by Adam Roberts
‘And go where?’
‘This great sphere descends. It has slain countless of our people and your people. Do you think it bodes us well?’
‘No.’
Portioli shook his sage head sadly. ‘Mankind is in a dreadful place, at a dreadful time. The plague is a terrible affliction. But this great visitor from above the sky is worse. And we are caught between the two, squashed like a flea between two thumbnails. All of mankind is but a flea to him, perhaps.’
‘Humankind is dying,’ grumbled the Dean. ‘We are all dying. Every soul on this stony earth, every child, every man, every—’ he choked. He began, feebly, to weep.
‘The prospects are not good, I agree,’ said Bates, energetically; ‘but we must not despair. Despair is a sin, my friends. If humankind must assemble a thousand giant cannons to destroy this machine, then assemble a thousand cannons we shall!’
‘The great Davidowic is dead,’ said the Dean. ‘Who can build another? I knew him, and though a Jew he was the greatest of men. The greatest man I ever knew.’ The tears came again, rheumy and thin, and he continued speaking though his voice warbled. ‘But he died of the consumption of the lungs. And if we had a thousand Davidowices, it would take a lifetime to assemble so many great guns. And all the time our people dying of the plague.’
‘Come,’ said Bates. ‘This giant-of-giants, though he is huge, is slow. When the English bombarded him he moved his craft - but a day after the cannonade began. He has taken a week to lower his craft to the ground. He is slow, and we are quick!’
The following morning, as dawn was smoothing the fields with rose-gold palms, the English soldiers came. But not an army. It was the same troop of English soldiers that had earlier taken Bates into its custody. Eleven men. Captain Longley, Cheeks and the other man were in the cart: the last of these with a bandage around his eyes. Longley himself looked iller than he had done when Bates first met him: as white as ice, trembling slightly. ‘He’s lost a peck o’ blood,’ said one of the men - a bearish, brown-red, pock-faced private called Dartford. ‘We had to tar up his stump. We had to fetch the tar from the field.’
‘Field?’
With a sour expression, as if Bates were being deliberately obtuse. ‘Battlefield; from one of the guns.’
‘They use tar on cannons?’
‘On steam cannons they do.’
‘They do?’
‘Barrels need caulking. Or the water’d leak away.’
‘Water,’ said Bates, ‘for the cannons.’
‘By the time we got back he was near dead, ’cept the scorching of the wound had sealed some of it.’
Bates felt a queer pressure of guilt about the loss of Longley’s hand, although God knew it had little enough to do with him. He had not wished it, or worked for it, had raised no cleaver to his wrist. But, after the Captain was carried, moaning softly, into the farmhouse, Bates sat beside him and attempted such ablutions as seemed appropriate: brow-wiping, sheet-adjusting and so on. He sat with him for some hours and attempted questions, but all Longley did was mutter and keen and fall silent. ‘Should we change the dressing?’
‘I know nothing of wounds,’ said Portioli. ‘You are the doctor, my friend.’
‘No doctor, I,’ said Bates.
‘You healed me,’
‘Not I,’ said Bates. ‘The animalcules inside me, educated by martial experience in the ways of their incomprehensible wars, and carrying that knowledge with them into other bodies.’
‘And I suppose,’ said Portioli, leaning over the Captain, ‘that a similar war is being fought in this poor soul’s body now. His own forces fighting a war against - what?’
‘Animalcules in the air - the bad air,’ said Bates, ‘from the field of death over the hill.’
‘The breach in his skin,’ agreed Portioli.
It transpired that Dartford, who had a brother in the navy, had heard of but never actually witnessed the therapeutic tarring of amputated limbs. Portioli reasoned that more than simply coating the stump in tar would be required - the channels and veins of the arm would need to be knotted together. Moreover, as they discussed it further, they agreed that the air on board a ship, salted and washed by continual oceanic laving, was healthier than the air in such a place as they now were for surgical interventions of any sort.
