by Adam Roberts
I could sense it, almost as if running my fingers over it. I could almost cram it into my mouth.
Here are the ventricles of the Gulf of Bothnia, reaching into the lobes of Finland and Russia, Estonia and Latvia. South, though, over the rough membranes of forest and gully, over fields of beetroot and kale, roads that see no car from one quarter hour to the next. This wide land, the steppes of Poland and Belarus, the tender belly of Ukraine all in greens and yellows. Or the conker-coloured mountainsides of Romania, Slovakia, the Czech lands. And the pendulum is swinging us back again towards the centre of the stage: Hungary, Croatia, the wide lands of Illyria down to the Adriatic as blue as blueberries and scuffed where the sunlight bounces back.
Here is mountainous Austria, and here Germany. People have lived in these countries for thousands of years; and they have scratched the itch of the earth with their ploughs and been rewarded with wheat; and they have threaded themselves through the stems of these forests to shoot down game, and to drag the carcasses back by their hooves, a rope fastened and tight over the hunter’s shoulder, and the man leaning to take the strain as he walks. The people of Europe have trudged over mountains, Ötzi-man’s trail, with a meal of grain in their belly and animals skins stitched about them. They sleep here, and eat; they work and play and fuck. They have cleared the woodland away and made towns, and navigated the rivers. But the woodland was still the most of it, the membrane insulating ground against sky. I could see all of it from my vantage. Forests called Black and Great inundating the hill-sides and splashing high up the flanks of mountains. So many trees it made the ground nighttime at midday. In this clearing a trench is dug and filled with blood. Why blood? Horrible. And where did that image come from? The trench must be a mass-grave, such as made for the Protestants or for the Catholics, for the Jews or the Partisans or the Gypsies or whoever was made, at gunpoint, to dig them out in these central forests. All in amongst these endless, primal forests. This was where Red Riding Hood walked whilst wolves watched her with eyes that shone gold. They must excavate a long trench, which is hard work, and stand on the lip of their own earthworks, and then we will shred their flesh with bullets, and crack their bones with bullets, so that they fall forward and they bleed and the trench is filled with blood. A strip of red in amongst the green.
The forests of Grimm. Fairy tale. Her hood was red because it was dyed by human blood.
The fever was not war, passing and passing over the surface of Europe. Peace was the fever, keeping people at home and close to their fires and wrapped in blankets. War was the way people chose to dispose of their heath and vigour. War was what men smelt in the clear air, and saw in the distance, near the horizon, when their noses and eyes were sharp. The hawk, roosting, sees it when he looks down.
Why do men keep making war? This is the most important question. Really, I can’t think of a more important question. The dead are dancing, round and about this trench filled with blood. You can see your mother. You can try and embrace your father, but your arms will go through him, not once but twice and three times. There’s my boy, my blue-skinned boy, my shadow-coloured boy, with the key right in the middle of his head, in the middle of his forehead.
The whole landscape was shrunken down into one of those Stefan Heck artworks
The whole of Europe was within my reach.
And now what had happened? Now the giant had twitched and shrugged, and a new form of life had come to be. And I could see that, too. I could see it as clear as eyeing. But actually it was all mist and white brightness on every side. I turned my head but everything was the same. I was shaking, trembling. The air around me with vividly cold, and I was shaking because of that; but I was roasting hot at the same time. My body felt like flu. My cheeks and my chin were wet.
Giants were striding, now, over the landscape. Leviathans, in motley, with massy arms and legs, and weighing a million kilos each.
This image - stepping as neatly across the Manche as if it were an irrigation trench no more than a yard wide.
But that’s not right, since that giant is all face. Hobbes saw truly that giganticism was the secret hidden in the narrative of mankind’s evolution and his image is closer to the truth:
Though Hobbes had a feudal mind, and could not help but imagine that his giant would have a royal head, a guiding and directing organ. Somebody explain to him that this is not needful. The next stage in human evolution is necessarily away from the restrictions of feudalism. The next stage is the land of the headless giants: for without eyes their eyes cannot play them tricks, and without ears they cannot be lied to, and without a mouth they cannot be fed poisoned food, and without a nose they cannot smell the stink of mortality. I see them as if the vision is projected upon the screen of all surrounding whiteness: they tower over the land. Here is Schäferhund; and he is a young giant, and not as strong as some others. But see how effortlessly he strides! He walks through Bavaria and the hills and mountains inconvenience him not at all, and the forests tickle his ankles. And he walks, also, through the packed-together farmlands of central Germany, and leaps up in amongst the factories and docks of the North. And he draws himself to his full height here, on the east bank of the Rhine. There is Alsace, lying below him, with Strasbourg at its centre. He need only reach down with his arm and strike it; to haul up the spire of the cathedral and upend it, like a spearhead, to jab it down amongst his enemies. The city is full of people who want to stop him, he knows that. But what can they do? They are, compared to him, so very small.
