preface
Deep in the everglades,
where the sly mists rise and there are only turtles (out through the woods,
over the ferny wastes, down into the wetlands, where mud oozes over mud),
sometimes, the villagers report, there is a deep and fearsome roar borne across
the water on a breeze.
They huddle, isolated,
each family perched in its stilted hut. At night they haul in their ladders for
fear of what might slither up, something as cold and silent as the mist,
something big and old and horrible.
Of course, there might not
be anything out there, might not be anything wonderful in the world for that
matter, except the flash of light in water; but that is easier to believe in
air-conditioned shopping-malls than it is in the dark Chailey night, when the
fog is thicker than your wrist, even the
star-eaten nights when the moon sails over, bright as a B.M.W. headlight,
fixing the mists into icy solids.
'Squat,
web-footed, greeny grey, truculent and surly,
given
to witchcraft and depression, breeding hugely,
though
losing many young to bronchial complaints and the black fungus,
the
natives of the swampland construct their huts on wooden piles driven
sixty
feet or more into the seething mud.'
so says Parson Grimes'
notebook, one of the earliest records of this little-frequented region, where
it is easy to believe nothing has changed in a thousand years.
<{*}>
chapter
one
The fairies were leaving.
Count Ironhand had issued a decree, and while many goblins, trolls, witches and
suchlike had decided it did not concern them, the Elvish council had considered
the matter serious enough to abandon the sacred pools and groves they had
inhabited these many years and set off for new lands.
Since when, you may well
ask, have the citizens of Faerie taken such account of the proclamations of
mere mortals ? Not often, it is true,
but we must bear in mind the reputation of Count Ironhand, who had drowned his
own nurse in the bath when but a babe in arms, and not only of the Count
himself, but of his newly appointed Chancellor, Norbert Sedge, universally
known as 'the Idealist'.
Norbert had gained
responsibility at Court over several years, enjoying successive promotions, and
earning, eventually, what might even be termed favour, though the favour of
Ironhand was hard to detect, except insofar as one's head remained attached to
one's shoulders. In his career to date Chancellor Sedge had drained swamps,
cleared forests, burned churches, crushed revolts, quelled superstition,
banished wizards, killed and fried a dragon,
instituted significant advances in agricultural practice, opened mines, built
roads, and promoted both the eating of fish and a series of mechanical
innovations involving the damming of streams and the confinement of many people
in large sheds.
If some of the sun seemed
to go out of the sunlight or the stars to twinkle less merrily when the elves
departed, at least it could be said that the trains ran on time.
Not of course that there
were any trains in that distant age. It was not only the changes that Norbert
Sedge set in motion that earned him more respect than love from the people of
Poictesme, (and perhaps more fear than either), but the attitude of the man as
he accomplished them. He greeted triumph with a sneer, he lived a life of
ostentatious simplicity, and offended one and all by his brusque and
uncharismatic manner.
The seven Wizards who had
advised Count Ironhand in the past age of magic were gone into the far west,
retreating to ancient castles surrounded by rumour. As is only natural, these
castles had tall, decaying towers and deep, dripping dungeons, and in these
castles the Wizards wove their most powerful magics, fuelled with anger and
shame, working with the strength of desperation. Great were the invocations,
the fastings, the vigils, the burnings and the sacrifices they made. An odour
of magic arose which came to the sharp nose of the Grim Rationalist Norbert
Sedge as he sat in his bare chamber in the Count's palace scratching at dry
paper with a quill. He sent for reports. He sent for the regional governers. He
sent for scribes. He sent for maps. He sent for Generals. When all these
materials were assembled the High Chancellor of the imaginary realm addressed
them thus.
"It has come to my
attention that all is not well in the West. There are rumours. Roads remain
unbuilt. There are protests. Rivers run unchecked. Men come and go as they will
without paying taxes. There are dragons reported. There is a strike in the
mines. The weather is unseasonal. Brigands attack honest travellers. The people
have respect neither for the law nor for the authority of the Count. There is a
smell of magic."
(and here he paused, a
little excited)
"All this must stop.
No interference can be tolerated. We shall raise an army and suppress this
rebellion."
The Generals nodded and
left to issue orders, and the Regional Governers clapped and cheered, and
proclamations were written out by the scribes and duly proclaimed in the
squares and public places by the appointed and authorised officials.
<{*}>
'In the sludgy depths of the delinquent forests to the west of the big
river, there is a small village huddled among the trees, there is a castle
carved from a huge grey rock, a faint pre-echo of the mountain ranges in the
far west. Walid, a thin boy, pale as moonlight, walks the snaking path through
the swamp under a sky thick with magic.'
Walid held the definite
and fixed view that things were not as they should be. The talk of his parents
and of his aunts, uncles, cousins and other neighbours was all, had
increasingly become, of wonders, signs, portents, omens and supernatural
forces.
