CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD anticipates some of this year’s likely literary successes
As I write this it’s the tail end of January, and I sit at home on the edge of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, which means that it’s one of those times when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us and the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke.
Meanwhile, we’ve collectively at least survived the traditional blizzard of Christmas review roundups, and no doubt – unless we’re all blown to smithereens in the meantime – we’ll soon have the inevitable Easter reading recommendations and summer beach-book lists in our sights, until before long the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness rolls around once more, and with it yet more critical effusions, and so on, ad infinitum.
If for no other reason than to get a head start on the whole craze, I offer here a brazenly subjective midwinter lineup of half-a-dozen worthy candidates culled from among the many thousands of our publishers’ new or forthcoming titles, any one of which is guaranteed to warm the reader’s heart in these otherwise unremittingly bleak days and nights.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Like several million others around the world, you may know the basic outline of Haig’s breakthrough 2020 novel The Midnight Library. In short: the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed (even great writers sometimes struggle with names), in her mid-thirties, single and childless, feels useless. Her cat is dead, she’s alone, and she’s been fired. Late one night, she tries to kill herself. Unpromising, I know, but this is where Haig lifts the whole thing out of itself and into the sort of energetically sustained parallel universe that C.S. Lewis might not have disowned. Instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. All she has to do to step into that life is to open the book. You may possibly recognise some of the plot ingredients of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, itself a product of the so-called many-worlds theory in which a new universe beckons from our every choice and decision.
The whole enterprise possibly sounds a bit strained, but in Haig’s hands it delivers the goods as a serviceable get-away-from-it-all novel that works both on the level of a good yarn and a speculative rumination on what we’re really doing during our brief tenancy of the planet. What’s the best that can happen in your life, and what’s the worst? Those are the questions. Without spoiling the treat, The Midnight Train is broadly speaking in the same vein as its predecessor, only – as the title rather implies – translated from a library onto, well, a train. I’ve slightly furtively read about three-quarters of the new book in what publishers like to call uncorrected proof form, and I can confirm it’s well up to par with its distinguished prototype; both have interesting things to say about how hard it sometimes is for any of us to completely accept ourselves for what we are – and, like the eponymous train itself, it all rattles along at a brisk clip.
Canongate Books, April 2026, £20
Malcolm Galfe, Near Horizons
The author here knows his technology and he knows his psychology, and the two combine in seven wonderfully engrossing stories which themselves incorporate elements of horror, sci-fi, mystery, dystopia and good old-fashioned (it never seems to go out of style) human drama.
That said, I’m pleased to report that we’re not exactly in Stephen King, let alone Stranger Things country in Near Horizons. Without exception, Galfe’s tales have a rich, understated texture to them, weaving together a patchwork of tropes and allusions to create something that feels consistently exciting and new. He achieves his effects by tweaking our anxieties and using the suggestive power of good dialogue, not by the sudden arrival of a race of invading pod-people or their like. It’s the literary equivalent of the way in which the best Hitchcock films play with cinematic techniques to tease and torment us, and in its way just as delectable.
As a matter of fact, it’s not entirely illogical to review this title in close physical proximity to the aforementioned Matt Haig; both are neatly crafted, elegantly written, sharp, shocking and often mordantly funny. What raises Near Horizons above the pack of lesser tech-themed morality stories is Galfe’s wise and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his grasp of the elements of suspense, and the way he weaves fictional characters into recognisably true-to-life crises in consistently gripping ways.
But if Haig’s book stands as a just slightly over-manicured front lawn, complete with reassuringly familiar garden gnomes and even a fluffy household pet or two on hand, Galfe’s has an authentic touch of the jungle to it: it feels exotic and a little dangerous, often disarming the reader with a page or two of seemingly casual exposition before blindsiding them with a sudden plot twist. Or put another way: these are the sort of stories tailor-made for those of us who like to be both entertained and shocked, and perhaps also secretly comforted by the fact that it’s the characters in Near Horizons, not themselves, being manipulated in this way. There’s something inherently reassuring in the notion that nothing here could ever, surely, happen to us – an almost physically soothing sensation, like a welcome descent into a warm bath when the door is firmly locked and bolted against a storm raging outside. I confidently predict that we will be hearing much more of this supremely assured author in the future.
Woodbridge Publishers, November 2025, hardcover £16.12, paperback £13.05
Cheryl Hines. Image: David Torcivia, Wikimedia Commons
Cheryl Hines, Unscripted: A Memoir
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress, who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major film star – you may know her best as Larry David’s foil on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced US cabinet minister who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book been written that straddles the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those as embodied by the current administration in Washington DC. Yet, against the odds, Unscripted turns out to be an enthralling read.
Essentially, what’s on offer here is a well-told and often deftly comic account of a working-class Florida girl with dreams of doing something in life other than following in her father’s footsteps as the manager of a local Burger King outlet. In time, Hines goes on to catch the acting bug, makes her way to the Universal Studios in Orlando, and promptly finds herself staffing a sex chatline. Next she’s offered a part in a cable-TV show called Swamp Thing, where the script calls on her to do little more than emerge from a large manmade puddle on the studio floor and stand there for a while, topless. Another time she appears on an episode of American TV’s The Dating Game, but isn’t chosen to go on a date.
Life was a bit like that for Hines in the 1990s. This may have been her nadir as a working actress, but it’s the high point of her book, which passes over the serial rebuffs and setbacks in breezy, vernacular fashion, with none of the professional biographer’s tendency to choke the pages with a flat-footed account of names and dates. Things slow down a bit once we settle into the groove of Hines’s long and apparently blissfully untroubled run on Curb, and her equally happy marriage to RFK Jr., but the first act of the show is itself worth the price of admission.
Skyhorse, March 2026, £21.59
Sir Anthony Hopkins. Image: Elena Torre, Wikimedia Commons
Anthony Hopkins, We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir
According to its publisher, this book is a ‘raw, honest and moving account’ by one of our foremost living actors. It’s certainly raw. Hopkins lays out his early life in unsparing detail, as the son of a tough, hard-headed Port Talbot baker who didn’t have much time or sympathy for a son with an alarming tendency to slap on makeup and hang out with the local amateur dramatics society. ‘My mother and father were both prone to depression and black moods,’ we learn. ‘They fought and wept. My father drank heavily, which only fueled his heightened emotionality.’ Anthony Hopkins himself liked a drop in later life, to put it no stronger than that, and proved a less than stellar National Service recruit as a result, often brought up on charges of brawling with his fellow soldiers. The fractious reputation followed him back into civvy street, first in the world of semi-professional provincial theatre, and then the more refined halls of RADA in London.
Hopkins assesses his talent in these days modestly. ‘I could barely speak, and had the posture of a camel,’ he writes. But he worked hard, and never turned down a job. In time he came to the notice of Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After standing in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having ‘walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.’ Even so, the young Hopkins was soon bored by the repetition of the stage, one of those people who always seem to want to be elsewhere, doing something else. ‘I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,’ he writes. ‘I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.’
As with the aforementioned Cheryl Hines memoir, this book most comes alive when charting the uphill struggles of the author’s early career, and rather settles into a holding pattern once we come to see him triumph in The Silence of the Lambs and all the rest. Anyone hoping for rollicking Hollywood scandal à la Bette Davis or David Niven may be disappointed, although Hopkins does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino, with whom he worked unhappily on Oliver Stone’s Nixon. In the absence of gossip, there’s a good deal of what’s-it-all-about rumination on the author’s part, some bits of it more compelling than others. The takeaway message of the book is of the essential strangeness of the acting profession, which, like any intelligent observer, the author sometimes struggles to take entirely seriously. For all the money and awards, I grew to feel quite sorry for Anthony Hopkins as I finished We Did OK, Kid. But that’s because he knows how to tell a story.
Simon & Schuster, November 2025, £25
Bob Spitz, The Rolling Stones: The Biography
Ah, the Stones. By now there have been almost as many books on the old devils as records and concerts by the lads themselves over the course of their sixty-plus year career. In no particular order, we’ve had the late Stanley Booth’s fly-on-the-wall account of the band’s notorious 1969 tour of the United States, ending with their disastrous concert at Altamont; an enjoyably gossipy romp through the narcotic days of the 70s by their factotum and sometime heroin dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez; formidably brainy group biographies by the likes of the journalists Stephen Davis and Philip Norman; and, not least, the necessarily sanitised but still quite lively first-hand accounts by Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood themselves, all of them estimable enough in their own right, if perhaps betraying the hand of a ghostwriter. Back in the dark ages, there were even biographies of both Richards and Mick Jagger, and a third book (a glutton for punishment, that author) on the band collectively by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t linger on them.
Now Bob Spitz, an American journalist known for his previous works on pop-cultural figures like the Beatles and several lesser groups, as well as his juvenile nonfiction books (in so far as there can truly be said to be a difference between the two genres), brings us this ‘definitive’ account of rock’s bad boys, which he stretches out to the gatefold triple-album length of 700-plus pages. Does it actually say anything new? Yes and no. The basic story is present and largely correct: an initial eighteen months of struggle, followed by ten years of inspired music and personal debauchery – and in turn by five decades of meticulous decline management – might sum it up. Spitz is at his most engaging when he abandons the weary chronological plod, and instead follows the template of Ian Leslie’s triumphant recent dual-biography John & Paul in putting the Jagger-Richards relationship under the microscope. The author takes on the tired polarities – Mick as the uptight details guy, Keith the agreeably wrecked one – by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: ‘passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of love, riven by jealousy.’ However much they were at odds, seems to be the message, Mick ’n Keef were, or are, still an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Stones, with the others, even the band’s original wayward genius Brian Jones, mere talented add-ons. The cast and basic plot may be familiar, but Spitz has at least succeeded in giving a recognisably human face to the whole star-crossed saga.
Penguin Press, April 2026, £26.14
1918 – Children play on a captured German field artillery gun exhibited in the Mall, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Alwyn Turner, A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
It’s always good to find a readable and well-researched variant on the standard schoolroom account of events, which in this case would have had us see the UK of the years 1918-39 as a uniformly grim place, grey, soupily lit and generally austere, somewhere the Great Depression set in like a chill Channel fog and lifted again just in time for the arrival of the Luftwaffe. What’s most striking about Alwyn Turner’s new book, by contrast, are the similarities between those sepia-toned times, seemingly out of some vanished Jurassic social order, and our own. Consider that, in 1922-24, Britain managed to get through four prime ministers; that politicians as a class were said to be ‘uniquely unpopular’, occupying a place in the nation’s affections only slightly more elevated than that of child molesters; that London itself was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality; that the UK was drowning in debt while simultaneously undergoing the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed an estimated 40-50 million people worldwide, roughly three times more than Covid; and that ‘tariff reform’ divided the nation much as Brexit did a century later.
For that matter, many of the products and institutions of our current daily lives entered service in the 1920s or early 30s. Among other goodies, Turner lovingly catalogues the new confectionery brands manufactured in Britain: ‘Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars Bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.’ That’s not to mention such establishments as the BBC, Butlin’s holiday camps, British Home Stores, NAAFIs, Wembley Stadium and London Transport, or the last’s iconic diagrammatic tube map and double-decker buses.
Maybe the book as a whole tends to be long on lists of this sort, as opposed to locating the human narrative that generally makes a social history come alive on the page, but, that minor cavil aside, A Shellshocked Nation is still a bracing and well-paced read, set against the ever-louder ticking clock of international events, which reminds us why the author’s devoted fans admiringly refer to him as ‘Page’ Turner. You could do much worse than to treat yourself to a copy this winter.
This powerful novella is set in southern England, following some vaguely described disaster, which is causing everything to collapse, and everyone to flee in panic. “There’s something spreading up from the far south east,” one man ‘explains’ to protagonist Flo – “Humongous red blob expanding and inflating across the land.” Notwithstanding this creeping carmine menace, the determined Flo is on a quest to find her twin brother, ‘bro.’
The novella falls within a certain Anglo-apocalyptic tradition, where folk horror meets sci-fi and terrible things can happen in cosily familiar landscapes – Richard Jefferies’ After London, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, the 1970s TV series Survivors, and 28 Days Later. But Gransden’s language is highly original – assured, forceful and inventive, made up largely of monosyllables, which gives a staccato, almost Old English quality. Flo is faintly reminiscent of Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Buckmaster’ in The Wake – a strong-minded individual in a defeated land, whose existential plight is likewise expressed in an idioglossia that takes some getting used to. Some readers will find themselves yearning for longer words and sentences, but then Gransden’s country is a place of grim and elemental purpose, where the struggle for survival leaves no time for complex concepts.
From the outset, there are echoes of ancient epics and exhausted landscapes – “And the old red sun on the land. A slow wind stalks the brush. When the tide out at sea waits to run in green.” There is also brooding evil, as Flo sits on a clifftop and thinks “of a boy and the push that sent him down to the rock.” Was that boy who “falls to hell” bro? And was it Flo who pushed him?
Time circles and collapses in on itself, and the narrative disjoints. We see Flo some years earlier (or maybe more recently), running away from school and sleeping rough, finding a skeletal dying man, with insects already settling on him – “hair in his mouth, his knees poke out of holes in his pants, and he smells.” There are echoes and connections everywhere. Late in her wanderings she finds herself in Amesbury, Wiltshire – famous for a lavish Early Bronze Age burial, but now a setting for the twenty-first century’s fall.
Eerie strangeness is abroad, sometimes beautiful, much more often menacing – plants glow pink and gnash “at the air neath burnt day stars.” Birds are silent, but trees sing instead, “shrill and bleak.” There seem to be surreally expressed ecological concerns brooding behind the writing, as red ant armies march up out of drains, blue wasps sting dead black rats, and mutilated laboratory monkeys scream to see her. Toads are underfoot and climbing walls, and even opening their toothless maws to prophesy – a Biblical plague, appropriate for an England where everyone is in exodus – except a few left-behind loners awaiting their inevitable destruction, or clinging doggedly to delusions of salvation.
Lantern-carrying hooded religious visionaries seen by Flo in the depths of a black forest “murm as they eat the glow-worm” – an image that could have come from the hellscapes of the elder Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch. Spindle-shanked gargoyle-demons have clambered down from church walls to stalk the shires for human prey, and terrified humans pushed to traumatic limits show themselves capable of equal evil.
Central and causative to England’s overthrow is a terrible sonic force – a sound first faintly heard and intriguing, like the seemingly sourceless Hum that some people today claim to hear in the atmosphere. In Gransden’s vigorous imagination, this possibly non-existent ambient noise becomes a cacophony and hurricane – a maddening and shrieking maelstrom of “cliff noise” which spits bees and beats people to the ground. Seemingly sentient, it finally comes for Flo, eating up the way she has come as she makes a last dash for the coast in desperate hope of escape. John of Gaunt’s fort and demi-paradise has become a howling and infected Alcatraz. This striking dystopia is uneasy reading, yet “a breath of old land and ghost voice spills from an age.”
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicholas Poussin (c.1640)
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD honours a unique novelist
A framed letter faces me on the desk as I write this. Composed in an engaging mix of spidery longhand and erratic manual-typewriting, with a rubber-stamped phone number giving it a further touch of the haphazard, dated September 1992, it reads:
Dear Mr. Sandford
I am delighted you like Dance well enough to want more, but I have always set me [sic] face against doing any sort of coda after I finished, because even while I was writing, it was difficult enough to keep the same tone of voice, and now that I am so ancient it would be quite impossible. All the same, kind of you to ask.
Yours sincerely
Anthony Powell
PS I expect you know Hilary Spurling’s Handbook to a Dance (Heinemann), which is very good and amusing.
It was the beginning of a modest correspondence I kept up with Powell, author of the magisterial 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time – the last volume of which appeared a blink-of-an-eye half-century ago, in September 1975 – during the remaining eight years of his life. He would have been 86 at the time of our initial exchange, and by all accounts was becoming increasingly crotchety, not least in the matter of the correct pronunciation of a name he insisted should rhyme with ‘bowl’, not ‘trowel’.
One freezing January morning later in the 1990s, a plumber answered an urgent call to attend to a burst pipe at a large Georgian house in the English countryside near Bath. An elderly man dressed in tweed answered the door.
“Mr. Powell?” asked the plumber, pronouncing it Pow-ell.
“There is no one here of that name,” replied the old man.
“Oh, sorry,” said the plumber. “I must be at the wrong house.”
“I can’t help you,” said the old man.
The plumber then drove around the frozen neighbourhood before being told that Anthony Powell did indeed live in the house he had just visited. So he returned.
The same man opened the door. This time the plumber enquired, “Does a Mr. Powell live here?” “No,” the elderly gentleman said. “However, do you mean Pole?” The plumber nodded. “Ah! Then go round to the back door, the leak is in the kitchen.”
This is surely a scene that could have been torn direct from the pages of Dance, peopled as it is by a cast of louche London artistic types, colourful military coves and eccentric English landed squires. The sequence has been described as everything from “Proust anglicised” to “a kind of social accountancy, and not much more enlivening than the financial sort.” Evelyn Waugh’s son Auberon (of whom more presently) thought the whole thing no more than “an early upmarket TV soap.” PG Wodehouse, by contrast, was “absolutely stunned by [Powell’s] artistry.” Fifty years later, the critical divide persists. Powell’s magnum opus has become an odd sort of cult work, its reputation kept alive not just by the devotees who have loved or still love it – among them Christopher Hitchens, Stephen King and Clive James, who called Dance “the best modern novel since Ulysses” – but by those who love to hate it and consider the whole thing a testament to staleness.
I’m in the supporters’ camp. Taken as a whole, the Dance’s twelve-book sequence strikes me as an unsurpassable panorama of a vanished Britain, and – lest you not yet have made its acquaintance – an almost chemically addictive joy to read; hence my brazen request of its author for more of the same. But here’s a curious thing. As I say, I had the pleasure of corresponding with and meeting Powell himself, and have read and re-read both his novels and the various biographies, particularly the aforesaid Hilary Spurling’s, and yet the more one comes to learn about the man the more elusive he seems to be as a flesh-and-blood human being – not to mention one whose life took him from a lonely and nomadic boyhood at around the time of the First World War to the twilight years spent as an obsessive genealogist and high-and-dry Tory who, almost incredibly, survived long enough to see in the twenty-first century. All I can add by way of a physical sketch is that in person Powell was compact, immaculately turned out in a manner that seemed to have been frozen in place since about the year 1933, with a piercing stare under incongruously untidy eyebrows, and a sharp, nasal voice that was close to a comic turn in itself.
Anthony Powell in 1934
On the other hand, in a canonical work full of shadows, as Powell nearly wrote in Books Do Furnish a Room, certain characters are bound to be shadowy. There is the superbly detached role, to cite only the most obvious example, he gives his alter ego Nick Jenkins, the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. Both the author and his fictional self seem to have gone through life as scrupulously neutral observers of the human condition, rarely if ever offering a declarative judgement on people or events, let alone asserting their own identities. There’s a section in the early wartime novel The Valley of Bones, about midway through the whole sequence, where Jenkins’s wife Isobel suddenly goes into labour with the couple’s first child, an event she announces with the line: ‘Look here, I’m sorry to have to call attention to myself at this moment, but I’m feeling awfully funny. I think perhaps I’d better go to my room.’ This same sense of supreme self-effacement applied equally to the author who gave her the lines to speak, who himself once said, ‘I have absolutely no clear picture of myself’, and confessed that he began writing shortly after coming down from Oxford in large part because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, rather than due to any particular aptitude or talent.
With respect to that judgement, it strikes me as taking diffidence to unnatural lengths, if not to qualify Powell as a martyr to false modesty. Taken as a whole, Dance is a fiendishly intricate literary feat, which its author carries off throughout the whole 3,000-page, million-word sequence as it passes over some sixty years of English social history, conveyed through perfectly ordinary (which is to say, often absurd) situations rather than conventional drama. It remains a singular, and brilliantly sustained, achievement of twentieth-century letters. Powell himself, as conveyed by his biographers, may be retiring to the point of near invisibility, but his great roman fleuve more than once touches the artistic heights occupied by P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.
Yes, to address a frequently heard opinion of the Dance sequence, there are moments where the prose is arid and the terminology fustily dated. Powell’s characters adopt “sun spectacles”, for example, when finding themselves in “not wholly inclement climes”, or travel on that “uncomfortable but commodious conveyance” the Clapham omnibus. It might be said that the author sometimes makes heavy work of simply getting the reader from A to B. When introducing the minor character Rosie Manasch, a patron of the arts who emerges in the tenth installment of the series, Books Do Furnish a Room, Powell notes: “In the course of further preliminary conclaves with Bagshaw on the subject of Fission’s first number, mention was again made of an additional personage, a woman, who was backing the magazine.”
Or, of a pair of MPs, Labour and Conservative, meeting at a funeral described in the same book: “The two had gravitated together in response to that immutable law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders; differences of party and opinion having little or no bearing upon the preference.”
The Dance, then, may have an old-fashioned roll to it, but beyond the occasional dowager style Powell’s genius was surely to sustain a vibrant, and highly credible, self-contained imaginative world. Some of the series’ individual performers recur from book to book, going on from school to university, their careers interweaving, marrying, divorcing, fighting for their country, haunting the rackety dives of postwar Soho, and finally catching up with life in the hedonistic, culturally vapid 1970s. As anyone who’s ever written a novel will tell you, it’s hard enough to plausibly develop even a single life over any protracted amount of time. Powell does this for literally scores of deftly sketched, sometimes honourable, not infrequently comic, invariably compelling leading characters, appearing and disappearing and then reappearing at intervals, all in perfectly logical order, guiding us from the Great War to the moon landings in the process, with the subordinate cast, typically drawn from the English literary or artistic demi-monde, providing the crucial ballast.
In short, Powell’s achievement is that of the architect as well as the author. The delicate slapstick of events is slowly drawn together, the apparent coincidences and chance reunions never less than true to life, the touch exquisitely light in its sardonic treatment of the material. Here is Powell’s doppelgänger Nick Jenkins, musing in a rare moment of intellectual candour, in the third book of the sequence The Acceptance World:
I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed … Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.
As often noted, Powell’s opus is really a form of elegant soap opera, with cyclical themes and characters, and an infallible knack – the envy of many a television screenwriter – of ending each episode with a crisis. (Powell spent the winter of 1936-37 script-doctoring in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, an experience, however venal, he later admitted was invaluable ‘when one came to the engineering’ of Dance.) When the series’ narrator joins the army in 1939, he is promptly assigned to the corrosive Kenneth Widmerpool, his school contemporary of twenty years earlier. The physically clumsy, socially tone-deaf Widmerpool then returns at intervals in each of the remaining novels of the series, variously translated from soldier to businessman to MP to university chancellor-cum-pagan cultist, a figure at once ludicrous and sinister, and taken as a whole one of the great comic ogres of 20th century literature. It says something for Powell’s artistry that there was intense competition among his circle to be publicly identified as the model for a character synonymous with the harsh and manipulative use of power, the author’s brother-in-law Lord Longford laying the strongest claim, but the likes of Powell’s wartime chief Denis Capel-Dunn, the richly-tinted jurist and latterly Lord Chancellor, Reginald Manningham-Buller, the art historian Gerald Reitlinger, and even the sometime Tory prime minister Ted Heath all making a persuasive bid for consideration.
If not exactly required reading these days, Powell’s masterpiece remains one of Western literature’s enduring feats, and might even be one of the few things that nurtures an awareness of an older, more reticent England, not dead, perhaps, but gone into hiding until the present tabloid version self-destructs. The author himself lived long enough to see such bracing developments in British life as the advent of punk rock and of Sarah, Duchess of York, as well as a modern idiom in which domestics would come to refer to assaults, not servants – all recorded in his wonderfully mordant late-life diaries. A modest man with a profound dislike of reckless informality and self-promotion, Powell continued working almost until the end, publishing the final volume of his Journals in 1997, not long before Channel 4 finally succeeded in bringing a seven-hour version of his magnum opus to television screens. He once told me in characteristic tones that he was “not wholly unsatisfied” by the Dance sequence (in written, if not screen format) as a whole. It remains good literary fun, like all the best fiction a brilliantly contrived escape from the banality of the real world. The author Michael Frayn perhaps put it best when he recalled of stumbling on Powell for the first time: “It was like discovering a complete civilisation – and not in some remote valley of the Andes or the Himalayas, but in the midst of my own life … Another world had been superimposed upon my own, refracting and reflecting it.”
As mentioned, Powell brought his opus to a triumphant conclusion with its final installment, Hearing Secret Harmonies, as long ago as September 1975, and resisted all overtures to revive it from behind its marble slab at any point during the remaining quarter-century of his life. That decision notwithstanding, the years in question were far from without interest for him. Apart from turning out a stream of increasingly free-form reviews and memoirs, Powell found himself at the age of 84 embroiled in one of those explosive literary feuds the English seem to do almost as well as their genius for the political sex scandal, and which itself might have graced the pages of Dance. His adversary in the matter was Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon, who published a damning review of Powell’s latest volume of memoirs in the Sunday Telegraph, a paper to which they were both long-time contributors. When the moment came, Hilary Spurling would pass lightly over the incident in her official life of her subject by taking what could be called the psychological approach to the whole affair. Waugh Jr, she writes, had himself not long beforehand published a memoir,
…contain[ing] a scary portrait of Evelyn as a monstrous egoist who regarded all his sons, and this one in particular, as rivals to be snubbed, derided and put down. Even in his own distress, Powell regarded young Auberon’s response [to his book] as essentially vicarious, the vengeful product of a largely loveless childhood.
