‘What’s wrong?’ she’d say. ‘Something is wrong.’
‘No, no,’ I lied.
But soon I was unable to sleep either. I’d slip from her side at night and spend the hours padding up and down the river’s edge in the dark. I’d return and seeing her again I’d adore her, her jackalberry scent, more than ever. The love I had for her was the sweetest pain I ever had. One day, I searched out the phial amongst my master’s things, carried it to him in my mouth and dropped it in his lap. The look he gave me, of admiration, and trepidation, made my stomach swill.
‘My love,’ I said to Blaise, before my master began the preparations. ‘He’s going to give something to you. It may hurt a little.’ The look of puzzlement on her face was bad enough, no matter what was to come. ‘It will keep you from getting ill. From getting old. I was given it, when I was young and—and I have lived a long, long time. Do you understand?’ She gave a little nod, but I was unsure if she really did.
‘No!’ she squealed when he administered the first injection, pulling away so the liquid spilt on the floor and soaked into the stone. A year’s work gone in an instant. ‘Be brave, my love,’ I said as he tried again. And she was, for me, and my master half succeeded, but her scream when the needle drove home, and the fright in her eye, was unendurable. Then she was nauseous for days, couldn’t keep food down and was bleary on her feet until the next jab was due. No matter how gentle my master was, how much I comforted her, she could not get used to them, twisting her whole spine in resistance. After just three doses, her character had begun to change, to introvert. One evening, the room was dark and I remember thinking how menacing my master looked in shadow, filling up the syringe, and that I was his accomplice in the act. ‘Enough,’ I barked. He knew it too. He put his things away and closed the buckle of his holdall.
‘Let us light a fire and be calm,’ he said.
The three of us sat round it, I not ceasing, not for one second, to catch her scent and wonder, until my head hurt, how to store it inside me. When the fire had burnt down to embers, and my master fallen asleep in front of it, she whispered in my ear. ‘You said you want to stop me from being old. Because you are thinking of times to come. But it is here and now I am happy.’ The root of my tail shook. I was lost for words and found myself remembering Jacobina on the boat amidst the flower fields. A while later, Blaise asked, very sweetly, ‘And what is your age?’
I think I laughed, and certainly my mouth stayed open some time before a sound came into it. ‘Almost fifty?’
She kissed my nose with hers and once again she was enthralled but not surprised.
A cycle of summers and winters passed and Blaise got old. Her hair thinned, lost its sheen, her muzzle greyed and her eyes went cloudy. Her mysterious aromas faded away, replaced by the commonplace smells of age: thin blood, hard kidneys, swollen joints, clogged intestines. She liked to walk, but she found it hard. I would pace at her side slowly, reassuring her there was no need to hurry. She became scared of things: noises at night, being left alone by our master, and sometimes she got muddled. But she never, not once, got bad-tempered, like many old dogs do.
I buried my heartache well, in a deep place, but my master knew of it. He eased her discomfort with balms, but he could not stop now what nature had started. She lost her hearing and her sight and one autumn day she sat with me by the river, our cheeks touching—hers just bone now—her paw nestled under mine. I listened to her deep breathing, a soft rattle that seemed to come from far away. We watched leaves drop from the horse chestnut on the far bank, spiralling down to be carried away by the river.
‘You’ve been my life,’ she whispered in my ear, digging her paw tighter into mine, then tighter still. A moment later, it went limp, her breath clattered like metal and stopped. I lay there next to her warm dead body as my insides spasmed with horror.
We buried her in the beech wood, in a place where snowdrops bloomed in the spring. My master and I remained at the croft, but I became listless, always falling asleep, so Blaise might visit me in my dreams. She often appeared as she was in her younger days, idling in the gardens of Oxford, safe in our place. My master never left my side; his warm hand was forever on my back. When he knew I could bear the house no more, he packed up, retrieved his holdall, shook the dust from it, and we left.