The evening came. Bates slept in the floor space with Portioli and another man. This was the first night they had to soak a cloth in rum and wrap it about their mouths. They tore little plugs of cotton, rolled them and tamped them into their nostrils.
In the morning the Dean complained loudly that Longley’s arm was gangrenous. He would not be silenced, nor reasoned with, to grant that the stench now unavoidably filling the farmhouse came from the harvest of corpses over the lip of the hill. ‘Take him out of the place,’ Oldenberg insisted. ‘His flesh is decaying with the gangrene.’
‘It is not, Dean, I assure you,’ said Bates; but he could not be certain.
They waited another day, but still no armies came, neither English nor French. Another trip to the corpse valley in the late afternoon, with dusk grinding the sky to a fine dark powder and a faint but unsettlingly evident luminescence, pale green, as if mocking the strange light that had slain the men. They went out under the enormous lowering presence of the great white circle, stage scenery on a vast scale, a shield fit for God himself rolled against the sky. They scurried under this: Portioli and Bates and one of Longley’s men, called Benfy. All three were muffled. ‘Strange to think,’ said Benfy, in his boomy London voice, ‘that if the Frankies come o’er us first then you and I’ll be prisoners, Mr Bates, and this here Italian lord.’ He pronounced the word eye-tail-un. ‘Whereas if the English come first then you and I will be heroes.’
‘I do not believe, Private, that we will be able to stay here for much longer,’ was Bates’s reply.
The mendax luna was much lower in the sky now - its lowest curve perhaps only a hundred feet from the side of the opposite hill. ‘It is coming down,’ observed Portioli. ‘Another day, or two, and it will have made land.’
‘It moves so slowly.’
‘The slowness of the leviathan,’ said Portioli, ‘is the same thing as the swiftness of the flea.’
The trip was not so much for food as for tobacco: pipes and pouches retrieved from those who could no longer use their lungs. Back in the farmhouse everybody smoked; and most packed their nostrils with wads of moistened tobacco. It reduced the oppressive foetor. ‘How long must we remain in this place,’ complained the Dean, as he attempted, onto a handkerchief, to shred pipe tobacco fine enough with his fingers to take it as snuff. ‘We should leave in the morning.’
‘Abandoning the field,’ said Portioli, ‘is no military honour.’
‘The field,’ scoffed the Dean. ‘We do not possess the field - what? what? Two dozen Frenchie and one dozen English soldiers? A Pyrrhic sort of victory, ain’t it?’
‘Naturally one side or the other awaits reinforcement.’
‘And what if it come? What if it come? The globe will kill them all anyway. I’m only surprised it hasn’t sent its devil death upon us. But I tell you all, it has only omitted to do so because we are so few, we are beneath its notice.’
This sentiment lowered the morale of the farmhouse. There was no denying its truth, although it was of course possible to deplore the tone in which it was uttered. ‘It looks bad,’ said Benfy, sounding surprisingly undowncast. ‘If the plague don’t get us, the death will come down from above.’
‘They are two invading armies,’ said Bates. ‘The plague is caused by a vast horde of miniature, invisible, tiny soldiers. The mendax luna is crewed by a troop of giants to whom our Brobdingnagians are as Lilliputians. Both wish us ill, or at least wish us disposed of and out of the way.’
A man came running in at the door. ‘Captain,’ he cried. ‘Somebody has leapt from the great circle.’
Scarfed and smoking, a dozen men followed Bates and Portioli to the summit of the littl
e hill. The light was almost gone from the sky, but enough of a blue gleam remained over the western horizon to silhouette the figure of a man. ‘A giant! He came from the circle?’
‘Yes Captain - he leapt down.’
‘Leapt a hundred feet—a mere nothing to him.’
‘What should we do?’
‘Do? We must signal him, of course. We must light a fire. A fire here, on the hilltop.’