Last week the seventh in a
litter of ten pigs had been born with what were apparently wings, which were
odd and scaly, and gave it a comical look, as though it was caught in an
umbrella. The weather had not been the same two days running. Sudden electrical
storms frightened the geese and set them honking. Sometimes it was dark all
day, clouds circling the sky like sheep draining from a sink. Trees in the
forest seemed to move about under cover of darkness, and Walid was sure he had
heard sucking and squelching noises in the night, just as though some great
tree-being was pulling up its roots and moving off. Paths too seemed to have
lost what certainty of purpose they had had, especially those which were
travelled on to distant places; especially, in fact, those which led in and out
of the forest. People wandering about at the margins of the swamp nowadays
often found themselves in a quite unexpected place, and would then have to
trudge home again.
A concentrated effort had
been made by a party of villagers to attend
market, where they had hoped to exchange slime-fruit and reptile skins
for cow's-milk-butter and wheat flour. The unfortunate traders travelled for
days, cutting marks on trees, crossing swamps on skis, navigating by stars,
sun, the migrations of birds, but always finding their way barred by an
impassable tangle of ancient trees and thorny bushes, or a sudden expanse of
evil smelling mud inhabited by poison-flies and crocogators. 'It was as though
the swamp-forest would not let us out.' they said as they returned, sodden and
filthy, with their cargo half lost or spoiled, and their desire for a glimpse
of dry ground and green grass and a taste of cow's-milk-butter squelched out of
them.
Walid, leaving the
familiar groves of plumiol trees and the sasquat plantations on the hillocks
towards the castle, and his mind being more on the sort of oddness that life
had become than where it was his feet were leading him, found himself at last
awake in the increasing darkness in an area wholly unrecognisable. He was
hungry. He was getting cold. He turned round and walked back the way he had
come, but found a stretch of water barring further progress, and returning to
the last crossroads was faced with five paths, none of which he recognised.
All five led out of the
clearing he was in into the deep forest, and the darkness under the trees was
only made more threatening by the
encroachment of black oily clouds into the sky above him. He felt as if the
last bit of blue up there was his last link to life, and when that was winked
out by clouds he fell to his knees at the edge of the clearing, and perhaps he
might have cried, being, as far as he could tell, a long way from home in the
forest in the dark, had something not happened at that moment which distracted
him.
Into the clearing, from
each of the paths, not all at once, neither yet singly, with a common purpose,
very slowly, accompanied by an eerie glow and a low hum and a sound like a
tickling in the ears came five robed figures, one carrying a sword, one a
golden ball, another something like a pulse in a bottle, this one with a
four-armed thing, the last with something else altogether. It was clear that
they had not noticed Walid, since when they saw each other they threw back
their hoods and began to speak.
"There you are!"
began one with a hooked nose, placing his bottle on the ground.
"Khemal !"
"Good to see you
again, Ptolemy, and so prompt !"
"Aha ! My old friend !"
"Where on earth are
we ?"
"On earth, you think
?"
"Well, one presumes
so......and where is Demtel ?"
"Demtel ? He'll be along. He likes to make an
entrance."
"Yes, where is he
?"
"What have you
brought ?"
"Never mind me, what
has that fool Sedge been up to ? I hear
he has raised an Army."
"Yes, I fear so, I
fear so...."
"To suppress what he
is pleased to term a 'rebellion'."
"He is the rebellion
!"
"Well, what of it
? An army is an assembly of
people."
"So is a rebellion.
There is no comfort in people. That is well known."
"It may be well known
to you, but what does it mean ?"
"Yes, Gremthell, the
little you know you know well enough, I grant you."
"And you know nothing
at all about everything, Speddle."
It was not that all these
apparitions looked alike to Walid, but rather that they all looked so strange
and different; one bald, another with long hair in a ponytail, one with matted
dreadlocks and a huge beard, one thin and unnaturally tall, one almost square,
one with a huge belly and bow legs, and that they all talked so fast and so
much at once which meant that he couldn't place any of these strange names
firmly upon their strange countenances. Walid had a feeling which was like the
feeling he had when he stared into the trees as they stretched out above him as
he lay on his back and the high green leaves flicked specks of dappling
sunlight through a green filter down to the forest floor. The five identically
robed figures, who had made such an impressive entrance and who were still illuminated
by a glow of unknown origin, (something like firebugs), but who now joked
loudly in the still, dark forest as though they were in their own living-rooms,
they seemed, although certainly now human in form still nevertheless although
apparently real and behaving like people might who had not seen each other for
some time, all the same, despite looking as though they were there, and not see-through or anything, it
was to Walid as though they were in a separate place, perhaps a sort of bubble,
or raised up above the ground a little, or perhaps they were a vision, a vision
like his Uncle had who had drowned. This was only a fleeting impression however
which flavoured the moment of their arrival and conversation, but which faded,
or was driven back to form a context for the next event in Walid's mind.
