by Adam Roberts
At this he fell into a depression for several decades; barely moving from his chamber, letting his hair and beard and nails grow to prodigious lengths. He attempted to kill himself - an honourable, warrior’s death, falling on his own sword like Mark Antony. But he was himself born of woman, and thus incapable of self-harm.
After that he did various things. He spent much of the thirteenth century travelling the world; first as an anonymous foot-soldier of the crusades, and thereafter as a curious tourist walking and riding to Cathay, to Siberia, over the ice to Alaska, and across the great plains of the New World. If I were to detail his adventures, this story would stretch through thousands of pages, and marvellous though the adventures were they would come to seem tedious to you; as they did to him. He roamed through Central and South America, and finally travelled back to Europe on one of Cortez’ ships. Bored of travel, he made his way back to Scotland. Once again his castle had been occupied, but he disposed of the family living there and retook possession.
For a decade or so this reinstallation in his own home provided him with various distractions. Enraged villagers, and later religiously devout armies, came to destroy him - he was now once again infamous (after many decades of anonymity) far and wide as a devil in human form, a warlock who had sold his soul to Satan, and many like phrases. They burnt his castle around him, but the flames did not bother him. Instead he walked amongst them bringing death with his sword. Eventually they fled. They always fled. It took Macbeth a decade to rebuild Dunsinane, working entirely by himself, but he found he quite enjoyed the labour.
In the year 1666 he became intrigued by the idea that the world might be about to end. Travelling preachers assured the world that the apocalypse promised by Saint John was imminent. Would his charm survive the end of the world? He thought about this a great deal and decided it would not. He had come to the conclusion that the operative part of his charm - the ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’ - was the woman. Mary, mother of God, had been a virgin. Therefore she was a girl rather than a woman: and Christ was not of woman born. At his second coming, Macbeth decided, there would exist in the world a person capable of destroying him - an end he looked forward to with complete equanimity. But 1666 turned into 1667, and then into 1668, and the end of the world did not come. Macbeth reconciled himself to a genuinely immortal life. He discovered that immortality tasted not of glory, not even especially of life. It was a grey sort of experience, neither markedly happy nor sad. It was the life stones experience: endurance. It was the reason they are so silent and unmoved. It was the existence of the ocean itself, changeless though restless, chafing yet never progressing. It was Macbeth’s life.
~ * ~
Act V
There was a knocking at the door.
Nobody had knocked at his door for a decade or more. His last visitor had been the census taker, and Macbeth - who had learnt this lesson from experience long before - had disposed of him swiftly, rather than risk having his precious solitude disturbed. Maps marked Dunsinane as a folly, and Macbeth had gone to great lengths to dig out underground dwellings and knock down much of the upper portion, so as not to be too conspicuous from the air. What with the reforestation of pretty much the whole of Scotland following the European Environmental Repair Act of ‘57 his home was well hidden: off the ramblers’ trails and not listed in any land tax spreadsheets.
So who was knocking?
He clambered up the stairs to the main hall and pulled open the door. Outside, standing in the rain (Macbeth, sequestered in his underground laboratory, had not even realised it was raining), was a man. He was wearing the latest in bodymorph clothes, a purple plastic cape that rolled into a seam of his shirt as he stepped over the threshold.
‘May I come in?’ he asked, politely enough.
‘I dinnae welcome visitors,’ said Macbeth.
‘That’s as may be, sir,’ said the man. ‘But I have official accreditation.’ He held out a laminated badge for Macbeth’s perusal; an animated glyph of the man’s face smiled and nodded at him repeatedly from the badge. ‘And the legal right of entry.’ Macbeth thought of killing him there and then, but he held back. He hadn’t so much as talked to another human being in two years. He was curious as to what errand had brought this official individual so deep into the woods.
As he shut the door behind him he asked, ‘So what is it you want?’
‘Are you, sir, a relation of the Macbeth family?’ the man asked.
Now this was a startling thing. The people of this part of Scotland had long, long ago forgotten Macbeth’s name and true identity. He lived, where he was not entirely forgotten, as a kind of legend, part of stories of an ogre who could not be killed, of a wizard with the gift of immortality. ‘How d’ye know that name?’
‘Databases worldwide have been linked and cross-web searched,’ the man said in a slightly sing-song voice. ‘Various anomalies have been detected. It is my job - assigned me by my parent company, MCDF Inc - to investigate these. The deeds to this property have not been filed in eleven hundred years. The last listed owner was a Mr Macbeth. I am here to discover whether this property is still in the possession of that family, in order to register it for Poll Tax, Land Reclamation Tax and various other government and EU duties.’
This told Macbeth all he needed to know. This taxman would have to die or Macbeth’s life would be disturbed. And he did not like disturbance. Nevertheless, he reached this conclusion with a heavy heart. The youthful enthusiasm for slaughter had long since passed from his breast. Now, from his immortal perspective, the mayfly humans who were born, grew and died all around him were objects of pity rather than scorn. Still, necessity overrode his compassion. If it must be done (as, of course, it must) ‘twere well it were done quickly.