Be that as it may, Powell went ballistic, severing his relations with the Telegraph, who rather bizarrely commissioned a bust of their departing eminence grise but then found they had nowhere to put it. It perched for a while on an office filing cabinet. The Powells and the Waughs never spoke again. Somehow, the whole episode could once again have been taken from one of those darkly comic contemplations of the postwar London literary scene that enliven Books DoFurnish a Room, the tenth and in my judgement best individual installment of the Dance.
Anthony Powell was that highly overused word, unique. The room he occupied in the mansion of English literature was distinct, located on a level where no one else regularly ascended, although Evelyn Waugh might be said to have inhabited broadly the same space. Any reader not yet familiar with the Dance, widely available today in various formats, should treat themselves to one or more of its volumes immediately. The dozen subsidiary novels, so beautifully written, so riotously entertaining, for all their pervasive air of English melancholy and social decay, are the work of a master of his craft. We have not his equal.
NOTE: This is a reimagining of a medieval Lincolnshire folktale, of Sir Hugh Barde and the dragon of Castle Carlton
The song of the lark was abroad in the Marsh, with March greening the tips of the willows – but in Hugh Barde’s heart it was December.
He’d come out of his door in disgust, and now stood in the shadows, looking at his courtyard in deep dissatisfaction. Damn Hildegard! She’d been at him again. The same bloody subject – Sir Guillaume. How much better their knightly neighbour was as landlord. How much more successful. How much better maybe even as a man.
The despicable knight– him, a knight! – had just expanded his estate again, so his holdings now nudged right up against Hugh’s on two sides. The little hill on which Sir Guillaume’s handsome castle stood had always been irritatingly visible from Hugh’s chamber window, but now his churls could also be seen not far from Hugh’s front door, cutting brushwood and digging a ditch to drain the two carucates Hugh had not been granted by the King.
Guillaume, it was well known, was also manoeuvring to get the acres of waste along the coast road – right where Hugh had always intended to plant his town. Soon the jumped-up bastard’s corn would be waving right in front of Hugh’s own gates, his sheep baa-ing balefully on all sides. If this wasn’t stopped, soon the fame of the Bardes would start to fade, their line bleed into the peasantry. One day, Hugh thought, trees could be growing in this garth, uprooting all the Bardes’ embankments.
Guillaume, blast him to Hel, was cousin to the King, thanks to artful marriage into one of the oldest families in Falaise. That was why he was granted lands. That was why he was Lord Justiciar, holding life and death over the district, and with entrée at Court. All this, although both Barde lines were older, and incomparable at war. Yet Hugh’s father – a descendant of both Charlemagne, and the man who had won the way up out of the Malfosse – hadn’t even been given permission to fortify his own bailey! Hugh looked around sourly, thinking how shabby his holdings seemed, and how small. Ever since coming back from the wars, everything had seemed unsatisfactory.
It appeared not even Heaven favoured the family. Hugh had spent three whole years in the Holy Land, and at Aleppo had felled the Saracens’ giant champion – while Guillaume had stayed at home eating, reckoning up deeds and scrip with his fat fingers and soft hands. They didn’t even have a halfway-decent house-chaplain, Hugh reflected bitterly, as he observed that shaven-headed spiritual advisor slinking out of the chapel, and towards the kitchens with their ale-barrels. As well as being a sot, he was also ignorant and lecherous, spending less time with the Church Fathers than with the miller’s mooncalf daughter.
Hildegard couldn’t really understand the way courts worked. She was only an English noblewoman, and so scion of a failed nation – although that little detail didn’t prevent her having commanding airs. Hugh’s mother had had these too – sniffily conscious of her Mercian bloodline, and obviously regarding her husband’s people as brutal arrivistes. Once, when especially exasperated, Hugh’s father had confided in him that he wished he had found some nice quiet bride from the old country.
National pride lurked in even the mangiest and muddiest of Karleton’s vassals, for all their bowing and scraping and tugging of their stringy forelocks. As if they still hated, just waited to overturn their nation’s fate. Our nation’s fate now, Hugh corrected himself glumly. Two of these half-fellow countrymen trundled past at that moment, inclining their heads in what Hugh was sure was false fealty, towing a cart piled with fresh-cut reeds. Hugh looked sourly at their smocked backs, suspecting they were smirking.
Hugh’s Norman ancestors had now been in England for over a century, and of course his English antecessors since time out of mind. Hugh’s Norman grandfather had symbolically placed their bailey on the outline of an ancient fort. Yet Hugh still often felt he was not fully of this place. He wasn’t quite accepted, not privy to its secrets – didn’t know its still half-heathen gods. The full-bloods seemed a people of primitive beliefs, dwelling in a realm of ghosts.
Their superstitions could be contagious, even for Hugh, who had read a little, and travelled widely. There were odd moments, even on the bravest of days in the season of the year, when Hugh was eager on the trail of the boar, that he would find himself drifting into peculiar reveries, as if suddenly seeing himself from outside. All earthly sounds would die away, and he was suddenly unsure about where on earth he was, and what he was doing and why. Moments when it seemed nothing was real.
Some unanticipated movement might cause him to pause – or breaking through an arras of trees to find some hot and muffled clearing, where something important seemed just about to happen, or maybe had just been. Moments when the only noise was Bayard’s breathing, as the great big-eyed bay laid back his ears in fear, and goosebumps rose along his glistening neck. Some deeper than usual dappling or shadow – the monstrous shape of some trunk – the way roots seemed to swarm out of the ground… Hugh would foolishly imagine darting eyes amid the tangling leaves, cold watchers among the boskiest brakes of thorn.
There were wolves out here sometimes, of course, and cats – not to mention brybours, wandering robber-gangs who sometimes stooped to murder, about whom Guillaume naturally did nothing. The only crime he cared about was poaching, as might have been expected from such a voluptuary – who reportedly enjoyed watching miscreants being beaten in his basements.
But Hugh also sensed less corporeal dangers – dangers not easily driven away by the angriest barking of alaunts, or the most stoutly-wielded steel. The boars themselves could be more than just meat – capable of biting and excreting as burningly as any bonnacon, giving off infernal fetor, some even capable of shapeshifting. Witches still lingered in some corners of the woods, and leaf-clad wodewoses padded the greenest glades of all.
Even out on the open moor there were sunsets that seemed significant, dangerous dawns, and aery phenomena. The moon sometimes had a corona, at that season when ice-floes encrusted the beach, and your breath hung before your face like your essence escaping. On the night the old king had died at Thorney, a flaming star had arced over Karleton, charging eastwards at colossal speed before dousing its glim somewhere out at sea. The year of the Great Hunger, a vast skeleton had been seen by many out over the waters, grinning and stretching a long arm towards the land.
On the clearest and coldest nights, the alaunts would sometimes bay for unknown reasons, joined by the limers and greyhounds, signalling something unseen. These would awaken other dogs, and so others, and so others – on endlessly out across the silvery east, across expectant leagues of fen and moor, broad river and misty ditch, making churls curse and scratch on their paillasses, lords stir and mutter in their tapestried chambers, and wakemen look upward in interest. These eldritch alarums could carry all the way to Lincoln, to vex the uneasy moneylenders in their fancy new houses on the Hill, and the canons in the Cathedral, whose slumbers were too often filled with sin.
Even under the fullest light of day’s eye, there were lanes no-one liked going down, and particular pools in the fens, black and cold as could be, showing shivering facsimiles of the firmament, and tremulous reflections of reeds – whole worlds inverted, as if reversed men might be growing downwards into some underland. Summer’s lightning-flash adderbolt flies betokened the nearness of vipers, whose red tongues also lolled forth from the marsh-flowers gathered as simples by the goodwives.
The Anglais thought these pools held hags, or monsters they called nicors, Sir Guillaume had once informed Hugh superciliously (well knowing Hugh’s half-blood inheritance) – serpent-spirits that crept out at night to drain the udders of kine, or batten on the tender throats of children before taking them below. Their vapours were blamed when men sickened in the Marsh with unaccountable fevers, and grew yellow with unhealth and waking dreams. Women grew fractious and thin-haired in the noxious fumes, and brats often died at the dug. Hugh didn’t reject these stories nearly so readily. It couldn’t be denied that strange things did happen.
The Blue Stone, for instance, that had been dragged with such labour from the Bishop’s bovate, had eventually needed to be reinstated to stop the bad luck. Even Hugh’s hall was visited in the night by what the maids called boggarts – casting charms or stealing, sometimes just nuisances, sometimes something much worse. The maids propitiated them with dishes of milk, which would be empty the following day – although Hugh guessed this sometimes had more to do with cats, house-cousins of those at large in the greenwood. Hildegard had one – a grey Grimalkin that would sit with her while she span, glaring at Hugh, and hissing if he came too close. It was with her now, he knew – a changeling for a fine lady’s chamber, a watchful reminder of old darkness under trees.
Hildegard was right, though. It was unfair the way they were treated. If only, he thought yet again, he could find some way to distinguish himself. There were so many things he yearned to do, to turn the waste into fine estate, and secure a future for the boy. He saw the bailey made good, an elegant abbey arising, rows of robbers in gibbets, the trim roofs of a gated town with carts coming clopping from the coast, each carter leaving a token of respect to the Bardes, who had made the Marsh to bloom.
He turned his head. What was that? Something odd was happening down by the ash-grove. There was a crowd – a very large crowd, several hundreds perhaps, with others coming at a run. They couldn’t allbe from Karleton. But whoever they were, they should all be working, he thought, as he walked their way irately.
But as he neared, he realised the reason for this strange stoppage. One word stood out amid a hubbub of wildly excited noise – wyrm, wyrm. As they noticed his presence, the crowd faltered and fell sullenly silent, looking down, or at each other, or away.
Hugh spotted a solid sort of servitor – Asser of Markebi, the master-mason. “Well, Asser? What is all this?”
Asser cleared his throat. “It’s a worm, sire! They say a great worm has come to Ormesbi – burning everything, eating people! A worm, sire, with a single huge eye like a burning wheel!”
“Nonsense!” said Hugh reflexively – but his heart sank into his stomach. Everyone knew dragons existed outside the tales boys were told – the saint taming the Tarasque, the dreadful Guivre of the Seine, the Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard, the loathly Lambton worm, Piers Shonks of Pelham, the white wyvern of the West and the crimson firedrake of the Welsh, locked together forever in fight far under Cambria, contesting for the country in eternity.
Had not the most learned geographers written of terrible lizards, and hadn’t Ptolemy set a dragon in the night-sky? Hugh himself had seen a crocodile in the Holy Land, and dragon’s blood on sale in apothecary shops. Kings of England had carried a dragon device. The Conqueror too had been called dragon for his desolations. Were not huge bones sometimes found in fields, or seen in the faces of cliffs? At Conisbrough of the Warennes was a stone showing a writhing beast beset by bishops. Hadn’t Sir Richard Buslingtorp bested a fiercePython just a few years before? The gold he had found had been the making of his fortune. Tiny dragon-like things could even be seen in Lindsey’s ponds, cousins to the cave-dwelling salamander, which crouched amid all flames unscorched.
In any case, the Bible was clear – such terrors had been in Babylon and would squirm forth again, crawling masters of the ground, agents of Chaos, emissaries of evil, harbingers of The End. Every Rogation-day, the churls carried a dragon effigy while they beat the bounds, immolating it after to feed the fields, and as insult to creeping Pontius Pilate. There would always be such beasts, until all lands were drained and tamed, and the End of Days.
Asser propelled a scarlet-faced man forward. “This is John of Ormesbi, sire. I knew his father – a man right worthy. He has run here to tell us what he has seen this day.”
John looked up defiantly into Hugh’s face, obviously not expecting to be believed. “This morning, sire, a giant serpent, with wings, and a great rolling eye, landed on our hill like thunder! Longer than the church, it was – taller than the trees, blacker than night, hungrier than the wolf! It ate the sheep, the swine, and some of our people – and scorched up all the earth with its foul breath and trampling claws. Everyone fled! No-one can withstand such! I and all these others ran all the way, to warn you.”
The crowd burst back into babble, while Hugh tried to assess John’s worth. Eventually, he asked, “Did you take this report to the Lord Justiciar?”
“Yes, sire, with these men, and other men from Ormesbi, and Calesbi, and Wormesgay, and Burwell. From everywhere. But the lord just said – well…“. He paused, and looked away in indignation.
“Well?”
“The lord sent down a message, sire, by his steward, saying these were lies, and that we had better return to work, or face whipping!” The crowd groaned and seethed and muttered. “Norman scum! Always the same! That’s how they treat the people!”
John spoke up again: “But these are no lies, sire. I swear it, on the Virgin’s life!”
Asser interposed gravely. “Master Barde, I believe this man is in the right.”
Hugh’s brain was awhirl. Of course Guillaume wouldn’t go. He’d always been a coward, though who wouldn’t be when it came to dragons? Cowardice could never be an excuse, though – not for such as valued their honour. And now all were looking to him. There was no-one else. And sometimes – he gulped – even the worst fears needed facing. At last he nodded.
“I believe you, John of Ormesbi! I believe you.” He clapped John on his shoulder, startling him, and himself, with his condescension. “I will go!” he said, and the crowd inhaled in admiration. Before he could change his mind, he started issuing orders. “You, boy – to the hall! Send for the priest Godric, and Athelstan my esquire. Bid them meet me in the courtyard!”
“Yes, sire!” Several boys raced away to be first with the news, as Hugh walked quickly towards his hall, followed by most of the crowd. As he approached, Hildegard was already issuing forth, holding the hand of their wide-eyed son, three-year-old future of the line.
“I have heard this strange news, husband! Is it true? And are you then riding out?”
Hugh nodded rather stiffly, but then Hildegard broke out wonderfully into a radiant smile – a smile he had never seen before. “The Bardes are never fainthearts!” she cried proudly. Hugh straightened instinctively, and then she drew him apart, speaking in low and eager tones. “Our neighbour has spurned this challenge?”
“He has, wife!”
“This then is your chance – our chance! Kill this thing, and tell the King, and Guillaume too is finished. He cannot be Lord Justiciar if he does not do the Lord Justiciar’s work! And then, husband, and then…well, who could be better fitted than a dragon’s bane?”
Hugh was struck by this. But there was one obvious difficulty. “But what if I miscarry! What if… well, what if I don’t come back?”
“You will not fail, husband! But – if you do, then you will have died like Roland – an example to our son, and certain of a place at Heaven’s board. I should be proud to be widow of sucha man!”
Hugh couldn’t help wishing she had seemed less easily accepting of that prospect. Hildegard however kept talking, “But I know you can do this, husband. And when you do, you will have your reward. Your rights. Do this thing, for our son. Do it, for your honour. The King cannot refuse you anything if you succeed. And nor” – she paused significantly – “nor could I!”
Hugh could see it all – the grateful countenance of the King – the downfall of Guillaume, reversion of his lands to the Crown and so to him – a barony, and crest – a market charter. Above even these swam that superb new smile of his wife’s – a smile that filled his heart, and seemed to strengthen his sword-arm. He inhaled deeply of fragrant future-time, and a new kind of life with a Lady as wife.
Then his esquire Athelstan arrived with boys and accoutrements as brilliantly burnished as the day they had been stored – chainmail, breastplate, bascinet, helm, long shield, and sword. Another boy came struggling after, battling to balance the long lance last levelled in the Holy Land. The stable-boy also came hastening, leading Bayard by the bridle, and another boy trotting alongside, tightening the girths of the war-saddle last straddled against paynim in Palestine. Everywhere was frantic with life, as if half the Marsh had come.
“Hold!” Hildegard cried, and all astonishingly did, struck by her command and clarity. “Goodwife, lend me your dirk.” To murmured delight and surprise, she sliced a strip of blue cambric from her own bodice. “Here, husband. My token!” She smiled yet again, but Hugh had no time to dwell even on that as he found himself beset.
The courtyard teemed with clamouring men and women of all ages and degrees, and from several estates, noisily exchanging advice about the best ways to deal with dragons. Lore was dredged up from murky depths, rich and shiny and strange as upcast from a ditch. There was a cacophony of contradictory suggestions, drawn from everywhere and nowhere. “Look for the gold! – Don’t look in its eyes! – Watch for its tail! – Don’t let it speak! – Give it an ox head! – Give it milk! – Bind it with a virgin’s girdle! – Watch for the wart! – Its blood burns fire! – Quench it in the lake!”
Hugh’s soldiering sense somehow asserted itself, and he went over to the corner to urinate before donning his array. He had once disgracefully bewrayed himself outside Jerusalem. As he adjusted his britches, he saw the priest Godric emerging furtively from the fortuitously unattended kitchens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if wiping ale away, which almost certainly he was. Hugh considered him dissatisfiedly; if only there’d been time to bring the Bishop, or even the doddery old Abbot from Louth.
“There you are, priest! Look lively! We have a great work to do!” Hugh moved over to the waiting esquire and house-boys, and now stood still among them, arms outstretched, as they began to gear him up. Athelstan’s fingers moved swiftly over Hugh’s sturdy frame, expertly buckling and lacing, every moment weighing him down more heavily.
“A great worm, sire!” said the priest. “Can it be true?”
“Why not? They’re in the Bible, aren’t they?”
The priest seemed unsure, then brightened. “There was one in the Garden, sire. It tempted the woman! And, err, there were some more, near the end! Or were those gryphons?”
Hugh snorted. “I seem to remember there were a few more than that! But let’s not worry too much about fine exegetical points!”
The priest smiled ingratiatingly. “Of course not, sire! Of course not, ha ha!” He paused for a moment. “May I just say, sire, how admiring I am of your great courage? And how proud I am to have known you? It has been my great privilege to have served you in howsoever humble a capacity…”
“You’re still serving, man! You’re coming with me! You, Father, are my spiritual buckler and shield! You’re the best I can do at short notice!”
There was rough laughter from all within hearing as Godric gawped. “Me, sire? You don’t mean it, sire! I mean, you can’t. And…and what about the Rector at Ormesbi? Or Calesbi? I would not wish to impinge on their privileges… Or perhaps Oswald of Burwell …”
Hugh smiled grimly. “Eaten, for all I know! They’re probably choking the beast right now! It’s up to you, I’m afraid, Father. This is your chance! So go and get your book, and your cross, and your water, and get ready to ride – there’s a good priest. In fact, who not put on all your gear? It can’t do any harm. You, boy, go with him to help – and you, get the priest’s palfrey. You, fetch Dagobert and Manu. Today is the hunt of hunts!”
All the dogs had sensed the excitement, and were moving and moaning in the kennels, snapping impatiently at each other, whimperingly eager for the off. With difficulty, the kennel-hands eventually extricated white-and-black Dagobert and brindled Manu, Hugh’s favourites – veteran companions of la chasse, gashed with tusk of boar and tooth of wolf, slobberers over Hugh’s hands, and sires to many lusty pups. They almost pulled their handlers off their feet, nearly strangling themselves as they surged towards their master, drooling and whining. Everywhere was a-thrum with thrilling errantry and an acrid tang of fear, like the end of some age, or the start of a new.
All too soon, Hugh found himself clambering onto Bayard’s broad back, for what he couldn’t stop thinking might be the last time. Athelstan waited stolidly by, on his horse Godwine, Hugh’s lance resting in straps alongside his saddle until called for. The priest was being shoved unceremoniously up onto his mount, the humorously-named Godspeed, tricked out almost comically in full canonicals, holding miserably on with one hand, while the other clutched his book. Vials of holy water and chrism, plus some wafer, were in a bag belted across his body, so he was prepared for all eventualities. When he thought nobody would see, he slurped surreptitiously from a large leathern flask. Last came the huntsman and the whipper-in, who would run behind, or in front, depending on the fleetness of the hounds and the closeness of their quarry.
As the little group lined up to leave, an awed silence came down, broken only by the panting and whining of the dogs. Athelstan leaned down to rumple young Athelstan’s curly head, while his wife wept openly. At the back of the throng, the miller’s daughter’s eyes devoured Godric, but he was too preoccupied to notice, muttering intensely to himself. Hildegard stood out easily to her husband – noble in blonde and blue, holding the hand of the infant Hugh. As she and he exchanged a gaze of understanding, he fastened her cambric around his armoured neck, and nodded. She raised her right hand in salute, and smiled as if in wistfulness, or farewell. “Ride hardily, husband!” she called, clear as an abbey bell.
He weakened – but all eyes were on him – on the Bardes. He turned at last, and said “Let’s go” – and the retinue moved out amid cries of “Good luck!” and “God be with you!” People streamed out through the gates behind, and cheered the plucky party out of sight. Whatever happened hereafter, Hugh knew, Karleton wouldn’t be the same.
The fields fell unnaturally silent and still. Almost like the deserts in Isiah, thought Hugh, habitations of dragons and courts for screech-owls. Tools and barrows and lunch-pails lay where panicking people had dropped them. Bundles of reeds awaited unbound, eels were escaping from a basket, and a tree leaned crazily half-sawn. A cart of stone for the priory at Greenfield stood driverless, its still-yoked oxen grazing unconcerned. A hare that on any other day could have ended up on the high table raced away when it saw them, and a squirrel chittered angrily from an ash. The hounds had stopped barking, but were surging powerfully on, towing their stumbling and swearing attendants.
Hugh cantered at the head of the little line, wondering what he had let himself in for. It had been easy to be brave in the courtyard. But this really might be the last time he rode this road. That really might be his last hare. Those, his last sheep – and that his last oak burgeoning into leaf. Would he see it in full festoon? Would he see his son as man? A murder of crows going over brought back the battle-birds of Acre.
He wondered what his companions were thinking. These might be the last men he would see, and he realised he knew almost nothing of their lives. Yet even those now so cursingly busy with the dogs doubtless also had terrors. As for Athelstan, his esquire of twenty years – even he was an enigma, riding as always behind, expressionless as usual, sure and steadfast as a shieldwall, and just as blankly incommunicative. But the priest seemed the least knowable of all. Hugh had often wondered what possessed a man to take the tonsure, and now it looked like he’d never know. He observed Godric – so puny and uncertain in his seat, so ashen and muttering, letting Godspeed lag – and felt pity with his contempt.
“Ride up with me, priest!” Godric grudgingly spurred alongside. Hugh spoke more jocosely than he felt. “What about a bit of praying, eh? In English, if you like! Better simple faith than Norman blood, eh?” He would have liked Latin, but Godric’s Latin was notorious.
“In English? Of course, sire! Err, let me see, dear Lord, deliver us from evil! Um, shield us from the beast. Err…deliver us from evil. Shield us from the beast that crawls in the dirt…”
Hugh listened impatiently for a while. “What about one of our own? Guthlac, maybe?”
“Good idea, sire! Good old Guthlac! Err, dear Blessed Guthlac, deliver us from evil. Shield us, o sainted one, from the beast that crawls in the dirt, err…”
Hugh shook his head regretfully, and spurred on – searching inside himself instead for words that might suit saints. But he was acutely aware of his inarticulacy, and conscious of certain past transgressions. Maybe any words would be inadequate. Norman blood might be needed after all. Deus vult, he sighed in conclusion, Deus vult – and might to the smiting hand!
The priest fell back. He took another draught from his flask, then another. Godspeed was soon overtaken even by the profane and puffing men on foot, who stared at the priest contemptuously as they were towed past. He fell yet further behind, and Godspeed stopped to tear at grass, as Godric’s flask swiftly emptied.
Not far now, Hugh knew. Not far enough! Ketsbi-lane unrolled into the valley, and up again the other side, to the crest beyond which he knew they would find…what they would find. Whatever would find them. He registered Calesbi church with its gleaming walls to the south, and Burwell’s little tower to the north – reassuring sights for a once familiar world now in perilous play, his world that might be coming to its end. A storm came even from the blueness behind, clouds piling over the nearby ocean, a sudden squall blowing them on, and setting the trees to frantic dancing. Not far now. Not far enough…
Sky white in front – too white to be right – and then that white was forming a flaw – a wavy uncertainty, shimmering like the air that radiated from the soil in the long month of Leo, cutting off men’s heads, and inverting all elements. A buzzard circling Ormesby Top seemed suddenly to stop, and just wink out. The breath of the basilisk, Hugh groaned, sickeningly realising he had brought nothing to shield his face. The very shape of the wold was snakelike – those tormented stones a supple spine, that boulder a bulging and baleful eye.
An enormous roaring was now around, and a clashing of claws on scales – metal on metal, like the swords they had beaten on shields at Aleppo as they eagerly awaited the infidel attack. Heats of Hel now too, and charge of lightning, and a rank stench emanating from everything – incendiarized exudations of a thousand charnel-houses and cess-pits, worse than the scourings of sickrooms or the foulest fewmets of the wickedest wolf. As Hugh bit back vomit, and fought a desperate urge to flee, vast and sweaty steams swirled down and cloaked the crest in cerements of dread.
Bayard was twitching and whickering, with staring eyes and shining flanks, terrified but still true – true like a steed of ancient times, this wonderful warhorse of the Norman world, the finest mount between England and Jerusalem. Hugh stroked him to soothe, stroked Hildegard’s cloth, and wondered how the world would be for their boy.
Athelstan was now alongside, for the first time ever unsure, eyes huge as Hugh’s, and as affrighted. “Sire, you see…?” But he recalled his duty, and place, and was handing Hugh his lance as the breathlessly boiling and mire-bespattered hound-handlers caught up, their frothing and straining charges only just held in check.
“The dogs, sire?” panted the almost expiring huntsman, as the maddened hounds reared up to claw the air.
“Loose them!” Hugh somehow said, swallowing down his soul.
The slipped alaunts bounded away berserkers, frothing to be first to find, and rend, leaving their handlers rolling helpless on the ground.
Startlingly in that same second, the priest miraculously materialized, a pale rider on wings of storm, unnaturally upright and even in that moment faintly risible – shouting indistinguishable oaths as he incredibly overtook them all, holding on with one hand while waving the Cross, chasing the hounds towards the crest behind which lay certain death. With the hounds Godspeed melted into the monster’s mists, and vanished from view.
