Wat obstinately closed his eyes. She opened them with her thumbs. He deliberately emptied his mind of thoughts and lost consciousness after some helpless, shameful intervals of pain and pleasure and wakened still helpless and shivering but on his feet. He was upright because his arm was over the shoulder of a robust presence who also grasped him round the waist. There was a big brown animal nearby. Some pale blobs before him were probably faces.
“Careful, Colonel Dryhope! Take it easy sir!” said Jenny’s voice.
He was on the shore of Saint Mary’s Loch on a cold grey morning with sharp aches in his head and testicles and muscles. Jenny was supporting him. Nearby his father’s horse, Bucephalus, stood on the path under the trees, sniffing among pebbles at broken glass and a crushed cigarette. Women from Bowerhope were in front of him. Myoo laid her hand tenderly on his shoulder and said sadly, “Oh Wattie lad, you look awfy sick.”
“How came your clothes in that fankle?” asked Myow beside her and Wat noticed his clothes felt dirty and ill-fitting. He realized Delilah Puddock must have put them on him while he lay unconscious and before she removed the tent. This provoked two feelings he knew to be insane: gratitude so maudlin that it brought tears to his eyes; a sadistic lust to punish her so urgent that it made his testicles ache worse than ever. He groaned and said, “I’m sick, aye, but don’t ask what happened. I need Kittock.”
“There are many messages for you at the Warrior house Colonel.”
“Send them to Dryhope but first help me onto this bloody big horse.”
FIVE
THE HENWIFE
HE DISMOUNTED on Dryhope common, stabled Bucephalus and went through the garden without seeing a soul. He was thankful but puzzled, then realized that if Bowerhope had warned the Dryhope mother of his filthy and disordered appearance she would certainly have organized a party or expedition to move the children where they would not see him. She had also made the walls of the house opaque except for a line of clear portholes under the eaves. As he approached the veranda she was waiting for him there and said sternly, “What hit ye? Have ye been pioneering in the woods? Is this the result of alfresco fucking?”
“Aye, but not how ye think. Where are the bairns?”
“Off to watch the circus being pitched on the hills round Selkirk. The aunts and a few grannies have gone with them.”
Standing on the path beneath her he said, “I’m coming no nearer till nurses have seen me. Mibby I’m infected with something.”
“Aye? Well, they’re waiting for you.”
He walked round the path to the infirmary door. It was ajar. He mounted the veranda and entered.
Two nieces, a sister and a cousin swiftly undressed him and were shocked by the sight of his body. They said, “Naebody in Ettrick makes love like that!” and, “Were you playing soldiers with a queer man, Wat?”
“No.”
“Was it a gangrel lass?”
“No.”
“Was it a circus woman?”
“Mibby. She said she was famous but I didnae ken her. Be quick with this.”
One cleaned his body and put lotions on the wounds. The others took samples of his breath, blood, lymph, urine and (by an exertion which almost had him screaming) semen. They analyzed the samples and keyed the results into the network while he was shaved and massaged by hands which expertly avoided the bites and bruises. One told him, “Your brother Joe is a lot cheerier. Annie Craig Douglas visited him last night. She’s still with him.”
“Good.”
“She says her mother sent her — Nan, ye ken? — but I think Annie would like to see you.”
“I’ll see naebody till I’ve seen Kittock.”
“You can see her as soon as you’ve dressed and had your medicine,” said another handing him a diagnostic printout.
It said Wat Dryhope’s excellent constitution had been exhausted by at least nine days of intense muscular and nervous exertion, by opiate overdose from a cocktail of caffeine-lavoured chloroform water plus heroin plus alcohol plus cocaine plus L-dopa aphrodisiac, also by a common and harmless throat infection which only afflicted the exhausted. For the exhaustion it prescribed a fortnight of mild activity, sauna baths and massage; for the narcotic poisoning, detoxification with naloxone and total avoidance of all stimulants including caffeine; for the throat infection, a syrup of squill liquid extract and capsicum tincture, one spoonful after meals. A nurse went to order these medicines from the powerplant. In a puzzled way Wat re-read the diagnosis.
“A few hours ago I was in the worst fever of my life,” he said, frowning, “My heart was hammering and the sweat lashing off me, but I don’t remember coughing. Are ye sure I’ve just a throat infection?”
“No, Wat, we’re too ignorant, but the network is sure. The network has records of every virus that ever mutated naturally, along with those invented by murderous governments and business corporations in the bad old days. It knows all viruses that have evolved on the satellites and the planets, all viral mutations which could possibly happen in the last three weeks and next ten days. You’re safe, Wattie. Your fever was a sober body’s healthy reaction to bad drugs in your coffee. I hope you gave the bitch as good as you got.”
“Here’s a billet doux from her!” cried one of his nieces triumphantly, returning from Wat’s room with clean clothing and a rainbow-coloured ticket which she waved above her head, “I found this and a book about shaking the world while emptying his dirty pockets. It’s for tonight’s circus and on the back it says — ”
“Gie’s it!” yelled Wat so fiercely that she stuck out her tongue at him, threw the clothes into his lap, dropped the ticket on top. He lifted it and read with the other nurses peering over and round his shoulders.
