‘Close one there, eh, Lovegod?’ the lieutenant says, winking. The youth gives a nervous laugh and quickly does himself up again. You have looked away. ‘Lovegod had a narrow escape,’ the lieutenant tells you, scanning the sky for more sport. ‘Shrapnel, wasn’t it, Lovegod?’ The soldier boy grunts, still embarrassed. ‘Shell,’ the lieutenant informs us. ‘Could even have been fired by one of the guns we can hear now,’ she says, eyes narrowing, nose raised to the wind. The two soldiers look puzzled and you give no sign. I concentrate, and there indeed, now I’m listening for it again, is that distant, nearly subsonic rumble of the faraway artillery. ‘Ah …’ the lieutenant breathes, as another blur of tiny birds rush down from the higher slopes and circle in the air round the pool.
Several of the birds, only wounded. fall one wing fluttering, trapped in a tiny confusion of fallen, blasted leaves to land near your feet, hitting the ground to cheep and flap about with eccentric self concern, only to be stood on.
When you were younger, you would have cried to hear their tiny skulls crack so. But you have learned to look away and inspect your gun, or with those strands of spent smoke greyly curling against your worn up hair, break it and reload.
Ah, did I desire you at that moment; I wanted you for that night, unwashed, half dressed, in a tangle of clothes and rugs and boots and belts, anxious by an eager, open fire while that cartridge powder perfume lingered blackly on your skin and in your let down hair.
It was not to be. Having granted me the status of hound for the rest of our shoot and filling two sacks with the booty, the lieutenant orders me to an early bed like a fractious child, on our return to the castle.
It was, I think, for my transgression. Between gun dog and child, I become briefly a pack animal, ordered to carry the heavy, warm sacks of dead birds and a broken gun on our way back home by the same steep route.
Behind me, the lieutenant talks on, regaling you with her life; another broken home. A mean start in less troubled times, modest victories at school and sport building a dawning self esteem and leading to a slow and self determined struggle up from the rest of the herd. There followed a stint at some college then ~ with the coy hint of a disappointment in love the decision to enlist, some time before the onset of the present hostilities.
Tiresomely, then, one of those for whom such troubles are in truth a liberation, providing the making of the individual character within the theatre of this greater destruction; a contrarily minor eddy of creation in these fiercely corrosive times. Our lieutenant’s is a spirit freed by the re ordering implicit in this general disorder; a beneficiary, so far, of the conflict. That which has dragged us down has buoyed her up, and, in the castle, we meet, mirrored, and perhaps pass.
I might like to hear more of our captor’s story, but seeing my opportunity I drop my precious cargo. On the first bridge across the stream I slip and clutch at the damply greasy rail, letting the bulky sacks drop from me, with the gun, so all the lieutenant’s catch goes flying down to the rapids far below. The gun just disappears without a fuss, its own splash lost within the endless foaming rush of that steep stream. The sacks fall more slowly, hit a swirling pool and let forth their dead. The birds sail out, the foaming water fills with feather, lead and flesh, and the wet birds water skinnied even further float and circle and peel off and race away in that airy torrent.
I rise slowly, wiping green slime from my hands. The lieutenant comes up to me, grim faced. She glances over the side of the bridge at the noisy, eddying surge below, as all her booty speeds away. ‘That was careless, Abel,’ she tells me through lips like a grey pink wound and teeth which seem disinclined to part.
‘Perhaps I chose the wrong shoes,’ I offer, apologetic. She looks down at my brown brogues; reasonably rustic in aspect but with poor soles for such terrain.
‘Perhaps,’ she says. I do believe I am frightened of her, just for this moment. I could believe that she is capable of blowing a hole in me with her shotgun, or putting a bullet from her pistol through my head, or even just having me thrown over this wooden parapet by her men. Instead she takes one last glance at where the birds have disappeared within the rocky race and, in that cataract losing sight of them, has the soldiers load me with the remaining guns. ‘I really wouldn’t lose those, Abel,’ she says, sounding almost sad. ‘Really.’ She turns away. ‘Watch our friend carefully,’ she tells the man behind me. ‘We don’t want him slipping again. That would be too terrible. Eh, my lady?’ she asks as she passes you. We tramp on, and leave the river’s roar buried in its chasm.
I am closed within a high and unused room, a silted backwater in the east tower’s highest floor. Cluttered, it is, jumbled with all the froth of our living, like our fond remembered attic. The small windows are mostly smashed, their sills spattered with bird droppings. The fractured panes let in chill rain; I stuff some old curtains into the spaces. In the cold grate I light a fitful fire from bound, collected volumes of old and yellow paged magazines, some of them dealing with hunting and other rural matters; it seems appropriate.
This theme continues. I cannot believe the good lieutenant memorised the castle’s every room on one tour round, so I conclude it is just luck that she has me confined here, with these old journal collections, and in glass cases trophies of previous hunts. Animals, birds and fish stare out, glassy eyed and stiffly posed, like awkward ancestors in paintings. The cases are locked; I look for keys in vain, so force a few of these glass sarcophagi, splintering the wood and fracturing the glass.
Regarding the stuffed fowl, the gutted fish, the glass eyed fox and hare, I tap their hard, dead eyes, sniff their dustless plumage and stroke their strange dry skins. Feathers and scales stay with my hand. I hold them up to the candelight, trying to see their link, the time slow change from sea to air, from scale to feather, tail to tail, iridescence to iridescence that these ends unravel back to, expressing evolution’s glacial, erratic continuity. The scale, so small, stays too great, however, and remains unseen.
I throw open a narrow window over the moat and launch the birds; they fall. I heave the fish out to the waters; they float. I suppose this is the extra element revealed; the quickness found in living things which ranks above the rest and makes fire, air, earth and water seem closer to each other than ever they are to it.
Just so, the bird and fish, elementally distinguished, are more similar to each other than either is to us. (I stretch the unpinned wings they grate upon their keel. The lithe trout’s body, a single fluid muscle wrapped in rainbow tissue, stays inflexible as bone.) But theirs is a beauty of extremity, and I remember catching sight of a bat, silhouetted against a floodlight, its skin like translucent paper, each long and tiny bone picked out in a tracery of exposed flight; the thing was comely but the outline of elongated limb, the paw shape stretched out contorted to become half the wing itself, looked like some preposterous distortion, a mad exaggeration of form which nature somehow ought to feel guilty for. The grace and poise bestowed upon the beast by that exaggerated reformation of its inherited parts, from hand to wing, is something that hands alone, need time and a mind to fashion so decidingly.
I throw the useless things away, burning them on the bed of pages. Before I go to bed, on a platform of boxes, rugs and cloaks, I eat the tray of roasted peahen, plucked but dressed, you have the lieutenant send to me.
I dreamt that night, and in amongst the amber wreckage of your eyes, like a fractured glass containing your chill spirit, hazy visions of a brighter fate swam slow. It was, in the end, the usual thing, the ordinary speciality of our minds’ house, a seamy buffeting wrestled out within the pillowed folds of the brain; desire expressed, wishing to impress. Yet, like an old book by fire or dampness warped, around the edges of this fancy lurked my submerged thought (or dream’s the fire, consuming, the mind the centre, the little bit unburned, the prose reduced, promoted to a random poesy).
And I have written you, my dear; I have left my mark, my pen’s spilled, I’ve left you soiled and more than my tongue has lashed. falling, to raise the scores. Cut, hurt, tied, taken, left, you want what you do not want and get it; a kinder fate, it suits me to consider, than really wanting what you do, and not.