“He’s drunk!” shouted Athelstan, amazed.
“He’s full of spirit all right!” Hugh joked grimly – his last joke – and gritting his teeth and gripping the lance with his gauntlet, with a tremendous shout he spurred Bayard up the slope.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
Alexander Adams, London: Exeter House, 2025, 304pps., pb., £14.93 (Amazon)
DEREK TURNER reads about a young artist’s attempts to get established
In 2007, a burned-out young British artist arrived in Berlin from London. He rented a frigid apartment in the worst district of the city, and subsisted on coffee and chocolate while he hammered out the draft of a novel ‘inspired’ by his recent bad experiences in London, perversely using an old-fashioned typewriter instead of a user-friendly laptop. In a May 2025 article published on his Substack, he explained his mindset at that time: “I wanted to do it the difficult way because that was what made it real. Suffering – even self-inflicted unnecessary suffering – made any achievement more worthwhile because it had been hard won.” Alexander Adams’ grimly determined mindset has changed little since that time, although he has subsequently found not just some artistic success, but also greater acceptance and understanding of himself, and the art world in which he operates as a rare ‘conservative’ presence.
Adams made desultory attempts to publish his manuscript at that time, but following rejections put it away for almost two decades. Having come across some of the artwork of that period again while working on a new project, he feels it is now a good time to publish, to set his present work in context and reveal more of his backstory to his subsequently acquired audience. It will also, he feels, be purgative – “a personal accounting” that can balance his books.
Novelists, as we know (or think we know) write largely about themselves, but The Naked Spur really is based very closely on actual experiences. The protagonist is a thoughtful artist called “A,” he is highly skilled but commercially unsuccessful, and he lives where Adams used to live, and bristles with his former emotions – a frustrated, lonely and resentful figure surrounded by equally atomised but usually far less intelligent individuals.
In desperate need of money, and in search of any kind of recognition, A has a cunning plan – to sell customised nude pictures to wealthy sensate individuals who wish to parade not just their wealth as patrons of the arts, but their allegedly ‘liberated’ selves. It is a cynical and even seedy concept, designed to prey on the gullibility and vanity of self-styled ‘sophisticates,’ and the reader is not sorry when it fails, despite the strenuous efforts of A and several revolving-door associates and collaborators.
One does, however, develop some sympathy for A himself – an impressive person reduced to such resorts, who has besides come to believe in the worth of the art he is producing for such shabby purposes. Yet in the end the failure of the scheme was good for him, as well as for society – because it forced him to do something infinitely more useful with his talents than flogging pornography-adjacent images to the wealthy and credulous. And he has done many more useful things in the years since – produced artworks which are held in world-famous collections, staged powerful exhibitions, edited anthologies, and written insightfully about the state of the arts in many articles and reviews, and important books like 2002’s Artivism.
In the present book, the London of some twenty years ago is excellently evoked in innumerable gritty details. I lived in Deptford around the same time as the artist, and his landmarks were also mine – the handsome baroque church of St Paul’s, the Bird’s Nest pub, the High Street, the Docklands Light Railway, and immediately across the river Canary Wharf still rising around its central silver tower. The sadness and shabbiness he shows in such photorealist detail – the drunks and their vomits, the glue-sniffers, the unhygienic takeaways, the graffiti and litter, the futile casual encounters and conversations in grubby rented rooms, the sleazy ‘top shelf’ magazines in newsagents – all that too rings authentic, the underbelly of the brittle metropolitan world A so badly wants to break into. It is closely observed, and faithfully depicted.
But sometimes the detail takes up space that might have been better devoted to character development. Some of the characters in The Naked Spur seem insubstantial, at times almost staffage, representations of sets of attitudes rather than real people. Even A hovers on the edge of focus, an observer rather than instigator, a reactor rather than a principal. He is obsessed with his single big idea, and concentrates so hard on trying to bring it to fruition that everything else is forgotten. The project becomes an end in itself, the artistic vision increasingly reduced to individual brush strokes, and the logistics of packing crates and pots of varnish. For a book about ‘nakedness’ and ‘spurs’ – a book, furthermore, which the author has described as “very personal” – A’s character and motivations seem rather opaque.
Insofar as we can see into A’s soul, it can seem sere. Sitting in that freezing flat in Berlin, he was writing in “self-aware replication” of his project’s failure. He goes on, “I would become an isolated broke author engaged in a private unprofitable gesture writing an uncommissioned novel about an isolated broke artist engaged in a private unprofitable gesture painting unsaleable pictures. The novel would be as sterile as the paintings – uncontaminated by commerce, uncompromised by any consideration of propriety.” As an explanation of what he was doing and thinking at that time, it is bracingly honest, but it sounds like a rather unappetising fictive formula.
The prose style is generally austere, a welcome change from the pretentious word-salads of the arts ‘establishment.’ This amorphous entity is the hinted-at villain of the piece, a jellyfish without a central brain but capable of responding quickly to environmental stimuli (money, or trending politics), and of course armed with poisonous nodules. Whatever the merits of A’s art (and Adams really is a superb craftsman) he was destined to be included out of lionisation or major grants by early Noughties arbiters – and he did not exactly help himself with his choice of subject matter. Adams’ more recent art must similarly sometimes have found itself treated with suspicion, because of his now publicly known political views; it is a testament to his abilities that he has achieved as much as he has against such odds. His art is luckily likely to last longer than that of many of his establishment-embraced contemporaries.
One slightly wonders who the novel is addressed to, apart from himself. Some of Adams’ generally conservative admirers and followers might even look askance at these productions of the artist’s youth – although conservatives are frequently more forgiving than the liberal-minded, and more morally complex. All would doubtless welcome a more recent autobiographical outline, in which the tough but callow young A can be balanced with the thoughtful and experienced Alexander, the ‘naked spur’ clad more warmly. For now, at least we have a striking study of a clever and interesting man at a low ebb in his life, losing all illusions to his and our advantage.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
LUKE GILFEDDER provides two chapters from his forthcoming novel
INTRODUCTORY SYNOPSIS: Several wealthy elderly men have committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, and Quinn suspects his long-lost school friend, Falin MacNaught, is responsible. To uncover the truth, Quinn forms an uneasy alliance with Raina, another ex-friend of Falin’s, his old form-master, Dr Sandy Falconer, and the retired spy Doyle Brogue. Together, they must journey to Saxain Manor in the Peak District, where Falin has fled with his next intended victim: the elusive baronet, Sir Rafael Mordkine
In this extract from Chapter Eleven, Falconer convinces a reluctant Brogue that they should use Owls’ Nest, an ex-army hut on the moors owned by the school, as the base for their expedition.
Chapter Eleven
Checkmated, Brogue’s face turned a shade of chateaubriand. Despite his reluctance to admit it, his military instincts must have told him Falconer’s plan was the better option. He realised he was still fidgeting with his keys, stopped, and walrussed smoke from his nostrils.
“Feck it, I suppose four make up a mess. Reet— Sandy, sit up front.” He ground out his cigar butt with a sound as satisfying as the crunch of a bone to a dog. “You can start by reading us those directions.”
Falconer grinned, “That’s the spirit, laddie,” and folded his gown over his arm. Under it, he wore a tweed jacket woven to blind. He was not, Quinn reflected, altogether miscast as an outdoorsy biology teacher. “Dinnae worry,” he burred, catching Brogue’s dubious stare as he bent into the car, “I’ve got a change of gear at the Nest.”
He glanced at Quinn in the wing mirror, subtilising the dynamics of student-teacher into a wink of connivance. Brogue huffed with forced good humour and twisted the ignition key. The warm motor caught at once, and they accelerated through Alderley into Wilmslow, settling on a quiet seventy through the silver-birched and golf-coursed Cheshire countryside. They reached the A34 junction, and Brogue took it.
The short winter’s day was duskening by the time they left the Footballer Belt and entered Manchester. It had only been a half hour’s ride at Brogue’s speed, this journey from streets of fatalistic wealth to streets of fatal poverty, but for Quinn, it felt as if they’d driven through his life story in reverse. Brogue wrestled the car through the treeless streets of brick back-to-backs, past boarded-up shops and offies with iron grilles. The Cadillac’s prow-like bonnet caught the dying gold of the setting sun, a gold that had been debased to a copper and decaying lead along the million terrace roofs. Starlings fell on the chimneys like rain, shrieking their cries of doom. Brogue cast a wry smile into his rearview mirror.
“Nice to be back, eh?”
Quinn mmhmed as he stared across the broken-bottlescapes of goose grass, bricked-up windows and arsoned warehouses. Strange, he admitted, how Manchester—the city that sparked global industrialisation and gave birth to the Modern World—so openly displayed its poverty and degradation for all that world to see. Over towards Deansgate, towers of scaffolding drew crisscross patterns of bars in a monstrous tartan upon the sky. But even these new skyscraping flats—rushed up to stave off the general decline— already looked in the grip of decay. White clouds, drifting from the Irish Sea, reflected in their grubby glass fronts, a low scud muffling twilight.
Falconer said, “The skies look grimly, Doyle. Think it’s going to rain?”
“According to my knee,” answered the old chief, obscurely patting his bad leg.
After leaving Manchester, the bungaloid miles clicked by like the leaves of a book. Gorton gave way to Hyde, and Hyde to Dinting Vale. Through the rearview mirror, Quinn watched the old hills of Cheshire, like aged men, fade away. The Edge’s magical influence waned with each passing kilometre, and the landscape grew wilder and bleaker. Soon, barren pastures stretched in every direction, revetted with drystone walls and furrowed with snowy windrows. By Moorfield, the only signs of civilisation left were a few ancient and rocky farmsteads strewn across the valley slopes, while behind them, the city receded to a greyish blur, dwindling rapidly beneath a dark massing of cloud.
Light thickened now along the road, and up ahead loomed the Peaks, rising sheer and cold into the already-red sky. The sun had set a third of the way behind their jagged crests, the last splinters of its light ruddling the gritstone faces of Black Hill and Laddow Rocks. In a few minutes, it would disappear entirely behind the moorland ridges and flood the road and valley below with night.
Brogue seemed to relax, driving the Cadillac as if it were a Jaguar now, his seat erect and far back, arms extended, leather-clad hands holding opposite sides of the wheel. The road narrowed, and the hills appeared to come suddenly nearer and to frown down upon them. Two posts stood sentinel at the entrance to the national park, and between them hung the sign: NOW ENTERING DARK PEAK. As if to emphasise the point, the road swung abruptly upward into bleak moor and forbidding black cliffs.
Taking his eyes off the ascent, Brogue glanced back at Quinn, demanding that he be told about the morning’s events. A treacherous hairpin loomed ahead, and Quinn broke into a cold sweat as he answered. But when he mentioned Mottram Hall and the suitcases, Brogue mercifully circled his gaze back to the road. He punched a number into his mounted mobile.
“Joan, it’s Doyle. I need a favour. Run this name through the database, would you: Falin, Falin Mac Naught. Aye, it’s Searlas’s grandson. Try Xavier Flynn, too. Christ, try Sebastian Melmoth while you’re at it—” he swerved at eighty round the bend. Without missing a beat, he added, “I know, I know. I’m retired. But I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important. Call me when you find anything—and alert airport security, would you?”
He hung up. His eyes re-joined Quinn’s in the rear-view, entreating him to continue.
“Christ,” he said when Quinn had finished. “And to top it all off, the old josser turns out to be Raffy Mordkine….”
That caused him to stop speaking. Mordkine. It even unsettled Quinn how he said the name. Brogue could have been speaking of an old fort where great losses had been taken.
They screeched across a Y-junction and onto an even steeper pass. The sleet-glazed road curved into switchbacks through the writhen hills, which gathered themselves and climbed up, scarp upon scarp, into the great gritstone plateau of Kinder Scout. Scree cliffs reared over Raina’s side, while a sheer drop to a river valley fell away on Quinn’s. The pass went on like this for some miles, undulating like a snake rearing on its tail.
“That’s where we’re headed,” Falconer said abruptly, pointing to a tongue of pines that tapered to a black speck on the upland. “Owls’ Nest.”
Everybody looked, but nobody answered—each gazed mutely with the vagueness of unrest. All around the car now the violence of the sunset was failing, and the light was crumbling momently from the crags. Something glinted in Falconer’s wing mirror. Quinn glanced back at the slanting fells, and in a fold of darkness between two slopes, he spotted a pair of headlights spring to life, dim, and die out. Had they been trailing them since the Y-junction? Maybe he was being paranoid — or maybe not paranoid enough. He stared at the road disappearing under the faint reflection of their tail lamps, sensing they had entered a trap: that in Alderley, they had been free — no matter how out of their depth they had been —but here, they were free no longer. He gave up staring and leaned his uneasy head against the seatbelt. The peaks sharpened against the dying sunset, and a pale violet gloam spread over the moor like ink dispersing in water.
Cdunk-cdunk!
They vibrated over a cattle grid, necks bouncing on headrests. Quinn jerked awake, startled out of his troubled nightmare of a doze, shocked to find the Cadillac climbing through a pine forest. A heavy fog, with holes in it, like artillery fire, rowed against the windows. Raina’s fingers tightened on his wrist. “I don’t feel safe…”
He held his smile but let the uneasiness out, like a slowly expelled breath, his mind still half-steeped in dreams. He felt in his pocket for the picture of Falin. In his hypnopompic state, he’d seen himself back on that school lawn, playing chess with his old friend, the same thick fog eddying around them, closing in without their notice. He had just opened with the Ruy López, a move Father Patrizio had taught him, and Falin had countered with the Arkhangelsk. Patrizio had said if you studied openings well enough, you could play on equal terms with a far superior opponent for the first eight or so moves. After that, he warned, you were ‘out of the book’…
Quinn stole a glance over his shoulder. The headlights were gone, swallowed by the south-fog. He let out a pent-up sigh and slumped back, but a second later, the headlights reappeared. Before he could mention it, they vanished again, as swiftly as if covered by a grey kerchief.
Brogue thumped his fuzzed SatNav with sudden indignation: “Sandy, are you sure this is the way to Saxain?”
Falconer tapped his window-pane. “Aye. Down there.” Quinn peered over the fog-bound pines and across the valley to the steeps of the Kinder massif. Becks poured like molten lead from Kinder Downfall, melting into an eye-achingly silver reservoir. Falconer indicated the reservoir’s black-wooded rim. “See those lights ower yonder?” A scatter of turreted windows glowed beyond the shine of the water, remote and inaccessible, like a witch’s house in a forest. “That’s Sir Rafael’s place, all right. Saxain Manor.”
Brogue grunted as though none of Falconer’s replies were above suspicion. “What now, then?’
“Get ourselves changed at the Nest,” Falconer said, “then go and take a closer look. An’ thank Christ all the lights are on—at least we’re not too late.”
Brogue grunted again. “A man does not necessarily choose to die in the dark.”
A few miles of silent driving later, a narrow granite bridge appeared, crossing over a streamlet that flowed into an old mill. Beyond the bridge, black contours dipped into a fog-carpeted valley that rose sharply to another ridge.
“How far to go?” came Raina’s voice. Quinn glanced at her. A clean girl’s look lay upon her face, as if she had been watching a horse which had broken its leg and was now simply miserable before the proportions of things.
Brogue jutted his chin toward the far ridgeline.
“‘Bout twenty minutes. Traffic-dependent. Ha ha.”
They slowed over the bridge’s rustic hump and tore down through the moss-coated hamlet of Furness Vale. Soon after, the road ascended again, twisting snakewise through holt and heath. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant impassable peaks re-emerged above the crags, and the wind stirring the fogforetold of the dark and limitless moor awaiting them. After climbing past the Bow Stones, the corkscrew road levelled off onto the high peak plateau. Brogue flicked up his headlamps, and the Cadillac soared lonelily across a barren moonscape of bare peat. He stared straight ahead, the chevrons blinking white under his headlights like the bones of Jacobites long dead.
“There’s the turning,” Falconer said suddenly, and told Brogue to switch into a lower gear. An ivory-white signpost grew larger before them, and Brogue indicated right. The Cadillac stirred up a blizzard as it jerked up a steep sleet-gritted track and coughed to a stop. At the top of the gorse-clad hill— up to its knees in restlessly tossing cotton grass—stood Owls Nest. Quinn glanced back at the infinite moor behind, reassured that nothing was visible and feeling nervous for the same reason. Falconer rubbed his hands together. “Just like old times, eh Roseblade?”
Just the opposite, thought Quinn. No, there was no Tennysonian afterglow shining on this trip. This time, they were out of the book.
Chapter Thirteen
Brogue’s headlights tunnelled down through the trees, the wind-blown rain smearing like jam on the window. Through the branches, Quinn caught a dim glimpse of the reservoir, its oily shimmer reminiscent of the bottom of a sardine tin. Beyond the water, Saxain’s turrets, like great charcoal drawings, suddenly began to expose their structure, the layers of knuckled masonry rising stone after grey stone above the forest, their lichened slates wet with starlight. A second later, the headlights sprayed on a red-lettered sign: Private Road. No Trespassing. The Cadillac slowed to a crawl. A faint glow soaked through the trees, announcing the moon’s rise over Kinder Scout. Brogue deadpanned: ‘Lovely night for a murder.’ No one replied.
Their wheels hushed as they drove deeper into the cedarn gloom, crossed a brook, and broke before a five-barred gate to which another flaking sign was nailed, this one hand-lettered: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Beyond that, the ghost of some obsolete road expired in thistles and purple heather. Brogue cut the headlights, cocked his chin at the forest and said:
“We’re on foot from here.”
Raina checked directions on her phone, looking as reluctant as a young bitch carried to a hunt. “But that’s such a hike, man. And it’s raining pipe-stems out there.”
Brogue yanked his key out of the ignition. “I did say you didn’t have to come.”
She stuck out her tongue tip at him as though it were a small almond. They tightened scarves and zippered up coats, and Brogue unlocked the car. Like a football crowd, the freezing rain charged and rushed them at the opening of the doors. Bodies braced, they ran for cover under the wind-shaked trees, following Falconer’s army-and-public-school voice: “Stick close tae me chaps, or we’ll be solitaires! And stay off the path! There’s an awfy big ditch!”
Raina took Quinn’s arm and put it around her waist. “You think Sandy knows where he’s going? This track isn’t marked.”
“But it’s here. So put your phone away and watch the real thing.”
“Fokker. I’ve lost signal anyway.”
She leaned closer to him, and his fingers felt the rocking of her delicate toy spine, neat as the couplings of a small boy’s locomotive. They yomped through the frozen rushes and sphagnum mosses, their eyes screwed against the sneaping wind. Falconer strode jerkily ahead, his cape fluttering over his tweed suit like Peter Cushing in TheHound of the Baskervilles. Quinn, meanwhile, soggy with mud from the knees down, looked about as cheerful as Heathcliff in a stage musical.
“Sir, which way now?”
The game trail Falconer was following could be headed in any direction under the whitewashed canopy of branches, and sleet pelted their eyes whenever they lifted their faces. Falconer signalled downhill with his alpenstock.
“There. Head for that shooting hut.”
What he pointed to wasn’t a hut at all, but a squat brick corpse, its near side palsied and sagging into the marsh. They huddled under its tin overhang while Falconer wrestled the O.S. map, crackling and billowing, from his jacket. He flattened it against the wall and turned his pen torch on it.
“Right, chaps. Saxain’s ower this next hill. But be careful. See that upturned rock yonder? That’s an old merestone.”
Raina strained her eyes into the blustery dark. “A what stone?”
“A boundary marker.”
She made a face at Quinn. “Why didn’t he just say that then?”
The moon slashed through the wrack of clouds hanging over the festering Peaks, lightening the darkness. Falconer folded the map and said they’d better hurry. The track sloped up to the woodland’s crest, emerged from the shadow of the trees, and opened out onto a heather-strewn clearing frozen into black and silver by the patchy moonlight. The finest grouse shooting ground in the county, Falconer observed with academic inutility. The woods pressed against it on three sides, but northward, the ground fell away steeply, and the tops of wet gables and towers were just visible at the bottom of the slope.
Brogue looped his cane over his arm and passed Quinn his binoculars, almost spitting the word: “Saxain.” Quinn looked closer and did not like what he saw. At the far edge of the clearing, cowled in shadow, stood a gaunt-turreted mansion — more a tiny castle than a hunting lodge — its crags and its stark walls of granite pocked with nameless windows. The rain smutched its outlines, but its battlemented and spired silhouette looked as sharp as if cut with an engraving knife.
Raina let out a low whistle. “Sheesh, Falin must be paranoid to hole himself up in there.”
Brogue grunted and said, “If he’s ‘owt like his grandfather, he’ll be too schizoid to be paranoid.”
“Just like you’re too paranoid to be schizoid,” Quinn almost replied, but stopped himself just in time.
Urged on by Falconer, the four scurried down the slope and into the cover of a gorse thicket. They were now but a rifle shot from the main gates: a maze of queer tracery in wrought iron, with ragged stone pillars on either side, weather-bitten and surmounted by the lions’ heads of the Mordkines. The manor’s shadow hung like black water along the drive and over their huddled figures, uncompromising and stark for all its theatricality. Quinn spotted a dim, hostile hearth flickering in one of the corner turrets, framed against a backdrop of darkly swaying willows. Brogue, following his gaze, whispered breathily,
“If you can get into the garden, you could try listening in.”
Quinn, struggling to hear over the orchestral swell of the rain, shot back,
“Why aren’t you coming too?”
“No. I’d best stay put,” his hands clasped over the handle of his blackthorn cane, panting, “Some daft sod’s got to watch your back.”
Quinn shrugged in agreement, supposing Brogue would make a rather conspicuous and tardy-gaited shadow, what with that bloody limp. They left him behind and trailed Falconer across the dead ground to the stone perimeter wall, crouched like three snatchers. With heads bent against the foul wind, they noticed the grass underfoot was strewn with frozen remnants of shotgun shells — hundreds of spent cartridges scattered like dead lipsticks in the snow. Falconer glanced up, gesturing toward the stables set diagonal to the main house, like a corner pocket on a pool table. One ivy-shaggy section of the wall looked climbable.
“You two get in there. I’ll find another way in.”
Quinn scaled the damp stones, using the thick vines as toeholds, swung over the top, and dropped silently into the shadows below. He helped Raina scramble down after him, then pivoted to face the ill-preserved garden. Moonlight lay like a white shawl across what once had been, no doubt, a well-kept lawn, but was now rough and ragged, with a cold sea of nettles and coarse weeds struggling in the places of the flower beds. They tiptoed forth between rusted patio chairs, decollated statues, and pleached hedges like prisoners with wildly overgrown hair. Overhead arched the bare trees, wild-armed and too tall, clawing with studied malevolence at the black December sky. The manor itself exuded a deliberate air of nostalgic decay, yet there was nothing eldritch about the motion-sensor lanterns flanking the odd-pillared porch, nor the wireless alarm under the moss-grown gable.
“Stay off the grass,” Quinn said, pointing to the stepping stones that led to the corner turret. “It’s best not to leave footprints.”
They darted from one stone to the next, lucifugous as bats. The turrets loomed higher overhead, black as thunderheads, holding low clouds captive at their summits. Somehow, Quinn felt that these time-eaten spires — pierced with their countless slit-eyed windows — were leering at him, expecting him. Suddenly, like a flame, a red flash leapt across his vision. A fox! Raina gasped — too loudly — sending the fox scuttling toward the manor with a little volley of shrill yips. A few heartbeats later, the porch door burst open, spreading a tight fan of light across the grass. Quinn pressed Raina’s shoulder.
“Get down!”
They dropped behind the chairs, their hearts pit-a-patting like ducks’ feet in mud. A black figure emerged in the golden oblong of the doorway, tall and stooped as Irving’s Shylock. He scooped up the fox and shouted, “Who’s there?”
Raina dug her nails into Quinn’s palm. “It’s Sir Rafael”.
The backlit baronet scowled out from under the porch, his shadowed face, seignorial and aquiline, scouting gloomily towards them.
“Who’s there, I say? Sh-show yourselves!”
The two stayed crouched like galley slaves, not daring to move so much as a coat sleeve. Quinn’s pulse clanged in his heart: they were trapped! But just then, a voice hallooed from the gates:
“Sir Rafael? Is that you?”
“Y-y-yes… who the hell are you?”
“It’s Sandy, Sandy Falconer,” said a voice with insane calm. “Could you let me in? It’s feechie weather out here.”
The gates buzzed open; Quinn glanced down the drive and glimpsed the Daimler, lustrous as ebony, a polished docile monster lazing on its bed of pink gravel. Falconer strode by it, upright as the cedar, his sagacious profile upraised, his bony nose strong to break the wind. The old master snuck them a wink, then turned to face the porch. Sir Rafael’s voice lisped,
“Sandy, w-what the devil are you doing out on a night like dis?”
“Teacher’s retreat at the Nest, old boy,” Falconer carolled in his pan-loafiest voice. “I saw your lights from the highway and thought I’d swing by.”
“I see…” Something in Sir Rafael’s tone changed. “You should be careful walking on the hunting grounds. You might get shot.”
“Oh, dinnae worry, I’m not in season.”
From inside the mansion, a second voice called:
“Who is it?”
Quinn’s skin shifted like a jacket of lizard skin. He whispered, “That voice is Falin’s.”
Raina’s teeth clittered in the darkness.
“Can you see him?”
“No… I think he’s behind Mordkine.”
Quinn craned his neck, his gaze working upward from Sir Rafael’s feet, like in the movies when the cameraman is trying to be tantalising. First came the morocco slippers, then the hem of the red-satin dressing gown, purlfed with gold. Still higher, a burgundy pyjama shirt and a silk scarf loosely knotted about a wine-flushed neck. Quinn dared not raise his head another inch. But he knew the face must look Alderley as all hell.