A sixth figure, similarly
robed, appeared in a stunning flash of light. For one instant the surrounding
trees and hanging branches, their ridged and various bark, the million leaves
and their tiny veins, the mosses on their thick, gnarled trunks, the mosses on
the moss, the hanging growths, the fungii, the fallen wood in gradual decay,
the receding swamps, level, still, shining wet, radiating out in all
directions, the reeds, the saplings, even the black, oily clouds above the
clearing; all more clear than daylight, shadowless.
Then the sixth man threw
back his hood, but Walid could see nothing, blinded by the flash, there was
only a sheet of green that slowly turned purple in front of him and everywhere
he looked. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, which was no use. When he started to
listen he realised that the chattering had died away. He heard voices receding.
He stumbled after them as quickly as he dared, dreading the idea of being left
alone, blinded, in a strange part of the forest. He banged himself on a tree
and scraped his leg on a fallen branch, so he began to crawl, but, as he
started sinking into the soft mud called 'schlub', he found a tree-root, sat on
it, and sobbed.
He could hear nothing now
except his own dry, miserable noises. He was going to die, blind and alone in
the swamp. He was going to starve and freeze and be subjected to horrible pain
and be eaten. After a little while spent whimpering and rubbing his eyes he
realised that he would have been able to see if it were not so dark. In the
middle distance there was a faint glow among the trees. It was either a swampy
or those weird men. Walid didn't care any more what it was. He ran after it as
fast as he dared.
<*>
The Lord High Chancellor
was ushered into the presence of the Count.
"To what purpose raise you this
unauthorised force ?"
"My Lord. I seek the heightened
prosperity of the realm. When wizardry
and magic are expunged from this land a
new era of order,
reason and stability will
blossom."
"Your platitudes do not
impress us."
"Pardon me, my Lord. To be succinct,
then. Valuable trade is being lost
with lands to the West. Trade means taxes.
The western province is in
rebellion. Tributes remain unpaid. A show
of force is advisable."
"The west is
barbarous."
"All the more reason,
then, to subdue it."
"True. But it must be done quickly. Armies
are unpopular. And expensive."
"Order is popular. People
get used to it."
"People get used to anything. 'Order',
'reason'; people do not eat ideas."
"No, my
Lord."
"Go then. Subdue the West. Expell
magic. Make sure that reason is
profitable."
"Thank-you, my
Lord."
Thus it was that a grey
host gathered around the
<*>
Archaeology is a
conjectural science. We sift layers of dirt, we note the positions of whatever
we find, we make up stories to explain our behaviour to ourselves. The
archaeology of the
The area was once all
swamp. Drainage works were started early in the Fourteenth Century, drainage
works of an unusual size and scope for that era, which soon turned the swamp
into a valuable agricultural resource. Pre-existent settlements sustained
damage and were abandoned. The ancient Castle had apparently been unoccupied
since before this began, perhaps for more than a Century. Traces of splintered
bone, human and animal, reveal the hazardous nature of tunnel building and
ditch-digging in the shifting, waterlogged mud. Some bodies have been recovered
perfectly preserved. The walls of the tunnels are constructed with stone
brought from the western mountains, a distance of more than fifty kilometres,
in flat-bottomed barges. The ditches are lined with wooden staves and panels,
built, in effect, like long boats with no ends. They carried water down a
gentle gradient to the River Culver. There was a system of locks installed at a
later date, probably in conjunction with works designed to improve the river's
navigability. The swamp must have been a severe impediment to communications
between the coastal plain, the mountainous region to the west, and the areas
beyond, standing as it did across the route to one of the few reliable passes.
The conjectures of
Archaeology run thus. The swamp was drained to improve communications, health
and agriculture. Its drainage represents Historical Fact and Technological
Progress, thereby re-inforcing the bases of Archaeology's own prejudices.
Further, it suggests that things were better after the drainage than before,
that these actions constituted 'improvements'; that our present way of life is
superior to others. All these conjectures, self-serving and self-reflexive, are
patently false and misconceived. They chime with a notion of History as
'progress' long since dead in the water, they spring directly from a cultural
standpoint that sees divine beauty and wisdom reflected only in its own face.
All this must be swept aside, and in its place; only the play of values,
intricate and subtle, infinitely sparking in the mind, in the Universe; the
dance of probabilities. For what story does he make into His-story ? (and it has always been 'he'). 'The lies of
the Victors.' What was believed by those who committed the atrocities would
excuse them in the eyes of their contemporaries and successors. Thus the real
forever perishes in the service of the imaginary. Both 'now' and in
'posterity'.
Except for those shards of
splintered bone, both human and animal, the preserved corpses, the 'drainage
tunnel', driven deep into the Castle itself, except for remnants, the
discarded, the forgotten.
For the truth, I
asseverate, is that here in this forgotten swamp a terrible, titanic struggle
took place, both symbolic and actual, and that here the soul of the world was
at stake, and its fate decided, or so it seemed at the time.
<{*}>
It is perhaps felicitous
at this point to behave like a guide-book or Geographical gazetteer and explain
that the ancient Principality of Poictesme lies on a verdant plain, bordered on
the West and North by mountains, in the East by the
<{*}>
chapter
two
The Castle in the Rock.