He pulled a sword from the wall, and squared up to the puny individual. ‘I’m afraid,’ he announced, ‘that I cannae be disturbed by taxes and duties. I value my solitude, you see.’
‘I must warn you, sir,’ said the taxman, holding up one finger in a slightly prissy gesture, ‘that I am licensed to defend myself from unprovoked attack. My parent company, having invested thirty-eight million euros in my development, are legally entitled to preserve their investment from unnecessary harm.’
Macbeth only shook his head. He swung the sword. The blade crashed against the man’s shoulder; but, instead of severing it as Macbeth expected, the collision resulted in a series of sparks and fizzes, and a scattering of grey smoke into the air.
‘You have caused several thousand euros damage,’ said the strange man, ‘to my right arm. I must inform you that my manufacturers, MCDF Inc, are legally entitled to recover that sum from your bank account.’
Puzzling, Macbeth wrenched the sword free and lifted it for another sweep, aiming this time at the taxman’s head.
‘I do apologise for this, sir,’ the taxman said, with a mournful expression on his face. He pointed a finger at Macbeth. The end of the finger clicked and swivelled to the side. With a loud thwup sound a projectile launched itself from the hollow digit and shot into Macbeth’s chest. More in astonishment than pain, he dropped his sword and fell backward over the stone flags.
The strange taxman, leaning over him now, was speaking into a communicator of some kind. ‘Please send a medical team at once. Unmarked and unnamed property, located near the centre of Greater Birnham Wood. Lock onto my signal. Please hurry; the subject is badly wounded.’ He peered down at Macbeth, whose eyes were already losing their focus. Macbeth considered the sheer oddness of this feeling, these smashed ribs, this blood (which had stayed safely in his veins through all these centuries) spilling onto the floor. It was, he had to admit, and despite the pain involved, a feeling something like - release.
‘I do apologise for doing that, sir,’ the taxman was saying. ‘I have called an air ambulance to assist. I do hope, sir, that they arrive here before you die.’
‘Oh, I do hope,’ said Macbeth, in a gaspy voice, ‘not.’<
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~ * ~
(The following ‘Afterword’ was included with the story on its first publication)
With a writer as culturally ubiquitous and myriad-minded as Shakespeare, it seems to me inevitable that you encounter the plays as reflections upon your own consciousness rather than as objective entities in the outside world. I have certainly learnt a number of important lessons from Macbeth, a play that has lived vividly inside my head ever since I first read it as a teenager. When I was a school student I wrote an essay on the play which lifted its argument from the criticism of A. C. Bradley (I was, as an impressionable youth, content to parrot the opinions of my elders and betters) that Macbeth was the only one of Shakespeare’s major tragic heroes without a sense of humour. My teacher, a great sensei called Derek Meteyard, scoffingly and quite properly, marked this essay down. ‘On the contrary, he has a very lively sense of humour,’ he told me, and pointed to, for instance, the scene where his hired assassin returns to report the successful murder of Banquo to Macbeth:
MACBETH: There’s blood upon thy face.
FIRST MURDERER: ‘Tis Banquo’s, then.
MACBETH: ‘Tis better thee without than he within.
This last line - ‘the blood is certainly better on your outside, than in Banquo’s inside’ - is indeed darkly funny, and it is one example of many in the play. From this episode I learnt a crucial lesson: don’t believe what a critic says just because they’re famous, or respected, or because they’ve gotten their opinion printed up in a book published by a University Press. That’s a lesson that has served me well in my academic career.
Why was I so easily misled by Bradley? The answer, of course, is that at the age of seventeen, I read Macbeth through the lens of my miserable-teenager, melodramatic-depressive-gothic mindset. I read it, in other words, not as a play about a medieval Scottish King, but as about depression, and therefore, somehow, as about me; or more precisely about me at my most humourlessly glum and self-absorbed (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/ creeps in this petty pace from day to day/and I am spottily adolescent/And can’t get girls to go out with me’ and so on). Now I am in my forties and I find a different play when I read Macbeth. It strikes me, indeed, as a quite astonishingly, and perhaps horribly, energetic play, aggressively and blackly comic at the same time as it rehearses its tragic dynamic. It is a play based upon precisely the same misunderstandings and incongruities as farce, but it pushes its premise to a destructive, bloody exuberance that only gets more startlingly relevant in today’s world. It is not a comedy in the conventional sense, of course. But in today’s world it seems to me that there is also a need for that strong laughter in the face of disaster and death that is the expression of man and woman at their most heroic. ‘I am going to die? Ha-ha-ha!’
‘And tomorrow . . .’ is a comic piece, although not an especially cheery or laughsome one. I was intrigued by the disjunction between, on the one hand, the Gordian-knot vehemence with which Macbeth unleashes violence upon the things that restrict him, and, on the other, the pedantically legalistic terms of the prophecy that is his eventual undoing. But I was more intrigued by the comic possibilities of reading this most bloody and murderous of Shakespeare’s plays as an articulation of a very modern sort of heroism, the refusal to simply crumple, the refusal to give up, the discovery of a strenuous and dark joy in the face of extinction. I was also struck that the pedantic and legalistic prophecies that doom Macbeth wouldn’t stand up to ten minutes of cross-examination in a court of law by any half-decent contract lawyer.
