by Iain Banks
'Hello,' he says. I stand some distance away, in case he is under orders to whip everybody on the field, regardless. 'Remember me?' I ask him. He strokes his bloody lash.
'Can't say I do,' he says. I tell him about the city by the sea. He shakes his head. 'No, not me,' he says. He digs into his filthy robes for a moment, then comes out with a small rectangle of card. He wipes it with one strip of his rags, then holds it out. I step forward warily. 'Take it,' he nods. 'I was told to give it to you. Here.' He leans forward. I take the card, step back. It is a playing card; the three of diamonds.
'What's this for?' I ask him. He just shrugs, wipes his flail-hand on one tattered sleeve.
'Don't know.'
'Who gave it to you? How did they know-'
'Is it really necessary to ask all these questions?' he says, shaking his head. I am shamed.
'I suppose not.' I hold up the playing card. 'Thanks.'
'You're welcome,' he says. I had forgotten how soft his voice was. I turn to go, then look back at him.
'Just one more thing.' I nod at the bodies littering the ground like fallen leaves. 'What happened here? What happened to all these people?'
He shrugs. 'They didn't listen to their dreams,' he says, then turns back to his task.
I set off again, for the distant line of light which fills the horizon like a streak of white gold.
I left the city in the dried sea basin and walked the railway track away from it, heading in the same direction as the Field Marshal's train before it was attacked. There was no pursuit, but I heard the sound of distant gunfire coming from the city as I walked.
The landscape changed gradually to become less harsh. I found water and, after a while, fruit on trees. The climate grew less bleak. I saw people sometimes, travelling alone like me, or in groups. I stayed away from them, and they avoided me. Once I found I could walk without danger, and find food and water, the dreams came every night.
It was always the same nameless man and the same city. The dreams came and went, repeating and repeating. I saw so much, but nothing clearly. Twice I think I almost had the man's name. I started to believe that my dreams were the genuine reality, and woke each morning beneath a tree or in the lee of some rocks, fully expecting to wake into another existence, a different life; just a nice clean hospital bed would be a start ... but no. I was always here, on temperate downlands that eventually became a battlefield, and where I have just met the man with the flail. Still, there is light at the end of the horizon.
I head for that light. It looks like the edge of these dank clouds; a long lidded eye of gold. At the top of a hill I look back on the small, misshapen man. He is still there, whipping at some fallen warrior. Perhaps I ought to have lain down and let him lash me; could death be the only way I might awake from this terrible, enchanted sleep?
That would require faith. I do not believe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don't know what the rules are here; I can't risk throwing everything away on a long shot.
I come to the place where the clouds end and the dark downs give way to a low cliff. Beyond, there is sand.
An unnatural place, I think, looking up at the edge of dark cloud. It is too distinct, too uniform, the boundary between the shadowy downs with their fallen armies of dead and the golden waste of sand too precisely defined. A hot breath from off the sand blows away the stale, thick smells of the battlefield. I have a bottle of water, and some fruit. My waiter's jacket is thin, the Field Marshal's old coat dirty. I still have the handkerchief, like a favour.
I jump from the last hill over the hot sand, down into the golden slope, ploughing and sliding towards the floor of the desert. The air is hot and dry, devoid of the corrupting odours of the rolling battlefield behind me, but full of another sort of death; its promise in the very dryness of that air moving above a place where there is no water, no food, no shade.
I start walking.
Once I thought I was dying. I had walked and crawled, finding no shade. Finally I fell down the slip face of a dune and knew I could not rise from there without water, without liquid, without something. The sun was a white hole in the sky so blue it had no colour. I waited for clouds to form, but none came. Eventually dark, wide-winged birds appeared. They started to wheel above me, riding an unseen thermal; waiting. I watched them, through half-glued eyes. The birds flew in a great spiral over the desert, as though there was some immense, invisible bolt suspended over me, and they were just scraps of black silk stuck to its spiralled plane, moving slowly as that vast column turned.