Rusty armour piled in antique stacks. The rooms are dark, dark as the inside of
a mountain. Bald, white, blind, amphibious rats patterplash the deep corridors.
Damp pervades, inside everything, on every surface. Even the one fire burning
at the centre seems to give out no heat. The fire is small, it has a single
flame, that flame is of a dazzling, unnatural white. It illuminates a room deep
within the core of the huge rock, and it illuminates the activities of three
men and a boy, the sole so to speak human inhabitants of the castle.
Not to say, however, that
there are not other presences there, even other intelligences: There is a feeling or sound as if of the
beating of many wings. There is
sometimes a light the exact colour of darkness. There is a smell like a giant
moth. Things slip sideways
from the corner of the eye. There are thickenings in the air that seem
about to burst. There are sudden coldnesses that pass about in silence. The Castle in the Rock is full to the top with
atmospheres and spirits.
At first, all seems silent
in the chamber in the centre of the Castle in the Rock. Only the single white
unflickering flame. But later, when we have thickened into shape, we will hear
an undercurrent of voices which guides the procedures being undertaken. Each of
the Magi is involved in the summoning and maintaining of powerful energies.
They have in mind an architecture or pattern of multifold interperability, a
self-sustaining web of invisible forces limited only by the latencies of its
deep structures. To this end they labour, guided by their sympathies and their
experience, by the knowledge passed onto them, the knowledge of forms and
essences divined over countless generations by the ancients.
[Now we are nearly here,
we are arriving in the shadows at the edge of the Chamber, it is hard to squeeze through so much rock, so much time. Track
stands by the flame, reading a huge book in which are written all the possible
futures. His lips are moving as he reads a line here and there. The secret
hinges of the world are implied in its cryptic, ever-changing text. Schadengraf
stands in the midst of a pentacle, moving his arms in a pre-determined pattern
and sometimes singing in a horrible, cracked falsetto. Gremthell watches his
bubbling pot, adding tinctures to the potion, stirring thrice widdershins,
feeding more incense to the brazier, reciting a spell in an unknown language.
The fourth occupant of the room, apart from ourselves, is a boy of about ten or
eleven years. I do not know him. He is not in the directory of Wizards. He is
eating from a bowl with a spoon made of horn. He wears a shapeless tunic. He
seems relaxed and distracted, possibly tired. I think we can attempt a little
limited contact with him. He is feeling.....he is......cold......food slides
down his throat....ah. Peristalsis. How satisfying. He thinks....is
thinking......(mother image. Dark warm. Loss. Lost.) He wonders what his
parents are doing. He misses them. He is confused. He has been recently
frightened.
Stumbling after the retreating glow through the unknown lowering of
formless shadows and crying out in fear as he reaches the last figure, pulling
at his robe, the head turns towards him, he falls, is lifted.
(The wizards crowd round the singular apparition. There is an image,
that is to say, of faces, blurred and shifting, with stern expressions.)
Walid is weeping. His eyes, his eyes fill with tears. There is a
tightness in his throat. His nose feels pinched. He is leaking.
"Mama."
"Mama."
Mama is not here. Mama is a long way away somewhere else. Here there are
only strange men.
There
is speech in a language to which we do not have access.
Walid is hoisted onto the shoulder of the square one, and taken up to
the great dark walls and open gate of the Castle in the Rock. Inside, all the
sounds are different. He is put on a pile of sacks in a corner and left
sniffling. After a while a thin, bearded one older than death comes with a
glass box with fire in and some brown dry sticky things which he shows are to
be eaten. He eats one himself.
Walid is amazed at the box of light. The tall one prevents him from
touching it, but hangs it on a hook nearby. Walid is unwilling to eat the brown
things. The tall one puts one in his hand and Walid drops it, but it smells
good and is sticky, and when he licks his finger it is sweet. When he eats,
stuffing them in his mouth, the sweet brown liquid oozes down his throat and
out between his lips. The tall one smiles, which is probably friendly, but
which is like looking into a graveyard. He produces a ball from his pouch. The
ball glows. He moves his hands over the ball, which is then gone. He looks up,
and the ball is there in his hand again. He throws it away with a sudden,
dismissive flick. Walid's shock and disappointment turn to wonder when the ball
bounces, glowing back to his feet.
The wizard smiles again, shows him a glass of milk, a blanket, turns and
leaves.
Walid stares at the bright box as he holds the ball, which he dare not
throw into the endless darkness beyond. He is never going to let this ball go.
Never. Never. Never.
Now, quickly, we must go.
Track is onto us. All of you now. Come on.
<<§>>
GUIDE G.A. 94721.
report follows:
Led party in third-person
narratorial mode into Cavern in Rock
(Scene B.S. (P/T) 041/=k).