It took minutes to assemble the materials and light them, and soon enough a fire threw an upward shower of flames and sparks into the dark sky. The giant stood still, motionless. Portioli leapt and hallooed, threw his arms around, and several of the men followed him. And then, sure enough, the giant started into its great stride. In moments it had walked down the valley, and stepped over the river, and started looming up towards the light.
‘Mon ami!’ cried Portioli. ‘My friend!’
And the figure, red and black in the firelight like a painted savage, came closer, with his great jacket like a bell tent with sleeves, the rope strands of the cloth visible; and his trowsers creasing with audible cracks like the fire itself. ‘I recognise you,’ shouted Bates, in a sudden ecstasy. The nighttime, the shove of heat given off by the fire on his left hand, the stars shimmying in a dance with the hundreds of aspirant sparks - it all added to a dreamlike quality. ‘I recognise you!’ And with dreamlike rightness, as the giant reached the top, his enormous seamed face made craggier by the underlighting of the blaze, and looked down upon them - lowered himself, and folded his treetrunk legs into a child’s posture - and opened the flap of his pocket, Bates heart thrummed and leapt over irregular chiasmuses, and there she was. Of course it was her: for in dreams this is the nature of consummation. All the tedious days of waiting, as the stench grew around him, slipped from his mind. Now there was only this intimate linkage between his wanting her and her appearing.
Men were helping her down from the pocket, and bringing her over to the fire. Her face, as beautiful as ever, looked warm in the blazelight, but also severe, changed by her experience.
‘The smell!’ she said, holding a hand before her mouth.
‘It is terrible, Madame, I know it is,’ said Portioli. ‘I can but apologise for your offended feminine sensibilities. Permit me to inform you that my name is Portioli.’
‘I am Mrs Eleanor Burton,’ said Eleanor, looking around. Bates could not move, he was so deeply and terrifyingly thrilled. He could not squeeze enough will into one foot to move it so much as an inch. Her gaze passed from face to face, then alighted on his, and shared no shine of recognition. It passed to another face. And with that a dark hand moved over his heart. ‘Eleanor!’ he cried.
She looked at him. Looked, and then recognised, and called back: ‘Abraham! You’re here!’
‘Eleanor,’ he called back, delirious and careless of his surroundings, ‘are you well?’
‘Madame,’ said Portioli, bowing. ‘May I ask - did you come out of that great sphere?’
She looked back, distractedly, and then at the giant. ‘My friend,’ she said. ‘He broke through the skin and leapt down, with me in his pocket. I thought he was going to murder himself, but that - no. That is not the Brobdingnagian way. He used his great pistol—he fired it again and again, for a day. Or a night? He broke through the skin and leapt.’
‘But, forgive me,’ pressed Portioli. ‘I have a particular reason for repeating my question, and avoiding all obscurity: you have been inside.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
From this moment could be dated the inevitable gathering of force, of collective will; and Bates found himself quite literally turning and turning about, as if spun by the swirling force of hurricane. When the Dean saw Eleanor come walking through the door he barked like a dog, barked and got to his feet, scattering a brown snowfall of tobacco all about him. He was crying. ‘I thought you dead!’ he wailed repeatedly, childlike, embarrassing, yet touching too. Eleanor was damp-eyed too as she embraced him, and the blanket that had covered him fell to the floor. ‘I thought you dead!’ he said.
‘No, no, my Henry.’
‘I thought you dead!’
The mood of celebration infected everybody, even the score-and-a-half of soldiers, French and English, to whom Eleanor was as perfect a stranger as Eve. Such rum as had been gathered from military supplies, and hoarded as an antiodorant in which to douse rags and headscarfs, was brought forth and drunk. There was singing.
Splancknunck (for Eleanor told them his name) sat outside the farmhouse with his head down, silent, motionless, like an Aegyptian statue of a long-passed Pharaoh.