Cher Liebling!
I will never forget the maddening
sweetness of your caresses. Dressed in flame
tonight I will again be yr
slave after the big show.
D.P.
Someone asked him what the initials meant and he said they wouldnae believe him if he told. He spoke absent-mindedly because the words on the card filled him with a murderous desire for Delilah Puddock. Someone asked if she was a circus artist, a gopher or a camp follower. He cried, “I’ve telt ye I don’t ken a thing about her! I just ken that I’m going to — ”
Their startled faces silenced him. He saw his hands clutching the air before him as though throttling a neck.
“Lassies,” he said plaintively, “I’m hungry. My wame thinks my throat’s cut.”
They brought him powsoudie, drummock, kebbuck and farle. He ate it and dressed.
Kittock had no modern intelligence communicators so he went through the garden to the old tower near the duck pond. The smoke of her oven trickled up through bushes on the ruined top. She was not in the goose field or poultry runs and as usual (he thought with a smile) the tower door was locked against him. She might be entertaining a gangrel. On a scrap of paper he wrote, “Wat is home, mother, and badly needs you,” slipped it under the door, returned to the house, and entering his room suddenly saw it was too small for a grown man. When he had returned from the stars, and found it kept for him, and realized the women had foreseen he would return, he had been so grateful that he had refused offers of a bigger room. The only change since infancy was a bed which now covered half the floor, also a new telecom with commander facilities — the mother must have ordered and installed it as soon as she heard of his colonelization. The screen showed names of many who wished to speak with him but none was Delilah Puddock. A thick sheaf of pink, blue and violet printed sheets had issued from it. He could not face them so made the outer wall transparent and was soothed a little by the familiar view: a garden with a tower holding the wisest person he knew, the loch and hills beyond the tower under a cloudy April sky which was brightening to a fine afternoon. With a faint cough the telecom spat a rainbow-coloured message onto the sheaf. Its print was too eye-catching to be ignored.
PROFESSOR DO
GBITCH Z. CELLINI
Virtuoso Assoluto of the
COSMOPOLITAN CLOUD CIRCUS
invites
COLONEL WAT DRYHOPE
Commander of the Ettrick Warriors
and Prime Instigator of the New Era of
Military Power and Poetry
to be
GUEST OF HONOUR
At a Grand Banquet Breakfast for
ARTISTS, HEROES, COMMANDERS
Attending the Dusk-to-Dawn
Never-to-be-Repeated Cloud Circus
Production of
HOMAGE TO ETTRICK
A Four Act Evolutionary Opera
Hymning Creative Strife From The
Big Bang to The Battle of
The Ettrick Standard!
ORIGINAL TEXTS BY
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Milton,
Goethe, Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot,
MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson
et cetera;
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY
Carver, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz,
Wagner, Verdi, Stravinsky,
Hamish Mac Cunn
et cetera;
ORIGINAL CLOUD EFFECTS BY
Rubens, Tiepolo, Delacroix, Turner,
Thanks …
Impatiently Wat scanned the print for the name of a living woman and saw Alauda Magna was Choral Synthesizer, Cathleen na Houlihaun was Cloud Choreographer and the mirages had been designed by Lulu Dancy. Under these was a guest list of over three hundred commanders and famous fighters from all round the globe. Lust for Delilah Puddock, the honour of his clan, personal vanity now pulled him so strongly toward the circus that he instinctively knew it would be wrong to go. Welcoming escorts, loud cheering, handshakes with other celebrities would inevitably turn him into a posturing, smirking ornament — into a something used for other people’s benefit. To find why he had been called Instigator of the New Era he switched his telecom to the public eye.
Several housewives, one weeping, said the mobilization epidemic infecting most of the world’s males was a crazy and dangerous fad. An equal number of young women were shown who expressed pride that their brothers or lovers would face death for the glory of their clan.
“Like the crowds of men swarming to their local Warrior houses, most people in the public eye are responding euphorically,” said a public eye announcer euphorically, “Commanders everywhere predict a new age of more challenging war games played on a scale of almost historical proportions. They also insist that this is no cause for alarm. The Geneva Conventions will not be contravened though war game rules may have to be redrawn.”
Wat was alarmed by how many people said there was no cause for alarm. He watched Wolfgang Hochgeist with a globe of the world showing the spread of the epidemic from its origin in Ettrick. The least infected areas were Tibet, Ireland, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Italy. Most of the worst infected had military histories. In Japanese, German and French speaking lands the armies trebled, in the British Isles and North America they more than quadrupled. The big surprise was Canada, where fighting men had multiplied by six. Hochgeist daringly suggested that the Japanese, German and French had been slightly inoculated against militarism by historical recollections of disaster; Britain and the former U.S.A. were more prone to it because of former victories; Canada was worst infected because as a historical nation it had a less secure identity for which it was now compensating.
“The persistence and evolution of national military attitudes through generations for whom nationality has not been operational is interesting but not alarming,” said Hochgeist,
“Since soldiers will not be fighting to enrich their homes future warfare will remain unpolitical.”
