Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

Such energetic canterings always excited you, and we rode again, you facing me, straddling and impaled, your skirts covering our union, while that brave horse, uncomplaining, rode round and round within the hidden, sunlit arena of that flower carpeted, insect loud clearing, the animal's springing, muscled vigour bringing us, finally, eventually, by our relative stillness (hypnotised, oblivious, lost within that lengthened moment of dappling light and buzzing air) surrendering all control to its long pulsing motions, to a sweet mutuality of bliss.

While always preferring poetic injustice to prosaic probity, it would, I think, have been a shame if that which wakened us in the morning had put us instantly back to sleep again, so that, in some state, we lay in.

You were always the darker sleeper; I have seen your slow unslumbering take more than one cock's crow to achieve. Our reveille is accomplished, however, by something capable of flight which happily does not find its voice.

Sudden and intrusive chaos takes the castle's roof, its floors, walls and our room and shakes it all; flaps the castle's stones like a scaly flag and sets free the dust and us, tumultuous and milling and emplaced within its cloud, losing us within that swirling, particulate confusion.

A shell; a first too lucky round that found the castle out and hit it square, running it through, producing a violent trail of stone dust, splintered wood and panic in its wake. But to no climax; it stops between the ground and lower floors, unexploded.

I reassure you as you sob, reduced to patting and uttering trite inanities by this unexpected intrusion. I look around at the dry mist of choking dust the shell's passage has bestowed upon us, while an and shower of debris patters from the hole in the ceiling on to the floor, then I go calm and smiling from you, a kerchief held over my nose, waving white clouds aside, to inspect the demolished corner of my room. There is a hole above, and daylight visible through curling dust. The upper part of the wall has been removed in a great semicircle, as though bitten by a giant, affording a view into a dark space next door. It should be an old storeroom, piled high with furniture, if I recall correctly. Beyond would be the principal guests” suite, which the lieutenant has commandeered for her own use.

I climb upon the side of an elegant armoire it escaped injury by a hand's breadth as the shell passed it by and lean into the shadows on the far side of the stone and rubble wall. Stretching forward and reaching through, past age dark, torn wood, I detect an odd chemical smell; an odour from my childhood which I associate with clothes, parties and with hiding. I see. something metallic glint and reach for it. Mothballs; the scent is of mothballs, I think suddenly.

My hand closes round a coat hanger. I pull it from its rail, in the punctured wardrobe standing in the dim room beyond, then throw it back and climb back down. Below my feet, another hole leads through the mosaic of wooden flooring, boards, lathe and plaster into the dusty dining room. Shouts issue from the gap, and the sound of running feet.

I go to the windows and open them to the day, leaving the curtains drawn behind me. A curious peace reigns beyond; another ordinary day, with mist and a low, watery sun. Birds sing in the woods. “What are you doing?” you wail from the bed. “I'm cold!”

I lean out, looking up to the skies at this point still thinking that we might have been bombed rather than shelled then out towards the hills and the plain. “I think the windows are safer open, if we are to be bombarded,” I tell you. “If you like, being underneath the bed might be advisable.” I look for my clothes, but they were left on a seat that stood where our little visitor has passed; on the floor by the hole I find a few kindling sized bits of the seat itself and a couple of buttons from my jacket. I wind myself in a white sheet, pour dust out of my shoes and slip them on, then catch sight of myself in a mirror and kick the shoes off again. I descend to meet the others, thinking to follow the artillery round's route down through the castle.

In the Long Room on the floor below the lieutenant's men run shouting, clutching weapons or their pants. A dulling whoop from outside the walls makes us all duck or dive. There follows an equivocal sort of thud, something that neither ears nor feet want to take full responsibility for sensing, a conclusion that the brain may have provided by itself. We rise, and I walk on.

In the dining room, its generous depths extended by the dust which fills it, two soldiers wave their arms over a hole in the floor which must lead down to the kitchens or cellars. Above, the punctured roof rains powdery motes. From a tear in the ceiling close by, a thin pipe hangs free, wagging; steaming water geysers from it, splashing down upon the table and the central rug. steam contending with the corkscrewing weight of dust. Curtains, caught by a piece of fallen frieze work, lie sprawled on the floor, admitting light which catches the dust and steam. I stop for a moment, forced to admire this fabulous disarray.

As I approach the hole and the two soldiers, a huge tearing noise, braided with a dying, inhuman scream, rips across the sky outside; the two irregulars throw themselves to the floor, thudding to raise more dust. I stand, looking at them. This time there is an explosion; sound bursts in the distance, quaking the boards beneath my feet and rattling the windows like a storm's gust. I run to the windows as the lieutenant's men scramble to their feet. Peering out, I can see nothing, just the same calm skies.

I take a look down the hole the soldiers are now kneeling by, then head for the corridor outside, tiptoeing across a shallow pool of warm water.

“A ghost already?” says the lieutenant's voice. I turn and she is there, long boots thudding down the stairs two at a time, pulling on a jacket, tousle headed, stuffing a thick green shirt into her fatigues, a bolstered pistol at her hip. She looks tired, as though just woken from the very depths of sleep, and yet more consummate too, as if all chaos merely served to boil excess water from her spirit and leave a stronger concentration behind.

“Mr Cuts!” she yells, over me, to her deputy just appeared at the far end of the Long Room. “Onetrack on guard? Send Deathwish and Poppy up there too; see if they can spot where this stuffs coming from. Tell them to keep their heads down and watch the grounds too in case it's cover. And get Ghost on the radio; find out if he can see anything from the gatehouse.” She sticks her head round the door to the dining room. “Dopple!” she calls out. “Fix that leak; get one of the servants to show you where the stopcocks are.” She waves dust from in front of her face, then sneezes, and for the smallest moment is girlish, a soft but hard figure in this haphazard mist shaken from the castle's strength.

“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?”