A long half minute elapsed before they heard Falconer mount the steps and Sir Rafael usher him inside. The door slammed shut, and the latch clicked.
“Ag nee!” Raina cried, casting her face down into the stiffened cups of her hands. “Ag nee, what have I done?”
Quinn strained her against him, her shivering body almost shaking his. “Come on; we’ve got to get out of here, now!”
He hoisted her to her feet, and they sprinted across the lawn, silent as their smote nerves would allow. The jarring of Raina’s boots shot fire up her ankles and through Quinn’s palms. They slipped through the fast-closing gates, and the button of her blouse popped undone, but she ran on, clutching at the gap with her free hand. A torch blinked twice ahead, and a paunched figure crutched forth from the dark, rising from the thicket like an antic root peeping out of a cracked tree trunk. It was Brogue. He seized Quinn by the collar, his eyes big as though exaggerated by blackface. “What the hell happened down there?”
“It was my fault,” Raina panted, her breasts rising and falling like an exhausted runner’s.
Unelated, Brogue released Quinn. “Whatever. Get back to the car and start the engine.” He tossed Quinn the keys, attached to a metal boar keyring. “I’ll deal with this.”
He turned his crookback to them, grumbling andgritting bad teeth, and retrainedhis binoculars on the manor’s grim-mullioned turrets. Resisting the temptation to argue, Quinn took Raina’s arm and steered her thrashing into the vast and gloomy woods, hurtling headlong in what he hoped was the right direction. From stile to gate, through pricking gorse and thorns, the two ran, splashing through the trackless undergrowth in search of any known landmark.
The wind came in fierce bursts now, clawing at their faces, driving the sleet with a vengeance against their nithering bodies. All they could see through their clenched eyelids were the streaking pellets, which seemed not to fall but fill the air in throngs of swirling eddies. To keep to one direction—the approximate direction of the Cadillac—was more a matter of luck than sense. They could not find the track through which they had descended the wood; every way was like every other way, a grey whirl through which they struggled, blind as untamed falcons.
When, just for variety’s sake, their route bore uphill again—against the wind now—Raina glimpsed at some distance, as if hovering there in the frost-fretted tangle of branches, the pale silhouette of a brick shack. Quinn thanked his kind saint—it was the shooting hut! Shoulders braced, they made for the chimerical wrack, which thrice vanished and re-appeared in the stormy murk, and when they finally reached it, scarce breathing, they spied the Cadillac just up ahead, the smoke-blue frame lit by one argent wedge of moonlight. Quinn ran to it, keys ajangle, and no sooner had he unlocked the doors than Raina collapsed on the cream leather seats, breathing from the top of her lungs, her eyes riveted on the trees.
“I’m so sorry, Quinn…. But when I saw that fox… it gave me such a skirk.” Her throat jammed, her golden hair dripped, darkened at the forehead by sweat. “It was the same one from Brogue’s garden, I’m telling you—”
Quinn pushed the hair over her eyes and shushed her.
“Don’t be silly. It could have been any fox.”
“Should we go back?”
“No. If Falconer’s in trouble, Brogue’ll handle it.” He reached over and started the wipers, of a sudden less confident. “Give it a half hour, anyway.”
She nursed her bloodied boy-knee, her bare throat throbbing, the hollow between her dress and the locket she wore beating like the ruby heart of Salvador Dali. After a minute, its pulse calmed, and she let her head fall back.
“At least Sir Rafael’s still alive. I couldn’t believe how well he looked—all dressed up like some Victorian count.”
Quinn smirked. “A what?”
“A count. C-o-u-n-t.”
“Must be a new way of spelling it.”
She bit her lip to keep herself from smiling. Quinn took Brogue’s duster and wrapped it around her shoulders. A shiver of tenderness rippled her features as a breeze does a reflection. Her eyes crinkled at the corners, staring up at him in gratitude, and her lips took on the frame of his name without saying it. She curled her head on his chest. After a bit of a while, she smiled. In the middle of that smile, she fell asleep.
LUKE GILFEDDER is a writer from Manchester, set to launch his debut novel, Die When I Say When, in 2025. Previously, he worked as a playwright, with scripts produced at The Royal Exchange Manchester, the Lyric Hammersmith, and in London’s West End. He has recently completed a PhD on the life and work of Wyndham Lewis
DEREK TURNER revisits a medieval Lincolnshire folktale, of the dragon of Castle Carlton
The song of the lark was abroad in the Marsh, with March greening the tips of the willows – but in Hugh Barde’s heart it was December.
He’d come out of his door in disgust, and now stood in the shadows, looking at his courtyard in deep dissatisfaction. Damn Hildegard! She’d been at him again. The same bloody subject – Sir Guillaume. How much better their knightly neighbour was as landlord. How much more successful. How much better maybe even as a man.
The despicable knight– him, a knight! – had just expanded his estate again, so his holdings now nudged right up against Hugh’s on two sides. The little hill on which Sir Guillaume’s handsome castle stood had always been irritatingly visible from Hugh’s chamber window, but now his churls could also be seen not far from Hugh’s front door, cutting brushwood and digging a ditch to drain the two carucates Hugh had not been granted by the King.
Guillaume, it was well known, was also manoeuvring to get the acres of waste along the coast road – right where Hugh had always intended to plant his town. Soon the jumped-up bastard’s corn would be waving right in front of Hugh’s own gates, his sheep baa-ing balefully on all sides. If this wasn’t stopped, soon the fame of the Bardes would start to fade, their line bleed into the peasantry. One day, Hugh thought, trees could be growing in this garth, uprooting all the Bardes’ embankments.
Guillaume, blast him to Hel, was cousin to the King, thanks to artful marriage into one of the oldest families in Falaise. That was why he was granted lands. That was why he was Lord Justiciar, holding life and death over the district, and with entrée at Court. All this, although both Barde lines were older, and incomparable at war. Yet Hugh’s father – a descendant of both Charlemagne, and the man who had won the way up out of the Malfosse – hadn’t even been given permission to fortify his own bailey! Hugh looked around sourly, thinking how shabby his holdings seemed, and how small. Ever since coming back from the wars, everything had seemed unsatisfactory.
It appeared not even Heaven favoured the family. Hugh had spent three whole years in the Holy Land, and at Aleppo had felled the Saracens’ giant champion – while Guillaume had stayed at home eating, reckoning up deeds and scrip with his fat fingers and soft hands. They didn’t even have a halfway-decent house-chaplain, Hugh reflected bitterly, as he noticed that shaven-headed spiritual advisor slinking out of the chapel, and towards the kitchens with their ale-barrels. As well as being a sot, he was also ignorant and lecherous, spending less time with the Church Fathers than with the miller’s mooncalf daughter.
Hildegard couldn’t really understand the way courts worked. She was only an English noblewoman, and so scion of a failed nation – although that little detail didn’t stop her having commanding airs. Hugh’s mother had had these too – sniffily conscious of her Mercian bloodline, and obviously regarding her husband’s people as brutal arrivistes. Once, when especially exasperated, Hugh’s father had confided in him that he wished he had found some nice quiet bride from the old country.
National pride lurked in even the mangiest and muddiest of Karleton’s vassals, for all their bowing and scraping and tugging of their stringy forelocks – as if they still hated, just waited to overturn their nation’s fate.Our nation’s fate now, Hugh corrected himself glumly. Two of these half-fellow countrymen trundled past at that moment, inclining their heads in what Hugh was sure was false fealty, towing a cart piled with fresh-cut reeds. Hugh looked sourly at their smocked backs, suspecting they were smirking.
Hugh’s Norman ancestors had now been in England for over a century, and of course his English antecessors since time out of mind. Hugh’s Norman grandfather had symbolically placed their bailey on the outline of an ancient fort. Yet Hugh still often felt he was not fully of this place. He wasn’t quite accepted, not privy to its secrets – didn’t know its still half-heathen gods. The full-bloods seemed a people of primitive beliefs, dwelling in a realm of ghosts.
Their superstitions could be contagious, even for Hugh, who had read a little, and travelled widely. There were odd moments, even on the bravest of days in the season of the year, when Hugh was eager on the trail of the boar, that he would find himself drifting into peculiar reveries, as if suddenly seeing himself from outside. All earthly sounds would die away, and he was suddenly unsure about where on earth he was, and what he was doing and why. Moments when it seemed nothing was real.
Some unanticipated movement might cause him to pause – or breaking through an arras of trees to find some hot and muffled clearing, where something important seemed just about to happen, or maybe had just been. Moments when the only noise was Bayard’s breathing, as the great big-eyed bay laid back his ears in fear, and goosebumps rose along his glistening neck. Some deeper than usual dappling or shadow – the monstrous shape of some trunk – the way roots seemed to swarm out of the ground… Hugh would foolishly imagine darting eyes amid the tangling leaves, cold watchers among the boskiest brakes of thorn.
There were wolves out here sometimes, of course, and cats – not to mention brybours, wandering robber-gangs who sometimes stooped to murder, about whom Guillaume naturally did nothing. The only crime he cared about was poaching, as might have been expected from such a voluptuary – who reportedly enjoyed watching miscreants being beaten in his basements.
But Hugh also sensed less corporeal dangers – dangers not easily driven away by the angriest barking of alaunts, or the most stoutly-wielded steel. The boars themselves could be more than just meat – capable of biting and excreting as burningly as any bonnacon, giving off infernal fetor, some even capable of shapeshifting. Witches still lingered in some corners of the woods, and leaf-clad wodewoses padded the greenest glades of all.
Even out on the open moor there were sunsets that seemed significant, dangerous dawns, and aery phenomena. The moon sometimes had a corona, at that season when ice-floes encrusted the beach, and your breath hung before your face like your essence escaping. On the night the old king had died at Thorney, a flaming star had arced over Karleton, charging eastwards at colossal speed before dousing its glim somewhere out at sea. The year of the Great Hunger, a vast skeleton had been seen by many out over the waters, grinning and stretching a long arm towards the land.
On the clearest and coldest nights, the alaunts would sometimes bay for unknown reasons, joined by the limers and greyhounds, signalling something unseen. These would awaken other dogs, and so others, and so others – on endlessly out across the silvery east, across expectant leagues of fen and moor, broad river and misty ditch, making churls curse and scratch on their paillasses, lords stir and mutter in their tapestried chambers, and wakemen look upward in interest. These eldritch alarums could carry all the way to Lincoln, to vex the uneasy moneylenders in their fancy new houses on the Hill, and the canons in the Cathedral, whose slumbers were too often filled with sin.
Even under the fullest light of day’s eye, there were lanes no-one liked going down, and particular pools in the fens, black and cold as could be, showing shivering facsimiles of the firmament, and tremulous reflections of reeds – whole worlds inverted, as if reversed men might be growing downwards into some underland. Summer’s lightning-flash adderbolt flies betokened the nearness of vipers, whose red tongues also lolled forth from the marsh-flowers gathered as simples by the goodwives.
The Anglais thought these pools held hags, or monsters they called nicors, Sir Guillaume had once informed Hugh superciliously (well knowing Hugh’s half-blood inheritance) – serpent-spirits that crept out at night to drain the udders of kine, or batten on the tender throats of children before taking them below. Their vapours were blamed when men sickened in the Marsh with unaccountable fevers, and grew yellow with unhealth and waking dreams. Women grew fractious and thin-haired in the noxious fumes, and brats often died at the dug.Hugh didn’t reject these stories nearly so readily. It couldn’t be denied that strange things did happen.
The Blue Stone, for instance, that had been dragged with such labour from the Bishop’s bovate, had eventually needed to be reinstated to stop the bad luck. Even Hugh’s hall was visited in the night by what the maids called boggarts – casting charms or stealing, sometimes just nuisances, sometimes something much worse. The maids propitiated them with dishes of milk, which would be empty the following day – although Hugh guessed this sometimes had more to do with cats, house-cousins of those at large in the greenwood. Hildegard had one – a grey Grimalkin that would sit with her while she span, glaring at Hugh, and hissing if he came too close. It was with her now, he knew – a changeling for a fine lady’s chamber, a watchful reminder of old darkness under trees.
Hildegard was right, though. It was unfair the way they were treated. If only, he thought yet again, he could find some way to distinguish himself. There were so many things he yearned to do, to turn the waste into fine estate, and secure a future for the boy. He saw the bailey made good, an elegant abbey arising, rows of robbers in gibbets, the trim roofs of a gated town with carts coming clopping from the coast, each carter leaving a token of respect to the Bardes, who had made the Marsh to bloom.
He turned his head. What was that? Something odd was happening down by the ash-grove. There was a crowd – a very large crowd, several hundreds perhaps, with others coming at a run. They couldn’t allbe from Karleton. But whoever they were, they should all be working, he thought, as he walked their way irately.
But as he neared, he realised the reason for this strange stoppage. One word stood out amid a hubbub of wildly excited noise – wyrm, wyrm. As they noticed his presence, the crowd faltered and fell sullenly silent, looking down, or at each other, or away.
Hugh spotted a solid sort of servitor – Asser of Markebi, the master-mason. “Well, Asser? What is all this?”
Asser cleared his throat. “It’s a worm, sire! They say a great worm has come to Ormesbi – burning everything, eating people! A worm, sire, with a single huge eye like a burning wheel!”
“Nonsense!” said Hugh reflexively – but his heart sank into his stomach. Everyone knew dragons existedoutside the tales boys were told – the saint taming the Tarasque, the dreadful Guivre of the Seine, the Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard, the loathly Lambton worm, Piers Shonks of Pelham, the white wyvern of the West and the crimson firedrake of the Welsh, locked together forever in fight far under Cambria, contesting for the country in eternity.
Had not the most learned geographers written of terrible lizards, and hadn’t Ptolemy set a dragon in the night-sky? Hugh had himself seen a crocodile in the Holy Land, and dragon’s blood on sale in apothecary shops. Kings of England had carried a dragon device. The Conqueror too had been called dragon for his desolations. Were not huge bones sometimes found in fields, or seen in the faces of cliffs? At Conisbrough of the Warennes was a stone showing a writhing beast beset by bishops. Hadn’t Sir Richard Buslingtorp bested a fierce Python just a few years before? The gold he had found afterwards had been the making of his fortune. Tiny dragon-like things could even be seen in Lindsey’s ponds, cousins to the cave-dwelling salamander, which crouched amid all flames unscorched.
In any case, the Bible was clear – such terrors had been in Babylon and would squirm forth again, crawling masters of the ground, agents of Chaos, emissaries of evil, harbingers of The End. Every Rogation-day, the churls carried a dragon effigy while they beat the bounds, immolating it after to feed the fields, and as insult to creeping Pontius Pilate. There would always be such beasts, until all lands were drained and tamed, and the End of Days.
Asser propelled a scarlet-faced man forward. “This is John of Ormesbi, sire. I knew his father – a man right worthy. He has run here to tell us what he has seen this day.”
John looked up defiantly into Hugh’s face, obviously not expecting to be believed.
“This morning, sire, a giant serpent, with wings, and a great rolling eye, landed on our hill like thunder! Longer than the church, it was – taller than the trees, blacker than night, hungrier than the wolf! It ate the sheep, the swine, and some of our people – and scorched up all the earth with its foul breath and trampling claws. Everyone fled! No-one can withstand such! I and all these others ran all the way, to warn you.”
The crowd burst back into babble, while Hugh tried to assess John’s worth. Eventually, he asked, “Did you take this report to the Lord Justiciar?”
“Yes, sire, with these men, and other men from Ormesbi, and Calesbi, and Wormesgay, and Burwell. From everywhere. But the lord just said – well…“. He paused, and looked away in indignation.
“Well?”
“The lord sent down a message, sire, by his steward, saying these were lies, and that we had better return to work, or face whipping!” The crowd groaned and seethed and muttered. “Norman scum! Always the same! That’s how they treat the people!”
John spoke up again: “But these are no lies, sire. I swear it, on the Virgin’s life!”
Asser interposed gravely. “Master Barde, I believe this man is in the right.”
Hugh’s brain was awhirl. Of course Guillaume wouldn’t go. He’d always been a coward, though who wouldn’t be when it came to dragons? Cowardice could never be an excuse, though – not for such as valued their honour. And now all were looking to him. There was no-one else. And sometimes – he gulped – even the worst fears needed facing. At last he nodded.
“I believe you, John of Ormesbi! I believe you.” He clapped John on his shoulder, startling him, and himself, with his condescension. “I will go!” he said, and the crowd inhaled in admiration. Before he could change his mind, he started issuing orders. “You, boy – to the hall! Send for the priest Godric, and Athelstan my esquire. Bid them meet me in the courtyard!”
“Yes, sire!” Several boys raced away to be first with the news, as Hugh walked quickly towards his hall, followed by most of the crowd. As he approached, Hildegard was already issuing forth, holding the hand of their wide-eyed son, three-year-old future of the line.
“I have heard this strange news, husband! Is it true? And are you then riding out?”
Hugh nodded rather stiffly, but then Hildegard broke out wonderfully into a radiant smile – a smile he had never seen before. “The Bardes are never fainthearts!” she cried proudly. Hugh straightened instinctively, and then she drew him apart, speaking in low and eager tones. “Our neighbour has spurned this challenge?”
“He has, wife!”
“This then is your chance – our chance! Kill this thing, and tell the King, and Guillaume too is finished. He cannot be Lord Justiciar if he does not do the Lord Justiciar’s work! And then, husband, and then…well, who could be better fitted than a dragon’s bane?”
Hugh was struck by this. But there was one obvious difficulty. “But what if I miscarry! What if… well, what if I don’t come back?”
“You will not fail, husband! But – if you do, then you will have died like Roland – an example to our son, and certain of a place at Heaven’s board. I should be proud to be widow of such a man!”
Hugh couldn’t help wishing she had seemed less easily accepting of that prospect. Hildegard however kept talking, “But I know you can do this, husband. And when you do, you will have your reward. Your rights. Do this thing, for our son. Do it, for your honour. The King cannot refuse you anything if you succeed. And nor” – she paused significantly – “nor could I!”
Hugh could see it all – the grateful countenance of the King – the downfall of Guillaume, reversion of his lands to the Crown and so to him – a barony, and crest – a market charter. Above even these swam that superb new smile of his wife’s – a smile that filled his heart, and seemed to strengthen his sword-arm. He inhaled deeply of fragrant future-time, and a new kind of life with a Lady as wife.
Then his esquire Athelstan arrived, with boys and accoutrements as brilliantly burnished as the day they had been stored – chainmail, breastplate, bascinet, helm, long shield, and sword. Another boy came struggling after, battling to balance the long lance last levelled in the Holy Land. The stable-boy also came hastening, leading Bayard by the bridle, and another boy trotting alongside, tightening the girths of the war-saddle last straddled against paynim in Palestine. Everywhere was frantic with life, as if half the Marsh had come.
“Hold!” Hildegard cried, and all astonishingly did, struck by her command and clarity. “Goodwife, lend me your dirk.” To murmured delight and surprise, she sliced a strip of blue cambric from her own bodice. “Here, husband. My token!” She smiled yet again, but Hugh had no time to dwell even on that as he found himself beset.
The courtyard teemed with clamouring men and women of all ages and degrees, and from several estates, noisily exchanging advice about the best ways to deal with dragons. Lore was dredged up from murky depths, rich and shiny and strange as upcast from a ditch. There was a cacophony of contradictory suggestions, drawn from everywhere and nowhere. “Look for the gold! – Don’t look in its eyes! – Watch for its tail! – Don’t let it speak! – Give it an ox head! – Give it milk! – Bind it with a virgin’s girdle! – Watch for the wart! – Its blood burns fire! – Quench it in the lake!”
Hugh’s soldiering sense somehow asserted itself, and he went over to the corner to urinate before donning his array. He had once disgracefully bewrayed himself outside Jerusalem. As he adjusted his britches, he saw the priest Godric emerging furtively from the fortuitously unattended kitchens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if wiping ale away, which almost certainly he was. Hugh considered him dissatisfiedly; if only there’d been time to bring the Bishop, or even the Abbot from Louth.
“There you are, priest! Look lively! We have a great work to do!” Hugh moved over to the waiting esquire and house-boys, and now stood still among them, arms outstretched, as they began to gear him up. Athelstan’s fingers moved swiftly over Hugh’s sturdy frame, expertly buckling and lacing, every moment weighing him down more heavily.
“A great worm, sire!” said the priest. “Can it be true?”
“Why not? They’re in the Bible, aren’t they?”
The priest seemed unsure, then brightened. “There was one in the Garden, sire. It tempted the woman! And, err, there were some more, near the end!… Or were those gryphons?”
Hugh snorted. “I seem to remember there were a few more than that! But let’s not worry too much about fine exegetical points!”
The priest smiled ingratiatingly. “Of course not, sire! Of course not, ha ha!” He paused for a moment. “May I just say, sire, how admiring I am of your great courage? And how proud I am to have known you? It has been my great privilege to have served you in howsoever humble a capacity…”
“You’re still serving, man! You’re coming with me! You, Father, are my spiritual buckler and shield! You’re the best I can do at short notice!”
There was rough laughter from all within hearing as Godric gawped. “Me, sire? You don’t mean it, sire! I mean, you can’t. And…and what about the Rector at Ormesbi? Or Calesbi? I would not wish to impinge on their privileges… Or perhaps Oswald of Burwell …”
Hugh smiled grimly. “Eaten, for all I know! They’re probably choking the beast right now! It’s up to you, I’m afraid, Father. This is your chance! So go and get your book, and your cross, and your water, and get ready to ride – there’s a good priest. In fact, who not put on all your gear? It can’t do any harm. You, boy, go with him to help – and you, get the priest’s palfrey. You, fetch Dagobert and Manu. Today is the hunt of hunts!”
All the dogs had sensed the excitement, and were moving and moaning in the kennels, snapping impatiently at each other, whimperingly eager for the off. With difficulty, the kennel-hands eventually extricated white-and-black Dagobert and brindled Manu, Hugh’s favourites – veteran companions of la chasse, gashed with tusk of boar and tooth of wolf, slobberers over Hugh’s hands, and sires to many lusty pups. They almost pulled their handlers off their feet, nearly strangling themselves as they surged towards their master, drooling and whining. Everywhere was a-thrum with thrilling errantry and an acrid tang of fear, like the end of some age, or the start of a new.
All too soon, Hugh found himself clambering onto Bayard’s broad back, for what he couldn’t stop thinking might be the last time. Athelstan waited stolidly by, on his horse Godwine, Hugh’s lance resting in straps alongside his saddle until called for. The priest was being shoved unceremoniously up onto his mount, the humorously-named Godspeed, tricked out almost comically in full canonicals, holding miserably on with one hand, while the other clutched his book. Vials of holy water and chrism, plus some wafe, were in a bag belted across his body, sohe wasprepared for all eventualities. When he thought nobody would see, he slurped surreptitiously from a large leathern flask. Last came the huntsman and the whipper-in, who would run behind, or in front, depending on the fleetness of the hounds and the closeness of their quarry.
As the little group lined up to leave, an awed silence came down, broken only by the panting and whining of the dogs. Athelstan leaned down to rumple young Athelstan’s curly head, while his wife wept openly. At the back of the throng, the miller’s daughter’s eyes devoured Godric, but he was too preoccupied to notice, muttering intensely to himself. Hildegard stood out easily to her husband – noble in blonde and blue, holding the hand of the infant Hugh. As she and he exchanged a gaze of understanding, he fastened her cambric around his armoured neck, and nodded. She raised her right hand in salute, and smiled as if in wistfulness, or farewell. “Ride hardily, husband!” she called, clear as a church bell.
He weakened – but all eyes were on him – on the Bardes. He turned at last, and said “Let’s go” – and the retinue moved out amid cries of “Good luck!” and “God be with you!” People streamed out through the gates behind, and cheered the plucky party out of sight. Whatever happened hereafter, Hugh knew, Karleton wouldn’t be the same.
The fields fell unnaturally silent and still. Almost like the deserts in Isiah, thought Hugh, habitations of dragons and courts for screech-owls. Tools and barrows and lunch-pails lay where panicking people had dropped them. Bundles of reeds awaited unbound, eels were escaping from a basket, and a tree leaned crazily half-sawn. A cart of stone for the priory at Greenfield stood driverless, its still-yoked oxen grazing unconcerned. A hare that on any other day could have ended up on the high table raced away when it saw them, and a squirrel chittered angrily from an ash. The hounds had stopped barking, but were surging powerfully on, towing their stumbling and swearing attendants.
Hugh cantered at the head of the little line, wondering what he had let himself in for. It had been easy to be brave in the courtyard. But this really might be the last time he rode this road. That really might be his last hare. Those, his last sheep – and that his last oak burgeoning into leaf. Would he see it in full festoon? Would he see his son as man? A murder of crows going over brought back the battle-birds of Acre.
He wondered what his companions were thinking. These might be the last men he would see, and he realised he knew almost nothing of their lives. Yet even those now so cursingly busy with the dogs doubtless also had terrors. As for Athelstan, his esquire of twenty years – even he was an enigma, riding as always behind, expressionless as usual, sure and steadfast as a shieldwall, and just as blankly incommunicative. But the priest seemed the least knowable of all. Hugh had often wondered what possessed a man to take the tonsure, and now it looked like he’d never know. He observed Godric – so puny and uncertain in his seat, so ashen and muttering, letting Godspeed lag – and felt pity with his contempt.
“Ride up with me, priest!” Godric grudgingly spurred alongside. Hugh spoke more jocosely than he felt. “What about a bit of praying, eh? In English, if you like! Better simple faith than Norman blood, eh?” He would have liked Latin, but Godric’s Latin was notorious.
