A Song of Stone Read online

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Here.’ I stand slowly, and look down at the box beneath the coachman’s seat. The lieutenant nods to a soldier I had not noticed on the other side of the carriage, who jumps up, opens the box, searches it and hauls out the oil-heavy bag in which I stowed the guns; he checks inside, then jumps back down.

  ‘The rifle is not of a military calibre,’ I protest.

  ‘Ah. That’ll mean it can’t shoot soldiers, then,’ the lieutenant says, nodding ingenuously.

  I glance round in the direction we were travelling. ‘For pity’s sake, we don’t know what we might meet further on--’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that,’ she says, climbing a step higher on the carriage and giving another nod. The same soldier who took the guns clambers up beside me again. He proceeds to search me, efficiently but not roughly, while the lieutenant alternately grins at me and smiles at you, who look on, gloved hands clenched but visibly trembling. The soldier has a sour, almost fetid odour. He finds nothing he judges worth exhibiting, save the heavy bunch of keys I put into my pocket this morning. He throws them to the lieutenant, who catches them one-handed and looks at them, holding them up and turning them against the light.

  ‘A mighty bunch of keys,’ she says, then looks at me, inquiring.

  ‘The castle’s,’ I tell her. I shrug, a little embarrassed. ‘A keepsake.’

  She rolls them clinking round her hand, then with a flourish pockets them in her torn jacket. ‘You know, we need some place to hole up for a while, Abel,’ she tells me. ‘Bit of rest and recreation.’ She smiles at you. ‘How far is this castle?’

  ‘It took us since dawn to get this far,’ I tell her.

  ‘Why did you leave? A castle ought to be protection, no?’

  ‘It’s small,’ I tell her. ‘Not very formidable. Not formidable at all. Just a house, really; it used to have a drawbridge, but now there’s just an ordinary stone bridge across the moat.’

  She makes a show of being impressed. ‘Oh! A moat . . .’ She draws smirks from the soldiers around her (and I notice for the first time how tired and beaten-looking many of them are, as some gather round us, some carry away the body of the young soldier and others start to usher the people behind us round our carriage and onwards down the road. Many of them seem wounded; some are limping, some have arms in frayed slings, some dirty bandages on their heads like grey bandanas.)

  ‘The gate is not very strong,’ I say, and feel that my words sound as lame as some of these grubby, motley soldiers. ‘We were worried it would be sacked if we stayed and tried to hold out,’ I continue. ‘There were soldiers there; trying to take it, yesterday,’ I conclude.

  Her eyes narrow. ‘What soldiers?’

  ‘I don’t know who they were.’

  ‘Uniforms?’ she asks. She looks slyly around. ‘Any better than ours?’

  ‘We didn’t really see them.’

  ‘What sort of heavy equipment did they have?’ she asks, then when I hesitate waves one hand and suggests, ‘Tanks, armoured cars, field guns . . . ?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. They had guns; machine-guns, grenades . . .’

  ‘Mortar,’ you say, gulping, startled eyes looking from me to her.

  I put my hand on yours. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ I tell our lieutenant. ‘I think it was . . . a rifle grenade?’

  Our lieutenant nods wisely, seems to think for a moment, then says, ‘Let’s take a look at your castle, Abel, shall we?’

  ‘It’s easy enough to find,’ I tell her. I glance back the way we’ve come. ‘Just--’

  ‘No,’ she says, opening the carriage door and swinging her short frame up and in to sit across from you. She levers some bags aside to get more comfortable and places the long gun across her knees. ‘You take us back,’ she tells me. ‘I always wanted to ride in a carriage like this.’ She pats the plush surface of the seat. ‘And a little local knowledge can be useful.’ She fishes inside her jacket - some sort of dark, ceremonial thing, torn in a few places, stained and smudged with dirt - then pulls out a gleaming silver case, opening it and offering it to you and me. ‘Cigarette?’

  We each refuse; she takes out a cigarette then puts the silver case away.

  ‘I don’t think going back is a good idea,’ I say, trying to sound reasonable.

  She is taking off her cap, pushing a hand through her short, mouse-brown curls. ‘Well, too bad,’ she says, frowning to inspect something inside her cap and running one finger round the inside rim. ‘Consider yourself requisitioned.’ She puts her cap back on and glances up at me with a small cold smile. ‘Turn the carriage round and head back there.’ She pulls a lighter from a breast pocket.