Then I see another man appear at the top of the dune. He is tall and muscular and dressed in some savage's light armour; his golden arms and legs are bare. He carries a huge sword, and a decorated helmet, which he holds in the crook of one arm. He looks transparent and unsubstantial, for all his bulk. I can see through his body: perhaps he is a ghost. The sword glitters in the sunlight, but dully. He sways as he stands there, not seeing me. He puts one hand shakily to his brown, then seems to talk to the helmet he holds. He half-walks, half-staggers down the slip face towards me, his booted feet and thickly muscled legs plunging through the baking sand. Still he does not appear to notice me. His hair is bleached by the sun; peeling skin covers his face and arms and legs. The sword drags in the sand behind him. He stops at my feet, staring into the distance, swaying. Has he come to kill me with that great sword? At least it might be quick.
He stands, still swaying, eyes fixed on the hazy distance. I would swear he is standing too close to me, too close to my feet; as though his own feet were somehow inside mine. I lie, waiting. He stands above, struggling to keep on his feet, one arm going out suddenly as he tries to balance himself. The helmet in the crook of his arm falls to the sand. The helmet's decoration, a wolf's head, cries out.
The warrior's eyes turn up into his head, going white. He crumples, falling towards me. I close my eyes, ready to be crushed.
I feel nothing. I hear nothing, either; he does not fall onto the sand beside me, and when I open my eyes there is no trace of him or the helmet he dropped. I stare into the sky again, at the entwined double-spiral of circling birds that are death.
I used the last of my strength to peel open my coat and jacket and bare my chest to the invisible, turning bolt in the sky. I lay, spreadeagled, for some time; two of the birds landed near me. I did not stir.
One of them swiped at my hand with its hooked beak, then jumped back. I lay still, waiting.
When they came for my eyes I took them by their necks. Their blood was thick and salty, but like the taste of life to me.
I see the bridge. At first I am certain it is a hallucination. Then I believe it might be a mirage, something which looks like the bridge reflected in the air and - to my parched, obsessed eyes - taking on its form. I walk closer, through the heat and the slopes of clinging, flowing grains. I have the handkerchief over my head, shading me. The bridge shimmers in the distance, a long rough line of summits.
I come slowly closer to it throughout the day, resting only for a short while when the sun is at its height. Sometimes I climb to the tops of the long dunes, to reassure myself it is there. I am within a couple of miles before my confused eyes admit the truth to me; the bridge is in ruins.
The main sections are largely intact, though damaged, but the linking sections, those spans, those little bridges within bridges, they have collapsed or been destroyed, and large parts of the section extremities have disappeared along with them. The bridge looks less like a succession of laterally stretched hexagons and more like a line of isolated octagons. Its feet still stand, its bones still rise, but its linking arms, its connections - they have gone.
I see no movement, no sudden glints of light. The wind sighs sand over the edges of dunes, but no sound comes from the tall ochre skeleton of the bridge. It stands, blanched and gaunt and jagged in the sand, slow golden waves lapping at its granite plinths and lower buildings.
I enter its shadow at last, gratefully. The bur
ning wind moans between the towering girders. I find a staircase, start to climb. It is hot and I am thirsty again.
I recognise this. I know where I am.
Everywhere is deserted. I see no skeletons but I find no survivors. The train deck holds a few old carriages and locomotives, rusted to the rails they stand upon; finally part of the bridge. Sand has blown up even here, shading yellow-gold into the edges of the rails and points.
My old haunt, indeed. I find Dissy Pitton's. It is a fallen place; the ropes which used to attach tables and chairs to ceiling have mostly been cut; the couches and seats and tables lie sprawled over the dusty floor like bodies from long ago. A few hang by one edge or corner; cripples among the dead. I walk to the Sea View Lounge.
I sat here once with Brooke. Right here. We looked out and he complained about the barrage balloons; then the planes flew past. The desert is bright under the high sun.
