Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  The angels held crystal wands in their hands that could, with a flick of expanding fire, cleanse the whole sky from east to west; could scorch away every living being. Yet God had chosen instead not to immolate the suffering but rather to plunge into it. Purity of self-sacrifice, or desperate prophylactic medical treatment of his own isolation? For even if He purged the world of future suffering, the pressure of past horror would be lodged in His Divine plenum, under the Holy breastbone, unrelieved. The spear that wounded Him shall also cure. Did not the Homeric gods hurl themselves, like suicides, from the highest high into the unresting surge of human warring down human? Was this the same urge?

  She saw an arctic fox scurrying from one bank of white grass to another. Even its glistening nose was white. Its eyes too: not albino pink, but white as paper.

  Feeling the abandon very acutely in her soul, Eleanor hurried down the slope and threw herself amongst the bustle of this strange crowd. The individuals were a little above human height, but thinner and more wraithlike.They were clothed, but in shifts of such loose weave that their skin - white as ivory - was perfectly visible. The men walked with loose sleeves or flappy folds of white flesh, like untucked kerchiefs, where their membrum virile might be expected to perpend. The women were bushy with white hair. Their large almond-shaped eyes carried the slightest of blue tints, which caused them to stand sharply out from their white faces; faces shaped like two cupped hands.

  ‘Friends!’ cried Eleanor. ‘Enemies! Help me, I beg of you!’

  Most of the white folk ignored her, and continued with their myriad tasks, their hurryings and comings and goings. But a dozen or so clustered around her, broadening their mouths and speaking: a wei-lala wal-lala babble, a bass-flute warble, quite pleasant.

  ‘I do not speak your language! O friends, help me!’

  They babbled: wal-lala wei-lei-lala. They seemed very interested in her clothing, and peered at her with a disconcerting candour. Others moved past this little knot of interruptants, jostling, but without, it seemed, rancour.

  ‘I have come to cry you mercy,’ Eleanor tried, hoping to chance upon some piece of universal vocabulary. ‘Love!’ she tried. ‘God! Truth! One!’ There was an odour about these people, not unpleasant but remarkable: the scent of new rag-paper, or of something growing, something dry yet alive. And soon enough they seemed to lose interest in Eleanor and went about their business.

  She used her elbows to make a way out of the pressure of white folk, and wandered some more. A tiredness oppressed her and she lay down and fell at once into a despairing, hopeless, total sleep. She awoke with no sense of time passed, for it was the same mild white lightness all around her. She could see the ceaseless traffic of pale folk along the straight road a little below her. To her right was a stone circle, a dark Stonehenge against the whiteness. But it was nothing of the sort; it was half a dozen Brobdingnagians sitting, still as the centre of their own spun worlds. Her giant, the fellow upon whose foot she had ridden, did not seem to be amongst them; but she made her way over to them anyway.

  ‘Can you help me?’

  She danced and cried to them, but they seemed to have entered a trance state; their eyes open but rolled up white. She wondered briefly if they were dead, but the geologic but certain slowness of their chests moving in, out, in, disabused her of such a notion. There was nothing she could do to attract their attention.

  Yet it was peaceful, perhaps strangely so, simply to sit amongst these figures and be silent. She ate some more of the white grass, which tasted less sugary to her now. She drank from one of the improbably linear streams. It began to occur to her that, or she began to become aware of the process of wondering whether, she might be dead; and this strange place heaven. But as she looked about her the whiteness had lost its brute quality. She could almost, loosening her focus and simply letting her eyeballs sit in her skull, begin to see varieties of colour in the bright blur. Palenesses to begin with: creams; the suggestions of tan; low-intensity turquoises like the gleams that lurk in a pigeon’s feather.

  This was no heaven; or heaven was only a material and physical place. Those white people she had seen, hurrying along their pathways, were only the crew of a giant flying vessel, sent by their commanding officers on ordinary missions to make the great steam-engine, or crystal, or stellar fire machine operate.

  And there - was - her giant. Disappearing over one of the pale golden hilltops, marching purposefully. A long spar in his right hand that, she could see, was his iron weapon, his huge fusil.

  She leapt to her feet and pulled up the dirtied and fraying hem of her ample skirt and began to run. ‘Sir Giant!’ she called out. ‘Sir Giant! Wait! Wait!’

  He was too fast for her, of course. And as she laboured up the hill she wondered if it had indeed been him, for her eyes seemed tricksy and unreliable in this strange place. But of course it was.

  She ran and ran, stems of grass whipping thin as silver thread against her legs as she moved through. Into the valley and up again, breathing hard, unused to the exercise. And at the top there she could see him: sitting in a hollow, nursing whatever giant metal tube he was carrying in his lap. ‘Sir Giant!’ she called, running and tumbling down the hill. ‘It is I!’

  When she got closer he looked up, with his vast head, and nodded.

  She reached his legs, crossed and massy, and rested there. It took her several minutes to recover her breath.

  ‘Sir Giant,’ she called, loud as she could. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘It is Splancknunck,’ he said.

