Eleanor. ‘And look how thin the moon!’

  ‘What is the nonsense of—’

  ‘Look!’

  Immediately below them there was motion, as of insects. And it was the French soldiery moving about the shins of the giant. The horizon eastward was starting to thaw and gleam with incipient dawn. But this only made the shaped moon seem paler. And yet the silver light washed over everything.

  ‘Bright the moonlight,’ Eleanor repeated. ‘And not from the moon.’

  ‘Light,’ said the giant. ‘Look up!’

  Of course they looked up.

  ‘He has come again,’ cried the Brobdingnagian.

  ‘Who has come again?’

  ‘The man bigger than any. Mitras, mitras. The Christ man. And only look up, to see his coming.’

  Eleanor and Dean looked up before the giant could get to the end of this last, rumbling, slow sentence. There was the comet, much larger than it had been before. Much larger than the moon ever was. A great teardrop of light in the purple and the black, overwhelming the sky. And silver light poured from it.

  ‘He has come again,’ said the giant. And somebody was crying aloud, in Latin, somebody below them on the ground crying in good ecclesiastical Latin though with a French accent, ante paucos annos propinquus uester Christus nobilitatem patriciam nomine sonans nonne specu Mitrae et omnia portentuosa simulacra . . .

  [4]

  Bates stumbled in the cave, regained his feet with difficulty. The darkness was total. ‘Do not extinguish your light!’ he called into the black. ‘I pray you!’ Then he bethought himself of bandits and robbers, not shepherds but desperadoes, and he was filled with despairing terror. ‘Who’s there?’ he querulled. ‘Is anybody there? Who is it? Who’s there?’

  It was perfectly black. He could only orient himself by putting the sound of the torrenting rain behind him, and shuffling forward slowly with outreached arms.

  ‘Don’t torment me, sirs!’ cried Bates, feeling his self-control slip towards weeping. ‘If you be robbers, then know that I have nothing on my person - nothing worth murdering me for. But I am a gentleman! And in this fearful night, when I have been cudgelled already, and near drowned in a ditch, and chased from stump to stump by the lightning, I—’

  There was a squeaking sound, and then Bates’s thoughts of banditry were replaced by thoughts of rats. ‘Ugh! Ugh!’ he called. ‘But whose light was that?’

  ‘Stand still,’ said the squeaking.

  And then with sudden recognition, Bates understood. ‘O Lilliputian sir!’ he called into the darkness. ‘Oh, reignite your lamp, I pray you! I mean you no harm. I am a friend of the little folk-I have devoted my life to—’

  ‘Stand still,’ said the voice again. Bates obeyed.

  There was a pause.

  ‘I am shivering, sir,’ he said. ‘I mean you no harm.’

  The little voice sounded nearer. ‘You misunderstand, for the balance of consummation lies upon the other side.’

  ‘I,’ said Bates, his teeth chittering, ‘I do not understand, good little sir.’

  ‘The slowness of wits of the big folk,’ said the little voice, as if reciting a proverb, ‘is like the motion of glaciers.’

  And then there was light.

  Bates’s eyes flinched, and he rubbed them. The illumination came from a lamp of a style he had not before seen: a block, black, and on top a bright globe pouring out light with unflickering intensity. This light showed the walls of the cave, ribbed like the roof of a man’s mouth, black and yellow and glistening. On the floor rested one of the toy aero-fliers of the sort that Lilliputians flew. It had room in its slim central carriage for two pilots. A flying machine. But only one Lilliputian stood next to it, handsome in a yellow uniform. He was holding one of the tiny muskets, and this was aimed at Bates’s face. But he held this weapon with one hand only; in the other he had a tiny brass-coloured megaphone, and this he lifted to his lips.

  ‘You are no Dean of York.’

  ‘Not I!’ said Bates, startled. ‘Do you know of the Dean?’ Then, with realisation: ‘Did you fly after us in yon flying machine?’

  ‘Sit yourself, Sir Giant,’ said the Lilliputian, through the little trumpet. ‘Sit cross on the floor.’

  ‘Sit cross?’ Bates asked. But he lowered his shivering body to the floor, and of course he knew that the Lilliputian meant cross-legged. He arranged himself. ‘I am cold, sir,’ he said, hugging himself.

