by Adam Roberts
‘It is,’ he whispered, in the dark, turning on his side, ‘schoolboy matters, you are right.’
‘A man,’ whispered Portioli, ‘understands that we are not given a place to stand. We must make that for ourselves.’
‘I try,’ Bates whispered, ‘to take comfort in that.’
The birds had returned to the fields now in large numbers, to feast on the dead flesh, and very penetrating and ubiquitous were their multiple ululations. In the dawn they shrieked as if the sunlight scalded them, and flew in great snow-flurries, and fought one another. In the evening they were calmer, satiated, many of them making their way ungainly on two legs over the uneven ground, made uneven by the presence of so much butcher’s material.
The great disc of deadly silver dominated the sky. Everything they did was rendered inert and petty beneath its magnitude.
Splancknunck rose to his feet and departed that place, silent except for the thud and the thud his feet made on the moist earth and the bodies of the dead. He spoke to nobody and nobody knew where he went.
In the morning Portioli gathered all the soldiers together outside the farmhouse. Eleanor stood in the doorway, looking out over them.
‘Are you soldiers?’ he cried. They, muffled to a man, and all with smoking pipes, mumbled and muttered, so he sang out cheerily and huzzah’d them into more of a soldierly state.
‘Are you soldiers?’
‘Y/y/es-yes. Mmmmm.’
‘Are you soldiers?’
Louder - ‘Yes.’
‘Are you soldiers?’
As one, ‘Yes!’
‘We face an enemy, a terrible enemy. But we are soldiers, and we can fight the enemy.’ He attempted to explain the nature of the situation. But the men were disinclined to see it.
So—
So—?
So - we are to fight the . . .
Portioli flashed fire from his eyes. ‘Think of this great sphere as a castle. We must capture the castle - for by doing so we defend the world from this invasion. And what else.’
‘We shall capture the castle, as an animalcule invades . . . infects . . .’
‘This is what I understand,’ Portioli said, ‘from the esteemed and medically-trained Dr Bates. But I prefer to think of it this way, that we are to capture the castle by colonising it, and making it our colony, a portion of our empire. That this body is to be our America, our new-found land.’
‘In which case . . .’ shouted one of the soldiers.
There was some commotion.
‘In which case we will need women!’ yelled a trooper, from the back. ‘Women!’
There was much agreement amongst the group of them.
Portioli waited until the clamour had died, and held up his hand. ‘But you have not yet grasped it. It is not by a process of outbreeding the invader that we shall defeat him. For to do so would take many centuries - and that without certainty of success. But it is not needful. We do not need to outbreed the enemy’s population of—’ but, here, he could not supply the word to describe them, and after a pause he continued, ‘—for we have another way. Do you know why? Because breeding generates matter, and inert matter is not the principle of the cosmos. Do you know what the principle of the cosmos is? It is mind! It is mind! Every atom thinks, the whole cosmos thinks—the whole cosmos is but an atom, and an atom that thinks.’
This was too metaphysical for the men. ‘But! But! But!’
‘How did the Romans, my ancestors, conquer the world?’ shouted Portioli. ‘One tiny city against millions? Some they fought, yes, when that was necessary. Some they killed. But most, the majority, they turned into Romans.’
He turned his face from person to person.
‘Conversion is a better weapon than a rifle. You will storm the castle as a small band, but you will win over those of your enemy you do not kill. And you shall not kill many.’
‘But how!’
‘With an idea. An idea is more infectious than the most violent plague. The idea of Christ! You shall be missionaries. You shall be Christian soldiers.’
‘But how shall we live? What shall we eat?’
‘Food? Food is plentiful. We shall be the bearers of good news. We will be revered as princes and kings!’
At the end of the talk Portioli led the men to the brow of the hill and had them stand and gaze upon the ghastly spread of dead men, walking amongst them and reminding them: ‘These were your comrades - these were your friends - would you not be revenged on him that did this?’
And then he repeated the stories that Eleanor had told them, embellishing them to stress both the feebleness of the crew, or cells, or what-might-they-be of the giant being - whilst also hinting at an unspecified but sizeable wealth that awaited them, like stout Cortez, ready for the plunder. Within the hour the group of men were one cohort, French and English together, united with an eagerness to storm.
Bates felt a sickness in his heart. It took him most of the day to understand that this sickness was hope.
He pincered Portioli’s shoulder, and pushed him to the corner of the room. ‘We cannot lead Mrs Burton into this assault.’
‘Indeed not. She must be escorted - to York, I believe best, as she is English. Although I fear she will find a city mostly deserted.’
‘Escorted by whom?’
‘By yourself, my friend, for you are no soldier.’
