He discovered an outlet between two houses, leading into the main street. A cool breeze came from the river, and he found himself a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded bridge which led to the centre of Orcam. But the taste of freedom was sweet, even though he was still too close to Mella.
He must have taken the wrong turning from the courtyard, though he gradually increased his distance from the bridge by keeping well into the sides of the houses. He began to breathe freely for the first time since leaving Mella’s bed, and decided to turn right at the next intersection, so as to get on to the Shelp road. The street was empty, and he wondered where the two thousand soldiers of Mella’s brigade had gone. A feeling that they had deserted her cause made him sweat, and pause in his slow painstaking footsteps.
A green signal-light wriggled like a tadpole into the air. The silence haunted him. He fancied a faint hissing sound as a small rocket went up, which meant that it had been fired from close by. Left and right along the intersection, both streets were crammed with soldiers — standing, sitting, smoking, looking at nothing, waiting perhaps for another signal-light. A bayonet was thrust against his chest: ‘Where are you going?’
The slight irritant of the point made it difficult to speak. The man glared, and repeated his question, this time in a rasping whisper that terrified Edgar far more than a bawling voice.
‘To the bridge,’ he answered, to prevent the bayonet being thrust into his lung.
A rifle was given to him, and a belt of ammunition draped over his shoulder. ‘Take off your shoes,’ said the soldier.
Another light went up, this time red. A score of soldiers came from each street, walked towards the bridge in single file along the left line of house-fronts. All were in bare feet, so as to make no sound. The uneven surface of the pavement was painful to the skin through Edgar’s thin socks. The soldiers had a thicker wadding of cloth round their feet and could therefore concentrate on not being seen, instead of on avoiding the discomfort of stones and potholes.
He did not know what to do with his rifle, and wanted to throw it away. Why had such an important attack been kept secret from Mella? Because she would have exposed herself to danger by joining it, he reasoned. She would have led her band on like a fearsome queen, her presidential future jeopardized by any stray bullet or piece of shrapnel.
He mistook the ache in his head for a feeling of excitement, which he didn’t like, preferring to acquire it in the more useful project of threading his way back towards Shelp. Getting involved in this pointless fight was a terrible misunderstanding. When a yellow signal-light showed over the bridge he became frightened and wanted to shout for Mella. He opened his mouth as if to do so, but before any sound came, a bayonet caught him in the back and prodded him on. A whistle shrieked from behind, blown by someone still at the safety of the intersection, and Edgar cursed it for an entirely unnecessary noise.
The street was filled with two blinding lights, one red and one blue, and those caught in it began running towards the bridge, as if to get back into the darkness even if it killed them. Faces fixed in the pallor of the beams ran forward, and Edgar, whose marrow had collapsed, clung to a drainpipe, knowing that something cataclysmic was about to happen.
Machine guns began a dreadful stutter from three hundred metres, and the forty men melted into the stones, though only half as many were hurt. Edgar let go of the drainpipe, and ran back towards the intersection, when he spun like a top as if a ball of ice had smashed into him below the shoulder. He cried out, not from pain, which wasn’t yet apparent, but from the indignity of having to put up with the unexpected. When someone tried to lift him from the road he cried out that reinforcements were needed at the bridge.
The officer, assuming him to be a messenger who had come back with this information at the risk of his life, passed it on to someone of higher rank in case anything could be done about the obvious failure of their surprise attack, on which so many hopes had been placed. Before his eyes closed, and he fainted, Edgar saw several dozen more unfortunate soldiers make their way out into the Nihilists’ field of fire. His mind bit hard on the fact that if he hadn’t run back, and faked this message to cover his cowardice, they might not be going off to get killed. But even the bitterness of this reflection didn’t stop him thinking what a pity it was that he should be dying in some nightmare battle, when only a few days ago he had been nothing more (or less) than a happy-go-lucky tourist.
Chapter 28
Nihilism had worked so well, Benjamin reflected, after setting up his headquarters at Agbat railway station, that it was almost impossible not to believe in God. During the last twenty-five years, industrial production had gone up five per cent. Not much, perhaps, but certainly it had not declined. And if the people weren’t happier than they had been before, at least they were livelier. Nihilism had given them a new zest for life, a positive interest in it. What more could they ask for?
It may not be the finest of governments, but it was the next best thing to having no government at all, he decided, signing an order to have another half-dozen prisoners set free when, according to the new principles of honesty and re-education, they should have been sent for trial, after which they would have been committed to a special establishment for rehabilitating. Nihilists which had yet to be set up.
Before him were several thick volumes on Nihilist industrial progress during the first quarter-century of its power. Apparently they had been the stationmaster’s favourite reading. The columns of figures presented a dazzling picture of a nation set on such a course of economic betterment that it seemed destined to dominate the world. Every commodity for a firm industrial base was to be found in Nihilon, it was stated, from coal to bauxite, tungsten to pigiron, copper to oil, though no one had ever claimed such a thing for the country before it went Nihilistic. However, the National Statistics Board of Mystical Nihilism (to give these voluminous reports their full title) acquired such deposits for Nihilon simply by stating that they existed. And so, in the imagination at least, as well as in print, they did.
A poet must have drawn this picture, and primed these books before the figure-men got to work on them. And if such fabricated calculations kept the people happy, what need was there of the real thing? The question to ask was: Would the real thing make them more happy? And one could only answer that it was doubtful. With these figures even dry bread would taste as if it had butter on it. Benjamin sighed, at the fact that the moral regeneration of mankind was simpler to accomplish than he imagined. Perhaps, after all, the Nihilists had hit upon the secret of it, and now with his insurrectionist brigade he was out to upset the delicate fabric of nihilism that had been painfully built up over the last twenty-five years by these idealistic perverts.
He could not deny that the people had grown accustomed to it. It was their one and only way of life. It worked for them, and it was working for their children, and so what right had he, with his ideals, to come along and wreck it so completely? The only reason that people were running with such alacrity to join his standard was because they saw it perhaps as another playful manifestation of nihilistic mismanagement, and would not realize their mistake until it was too late.