Dr Joyce's office; not his. I do not recognise any of this furniture, but then he was always moving. The blinds, blowing in and out gently behind the broken windows, look the same.
A long walk takes me to the Arrols' abandoned summer apartment. It is half-submerged in the sand. The door is open. Only the tops of the still sheet-covered pieces of furniture are visible. The fire is buried beneath the waves of sand; so is the bed.
I climb slowly back to the train deck and stand, looking out over the shimmering sands which surround the bridge. An empty bottle lies at my feet. I take it by the neck and throw it from the train deck. It curves, end over end, glinting in the sunlight, towards the sand.
A wind comes up later, screaming through the bridge; scouring me, flailing me. I hug myself in a corner, watching the edge of the wind strip paint from the bridge like some endless rasping tongue. 'I give in,' I tell it.
The sand seems to fill my brain. My skull feels like the bottom of an hourglass.
'I give in. I don't know. Thing or place; you tell me.' I think this is my own voice. The wind blows harder. I cannot hear myself speak, but I know what I am trying to say. I am suddenly certain that death has a sound; a word which anybody may utter which will cause and be their death. I am trying to think of this word when something grates and swivels in the distance, and hands lift me away from this place.
Let's get one thing absolutely straight: it's all a dream. Either way, whatever. We both know that.
I have a choice, however.
I am in a long, hollow, echoing place, lying in bed. There are machines around me, drips into me. People come and look at me, occasionally. The ceiling sometimes looks like white plaster, sometimes like grey metal, sometimes like red brick, sometimes like riveted sheets of steel painted the colour of blood. Finally, I realise where I am; inside the bridge, within its hollow metal bones.
Fluid seeps into me through my nose and out again via a catheter. I feel more like a plant than an animal, a mammal, an ape, a human. Part of the machine. All the processes have slowed. I have to find a way back; blow the tanks, pull the cord; floor the throttle?
Some of these people look familiar.
Dr Joyce is here. He wears a white coat and he makes notes on a clipboard. I'm sure I saw Abberlaine Arrol, just fleetingly, a while ago ... but she was dressed in the uniform of a nurse.
This place is long and echoing. Sometimes I smell iron and rust, and paint and medicines. They took away the card I was given, and the scarf... I mean the handkerchief.
Ah, coming round, are we? Dr Joyce smiles at me. I look up at him, try to speak: Who am I? Where am I? What is happening to me?
We have a new treatment, the doctor says to me, as though to a particularly dim child. Would you like us to try it? Would you? It might make you better. Sign this.
Gimme gimme. In blood if you like. Give you my soul if I thought I had one but never mind. How about a tranche on a few billion neurons? Nicely run-in brain here doc; one careful owner (ahem); didn't even take it to church on Sundays... Bastards; it's a machine.
I have to tell everything I can remember to a machine which looks like a metal suitcase on a spindly trolley.
It takes a while.
Just me and the machine now. There was a sallow-faced lad in here for a while, and the nurse, and even the dear good old doctor, but they've gone now. Only me and the machine left. It starts to speak. 'Well,' it says -
Look, anybody can make a mistake. Isn't this meant to be the season of - naa, forget it. OK already; I was wrong; mea fuckin' culpa; Joe Contrite here. You want blood?
'Well,' it says, 'your dreams were right in the end. Those last ones, after you left here. That really is you.'
'I don't believe you,' I tell it.
'You will.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm a machine, and you trust machines, you understand them and they don't frighten you; they impress you. You feel differently about people.'
I think about this, then try another question: Where am I? The machine says, 'Your real self, your physical body is now in the Neurosurgical Unit at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow. You were moved from the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh ... some time ago.' The machine seems uncertain.
'You don't know?' I ask it.
'You don't know,' it tells me. 'They moved you; that's all we both know. Might have been three months ago, might have been five or even six. Whenever; in your dream it was about two-thirds of the way through. The treatments and drugs they've been trying out on you have scrambled your sense of time.'