‘Indeed not. Myself and the Dean?’
‘The Dean?’
‘He is affianced to Mrs Burton.’
Portioli’s face ticked through several expressions. ‘A widow, then,’ he said. ‘Alas there are many in these days. And January can marry May—my father was Genoese and decennads older than my mother. My beautiful mother. Is it decennads? In English?’
‘You mean . . . decades?’
‘Ah! Just so. But there is a problem. It is a problem we have. We have need of the Dean.’
‘The Dean is no soldier.’
‘Come! Friend! He is a soldier of Christ. He is Dean of York.’
‘An old man . . .’ said Bates, with a sense of desperation in pressing his case that he did not properly understand. The shocking revelation that hope can work in the heart exactly like greed. Even as he spoke the words he understood that he was offering them not in the rhetorical sense, to persuade Portioli; but in the sense that a toy is offered to a cat, that she can bat it away.
‘Not so old as some,’ said Portioli. ‘Not so old as he is pretending to be, sitting in that chair all day with the blanket on him.’
‘But I do not see . . .’ Bates pressed, a voice sounding as strong in his ear as if Gugglerum had made his way out of the mess of carnage and had climbed inside the empty bone globe of it: Stop! Be rid of him - and yet he pressed on. Why did he continue? What had he to win by this effort, except, perhaps, to test his manly courage, in the truest way - ‘I do not see what good the Dean will do inside that great place. You have seen him, how easily enfeebled he is.’
‘My friend,’ said Portioli. ‘He is your friend, evidently, and you are noble to hope to spare him. But it is his duty. We need him, and for this reason: that he is a man of God, and God will be our weapon. We will neither kill all the inhabitants, nor could we ever outnumber them. We must work as a missionary works.’
Bates said nothing more, but walked outside to stare at the great sphere - now closer than ever to the ground - and at the stars behind it. The valley of dead bodies was gleaming with its greenly nacreous decay. It twitched and wriggled with life—birds, and dogs, come hurrying in from the surroundings to snatch what morsels they could. The still of the nighttime was laid under the occasional raucous dog quarrel, or the occasional niggling and yawping of birds.
The Dean was having none of it. ‘Do you take me for a stumparumper? No, sir. I’ll not take orders from a black-face man, and an Italian into the bargain, and a sapper in the French army, and all of these things in one man - you sir. No sir.’
‘Dean, I implore you to put aside mere national
differences - you have seen the devastation this Littlebig creates with his antivitalic. Do you wish to see York, or London—or Paris, or Rome - washed over with this terrible light?’
‘I’m no soldier,’ Oldenberg insisted, with an almost unhinged emphasis on the last word.
‘Your presence will be by way of missionary work, my dear Dean, as I explained . . .’
‘I’m no dear of yours, sir!’
‘The greater good of humanity . . .’
‘No sir!’
‘The calling of Christ himself . . .’
‘Do you dare to lecture me on that subject?’
‘I dare,’ said Portioli, becoming stern for the first time in Bates’s memory, ‘to insist upon a man’s duty in the face of...’
‘I am a man, sir,’ shouted the Dean, his face reddening. ‘I am a white man, sir. It is not for a white man to take orders from . . .’
‘Dean!’ said Bates, loudly. ‘Hold your tongue, sir. You speak offensive impertinence.’
Oldenberg’s glaucous eyes bulged in their sockets, but he kept his silence, shocked, it seemed, at Bates’s intervention. His breathing deepened. He might have been having an apoplexy. His skin tone darkened further, to purple, until it was almost the same albedo and contrast, although of course differently hued, as Portioli’s.
‘Dean,’ said this latter, calm again, ‘please understand that I command the men, French and English both. The requirements of war are such that I have the power to compel you to accompany us on this mission. Such would be a perfect legality, on my part. But I offer you the free choice.’
The hrrr-haa of the Dean’s breathing.
‘A free choice.’
There was chatter, and a variety of non-specific activity, as the men arranged their possessions, packed their satchels, readied themselves for the morrow, as soldiers have done on battle’s eve for thousands of years. Bates wandered, uncertain. He was on the verge of obtaining his heart’s dream, perhaps; a more alarming prospect than the verge of one’s own death. For after all death, whatever else it may be when it comes to us, is not going to be a disappointment. ‘And why tomorrow?’ one man was saying. Another translated the question into French, Il dit, pourquoi demain? Because that is when the great circle will touch the Earth, and we can scramble aboard.
• But surely it will rest there, as solid a feature as the White Cliffs Dover-way?
• Oh who knows? Who knows? It could fly straight back up.
• No I hope not.
• But who knows?