I stopped on the riverbank and looked back at the beech wood, now bare of leaves. Blaise would be cold already under the ground, worms would be about her, the soil drinking the last of her smell. An emptiness had been growing inside me, a gloom that had no end. What would I do with all the years? How could I start the journeys again? Why, I raged, do I live and live? The years, how will I last them?
‘My champion, my poor champion.’ My master hugged me, and I wished I could cry. ‘All you can do is put one leg before the other and walk on. All you can do is wake up in the morning and start anew. It will seem as torture at first, but hold fast.’ He was right in both ways: it was agony to begin again, begin every day again—but it was all I had left to do.
We journeyed back to the road that we had parted from years earlier and went south-east to London. Remnants of war littered the fields: broken carriages, torn flags, old boots, wheels, horse skeletons chunked with grey flesh, scraps of armour. In everything I saw tokens of worthlessness, tawdry emblems, reminders of the futility of short lives.
It was bitterly cold when we reached the city, the sky iron and the air flecked with tiny stones of ice. The buildings remained as they were, but the streets smelt neglected, stagnant, the colour and pomp washed away. The people were altered too, mechanical, demented almost—or perhaps it was just the Arctic wind that made it seem like that.
At Westminster we found ourselves being carried along by a fast-moving crowd. Bone-chilled, cheeks and knuckles red, they were swarming towards a scaffold put up in front of the great Banqueting House. The scaffold was peopled by half a dozen courtiers, a bishop in a crimson gown amongst them. There came a collective sigh as a man stepped from the window of the hall on to the scaffold and shuffled forward. He was slight but imperious: bearded, cloaked, grey hair curling about his shoulders. I noticed my master’s eyes bulge and I peered more carefully—it was the king. He was milk-pale now and the skin drooped under his eyes in swags.
The crowd listened in silence as, chin up, he delivered a speech in a reedy voice. The wind carried it away across London and I heard only the last line of it: ‘I am the martyr of the people.’
He motioned his fingers and the bishop passed him a cap. Another man came forward, the executioner, and politely asked the king to tuck away his hair. It was unruly and the executioner had to help him, the bishop too. Their conversation turned to the block, the king nudged it to see if it was firm and commented on its height. The executioner was good-natured and answered all his queries, but he changed none of the arrangements. They were so casual with one another, they might have been discussing a chest of drawers that the king was thinking of buying.
The king lay down, positioned his neck on the block, trying to get comfortable. The executioner apologized as he tucked a few more stray hairs into the cap, then raised the axe and struck. Blood pumped from the boned neck and a groan went up. I looked up at my master, and though it took a good deal to shock him by then, his face was a cartoon of disbelief.
We went back to our crusade, to the war fields of the continent, forty more years of it before Venice. In time, I told myself, I’d forget the clatter of Blaise’s last breath, but I never have. Nor the sight I saw in London that January day: white bone in the thick of the king’s neck and his lace collar turning crimson where his head once had been. That vision declared, above any other I’d seen, the irrefutable fact of death.
15
THE PACK
Waterloo, June 1815
We travel south from Brussels all day, Sporco and I, locked up in the back of the munitions cart. It is as uncomfortable a vehicle as
I’ve ever known, with its coagulating stench of grapeshot and barrels full of gunpowder forever wobbling towards us, so we have to catch them and shoulder them back. And to make matters worse, the rain began not long after we left town and has fallen in a steady drizzle ever since. It seeps through the cracks, and sloshes around us in brackish puddles, all to the incessant, wet clap of ten thousand marching boots. In time with it, the image of my master aboard the troop wagon in Brussels, jacketless amongst the other soldiers, a scrawled yellow symbol on his backpack, appears to me over and over. Still wondering if truly it was him, I try to hold the vignette in my mind long enough to study it more closely, to see if I missed any clue, but it slips away from me. If I could see out of our cart at least, I could carry on searching for that flash of yellow amongst the lines of troops, but the gaps in the timber are not wide enough. And besides, outside is just grey murk.