The whiteness flickered, and then flew away upwards in blobs and shards, thrown crazily above my head. We were descending. I could feel it in my hollow gut. I was still penduluming, but according to a gentler trajectory, and there was something almost soothing in the blurrm blurrm sound of the rotors overhead. But I was sopping wet; my clothes soaked through to my shivering skin. Given how ill I felt, that was clearly not good. Better, when you are ill, to be warm and dry than cold and wet. My head felt three times its normal size, and throbbed. It radiated more heat than the sun.
Strasbourg had been removed from the landscape below. Now there was only forest. I looked east for the Rhine, and did not see it; but then I looked in the other direction, and it was away to the west, inset into the landscape, dimly luminous, the colour of lit silver. Then I lost sight of it, because the tree tops were sweeping up towards me and their ivy-greens and racing-greens and olive-greens and blue-greens became the entire land. I felt a flutter in my heart - which proved that I was not wholly hollow, since I still had a heart - at the thought that we were going to crash into the forest canopy. But at the last minute a clearing opened up, and the ground rushed at me, and I caught a glimpse of parked cars, and a collection of people, some of whom were running towards me. And the next thing was the thump that I remembered from parachute training, back in the old old days when I had been hale and beautiful and when I had been a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces.
A bump and a clatter, and I was on my side, still strapped into the chair. The grass, close against my face, was wriggling and struggling like miniature tentacles; like the scilla in the lungs before they had been so scorched. Litter and fag-ends and bits of leaf and soggy pine needles were being blown about in every direction. And then, as arms reached underneath me to haul me upright, I heard the rotors slow, their noise stutter out into separate snare beats, and then stop altogether. My bindings were being loosened. I was vaguely aware of many people clustering around me. They were talking, voices loud. I could not understand them at all. They were just talking gibberish. But then I caught a word I recognized, and tripped, mentally, over the realization that they were talking in German. I could speak some German. My dad was German! I was half-German! Unlike the other guy, who couldn’t speak any German at all - who was it, recently, who had been complaining that he could not speak German? It hardly mattered now.
‘Ach!,’ somebody close by my ear, in Deutsch. ‘He is feverish, he is shivering.’
‘He is ve
ry wet,’ said somebody else. Then something I didn’t understand, to which somebody else said, ‘No, no’ and a different person again said: ‘But yes, perhaps in the van.’
Then some more talk.
‘He is dying, perhaps.’
Gabble gabble.
I was lifted and carried, and the artillery began its bombardment. I thought to myself: hah! Now you’re for it, my Schäferhunden friends, because the EU Military will grind you like coffee beans into powder with their big guns! But it was not artillery. It was thunder, and the fat black clouds from the east, burlying the white clouds of the way, were bringing rain.
I was laid out in the back of a van, and the door was shut with a sliding-crescendo and a slam. There were other people in the back with me, and one was trying to undress me, but I was shivering so hard my arms and legs were flopping about, like an epilepsy. Another was rubbing at me with a towel, or possibly a blanket.
Rain started clattering against the roof of the van. The rainstorm threw innumerable plastic beads at the windows and upon the roof over my head. The back window blued.
What is that sound, over and above all the others? It is the engine starting. What is that horizontal sensation? It is us, driving away.
I fell asleep, despite the rattle and the lurch.
When I awoke I had been taken out of the van, and laid on a truckle bed in a clearing in the forest. It was dark. It was no longer raining.
A blanket had been tucked tight about my body, which felt simultaneously comforting and restricting. I was not sure if I had the energy to sit up. I did not test the possibility. I was content to lie there.
It was dark. It was not raining. Broccoli-shaped blocks of shadow obscured perhaps a third of the sky, but they were slipping westward, and revealing more and more starlit blue-grape black. Chickenpox tiny white stars all over it. One of the glories of being in the middle of a forest, and far away from artificial lighting, was the view of so many stars.
The moon, like an open-brackets.
I lay for a long time, just looking upwards; feeling a little less feverish, and a little more in control; but still weak, and helpless, and kittenish. I was aware, peripherally, of comings and goings. There were sounds of movement and, somewhere the liquid, Kate Bush warble of a nightjar. I took, I recall, absurd comfort from the thought that I had made it through the storm. That the storm had passed over me and I was still alive.
The land is heavier after a rainstorm than before.
A woman’s voice said: ‘Hello, I am Marie.’
Marie, Marie, Marie. ‘Hello.’
‘My friend Benni tells me you are unwell.’
‘Benni,’ I croaked.
‘Benni is that Schäferhund who flew you out of Strasbourg.’
I discovered, by virtue of flexing my arms outwards (like Samson! like Samson!) that I could untuck the blanket from the sides of the bed. I struggled, shakily, on to one elbow, and this change in orientation brought Marie into my line of sight. The first thing I noticed was that she was wearing a helmet with a lit under-rim, which gave a spooky Halloween cast to her features. The next thing I noticed was her dwarf rifle, and then her whole uniform and pack. Lights jiggled and moved through the dark behind her. ‘Your English is very good, Marie,’ I said.
