With the conscious blessing of the Merchant Venturers, who’d had more than their fill of the stultifying influence the guilds’ restrictive practices were having on their campaigns, she emerged from the mutterings of the delirious on to Western front pages. Songs were written about her. Pamphlets were published. As the hospital facilities continued in their failure to cope with the flood of disease and casualties which war proved effortlessly capable of producing, Marion Price was given a free hand. It was sometimes hard, as those who opposed her found to their dismay, to separate the woman from the haze of adoration and myth which came to surround her. That was part of her strength. There were Marion Price medallions and Marion Price figurines. Other hardworking nurses, gripped by the spasming hands of men falling towards death, would assure them that, yes, yes, they were her. Even as she banged her fist in fury on the cedarstone tables of meeting rooms in Bristol guildhalls, Marion’s spirit drifted on a healing breeze above the stinking, moaning beds. The very sound of her name became a reassurance, and then a battle-cry. Ma-ri-on. It sustained the march of weary boots, and shaped the cough of guns. It filled the telephone wires as well, and tumbled on old posters blown up-channel towards Invercombe to snag in the laburnum walk, and Invercombe listened. As other creatures filled with twisted murmurings crept towards Invercombe’s boundaries from nearby Einfell, the surface of its seapool gleamed in grey remembrance of summers gone.
PART THREE
I
ALL DAY LONG THE GUNS had spoken, but with evening came a kind of quiet. The wind sighed over the marshes which had lain between the battalions of the opposing armies and were now polluted with blood and wood and spent iron as Ralph wandered amid the dying beasts and the great dead engines. The crows which had followed his army these recent shifterms settled in black flocks. He breathed the reek of death and burnt rubber and spent cordite. His boots sucked out of the oil-rainbowed effluent and mud. He wondered if this was how victory felt.
‘Sir?’
The four elite guards who followed him, hanging back in understanding of their general’s mood, yet wary still of the unextinguished jaws of a hookmine or the last bullet of a dying sniper, spun to the sound. They raised their guns. But it was only some squaddie from one of the new regiments which the East had created for this summer’s campaign. His boots flapped around his naked ankles as he hobbled along the blasted remains of the tracks for command of which this battle had been fought. He looked ridiculously young.
‘Found?’ Ralph knew instantly who the lad meant, but it was necessary for him to consider his every reaction at this time and place. God the Elder might not be watching—indeed, Ralph had come to believe that the old fellow had probably averted his gaze some years before—but his men certainly were.
‘Yes, yes! Marion Price …’
He grew conscious of the pressure of a long-delayed headache crawling around his skull. Calmly amid his orders for the rounding up of casualties and the interrogation of officers and the setting up of camp, he had repeated the longstanding order that she should be looked out for. But it had been a mere matter of housekeeping. Or so he had thought, although the feeling which was strengthening in his head now whispered otherwise. He made a downward gesture to his men with their guns and stepped towards the squaddie. ‘You mean she’s been captured …?’ She could, the thought came quicker than his words, already be dead.
The squaddie nodded, then gave a belated salute. He had a bandoleer slung across his shoulders, but that was empty, and he seemed to possess no weapon. Ralph, who himself was unarmoured and bareheaded, had cause to envy his guards their armoured casing of blue-grey liveiron, which, even now that it was battered and rusted and bloodstained, somewhat masked their weary stance. How is sh—His head swam. Hold back the thought. No show of frailty or weakness. Never be hasty, least of all at moments when haste is required. Random instinct is the animal luxury of the common soldier—or these damnable birds. The next unthinking step is where your gravestone lies. ‘What measures have been taken to secure her?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know … Sir.’
‘Show me where she is.’ He gestured to his guards. ‘The rest of you, get some food and rest.’
‘Sir? Are you … ?’
But the squaddie was already hobbling off down the rails, and Ralph followed him.
‘Where are you from?’ Ralph asked.
The boy gestured towards the fire-gleaming smog. ‘Place called Shenstone, although no one I tell’s ever heard of it and they always say it wrong.’
‘Where’s it near?’
