by Adam Roberts
The archer placed her bow on the grass and started gabbling something incomprehensible.
‘My friend,’ said the first stranger, coming over to Soop now with her knife, ‘wanted to shoot you both in the throat, right at the beginning. That was her plan. She says that you would have stayed alive long enough for us to get useful imprints. I was not so sure. My way was riskier. I was beginning to think that he—’ Soop tried to look at Jeunet, but moving his neck tugged on the arrow in his gut. He could just see the other man, out of the corner of his eye. The archer-female had somehow got the pistol free from Jeunet’s hand, and drew it gently along the length of the shaft of the arrow. ‘—would just kill me from the doorway, that Aliss wouldn’t get a clear shot at him. It was a frightening thing, I don’t mind telling you.’
The first female brought something from her purse, a small black tube, and pressed it against Soop’s right eye. ‘Uhh!’ he gasped. ‘Ah! Ah! Uh! Uh!’
‘And there are good reasons,’ said the stranger, stowing the tube away again in her purse, ‘why Strong-Arm wants to keep certain stories prohibited. It just so happens that they’re not the reasons he gave you.’
‘Don’t listen,’ Jeunet gasped. ‘To them. Soop.’
But Soop couldn’t think about that; couldn’t concentrate on that. His pain was the entire horizon of his thoughts now. These females moved like spectres through the fog of his agony, performing their precisely choreographed actions, a sort of callous ballet. Soop’s pain was so entire a thing he found it hard to imagine that there had ever been a time when agony had not squatted inside him, twisting his nerves, shredding his mind.
‘Stories are important,’ the stranger was saying. ‘But perhaps they are not enough by themselves. Tyrants like to control what sorts of stories are told,’ she was saying, as she rolled a small block, a plastic-feeling something, over Soop’s fingertips, one, two, three, four. ‘Of course they do. Celebrations of the heroism of tyranny.’ She pressed the block against his right thumb. ‘But, you see, the story of Armstrong is a different sort of story. A story worth celebrating. You, your leader believes, what? That a strong man’s gotta know his limitations? This isn’t a story about safe little impossibilities.’
‘Science fiction,’ barked Jeunet, in a desperate voice.
‘Science fiction,’ repeated the female, and her flat delivery and accented English made it impossible to tell what she meant by this. ‘Anyway, of the various ways of getting different stories into circulation, alternative stories . . . well of the various ways, pistols have a certain . . .’ She trailed off.
‘You’ll not,’ Jeunet said, speaking slowly and strenuously. ‘You’ll not. Decode the. Decode the.’
‘Man,’ said the female, ‘we certainly can. You want to worry what we’re going to do after we’ve reset them.’
‘Tzent’u!’ cried the archer, snatching up her bow and drawing the string. She was aiming in through the open door.
‘Relax,’ said the other one. She added something in her native tongue.
Soop tried to turn his head, to see what they were looking at in the doorway, but the action tightened the skin at his neck, which pulled on the skin of his torso and ground further snaps and jags of pain from the arrow in his gut. He was crying freely now, water simply oozing from his eyes and slicking his cheeks. Tears just pouring out of him, as if his head were a cracked pitcher. This made vision blurry, framed as his line of sight was by the sparkles and little leaps of bodily agony. He thought he saw one of the women in the doorway. It was definitely one of the women. She threw up her gloved hands and scurried back inside.
‘It’s only one of their women,’ said the first female, in a contemptuous tone.
The archer spoke hurriedly.
‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘Yes. We’re done here anyway.’
They were on their feet, and Soop’s pistoletta and, much worse than that, Jeunet’s pistol were in their purses, and in a moment they had vanished into the jungle.
The quiet that occupied the clearing afterwards had the tangible quality of enormous, persistent pain stitched into its insect under-throb. The melodic booms from the distant bitterns echoed along Soop’s nerves. He tried his very best not to move; to take the shallowest of breaths, not to sway, not to move anything that would cause the slightest friction between his flesh and the shafts of the two arrows that were in him. The dry, pulling sound of Jeunet’s breathing was lessening; the spaces between breaths growing longer, his life force marking a sort of diminuendo. The green itself, the mere colour, the colour by itself, seemed somehow to detach itself from the leaves and, in some peculiar manner, to stain Soop’s mind, to give his impossibly extended physical suffering a chromatic focus. He became aware that his trousers were sodden, and panic at the thought that he had wet himself - disgraced himself - like a child - made his heart beat faster, which in turn pushed blood through bulging veins and squeezed a new peak of agony from his wounds. But he had not pissed himself. It was blood from his stomach that had flowed down there. The air felt thin in his mouth. Everything was slower. Jeunet drew in a pained breath, and breathed out roughly. There was a long pause. Then Jeunet drew in another breath and didn’t let it out. Colours tinkled in Soop’s eyes. Pain was unlike sound. If his pain were a symphony then the cacophonous crashing of his elbow, his hand, his stomach, would drown out all other sensation. But in fact, and despite the overwhelming nature of those sensations, he was also aware of sweat trickling into his eye. He was aware of a tickling sensation on his hand and up his arm, where ants from the grass had crawled up to investigate the site of the trauma.
