Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  She pulled her artificial eye back a little way. There was a mess of action around her randomly chosen figure. Soldiers scurried. But, here and there, people stopped to - to what? It was unclear to Eleanor. But, in the heat of battle, surely they must bestir themselves - but there! One was kneeling and emetically voiding the contents of his stomach. In the middle of the battlefield! As musket balls and shells flew about them—

  But of course they were sickening. Eleanor had too sharp a memory of exactly what the sickness involved. She looked at the field with a new sense of what effort must be involved in this physical labour. Were all the soldiers ill? Yet (withdrawing her view to a more aerial perspective) with what cumulative vigour did they push forward! Eleanor pulled back further and saw the whole battlefield: the sweep of the landscape up and down, the myriad forms twitching and flowing over it, like gnats in a cloud, or a mist of flocking starlings folding over and in upon themselves as they gather for migration. The left flank of the French poured up a hill, to where the English, in thready lines, fired their many muskets. The lines spilled squirts and puffs of smoke. More smoke jetted from the cannons - many many cannons. And this grey gunsmoke poured over the whole of the battlefield like a coastal bore.

  And then, on the right flank, Eleanor saw the reactive movement of an English counterattack. There were horses, but no more than a score—sapient horses, perhaps - and they were surrounded, seemingly embedded, in a mass of foot soldiery that rushed the length of a field. The French generated their own grey dusty smoke from ranked muskets and cannons. The seething mass of the English was like a red foam pushed forward by the seawave. As it rolled on many of the bubbles in the foam popped and disappeared. Or, Eleanor thought, with a delicious and perfect detachment, the entire battle was like an organism. It was an organism that had come together for this morning, assembled out of a million constituent parts like cells and given temporary life by the two interlocked powers-of-will of the commanding officers. And now the organism was slowly turning about, as the French pushed the English back on the left and the reverse action happened on the right.

  The thought of her fiancé popped into her head, accompanied by a twitch of guilt that her thoughts had been distracted. How was he faring? Was he caught up in the battle? She had been lucky, she realised, to have been plucked from the field immediately before the fighting began. With an increasingly sure touch of her hand upon the miraculous floor, she spun the image about, swept along it, darted in and in, pulling out face after face contorted in rage or pain or drained by illness or fear. And - there! Henry, on a hilltop, away behind the main bank of French cannon. Oh, he was terrified. He had scurried behind a French cart and was trying to wrap his arms about his head. She peered closer at him through the magical glass, and could see how tremulous he was, how blanched and fearful.

  She was at that moment aware of two distinct, opposite and yet intimately connected emotions. One was a sort of sudden glory in herself, an inner triumphing - for she was aerially projected, secure and potent as a god, and he was suffering and vulnerable. But, at the same time, she felt a genuine pang of compassion. How strange it is that compassion can strike with a pang like physical pain! She became aware of a new quality in her emotions, something that had been steadily cultivating itself inside her without her even being aware of the growth. She became aware of shame.

  She must help him.

  She leapt to her feet and ran towards the Brobdingnagian. ‘Sir Giant! Sir Giant!’

  With his infinite and infuriating slowness, the giant brought his head round and leant down. ‘Child,’ he boomed. ‘I am speaking to the king of this craft.’

  ‘We must help them! Tell the King - tell the King - that just as he lifted you to safety, he must bring up here my fiancé and . . . tell him that!’

  ‘The King,’ said the giant, shaking his head, ‘is not concerned with such little things.’

  Eleanor took this immediately in her stride. ‘He must use his powers to end this battle - he surely has the power to end this battle. Tell him!’

  But the giant’s head was still shaking. ‘He has not come to talk with you,’ he said, ‘and I am sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I am sorry for you. But it is not your world any longer. He talks with us about it - he and his kind.’

  ‘He and his kind?’

  ‘There are one hundred and forty-four of his kind, in their various craft, all coming to this world. And why should they consider you? It is not your world to cede to them. It is a kindness,’ said the giant, in an enormously sorrowful voice, as if this were a kindness that pained him acutely, ‘that he speaks even to me.’

  ‘Wait!’ cried Eleanor. ‘What is your meaning? Why do you talk of ceding the world? Wait! Wait!’ But it was no good, for the giant was straightening himself and standing upright, and that was the end of his conversation with Eleanor Burton.

  [8]

  Bates dipped a mug into a metal canister of coffee suspended over a campfire. He was so thirsty that he bolted the boiling fluid. The life of this little knot of soldiers pressed upon him, after days of solitude. The English chatter, after so long amongst Frenchmen, sounded almost alien to him. And if they were to discover that he was a registered Ami de France! It would mean his death, surely. And here was the Captain, on his stretcher; brought out from his tent, by his own orders, so that he could see the morning star Hesperus once more before he died.

  ‘It is, sir,’ the Captain was saying. ‘It is always a pleasure to meet an English gentleman. I am like to die, sir. But I am glad to know you, before I do.’