  ‘Sir Splancknunck,’ she cried. ‘I have missed you!’

  ‘Littlebig does not speak to me now.’ The words rolled out with the slowness of seven sunrises. Eleanor clung to the cords of his trowser-fabric, held tight as if he represented her salvation.

  ‘You intend some dire action with that gun,’ she shouted.

  He looked at the fusil in his lap: a cannon, bolted with mighty shafts to a barndoor for a stock. ‘There is little enough damage I can do with this weapon,’ he said.

  ‘We must forgive! I understand now the impulse of the divine sacrifice - forgiveness not as an end in itself, but as the opening up of the mortal level, for without forgiveness the divine cannot enter in; cannot partake of our pain; and it is cruelty to God to exclude Him.’ But he cannot have heard much of this, for she spoke rapidly and indistinctly.

  ‘There is,’ said Splancknunck, ‘no harm I can do Littlebig with so small a weapon.’ And he laid it on the white lawn.

  ‘How can we harm him who is so great?’ Eleanor agreed.

  ‘He intends us no harm.’ But the giant, saying this, bethought himself, and looked down at his tiny companion. ‘I mean my kind,’ he clarified. ‘He is content to truce with us. But you - your kind—’ and the great head shook left, shook right.

  ‘It is the end of our world,’ said Eleanor, to herself. She repeated the sentiment at a louder volume for the benefit of the giant’s slower, greater ears: ‘It is the end of our world.’

  With tremendous sorrow he ducked his great head down, raised it, ducked it down again, raised it, ducked it down.

  Things were silent for a long time. Eleanor smelt the breeze that blew without vehemence over and around her: a pale cinnamon, a light autumnal fragrance.

  ‘I mistook him,’ said the giant, after a while.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I thought him the Christ man, of whom I had been taught by your people. But he has nothing to do with them. He had nothing to do with such a God.’

  Eleanor tried to digest this thought. She thought of her own heart, like a globe of that cheese for which the Swiss are famous, containing bubbles of air throughout its mass. She thought of mountains and goats, clouds resting their weariness like enormous canvas sacks of water. Goitre is common amongst the mountain herders. She had read that in a book on European medical disarrangements. She had been thinking about goitre a little earlier, but she could not remember when, or why. Everything was dislocated
within her. She felt tears swirl within the empty globe of her cranium like snow under the influence of a tremendous gale.

  ‘I have been involved for years,’ the giant said slowly - which is to say, slowly even for a Brobdingnagian - ‘in such fighting and killing as has wounded my soul very sore. I have been full of sorrow for many years; and there is more room in me for sorrow than in you.’ He said this without reproach.

  ‘We must forgive,’ urged Eleanor, who was starting to understand the direction his words were taking him. ‘Even unto forgiving ourselves . . .’

  ‘It is hard and contrary to Brobdingnag to perform such killing. In my country murderers are unheaded. And all killing is a murder.’

  ‘But you cannot abandon me here,’ Eleanor urged, with an extraordinary urgency and force of will-to-life flaring in her breast. She struggled and clambered up until she was standing on the being’s leg, a footstep away from where his knee triangulated outwards.

  ‘I have tried to serve the Christ-man,’ said Splancknunck, ‘even unto crushing my own soul. But it has been in vain.’

  ‘Do not,’ cried Eleanor, tears flowing easily now and spattering downwards, ‘do not compel me to watch, sir! Do not do that!’

  The giant hand moved slowly but with irresistible force, and lifted the giant pistol. ‘There is no compulsion in my heart,’ he rumbled. He lifted the gun. ‘My name is Splancknunck,’ he said.

  Eleanor had enough self-possession, even with her trembling and her eye-fogging weeping, to scramble down from the giant’s lap and to run, irregular and desperate, from the enormous figure, and not to look behind her when the cannon made its panic-shout to violate the air.

  [14]

  The man was called Captain Portioli; and although his men hinted at a grander title even than that (Count Portioli, perhaps even Prince Portioli) he himself eschewed all manner of flamboyant appurtenance. He was an Italian military man, a mining expert and gentleman, but he had been stricken with the pestilence and had been laid in a farmhouse with some other senior officers likewise afflicted. Hence he had, it seems, avoided the devastating and fatal effects of the strange green light that had flowed - it was assumed - down from the mendax luna and had slain all the fighting men and all their officers; all French, all English, with the unseemly swiftness of a great tidal bore, flushing everyone instantly at once. He was still sick, but not so ill that he could not walk about.

  Portioli was a tall, thin man with a very dark skin. From a distance he looked bruised all over his body, as if the plague had taken some terrible hold upon him. But this was Bates’s agitated mind, of course, and not the reality of the figure. As he came closer, and spoke words of greeting, Bates saw that this dark brown tone was the actual colour of the man’s skin. He spoke a rapid and fluent English. ‘I was staying in a farmhouse, where a great many French men were laying.’

  Bates, jangled from his recent experiences, could only repeat certain words from the Italian’s speechifying. ‘Laying?’

