Note landmarks. Your first duty is to bring our visitor back safely." He bows.
I approach Joll again, trying to get an outline of his intentions.
"Yes," he says. "Of course I should not want to commit myself to a course beforehand. But, broadly speaking, we will locate the encampment of these nomads of yours and then proceed further as the situation dictates."
"I ask," I continue, "only because if you get lost it becomes our task here to find you and bring you back to civilization." We pause, savouring from our different positions the ironies of the word.
"Yes, of course," he says. "But that is unlikely. We are fortunate to have the excellent maps of the region provided by yourself."
"Those maps are based on little but hearsay, Colonel. I have patched them together from travellers' accounts over a period of ten or twenty years. I have never set foot myself where you plan to go. I am simply warning you."
Since his second day here I have been too disturbed by his presence to be more than correct in my bearing towards him. I suppose that, like the roving headsman, he is used to being shunned. (Or is it only in the provinces that headsmen and torturers are still thought of as unclean?) Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men. Does he wash his hands very carefully, perhaps, or change all his clothes; or has the Bureau created new men who can pass without disquiet between the unclean and the clean?
Late into the night I hear the scraping and drumming of the orchestra under the old walnut trees across the square. There is a rosy glow in the air from the great bed of coals over which the soldiers are roasting whole sheep, a gift from the "Excellency". They will drink into the early hours, then set off at daybreak.
I find my way to the granary by the back alleys. The guard is not at his post, the door to the hut stands open. I am about to enter when I hear voices inside whispering and giggling.
I stare into pitch dark. "Who is here?" I say.
There is a scrabbling sound and the young sentry stumbles against me. "Sorry, sir," he says. I smell his rum-sodden breath. "The prisoner called me and I was trying to help him." From the darkness comes a snort of laughter.
I sleep, wake to another round of dance-music from the square, fall asleep again, and dream of a body lying spread on its back, a wealth of pubic hair glistening liquid black and gold across the belly, up the loins, and down like an arrow into the furrow of the legs. When I stretch out a hand to brush the hair it begins to writhe. It is not hair but bees clustered densely atop one another: honey-drenched, sticky, they crawl out of the furrow and fan their wings.
My last act of courtesy is to ride out with the Colonel as far as where the road turns north-west along the coast of the lake. The sun is up and glares so savagely from the surface that I have to shield my eyes. The men, tired and queasy after their night of revels, straggle behind us. In the middle of the column, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him, comes the prisoner. His face is ghastly, he sits his horse uncomfortably, his wounds plainly still cause him pain. In the rear come the pack-horses and carts with water-casks, provisions, and the heavier equipment: lances, fusils, ammunition, tents. All in all not a stirring sight: the column rides raggedly, some of the men bareheaded, some wearing the heavy plumed cavalry helmet, others the simple leather cap. They avert their eyes from the glare, all save one, who looks sternly ahead through a strip of smoked glass glued to a stick which he holds up before his eyes in imitation of his leader. How far will this absurd affectation spread?
We ride in silence. The reapers, busy in the fields since before dawn, stop their work to wave as we pass. At the bend in the road I rein in and bid farewell. "I wish you a safe return, Colonel," I say. Framed in the window of his carriage he inclines his head inscrutably.
So I ride back, relieved of my burden and happy to be alone again in a world I know and understand. I climb the walls to watch the little column wind away along the north-west road towards the far green smudge where the river debouches into the lake and the line of vegetation vanishes into the haze of the desert. The sun still hangs bronze and heavy over the water. South of the lake stretch marshlands and salt flats, and beyond them a blue-grey line of barren hills. In the fields the farmers are loading the two huge old hay-wagons. A flight of mallard wheels overhead and glides down towards the water. Late summer, a time of peace and plenty. I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.
Two miles due south of the town a cluster of dunes stands out from the flat sandy landscape. Catching frogs in the marshes and coasting down the slopes of the dunes on polished wooden sleds are the staple summer sports of the children, the one for the mornings, the other for the evenings when the sun goes down and the sand begins to cool. Though the wind blows at all seasons, the dunes are stable, being held together by a cap of thin grass and also, as I found by accident a few years ago, by timber skeletons. For the dunes cover the ruins of houses that date back to times long before the western provinces were annexed and the fort was built.
One of my hobbies has been to excavate these ruins. If there are no repairs to be done to the irrigation works, I sentence petty offenders to a few days of digging in the dunes; soldiers are sent here on punishment details; and at the height of my enthusiasm I even used to pay for casual labour out of my own pocket. The work is unpopular, for the diggers must toil under a hot sun or in a biting wind with no shelter and with sand flying everywhere. They work half-heartedly, not sharing my interest (which they see as whimsical), discouraged by the speed at which the sand drifts back. But in the course of a few years I have succeeded in uncovering several of the largest structures to floor level. The most recently excavated stands out like a shipwreck in the desert, visible even from the town walls. From this structure, perhaps a public building or a temple, I have recovered the heavy poplar lintel, carved with a design of interlaced leaping fish, that now hangs over my fireplace. Buried below floor level in a bag that crumbled to nothing as soon as it was touched I also found a cache of wooden slips on which are painted characters in a script I have not seen the like of. We have found slips like these before, scattered like clothespegs in the ruins, but most so bleached by the action of sand that the writing has been illegible. The characters on the new slips are as clear as the day they were written. Now, in the hope of deciphering the script, I have set about collecting all the slips I can, and have let the children who play here know that if they find one it is always worth a penny.
The timbers we uncover are dry and powdery. Many have been held together only by the surrounding sand and, once exposed, crumble. Others snap off at the lightest pressure. How old the wood is I do not know. The barbarians, who are pastoralists, nomads, tent-dwellers, make no reference in their legends to a permanent settlement near the lake. There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. The houses contain no furniture. In a heap of ashes I have found fragments of sun-dried clay pottery and something brown which may once have been a leather shoe or cap but which fell to pieces before my eyes. I do not know where the wood came from to build these houses. Perhaps in bygone days criminals, slaves, soldiers trekked the twelve miles to the river, and cut down poplar trees, and sawed and planed them, and transported the timbers back to this barren place in carts, and built houses, and a fort too, for all I know, and in the course of time died, so that their masters, their prefects and magistrates and captains, could climb the roofs and towers morning and evening to scan the world from horizon to horizon for signs of the barbarians. Perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls. Perhaps when I stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, another grey-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face at last with the barbarian. How will I ever know? By burrowing like a rabbit? Will the characters on the slips one day tell me? There were two hundred and fifty-six slips in the bag. Is it by chance that the number is perfect? After I had first counted them and made this discovery I cleared the floor of my office and laid them out, first in one great square, then in sixteen smaller squares, then in other combinations, thinking that what I had hitherto taken to be characters in a syllabary might in fact be elements of a picture whose outline would leap at me if I struck on the right arrangement: a map of the land of the barbarians in olden times, or a representation of a lost pantheon. I have even found myself reading the slips in a mirror, or tracing one on top of another, or conflating half of one with half of another.