Somebody else, a rough English voice, picked up the echo of who knows, and sang in a low tone: Oh who is it knows
For whom the rose blows
The white bloom of Bristol
The red bloom of Cloves?
‘Abraham?’
It was her voice, it was as pure as a musical note in this stinking place.
They walked out together in the starlight, she sliding her arm into Bates’s, and causing his heart to flipper like a fledgling’s wings as he attempts first flight.
‘I cannot go back into that great white place,’ she said.
And Bates’s heart sped faster. ‘No, of course, Eleanor, of course. You are to be escorted to York.’
‘Escorted by . . .?’
He gulped a fishlike gulp. ‘By - but whom would you like to attend you, Eleanor? My—’ and he swallowed the word. But then he rebuked himself inwardly, and blurted the word, just as Eleanor began to speak. ‘—Darling—’
‘—I hardly feel,’ she stopped, started again, ‘that I need any escort at all. I have walked the roads of the country alone before. But if others are going that way . . .’
‘The others are storming the castle.’ And he gestured with his free arm. ‘All the others, save only—’
‘Henry will not go,’ she said. ‘He will not go into the sphere.’
‘Indeed he says so,’ agreed Bates. ‘He says so, although Captain Portioli is adamant that a man of God is essential to the success of...’
He felt as if the things they had to say kept bumping in at one another, although there were as many empty spaces as there were words between them. There was one now. Bates found his stomach curling and its content pressing against his gorge. The caprice of the cosmos: a starlit promenade arm in arm with the woman he loved - but accompanied by the stench of putridity.
He, she, silence. Then - he and she together: ‘I have thought of you constantly—’
‘I am changed from the woman I was before I—’
Silence again.
She took up the chain of conversation. Each of the links was heavy in her hands. ‘I am not the woman I used to be,’ she said. Bates heard this, and weighed it, before it was able to fire the hope higher inside him. Did she mean that she could now be—
‘I witnessed the destruction from on high,’ she said. ‘Inside the sky-ship of this Littlebig giant.’ She waited for the next words to gather enough momentum to leave her: ‘Never again can I sit aside and spectate.’
‘I think I understand.’
‘Everything in my life,’ she said, slowly, ‘has been wrong.’
‘But your future . . .’ he urged.
‘Everything I have seen,’ she said, ‘connects me now to the sufferings of others.’
And in a perfect moment there was, for Bates, a vision of himself and herself married, missionaries together to the suffering poor, to the sick and the godless, devoting themselves to others - and which other had greater claim on him than her, or on her than him? Human being, believe it, for you find perfect happiness only in others.
‘I love you Mrs Burton,’ he hurried. ‘I love you Eleanor. Eleanor.’
And she stopped and clasped his hands in hers, such that they faced one another, and she said: ‘You must know that I love you also, Abraham,’ in an earnest, almost pleading voice; and he knew with that, just that arrangement of her body, that pressure of her cold hands, the emphasis of her voice, that she would not marry him. That even if circumstances removed the Dean, then she would not marry him. It struck out his heart, of course. It was the blocked barrel down which he had fired his charge, and its retorting explosion had excavated the cavity of his chest; but the wound in such cases does not smart, nor even necessarily disable, the warrior.
‘You know that I must ask you to marry me.’
‘I shall marry Henry,’ she said.
He was silent for a while. The great and oppressive circle was a lid ready to clap shut over the entire sky. It was death to him, and death to his hopes, and it was readying itself to stifle his love. He must go into it, in Oldenberg’s place, and she must go with her affianced husband to York. He did not will the words, but nevertheless his mouth was saying: ‘I have always understood this.’
They stood in silence, and he added: ‘You said before, after the intimacy we shared . . .’
‘Do not think,’ she interrupted, ‘that it was meaningless to me.’
‘No.’
‘Do not think that.’
‘You said once that you wished you could take two husbands.’
‘I could fashion that wish within me again. But you understand why I must marry Henry?’
‘He can escort you to York,’ said Bates.’
‘You may come with us, if you wish it.’ Almost coyly.
‘Though not a man of God,’ said Bates, ‘in a doctrinal or official capacity, yet have I worked to spread what I took to be God’s message. In the days before the French came I took the news of the importance of the freedom of the Lilliputians’ (a shiver across his mind, a fleeting memory of Gugglerum) ‘to many meetings, to people susceptible to the message and to those hostile. I can carry the message that Portioli needs me to carry. I can teach the soldiers to carry that message too.’
‘You will go inside . . .’
‘I will. I will go inside. I have bethought me: on my journey here, from London, I fell into a fever twice, and each time it might have been my death. Once in the carriage—’
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