Wat switched to another channel and found an amicable discussion between Hinchinbrook, commander of the East Anglian Alliance, and Winesburg, North America’s most popular fighter since Stormin’ Norman. The alert and boyish Englishman was obviously talking hard to impress the famous veteran.
“The primitive armies of yesterday — and I mean precisely the yesterday of twenty-four hours ago — were single regiments. This wonderful new influx means every general must divide his force into three, four, five new regiments, so we will require a whole new hierarchy of command.”
“Or an old hierarchy of command?” said Winesburg, smiling.
“Of course! How clever of you to notice. Yes, we will have to bring back the highly unpopular sergeant major.”
“And commanding officers will lead less risky lives, if you don’t mind a battle-scarred old veteran saying so.”
“Quite right! More brain work, less cut and thrust.”
“What do you think now of the global and interplanetary referendum called by Geneva, General Hinchinbrook?”
“What do you think of it General Winesburg?”
“Out of date?”
“Utterly out of date. I don’t mind keeping the Boys’ Brigades in reserve because with these thousands of other lives to play with we don’t need them. But it’s absurd to confine battles of the scale we now anticipate to two days! Why not a fortnight? Plenty of room to manoeuvre in that. And this fuss about standards also seems outmoded. What the world’s armies now need — and what our families viewing us from home deserve — is a more inspiring object to struggle for. Last week a great Scottish soldier called his standard a pole with a tin chicken on top. I was shocked, I confess. I now see he had the right idea.”
“Have you another object to fight for in mind?”
“None. Not the faintest. But in six months — not more than six months — we’ll be commanding whole new companies of troops just raring to go. I dare say we’ll have thought of something better by then.”
“Would you mind saying a word about the manoeuvring of large new armies on common land for whole fortnights?” said a public eye chairman, “Won’t that play havoc with the migration of gangrels? Not with all of them everywhere, of course, but many of them sometimes?”
“Some havoc, no doubt,” said Hinchinbrook with a pleasant smile, “But we are many and they are few. I’m sure they’ll manage to adapt. Besides, they stink. There is nothing to be alarmed about as long as our houses are safe.”
Wat blanked the screen and gloomily pondered the fact that every general in the world would soon command a new army of beginners, most of them bigger than his because they lived in more peopled places. He had another fit of wanting Delilah Puddock. He wanted to tie her up and torture her until she told him exactly what she was trying to do; he was also disgusted with himself because he knew she must have foreseen that reaction. He kicked his shoes off, lay on the bed and tried not to want her by remembering other women he had passionately wanted. Their only similarity was that none had passionately wanted him.
He had staggered after the henwife as soon as he learned to walk because she was small, aloof, and unlike the comforting big-bosomed grannies and thin energetic ones. She only visited the house for the morning service, always ordering two sacks of grain and a book. She had a pocket for the book but he insisted on carrying it, trotting beside her when she crossed the garden to the poultry yard with a sack under each arm. After feeding the geese, hens and chickens she firmly took the book back, entered the ancient tower and shut him out. No other granny had a door which could be locked from inside. It was the only wooden door in Dryhope and he hated it, kicked and screamed at it, pounded it with his fists, threw stones at it and occasionally butted it with his head until the Dryhope mother came and carried him home. After what seemed years but was maybe less than a month the upper half of the door opened inward. Kittock leaned her folded arms on top of the lower half, looked down on him with interest and said, “Will you keep doing that till I let ye in?”
“Aye.”
“Even if I never let ye in?”
“Aye.”
“If you hold on to me you’ll have a lonely life, Wattie. I don’t like weans.”
“I don’t care.”
“O, if you understand that cheerine
ss is not man’s chief end, come in.”
The tower wall was so thick that the doorway seemed a tunnel. It led to the living-room, a cavernous vault with a plank floor, a big flat-topped stove in the middle, several chairs and a table. The stove was called the Aga. Above it stood a giant bed whose leg-posts were seven feet high and nine inches square. It had a ladder to climb in by and a low plank wall to prevent rolling out. From floor to ceiling the walls were hidden by shelves packed with every size of book, some in good condition but most appearing to have been often read by people with dirty hands. She led him across this chamber and up a dank spiral stair. They reached to a vault shaped like the one below. It was loud with croodling pigeons and had a thick carpet of feathers and bird shit.
“The doocot,” she said, leading him higher.
They emerged between broken walls on an open space where brambles, birks and an osier bush sprouted. Wat, looking out across the sunlit loch, had never been so high. He felt as high as the hills. After a moment Kittock said,
“I am the henwife because I’m too selfish to be a housewife, too feart to be a gangrel. We should all be gangrels. Will I make ye one Wattie? I know their ways.”
“No.”
“Their lives are short but never dreich because they see more than settled folk — they can only feed and keep warm by seeing more. They have added reading to their old skills of song and story-telling. Some are still Christians — it adds zest to their swearing. Most are fiercely monogamous and often unfaithful. They need no powerplants and telecoms because the world is their house. Would you not like the world for your house Wattie?”
“It’s too big, Kittock.”
“Gangrels don’t think so. Do you promise never to try and stop me doing what I enjoy?”
A History Maker Page 9