Experienced psychic probe phenemenon, possibly deriving from subject 'Track' (ref.01). Request and recommend
discontinuation of intrusive monitoring around this episode, and in particular
this scene and subsequent 'magical' episodes (P/T 49, 52, 75, 76, 77, etc.). The reduction of client insertion
already implemented has eased, but not eradicated the dangers inherent in this
proceedure, which I estimate to be AMBER with particular emphasis on the
effects of penetration, probing, ghosting. There is a possibility of flux or
even temporal transference, remote as this may seem. The possibility remains
strong that such activities and their concomitant effects will alter or disturb
the course of this probability, and result in inversion, warping, and other,
frankly unpredictable results in violation of the Codicil requirements and
guarantees 5, 7, 12, 19, 31b and etc. etc.
This is a dangerous time.
<{§}>
The Idealist sits behind
his eyes engaging with the tasks which he confronts. Magic is a form of
confusion. Once things are seen clearly, such elements can be eliminated. In
thus such a way does his conscious mind regard the parched hinterland of his
internality. He is content that all from that quarter should be laid neatly in
rows, like the rows of wheat in the fields either side of the straight road.
Behind him stretched the
long grey train of his army, inching across the broad, flat plain towards the
distant mountains, the setting sun. In an hour more they would break the march
and set up tents in blocks and lines, build twenty-five similar fires, cook
their food, and sleep. Provisions, bedding, tools, lists, procedures, order.
All plans turn within the great plan, as laid down by patterns perceptible to
the intellect, grasped by reason.
The reports of scouts had
indicated that the area around the Castle in the Rock, (a swampy, wooded,
unhealthy place in need of drainage, clearance and resettlement) had been
defended against approach. Unnatural-seeming growth around the edges of the
swamp had blocked the paths. There was no possibility of moving in the cavalry
and heavy equipment, nor yet of marching in a large company of infantrymen in
good order. A pitched battle was unlikely in any case. Norbert Sedge smiled a
small, taut smile. It was very well. He would not be unprepared.
<<§>>
It was a long march with
the slow, creaking carts full of speculations.
When the carts were
unpacked they did not disgorge the expected stock of halberds, pikes, chain
mail, breastplates, cannon balls and soforth. Instead there were shovels,
buckets, huge leather socks, hammers, long boards, stakes, planks, dowels,
awls, saws, ropes and all manner of contraptions for pumping and scooping.
There was a great deal of unpacking and assembling, gathering and collecting,
sorting and issuing and receiving and explaining.
The first organised
parties approached the borders of the swamp across a ferny heath. They cleared
the area of bracken, which they tied in bundles and stacked. Another party
squelched round the edges of watery areas collecting reeds and carrying them to
a gradual pile. Small thickets were also cut down, and the occasional large
tree that was caught out on its own. The main body of the wood remained
untouched, a glowering presence at the limits of the world, the dark boundary
of the unknown.
These bundled ferns and
reeds and the brushwood were used to make runways, tracks or pontoon bridges
across the liquid plain. The paths were narrow and temporary, made to slide
barges or trays along, which in turn bore large devices made of wood and brass
and leather. Most of these machineries were left resting in various positions
along the course of the trackways, but two, which resembled thin cannons, were
taken right up to the edge of the wood, and supplied with a stock of large and
heavy barrels which had to be rolled more than a league.
Filbert Gran died in the
attempt, squelched into the sucking mud. He had been pressed with his brother
and two friends, given grey clothes and told to march. Rolling barrels over the
endless, shiny, stinking mud, coming to a place where the boards slapped
loosely against water, and so trying to build up speed he had lost his footing;
the raised edge of the track failed to hold the barrel on its course, Filbert
grabbed for it, it whirled him round, pulling his legs away from the slippery
boards. The end he grabbed slowed dramatically relative to the other, but its
momentum propelled it forward, sideways, over the edge, with Filbert
underneath.
The barrel remained where
it was, as if cautious of further movement. Of course, all this was physics,
the simple, inevitable laws of motion; there was nothing uncanny about it,
despite the talk of the soldiers.
There were few major
settlements in this underdeveloped western region, none near the swamp. The
grim straight road was more of a promise or a threat. The small villages and
the scattered farmhouses were visited with orders for a 'special levy' to be
made by the authority of the Count. By this means the army was to be supplied
during what seemed to be a siege, as far as anyone could tell, although it was
the strangest siege in recollection, with no enemy in sight, nor any garrison,
nor any parley, nor any restraint of passage of goods and foodstuffs, nor any
attempt at encirclement. In truth the enemy was isolated enough already, if
there were any enemy.
They had been there a
week, and the weather had been good, although dark clouds gathered in the West,
and they looked set fair for a month, for all anyone could tell. The wits of
their commanders were becoming strained with the effort of keeping them
gainfully employed or at least busy. News of their first fatality spread
quickly through the camp. Until that point the stinging flies and the noises
from the swamp at night had been the greatest worry.