He didn’t want to look at that. He rolled his eyes upward, at the sky, and its patch of blue was almost a relief from the agony of green. There was the moon. He could see the moon, round as a coin. That insubstantial way the moon looks in the afternoon sky, as if it is an image projected upon a screen rather than a solid island of rock amongst the waveless blue of its idiom. Moon, he thought. Moon, moon, moon. It didn’t look like an eye. He couldn’t understand people who thought it looked like an eye. It was rather a sort of lid, the texture of its iron pitted and stained with long use, on the manhole of existence. The lid sat at the top of a tall blue shaft with impossibly smooth sides. It was hot. He was intensely aware of the heat in the air, the jungle stench, the noise, and infiltrated into every element he was aware of his pain. It was his pain, most of all, that pinned him to the mud. He was broken. Moon, he thought, it’s gone wrong.
To his left he sensed movement. Women had come out of the doorway, and with them came Heston. They must have woken him from his sleep. He wouldn’t, Soop thought, be happy about that. He didn’t like being woken from his siesta. On the other hand, and considering the circumstances they were in, being woken from his nap was really the least of his worries now.
‘Heston!’ Soop rasped. ‘Heston, we have a problem.’
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Wonder: a Story in Two
1. Hieronimo
His father taught him regular carpentry first, and here the essence was to achieve straightness in planing and sawing, plumb timbered lines and solid right-angles. But then father showed him the deeper mysteries of his craft. His beard was big and black, and always sprinkled with the white stars and dots of sawdust. His smell, when he embraced his son, was partly old sweat and reek, like their goats, and partly sap and wood dust and cleanness; a mixture of foul and fair uniquely his own. ‘Any fool can be a regular carpenter,’ he told his son. ‘It takes a special skill to be a wheelwright.’ Straight lines are easy, he said, but curves are hard. He showed Hieronimo how to press layers of wood, and how to glue strips together with hoof-glue, and then how to soak the spar, and set in the frame. He explained how wood is stubborn, more stubborn than donkeys, and how it yearns to stretch itself flat again; and that therefore it needs be set a long time in the frame before its will is broken and it agrees to stay curved.
He liv
ed with his father. Their house and the workshop were behind the church. Hieronimo’s mother was with the angels. Regarding this mysterious location Hieronimo’s father could not be induced to be more specific, though the lad nagged at him. ‘Where are the angels? Are they nearby?’
‘They are in the sky,’ snapped his father, and told him to clean out the goats.
School had been in the church. The priest was even less patient with questions about angels than was Hieronimo’s father, and smacked Hieronimo’s forehead against the wooden edge of the stall. But he was thirteen now and the need for schooling had long since ceased.
From time to time he would stare at the sky, examine it as carefully as he could. Sometimes he would climb the hill on the edge of the town, and look back across the regularly tiled rooftops, and the irregularly tiled spread of more distant fields, and the lake, shining like a stretch of wet leather. From up here the sky occupied a greater proportion of what could be seen. What was the secret of the shapes clouds took, sometimes as white and sharp-edged as eggs, sometimes great torn masses of shred and mist? The sun went into hiding every evening, like Tomas Drunk, who hid in the ditch when the priest passed. What was it in the sky that was worth hiding from?
One day Josef Fisherman, having trawled an unusually large catch in the lake, persuaded father to buy more fish than he normally would. They ate a baked fish that evening, and they salted some in the larder, but the rest father nailed to the shed wall to dry in the wind. For some reason, however, the fish did not dry properly; and when Hieronimo checked them next they had taken rot. When father pulled them from their nails and threw them to the ground one fish broke, and a mass of maggots squirmed from the rip. Hieronimo did not like the look of it. He wished not to think about it, and yet he could not stop thinking about it.
The War, reports of which were a mainstay of town gossip, grew more furious. There was talk of a great battle, only some two-score leagues away. The great War. And then one day two horsemen pulled their horses up outside the yard fence, and looked down upon Hieronimo and his father standing in the yard. Hieronimo rarely saw horses. The sheer size of them oppressed him. He could not take his eyes from their teeth, the cavernous holes of their nostrils, the way they chewed and chewed at the bar of iron in their mouths as if taking sustenance from it. The patches of writhing foam at the corner of their mouths reminded him of the maggots from the fish.
‘You’re the wheelwright? My captain has carts need mending.’
‘I’ll be happy,’ said father, ‘to undertake the work.’
‘Best come with us then.’
‘Better still, you should leave me here. For how can I make wheels away from my workshop?’
The first soldier put his hand to his belt, and laid his fingers upon his undrawn sword hilt, so that Hieronimo understood in a terrible flash that he might kill father for such insolence. But instead the soldier said, ‘You’ll come with me, living, half-alive or dead.’