Everybody gathered in the farmhouses - three dozen eager people, to hear Eleanor give a halting and, truth be told, not very coherent account of her time inside the super-gigantos. Portioli questioned her minutely.
She continually broke off her narrative. ‘The smell! Oh, forgive me - the smell.’
‘Have a pipe, Ma’am,’ offered Private Dartford.
‘Tobacco? No thank you.’
‘Come, Ma’am, it’ll mask the smell better than ladylike tea.’
She took a pipe and sucked timidly on the end, letting the smoke leak from her lips.
‘Please continue, Ma’am,’ pressed Portioli.
She looked around the room, the faces packed so tightly around her they might have been bricks piled upon bricks.
‘And the green light - there was a green light - did ye know of that, Ma’am?’ asked somebody.
She told them about the antivitalic, and the things that Splancknunck had said.
‘Trust a giant?’ scoffed Benfy. ‘A Frankie giant?’
‘He is my brother,’ said Eleanor, in a more severe voice. ‘He has saved my life, and I love him. I’ll not hear him abused. He is my brother.’
There was silence.
When it became clear that Eleanor had no great tale of adventure to relate, merely confused recollections about Hamletian out-of-joint time and a white land, a place where time seeped and dipped instead of marching straight on, people broke away. They sought out the remaining rum and drank it; found their way to the outhouses and slept. But Portioli - and, of course, Bates - stayed with Eleanor.
Bates could see the way Portioli’s mind was working. But surely it was a death wish, and nothing more. It gave him glimpses of everything as sickeningly strange, but he could not dispute the logic of it. ‘Do you doubt the danger this creature embodies, in his vastness?’ Portioli hissed, as they lay on the farmhouse floor in the dark. Eleanor had been given the roof space to herself; and the Dean, Bates, Portioli and two others were rolled in blankets on the floor.
‘It is his vastness that renders the prospect impracticable,’ whispered Bates.
‘Did the animalcules that have slain so many human beings in these lands over the last months think so?’
‘The case is hardly comparable.’
But there was a ferocity in the heart of the well-mannered Italian that burnt with an unwavering blue-purple flame. He would not be dissuaded. He was, Bates understood, lying in the darkness on the stone flags, one of those men whose commitment to a chevalier code compelled them to seek out self-sacrifice. The stench that revolted Bates’s stomach - even Bates’s stomach, and even as he felt revolting desire stir again interfemorally - seemed to spur him on.
‘But does it not seem . . .’ Bates tried, searching to find a means of expressing the range of his disillusionment, the way the tiny crystal of his own sufferings had acted as a lens that revealed deserts of meaninglessness. ‘Does it not seem that this super-gigantos, in his airy chariot, is but a man - and that man moves through a space inhabited by beings that seem gigantic to him - and those beings are dwarfed in their turn - does that not seem . . .’ But there were, it seemed, no words in his store to capture it: ‘Does that not seem . . .’ What did it not seem? Why did the breeze that blew up from the hatch he had opened into the infinite vista chill him to?
‘It is - forgive me, my friend,’ Portioli said. �
��Is it not the thing that all schoolboys do when they are given their copy book? They write in the cover...’
Bates knew immediately what he meant. ‘Yes, they write in the cover,’ and he repeated, in a singsong:Abraham Bates
Year VI
King’s School
Canterbury
Kent
England
The United Realm of King George
Europe
The World
The Universe
It was the ease with which a few scratches of a boy’s pen could transport him from exactly inside his skin to the grandeur of the universe itself. But at least that was a progression with definite commencement and completion points. If the list indeed kept shifting, step back and step back, Abraham Bates to Gugglerum to animalcule to who knew what . . . and if it spooled out, such that the entire universe were a single man in a population of many men, and they themselves dwarfed by something larger and more pitiless still . . . it collapsed the mind even to begin to think of it. Was the God Abraham had worshipped the being constituted by the whole universe? Did God himself quail beneath the enormous stride of some God-giant?