It was not long before
others died. On the eighth night a terrible rainstorm turned the camp to mud and
raised the water level in the swamp several inches. Two men drowned, having
blundered into soft mud when their tent collapsed, the rain smacking at them in
lumps so that they could not see, or breathe, or speak, or hear properly, the
water on the ground everywhere equally leaping to meet the water falling out of
the sky, there being no perceptible division between 'camp' and 'swamp' any
more.
After that, all water was
the same water, there was nowhere to get dry, there were the flies, and the
snakes and other things escaping the flood, the food was wet and spoiling,
there was little or no fresh fruit. Now they began to fall ill and die of
fever, sickness, diahorrea. Some began to say the place was cursed. Green mould
grew on leather. Rust began to eat chain mail. Still it rained. The horses
began to lose their hooves. It rained for seven weeks, not always hard, in fact
it may sometimes only have been low cloud, but before it stopped raining the
pontoons and brushwood walkways had vanished and everything was the colour of
mud, except the shining, naked water.
When the sun began to heat
the mud the floods gradually began to slip back, but the flies and stink were
twice as bad, and a dank, unhealthy mist rose from the water, setting to a fog
as thick as butter when the air cooled in the night.
Your companions, clothes,
hair, face, body, tent, bed, food, horse (if you had one), even your name were
all a uniform brown with mud. Elsewhere was only shining water and the sickly
mist. Or else it was all invisible, everything separated by a fog which stopped
fires burning and killed a shout at arm’s length.
Whether it was this, or
fever from the bites of the water flies, or what on earth or beyond it was -
who could possibly do more than merely indicate certain prevailing conditions
at this distance ? - but anyway a fear gripped the camp, a fear that there was
something uncanny about this change in the weather, a fear that turned to stark
panic when a flock of birds or bats or some flying experience perhaps confused
by the fog flew into the camp and beat about them with blind wings and sat
croaking on the ground and on the ridges of the tents to be disturbed suddenly
by a stray foot in the dark.
"SPIRITS"
was the cry then, and all
was running and splashing and separate red panics. Had there been someone,
someone in authority who had the respect and trust and affection of the
soldiers, and who had called out to the men to stay, not to run from birds in a
fog and into certain, sucking danger; but to join together in a group and feel
the strength of their community, which would defend them from danger; had there
been some such person there then perhaps Norbert Sedge would not have retreated
in defeat from his first foray against the powers of the west, but as it was
his protestations were in vain and his exhortations went unheeded.
Many died that night. It
was at the head of a reduced and much chastened force that the Grim Rationalist
set about regrouping, fifteen leagues or so away, on the nearest hill.
<<{§}>>
Snape, when we find him
first, has not quite recovered from the experience of volunteering for barrel
rolling. We have to go through it, it preys on his mind. He had thought it
would be better to do something rather than march around the camp for the
amusement of Sergeants. Barrels had always had pleasant connotations for him
before this, they had generally contained something good, but nothing in his
previous experience of barrels had prepared him for rolling large numbers of
huge ones over duckboards surrounded by an endless swamp. Snape was big, and
liked to take things slowly, so he rolled his barrels carefully over the
creaking, splashing track. It was he who had christened it 'Norbert's Pier'.
There were eight of them
rolling in a team, and then they stacked the barrels and walked back. Snape had
been working with some men from his village, among them Filbert Gran and his
brother, and in fact had been immediately behind when Filbert had lost control
of his barrel and been squelched. There's no other word for it, really, he
thought, the mud too soft to allow 'squashed', but the humour of it disturbed
him. It had been a bad thing. Filbert tried too hard, was going too fast,
endangering himself. Snape had said as much, but Filbert had just smiled and
shrugged and shaken his head and opened his hands towards him as if saying 'What can I do ? This is the way of me. I can no more control
me than change the weather.' Which is the way of things, after all, even
among friends. When Snape closed his eyes he could see the barrel lurch, and he
felt the dizzy jerk in his gut that comes with stepping down something
unexpected.
They had squelched through
the expanding edges of the swamp and past the first few farms to the low hills
and the first (or last) settlement and the beginning (or as it had seemed to
them before the end) of the road, which led indifferently off into the distance
across the wide plain and towards the rich farmlands of home. Camp was
re-assembled, messengers were sent back to the Court. Latecomers arrived in
sodden grey uniforms. Men shuffled and spat.
Snape had been seconded to
kitchen duty, and was sent with a party of heavily armed men to collect
provisions from the local market that Tuesday. They trudged into town through
the rain, the general view of the party being that they should retire to an
alehouse for the day, but the officer in charge was some toffee-nosed squit
with a head full of duties, and their Sergeant was well-known for his rough and
ready dispensation of martial justice, so it was with little enough expectation
of a good time that the troop passed the first dirty hovels at the outskirts of
Newholme and realised they were already in the centre. Snape, as appointed
expert, detached himself from the general body of the troop and inspected the
meagre stalls of produce set out around the mud. There was precious little available,
the quality was appalling, the prices, when enquired about, insanely high. Such
was the effect of this on the spirits of the party that it was only the
unexpected decision by the Viscomte de Gallas to retire to the hostelry that
pacified them.