  ‘But it took us since dawn,’ I protest. ‘And that was with the flow. It’ll be after dark--’

  She shakes her head quickly. ‘We’ll put the trucks in front.’ She flicks the skip of her cap. ‘People get out the way for a truck with a machine-gun; you’d be amazed. It won’t take too long.’ She makes a delicate twirling motion with one finger as she lights her cigarette with her other hand. ‘Turn around, Abel,’ she says through a cloud of exhaled smoke.

  The tall truck ahead of us has been driven into the field; its diesel fuel is being siphoned off. We turn round in the gateway and a couple of jeeps and two six-wheel trucks with camouflaged canopies drive out of hiding in the forest track opposite. The soldiers who investigated the remains of the burning van load petrol cans and plastic drums into the back of one of the trucks, which go ahead of us back up the road, into the stream of refugees, horns blaring, a soldier standing proud of the leading truck’s cab where a machine-gun points out. The people part and scatter before the trucks like water round the bows of a ship; it is all I can do to keep up. The mares break into a canter for the first time that day.

  One of their jeeps follows immediately behind us. It too has a machine-gun, mounted on a post behind the front seats. The second jeep remains behind; two of the soldiers and our servants will bury the young soldier and then follow us.

  The carriage rattles, sways and shakes; the damp wind courses round my face, cold and quick. The carriage’s shadow, wheels flickering, is thrown long and spindly across the verge by the watery sun. The lieutenant looks pleased, and sits cross-legged with the gun balanced against one thigh, her cap on a bag beside her, her hand absently pushing through her short char-brown hair. She smiles at us both in turn. You look up at me, put one gloved hand up to mine.

  Behind us, the refugees close up again and continue on their way. The burning van in the ditch makes a noise like a distant cough and a dark blister of smoke rolls upward into the greying sky, joining the smoke from all the other burning vehicles, farms and houses across the plain.

  CHAPTER TWO

  And so we are delivered to the castle. I had not thought to see it again so soon; in fact I half expected never to see it again. I feel foolish, like somebody who has bidden a long and heartfelt farewell to a dear friend at a station, only to discover that through some misunderstanding they are on the same train. Still, as the trucks turn off the main road, leaving the line of refugees behind, I wonder what welcome awaits us. I have been watching for smoke as we approach, apprehensive that the soldiers who appeared yesterday might have sacked our home and set it on fire. So far, however, the sky above the trees where the castle is shows only the grey clouds moving down from the north.

  The lieutenant investigates the interior of the carriage while we drive, finding much that fascinates her. I look round as she discovers your jewel box, behind your feet; you bend and hold it to your breast but she prises it from your hands with a deal of soft clucking and gentle admonishment that breaks your grip, I believe, as certainly as her greater strength. She inspects each piece in turn, admiring a few against her breast, around her wrist or on her fingers, before laughing and giving them back to you, save for one small ring of white gold and ruby.

  ‘May I keep this?’ she asks you. The carriage jolts,
clattering over a pothole and I have to look forward again; your head is pressed up against the small of my back as I pull on the reins, keeping the mares away from a line of holes along the road. I feel you nod to her.

  ‘Thank you, Morgan,’ the lieutenant says, and sounds well satisfied.

  She seems to doze for the last few minutes (you touch me on the back, to get me to look, and there is a smile on your face as you nod at her, head bobbing slackly). I am not so sure; our lieutenant’s face does not appear completely relaxed to me, the way people really look when they are genuinely asleep. Perhaps she is still watching us, tempting us, waiting to see what we shall do.

  However that may be, now she rouses herself, looks around, asks where we are and pulls a small radio from her tunic. She talks briefly into it and the trucks ahead of us growl to a stop on the driveway. I pull the carriage up just behind; the jeep idles to our rear. We are perhaps a half kilometre from the entrance to the castle’s drive, hidden round a bend beneath the damp dark skeletons of the trees.

  ‘Is there a gatehouse?’ she asks me quietly. I nod.

  ‘Any other road or track avoiding the gatehouse?’

  ‘Not for the trucks,’ I tell her.

