“Oh, sir!” Rolans, one of our younger staff, a pasty faced young man of an awkward, chubby build, comes running up to me, struggling into a jacket. “Sir, what?”
“You'll do,” the lieutenant says, grabbing the fellow by his wrist. She urges him towards the soldier emerging from the diningroom. “Here you are, Dopple; go and do some plumbing.”
The one she called Dopple grunts. Rolans looks at me; I nod. The two set off along the corridor, whitened faces like badges in the morning gloom. The desiccated smoke that is the stone and plaster dust rolls about them, contaminating all of us as we move and breathe within that everywhere surface with an infection of the castle's assaulted shock, leaving us all half ghosts and I, in my blank uniform, archly archetypal.
The lieutenant turns to a man limping past wearing a steel helmet and carrying a rifle, puts out one arm across his chest and brings him smoothly to a stop. He looks frightened; sweat coats his face save where a long jagged scar runs. It is the elder of the two men I spoke to yesterday. “Victim,” she says, gently (and I have to think, well, he was at least well named). “Easy, now. Get the wounded down to the cellars on the east side of the castle, would you?”
He swallows, nods, and limps quickly off.
I look after him. “I'm not sure that's the safest place,” I tell her. “I think that first shell ended up in one of the cellars.”
“Let's take a look, shall we?”
“Is that safe?” I ask as the lieutenant ignites her lighter in the darkness.
She looks at me in its flickering yellow flame. Her mouth takes on a small twist. “Yes,” she says shortly. We are in the cellars squatting on top of an empty concrete coal bunker, gazing at a pile of rubble fallen from the ceiling and landed on top of a logpile; my toga garb makes the position awkward and my feet must be filthy.
The lieutenant takes her silver cigarette case from her jacket, selects and lights a cigarette. I feel I am being treated to a show of courage. She draws upon it languidly, breathes out.
“I meant,” I find myself saying, “that we are in a fuel store.” It sounds lame. I hope the lighter flame is too weak to show my blush.
The lieutenant looks sceptical, glancing about the dark, cellar. “Anything explosive in here?”
“Only that, I suppose.” I indicate the pile of rubble where we are assuming the shell has come to rest.
“Unlikely,” she says, drawing upon the cigarette. “Here; hold this,” I am told. I am given the lighter. The light is poor. How odd the things one misses. I am trying to remember the last time I saw a torch battery. The lieutenant leans forward, cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth, and scrapes some of the debris carefully away, sending small soft falls of pale dust spilling softly to the floor of the coal black room. Some shards of rock follow, then she tugs and hauls, grunting, at a more reluctant piece. There is an alarming crunch and a small raft of dusty stone and broken wood collapses off the wineracks, taking some logs with it.
“Hold the light closer,” she tells me. I do so. “Ha,” she says, supporting herself on the underside of the ceiling as she leans forward to jostle something out of the way above. “There it is.” I look, and see the swollen side of a gleaming metal casing. She smooths dust from its flank, hand gentle as any mother's on her child's head. “Two ten,” she breathes. A tremor shakes the cellar around us, and the sound of a distant explosion comes through the hole to the dining room above. The lieutenant sits back, slapping her hands, seemingly unheeding. “Better get at it from above.”
The lieutenant watches as two men pick at the shell's brief tomb, kneeling on the dining room's splintered floor and reaching down to scoop out lumps of stone and wood. The flow from the water pipe hanging over the dining table has been reduced to a drip; water has pooled towards the room's outer wall, forming a long, gently steaming pool. Above, one of the servants is attempting to repair the void in my bedroom floor, gagging its throat with wood and an old mattress; his efforts dislodge more clouds of failing, rolling dust. Every now and again pieces of plaster fall from the hole, hitting the floor near us like small powdery bombs.
A noise behind us is the red haired soldier, treading with a comic wariness over the film of dust on the floor and holding something long and black. He approaches the lieutenant, makes a sort of half bow to her and mutters something, handing her the garment. It is a long black opera cloak, red to the inside. I think it was Father's. She smiles as the soldier backs off, and thanks him. She glances at me with a look of amused tolerance, then puts it on, opening it and swinging it out so that it settles over her shoulders like a shadow.
Another plaster bomb plummets from the ceiling, crashing on to the floor beside the two men clearing the rubble away from the shell and making them jump. They glance round, then continue. The lieutenant glares up, hand waving in front of her face.
“So much dust,” she says.
I gaze upwards too. “Indeed. But then the place has had four centuries to dry out.”
She merely grunts, then claps her hands, releasing dust, and in a small storm of it swirls out in her dramatic cloak, her footprints upon our punctured, coated floor like an animal's in snow.
Still clad in my sheet, I stand, trying not to shiver, on the battlements with the lieutenant and a group of her men. She puts down the field glasses. “No sign,” she says. Her stubby fingers tap on the stonework, her eyes narrow as she takes in the distant scene.
The artillery fire has stopped and left the morning hung out as though to dry, its dew hanging from the smooth ridges and the needled trees like a coy veil the land's assumed following the distant gun's intolerant assault. There have been no more shells for ten minutes or so. The last was the closest excluding that first which pierced the castle landing in the woods up hill one hundred metres off. A faint wisp of smoke rises from where it hit, though there is no other obvious damage to the forest. The men the lieutenant sent to the roof were not able to observe where the shells were coming from. They confer, trying to agree how many rounds were fired. They settle on six, with at least two of them duds. There is some talk concerning who fired upon us and from where. The lieutenant sends two of the men below and stands leaning on the parapet, gazing towards the hills.
“You know who might be firing at us?” I ask. My feet are numb but I want to find out what I can.
She nods, not looking at me. “Yes. Old friends of ours.” She takes another cigarette from her case, lights it. “We tried to take the gun that fired it a week or two ago, but they have it in the hills now.” She pulls on the cigarette.
“And in that range, appear to have ours,” I offer with a smile.
She looks at me, unimpressed. “I think we almost found them again yesterday,” she says, and shrugs. “Thought they'd headed off. Looks like they didn't. Must know where we are. Trying to get us to quit this place.”
I let the silence run on for another two lungfuls of smoke, then ask her, “What will you do?”
Another draw on the cigarette. She taps some ash down towards the moat and inspects the cigarette's burning end carefully. Something about the way she does this chills me, as though our lieutenant is used to checking that such a glowing tip is just right for applying to an interrogatee`s flesh. “I think', she says contemplatively, “we might have to take it from them.”