Alastair Bruce: Wall of Days

The forest is not my favourite place on the island. Everyone has a place like this in the areas in which they move. No matter how much you love where you live there is always a dark corner, always somewhere you would prefer not to go. I have my head down, breathing heavily, the thud of the axe echoing around the pines. I feel out of place. I feel surrounded. The noise of the final splintering of the trunk always takes me by surprise. I glance around whenever a tree falls as if I think someone is watching. I look up to see if there is a body in the branches. But I know there is no one to watch me. If I close my eyes in that place, shapes appear behind my eyelids. When I leave the forest and step out into the light I feel the breeze drying my sweat. It makes me shiver.

At the end of the day, I draw another line on the wall.

When I first arrived I toyed with the idea of naming the island, of putting up a sign facing out to the ocean in case someone came looking for me. But I gave up on the idea. It is better off without a name. And what would I have called it anyway? A name for a place without a history would be pointless.

It is raining heavily when I make my way down to the shore for my swim. I take nothing with me and I walk down the cliff path naked.

When I first came here I felt self-conscious about doing that. Now I don’t think much about it. It keeps my clothes dry and, besides, it is never unbearably cold here. My feet have toughened up and I don’t feel the small stones under my soles.

There is a reef about half a mile out and it is to there I swim, to where I can feel the spray from the breakers on my face. The spray and, in between, the drops of rain. The ocean is warm, the rain cold. I float in the water on my back, tasting the salt, before starting slowly back.

Today when I reach the shore and am standing catching my breath I see something further down the coast. Nothing has ever washed up here, nothing besides dead fish and birds. I can’t tell what it is but it is a dark red colour and looks out of place on the grey sand. I walk over and as I get closer I realise it is a coat, a man’s coat, soaked through, torn and covered in marine snails. I shake them off and hold it up to the light.

I go through how this could have appeared. I have gone so long without seeing anything washed up and then this, so out of place. The routes we once sailed on our way to war were far to the north and, since a couple of years after the peace, were unused. No one bothers to try to fish from boats anymore. What little fish there are gather mostly round the shorelines. A man can be in a boat for days and not catch a single fish. I was lucky to catch a few on the way over here. When I left Bran we had been talking about sending ships on exploratory voyages, looking for regions we had forgotten about, regions whose climate had changed for the better. Perhaps these have begun. But here? Sailing so close to Axum is tantamount to a declaration of war under the terms of the Peace Treaty. Perhaps a ship was lost, the crew hungry, its captain uncertain and losing influence. There was a mutiny, the captain hurled overboard, his possessions shared amongst the men. Except for the coat, lost overboard in a scuffle.

Or is this the remains of another exile? A piece of flotsam from a forgotten world.

I shiver. I look around me. I don’t know if I expect to see someone.

I think of the shadows over the horizon, the eyes staring after me. I watch the mist rolling in. A gull calls.

Suddenly I am flying again. I look down on a man clutching a red coat. I scan the island. The higher I am the more of it I can see but the less detail I can make out. Is that a rock or a man in the shadows of the cliff face? A dip in the grass or a body pressed down to avoid being seen? I cannot tell. It grows darker and the figure with the red coat on the shore fades with the mist and the last of the light.

In the cave I spread the coat out on a rock. I sit opposite it and pick at my food. I have not dried myself.

The coat looks like it is part of a uniform. Stained red. Metal buttons. It is not from Bran. It is not something one of my people would wear. The uniform of our soldiers was brown. It takes me back.

I remember killing a man. A man who wore a coat like this, though plainer, less well made. I remember killing many, both as soldier and later but this one in particular. We had surrounded a house in a burnt-out settlement. Whether it had burned in recent fighting or decades before I don’t know. We had tracked an enemy platoon which was taking cover in the ruins. Our orders were to storm the house where the soldiers were hiding and kill the occupants. We were not able to look after prisoners. Our charity extended to refugees but not to the enemy.

I went in through the front door, others went in through windows, through gaps in walls. They did not stand a chance. The enemy got off three shots. Three between seven of them. One was too scared to shoot. He stood in the corner, still holding his rifle but flinching at the sounds of the shots. No one but me seemed to notice him. I kept an eye on him during the few seconds of fighting. When the others were dead I shouted to stop firing. I walked up to him. He was a boy. He was not crying. His body was turned slightly away from me, fearing a strike.

He fixed his eyes on my chin. My gun was aimed at him. I flicked my head at him, meaning he should turn around. I watched his breathing slow down and he nodded. He understood. That stayed with me and I saw it many times after that. I told him to kneel. With my gun still at his head I reached down to his belt. I took his knife from him. We were not allowed to waste bullets. If you could you had to kill people in other ways. I holstered my gun. I took his forehead in my left hand.

With the knife in my right I drew a line across his throat. I did it rapidly but I felt each tendon, felt each muscle sever. He did not make a sound. I let him go and he fell to the ground. The rest may have been slightly different but the nod I remember. The moment fear turned to acceptance. I kept the knife. A lifetime later I still have it.

That was early on in the wars, which would drag on for another eleven years. By the end I was leader of the entire force: a thousand men.

The wars largely fought themselves out. We kept on killing each other, kept on dying, until our populations were reduced to a level where the land could begin to sustain us all. We negotiated a peace, the terms of which ensured sustainability. I say ‘we’; it was I who brokered the peace, along with my counterpart from the other side. It was a tense peace and not without sadness, not without consequences, but peace nonetheless. It lasted until I left and probably beyond.

I remember saying goodbye to Bran. A few people had accompanied the soldiers and me to the coast. There were a few civil servants, the judge, my neighbours and of course the new Marshal, my successor and protégé, Abel. My lover was there too, though by that stage I could not call her that.

The Marshal would not look me in the eye. Instead he looked over my shoulder. His lips were a thin line. I remember the touch of his hand as he briefly shook mine. It was soft – the grip, the skin. No doubt mine was too. The life of a Marshal in our outpost was not a physically demanding one. In years gone by we were fighters. But peace made us softer. It gave us more time for contemplation, more time to consider what we did.

I imagine the people on the mainland, those I have left behind.

They stand on the rocky beach in the sun staring out to sea, the waves lapping at their feet. I wonder what they might be thinking. I wonder, if we could see far enough, if we would wave to each other or whether we would simply stare in silence. But no one can see that far. I was on the raft for three weeks before putting to shore here.