“In English? Of course, sire! Err, let me see, dear Lord, deliver us from evil! Um, shield us from the beast. Err…deliver us from evil. Shield us from the beast that crawls in the dirt…”
Hugh listened impatiently for a while. “What about one of our own? Guthlac, maybe?”
“Good idea, sire! Good old Guthlac! Err, dear Blessed Guthlac, deliver us from evil. Shield us, o sainted one, from the beast that crawls in the dirt, err…”
Hugh shook his head regretfully, and spurred on – searching inside himself instead for words that might suit saints. But he was acutely aware of his inarticulacy, and conscious of certain past transgressions. Maybe any words would be inadequate. Norman blood might be needed after all. Deus vult, he sighed in conclusion, Deus vult – and might to the smiting hand!
The priest fell back. He took another draught from his flask, then another. Godspeed was soon overtaken even by the profane and puffing men on foot, who stared at the priest contemptuously as they were towed past. He fell yet further behind, and Godspeed stopped to tear at grass, as Godric’s flask swiftly emptied.
Not far now, Hugh knew. Not far enough! Ketsbi Lane (medieval records rarely seem to capitalise words like “lane” or “church” (see Calesbi below) and often join them with hyphens to proper nouns, but it’s up to you) unrolled into the valley, and up again the other side, to the crest beyond which he knew they would find…what they would find. Whatever would find them. He registered Calesbi church with its gleaming walls to the south, and Burwell’s little tower to the north – reassuring sights for a once familiar world now in perilous play, his world that might be coming to its end. A storm came even from the blueness behind, clouds piling over the nearby ocean, a sudden squall blowing them on, and setting the trees to frantic dancing. Not far now. Not far enough…
Sky white in front – too white to be right – and then that white was forming a flaw – a wavy uncertainty, shimmering like the air that radiated from the soil in the long month of Leo, cutting off men’s heads, and inverting all elements. A buzzard circling Ormesby Top seemed suddenly to stop, and just wink out. The breath of the basilisk, Hugh groaned, sickeningly realising he had brought nothing to shield his face. The very shape of the wold was snakelike – those tormented stones a supple spine, that boulder a bulging and baleful eye.
An enormous roaring was now around, and a clashing of claws on scales – metal on metal, like the swords they had beaten on shields at Aleppo as they eagerly awaited the infidel attack. Heats of Hel now too, and charge of lightning, and a rank stench emanating from everything – incendiarized exudations of a thousand charnel-houses and cess-pits, worse than the scourings of sickrooms or the foulest fewmets of the wickedest wolf. As Hugh bit back vomit, and fought a desperate urge to flee, vast and sweaty steams swirled down and cloaked the crest in cerements of dread.
Bayard was twitching and whickering, with staring eyes and shining flanks, terrified but still true – true like a steed of ancient times, this wonderful warhorse of the Norman world, the finest mount between England and Jerusalem. Hugh stroked him to soothe, stroked Hildegard’s cloth, and wondered how the world would be for their boy.
Athelstan was now alongside, for the first time ever unsure, eyes huge as Hugh’s, and as affrighted. “Sire, you see…?” But he recalled his duty, and place, and was handing Hugh his lance as the breathlessly boiling and mire-bespattered hound-handlers caught up, their frothing and straining charges only just held in check.
“The dogs, sire?” panted the almost expiring huntsman, as the maddened hounds reared up to claw the air.
“Unleash them!” Hugh somehow said, swallowing down his soul.
The slipped alaunts bounded away berserkers, frothing to be first to find, and rend, leaving their handlers rolling helpless on the ground.
Startlingly in that same second, the priest miraculously materialized, a pale rider on wings of storm, unnaturally upright and even in that moment faintly risible – shouting indistinguishable oaths as he incredibly overtook them all, holding on with one hand while waving the Cross, chasing the hounds towards the crest behind which lay certain death. With the hounds Godspeed melted into the monster’s mists, and vanished from view.
“He’s drunk!” shouted Athelstan, amazed.
“He’s full of spirit all right!” Hugh joked grimly – his last joke – and gritting his teeth and gripping the lance with his gauntlet, with a tremendous shout he spurred Bayard up the slope.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
I’ve always been impressed by the ones who leave a note. Not just any note, mind you. I mean something along the lines of “You’ll find the key to my safe in the sock drawer,” or “Don’t forget to water my prize rose bush,” or even “Give an extra hundred to the cleaning gal for the mess.” No accusations, no justifications, no pontification—none of that. Just something simple, pragmatic, to the point. Elegant, you might even call it. Or perhaps you find that word queer in this context, even distasteful. Fair enough. There’s no point arguing matters of taste. But as for myself, I’ve always admired the ones who can write something so matter-of-fact a few moments before their brains are dripping from the ceiling.
I had the good fortune of knowing several such men during my time in the armed forces. Quite intimately, in fact. You see, I was their superior, and it was on my orders that they carried out the acts that inspired them to pen those pithy little sign-offs. They died by bullet, buckshot, belt—and in one case band saw, if you can believe it. Though in that instance the gentleman’s civilian occupation was carpentry, so I suppose it made good sense. One returns in the end to what one knows best, after all. And though the methods were varied, the cause of death was singular, even if it eluded the coroner: to a man, they all died of a bad conscience.
It’s the source of that bad conscience that you’ve come to hear about tonight, I gather. Unless you’ve come for the free meal, sponsored by your editors. Please extend my gratitude to them for that courtesy, by the way. I was half expecting to have to pay my own way, miserly as they are in the journalism industry nowadays. In any case, I guess we’ll see by the end of the evening whether my story earns the meal. The head chef is trained in the finest pre-Collapse French tradition, so I wager I have my work cut out for me.
Speaking of which, I took the liberty of ordering us a few hors-d’œuvres just before you arrived.
My pleasure. Apéritifs are on the way as well. Dry vermouth, a 2059 vintage, I think.
That’s right, from just before the bombs fell. Supposedly there’s still a trace amount of cesium-137 in the bottles. But you needn’t fret: all the especially nasty radioisotopes decayed away ages ago. The only danger now is a hangover. Do take care, though—vermouth sneaks up on you, in my experience. Anyhow, I hope you don’t mind drinking on assignment. Alcohol is included in the reimbursement, surely?
Splendid. I suspect you’ll need it. It’s liable to be a long night.
I understand that you have your work cut out for you as well: winning over today’s jaded readership takes something altogether more charged than death by perforation, laceration, or asphyxiation. Don’t worry, I intend to make your job as easy as possible in that respect. And since I don’t expect muckraking to prove overly difficult here, I hope you won’t take exception if I ask something else of you, something a bit more… pressing. You might even call it a matter of life and death. But I’m getting well ahead of myself.
Before you agree to anything, I imagine you’ll want some reassurance that I am who I claim to be: the man who’s dodged interviews for three decades now, yet on the thirtieth anniversary of the armistice finds himself knocking on a journalist’s door instead of slamming his own in her face. To remove any doubt, I’ve curated my prepared remarks to open with some as-yet-unpublished details about the anecdote that earned me my fifteen minutes of fame—or infamy, as the case may be. It’s all the same to me. No publicity is bad publicity, as they.
So let’s start things off with a bang and get on with the fireworks, shall we?
Brilliant!
It was March 2143, two years into the war with the North, and I was a major stationed in the Garrisoned Zones. That’s what leadership had taken to calling the bombed-out husk of a former megacity located fifty kilometers north of our border. It had been nuked to rubble during the Firestorm of 2060 and left uninhabitable for the better part of a century—at least, for anyone who wasn’t keen on getting a sunburn in the dark or losing their teeth at age twenty-five. That is to say, anyone who didn’t wish to end up like the Zonees: the remnant population of some hundred thousand urbanites, plagued by sundry mutations and malformations resulting from congenital radiation poisoning.
My battalion was barracked alongside a community of three hundred such holdovers, on account of a very particular task we’d been assigned. Their enclave lay in the ruins of a rail yard, with dilapidated boxcars serving as single family condominiums. It was rather quaint, as scrap heaps go. They practiced subsistence agriculture using pre-industrial techniques, supplemented by the few functional Old-World relics remaining to them.
The first sabbath after we arrived was a local high holiday marking the vernal equinox. It was considered an auspicious day for nuptials, and several couples were to be wed at a church service. Consequently, the entire community had turned out in their Sunday finest: the broodmares with all their little sucklings in tow, widows and widowers in their stooped dignity, preening debutantes, teenagers exchanging furtive glances with their paramours, men chattering about work or the weather or God knows what. From our position on a nearby hillock, I studied them closely, as I often did, with an anthropologist’s eye. Overall, it was a veritable cross-section of humanity, just like one would encounter in the civilized world.
I waved to several of the parishioners as they filed past, and I encouraged my subordinates to do the same. At one point, a village girl, perhaps five or six, left her mother’s side and came bounding up the slope toward us. The woman didn’t appear to notice until her daughter had almost completed the foray. She called after her, but by then the girl was already reaching up to caress the neck of my black stallion.
I fished around in my saddlebag and retrieved a foil-wrapped chocolate and hazelnut bonbon, the kind I had regularly shipped to me from the finest confectionery in the capital. She reached up and grasped it with her chubby fingers—all six of them. I gently spun her around and nudged her back in the direction of her parent. After they were reunited, the woman raised a hand in appreciation, and a smile spread across her face. The two disappeared into their house of worship, hand in hand.
The church was a curious edifice, a collection of what looked to be Old-World portable privies. They had been welded together with some of their walls removed, so that they formed a single large chamber with windows sizeable enough for us to observe the proceedings from our elevated vantage point. The toilets themselves had been left in place as seats for the congregants, with the tanks serving as elbow rests for the person to the rear when kneeling in prayer. Conveniently, the bowls were still connected to plumbing so that they could double as replenishable holy water receptacles.
The structure was made almost entirely of plastic, which was no arbitrary design choice. In fact, its composition was integral to the Zonee faith, a kind of cargo cult that elevated Old-World materials and artifacts to the status of sacred relics from a mythical age. According to their eschatology, the accumulation and consecration of a threshold amount of such antiques would bring about a “return of the gods” and a restoration of twenty-first-century glory. There was just one small problem with that belief, from our perspective: we too had aims on pre-Collapse synthetics, though for a much more worldly reason.
You’ll forgive the history lesson, but I’ve found I can’t take anything for granted with your generation, what with the state of schooling nowadays. Why, just look at our company in this very establishment, full as it is of half-naked and semi-literate libertines! Besides, I gather from the microphone you’ve affixed to my lapel and the tape machine in your purse that I’m not only addressing you. Who knows how long your little recording might survive and garner interest. So there’s posterity for me to consider as well. Therefore, I’ll save my unborn audience a trip to the library and tell the whole story, beginning to end, in its full historical context.
Now, where was I? That’s right, the sacred cesspit. In my view, a church is still a church—whether affiliated with the Bible movement or the bowel movement—and I was determined to see that particular service through to its climax. By the time the procession of bathroom-goers tapered off, the building was filled to overflowing, a real squatting-room-only affair.
The ceremony began somberly, as was their custom. The priest intoned a sonorous dirge, which I took to be some kind of lament over their travails as a people, or else over the sorry state of the world in general. From there the pitch increased in turns as more voices joined in—first the men, then the women, finally the children. The mood brightened and the pace quickened, building at last to a crescendo of fervent ululation as their sacred totem—a rusted old can of air freshener, I think—was revealed to the congregation.
I couldn’t help but wonder about that. Perhaps they misunderstood “air freshener” as applying not only to the scatalogical, but the radiological as well. Perhaps they considered the relic some sort of mana from heaven that had the powers of a cure-all and was thus deserving of their adoration. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, and the can was simply the shiniest thing they had on hand. Whatever the case, it was long since empty and no good to them for purifying the air—so I figured I’d do my part and light a match instead.
Consequently, it was in that instant—just as the priest raised the deodorizer overhead in triumph—that I gave the signal. I’m not a person devoid of a healthy sense for the theatrical, you understand. Neither am I without feeling, and it seemed to me right and proper to allow them that moment, if nothing else.
The lead sapper glanced up at me, flipping his switch after only the briefest hesitation—and the entire assembly ascended to the heavens in a great fireball of religious ecstasy. The explosion took our breath away and rocked the enclave to its foundation, breaking windowpanes half a kilometer away. Debris from the sundered structure littered the vicinity, and the central pile of rubble began coughing up thick plumes of acrid black smoke.
It was only after we recovered our wits and surveyed the results that we realized the townsfolk had left behind a few bodily mementos before departing on their journey skyward. You’ll have trouble believing this, I’m sure, but the head of the priest had landed directly in a toilet bowl, where it was spinning in circles as the broken mechanism flushed uncontrollably. His mouth, still agape in its final “Hallelujah,” was issuing forth a jet of toilet water three feet into the air, like a fountain cherub. That’s the God’s honest truth. From his lips to God’s ears, as they say.
You see, it had occurred to me the night before that the engineers attached to our command happened to be in possession of several crates of dynamite, on hand for the purpose of blowing bridges or clearing obstacles. I instructed them to take the whole lot of it—two hundred kilos in all—and plant it in the church under cover of darkness, in the toilet tanks and otherwise out of sight. A curfew was in place at the time, so we could proceed with confidence that our work would go unnoticed. I could go on, but I’m sure you’ve already seen the photos. They made something of a splash when they were published after the war. Shreds of flesh dangling from tree branches like red lingerie drying on a clothesline, as I recall.
My bluntness appears to have rankled you. I do apologize, but I’ve never been one to mince words—bodies, yes, but not words. And you must understand that I didn’t know who my dining partner would be tonight, so I prepared my remarks with a general audience in mind. That audience includes those of a gruffer breed than you—you, a twenty… five-year-old female journalist? Educated, at least by today’s standards; cultured enough to know her ristretto from her macchiato; unattached, save for maybe a cat or two; someone who’s waded through her share of muck and sludge, but still holds out hope for that elusive kernel of human goodness—perhaps even secretly yearning to land the scoop on some great “Kumbaya moment” that redeems us of everything. Right on all counts, no?
Very good. I’ve always been a real people person, a true empath, as you’ll glean soon enough. Consequently, matters of character rarely escape me. Don’t mistake me, though: none of my observations were meant as insults. I’m well acquainted with your work, and I admire you as an impartial newswoman of the old school, in spite of your youth.
Why, the mere fact that you didn’t put a microphone on your own lapel tells me just the kind of reporter you are: the kind who’s not infatuated with the sound of her own voice. In fact, if it weren’t for your reputation as someone who does her damnedest to keep herself out of the story, who forbids her own scruples and foibles from clouding her work, I wouldn’t be planning on asking for that personal favor I mentioned—a favor that involves me placing complete faith in your professional judgment.
What’s more, I’m sure you understand that anecdotes of that sort are precisely why your editors sought me out for the past thirty years, and why they leapt at my invitation tonight. Your rag was the first to print the dynamiting photos—the photos that scandalized a nation—so it makes perfect sense that they’d go out of their way to land the first interview with its orchestrator.
And aside from your bosses, I have other listeners of this recording to consider as well—listeners a hundred years hence, who may not be quite as dainty and starry-eyed as you. Indeed, if history is any guide, they may well be even more blood-thirsty and jaded than today’s lot. Perhaps even as jaded as the twenty-first-century set, before they melted each other’s faces off with atom bombs. So I hope you won’t hold it against me that in opening my story, I chose to heed an age-old newsroom adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
I trust you’ll now allow me to explain my foray into high explosives, since some context is necessary to fully appreciate things of that… nature. Without it, I can sense that misleading first impressions are a real danger. In fact, based on how feverishly you’re scribbling in your jotter, I’d wager you’re jumping to conclusions already. And it’s easy enough to guess from your facial expression exactly what sort of conclusions they are. I’m not blind, after all. To save you from having to scratch out anything later on, I should clarify this act of mine, an altogether monstrous one, I suppose—to the untrained eye, at least. So let’s train our eyes before proceeding further.
To accomplish that, I’d like to backtrack a little, to April of ’42. I was a freshly minted captain then, bound by rail for my initial field posting in Z-4, a northeastern Garrisoned Zone. On account of my background in jurisprudence, I’d been assigned to the Security Echelon, a paramilitary police agency tasked with safeguarding our assets in the city.
As our steam locomotive wound alongside an urban waterway toward the central rail station, fog lay low and still over the riverbanks, undisturbed by flap of wing or stroke of oar. The water fowl had long since left those parts, or else fallen motionless from the sky. The fishermen and their boats followed close behind. The birds that remained were sickly things: flightless, often blind, they toddled in circles and pecked fruitlessly at the lifeless ground. The people, it was said, were little better. At least, according to the orientation literature I’d been reading as the train rumbled along, cutting through the fog and sending the birds perched along the tracks skittering away.
Eventually, the wheels began to squeak as we decelerated into the station. A sergeant leapt aboard and barged into the enlisted men’s boxcar before the train had fully ground to a halt. “All right, you lot!” I heard him exclaim from my private quarters, one car over. “Welcome to the Exclusion Zones.”
I poked my head out of my cabin to observe the spectacle through the window of the door separating our cars. The sergeant’s underling, a corporal, whispered something into his ear.
“Garrisoned Zones, I mean!” the NCO corrected himself. “As of two weeks ago, at least. Don’t let that ‘exclusion’ bit scare you. I can guarantee you won’t get more than a healthy dose of rads here—just enough to put some hair on your virginal chests. So long as you stay within the yellow lines, of course.”
The corporal whispered to him again.
“Oh, you’re the ones who’ll be painting those yellow lines. Well, then… I can guarantee that if you do get more than a healthy dose, you won’t feel a thing—until your insides are a chunky pudding dribbling out your anus. And by then, you won’t have anything more to worry about anyway.”
I cracked a smile and listened to another couple minutes of the sergeant’s theatrics. That sort of cheeky hazing—carefully orchestrated, to be sure—was exactly the reason I preferred the enlisted initiation to the officers’ briefing. But just then I caught sight of a lieutenant beckoning me insistently from across the station’s platform. I gathered my belongings and strode out to meet him. After we exchanged curt pleasantries, he ushered me into a nearby command hut, where said briefing had just begun. I claimed an unoccupied seat at the back of the room.
A gaunt major with an exceedingly erect posture was addressing the dozen fresh officers in attendance. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there’s one thing you simply must understand about the Garrisoned Zones. This isn’t a city—not to us. It’s an oil well. Every plastic-shingled shanty-town, every bottle-laden garbage dump, every prosthetic-legged old woman—they’re all latent fuel, waiting to be tapped. Coal is history, fossil fuels are a memory, so plastic is the name of our game here. Petroleum pyrolysis, the boffins call it: going from plastic to oil to gasoline. But you don’t have to worry about that part. That’s what the civilian contractors are for.”
He picked up a misshapen human skull perched conspicuously on his desk. I couldn’t tell whether it was a fossil or from a more recent kill. “What you do have to worry about,” he said, “are the locals, like this one. Thirteen hundred cc cranial capacity, about a hundred less than ours. They make up for it with a few extra teeth, though: many of them have thirty-four instead of thirty-two, as you can see here. That combination means they’re prone to bite first and ask questions later. We’ve only been here a month, and they’re already at our throats every time we so much as rustle a prehistoric tampon lying in a garbage heap.”
The line elicited a few chuckles from the assembled.
“Two weeks ago, things got out of hand and they killed a worker in Z-3. Ripped him limb from limb, I’m told. The contractors refused to continue unless they were assigned a dedicated force of gendarmes, so here we are.”
He went on for some time, but my thoughts were elsewhere. His address was mostly a rehashing of the orientation pamphlet anyway, and I was eager to see with my own eyes what I’d only ever experienced through bedtime stories or schoolroom lessons. As soon as we’d been dismissed, I headed for the garrison stables, a short walk from the hut. Although the frontline infantry were mostly mechanized, scarcity of fuel meant that horses were still a mainstay of transportation for rear echelon troops like us. I tacked up and mounted a black stallion that seemed docile enough.
I rode along the camp’s network of trails until my destination came into sight in the distance—the local plastic extraction hub. It was a massive earthwork, the grandest I’d ever seen in person: an open pit mine that looked about as large as the crater from the rock that ended the dinosaurs. It was situated directly atop a buried Old-World garbage dump, a relic from the days when polypropylene and PVC were waste products rather than worth their weight in gold. I took in the length and breadth of the operation, observing laborers shipped in from back home, police reservists standing guard, and the occasional officer milling about.
“Quite the thing, isn’t it?” a voice to my right said, startling me out of my awestruck reverie. An NCO on horseback had sidled up alongside me. He introduced himself as Sergeant Meyer.
“You’re an officer, so your parents were probably well-off, right?” he asked.
I nodded, a bit surprised by his forwardness. In fact, my family were only upper middle class. My father was a lawyer, like me. But I wasn’t inclined to go into details with someone I’d only just met.
“I bet yours was one of those clans that could afford pre-Collapse plastic for their fine China. Do you still remember drinking from straws?”
I nodded again. “My mother did keep a few in the pantry for special occasions, as a matter of fact.”
“God, I remember straws too. But only from before the re-industrialization, when plastic became a commodity. I swear milk tasted better sucked through them. The dissolved micro plastics added a little sweetness, I think. You recall the plastic drives of the ’30s, don’t you? When every family had to turn in their synthetics in exchange for government bonds? How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” I said.
“Heavens, only sixteen. I had already fought in my first war by then. That one was all about rubble, and this one’s about garbage. Go figure.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“Well, here’s to the poor bastards who died for bricks in the last war—and to the ones who’ll end up dying for disposable utensils in this one.” He removed a pocket flask from his jacket and took a swig, offering it to me afterward. I obliged him. Bad luck otherwise, I figured.
Regardless, it wasn’t too long until someone in our battalion earned the toast. Six weeks later, one of the the sentries on night watch at the mine was ambushed and shot through the throat. His corpse was subsequently defiled—emasculated, to be precise. His testicles were found stuffed into his mouth, giving him the appearance of a chipmunk hoarding acorns for winter. We never did find his penis, which led us to surmise it was kept as a trophy. To top things off, a placard had been hung around the man’s neck with a piece of twine, on which a single word was scrawled in his blood: “Plunderer.”
The news quickly filtered up the chain of command. As it turned out, the assassination was just what High Command had been waiting for. The week before, Zonees in Z-2 had orchestrated the sabotage of a major synthetics hub. It was a real bloody nose for the SE and a serious embarrassment for leadership. There followed some half-hearted attempts at negotiation with village elders, but High Command concluded that religious fanaticism around Old-World esoterica left little room for compromise. The only fitting solution, they determined, was an equally fanatical policy on our part. Since the farming settlements were thought to form the agricultural bedrock sustaining the budding uprising, they were seen as ideal targets of reprisal for any attacks.
In this way, the belligerents—“bandits,” as the higher-ups disparaged them—would be “torn out root and stem” before their harassment could bloom into an insurgency proper. Though it wasn’t shared with us at the time, the tactic was also in alignment with High Command’s intention to bring about a diminution of the Zonee population by two-thirds over the course of the occupation, with an eye toward freeing up living space for post-war resettlement by our own citizens. The remaining third would be kept alive to serve as forced laborers.
All that was lacking was a catalyst to incite the troops—a catalyst that the guard’s killing and desecration provided. The very next day, for reasons ostensibly personal but ultimately well above our pay grade, it was ordered that “any village found nourishing even a single bandit be eradicated down to the third generation, razed to the ground, and defoliant spread across its agricultural tracts, such that anyone escaping the firing line is taken by hunger.”
Oh, and there were a few flowery addendums about “liberating the material heritage of mankind from those who blindly trample it underfoot” and “letting rubble and bone serve as a testament to our strength of will, and to the terrible but righteous judgment handed down upon the bandits and their kin, and their kin’s kin.” You get the picture.
That was the exact text of the order as it came across the wire and subsequently seared itself into my brain, where it remains lodged to this day. It was titled the “Hardening Decree,” laden as it was with High Command’s usual penchant for machismo and sexual innuendo, or more fully, “a decree promulgated for the purpose of hardening our resolve against organized crime and banditry.”
With the swipe of a pen, hundreds of policemen, jurists, and scholars—entirely ordinary people, all things considered—were given carte blanche to kill. Some did so reluctantly, others with great zest and enthusiasm. But all of us, with very few exceptions, dutifully took up the occupation of murderer for the better part of the next four years. Or as long as we lasted.
The sentry’s assassins likely didn’t hail from the nearby village, a community of two-hundred-odd residents cultivating crops in the middle of a dilapidated football stadium. Most of the bandits were nomadic: they relocated their tent camps every few days to avoid being found out by our long-range patrols. In fact, they could have originated from almost anywhere in the city, realistically. But it didn’t matter. The settlement was proximate to where the outrage had taken place, so its inhabitants would have to shoulder the burden—and how!
I won’t go into all the finer points of a reprisal action here. There’ll be plenty of time for that later on. Besides, that first one was so badly bungled that it was hardly representative of those to come. It was a real ham-fisted, amateur operation, as could be expected of men who had, for the most part, never before fired a single round at a live target of any kind, let alone a six-year-old.
Some of the shooters broke down in tears; others fainted. Still others really lost the plot and collapsed into trembling heaps. Several pissed themselves. One even shat his pants, as I recall. Rounds fired from rifles held in tremulous hands missed the mark or struck outside center mass, necessitating follow-up shots, sometimes two or three.
Children were shot before their mothers, wives before their husbands, leaving the strongest among them with nothing to lose. Many of the initial survivors chose to fight to the death with fingernails and teeth rather than be put down quietly. One lieutenant had a chunk bitten out of his face by a mother who had just seen her preteen daughter shot six times before finally receiving a well-placed round. When all was said and done, fully a quarter of them escaped. Our men had by that point had enough, and they were in no mood for a foot pursuit. We opted to let the survivors go.