  ‘Surely not to die, sir,’ said Bates, reflexively.

  ‘I have made my peace with God,’ said the Captain, in a weak and wretched voice. ‘He has spared me longer than many-I have seen men sicken and fall down on the spot never to regain their consciousnesses. I have seen men, hale and strong in their youth, standing one minute - spitting phlegm and weeping the next - dead the next. It is a plague. It came upon us, and in less than a week it has devastated, it has devastated the civilised . . . well, well, perhaps it is the end-times.’

  ‘End-times.’

  ‘Revelation speaks of plague, and the star Wormwood coming down to Earth. You have seen it? It grew and grew in the sky and last night it swelled overhead.’

  And there it was, huge in the sky, much larger than the moon and still clearly visible in the late afternoon sky. The two men looked at it in silence for a while. It seemed to look back at them, this cataracted great eye, bone-white in the sky. That made Bates uncomfortable. He spoke up:

  ‘I could see little last night for the storm.’

  The Captain coughed. ‘The storm was great,’ he conceded, ‘and then it passed. This Wormwood-star swept it away, I think. It was brighter than an argent torch. Still, if it be the end-times then I am selfish enough to be grateful that this sickness will carry me off soon. For if it be the end-times, then terrible things are before us.’

  Bates hid his face behind the tin mug, and took another swig. But all he could think was: Once on a time I would have thought that way myself. Once I would have been eager to project my own sufferings onto the cosmos as a whole. What had changed? And then he bethought himself of little Sir Gugglerum, who had slain his own kind to protect humanity. Who had saved Bates’s life for some great purpose - Bates knew not what - only to be shot like a quail in the sky. So arbitrary a dying, a randomness. Though he had been little, yet there was exactly as much life in him to be lost as in Bates himself. It was a bitter turnabout. The sorrow smote Bates’s soul. He had learned, perhaps, to feel another’s suffering as more acute than his own. And that, perhaps, was something, in a universe created by a deity of Compassion.

  ‘What would your men do,’ he asked, ‘if you were to pass away?’

  ‘They are a dozen. I have promoted one Corporal, and he shall lead them on a roundabout path to York. We cannot join battle now. Our numbers are too few. Some of those alive are sickening themselves.’ He
shook his head. ‘End-times, sir, end-times.’

  ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps it is merely a regular cometary body. Perhaps it is an astronomical rather than a theological object.’

  ‘Look about you, sir,’ the Captain gasped. ‘The northlands are laid waste by pestilence. I would despair of our ability to fight the French, were it not that I feel sure their army is as afflicted as is ours.’

  ‘It is,’ said Bates, at once, with feeling, remembering Scarborough. ‘Believe me sir, it is.’

  ‘But it hardly matters. These are puny matters, these human quarrels, in the face of the Great Day of His Wrath, which is to come. Wormwood is His avenging angel.’

  ‘And what chance,’ said Bates, ‘do we stand, squeezed between Pestilence from below and Force from above?’

  What chance indeed? But his thoughts were not on what he said. His mind reverted again to Gugglerum. Why had the little creature sought to help Bates at all? He had been about to reveal a great secret, and had been prevented. But what secret? Whilst he did not ratiocinate it in precisely such terms, yet was Bates’s mind caught between a sense that the world was arbitrary and abrupt-a concept against which all his yearnings revolted - and a sense that everything happened for a purpose. On the one hand was the chill perception that such was indeed life, a cold and vasty chaos. To think that brave Gugglerum, who had sacrificed so much, could be snuffed out like an insect as he was on the very edge of revealing the profoundest mystery that could save a whole nation, a whole world. And on the other hand was Bates’s inner infant, the naked newborn portion of his soul, who knew the universe to be ordered. Who knew in his heart that not a sparrow fell but had a place in the grander plan. Greater minds than his had pondered this dilemma, of course, and come to no stronger solution. But Bates felt that there was something, just below the oceanic surface of his mind; something that dabbed a fin into the air before diving again. There was something.

  What had Gugglerum been about to tell him?

  ‘I do not know your name, sir,’ the Captain was saying.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I do not know your name.’

  ‘Abraham Bates, at your service.’

  ‘John Longley, at yours.’

  Bates held out his hand.

  Captain Longley uttered a half-cough, half-laugh, and shook his head. ‘I would advise you, sir, to forgo the formality. I have seen the pestilence pass from person to person by as little a contact as two hands shaking.’

  ‘What matters it?’ Bates said, with a curious inner sensation of mental shifting, as if something within him were on the point of collapsing - or, strangely, of assembling itself, like the temple erected in moments by Solomon’s magical key. The sensation caused tingles up and down his backbone. His stomach thrummed. There was a smell - bread, or something else, in Bates’s nostril. He was on the precipice of comprehension, a half-inch from understanding everything.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Oh, I only meant, what matters it if the light in the sky is truly Wormwood, as you say? If the world is ending then catching pestilence from your hand is the least of the things I should be worrying on.’