I find myself grumbling about everything, even cursing the rain for ‘being indifferent and having no guts,’ and wish—with a total absence of logic—that one of the tiresome powder kegs would ignite, so the driver could learn his lesson. Sporco, on the other hand, gives no complaint at all. In fact, he makes a clever improvement. As we descend a slope, the barrels all bunch together and he presses his body against the foremost one, locking the rest into place. He stays there, back straight, proud to be of service—and when a shaft of light catches him across the eyes, he looks at once like a gentleman, a noble Lombardian prince or a dashing captain of the guard. The rough, clownish stray that never once left his quarter of Venice has become a citizen of the world: considerate, resourceful and sophisticated. As for his revelation, that he has never managed to have sex, it makes me fonder of him still. It shouldn’t amuse me, but it does, thinking back to his almost non-stop bragging in our old stomping ground in front of the cathedral, him doing little else but swaying his tail at every passing female and pestering them with the most bizarre mating calls I’ve ever heard: ‘You are the sun and I the moon,’ ‘You smell of donkeys,’ ‘I am more man than cat.’ I certainly saw him try to mount a few of them, and even though some had been apparently halfway obliging, I never watched long enough to realize he’d been wholly unsuccessful.
It’s almost dusk by the time the driver snaps the reins and the cart shakes to a halt. The chains are untied, the rear doors shunted open and the driver—short, round, thinning hair rain-pasted to his face—finds us staring back at him. He’s stunned for a moment, as if the bad weather had conjured us up. ‘Out, out with you!’
We jump down to the relief of fresh air and open space, though a jarring wind brings cold where there should be summer. Immediately I begin searching for the sign of yellow, turning my head from brigade to brigade. When we’d left the city, we’d been at the back of the convoy, but other battalions have joined since and now its tail is a long band of red, snaking back for miles over darkening hills to the dreamy melodies of pipes and chants. Ahead of us, the convoy fans out across fields, trampling crops flat, unleashing the tangy scents of wet corn and maize, and pours over the ridge.
We follow the general movement to the other side of the peak. In all directions, far into the distance, the valley heaves with troops, moving like ants around constellations of bonfires, whilst a million little flecks of metal—of lances, pikes, muskets, sabres—catch the last of the light. On the other side, beyond a thick band of darkness, no man’s land, is the mirror image of the spectacle. The sight is both dispiriting—in an instant I travel back almost thirteen decades to my last battle—but also filled with possibility. There are so many souls before us, surely my master must be amongst them, surely we’ll find that yellow intaglio? The promise of it gives me a fidgety happiness, a slight quickening of the heart. Sporco’s tail has frozen mid-air in surprise, but soon begins to sway in steady beats of curiosity. Of course, I realize, he knows nothing of the meaning of armies and their movements. He probably thinks they’re all going to dance.
‘Let us look there first,’ I say, nodding towards a farm building, lower down, around which hundreds are massed. On a battlefield such places are often used as makeshift hospitals.
We go down, threading through the sea of men, hunting that touch of yellow. The lucky soldiers are crammed under the shelter of flapping bivouacs, but most sit silent in the open air, collectively holding their breath it seems, lines and lines of infantrymen hunched on kits in grim acceptance of the weather and whatever tomorrow may bring. In the four decades I spent trailing armies with my master I’ve rarely seen fatigue like this, such broken bodies and bloodless faces. I scan every one of them, for him, but strangers stare back, or lift their arms to touch us listlessly as we pass. It doesn’t take long for Sporco to realize there’ll be no dancing here. His curiosity wanes to uncertainty, his tail stops moving and curls between his legs.
Close up the farm seems bigger. A thick perimeter wall encases a cluster of houses, a stout three-storey chateau and a dozen or so outbuildings. At the front, high gate doors are open and guards are counting in platoons. We sneak in amongst them, coming to a noisy courtyard. It reeks of wet wool, brandy and vinegar-sharp sweat. Soldiers are tending a fire made of furniture looted from the house, but the rain keeps getting the better of it, washing it to smoke, making the fire-builders cough into their sleeves. A cook is gutting rabbits and others are frying the meat in breastplates. Some troops have peeled off their soaking clothes, hung them from lines and stand naked before the fire, skin as pale as pig fat, passing round bottles, cursing and singing. More infantrymen shelter against the walls, fidgeting with their guns, mending buttons with needle and thread or crouching with their arms round their chests. A youngster writes a letter in a doorway, but the ink keeps bleeding across the page. They are all strangers. There is no rod of Asclepius.