  ‘That cannot be helped.’

  ‘Are there no supplies in this cavern? The entrance has been laid with stones - people sometimes—’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Bates rubbed himself, sending spray into the air. ‘I must make the best of things, then,’ he said. ‘I am Abraham Bates, sir.’ He felt terrible ill. Terrible ill. His head throbbed, and his nose ran. He was ill. A fever. Another fever, or a recurrence of the former.

  ‘Not being the Dean,’ said the little fellow, ‘I deduced as much.’ He laid his rifle along the top of his flying machine, with the muzzle resting near one of the sycamore-seed-shaped propeller blades; and he sat himself on one of the wings. This left his hands free, although he was within eas
y reach of the trigger.

  ‘You know of us, clearly,’ said Bates.

  ‘Until this killing rainstorm,’ said the little fellow, ‘I followed you. I followed you when the sky was clear. But we are not so brutish as the big folk, to be able to withstand the falling of the sky.’

  ‘And so you were compelled to seek shelter,’ said Bates, hugging himself, ‘or have your head stove in by these raindrops, I see, I see. Sir, little sir, I sympathise - for it is a fierce rainfall, I agree. I suppose the rain is thinner in your homeland.’

  ‘You suppose as a fool supposes,’ said the Lilliputian. He kept his eyes unwaveringly upon Bates. ‘Rain falls the same size the world across.’

  ‘But of course it does,’ said Bates. His physical discomfort was making it hard for him to think clearly. As the immediate misery of the freezing rain began, slowly, to reduce, he became aware of the throb and grind inside his skull: a headache where he had been smitten by the peasant with the staff, and a burning pain in his cheek where he had been shot the morning before. Oh, his poor head! Battered and shot! He looked again at the toy plane.

  ‘You, Sir Lilliputian, you - aaa—’ A sneeze vulgarly interrupted the sentence. When he recomposed himself, Bates asked: ‘What is your name, sir?’

  ‘My name is Gu’glrem.’

  ‘Good little Sir Gugglerum,’ said Bates. ‘Methinks I recognise your craft - and recognise you sir, too.’

  ‘So you should, Abraham Bates.’

  Bates looked around. He did not feel threatened by the little fellow, for all his popgun weapon. Very like he was too tired and cold to feel the fear. Besides, the mouth of the cave was fifteen yards behind him, and a quick sprint into the rain would save him, whatever befell. Then he thought: this creature has just told me that he would be smashed by the force of the raindrops, where I can walk through the deluge with my head high. And who, then, is the weaker? Except that he, Bates, was ill. The fever was inside his bones, and he felt tired, tired.

  ‘Your comrade tried to kill me, I think,’ Bates said, attempting to keep his wits about him. ‘To lance out my brains as I slept.’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘Yesterday morn. You stood on the windowsill and looked on. You and another - the third of you crept up to my pillow as I slept and tried to stab me.’

  ‘He tried only to scratch you.’

  ‘And so he did!’

  ‘He was successful in his mission,’ agreed the Lilliputian.

  ‘Psh! He tried to kill me - ’twas no scratch. Were it not for my quick reflexes I would not have been saved!’

  ‘I watched,’ said the little fellow. ‘I know what passed. He scratched you, but you killed him.’

  ‘In self-defence!’

  ‘I watched,’ said the little fellow, and then: ‘You killed him. He was a great warrior, but luck was not with him. You killed him with a book the size of a building. You dropped a house on him. No warrior, no matter how great, could survive such assault.’

  ‘A warrior great in Lilliputia.’

  ‘I am Blefuscudan.’

  ‘Blefuscan!’

  ‘Blefuscudan, and so was he, and so was A’gglem.’

  ‘The third there present?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘What happened to that third fellow? Is he here? He should step forth, and not hide in the shadows—’ and Bates felt a spurt of anxiety: for whilst this one little man kept him talking, who was to say that the other wasn’t creeping up with some weapon or thorn-prick or other horrid scorpion surprise?

  ‘Dead,’ said the Blefuscan. ‘He is dead. They are both of them dead. I fly this plane alone.’