The boy shrugged. ‘My dad once went to Stafford. But that was years ago …’
Some anonymous Midlands village, Ralph supposed. The sort of place where people lived their lives without travelling much further than the nearest church and pub. At least, they had until this war began. He wondered if Shenstone would still be there, if and when the lad got back to it. And whether his family would be alive, his home standing.
‘Why have you come to fight?’
‘Same as all of us, s’pose.’ From the pale angles of the lad’s face, Ralph sensed surprise that he of all people should ask such an obvious question. ‘Freedom and decency.’
Back at the main camp, which had been brought forwards from nearby Droitwich once the West’s main guns had been silenced, barrels of cider had been found hidden in a farm attic, and songs and curses of the kind of Lor-Bless-You-Guv familiarity which would have been unthinkable before the battle briefly reigned. The victory had been an undoubted one, which (ten wasn’t the case, and Eastern casualties had been far lighter than anyone had expected. The railhead for the Midland line had fallen surprisingly easily. What was left of the West’s Third Army, a paper tiger in any case, which had been trapped between the twin fists of their advance, was seemingly in disordered retreat with its morale, infrastructure and main armaments destroyed.
The clean sizzle and smoke of cooking brushed Ralph’s senses as he strode the edges of the main camp. Fire-lit faces, rifles stacked, breastplates piled like tortoises copulating, the corporal singing arm in arm with the private those rowdy old songs which had spread from the music halls and the picture palaces. Whispers and nudges as the meat spat and the sparks spiralled and their general went past. Make yourselves … But already he had gone. Not the evening for the spit and polish, for the weary salute which he would then have to return. Not the time for looking ahead or for remembering. For them, dawn could take care of itself.
‘Must be careful, Sir,’ murmured the squaddie. ‘You know what they say—’
‘And what do they say?’
‘Well, that she’s a witch.’
‘Then they’re wrong. She’s just a guildswoman—and scarcely even that. That’s why the men of the West so …’ He didn’t want to use the word revere. ‘Feel as they do about her.’ Ma-ri-on. Ma-ri-on. The three syllables of that name turned into a foot-stomping yell, a battle cry. Yet still, to Ralph’s ears, such a soft sound.
Here, hunched in the dark, lay their main armaments. Cannon raised sleepy snouts from under awnings like huge steel moles. A dim mist had permeated the ground from all the day’s smoke and the spells. Like lovers, the artillery masters who tended the pitch-black wyreglow of these charnel-house mouths had special names for each of their charges; sounds whispered in the roar and the dark of battle which, even under torture, they would never reveal. But it was as quiet here now as it could be anywhere in a military camp, as if all the daytime thunder of the guns had blasted a crater-like silence through the substance of the evening.
‘Do you think she should be put on trial for treason when this has all finished,’ the squaddie asked, ‘with the rest of her lot… ?’
Ralph didn’t bother to answer. Even now, and after what he supposed would be called the Battle of Droitwich, when it looked as if peace might truly be there for the winning, he disliked speculations about the end of the war. Beyond some shell-wrecked buildings lay the cages and the chains of the rav
eners; a bizarre circus of huge claws and impossibly jointed limbs. Tonight, amid the sounds of much ripping and tearing and slobbering, they were feasting on more of their own. To the victor, the spoils. One, part reptile but horned like a bull and twice the height of a man, eyed Ralph with its red gaze, its mouth strung with the innards of the gargoyle which lay before it in its cage, as if wary that he might want some of its feast.
Then past the hospital tents, where, but for the silence of the guns, all the sounds and the stench of battle seemingly continued. A miasma hung here, too dense to be dispelled by the winds which had touched the lower marshes, beating back all the usual odours of mud and cordite and poor latrines with the sweat of pain and the first edgy smell of meat on the rot, which would strengthen over the next few days into a presence which no spells could disperse. The flies came from nowhere, just like the crows. And here were the bodies of the already dead, heaped out in loose rows where they would wait until morning for the priests and a final checking. It seemed to Ralph that he was being led past every horror of his campaign.