So father went away, walking between the horsemen, and the last Hieronimo saw before they rounded the corner was him receiving a knock between the shoulder from a horsewhip, to encourage him to run.
Hieronimo sat down where he was, in the yard, and did not move. People passing saw him and called to him to ask what had happened, but he said nothing. Eventually Elsa came bustling up the road and took pity upon him, nudging him inside and giving him some supper.
That night he sat outside, hoping his father would return. He watched the sky. The moon was full like a round stone. It was the colour of ash. He pondered the relationship between the moon and the stars, and wondered if they had broken out of the body of the moon, as maggots perhaps, spilling from there across the sky. Perhaps every time the moon waned it was a breach in its body and more stars spilled out. It would explain why there were so many. He thought of the sun. There were, he saw, three bodies in the sky: the moon, and the sun, and his mother. The angels he did not figure. They were not permanent fixtures, as his mother was. They were like the clouds, perhaps.
Two days later his father came ambling back into town, his left eye bruised as black as his beard. He said nothing of his time away. He simply went into the house and took some bread and beer, and picked up his plane as if nothing had happened. Hieronimo asked, and asked, but got no answer.
That night, as they ate together, father said gruffly, ‘We need to teach you how to bend the wood. Anything could happen. You’re a man now, and should be ready to take over things if I go.’
Hieronimo replied, first, because his pride was hurt, ‘I know how to bend the wood.’ But then he added, quickly, ‘And what do you mean, go?’
‘Nothing lasts forever,’ said his father.
‘Going where?’
This made him roar. ‘I’m not going anywhere! Why do you chatter so? You’re like a woman! Always questioning and nagging! I’m not going anywhere!’ It was a long time before his temper cooled. Then he said, ‘But everybody dies sometime. We all owe death a debt, and I’ll have to repay mine sometime, just as your mother did.’
Usually Hieronimo would fall silent when his father lost his temper. But the mention of his mother emboldened him. ‘Sunday, the priest said Jesus beat death in a great battle, like the battle the soldiers are fighting in, and that because of that we need not die.’
‘He did that,’ father agreed, in a lower voice. ‘But it was in another country, far from here.’ He went to the barrel and tapped himself another mug of beer. Then he sat down and drank it. His son watched him. ‘Far from here,’ he repeated. ‘A long way away.’
‘If we go to that other country,’ Hieronimo asked, ‘will we not die?’
‘Everything dies.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just the stubbornness of things,’ said father.
‘The way the wood is stubborn?’
‘You ask too many questions,’ growled his father. ‘Stop it, or I’ll take a hammer to your head and knock all the questions out of it.’
Of course Hieronimo was quiet after that, and sat there chewing his heel of bread and drinking the last of his own beer in small sips.
In the morning there was work to do. The sun came up swift and bright, and licked the sky clean of clouds. Hieronimo helped his father make a pole by turning the wheel of the lathe, exactly as he had been taught, with a forceful, unchanging motion, so that the lathe turned at a regular pace and sharp edges of the wood could be knocked away evenly. It was hard labour, and made his arms ache. Mid-morning he went outside to rest a little, and took a drink from the well.
A horseman came up the street and stopped at their gate. Hieronimo could not tell if it was the same horseman who had come before, because on that occasion his attention had been entirely taken by the horse, and the rider had been nothing more than a shadow of menace. Hieronimo could see it was not the same horse.
‘What’s your name?’ asked the horseman.
‘Hieronimo.’ His stomach was chewing at itself in fear, and his voice piped.
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘You’re a good, strong-looking lad,’ said the horseman. ‘I’ll tell you something. I am a soldier of the King. He is always looking for soldiers. He’d like it if you came to fight for him.’
‘I need to stay and help my father,’ said Hieronimo, blinking.
‘Of course you do. Is your father about?’
‘He’s inside. Do you want a wheel? Shall I fetch him?’
‘In a minute, lad. Tell me first: where’s your mother? I’ll bet she’s a beauty.’
‘She’s with the angels.’
‘Ah.’ The horse chewed and chewed at its indigestible meal of metal. ‘I met them once, too,’ said the soldier. ‘The angels, I mean.’
Hieronimo’s curiosity was fiercer than his fear. ‘Where did you meet them?’
‘It was in Hamburg, since you ask. They live there, in a large house, right in the middle of the town.’
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‘Is Hamburg in the Holy Land?’
The soldier beamed at him. His face was broad, and his skin was very white indeed. His moustache completely filled his upper lip, and curved at the ends. He wore a cocked hat much bluer than the sky. ‘Do you know what coneflower looks like?’ he asked.
‘Of course. It grows on the hills round here.’
‘When I met the angels they made me a special tea out of coneflower petals, and I drank it. Before I drank it they looked like ordinary women. Afterwards I saw them as they truly were, angels.’
‘Did you speak with them?’ Hieronimo asked, eagerly.
‘I did indeed.’
‘Perhaps you met my mother?’
The soldier beamed again. ‘Fetch your father, lad. I have business with him.’