My own reaction to popping my cherry was somewhat more muted. I was the “thousand-yard stare” type, as I learned that day. I’d always been more inclined to introspection than exhibitionism, so it made good sense. In later actions, officers were rarely assigned to the shooting detail. But for that first one, it was decided that everyone would participate directly, regardless of rank, so as to share in the onus and culpability. I wasn’t opposed to the arrangement on principle—fair is fair—but in practice it did end up posing something of a problem for me.
Sergeant Meyer was overseeing us younger officers on the firing line, and I can hear his words like they were spoken only yesterday. “All right, you’re up.” After I drew my sidearm, he was kind enough to rack the slide for me. I was a bundle of nerves by then and couldn’t manage to work the pistol’s action myself, especially after I had seen my target: a waiflike girl in a pretty floral dress who looked all of sixteen. She had pulled the garment’s hemline up to her thighs before kneeling on the ground, presumably to avoid dirtying it. It was the damnedest thing, looking back on it now. But somehow it made perfect sense to me in the moment, out of my wits as I was.
Anyway, to make a long story short I blew her brains out.
Quite literally, too. You see, my pistol had been unwittingly loaded with hollow-point rounds. The sergeant apologized and promised I’d be issued full metal jacket from then on. “With these expanding bullets,” he explained, “it’s ‘in like a pebble and out like a boulder.’ Makes a real mess of things. Entirely avoidable with FMJ, mercifully.”
I thanked him, returned to my private quarters, and threw up my lunch into my helmet.
Chapter 2
I see that you’ve beaten me to the bottom of the glass, and you rather look like you could use another. I hope it wasn’t something I said.
Garçon, another round for me and my honored guest, if you please!
I’m sorry if my choice of table talk strikes you as untoward, or my delivery comes across as uncouth. We soldiers sometimes forget that civilians don’t share our acquired taste for mess hall banter. With any luck, the next drink will be a boon to my eloquence—or, failing that, at least infuse you with some liquid courage. Besides, there’s a point I’m driving at with the little romp I just related, something more instructive than pure sensationalism.
Like I said, I’m aiming to establish my motivation for the affair with the dynamite, as you’ll grasp shortly. And aside from that, what I suppose I’m trying to communicate, however inelegantly, is that the confidence and authority I project when discussing this dirty business now was hard-won. It was earned only after many months of “putting lead on target,” so to speak. Becoming a businessman of my sort—someone whose business is death at a time when business is good—constitutes the profoundest rupture in any psychologically normal man’s life, a break with everything believed and hallowed up to that point. My bad conscience had to be ejected, violently and repeatedly, until my stomach was empty and spasming, and vomit gave way to blood-laced spittle from my excoriated trachea.
Our second action went a bit better than the first logistically, but the rawness, the shock, were still very much at play. Nausea too, naturally. That time there were only a hundred Zonees, but far fewer of us as well: a single squad of ten men and a lieutenant under my command. The bulk of our unit was engaged in a skirmish with bandits over possession of a plastic-rich garbage dump several miles to the south. Apparently, it was something of a Zonee Mecca to which pilgrims came from far and wide to pay homage, and they weren’t prepared to surrender it without a fight.
Back home, surface deposits like that had been thoroughly tapped during the ’30s. By the end of the decade, the easy pickings were exhausted and we’d resorted to digging for microplastics a quarter mile underground. But plastic lying undisturbed in the open was still a common sight in the Zones, where subsistence farming created little demand for petrol, and local superstitions actively encouraged its preservation. By 2140, fuel-hungry powers on both sides of the city were drawing up plans. Hence the war with the North—and the occupation, after we mobilized to seize the Zones first.
The village nearest the pilgrimage site had been singled out for extermination, in keeping with the new policy. It was another agrarian enclave, as stipulated, but rather than soil farming, the residents had created a hydroponic system in the ruins of a five-story high-rise. The entire surface area of the building, top to bottom, was covered in edible plants of myriad types and strains. All quite healthy, from what I could tell. It struck me as an ingenious method that cleverly avoided soil and groundwater pollution—which was especially high in that area, according to our dosimeters.
I announced our presence via loudspeaker and demanded that the inhabitants present themselves outside. “Census-taking” was the excuse I gave, which wasn’t entirely false: I merely neglected to mention that our count would be of their dead bodies.
After a good number of occupants had exited and their egress slowed to a trickle, a five-man entry team conducted a full sweep of the tenement that netted a few stragglers. I surveyed the resulting crowd of Zonees with growing consternation: I didn’t know how we were going to dig a hole big enough for a hundred people with the ten enlisted men we had on hand—especially since those hundred people would have just as soon not gone into the hole, all things being equal. That meant there’d only be five of us digging, as anything less than five on watch was asking for trouble.
Sergeant Meyer was with us, and I asked him how long he thought it would take. He was a veteran of the last war, twenty years prior, and things had supposedly gotten nasty during that one too. Though from what I’d heard, the summary executions back then were of enemy combatants, not civilians.
Meyer pressed his boot into the poppy field directly adjacent the building to gauge its pliability. “In this soil, it should take about an hour.”
“How’s that?” I balked. “Fifty people couldn’t dig a hole big enough in an hour, and we’re only twelve.”
“There’ll be a hundred digging.”
“You mean them?” I pointed to the pajama- and knicker-clad contingent of tenement rats dawdling in the field, ringed by my subordinates.
The sergeant nodded.
“Does that really work, in your experience?”
“Better than asking them to stand around, actually,” Meyer said.
“Unbelievable.” I removed my cap and ran my fingers through my hair.
“Believe this.” Meyer raised his submachine gun and fired a five-round burst into the air. “Attention! Every Zonee, grab a shovel from the back of the truck until they’re gone. Then line up two by two and start digging. Women and children, dig with your hands. We’ll tell you when to stop.”
The haggard lot did as instructed without a word of protest, trotting up to the idling armored personnel carrier and retrieving the wooden shovels. I watched in amazement as they dutifully took up their task, breaking ground in the soft earth. Fifteen minutes passed and the hole grew deeper, until their shins were no longer visible. Finally, I could take no more: I had to know. I approached a group of five women kneeling in the dirt, their hands blackened and bloody.
“Excuse me, ladies,” I interjected. “Pardon the interruption, but do you happen to know that you’re digging your own graves?”
They nodded.
“May I ask why? Why are you doing that?”
“Because he told us to,” a young woman said, gesturing to Sergeant Meyer. She was quite pretty, in a rustic sort of way—but her under-eyes were puffy, as if sodden with a deep and rising well of tears.
“Why not refuse?” I asked.
“Then you’d dig it yourselves, and we’d have to wait longer.” Her manner was calm, her speech measured, but I perceived a slight tremble in her lower lip, and her voice quavered on the last word.
“Wouldn’t you rather live a little longer anyway?” I pressed, in spite of my own growing discomfort. “Are you in such a hurry to die?”
With that, the dam burst, and her tear ducts loosed a torrent. She let out a long, piercing wail that dropped my stomach like a lead anchor and drew the rapt attention of everyone within earshot, briefly wrenching them out of their own personal hells.
An old woman wearing a polka-dot headscarf intervened, gently stifling the girl’s sobs. “We’re already dead,” the elder declared flatly, locking eyes with me. “All that remains for us now is crossing the Styx. We may as well help the ferryman by rowing the oars ourselves.”
I considered her words carefully. “Very well,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I won’t prolong your journey a second more, then.”
I handed her my canteen—from which she took a healthy swig—then parted from her with a little bow of gratitude. An hour later, she was four feet below my boots. I lit a cigarette. Meyer joined me and did likewise.
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he remarked.
“Hell of a thing,” I concurred.
We stood there in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, from the direction of the Northern Front, I could hear the muffled patter of machine guns and the low rumble of artillery fire. Air bursts, I think. The horizon was bright with tracers and the orange glow of a burning skyline. I found it strangely comforting, a reminder that somewhere out there soldiers were still soldiering—instead of whatever the hell it was we were doing.
“What did you talk to the old lady about, by the way?” Meyer finally asked.
“Nothing important. I asked her why they agreed to do it. Dig the grave, I mean.”
“Oh. What did she say? Anything enlightening?”
“In a way,” I said, gazing into the distance.
Meyer waited a moment for further elaboration, but I wasn’t prepared to offer any. “Well, here’s to her, then,” he said, flicking his cigarette butt down and grinding it into the freshly turned soil with his heel.
After the men had finished stowing the shovels and other gear, the twelve of us climbed into our open-topped APC. One corporal manned a forward-mounted machine gun and another drove. I was in the front passenger seat. The others sat in back, singing.
“What’s dug by a hundred and covered by ten?” their ditty went. “What swallows the young and the wives with their men? What gobbles a village but leaves every hen? What’s sure by next week to get hungry again?”
I suddenly realized I’d lost track of my own hunger. I’d been too anxious to eat anything before the operation, and now twelve hours had passed since my last meal. I felt rumbling as blood returned to my stomach from my limbs, where it had evidently migrated during the shooting. I knew it would be at least another half hour before I could eat: it was only several miles back to camp, but the roads were treacherous. What had been smooth asphalt a hundred years prior was now a pockmarked, undulating mess, melted and warped in some places and fragmented in others. The APC crawled along at ten miles per hour, zig-zagging as it went.
I rummaged through my pack and retrieved a small pouch of rodent jerky, a squirrel and vole mix. Despite my hunger, I stared down at the jerky with revulsion. The strips of flesh appeared remarkably similar to the flaps of scalp I had just seen dangling from the old woman’s skull, after a rifle round blew her head apart from ten paces away. And seeing those yellow polka dots smiling up at me from the pulsating leftovers of her gourd certainly didn’t help matters, either. I’m told yellow on red never goes out of fashion, but in that case I’d beg to differ.
I hadn’t participated in any of the shooting myself. After the first reprisal, that was the purview of the enlisted men alone. Still, I had a front-row seat, which seemed to be enough to set my stomach churning.
The driver noticed my distress. “Won’t be much longer, sir,” the young man said. “Then we’ll be able to have potatoes or beans or… anything other than meat, really.”
I looked over at him with a twinge of embarrassment.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The rest of us were just as close to losing our breakfasts as you. The lads back there are putting on a good show of things, but it’s just that—a show. Can I be honest with you, sir?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know how we’re going to keep this up for much longer.”
Yet somehow, we did exactly that. Nausea aside, our technical proficiency with the procedure increased rapidly. Within six months we were already old hands, and I’d been promoted to major. Being proficient at something is different from being accustomed to it, though, and I’m afraid one never grows entirely accustomed to such things.
Those of us who know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together—or to see five hundred, or a thousand lying there—know well the invariable unease in the stomach, the shakiness in the extremities, the weakness at the knees. And we know, what’s more, the genuine mental anguish of seeing in the vacant faces of the dead the faces of our own wives, children, and parents. Whatever may differentiate us from other men—I promise you, it isn’t much—we’re still men at bottom, with all the weaknesses inherent to that condition.
By spring of ’43, I’d witnessed the terrible toll the shootings had taken on the men. Outright shock had long since worn off, only to be replaced by a more subtle and insidious degradation, a drip torture of blood spatter from each of the many victims in a soldier’s ever-increasing personal tally.
And indeed, attrition was mounting. More than a handful of the lads had broken down into nervous fits, leaving them gibbering idiots. Others had become documented alcoholics or permanent depressives. Even the ones who escaped the worst of it were at risk of being taken off the line for weeks at a time to convalesce in a sanatorium. I myself was at my wit’s end. Something had to be done, you understand.
The last straw was the string of suicides in March. First a corporal, then a few privates, then a sergeant and a lieutenant all decided that they wouldn’t be returning from their furloughs after all. As the unit commander, I was responsible for investigating their deaths. That’s how I became so well acquainted with those little notes I mentioned earlier, the ones they left for their next of kin. And it’s what gave me such an affinity for those of the pragmatic variety, I think—the kind that betray no resentments, make no excuses, and most importantly, tell no tales.
To a man, the decedents had taken the secret of our actions in the rear combat areas to their graves. Their letters gave no indication of the deeds that weighed so heavy on them, eating away at their brains like tapeworms until there was nothing left but a writhing mass of regret and shame. Call me juvenile, but I was always rather proud of that. Whatever my faults as a leader, I didn’t breed tattletales.
And while we’re back on the subject, I’d like to pause and ponder over those notes a while longer. That way you’ll discern that I’m a reasonably well-rounded and well-adjusted individual, capable of something more than brutishness and bloodlust. You see, I’m a philosophic sort, and leaving behind something so matter-of-fact has always struck me as stoicism of the first order, an act of real philosophical power. What I mean is, it’s a veritable philosopher’s stone of a suicide note, transmuting death into something as mundane as a trip to the post office. Surely there’s power in that.
There’s another reason, too. I can’t help but see genuine self-effacement in the decision that one’s final words on this Earth—one’s legacy and apotheosis—should be a reminder to pay the utility bill on time. It’s a little bow before the eternity of the species, an admission that the show must nonetheless go on. Instead of “After me, the deluge,” it’s “After me, the rubbish still has to be taken out to the curb.”
But perhaps I’m wrong to admire such notes. Maybe I’m incorrect in my assessment of them as laconic masterpieces, theses in ten words or fewer, a dissertation in a fortune cookie. Maybe instead of demonstrating deep philosophical insight, they result from some particular deficiency: the inability to properly envision death as the absence of not only bodily functions, but obligations and desires as well. If you recognize that you’ll no longer have to eat, shouldn’t you recognize by the same token that it won’t make much difference to you whether your kids eat, either?
What I’m saying is, it makes little sense to project one’s desires beyond the point in time when the physical substrates of those desires cease to exist—the point at which one’s hippocampus is passing through the digestive tract of a maggot. Why bother providing for a future that won’t ever arrive, insofar as you’re concerned? Isn’t that just as foolish as a business setting aside contingencies for an event in which it’s no longer a going concern? Nowadays we laugh at the Egyptians for leaving food in their tombs; maybe in a thousand years they’ll laugh at us for leaving wills.
Twenty-five centuries ago in Greece, when Alexander was asked to whom he bestowed his earthly empire, he arrived at the only truly sensible answer: “To the strongest.” So much for wills! Yet even amongst that nation of thinkers, there were those who lived with an eye toward posterity: the Spartans were willing to sacrifice much in life—life itself, in fact—for the prospect of a marked grave, for something that would outlive them. They were only too happy to die on the point of a spear in exchange for the chance to leave behind the most laconic of all possible notes: their name alone.
You might find this little more sensible than leaving behind food for a corpse. What good is an inscription if you’re not around to see it? Yet what lacks in logic for the individual often makes perfect sense for the collective. Our legacies—military, artistic, or otherwise—don’t serve us, ultimately, but rather those who come after us. “Oh you passerby, go and tell the Lacedaemonians that here, loyal to Spartan law, we lie.” Those men built a legacy for themselves and their people on the backs of twenty thousand Persian corpses, along with their own.
And so too with my men, the clear-eyed killers who threw themselves into a moral abyss, sometimes never to return, leaving behind only a sentence or two as a testament to their strength of character. They found it within their hearts to bear an unbearable duty for as long as they were able, and then, when the time came, to end their watch with tact. I’m likely dating myself, but in my view obedience of that rarefied sort is a virtue—so long as it’s not given blindly to human authority, but in submission to the dictates of necessity. It then becomes resolve, humility, love of fate. For circumstance fated us with the duty, the moral obligation, to seize the resources necessary to rekindle the five-thousand-year-old flame of human ingenuity… even if that flame burned a hundred villages to ash. And “not even the gods fight against necessity.” What business, then, had we to?
It remains to be seen if history will give due respect for shouldering that burden in spite of all human weakness, in spite of all revulsion and shock and horror. Regardless, one thing is certain: in a hundred years, people will read our history not on scraps of paper, like my men left behind, but on digital wonders made possible by the very plastics we hauled out of the Earth at the barrel of a gun. But there I go getting wistful and sentimental. I try my very best to avoid that. These days, such moods invariably lead me to the bottle.
And what’s that, you say? Reading too much into it? Maybe you’re right. Maybe things are simpler than all that. Sometimes a note is just a note. Perhaps I’m giving too much credit to my fellow man. I’ve certainly been guilty of that before. Still, I’m something of an optimist, and I prefer to think the best of people, to look on the bright side—even of a suicide. I’m sure you can see that by now. Aside from the occasional opioid high, it’s the only way I’ve found to get by, to keep myself from writing a note of my own, jumping inside a meat grinder, and dissolving into a happy little puddle of blood and shit. And you can be sure that if I did, I’d leave a few coins to the restaurateurs for borrowing their equipment. I’m not a boor, after all.
Incidentally, you really must try some of this steak tartare! The chef’s preparation is a true delight.
Suit yourself.
But let’s return here to ’42. There were other concerns at the time than the suicides of the shooters, certainly—namely, the agony of the victims. The long minutes awaiting their turn on the firing line, seeing their kin shot to ribbons in front of them, all the while trying to soothe their toddlers with some bogus story or other about why Nana’s head just exploded. And after the shooting was done and the death pits covered with soil, mercy still proved elusive. We often observed a distinct heaving of the earth, which couldn’t be fully explained by post-mortem off-gassing. This led us to suspect that some of the villagers had been buried alive… All in all, a real sordid affair, as you can imagine.
Simply put, we couldn’t go on like this. It was impossible. Discipline was beginning to break down: the men were often drunk on duty, many had stopped saluting. I was risking a real crack-up if something wasn’t done. Truth be told, I too had grown liberal with the vodka, which was never a habit of mine before the war. Not that I’d ever been a teetotaler—“μηδὲν ἄγαν,” “nothing to excess,” was always my philosophy. In my career as well as in my personal life, I’d long subscribed to the middle path, to a certain Buddhist sensibility of avoiding excesses on both ends.
Aside from its philosophic appeal, I found that temperament beneficial to advancement, practically speaking. For the most part, people seem to trust and favor the man who keeps his head when everyone else is losing theirs, whether out of euphoria or despair. It was how I made major by the age of twenty-eight. More importantly, it was how I’d avoided putting a bullet through my skull, like the last major to lead the outfit before me.
By that time, though, I wasn’t quite myself any longer. The war had brought out the extremes in me. And so it was one evening that, faced with the prospect of yet another village roundup the next day, I found an empty quart of vodka in my lap and a loaded pistol in my palm. As I felt the coolness of the aluminum muzzle dissipate against the heat of my throbbing temple, I snapped out of my stupor as out of a fever dream.
From the depths of despair, something providential had been wrested; from somewhere in the pits of my drunkenness, the undeniable solution had stumbled forth. I holstered my sidearm, threw myself together, and roused the engineers from their bunks. They must have thought me as mad as Diogenes with his lantern, but I shrugged off their bewilderment, ordering them to gather all available explosives and make hasty preparations before dawn, exactly in the way I described.
That brings us full circle, back to the church dynamiting—which I hope by now you’ve developed a bit more of an appreciation for, considering all the above-mentioned ugliness that it spared both us and the Zonees. Still, there’s the matter of those equally ugly photos of the aftermath. They open up a whole other can of worms, don’t they? Or perhaps a can of Spam, given the thorough emulsification of the congregants.
Indeed, I imagine it must be difficult for someone like you, whose experience of war is limited to news articles one page removed from the Sunday funnies, to understand how turning a wedding group into wedding soup is more of a mercy than leaving them intact, save for a few holes in the head. Especially when that soup comes with all the fixings: vocal chords hanging from signposts like meat left out to cure; faces ripped from their skulls, floating in a fountain basin; filleted cocks lying on the ground like discarded banana peels… And have you ever seen a labia perched on a rose bush? With just a bit of artistic license, you might say it looks like a butterfly.
Ah, here’s the server at last. I’m thinking of the thirty-ounce porterhouse. I’ve worked up quite an appetite with all this talk, and it’s supposed to be excellent here, a prime cut with a nice layer of adipose tissue. “A little fat on a piece of meat can be a wonderful thing.” That’s what my grandfather used to say. Back in his day, he’d tell me, guests of honor were always served the fattiest piece. Those were the days when calories were scarce, and people weren’t so soft and sated as they are now. That’s half our problem nowadays, I suspect. Anyhow, you surely want more than salad, don’t you?
Not in the mood for fat? How about a nice rare filet, then?
As you wish. Suum cuisine—to each her own meal.
Now, where was I? That’s right, those photos. What bears repeating about them is that, despite the volume of bodily detritus—or rather because of it, as the case may be—the villagers felt nothing at all, save for their final moment of jubilation, immortalized forever and ever, amen. I almost envy them that, in truth… Almost. And as for the odds and ends, which proved so offensive to the squeamish here at home—what’s it to the Zonees? They had little use for ears or eyes or spleens in the afterlife. They were no Egyptians. The integrity of mortal remains is a matter of concern and handwringing for the living, not the dead. Besides, the villagers no longer had hands to wring, hands being among the most numerous detached bits we recovered.
I jest, of course. A little humor, however dark, can brighten even the dourest subject, in my considerable experience. It’s one of many defense mechanisms I’ve acquired over the years, I suppose. In truth, I myself wasn’t immune to the same profound disgust at the disassembly of fellow humans into their raw physical components, like appliances pulled apart on a scrapyard. Nor did I escape sheer existential terror at the alacrity with which the universe allows sentient beings to be reduced to unthinking globs of meat.
As I said, though, such things are a source of consternation only to us onlookers. Thinking rationally, they ought not factor into our decision-making whatever, as regards the disposition of the victims. To act otherwise is folly and fallacy—anthropomorphizing the dead, you might call it. And beyond not feeling a thing, let’s not forget that the congregants never suspected a thing either. It’s not death itself that’s intolerable, under the right circumstances: that’s but one fleeting moment, hardly even worth mentioning, especially if the executioner understands his craft.
No, it’s the knowing—the knowing and the waiting—that are the worst parts of the whole business. As I learned from the insightful gravedigger at my second reprisal, it’s standing around twiddling one’s thumbs, awaiting the blow, that allows the mind to make a dragon out of a dove. I slew that dragon, I blew it apart with dynamite—certainly no small accomplishment, if you’ll forgive the boast.
The new arrangement proved wholly satisfactory to the men as well. We were able to carry things off with only a fraction of the personnel required for a shooting action, sparing most of them involvement at all, save for employment as cordon guards to machine gun any survivors who fled the building. But the engineers had done their work expertly—a real bang-up job, you might say—and no one left the church in fewer than a dozen separate pieces. As a consequence, not a round was fired. It was an immense relief for men used to staring their quarry in the face, as you can imagine.
But I can discern by this point that you still find me morbid and peculiar, even after my explanations, and I sense that I’m in danger of being misunderstood. Perhaps you’ve detected a certain glibness in my tone, even a flippancy. I can’t really argue with the observation, but I’ll append the following qualifier: in a life as full as mine, I’ve found that one is often confronted with the choice to either laugh or cry. Bitter experience has taught me that it’s almost always better to laugh.
And the truth is, I’ve cried myself dry already. A river of tears is soaked into every seam of my old duty uniform. So what choice am I left with, really? Simply this: either to become, in the end, a dried-up husk of a human being—hollow, stuffed, like a taxidermied relic of times best forgotten—or to remain a generally lighthearted and jovial fellow in spite of it all. Call it an instinct for self-preservation, if you will, but I’ll choose laughter in most every case.
Even apart from its tone, I know full well that my tale will compel any thinking person to form a judgment as to my character, and perhaps even arouse the fiercest of passions. It’s not exactly the kind of story one tells over tea and cucumber sandwiches. Indeed, I can see that you’ve already begun to form just such an opinion from what you’ve heard so far. It’s only natural, and you can hardly be faulted for it. Maybe you’ve even started to entertain the wildest fantasies about me—that I torture small animals, perhaps, or that I was myself tortured in some way as a child.
Let me allay those suspicions right off. I had a perfectly normal upbringing. Not that everything with my family was always sunshine and roses, naturally, but it was entirely satisfactory as childhoods go. What’s more, I’ve always had a particular fondness for animals, and they seem to like me well enough too. All five of my cats died of natural causes after long and contented lives. I don’t really have the heart to take on a sixth. It breaks so easily nowadays. So I would ask that you kindly refrain from fixing any opinion about my character as a matter of established fact until you’ve heard the whole story, beginning to end. That’s simply common courtesy, and not, I think, asking too much.
As things stand, though, I can tell that my good cheer has fallen on deaf ears, and my humor has landed about as well as flatulence at a funeral. That might pose a problem, seeing as how there’s still the matter of that small favor I keep bringing up. It’s one that involves considerable judgment on your part, and for my own sake I’d do well not to tip the scales too heavily against myself solely for the sake of a cheeky little laugh.
So I’ll try another tack. With my next anecdote, I promise to be as sober and forthright as possible, and to refrain from any puns of the anatomical variety. As for the anecdote itself, I suppose I should try something a bit more relatable, more human. Hmm, what would serve us well in that respect?
Let me shuffle through my papers. One moment… No, that story won’t do. Not one little bit. Especially since there’s only a single toilet in this restaurant, and we can’t be sure it’ll be available to you on demand. What else, what else… Egad, certainly not that one, either. Not with ground beef sitting on our table. There must be something here for us…
Oh, I’ve got just the ticket! How about a love story?
Chapter 3
Very good, a love story it is. So let’s return now to April of ’42, before mass graves had become my stock in trade, to a time when my smile was still an innocent thing—not a facial contortion intended to hold back a mountain of corpses piled behind my eyes.