  ‘Very sick with the fever. The fever has gone very quickly through this part of the world, I say. I’m certain that the many English are sick with it, precisely as many as the French. Yet the officers pushed many sick people into battle despite their malady. On both sides, I have no doubt. They did this on both sides.’

  ‘On both sides.’

  ‘Not me. I am an expert in mines and sieges, and seconded from the Army of the Separate Imperial Kingdom of Italia. From your face I can see that you don’t a-believe in the separation of kingdoms between Italy and France, but there is a great amount of independence, truly, truly, in the running of affairs in Italy.’

  Bates nodded dumbly.

  ‘So I came out, and found all these people dead. There are many people dead in the farmhouse too, but dead of the fever. There were soldiers assigned to dig trenches.’

  ‘Trenches.’

  ‘To dig trenches to dispose of the bodies, and many bodies were going into this trench. But then the diggers got sick with the fever and they have stopped digging.’

  Bates’s exhausted and jittered mind latched onto this. ‘I can cure it,’ he said.

  ‘Sir doctor,’ said Portioli, bowing. ‘I am glad to hear it. I am glad to hear it because I have felt the first unsettlements of fever in my own blood.’

  ‘I have cured,’ said Bates, looking around himself in some agitation, and keen not to overstate his achievements, ‘six or seven men.’

  ‘I have seen the course of the fever,’ said Portioli, bowing again, ‘seen it take that course many times: and any treatment seems to me to be preferable to that fate.’

  ‘I must kiss you.’

  ‘Kiss me?’

  ‘It is the cure.’

  Portioli stepped back. ‘You seem, sir doctor,’ he said, smoothly, ‘to be a little - ah - as the French say, distrait.’

  ‘Distracted,’ said Bates, turning, slapping his own shoulders and chest, turning again. ‘Distracted. Distracted.’

  ‘If there is a way in which I can be of assistance to . . .’

  ‘It is a question of the portage of a Lilliputian, or rather Blefuscudan, fellow,’ said Bates. ‘He was on my shoulder. He was on my hair. He was keen I hurry to the King himself. But he seems to have fallen from me . . .’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Portioli offered, ‘when you stumbled, earlier? Forgive me, but I saw you trip over one of the many bodies with which we are . . .’

  ‘Still, still, still,’ said Bates.

  ‘Come,’ said Portioli. ‘I have been searching for supplies amongst these bodies, and have enough biscuits militaires and wind-dried meat to make a good meal. Come back to the farmhouse and share it with me. I would be glad of your assistance, and perhaps your arm to lean upon, for I am not well. I am not well, sir. Perhaps, too, you might tell me more about this cure?’

  They picked their way across the endless litter of bodies, with Bates trying to piece together his shattered consciousness. Oh, he was aware of his disintegration of soul, although it was his very awareness that was so jangled. There was no paradox or mystery there. He ranged through the disorienting rush of events of the previous few weeks in search of some fixed point, pou sto, by which to reorient himself. It came to him at once, of course: Eleanor. His slogan. His love for her, the one fixed point in an ocean of chaos. So much, such a flux, so many folds and involutions: to fall sick with the fever, because the Lilliputians had - what? Negotiated with the atoms who existed beneath them in the scale of things? But being one of the earliest of those assaulted in this manner had probably saved him; the soldiers who has swarmed invisible into his body had been unused to fighting the forces - whatever they were - that defended bodies such as Bates’s. But the myriad insect-like peoples of Lilliputia . . . he lurched forward, and grabbed Portioli’s elbow.

  ‘The little people,’ he urged, ‘those of Lilliputia - they have declared war against all mankind. Not only against the French, or the English. Against us all.’

  But Portioli smiled, and was calm, and this in turn helped calm Bates. He did not flinch, but placed his own hand on Bates’s hand. ‘I have sworn an oath to the army of France,’ he said, ‘and the army of France has no love for those little things.’

  ‘No,’ said Bates. ‘No, and the army of England neither.’

  ‘Not to be trusted.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Bates, folding his brow upon itself, ‘the one of which I spoke, Gugglerum, he saved my life, not once but several times . . .’

  ‘Come,’ said Portioli. ‘We are nearly there.’

  They reached the limit of scattered bodies, three-quarters up the flank of a green hill. Looking over his shoulder Bates could see the extent of the catastrophe: bodies filled the declivity, splotches of scarlet and blue blending in the mid-distance to achieve weirdly painterly effects, as if each destroyed life were nothing more than a brushstroke on an unshaped canvas.

  ‘It will be,’ said Portioli sadly, ‘pestilential in only a few days.’

  ‘Yet there are n
o carrion birds . . .’

  ‘There are some. The birds were killed when the people were killed. All were killed at once with this stroke from that malign - object - above. But other birds have begun to fly in. In days this terrible sight will grow more terrible still.’

  Bates’s heart convulsed. ‘Eleanor! Sir Portioli, is there a woman... I am searching for a woman . . .’

  ‘A woman has no place on a battlefield,’ said Portioli.

  ‘She was carried away by a Brobdingnagian, she and - a man.’