Once inside the
unpromising shed, marked by a bush hanging above the door, the Viscomte was
ushered into a private room and the rest of the company removed their helmets,
ordered ale and stood in a gently steaming group round the fire.
The landlord was a fat
thief with one eye and a greasy beard. Snape and the Sergeant, leaning now on
the bar with their attention on the hams and the sausages hanging from the
rafters, saw him enter the kitchens, saw, later, plates of food being carried
out to the private room, a joint of roast beef dripping with gravy, two
partridges and a pheasant, piles of roast potatoes, an assortment of pies each
venting a secret steam, fruit, wine, brandy, cheese, bread, yellow slabs of
butter, jugs of cream.
"Well now, landlord,
you lay a fine table."
"For those as can
pay."
"Why yes, of course,
we understand matters of trade, we are not brigands,
are we lads ?"
(Calls of 'no', 'not
likely' and 'worst luck' from the troops.)
"But privately,
between ourselves, you must have had word of our coming."
"No, to be sure, had I known I would have
had something special prepared, a
roast
sucking-pig, perhaps; or a full banquet, eh, with dancing; but as it
is all we have is beef,
ham, fowl, cheese, bread, soup, fruit......."
"Dancing ? Well, there's a thought. You mean to say you
have all this provender just lying spare, on the off-chance ? You never get all this from the Market out
there."
"Ha ! The Market !
There's not many buying today, I'll warrant. That's
just what Sir Hugo left
instructions for."
"Oh," continued
Snape, not really understanding, "So where do you get your
provisions ?"
"From Sir Hugo, by his warrant, from the
local farms. There's not much left for
Market. We've had unseasonal weather this twelvemonth. Unseasonal."
"You can say that again, right enough. We
were caught in the rain properly
a day or two back, and
near washed clean away. The Sergeant here lost his hair in a sudden downpour,
and I myself was a thin man, before the flood."
"Ha ! Yes, well things have been this way or near
as bad for months. Would
you gentlemen be requiring
anything more ?"
"As to our
requirements, Landlord, well, a ton of gold, a mile of beer, a
waggon-load of women and
six acres of land each might see us through, but for now I think a slice of pie
and another jug of ale for the Sergeant and myself will have to do."
In due course the company
re-assembled, and marched from the hostelry in a ragged line with the Viscomte
ambling on his charger at its head. At an order from the Sergeant three men
approached each of the stalls in the market and overturned them. Sullen faces
peered at the backs of the soldiers as they returned to camp.
When news of the
expedition reached the Grim Rationalist he filleted the essential from the raw
information. His first reaction was to declare war on Sir Hugo. But Sir Hugo
would have to wait. First it was necessary to feed and billet the troops. The
<<§>>
There was no doubt a great
hewing of trees and cutting of planks and sawing of timbers. Also a great
stripping and demolishing of barns, much to the disgust of local farmers, who
had a hard enough time as it was, what with the rain falling on the mud, and
the mud rising up to meet it. And the Grim Rationalist decreed that a vast
number of barges be constructed, and that strange boats with hinged bottoms be
built, and a number of brass devices appeared up the long road from the coast
and were attached to certain of the smaller barges, and at a certain time this
weird flotilla was nudged, slithered and dragged to the edge of the swamp, in
sight of the looming trees (had it not been for the eerie, swirling mist.)
The men were embarked
according to instructions, and the barges slid over the liquescent surface of
the swamp propelled by water wheels powered by a crank. But the Grim
Rationalist was no crank. He so arranged things by the exercise of consciousness
over matter (but mediated through social and mechanical systems _ structures,
oh my beloved) that those certain smaller barges equipped with brass implements
first approached the huge trees across the lake, and taking aim with their
wierd nozzles, and priming their fuel-lines, and building up pressure in their
air-skins they sent forth vast, billowing clouds of flame which crept
frightfully over the surface of the water, sizzling, and which stuck to the
skin of the trees and burned into their sapwood and through to their ancient
hearts, the flames tearing upward, crackling the great flabby leaves on the
huge pendant branches.
Imagine.....Patches of
fire drift across the water. Soon the barges of the fire-breathers would also
be consumed by the flames. A line of flat-bottomed boats was arranged and
scuttled, the mariners from these sacrificial vessels clambering aboard barges
which returned them to base camp, (constructed on piles, but rather barge-like
itself) to collect more boats and sink them too. In this way an almost
perfectly straight channel was made from the region that can now properly be
termed 'river' deep into the place we now consider a drained swamp.
At certain times, after a
day or two, when the smoke had died down and the mist lifted a little, before
the rain came again, it would have been possible, perhaps, to see a blackened
area in the wooden fringes of the impenetrable swamp, an area marked by inroads
of sky against black spikes. It was towards this caesura that the channel of dead
boats proceeded.
