I retire to the castle, climb to the battlements and by the tower, the same one in which I was imprisoned last night inspect the trio the lieutenant had suspended here. They sway in a damp breeze, uniforms flapping. The dark hoods over their heads, I see now, are pillow slips of black silk where often our heads have lain. The moist fabric clings to their features, turning their faces into sculptures of jet. Two of them, arms dangling tied behind, have their chins on their chests as though gazing morosely down at the moat. The head of the third man is thrown back, his hands clutching the rope at his neck, his fingers pressed between the rope and black bruised skin, one leg drawn up behind his rear, his back still arched and his whole body frozen in that last desperate posture of agony. Behind the black silk, his eyes look open, staring up at the sky, accusatory.
It seems unfair; all they did was try to unearth some booty in a building abandoned by its owners, not expecting to incur the lieutenant’s vengeful wrath. She says it was to make a point, to provide an example, by initial ruthlessness to make a more lenient regime the easier to maintain.
Above them, on the flagpole, the old snow tiger skin ruffles heavy in the gentle wind. The two rear leg pieces have been crudely tied to the lanyard, the skin itself looks worn and thinned in places, it is matted with the rain that’s visited us over the last few days and still troubles the distances of plain, and in all is just too weighty for the use the lieutenant’s men have tried to press it to. A stiff breeze will hardly lift it, a strong wind will make it snap and sail all right, but much more a decent gust and I suspect it will snap the flagpole too.
It seems an ignominious end for this aged heirloom, but how else would the old thing, have ended its days? Thrown out upon a midden, burned in some bonfire? Perhaps this is a more fitting end.
It stirs itself in the curling breeze, and looses a few anointing drops of soaked up rain upon the bodies hanging under it.
The cold weather means the lieutenant’s trophies have not yet started to smell. I leave them and the furry flag to their fixed contemplation of all things pendulous and pending ,.nd walk along the serried summit of the castle.
From these brave battlements with a chosen bird of prey I used to fly my spirit free. From this quarried perch, I as much as the quarry they seized was gripped by them, and through those sleek carnivores, swift death’s craftsmen, I felt that I partook of their airborne, slicing skill, and saw, in that stooping instant of mortality, a kind of ephemeral persistence. Here were the old rules, written across the sky in dark, gliding purpose, in curved lines of flight, in the panicking dips and flips and desperate lunges, dives and sprints of the target, all answered by instant flicks and turns executed by the following, closing hawk. Here was the sudden buffeting connection sometimes, close enough, you heard the thud of talons hitting flesh the small puff of feathers that hung upon the air, then the long, corkscrewing fall, the raptor’s wings scrabbling for purchase in the air, its prey limp or struggling weakly, also flapping, and the whole, this binary avian creation one dead or dying, the other more alive than ever before, as though transfused that death melded twin secured by claw and tendon, rotating about their shared axis as they dropped locked together, drizzling feathers, distributing the game’s last plaintive cries and then falling finally to field, lawn or wood.
The dogs were trained to frighten off the hawks, then with their warm cargo come running back to the castle, across the stone moat bridge, through the courtyard, up the winding stair and out on to the battlements, a trail of feathers and blood behind them on the spiralled steps.
With those surrogate hunters I sought to be part of that ruthlessly elegant struggle of life and death, evolution and selection, predator and prey. I believed I might, through them, withstand the air’s stern siege and the slow weathering of time and the onward tramp of age, by meeting it with no cloud’s means giving way and giving in but a carving use instead; a fixity of vision and of grasp that would let me so delegated, unreduced stand, connected and defined.
The dogs died last year; some illness when there was no vet to be found. Generations of devotion and meticulous breeding went with them.
I let the damn birds go when first we left the castle, fleeing from a fate that instead found us, and where they sail now, what they see and take, I cannot know.
The wind wraps me, the wind comes to me and leaves across the beaten plains. Slim slivers of sunlight prise underneath the clouds and, reflecting, appear to take instead of give, dazzling like camouflage, by their Jarring contrast, bright on dark, breaking up the few remaining shapes and signs of civilisation still evident, in better light (like that the memory provides), within the steady chaos of the landscape’s reach.
Within the fields, the outcrop hills and the stands of trees, the stagnant oxbows gleam with a soiled yellow grace, alive to the eye from this angle only. The trees, lately coloured within the season’s slow turn chill, now are bared black shapes, branches bared for the weight of snow and the force of winter storm. Higher, the forests glisten with the clouds that slew above them and about, and snag their slow grace down.
I listen for the sound of artillery, but the freshened wind has quartered, and holds the gunfire back. That distant, artificial thunder has become an almost comforting companion over these last weeks. It is as though we have relapsed into a more primitive system of belief, as though by the fractious meddling with our collective, lived through histories we have woken one of the old gods; a storm god, one to stride, hammerfooted, anvil headed over the land, amorphous, angry and omnipresent, while thunder like the sound of cracking skulls splits over all our darkened lands and the air conducts the lightning’s breath to earth.
That woken deity marches on us now, towards the castle’s doors. The noise is like the earth’s gut rumbling, like an old fist slamming empty boards in an abandoned heaven overhead, and for all that the freshened wind has formed its own front against the blast, and moving air displaced all that noise, we know it is still there; what wind conceals, the mind insists upon revealing, providing the memory of that sound.
Air and rock, even the seas, forget quicker than we do.
A shout in the mountains fades over seconds, the earth itself rings like a bell when its sliding and colliding continents spasm. but that signal too fades over days, and for all that great storm waves and long tsunami can circle round the globe for weeks and months, our modest lump of stem flowered brain quite outdoes such crudely mechanical recollection, and what echoes in the human skull may resonate for a long lifetime of joy, fear or regret, only over decades slowly decaying.
Squinting against the barrage of light, in the distance I believe I can make out a few moving forms, frames made skinny, elongated against the ricocheting brightness of the reflecting water. I have no binoculars or spotting scopes left they have been requisitioned but either would be worse than useless, staring into this already painful light. Are those refugees I see, implicit in the shimmer of shadows against light? They could be soldiers, I suppose; they might even be you, my dear, leading our lieutenant and her men on an unintentional wild goose chase, but I think not. It might have been a herd of cattle, up to a few months ago, but most beasts hereabouts have been killed and eaten since, and the few that remain are closely watched and not allowed to wander.
Refugees, then; a pre echo of the coming front, the very image of the deep, soughing trough before the great wave falls, an in drawn breath before the scream; a rush of dead cells in these arterial ways, a scramble of dry leaves before the coming storm. Bared and broken trees line their way, the splintered stumps, the pale heart wood naked to the air; hacked, torn down for camp fires as though by massed gunfire. They stand, grown but broken, in imitation of their fretful mutilators.
The light changes, dimming the brash coruscations of the view. The river, tributaries, drainage ditches, oxbows, pools and flooded fields dim as the clouds shut off their direct source of sun. Now I can see some thin parings of smoke rising from the plain, marking where villages, farms and houses were, the dwellings built from, growing on and taking in the land and all its separated product now combining with the barren air.