The silence resumes.
I stand upon the track at the entrance to the mine’s compound in the deep dusk light; the sky is a cooling turquoise bowl above the dark, silent crowds of trees. The sunlight drains slowly up the slope beyond, falling back before the shadows. The air is fragrant, full of the smell of pine resin, replacing the stink of cartridge smoke. The dull red gravel beneath my feet rasps as I turn to survey the killing ground.
I watch the lieutenant’s men as they cautiously check the prostrate forms littering the earth, guns levelled and ready as they frisk and search each body, expropriating guns, ammunition and whatever else takes their fancy. One of the fallen moans as he’s turned over on his back and is quieted with a knife, breath gurgling from the wound like a sigh. Curiously little blood.
The lieutenant has checked the gun, finding it intact; Mr Cuts seems fascinated by it, climbing over it to test its controls, spinning metal wheels, hauling on its levers, pulling the shining steel plug of the thread ridged breech open and sticking his nose inside. The lieutenant tries to use the radio, but has to climb back up to the ridge before making contact. The trailer behind the truck is opened, revealing boxes full of shells and charges for the field gun.
The back of the devastated truck yields more ammunition, various supplies, food and several crates of wine, mostly undamaged.
The jeep that left the farm appears up the track, heralded by a shout from the man the lieutenant has left on the ridge. The men from the jeep all whoop and laugh and back clap those who took the mine, telling of their own fire fight, surprising another truck further down the track leading to the mine. Stories are told, joking insults traded, and a sense of relief fills the air, as obvious and sharp as the scent of pine. Two dozen or more they have killed. In exchange; one trivial flesh wound, already cleaned and bandaged.
Something moves at my feet. I look down and there at my feet, like another wounded soldier, I see a bee, crawling heavy and awkward, clambering blindly over the cold surface of the gravel track, dying in its thick, furry uniform as the season’s chill turns against it.
Another shout from the man on the cliff top and an engine’s roar comes from down the track. One of the trucks from the farm comes bustling up, lights flashing. It rumbles straight towards me; I have to step back off the track to let it roll growling past. It turns, swaying, in the centre of the buildings and grates to a stop. I look down at where its wheels passed, expecting … but the bee, uncrushed, crawls on.
We leave quickly after that; the truck takes the gun, booty and us, while the jeep leads the way, struggling with the weighty ammunition trailer. At the farm the second truck assumes the burden of the trailer and the farmer is breezily informed where his horses may he found. His look is dark but he wisely holds his tongue.
The lieutenant takes to her jeep again; I am left in the rear of the second truck with some of the joking soldiers; a bottle of wine is pressed into my hand and a cigarette offered as we jolt down the track and into the gathering darkness beneath the trees.
There is one last act, just before we find the first narrow metalled road; a jolt of brakes and a burst of gunfire from ahead sends everyone diving for their guns and helmets. Then shouts tell us the matter’s settled.
It had been a pick up, full of comrades of those killed at the mine, shot even as they hailed the lights approaching them. They too are dispatched without injury to the lieutenant’s men, only one of their number even escaping the bullet torn vehicle, to die face down on the track. The pick up, on fire, is nudged out of the way by the leading truck, settles on its side in a weed choked ditch beneath the trees, and begins to crackle with exploding ammunition. We leave it blazing in the night alone, and bump off, singing, for the road.
I watch that distant burning for some time as we ride the long straight road back. The blazing pick up, the bushes, the overhanging trees and whatever lies about to be infected by their fever produce a pyre that grows and yet does not; a quivering, climbing conflagration beating at the night sky and spreading just as we diminish it by moving off from it, so that the whole unsteady mass seems fixed, and that furiously unrepeatable consumption, for a while, enduring. But then, from the cold Jolting of the truck’s open rear, swinging wildly through the bends created by empty vehicles long abandoned, I watch as all we have consigned to the starry night’s attention eventually succumbs, and the glaring flames die down.
I do not sing or shout, or drink, or laugh with the merry crew I share the truck’s side benches with. Instead I wait, for an ambush, crash or climax that does not come, and when, in this night’s loud midwinter, we turn into our home’s drive, I sense the castle’s bulk both with surprise and a sick, sure disappointment.
Chapter 13
The hand’s grasp near fits the skull, the covering bone by bone enclosed. And saying this, we grasp that.
We each contain the universe inside our selves, the totality of existence encompassed by all that we have to make sense of it; a grey, ridged mushroom mass ladled into a bony bowl the size of a smallish cooking pot (the lieutenant’s men should look inside the webbed and greasy darkness of their own tin helmets, and see the cosmos). In my more solipsistic moments, I have conjectured that we do not simply experience everything within that squashed sphere, but create it there too. Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so in a sense deserve whatever happens to us, for not having had the wit to imagine something better. So when, despite my gut felt certainty of doom, we arrive back at the castle uncrashed, not ambushed, and find it hale and whole and everyone within it present and correct, my earlier dread vanishes like mist before the wind, and I feel a curious sense of victory, and even, contrarily, of vindication. As ever, when in this fervidly self referential mood, I decide that whatever unsleeping force of will continually keeps my life steered to a safe and proper course has triumphed over the half sensed vagaries of a current that might have led to danger. It could be that I have kept the lieutenant and her men safe from a disaster that would have befallen them had I not been present; perhaps I have indeed been their guide in more ways than they know.
Still, as we roar swaying up the drive, lights making a tunnel of the grey and leaf bare trees, I consider this supposition, and consider it, to be charitable, unlikely. It is too neat, too self contained; one of those facile faiths to which we give credit, but draw none from, and whose only certain effect is to make us become what does not become us.
The trucks draw up outside the castle, the men jump down, and laugh and shout and joke. Tailgates bang flat, rattling chains, the gun’s unhitched, the plunder from the mine is manhandled, thrown down and carried off and the soldiers left in the castle rush out to meet those returned from the fray. Backs are slapped, pulled punches thrown, rough, hugs exchanged, bottles are clinked and hoisted, and the raucous laughter of relief fills the night air with steaming breath.
I climb demurely down, unable to join in all this hail fellowing. I look for you, my dear, thinking you might be with this welcoming crowd, or just watching from a window, but you do not appear. I see the lieutenant, smiling by her new won cannon, surrounded by all this rumbustious camaraderie, looking round with close appraisal at her rowdy crew, calculation written plainly on her face. She shouts, fires her pistol in the air, and in a brief trough silence, every face turned to her, announces a party, celebration.
Break out more wine, she commands; secure some dancing partners from the camp of dispossessed, have the servants prepare the very finest feast they can from what’s in store, and charge the generator with some precious fuel to turn on all the castle’s lights; tonight we all make merry!,
The soldiers whoop for joy, bay at the moon, and raise gun muzzles to the skies, firing in crackling, deafening agreement, a feu de joie to wake the dead.
A quick conference between the lieutenant and Mr Cuts, standing by the gun and looking at the bridge across the moat, while men run from truck to castle, carrying crates between them, arms bowed out in balance, others shoulder drums of fuel and head for the stables while most directing one truck’s lights at the camp of refugees go amongst their tents, issuing invitations, indeed insisting on the company of its women at the festivities. I hear shouts, wails and threats; some scuffles start and heads are cracked, but there are no shots. The soldiers start to return, dragging partners by the wrist; some meek, some cursing, some still struggling into clothes, some hopping on grass and gravel as they put on shoes. The faces of their forsaken men, darkly desperate, watch from the shadowed tents.