‘I would like to talk to you,’ she replied. ‘I have heard that you are a weapon, and I would like to know about this. Is it true you can kill giants?’
‘Not true,’ I replied.
‘But we have heard that you can kill giants.’
‘It’s really important that I explain myself,’ I rasped. ‘That’s not what I can do.’
‘You were captured by the US. You were interrogated, and persuaded to swap sides?’
‘That’s what they think.’ I said. I didn’t mean to sound so cryptic.
‘You were interrogated?’
‘After I was wounded, I was treated in a US facility. I had . . . long conversations with a US Officer, and his detail was counter-NMA. That’s true. But what he thinks he’s doing, sending me here, and what I’m actually doing . . . that’s two separate things.’
‘You understand we are concerned,’ Marie said. ‘The US killed that giant, in the Southern States of America.’
‘They got lucky,’ I said. ‘With one giant. That one time. But I had nothing to do with that—’ I sneezed, weakly, and trembled.
‘Have you been used, you weapon, against Pantegral?’
Naturally this touched me. ‘Pantegral’s fine,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that giant.’
‘We have heard nothing from him.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s dead.’
‘Asleep, is he?’
‘Exactly,’ I said, too quickly. ‘Not dead, but sleeping. There’s a really crucial difference between—’
The conversation was snapped off at that point. Fireworks begin in amongst the upper branches all around us. Flashbulbs everywhere, and bang-bang-bang, and the trees begin to move. The trees begin to bellow. I recognize this particular cacophony: the first series of detonations, compressing and wrenching the air in your ears, a rapid series; then a series of more irregular rhythms of crashings and smashings. The focus of the blasts was a couple of hundred metres away, but the waves of pressure, and heat, were immediate. There was a two-second hiatus, just enough time for me to register that my ears were singing like a tuning fork. Insects were swarming all about, a locust-thick cloud of them. It was either insects or else the softest shrapnel in the universe. Then I understood that it was fir needles, blown clean off the trees and swirling all about. It was a blizzard of pine needles, stinging my flesh. But hands were already pushing me down, back on to my truckle bed, as the bombardment began again - a little further away, but still deafening and terrifying and viscerally horrible. I swayed, even though I was pinned and horizontal. The world wobbled. A forest by flashes of artificial lightning. The enormous tree trunks swaying and groaning. A thick swarm of pine needles.
Then a metallic clunk, which for a moment I thought was a proper piece of shrapnel intersecting my body, but which was nothing of the sort. Quieter, and the vibration of an electric motor. The metal clunk was the back door being slammed shut; and I was in the back of a truck - a different one than before, electric not petrol - with two other people, and the truck lurched into life.
We drove a certain distance (how far? impossible for me to gauge) and the sounds of the bombardment rattled the sides of the van. I watched the people in the van with me - Marie was one - by the gleam of the screens on their wrist. They all of them had all their attention in their wikis. Something was up. ‘This part of the plan?’ I asked.
One of the other said something in German, which, expecting English, and what with my bashed eardrums and the high ambient noise, I didn’t quite catch. The superficial similarities between the two languages is rather disorienting, don’t you think? Whatever he said it had the word break at the end. Then Marie yelled, ‘It’s ongoing, it’s ongoing, they’re reacting, not acting.’ Which meant, I assumed, that the assault on Strasbourg had begun.
I thought about Martin, slouched dead across the easy chair in that hotel room. Had they found his body? Of course they had, but I supposed there was always the chance that he was still sitting there, the hotel window giving his dead eyes a good view of the barrage of the city. No, I told myself, there was no chance he had just been left there. His comrade had been bringing him coffee, and had been shot down in the street. Then I remember that the Schäferhund guy was dead too, on the street. Two dead bodies, and me missing - the US would have been all over that place.
I needed to get my thoughts sorted out.
There were four of us in that truck, except that there were five. I counted them: me, on the stretcher, and three Schäferhunden, all fiddling with their wikis. One plus three; and yet there were five of us. I tried to pinpoint where the fifth was: in which corner, front or back; but there was very little room, and the space kept jolting and shuddering,
which made it harder to get straight in my head. But there was no question about it.
I knew who the fifth lad was, of course.
Then we stopped and they pulled me out. I was feeling a little less feverish now, and told them so, but they insisted on carrying me anyway. In retrospect that was good, because whatever I said I was still very poorly. I doubt if I could have stood up.
We were in a village, motionless and empty in the middle of the night. And then, with a jog and a swoop, we passed through a doorway and we were inside a house. I was laid down and had time to get my bearings. Not a terribly big house. None of the electrics seemed to work, but the Schäferhunden had standing lamps clustered on tables and mantelpieces, spinning multiple shadows off things. Rifles were stacked in one corner, and some intriguing-looking boxes in another.