I search the various buildings and Sporco trails obediently behind. Room after room is colonized by red-tuniced men, five or ten deep, as someone else’s china still sits on shelves, and unknown portraits hang at angles. Shouldering through them all, for hours it seems, and finding no sign of my master, I grow despondent. Sporco has tried not to show his fear, but I can smell it on him. These are such sights as he’s never seen. I myself lived thirty years before I encountered war. I lead him out and we slip through the gates, just as they’re barricaded shut.
‘Where now?’ I say. Sporco makes a show of looking around and the rain comes again, ice cold now, in whistling curtains that make the fires hiss. Calls go up and down the length of the valley as troops pack closer together or take shelter in the woods. ‘Can you go on?’ I could. I could walk and walk all night through the brigades.
‘Yes,’ he says, water streaming from his snout. ‘This way?’ I can tell he’d rather be anywhere else but here. His paws sink in the mud and I have the sense once more of his spirit, of his everyday bravery—and that this ordeal would be so much harder without him by my side. I am proud of him, and it strikes me, forcefully so, that he was right: that we are a pack after all.
‘Let us find somewhere clever to sleep. Tomorrow we can search again. Tomorrow our affairs are always better.’ In the distance, away from the battlefield, behind the British lines, I notice a windmill, its sails turning in the gale.
‘Make for there,’ I nod. ‘A safe place.’
We ascend once more the valley ridge. As we reach the summit, there’s a clap of thunder, a pince of lightning and in the split second of whiteness the two armies are laid out in all their vastness and I try to catch the flash of yellow, but darkness falls again.
The windmill sits on its own bank, edged by a wood on one side and far away from the fray. As we approach it, I notice people—the miller and his family I presume—locking it up, and hurriedly loading their things on to a cart. ‘There is a piece of fortune,’ I say. ‘We may have it to ourselves.’ We pause at the foot of the bank, waiting for them to leave, and Sporco inspects a well that is there. ‘Careful of that,’ I say, as he peers down inside. I’m su
perstitious of them, of the way they plunge like cliffs into darkness. There comes a whip crack from above and the miller’s cart takes off, north.
Going up to the building, we crawl between a gap in the timbers into an octagonal room at the base of the mill. Still warm and homely, the remains of a fire in the hearth. Many sacks of grain, fresh and pleasant-smelling, are piled about, cushioning the room from the noise of the rain. And high in the eaves, driven by the sails, the machinery creaks and turns.
‘Fagioli!’ Sporco exclaims, his nose disappearing into a pot by the chimney, his tail reanimating. There’s not much left, but enough for us.
I use my teeth to drag a new plank of wood on to the fire and once there’s a good flame and we’ve dried off, we eat in front of it, safe from the gale. Fagioli, made in the old style with no meat and still warm: surely an auspice of good fortune. Sporco does not hurry his food; he savours every mouthful, and as the firelight catches against his face it picks out threads of gold in his oversized brows—they used to be ridiculous, but now they are wise—and we could be patricians dining in one of those new eating places that had started to appear in Venice, restaurants as they’re called, where clientele, with a sense almost of scandal, sup on extravagant treats at separate linen-clothed tables.
Our bellies full, I stretch out on the rug and Sporco entertains me by doing tricks with his ears, pointing one up and the other side to side and vice versa, and with his tufty eyebrows rolling them in a wave across his face, then bunching them together to make shapes.
‘Do you do impressions?’ I ask, remembering how Blaise used to make me laugh.
‘Yes.’ He sits very straight and very seriously.
‘Are you doing it?’
‘Yes.’ He relaxes, then assumes the position again, this time saying in an earnest tone, ‘I wait.’ Still I don’t get it. ‘It’s you.’
Tomorrow Page 21