The edge of the Salwarpe Valley had risen to meet them. Here, above a cratered moonscape of mud where some of the worst shelling had been, the rails which they’d fought over gleamed almost intact in a bloody sunset. An awninged station platform which had somehow survived the destruction announced itself as DROITWICH JUNCTION, although the chocolate vending machine was bullet-riddled and pillaged. Beyond slumped the corrugated bulk of an engine shed.
‘This is it…’ The squaddie gestured towards its entrance. ‘She’s in here …’ But the lad didn’t sound that certain about it. Somewhat warily, they entered the warm, dim interior, which still retained the sweetly purposeful smells of oil and iron.
‘Ten-hut…’ Eastern soldiers reshouldered their guns. They seemed alert, edgy, afraid.
Ralph cleared his throat. ‘Everything as it should be?’
Their corporal, a small man with a dead eye and a stain of blood—presumably not his own—across his tunic, gave a grinning salute. ‘’Bout as good as things could be, sir.’
‘This private came with a message. I know this sounds ridiculous …’ Ralph chuckled. Now, suddenly, it really did. He said you’d captured Marion Price.’
‘She’s down in the pit.’
‘Pit?’
A pause. The dangling chains. ‘S’pose it was the place the ironmasters used to get at the undersides of their engines. I mean, it seemed the best spot for her. And we thought—’
‘No, no. I’m sure you chose the best possible situation.’
Ralph no longer had the faintest idea of what to expect. This, after all, was exactly how the long-anticipated might arrive. In the last place you might think, and in the wrongest possible way. But what would Marion be doing here—when the West always kept her well away from the front? They were sanding almost at the edge of it now; a pit between two rails. It was twelve foot deep if it was anything, and oiled water glinted at one end of the concrete floor. For a moment, it seemed as if there was no one down there, and the claws of Ralph’s headache pincered his eyes. Was this some joke? Always, behind the kind words and the bluster, his steady insights and his moments of unpredictable rage, he was expecting his authority to be snatched away. It was that old dream-like feeling. He was a child, naked, or in his pyjamas. Think you should go to bed now, dear. The whole world was laughing at him and his men thought him a fool. But—
There in the corner, what could have been a bundle of sacking suddenly raised its face. Her eyes were hollow, then fever-bright. Hair in snakes, and the broken split of a black-toothed smile. Slowly, in a slurred Western accent and looking right up at him, she began to sing. The cracked voice, which didn’t belong to that tiny body and thin face, echoed up from that well of concrete, shivering the dead machinery and chains. She was looking right up at him, uncoiling herself to stand with arms outstretched on pipe-cleaner legs. Her attire was extraordinary. She was clad in ribbons of threaded and eviscerated insect. And she was thin and ragged, and her wrecked voice was somehow strong, filled with the word of God the Elder and the endless certainty of victory.
The voice became cawing, taunting, as Ralph turned away. Then it softened, grew—as a faint wind picked up and blew through the engine house and tinkled the winches and chains—into a cooing, wordless lullaby. He saw the soldiers making secret signs. He felt the hairs of his neck prickle as he shook his head.
‘It’s certainly not her… She’s just—well, like all the rest, the followers. Injured in the head. Perhaps there was a sweetheart, or a son who died. Perhaps she’s just drunk too much hymnal wine.’ He shrugged. Chill sweat came across his body.
‘So what,’ asked the corporal with the blood across his tunic and the one good eye, ‘do we do with her?’
‘Release her in the morning. Put her on the back of a wagon and take her somewhere far enough away from here that she won’t trouble us again. Meanwhile, I don’t want anything done to her. You understand?’
The corporal’s grin was impenetrable. Ma-ri-on. Ma-ri-on. Ralph’s head pounded. He glanced back down to the creature in the pit. She looked like some corporeal expression of all the madness of this war. It was quite impossible to imagine that she could have existed before it all began, but at the same time, he had the odd sense that there was something about her… Perhaps his expression changed, or something in his already weakened stance, for she changed the pitch of her mutterings, and raised a spidery hand towards him.
‘You …’ The sound was half-whisper, half-screech. ‘You were there. Look, look, that summer at Invercombe. You knew her … You’re him. You’re the—’
A lobbed chunk of iron bounced against the creature’s side, and she squealed and hunched down, rocking and moaning on the concrete as another of the squaddies chuckled and prepared to take aim.