And let’s return as well to fair Z-4, crown jewel of the Garrisoned Zones, whose crimson poppy fields and storied hanging gardens would have been the envy of the German romantics of yesteryear. In reality, those gardens were the carcasses of towering Old-World high-rises, undisturbed by human trespass for a hundred years and reclaimed by nature. Still, that didn’t lessen their appeal—in my eyes, at least. If anything, it amplified their majesty through an added aura of historical gravity. Standing at the feet of those mysterious, slain giants and peering up into their lofty canopies left me with a distinct awareness of how frail and fleeting are all works of man, ultimately.
In my case, then, although I had come as an occupier, the Zones had conquered their rude conqueror, for I was well and truly smitten. At the time, I styled myself a real Schiller or Heine, and had taken to waxing poetic in my off-duty interludes. Looking back on it now, as I sometimes do, my scribblings were more kitsch than genuine craft—but show me an artist who’s capable of something greater than imitation at the age of twenty-seven, and I’ll show you someone who fizzles out equally young.
Oh! Mind the spider that just landed on your head! Here, let me help you. I’ll keep him under this spare wine glass until we can relocate him safely outside later on. A plump fellow, isn’t he? By the look of things, he hitched a ride here from the Zones. You can tell from his web in the corner there. See? It’s not a taut, organized, symmetrical web, like we’re used to. No, it’s loose, messy, irregular, with no discernible pattern to the latticework. I guess a few dozen Sieverts of radiation per year is all it took to make abstract artists of our arachnid friends. I always did suspect those twentieth-century expressionists had something wrong with their brains, and this development seems to bear that out.
Anyway, as for my own Zonee artistry, it wasn’t just the landscape that inspired me. I had become quite enamored of a local girl whose delicate features and fine proportions gave no indication of her people’s unfortunate legacy of intergenerational radiation poisoning. I had at first no idea whether my feelings were requited, though I liked to think so. When our eyes met sometimes in passing, at the vegetable market or near the local plastic mine, she often smiled and laughed a little before turning away.
One day, as chance would have it, I was startled out of my flirtations by the shouts of a mine overseer. He was a contractor, one of the skilled civilians shipped in to supervise the Zonee forced laborers. A rotund man, and a rather slovenly one too. He was lambasting a whimpering ten-year-old working on the sorting line. The girl had mistakenly mixed thermoplastic and thermoset scraps into a single bucket.
“Not like that, you ignorant bitch!” he exclaimed. “How many times will it take to get this through your radiation-addled brain: these ones get melted down and the others don’t!” He raised his right hand, preparing to strike her.
“Hey!” I shouted. “If you hit that girl, you won’t answer to the disciplinary committee. You’ll answer to me.”
He lowered his arm and looked at me incredulously. “What’s it to you?” he snapped.
“Tell me,” I said, “haven’t you ever heard that there are no failed students, only failed teachers?”
He nodded slowly, jowls jiggling.
“What does that make you, then?” I asked.
Apparently, he had finally noticed my rank tabs. He removed his cap and clasped his hands nervously. “Sorry, Captain. I know we ought not be too harsh with the young ones. It’s just so hard getting through to these pinheads—I mean, microcephalics, that is—without a little tongue lashing. We already stopped the actual lashings, though, just as instructed. A momentary lapse on my part was all. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t. Oh, and have one of your own men clean up the puddle of waste over there. The kids aren’t trained for that.” The mine was located near a melted-down nuclear reactor, and remnants of the liquified reactor core still occasionally bubbled up to the surface.
The overseer scurried off, cap in hand. I looked back around in search of my love interest, but she was nowhere to be seen.
I did spy her again the next day, though, and from then on I found my glances reciprocated more readily. As the weeks passed, her gaze lingered longer and drifted lower, hovering over the outline of my pectorals beneath my field tunic and the bulge in my riding breeches. Her expressions grew more serious and less coy, until one day she abandoned all pretense and failed to avert her gaze at all, daring me to do so first. Her eyes held me fast and bore me along after her, through the marketplace and into an empty pole barn nearby. She had already stripped bare by the time I entered. I quickly did likewise.
“That was my sister,” she said after I removed my trousers.
I regarded her with confusion.
“The girl at the mine,” she clarified. “Three weeks ago. You protected her. Why?”
I shrugged, unsure how to answer.
“You’re a good man. And…” she said, looking downward, “a gifted one too.”
I saw her there in her nakedness, skin glistening and mons swollen, and she saw me in mine, engorged and trembling, and we knew each other for the first time in a horse stall, again and again and in every arrangement, pausing only to gulp air and water, until the sun was low in the sky and the calls of her parents were rising in the distance. Throughout the whole encounter, not another word passed between us, save for her name: Claire. We parted with a long embrace and the shared, unspoken intention of repeating the act as soon and as often as possible.
For days thereafter, I felt wild and unconstrained by duty or circumstance. I laid mad plans to wed Claire and abscond with her to our own little republic of love and harmony, somewhere unsullied by smokestacks and dead rivers and barbed wire. I longed for the war to be behind us and men the world over to become brothers once more. I even dared to write as much in my journal—in iambic pentameter, no less… Pure kitsch, as I said!
Regardless, fate swiftly intervened to stymie universal human brotherhood, as it often seems to. The very next week came that first reprisal I told you about earlier, after issuance of the Hardening Decree and the assassination of the sentry at the plastic mine. Unfortunately, it was Claire’s community on the chopping block.
My entire battalion was awoken pre-dawn and summoned to muster in the courtyard of the garrison fort, where our colonel read us the full text of the decree. You could have heard a pin drop—or a helmet drop, as the case may be: one stunned private actually did lose hold of his. The men were by and large shaken, anger at the sentry’s murder quickly giving way to shock at the scale of what was being asked of them. Many looked from side to side to ensure that they had heard correctly. Some fell out of attention, and a general murmur went up along the line.
“Silence!” the commander’s adjutant shouted. “The colonel hasn’t finished!”
“Men,” the colonel resumed after everyone had snapped back to attention, “that was the full text of the order, just as it crossed my desk. I’ve now delivered it to you, as required of me as your commander. But as a fellow human being… I cannot in good conscience demand that you carry it out.
“Therefore, I ask only that you search your own hearts. No man who absolves himself of this duty will be subject to any official reprimand, so long as I remain in command. Neither will anyone be questioned who chooses to join the firing line and do his duty to the Director in good faith.
“That is all. Those who wish to depart may do so now and return to their bunks. Those who prefer to stay, gather rifles and shovels. God alone knows which of us chooses rightly. Victory guide us all. Dismissed.”
After we had fallen out, some of some men chattered in small groups, laughing nervously. Others paced back and forth alone. A few knelt in prayer, evidently looking to the heavens for guidance. One simply sat on the ground with his head in his hands, crying. Cigarette smoke was ubiquitous, and a white haze formed over the entire forlorn assembly.
Plans were quickly drawn up by the executive officers, a conversation to which I was privy. I was only half-listening. My thoughts were fixed entirely on Claire and how best to ensure her survival. We spent a scant half hour in the briefing room. It wasn’t nearly sufficient, in hindsight, but the colonel wanted to beat first light.
Just before dawn, we rolled into the derelict football stadium the locals called home in full force, horses whinnying and sirens blaring. The residents were ordered out of their domiciles in the stands with bullhorns. After they assembled, groggy and befuddled, they were kept under guard as we readied to dig a pit in a poppy-studded section of turf. Unlike the rest of the field, which sported a variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains in carefully cultivated lots, the poppy patch been left unsown and allowed to grow wild as a space for children’s play.
“They mean to bury us!” came the apt cry from one of the local women, shortly after we’d broken ground with engine-powered excavation equipment. Several others shushed her, insisting she was mistaken. Now, the Zonees aren’t exactly known for their smarts, but it doesn’t take a higher mind to realize we weren’t digging for buried treasure. Still, there was no precedent for such a thing in living memory. And apparently, they found what we were preparing to do as unbelievable as we ourselves had just a few hours prior.
Within thirty minutes, the pit had been dug to the engineers’ specifications. It was a best guess—but not nearly deep enough, as it turned out. The shooting then began posthaste. The first batch of ten Zonees were ushered to the edge of the death pit at bayonet point. The thirty riflemen of the firing squad took their positions, ten yards from the condemned. A private who doubled as a percussionist gave three quick strikes with his drumsticks, silencing the assembled.
“Ready!” a fellow captain barked.
The riflemen shouldered their weapons, bringing the muzzles into line with the Zonees.
“Aim!”
They aligned their sights with the condemned, so that three rifles were aimed at each of them—one at the head and two at the chest. The percussionist began a slow drum roll. It gained speed, steadily building to a crescendo.
“Fire!”
The guns let out a sharp report that cut right through me. Wisps of unburnt powder spilled out of the barrels, and in the same instant puffs of dust arose from the villagers’ shirts and blouses, along with clouds of red mist from their crania.
The shooters immediately racked their rifle bolts, ejecting the spent cartridges. The casings fell to the ground at the same moment the victims did—all except one, who had somehow gone unscathed and remained standing.
One of the riflemen trotted up to the man and dispatched him with a shot to the forehead, point blank. The muzzle energy blew the back of his skull off and popped his right eyeball out of its socket, leaving it dangling by the optic nerve. Some of the townsfolk began to weep. A few fainted.
Sergeant Meyer paced up and down the line of the fallen, firing a pistol round through the head of any corpse twitching excessively. He sometimes leaned onto one foot while he did this, adopting an air of nonchalance that spoke of experience and comfort with the act. The captain signaled to the grave detail, who pushed the bodies into the ditch with their boots.
It continued in that fashion, wave after wave, until finally the ceremonial drumrolls were abandoned and shooters were left to fire at will, choosing their aim points themselves. In several cases, three rounds penetrated a single head. Their skull caps were propelled ten feet into the air by powerful spouts of brain matter. Other crania blew out to the sides, evacuating their contents in a gentle cascade. Heads that remained intact discharged their insides forward, through the eye sockets, nose, and mouth. Even at a distance of twenty feet, one shooter received a smattering of brain to his face. He threw up immediately. That set off a vicious cycle, with five others vomiting in quick succession.
From there it was all downhill. The shakes set in and shooters began to miss, resulting in some residents clutching wounded limbs and others left standing entirely unharmed. The men fumbled their reloads. One woman even made it past a second volley unscathed. A baby-faced private approached and shot her in the head, but his pistol round only succeeded in ripping her nose off, otherwise failing to penetrate.
The private hesitated, then fired again. I couldn’t see where his second round went, but the woman was still standing. He began to scream, firing over and over until he had emptied his entire magazine into the oozing, quivering vestige of her head. Still she refused to fall, and suddenly it became clear that her body was being propped up by a small tree stump tangled in her dress, pressing into the small of her back.
By then it was apparent that discipline was at risk of fracturing, so the colonel ordered a temporary halt to rest the riflemen and ply them with liquor. The pit was only halfway full. In the interim, officers were ordered to the line with pistols to do their bit. I was third in the queue—and, as I’d arranged, so was Claire.
The lieutenant before me shared a cigarette with his victim-to-be as they awaited their turn, chatting. His Zonee was an elderly man who appeared unperturbed by the proceedings, as if he’d been ready to go for some time, and this was as good a way as any. The cigarette was still burning between his fingers when they shoveled him into the pit.
“All right, we’re waiting on you now,” Meyer said to me soon after. He had been assigned to babysit me on the firing line in case I really lost it. It’s difficult to predict how a given individual will respond under such circumstances, as I would learn. “It only takes one moment of resolve,” he added softly, with what seemed like genuine empathy.
I drew my sidearm but for the life of me couldn’t fully retract the slide to chamber a round. The pistol had scarcely been fired except in proofing, and its recoil spring was still exceedingly tight. I finally managed to pull it back far enough to unseat a cartridge from the magazine, but my stroke was too short and the round failed to feed properly.
Meyer held out an open palm. I stared at it in bewilderment. He gestured with his fingers until I realized he was inviting me to give him the gun. I handed it over, happy to be rid of the thing. He examined the pistol for a moment, then methodically cleared the jam. He drew the slide back and released it in one smooth motion, chambering a round. Finally, he retracted the slide a few centimeters to check that the cartridge was seated properly.
“All good now, sir,” he said with a reassuring smile, returning the pistol and closing my fingers around the grip. He patted me on the back. After a few seconds, the pat turned into a gentle nudge toward the death pit.
Claire had already taken a kneeling position on its lip, preparing to join her family and neighbors therein. She appeared serene, unflappable, her breathing steady and unlabored. It was as if she had already come to terms with her fate, despite that fate calling her to an early grave. Before raising her eyes to the horizon, she cast a final glance at me over her shoulder. Her hazel eyes were full of compassion—compassion, I imagine, for what she knew was a fate worse even than her own.
My legs were rubber as I approached and came to a halt directly behind her. I raised my shaking pistol, centering her cascade of red locks between the sight posts. After a moment of panic-stricken indecision, a sense of tranquility came over me, quite inexplicably. My hand steadied and my heartbeat slowed. My senses seemed to heighten, and the ticking of my timepiece became the beating of a bass drum. The duration between strikes lengthened until the watch’s gears shuddered and ground to a standstill.
Then, suddenly, everything reversed, picking up speed and gaining momentum, faster and faster, like a freight train hurtling toward a bend in the tracks, entirely out of the conductor’s control. My heart thundered against my rib cage, a prisoner pounding the bars in impotent defiance.
Just as it felt ready to explode out of my chest, I jerked the trigger forcefully—forcefully enough to pull the entire pistol to the left, so that the shot missed wide. Claire’s hair fluttered as hot gas exited the bore and the bullet grazed her temple, lacerating the skin.
Before the smoke had even cleared from the barrel, I kicked her on the back, hard. She lurched forward and tumbled into the pit. Her fall was broken by the body of a pregnant woman whose swollen belly, violently compressed by the impact, discharged a meter-high jet of reddened amniotic fluid through a dime-sized bullet wound.
Meyer stepped forward a few paces, flattening red poppies under his hobnailed boots. He paused at the lip of the pit and gazed down in. Claire lay completely still. Her face and arms were smeared with blood, excrement, and bits of placenta; it was impossible to determine whose. In fact, it was difficult to tell where one body ended and the next began. Her right arm and left leg were intertwined with the limbs of the corpse beside her, a young mother with a gaping chest wound whose nipples were discharging a pinkish slurry of milk and blood.
“Good shot,” Meyer said. “Now go wash up and hit the rack. You look exhausted.”
I rode back to camp in a daze. Behind me, the shooting continued unabated. Rifle and pistol reports reached my ears like corn popping on a stovetop, first continuous and indistinguishable, then regular but distinct, finally sporadic. That last bit was the worst, actually. Each shot, I knew, represented a father or a brother, a woman or her infant—or perhaps both of the latter two, since mothers were allowed to hold children under three years of age to their breast on the firing line. That seemed to calm both mother and child, as well as allowing a single bullet to pass through both; a tidy cost-savings, the higher-ups figured. The engorged belly of one baby killed in this way burst like a water balloon, spraying a liter of milk in all directions.
After I arrived at our garrison stables, I struggled to tie up and untack my horse, nauseated and trembling as I was.
“Here, let me help you with that, sir,” a private said, jogging up to me. He was one of only several men who had elected to sit out the action, claiming stomach distress. Everyone knew it was a pretense. “It’s the least I can do,” he declared with a little bow of shame.
“It’s I who should be bowing before you,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.
I excused myself and stumbled into my quarters, barely making it to the bunk before my legs gave out. In spite of my fatigue, sleep refused to take me. It was 6 p.m. For the next six hours, I lay awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I thought in equal measures of the last twelve hours and the next.
At the stroke of midnight, I arose and exited the hut as quietly as I could. I fed my horse a carrot to stifle any whinnies and tacked him up. After mounting, I rode the mile back to the stadium. The death pit was covered with only a thin layer of dirt—not enough to deter the jackals that had come to scavenge by night. They fled as I approached, a few carrying off hands or feet.
I immediately set to work, clearing the earth from one section and pulling corpses out one by one.
“Claire,” I whispered. “Cry out if you can hear me.”
“Here!” she sobbed at once, as if a dam had burst from her lungs. Her voice came from what sounded like a few feet below and to the right.
“Hold on, my love. Please hold on.”
As I hoped, the bodies had been stacked loosely enough, and the dirt shoveled on sparsely enough, to allow for air to pass through. I dug faster, dropping my shovel and switching to bare hands when I reached the last few inches of soil. After uncovering her, I brushed the dirt off her face and made certain her airway was clear. She coughed forcefully, then took deep gulps of air punctuated by sobs. I cleared the earth from the rest of her body and hoisted her out of the pregnant woman’s collapsed abdomen like a chick plucked from an egg.
Throwing her over my shoulder, I clambered up the side of the pit. I set her down and examined her. All the blood appeared to belong to others; she had no wounds of her own. I helped her to her feet and she threw her arms around me, still wailing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, holding back my own tears. “Ever so sorry.”
I knew we hadn’t a moment to spare. I gave her my canteen, which she drained in one quaff, then threw a woolen blanket around her shoulders. I hoisted her onto the stallion and swung myself up. We set off into a nearby wood on the outskirts of the city, following a trail that led to parts unknown. It didn’t matter. Anywhere but that godforsaken football field would suffice.
We rode and rode, further and further into the forest and away, I hoped, from those who would tear her from me, given the chance. The sun had already started to rise when I spied it: a small log cabin that looked to be abandoned. Perhaps an unattended hunting lodge, I thought.
I tied up the horse outside and helped her down. The door of the cabin was unlocked, and there were two small cots inside. She was already asleep on one of them before I had even closed the door behind us. I lay down and did likewise, falling immediately into a dreamless slumber.
Some hours later, I don’t know how many, I awoke with a jolt. Claire was gone from the other cot, which was made up neatly. I threw myself out of bed in a panic. Had I dreamt the entire thing? Was she still back in the death pit, moldering away, while I in a fit of mad grief rode alone to this place?
No, I soon realized. Her voice was rising from just outside, soothing my stallion in spite of her own recent torments. I was equally comforted by what I didn’t hear—shouts of soldiers, screams of the dying, idling of engines or the crack of rifles. Aside from Claire’s words and the chirping of songbirds, there was only welcome silence. All was as it should be. Reassured, I left the dwelling and quietly made my way to the edge of the tree line, stepping over scores of poppies along the way.
I hadn’t noticed the flowers when we arrived. Their vibrant red hue stood in stark contrast to the greens and browns surrounding them. But it wasn’t the flowers that interested me in the moment: my sights were set on a willow tree. I broke off a thin, pliant stem from one of its low branches, looping it several times and carefully knotting the ends to form a ring small enough to fit Claire’s finger.
Satisfied with the result, I returned to the vicinity of the cabin, where I saw her outside. She had just finished bathing in a stream and was donning her pretty, homespun dress. The garment was clean again, free of any traces of blood or muck from her time spent below ground. After she pulled it on and wrung out her hair, she knelt in the garden, collecting a few carrots to feed the horse.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I approached her kneeling figure from behind. I did so in silence, hoping to surprise her with the ring and declare my intentions. She didn’t notice my steps and remained turned away, her face in a rosemary bush.
When I had come within a few feet, I raised my arm up and toward her, toward her cascade of auburn tresses, which I wanted more than anything in the world right then to stroke, to caress and let flow through my fingers like water, until she knew how dearly I loved her. In my hand was the ring, grasped between my thumb and pointer.
I suddenly felt it slipping from my grasp, as though I were about to lose hold of it. Instinctively, I tightened my fingers to prevent it from falling—and in that instant a shot rang out. It was then that I realized: I wasn’t standing in a forest at all, but in the poppy patch. There was no cabin and no freshwater stream before me—only the death pit and the stream of blood running into it.
No, there had been no missed shot, no clever ruse, no daring rescue, no moonlit ride to safety. Nothing of the kind. I was back in the moment of decision, from which there was no escape, then or ever. And the ring? It was no ring at all. It was the trigger guard of my pistol. The decision had been made.
No sooner had my fantasy disintegrated than Claire’s head did likewise, exploding in a shower of gore that scattered blood, brain matter, and shards of bone in a dramatic arc onto the ground in front of her.
The dry, thirsty soil was quick to absorb the moist bits, soon leaving only her skull fragments, which were embedded into the earth like splinters of bark from a pine tree after a lightning strike. The lifeless husk of her kneeling body remained upright until Sergeant Meyer gave it a firm shove with the sole of his boot. It tumbled end over end into the death pit, discharging the remaining contents of its braincase on the way down.
“A messy one for your first time, sir.”
That’s what he said. I remember that clearly.
And then, “Sorry about that. But don’t worry, it’s not the norm. Most of the time at this distance it’s a clean through-and-through and the skull stays intact… Come to think of it, mind if I have a look at your sidearm?” Or something to that effect. He held out an upturned palm, inviting me to give him the gun.
I handed it over. He cycled the slide, ejecting a live round and deftly catching it in mid-air. Holding it up to his face, he studied the tip of the bullet protruding from the case. Then he quipped, “Ah, there’s your problem right here, sir. Hollow point. See?” And then that line about “in like a pebble and out like a boulder.”
Thus concluded my first punitive action, which I already mentioned previously, though perhaps in a little less intimate detail. My own participation lasted only half a minute in reality, but a bit longer in my mind’s eye, as I’ve just elucidated. The human mind is curious that way. We ourselves are our own deepest mysteries; we carry universes in our heads. If I learned nothing else from the experience, it’s exactly that.
After confiding the vision to our field doctor, he assured me that the whole thing was the result of an antimalarial medication we’d been issued. Apparently, visual and auditory hallucinations are a well-known side effect. He took me off the drug, but I still had half a bottle left. I downed the pills in an attempt to return to the cabin in the forest, without success. I never did make it back to that place.
Some weeks later, after the bitterest of my tears had already been shed, I was feeling inspired by the strange occurrence on the lip of the death pit, that liminal space at the edge of nothingness where wondrous possibilities abound, both exhilarating and excruciating. So I took occasion to jot down a little poem. I’ve held onto it all these years. Would you believe it? Here, let me show you.
Still legible, yellowed from age and stained with teardrops as it is. I’ll give you a brief recitation, if you’ll pardon the lilting of a mawkish old man. Here goes.
Claire.
Nightly, while I lie in bed, dreaming dreams—though she be dead—
Of freckled skin and windswept hair and all the goodness that was Claire,
Throwing round her frame my arms, I embrace her with alarm—
My love, you see, slips through my grasp in wisps of flesh and puffs of ash.
Though I’m not a maudlin man, human wonts mean I still can
Perceive the sights I used to see: the lilac, lark, and bumblebee;
Hear, too, sounds that I once heard: her gentle laugh, the hummingbird;
And smell what once beguiled my nose: her rain-soaked clothes, the fresh-cut rose.
Sights and scents of yesterday serve me now to ward away
Those that take root here today: the dirt, the grave, her sweet decay.
Claire, in grace, returns to me in spite of how she left—You see,
I loved so much that, ere we wed, I loved the brains out of her head.
Très romantique, no?
Chapter 4
No publishers would bite at the poem. Odd thing, that. But there’s no accounting for taste. Besides, any artist worth a damn isn’t understood until at least a hundred years after his death, for the most part. I suppose artists and war criminals have that in common.
Anyway, you’ll forgive the romantic interlude, but I thought it prudent to finally lay our scene properly. After all, you came to hear the story of a conscientious killer, a person who, in service to the state and in pursuit of ends not of his own design—in spiteof his own designs, in fact—set about systematically liberating human brains from their skulls. And the beginning of that story—an altogether atypical one, I’ll admit—was the precise point at which my life diverged from the typical. For it’s not every day that a man toasts his engagement with cerebral fluid, you’ll concede. Not all biographies are so clear-cut in their inflection points, but if nothing else, mine has the virtue of clarity in that respect.
You’ll also want to know, of course, why I did it. I suppose I could tell you that had I refused, Claire and the others would have been killed all the same. I could remind you that the only one I would have saved is myself—not my love, not her family, certainly not the other poor bloke who would have had to ventilate her skull in my stead. I could insist that any morality that takes as its chief duty sparing one’s own tender sensibilities at the expense of one’s comrades is no morality at all.
I could tell you those things, but I won’t, because the truth is they’d be nothing but fancy post-hoc rationalizations. In the moment, such thoughts were as far from my consciousness as they are from a chimpanzee’s. My mind was entirely blank; higher order thinking had abandoned me. I was an automaton acting by rote, a creature reduced to base physical impulse. And whether by training or by instinct, by fault in myself or in my stars, my hand held steady, my aim was true—and Claire, poor Claire, a mound of goo.
So much for insight! But perhaps I’m still the wisest perpetrator of them all, in the same sense that Socrates was the wisest Athenian: I’m the only one who’ll honestly answer you, “Fuck if I know.” But as to why I kept it up and saw things through to the finish in action after action, even with my wits about me, I can only state the following: In the end, I had a job to do, and I did it to the best of my ability.
It’s the duty that chooses the man, not the other way around. And those of us chosen by that heaviest duty became for the nation a forlorn hope, charging headlong through the breach of a moral chasm, many never to see daylight again. We did this without the expectation of fame or recompense, or even a marked grave. We knew that ours was a page in history destined either to be torn out, if the war were won, or held high for public ridicule if it were lost. No, we persevered simply because we wished to spare others the same burden.
That was our code, our fundamental decency. And through it all, I like to think we remained decent fellows on the whole, even if the only decent thing we could offer was a cigarette, a sip of fresh water, or a bullet to the back of the head instead of the front. We offered these things not because we expected to be held to account if we didn’t, nor because we were beholden to some half-baked moral dogma like the self-righteous screamers and sensationalists of virtue back home, but simply because it pleased us to.