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~ * ~
The Man of the Strong Arm
1
‘By permitting,’ Jeunet began to say. He was, perhaps, distracted by something, for he stopped. Maybe it was the sound of the small waves folding over onto the beach again and again, below the platform on which they sat, as if the ocean itself were bowing before him. At any rate he didn’t finish that sentence. Presently he started again. ‘The strength of story,’ he said. ‘Its strength.’ ‘Story,’ said Soop, absurdly excited to be in the presence of a man such as Jeunet. ‘Story, yes. Absolutely, yes.’
‘The Man of the Strong Arm permits the study of art,’ said Jeunet, as if this fact were so extraordinary a thing that he needed to remind himself of it by speaking it aloud.
‘Such art as expresses the strength of the human spirit,’ agreed Heston.
Soop was so excited he couldn’t keep his legs still.
Jeunet waved his hand in the air. ‘And you believe your latest find, this latest science fiction is - appropriate? You’re certain?’ ‘Certainty is strength,’ said Heston.
‘So, this—’ Jeunet’s speech slowed as he navigated the syllables, ‘this Edgar Burrough of the Rice - you’re sure it is art?’
‘Oh, very much so,’ said Soop, getting to his feet. He really couldn’t help this; his enthusiasm for his discipline just bubbled over. ‘It is a fantastical and dream-like story of a hero — a strong man - a strong hero - who flies by sheer force of will to the stars - to a red star, which becomes, when he arrives, a red desert. He sees a red star, Mars, you know, and by sheer force of will he conjures out of that a world of red desert. Conjures desert out of the light of the star! For of course we know that light is not sand . . . although,’ he added, at a gabble, for Soop’s mind worked by means of sudden leaps to the left or right of his train of thought, ‘sand is glass, and glass has to do with light, after a fashion . . .’ He stopped, and looked about him. Heston was staring at him. Jeunet was looking away. Soop blushed as though a fire were lit inside the bowl of his skull. ‘I’m sorry.’
He sat down again.
The bitterns boomed and boomed and rolled through the sky on their inconceivable avian errands. The sea was very calm and gave the illusion of being composed of a single unbroken substance, a fabric stretched taut seemingly at a slight upward tilt, running away from them until it slotted into the groove of the horizon. The small waves continually stroked the white flank of the beach as if trying to pacify a bulky and potentially violent monster. One of the women unzipped her eye slit, identified that the tumblers of the men were empty, and shuffled in to retrieve them. Jeunet leant a little to the right to avoid being touched by fabric of her alldrape.
‘Why, of the Rice?’ he asked.
‘We’re not sure,’ said Heston, holding his right hand out in front of Soop to restrain him from attempting to answer the superior’s question. ‘We believe it is that the author derived his income from rice. Perhaps he farmed it.’
‘Farming rice is a perfectly honourable occupation,’ said Jeunet, thoughtfully. ‘And you have the whole of this red desert story?’
‘Not all of it. Its source has of course been corrupted,’ said Heston. ‘We’ve recovered about two thirds. It seems likely the text is from a variety of provenances, some of them indecent.’
‘But the tale itself is not indecent,’ Soop broke in. He really couldn’t contain himself. This was a failing of character, a blockage in the development of his own strength. He knew it, but couldn’t help it, and again the excitement came bubbling up. ‘It’s a strong, heroic tale. It reminded me of the Faerie Queene, a much older tale, or at least another tale from a different historical period. As in the Faerie Queene, a warrior goes to a strange world and fights Error. Error in this case takes the form of an army of green-skinned monsters with four arms and two legs.’
‘The Queen of. . . what did you say?’ asked Jeunet.
‘A piece of poetic art,’ Heston explained, in a smooth voice. ‘A perfectly decent, strong-armed piece of art. It is well known, amongst those who specialise in . . . that sort of thing.’
‘Art. I wish,’ said Jeunet, ‘I could be as comfortable with that word as you are.’ The woman, or one of the other women standing down by the low wall, for their dark grey alldrapes rendered them all equally indistinguishable, brought new drinks on a tray. ‘This talk of corruption in the text disturbs me,’ said Jeu
net, gazing past her to the placid sea.
‘Well,’ said Heston, in a practised voice, ‘corruption is an inevitable part of retrieving art from the historical periods. It is inherent in the nature of the medium. The means of computational storage from that age, to put it plainly, were not watertight. All sorts of extraneous materials, images, portions of other texts - they all find their way into the zeros and ones. That’s our job, essentially: to sift this heap of rubbish and pull out the clean, spiritually-strengthening works of art. To discover the sort of stories that the Man of the Strong Arm would endorse.’
‘Not without risks,’ said Jeunet, looking pointedly at Soop.
‘Junior Soop works under my guidance at all times,’ said Heston.