'Do you - do I - have any idea what date it is? How long have I been under?'
'That's a little easier; seven months. The last time Andrea Cramond visited you she mentioned something about it being her birthday in a week and if you were to wake up it would be the best-'
'OK,' I tell the machine. 'That makes it early July; her birthday's on the 10th.'
'Well then.'
'Hmm. And I suppose you don't know my name, do you?'
'Correct.'
I say nothing for a while.
'So,' the machine says, 'you going to wake up then?'
'I don't know. I'm not sure what the alternatives are; what's the choice?'
'Stay under or surface,' the machine says. 'Simple as that.'
'But how do I surface?' I was trying to do that on the way here, before I reached the desert. I tried to wake up into -'
'I know. I'm afraid I can't help you with that one. I don't know how you do it, I just know you can if you want to.'
'Hell, I don't know; do I want to?'
'Your idea,' the machine points out, 'is as good as mine.'
I don't know what they're pumping into me, but everything's hazy at the moment. The machine seems real, when it's here, but the people don't. It's as though there's a fog inside my eyes, as though the fluid in them has darkened, as though they have finally silted up. My other senses are similarly affected; everything I hear sounds mushy, distorted. Nothing smells or tastes of anything very much. I think even my thoughts are slowing down.
I lie, a shallow man breathing shallowly and trying to think deeply.
After a while, nothing. No people, no machine, no sight or sound or taste or smell or touch, no awareness of my own body. Greyness everywhere. Only memories. I fall asleep.
I wake up in a small room with one door; there is a screen set in one wall. The room is cubical, finished in grey, windowless. I am sitting in a large leather armchair. The chair looks familiar; there is one like it in the house in Leith, in the study. There should be a tiny burn on the right arm where a bit of dope fell out of ... no; not there. Must be a new chair. I look at my hands. A little scar tissue on the right one. I'm wearing Mephisto shoes, Lee jeans, a checked shirt. I have no beard. I feel thinner than I remember.
I get up and look round the room. Blank screen; no controls. Concealed lighting round the top of the walls. Everything in grey concrete; feels warm. No seams in the concrete; not a bad pouring job at all; I wonder vaguely who the contractors were. The door is ordinary, made of wood. I open it.
/> There is a similar room on the other side of the door. It has no screen and no armchair; just a bed. It is a hospital bed, empty; crisp white sheets and a single grey blanket pulled back at one corner, as though in invitation.
A noise comes from the room I've just left.
If I go through there, I think, and find an old guy who looks like me, I'm going to get out of there somehow and find that machine and complain.
I go through to the room with the armchair. I do not find Keir Dullea in make-up. The room is empty but the screen has come to life. I sit down in the armchair and watch.
It's the man in the bed again. Only this time everything's in colour; I can see him better. He is lying on his front, for a change, in a different bed in a different room. A small ward, in fact, with three other beds, two of them occupied by older men with bandaged heads. There are screens round my man's bed but I am above him, looking down. His bald spot is quite visible. I reach up to my own head; a bald patch. Sure enough, the hairs on my arms are not black but muddy brown. Shit.
It all looks more cosy that I remember. There are yellow flowers in a vase on the small bedside cabinet. There's no chart hanging on the bottom of the bed; maybe they don't do that these days. There's a plastic bracelet on the man's wrist. I can't read what it says.
Noises in the distance; people talking, a little female laughter, bottles or maybe something metallic clinking, and what might be a set of wheels squeaking on a floor. Two nurses appear; they go inside the screens and turn the man over. They plump up his pillows and sit him up a little, chatting to each other most of the time. Infuriatingly, I can't hear what they're saying.
The nurses leave. People start to drift into the picture, approaching the other two occupied beds; ordinary people; a young couple for one elderly man, an old woman talking quietly to the other old chap. Nobody for my man yet. Doesn't look as though he cares.