Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

“I'll see he's buried, if you like,” she offers. I can think of a host of replies to this, but restrict myself to a nod and, “Thank you.”

“Now.” She breathes deeply, stands, strides to the windows and pulls the curtains open to the sky. “These maps,” she says, settling into the chair again.

We discuss her miniature campaign; she wishes to strike this afternoon, before we lose the light. The day seems fair, and without such luxuries as weather forecasts, soldiers as much as anybody else are reduced to the sort of weather lore that has apocryphally guided shepherds through the ages; best to attack when one can, lest rains set in and make the whole proceeding sodden as well as lethal.

I am what help I can be. I pencil in amendments to the charts, ploughing a new track here, erecting a bridge with a couple of pencil strokes and by a single solid line and a few wags of the wrist constructing a dam and filling in the waters behind. The lieutenant is appreciative, hmm ing and nodding and biting on one fingernail as we talk the matter through. A curious and novel feeling of what I believe must be usefulness creeps over me, along with the surprisingly agreeable appreciation of what it is to be in a team such as that the lieutenant has around her to command, each man depending on this sort of planning, each life hanging on how well or ill she thinks through what she might ask them together to accomplish. How collective, how even convivial, if also potentially humbling as well as deadly; such exemplary esprit de corps makes the contrived camaraderie of the hunt look a pale and paltry thing indeed.

Later her deputy, Mr Cuts, joins us, and he too sits and studies the maps, listening to what she proposes. Mr Cuts looks to be of late middle age; not quite old enough to be the lieutenant's father. He is tall and spindly with silvery dark hair and wears small thin rimmed glasses sitting high on a great narrow hook of nose.

He is, now I think of it, the only one of the lieutenant's men who is free of facial hair (even if, in the case of some of them, such hair is scarcely more than downy, youthful tufts). I was myself briefly bearded when we lost mains power a year or more ago. For this last year I've used an antique cut throat razor old Arthur discovered for me complete with brush, mug, mirror, whetstone and leather strop in a storeroom. I find myself wondering if Mr Cuts has a supply of razor blades, and whether his nickname is linked somehow to his clean shaven nature.

The fellow sits hunched, concentrating on the maps. He contributes his own grunts and a few suggestions, mostly regarding his pessimistic projections of the distances their vehicles can cover without running out of fuel.

In time I am dismissed, albeit with the lieutenant's apparently sincere thanks. I feel excluded, perhaps denied the witnessing of their more detailed plans by an instinctive or suspicious urge in them to keep their preparations secret, perhaps by the lieutenant mistakenly thinking I might be bored by such martial business. I stop at the library door, decided.

“You're short of fuel?” I ask.

The lieutenant looks up, glancing at Mr Cuts. “Well, yes,” she says, as though amused. “Sort of the way everybody is, these days.”

“I know where there is some,” I tell her.

“Where?”

“Beneath our carriage, in the stables. There are a few drums of petrol and diesel and one of oil, strapped underneath.”

She looks at me, one eyebrow hoisted.

“I thought to use it as currency,” I explain, refusing to be bashful. “Something to bargain with, while on the road.” I give a small frown and gesture with one hand. “But please; feel free.” I smile as graciously as I can.

The lieutenant breathes slowly in and out. “Well, that's very generous of you, Abel,” she says. Her eyes narrow above a tight twist of smile. “Is there anything else you've been keeping back which we might be interested in?”

“There is nothing else which is hidden,” I tell her, only a little disappointed with her reaction. “Everything in the castle and the grounds is open and obvious enough. We have no weapons or medical supplies you don't know about, and you let Morgan keep her jewellery.”

She nods. “So I did,” she says. Her smile loosens. “Well, thank you for your contribution,” she says. “Would you mind asking one of the men to bring the fuel round to the trucks?”

“Not at all,” I say, with a small bow, then leave and swing closed the library door, a strange feeling of both relief and exhilaration coursing through me.

This duty discharged, I climb towards you again, my dear, and stand for a moment at one of the casements in my room. The hole in the floor has been filled in and covered with both a rug and a large ceramic urn, while an old tapestry has been nailed across the ceiling and wall where the hole is. Continued thumping from above bears witness to the servants” efforts to repair the roof as best they can.

I throw open the windows to gaze through mists and scattered showers upon the far, unpopulated lands, our tentdespoiled lawns and catch on that still veering wind, brought over the hills and across the plains the reasserted rumble of distant artillery fire, and the smell of death's decay upon the freshening breeze.

You are stirring, the wind is stirring a swift unmaking in the clearing air and rustling trees around us as I prepare to leave. I determine that my shoes are not sufficiently sturdy and change to a pair of stout boots, requiring a change in socks and trousers too, then of jacket, shirt and waistcoat if I am not to look ridiculous. I am careful to transfer everything from my pockets and even hang the clothes up myself.

Making my way through to your room, I find you with heavy eyes and clumsy mouth.taking in a cold breakfast. I sit on your bed, watching you eat slowly. You are still breathing with some difficulty.

“Roly said', you say, wheezing, “that Arthur is dead.”

You shouldn't call him Roly,” I say automatically.

“Is he really?” you ask.

Yes,” I say. You nod, continue eating.

I wonder at what I feel now and decide it is nervousness. I am used only to anticipation, not to this perhaps similar but entirely unpleasant emotion and I imagine it affects me all the more acutely because I am so unused to it. There have been scares and crises aplenty over the last few years as circumstances spiralled down unbelievably at the time, though there is a cast of inexorability to what transpired, looking back to the present excess of adversity, but somehow in the past I escaped this sense of dread.

Perhaps I always felt in control in the past, “secure in the stewardship of our home and its distributed resources; even taking to the roads, abandoning the castle for its own sake, seemed at the time like a brave and resourceful act, finally taking our fate into our own hands when that previous resolve began to look more foolhardy than courageous. And at the end of that attempted flight, when the lieutenant brought us” back, I felt concern, anger and a “sort of indignant, physical fear, but all was held in cheek at the back of my mind by the immediacy of response our situation called for, our immersion in the demanding instant.

But this trepidation, this febrile anxiety, this apprehension of the future is something quite different. I cannot recall feeling so since I was a young child and sent to my room, to await punishment from Father.

I look around your room. Downstairs, I hear the lieutenant commanding her men, shouting out orders. The hammering continues above. The castle, surrounded, assaulted, invaded, used and pierced, holds us all; you and I, our servants, the lieutenant's men. Its old stones, still arguably inviolate, still seem now lessened; without their slighting without the theft of any significant treasure but just by the addition of the lieutenant and her men it is brought down, reduced to something expressible in only time and matter. What for all our heritage now? Where lies the spirit of the place, and what does it matter?