That’s just the kind of men we were. That was our nature; it couldn’t be helped. And ultimately, we shouldered the burden for them too—the screamers and sensationalists who slapped us across the face with the very hands we kept clean; the fuel-drunk hypocrites who were only too happy to enjoy the bounties of our campaign while condemning its unavoidable exigencies; the effete dandies whose lifestyle of coffee-sipping malcontent was built on the backs of more stolid, uncomplaining men. Theirs was the fruit of our labors, the luxury of morality in a nation of abundance. Ours was perseverance in harder times that demanded harder hearts, a world less than a century removed from collapse. Ours was, in short, the cross, the grave, the skies. There’s nothing more to be said.
So when they write the history of the whole godawful mess a hundred years from now, after the wounds have long scarred over and cooler heads prevail, it’ll be us, not the hypocrites, not the phony do-gooders and impotent well-wishers: we’ll be the ones unlike the rest, the kindhearted few who did what was necessary—and not a thing besides. We, the earnest killers, the men whose deeds were the terrors of the Earth: we’ll be the decent ones, we’ll be the men apart.
But I don’t have a hundred years to wait—not even ten, in all likelihood. I need an impartial judge in the here and now, a dispassionate arbiter of my life’s work. That brings us at long last to the subject of the little favor I mentioned, the token I’ll ask of you now. A trifling thing, really. You see, I didn’t come here tonight for a disquisition, but rather a deposition. What I mean is, I had in mind not just a sharing of accounts, but a settling of them. You might even call it a trial of a sort: the same trial, in fact, that was denied to me at the end of the war, when we were granted clemency as part of the accord. And it’s you who’ll be presiding.
You seem a bit bewildered, so allow me to explain. As I said earlier, the worst parts of this whole living business are the knowing and the waiting, and that applies equally whether one has five minutes remaining or fifty years. I spared the Zonees that, but I couldn’t spare myself. In my case, it’s knowing that after yielding the best years of my life trying to wrest some semblance of decency and order from a horror show, what remains to me now isn’t vindication or absolution—not even judgment. No, firing lines have been replaced by waiting lines at the bureau of motor vehicles, plugging skulls with plugging leaks, signing death warrants with signing pension checks. In short, the horror of the extraordinary has been displaced by the horror of the ordinary, the mind-numbing march toward oblivion.
The real horror, you see, isn’t judgment, isn’t elevation to heaven or consignment to hell. The real horror is abeyance, purgatory, limbo. It’s the state of clemency, non-judgment, of no one caring enough to even bother putting a noose around your neck. And then, when you finally do die, someone will read about it in the newspaper while they’re on the shitter. Only it won’t say anything about whether you did good or bad, whom you loved and whom you loathed, the things you hoped for or feared or despaired of. It’ll simply say “veteran, registered war criminal, died of natural causes.” And then they’ll pinch off their loaf and close the page on your existence.
So I hope you won’t begrudge me that, whether out of defiance or terror or simple boredom, I’ve come to you for judgment instead. Since the legal system has sworn me off, I figure you’re the next best thing. Who better than a hard-nosed, no-nonsense journalist to take a cold, disinterested look at the issue and give an honest accounting of the facts, free of any obfuscation or prevarication—even if the issue under interrogation is a human life? I need a person unafraid to sift through shit and sludge, a muckraker to rake through the muck of my existence. I need to know whether, in your eyes at least, all my dutifulness and good cheer, all my striving after decency and fair play, amounted to anything more than a piss in the wind. I need to know, in other words, whether I’ve made my case.
Your judgment in the matter should wrap up the proceedings of my life nicely and end things with a bang rather than a whimper, as befits me. You might wonder why I don’t simply make the determination myself and settle things in the privacy of my own home, if it comes to that. The truth is, it’s clear to me that I can no longer trust my own judgment. Why, just last week I confused a child at the park for a Zonee girl whose brains I couldn’t extricate from under my fingernails for a good two weeks, thirty years ago. I suspect dementia and other cognitive maladies are fast approaching, if they haven’t taken root already.
The time for delay and indecision is therefore at an end. I hereby recuse myself; my fate rests entirely in your hands now. Enough talk. Ten words sufficed for my men, so fifteen thousand should be more than enough for me, whether as an apologia or an epitaph. Indeed, it’s not what remains unsaid that matters now: it’s what remains undone. The time has come for me to shrug off the infirmities of old age and become a man of action once more—and maybe a trigger man too.
You see, all this business about notes and meat grinders and band saws was no idle chatter. No, I’d like to put some skin in the game, as it were. So I brought an old friend along tonight. He’s been with me the entire time, waiting patiently, right here in my trousers. Allow me to introduce you to my old duty sidearm, freshly cleaned, lubricated, and checked for function just this morning. I figure it’s fitting that he’s here with me now to bring things full circle.
So what’ll it be, Your Honor? Will your recording be my exoneration or my adieu? Are you prepared to absolve a war criminal—or shall I blow my fucking brains out the back of my skull, right onto that lovely young couple sitting behind me?
I’d wager that ought to earn me a little more than an overlooked obituary in the Sunday paper, don’t you think? And if I can’t win my legacy the Spartan way, at the business end of an enemy spear, I may as well earn it like my men—at the end of my own barrel. That way I’ll restore some of the blessed simplicity I’ve foregone with all this blabber, in the form of tomorrow’s news headline. I imagine it’ll be short, to the point, but memorable enough. I’d fancy something like “Diner turns own head into bowl of soup at Le Ranch Radioactif,” if I had my druthers.
And say, would you look at that! Here comes the waiter with our mains, right on time. I hate to rush your decision, but I’ve never been one to eat and gun. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon learn straight away whether I’ll be eating my steak or eating a bullet.
Now tell me, will this be a full course meal—or a soup-and-salad affair?
Truman Capote, 1948. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Wikimedia Commons
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD remembers a brush with brilliance
Better men than me will find ways to celebrate the centenary of Truman Capote’s birth on 30 September 1924, or will have already done so. Forty years after his death, the critical consensus on Capote is of a radiant youthful talent who later developed a tragic addiction to drugs, alcohol and the attention of well-heeled café-society ladies, whilst bloating in his kitschy New York penthouse apartment like Elvis Presley at Graceland. It’s a caricature, if one with a grain of truth.
Some of Capote’s early stories, written when he was barely out of school, still dazzle today in their precocity, craftsmanship, clarity, and, above all, the tendency to leave powerful things unsaid just below the surface that he shared with Ernest Hemingway. By and large, they deal with the lives of the lonely, broken and/or marginalised in society, and it could fairly be said that their author, having grown up gay in the American Deep South of the 1920s and 30s, knew whereof he spoke. Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, written when he was 23, bears comparison in some of its broad outline to The Catcher in the Rye as acoming-of-age saga,both books in their way a definitive work on what it was like to be a teenager in those rackety immediate postwar years. Each one speaks in the unforgettably haunting voice of the adolescent at odds with an uncaring world.
I admit I can take or leave Capote’s celebrated 1966 true-crime novel In Cold Blood. It’s an arresting tale in itself – the slaughter of four innocent members of the Clutter family in their desolate midwestern farmhouse – but set against that the author’s implied sympathy for the two murderers, and the note of voyeurism throughout, always seem to produce effects comparable to mainlining castor oil. For better or worse, the book made Capote’s reputation for the ages. Sometimes considered the original non-fiction novel, it became an international best-seller but also in time took a heavy toll on its author. Capote himself later remarked following the judicial execution of the Clutter family’s killers, “I’m still haunted by the whole thing. I may have finished the book, but in a sense I never will.” For whatever reason, he never wrote anything of real substance again.
Truman Capote, 1968. Photo: Erich Koch. Wikimedia Commons
Which brings me to the events of April or May 1983 (in those blissful analogue days, I wasn’t keeping a precise diary of my movements), when I was living a somewhat makeshift existence in a basement room on the Upper West Side of New York, trying, and failing, to become a great Anglo-American novelist, or for that matter a novelist at all. A local friend had worked on and off with John Cheever, who actually was a great author – you should read his story ‘The Enormous Radio’, if you haven’t already – who had died about a year earlier at the age of seventy. Now he, the friend, was organising an informal gathering to celebrate Cheever’s life at a bar across town called The Guardsman, where the deceased had apparently often come to loiter of an evening. I went along.
The Guardsman (since defunct) was one of those dimly-lit, wood-pannelled rooms with framed caricatures of famous habitués on the walls and a perhaps overdone but not wholly unsuccessful aspiration to the general look and feel of a London gentleman’s club. Everyone there – journalists mainly – was clever, voluble, and (those were the days) beautifully dressed. Our host, for example, wore a red silk shirt and a Tom Wolfe-like luminous white suit, in which he darted hither and thither like a large tropical fish. (Wolfe himself, though living reasonably nearby, wasn’t present.) There was quiche and bite-sized sausages to eat and plenty of champagne chilling in the stainless-steel Miele fridge behind the bar. The conversation was bright, witty and ill-informed. I remember that one prominent Manhattan political columnist assured me that “that bitch Thatcher” would lose the forthcoming British general election, and I advised him not to bet on it. (When the day came, the Conservatives won their biggest parliamentary majority since the Second World War.)
Truman Capote, 1980. Photo: Jack Mitchell. Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t all vacuous backslapping amongst hacks out for the night, however, because seated on a high stool at a table in the corner of the room, his tiny legs dangling down far short of the floor, was a middle-aged man in rumpled grey trousers and what looked suspiciously like a crested school blue blazer, with five or six young people standing attentively around him. “Truman,” my friend hissed in my ear, as if he might not be instantly familiar. It turned out that Capote had been both a friend and an admirer of the writer whose memory we were there to honour, which was no small accolade coming from him. This is a man who had said of James Baldwin of Go Tell It on theMountain fame; “I loathe his fiction; it’s crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom,” which was harsh, certainly, but almost counted as a rave review compared to his opinion of Gore Vidal. “I’m always sad about Gore,” Capote once quipped. “Very sad that he has to breathe every day.”
Catching my own breath, I went over to the centre of the action. It was Capote, all right. Diminutive, sallow-faced, such hair as remained a sort of cornfield blond-and-grey stubble, pink-framed sunglasses, the trademark singsong voice. Everyone was laughing loudly about something he’d just said, the way people do when someone with a reputation as a wit does so much as to ask what time it is. He smelled a bit musty, but with a patchy application of dynamite-strength cologne. One woman aged about nineteen was standing at the back of the circle, eating a slice of quiche. “What did he just say?” I asked her quietly as I came up to join the group. She tried to tell me, but her mouth was too full of quiche for her to reply coherently.
I had just one direct exchange with Capote. After a while he asked me my name and occupation, and when I mumbled the word “writer” he said “Oh?” and enquired what I was working on just at present.
Since he’d asked, I launched into my still-unrealised plan to publish the definitive biography of Charlie Chaplin, my hero then and now, with words along the lines of “There’s a poignancy to him that I’m not sure anyone’s ever really captured in print, when you come to consider his upbringing on the back streets of Lambeth, and how just a few years later his wealth and fame fused together to create something close to our modern definition of celebrity, beyond anything people had conceived before …” My voice trailed off as I realised, hopefully just in time, that I might have been telling Mozart about this little piece I was larking about with on the piano.
I have to say that Capote’s face – so far as it was visible behind the shades – registered nothing but good-natured interest. After a bit he gave a high, ringing laugh, which sounded something like a pile of loose change being thrown onto a counter-top, looked up at me, his eyes then seeming to dart around the room to make sure everyone was listening, and began a long and magnificently obscene story about “my friend Charlie” and his widow Oona, that concluded with an account of how a few years earlier a pair of feckless Bulgarian auto mechanics-turned-grave robbers had removed Chaplin’s body from its resting place in a Swiss cemetery in a failed attempt to extort money from his family for its return. On the whole, Capote was loquacious, unapologetically rude about certain parties, and still very funny. No doubt his Chaplin monologue might have been construed as inappropriate, or offensive, had one of today’s culture police overheard it. But everyone around Capote’s stool was guffawing. I thought him to be on cracking form, and apparently content to sip a single glass of what looked like either gin or possibly vodka, although I noticed the merest hint of a reel when, a few minutes later, he stood up, bowed to us elaborately, and made for the door. After he left, it felt as if about twelve people were suddenly missing from the room.
Although Capote appeared commendably restrained in the Bacchic rites that night at The Guardsman, I wasn’t completely amazed when I read a couple of months later that he’d been found guilty on a drunk driving charge – appearing in court, to the presiding judge’s displeasure, in a pair of tight blue shorts and a sports jacket – nor, sadly, when it was announced in August 1984 that he’d died, at the age of 59, officially as a result of ‘liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication’, to quote the coroner’s report. His old sparring partner Gore Vidal, unable to restrain his glee at the news, called his death “a wise career move.”
Some time later, I found myself thinking of the strange tale of Charlie Chaplin’s exhumation once again when it was reported that Capote’s own ashes had been twice stolen from the home of his friend Joanne Carson, and then on Carson’s own death put up on public auction, where they were sold for $44,000 to an anonymous bidder. Perhaps the Southern-gothic writer in him might have been sardonically amused by the notion of complete strangers competing to own his mortal remains. Or perhaps not. Somehow you could see Capote making it the denouement of one of those wonderful early stories with their lapidary prose style and fascination with what happens once someone moves the guardrails defining the limits of what constitutes acceptable moral behaviour.
As I say, a purely personal, thus subjective, Capote story to mark his centenary. Intelligent, opinionated, scathingly funny, arch, camp, surprisingly kind, and in my limited experience raucously good company, even if his charm came equipped with a sensitive on-off switch, his career might be broadly divided into a first half in which he was positively touched by genius – almost spoilt by fortune – and a second in which he increasingly became not so much a creative artist as a character, a carefully constructed image that seemed, frankly, to be more mask than man. On 30 September I shall raise a glass of something suitable, and re-read the last pages of Other Voices, Other Rooms, in his honour.
In an 1874 letter to members of the Augustinians of the Assumption, Venerable Emmanuel d’Alzon, who founded the congregation in 19th century France, spoke about the “radical denial of the rights of God” in the post-revolutionary period. Society then – as now – did not understand the order of things and did “not want the truth to serve as its bedrock.” And he observed that “ever since society ceased to rest on this doctrinal foundation, we can see…the resulting turmoil.”
Like other thinkers and figures of the time, d’Alzon recognized that the disenchantment of the world caused profound disorder. His solution to this was to “proclaim everywhere in the world the rights of God, of Jesus Christ and of his Church.” To do this, the Assumptionists had to focus on education in all its forms. Elsewhere, d’Alzon had written that “humanity needs to be taught, but first we need to give humanity a heart of flesh, as Scripture says, to replace the one becoming like stone in its chest.”
I open with d’Alzon for two reasons. First, I am indebted to the Assumptionists and d’Alzonian thinking; I was educated by the Assumptionists at Assumption College in Massachusetts, now Assumption University, and briefly considered a vocation to the congregation. Secondly, I believe his observations on the turmoil of the modern period have much to teach both intellectuals and artists.
D’Alzon can help us approach art because art, good and bad, has an educative dimension to it, particularly a moral one. To demonstrate this, I’d like to take a moment to compare him to T.S. Eliot. In Religion and Literature, Eliot observes that modern literature seems to express “no higher ideal to set before us than [absolute liberty].” It has been “corrupted by…Secularism, that it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.” If we are exposed to this and do not think seriously about what we are reading, then, Eliot says, we will receive an improper formation, one that puts us at odds with the Truth. Emmanuel d’Alzon would likely agree with Eliot and has, in fact, used artistic language to talk about the seriousness of human formation. He has noted that the soul is “like a block of marble” that like the sculptor’s block can be chipped away meticulously until it becomes a work of art.
A good example of a novel that can shape the reader and demonstrate where we moderns have become unmoored is G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. In the aforementioned essay, Eliot identifies Chesterton as a propagandist, used in its original sense to mean propagation of the faith. But despite its rather overt sensibility, the novel works quite well for my purposes.
It’s apt to describe The Napoleon of Notting Hill as a story about education and ideas – in particular, the Christian idea.
Before the novel – which is set 80 years after its publication date – begins in earnest, Chesterton’s introductory note runs through a litany of modern “prophets,” each of whom has offered a particular vision of what the future might look like – from H.G. Wells saying “science would take charge of the future” to Edward Carpenter’s assertion that “we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do.” These are all attempts at what Eric Voegelin called “immanentizing the Eschaton.” [Editor’s Note: From A New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin, 1952: “The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.” The term “immanentizing the Eschaton” would become a satirical way of describing utopian thinking.]
That so many people would strive for utopian solutions makes sense, because, like d’Alzon, Chesterton would have encountered similar disordered thinking. Ideas take root and spread. All these “prophets,” having jettisoned God, still needed to find ultimate meaning, in the form of capital-s Science or something else. But the order of things cannot be separated from God, and human life cannot be reduced to a series of predictions and numbers. Reality is deeper than ideological fads, and life is not a series of “cold mechanic happenings,” to quote from Chesterton’s poem he includes as an epigraph. Instead, it’s all bound by joy.
The novel opens in a London “almost exactly like what it is now.” Chesterton’s third-person narrator tells us that the people of this time have “absolutely lost faith in revolutions” and instead have accepted “Evolution,” in the sense that any changes must be done “slowly and safely,” as in nature. This flattening of the human spirit had resulted in the death of democracy, because “no one minded the governing class governing.” England, seemingly a world-bestriding colossus, because it seems to have conquered Athens, Jerusalem, and Nicaragua, was “now practically a despotism, but not a hereditary one.” The narrator tells us that “someone in the official class was made king.” The passive voice there suggests the passivity of the population, and indeed, in the next sentence, the narrator says that “no one cared how; no one cared who.” We then learn that, unsurprisingly, “everything…had become mechanical.”
Into this comes Auberon Quin, a comic figure whom the narrator describes as godson of “the King of the Fairies.” Apparatchiks of the regime arrive at Quin’s house and, to the shock of the people present, announce that he has been named king. Later that day, King Auberon makes a humorous speech in which he announces his desire to save “from extinction a few old English customs.” He suggests a form of local patriotism, in which each borough of London “shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset.” These places will be “armed to the teeth” and will “have a banner, a coat of arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry.” Intellectuals turn “purple with laughter,” while others are “purple with indignation.” Most have their “minds a blank.” But not one Adam Wayne, who is there watching with “burning blue eyes.” He takes Quin very seriously.
It makes sense that Wayne would take Quin seriously. A mechanized, flat world is an inhuman world. People float through it like seaweed in the deep, because they have been given nothing to believe in. This is a world that isn’t foreign to us, but nor was it foreign to Chesterton or d’Alzon. The latter, in discussing his vocation to the priesthood – he founded the Assumptionists and became a religious later – observed that France had become a “decrepit machine.” Because it was “dangerous to try to repair,” he reasoned that the best approach would be to become a priest and press on the culture “with all the weight of the rights it had no authority to give.”
For d’Alzon, humanity is “deeply wounded” by “indifference and ignorance,” both of which “imply a total lack of faith.” His solution to this, as was mentioned, was to provide a serious education, one that would “penetrate” the world with “the Christian idea.” It would otherwise be in danger of collapsing. D’Alzon’s description of France and of his vocation should remind us of what Chesterton says about England in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are striking similarities of language: machine, indifference, a loss of faith.
Another point of comparison: the reactions to d’Alzon’s decision to become a priest mirrored the reactions to Quin’s speech. He was from an aristocratic family. People were shocked that, as they saw it, he would renounce his inheritance to become a priest. In an 1830 letter, D’Alzon had chided a friend for not wanting “at all to be reasonable,” going as far to say, “I scare you in a priest’s robe.” In the same letter, he offers his thoughts on the state of France. In addition to describing France as a “decrepit machine,” he observed that “sovereignty did not exist any more in the Palais Bourbon than at the Tuileries.” This was a “society that was so sick, one could have influence only in separating oneself completely.”
The England of the novel is also a sick society and one that truly lacks sovereignty. In effect, Quin is providing a kind of education. The fact that he views things as a joke fits his character as a “Fairy.” But fairy tales themselves – and Chesterton wants to link The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the fairy tale tradition – discuss very serious things. In his essay “Fairy Tales,” [Editor’s Note: Included in his 1908 book, All Things Considered], Chesterton points out that “if you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.” He closes the essay by observing that fairy tales find “the great mystical basis for all Commandments.”
Quin’s speech, then, awoke something in Adam Wayne. To use d’Alzonian and scriptural language, you could say that Quin replaced Wayne’s heart of stone with one of flesh. And because his kingship sets off the events of The Napoleon of Notting Hill –Wayne decides to lead a rebellion, and this inspires others – we might say that Quin has effectively brought about a re-enchantment of the world. Indeed, Wayne says as much, both at the beginning of the novel and at its end. He says Quin has given him a desire to “fight for something greater,” noting that “this leadership and liberty of Notting Hill is a gift from your Majesty.” Wayne has been reminded that the purpose of human life is, as Pope Emeritus Benedict has noted,” is one of “greatness.” And he thus sees that there is a “mystical basis for all Commandments.” Now fully awakened, he believes these things are worth fighting for.
Adam Wayne was taken up by this idea of Quin’s, and it reshaped the world as it is. He brings it from a mechanized, empty flatness to “fairyland” and “elfland.” It leads to a re-enchantment and, à la d’Alzon, reorders the being of the world.
By the end of the story, it’s clear that both Wayne and Quin function as a dual symbol of “fairyland,” which, as Chesterton observes in “Fairy Tales,” is “a world at once of wonder and of war.” Wayne remarks that he and Quin “are not two men but one man.” He continues, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:
It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that though we seem to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and woman aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are the father and mother of the Charter of the Cities.
In effect, he is saying that the complete picture of the created order is a place “of wonder and war.” This is the full picture of human life. Quin and Wayne broke the mechanized imposter that, demiurge-like, was posing as the created order and made things real again.
How, then, does The Napoleon of Notting Hill educate the reader, both then and in the present? Chesterton deliberately sets the novel in a London not far removed from the one of 1904 and peppers it with real places, in addition to references to real people. The reader from 1904 would then be able to recognize his world in the text. Then, if he is attentive, he would start to ask questions: are things detached and mechanized? Where do we find meaning today? What is the cause and purpose of my life? Am I ordering my life toward good and appropriate things? And so on. We do have a real-life example of this. According to Dale Ahlquist, president of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, was inspired by the novel to seek Irish independence.
But despite its references to early 20th century things, this is not a novel that is time-locked. We can read it and still be edified; the problems discussed by d’Alzon, Eliot, and Chesterton have persisted.
Consider Quin’s reflection during Adam Wayne’s initial audience with him at the beginning of the novel. He says that “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me.” This madness consists of being obsessive about politics, caring for money, and thinking yourself right. These of course are perennial human concerns, but then Quin gets specific. He accuses people of trying to “spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational.” This joke-spoiling and bullying has of course accelerated greatly since Chesterton’s time – leading to confusion and unhappiness, and eventually maybe even destruction.
As the American Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once observed in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, “in the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.” She continues: “It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
We can objectively call this true. The 20th century was one of theories, each of which, like Chesterton’s prophets, attempted to bring about utopia, but instead led to millions and millions of deaths. But this confusion has persisted. As Walker Percy observed inhis posthumously-published Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, ours is a “deranged age…because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
In 2017, in an essay for Crux on both d’Alzon and education, I pointed out that the Department of Education lists its purpose as “foster[ing] student achievement” and “preparation for global competitiveness.” I observed that we tend to see education as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. Seven years on, the US Department of Education still lists its purpose as “preparation for global competitiveness.” Then, as now, these are buzzwords, but they also tell us something about how we view education: a mere means to an end, a way to place people into a culture with only the basest of aspirations. When we are taught that there are no higher things, we will be led to believe that life is a mechanized existence, as described by both Chesterton and d’Alzon.
In a way, it’s all more of the same. Various techno-utopians have proposed that the solution to the human condition is to place us in a “metaverse,” where we’d live our lives in virtual reality. In City Journal, Jacob Howland has detailed the “destruction” of the University of Tulsa, where he holds emeritus status. Entire programs were eliminated or consolidated into minors: Greek, Latin, philosophy, religion. This, he pointed out, will result in students who are “credentialed, but…not…educated.” Sadly, his university is not unique.
But what are the results of this? A profound sense of malaise, particularly among the young.
Perhaps reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill – and having a good teacher discuss the novel with students – might provide a way forward for students who are feeling stifled by our deranged age. It would show them that the ideas that undergird our modern culture are ones that flatten the human spirit. They would not have to become revolutionaries or leaders of statelet neighborhoods, like Michael Collins or Adam Wayne, but perhaps they could be awakened to the idea that there is something profound about human existence. This is the purpose of good art and literature–to show people that there is a higher ideal than Eliot’s “absolute liberty” – because absolute liberty is little more than nihilism.
I can speak to this. I felt a sense of aimlessness when I’d finished high school, with vague ideas about becoming a doctor or a politician, but then, while at Assumption, I received two gifts, which cannot be separated: the Catholic faith, which I reverted to as a student, and liberal education. My professors – although not trickers or jokesters! – were my Quins. They awakened something in me and gave my life a telos. I don’t think it’s an accident that liberal education is often deemed a kind of lunacy. Quin and Wayne were seen as lunatics, but Auberon Quin notes that “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me.” I am thankful that I pursued this “madness,” and was given access to the truth.
An education that featured books like The Napoleon of Notting Hill would send readers and students on a search, resulting in a deeper engagement with tradition, and helping settle the turmoil of our age. It might help sweep away the sadness and hopelessness that plague so many people today, by reminding us that the world is enchanted, and guiding us along “the starry streets that point to God.”