<<*>>
The mythic histories of
those few primitive swamp-dwellers who remain seem to fuse this conflagration
with its magical counterpart in the figure of 'the Bull-Dragon' or 'Great
Crocodile'. (See here Grûber's seminal account 'The Religion of the Bulldozer',
Berlin, 1942). Imagine, however, if you will, the cowering, mud-stained pygmy
brought face to face with the implacable force of technology, the awe, the
revelation of the majesty of the coming age. We shall return to this motif of
fire destroying him who wields it at a later time.
<<*>>
Jehb stood at the edge of the wood and looked out at the distant,
toiling figures. He had come to shoot water-birds, but the activity had scared
them, they were feeding elsewhere. He spat into the still water.
'Shitfuckers.'
<<§>>
'Historical Visitations'
is all decent and respectable. We don't do no snuffs, we don't do perverts, we
do proper historically significant moments, what we call crucial narratives. We
get trouble sometimes, mostly with the guides, sometimes with the customers,
but it's usually nobody's fault, it's just the way it takes them.
Materialisation and time-porting and psychism, well, they wear you down, they
can come as a shock to the client, but for a guide, they wear you down.
<<§>>
What worries me is the way
in which by entering the mind of another we might change the way it thinks of
itself. The mind is bigger, more active than we know. Our knowing of ourselves
is merely conscious. I don't want to be caught. And then the narrative, when
the narrative seems clear, by, when entering, and then taking places, picking
spots where something is made into a point on a string which is a necklace of
moments pointing one way into the future, when really at each of these points,
and any point, anywhere there is always the endlessly possible stretching out
into other places. Sometimes the world is wearing thin. Sometimes it almost
seems as though we are tying up the past, holding it to the shape we want. It
seems as though anything could happen. And when you enter, silent, secret,
slow, reserving yourself in a hidden place, behind imaginary barriers in an
imaginary space within a distant time, hollowed, whittled, refined, distilled
to a whisper....... then you are almost not, and perhaps if something were to
happen you might cease to be, might never come back.
<<§>>
As each barge is sunk in
position and the end-boards removed, water rushes in, thick and oily and green
grey, and flows out of the far end into the deeper water of the river. A
further party is detailed to clear obstructions in the river downstream, but
the recent rain has done most of that, and the river slides, wide and flat, off
through the distant plain.
They build for weeks. They
build 4,000 barges. They pile bags of mud on top of muddy banks. They bail and
sluice and drain and dredge and caulk. They live for months in the bilges,
coaxing soupy water out of mud. Still the rain comes, sometimes thin and
gradual, sometimes solid. The network of barges spreads out its delicate
capillaries like the veins in a leaf. Mud chokes the channels, walls give way
beneath the weight of mud, mud pushes at the creaking boards, men wade or
paddle anxiously through the channels, hearing the walls creak as the mud
presses with infinite subtlety, infinite patience, oozing and seeping.
Six men are crushed when
the walls give way in channel b.12 as they investigate a blockage. Repair work
takes three weeks. Four men are drowned in flash floods. Twenty-seven men
suffer serious injuries manoeuvering barges into position. Seventeen are lost
without trace 'outside' the network of scuppered boats. Five are drowned when
their barge sinks before time. One hundred and twenty-three men desert. The
countryside is stripped of timber. There are no carpenters to be found, neither
for gold nor for love in fifteen counties.
Still the rain comes.
Still the water rises.
<<§>>
Newholme itself was little
more than mud. The troops were huddled in barns and hen-houses, decamped upon
the floors of hovels, tucked into lofts and privies. There was no timber to
spare for building shelters.
Sir Hugo had been
prevailed upon, by force of necessity, to provision the troops, but a meagre
ration was all that was forthcoming. At least Snape got his share of what there
was. Whatever grew underwater, or had escaped the mould. Whatever you could
cook out of damp barley flour, in a wood oven, that's what they ate. Truth and
Reason, all very fine in principle, no doubt, were not great rallying-cries to
the diseased stomach; but at least there was no more cholera 'up here', the
water was clean.
It was clean because it
was rain water.
The cholera had drowned.
Snape hadn't seen the
laborious inching of the capillary channels, he didn't care, he wasn't interested,
he just chopped and stirred and washed, and stayed as much in the kitchen of
the Inn as he could manage, and as near the oven as he thought advisable, and
sometimes nearer than that.
<<§>>
MEMO : to GUIDE 94271
It is known that this
period (P/T 041/=k-93) shows signs of instability. Advise caution regarding
probing, ghosting. Present narrative must continue at all costs. No,
repeat no infringements of Codicil are anticipated, the situations are being
fully monitored. Take it easy.
Travis.
<<§>>
"Take it easy ! Take it easy ! I'm fucking mad about this. He expects me to
take a party of V.I.P.'s up against trained wizards and 'take it easy' at the
same time. Fuckwit."
"You need a
break."
"I need a break. I
need.......Oh Christ, I'm sorry, lover. I better take a pill, I better smoke a
joint, I better go to bed, I ought to eat, and have a shower."