  The Captain angled his head and looked at Bates, and then laughed. ‘Truly said, sir.’

  He grasped his hand, and the two men shook.

  ‘You are not afraid, sir,’ said Longley. ‘I admire that in any man, sir, soldier or civilian.’

  ‘My trust is with Jesus Christ, sir,’ said Bates, ‘though I am as miserable a sinner as any, and worse than most.’

  ‘I too,’ said the Captain.

  ‘And besides,’ said Bates, as an afterthought, ‘I have suffered through the plague once and recovered. I do not believe it can afflict me again.’

  ‘You’ve recovered?’ said Longley, nodding. ‘Bravo, sir. Bravo. I could wish I had a constitution as robust as yours.’

  A chink.

  Everything tumbled and collapsed in Bates’s head, a scree slope of falling pieces; and then with a noise of wind, and the thundering passage of blood through the vessels of his body, past his inner ear and into his brain. And the tumbling and collapsing reversed itself, and everything swept up in a pillar of wind and a pillar of light. Everything suddenly made sense.

  There it is.

  For this Gugglerum saved him, and died. For this! Bates had reached into the calculating device and been pricked upon the thumb—

  Eureka, conjugated from . . .

  ‘This disease is a malign thing,’ Longley was saying. ‘My brother is a physician. I used to talk with him about the great debate as to whether sickness is passed by a miasma that moves through the air, as an odour may; or whether there is some other agency. I inclined to the former explanation. As a soldier, you see, I know that illness is always accompanied by bad odour.’ Bates was too stunned by his revelation to interrupt the man’s chatter. ‘But my brother,’ Longley continued, ‘insists that the new technologies of microscopy have brought to view a whole universe of animalcules and specks and germs, and that these tiny beasts are what sicken us. As the Lilliputian devils are to us, so there are creatures smaller than they who—’

  ‘Your brother is correct sir,’ Bates burst out. ‘This is what Gugglerum was trying to tell me. Of course! Of course! Your brother is correct, Captain, for science has known for some years now that infection is caused by the action of these animalcules. But what we should have known—what we did not know, but should have known, is that Mind is a universal principle . . .’

  ‘You speak too rapidly, Mr Bates,’ said Longley.

  ‘But the principle of mind - no atom, but that thinks and feels and - and why, for who was it, sir, that claimed there were no atoms, only a continually refined and infinitely refinable flow? Was it a Greek, sir?’ He stopped himself, drew himself. ‘I apologise for my outburst, Longley,’ he said, frankly. ‘But I have, just this moment, experienced a profound revelation. And what is more, I think I see how this sickness may be cured. I see it.’

  The Captain shook his head. ‘It has baffled greater healers than you, sir. Better to accept God’s will. If I am to die here, then I am. Into his hands I commend my spirit.’

  ‘But you need not die! I too have been sick with this fever - my body had been the battleground. But . . . I think I see. The Lilliputians made an alliance with the animalcules. This is what Gugglerum spoke of. And I can see, also, why he was uneasy at what his kind had done - for once the animalcules had killed off the human beings, who is to say that they would not go further ? Lilliputians have been immune to illness, and perhaps the animalcules are creatures too coarse to infiltrate and devastate Lilliputian bodies - but - but—’ the insight was sudden and complete, ‘who can say that there are not animalcules to whom animalcules are like men? That there are not sub-animalcules with whom the animalcules might not treat and parley, and turn them against the bodies of the Lilliputians? It is a dangerous balance to upset, Gugglerum was right. Oh, he was wise to oppose the alliance. He was a wise creature.’

  ‘I pray you leave me,’ said the Captain. ‘To be frank, your chatter wearies me. I am on the threshold of death, sir, and I must sleep.’

  ‘But I can cure you!’

  At this the Captain looked disgusted. ‘You are the Lord Saviour to touch the lepers and heal them, are you? Such talk approaches blasphemy, sir, I repudiate it. I ask you to leave, sir.’

  Bates gaped at the Captain. The revelation had been so sudden, and so complete, he doubted his ability to convey it to this person in any comprehensible way. But he saw, now. He had reached inside the Computational Device, that dawn many weeks before, and his finger had been pricked. The sharpness of the wound, the little bite—was that where the animalcules had been introduced to his body? And they had fought with his own cells. But why had he not died, as had so many? Was it that the invading army was, at that point, inexperienced in the war it waged? Bates’s own body, and then the body of Eleanor, and then the body of the Dean, each had possessed - or acquired - the skills to de
feat the invaders. But the invaders had at the same time grown more expert in their strategy. As some of them had passed from person to person, swept over in the phlegm or unspeakable matter that the sick expelled, they had taken their expertise with them. And with each new battle they had grown more expert. And soon they knew how to storm the citadels of the world with unpreventable force.