  ‘The jeep?’

  ‘I’d think so.’

  She stands quickly, rocking the carriage, tips her cap at you then nods to me. ‘You lead us. We’ll take a jeep.’ You glance fearfully at me and put your hand out to me. ‘Kneecap,’ our lieutenant says to one of the men in the jeep. ‘You look after the horses.’

  The lieutenant gives orders I do not hear to the men in the trucks, then swings into the jeep, taking the wheel herself. The fellow sitting in the passenger seat holds a drainpipe-diameter olive tube about a metre and a half long. I take it to be a rocket launcher. I am squeezed in the back between the metal post supporting the machine-gun and a fat, pale soldier who smells like a week-dead fox. Behind us, sitting on the rear lip of the vehicle, crouches a fourth soldier who holds the heavy machine-gun.

  We take the narrow forest track, round the back of the old estate, beneath the small escarpment fringed with dripping evergreens. The overhanging trees and bushes in places form a tunnel around the track, and the soldier manning the machine-gun curses quietly, ducking as snagging branches try to wrest the gun from his grip. The track approaches the stream that feeds the moat. The bridge is rotten, too frail for the jeep, timbers skewed and loose. The lieutenant turns to me, a look of disappointment beginning to form on her face.

  ‘We’re close now,’ I tell her, keeping my voice low. I nod. ‘Just over the ridge; there’s a clear view.’

  She follows my gaze, then says quietly to the soldier at the machine-gun, ‘Karma, take the gun. Let’s go.’

  It would seem I am included. We leave the jeep unmanned and the five of us - the lieutenant and I, the man with the rocket launcher, the fat, pale soldier and the one she called Karma, who totes the jeep’s machine-gun and several heavy-looking loops of belted ammunition - cross the bridge and scale the steep bank on the far side. From the top, through bushes, the castle and the nearer gardens are spread out. It is a fine vantage-point. The lieutenant takes out a pair of small field-glasses, training them on our home.

  A brief shower comes upon us, the falling drops catching in one last slant of sunlight levered underneath the rain clouds billowing down from the north. I look at my home, as a golden shroud of wind and rain wraps round it, trying to see it as another might; a modest castellation, not large; age-smoothed, sitting prettily in a ring of water and surrounded by lawns, hedges, gravel paths and outbuildings. The ancient walls - once pierced only by arrow slots, long since remodelled to allow more generous windows - are the colour of honey, in that rose-red light. It looks peaceful; but still, for all that architectural delicacy, somehow too strong for these brutal, disrespecting times.

  Steeped in all this indiscriminate barbarity, anything standing proud invites a razing, like some defiant shout which only draws the hands’ attention still faster to the throat, to grasp that moving strand of air by which we hang from and on to life. The only persistence in these unleashed days is achieved through low denominations and banality; in uniformity if not in uniforms, like that shoal of the displaced we tried to become part of. Sometimes the lowest bow is the highest guard to offer.

  For now, all is still about the castle; no smoke rises, no figures stalk its square of battlements; no flag flies above, no light shines and nothing moves. There are still a few tents on the front lawns; people from the village who’d suffered the attentions of armed bands before and had thought the proximity of the castle might guarantee a degree of safety. Some smoke rises slowly there.

  I think the castle never looked so good to me as now, for all that one lot of pirates are in charge of it and I am being forced to help another band even more determined to have it for their own.

  The grounds around it are another matter; even before the despoilings inflicted by our mongrel dispossessed - cutting wood for fires, digging latrines in our lawns - the fields, woods and policies were running down, going to seed, becoming neglected. We lost our estate manager two years ago, and I - only ever distantly interested in the running of the estate - could not find it in me to take his place. Thereafter, gradually, all the other estate workers were taken by the war, one way or the other, and nature, unrestrained, began to renew its old authority over the burden of our lands.

  ‘There, at the stables,’ the lieutenant whispers, over the noise of raindrops pattering through the foliage around us. ‘Those two four-wheel drives.’

  ‘Ours,’ I tell her. We left them there, and the stable doors unlocked, knowing that to attempt to secure anything would only invite more damage. ‘Although we didn’t leave the doors open like that.’