‘That’s enough. I said she wasn’t to be harmed.’
Ralph turned away, his skin crawling, no longer sure of what he’d seen or heard. War, after all, was drenched in fear and superstition, and it was his job to rise above all of that and provide clarity, logic and leadership. Go the other way and the fall was too long and far to be contemplated. But had she really said Invercombe? Surely not. No, it was all just another sign of his inexpressible weariness. Certain he’d made a poor impression on men he’d probably never see again until he sent them to their deaths, and telling the squaddie who’d brought him here to get some rest, he headed out of the shed.
The stench still hung, even if the smoke had cleared somewhat. The smell of war was of shit and of burning, with a salt edge of cordite. That, and of rotting meat, and an all-pervasive lamp which never seemed to dissipate even on days as warm as this. Needing to refocus his mind on the tasks in hand, he called in at the command tents on his way back to his quarters. A telephone pinged, and its mirror brightened, then darkened apologetically and was ignored as faces looked up from tables of maps. The questions and options which would be put to their general at dawn tomorrow were being refined by his staff officers. Courses of action which, in the cause of a larger good and a greater victory, would inevitably lead to many deaths, although he knew that they needed to push their advantage as hard as his weary troops and stretched supply lines could sustain.
Here, pinned out for the first time beyond the maps on which this battle had been planned, and warm and intricate and green, lay the way ahead, which now stretched all the way west across England. The black mandibles of Ralph’s headache scrambled again behind his eyes, huge and real as the earwig he’d once glimpsed magnified within the card tube of a kaleidoscope as a child. He’d known death as a close friend then, always hovering in the shadows, pooled in each day’s inky remains. That small, innocent insect—the way it dragged and wavered across the blaze of colours from his sickroom window—had become part of his deliriums, which were touching him again tonight with the trailing visions of that insect-apparelled woman. He reeled and gripped the rickety edge of the map table.
‘Sir
? Are you all right?’
He coughed and swallowed and nodded, and looked down again at the map. The swirl of roads and contours and rivers. The twisting curl of the River Wye, the Avon and the wider Severn; a sweet and intensely English landscape which this war and foreign powers of ignorance and greed and bigotry had grabbed and would destroy. The rivers met, grew great, and there, at some indefinable point like the taint of a woman’s scent after she has left a bed, the water grew brackish and ebbed and flowed to the moods of the moon, and the land widened its arms to greet the salt ocean. Ralph let his gaze soothe itself on a landscape which he so often thought of, but which he had scarcely dared to envision as conquerable—and yes, he knew the correct word was reclaim—even though this was the way in which all the strategies led. But perhaps, after today’s victory, he really could allow himself to imagine that the job could be done efficiently, with such a great show of skill and force that the West would admit defeat and end this dreadful war. Yes, that would be a nice thought to think.
He allowed his fingers to touch the map’s new print. Bristol. The Severn Bridge. Those distant hills of Wales, which he had gazed at through the misted window of a car long ago on a morning journey towards what proved to be the happiest and saddest summer of his life. He remembered the prickle of the blankets and the churn of the engine and the driver’s grubby neck. Of all the many places across Europe he and his mother had travelled in search of a cure for him, England’s West had somehow seemed the most distant of all to him. It still did. And Invercombe. There it was, named on the map just any other place.
Ralph straightened up and nodded to silence the officer who was telling him about the need for more coal. To wary stares, he headed outside and wandered on through the gloom. There was scarcely room inside his own small tent for his trunk and bunk bed. That was the intention; this was his last place of retreat where others couldn’t come in. Carried on the wind, he could still hear the voices of his men. They’d gone beyond bawdiness, and were softly singing. In his weariness, their cadences sounded much the same as those that madwoman with her cloak of dead insects had sung. Was it a hymn? Perhaps some new patriotic song? Ralph thought how nice it would be, to be taken away in a cart tomorrow and left in a field somewhere, far away from this mud and chaos. Then he remembered the blood-stained corporal’s grin.
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