I appear to have persuaded myself. All is silent for a moment. I reach for your ankle, grabbing it beneath the covers while you look up, startled, and a door is brusquely knocked. The sound comes from my own room. We both look.
“Yes?” I say, loud enough.
“We're going now,” shouts a soldierly voice. “The lieutenant says you've to come.”
“One minute!” I yell. I whip the bedsheets from you.
You look sullen, raising your hips to tug your nightdress up. “Are we attempting a record?”
“Some things will not wait,” I say, minimally unbuttoning as I hoist myself towards you.
“Well, don't hurt…” you say petulantly.
More than pain, such unexpected forcing still takes time, however determinedly done. I bury my face between your legs, submerging in your scent, at once earthy and sea salt tanged. I loose a lubricating mouthful of spit, then rear and take my plunge.
Another shout.
Chapter 10
A lower vestibule; in the castle's front hall, the lieutenant's opera cloak lies discarded like a velvet skin, thrown over the shoulders of a hollow armour suit standing beneath a rosette of swords upon the wall. The jeeps” engines sound cold and clattering in the courtyard.
The lieutenant is talking to the soldier with the grey hair and scarred face, the one with wounds to the legs; he leans upon his makeshift crutch, dutifully taking orders. A couple of our servants stand near, watching the lieutenant, then turning their attention to me.
The lieutenant looks me down and up. “Changed again, Abel?”
“For the better, I trust,” I say, touching my fly to ensure that all is secure again. I do not think the lieutenant registers the gesture.
The lieutenant too is dressed differently, still sporting her long boots but now, above them, tweed trousers and a waistcoat over her thick green shirt. Her camouflaged jacket and a steel helmet have to fight to re establish the martial effect over that of the country set. The lieutenant's helmet has a green cloth cover stretched over it, and on top of that there is dark webbing, a black net stretched taut and tense and at this moment detumescing, heart thumping evocative.
The soldier with the scarred face mutters something to the lieutenant. She frowns, glances at the servants and bends to me, putting a hand to my arm and quietly saying, “They'll bury old Arthur in the woods at the back; the best place might be in a shell crater it would be deep, at least.”
I nod, surprised. “And appropriate,” I agree. So Arthur will join Father. His ashes were scattered there by Mother, thrown to the soil of our home after he eventually returned to us, in a box, following his assassination in a foreign city.
“They'll probably cut something on a piece of wood,” she says. “What was his last name?”
I look at her, nonplussed. “His last name?” I say, procrastinating.
She looks at me with narrowed eyes, and I fully expect that she anticipates my ignorance. She is quite right, of course, but this is one advantage over her I cannot pass up.
“Yes,” she says. “Arthur's last name; what was it?”
Ignatius,” I tell her, taking the first name that comes to mind (and now I think of it, that was the name of the cousin I found you with on that night of shared occupation).
The lieutenant frowns but then quietly transmits this false information to the scar faced soldier, who nods and hobbies off. She smiles thinly at me and lifts her gun from its place by the wall. I had not noticed. The receptacle in which the lieutenant had placed her long gun is an old artillery shellcase our family has long used to store umbrellas, shooting sticks, canes and the like. She catches my glance as she checks her gun and shoulders it. She taps the brass cylinder with one boot.” “Smaller calibre,” she tells me, then gestures towards the door and the courtyard beyond.
“No no; after you,” I say, clicking my heels together.
Her mouth makes that little twist again, and with a nod to the two wounded soldiers in the hall, she steps outside into the light, clapping her hands, herding her charges and with a sudden urgency shouting, “Okay! Come on! Let's go!”
I take my place in the “second jeep, with her. She sits behind the driver, I in the other rear seat, with the metal machine gun post in between us, manned by the red haired soldier she called Karma, who for the moment is sitting down, one buttock cornered on the back of each rear scat, his feet squeezed in between our thighs.
The first jeep barks and jerks away, narrowly avoiding the stonework of the well and swinging down and out through the inner gate and across the bridge outside, over the moat. We follow it, past the well, across the damp cobbles, skidding fractionally and then dipping steeply down to the narrow gate. The engine sounds loud as we pass through the short tunnel beneath the old guardroom and between the towers. The day beyond blinds, flooding my eyes with a rich golden light. Above, the sky is cobalt.
Our lieutenant reaches into one pocket and smoothly puts on sunglasses. The driver is similarly equipped. He is helmetless but with an olive bandana tied round his blond locks; despite the temperature and the skimpy protection from the elements provided by the open vehicle's windscreen, he is bare armed, wearing a ragged T shirt, a body warmer, what looks like some form of bullet proof vest and, over all, a gilet, pockets heavily bulging and lapels crisscrossed with linked machinegun rounds.
The jeep tips us back again as the arched stone bridge takes us over the moat, while the first jeep accelerates down the drive. We pass the trucks, waiting on the gravel round. Each coughs and guns its engine and comes rumbling obediently after us, exhausts clouding the sky with dark gouts of smoke. I wonder if they have already filled the vehicles” tanks with the fuel I told them of.
The lieutenant stuffs a plastic sheeted wad of papers into my hands. Within the transparent cover I can see part of the map we looked at earlier, in the library. The lieutenant takes out a cigarette and lights it, staring ahead. The gravel of the drive sounds loud beneath our wheels. I look round as we pass by the encampment of the displaced, watched, dark eyed, by a few drawn and anxious faces.
Behind us the two trucks trundle delicately between the close crowded guy ropes of the camp, their camouflage mottled canvas covers like a pair of swaying tents somehow made mobile amongst the rest. Beyond; the castle. Its stone blocks stand, its windows glint, the towers and battlements the clear blue sky divide, and brassy, gold, the colour of lions against the backdrop woods and sapphire sky, it endures, proud and still prevailing, despite all.
I'm leaving only to return, I tell myself. I abandon only to secure. Castles need their share of luck as well as good design; we had our allowance and more of welcome fortune this morning, when our windfall shell failed to germinate and blossom its explosive result, and I hope my stratagems absorbing, co operating, watching and biding may provide a better thought protection than a grimly prophylactic defiance that invites only rape and rasure.
Absorb like the land, co operate like the farmer, watch and wait like the hunter. My strategies must remain hidden beneath the appearance of things, like the geology that's only hinted at by the surface of the world. There, in the hard palatal shift of underlying stone, the real course of histories and continents is decided. Buried within the indefinite edge stressed in continual shock below and obeying their own trajectories and rules, the pent powers that shape the future world lie; an ever blind rough gripping of darkly fluid heat and pressure, holding and withholding its own stone store of force.