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They untie the tiger skin and throw it down, flopping wetly on to the grass. They tie you there instead, pulling down so that you are hoisted up, bowing the flagpole, bumping against it as they raise you feet first to its top and tie the lanyard. You hang, still twisting and untwisting, offered to unbounded depths of sky.
The soldiers desert the roof and, soon, some smoke drifts up.
The grey wisps turn black, filling the air around you, the rolling tumbling locks and curls of black being caught and blown away by the dampening wind.
I see you, unseeing, disappearing white in grey and black. I lower my head, and by and by, small flakes of soot drift down and cover me.
The people fall back to their tents and carts, some striking camp, some already on their way. Rain and cold moatwater drip from me. The portcullis groans and scrapes, and engines start. One of the soldiers walks out to me, takes me by the elbow and supports me as I stagger, then guides me almost kindly back across the bridge. I want to break away, to run for my life, or dash out to the refugees, to shout and wail and demand their help, or somehow to shame the soldiers into a show of contrition or regret, but I have no strength left, no warmth for you or me or anybody or anything else.
The other soldiers meet me, show me my castle all dressed in flames, fire leaping exultant from every door and window, then with their trucks and jeeps and the gun, they leave the place to blaze and smoke and take me with them out of it.
I see you through the fire, I think, cold and white and in a still point poised, untouched between those warring tides, at full mast floating in that swift, turmoiling mix, flying in the wind's swift gust, and all downfalls at once saluting.
Chapter 20
And now, my dear, I'm finished. The tale is done, and done with us as it would. There has been an evening, and with the dawn comes worse. I watch the day die slowly, the sunset's gaudy show dragging clouds down with it and finally outdoing the castle's last weak glow.
A bird of prey, returning hunter, is circling and wheeling, rising and falling over the last surrendered warmth our home breathes up, cutting edges through that quiet grey smoke and surfacing beyond and banking back.
A hawk, I do believe. One of mine I let fly out, come back. I gaze up, submitting for a moment to an easy admiration of the beast, imagining that it knows somehow that I am here and you are not and all is lost, that some honed slayer's instinct brings it back to acknowledge all our fates.
But it is just a bird, and stupid in our terms; its delicately fierce frame, that narrow pared skull, holds just sufficient sense for its carnivorous function, and contains no room for any further thought. Carved to fit its place in life through the struggles of all its ancestors, sculpted by the vast simplicity of evolution it has no more sense of our tribulations than does a knife, or a bullet, and is just as blameless. What we call its cruel beauty appeals to our found sense of awe, but it is our pride, our ferocity and our grace that we deify in it, and at our peril think at all which we put below the talon's crude mechanic grasp, and precisely by our reckoning it is we who remain forever above it.
I hear the sound of other guns, that great rumble rolling over the land from some distant front, somehow surprising me, forcing the unknowing world back upon my consciousness, as I stand here; bound, condemned and waiting.
The soldiers say they will move on tomorrow. They shooed the refugees away to take over their mean camp upon the lawns, and now a couple of husbands and one of our servants float in the moat too. You, forever silent one, are still raised up within the clearing air, poised blackened over the collapsed and gutted shell of the castle, your composed eyes at last observing dryly what the air now offers you, and I wonder will the hawk, preferring cooked or undone meat, visit you or I.
For I too am tied, in Mezentian hyperbole, made a toy. a puppet of before the ca
All my attempts at playing the man of action, the lieutenant's murder and the responsibility for yours, secured me just one more day of life, and cost us everything. Their intention, at the next day's light, is to raise me to the skies, elevate me, spread over the gun's great snout, set a charge but no shell in the breach and then throw dice for which one gets to pull the firing lanyard.
I made my pleas, I tried to reason, to appeal somehow, but they see a fitness in my death, I think, that is not entirely predicated upon their admittedly correct conviction that it was I who killed the lieutenant. My pleas were too eloquent, perhaps, my attempt to use reason doomed from the start, and as for my try at appealing to them man to man as a chap unjustly accused, a chum, a mate in trouble that was, apparently, just laughable (for certainly they laughed).
Still, for all my fear felt in the guts that will bear the brunt of my release I think I can still savour the fact that my life ends with a blank, and see the possibilities for touches the soldiers might not appreciate. And so I want the hawk to come down and peck some living part of me, or the soldiers to raise me up now, place an old tin helmet on my head, sponge some water into my mouth and stick a bayonet in my side… But I am anyway between these thieves, and a calm eye in the circle of their vehicles, something they have already grown bored with. The hawk settles on you, my dear. I try to watch it perch and pull and pluck and tear with a disinterested eye, but find the exercise impossible, and have to look away, at the bare trees and the dark tents and the remainder of the lieutenant's men.
They are busy finishing off the castle's last reserves, consuming its food and wine or busy with the women they decided to keep from the camp. Tomorrow they may fire a few more rounds back at some hazy westward front, and then retreat, but perhaps not.
There have been arguments. They seem uncertain, now. Some want to abandon the gun entirely, thinking it might slow them down, complaining that they have nothing they particularly want to target. Others want to offer their services to a larger concern, or find some other shelter, citadel or town which they can threaten with the gun, and so be paid for sparing.
I do not understand their war, nor know now who fights whom for what or why. This could be any place or time, and any cause could bring the same results, the same ends, loose or met, or won or lost.
I look around their appropriated camp and see them, quiet or snoring, stoking a fire, smoking the lieutenant's dry cigarettes, guzzling their booty, checking their weapons or with their women.
“I am too tolerant, I suspect, for the truth is that I feel sorry for these brutes. They kill me now but they'll die later, writhing on the blood muddied ground with no lieutenant there to kiss them and then swiftly dispatch; or they'll live limbless, institutionalised, with a ghost of pain forever haunting the abbreviated memory of flesh, or carry the wounds deeper still, in the abyssal darkness of the mind, and toss tormented by the dreams of death decades hence, alone in their sleep no matter who lies by their side, transported by the recollecting claws of that embedded horror back to a time they thought they'd lived through and escaped, forever dragged back and down.