  ‘And how did he die? This Haggleman?’ Bates asked, hugging himself again, and trying to squeeze the shivers out of his torso. ‘Is his death on my conscience as well? I mislike killing, little sir. Did I kill him? I’m sorry if so.’

  ‘I killed him,’ said Gugglerum. ‘I killed him with my hands.’

  ‘ You killed him?’

  ‘I fly the plane alone.’

  ‘But why did you kill him?’

  ‘With these hands,’ said the little man.

  ‘No - why - why did you kill him?’

  ‘I heard your question. Did you think I did not hear your question? My ears are young, and your voice booms.’

  A silence fell between them.

  Bates clung to himself, and tried to calm his shivers. The pains in his body intensified and calmed, grew and diminished, in time to his pulse. There was a dizziness in his head which gave the tiny creature’s words a weird, prophetic, John-of-Gaunt quality. The cave itself seemed to throb around him. He put a finger to his cheek, and the carbuncle that marked the place where the musket-ball had struck him felt hot as a struck Lucifer head. ‘You,’ he said, trying to focus on the little man. ‘You followed us.’

  ‘We had orders. We are at war.’

  ‘You aid the French—’

  ‘Indeed no,’ said Gugglerum. ‘The Fronssai are as greatly our enemy as the English. We have declared war upon all of the big folk.’

  ‘You might have done us the courtesy to have informed us of this declaration,’ said Bates.

  ‘Such would advantage you.’

  ‘It is the honourable way.’

  ‘This is a big-person religion,’ said Gugglerum. ‘Honour.’ He said the word blandly, without scorn, but as an empty thing, as he might have said dust or straw.

  ‘Why were you following us?’ said Bates. ‘Before you were compelled to take shelter in this place?’ And then, his mind distracted by his own pain, he lost the thread of what he was asking. ‘And does it happen in your own country, that when the rain comes you run and hide your heads? Or die? Can that be so?’ He was shivering prodigiously.

  ‘It is so.’

  ‘How,’ said Bates, ‘inconvenient.’

  ‘In Blefuscu,’ he said, ‘we have shelters on all the turnpikes, and we have many public halls in every city. The rain is sometimes small enough to do nothing but soak us, but often there come what we call p’grerum, which is rain in which the drops are the size of a man’s fist, or his head, and they fall with great vehemence and will break your bones, or flatten you and drown you. We see the clouds that bear such rain from afar and take shelter.’

  ‘But are you never surprised by the rain?’

  ‘Some die in rain. And we execute criminals by tying them to posts in the storm.’

  ‘And hailstorms!’ said Bates. ‘They must sure break your roofs! Imagine,’ he said, ‘hailstones the size of cats and dogs.’ The shivers, he thought to himself. These shivers are feverish, and not from the cold. Or were they the cold?

  ‘We have no such weather in Blefuscu,’ said Gugglerum. ‘Though I have seen it here in England.’

  Shiverish.

  ‘I must sleep,’ said Bates, feeling his weariness very heavily within him. Oh, he had suffered so much! ‘Can you let me sleep?’

  ‘Sleep,’ said the tiny man.

  ‘You’ll not harm me in the night? But what answer can you give? Honour is a void to you.’

  ‘I shall not harm you,’ said the man. ‘Sleep.’

  ‘I’m too ill and worn to care,’ said Bates, with a queer flicker of liberation in his breast. ‘I do not seek death, but I am too worn and exhausted to care.’

  ‘I shall not harm you.’

  ‘I would not blame you. For I killed one of your comrades.’

  ‘You killed one, and I killed the other,’ said Gugglerum. ‘With these hands.’

  Bates got to his feet, slow and creakingly, and removed his coat. He was shivering. A few steps towards the cave mouth and he wrung it, as best as his trembling hands could manage, to rid it of some of its water. He took off his boots and poured trickles from them. His stockings were black, wet as dishcloths. He wrung them out too, and then - because he could think of nothing else to do with them - he drew the cold cloth back over his toes. Then he laid himself full-length on the floor of the cave, and drew his coat over him
. He was shivering fiercely. He tucked his arm under his head.

  ‘Sir Gugglerum,’ he said. ‘I am not well.’

  ‘I know this,’ said the tiny man.

  ‘I shiver. I shiver with more than the cold.’

  ‘I see you doing so.’