  ‘That building with the slatted sides at the back of the garages,’ the lieutenant says. ‘Is that a generator house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any fuel for it?’ She looks at me hopefully.

  Only under our carriage. ‘The tank ran dry last month,’ I tell her, truthfully enough. Saving our last few drums of diesel, we have mostly used candles for light and open fires for heating since then; the kitchen stoves burn wood too. There were fires and lamps that ran off propane, but we used up the final cylinder last night, before we left.

  ‘Hmm,’ our lieutenant says, as the soldier to her other side nudges her and points. We watch as a man - another irregular, as far as I can see - appears from the stable block, puts a drum in the back of one of the four-wheel drives and then starts it, bringing it round to the front of the castle, out of sight from us.

  ‘Much fuel in those cars?’ the lieutenant asks quietly.

  ‘Only what we couldn’t siphon,’ I reply.

  ‘Can you take a vehicle into the castle itself?’

  ‘Not one of those,’ I tell her. ‘Too tall. There’s a small courtyard, with enough room to turn something the size of a jeep around.’

  ‘No drawbridge?’ she says, looking at me. I shake my head. She smiles thinly. ‘I think you mentioned a gate, though, didn’t you, Abel?’

  ‘A thin one, and a portcullis of wrought iron. I doubt either would stop--’

  The lieutenant’s radio chirps. She holds up one hand to me, and answers the radio, listening then making a snuffing noise. ‘Yes, if you can do it cleanly. We’re on the ridge just behind the castle.’

  She puts the instrument away. ‘Amateurs,’ she says, sneering, and shakes her head. ‘They’ve nobody in the gatehouse.’ She looks at the man to her other side. ‘Psycho’s in the trees by the drive, over there,’ she tells him. ‘Says there’s only two loading the car. Nothing heavy in sight. He’s about to start shooting, then one of the trucks and the other jeep are going to make a dash for the front. Give them cover.’ She turns to me. ‘These aren’t soldiers,’ she says with seeming disgust, ‘they’re just looters.’ She shakes her head, then puts the binoculars away and readies her long gun, steadying it and sighting. ‘Deathwish,’
she says to the soldier with the rocket launcher. ‘Save it. Not unless I tell you, okay?’

  The fellow looks disappointed.

  Gunfire comes from beyond the castle, near where the driveway leaves the trees and climbs up the shallow slope to the main lawn. There is nothing to see for a moment, then the four-wheel drive reappears racing round the gravel track from the front of the castle, back towards the stable block. The car drifts across the gravel, rear door swinging wildly, still open. Its windscreen is starred white and somebody is trying to punch through it from behind. The lieutenant’s gun barks suddenly, making me start; the heavy machine-gun they brought from the jeep opens up and I put my hands to my ears. The four-wheel drive shakes, pieces fly off it and it turns sharply, front wheel seeming to buckle, almost tipping it into the moat (the machine-gun’s rounds kick tall thin splashes in the water for a moment); the car swerves the other way, losing speed; it straightens out briefly and crashes into the corner of the stable block.

  ‘Stop!’ shouts our lieutenant, and the firing ceases.

  Steam curls upwards from the car’s crushed bonnet. The driver’s door opens and somebody falls out, crawling on all-fours on the ground, then collapsing.

  Another motor sounds, there is more firing from the front of the castle, and then one of the lieutenant’s trucks appears, roaring up the drive, straight for the castle. The gunfire stops; the truck disappears from view, obscured by the castle. We hear its engine rev, then stop altogether.

  The rain has ceased. For a few moments there is silence and the only movement comes from the wisps of steam escaping the four-wheel drive’s engine. Then we hear a few shouts, and some shots. The lieutenant takes out her radio. ‘Mr C?’ she says. I hear a crackle in reply.

  ‘Ah, Dopple; what’s happening?’

  She listens. ‘Okay. We got the four-wheel drive; it’s out of action. We’re coming in now, from the ridge behind. Three minutes.’ She puts the radio away. ‘Psycho got one at the bridge,’ she tells us. ‘There’s another two or three inside the castle, but the truck got to the gate in time; we’re in.’ She shoulders her gun. ‘Tootight,’ she says to the fat soldier I shared the rear of the jeep with. ‘You stay here; pop anybody running away who’s not one of us.’ The fat soldier nods slowly.